by Thomas Laird
“You... You’re under arrest... Put... Put the fucking piece down!”
Chaka looks at the gun still gripped in his own right hand as if it’s something he picked up by mistake. He drops it to the concrete beneath him, and then his hands go down onto his kneecaps.
Staggering, I walk up to him.
“Get down on your knees. Put your hands behind your head. Do it, motherfucker!”
He looks up at me blearily. He’s all out of juice. The black teeshirt beneath the banger coat is saturated with perspiration. I can see the stains on his chest.
“Do it, cocksucker!”
He gets the hands where I told him to place them, and I cuff him as the police from the beach make it up to me and Chaka. Doc is with the two coppers from the beach’s roving Jeep, and now the boat patrolmen are alongside the pier, calling out to ask if we need any help. Doc gets on his communicator and tells them we’re okay and that they can turn back around. The Captain of the patrol boat doesn’t waste any time turning his vessel around and getting back out onto the darker blue waters of Lake Michigan.
I pull Chaka up to his feet. His hands are shackled behind him.
“All these police,” he leers. “Where the fuck you think I was goin’? Cain’t swim, motherfuckers. Caint swim a lick.”
He laughs briefly, but then he begins to cough. Next he bends over and vomits. When his spasm is done, he straightens up and looks at me.
“You on some fuckin’ steroids, man? Where the fuck did you come from? The motherfuckin’ Olympics?”
Doc grabs him by the back of the head and directs him a little roughly toward the beach Jeep.
“Take it easy on the little prick,” I tell my partner. “He’s going away on a long trip.”
Now I’m bent over, myself. But there’s no nausea. The pain in my arm and chest has miraculously vanished. I straighten up as Doc waits at the police rover. I wonder where all my pain has gone.
And then I see Chaka sitting in our vehicle, his hands outlined in steel.
This time Walter Evans isn’t quite as haughty as he was the first time we busted his little man.
“I think we can come to an agreement.”
“What agreement?” Doc asks Walter, here in the downtown Division interrogation room.
“I think my client has something to offer you.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“He might be able to shed light on someone who is, let’s say, in the larger picture when it comes to crime at Cabrini Green.”
“Why Walter!” Doc laughs. “You’re caving in on your money cow, Bobby Wells?”
“I’m here to represent only Julius Johnson. I have no loyalties when it comes to former clients.”
“You mean you’re not on Rahaan’s payroll anymore?” I ask him.
He doesn’t answer at first.
“Are you interested or aren’t you?” Walter rebounds.
“The Candyman doesn’t want any deals. This has become a high profile case, if you haven’t noticed, Mr. Evans,” Doc grins.
“I read the papers,” he answers.
“Your man Chaka gets no free rides. We’ll get Bobby Louis Wells by ourselves. We don’t want any deals. And that’s a direct quote from Mr. Brego himself,” I explain. “We’re going after your ex-employer too, but the trading deadline has been aborted. There will be no deals for your young client. Now you can go break the sad news to him. Have a nice day, Walter.”
He hates it when we call him ‘Walter.’ You can see him wince ever so slightly.
When he leaves, Doc looks over to me.
“The Candyman really said no deals?”
I nod.
“That’s good. Because if he had made nice with these pricks I would’ve had to shoot Mr. Brego.”
“There are some people who don’t play ‘Let’s Make a Deal’, Doc.”
“Thank God for small mercies.”
When all the savoring is finished, I get on the phone with the mother of the little boy who has been gone all these months.
There is no one who needs to know about Chaka’s incarceration more urgently. And when I tell her, she begins to weep. I hear her weeping for her lost son more than for the caging of an animal, and pinpricks sting the circumference of my own eyes.
“It’s almost over, baby. Take it easy. Celia, we’re almost there.”
But I can’t stop her from letting it go. I don’t know, now, if I want to, either.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was the screaming that brought on the police. Me, that is, and Doc. It was the mother who opened the door and found him. Then she kept right on shrieking down those eight flights of steps until she reached Wendell, the constant guardian of the Green, and Wendell calls 911. Doc and I arrive in thirty-five minutes. We were on scene of yet another domestic homicide on the near northside. This time it was a sixteen year old sister stabbing a fourteen year old brother over the use of a hair dryer. One of those $14.95 jobs that you can buy at anything that ends in ‘Mart.’
Creel is stretched across a naked mattress in his mother’s apartment. His throat is slashed much like the second knifing we investigated — the one with Antoine Omarr. Whoever did Creel did him with extreme prejudice. It was the same MO. There is a large, nasty knot on his forehead, and it was afterward that all the cutting occurred, Dr. Gray suggests to us on his way out of the flat.
“I thought this kind of thing might’ve been finished,” Doc laments. “I thought that whoever did the first two either got killed or decided to stop. It’s been a while between these things, Jimmy.”
“Old habits, Doc. Chaka’s next, if they can get to him behind bars.”
“Yeah. That little dick is safe, courtesy of you and me,” he grins.
“I’m happier that he’s still alive, partner. You know how it goes. You can’t pay for a crime unless you’re still on scene.”
