“Ah, yes.” There was an audible sigh, reminiscent of Stefanie Randle, in fact. “Well, I suppose then a couple of us would drive up there. In that case maybe you would need a lawyer. I don’t know.” He inhaled, maybe smoking a cigarette. “So, you comin’ in?”
“It’s six o’clock,” I said. “You still be there in an hour?”
* * *
MAIN POLICE HEADQUARTERS at that time was still just a mile south of the Loop, at Eleventh and State. The rain had started in again, but just a drizzle, and it was too early for much traffic, so I made good time. I parked in a lot at Eighth and Wabash and locked my Beretta, along with the padded envelope with the tape of Marlon Shades’s statement, in a steel box I’d had welded into the trunk of the Cavalier. It’s always a worry, leaving a gun in the trunk of a car, but I sure couldn’t take it into the police station and I wanted the goddamn thing handy. I walked to Eleventh Street, then a block west to State.
It was an old eleven- or twelve-story rectangle, and could have been designed by the same architect who did the equally ugly public housing highrises that ran along State Street three or four miles to the south. The First District police station clung like a barnacle to the north end of the building at ground level, and had its own separate entrance. Up in the main building, besides the offices full of department bureaucrats, there were still a few dingy misdemeanor courtrooms. The city was just finishing up a brand-new facility farther south, and with any luck this one would be torn down soon.
A uniformed cop stood guard beside a podium just inside the door and wanted to know where I was going. I told him. Clout must have gotten him this soft job. He was grossly overweight, and had a .357 Magnum in his holster and an unfriendly attitude that matched how I felt, perfectly, so I gave him a wink and a peace sign and went through the metal detector.
The elevator had to be fifty years old, and smelled like bleach mixed with cut-rate cologne. When I stepped off there were signs hand-printed on white cards taped to the faded gray wall in front of me. I followed the arrow on one of them to a closed door with a frosted glass window that had the words Internal Affairs Division painted on it. Taped to the wall beside the door was another white card that said VIOLENT CRIMES in very large letters, as though they were proud of it.
I thought maybe there’d be a big open area filled with desks and balding men in shirtsleeves hunched over their telephones or pecking at typewriters with index fingers. But there was just a small reception room with six wooden chairs and a russet-haired, Hispanic-looking woman, fortyish, behind the counter. She scowled at me as though she’d been working there all her life and I was the first person who’d ever dared come through that door.
“Hate to intrude,” I said, “but I received an invitation.”
“You one of the new guys?” She rhymed the last word with dice.
“Nope. I’m here to see one of the old guys.” I rhymed it the same way.
“Ah.” She picked up a ballpoint pen and held it poised over a sign-in sheet on the counter. “Name?”
“Theodosian.”
She looked up at me. “No, honey. I mean your name.”
“Oh. Well then, Malachy P. Foley. Here to see Lieutenant Theo—”
“Hey Lieutenant!” She leaned toward an open doorway to her left. “Someone to see you,” she called. If anyone answered I didn’t hear it, but she turned back to me. “Have a seat. He’ll be out in a minute.”
“Great,” I said, and sat down on an uncomfortable wooden chair. Two or three minutes went by. “Um … got anything for customers to read?”
She smiled then, and looked very pretty all of a sudden when she did. “That’s a joke, right?” she said.
“Yeah.” I smiled back. I didn’t feel like it, but you never know when you’ll need a friend.
“Because most people come in here don’t read much.” She leaned down behind the counter, seemed surprised at what she found, and came up with a newspaper and a magazine. “Let’s see. Yesterday’s Sun-Times, and last month’s Playgirl.”
I took the Sun-Times. “Don’t wanna get busted,” I said.
She put the Playgirl back where it came from. A phone rang and she answered it while I paged through the paper.
There was nothing in it about anything I was interested in, because my interests had narrowed down to Yogi—what happened to him, who did it, and why.
“Malachai?” I recognized Theodosian’s voice, but I didn’t look up. “Malachai?” he repeated, rhyming the final syllable with “sigh,” like it was a name he’d read in the Bible. He came out to my side of the counter.
