“Why? Why did he do that? I mean, why would he make up a very specific story like this, then just recant the whole thing? It seems about as genuine as a three-dollar bill, man.”
“Exactly. It’s total bullshit. I think this Bannerman knows who the killer is. I think someone got to him and threatened him in jail. He took the blame and did the time. Then this other person waited until he got out and started enacting a revenge plot to pin on the kid a second time.” Bud was really rolling at this point
“Slow down a little, Bud. What if things did go down like this statement said, and someone came and talked him into changing his story? Gave him some shit about not taking down everybody with him. Maybe the person convinced him it was just an innocent prank. I don’t know. This all makes me sick to my stomach. It’s just extraordinarily fucked.”
“I know. I called Rockford today, and Bannerman’s parole appointment is for tomorrow at eleven in the morning. I asked if I could come sit in. The officer had no problems with it at all. I may even take a ride out to Bannerman’s place and take a look around.”
“Bud, if you do that, you take someone with you. I don’t care who you take. Take a Rockford local. I can’t take the day off and go with you, but this guy could be dangerous. If he’s doing all of this, he’s patient, ruthless, and very, very smart.”
“I will. You can keep all that shit.” He waved toward the file and the newspaper. “I assume Miss Edith will want to take a look at it.”
“Thanks, Bud. Nice work. Can I ask you a question?”
“If I can ask you one.”
“OK. How come you work alone? I thought most cops had partners. You work alone. If it’s too personal, just tell me to fuck off.”
“Fuck off.” Bud paused, then burst into laughter. “I thought we needed to lighten the mood. No. Nothing heavy or anything. I drive people crazy. I like working on closed cases and weird shit. People getting impaled on broadswords. I’m a detective; I feel like I should spend time detecting. Betsy thinks it’s safer that I work on my own, doing mostly research work and cold case work. It’s probably about the same. I mean, when you knock on someone’s door to ask a routine question and they thought they got away with murdering their great Aunt Thelma twenty years before…well, people get a little touchy.
“I also think a lot of cops are lazy. Not to the point of incompetence, but lazy. They’d rather not go the extra mile to remove all lingering doubt. I would. Like driving to Rockford tomorrow. I’m excited about it. I want to know more about this guy, Bannerman. Even if he had nothing to do with these other deaths, his life, his story, his adventure, whatever you call it, well, it’s better than any book or movie for me. It’s the best entertainment there is.”
“Asked and answered. Now what’s your question?”
“Why don’t you have a steady girl? I’m using my expert detecting skills to gather you are either not cheating on someone at home or you really are one of the greatest actors who has ever walked the planet.”
Al gave it some thought. It was a deep question with a potentially lengthy answer. “I was married. I think I told you. Well, things didn’t work out. It hurt me a lot more than I wanted to admit at the time. One thing led to another, and now I’m sober and work in an entirely different field than I used to. My old life ceased to have meaning because I had built so much of it on a foundational error. After the dust settled, I dated a few women, but I’d moved in with my parents. I built a guest house in their back yard and my business was just taking off when I met a pretty wonderful woman.”
“What happened to her?”
“It was my first big case. It’s where I met the guy who just made me a deputy. We stormed the Bastille, and she got caught in the cross fire. Fucked me up straightaway. I almost didn’t make it through. It’s been over a year, and I’m just starting to get my sea legs back.”
“What about Edith? I gotta tell you, Al, she is a gem. I like her. Bets and the kid love her. She’s a special woman. I can tell she’s got the heart of a lion. I also think she might be your mental match as well, Mr. McNair.”
“That’s not that hard.”
“Oh, fuck, Al, really? I’m a detective. There hasn’t been one time when I’ve been with you that you haven’t been the smartest guy in the room. You know that. I don’t think you like it much, but you know it. The only close exception is when Edith is around. She may not be smarter than you, but she’s smart in a different way. You two make a great couple.”
