The Chicago Way

by Michael Harvey

  I put down Homer and picked up the here and now. I needed an education, quick and dirty, about an old rape that might be spawning fresh murder. And I thought I knew just where to get it.

  Chapter 16

  Cook County’s evidence warehouse sits at the corner of Twenty-third and Rockwell on the city’s South Side. A pile of red and white bricks, surrounded by barbed wire and flat, vacant pavement, the warehouse holds the bones of Chicago’s crimes. Eight stories high and chock-full.

  Ray Goshen was six feet two and had to run around in the shower to get wet. His shoulders were as wide as my fist, and his neck didn’t support his head, which tended to tilt to the left—although sometimes, when he got angry, I swore it tilted right. Whichever way he tilted, I always felt myself looking sideways at Ray and never really able to get a handle on what he was saying. Not that the head should matter. Tilted or not, the words all come out the same. Or so one would think. Anyway, in the world of Chicago evidence, Ray Goshen held the keys to the kingdom. He met me at the door, head leaning right and, true to form, not a happy man.

  “What you doing down here, Kelly?”

  “Hey, Ray, nice to see you, too.”

  “Last time you were here was not a good thing.”

  Last time I was here was almost a year ago. I’d gotten a tip on some home movies a killer named Alan Lake had covertly made from his jail cell in Stateville prison. He and his buddies smoking some weed and just having a hell of a good time. A client asked me if I couldn’t track the tapes down. Goshen let me take a look through some of the evidence in the warehouse, and I found Lake’s wallet. In it was a phone number. Twenty-three years later and it still worked. Someone still answered. She was Alan Lake’s half sister. She had a copy of the tape in question and was more than willing to barter. A few dollars later, I had the tapes. A week after that, my client put them on the ten o’clock news. I didn’t know about that part of the bargain. If I had, I’m not sure it would have made a difference. It did to Ray.

  “They traced it back here, you know,” Goshen said.

  I knew that but pretended I didn’t.

  “Asked all kinds of questions. Nearly lost my job.”

  I knew that, too. Fact is, I’d watched the whole thing. From a distance. Fortunately, my client had a conscience, at least when pushed. They all tended to when pushed. She made a call and Ray Goshen kept his job. Otherwise, my client would have lost hers. That’s what I told her, anyway. Goshen had just chalked it up to his good luck, which was fair enough.

  “You owe me nothing, Ray. I know that.”

  “Fucking Kelly. This is about Gibbons, right?”

  I nodded. Goshen knew Gibbons, worked the evidence locker at Gibbons’ old district.

  “I didn’t kill him, Ray.”

  “No shit, Kelly. That doesn’t mean you won’t go to jail for it.”

  “Not likely.”

  Ray gave me a look like he half didn’t believe me. I half didn’t believe myself. Still, Goshen could never resist playing God with his evidence. Besides, he loved the gore. I knew that and counted on it.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “It’s an old file,” I said. “Maybe it ties in. Probably not.”

  “You got a case number?”

  “No. I got the name of the victim and a date.”

  I shoved a piece of paper in front of Goshen, who clicked his flashlight on it and then tilted the beam up.

  “Rape or murder?”

  Goshen’s smile was missing a few parts. Coupled with the flashlight it was like talking to a human jack-o’-lantern. One with a broken neck. Still, he was the man with the keys. Keeper of the kingdom.

  “Rape,” I said.

  Goshen scratched his private parts and started to laugh.

  “How old was she?”

  “Nineteen, twenty, maybe.”

  That tickled him even further.

  “Come on.”

  We walked through the first floor, past rows of shelving stretching thirty feet to the ceiling, jammed with the various and sundry. Knives and pliers, machetes and cudgels. Two-by-fours and bedposts, metal shanks and flex cuffs. Toilet-seat covers, window frames, lengths of rope, twine, piano wire, and bed-sheets. The tools of murder, rape, and plain old mayhem, some of them sealed in plastic, some jammed into cardboard boxes, others just lying about with a tag and a piece of illegible scrawl attached thereto.

