“You can’t talk to her. The court will believe you’re trying to influence one of its members, and have one more reason to deny your petition.”
“I don’t care what the court believes. I thought I established that long ago. I want to confront Flanagan with her special interest in my case, but not let her know you eavesdropped on—”
“I didn’t eavesdrop. I overheard.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Anyway, she’s not going to tell you why she cares.”
“I said I want to confront her, not ask her. I already know what her interest is.”
“You do? What is it?”
“She was part of—” I stopped. “The less you know, the better off you are.”
“But I’m only in trouble if she discovers I heard her warn Clark Woolford that our office better not raise an objection to your reinstatment. I’m sure you’re not going to tell her that.”
“Right,” I said. “But you still don’t have to know why she’s interested.”
“Except that I want to know.” She leaned forward. “I mean, I’m the one who let you in on what she told Mr. Woolford, so you owe it to me to tell me how she’s involved.”
In fact, she’d only told me because she was scared out of her wits and wanted me to tell her what to do, but chivalry kept me quiet about that. “I owe you?”
“Well…” She let the word trail off, and there was a new look, a sort of humorous twinkle, in her eyes. “You sort of owe me.”
Maybe the look wasn’t so much humorous. Maybe seductive, or whatever. Anyway, why not tell her? Maybe she could be of some help. Maybe I just felt like telling her and seeing what she thought. Lots of maybe’s. Maybe I just enjoyed talking to her.
“You told me you read the police reports about that shooting,” I said. “You find anything odd?”
“Actually, I focused on what happened afterwards, the parts about you and your client. How he was supposed to turn himself in and you were to take him to the police station, but he didn’t show up. And then how, later, you wouldn’t say what he told you. And what eventually happened to you.”
“You didn’t read about the shooting itself? About what happened when the police got to Lonnie Bright’s house?”
“Oh, I read everything. As to the incident itself, I read the reports and I guess … well, my main thought was they weren’t very clear. But I decided that was because, out of the four policemen who were actually there when it happened, one was dead and two were taken to the hospital. So the initial description came from whatever the detectives could get from … from my ex, from Richard. And somewhere in there it said he appeared to be in shock, and not entirely coherent.”
“Right.”
“Plus there were descriptions of bullets and shells and whatever else they found on the scene. A tiny bit of cocaine, or crack, or something.” She frowned. “But you asked about anything ‘odd,’ so I guess what struck me was why would that man—Lonnie Bright?—why did he just suddenly turn around and start shooting at the policemen? I mean, it seemed so … so dumb.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Dumb.” Which this woman was not.
“Then I thought, since they’d seen him with a gun, maybe he was afraid a weapons conviction would send him to prison for a long time. Still, though, it—”
“Lots of arrests. No prior felony convictions,” I said. “The weapon was registered. Don’t forget, this was a guy who probably knew as much or more about the criminal justice system—from personal experience—than you and I. He’d have known that with a halfway decent lawyer he’d walk on an ‘unlawful possession’ charge.”
“Then I was also thinking, since he was a drug dealer, that maybe he and the other guy—the one who got away—maybe they were doing a drug sale and the police burst in and that’s why he shot.”
“Cops didn’t say that. And they found no drugs, no big sums of money.”
“Maybe the man who got away took all that with him.”
“Pretty lucky guy, huh? All kinds of shots fired. Three people dead, two wounded, and he’s right in the middle of it. And still he gathers up the money, and the cocaine—or whatever—and walks away without a trace.”
“So then, what’s your theory on why Lonnie Bright started shooting?” She paused, then added, “Or maybe you know. Maybe your client told you.”
“All my client knew was where he was and what he was doing when it all went down.” I paused. “By the way, that’s the most I’ve ever told anyone about what he told me.” I poured a new cup of coffee, without the creamer. “My theory is that Lonnie Bright didn’t start shooting at all.”
