City Blood

by Clark Howard

  “Lenny—?”

  Kiley removed the muffler from around his neck, drew the Tutweilder .380 from his belt, and quickly wrapped the muffler around both his hand and the gun. Then he stepped over to the stairs and started walking up. “Lenny can’t help you right now,” he said to Fred Scarp.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Scarp asked. Kiley saw no fear in his face, detected none in the hoarse voice. Without answering, Kiley kept moving up the stairs. “Do you know who I am, you asshole?” Scarp asked.

  “Yeah, I know who you are,” Kiley replied.

  “Then you know what you’re doing isn’t very smart—”

  “Nothing I do anymore seems very smart,” Kiley said.

  Reaching the landing, Kiley raised his right hand and Scarp could see in the folds of the muffler a stainless steel pistol muzzle. The old man’s already pale face went even whiter, emphasizing half a dozen ugly liver spots that dotted it. “Who—who sent you—?” he managed to ask, then quickly held the breathing cup to his mouth and sucked in air.

  “The Touhy brothers,” Kiley told him. Let him die thinking his own had betrayed him.

  A wave of disbelief, followed at once by hurt, passed over Scarp’s eyes. Then his racketeer mentality kicked in. “How—much—they paying you?”

  Kiley shook his head. “I’m a volunteer.” He brought the gun all the way up, aiming it at the old man’s face.

  “You—bastard—” Scarp hissed. Dropping both the oxygen tank and the breathing cup, the old man began to flail out at Kiley. He stumbled forward, feeble fists hitting Kiley’s raised arm, his chest. Kiley brought the gun around to the side of Scarp’s head and was about to squeeze the trigger when suddenly Scarp drew in a loud, vibrating breath and immediately started choking on the air. His tongue folded out and he staggered backwards. One hand clutched at his chest and his eyes bulged grotesquely. A gasping, sucking sound came from deep in his lungs.

  Kiley watched in astonishment as Scarp lurched to the edge of the landing and went tumbling and bouncing down the half flight of stairs to the foyer.

  “I’ll be damned,” Kiley said softly to himself. He walked quickly down the stairs and knelt next to the twisted old body, putting his fingers on Scarp’s throat for a pulse. There was none. “I’ll be damned,” he said again, in a whisper.

  Rising, Kiley crossed the foyer to the front door, putting the muffler back around his neck, tucking the gun away. He had bought that gun possibly to kill Fraz Lamont with, but that had been avoided. Now he had been saved from using it on Fred Scarp.

  But gun or not, Kiley knew he had still murdered Scarp; he had no delusions about that. Maybe it was Scarp’s payback for all the crime he had been responsible for during all the years he had been the undisputed mob czar of Chicago and the rest of the state. But that, Kiley knew, was only superfluous to the real reason Scarp had died. He had been killed because he was essential to Kiley’s plan to avenge the killing of Nick.

  Not for a moment did Kiley consider Fred Scarp a criminal finally brought to a just end. He did not even consider him a victim. To Joe Kiley, the dead old mobster was merely a tool.

  Walking out of the house, Kiley picked up the empty Cherry 7-Up can, put it in his pocket, and started back toward his car.

  Twenty-Five

  Two mornings later, Kiley woke to loud, persistent pounding on his apartment door. Struggling to come out of the haze of a deep, drunken sleep, he became aware as soon as he moved of a brutal hangover headache that seemed to be oscillating inside his skull like it was machine driven. He wanted to ignore the heavy hammering on his door, but every pounding rap was an individual jolt to his senses that was too painful to disregard.

  “All right, all right, goddamn it!” he shouted. “I’m coming! Stop the goddamn pounding!” Somewhere in the pit of his agonized mind was the hope that his landlady, Mrs. Levine, had not heard him. He did not like for her to hear him use profanity.

  In his underwear, Kiley walked unevenly into the living room and looked through the peephole in the door. Recognizing the two faces in the hall, he said, “Shit,” under his breath, and opened the door. Dan Parmetter, his old General Assignments captain, and Leo Madzak, the B-and-A commander, came in and closed the door behind them.

