“Mr. Dodson.” The nurse was calm, very black, and old enough to be Antoine’s grandmother. “You are going to be fine. Eight pellets were removed from your leg. You’ve lost a lot of blood, but you are going to be fine. Are you up to talking to these men?”
“Who are they?” asked Antoine, mouth dry, leg throbbing, but the terrible pain gone.
“Police,” she said.
“Too weak,” said Antoine, closing his eyes.
“That’s unfortunate,” said one of the two men. “Without some answers soon, we’re going to have to consider booking you for murder, robbery, and twenty other counts including reckless driving and take you in as soon as you can get up.”
Antoine’s eyes opened. “Murder? I didn’t kill nobody. I got shot.”
The two men in front of him were an unlikely pair. One was old, small with white curly hair and a little mustache. The other man was big, as big as Irwin. He looked powerful and he looked sad.
“You want to talk?” the nurse said. “You are capable.”
“Maybe I’ll talk a little,” Antoine said in a whisper that sounded weaker than he was.
“I’ll be at my station or with a patient,” the nurse said, leaving the room.
“I’m Detective Lieberman. This is Detective Hanrahan. I’m going to read your rights and we’d like you to sign a statement that you’ve been read those rights and understand them.”
“Okay,” said Antoine. “But I didn’t kill nobody.”
Hanrahan began immediately to recite the Miranda warning, talking fast and not letting Antoine interrupt. Once Antoine asked for a lawyer, the questioning would stop. The trick was to keep him talking and any time it looked as if he might be about to ask for legal help to ask a new question.
“Let’s talk about murder,” Lieberman said, almost bored.
“Murder? I didn’t kill nobody. I got shot over on Gunnison a few hours back or whatever time it is. Just walkin’ down the street. Guy steps out, calls for my wallet, and shoots.”
“He didn’t get your wallet,” said Hanrahan. “It was with your clothes. Forty-two dollars in it.”
“I guess he got scared and ran,” said Antoine. “I didn’t kill anybody.”
In fact, he was quite right. The Pakistani woman who had gone screaming down the alley was perfectly fine and remarkably able to give details of what had happened. She was sure she could identify both of the men who had robbed her and tried to kill her.
“We’ve got the gun,” said Lieberman. “Found it in front of the hospital in the bushes.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about a gun,” he said. “I’m on parole. I don’t carry guns.”
“If you didn’t do it, who did?” asked the big cop.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t anywhere near that store.”
“What store?” asked Lieberman. “Who said anything about a store? Detective Hanrahan, did you mention a store?”
“No,” said Hanrahan. “And you didn’t either.”
“Someone did,” said Antoine. “Can I have some water?”
“I don’t know,” said Lieberman. “It might leak out of the holes in your leg and ruin the bandages.”
“You’ve got a partner,” said Hanrahan. “White guy, big. Maybe he knows about murder.”
“I’ve got no —” Antoine started.
“We’ve been after you for two months,” said Lieberman. “We’ve got store clerks lined up like opening day at Wrigley Field to identify the two of you. Now, if your partner knows about murder, maybe we can do something for you. We don’t want you for anything but the robberies if you didn’t kill anyone.”
Antoine turned his head to the side.
It was a tense few seconds for the policemen who knew that Dodson might now ask for that lawyer. Amazingly, like so many criminals, Antoine didn’t really know the law. Even if there had been a murder during the robbery and even if his partner had committed it, Antoine would still be eligible for a murder arrest as an accessory before the fact.
“Give us a hand,” Hanrahan said reasonably, “and we’ll give you one. All we want to do is clear this up, mark it solved, get our captain to say ‘Job well done,’ and go on with the next case.”
“How much time will I get?” Antoine said.
“Don’t know,” said Lieberman. “We can put in a good word for you. Maybe you’ll even walk if you turn in your partner.”
The odds on Antoine Dodson walking away from this were nonexistent, as both detectives knew, but lying in that bed, Antoine might be ready to kiss the detectives’ hands and believe anything they said.
“He left me in the parking lot,” Antoine said. “Left me bleeding. I drove away. He must have killed her.”
