City Blood

by Clark Howard

  Donning black slacks and a purple silk shirt as his signature dress, Fraz began eliminating his rivals the only way he deemed both propitious and permanent—by killing them. It had been estimated by the Street Gangs Intelligence Unit that Fraz personally executed no fewer than seventeen individuals, probably more, on his way to the top. Along the way he recruited loyal followers whom he called “disciples,” and whom he required to wear, in some combination, his “colors.” After a period of selective bloodletting, a structured organization evolved with various levels of responsibility and power that spread out like a massive tent to cloak every facet of life in the Green. And on a throne in the center of that tent, ruling with homicidal charm, sat Fraz Lamont.

  Kiley would not have been more surprised if the mayor’s car had been on the list of those parked at the Shamrock Club. The other names could have been predicted; the city’s mob hierarchy, oddly like the city’s police department, had ultimately been forced to reach out and embrace new ethnic candidates. With the department, it had been the Irish letting in first Polish-Americans, then Italian-Americans. With the mob, it had been the Italians letting in the Irish, then both of them admitting the more recently corrupted Poles. But, as Joe Kiley acutely knew, both communities had held firm against the blacks with fierce tenacity. It was only in the wake of civil lawsuits, and the interest of obtaining federal funds, that the department had opened up to blacks, Latinos, and other minorities by establishing hiring quotas.

  But that was the department, Kiley knew. That was not the mob.

  “Do you think,” Gloria asked, “that the Disciples could be involved in Nick’s killing?”

  “I don’t see how,” Joe replied. “I don’t believe Tony Touhy or Phil Touhy or any of those hoods on that list would have anything to do with Fraz Lamont or any black punk. Blacks are like aliens to the mob: They’re not trusted and not liked. And as far as the Disciples are concerned, they only kill their own people; I don’t think they’ve ever been involved with a white vic.”

  “Do you think Fraz might have been there dropping a payoff?” Gloria wondered.

  “Possibility, I guess—although it doesn’t seem likely; the book on Fraz is that he delegates everything except counting the money and having sex. Those he does himself.” Kiley finished his coffee and rose. Folding the sheet, he put it in his inside coat pocket. For a long moment he looked thoughtfully at Gloria Mendez, until she became self-conscious and asked, “What?”

  “Nick said something about you the other day,” Kiley recalled. “He said you’d help us because that was the kind of woman you were. I didn’t understand at the time what he meant—but I think I do now. He meant you’d do what you thought was right. I want you to know that I appreciate your help. I owe you.”

  “You don’t owe me.” Gloria looked away.

  “Yes, I do,” Kiley insisted. “I owe you. And I want you to remember that I owe you. If I can ever help you in any way, with anything, all you have to do is let me know. I mean it, Gloria.”

  She smiled—tentatively, still self-conscious—and nodded. “Okay.”

  She walked Kiley to the door and they said good night.

  On his way out of the building, Joe had to pass Meralda and her Latin Princes again. “Good night, Detective,” she singsonged.

  Kiley paused and looked glacially at the teenager. “You’ve got a hell of a fine lady for a mother, kid,” he said very quietly. “Someday you’re probably going to wish you’d spent more time with her and less with people like this.”

  One of the Princes parted his lips to make a remark, but Kiley’s icy light blue eyes turned on him, and whatever devil or demon the Prince saw in them, it suspended his words.

  Turning then, Kiley walked away, down the sidewalk toward his car. For some reason, he felt that Gloria Mendez was watching him from her window.

  But he would not allow himself to look back and see. He did not want to know for sure.

  Ten

  At eight the following morning, Joe Kiley was again at a computer terminal in the B-and-A squad room. And again he was fighting the battle of restricted access to information he needed. This time it was on Frazier Leroy Lamont aka Fraz Lamont. Every record Kiley tried to pull up on the leader of the Disciples displayed:

  ACCESS RESTRICTED

  STREET GANGS UNIT ONLY

  It was clear that he was not going to get any help from official files in trying to determine what the connection was—if any—between the Touhy crime family and the city’s leading black street gang. And why, he wondered, had he mentally qualified that question with an “if any” disclaimer? There had to be some connection; Fraz Lamont’s car was seen by Nick parked behind the Shamrock.