“You can’t tell me you wouldn’t smile a little if we found Chaka just like this.”
I watch his eyes, looking for humor in them, but there is none.
It is a very messy crime scene. There is arterial spray all over the bed and behind the bed on the wall. There is gore on either side of the bed, as well. Whoever did this damage must have been covered in blood. They could not have gotten out of this building without drawing attention to themselves. They had to change clothes in this project, or they live in this project or work in this project and they have a way to discard all those smeared tops and bottoms.
So who would it be who lives in the Green? Who’s the avenging angel? We tried Wendell and all we came up with was pooch blood on a hunting knife. There was no trace of anything on Mitchell’s bayonet. And here we go again with no physical evidence.
Wendell’s place was creeped once already by us, and we pulled a favor out of the well from the last judge who let us toss Mitchell’s dwelling. I’m running out of favors and friendly judges. I don’t know if we have cause to try either of those two men again.
Then I remember the basement. There were washing machines and wash tubs down there. Doc and I take a walk downstairs after we’ve watched them bag and tag Creel. The medics have to be very careful lifting him off the mattress because his head has been almost severed from the rest of the corpse.
I check the wash basin as soon as we walk into the storage area where the washers and dryers are.
“There’s something in here,” Doc says. He turns on the overhead bulb to get a look.
“We need to get our people down here. We need to tape this room off,” I tell Doc.
I get on the walky talky and ask for some help.
“It’s blood, Jimmy. The red stuff for certain.”
He points a bloody forefinger at me.
“It’s all over the tub and it’s on the floor, too. Be careful and don’t step in it. It looks like it’s in a three foot radius of the wash tub here.”
Doc tip toes away from the sink.
I check out the washers. There’s nothing in any of the four
of them, but two of them have been used recently. They’re still a little wet, even after the spin cycle or whatever.
“They might find traces in these two. Somebody’s been here just a little while ago.”
The forensics and evidence people arrive in a few more minutes. They’ve just finished up on the eighth floor where Creel got his.
“I wonder if he was still dating that broad with the big bazoofas,” Doc muses.
“She didn’t do him,” I say.
“Why not?”
“She liked what she saw on Creel. A stiff mast in a stiff breeze. She was probably very happy with her lover man.”
“Not anymore, Jimmy. His stud career is finished.”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
Our people spend forty-five minutes examining everything in this storage area. They go over the sink with the visible blood stains, and then they scour the insides of the washers and dryers — all of them, wet or dry. Detective Bill Ganny tells me he’ll be in touch as soon as he can with the results.
“I’ll lay twenty it’s Creel’s blood,” Doc says as we depart from the basement.
“No line. No wager. Terrible odds.”
*
It was Creel’s blood. Most of it, anyway. The hitch is that there was a trace of someone else’s type in that sink. There was only the victim’s blood in the washers. Whoever did Creel used two of the machines. Why? I ask myself. Did the son of a bitch have an extra load of wash that he decided to throw in just minutes after he’d damn near beheaded a seventeen year old punk? What could have been so bulky that he needed both machines?
The other blood type is ‘AB.’ Creel’s blood type is ‘O.’ So the killer had the rarest blood there is. Only five percent of the population shares ‘AB’ with him. I wonder if the rarity will help us find him.
“We can have the DNA people check out the other dude’s serum,” Doc says.
I nod.
“Course you’ve already figured on that, haven’t you, Jimmy.”
“Hmm?”
I realize I’ve been lost in thought and that I’ve not been listening to him. It’s a bad habit I have that I’ve never really corrected. When I get lost in concentration, I shut off everyone and everything around me. It disturbs me most when I turn off my own partner.
“I’m sorry, Doc. I was just thinking about that crime scene.”
“What about it? We got it covered.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking, too.”
“Then what is it, Jimmy?”
“Whoever was down there had to go down eight floors before he got where he was going, to the basement. And no one saw the son of a bitch all that way down the stairs?”
“Maybe they had a coat over the bloody clothes. Something no one would pay much attention to. Some long thing that’d go down to your thighs, say. That would’ve got them downstairs with no problem.”
“You’re probably right... And how’d they know Creel was back? Our own Tacticals didn’t even know he was crashing at the Green. Was it just some kind of luck that our guy made Creel walking the projects?”
“You’re thinking Wendell again.”
“Could be, Doc. He sees a lot of what’s happening at Cabrini. And Mitchell’s a possibility, too. That was some pretty drastic hacking, with Antoine and Creel. And since they were both part of the shooting party that killed Andres, there was all that massive damage. Ronnie was just executed like he was a cause, but not a direct cause. You know what I’m saying?”
Gibron nods. He’s with me.
“They blamed Ronnie, but not as much as they did the three who tried to pop Ronnie and got the little boy instead.”
“And what about Chaka? He can’t hardly be the killer of Ronnie and Antoine and Creel. Not unless the motherfucker can bi-locate,” Doc says.
