City Blood

by Clark Howard

  At the end of the hall was a door with OFFICE lettered on it. Kiley knocked once and waited. No one answered. Probably hoping whoever it is will go away, he thought knowingly. He knocked again, louder, and this time heard impatiently, “Yes, yes, come in—”

  As Kiley entered, a gray-haired old priest looked up from a cluttered desk, squinting as the younger priest outside had. He wore no coat, no clerical collar on his black shirt, and had not shaved yet that day.

  “Yes, what is it?” he asked. He tilted his head slightly. “Who’s that?” Then his eyes widened slightly. “Joseph?”

  “Hello, Father,” said Kiley He stood in front of the grossly untidy desk, hat in hand.

  “Joseph Patrick Kiley,” the old priest said. “My, my, my. Well, sit, sit—”

  “How are you, Father?” Kiley asked.

  “Not well, I’m afraid, Joseph, not well at all.” From a top desk drawer, Father Conley retrieved a tumbler of whiskey and put it back in the one bare spot amongst all the disorder. “I’ve a number of ailments that God has seen fit to plague me with after a lifetime of service to His name. I’ve lumbago, arthritis, sciatica, glaucoma, tinnitus—do you know what that is?”

  “Buzzing in the ears,” Kiley said. Father Conley raised his eyebrows in surprise.

  “You’re absolutely right. You’d be surprised how many people never heard of it, Joseph.” He frowned. “You don’t suffer from it, I hope.”

  “No, Father.”

  The priest took a sip of whiskey, then said, “I won’t offer you a drink, Joseph, because I don’t approve of drinking this early in the day. I only do it for medicinal purposes, to lessen my constant pain.” Sitting back, he laced his fingers over a protruding little belly that forced his belt down several inches. “Well, how long has it been, Joseph? Five years, about?”

  “About,” Kiley agreed. “I stopped around a few times,” he lied, “but I missed you—”

  “Did you, Joseph?” Father Conley nodded knowingly. “Well, it’s the thought that counts. Still a policeman, are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you a sergeant by now? A lieutenant maybe?”

  “No,” Kiley said. He knew the question was a dig; Father Conley had never predicted anything for him but failure. “What about you?” Kiley asked. “You a monsignor yet?”

  “Ah, you wouldn’t believe the problems I have down here, Joey,” the priest replied in a kindlier tone, ignoring the retort. “Membership in the parish is down by sixty percent—and those that are members contribute such a trifling amount to our support that it’s all but impossible to maintain even a modicum of church activities. We don’t have a car anymore to visit the sick and bereaved; there’s no money for equipment to sponsor a youth athletics program; why, we don’t even have Bingo anymore, Joseph, because most of the parishioners can’t understand the letters and numbers in English! Can you imagine St. Susan’s without Bingo?”

  “Everything’s changed, Father,” Kiley said. “Nothing’s the way it used to be.”

  “We’re reduced here to nothing except masses, baptisms, and the cathecism lessons. Not even weddings any longer; people get married over at St. Hortense of the Angels because it has a gazebo out back with a bubbling fountain where they can take pictures after. Ah, I’ll tell you, Joe—” His words dropped off, slowly and sadly, like dying leaves in the fall.

  “Could you use a thousand dollars, Father?” Kiley asked.

  “A thousand dol—?” The old priest was flabbergasted “We haven’t had a donation that large in years—not even from our business supporters.” His eyes flashed suspicion. “It’s not dirty money, is it?”

  “No. It’s my own, money I’ve saved.”

  “This is amazing,” the old priest said, barely louder than a whisper. “You, of all people—”

  Kiley took out a checkbook and ballpoint. “I’ll make this out to ‘cash’ so you can use it however you see fit—”

  “Yes, that’ll be fine, Joseph—”

  Before he signed the check, Kiley said, “Father Conley, I wonder if you’d take a little ride with me? There’s someone I need to convince of something, and I think you could help me do it. I’ll be glad to wait while you shave and put your collar on. Better gargle, too—”

  An hour later, Kiley and a very proper-looking Father Conley stood on the porch of Bernard Oznina’s neat little house and rang the bell. Oznina, in his undershirt, a newspaper in his hand, opened the door.

