She had a point. Robert Norwaldo raised every flag and rang every alarm Shannon had.
“But what kind of flower shop?”
“The plot thickens.” Marcie clicked her pen.
“What are you working on over there, anyhow?” Shannon said. “Is that some new kind of brain teaser you made yourself?”
“My clothes chart.”
“What’s that? A listing of all the clothes you own?”
“No.” Marcie’s eyes stayed on the page. “It’s a schedule of sorts, for which clothes I plan to wear on which days, so I can think ahead about my outfits.”
“I think I’d rather swallow a razor than do that,” Shannon said.
“I like to stay organized. Organization is the cornerstone of good detective work.”
“I didn’t know waking up in the morning and getting dressed counted as detective work.”
“My clothes represent the department.”
“So it’s all in service to the job,” Shannon said.
“I suppose it is.”
Shannon, Miss Hermit-in-the-Making, was one to talk. Everything she did revolved around the Chicago PD. At least Marcie had her family as a distraction every now and then. Maybe Michael would’ve been the same for Shannon at one point in her life, but he certainly wasn’t now. And he would be even less so if he got that job.
“I was thinking about Jennica Ausdall’s pictures,” Marcie said.
“What about?” Shannon still hadn’t told her what she and Cooper talked about when they were up in his room.
“I found it odd that she didn’t have any family pictures anywhere in her house. Not the living room, not her bedroom, not even the upstairs hallway.”
“I noticed that,” Shannon said.
“Nearly every lady in my social circle would take a bullet for their family pictures—except Diana.”
“Maybe Diana isn’t the sentimental type.”
Marcie snorted. “She was until her husband cheated on her and they divorced. After that, she was … distant.”
“Did she take her pictures down, too?”
“Not immediately. Diana was resolute in her efforts at normalcy, I think, and she kept them up for a couple months,” Marcie said. “Then I remembered coming to her house for a dinner party with everyone, and the pictures were gone. They were replaced with those art prints you’d get from T.J.Maxx or Kirkland’s on a whim. I think each of us understood what it meant, because no one asked her about where the photos of her and her husband had gone.”
“She didn’t have kids?” Shannon asked.
“Thankfully, no. I was on the fringe of it, but I gathered it was a very messy split.” Marcie looked up from her clothes chart. She stared out the front windshield. “The way she seemed to be unable to trust anyone afterward really struck me.”
“How so?”
“Relationships are built on trust. If you can’t trust someone, you can’t be close to them.”
Neither Shannon nor Marcie said anything more. They watched the highway roll beneath them for the better part of an hour until they came to a stop in front of Robert Norwaldo’s nauseatingly suburban house.
“This isn’t exactly the sort of place I’d expected a bookie to live in,” Marcie said. “You’re sure this is the gentleman Leigh Corvath told you about?”
“Don’t let the quaintness of it all fool you. I doubt Norwaldo plays stickball with the neighborhood kids after school.”
They walked up the driveway, past the dusty patch in the grass. There were more cigarette butts sunning themselves nearby. Looked like that may have been a place Nurse Patricia regularly used for smoking.
The front door opened before Shannon and Marcie got halfway up the driveway.
“I recognized the sound of those shoes on my driveway.” Robert Norwaldo was on the other side of the screen door, his blind eyes looking past the detectives’ heads. “I knew you’d come back to me, Detective Rourke.” He sniffed the air. “And you brought someone else along, too?”
“Mr. Norwaldo,” Shannon continued toward the door with Marcie behind her. “I’m checking to see if you’ve come back to the remaining four senses you have.”
He threw his head back and coughed out that tuberculous laugh of his. “I see you might be a little more clever than you sound. I guess that’s more my fault than yours—the years ain’t made me expect much from a girl with a voice as pretty as the one you got.”
“On behalf of pretty women everywhere, I’m offended,” Shannon said. She and Marcie stood across the screen door from him now. “Where’s your nurse?”
“Patricia’s in the can. She’s been in there for ten minutes, so she’s probably laying a crap big enough to dam the Mississippi.”