I turned to the sports page.
“Hey you!” He was right in front of me now. Dark brown shoes stuck out from the cuffs of tan slacks, and were polished to a high gloss, but one of the shoestrings had broken and been tied back together with a clunky-looking knot. “Your name Foley?” he asked. “Or you just come in to check up on the White Sox?”
“Foley it is,” I said, and finally looked up at him. “But it’s not Mala-kai. It’s Mala-key, as in Key-stone Cops.” I put the paper on the chair beside me. “Which you would already know if we were on a first-name basis, Lieutenant Theodosian.”
“Jesus.” He shook his head, more resigned than angry, like someone who had to put up with bullshit of one sort or another on a daily basis. “C’mon this way.”
He was six feet tall, medium build, with sharp, handsome features, deeply tanned skin and dark eyes. His jet-black hair was slicked back and he looked like a dealer in an upscale casino—except he looked smarter than that somehow. He wore a dark blue shirt and a bright yellow tie, no coat. I followed him through an opening at one end of the counter and then through the doorway. Still no big room full of desks and detectives in shirtsleeves, but a hallway with tiny offices on each side. We went into the third one on the right.
There was an old metal desk and a couple of chairs and a file cabinet, and a computer that looked sort of embarrassed to be there. One huge, sooty, double-hung window that probably didn’t open anymore looked west across State Street. There was a housing development there, on what had been an abandoned railyard twenty years ago or so, until developers got cheap financing based on their solemn promise to include housing for poor people in the mix. If there were any poor people inside that walled community now, they left at sundown.
“Have a seat,” he said, so I did, and he went around to the other side of the desk and sat down, too. “You’re not a suspect. At least not so far. I just want to know what you know about this man.” He took a black-and-white photo from a folder and slid it across the desk.
It was a head-and-shoulders shot of Yogi. He was lying on his back on what looked like a sidewalk and his dreadlocks were spread out around his bruised and swollen face like a halo. His eyes were closed, and his mouth was closed. He looked almost serene.
I pointed to a blotch on the concrete near his left ear. “Blood?”
“Yes.” He took a fingernail file from his desk drawer, and went to work filing the nails of his left hand. They didn’t look as though they needed it.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Do you know him?”
“Beaten to death?”
“Do you know him?” He stayed busy with his nails, and didn’t look up at me.
“Not really. I’ve seen him in the park a couple of times. Downtown, near the Art Institute.”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know. Where did you find him?”
“He know your name?” He started in on the nails of his right hand.
“How would I know whether he knew my name?”
“You’d know if you told him.”
“I don’t recall ever telling him my name.”
He laid the fingernail file on the desk between us, then took a card out of his folder and slid it across, lining it up carefully beside Yogi’s photo. “This your business card?”
I stared down at it. “It says ‘Malachy P. Foley, Licensed
Private Detective,’ and that’s my phone number, so it’s a good bet it’s one of my cards. Of course, anyone could have something like that printed up. Where’d you get it?”
“The victim would have—”
“The victim? He was beaten, then?”
“You thought he got those bruises from a heart attack, maybe?” When I didn’t answer, he went on. “He’d have known your name if you gave him one of your cards, right?”
“That’s a reasonable inference,” I said. “Look, I don’t think I ever saw the man before a couple of days ago. I’ve talked to him two or three times in the park. I gave him money when he said he was broke. That’s about it.” I paused for a second to think, then added. “Oh, and I think I saw him a couple nights ago walking through the Metra station—the Randolph Street underground station—but he was wearing a sport coat, and shoes, too.” I tried to stay close to the truth, mostly because it might have been Theodosian’s man I’d run into in the station.
“Did you give him one?”
“One what? Oh, one of my cards? No.”
“I think you did. That card was found in his pocket. How do you suppose it got there, Mala—Mr. Foley?”
