City Blood

by Clark Howard

  “Unless she had been restrained in some way,” Kiley said grimly. His expression was like it was set in stone: gray, immutable, foreboding. Rising, he extended his hand across the desk, and the deputy coroner stood to take it.

  “Thanks, Doc,” Kiley said as they shook hands. “Thanks very much.”

  “Nothing to thank me for, Joe. I haven’t said anything.”

  Kiley went home and started changing into the casual clothes he wore to the Bel-Ked to drink with his old buddy, Hal. While doing so, he called Aldena.

  “Anything new on the Liar of the Year?” he asked.

  “Could be I got a link for you,” the secretary said. “Transit Authority fired an employee named Codman in August 1982—but it wasn’t Harold Paul, it was his birth father, Aaron Codman. Reason for the termination was for political soliciting among city co-workers, which is prohibited by the city charter.” Aldena paused just enough to tease. “I’ll bet you’re going to want to know what kind of political soliciting, aren’t you?”

  “Come on, Aldena, play nice—”

  “En-vi-ron-men-tal, that’s what kind,” she emphasized each vowel. “Man was circulating a petition to try and make the Transit Authority convert the engines of their buses to use cleaner fuel so they wouldn’t mess up the air with all those nasty exhaust fumes—”

  I’ll be goddamned, Kiley thought. So the hint Winston had dropped—“What about pollution?”—hadn’t been bullshit, after all. Kiley had been wrong in his analysis of Winston again. The little bastard was smart, give him that. More than smart: he was clever, cunning, crafty. He was fucking shrewd.

  “Did you get his city college records?” Kiley asked Aldena.

  “Oh, yeah. You want me to tell you what he studied, or you want to tell me, Detective?”

  “Chemistry,” Kiley ventured.

  “You got it, baby.”

  “Okay,” Kiley said, relieved. Very relieved. “Okay, I think I can nail him now. Aldena, when I make this guy, I want your name on the report. You’ve got major credit coming here.”

  “We’ll see,” Aldena hedged. “Sometimes in civil service, Joe, too much credit can hurt instead of help. You been around long enough to know that. Let’s talk about it first.”

  “Got you. The report aside, though, I owe you—big time.”

  “I’ll remember that next time I want a new car. I got work to do now ’Bye.”

  She hung up.

  Kiley finished changing, then left for the Bel-Ked Tavern and what he hoped would be his last buddy session with Harold Paul Winston.

  Nineteen

  Kiley was alone in the back booth, drinking beer, when Winston came over carrying his own glass.

  “Hello there, Joe.” He slid in across from Kiley. “What’s the matter? You look terrible.”

  “I feel terrible, Hal,” said Kiley. “My whole fucking life is coming apart at the seams.”

  “I’m sorry, Joe. Is it the job thing still?”

  Kiley looked across at Winston with a drawn, almost ill expression. “You remember I told you about a police officer who might be in some trouble because of helping my late partner and me on a case? Well, she’s dead. She killed herself Friday night.”

  “Jesus, Joe, I am sorry,” said Winston, surprised. “I remember you mentioning that officer, but I don’t think you said it was a woman—” “Yeah. Her name was Gloria. Good cop. Left a sixteen-year-old daughter—”

  “Christ.” Winston shook his head sadly. “Suicide is such a terrible solution to a person’s problems. Was her situation that serious?”

  Joe shrugged. “Depends on your point of view, I guess. I didn’t think her problem was all that bad—but then maybe she didn’t think my problems were bad either.” Kiley drank a long swallow of beer. “I’m not so sure she made a bad choice, Hal. One thing about it: she doesn’t have to worry anymore.”

  “Look, Joe,” said Winston, “I don’t like to hear you talk like that—”

  “It’s how I feel—”

  “I know, I know. I just hope you’re not thinking along those lines yourself.” Winston paused, staring, waiting, but got no response. “Are you?” he finally asked.

  “I don’t know, Hal,” replied Kiley, shaking his head slowly. “I don’t know what I’m thinking anymore.” He smiled wryly. “One thing I do know: I may not have to make up my mind about resigning from the department. I think the brass is getting ready to bring me up on charges.”

