by Clark Howard
Opening the smaller of the two bags, Kiley removed the things that had to do with the job: Nick’s two guns, holsters, ammunition, the handcuffs, the spiral notebook. Those he put on top of the bagged clothing and closed the box. Using the outside basement door, he took the box out and put it in the trunk of his car. Returning to the basement, he replaced the remaining items in the smaller bag and put it in the workbench drawer.
Upstairs, he said to Stella, “I sorted his things out; there’s a bag in the drawer down there. I’ll take care of the rest of it. I thought I’d keep his guns and stuff for the time being—”
“Please do,” Stella said, caught by an involuntary shiver. “I don’t want them around in case the girls might see them. Tessie’s such a little snoop lately: always into drawers, closets, whatever’s closed. Nick had to threaten to spank her a couple weeks ago if she didn’t stop prowling in Jen’s dresser.” Stella put the big bowl of sauce on the kitchen table. “We’ll just eat out here, I think. It’ll be cozier than the dining room. You don’t mind, do you?”
“The kitchen’s fine with me.”
Stella patted his arm. “Get the girls while I dish up the spaghetti.”
Later that night, when he got back to his apartment, Joe faced a dilemma about what to do with Nick’s clothes. He put the morgue box on his coffee table and sat looking at it while he drank a glass of cold milk to help settle his stomach from Stella’s spaghetti sauce. It did not seem exactly fitting to simply throw the clothes into a trash dumpster—yet what else was there to do with them? He could see without opening the bag that a great deal of Nick’s blood had spread out on his shirt, one side of his coat, and the front waistband of his trousers. The clothes couldn’t be donated to a thrift shop in that condition, and Joe guessed the suit—one of Nick’s hijacked Valentinos, he supposed—would be impossible to dry clean. So the stuff had to be disposed of—but how, for Christ’s sake? he wondered.
Joe knew he was procrastinating about the clothes because of the guilt he felt over Nick’s death. For days he had been trying to neutralize that feeling by rationalizing that he and Nick had decided together on the course of action they took; that it was a joint decision, equally made, and that it had been the logical result of information connecting the dead dancer and Tony Touhy practically dropping on them out of nowhere. That and the fact that both he and Nick were buried in a GA slot they’d probably never get out of unless they attracted some attention. Not that he himself any longer coveted promotion; mostly all he did anymore was resent it when others got promoted, especially if they were black or Latino and had less seniority than he had. One of the things that had capped his and Nick’s decision to take a run at Ronnie Lynn’s killer themselves was when Dietrick and Meadows had shown up from Homicide. Both Joe and Nick knew about Dietrick; he was a dickhead who had made promotion by blowing away two punks in a liquor store heist while taking a slug in the thigh himself—pure fucking blind luck to go out for a bottle of Seagram’s and walk in on a play like that. And Meadows, he made promotion by being a spade, plain and simple; he was part of the mayor’s quota.
So Joe and Nick had decided—together—to go for a collar themselves. It was done all the time. But this time it had backfired. Backfired, big time.
Fuck it, Joe thought. All the justifying in the world wasn’t going to wash it. He felt responsible for Nick’s death—period.
Finishing the milk, he went into his little kitchen, rinsed the glass, and put it in the dishwasher. Always clean up after yourself right away, his mother had taught him early on. The secret to keeping a clean house is never to let it get ahead of you. Kiley’s kitchen could have been on the cover of a hygiene magazine, it was that clean. Maddie Leary Kiley would have been proud of her boy.
From a cupboard, Kiley took another glass and a bottle of Beefeater’s, and poured himself three ounces. Sitting back down in front of the morgue box, he sipped the gin straight, at shelf temperature. All right now, he began marshaling his thoughts. Deal with the accountability. If it’s actually your fault that Nick’s dead, then accept it; even if you just think it’s your fault, it amounts to the same thing, so accept it. And if you’re going to make yourself take the heat for it, then all you can do is look for atonement to go along with it, just like when you were a kid going to confession. Extricate yourself from sin by making amends. Fifty “Our Fathers” and a hundred “Hail Marys” would get you off the hook for just about anything back then, short of raping a Mother Superior.
