Chicago Broken: Detective Shannon Rourke Book 2

by Stewart Matthews

  “I didn’t give you permission to enter,” he said.

  “I didn’t ask permission.”

  A smile cracked across his face. “You’re one of those cops, aren’t you? Not afraid to pick on a blind man in a wheelchair?”

  Shannon leaned over him and dropped her hand to the chair’s armrest. She stared down at him, at the cavernous pores in the skin on his nose, the patch of stubble in front of his ear that his nurse had missed when she shaved him. She pushed his wheelchair back an inch or two—just far enough that he’d be sure it was Shannon who had rolled it.

  If Norwaldo couldn’t see her, he’d damn well better feel her breathing down his neck.

  “I’m the kind of cop who gets her questions answered.” She stood up and gave him his space back.

  He smirked at her. “Go on, then. Ask me questions. We’ll see what answers you get.”

  “A woman was run over at North Cardinal High School by a dark-blue Corvette Stingray this morning. Know anything about it?”

  “Lady, if you’re trying to say I got behind the wheel of a car and ran over somebody at North Cardinal, I’d tell you to check every road between here and there, because I would’ve smushed a lot more than one person.” He chuckled. “Can’t believe you’re trying to pin something like that on me. You cops get more and more desperate and stupid every year.”

  “Mr. Norwaldo, I’m not desperate,” Shannon said—although that may not have been the whole truth after the string of bad cases she had yet to solve. “I’m not stupid either. I know you didn’t get behind the wheel of a car and drive an hour away to go run someone over.”

  “Oh yeah? You think Patricia did it?”

  “Your nurse?”

  “Who in the hell else you think I’m talking about?”

  “No, I don’t think she did either.”

  “You sure?” he said. “I pay her a damned ransom. She should kill someone for me, if I were inclined to that kind of behavior.”

  “I’m sure you’ve had your moments of weakness,” Shannon said. “But more to the point, Mr. Norwaldo, I think you know something about that car. I think you had it, and someone took it from you. Whether it was with your consent or not, I can’t say. But I’m guessing a man working in a racket like yours doesn’t have things done against his consent.”

  “A man too weak to move his own wheelchair doesn’t get much in the way of consent. You shoulda realized that when Patricia dumped me off at the front door.”

  “That might be true,” Shannon said, “but you don’t have things stolen from you, wheelchair or not. I think you had Leigh Corvath’s Stingray and you gave it back to him so he could murder Jennica Ausdall.”

  Norwaldo leaned back in his chair and stretched his mouth into its widest smile yet. “I don’t know nobody named Leigh Corvath. For that matter, I don’t know nobody named Jennica neither.”

  “I don’t have time to play games with you,” Shannon said. “Tell me what you did with the car.”

  One of his murky eyes rolled around in its socket until its pupil settled near the corner of his eyelid. Shannon could’ve sworn it looked right at her.

  “Nurse!” he yelled. “Patricia!”

  “What?” Through the picture window along the front of the living room, Shannon saw Patricia halfway down the driveway, phone in one hand, cigarette in the other.

  “I’m done talking to the detective.”

  “The hell you are,” Shannon said. “I want an answer.”

  “Then get a subpoena. I ain’t talking to nobody without one.”

  “Tell me what you did with the car. Did you give it back to Leigh? Did you help him kill Jennica? Why’d you do it?”

  “Excuse me,” Nurse Patricia appeared in the doorway behind Shannon. She elbowed past her, toward the far side of Norwaldo’s wheelchair. “You will not talk to my client like that in his own home. And for that matter, I don’t recall inviting you in.”

  “He’s an accomplice to murder.”

  “Get out.” Nurse Patricia pointed at the door. “Get out or I’m calling the police.”

  “I am the police.”

  “Then you should know that what you’re doing is illegal.”

  Shannon didn’t argue. She adjusted her bag on her shoulder and made her way out the door. It slammed shut behind her. Before she’d taken three steps away from it, the muffled voices of Robert Norwaldo and Nurse Patricia started wrestling with each other.