  Goshen turned a corner and found his way to a small office. I could see the light inside. Beside the office was a black metal door. Goshen fished out a key and fit it into the door’s lock.

  “Bit of history in here, Kelly.”

  Goshen opened the door and clicked on a light. The room looked like it used to be a supply closet. Now it was filled up with brown boxes on one side and a row of wooden shelves on the other. I took a step inside and sneezed. Everything was covered in dust.

  “See the boxes,” Goshen said.

  I did.

  “See the shelves.”

  I did.

  “This is Grime. Not all of it, mind you. We have three other rooms for that boy. But this is some good stuff.”

  Goshen pulled out a stack of Girl Scout magazines once owned by John William Grime, Chicago’s very own street mime and serial killer. They looked like normal magazines, except all the Girl Scouts were naked.

  “Found cartons of this stuff inside his house. Sick fuck.”

  The warehouse man fingered one of the magazines, put it back down and picked up a plastic evidence bag. Inside it was a girl’s school ring.

  “See this? Suzanne Carson’s ring. They found this in the attic. You remember Carson?”

  I remembered Carson. Anyone who knew anything about Chicago crime would. She was Grime’s last victim. The Girl Next Door. The case that led police to the house on Hutchinson and the fifteen bodies buried underneath. Through the plastic evidence bag, Goshen played his hands across the ring.

  “You come in here a lot, Ray?”

  For a moment there was a touch of hunger about his lips and eyes. Then Goshen subsided and dropped Suzanne’s ring.

  “My job is to keep this stuff straight. Let’s go.”

  We locked up Grime’s broom closet and walked next door. Goshen’s office was small and jammed with more boxes of evidence. In one corner was a shipping cart full of handguns and rifles.

  “They’re getting melted next week,” Goshen said. As if the guns needed an explanation. Which they didn’t.

  The office walls were covered with a brand of grit only true despair can create. The only decoration was a pinup calendar from August 1983. The girl on the calendar looked like she was about thirteen, and she was naked. Not coquettishly naked. Disturbingly naked.

  “You like her?” Goshen said. He was behind me now, chin nearly on my shoulder.

  “She’s a little young, Ray.”

  He shrugged, moved back around the desk, and sat down.

  “Have a seat.”

  From a drawer, Goshen produced an enormous green book with a red binding. He opened it and began to turn the pages, slowly and with care.

  “Your girl. How old did you say she was?”

  “About twenty.”

  “Raped, you say?”

  “I did.”

  Goshen stopped turning pages.

  “Did she fight?”

  “Is she in the book, Ray?”

  Goshen looked at me like I should be happy I wasn’t stuffed underneath Grime’s house and left there for a good while.

  “How the fuck do I know? Let me take a look.”

  He returned to the ledger.

  “You get a lot of people coming in here?” I said.

  “Sure,” Goshen said. “People like police officers. You know, the guys who actually belong here.”

  I snuck a look at the pages as Goshen turned. The entries were all handwritten. The first page I saw was dated January 1,1934. Goshen stopped turning again.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Fucking ancient. But yo
u know what? Handwriting makes people think about what they put in. And besides, it’s pretty damn hard to disguise your scrawl, in case you ever tried. So we say, fuck the computers. Let everyone write it all out. We just keep adding pages to the ledger. And there it is.”

  Goshen was flipping pages now. Each was large and took two hands to turn.

  “Is this the only copy?” I said.

  “Fucking pessimist. Yeah, it’s the only copy and been the only copy for most of the last century. Fucking pessimists.”

  He stopped the turning.

  “Here we go. The crime happened in 1997, right?”

  “Right.”

  “We search by file number. Page by page. Here. This covers 1980 through the nineties.”

  Goshen unclipped the ledger and split up the hundred or so pages cataloging two decades of Chicago crime.

