by Clark Howard
“Like what?”
“Wait, let me finish, Hal. I think he’s trying to make a point of some kind, and he’s doing it in a very commendable way—”
“Commendable?” Winston was clearly surprised at that.
“Yes, commendable,” Kiley insisted. “Look at the facts, Hal. You know why the department has been able to keep this story away from the media? Because nobody’s been killed or injured, that’s why. And you know why nobody’s been killed or injured? Because the guy has been placing his bombs to go off after the bus has made its last run of the night and is parked in a transit authority garage. In other words, he’s being extremely careful not to injure anyone, Hal. I’d say that was commendable, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, yes, I’d say so. Certainly,” Winston agreed.
“Another thing he’s doing,” Joe continued, “is placing his bomb in the back of the bus so that the only damage it does is to tear out a few seats and shatter a few windows. I’d say that was commendable too. I mean, he could stick the thing under a seat up front where it might blow up the steering wheel, drive shaft, door control, all kinds of things that might total the bus completely. Right?”
“Looking at it from that perspective,” Winston said, “I’d have to agree with you, Joe.” He finished his beer and held up the glass for the bartender to bring another round. “What really interests me is your theory that this person is trying to make a point of some kind. I mean, what could it be, for instance?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” Kiley admitted. “Maybe he’s a disgruntled ex-employee who feels that he was unfairly fired. Or maybe he’s a guy who was involved in some kind of accident with a bus and doesn’t feel that the city gave him a big enough settlement—”
“Can’t they check their records for people like that?” Winston asked.
“Sure. Doing that already. But it takes time, Hal. In a day or two, the captain will probably dump a bunch of names on my desk and I’ll have to start wearing out shoe leather checking on them.” Kiley finished his martini and smiled slyly at Winston. “Hope I don’t find your name on any of those lists, Hal.”
Winston smiled back, just as slyly. “You won’t, Joe,” he said confidently. “You won’t.”
Greg brought their fresh round of drinks and when Joe started to hand him some money, Winston pushed his hand back and said, “No, on me, Joe. I’m ahead of you from the other evening.” He gave Greg a ten and said, “Take a buck for yourself and put the rest in the jukebox.” Glancing at Joe, he added, “But no rap music.”
When the bartender left, Kiley objected to Winston paying. “Should’ve been my round, Hal.”
“No, no, I keep mental track of who’s ahead, Joe. Inventory control, remember? Your turn to get the next one.”
“Have to be some other time, then. I’m going to make this one my last.”
“Quit any time you want to,” Winston said. He took a swallow of beer. “Speaking of quitting, I’ll bet you weren’t serious when you mentioned a while ago about resigning from the police department. Especially since your father was a policeman before you—”
Kiley stared down at his drink, recalling his father, Sean Patrick Kiley, a pick-and-shovel day laborer who got paid in cash after each ten-hour day and who gave his wife part of the money to feed the kids and pay the rent only when she met him at the door of the bar and demanded it. Good old Pat Kiley, he’d always stand his cronies a round of Irish whiskey, but Maddie had to slave over the steaming, stinking tubs of a goddamned commercial laundry to buy milk. What a bastard Pat Kiley had been, and what a saint he’d been married to.
“Hal, I have a confession to make,” Kiley said quietly. “I do remember some of the things I told you the other night, and one of them was a lie. My old man wasn’t a cop; he was an alcoholic construction laborer. And he isn’t retired in Florida, he’s dead; he strangled on his own vomit one night when he was too drunk to regurgitate.” Kiley sighed, as quietly as he was speaking. “I apologize for lying to you, Hal.”
“That’s all right, Joe. I guess everybody tells lies about their parents once in a while. Most of the time we do it to make ourselves look better; you know, impress somebody about how hard we had it as a kid, and how well we turned out in spite of our parents. Those are the people who tell everything bad there is to tell, never any of the good. And on the other side of the coin are people like you, who are ashamed of a parent, but lie to make that parent look better. There aren’t many people, Joe, who don’t have some kind of animosity toward their parents.”