  Kiley turned his attention to the 1993 Continental Mark VIII, owned by Prestige Auto Leasing Company in the suburb of Lake Forest. Probably leased to some member of the Irish, Italian, or Polish mob families, Kiley thought, which would explain its plate being OCB restricted. Turning off the terminal, he went over to a library of telephone directories, with a sign above it that read: DO NOT TAKE DIRECTORIES TO YOUR DESK. REPLACE DIRECTORIES ON SHELF WHEN FINISHED. It was signed: ALDENA. Locating the book for the northern suburbs, Kiley opened it on a small worktable in front of the shelves. In the old days, he would simply have gone back to his desk and called Directory Assistance for a number he wanted; but now that information calls cost forty or fifty cents each, a memo had long since come down from the city treasurer forbidding it. Kiley found the number for Prestige Auto Leasing and jotted it down on the sheet Gloria had given him. Like a good little policeman, he then put the directory back in its place on the shelf. And was glad he did, because on the way back to his desk he saw that Aldena, the squad secretary, had been watching him.

  Pushing the button on his phone for an outside line, Kiley called Prestige Auto Leasing. A woman with a pleasant voice answered.

  “Good morning,” Kiley said, “my name is Arthur Davis, with Allstate Insurance. One of your leased cars has been involved in a little fender-bender with one of our insureds and I’d like to get the name of the person you lease the vehicle to.” The woman asked for the make, model, and license number of the car, which Kiley gave her, then put him on hold to listen to canned classical music while she checked. Waiting, Kiley wondered why he was wasting his time; all he was going to get was another mob name to go with the five he already had—and what the hell good was that going to do him? The best he could hope to do was maybe locate some of their hangouts and cruise the places hoping to spot Tony Touhy’s teal blue Jaguar. Tony—and everyone else connected with the mob—would be avoiding the Shamrock Club, that was certain. And Tony, if he had been there when Nick was killed, would be lying very low—

  Presently, the woman at Prestige came back on the line. “Mr. Davis? I’m sorry, where did you say you were from?”

  “Allstate. You know, the ‘good hands’ people.”

  “When did this accident occur, sir?”

  “Just today. Early this morning. It probably hasn’t even been reported to you yet.”

  “That’s what I was about to say. And it isn’t a leased car; it’s an executive car driven by one of our officers—” There was a muted voice in the background, then she said, “Excuse me, would you hold again, please?”

  Son of a bitch, Kiley thought. She was just about to give him a name when somebody stopped her. An officer of the leasing company drove the car, she said. If that was so, then Prestige Leasing was possibly a mob front—or one of the legitimate businesses the mob owned now that it was using corporate lawyers and accountants instead of hit men and strongarm thugs. Although Kiley doubted it had been a lawyer or an accountant who had conducted the last bit of business with Nick Bianco—

  The woman came back again, and this time her voice sounded a little distant and not as easy to hear—as if someone might be listening on an extension. “I’m sorry, Mr. Davis, which Allstate office are you with, sir?”

  “The main office.”

&
nbsp; “Well, if you’ll let me have a number, our own insurance representative will give you a call back as soon as we have a report of the accident.”

  “I’ll be happy to fax you a copy of the report,” Kiley pressed. “Which one of your officers did you say drives the car?”

  A man’s voice cut in, saying, “Mr. Davis, this is Matthew Field, the general manager. I’m sorry but we can’t give you any further information at the moment. Would you care to leave a number or not?”

  “No, I’ll call back,” Kiley said. “Thank you.” He broke the connection.

  As soon as Kiley hung up, his phone rang, startling him slightly. It was Aldena. “There’s some woman named Alma Lynn at the lobby information desk wants to see you.”

  “Tell them I’ll be right down,” Kiley said.

  As Kiley walked past Aldena’s desk to leave the squad room, she said, “ ’Member, you got to sign out on my log if you leave the building.”

  “Yes, dear,” he replied, and kept going.

  “Sweet talk going to get you nowhere; you still got to sign out.”