  “Jesus Christ,” Madzak said, heading for a window to open, “it smells like a jig locker room in here.”

  “Nobody invited you,” Kiley said grumpily, slumping down on the couch so they wouldn’t see him reel as he stood.

  “You mind your lip, lad,” snapped Parmetter, pointing a warning finger at him. “Leo happens to be your captain at the moment, and you’ll show him the proper respect. You want him to think you never learned nothing under me?”

  “Where do you keep the coffee?” Madzak asked, as if he had not even heard Kiley’s remark.

  “Bottom shelf next to the stove,” Kiley said.

  Parmetter sat on the arm of the couch, facing Kiley. “How long have you been drunk?”

  “I don’t know,” Kiley leaned forward, forearms on knees. “Three days, I guess.”

  Actually it was less than two; some thirty or so hours. He had begun drinking as soon as he got home from killing Fred Scarp, as soon as the reality of the death he had caused settled in his conscience. He told Parmetter it was longer in case he needed an alibi. “Jesus,” he said, pressing each temple with his fingers, “this fucking headache is a killer—”

  “I don’t doubt that,” Dan Parmetter replied. “You look like shit.”

  The GA captain got up and walked through Kiley’s bedroom, grimacing and pausing to open a window in there also, then went into the bathroom and got four Excedrin tablets from a bottle in the medicine cabinet. Moving on to the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator, checked the date on a carton of milk, and poured a glassful. “He’s got an ulcer,” Parmetter said to Leo Madzak by way of explaining the milk.

  “Who hasn’t these days?” Madzak, who was making the coffee, asked rhetorically.

  Back in the living room, Parmetter said, “Here,” and handed Joe the headache tablets and milk.

  A few minutes later, as Kiley shakily took sips from a cup of hot, strong, black coffee, with the two police captains now sitting in front of him, Parmetter said to Madzak, “Think he can shave himself without bleeding to death?”

  “Maybe one of us ought to shave him,” Madzak suggested.

  “Shave me for what?” Kiley asked.

  “For court, Joe,” said Madzak. “Winston’s preliminary hearing on the bus bombings is this afternoon. I need you to testify.”

  Kiley grunted softly. “What do you want me to say when the defense lawyer asks what my current assignment is? Suspended and facing charges?”

  “We’ve got that covered, Joe,” said Parmetter. “Leo and I went to Allan Vander and cut a deal with him. He’ll drop the suspension if you’ll agree to be interviewed about Sergeant Mendez’s death. He thinks there might have been more to it than a suicide. He wants your cooperation, Joe, that’s all.” Parmetter drew a folded sheet of paper from his inside pocket. “This rescinds your suspension as of ten a.m. today. All you’ve got to do is cooperate.”

  “I need you at Winston’s prelim, Joe,” said Madzak. “Without you, he’ll walk. And if you testify as a cop suspended such a short time after you busted him, he’ll probably walk then too.”

  “Vander agreed to give me my badge back?” Kiley asked incredulously. “After I called him a cocksucker?”

  “Grow up, Joe,” said Parmetter. “He’s been called a lot worse than that.” The GA captain leaned forward a little. “Look, Leo and I don’t have a high opinion of Vander either, but we think he’s a straight cop, everything considered. It’s his job that’s so fucking despicable. But Leo told him what an A-one job you did on the bus bomber case, and I think Vander was impressed.”

  “That deputy of his, Bill Somers, he put in some good words for you too,” said Madzak.

  “Nobody wants to see you fuck up a fourteen-year career, Joe,�
�� said Dan Parmetter.

  “You’re a good cop,” Madzak emphasized. “You proved that by the way you handled Harold Winston. I’d like to talk to you about staying in B-and-A, maybe going to school, getting some formal bomb training. I think you’d be an asset to the squad.”

