by Clark Howard
“Joey,” the elder man greeted him with a show of warmth, “how’s my favorite cop doing?”
“Doing okay, Gino.” Joe shook hands with both of them as they offered. “How’s everything with you?”
“Ups and downs, Joe, ups and downs. You know how the car business is. But I don’t complain; life has been good to me. Listen, Joe, Frank and me would like to buy you a drink. We got something we want to talk to you about.”
“Can’t do it right now, Gino. I’m tired; just drove,” he exaggerated it a bit, “three hundred miles.”
“Hey, that’s a sharp sport coat,” Frank Bianco said, studying Joe. “Didn’t Nicky have one just like it?”
“We’re not here to talk wardrobe, Frank,” his father said, apparently not getting his son’s point. Then, to Kiley, “Joe, please, one drink. A nice little talk. Believe me, I’m trying to save everybody a lot of unnecessary trouble. And I’m including Stella in that.”
At the mention of Stella’s name, Kiley relented. “Place on the corner,” he bobbed his chin.
They walked half a block to the neighborhood bar where Kiley did most of his social drinking. It was fairly crowded with customers watching a Cubs game on a fifty-two-inch Sony wall-mounted above the far end of the bar. The bartender and half the customers they walked by greeted Joe by name.
“Okay to use Connie’s booth for a few minutes?” Kiley asked the bartender.
“Help yourself, Joe.”
Kiley led the way to a separate rear booth with stained glass partitions that was the private domain of Connie, the owner. She allowed it to be used by certain select individuals, Kiley among them, when she was not on the premises.
Sitting, Kiley and the Biancos ordered and casually watched the ball game, waiting for their drinks to be served before talking. Then, after a toast by Gino—“Good health to everyone we love”—the elder Bianco made his pitch.
“I’m gonna put all my cards on the table, Joe,” he said, “in the hope that with honesty and sincerity on both sides, we can all reach an agreement. My boy Frank here is interested in Nick’s widow, Stella. When I say interested, I mean in a proper, respectful way. He wants to wait until an appropriate period of mourning has passed, then have an appropriate period of courtship, an engagement, have the banns of marriage announced, and have a formal wedding in the church. At a later time, perhaps, with Stella’s consent, a legal adoption of the girls can be considered.” Gino patted his son’s arm. “Everyone in our family thinks this is a good match, Joe. Frank and his cousin Nick were pretty close; they thought a lot of each other—”
“Bullshit,” Kiley cut in bluntly. “Nick thought Frank was an asshole. He told me so a dozen times.”
“Why, you fucking mick bastard—” Frank, face turning an angry red, started to rise.
“You come at me, you guinea prick,” Joe warned coldly, “and I’ll take your fucking face off.”
“Frank, you calm down!” his father ordered, the hand on his arm becoming a grip. To Kiley he said, “There’s no need for name-calling here. Can’t we be civil, Joe?”
“Maybe we can, maybe we can’t,” Kiley clipped his words out. “You said you were putting all your cards on the table; then you try to handle me with some cheap shit about Nick and Frank being buddies. I was Nick’s partner, remember? He and I were as tight as two guys can get. I know how he felt about everybody—even you, Gino.”
“Okay, okay,” Gino concluded, “so you’re an expert on my dead nephew’s personal opinions.” His voice now took on the hint of an edge. “We’re not here to talk about Nick. This is about Stella. Frank wants to marry her. And there are many reasons why such a match would be a good idea—”
“Is that so?” Joe cut in again. “What reasons, Gino? A nice house in the suburbs, maybe—that’s now paid off by the mortgage insurance? The life-time widow’s pension that Stella gets? The lump-sum insurance settlement?” Kiley pulled a cold smile. “Those are nice incentives for a used-car salesman who probably doesn’t even have a checking account—”
“Go fuck yourself, you shanty mick bastard!” Frank snarled.
“I’d rather fuck you, Frank. Everybody says you take it in the ass—”
“Enough!” Gino snapped. He leaned forward a little, eyes hardening. “Those are also nice incentives for a city cop who ain’t got much either. What, are you that much better than my Frank?”