“Who is he?” asked Hanrahan.
“Where is he?” asked Lieberman.
“Irwin, maybe back at the room,” Antoine said softly. “He ain’t too bright. I don’t know.”
“Where’s the room?” asked Hanrahan.
Antoine gave the address. It was less than eight blocks away. He gave the room number and the name, Irwin Saviello.
“That’s all I got,” said Antoine.
“You did the right thing,” said Lieberman, believing, in fact, that Antoine Dodson had done the wrong thing if his goal had been to keep from going back to prison. “I think you should get a lawyer now. Want a public defender?”
Antoine shrugged and said, “I want some water.”
“We’ll tell the nurse on the way out,” said Hanrahan. “And we’ll call you a lawyer.”
In the hall, Hanrahan said, “Warrant?”
“No time,” said Lieberman. “We’ve got a felon with a lethal weapon who could flee at any second. I’ll get Dodson a lawyer and then we go to the apartment.”
Hanrahan nodded in agreement. He hoped Saviello was in the room. He hoped, though he would never tell anyone, not even Lieberman, that Saviello tried to shoot it out. Bill Hanrahan needed closure on something.
Lieberman used a hospital phone and called the public defenders’ office for Antoine Dodson. Whoever caught the case would be pissed as hell. With a stack on his or her desk, the lawyer would have little time to visit a defendant in the hospital. The hope was always for a plea bargain, quick, the best deal they could get. Their fear was a stubborn client who insisted he or she was innocent and wanted a trial.
Antoine Dodson would deal.
They had driven to the hospital in Lieberman’s car, so Lieberman drove to the address on Magnolia near Lawrence and Broadway. The call from Weiss Hospital security had not gone specifically to the Clark Street station, but a report on the man with a leg full of shotgun pellets had been sent to all the stations in the city and suburbs.
Tying it in to the convenience store robbery had been obvious. Since the Salt and Pepper robberies belonged to Hanrahan and Lieberman, they had been handed the report, talked to the woman who had been robbed, and headed for the hospital. Considering the fact that she had probably broken the arm of one of the robbers and had definitely shot the other, not to mention that one of the robbers had come close to killing her, the woman had been remarkably calm.
All of this had taken place after three o’clock, when the two detectives and the one-armed Kim had gone to the bench in Lunt Park to pick up Clark Mills. Mills wasn’t there. They tried other benches. They asked the few people they saw and the gas station attendant across the street if they had seen Mills, who was easy to spot and well known in the neighborhood. No one had seen him.
“Thought he’d show,” said Lieberman.
“Makes two of us.”
They had waited twenty minutes, then drove around the neighborhood. Nothing. Then they had taken Kim to the Greyhound station downtown and bought him a one-way ticket to San Francisco. Lieberman had also given him seventy-five dollars of his own money.
The bus was at five-fifteen.
“I suggest,” Lieberman had said, “that you see a doctor as soon as you get to San Francisco.”
Kim had
said nothing.
“Remember,” said Lieberman, “you don’t come back to Chicago. You come back and I let El Perro have you.”
“I keep my word,” said Kim. “My honor, my word, are all I have remaining.”
“More than a lot of people have,” said Hanrahan.
They had helped Kim onto the bus, then watched it pull out.
“What you think?” Hanrahan had asked.
“Odds are even that he’ll come back,” said Lieberman. “He may decide that his honor requires revenge, retribution. And then again, he may find a job in San Francisco.”
Now, after the stop at Weiss Hospital to talk to Antoine Dodson and wondering what had happened to Clark Mills to make him change his mind, they headed for the uptown address.
The transient three-story brick apartment building had about twenty single studio and one-bedroom apartments. The building looked pretty much like the other buildings on the block. Some were dark brick. Some were dirty yellow brick. The small plots of dirt between the street and sidewalk had no vegetation and looked as if someone had emptied garbage cans on them at least a year earlier and no one had bothered to pick up the garbage. There were some families, particularly from the rural South, who lived in the neighborhood and were trying to make a go of it and get into a better neighborhood, and there were a lot of people like Dodson and Saviello with nowhere better to go.