  “Don’t fuck these up,” he said.

  “I got it.”

  Fifteen minutes later Goshen found an entry.

  “Goddamn it, Kelly.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Elaine Remington, December twenty-fourth, 1997?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Next time come in with a goddamn case number. I ran a search for this evidence just the other day.”

  “For who?”

  Goshen slammed the ledger closed, blew his nose into a barrel under his desk, and crossed one knee over the other.

  “Couple of pukes from the DA’s office.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah.” Goshen smiled. “Thing is, I hate the DA even more than your sorry ass.”

  “Lucky for me.”

  “Got that right. Told the two of them everything was numbered; go ahead and search the place.”

  “How long did they last?”

  “First guy. About an hour. Second guy was a go-getter. Went the full day. Never made it off the first floor.”

  “Think he ever got close?”

  “I know he didn’t. The first floor only carries cases through 1975.”

  “Didn’t tell that to the DA’s men, huh?”

  Goshen gave me the blank gaze of a city bureaucrat, willing to stand there until I figured it out for myself. Or at least until quitting time.

  “You have a map of this place?” I said.

  Goshen tapped his forehead.

  “Right here. But you have to ask the right question. Let’s go.”

  The elevator was a birdcage job with one of those old cranks you have to hold down until you get to your floor. Goshen turned it on with a skeleton-looking key, and we started up. The warehouse man kept his eyes fixed on the crank. Not because he didn’t know how to work it, but because his alternative was to look at me. Didn’t exactly make me feel warm inside. Still, we were moving.

  “Fifth floor,” Goshen said. “Nineteen ninety through ‘99.”

  He cracked the elevator door and we walked out. Rows of iron shelving stretched upward and ran off into the darkness. Bits of light from what might have been bulbs filtered down from the rafters. Useless except as a reminder to go back downstairs and get a flashlight. Fortunately, Goshen was ahead of the game. He jumped into a forklift and pulled a flash from his pocket.

  “Let’s go,” he said, and powered up the lift. I got in and we drove.

  “Kind of a big place, this fifth floor, Ray.”

  “Lot of sick fucks, Kelly. Lot of sick fucks. This is it. The late nineties.”

  Goshen played a light over lumps of black, coffin boxes of evidence covered in dust. Forgotten by everyone. Cataloged by Ray.

  “Here, put these on.”

  Goshen handed me a set of latex gloves and a white breather. I started at one end of an aisle. He started at the other. The work was slow, box by box. Pull one off the shelf, open it up, and pick through the pieces of old crimes.

  Some of the material was strictly forensic: small plastic bags of hair, blood smears, or nails clipped off a corpse.

  Then there was the echo of what was once a life.

  In one box, coloring books, the pictures half finished, a child’s name in crayon, smeared with blood.

  In another, a CD of Pearl Jam’s Ten, AMANDA scrawled on the cover with a flower. Underneath the CD, a calendar from 1996. Filled with dates that never mattered. People never met. A life never lived and now forgotten.

  Two hours into the process, I picked up a small box with 12/24/97 scrawled across the side. My heart tightened for two reasons. That was the day of Elaine Remington’s attack. Even better, the signature on the box belonged to John Gibbons.

  Goshen was around the corner working on another aisle. I sliced open the box and found a single manila envelope inside. It appeared to be intact, with Gibbons’ initials and the date written across the red evidence seal. I sliced through the seal and slid out a single item, a green women’s polo gashed in several places and crusted with blood, now the color of rust. I felt a presence at my elbow.

  “What you got?” Goshen said.

  I showed him the evidence box.

  “The date is right and it’s got Gibbons’ name,” I said. “But there’s no case number.”

  Goshen picked up the envelope and turned it over. His fingers were thin, nails long and ragged.

  “Nothing on the envelope, either.” The warehouse man winked. “Almost like someone wanted it to be lost.”

  “I’m thinking this is the shirt my victim was wearing.”