  “Bring you up on charges? What does that mean?” Winston was frowning deeply.

  “Fire me,” Joe explained. “See, if you’re civil service, your boss can’t just fire you outright. He has to file charges against you with the civil service commission, saying that you’re not performing the duties of your job, or you’ve been insubordinate, or you’re misusing your position in some way for personal gain, whatever—there are a lot of standard reasons. Then you get to file an answer to those charges. Both of you then appear before a civil service review board and they decide who’s right. Needless to say, most of the time the employee loses.”

  “Of course,” Winston agreed at once. “The little guy always loses. The big shots, the bosses, the ‘brass,’ as you call them, they all stick together. God forbid they let some common person like you or me come out ahead on anything.” Winston held his glass up for the bartender to bring another round. “But, listen, Joe, I don’t understand how they can do that in your case. I mean, what the hell could they have on you?”

  “Well,” Kiley seemed to reluctantly admit, “I haven’t exactly been a model cop since my partner was killed, Hal. I’ve done a lot of bitching about not being assigned to my partner’s homicide case; I’ve said some pretty strong things to a few captains about how the investigation was being handled; and since I was moved over to the Bomb Squad, I haven’t been productive at all—which, frankly, may be what they had in mind. I mean, I don’t know anything about bombs or arson, shit like that; maybe they just set me up to fail. Tell the truth, Hal, I really don’t care; I’m almost ready to turn in my badge anyway—you know that. I just hate it being done their way.”

  Fresh glasses of beer came and Winston let Joe pay for it. Winston, who had begun taking his lead from Joe in such matters, waited until the bartender left before resuming the conversation. “What will you do if they bring you up on charges?” he finally asked.

  “Give them what they want, I guess,” Kiley shrugged. “Resign.” He made a fist and seemed to restrain himself from pounding it on the table. “I just wish I could do it my way, you know. Go out on my own terms so I could get a job with the county or the state. I hate for my record to have a civil service termination hearing on it.”

  “What would it take,” Winston asked with forced casualness, “for you to go out on your own terms? I mean, what would you have to do?”

  “Get something significant on my record, then resign voluntarily.”

  “Give me an example of something significant.”

  Again Kiley shrugged. “Make a major bust of some kind, or perform an act of valor, or come up with some important evidence in a big case the department’s not getting anywhere with—”

  “Like the bus bombings?”

  “Well—yeah, I guess so.” Kiley now frowned, then smiled. “Hey, Hal, you’re not going to tell me it’s you, after all, are you?”

  “No, of course not—”

  “Well, I hope to hell not. I mean, I closed your file, Hal. Talk about me looking bad.”

  “No, no, Joe. But suppose I could help you come up with some kind of evidence that wouldn’t necessarily result in you catching the bomber—but would make you look good.”

  “What kind of evidence are you talking about?” Kiley tried to look interested but puzzled at the same time.

  “Hell, Joe, I don’t know. Let me think about it for a minute—” There was a slight edge of irritation in Winston’s voice, as if he had suddenly become aware that he wasn’t quite sure where all this was leading him. But he forg
ed ahead somewhat rashly nevertheless. “Suppose,” he said, “someone leaked to one of the news stations that these bus bombings had been occurring, and the police department and transit authority had to admit that they’d concealed them from the public. Then suppose you were to find one of the bombs in a bus before it went off—not a parked bus but one still on a route: with passengers aboard. Wouldn’t that make you kind of a hero, Joe?”

  “Well, sure it would, Hal,” replied Kiley, impatience seeming to grow. “But how the hell could that ever happen? Ever since the second blast, transit authority people have been searching every single bus after its last run of the day, and twice they’ve missed finding the bomb. How could I search a bus full of passengers, Hal? And how the hell would I know which bus to search?”

  “I’d tell you which bus to search, Joe,” the little man said evenly. “You’d search the one I put the explosive in.”

  “You put the—?” Kiley kept a steeled grip on himself to look perplexed. “Hal you’re not telling me that you are—?”

  “No, of course I’m not,” Winston maintained. “What I’m saying is that I could prepare an explosive similar to the one being used by the bus bomber, put it on a particular bus myself, and let you find it.”

