No Show of Remorse

by David J. Walker

  I understood the court’s position, even though it was obviously wrong. What I didn’t like was the “contrived obfuscation” remark. I told them, in a response I filed from a Cook County Jail cell, that if anyone was deliberately confusing the issues it was the court, and that the justices could go screw themselves. Or words to that effect.

  Shortly after that they suspended my law license “until further order,” and transferred me to a downstate jail to rethink my ethics.

  Months went by before they decided it was useless to keep paying my room and board, and let me out. Marlon Shades was already in jail on unrelated charges, had a public defender, and was taking the fifth amendment. Arthur Frankel was back on the job, and Jimmy Coletta was progressing in rehab. Sally Rose, who’d fled after Marlon disappeared, had turned up again. She was dead. Multiple blows to the head, by a person unknown, in a motel room rented in her name near Midway Airport on the southwest side. The police theory was that the perpetrator was a client of hers. As suspicious as I was, it never seemed worth pursuing. It certainly wouldn’t have done Sally Rose much good.

  Eventually, Marlon got himself murdered in prison. Jimmy Coletta, on the other hand, had turned himself into something of a local celebrity. Not because he’d gotten shot, but because after that he’d gotten religion. Jimmy had joined some charismatic, evangelical church I never heard of. He’d dedicated his life, he said, to “service of the Lord through service of others,” and had started some sort of program for disadvantaged kids. He was touted as a real-life hero, even by some of the cynics of this world.

  There were still a few holdouts, though, like me.

  * * *

  I HAD SOME RESEARCH I WANTED TO DO, about Stefanie, before meeting her that evening, but there’d be time for that. I dug out the Art Institute membership card the Lady had given me for Christmas and went through the turnstyle to spend some time with Whistler and Winslow and Hopper and the gang.

  And to think about Jimmy Coletta. He’d agreed on a time and place to meet me the next day, without even asking what I wanted to talk about—which meant he had a pretty good idea already.

  CHAPTER

  8

  AT THE WEST END of the Prudential Building lobby were three revolving doors out to Beaubien Court. But to the left of those doors was an escalator down to the “pedway,” a below-street-level system of pedestrian tunnels. Yogi was to lead Stefanie that way, to the underground station for Metra southbound commuter trains.

  Arriving at the station by a different route, I bought a Rolling Stone and stood where I could watch people stream in. At about five-thirty Yogi showed up, sporting an ancient pair of Reeboks and a jacket that looked like a Harris Tweed—threadbare, but a perfect fit over his Bob Marley T-shirt. His dreadlocks were tied back into a sort of pony tail, and in the bustling crowd he looked surprisingly ordinary.

  A few yards behind him came Stefanie, dark-haired and trim, in a navy pants suit—also a perfect fit, and on a far more interesting frame. She was an attractive woman, for sure, but wore a look of chronic hostility and suspicion, as though she’d been dealt a long series of bad hands and had given up expecting anything better.

  Rush hour was going strong, with the noise and confusion of hundreds of people in a hurry, some to board trains, others merely passing through on their way to more pedway tunnels, headed for the subway or somewhere else on the north end of the Loop. Not far to my left, eating frozen yogurt with a pink plastic spoon, a uniformed security guard leaned against a pillar and watched people try not to run into each other. Yogi was weaving and elbowing his way in a zigzag pattern through the crowd, headed toward the far end of the station area. He may have nodded just slightly once in my direction as he passed, or he may not have seen me at all.

  As for Stefanie, she was focused on keeping up with Yogi and I was certain she hadn’t seen me—and equally certain she was unaware of the man who stood off to my right and who’d spent the last few hours focused on keeping up with me. A thin, fiftyish, intense-looking guy in stylish wire-rimmed glasses, I’d first spotted him when I left the Art Institute. He wore a tan raincoat and held a cell phone pressed to his right ear.