Shannon rolled her eyes. She didn’t dare verbalize her reaction and give Norwaldo something to peck at.
“Tell me about your friend here,” he said.
“I’m Detective Marcie Talbot.”
“Got a badge?”
“That I do.” She opened the door and held her star out in the palm of her hand for him.
“Sounds pretty, too.” He felt her star with the pads of his fingers, while the tips explored the skin on Marcie’s wrist. “If not a little too proper for me.”
“Detective Rourke tells me you might have some information pertaining to an open murder investigation.”
“Ain’t so open from what I heard. Your partner here said you pinched a guy named Leigh Corvath.” His fingers drifted down to hers. “I feel a wedding ring.”
Shannon and Marcie exchanged a glance as Marcie pulled her hand away from him. They were both already tired of Norwaldo’s antics.
“Mr. Norwaldo, Leigh Corvath said you had his car at the time of the murder of Jennica Ausdall,” Shannon said.
He grinned again with his corn-kernel teeth. His hand slid down from his armrest. It met an unzipped, soft cooler the size of a lunch box hanging off the side of his chair, then dipped into it.
“Either of you ladies like a Hamm’s?”
Neither of them answered.
Norwaldo pulled a pale gold and powder-blue can out of the cooler and popped the tab open, then drank. A rivulet of beer dribbled from the corner of his mouth. He wiped it off with the back of his hairy arm. “You two don’t know what you’re missing. Finest beer on God’s green Earth.”
“I’m sure it’s delicious,” Shannon said, “but we’re on the job.”
“You can come by later tonight. I’ll put some Marvin Gaye on and give you all the drinks you like. I’ll have the both of you buck-naked on my bed before it’s all said and done.”
“I would, but I don’t want you to ruin Marvin Gaye for me,” Shannon said.
“Oh yeah? You a fan?”
“Let’s stick to Leigh Corvath.”
“If that’s all you came here to ask me about, then we got no words to exchange,” he said. “I don’t know him.”
“And you’ll swear to that?”
“Cross my heart.” He drew an X over his breastbone.
Shannon opened the screen door to Norwaldo’s house. “Good.” She grabbed his chair by the armrest and pulled him out the door. When she did, she splashed a little beer out of the can.
“Just what in the hell is this?” He tried to slap a brake on, but he had the strength of a two-year-old.
“I’d like to bring you back to the station for further questioning,” Shannon said as she pulled him out onto his front porch. “If you’re telling me the truth, there’s nothing to worry about.”
“I ain’t going no damn place.” Norwaldo tossed his beer in Shannon’s general direction, but it didn’t get any further than his own lap.
“Careful, Mr. Norwaldo,” Shannon said. “Throwing a can like that could be considered assault of a law enforcement officer in some states.”
“You ain’t about to arrest a man in a wheelchair,” he said. “I know my rights, and this—this ain’t nothing but a violation, a way to intimidate me into admitting to something I ain�
�t had nothing to do with.”
Marcie waved at Shannon, silently getting her attention. She motioned toward the front yard—she wanted to talk.
“You stay right here,” Shannon said. “I’m keeping an eye on you.”
“What? Where you going?” A note of panic crept into his voice. “You can’t leave me out here like this—I’m liable to catch the bird flu!” He tried his best to get back inside, but keeping the front screen door open and wheeling backward proved too challenging. “At least let me have another damn beer before you go!”
Shannon sighed and turned around—she’d only gone a couple paces down the concrete ramp in front of his house. She walked back to him, then grabbed another can of Hamm’s out of the cooler bag. “Here.” She dropped it in his lap, then walked to Marcie.
She’d stopped about halfway through the yard, beside the tire swing in front of Norwaldo’s house.
“You can’t arrest him.” Marcie kept her voice low. “We don’t have any evidence that holds up to a shred of scrutiny.”
“We have Leigh Corvath’s statement.”
“As I said—no evidence.”
Marcie was probably right.