  Kiley rode down to the lobby and saw Alma Lynn waiting, suitcase at her side, out beyond the bank of metal detectors that separated the street doors from the elevators. She looked frightened. Kiley made his way over to her.

  “Hi. I thought you were just going to call—”

  “Hi. I was, but I had to come downtown to the bus depot anyway—” She looked around at the bedlam of traffic circulating in the lobby: a disorder of people that represented a cross section of Chicago’s bowels. “Is it always so—chaotic?”

  “Usually. Did you find anything in your sister’s belongings?”

  “Not exactly in her belongings. That place where she lived, it was a kind of semi-transient hotel, very small; she just had a room with a little kitchenette alcove. It was an older place, still had a switchboard at the desk; no direct dial, you know? Anyone wanting to dial out has to ask the switchboard operator to dial the number for them. They have a surcharge, so they have to keep a record of all outgoing calls—”

  “You got a record of her telephone calls?” Kiley asked eagerly.

  “Yes. I had to pay the back bill.” Alma drew a folded sheet from her purse. “No names, of course, just numbers.”

  Kiley looked at the list of calls. Aside from two long-distance calls to Ripley, Indiana, all of Ronnie Lynn’s calls had been local, and all to one of three numbers. Kiley knew the city’s prefixes fairly well, so he was able to generalize the area where the called numbers were located. The calls to an 878 prefix, he thought, were probably to the Shamrock Club; the ones to 265 were, he guessed, the 4-Star Lounge, where she had danced and died. The other, a 975 prefix, might have been Tony Touhy’s apartment on Lake Shore Drive; that was a number Kiley couldn’t check, because it had not been in the information Gloria Mendez had given Nick and him.

  “I can probably verify two of these, if they’re where I think they are,” he told Alma. “You want to come up to my desk while I check them out?”

  “I’d better not,” Alma said, looking at her watch. “My bus leaves in an hour. If I give you my home number in Ripley, would you mind letting me know how things turn out. And, you know, if those pictures show up—” She was clearly embarrassed about the photographs. The way she kept glancing around, Kiley knew the noisy, turbulent lobby unsettled her.

  “Listen,” Kiley said, putting a hand on her arm, “I’ll do everything I can to find those pictures and see that they don’t get circulated or passed around—”

  “We’re from such a small town, Ronnie and me,” Alma said. “If those pictures somehow ever were used as evidence against anyone and it got in the papers—”

  “I’ll do everything I can to see that it doesn’t happen,” Kiley assured her—actually, promised her, because that was what he felt like he was doing.

  “I know you want to get the man who killed your partner,” she said plaintively, suddenly on the verge of tears, “and I wouldn’t ask you to do anything to hinder that—”

  Moving his hand along her arm, Kiley laced his fingers in hers and let her squeeze. “I know,” he said understandingly, “you don’t have to explain—”

  In his peripheral vision, Kiley saw Dietrick and Meadows, the two Homicide cops, come in the front door with a short, familiar-looking man walking between them. A quick glance at the man had just pulled an identification of him to the surface of Kiley’s mind—when suddenly the man began to shriek.

  “Aaaaaahhhhh! No—!” It was clearly a cry of terror.

  “What the hell—?” said Dietrick, leaping away from him. Meadows moved away also, eyes widening, hand instinctively moving toward his gun.

  It was Wally, the janitor at the 4-Star Lounge. He had looked across the lobby at Kiley and Alma Lynn, and without warning gone totally ballistic.

  “No—! Aaaaahhhhh! Keep her away from me! She’s a devil! She’s a ghost! She can’t be here, I killed her—!”

  Wally was freaking out at the sight of Ronnie Lynn’s twin sister, but only Kiley realized that. Kiley, Dietrick, and Meadows all stared in stunned silence as the little man ranted and raved like a maniac. Uniformed officers on duty in the lobby began forming a circle to move in and restrain him. Then Dietrick was walking toward Kiley and Alma, and Kiley, saying, “Stay where you are,” to Alma, moved forward to meet the Homicide cop.

  “What the fuck’s going on, Kiley?” Dietrick demanded. He looked anxiously over at Alma. “Who the fuck is that?”