Kiley stared at Harold Paul Winston, impressed, but sober enough to wonder how much of it was Winston and how much the numerous martinis soaking into his brain tissue. Winston, he was beginning to realize, was not your average ding—and was not, Kiley decided a little hazily, going to be as easily handled as Kiley had originally predicted. Get out of here right now, his instinct told him, before this guy starts handling you.
“Hal, I really have to go,” Kiley said, finishing his drink. “Thanks for letting me bend your ear. I’m sorry I wasn’t better company—”
“You were fine, Joe, cut it out,” Winston chastised mildly. “Probably see you in here again, right?”
“Look forward to it, Hal. Take care now.”
As Kiley left the booth, Winston rose and followed him, catching up with him at the door.
“Oh, Joe—”
“Yeah?” Kiley turned back.
“That point you said the bus bomber was trying to make? I wonder if it could be pollution?”
It did not register at once and Kiley frowned. “Pollution?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you know, city buses are the biggest air polluters we have. Haven’t you ever noticed all the putrid exhaust fumes from all that starting and stopping, all that standing in rush hour traffic? It just seems to me that this guy might be some kind of environmentalist trying to get the transit authority to clean up its act.”
The two men locked eyes there at the front door of the Bel-Ked Tavern, and Kiley suddenly wondered if he had been mistaken in his conclusion just moments earlier that Harold Paul Winston was going to be harder to handle than he had expected. Maybe he was going to be easier.
“That’s an interesting theory, Hal,” he told Winston. “I’m going to give that some thought.” He bobbed his chin at Winston. “See you.”
“Sure, Joe. See you.”
When Kiley got to his apartment, the message light on his answering machine was flashing. He immediately sat down to listen to it; not since the night he unknowingly ignored Nick’s last message for ten minutes had he not attended to his messages at once. This, he guessed—even hoped—might be Stella, asking him over again. But after the tape rewound, he heard an entirely different female voice.
“Detective Kiley? Hello, this is Alma Lynn, calling from Ripley, Indiana. I just wanted to apologize to you for my behavior the other day. I know I said some things that were pretty naive, and I realized on the bus coming home that I probably wasn’t fair in being so critical of everything you said, the way I did. I hope you’ll understand that I was pretty stressed out at the time; I still don’t think I’m over the shock of seeing that awful person who beat my sister to death.” She paused, as if not certain what else to say. Kiley was staring at the machine, picturing her serious, freckled face as she spoke. “Anyhow,” Alma continued, “I also wanted to let you know that Ronnie has now had a proper burial in our family plot here in Ripley. I had a small, private funeral for her—I’m not sure whether I told you our folks were dead or not—anyway, just a few close friends and neighbors were there, and the casket had to be kept closed because of how she looked, but it was a very nice service. I want to thank you again for all your help. I hope we can talk again some day. And I hope you are successful in catching whoever caused your own loss.” Again a pause—very brief. Then: “Good-bye, Detective Kiley.”
Turning off the machine, Kiley removed his hat and tossed it onto the coffee table, then slumped back on his couch
and stared straight ahead at nothing. So much for Ronnie Lynn, the person who was the catalyst in everything that happened, he thought. Another small-town girl chewed up by the big city and spit out like so much phlegm. A virgin, an innocent, a child—perhaps not literally, but certainly figuratively when vying in the same arena of life as men like Tony Touhy, Max Getman, and Ed Laver: users and purveyors of young female flesh. And Wally, the janitor: unbalanced, unsettled, moving innocuously, insipidly, through life, toward one awful moment of madness.
Why, Kiley asked himself in the silence and safety of his apartment, didn’t they stay home, these simple, inexperienced, gullible young women from the sticks, the hick towns; these uninitiated country girls; why didn’t they, as Alma Lynn had done, stay home and become schoolteachers or librarians or young wives and mothers, or something? Why in Christ’s name did they have to pack their suitcases, get on the Greyhound, and travel from a bright place where flowers grew, to a darker place where predators flourished—why?
Kiley didn’t know. Kiley would never know. All he could do now was think, Rest in peace, pretty young Ronnie Lynn; the unfortunate misfit who killed you will be punished for it—after a fashion.