“What if we bring him in for a twenty-four-hour hold?” Shannon asked. “Tell me you don’t want to see him sweat a little.”
“If you’d like to get suspended, go ahead. But don’t look to me for help when you’re being sued by the ACLU for holding an old blind man at the station for nothing—not to mention any blowback from the public at large.”
“I’m starting to miss you girls,” Norwaldo cooed from the porch. Not a minute after losing his cool, he was back to taunting them and sipping a beer.
Shannon glared at him over her shoulder. “You’re sure you don’t want me to push him in traffic?”
He whistled. “Hey sweet peas, where’d you go?”
“I’m sure,” Marcie said. “I’m going back to the car, and I think you should leave the bookie alone—if he knows something, there’s nothing either of us can do at this time in order to get it out of him.”
Was there any arguing with her? What was Shannon going to do to get Norwaldo to talk? Tase him until he could turn on every light in his house with a touch of his finger? Even then, she had a feeling he wouldn’t say anything. He’d cackle at her and play with the porch lights.
“I’ll go wheel him back into the house.”
“Fine idea.”
Shannon walked back across the yard and up the ramp.
“Where’s your friend, Detective Rourke?” The corner of Norwaldo’s ashen lips glistened with beer foam.
Shannon ignored him and opened the front door. Just as she did, Norwaldo’s nurse, Patricia, came around the corner.
“What the hell is this? Did you forcibly move my patient?”
“Only for a minute,” Shannon said as she wheeled him back inside.
A spark of anger lit Patricia’s eyes. Evidently, she wasn’t in the mood for humor. “What’s your badge number?” she said. “I’m filing a complaint against you.”
“For what?” Shannon set the brakes on Norwaldo’s chair.
“For abducting a man who’s too weak to do much more than feed himself.”
Norwaldo laid a hand on Shannon’s arm. “Don’t listen to her, I can do a lot more than that.” He winked at her.
She pulled away from him and opened the screen door. “I didn’t abduct him.”
“You sure as hell tried.” Patricia came after her. “I heard you in there harassing him, I know you were threatening him.”
“You don’t know anything, lady.” Shannon didn’t slow down on her way back out to her Jeep, and neither did Patricia, who was practically hanging onto Shannon’s back pocket.
“I know you’ve come by here two days in a row, trying to charge Mr. Norwaldo with something he didn’t do. I know you’ve made it your business to intimidate an innocent man—and I know I’m going to get you fired for it.”
Shannon opened the driver’s door to her Jeep, pushed the seat forward, and tossed her bag in the back.
“Give me your badge number,” Patricia said. “I’m gonna handle you like you should’ve been handled yesterday.”
Shannon ripped open the lid to the center console between the two front seats. A stack of business cards with her name and the number to District 12 sat inside. She took one out, then thrust it at Patricia. “Here. Call that number. Ask for Sergeant Frederick Boyd. You tell him exactly what I did wrong.”
“I will.” Patricia snatched it from her. “And I’m gonna get you fired.”
Shannon jumped in her Jeep, and slammed the door. “Let’s go to Leigh Corvath’s apartment.”
CHAPTER 19
“I might kill someone for a piece of seared chicken like this.” The head chef at Lapis, Paul Laimbeer, pulled another piece from the chicken leg Michael had prepared, and popped it in his mouth.
Paul was about ten years Michael’s senior. He wore an old Sex Pistols T-shirt and a pair of jeans which probably hadn’t been washed since the band’s last tour. With his receding hair slicked back and the tattoos on his arms, he looked like the kind of guy who followed punk bands from club to club in the late 80s—which was probably when he bought the T-shirt.
“This garlic sauce is incredible,” he said. “Where’d you learn it?”
“A little bit of experimentation.” Michael tried to keep a cool exterior, but damned if the compliment didn’t tickle him.
“Really?” Paul shot an impressed look at the co-owner of his restaurant—his fiancée, Andrea Sloan. She worked as manager and bookkeeper. She looked every bit Paul’s counterpart, with her long, straight hair dyed black, and her cloud-white skin almost totally obscured with tattoos.