“Really. But would it make any more sense for his girlfriend to start it? And if it was the other guy up there, he’d be the first one the police would shoot back at, and—”
“And he’d be dead. Right.” I paused. “It wasn’t the girlfriend who started the shooting. And there was no other guy.”
“So, you’re saying…” She sipped water from her glass. “You’re saying the police shot first, then falsely claimed there was someone else there who got away. God, I mean, that’s a really serious charge. That means they simply shot Lonnie Bright, then they all lied about everything. I mean, when they finally got statements from the two officers that were wounded, they said pretty much what my … what Richard told them.”
“Right,” I said. “After they’d seen all the reports already. And maybe even had lawyers of their own. Would they lie?” I shrugged. “Would Richie Kilgallon lie to keep himself out of trouble?”
“Richard? He’d lie for no damn reason at all except he felt like it. But why the story about an extra man? I mean we all know sometimes cops shoot too soon. Then they explain they thought the victim was armed and dangerous.”
“Right,” I said. “As in: ‘That soup spoon in the victim’s hand, it sure looked like a gun.’”
“But in this case the man they shot, Lonnie, actually did have a gun, registered to his name. And even if he had no prior felony convictions, everyone seems to agree he was a bad guy. So why the story?”
“Lonnie had several gunshot wounds, but the bullet he died from went through the center of his forehead. There’s some indication in the pathologist’s report that that was probably the first slug he took. That could have been followed up on. But it never was.”
“I only sort of skimmed through the pathology reports.” She stared at me. “So, just what is your theory?”
“My theory is that four cops went to Lonnie Bright’s house. One or more of them went upstairs and deliberately put a bullet in Lonnie’s brain. The forensics lab couldn’t tell for sure whose gun that bullet came from, just that it wasn’t Jimmy Coletta’s. My theory is that murdering Lonnie was planned, but that then something went wrong. Maybe they didn’t know anyone else was up there. The girfriend was, though; and she had a gun, the semiautomatic they later had to pry out of her hand. Fact is, she had a record of violence worse than Lonnie’s. Anyway, she opened fire. The cops returned fire. More people got shot. Richie managed to call for help, and when help arrived it was all over but the bleeding.”
“And then all three surviving cops lied about someone there who got away?”
“Not to repeat myself, but would Richie Kilgallon lie?”
“The fact that someone might lie doesn’t prove that he did. Besides, the police turned up bullets on the scene that couldn’t have come from any of the guns they found there.”
“I know. Two slugs dug out of the hallway wall. I can’t explain that for sure. Maybe they were old slugs. Maybe they had nothing to do with that night.”
“So what’s your theory about why a police officer murdered Lonnie in the first place?”
“One pulled the trigger. Maybe they all murdered him.” I drank some coffee. “They were narcotics detectives. Lonnie was a drug dealer.”
“I don’t think you’re saying they killed him just because they don’t like drug dealers.”
“No.”
“So? Go on.”
I shrugged again. “Heroin, speed, coke, acid—all these chemicals and their various formulations. Most of us can’t even keep track of them. What everyone knows, though, is that there can be more money involved in one illegal drug transaction than most people see in their lifetime—and it’s all cash.”
“And you think the cops were doing a drug deal with Lonnie.”
“It’s a plausible theory.”
“Did your client tell you this?”
“Marlon Shades didn’t tell me one thing that I plan to tell you or anyone.”
“Okay.” She seemed to be thinking. “You don’t believe there was any unknown person up there who got away.”
“That’s my theory.”
“So then, where did the drugs go?”
“And the money, too,” I added. “I don’t know.”
“You won’t say?” she asked. “Or you really don’t know?”
“I really don’t know.” I did have a theory on that, too, but to explain it I’d have to tell her what Marlon Shades had told me.
“God, what a mess!” She shook her head and poked at the pen that lay on the table in front of her, as though studying it. I didn’t think she saw the pen at all, though, and I was hoping I knew what was going through her mind. “There’s a part of me,” she finally said, “that wishes I hadn’t convinced you to tell me what you think happened.”