The downstairs door was open, the lock long ago broken and not replaced. The same was true for the inner door beyond which the homeless probably gathered to sleep on the stairs where they would be kicked out by a building superintendent. The super might even feel sorry for them but fear the coming of the landlord. Bad job. The super probably was one of those poor whites from the South trying to make a living for his family. Such men, the detectives knew, sometimes found their lives unbearable and went violently mad.
Policy was to call for backup. Backup meant losing ten minutes or more. It meant marked cars that could be seen from a window. It meant possible noise from police or the curious. It was easier without help.
The routine was clear. The two detectives had been through it over a hundred times. Guns drawn, they stood one on each side of the door. Lieberman reached over and turned the doorknob slowly. It took only part of a turn for Lieberman to mouth across to his partner “Open.”
Lieberman went back against the wall and Hanrahan knocked twice.
The knock was answered by a gunshot blast that sent pellets exploding through the door, making a dozen or more little holes. The wall across from the door took the dying blows of the pellets.
“Saviello,” called Lieberman.
“Go away,” said Irwin. “I’m waiting for someone.”
“We’re the police,” said Hanrahan.
“Who gives a shit?” said Irwin.
“Antoine’s not coming,” said Lieberman. “He’s in the hospital. How do you think we found you? He told us. He told us you made him commit those robberies, that he was afraid of you, that he never wanted to do it, but you beat him, raped him.”
“He’s a lyin’ bastard,” Saviello said angrily. “I don’t rape anybody. I didn’t hit him. He planned it all. Then he left me standing in that parking lot. I’m gonna kill him.”
“I don’t think so,” said Lieberman. “But you can hurt him. Confess, make a statement about what he did.”
“He’s not coming?”
“In the hospital,” said Hanrahan.
“He’ll get sent back to prison?”
“No doubt,” said Hanrahan.
“My arm’s broke,” said Saviello. “She broke my arm. I can see the bone under the skin ready to just pop out like that thing from space in Alien.”
“Drop your gun, put your hands high, and we’ll get you to a doctor,” said Lieberman.
“Same hospital where Antoine is?” Irwin asked eagerly.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” said Lieberman.
“I can’t lift my bad arm,” said Saviello. “Broke. I told you. I try to lift it and that bone’ll pop through.”
“Then just drop the gun on the floor,” said Lieberman.
“You’ll kill me,” said Irwin. “I know.”
“We won’t kill you,” said Lieberman. “We need you to help us put Antoine in prison. Antoine left you standing. We want to get him. You want to get him. We kill you and we have nothing. Drop the gun.”
“I’m eating a Ho-Ho.”
“You can bring it with you,” said Lieberman.
“I got lots of stuff left to eat.”
“Saviello,” said Hanrahan, “drop the gun now.”
Lieberman looked at his partner. That was not the way this was supposed to go down. Lieberman had been getting to the near halfwit inside the room beyond the door. Hanrahan was risking blowing it.
“Irwin —” Lieberman began again, but it was too late.
Hanrahan reached over with his left hand, weapon in his right, and opened the door with a hard push. He went into a quick crouch aiming at the man seated in the chair facing the door. The shotgun was in Saviello’s lap. He had a Ho-Ho in his one usable hand. The floor was littered with wrappers and small rectangles of cardboard with traces of chocolate cupcake and cream filling.
“Push the gun on the floor now,” Hanrahan said, aiming at Saviello’s chest. “Push or die.”
Lieberman was in the doorway, weapon also leveled, backing his partner.
There was a moment, just an instant, in which both detectives and probably even Irwin Saviello thought the robber was going to go for the shotgun with his one good hand. He reached down, still holding the Ho-Ho, and pushed the gun on the floor.
It was over.
CHAPTER 8
THE MESSAGE FROM CAPTAIN Kearney to go to the new hotel room where Mickey Gornitz was being held in protective custody came just as Lieberman was about to sign out. The note also said “See me.”
“I’ll book Saviello,” said Hanrahan.