“I don’t know how, Lieutenant.” I stared at him. “I don’t even know that it was in his pocket. All I know is you say it was. And with all due respect, I—”
“Shut up!” He swiveled around and looked out the window for a few seconds, then turned back to me. “Turn the fucking thing over.” I reached for the fingernail file and used it to flip the card over. “That your printing?” he asked.
“No.” I stared down at the card and read the words aloud: “‘Use your head, asshole. Or there’s more to come.’” I looked up at Theodosian. “What does that mean?”
“I thought maybe you could tell me,” he said.
I thought maybe I could, too. But I didn’t.
I just stared down at Yogi’s face and shook my head. Theodosian was talking, but I couldn’t really hear what he was saying. Yogi probably couldn’t really hear what I was saying, either, but I was telling him anyway, right then, that I’d changed my mind again. The message on that business card wasn’t a message to Yogi; it was a message to me.
When I called Renata later that day, I wouldn’t tell her I wanted to withdraw my petition. I’d tell her I wanted a motion to set the matter for a hearing at the earliest possible date … and I wanted a little publicity about it.
CHAPTER
16
THEODOSIAN HAD RUN OUT of questions. “For now, anyway,” he said, “but keep yourself available.”
“Find any prints on that card?” I asked.
He stared at me. “We’ll talk again,” was all he said, and five minutes later I was back at the Cavalier.
I sat for a few minutes to calm myself down, then headed over to the Kennedy and went north, just as I had the previous afternoon. But this time I veered left at the Edens Junction and didn’t get off until an exit near O’Hare Airport. From there it was a short drive to Carl’s Gun Shop. The sign in the window said: Sales To Licensed Law Enforcement Officers Only. I knew Carl, and if I’d wanted to buy a gun I could have. But I was headed for the pistol range in the rear.
* * *
I HATED IT. Hated the noise and the acrid smell, hated the weight of the ear cups, hated the pop-up targets with silhouettes of people on them. Hated the swagger and bravado of so much of the clientele, the talk about weapons and ammo and stopping power; and the talk about freedom and being willing to stand up—meaning to shoot people—to preserve it. Hated most that I was a regular there and everyone took it for granted I fit right in … and that maybe they were right and I fit in all too well.
But if I’d been sticking to things I really wanted to do I’d never have petitioned for reinstatement to the bar, and never have met Yogi in the first place. For that matter, if I’d gone with what appealed to me years ago I’d have given up Marlon Shades when the court ordered me to. He would have gone to jail for a long, long time—and taken a few bad cops along with him. That didn’t happen.
So, like it or not, I fired my practice rounds until my arm was heavy and numb and my head ached. It’s the price paid to make something difficult seem easy, effortless. Like the piano. It’s a great kick to play, and every so often see someone nod and smile in remembrance of better times, but the cost is the hours sitting alone, going over and over the same old phrases. “Long, hard practice make the difficult look easy,” Dr. Sato preaches. “So sure you must love practice.”
So sure I did. I loved it all—noise, smell, targets, ear cups, and even my fellow shooters—and I put in another forty-five minutes with my left hand, and then went for lunch with a couple of guys named Gene and Eddy who’d been beside me on the firing line. They were off-duty cops from the suburbs and had no idea who I was, at least not when they told me they knew this great place for lunch, right nearby.
* * *
I LOCKED THE BERETTA BACK IN THE TRUNK and we walked to a tavern a block from the gun shop. It was hot and dark inside, crowded and heavy with cigarette smoke. The bar ran from the front to the rear along the wall to our left and a row of booths along the wall to our right. In between, about a dozen round tables took up the center of the room, most of them occupied. It was a raucous crowd for that time of day, and it would have been way too loud in there even without the jukebox blaring.
I knew at once the place was full of cops and cop groupies—and not a great place for lunch at all, not for me. The booth nearest the door emptied out, though, just as we came in, so we grabbed it. If Gene and Eddy noticed I chose the bench seat on the side of the booth with a view of the entire room, and sat on the outside end, they didn’t show it as they slid into the seat across the table.