“You didn’t convince me to tell you,” I said.
“You mean you planned to tell me all along?”
“I was thinking about it on my way here,” I said. “But I wasn’t sure, not until we talked, and you figured out who your secret helper is.”
“Wait a minute.” She frowned. “I didn’t say I figured anything out.”
“No, but I think you did.”
“Well, is it … my grandfather?”
“You didn’t hear it from me, or he’d be very unhappy with me.”
“But I never even met him. I—”
“Wait.” I held up my hand. “You said one part of you wishes I hadn’t told you my theory about Lonnie Bright. So tell me about the other part.”
“Other part?”
“Yeah, the part that’s glad I told you.” I paused. “Tell me about the part of you that wants to help me find out if I’m right.”
CHAPTER
30
NO QUESTION ABOUT IT. Stefanie couldn’t help hoping I was right about what happened at Lonnie Bright’s. She’d understood at once that if I was, and if it ever got out in the open, her no-good ex-husband would be up to his ear lobes in bad-smelling stuff. And way too busy to worry about Stefanie and her plan to move back home to Albany, New York, with their little girl.
On the other hand, she had difficulty believing Breaker Hanafan would want to help her. She’d learned as a child not to talk about, or even think about, her mother’s father, Francis Gilmary Hanafan. She’d never seen him, never communicated with him in any way. When other kids, or teachers, pressed her for information, she’d say he died before she was born. When she came to Chicago for law school, she’d had a vague notion to find out more about him. But at first she was too busy with classes and exams, and eventually with a job and a kid and a major headache for a husband. There was a touch of fear, too, knowing Breaker supposedly had “underworld connections.” So, if anyone ever asked, she stuck with the story she’d used all her life, and claimed her maternal grandfather was “deceased.”
She knew I had no reason to lie about it, but couldn’t believe Breaker actually cared what happened to her. I told her he’d gotten it into his mind somehow that it was up to him to punish Richie for what he’d done to her. I told her how badly he wanted Richie in prison—skipping the part about wanting him “bent over a bench”—and how he’d leveraged me into getting enough dirt on Richie to put him there. I didn’t tell her the leverage was his threat to kill Yogi, or that her caring grandfather planned to flat-out kill Richie himself if I didn’t succeed before the cancer had him too far gone to do it. I didn’t mention his medical condition at all.
“Oh,” I said, “about your being followed? Or in danger? I mentioned that to Breaker. So if someone does follow you, or bother you, it’s them I’d worry about … not you.”
Her hand went to her throat and her eyes widened. “My God!” Despite her shock, though, she seemed happy about it, too. “Do you think I should … contact him or something?”
“That’s your decision,” I said. “But I don’t see what help it would be. The man’s moods are, let’s just say, erratic. I’m not even sure it’s your interests he’s concerned about. Or if it’s simply to satisfy some need of his own.”
“You make him sound like … like someone I don’t want to know.”
“Which is what the people who knew him well taught you as a child,” I said. “But for now, I’m just hoping you’ll help me to help him help you.” I shook my head. “Does that make sense?”
“I guess so. I mean, this whole thing scares me to death,” she said, “but I’ll do whatever I can. How will your talking to Maura Flanagan bring out what really happened the night of the shooting?”
“I don’t know,” I said, which was the truth. “I’m just gonna put pressure on her, then wait and see what happens. The first problem, though, is how to get close enough to her for a private conversation, without getting arrested in the process.”
We kicked it back and forth awhile, and finally came up with a plan. On the one hand, we were in luck because Flanagan was to be back at the disciplinary commission for a meeting on Wednesday, just two days away. On the other hand, it wasn’t a very good plan. But, hey …
* * *
ON THE WAY OUT, I filed a notice with the commission’s clerk that I’d subpoenaed Jimmy Coletta to appear and give a deposition on the coming Friday. Then Stefanie let me use a phone, and I called my own number to pick up my messages.
