by KJ Kalis
Through the database, Lou was able to access a copy of Vince’s driver’s license. Lou stared at the image for a moment, the spread of Vince’s white teeth across the tiny picture, his dark hair slicked back off his forehead. The edges of the collar of a starched white shirt fringed the bottom of the picture. He looked like a regular guy, Lou thought. Nothing special, but then again, if there was anything Lou had learned in his career it was that looks didn’t matter. The most aggressive looking biker could be a volunteer at the local homeless shelter while the PTA mom could chop her husband to bits over a weekend argument over which sauce to serve with their beef tenderloin. Lou shook his head. With people, you just couldn’t tell. In some respects, that’s what made the work interesting and exciting, he thought.
Lou glanced at his phone again. Still nothing from Emily. He exited the CPD database and started an old-fashioned search on the Internet. While the search results were loading, Lou got up from his desk and walked over to the coffee station and started for himself a dark roast coffee, grateful that a few years ago the department had splurged and bought each division a single-serve coffee brewing system. That was way better than the commercial sludge they used to drink, thick and bitter after sitting on the burner for too long. Lou snapped the lid down on the pod, listening to the water filter through. The smell of coffee curled its way up to his nostrils. From across the room, he heard his phone chirp. Could it be Emily? He waited for his coffee to finish perking and then grabbed it, nearly sloshing the scalding hot coffee out of the cup on his way back to his desk. He set it down gingerly, licking his fingers.
Looking at his phone, he tapped the screen and saw a message from a number he didn’t recognize. It wasn’t the same one that Emily used before, but it was what she’d shown him. Lou frowned for a second, wondering what number the image had come from. He pulled up the police database again and ran the number. It came back as unlisted. A burner phone. Lou nodded. Emily was suspicious and smart. Since the image hadn’t come from a phone linked to her, there was no way he could connect it back to her if push came to shove. He knew that’s what she was worried about. A wave of surprise caught him at how wary she was. He’d never think in a million years that the Emily he knew would use a burner phone, but a lot of things had changed. That was for sure.
Lou glanced at the image. The writing was so small on the screen of his phone that it was nearly impossible to decipher. He sent it to his email. As soon as it arrived in his inbox, he sent the image to the printer. A few seconds later, he heard the printer in the corner of the room warm-up and saw a single sheet come out. He took a sip of his coffee and then got up from his desk, walking over to the printer, pulling the still warm sheet off of the bed where it was resting. As he carried it back to his desk, he noticed the page was a little cockeyed on the sheet of paper as if whoever had taken the picture hadn’t held their camera quite straight. It didn’t matter, but it was just strange. As he plopped down in his chair, he heard a voice over his shoulder, “What are you working on?”
Detective Aldo had come up behind him and leaned over his shoulder. She was sneaky that way. Quiet, that is, until you did something wrong. Then the entire division could hear her bellowing from her office whether the door was open or closed. “I got this from a CI,” Lou lied.
“Is it tied to a case?”
“Not sure.” Lou knew he wasn’t a good liar. At least it was a half-truth that he wasn’t sure yet whether the image was part of one of their ongoing cases. It could be. Lou just didn’t know.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before. What is it?” Detective Aldo perched her palms on the edge of Lou’s desk, leaning over. He could smell the faint scent of body lotion or her perfume, he couldn’t tell which.
“I’ve seen something like this before. If I’m right, it’s a bookie journal.”
“Really?”
Lou nodded, “Yeah, but I think it belongs to the gambler, not the bookie.” He stood up from his desk, feeling a sudden need to get away from Detective Aldo. Though she had no idea he’d met with Emily less than an hour before, the hair on the back of his neck was standing up. “I’m gonna run this over to Vice and see if they have any idea what it could be.”
Detective Aldo stood up and nodded, “Good idea. Let me know if you need anything.”
Lou watched Detective Aldo as she turned her back and walked away. She was one of the best detectives they had in the entire department. Lou figured she’d see it as a breach of trust if she knew that Lou had met with Emily and alienating her could destroy his career.
Right after Emily had been dismissed from the department, word had gotten around that Detective Aldo had taken the loss hard. Emily was her protégé. Detective Aldo had put her reputation on the line to move Emily into the Cold Case Division. Later on, when it was discovered that Emily had been framed, Detective Aldo still didn’t rebound. The fact that someone framed her best detective and pushed her out of the didn’t sit well with Detective Aldo, especially since there was no way to bring Emily back. Working for Aldo for the next six months had been torture. At the time, it had been bad enough that Lou considered transferring back to Vice — anything to get away from Detective Aldo and her wrath. She had everyone working in her department under the microscope as if additional supervision would be the one thing that would prevent what happened to Emily from happening again.
It wouldn’t.
As Lou grabbed his keys and the printout off his desk, he knew that if anything was true about Chicago in general and Chicago’s law enforcement in specific, it was that the old way was the only way. The city was steeped in the tradition of prohibition and the wars between the Italians and the Irish. No matter how much technology or progress you overlaid on the history of the city, the foundation of Chicago was still the same.
Lou ran down the steps, avoiding the elevator. He wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone, that was for sure. He nodded at a woman as she passed him on the second-floor steps before pushing his way out the door, the metal door clanking behind him.
In one of the vehicles reserved for detectives, an unmarked blue sedan, he backed out of the spot carefully, not wanting to hit any other cars coming in. He pulled out on the street, heading a couple of miles away, where the Vice unit was housed.