A tired-looking middle-aged woman with an ample bosom and too much red dye in her hair showed up at once. She swiped halfheartedly at the table with a gray rag, and took our orders. We all picked burgers—the alternatives were Polish sausage and pizza by the slice—and Gene and Eddy ordered two bottles of Miller Lite each.
“You have any nonalcoholic beer?” I asked.
“O’Doul’s,” she said.
“Fine, but just one.” The waitress left. “On the wagon,” I explained, then added, “again,” and tried to look like I knew it wouldn’t last long this time, either.
The jukebox pounded out the Supremes, who explained why “You Can’t Hurry Love,” while the three of us traded opinions on various types of hollow-point rounds and how big a mess they made inside the human body.
“Don’t know how you can drink that shit,” Gene said, when the waitress set down my O’Doul’s. A Miller Lite drinker, that Gene, and a real connoisseur.
“I tried it once,” Eddy said. “Tastes like alligator piss.” Then, as the waitress turned to leave, he said, “Say, Miss?”
She turned back.
“Would you wipe this spot … here?” Eddy held his two beers by the necks of the bottles in one hand and tapped his other index finger on the table in front of him. He was on the inside, near the wall, and the woman had to lean in deeply to wipe up a ring of liquid she’d missed before.
“Thanks.” Eddy grinned as he watched her walk away. “Nice tits,” he said.
“Jesus,” Gene said. “She’s twenty years older than you, man.”
“Didn’t say I wanna fuck her. Just she has nice tits.” Eddy sucked on his beer while the jukebox moved on to Tina Turner, wondering “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” “Either o’ you guys ever bang a redhead?” Eddy asked.
Must love practice, was Dr. Sato’s advice. Not: Must love fellow practicers.
“Alligator piss reminds me,” I said. “I got this cousin in Florida who wrestles alligators at a tourist place. He told me how one time he had his arms wrapped around this male alligator from behind. Standing up, you know? The spectators are clapping and cheering, and all the sudden the damn thing—” I stopped in the middle of my lie, because a man sitting at the bar had swiveled aroun
d … and we recognized each other simultaneously. “Shit,” I said.
“Huh?” Eddy said. “You mean the alligator crapped on his—”
“No,” I said. “I mean I shoulda got the hell outta here when I thought about it.”
In the several years I’d been coming to Carl’s I’d seen Richard Kilgallon on the firing range quite a few times—but always managed to avoid him. He still looked much as he had the day I’d showed up at the station to surrender Marlon Shades—but without Marlon. Curly black hair, even features, about six-one, and overweight. Not huge; just maybe thirty pounds too much, evenly distributed.
He was a good-looking guy—good enough six or eight years ago to snag Stefanie Randle—but he had a soft look, and my guess was he knew that. Maybe some part of him knew, too, that the effort to take off the extra weight wouldn’t be worth it, because the softness started deeper than that. So he papered it over with meanness.
Too late now to slip out the door. He was already headed our way. The stubby glass he carried was filled with ice and a clear liquid. Water? The odds were a thousand to one against that; and equally high against its being his first of the day, given the exaggerated care with which he maneuvered himself between tables on his way over.
“Well, well, well,” he was saying, “now I know what stinks,” and the volume and tone of his voice cut through the babble in the place. “I thought I smelled something rotten.” The conversations around him died away, as though a carpet were unrolling out from him toward the corners of the room. “Like a dead possum or something.”
By then even Tina, still questioning the relevance of love, went into a final fade and was gone. No new tune replaced her and I stared up at Kilgallon—right beside our booth now—and wondered if someone had pulled the plug on the box.
Kilgallon glanced around and seemed suddenly aware of how everyone’s eyes were on him. Center stage, and I guess he decided to give it his best shot.
“Always thought you two were coppers,” he said, looking at Gene and Eddy. He drank half his drink and set the glass down between Gene and me. Resting his palms on the table, he leaned low enough so I couldn’t miss the automatic hanging in the breakaway holster under his jacket. “Musta been wrong, though,” he added. It was vodka he was drinking. It does have an odor.
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