But Kiley could not yet think the same thought about Nick Bianco. That matter had yet to be resolved.
And now there was an even more urgent reason for making Nick’s killer: to save Gloria Mendez’s career. If Kiley could nail Tony Touhy, tie him up in some irrefutable evidence, and say that Gloria had worked with him to do it, the department would let her off the hook—there was no question in Kiley’s mind about that. Help bring down a cop killer and an infraction of the restricted-access-to-information rule would be looked upon as something very minor.
So now Kiley was carrying three loads. Stella Bianco’s pension. Gloria Mendez’s career. And Joe Kiley’s guilt.
With what he planned to do in the next thirty-six hours, he hoped to alleviate all three.
Fourteen
Early the next morning, Kiley drove past 4406 W Grainger Avenue, on the Northwest Side. Bernard Oznina’s little single-family residence, which he had owned for more than thirty-three years, appeared neat, well-maintained, and properly situated in a block of similar homes probably all built around the same time, just after World War Two. The neighborhood was predominantly Polish, which accounted for its cleanliness, the Polish districts of Chicago having traditionally been among the most fastidiously tidy in the city. It was an ethnic characteristic passed on to each succcessive generation. Bernard Oznina’s three grown children, Kiley knew instinctively, lived in similarly groomed homes out in the suburbs.
After scouting the neighborhood for several blocks in each direction, Kiley parked on Lawrence Avenue, the nearest commercial street, and took a walk, scrutinizing the small business establishments that served the area. After several minutes of matching in his mind various stores with stories he had devised, he finally selected Wojic’s Polish Bakery. Entering, he stayed back away from the counter until a big-boned, rawly attractive woman with bleached blond hair finished waiting on two older women and they left. Then he smiled and said “Good morning. My name is Arthur Davis. I’m with Blaisdell Property Management. Do you happen to know Bernie Oznina, lives over here on Grainger Avenue?”
“Yeah, I know him. Why?” she asked, just a touch reticent.
“I was hoping you would,” Kiley said. “Bernie works for my company; we have the building at 3333 Lake Shore Drive, where he’s the night doorman—” Kiley glanced anxiously out the front window. “I hope he doesn’t walk in on me; it would ruin the whole surprise—”
“What surprise? What do you mean?” the woman asked.
“Well, I hope you’ll keep this a secret now, but next month is going to be Bernie’s tenth anniversary with us—it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, but he started with us four years before Vera died—did you know Vera, his wife?”
“Yeah, sure. Everybody in the neighborhood knows the whole Oznina family.”
“The one thing I regret about this party we’re planning,” Kiley did a good job of sounding sad, “is that Vera won’t be there for it—”
“So you’re having a party for Bernie, is that it?”
“That’s it. Giving him his ten-year pin, and the other employees are chipping in to buy him a gift. Anyway, we want to order a big cake, see, but we don’t have any idea what kind he likes: chocolate, strawberry—”
“Apricot,” the woman said unequivocally.
“Apricot?”
“Apricot,” she confirmed. “I’ve been selling Bernie kalachkes every Sunday morning after ten o’clock mass for must be twenty years now, and he always orders apricot.”
“I’m sure glad I talked to you,” Kiley said, shaking his head in amazement. “Nobody would ever have thought of apricot. Listen, do you bake cakes like for special occasions?”
“Sure, all the time. We could do you a real nice cake for Bernie with apricot icing. When’s the party?”
“In a couple weeks. We don’t have the exact day yet. Can I call you a few days ahead of time?”
“At least three. I need three.”
“No problem. What’s your name?”
“Doris.”
“Write your phone number down for me, will you, Doris?” While she was doing that, Kiley said casually, “So Bernie goes to ten o’clock mass every Sunday. What parish is this, anyway?”
“St. Melvin’s. It’s over on Leland Avenue.” She handed Kiley her telephone number.
“Doris, you’ve been a big help. You’ll be hearing from me. Remember now, don’t let on. We want this to be a surprise.”