  I stepped into the crowd, moving toward the man and against the flow of commuters. When I reached the man, I flipped my wallet open and shut in front of his face, too quickly for him to read my Art Institute membership card. “Excuse me, sir,” I said. “The use of cell phones is prohibited in the station area.”

  He stood there for an instant, eyes wide, then just stepped to his right to go around me and join the moving crowd. I sidestepped to stay in his way, smiling and shrugging my shoulders. “Sorry,” I said. “Federal regulations.”

  By then we were doing a little side-to-side dance together, and blocking people in a hurry to get home. When some of them started to jostle us and complain, the man finally jammed the phone into his coat pocket and poked his finger at me. “Listen up, bud—”

  “Thank you very much.” I turned and saw the security guard staring at us, even as he scraped for the last trace of yogurt in the depths of his cup. “Officer!” I called. “Quick! Over here!” Instead of approaching, the guard dropped the cup in a trash receptacle and started talking into his radio. No dummy, that one.

  I moved in close to my dancing partner. “Whatever it is you’re doing,” I said, “I don’t think you want to explain it if the security guy calls for assistance.”

  He opened his mouth, closed it, then turned and walked away, pretty much an admission that he couldn’t afford to draw attention to himself. By the time he disappeared through the entrance to the tunnel to the Prudential Building he was on the phone again.

  “Got a problem here?” The guard had finally thought it safe to come over.

  “Yeah, I mean, the creep bumped into me, y’know?” I said. “And I swear he was going after my wallet. But like he says, I still got it, so…”

  “Didn’t look like our usual pickpocket,” the guard said. “But hey, man, you oughta keep your wallet in your front pocket.”

  Oh sure, blame the victim.

  * * *

  I CAUGHT UP WITH YOGI and Stefanie in the lower level of Marshall Field’s, in the cookware department. Yogi was planted amid a half-dozen women watching a silver-tongued, smiling young man demonstrate the joy and ease of greaseless, fat-free stir-frying in a pan as slick as he was. “Not plastic, not Teflon,” he proclaimed, “but a space-age miracle destined to revolutionize cooking forever.”

  Stefanie stood off to the side, arms folded.

  “Come here often?” I asked. She spun around and I slipped my arm through hers and walked her away from the cookware. “Has anyone ever mentioned,” I said, “how often you have that hostile and suspicious look on your face?”

  “Yes,” she said. “My ex-husband.”

  “Ah, an observant man.”

  “Not at all. Just a self-centered, mean-tempered man, with the emotional maturity of a twelve-year-old.” It slid out so easily, it had to be a line spoken many times before.

  “Oh, another one of those,” I said, steering her into a left turn. “Field’s has a food court down here somewhere.”

  They were about ready to close, but we ordered from the Mexican counter and went to a table in a corner of the nearly deserted dining area. Not a very secluded spot, certainly, but staying out of sight is all a matter of percentages. I hadn’t spotted anyone tailing Stefanie, and the chance of there being more than one person on me was pretty slim. Even Yogi had disappeared.

  I peeled the foil wrappings from a ground beef taco and a vegetarian quesadilla, pulled the tops off two little containers of salsa, and slipped a straw through the plastic lid of a cup of root beer. Stefanie had an easier time of it. She added a tablet of sweetener and was ready to sip her supper—decaf coffee.

  “I guess you’ll eat when you get home, huh?” I said.

  “Maybe some popcorn.” She glanced around the room, then looked down at her cup. “I’m beginning to wish I hadn�
�t called you last night.”

  “Uh-huh.” I poured salsa over the taco filling. “I’ve been wishing the same thing.” I bit into the taco. Not bad. Not very Mexican-tasting, but not bad. “What I’m wishing now is that you’d tell me some things you haven’t told me yet.”

  She made a point of stirring her coffee—which she’d already done once, quite thoroughly—and arranged her paper napkin at just the right angle to the edge of the table. “What things?”

  “For instance, you told me your daughter was staying with her father on the night you overheard Justice Flanagan talking to your boss. I checked with the court clerk’s office. Why don’t I find any divorce action involving a Stefanie Randle in the last ten years?”

