The Price of Innocence

by Lisa Black

  It could have been a waiting room in any low-rent hospital. One bathroom, one white-jacketed woman behind a Plexiglas window, and one closed door leading into the rest of the building. Patients would not be permitted to wander the halls. Chairs ringed the room and made a line down the center. Every human being present turned to look at Theresa as she hesitated in the doorway, wondering who she might be and if she had an appointment, and either way would she get in before they did? The only person who did not look up was the woman behind the Plexiglas.

  Most of the – her mind didn’t know what to call them: junkies? clients? patients? – lounged back against the walls and more than one appeared to be asleep. Others stared with unblinking eyes at the television, streaming twenty-four-hour news with the volume turned down so low it might as well not be on, leaving viewers with nothing to do but read the cryptic tickers at the bottom of the screen. One unlucky woman had to make do with the ring of chairs in the center of the room. Without a wall to rest her head against, she had doubled forward and laid her head on arms crossed over her crossed knees. I would need pain medication after two minutes in that position, Theresa thought.

  She forced herself past the sets of eyes, over the dingy linoleum, up to the window. The white-coated woman must have heard her approach and smiled a welcome. She had graying blond hair and not enough muscle or even fat on her bones, a white wimple on her head and a large wooden cross around her neck. A nun. Theresa wondered if she worked out of St Vincent Charity Hospital. ‘Hello, dear,’ the woman – Betty, according to her name tag – said. ‘What can we do for you?’

  ‘I was wondering if there’s a Ken Bilecki here.’

  ‘We have no one – oh, you mean a patient?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The nun’s gaze flicked over Theresa, or at least as much as was visible through a waist-high window. ‘I can’t give out any patient information,’ she said, but gently.

  ‘I don’t need any. I only wanted to ask him if he’s seen a mutual friend.’ This was sort of true. She wanted to ask him about mutual acquaintances, two dead and one a mere possibility, but sort of true didn’t really count with a nun. But surely Sr Betty simply wanted to know that Theresa had not come to harass the patient, which she hadn’t. Bilecki had no current trouble with the law to the best of her knowledge. Unless they got to talking and he confessed to participating in a meth lab that killed a student twenty-five years ago, but Theresa would cross that bridge when the black and yellow gate lifted. ‘I know he usually comes here on Fridays at about this time, and I hoped to run into him here.’

  Again the gaze flickered. Theresa could confuse people. She did not have the wariness, the constant alertness, to be a cop, yet there existed a sense of authority. She had grown used to this puzzled look. But it cleared and the woman told her, ‘I still can’t give out any patient information. However, if you care to take a seat, he might pass by.’

  Theresa took the hint, smiled her thanks and turned away, nearly bumping into a block of granite thinly disguised as a man. He wore a heavy flannel shirt under a leather vest and tattoos up both sides of his neck. Various metal studs and jewelry pierced parts of his head. Theresa froze, her body warring between fight and flight.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said solemnly. ‘Hi, Sister Betty.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Ralph, dear. What can we do for you?’

  ‘I got my three thirty.’

  Theresa scoped out the seats in the waiting room. No one had moved, so she headed for the chairs in the center. She heard the nun say, ‘I see your new tattoo has healed up nicely.’

  The man’s voice brightened. ‘Yeah. It come out good.’

  Theresa sat catty-corner to the hunched-over woman, their backs to each other, and focused on the TV mounted on the wall. The pretty heads there continued to talk, with only a background photo now and then to give a hint as to the content. Theresa gazed and thought, not for the first time, what a handy talent lip-reading would be.

  After a while, when she felt that her fellow waiters had grown bored with the new arrival and returned to sleeping, reading and staring at their shoes, she dared to examine them.