Outside the door, Kiley paused for her benefit, looked furtively up and down the street, then hurried to his car.
At his bank, Kiley pushed a withdrawal slip through the teller window and said, “Five hundred in tens and five hundred in twenties, please. And put it in an envelope for me, please.”
Kiley watched while she counted out the money. Then he put the enve lope into his inside coat pocket and returned to his car in the bank parking lot.
Twenty minutes later, he was driving down Flourney Street in the neighborhood where he had grown up. It had been a poor, shabby street in those days; it was a disaster now. Once shanty Irish, it had turned to mixed black and brown, with only a smattering of leftover whites too poor or too lazy to move on. The White Castle where he’d devoured ten-cent hamburgers was now a rib joint. Sweeney’s Candy Store was a 7–11 convenience store. The little corner market where his mother sent him to buy bread from the day-old table was now a liquor store. Half the buildings on the block were deserted, boarded up. He saw a scrawny dog sniffing an old bag lady sprawled in a doorway. Four young blacks, none of them wearing gang colors, were jiving around a parked Mustang convertible with its rear end raised nine inches; a condom hung from the rearview mirror. Little brown and black preschoolers played unsupervised on the sidewalk. A white girl who looked no more than fourteen sat lethargically nursing a baby on one front stoop, while a few doors away an obvious drug transaction was taking place between two Hispanics in front of an abandoned building.
It was a gutter when I lived here, Kiley thought. Now it’s a fucking sewer.
The only thing that was still the way it always had been was the church across the street on the next corner: St. Susan of Alexandria. It had aged, its gray cement walls changed in shade from parochial light to ghetto dirty, its entry doors no longer polished and shiny, now dry, cracked in places, even its name above the door now missing an N so that it read “St. Susa.” Kiley grunted wryly at that; as kids, he and the other hoodlums had called it “St. Sue”—a name forbidden by the nuns as blasphemous.
Parking behind the church, where the rectory hall and living quarters, as well as the cathecism classrooms, were located, Kiley walked over to the rectory door, where a young priest was picking up beer cans, take-out food wrappers, and other litter, putting it into a plastic bag. As Kiley approached, he paused and wiped his
brow on the sleeve of his black shirt.
“Look at this mess,” he said to Kiley, anger and frustration mixing in his tone. “The young heathens park out here at night with their slut girlfriends, drinking and doing God only knows what else, with their radios so loud a person can’t even concentrate to pray—it’s a disgrace, a scandal, a—a—a defilement of Holy Mother the Church—” Stopping abruptly, he squinted slightly at Kiley as if trying to recognize him. “I’m sorry—can I help you?”
“Is Father Conley still at this parish?” Kiley asked.
“Yes,” came a curt reply. “Yes, he is. You’ll find him at his desk in the rectory office, no doubt having his morning Scotch.”
“Thanks,” Kiley said. As he started in, he heard the young priest mutter an added comment behind him.
“I hope you’re early enough to catch him sober.”
Kiley turned back. “What was that?”
“I think you probably heard me.” The young priest’s chin came up defiantly.
“A comment like that is considered disrespectful irreverence toward a holy brother, isn’t it, Father?” Kiley smiled, but without warmth. “You’ll have to confess that.”
Inside, Kiley found the short hallway of cathecism classrooms to be dingy and uninviting, where once they had been cheerfully hung with religious cutouts and construction paper artwork done by the Tuesday and Thursday afternoon students from the nearby public schools. On impulse, Kiley stopped at one of the rooms and opened the door. The desks were exactly the same: old light brown wood with scarred lift-up tops and a hole in one corner for an inkwell. As Kiley’s eyes scanned the rows, he had a flashback of faces in his mind: Willie, Dermid, Zach, Cueball, other boys he’d run the streets with; but only one girl’s face manifested itself: Mary Ellen Daly—the sassy little Irish girl he had loved passionately, totally, helplessly—and secretly—for five entire semesters until her family had moved away. Jesus, Kiley thought, disregarding where he was, how sweet and simple life had been then—except for his misery over Mary Ellen Daly.