“I’m a lot better than your Frank,” Joe replied flatly. He pointed a finger at Gino. “You haven’t once said that he loves Stella.”
“Love is something that grows—”
“So does a pile of shit if you keep adding to it, and that’s all you’re doing. Give me one good reason why Frank should marry Stella that doesn’t have a dollar sign attached to it.”
“All right, I will.” Now the edge disappeared from Gino Bianco’s voice and its tone reverted to reasonableness. “Stella is Italian. Her kids are Italian. A minute ago you called Frank a guinea. Is that what you think of Italians, Joe? You call us guineas? Maybe dagos too, huh?”
“One of your problems, Gino, is that you only hear what you want to hear,” Kiley said. “I called Frank a guinea prick just like he called me a mick bastard. But to answer your question honestly, since we’re putting all our cards on the table, I only call some Italians guineas and dagos.” He looked squarely at Frank. “The ones who are guineas and dagos.”
“You motherfucker,” Frank growled, almost gutturally.
“My mother is dead, Frank, I can’t fuck her,” Kiley replied easily. “But I understand yours is still alive. Maybe I can fuck her instead.”
Frank looked pleadingly at his father, who still had a grip on his arm—and now, for the first time, Gino Bianco’s own face darkened with anger. His eyes, on Kiley, looked like bullet holes. “You’re talking about my wife,” he said coldly.
“Your son brought the subject up, not me. If you don’t want his mother talked about, tell him to watch his fucking mouth.”
“It don’t seem to me,” Gino said, same frozen tone, “that you want to be reasonable here, Kiley. It don’t seem to me that you care much about the welfare of your dead partner’s widow and kids, because you refuse to cooperate in what her family thinks is best—”
“My not ‘cooperating’ with you, as you call it,” Kiley said, “doesn’t have a goddamned thing to do with how I feel about Stella and the girls.”
“We think it does.”
“Then ‘we’ is wrong.” Kiley drummed his fingers on the table. “This discussion is starting to bore me, Bianco. If you’ve got a line to draw, do it.”
“Fine,” Gino nodded curtly. “The Bianco family wants you to stay away from Stella. Completely.”
Kiley shook his head emphatically. “Not unless Stella tells me to.”
“If she remarries, it should be to an Italian.”
“If she remarries, it should be to whoever she wants it to be.”
Gino’s bullet-hole eyes were locked onto Kiley’s own. “We don’t want to have to get nasty about this matter, Kiley.”
“Oh, shit,” Kiley said, half in amusement, half in disgust. Rising, he stood looking down at the father and son. “You’ve been reading too much Mario Puzo, Gino. I’ll go on seeing Stella Bianco as long as she’ll let me. And I’ll tell you something else—something I haven’t even told her: I’ll marry her in a minute if she’ll have me. Now take a little sincere advice: Stay the fuck out of my personal life. And,” he pointed a threatening finger at Frank, “keep Sonny Corleone here away from me or I’ll pull his pants down in public and kick his ass all over the street. Capice?”
Turning, Joe walked out.
When he got into his apartment, Kiley found that his hands were trembling. Not from any nervousness or fear of the two Biancos; Kiley had learned long ago, even before becoming a cop, that Italian hoods were mostly talk and threat, very little action. They beat up their wives and girlfriends, intimidated their underlings, occasionally killed one of their own t
o purge the Italian mob bowel, but they seldom pressed a matter with an outsider beyond what they perceived to be the menacing stage. There were few things, they felt, worth endangering themselves for.