  Across from her sat a woman whose clothing belonged to a twenty-year-old, but the drugs had sucked all the youth from her skin until she appeared nearly twice that. Theresa pegged her as a factory worker and mother of at least two school-age children, a younger one learning to write or draw who had left slashes of permanent marker in two different colors on her right hand, and an older child responsible for the letter on her lap. Theresa read the heading upside down – Cleveland Metropolitan School District – and its paragraphs appeared as ominous blocks even from across the aisle. The woman read it over and over, smoothing it out with battered fingertips, three of which were bandaged. Perhaps her job required working with machines which tended to catch fingers – or her addiction problems made her fingers too careless. Or she had an abusive husband who had designed creative ways to abuse. This was the trouble with clues: they could, almost always, mean more than one thing. That was the problem with forensics, with crime investigation, with life. Interpretations could shift at any moment. Everything depended.

  The black man next to the woman read nothing, couldn’t see the TV from his angle and did not care to make eye contact. The premature wrinkles and sagging skin made it impossible to guess his age. The top of his skull rested against the wall and he had scooted forward in his chair to form a forty-five-degree angle with his body, long legs extending well into the aisle. She could not reach any conclusions about him. Too clean to be homeless and yet thin enough to suggest hunger. His clothes had no identifying labels and she couldn’t see his hands, tucked up under his armpits. He stared, unblinking, into the middle distance. The ramrod position did not look restful and Theresa watched his chest for a few minutes to see if he still breathed. He did.

  Time passed. Two people went in and two came out. Theresa checked out the other waitees, forming more theories. After approximately fifteen minutes, Ken Bilecki appeared from the inner door.

  The nurses must complete the checkout procedure inside the offices because no one stopped at the window on their way out, and Bilecki was no exception. He walked directly to the door, pausing only to wave and say goodbye to Sister Betty. Theresa caught up with him in the foyer.

  TWENTY-TWO

  At first he became startled by someone saying his name, but as they spilled into the street he did not find her sufficiently threatening to bolt. He did not seem to recognize her at first but then his face smoothed out. ‘Oh, yeah, you were at Lily’s. You’re not a cop, right?’

  They always knew. ‘No, I work for the M.E.’s office. I would really like to talk to you for a few minutes.’

  He didn’t bolt at this, either. In fact, Ken Bilecki seemed distinctly relaxed. Either the doctors inside had given him something for temporary relief or he simply had the usual euphoria one felt upon escaping a doctor’s office. She suspected the former. He actually smiled when he asked, ‘What about?’

  ‘About you and Lily and Marty.’

  His expression became appropriately downcast. ‘I am really going to miss Lily, man. Marty, too, but Lily never stopped looking out for me. That’s why I came here today, I was in so much pain … now I’m really thirsty, though … I could use something to drink. Just pop would be OK.’

  She took the hint and guided him to a Subway, where, in the off-peak hours, they would have quiet and space in which to talk. He ordered a meatball sub with all the trimmings and some side snacks, along with the largest Coke they had. When settled down with his sugar and starches, he said, ‘Someone killed Lily, didn’t they?’

  Theresa bit back the ‘no’ before it passed her teeth. ‘There is nothing to indicate that. What makes you think so?’

  Bleary brown eyes gazed at her solemnly. ‘Well, how come she winds up dead in the same week as Marty?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why don’t we start from the beginning – did the three of you meet each oth
er in college?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He spoke around the meatballs. ‘Well, I met them. They’d known each other before that, high school, I think. I met Lily in a bar and we got to talking. We all needed a place to stay – actually all of us could have stayed with our parents, but we didn’t want to – so we split the rent.’

  ‘You got an apartment on Payne Avenue,’ she prompted.

  The chewing paused, ever so briefly, and then a hard swallow. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where there was a fire in 1985. That would have been your sophomore year.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t pass two of my classes, so credit-wise I was still a freshman.’

  ‘Did you know the student who died in the fire? Joseph McClurg?’

  A few words of graffiti etched into the tabletop suddenly captured his attention, and he traced them with one index finger. Then he took a sip of Coke. Then he traced the graffiti again.