They had brought Irwin to Edgewater Hospital, where his broken arm had been set and a cast applied. Irwin had shown no signs of pain or any further willingness to talk. Both detectives were sure that he would the next day, after a night in the lockup and the hint of special treatment if he turned on Antoine Dodson who had abandoned him in the parking lot.
In the waiting room of the hospital emergency room where they had taken Irwin Saviello, the two detectives had sat apart from those waiting.
“Father Murphy, what’s going on?”
They both knew what Abe was talking about. Hanrahan had unnecessarily risked his life breaking into Saviello’s room and facing him.
“Truth, Rabbi? I don’t know.”
“The cop’s death wish?” Lieberman whispered, sipping bitter coffee from a plastic cup.
“Maybe,” said Hanrahan.
“The usual. You feel guilty. You think you’re getting people killed. You want to make up for it by getting yourself killed. I thought you were working all this out with Father Parker.”
“You should have been a rabbi,” said Hanrahan.
“Some rabbis have the insight of a telephone book,” said Lieberman. “That’s a secret. We tell outsiders like you and we risk getting picked up in the middle of the night and taken to a secret camp in Wisconsin where we’re brainwashed into thinking all rabbis are brilliant.”
“Same for priests,” said Hanrahan.
“Sam Parker seems pretty sharp,” said Lieberman.
“He is. And could he run. You ever see him play?”
“Don’t think so,” said Abe, working on his coffee. “I’m a baseball man, remember? Go talk to Sam again. Keep talking to him.”
Hanrahan nodded. He had no coffee to play with. He had taken a cup from Abe and placed it on a table next to his metal-armed chair. The cup was growing cold on a two-year-old copy of Harper’s Bazaar.
“Tonight,” said Lieberman.
“Tomorrow morning,” said Hanrahan. “First thing.”
“Promise?�
�
“My word. If I fail to do so, I’ll take lessons and convert to Judaism. Even have a Bar Mitzvah. Hell, at this point I must know a few hundred words in Yiddish from working with you.”
“And every one of them of the utmost utility,” said Abe.
It was almost time for dinner when they got back to the squad room and Lieberman found the message about Mickey Gornitz. Hanrahan was at his desk. He had agreed to write the reports on both Dodson and Saviello and go home. It had, all in all, been a pretty good day, and Hanrahan felt a sudden drain in his soul. It would be a struggle to finish the reports, drive home, and go to bed. He would call Iris, tell her he’d see her tomorrow, and hope that he had no dreams. Hanrahan had thought he had himself under control, but when Saviello had hesitated in that apartment, he had lost it and risked his and his partner’s life.
When Lieberman had gone into Captain Kearney’s office, Kearney, eyes dark from lack of sleep, had moved from the window where he had been standing to the small conference table where he sat, brushing his straight black hair back from his eyes and returning to the world. He looked even more weary than Hanrahan. He pointed to a chair and Lieberman sat.
“Good work on the Salt and Pepper,” Kearney said.
“Thanks,” said Lieberman.
“Your partner all right?”
“Perfect,” said Lieberman. “Tired. Been through a lot.”
Kearney had nodded, looked up, and said, “Call came through to Carbin’s office a few hours ago. Caller said Gornitz’s son wanted to talk to him. Caller said if he didn’t, the kid was going to suffer and die. Simple as that. Carbin gave him a cell phone number, told the guy at the other end to call in an hour. Carbin went to the room with the cell phone. About an hour ago, the same guy called back from a pay phone and said that Gornitz should come on the phone fast. No chitchat. Carbin taped the call. Gornitz took it. His son came on, voice breaking, afraid, and said if Mickey wasn’t dead in twenty-four hours, Matthew would be killed. That was it. Phone went dead.”
“Twenty-four-hour suicide watch on Gornitz?” said Lieberman.
“Of course,” said Kearney. “But that could get the kid killed. Carbin told Gornitz that if they hurt Matthew, he would have all the more reason to testify and get Stashall. That didn’t seem to make Gornitz feel any better. Gornitz wants to talk to you. Now.”
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