Al sang, “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match…”
“OK. I’ll knock it off. I’m just saying you could do worse. Now, give me the rundown about this Robbie guy and what we’re gonna do when we get there. I can’t out-and-out shoot him. I still follow the law. But if I was on some Marshal’s business and someone took a shot at me, well, I might reconsider.”
“So, here’s how I think it’ll go…” Al spoke for the next fifteen minutes. They pulled up to a six-story building in West Pullman, a very built-up suburb of Chicago. The street was lined with buildings, all between four and seven stories tall. The buildings were old, and the neighborhood looked like it spoke a combination of several languages, not the least of which was gunfire.
“Stay close. Follow my lead. Be alert. I think you’ll end up hitting someone tonight. I hope that’s OK, and I may be wrong. They may just pack up peaceably and leave.”
“Al, this is Chicago. We don’t work and play well with others here.”
47
As soon as rehearsal was done for the day, Eric, now in his Lenny Tolbert outfit, set up a bunch of yellow folding “Caution: Wet Floor” signs and put down the first pass of shampoo on the Majestic’s carpets. He moved quickly, but without looking like he was rushing. He wanted to get this done, drive across town, take care of that little slime ball, Robbie, and be back here before the carpets were completely dry. That way, he could get in a good pre-treatment on the carpets, and by the time they had thoroughly dried tomorrow, they’d look like a million dollars. He wouldn’t see anyone’s reaction to the clean carpets, or hear anyone compliment the work. He’d be spending the day tomorrow in Rockford, then he’d go out to Freeport, cut the grass, and spend the night. He tried to get out to the little farm once or twice a week. He wanted the place to look lived in. If someone from law enforcement came by, or a neighbor came snooping, it would look like someone lived in the little farm house.
After he had the carpets pre-treated, he went to the van and started driving down to the faux gangster’s southern neighborhood. He would go to the place he’d found across the street from Robbie’s and just watch for a few minutes. Robbie was such a transparent fuck, it was easy to tell if someone important was coming by. If no one was coming by, he’d be dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, looking like the bum he was. If someone was coming by, he’d have a suit on, a drink trolley heavily laden with booze and every type of glass you could want. He even had a little pair of ice tongs in the ice bucket. For some reason, the mini-ice tongs pissed Eric off. They were just enough beyond pretention that Eric considered them a vulgar display of pandering. Eric knew his reaction to the tongs was stronger than he could justify, but he couldn’t help it. He’d always had anger issues, and this was just another of the many ways they crept unbidden into his everyday life.
Traffic was slow on the way down to West Pullman. It wasn’t unduly slow; it was just Chicago traffic. He could have taken public transit, but he would have had too much walking on both ends of the commute and didn’t think, as a felon, he should be travelling on the El with a silenced semi-automatic pistol.
Eric, still dressed as Lenny, parked three blocks away. He picked up a handyman’s bag and slung it over his shoulder. He wasn’t going to do anything fancy, but he wanted to blend in. He’d never seen security in the building that had a view of Robbie’s office, but there was always a first time, and even serial revenge killers benefitted from adherence to the scout’s motto.
He climbed the stairs to the fourth floor
of the building that faced Robbie’s place. Robbie’s office was on the fourth floor, but the building Eric was going up in was about half a story taller than its counterpart across the street, its first floor about six feet above street level. Robbie’s building had a first floor that was even with the sidewalk. It just meant that Eric’s vantage point would be at a less extreme sight line angle than if its first floor was flush with the sidewalk and he was spying from floor five. He’d be looking down from a vantage point that was a half a story higher than Robbie’s pathetic little closet.
He approached the widow in a crouch, duck-walking into position. He didn’t want to be spotted getting into position. He didn’t know if Robbie had spotted his alter ego “Lenny” at the theatre, but didn’t want to raise any undue curiosity. Eric had a telescoping mirror in his bag. It was basically a mirror on a stick like the ones that cops at the border use to look under the frame of your car. Eric’s was slightly larger, four by six inches, and it allowed Eric to sit on the floor and spy on Robbie by looking at the reflection in the mirror. Robbie was so clueless and unaware, Eric felt confident that he would never spot the small mirror sticking up like a cat tail in the window across the street from his building.