Kiley’s hands were trembling because of the obvious belief on the part of Gino Bianco that Kiley was serious competition for his son Frank in the matter of Stella Bianco’s future. To Kiley, that could mean only one thing: Stella must have said something, to someone, that led them to believe that she thought of Joe as more than just a friend. And now Joe Kiley trembled at the thought—incredible as it seemed to him—that he might, in spite of everything, have a viable chance to win Stella’s affection. He had never imagined that it could really happen—
Neatly hanging his clothes away, putting his old robe on over his underwear, Kiley went into the bathroom and washed up. It was still daylight but he was tired from the drive, still tense from the Bianco confrontation, so decided to stay in. There were frozen dinners in the freezer, gin in the cabinet, and he had plenty to do in the way of planning for tomorrow—when he would put Nick’s badge on Chief Cassidy’s desk and tell him the whole story, from beginning to end. In a little while, he thought—because he could not get her out of his mind now—he might call Stella just to talk.
Pouring himself a couple ounces of gin, Kiley sat on the couch, put his feet up on an ottoman, and used the remote control to turn on the television. As he took his first sip of gin, the local news came on, muted. His mind still dwelling on Stella, he did not immediately deactivate the mute signal. It was not until he saw a familiar face on the television screen that surprise registered in his mind and a finger automatically pressed the correct button on the control. The newscaster’s words came crisply across the room.
“… apparently committed suicide around ten o’clock Friday night. The cause of death, according to the Cook County coroner’s office, was an overdose of sleeping pills combined with an undetermined quantity of alcohol. The deceased had been a Chicago police officer for twelve years, and a sergeant for four …”
On the screen was a police identification photograph of Gloria Mendez.
Eighteen
Kiley was sitting at Aldena’s desk, a file in one hand, when she got to work the next morning, a few minutes before the day watch began.
“I don’t need nobody to warm my chair for me, Detective,” she said when she found him there. Then she took a closer look at him. “You better take a sick day, Kiley. You look like hell.”
Joe did. There were dark circles under his eyes and his usually ruddy complexion was much lighter, as if he had paled from some illness. His expression, normally implacable, was slack: the look of a loser, someone who had given up. Only his light blue eyes showed that there was any mettle left in him.
“I need a big favor, Aldena,” he said, rising to vacate her chair. “I’ve got some deep background digging to do on a suspect named Winston—” “That bus bomber man? The one we got replies back from Dayton and Detroit with no record?”
“That’s him. I think he may have been lying about living there—”
“A suspect lying? Mercy me!” She dropped her big purse, a pink one this time, onto the desk with a thud. It sounded to Kiley as if she might have a gun in it. A large gun.
“I have a suspicion I might have been thrown off his real background trail—which is here in Chicago,” Kiley admitted. “So I need some digging done in all vital stat areas. I promised the captain I’d have this guy made before Thursday—”
“Better work fast, Detective.” She began unlocking her desk.
“Aldena, I’ve got to go out to a mortuary this morning to see a dead policewoman’s daughter. It’s very important that I talk to her.”
Aldena stopped and looked at him. “You mean Mendez? The suicide? You know her?”
“I knew her, yeah.”
“The word’s coming down that she was a righteous cop. Why’d she OD like that?”
“I don’t know, Aldena. She had problems, but I thought she could handle them—”
The feisty secretary studied Kiley for a moment as he let his words hang. “What I been hearing, you got some problems of your own. I hope you not planning to OD.”
“I’m not.”
“Good, ’cause it just make extra paperwork for me. ’Sides, you the only one around here dumb enough to believe I only got one eye.”
“I don’t think I really believed that.” Kiley smiled wanly.
“You don’t think,” she scoffed—but gently. She snatched the file from his hand. “This everything you got on your suspect?”
“Yeah.”
“All right, get on out of here before anybody else sees you looking so sorry. Call me this afternoon.”
“Thanks, Aldena.”
“Don’t forget to sign out.”
Fuentes Mortuary was only a block down from Chavez Neighborhood Clinic, where Kiley had last met with Gloria. As he drove past the clinic, he felt a heaviness in his chest that caused him to suck in two deep breaths. Gloria, Gloria, Gloria, his mind recited her name. Why? Jesus Christ, why? It wasn’t the end of the world. Even if Chief Cassidy had refused to side with them, even if OCB had pushed its charge all the way, even if IA went to the wall with it, and it meant the end of the department, her career, her pension, it still wasn’t the end of the goddamned world. Especially since she still had Meralda to look after for a couple of years—
Kiley admitted to himself that Gloria had seemed—if not despondent, certainly depressed—at their last meeting. They both knew that the audit of her master terminal would turn up seven additional unauthorized accesses besides the one for Tony Touhy—and that would then mean official charges against her; but she also knew that Kiley had planned to go to the chief today, give him Nick’s badge, try to gain Cassidy’s support. Gloria knew there was hope.