  “Hello, Mr. Oznina,” said Kiley. “I’m the policeman who stopped by your job the other night about the purse snatching problem. You remember me?”

  “Yeah, sure—”

  “This is Father Andrew O’Brien, the Catholic chaplain for the Chicago Police Department. Can we come in and talk to you for a few minutes?”

  “Yeah, come in—” Oznina, confused, held the door open, then led them into a modest, somewhat untidy living room. “Excuse the mess; I live alone—”

  “Think nothing of it,” said Father Conley. They sat down. “Mr. Oznina, I’ve come along on this visit because the police department has looked into your background, and knows that you’re a good Catholic; we know you faithfully attend mass over at St. Melvin’s, and that you had a good Catholic marriage and raised three fine children in the church. You’re a credit to our religion, and because of that we believe we can come to you in confidence and ask your help.”

  “Well, thank you, Father O’Brien,” a bewildered Bernard Oznina said. “I’ve always tried to be a good Catholic—”

  “Mr. Oznina,” Kiley cut in, “we want to be completely honest with you, so I’m going to tell you that my name is not Detective Ed Monroe, of the Robbery Detail, as I said it was the other night. I am actually Sergeant Dick Mason of Homicide; I lied to you the other night because the department wasn’t sure then that it could count on you.”

  “We didn’t know then what a good Catholic you are,” the priest interjected.

  “What we’re actually doing, Mr. Oznina—”

  “May we call you ‘Bernie’?” Father Conley asked.

  “Sure, Father. And I’ll do whatever I can to help you, whatever this is about.”

  Kiley and Father Conley exchanged solemn looks. “He’s our man, all right,” Father Conley said, reaching over to pat Bernard Oznina on the knee.

  “What we’re actually doing, Bernie,” said Kiley, “is investigating the brutal murder of a police officer—”

  “A Catholic officer, sad to say,” Father Conley added.

  “You may have seen it on the news, Bernie: a detective found shot to death in an alley-—”

  “Yeah, I think I did—”

  “Well, Bernie, we have reason to believe that the officer was killed by a resident of your building.”

  Bernie’s eyebrows went up. “My building? Why, I can’t believe it—”

  “Do you know the tenant in apartment 2201. Anthony Touhy?”

  Bernie’s eyebrows came back down. “Oh, yeah,” he replied in sudden recognition, “him. There’s been some rumors about him being a mobster, but nobody knew if they was true. The building management don’t like us gossiping about the tenants—but there’s been some talk.”

  “The man is a criminal,” Kiley said, “part of the city’s organized crime that’s controlled by his older brother, Phil Touhy. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?”

  “Oh, sure. The one they call the Irish Al Capone.”

  “That’s him. Bernie, these people are involved in drugs, illegal gambling, prostitution, child pornography—”

  “My God, child pornography?” Bernard Oznina, a grandfather of young children, was shocked.

  Kiley nodded. “One of the biggest producers and distributors of the stuff in the whole country. They call it ‘kiddie porn.’ Bernie, have you ever noticed those pictures of missing children on grocery bags and milk cartons?”

  “Sure—”

  “Well, a lot of those kids—little boys as well as little girls—end up in ki
ddie porn movies made by your tenant in apartment 2201.”

  “The dirty son of a bitch,” Bernard Oznina said softly. “Pardon my language, Father.”

  “Don’t apologize, my son,” said Father Conley. “The man is that and more.”

  “We’ve never been able to get enough evidence on him for pornography or drugs or any of that,” said Kiley. “The guy is very good at covering his tracks and staying in the clear. But now, Bernie—now he’s killed a cop, and we want very badly to get him for that. If we can get him for a cop killing, we may be able to put a stop to all the rest: the drugs, the kiddie porn—”

  “And that,” Father Conley intoned, “would be a gift from on high.”

  “What can I do to help?” Oznina asked.