Eric got the telescoping stick adjusted, got his back against the wall, and slowly raised the stick up into the window. He’d done so often his guess about the angle of the mirror was accurate enough to not necessitate any adjustments.
He raised the mirror into position, looked in the mirror, and froze. At first his paralysis was due to his brain not being able to process what he was seeing. Then, as his confusion gave way to anger, he stayed still to monitor the situation while coming up with a course of action that wouldn’t get him arrested or killed.
He was looking at Robbie in his desk chair, his thug assistant standing next to the desk against the wall, a man in a trench coat standing with his back to the office door. Sitting in a chair opposite from Robbie was the one and only Al McNair. He couldn’t make heads or tails out of this development. How did Al get in with this low-level thug? Did he work for Robbie? Was he spying for him?
Eric decided that he should do nothing. He would sit here and watch how things developed. After Al and his buddy left, he’d go across the street to terminate Robbie and the thug. He would then make an anonymous call describing how he’d seen Al and his buddy, kill two people out here in West Pullman. Two birds, one stone, and Mr. McNair would finally be out of the way, for good and for all.
Eric waited and watched. After the show was over, Eric sat for twenty more minutes digesting what had happened. In a matter of moments, everything had changed, and Eric would have to re-evaluate his game plan, maybe even speed up the schedule for closing the book on Chicago once and for all.
48
Al called Robbie from the call box by the front door. Robbie buzzed the two of them in. Al had mentioned earlier that he’d have someone with him.
“What? Is he one of your California guys?”
“No. He’s local, but I had one of my California guys hook me up with a local. He’s a cop, but he’s crooked as shit. I’ve watched him snort coke. He’s not an undercover guy either. Sometimes they cut those guys slack. This guy would fail a drug test and end up doing time. I trust him because he made a deal with the devil a long time before I got on the scene.” Al was doing his free-form lying thing. He sometimes had to lie, and when he did, he just took his mouth off “hold” and let the bullshit fly. He had a gift for making shit up out of whole cloth. He didn’t lay it on too thick, but he made sure to paint it solid.
“Well, if you say he’s OK. Do you have the cash?”
“We’ll crunch the numbers tonight; I have some cash with me, we can draw the rest out of one of my branch banks tomorrow. You’ll have all you need by tomorrow morning, ten at the latest.”
“Sounds good.”
They had finished up the foreplay on the phone, and now it was down to the meet. Al was going to have some fun before he made this guy shit his pants.
They got to the office and Al knocked. “Hey, it’s me.”
Robbie nodded to his assistant--his dim-witted cousin, Dominic. Dom had a heart of gold but was as dumb as a stump. He’d do whatever Robbie said, and that was good enough for Robbie.
The door opened. “Robbie.” He turned to Dom. “I’ve never been introduced to you, big guy. I think if we keep doing business, I should at least know your name. I’m Al.” Al stuck out his hand.
Dom looked at Robbie and Robbie gave a nod from where he was sitting behind the desk. “Dom.” He shook Al’s hand. His grip was firm as steel.
“This is my pal, Bud. Say hello, Bud.”
“Hullo.”
“Bud’s just here to keep me safe. I’ve heard Chicago can be a rough place.”
“You’re so right, Al. Can Dom get you a drink?”
“Just a club soda for me. On the rocks with a twist would be swell, Dom.” Dom nodded impassively and started making a rum and coke for Robbie and a club soda for Al.
“I’ll take a Scotch.” Said Bud.
Al didn’t look at him. “You’ll take nothing and like it. I’m paying you to be here; you can buy your own goddamn drink after we’re done here.” Bud dropped his eyes to the ground.