  “Ronnie Lynn’s twin sister,” Kiley said. “What are you bringing the janitor in for?”

  “Just to look at mug shot books. He said he thought he could recognize a customer the Lynn broad got chummy with. He told us he remembered the guy yesterday.”

  “He’s remembering something else today. Did you or Meadows ever check his knuckles?”

  “We are cops, Kiley. His knuckles were okay.”

  Wally was dancing around like a crazed simian, pointing at Alma Lynn, still shouting, “No—! Keep her away! She’s dead! I killed her! She can’t be here—!”

  “Who is that man?” Alma, hurrying up, demanded of Kiley.

  Assisted by the uniforms, Meadows got Wally under control and led him down a hall off the lobby. The little man kept looking back fearfully at Alma Lynn until he was out of sight.

  “He’s the guy who found your sister’s body,” Kiley answered Alma’s question.

  “But he just said that he—”

  “I know,” Kiley interrupted. “I know what he said.”

  Dietrick was now staring at Alma too. “Jesus, it kind of is like seeing a ghost.” Turning his back to her, he whispered to Kiley, “Looks like you really fucked up on that Touhy lead, don’t it? Maybe you should’ve gone ahead and gave everything to Homicide.”

  Meadows walked quickly up to him. “Come on, Deet,” he said urgently. “I’ve got him in an interrogation room in Auto Theft. Steno’s on the way. He’s scared shitless and ready to cop.”

  As Dietrick and Meadows walked away, Kiley said to Alma Lynn, “Wait here for a minute,” and hurried to catch up with the command cops. “Hold it, will you?” he said, getting in front of them to block their way. “Look, I know you’re probably pissed at me, but stop and think for a minute anyway—”

  “Move it, Kiley,” Meadows warned. He, like many, knew Kiley’s opinion of blacks in the department, and he clearly was not in the mood to be interfered with by some honky racist.

  “Wait a minute, goddamn it,” Kiley insisted. He pleaded his case to Dietrick, whom he knew to be senior. “What about the sister? You might be able to use her if Wally decides to stop talking.”

  Dietrick’s eyes narrowed. “Not a bad thought,” he said to Meadows.

  “What the fuck do you want, Kiley? Part of the collar?” Meadows had one hand already balled into a fist. Kiley shook his head.

  “Look, I lost my partner, okay? I’m not interested in anything but finding whoever did that.”

&nbs
p; “What do you want from us?” asked Dietrick.

  “Let me listen to Wally’s statement. To see if I can pick up anything that might tie Touhy to Nick’s killing.”

  “We can’t let you question him,” Dietrick warned.

  “Just listen,” Kiley assured, holding his hands up as if in surrender.

  Dietrick looked at Meadows, who finally gave a curt nod, and the senior detective said, “Okay. Stash the sister somewhere. Then come on down.”

  “Room C in Auto Theft,” Meadows said. “And we ain’t waiting for you, man.”

  Dietrick and Meadows continued on their way, and Kiley hurried back to do something with Alma Lynn.

  “You guys can’t imagine what it’s like for somebody like me,” Wally said. “I mean, look at me: I ain’t exactly Tom Cruise. There’s times I can’t get no sex even paying for it. Then to have to work around all them women, most of ’em running around half naked or more—”

  The little janitor was sitting at a plain, gray-topped interrogation table, nothing in front of him except a styrofoam cup of coffee heavily laced with powdered creamer. Dietrick sat across from him, hands folded on the table like a schoolboy. Meadows and Kiley stood back away from the table, using the wall for support. A black woman of about fifty, from the steno pool, sat several feet away from the table, legs crossed, steno pad on one knee, making little curlicues on the page as Wally talked.

  “I always treated all them women very good,” Wally said. “I never stared at them undressed if they could see me, an’ I always knocked on their dressing room door when I needed to empty the wastebaskets or when one of them had a phone call. Laver, now, he just walked in, never knocked or nothing; half the time he didn’t even have no reason to be going in, you know: just wanted to remind them that he was the boss an’ could walk in if he wanted to. Thought he was a big deal, throwing his weight around. But, like one of the girls said, what else could you expect from a jig?”