But how, he asked himself as the gin bit his throat, could he do it now; how could he compensate for Nick’s death? He couldn’t bring him back. He had already decided to keep trying to nail Tony Touhy on his own time, even though it might cost him his badge if he got caught at it. And even though he didn’t have the remotest idea how to proceed, he had nevertheless covered himself for unmonitored fieldwork by getting the bus bomber case, so he was pretty much free and clear to operate any way he pleased. But operate how? In what direction? Everybody had the Tony Touhy connection now: Homicide, OCB, IA, the Chief. The only way he was going to come up with something they didn’t come up with, was to cross the line. Work dirty. Bend the rules. Break the law.
All of which Joe Kiley was perfectly willing to do. But again, how?
Assuming, he thought, that Nick’s killer would be made, whether by Homicide, OCB, himself, or a combination thereof, what then? Arrest, arraignment, trial, conviction, and—what? The death penalty? A fucking joke. Illinois had one hundred fifty-three people on Death Row, and had only executed one—one!—in nearly thirty years. The implementation of capital punishment, in Illinois anyway, sucked.
Okay, so a life sentence. That put a killer up for parole in twelve, practically guaranteed release after no more than twenty, maybe twenty-two. Jennie and Tessie would probably be young marrieds with kids of their own, and the hood that murdered their father would be out walking the street.
Maybe, Joe thought with another sip of gin, his duty in the situation was to make sure justice wasn’t served that palatably. Maybe it should be his function now to make sure Nick’s killer paid in kind for what he did. Bullet for bullet.
And what about Jennie and Tessie? And Stella? He had to watch himself very carefully in whatever he did, because he had an obligation to them too. He had to make sure Stella’s pension remained intact, no matter what. And, he nodded solemnly to himself on this one, he had to make sure she didn’t get taken advantage of by Nick’s pompous Uncle Gino and his flaky son Frank. Stella was too smart for that, Joe was almost positive, but in a time of loss, of grief, of uncertainty, she might be temporarily vulnerable. It galled him to think that Frank Bianco might have his eye on Stella, that he might be thinking of her in a personal way, a—sexual way; the dago son of a bitch.
Resting his head back against the couch, Joe forced the anger to pass by thinking back over the evening. Even though sad at times, tense here and there, on the whole it had been a nice evening. If he thought for a moment that at some time in the future Stella would even consider—
But he could not allow himself to start hoping in that direction. As far as he was concerned, Stella Bianco was still only a dream, a fantasy when he let her be, a woman unattainable; his partner’s wife, who had looked upon him as a surrogate big brother to her husband, an “uncle” to her children, an unmarried friend whose bachelorhood she thought it was her divine destiny to undo. No, he was sure Stella would never think of him as he wished in the deepest part of him that she would.
Finally, with a heavy sigh, having accomplished nothing that made him feel one iota better, Joe set down the gin glass and opened the morgue box. The goddamn things had to be tended to. Putting aside Nick’s guns and other things, he carried the box into the kitchen and put the morgue bag of bloodstained clothing into a green plastic trash bag. He broke down the sides of the box, flattening it, and put that in the trash bag too. Leaving the bag on the counter, he returned to the living room and the guns and other articles on the table
. As he tried to decide where to put the things until—and if—Stella ever wanted them, his expression suddenly drew into a frown and, as if having an out-of-body experience, he watched his hand push everything else aside and pick up Nick’s spiral notebook.
Jesus Christ, how could he have been so fucking dense?
Incredulous at himself, refusing to lean on any excuse—the shock of Nick’s death, the funeral, the censure in the chief’s office—he could only shake his head in total, abject disbelief. His exact words to Nick over the telephone now illuminated in his mind with dazzling brilliance, as if they had never lain dormant at all.
