The Bad Kitty Lounge

by Michael Wiley

  I drove over the streamer and less than a minute later rolled into the alley by my house. The familiar crunch of the asphalt under the tires made me laugh. Snakes. I was seeing snakes.

  I pulled into the garage and stepped outside into the dark shadow of the old elm tree. Then two men were beside me in the dark. I reached for my gun but I was too late, much too late.

  The men took hold of my arms and turned me back toward the alley. “Come on,” said one of them. I knew the voice—it was of one of DuBuclet’s helpers. Robert. I glanced to the other side. Jarik. In his hand, pressing against my neck, black gunmetal glinted in the dark. He and Robert had told me they would come gunning for me if they thought they needed to. Sweat slid down the insides of my legs.

  They marched me out of the alley toward the street. “You know,” I said, “you guys spend too much time lurking outside my house. If you’d knocked on the front door, I would’ve asked you in. If you’d called, I would’ve invited you for dinner.”

  “Shut up,” said Jarik.

  “I’ve got a friend coming over. She’s bringing Thai food. Probably not enough for all of us, but we could microwave—”

  Jarik stuck the gun deeper into my neck. “Shut up!”

  “You must have already eaten,” I mumbled.

  Their Lexus was across the street at the curb. Robert patted me down and took my gun.

  “In,” he said, and as I climbed into the backseat, Jarik smacked the back of my head with the gun butt. Hard enough to draw blood. Hard enough to make me think of a dead priest lying in a bathtub with a head wound.

  Robert climbed in next to me. Jarik drove.

  I held a hand to the cut. “Are we going to see DuBuclet again?”

  They said nothing.

  We went east toward Lake Michigan, crossed under Lake Shore Drive, and cruised into the park at Montrose Harbor. The harbor was a liquid shadow surrounded on three sides by a horseshoe road. The fourth side opened to the deeper shadow of the lake. We circled the harbor until we reached the end of a rock-and-sand landfill that kept million-dollar yachts safe from storms all summer. Now the docks and mooring cans were empty. The orange glow of the harbor-road streetlights shined on the blank pavement and told me I was all alone except for two guys who’d bloodied the back of my head and forced me at gunpoint into their car. Jarik parked and turned off the headlights but left the motor running. Outside, waves rolled in over the invisible dark of the lake and slammed into the blocks of limestone that protected the shore, then drew away with a hush and a hiss. I started to wish I was in a little boat bouncing on those waves.

  Robert spoke again and his voice was calm, businesslike. “If we’d wanted you to work with the cops, we wouldn’t have paid you five thousand dollars.”

  “How’d you find out so fast?”

  “Don’t talk. Listen,” said Jarik to the windshield.

  Robert said, “William DuBuclet has a long history in Chicago. Not just in politics—a personal history. He’ll do anything he needs to do to protect his interests.”

  “Do his interests include killing Judy Terrano?”

  Jarik shook his head like he couldn’t believe I still was talking.

  Robert said, “His interests are none of your business.”

  “They’re worth handing out stacks of twenty-dollar bills.”

  “Yes.”

  “And killing for?” I asked again.

  “I don’t think you get what we’re saying.” Jarik sounded exasperated.

  “I think I do,” I said. “You’re telling me to forget about Judy Terrano’s death. It has nothing to do with me. Same goes for Greg Samuelson’s shooting. Same for the murder of the priest. I’m supposed to ignore all that. It’s someone else’s problem—William DuBuclet’s, not mine.”

  Jarik clapped quietly in the front seat. “Good work, Joe.”

  “You know I’m not exactly the only one investigating this.”

  Robert’s voice was calm. “The cops think they’ve know the guy who did it. Why do anything to change their minds?”

  “It’s possible the cops are right.”

  “Okay. Then you can sleep good, too.”

  “But I don’t think they are.”

  In a flash, Robert held a gun to my head.

  I raised my hands. “But I could change my mind.”

  “We don’t really care what you think,” Robert said. “We care what you do. So, what are you going to do?”

  “Drop out of sight?”