  “I’m thinking you might be half-ass right for once. Let’s go back to the office.”

  We sat down with two cans of Old Style and the shirt between us. It was almost winter in Chicago but mid-July in Goshen’s cubbyhole. A fan chugged away in one corner. Goshen popped open his beer and pushed half the can past an impossibly large Adam’s apple, never taking his eyes off the shirt. And never touching it.

  “Officially,” he said, “this piece of evidence doesn’t really exist. No case number, no log-in report, no other identifying marks.”

  Goshen craned his neck, rolled his eyes, and pushed at the shirt with a pencil.

  “I got to go out and clean up that fucking mess you made out there. When I come back, I have a lot of work to do. I don’t want you here, and I don’t want any more distractions lying around. You got it?”

  I got it.

  “You really don’t like the DA, do you?” I said.

  Goshen gave me a look of pure nothing and left. Like any good civil servant, he cherished institutional hatred, nurtured the otherwise forgotten slight, and polished a grudge like it was gold. Whatever the DA’s office had done to Goshen, it wasn’t good for them. For me, however, it was a different story entirely. I picked up the shirt carefully, folded it into its envelope, and slipped out of the warehouse. As quickly and as quietly as I could.

  Chapter 17

  I returned to my office and slid the green polo into one of those secret hiding places they teach you in private-investigator school. Also known as my bottom left-hand drawer. Then I turned on the radio. ESPN was doing a hot-stove report on the Cubbies. Be still my heart.

  I listened intently, pondering deep thoughts, such as what manner of men might pay Alfonso Soriano $136 million to play baseball and where, pray tell, I might get such a gig. Then I noticed a piece of paper slipped under my door. I walked over and picked it up. Eat-A-Pita was having a special on char-grilled shrimp pitas layered with onions and wasabi sauce. I turned off the hot stove and was about to head out when the phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number but picked up anyway.

  “Kelly, it’s Vince Rodriguez.”

  The detective’s voice seemed a little stretched. Whatever he needed to talk about, Rodriguez had given it some thought and was uneasy.

  “You eat yet?” he said.

  I told Rodriguez about the special at Eat-A-Pita. He seemed properly impressed.

  “How about I meet you there,” he said. “Half hour.”

  …

  I FOUND RODRIGUEZ in a booth by the window. I figured the detective wanted one of two things. H
elp with a case. Or help with Nicole. I had barely sat down before I got my answer.

  “You and Nicole,” Rodriguez said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Friends since you were kids.”

  “Nicole told you all that, huh?”

  “A little bit.”

  “She grew up a couple houses down the street. Over on the West Side. I looked out for her growing up. Now I think she looks out for me.”

  I took a cursory look at the menu and kept talking.

  “Why the interest, Detective?”

  I tried to keep the grin out of my voice. Across the table, the Unflappable One squirmed.

  “She probably told you. We got a bit of a thing.”

  “A thing?”

  I took a sip of water and waited.

  “You know how it is. On the job and stuff.”

  A waitress drifted over. We both ordered the special. Rodriguez added an iced tea.

  “If she likes you, don’t try to figure it out,” I said. “Just take it as a blessing. Pray she doesn’t wake up one day and change her mind. At least that’s what I’d do. Is that all you wanted to ask me, Detective?”

  “Pretty much. I just wanted to see, you know.”

  “Whether we were more than friends?”

  “Yeah.”

  I shrugged.

  “Never have been. Just not like that.”

  I thought Rodriguez would let it lie. I was wrong.

  “Is there something else going on with her?”

  “How so?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Just seems like there’s some kind of hurt. When you were around the other night, it got a little easier. At least, it seemed that way.”

  “How much does she mean to you, Detective?”

  “You think I like making a fool of myself in front of an ex-cop I barely know?”

  “You give it time. You let her figure it out. Let her figure you out.”

  “I’m thinking maybe we shouldn’t work together. Maybe that would make it better.”

  “Can’t answer that for you.”