“Get license numbers; if the Jag doesn’t show, we can at least find out who has parking privileges.”
Then later, Nick’s excited voice on the answering machine: “The whole fucking parking lot behind the joint is full—”
Slowly and deliberately, Joe fingered through the pages of the little dime-store notebook until he came to the last one that had anything written on it.
And there they were: seven license plate numbers printed in Nick’s neat, precise hand.
Five minutes later, Kiley was in his car on the way downtown to the Shop.
B-and-A was deserted that time of night except for one duty cop who was keeping awake by doing the day’s filing. “Help you?” he asked as Kiley came in. Kiley went over and extended his hand.
“Joe Kiley. I’m on TAD here, started today.”
“Lee Tumac,” the duty cop shook hands, then went to his desk and checked a squad roster. “Oh, yeah. You’re the GA from Warren. Sorry about your partner. So what’re you doing here this time of night?”
“Trying to clean up the last of my open GA stuff. I need to run a few plate numbers and I didn’t want to go back to the division to do it. That’s where my partner and I were together for eight years, know what I mean?”
“Absolutely,” Tumac said. “Memories can be a bitch. No problem.” He pointed to a row of three computer terminals against a back wall. “Help yourself.”
“Thanks.”
As Tumac went back to his time-passing work, Joe turned on a monitor and accessed motor vehicle records. Nick had taken down the plate numbers of three Cadillac Sevilles, two Lincoln Town Cars, a Lincoln Mark VIII, and a Corvette. Logging onto the data base host, Joe keyed in all seven numbers and waited. When the information began coming up, he saw at once that he was going to get nothing. But it was a curious nothing.
All three Sevilles, both Town Cars, and the Mark VIII showed:
ACCESS RESTRICTED
ORGANIZED CRIME BUREAU ONLY
But the Corvette showed:
ACCESS RESTRICTED STREET
GANGS BUREAU ONLY
Street Gangs only? How the hell does that fit? Joe wondered. The Street Gangs squad dealt with outfits like the El Rukns, the Latin Princes, the Disciples, the Cobras, and other street trash cliques which had staked out parts of the city as their turf, their ’hood; areas which they ran by intimidation and violence, while engaging in open warfare with other crews. But what did that have to do with organized crime, Kiley asked himself, with Phil Touhy and the mob? It was something he would have to find out.
Shutting down the terminal, he went back over to Lee Tumac and said, “I need to make a couple of calls but I don’t have a desk yet—” He left the request hanging. There was an office full of unoccupied desks, but a cop did not just sit down at another cop’s desk. That wasn’t done. A cop’s desk was as personal as his wallet.
“Use that desk over there,” Tumac pointed, “the one with nothing on it; that’s probably gonna be yours anyway.”
“Okay, thanks.”
The desk Tumac had indicated was the only one in the big office that was devoid of piles of paper and files, and missing as well individual items such as ashtrays, photographs, calendars. Kiley found a metro telephone directory in the bottom drawer and looked in the M section for Gloria Mendez, hoping almost against hope that she would not have an unlisted number. He found a Mendez, G., no address listed, in the 276 prefix, which was the Humboldt Park precinct where Nick said he and Gloria had worked together. The area was about eighty percent Puerto Rican. Joe dialed the number. On the third ring, a young-sounding female voice answered. “Yeah, hello—”
“Gloria Mendez, please.”
“Who’s calling?”
“Joe Kiley. I’m a police officer.”
“Hold on,” the voice said, unimpressed. Then Kiley heard in the background, “Some cop named Joe something.”
A moment later, Gloria came on. “Hello—”
“Hello, Gloria. This is Joe Kiley. How come you don’t have an unlisted number?”
“Why should I? Street cops make enemies, not Records cops. I don’t have to conceal my phone number. Although right now I’m thinking maybe I should. What do you want, Joe?”
“I was just wondering: any flak yet?”
“No. And I don’t want to discuss it any further on the telephone, understand?”