  Jarik sounded doubtful. “You said you’d do that the first time we talked with you.”

  “You’re making a stronger argument now,” I said.

  “Yeah? Because we don’t want to have to tell you again.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, then,” Jarik said, and he flipped on the headlights and shifted into drive.

  I grinned a little. “You’re not going to kill me?”

  Jarik shrugged. “Not yet.”

  Robert said, “You’re an asshole, but when it matters you make the right decisions.”

  I had nothing to say to that, so I kept my mouth shut and fingered the sticky blood where Jarik had hit me.

  Fifteen minutes later we pulled up in front of my house. I had one other question I needed to ask. Eric Stone had paid me five thousand dollars to ask it.

  I said, “Is William DuBuclet planning to hurt Greg Samuelson’s wife?”

  Jarik gave me a look like I’d lost my mind. “Why the hell would he want to do something like that?”

  “I guess he wouldn’t,” I said.

  Robert and Jarik got out with me at my house.

  I touched the back of my head. I said, “Was the thugs-in-the-night routine really necessary?”

  “We want you to know what we can do to you,” Robert said.

  “Can I have my gun?”

  Robert laughed. “Sure.” He handed me my gun.

  Jarik said, “No hard feelings?”

  I took my Glock by the barrel. “No,” I agreed. “No hard feelings.”

  I swung the gun so its grip hit Robert square in the face, between his nose and his upper lip. He went down on the sidewalk.

  Jarik grabbed for his gun but I swung on him, too. I caught him above his left ear and he crumpled on top of Robert. “No hard feelings,” I said. Now we all had blood on our heads.

  SEVENTEEN

  JASON AND LUCINDA WERE sitting at the dining room table when I came in. I’d bought the house in the Ravenswood neighborhood after my divorce from Corrine. The ad had called it a handyman special, and I’d figured I should keep my fingers busy doing something healthier than unscrewing the caps from whiskey bottles. Now Jason and Lucinda had shoved the tools I was using to one end of the table, and they’d made the place look like home—if home was plaster dust, aluminum foil, take-out containers, mismatched glasses, and paper towels for napkins, which is what home was for me. They were chatting and laughing and if you didn’t know better you could’ve mistaken them for a mother and son eating together and welcoming home a father who’d been kept late at the office. But we all knew better.

  Lucinda had showered and put on jeans and a soft green wool sweater and looked like someone you’d want to cozy up to on a couch. Jason looked like the tall, grinning eleven-year-old he was, except he had a deep bruise on his right cheek.

  “What happened to you?” I said as I walked into the room.

  They looked at me and their laughter broke. Lucinda said, “What happened to you?”

  I looked at my jacket, at my hand. Blood had stained them. More blood streaked the top of my jeans. “Oh, this,” I said. I tried a smile, but got back blank faces. “Give me a minute.”

  I went to the kitchen, soaked a dish towel, and tamped the skin and hair around the wound, rinsed the towel, and touched it again and again, until the towel came away pink and then clear. I went to my bedroom and put my Glock on the dresser, emptied my jacket pockets, leaned the picture of the teenaged Judy Terrano against the mirror,
balled up the jacket to soak in the sink, and changed into new jeans.

  Jason and Lucinda gave me the same blank faces when I returned. “Bumped my head,” I explained, and took a seat. They’d finished the tom yum soup and pad see yew but had left a few bites of red curry with shrimp. So I poured the remaining jasmine rice onto my plate and ate. My head hurt when I chewed. They watched me in silence. I swallowed a bite and looked up. “What?” I said.

  Jason gave a little shrug. “You’re still bleeding.”

  I tried the smile again. “A lot?”

  A couple of quick shakes of his head.

  “Then it will stop,” I said, and ate another bite. “What happened to the cheek?”

  Again the shrug. “I bumped it.”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass. What happened?”

  He hesitated, then said, “You remember that guy I told you about who burns other kids’ butts with a lighter?”

  I nodded.

  “You remember how you said guys like him don’t get away with that forever?”

  I didn’t like the direction this was taking. “Yes.”