“Absolutely great stuff, Michael.” Paul took another bite. “You really brought out the freshness in the garlic.”
A smile slipped onto Michael’s face. He had to let a little of his pride seep through—he didn’t want to seem like a robot. He’d never had a chef of Paul Laimbeer’s caliber approve of something he’d made.
“Come have a piece of this.” Paul waved Andrea over. “Actually, no, don’t have any. It’s all mine.”
She laughed while he forked a piece of chicken, then held it out for her, which she took and ate.
“Oh.” Her eyes lit up. “Oh, that is good. I don’t think we’ll want to hire him—he’ll take this place over when you’re not looking.”
Michael smiled politely at them.
“Before we get too cozy, I do have some questions about your resume,” Andrea said. “It says you haven’t worked a steady job since a couple years out of high school?”
There went the other shoe dropping. It was only a matter of time before they brought up the gap in his resume. Any respectable employer couldn’t ignore a red flag like that. In any case, they were impressed with his talent, so his chances weren’t shot yet.
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“And you’re how old now?”
“Thirty-five.”
Andrea’s eyes yawned open in surprise. “How did you get by that long without steady work?”
“I spent a lot of my twenties ‘finding myself.’ It was just me being a kid who thought he’d never have to get serious about anything.”
“I know what that’s like,” Paul said. “I didn’t get this T-shirt at Hot Topic.”
Andrea gave him a sidelong glance. “Whatever ideas you’ve got about him right now are probably accurate,” she said to Michael. “We both know what it’s like to be wild in your younger days—but what about recently? What have you been doing the last few years?”
“My sister took me in.”
From Andrea’s face, he could tell that raised even more questions. He may as well bite the bullet and tell them the rest. Or at least some of it.
“It’s a long story, but here’s the quick and dirty—I’ve been in recovery the last four years and living with my sister, Shannon. She’s a CPD detective, and her sa
lary is the only thing keeping both of us afloat. I’m tired of making her my mom, so I want to see what’s out here for me. I want to find a place where I can use my talents to help somebody out while doing something I love.”
Andrea and Paul stayed quiet. He’d said too much, hadn’t he? Why did he feel the need to vomit up everything about Shannon and his addictions? Couldn’t he have waited until after the interview and spoonfed that to them?
“Hey, man,” Paul said, “four years is great. I got my ten-year chip last month, and that’s been a real slog.”
The muscles in Michael’s back relaxed. He let off a nervous laugh. “I was afraid I’d said too much.”
“We both know where you are,” Andrea said. “I’m six years, myself. I lost a marriage and two kids to my monster.” Andrea picked up Michael’s resume—it was only a page long—and folded it in half. “I think we’ve learned all we need to know here. What do you think, Paul?”
“Hold on. I’m not ready to say yes yet.” Paul set his eyes on Michael. They scrubbed over him. “What do you think about punk music while you cook?”
“I think I can live with it.”
Paul reached across the steel prep table and slapped Michael on the shoulder.
“Then welcome to Lapis, Mike. I start my line cooks off at $17.50 with a review after three months on the job, where we can talk about a raise. In your case, things look good.”
“Really?”
Andrea walked to his side and hugged him. “Show up on time, and you’ll do great here, kid,” she said. “Can you start tonight?”
“Definitely.”
This was incredible. A high-end place like Lapis felt like a long shot as soon as Michael ambushed Paul for a job interview during his 1 a.m. smoke break behind the restaurant.
“Thank you so much for letting me come work for you.” Michael pulled Andrea in for another hug. “I can’t believe it.”
“All right, buddy, I think she’s had enough hugs,” Paul said.
“I can always go for a hug.” Andrea pulled Michael in tighter.
Someone knocked on the door to the kitchen.
“Come in.” Andrea let go of Michael.
He turned to see who it was. As soon as he did, ice dropped down his spine.
Chicago Broken: Detective Shannon Rourke Book 2 Page 10