  Kiley shook his head. “I don’t understand, Hal. How could you make a bomb?”

  “Joe, anybody can make a bomb,” Winston said easily. He leaned closer, forearms on the table, and spoke in an almost tutorial tone. “All it takes is a knowledge of basic chemistry and the ability to obtain and put together certain elements, certain materials. Fertilizer, for instance. Buy it at any plant nursery. If it contains fifty percent or more nitrogen, it has explosive properties. But it needs to be combined with something: kerosene, for instance. Most gift shops sell little bottles of it now, to fill those silly little fragrance lamps that weirdos use instead of incense. And you can get mercury from those large outdoor thermometers that people buy to hang on their patios and porches; just saw off the top of the glass tube with a Ginsu knife and pour the mercury out. Dissolve it in ordinary denatured alcohol that drugstores sell. Drain the mixture through one of those Mr. Coffee filters. The residue that you get is fulminate of mercury. You use that for a primer, see. Then you go to a gun shop and buy a pound of shotgun powder—”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Kiley said, raising a hand and shaking his head. “You’ve lost me, Hal. I told you, I don’t know anything about this kind of shit—” He pulled a white paper napkin from a dispenser on the table and unfolded it between them. Then he handed Winston his ballpoint pen. “Here. Now show me, step by step. And go slow, Hal, so I can keep up. Where’d you learn all this shit anyway?” he asked, as if astonished.

  “I’ve got a little college,” Winston shrugged humbly. “I went to Northwestern, the School of Science. But like I said, this is real basic stuff, Joe. High school chemistry students can figure this out if they’re sharp enough. Look, I’ll start all over,” he drew the unfolded napkin closer. “First, ingredients,” he began to print neatly on the napkin. “Two pounds of fertilizer with at least fifty percent nitrogen content. Large bottle of fragrance kerosene. Pound of shotgun powder. Small cheap alarm clock. Patio thermometer. Bottle of rubbing alcohol. Mr. Coffee filters. Ballpoint pen refill—”

  “What the hell’s that for?”

  “Something to put the primer in. You wash the ink out with hot water, let the refill dry, and you’ve got a perfect little tube for the residue you get out of the Mr. Coffee filter—”

  Slowly, quietly, almost proudly, Harold Paul Winston went step-by-step through the procedure for making a small explosive device: how to mix half a cup of hydrogen-content fertilizer with half a cup of shotgun powder; how to soak the mixture thoroughly in kerosene; how to dissolve the mercury in the rubbing alcohol; how to filter the mercury-alcohol mixture to produce a pulpy residue; how to press the residue into a clean ballpoint pen refill tube; how to run one end of a short piece of crimped alternating-current electrical wiring into the refill, attach the other end with the AC wires separated to the hour hand of a cheap clock and, with electrical tape, to the face of the clock at a particular hour; how to pack the now pulpous fertilizer-shotgun powder-kerosene mixture around the shell of the clock, stick the ballpoint refill into it, slip it into a plastic sandwich bag, and zip-lock it closed.

  Voila, a bomb.

  “All you need then,” Winston said, “is a couple of strips of filament tape to attach it to the bottom of a bus seat. You do that from the seat behind where you’re putting it, so anyone searching from the front of the seats won’t find it—”

  “Jesus Christ,” Kiley whispered, as much to himself as to Winston. He turned the napkin around and perused, in genuine amazement now, what this little man had done. It was a draftsman-like diagram with neat little arrows running here, there, everywhere, connecting the neatly printed ingredients with each other to form new compounds which were then taken by other little arrows to various places around a precisely drawn clock face. Kiley shook his head in wonder. “This is incredible, Hal—”

  Winston sat back, pleased with himself, pleased with the fact that he knew he had impressed Joe, pleased by what he thought was admiration in the detective’s voice. “It’s nothing, Joe, really—”

  “You’re wrong, Hal,” said Joe. “It’s something. It’s definitely something—” Kiley folded the napkin back to its original size, then in half again, and leaned sideways in the booth to carefully put it into his pocket. “It’s evidence, Hal.”