Why in hell, Kiley castigated himself, hadn’t he kept her out of it? Why in hell, if he had to go after Tony Touhy so badly, hadn’t he done it on his own, without dragging her into it more deeply than the superficial, and explainable, involvement initiated by Nick? Christ, he silently bemoaned, she was such a good cop, a good woman, so straight, upright, so solid—
Then he had to come back to her, waving those goddamned license plate numbers in her face like a red flag; reminding her that Nick had bought it in a dark alley, and that whoever did it was still walking around; playing her, using her—
Just like he used everybody, he admitted to himself. Gloria, Alma, Father Conley, the doorman Oznina—
He didn’t really care who got walked on along the way—as long as he got whoever killed Nick.
And bodies by the wayside didn’t matter to him—
Like hell.
Gloria Mendez mattered. She mattered a lot.
Kiley pulled in next to the mortuary and parked. Even though it was still early, there were several cars already there. When Kiley walked in the front door, he saw a black felt announcement board with removable white letters that read:
GLORIA ARENAS MENDEZ
Slumber Room Three
Going back there, Kiley stood in the doorway of the small viewing room and looked past the half dozen people already there, to the casket on its bier, and the still, embalmed body of Gloria Mendez, not in uniform but in a silky white dress, hands together at the waist, fingernails nicely buffed as usual without polish.
A Hispanic woman came over to Kiley. “Are you here for Gloria?”
“Yes.” Dryly, his throat constricting slightly.
“Would you sign the visitor book, please—”
“Sure—”
Kiley wrote his name under about a dozen others on the first page. Then the woman gestured for him to approach the casket. Kiley saw that Meralda was sitting with several other people on folding chairs just off from the bier. She stared at him as he stepped up to the casket.
The first thing Kiley thought in looking at the body was that Gloria Mendez was actually a very beautiful woman. He had never seen her dressed in
anything but her police uniform, down at the Shop, and the jeans and sweatshirt she had worn at home. Here, upper body cloaked in silky white, a single strand of pearls around her neck, small pearl earrings on those flawless ears, she looked as elegant, as lovely, as exquisite as any woman Kiley had ever seen on the television screen, or in a magazine, or anywhere. Looking at her, he began to again feel as devastated by her death as he had when he first heard about it on the news. Turning away from the casket, he felt his eyes fill with tears, which he blinked to hold back.
“Crying, Detective?”
It was Meralda, standing now, very close to him. Her face was a mask of hurt and hostility.
“Crying, MeMe,” Kiley confirmed.
“Don’t call me that,” she said. “Only my mother called me that.”
“I’m sorry.”
Now she stepped very close to him, so near that he could see tiny white flecks in her dark green eyes. Dark green angry eyes.
“My mother did not commit suicide,” she said in a clear, firm voice. “You police are lying.”
“It isn’t the police who determine that,” Kiley self-consciously tried to explain. “It’s the medical examiner, the coroner—”
“It is a lie,” the girl said. “Whoever told it, it is a lie.”
A tiny spark of something ignited deep in Kiley’s mind, something minuscule, not yet demanding, just there; a barely discernible warning light. “What makes you so certain, Meralda?”
“Because she had the Scrabble board set up.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We always stayed up very late on Friday nights and played Scrabble. It was the way we started our weekend. Mama always bought fancy pastry for us to eat, and we drank Cokes; it was our weekly party, ‘just the two of us girls,’ Mama used to say—”
“Excuse me, but who are you?” A Hispanic man, ill-fitting suit, necktie, smelling like a heavy smoker, had come up to them.