  “I want to get into his apartment, Bernie.” Blunt and to the point. “I want to search it.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ—excuse me, Father—are you serious?”

  “Very serious.”

  “I couldn’t do nothing like that,” the doorman protested. “I thought you just wanted me, like, to keep an eye on him or something. I let you into his apartment, I’ll lose my job. I’d like to help, but—”

  “No one will ever know,” Kiley said.

  “He would. He’d be able to tell soon’s he walked in; things messed up, things out of place—”

  “No, Bernie, he wouldn’t be able to tell,” Kiley explained. “I would go through the place myself—very slowly, very carefully. Everything would be left exactly as I found it. There will not be one trace that I was ever in there.”

  “But if you found something, some kind of evidence, and used it against him, then it could come out—”

  “Nothing I find can be used against him, Bernie. This is a search being done without a warrant. It falls within the illegal search and seizure statutes.”

  “I don’t get it,” Oznina said, puzzled. “What do you want to do it for then?”

  “To try and find something that would lead us to some evidence we could use. It’s been done before, Bernie. We get into somebody’s house or office, carefully go through everything, maybe we find a diary or a bar receipt or a coded mark on a calendar—and maybe from that we are directed to some other evidence outside the house or office, or even to a witness; it’s happened, Bernie. It could happen in this case.”

  “Oh, Jesus, I don’t know,” Bernie said, not bothering to apologize for his blasphemy this time. “What if he should walk in on you?”

  Kiley shook his head. “He’s in Ireland, Bernie. That’s been verified.”

  Bernie got up and paced nervously about the room. Father Conley rose also and stepped over to a gold-framed painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. “Lovely,” he said quietly, “lovely. Your late wife selected it, no doubt?”

  “Uh—yeah, Vera got that on a trip we took to California. It’s painted on real velvet.”

  “God rest her soul, she must have been a woman of rare taste.”

  “Look,” Bernie stopped and turned to Kiley, “exactly what would I have to do?”

  “It’s simple,” the detective said. “Give me a duplicate key to his apartment, and a duplicate key to some back door of the building that I can use to get in.”

  “You wouldn’t do it on my shift?” Bernie asked, almost in horror.

  “No, it’d be around three in the morning, when the place was the quietest. Is there a delivery door or something off the back alley?”

  “Yeah. By the service elevator. But you can’t use that elevator. After ten o’clock at night, it signals the doorman’s desk if anybody uses it.”

  “I won’t use it,” Kiley said. “I’ll walk up the fire stairs.”

  “Christ, that’s twenty-two floors—”

  “Don’t worry about it. Is it all right to use the fire stairs; they’re not monitored?”

  “No, they’re okay, if you want to use them—” Oznina was softening. “I really do want to help—I mean, that kiddie porn stuff makes me want to puke—”

  “We all feel the same way, my son,” said Father Conley.

  “None of us likes to break the rules,” Kiley added, “but sometimes it’s the only way to catch scum like this Tony Touhy.”

  “He’s an evil person,” the priest said for emphasis. “An agent of the devil hisself.” Going over to Bernie, he put a hand on the doorman’s shoulder. “Do this, Bernard, and it’ll be a service not only to Christ but to your fellow man, as well.”

  “And all those kids on the grocery bags and milk cartons,” Kiley reminded.

  Bernard Oznina stared for a moment across the room at the Sacred Heart of Jesus painted on real velvet, then nodded his head emphatically. “I’ll do it.”

  Immediate praise was heaped on him by both priest and policeman, there was a round of hearty handshakes, and then Kiley took the bank envelope from his pocket.

  “Bernie, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but a lot of the murdered officer’s fellow cops took up a collection to show their gratitude if you decided to help us. It’s their way of saying thanks for your part in possibly catching a cop killer. There’s a thousand dollars in this envelope; it’s yours.”

  “A thousand dollars—?”

  “Don’t even try to refuse it,” Kiley said. “It’s from the Chicago police department to you, as a good citizen.”

  “Well, I—” Bernie took the envelope.

  “If you’d care to donate some of that to the church—” Father Conley began a pitch.