My main strategy was to keep the ball rolling. I’d had the subpoena served on Jimmy over the weekend, along with a letter from me. It was a polite, lawyer-speak letter—in case it ever got public—stating that we might be able to “obviate the necessity for sworn deposition testimony” if we met in person to discuss the issues. I gave him my phone number and wrote that the meeting could be “at any such time and place as is convenient to you,” but by Tuesday at the latest. “If this good-faith attempt to avoid the time and trouble of sworn testimony is not acceptable,” I concluded, “the deposition will go forward as required by law.”
The only message on my machine was Jimmy’s response. He said he’d meet me that night at the same south side gym where we’d talked the previous Thursday. He said to call him, and left his number. “That’s the gym,” he said. “I’ll be there all day.” He sounded tired, stressed out, impatient.
Feeling pretty much the same, I punched out the number. A man answered. “Beale here.”
“I want to talk to Jimmy Coletta.”
“Who’s this?” He didn’t sound friendly.
“Just get Mr. Coletta.”
“Y’all ain’t talkin’ to nobody, ’less y’all tell me your name.”
“Foley,” I said, “now just—”
“Hold on.”
I waited a few minutes and Jimmy came on the line.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Who was who? Oh, you mean answering the phone? Preston Beale, the janitor. He thinks he runs this place.” There was some cheering in the background, then silence, and I imagined Jimmy getting someone to close a door. “Tomorrow I have physical therapy, all day. I can’t miss it. But I’ll meet you tonight, here at the gym. Eight o’clock.”
“It’s just one-thirty now. I can be there in forty-five minutes, maybe less.”
“No, I can’t. We’re having sort of a tournament.”
“I can watch. We’ll talk between games.”
“Listen to me, will you? There are too many people around now. Come at eight o’clock. Except for my … my driver, everyone wi
ll be long gone by then. I don’t want anyone to know we’re talking. Don’t you understand?” Tired, stressed out, impatient. For sure. And frightened, too.
“I understand perfectly.”
Jimmy Coletta had been a bad cop. Then he’d taken a terrible blow, survived, and grown into a different person. Now he was afraid the new life he’d painfully constructed for himself and his family over the last five years was about to be suddenly demolished, and the pieces hauled off to a landfill.
I was scared, too. My fear was that Jimmy might be right, and that I’d be the one wielding the wrecking ball.
CHAPTER
31
THE CAVALIER WAS IN a parking garage a few blocks east of the disciplinary commission, on Randolph, and I had six hours to kill before my meeting with Jimmy Coletta. I walked back to the car and slid into the driver’s seat.
Ten minutes later, I was still sitting there, thinking.
I climbed back out, slipped off my sport coat and laid it on the roof of the car. I got the Beretta out of the trunk, snapped it into a shoulder holster and slipped the harness over my Chicago Symphony Orchestra Radiothon sweatshirt. Just then a white Cadillac DeVille came around the corner from the next level up, and a gray haired, wide-eyed woman slowed to a stop and stared at me.
“FBI,” I said, and gave her a stern, governmental glare. She drove away.
I put the jacket back on, slid an extra seven-round magazine into the left pocket, and closed the trunk. Back in the driver’s seat I checked my watch. Great. Now I had only five hours and forty-five minutes to kill. Maybe I’d go find a forest preserve and sit in the parking lot and stare out the windshield.
The advantage of doing that was it would bore the hell out of the guy hiding behind a newspaper, about a block away on Randolph in what looked like the same car Yogi had tipped me to a week earlier, a dark green four-door Crown Vic. The disadvantage was that I’d be equally bored, and I’d still have to shake him off before I drove out to see Jimmy.
I left the Cavalier where it was and departed the parking garage on foot, by way of an alley that opened onto State Street. At Barney Green’s office I told his secretary I needed a car. I’d have to come up with a client to send Barney pretty soon. He was way ahead of me in our exchange of favors.
No Show of Remorse Page 14