  Norwaldo knew something—there was no doubt about that. The only problem was whatever he knew, it didn’t do her any good locked away inside his head. Shannon had to get it out.

  But how? It wasn’t like she could dump him out of his wheelchair and stomp on him until he coughed it up. She had to get him to talk, and she had to get him to do it in a way that would make his testimony admissible in court, but that was going to be a damned hard thing to do—especially if she was right about the depth of his involvement.

  Shannon stopped at the bare patch of earth next to the driveway. She squatted down. The tire track was gone. A half-finished Newport laid next to it on the driveway.

  Nurse Patricia. But why would she have destroyed that track? Did she help Leigh and Robert plan Jennica Ausdall’s murder?

  CHAPTER 13

  “Don’t knock on her door, man.” The guy sitting on the steps leading up to Miss Honey’s apartment had never spoken to Michael before.

  “What?”

  “You going to Miss Honey’s apartment, right?” he said. “She just got her door painted today after some kid tagged it. She’s gonna lose her mind if you go touching the wet paint.”

  Michael nodded at him, then continued up the steps.

  “I’m serious, now, don’t go messing it up. She’s gonna come straight after me if you do.”

  When Michael reached the top floor, Miss Honey’s pristine white door waited at the end of the hall. It always felt a little like he was approaching the gate to Heaven when he saw it. Not that Michael thought eternal bliss was locked behind it.

  Maybe some men did. Miss Honey was never lacking for company.

  No, it felt more like this was the only place he could trust—that his only chance at internal peace was somewhere behind it. He knocked on the door frame.

  The door was already cracked open. The end of Miss Honey’s Colt Python sniffed at him.

  “It’s me.”

  “I don’t know nobody by that name,” she said.

  He rolled his eyes. “It’s Michael.”

  The gun fell away and the door swung open. “Well, Michael!” She stretched her arms out for a hug. “How you doing?”

  He hugged her. The back end of her Colt Python tapped him on the spine. It wasn’t the first time she’d hugged him with that thing in her hand.

  “Who’s that, Rochelle?” a voice inside the apartment called out.

  “Rochelle?” Michael was a little shocked to hear someone say Miss Honey’s name—he’d only heard it twice before.

  She wagged her finger in his face. “There are a lot of sub-par, pissed-off pool players out there who want to know that name, so don’t go spreading it around. And don’t take anything my sister says to heart. She means well, but she don’t really understand people like us.”

  Miss Honey took Michael’s hand and led him inside her apartment.

  “Why on God’s green Earth are you answering the door with a gun in your hand?” A woman who looked like a younger, more buttoned-down version of Miss Honey glared from the bedroom door with her hands on her hips.

  “For my safety.” Miss Honey sat the big revolver down on her counter. It landed with a heavy thud. “Michael, this is my sister, Jacqueline.”

  Michael smiled at her.

  She turned her glare on him for a moment, then returned it to Miss Honey. “Your safety?” Jacqueline said. “See, this is what I’m talking about—why are you living in a place where you feel like you gotta answer the door by shoving a gun in someone’s face?”

  “Bec
ause I like it here.”

  It sounded to Michael as if this wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation. He grabbed the handgun off the counter.

  “Uh, excuse me, but what are you doing with that?” Jacqueline said.

  “It needs to be cleaned.” He opened the cylinder and let the long .357 cartridges fall into his hand.

  “Thank you, sweetness,” Miss Honey said. “There’s a kit under the coffee table.”

  Michael sat the Python on the table, then took a seat in the middle of her old couch. Sure enough, he saw a cleaning kit peeking out from beneath the corner of the coffee table. He picked it up. The thing was smothered in a sheet of dust.

  “When was the last time you cleaned your gun out?”

  “I’ve got too many things going on to keep track of when I cleaned that gun.”

  “Reading too many books is more like it. I bet you’ve read more than everyone else I know combined.”

  “I can’t help that you hang around with a bunch of dummies who’d rather watch the Kardillions or whatever their names are.”