  Beginning to feel the first hint of relief from his titanic headache, Kiley steadied his hands enough to get a good swallow of coffee down. His expression was drawn, his mood extremely depressed. He knew that Dan Parmetter was a decent man and an irreproachable cop, as straight as an officer could be; he assumed that Leo Madzak was straight also, or Parmetter would not be partnering with him in this situation. And he knew that if the two captains were made aware of the murder he had committed—regardless of Kiley’s reason or who the victim was—they would turn their backs on him and have nothing further to do with him. And they would be justified in doing so. He knew he had never been as righteous a cop as either of them were, but he had been on the fringes of that rank. At times he was a maverick, at times he bent the rules, at times he lost his temper—usually at the expense of some scumbag he was arresting; so there were reprimands on his sheet, there had been promotion opportunities missed, there were reservations in some quarters about his prejudices and his personality. But there had never been any question about his reputation for honesty, for dedicated police work, and for loyalty to his partner and to his commander. Those traits had always reinforced his umbilical cord to men of the caliber of Dan Parmetter and Leo Madzak.

  Now that was gone—although only Kiley knew it at present. He could no longer count himself even marginally on their perimeter. He was a murderer now, and that wiped out all ties.

  Kiley was aware that he could break it off right then, very easily, simply by rejecting Vander’s offer to rescind the suspension. That might, over the long haul, be the smarter thing to do—particularly in light of what he himself still had planned; but Kiley could not bring himself to give such a step more than cursory consideration. There was, still, deep down, some of the good cop left in him—and even though he knew his life was now spiraling downward toward some dreaded, dark doom, he could not turn his back completely on the job that had been his whole being for so many years.

  “When’s Winston’s preliminary?” he asked.

  “Two o’clock,” Madzak told him. “Department Twenty-three.”

  Kiley nodded. “I’ll be there, Captain.”

  Madzak reached in his coat pocket and handed Kiley a small envelope. Kiley opened it.

  It was his badge.

  That afternoon, as he waited outside Department Twenty-three of Superior Court, Kiley tensely read the updated Sun-Times story of Fred Scarp’s death. It was follow-up coverage from the previous day’s account of Scarp’s body having been discovered by a housekeeper-cook who reported for work at seven a.m. two days previously to find Scarp dead at the foot of the stairs, and his live-in companion, an ex-wrestler named Lenny “Mountain” Pastrano, unconscious on the floor of the foyer. Scarp had died from a heart attack, the DuPage County coroner determined, probably caused by fright; Lenny Pastrano had been bludgeoned twice with a blunt object. Pastrano was hospitalized in serious but stable condition with two separate skull fractures; he was expected to eventually recover.

  The DuPage County sheriff’s office, under whose jurisdiction the case fell, had made a preliminary statement that Scarp’s death may have resulted from a bungled robbery attempt, with the burglars fleeing without any loot. There did not seem to be much of a motive in any other direction. It was certainly not, everyone in law enforcement agreed, a mob hit; there was no reason for one, and the facts were not indicative of a gangland killing. There were no apparent clues at the scene, and investigators had no suspects at the moment.

  As Kiley was reading the paper, an assistant state’s attorney, whom Kiley knew slightly, came over to where he sat. “Detective Kiley, Robert Faber,” he said, extending his hand. “I think we’ve worked together before.”

  “Yeah, about a year ago,” Kiley said, rising to shake Faber’s hand. “Child molestation case, I think.”

  “Right. Well, this one,” he indicated his file, “looks pretty cut and dried. We’re going to establish the background of Winston’s father being fired by the transit authority, Winston’s own knowledge of chemistry, the previous purchases of the types of small alarm clocks used for timers, and the diagram he drew in his own hand showing how to make an explosive device. I’m pretty certain the court will hold him to answer; I’m just not sure exactly what the charge will be. Incidentally, Winston has asked to speak to you. He’s back in the holding cell. You can talk to him or not; it’s up to you.” Faber started on down the hall. “See you in a few minutes when court convenes.”