  “Don’t be funny, Joe, give it here,” Winston said, pleased expression vanishing. Reaching across the booth, he tried to stop Kiley’s right hand. As he did so, Kiley’s left hand came up, from reaching to his back pocket, and in a quick, smooth motion, he closed, with a muted clicking, one bracelet of a pair of handcuffs around Harold Paul Winston’s right wrist.

  “No, Joe—!” Winston yelled.

  “Yes, Hal!” Kiley replied. He slid out of his side of the booth, pulled Winston out by the other bracelet, and spun him around to twist his arm up behind him, bending Winston over at the waist. A bartender and several patrons came hurrying over, and Kiley quickly shouted, “Police business! I’m a cop!” To the bartender, “You, call nine-one-one, give the operator this address, and say that a police officer needs help. Go on, move! The rest of you people just back off—”

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” the bent-over handcuffed man looked almost pleadingly up over his shoulder.

  “Believe it, Winston,” Joe Kiley said flatly.

  There was hurt in Winston’s expression when he realized that Joe wasn’t calling him “Hal” anymore.

  Twenty

  When Kiley entered the front door of Sacred Holy Cross church for the funeral of Gloria Mendez, he was surprised at how few people there were in attendance. Walking down the aisle, he saw that only about a dozen pews were occupied—unlike Nick Bianco’s funeral, at which there had been standing room only. Genuflecting, Kiley made the sign of the cross and turned to kneel in the first unoccupied pew. As he did so, he saw, off to the side near the confessionals, the IA captain, Allan Vander, with another man who was probably a member of his squad. Kiley looked across to the other side of the church and saw, as he expected, Vander’s deputy commander, Bill Somers, with another detective. Sometimes a lead could be found among those in attendance at the funeral. Like Joe Kiley.

  Ignoring the IA surveillance, Kiley pondered the scarcity of mourners. He knew, as most cops do, that friendship in one’s own neighborhood, with one’s close neighbors, is often, if not strained, then certainly forced, cordial but distant. There are always a few who will, usually for the benefit of others, go out of their way to give the impression of a real buddy-buddy rapport, but it was mostly show. Everyone else was congenial on the surface, guarded within. After all, a cop was a cop; they could, probably would, arrest anyone, for any violation—even something petty, like garbage overflowing in an outdoor can, an unleashed dog creating a nuis
ance, someone driving a little fast on the block.

  Gloria had been a Hispanic cop, still living in a Hispanic neighborhood that carried a high crime rate, considerable drug traffic, and inherent suspicion of the police. It could not have been easy for her living there among her own, yet, because of her badge, her gun, not being one of them. She had been trying to get out of the barrio, saving to move herself and Meralda out to the farthest reaches of the Northwest Side where they could make a better life for themselves. But until she had enough money to do that, she lived where a single Latina mother with a teenage daughter could live—in the Hispanic community. But, because of the social standards of that community, she lived with a stigma—even more so than white cops in white neighborhoods, or even black cops in black neighborhoods, for it was felt that white cops and black cops still retained their ethnic ties despite the badge; but Latinos were deemed to have abandoned their own when they put on the uniform. Thus, Gloria Mendez had only a scant portion of the neighborhood mourners she would otherwise have had.

  Some of the mourners, Kiley assumed, were cops who had known or worked with the dead woman, but none of them were in uniform. Word was probably out that IA had some interest in Gloria, which would have made gun-shy all but the most devoted. And there was no official contingent there from the department. Cops who committed suicide projected a bad image. The same as with Catholics. Until recently, Gloria could not even have been buried in the sacred ground of her own religion. Now the church, if not the department, embraced suicides.

  In the front pew Kiley could see Meralda in partial profile, her pretty face looking older under the black lace mantilla that covered her head. Next to her was her father, George Mendez, looking much neater, cleaner, today than he had in the funeral home. The rest of the pew was filled mostly with women, a couple of men, who were all around Gloria’s age, and whom Kiley presumed to be sisters possibly, brothers, cousins, whomever the family extended to. Nearby sat some younger mourners, kids around Meralda’s age, probably her friends from the neighborhood. A few of the young men wore Latin Princes colors.