  “You don’t even know whether I’m divorced or not.”

  “You just called him your ‘ex-husband.’ In my trade we call that a clue.”

  “Why would you check? Why would it make any difference?”

  “Just fishing,” I said. “It’s what I do. And maybe it doesn’t make any difference.”

  “Actually, it does, or it might, but I had no idea there was any connection. That is, I…”

  “Just slow down and tell me.”

  “I was divorced two years ago. The divorce case was in our married name, which I no longer use.” She rotated her cup on the table. “He was a Chicago police officer. I mean, he still is, but he’s not my husband anymore. He…” She stared off over my shoulder for a moment. “In law school I got involved in a crime victims advocacy program and started meeting lots of police officers. They were so … I don’t know … exciting or something. Richard was one of them and before I knew it we were married.”

  “And it didn’t work.”

  “I tried, you know, but I couldn’t adjust to … to the whole cop thing. The dark humor, the cynicism, the negativity, the—”

  “There are lots and lots of good cops.” I almost said some of my best friends are cops, but caught myself.

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t a good cop.”

  “That’s true. And what I meant was that if your husband’s ‘a self-centered, mean-tempered man, with the emotional maturity of a twelve-year-old,’ it’s not necessarily because he’s a cop.”

  “He’s my ex-husband.”

  “What’s his name?” I’d finished the taco and was working on the quesadilla.

  “Kilgallon.” She sighed. “Richard Kilgallon.”

  “Jesus.” I set down my plastic fork. “You said you’d read the police reports about my case.”

  “Yesterday, for the first time.” She shook her head. “Look, before that it never occurred to me that there was the slightest connection between Richard and … between my ex-husband and you.”

  “He was Sal Coletta’s partner, for God’s sake. He was there the night Arthur Frankel and the Coletta brothers got shot.”

  “I know that now.”

  “How could you have let Woolford assign my case to you? You must have heard about the shooting, about the cops leaning on me to tell what my client had told me.”

  “Except that I didn’t. I would have if Richard had been shot, sure. But he wasn’t. At that time I had a small child and I was in law school. I didn’t have time to read the papers or watch the news. Richard didn’t like me being in school and was no help at all. Besides, by then he had a girl— He was away from home a lot and when he was there we hardly even spoke to each other. I didn’t pay any attention to what he did—on the job or anywhere else. My marriage was dead.” She looked at me. “Believe me, I didn’t know there was any connection. Until yesterday, when I read the police reports.”

  “I believe you,” I said. “But you know, a few things didn’t get into the reports. Like how, after my client didn’t show up to turn himself in, your husband sat and watched a couple of other cops slap me around on and off over the next twelve hours. How they had me in custody and wouldn’t let me contact anyone. How one of them told me I was a dead man if I didn’t cooperate.”

  “Richard’s not my husband; he’s my my ex-husband. And I’m surprised he only sat and watched. He enjoys hitting people, almost as much as he enjoys the track and the casinos. He sure didn’t sit and watch in my case. He did the slapping himself. But only twice; that’s all. And I’m the one who told him he was a dead man if it ever happened again.”

  “Good for you. Me, I was cuffed to a wall ring and not really up to making any death threats. The time wasn’t a total loss, though. I did manage to throw up on Richie’s shoes.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  BY THE TIME WE SPLIT UP, Stefanie and I had agreed to stay in touch, and disagreed on most everything else. I told her to tell Clark Woolford she’d seen her ex-husband’s name in the police reports and get him to take her off my case. She said no, that might make him suspicious, and he could find out from the security desk sign-out book that she hadn’t left the office the night before until after he and Flanagan left.

  She lived in East Rogers Park, a neighborhood along the lakefront at the north edge of the city. Maura Flanagan’s warning that Stefanie would be in danger if she learned of Flanagan’s interest in my case had frightened her, made her wonder if someone was watching her. I said I’d take her home. She refused. I suggested a cab, but she said she’d take the el. She didn’t want anyone to see her acting unusually.