  They’d be there all afternoon at this rate, and she had a – gasp! – date. ‘Ken, you know I’m not a cop. I’m not interested in getting you in any sort of trouble. I only want to find out if someone could have had a grudge against Marty Davis.’

  ‘It was so long ago.’

  ‘Yes, it was. But it’s all I have to go on at the moment.’ And before I go on that date tonight, I’d like to know if David Madison had anything to do with a meth lab that blew up and killed someone. ‘I really need to hear about it.’

  It took waiting through the rest of his sandwich, but finally Bilecki said, ‘Yes. I knew about that Joe kid.’

  ‘He was friends with you and Marty?’

  ‘Not me. And not a friend, really. It was business.’

  ‘The meth business?’

  ‘Yep.’

  The pace hadn’t picked up much. She tried another tack. ‘What kind of process did you use? Reducing ephedrine, or the phenylacetone and methylamine route?’

  Lips wrapped around his drink straw, he stared at her, the huge brown eyes clearing in what seemed to be delight. ‘You know how to make meth?’

  ‘I know the rudiments—’

  ‘We did the red phosphorus and iodine.’

  ‘You scraped the phosphorus from match heads?’

  ‘No! Way too labor-intensive, right? Doc and DaVinci were both chemistry majors and teaching assistants. They got the chemicals by ordering them, same as they ordered the stuff for students to use in class. Reagent-grade chemicals! Pure. We made the most perfect crystals ever.’

  ‘They stole them from the college chemistry lab?’

  He grinned, giving her a too-close view of meth-ravaged teeth. Chronic use of the drug had exceedingly detrimental effects on enamel. ‘No. They bought them from the supply companies.’

  ‘But – didn’t the teachers notice—’

  ‘No, no, that was the beauty of it. DaVinci was a genius, man.’ He pushed the Coke to one side and leaned over the table, breathing out enthusiasm and garlic. ‘A friend of his, Bean, set up a bank account in a name that sounded like CSU, but wasn’t. Then DaVinci started separate accounts with three supply companies. DaVinci – teaching assistant, remember – would receive the supplies for our stuff, pay them out of our bank account, and no one ever figured it out. The teachers were ordering and receiving exactly what they wanted. The supply companies were being paid in full. No crime committed.’

  Theresa pictured this. ‘So DaVinci had a separate business running out of the same space as the normal college lab, with nothing to alert any of the three parties involved – school, company or bank – that something was going on.’

  Bilecki slapped the table. ‘Exactly! We had the sweetest set-up ever.’

  ‘What was DaVinci’s first name?’

  ‘Uh – I don’t know. We all called him DaVinci. ’Cause he was, like, a Renaissance man.’

  ‘What about Doc? What was his name?’

  The sudden onset of amnesia continued. ‘Don’t know that either. We were a business, man. We weren’t in each other’s hip pockets or anything like that. I’m not sure I ever met Doc. I dealt mostly with DaVinci. Like the guy who died – I guess he was one of our cookers, but I never met him.’

  ‘Joseph McClurg? He wasn’t Doc?’

  Bilecki reclaimed his Coke cup, and considered this. ‘I don’t know. Could’a been. Can I have a cookie?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They got those cookies here.’ He pointed to the counter. She gave him two dollars and he trotted off to get his sugar fix and a napkin. She wondered why he wouldn’t confirm Doc’s identity – the boy had been dead for twenty-five years and had been considered guilty of meth cooking for all that time, so it could hardly be out of respect for the kid’s reputation.

  He returned and wiggled into the booth, neglecting to hand over her change. She let that and Doc’s identity go for the moment.

  ‘So the ingredients came from the school. And you set up the lab in the apartment you rented on Payne?’

  He shook his head, spewing a few crumbs. ‘No! Meth’s dangerous stuff and it stinks. On top of that it’s kind of incriminating to have in your own space. Here’s the situation.’ He gestured at her with the chocolate chip-laden cookie. ‘The building we lived in had been a hotel. The landlord could squeeze a penny until the copper turned his fingers green. He bought a hotplate for each room and rented them as efficiencies. I don’t think he even vacuumed the carpets before hanging out a “vacancy” sign.’