  “Kardashians,” Jacqueline said.

  Miss Honey smirked at her. “And you ask me how I can live this way? Jackie, I don’t know how you can live like you do.” Miss Honey disappeared into her cubby kitchen. A few teacups rattled around. “Don’t you ever get bored? Don’t you want to fight for something or start trouble just for the sake of it?”

  “Maybe sometimes,” Jacqueline said. “But I’m happy living with my husband, I’m happy having kids and going to track meets and watching reality TV and all that other nonsense. That’s what I like.”

  “Then can’t you understand that this is what I like?”

  “What I like won’t get me killed.”

  “I ain’t dead,” Miss Honey said. “I’m standing here in my apartment, making tea and talking to you while a man cleans out my gun. I’m living the American dream.”

  Jacqueline laughed despite their philosophical divide. “You know how crazy that sounds?”

  “Ask me if I care.” Miss Honey turned on the sink and filled up her teapot.

  Michael tried to pretend that cleaning the chamber of her Python required a lot more concentration than it really did—he could’ve cleaned a revolver in his sleep. As a matter of fact, there was a time he used to sleep with a .38 special under his pillow, so maybe he had.

  “Plenty of crazy people done some good things in the past.” She looked at Michael “You want some tea?”

  “Sure. Give me whatever you’re having.”

  “Chamomile.” She looked at her sister. “How about you?”

  Jacqueline sighed. “No, thank you.”

  It was hard to imagine what being related to Miss Honey was like. Michael guessed that, depending on who you were, it was either delightful or exasperating. It wasn’t hard to figure out how Jacqueline felt.

  “You’re not sticking around?” Miss Honey said.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You got somewhere to be?”

  Jacqueline said nothing. She frowned and grabbed her purse off the top of Miss Honey’s record player, then made her way toward the door.

  It looked like that would be that, but as soon as Jacqueline opened the door, she turned around and faced Miss Honey.

  “I know the real reason why you’re staying here.”

  “You might,” Miss Honey said.

  “You should know that you don’t owe any of these people anything,” Jacqueline said. “And someday, I hope you realize there’s a place in my home for you.”

  Miss Honey smiled at her sister. “Have a good evening, Jackie. Don’t let anyone mug you on the way out.”

  The door slammed shut behind her.

  “Well.” Michael put the Python on the coffee table. “I could really go for a cup of tea.”

  “She’s only like that because she cares,” Miss Honey said. “It’d be easier if she didn’t, but she does.”

  “In my experience, having a sister who doesn’t care about you doesn’t make things easier.”

  “I’m sure Shannon cares.”

  He took a long, thin tool that looked like an elongated pipe cleaner out of the kit, and shoved it down the barrel of the gun. “I bet if I fell down a hole, she wouldn’t notice unless she was assigned my case.”

  “Don’t you cook her dinner?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I guess she’d get hungry at some point.”

  Miss Honey came in with two cups of steaming chamomile tea. “Maybe Jackie cares too much about me now, but it wasn’t always that way between us.” She set the cups down on the coffee table, next to the Python.

  “What happened?”

  “Her ex-husband up and left her one night. Said he was going out to hit up a club with his boys, and he never came back. Left her sleeping on the couch with all three of their kids. I stepped up to help out.”

  “Now, that’s a picture. You helping your sister raise three kids. How quickly were they running hustles for you?”

  “Shut up.” Miss Honey slapped his arm and laughed. “I’m a good auntie. Brought each one of them a toy whenever I visited—something they’d like, mind you, not just a piece of junk from the dollar store.”

  “Is that all it takes to pass for a good aunt nowadays?”

  She slapped his arm again. “I was there for all three of those kids. I got them on the bus in the morning when Jackie went to work, and I made sure they got their homework done before dinner. I was there for Jackie, too. I hugged her when she cried, I answered the phone in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep, I did all the things her husband was too chicken to handle. That’s how we bonded,” Miss Honey said. “We weren’t close growing up or nothing. I don’t think there was a single thing we agreed on, except that when family is in need, you gotta come running.”