“So, you got the cash with you?”
“It’s near. I thought we’d chat, get our relationship clarified, then I’ll get you set up in a style befitting of a man in your situation. Sound good?”
Robbie, who loved it when people acknowledged the fact he was important said, “Sure thing, Al. Whattya wanna know?”
“Well, it’s my understanding that you run concessions at the theatre. I also understand if I want to score something off menu, I can do that through you as well.”
“That’s about the size of it. If you want a large amount of anything, we need to make an appointment; it’s a security issue. If you want something small, I can usually handle that out of my pocket.”
“Do you get discounted booze? I mean, does it fall off of trucks and stuff?”
“Let’s just say my people here keep me well stocked for very little money. They have me set up so I can do my thing, and if they need me for anything, I’m there for them.”
“The family? Like our family?”
“Both ‘a Family’ and my family. I’m a cousin of one of the more powerful families in Chicago. They’re into some high cash-flow shit right now, which is the only reason I needed to do a fundraiser. But, you’ve fixed that uncomfortable little situation for me, and I appreciate it, Al. More than I can say.”
“No problem.” Dom handed him his club soda. Robbie seemed comfortable. He’d bought Al’s story, hook, line, and sinker. It was because of the promise of easy money close at hand. This guy might have killed someone in his life, but he clearly wasn’t a killer. If someone needed to be slapped around, Dom did the slapping. It was pretty clear.
“Let me show you something, Al. In here.” Robbie stood and gestured to the door that led to the other of two rooms in the shitty little office. Al stood up and the two of them went to the door. Robbie opened the door and turned on the light. There were cases and cases of hard alcohol. About two thirds of it was horrible off-brand liquor, Tanaka vodka and shit like that. The other third was the good stuff. Bombay Sapphire gin, Herradura tequila, and the like. There were a few cases of decent wine and a couple of kegs. “I keep my ready-to-roll stock here. I have a small storage facility where I keep the larger volumes of stuff, and the illicit substances as well.”
“Pretty slick. I assume when you aren’t making money, you’re cleaning it?”
“Smart man. Sure. We launder small to medium sums for people. We charge a percentage, and everybody ends up happy.” Robbie turned off the light, shut the door and headed back toward the desk.
“Hey, Robbie?” Robbie turned
“Yeah, Al…” As Robbie turned, Al punched him solidly in the right kidney. The little man dropped like a sack of rats. Al was pretty sure h
e’d have to deal with Dom, though Bud said he could handle himself. As he turned to look at Dom, he saw Bud deliver an open-handed strike to Dom’s throat, throw a fist down on the big man’s solar plexus, dance sideways one step, then hammer-punch him in the back of the head. Dom was down and out before he even hit the floor. Bud looked relaxed, almost happy.
“Keep an eye on that tub of goo.” He indicated Dom. He felt bad for the big guy. He’d backed a losing horse, and Al thought that was probably going to be the story of his life. He looked down at Robbie. Robbie had a gun shoved down the back of his pants. Al took it out and tossed it to Bud. Bud immediately went to Dom and started a pat down.
Al took two steps over to the desk and checked for hidden guns. He found a little piece-of-shit .22 and shoved it in his pocket. Once he was sure Robbie couldn’t be a danger to himself or others, Al half-lifted, half-pushed the smaller man into the desk chair. “You are so full of shit, Robbie. Probably why your eyes are brown.”
Robbie was getting his bearings back and decided he was going to try to bluff his way out of this mess. “When my people find out about this, you are gonna be so fucking dead.”
“Hey, Bud. His people are gonna make us dead.”
“That sucks. I don’t really feel like getting dead right now. It isn’t a convenient time for me.”
“Same here.” To Robbie, “Sorry, man, this is a tough week. I’m super tied up, swamped actually. I’ll make you a counter-offer, though.”
“Fuck you.”
Hog Butcher: 2nd Edition Page 29