  “I decided he shouldn’t get away with it.”

  I took another bite, chewed, and thought. If my head hurt when I chewed, it hurt worse when I thought. “You pick the fight with him?”

  The little shrug. “Kind of.”

  “Could you have stopped him without fighting?”

  The question surprised him. “I don’t know.”

  “You should have thought about it,” I said.

  He looked distressed but only a little and only for a moment. Then he ducked his head under the table.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  His head reappeared. “Seeing if you had on sandals.”

  “Huh?”

  “I thought you might have turned into Gandhi.”

  I shook my fork at him. “I’ll Gandhi you.”

  He laughed.

  I laughed, too, then said, “This really isn’t funny. You’ll hurt someone or you’ll get hurt yourself. You’ll get kicked out of school.”

  He looked like he was considering that. “Okay,” he said.

  “You’re too smart for that. No more fighting.”

  “No more fighting,” he agreed.

  Lucinda leaned back and gazed at me wide-eyed. “How’s it different from you coming in with a bump on your head?”

  I glared at her. “It’s different.” As if saying it could make it true.

  Jason leaned back, too. “How?”

  “You’re eleven. I’m forty-three.”

  Jason looked bewildered. I couldn’t blame him.

  “It’s no different,” Lucinda said.

  Jason nodded.

  I asked, “What do we have for dessert?”

  Lucinda smiled. “You’re not going to eat the rest of your dinner?”

  “No,” I said. “What do we have for dessert?”

  “It’s your house. You tell us.”

  I brought in a container of orange sherbet and three bowls, and I let them laugh at me while I finished my red curry with the sherbet. When Jason got up to clear his dishes, I saw a singe mark on the back pocket of his jeans.

  Lucinda motioned at the wound on my head. “Let me guess,” she said. “William DuBuclet?”

  I blinked once at her. “How’d you know?”

  “I spent the afternoon reading about him. He has a messy background. In the sixties, he led a radical leftist group. When the Black Panthers were still serving hot lunches to hungry kids and setting up inner-city community centers, DuBuclet’s group pushed for immediate change, no matter the cost. That included armed violence.

  “One of DuBuclet’s sons died in a police raid, a kid named Anthony. He was a young guy, but he’d already taken a leading role in his dad’s organization and in a more violent splinter group. The official story is that Anthony’s death was too much for DuBuclet and he got religion. He went back to school and got a job teaching at Chicago State, and by that time he was all about peaceful action. That’s the man you’re going to see on the statues if they ever make them.

  “But last December, the Sun-Times ran an article that said the old William DuBuclet was rumbling again. He’d made a couple of wild speeches and thrown around some violent language. Mostly the article took the angle that he’s a soft-headed old man who isn’t a danger to anyone but himself. But it also said his group is suspected in vandalism against businesses on the South Side and a couple attacks on the owners.”

  “DuBuclet isn’t soft-headed.”

  She gestured toward the gash on my skull. “So what was this about?”

  “They paid me five thousand dollars to lay off the Judy Terrano investigation, but they found out I was still involved.” I ran my fingers over my matted hair. “This was their second request for me to get out.”

  “And you told them . . . ?”

  I smiled. “I said, ‘Okay.’ ”

  She smiled, too, and gave that some thought. “You know that’s also what Jason said when you told him to stop fighting.”

  “Damn.”

  “He’s a smart kid, Joe. He’ll learn whatever you teach him.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Yeah, you should be.” Then, “You want to know about Judy Terrano?”

  “What did you find?”

  She went to the kitchen and came back with a small notebook. “Not much before 1989. In December ’82 she got arrested along with three other nuns during a march protesting Reagan’s policies in Nicaragua. This was liberation theology stuff—you know, the clergy on the front lines. The Sun-Times ran a photo of her and the other nuns carrying a pro-Sandinista banner and another of them in handcuffs. She got arrested twice more—in ’84 and ’85. Similar stuff.