  Theresa nodded to show her attention, though it did not seem necessary. Ken Bilecki had been dying to relive his past, in any way, shape or form.

  ‘It had been a hotel, right? So on the ground floor it had a kitchen and restaurant that would cost too much to rip out and certainly too much to run. So he boarded it up, used it for storage. Now, do you know what the limiting reagent is, in the manufacture of methamphetamine?’

  It seemed funny to hear a homeless guy talk about a chemical reaction using proper terms, but she did not smile. Obviously Ken Bilecki qualified for a PhD when it came to cooking meth. He referred to the reagent that controlled the yield of the reaction, usually whichever reagent you had the smallest amount of, percentage-wise – in the same way that if you only had one cup of sugar you could only make one batch of cookies, even if you had several sacks of flour.

  She ran through the process in her head. The ephedrine would be extracted from cold pills with methanol, then washed with acetone, then boiled with toluene. Sodium hydroxide would be added to change the pH, then condensed, then distilled, then crystallized with hydrochloric acid.

  Methanol, acetone and toluene. No wonder the place went up like a Roman candle soaked in kerosene and placed on a pile of paraffin and straw.

  Back to the limiting reagent. ‘The iodine?’ she guessed.

  He shook his head, delighted to have stumped her. ‘Heat.’

  She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Heat,’ he insisted. ‘You have to heat the oil bath for the reaction, and later the flasks for the distillation process, for hours. A stove in your average kitchen can give you about two kilowatts of power. This limits the size of the flask, or number of flasks, you can heat at any one time.’

  ‘Oh. But—’

  ‘But our kitchen wasn’t average. It had been designed to feed a few hundred people. We could double the batch, triple, quadruple. We could cook enough in one session for two months of sales.’

  ‘Didn’t your fellow tenants complain of the smell?’

  ‘Sometimes, yeah. We set up ventilation fans and the exhaust vents already went directly to the roof … I suppose to keep the kitchen smells from the rest of the building, back when it had been a hotel. I bet it had been a pretty nice hotel,’ he added, momentarily distracted by the thought of a glorious heyday for his old home. ‘Solid, you know? Anyway, I’m sure they smelled it, but they were kids, like us. No one would have ratted us out. No one did.’

  ‘So you cooked a whole lot of meth.’

  ‘Exactly! I’d find the customers, then me or Lily would make t
he deliveries. Usually in the hallways, student lounges, sometimes right in class.’

  ‘And still, no one noticed?’

  ‘Of course not. It was school, man. Kids trade stuff all the time, pens, calculators, notes.’

  Theresa ran down the personnel in her head. ‘Where did Marty come in?’

  ‘Not that much, really. He’d go with Lily lots of times to make deliveries, make sure nothing bad happened to her. Customers tended to pay up a lot quicker with Marty standing there. Lily, they’d give her a sob story or invite her to a party, and she’d let them slide. She was soft-hearted, like me.’

  ‘Then she and Marty would give the money back to DaVinci?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Any problems there?’

  ‘Hell, no. The proceeds would all go back into the school account – well, the fake school account – to pay for the chemicals. And we’d go round again. I told you it was the sweetest set-up ever.’

  ‘You didn’t make a profit?’

  A full-throated laugh floated up from his belly. ‘Hell, yeah! The extra money would go into another account and Bean would pay our rent out of it. Then he split the profit equally among us. It kept me in shoes and babes and meth – DaVinci made me pay for mine, the cheap bastard – the whole time.’ He sighed. ‘It was perfect.’

  ‘Until the fire.’

  The laughter ended. ‘Yeah. Until the fire.’

  ‘Were you there when it started?’

  ‘No, man. I wish I had been, maybe I could have done something. I’d gone to a party, and when I came back, one-fourth of the building was wet ashes.’