  “—you can do it in your own parish,” Kiley finished it for him. He took the priest by the arm and guided him to the door. “Get the keys tonight if you can, Bernie,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ll call you in the morning.” To Father Conley, he whispered, “Bless the house—”

  “Of course. God bless this house and all in it,” the priest said, making the sign of the cross.

  Bernard Oznina followed them onto the porch and waved good-bye with the envelope of money as they got in Kiley’s car and drove away.

  “I didn’t know you were going to give him money,” Father Conley said, on the way back to his own parish.

  “Insurance,” Kiley explained. “Makes it almost impossible for him to reconsider and back out of the deal.”

  “Well, I’m not altogether sure,” the priest groused, “that he should have received the same amount of money that I did. Or rather, my parish did.”

  “Why not?” Kiley said. “He’s risking his job; you’re not. Anyway, he has to take chances getting the duplicate keys; all you had to do was lie.” He glanced over and saw that the priest was pouting. “If it’ll make you feel any better, I’ll send you a case of Scotch.”

  “What kind?” Father Conley asked with renewed affability.

  “You name it.”

  “Cutty.”

  “Cutty it is.”

  They rode in silence for several minutes, then the priest asked, “Are the Touhys really involved in child pornography?”

  “No,” Kiley said. “Or drugs either, far as I know. There are only a couple of kiddie porn creeps in Chicago, and they’re both just distributors. Most of the actual production of the stuff is done up in Minneapolis. The feds know all about it; they just haven’t been able to stop it. But the Touhys aren’t involved.”

  “Well, thank God for that,” Father Conley said. “It doesn’t bother me all that much any more when Irish Catholics run gambling houses, and deal in stolen televisions and the like; even prostitution, if it’s operated properly, isn’t all that harmful. But narcotics and child pornography—those things are truly evil, Joseph.”

  Kiley did not comment. It would do no good to try and explain to this old man of the cloth that prostitution frequently went hand-in-hand with narcotics, or that narcotics frequently was responsible for kids as young as twelve being involved in child pornography. Priests, ministers, pastors, rabbis didn’t understand the interlinks of crime any better than grocery clerks, housewives, business executives, or anyone else. Only a cop und
erstood. A street cop, at that. Even police officers who moved up in rank—lieutenants, captains, administrative commanders, chiefs—more often than not forgot the basic credo that they learned on the street; the credo that others in the criminal justice system—the judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers—never understood at all. And it was so simple.

  Crime bred crime.

  Crime was crime.

  To say that one form of it was all right but another wasn’t, was, to Joe Kiley, insanity. Crime happened, just like shit, and it multiplied, just like lice, like cockroaches, like mosquitoes. Allowing it to go unchecked, un-dealt with, in any form, served only to abet the vermin in becoming as strong as the exterminators. Anyone who didn’t believe that, was suffering from cranium analitis—their head was up their ass. All Kiley ever had to do to reinforce his total belief in that philosophy was to remember one very often forgotten and neglected category of society: the vies. Victims of crime. For every criminal, there was an average, directly or indirectly, of nineteen victims. The prison population in the United States, the last time Kiley had seen figures, was the largest in the world: more than nine hundred thousand. They were responsible for more than seventeen million victims. Staggering numbers. Frightening statistics. Increasing—all the time, every day, every hour.

  And Joe Kiley knew, without ever consciously admitting it, that he was, peculiarly—and especially in his present situation—part of both the solution and the problem.

  And apparently Father Conley was aware of that fact also, because when Kiley parked at the rectory of St. Susan’s, the old priest quietly said, “Well, Joseph, now that we’ve done this thing, where is it likely to take you? I ask because I must share in the responsibility for what you do from this point on.”

  “I can’t answer that right now, Father,” said Kiley. “A lot will depend on what, if anything, I find in Tony Touhy’s apartment.”

  “If I understood correctly what you told Bernie, no evidence you find can be used against him in court, right?”

  “In court, right.”

  “But you could find some evidence that would then lead to other evidence which could be used against him?”