  After the prosecutor left, Kiley thought about it for several minutes, then decided to see what was on Harold Paul Winston’s mind. He walked down the hall in the opposite direction from Faber, to a buzzer-controlled door operated by a jail guard. Showing his badge, he was passed into a corridor that led behind the courtrooms to a series of holding cells for incarcerated persons awaiting appearances in court that day. Winston, in a suit and tie, sat on a bench in the third holding cell down the corridor. He looked surpassingly glum. Kiley went over and stood in front of the bars. He waited for Winston to look up. It took a moment for Winston to realize that someone was there, but he finally noticed Kiley.

  “Oh. Hello, Joe—”

  “Mr. Winston,” Kiley said. The little man smiled bleakly.

  “No more ‘Hal,’ huh, Joe?” When Kiley did not respond, Winston blinked rapidly several times, as if he might be counteracting tears. “I want you to know,” he said, a slight tremor in his voice, “that I think what you did to me was very deceitful, very unscrupulous, and very underhanded. You didn’t play fair with me, Joe.”

  “It’s not my job to play fair with people like you,” Kiley told him flatly “It’s my job to stop you as quickly as possible, before you hurt innocent people—”

  “That’s nonsense and you know it,” Winston cut in. “It was never my intention to hurt anybody You said yourself—in one of our buddy-buddy conversations,” he interjected sarcastically—“that you thought it was—‘commendable,’ I think was the word you used—commendable that I had taken such obvious precautions to make certain that no one was hurt. I went to great lengths to make sure those buses would be in the garage, parked, at two or three o’clock in the morning, before my explosive detonated—”

  “You’re incriminating yourself, Mr. Winston,” Kiley told him.

  “I don’t care!” Winston snapped in reply. “I intend to admit everything at my trial anyway. I just want it made clear that I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. I was disabling buses in order to make a statement against the transit authority for what it did to my father.” It became necessary for Winston to again hold himself in check to keep from crying. “My father,” he said emotionally, “was a heroic man. He was trying to combat a municipal department that year after year contributed to the pollution of this city’s air by operating hundreds of outmoded buses with engines that had no catalytic converters on them to reduce fumes; engines that were not properly serviced and maintained to keep their carburetors and oil filters clean; engines that were run on the cheapest, lowest-octane fuel available, which produced the maximum volume of pollutants. My father was trying to help every man, woman, and child breathing air in this city—and for his efforts he was made out to be some kind of radical lunatic, and he was dismissed from his job for it—”

  “Mr. Winston, that was twelve years ago,” Kiley reminded him.

  “I don’t care!” Winston snapped again. “How long ago it was doesn’t matter! It happened!” Swallowing tightly, Winston looked downward. “It happened,” he repeated in a quieter, almost melancholy tone. “And it ruined my father’s life. It actually took his life.”

  Kiley frowned deeply. “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean,” Winston replied with a soft, cy
nical grunt.

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t ask you,” Kiley said. “What do you mean?”

  “My father,” Winston said, raising his eyes to meet Kiley’s again, “committed suicide.”

  “Because he lost his job?” Kiley asked incredulously.

  “Not just because he lost his job; because he couldn’t ever get another one.” Winston’s voice became quietly bitter. “The bus authority blackballed him. Every time a prospective employer checked his references, the transit people would report that he was a troublemaker: an agitator, a rabble-rouser. So he wouldn’t get hired. My father tried omitting the transit authority on his job applications, but that didn’t work; he was always asked to explain where he was and what he was doing during those years. Somehow, the transit authority always came back to haunt him.” Winston sighed heavily, wearily. “Anyway, he never worked again. Not one day. Eventually his unemployment benefits ran out, then he used up all of his savings, and finally he ended up on state welfare. His second wife left him. His car was repossessed. Even his television was repossessed.

  “I tried to help him, but he wouldn’t let me. He kept insisting that everything would work out for him, that it was only a matter of time. I finally convinced him that it wasn’t going to happen; I finally got him to agree to come live with me. I was still living with my mother and stepfather at the time, but I was working and I had some money saved; I was going to get a place of my own where my father could live too. It took a lot of persuading on my part, but he finally said okay, that’s what we’d do. But the very next day he took a handful of sleeping pills, put a plastic bag over his head and buttoned his shirt collar around the opening of it, and went to sleep for the last time.