“Understand. But I do need to talk to you. Can I come by for a few minutes?”
“Look, Joe, that’s not such a good idea. I’m out of the situation.”
“So’s Nick,” said Kiley. “All the way out. I thought you might want to help with that. If I’m wrong, just tell me and I’ll leave you alone.”
There was a long moment of silence on the line. It told Kiley he was not wrong.
“Eighteen eighty-two Kimball,” she finally said. “Three-B.”
“Twenty minutes,” Kiley told her.
The Humboldt Park section of the city didn’t know whether it was a slum or a redevelopment area. Decaying, falling-down residential and commercial buildings stood next door to places that were being vigorously renovated and improved. In the former could be found the street trash of the district: the Latin Princes dressed in their red and green gang colors; the junkies and petty thieves; the winos who had given up trying; the ex-gang girls who had been dumped and now peddled pussy on the street. But in the latter, working at whatever their dream was, were the industrious, family-together Latinos who worked at honest jobs, usually for substandard wages, and at night nailed back together, cleaned up, began to paint and wallpaper some abandoned trap of a building or house that the city had taken over and sold to them for—to the city—pocket change. Somehow, the two diverse societies, perhaps because of their mutual culture, managed to coexist and survive.
The building at 1882 Kimball was a three-story six-flat that was only moderately well-kept on the outside and in the downstairs foyer, but looked better once Kiley had rung Gloria Mendez’s bell and was past the buzzer-controlled door. Inside, it smelled heavy of salsa, and from more than one direction came the sound of mambo. Kiley took the stairs two at a time. Gloria, in jeans and sweatshirt, was waiting for him at the top with her apartment door open.
“Hi,” Joe said.
“Come in,” Gloria replied, without returning the greeting.
The living room was comfortably but not expensively furnished, clearly a female room with no sign of anything masculine. Lounging on the couch, chewing gum, wearing too much makeup, was a prime, pubescent body in tight toreador pants, a bare midriff halter top, and spike heels that should have come with a whip.
“This is my daughter Meralda, Joe. MeMe, this is Mr. Kiley.”
“Officer Kiley?” the girl asked pointedly, rising.
“Detective Kiley,” Joe said. “But you can call me ‘Officer’ if you want to. You can also call me Joe.”
A very slight smile from Gloria seemed to say yes, that was the way to handle her. “Mr. Kiley and I have some business to discuss, MeMe,” her mother said. “You may go into your bedroom and close the door, or you may go outside for a little while as long as you stay on the block.”
“Is it police business or personal business you’re going to discuss?” the teenager asked brashly.
“Your room or outside on the block—now,” Gloria told her firmly.
As Meralda was
walking out the door, she said over her shoulder, “I think you can do a lot better than another cop, Mama.”
The door was closed before Gloria could respond, so all she did was roll her eyes in exasperation and say to Joe, “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” Kiley said. “I agree with her. You could do a lot better than a cop.”
“I’ll keep the opinions of both of you in mind next time I go shopping for a man,” Gloria said dryly. “Sit down, Joe. What is it you want?”
Kiley handed her Nick’s notebook, open to the last page the dead detective had used. “Nick wrote those down during the last few hours he was alive. All of those cars were parked behind the Shamrock Club during that time. Six of the plate numbers are access-restricted to OCB—”
“No, Joe, forget it,” Gloria was already shaking her head.
“—but the Corvette is restricted access to the Street Gangs Bureau,” Kiley continued talking. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t make sense is for me to get involved in this any deeper than I already am,” Gloria told him.
“I don’t want any files here,” Joe said, holding his palms up to reassure her. “Just names and addresses, motor vehicle stuff—”
“Restricted access is restricted access, Joe!” she said with an edge. “When I override it on a master terminal, a record is made!”
“Can’t it be deleted?”
“Not by me, it can’t, not for thirty days. Can you guarantee my cover for thirty days?”
Kiley shook his head. “You know I can’t.”