“Yeah. We can cross him off the list for these three, and it disappoints the living shit out of me. It would’ve been a lot more satisfying if we could’ve got him for multiples, not just Karen Nathan. We know goddam well Karen Nathan’s not the only victim he’s notched on that Uzi or that Nine.”
“You don’t think we can get warrants on Mitchell or Wendell again.”
“No, Doctor, I don’t think our track record with those two will allow it. Maybe the DNA report will help us. Maybe.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I want to go back to that basement. I want to expand the search a little. What if someone stowed something in one of those lockers?”
My beeper goes off just as we’re about to walk to the elevators here in the downtown headquarters. There’s been a double homicide over by Wrigley Field. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the Cubs. It’s late October and it’s post World Series time, so the Cubs have been on vacation for a long time.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I want to check out those lockers in the basement of Cabrini Green, but every time I set out to go there, I get interrupted. There’s something gnawing and uncomfortable somewhere inside me that says it’s important that I check that last detail. That I shouldn’t overlook what might lie in one of those lockers. I don’t have anything that suggests that Creel’s killer stashed a weapon in one of them, but you never know. I’ll get around to it eventually. Right now it looks like that second splotch of blood in the wash tub might give us some help. DNA takes a little time, but it’s a killer for evidence in court if you want to lock somebody up. They can’t escape genetics — unless the jury’s a real bunch of dumb fucks. When Daniel Brego gets a load of hard physical evidence, he’s very difficult to defeat, as I said before.
I buy Celia a new couch for her birthday in mid November. I also invite her to our house for Thanksgiving, but she says she’s already locked into her mother’s for the day. It seems like she’s making the first step in a reconciliation, so I don’t complain that she won’t be with us to partake of the bird. She complains about the lavishness of my gift, however.
“You spent too much money, Jimmy. You’re stealing from your kids, baby.”
“No I’m not. I got a good deal on it. Don’t embarrass me by looking the gift horse in the puss. Just be gracious and accept the damn thing.”
I expected to see her appreciate the humor in my jab, but her eyes go dark.
“I don’t want you taking money away from your children. I’m not playing, Jimmy.”
Then she begins to take off on me without leaving the room. She’s drifting the way she wanders away from me without physically departing. Where she is there’s no telling.
I repeat her name three times. Then she explodes.
“Goddammit! I said I don’t want you spending your money on me and I mean what I say. Can’t you understand that? Is there something wrong with your ears or your brain? Why don’t you ever listen to me, goddammit!”
“You don’t want the goddam thing then just tell me and I’ll have them come take it back.”
It’s a three seater, high-backed, beige-colored couch. The guy at the furniture store said the color would work in any room. It’s an earth color, he says.
I turn and walk out her apartment door. She doesn’t say a word to try and halt me.
*
A week goes by and I don’t hear from her. I pick up the phone several times, but I never get around to dialing the last four digits of her new, unlisted phone number. No one’s called since I had the trap installed. No one but me. Whoever was calling her — namely Chaka — isn’t able to freely access the telephone from his jail cell. His calls are screened, lately.
We didn’t really need the trap to figure out who the caller was, but it would’ve been more evidence in the stalking charge.
I go to dinner at Doc’s. His new wife, Mari, makes an Indian dish I can’t pronounce, but I know it’s got plenty of garlic in it. The Indians have at least garlic in common with us guineas.
“You’re having difficulties,” Doc says at the dinner table.
“What?” I answer.
“What’s wrong? You haven’t said a w
ord about her in over a week,” he replies.
Mari watches me. She’s a beautiful black woman herself. She’s as dark as Celia, without the African features, naturally.
“You playing detective off the clock?” I grin.
“Why don’t you just say what it is?”
“I haven’t seen her in over a week.”
I look down at Mari and I remember she’s an M.D. Not a shrink, but she’s at least in the same basic ballpark.
I explain about Celia’s mood swings, about her lapses into wherever it is that she escapes to.
“She should see a psychiatrist. I’m not trained in that field, as you know, but it sounds like she’s suffering from something like a delayed stress syndrome. You know, what soldiers suffered when they came back from war. Harold said he knew people from the Korean War who had the same symptoms you’re describing. It’s almost like dissociation. They try to distance themselves from the people they care most about. But don’t take my word for it. Get her some real therapy.”
“I tried. But she didn’t show up to the first two sessions. She said she had to work over, both times. But I think she just blew them off because the second time she said she needed to work overtime, I called the hospital and asked for her, but she wasn’t there.”
“Did you find out from her where she actually was?” Doc asks.
“Yeah. She got very vague. Angry, too. She pulled the same kind of scene she pulled with the couch I bought her.”
Mari is watching me, but she doesn’t say anything else.
“Hey. The meal was spectacular, Mari. First class stuff.”
I become awkward when I talk about Celia and me. It doesn’t matter who I’m telling it to.
I start to sway and stagger, verbally.
“Get her to the sessions, Jimmy. She sounds like she’s on the way down. The way I was headed when those two kids got shot on the west side.”
Doc is looking at me with his serious stare. He saves it for when he really wants me to pay attention.