  So she was scared—but tough. On the other hand, I didn’t think she was under surveillance. After all, no one knew she’d heard a supreme court justice putting pressure on the head of the disciplinary commission, bribing him with a judgeship in exchange for not objecting to my reinstatement to the bar … if I survived long enough to make it matter.

  So Stefanie left and I followed her myself for a while. No one else did.

  Then, leaving Marshall Field’s at street level on Randolph, I walked to Michigan Avenue and headed south. It was dark and the air was turning cool, with a light rain blowing in from the east—off the lake. There weren’t many people on the sidewalks and most of them kept their heads down as they hurried along. The streets were slick and shining with reflected automobile lights—distorted streaks of red and white—and tires hissed and spat out tiny sprays of water behind them. I crossed Michigan, went past the Art Institute, then cut diagonally through the grass and trees of Grant Park, toward Columbus Drive and the Cavalier.

  And someone followed me. I was sure of it, even though he stayed way back and in the shadows. Not recognizable in the dark and the rain, yet somehow familiar. Thin, like the man in the underground train station.

  I left the trees, crossed to the east side of Columbus, and continued south on the sidewalk. More grass and trees along my left; on my right a row of parked cars facing north. Mine was at the end of the line, parked just beyond the last legal space on the block. From thirty yards away I spotted a parking ticket stuck to the windshield.

  My shadow stayed with me, apparently satisfied to be just that—only a shadow, not a danger; much too far back to reach me before I got to the car and was out of there. Even so, I picked up the pace a bit. It was raining harder now.

  The ticket was stuck with its own adhesive to my windshield, low on the passenger side. I pulled it off. I’d have to squeeze it into the glove compartment with the rest of them and one of these days take them all to traffic court and try to settle up with—

  A footstep then—or maybe just a breath—behind me. I turned, but too late. What felt like a sock full of sand slammed hard across my left ear. It lifted me up on my toes and spun my head, and for an instant I saw someone a block away, running toward us on the sidewalk. The shadow, the one who’d drawn my attention away from the man hiding by my car.

  But the man sapped me again, and there was nothing then but pounding pain and bright, wild streaks of red, like tail-lights reflecting off wet pavement that heaved and tilted up around me. My knees turned to pudding and my body slumped and I was glad, because I couldn’t wait to be on the ground.

  The man caught me under the arms
, though, and stood me up with my back against the side of the car. I gasped for breath and he stuffed a wadded ball of paper into my gaping mouth. I choked and gagged, and he went to work on my body. Hard punches—painful, professional blows, deep into the gut. I took two of them, shook my head, but still saw only the blurred shape of a man in a ski mask in front of me. With my hands too heavy to lift above my waist, fighting for breath through blocked nasal passages, I could only sag back against the car and wait for more.

  But instead, another blurred shape came from my left and threw itself into the man in front of me. The two of them went to the sidewalk, thrashing and kicking. One of them was silent, but the other kept shouting, “Bam! Bam! Bam!” over and over. I suddenly realized the noisy one was Yogi. He seemed to be pretending he was hitting my attacker, but he wasn’t hitting anyone. He had his arms and legs wrapped around the man, trying to roll him around on the concrete.

  I backed off a little and managed to get the wad of paper out of my mouth, breathing hard and trying to figure out how to get them apart without Yogi getting hurt. Then, as though magically, Yogi broke free of the man and was on his feet, and then suddenly up on the roof of the Cavalier.

  He kept right on shouting, but it was “Run! Run! Run!” now, and it was me he was yelling at.

  I stayed put, though, as the man lunged toward the car, reaching up for Yogi. Then he must suddenly have remembered me because he started to turn—and I caught the side of his jaw with my right elbow.

  I was still too dazed to make it a direct hit, but it shook him, and he turned and ran. I took three steps after him and knew it was hopeless.