  “In ’89, she started the abstinence campaign, and the Tribune ran a short article on her in the religion pages. They said she was a well-known figure in civil rights battles and Latin American social rights, though I don’t remember hearing her name back then. Six months later a Sun-Times editorial praised her for her plain speech about sex, though she’d apparently gotten into trouble with the archdiocese. By ’94, she’d gone more extreme and the papers started calling her the Virginity Nun. She collected a bunch of awards and a bunch of ridicule. She made big claims about the success of her programs. The people who wanted to believe them did, and the people who didn’t like her said she was full of it. No one doubted her commitment, though. She appeared at hundreds of school assemblies, church conferences, fund-raising banquets, and youth rallies.”

  “What about more recently?”

  She flipped the page in the notebook. “Three years ago she got in trouble again, or almost. The Trib ran an article that said the Diocesan Finance Council, which is the group that keeps an eye on church finances, was looking at her after a hundred ninety thousand dollars went missing at Holy Trinity. There was no follow-up in the paper, so I’m guessing the money turned up or the Council realized they’d made a mistake. Or,” she added, “the Church decided a cover-up was cheaper than bad publicity.”

  I considered that. “The room she was living in says she wasn’t skimming from the offering plates. She was the kind of woman who saved soap slivers so she could pack them together and make a new bar.”

  “Yeah,” Lucinda said, “but she also hid a stack of twenties in her desk. That doesn’t look like a vow of poverty. What was she up to?”

  I shrugged. “Something with William DuBuclet. If he was paying her off, she probably knew one of his secrets. Maybe that secret was worth killing for.”

  “Okay, but what was it?”

  “Don’t know,” I said.

  “I also Googled Judy Terrano’s name,” Lucinda said. “I got eleven thousand hits, so I didn’t look too deep.”

  “Did you Google her name along with ‘Bad Kitty’?”

  She nodded. “Came up dry. What else did you come up with?”

  I went to the bedroom for the picture
and placed it on the dining room table in front of her.

  “Who’s that?” she said.

  “Judy Terrano as a teenager.”

  “Wow.” She ran a finger down the picture. “When I was eighteen, I wanted to look like that. Why the hell did she become a nun?”

  “It’s not like good-looking girls never do.”

  “She’s more than good-looking,” she said, and she held the picture close. “She’s a sex kitten. I bet a lot of guys fell in love with her.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “How about William DuBuclet?”

  “In love with her? He’s thirty-five years older than she is.”

  “You’re twenty-five years older than she was in this picture. Don’t you want to sleep with her?”

  “You’re talking about a dead nun,” I said.

  She nodded like she knew it. “You do. Jesus, I almost want to.”

  I cocked my head at her. “You get a chance to research Eric Stone?”

  “Not yet. The archives were closing. You think he’s involved?”

  “I wouldn’t swear it, but yeah. Something’s strange about him paying me five thousand dollars to keep an eye on DuBuclet. He could afford one of the big security firms. The only reason to hire me is I’m already in the middle of this mess. I think he wants to keep a leash on me.”

  She nodded. “So what’s next?”

  “Tomorrow one of us looks at the archives for Eric Stone and one of us talks to Amy Samuelson to find out what she sees in Stone and what she’s after.”

  “I’ll take the librarians. I don’t like ex-wives.” The way she said it made me think there was something in it for me. We sat quiet for a moment and I felt her eyes on me. “Are we done?” she said.

  “I suppose so.”

  She gave that a few seconds and then said, “You want to go to bed?” Like a surprise gift in the mail.

  “Now?”

  “If we’re done talking, what else is there?”

  “Jason’s in his room.”

  She took my hand in hers. “He’ll go to sleep sooner or later.”

  Three weeks earlier we’d spent the night together, the night she’d heard that she could either leave the department or spend the fourteen years leading up to pension in a police warehouse repairing radios, so far behind-the-scenes she wouldn’t even hear sirens. She’d shot a man to death. It didn’t matter that the man she’d killed was a killer himself. She’d used her service revolver and shot him outside city limits, breaking seven department regulations along the way. She was too hot for the higher-ups ever to put back on the street.