  “I’ve tried to help Shannon,” Michael said. “When Colm passed, I did everything I could to catch his killer.”

  “I remember.” Miss Honey sipped her tea. She had a look on her face like she knew something he didn’t.

  “What?”

  “Did she want your help?” Miss Honey said. “Not that you didn’t do a good thing by doing your part to put a murderer behind bars—but did you think that maybe your sister didn’t want you in on that?”

  “She asked me questions about Colm.”

  “That doesn’t mean she needed your help catching his killer. That was just her doing her job.”

  Michael fell back on the couch. He hadn’t ever thought about it like that. He was a character witness—someone who knew about Colm’s habits, about what he was up to, and that was all.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, now,” Miss Honey said. “Least your heart was in the right place. But if you want to get closer to her, you gotta help her lift off what she thinks is a burden.”

  And what bigger burden did Shannon have than Michael, himself?

  CHAPTER 14

  Shannon would rather sleep under an overpass than drive back from the suburbs during rush hour again.

  She flipped on the light in her apartment and dropped her work bag to the right of the door. Her bad shoulder was numb from holding the wheel so long. It’d just be a peach if she had to trade the manual Jeep she loved for an automatic. She kicked the front door shut behind her.

  “Frank?” He was normally all over her as soon as she walked through the door. Shannon looked over at the couch. The fleece Chicago Bears blanket she’d folded this morning and laid across the back of the couch was all wadded up into a well-considered doggy nest, but Frank wasn’t in it.

  Maybe Michael had taken him for a walk?

  The leash was on the coat rack next to the door.

  “Oh, Fra-ank?” Shannon crept into the apartment, listening for the jingle of Frank’s collar. If she’d left her bedroom door open this morning, he’d be in her bed, slobbering all over her pillow.

  She checked her bedroom. No Frank on the pillows and no Frank under her fluffy whi
te comforter. She opened her closet. No Frank curled up on all the shoes and purses that she never quite got around to organizing, despite many well-intentioned promises to herself that she would clean it all up some day.

  Did he get out? No, that wasn’t possible. If the walls of her apartment crumbled down, Frank would still be here, napping somewhere in the rubble. He wouldn’t take off without Shannon.

  When she came out of her room, she noticed Michael’s door on the opposite end of the hall was opened wide enough for a rather nosy American bulldog to have invited himself in.

  “Frank, are you in there?”

  A jingle of dog tags answered her.

  “Come on you, booger. Get out of Michael’s room.” Shannon poked her head into the room. She saw Frank’s tail in the air like a periscope on the far side of Michael’s bed—he’d probably grabbed a pair of Michael’s dirty underwear out of the hamper and set to chewing the crotch out of it. What better way to spend an afternoon?

  “What are you doing?”

  His head surfaced over the top of the bed. He tilted it at her. If he thought his guilty look was getting him out of this jam, he was dead wrong.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” she said. “Why are you in Michael’s room?”

  Frank left behind whatever he’d busied himself with, then padded toward her, his ears hanging back and his tail cracking through the air. It slapped against the side of the bed while he rubbed his shoulders against her knees.

  “Hi, buddy.” She rubbed him under his chin and he licked air. It was hard to stay mad at his cute, drooly face. “You know you’re not supposed to be in here.”

  He shook his body and snorted at Shannon. She walked over to the other side of Michael’s bed to see what Frank had gotten into.

  There was a rubber tube on the ground—or at least the remains of one. It looked like it had once been about a foot long, and half an inch or so thick—that was until Frank chewed it into a half-dozen different pieces.

  It was pliable, kind of like something you’d find in a hospital room—or something junkies used to tie their veins off.

  Shannon didn’t want to think about why her recovering-addict brother had it. She hadn’t noticed any track marks in his arms. He wasn’t wearing long sleeves, or acting strange. Working as a CPD detective brought her in close contact with more than her share of junkies, so she’d know the signs if they appeared in Michael.