Unlike some big-city police departments, the Chicago police had their specialty units spread out between the districts. Major crimes and Homicide in one building, Cold Case in another, Missing Persons, Counterterrorism, Intelligence, and Vice all in different buildings. Lou had never been able to figure out why they spread everything out. It probably would’ve made more sense to put all the subdepartments at police headquarters, but that would have meant dealing with a lot more white shirts, lieutenants, and captains sticking their noses in every single investigation. Having Detective Aldo hover over him was plenty.
Lou cracked the window in the detective unit as he drove. The cool air swirling into the car matched the thoughts swirling in his head. Seeing Emily had thrown him for more of a loop than he’d like to admit, he thought. He had the urge to pick up his phone and call his wife, letting her know what happened, but he didn’t, pulling his fingers away from it like it was a hot stone. Not yet. There would be time for Lou to tell her about Emily and how she looked and how she acted, but the time wasn’t now. He knew his wife’s inevitable question would be about his willingness to help Emily. It was a question he wasn’t sure he was ready to face yet.
The drive over to the Third District didn’t take too long, even with the crush of morning traffic. Lou had made the drive so many times that he didn’t even bother to think about it. When he got to the building, he left the car in the back lot and used his ID badge to scan the keypad by the door. He walked through the lobby, the walls covered in pictures of fallen officers and awards the department had won from law enforcement agencies around the country. As he made his way to the back of the building, everything seemed to age. The walls were white but with a faded yellow tinge to them
from years of people smoking in the building before it had been banned. The linoleum floors had cracked in a couple of spots. Might be time for an update, Lou thought, suddenly grateful for the fact that the Cold Case Division had received a facelift a decade before. Most people didn’t realize how much money was put into training and salaries and equipment so that the department could keep up with the regulatory changes that seem to come around every single bend just to keep the department operational. Lou couldn’t imagine the amount of paperwork it took to keep the department running. He shook his head as he pushed the glass door open at the back of the building. White letters painted on the glass said, “Vice,” in all caps.
Lou stood at the door for a moment, letting it close behind him, getting his bearings. It was set up much the same as the Cold Case Division, a center section of desks pushed together classroom style, facing each other with the edges of the room filled with small offices. Lou looked to his right and then to his left. In the left-hand corner, he saw what he was looking for and walked that way. He didn’t bother to knock before he pushed the door open. Startled, a woman with red hair looked up from her desk. “Lou!” she said, jumping up from her chair and coming around the desk to hug him.
“O’Malley. How are you?” Lou met Stacy O’Malley before he left to go to the Cold Case Division. They had worked together for eighteen months, partnered up on dealing with some gambling and growing prostitution issues in the city. Stacy knew Emily, too. At the time they were in Vice, Detective Aldo was running a couple of cases through their department. Emily had tagged along before Lou ended up in Cold Case.
“I’m good, I’m good,” Stacy said, sitting down.
Lou took a seat at a chair in front of her desk. Stacy was the typical Irish girl — porcelain skin, bright, carrot orange hair tied in a ponytail behind her back. She had the uniform of a Vice cop on, jeans, a blue long-sleeved shirt and a gray vest. That was one thing Lou missed about working in Vice. Because they were out on the street so much, the attire for the office was basically whatever was clean. When Lou worked there, he spent a lot of time in a hoodie and a pair of jeans, not like the jacket and collared shirt he wore for Detective Aldo’s benefit.
Stacy wrinkled her nose at him, “Are you just going to sit there, or are you here for a reason?”
Lou shook his head, realizing he’d been lost in his thoughts, “Sorry. Long day.”
“Already?” Stacy raised her eyebrows.
“You have no idea.”
“Tell me.”
Lou leaned back in the chair and proceeded to tell Stacy about his meeting with Emily, how Emily had called out of the blue and asked to meet. Lou explained how suspicious Emily seemed, but that she’d asked for a favor. “And you’re going to try to help her?” Stacy said, wrinkling her nose.
Lou nodded, “I feel like I owe it to her. Things didn’t go down very well when she left the department.”
“As I remember, it was because she was arrested.”
Heat flushed over Lou’s face. Police officers were some of the worst gossips he’d ever met, and they rarely got the story straight. “You do know she was exonerated, don’t you? One of those goofballs in IAB decided to frame her.”
Stacy nodded, “Point taken. So, how can I help?”
Lou fished the printout of the page from the red notebook out of his pocket. “Emily is working a case. She’s gotten in over her head and asked me to look into this.”
“She’s working a case? Is she a PI?” Stacy said, taking the sheet from Lou.
“I really don’t know...”
Stacy didn’t say anything for a moment, staring at the page Lou sent to her. A scowl on her face, she leaned forward, typing on her computer, “I’ve seen something like this in the last few months, I think.”
Lou waited, his heart beating faster. Why it was so important to him to be able to help Emily, he wasn’t sure. He swallowed, realizing he didn’t know the answer. He’d always felt guilty for abandoning her. Maybe getting her some information to help her case would be a way to make up for it. “What do you think it is?”
“Well, I think you probably already know. Recently, a lot of our bookies went back to using paper. Our Cybersecurity Division was getting a little too good at hacking their platforms. Have to say, I’d probably do the same thing in their shoes,” she said, still typing on the computer. ”There,” she pointed, twisting the screen towards Lou.
As his eyes focused, he saw a picture of notations that looked much like the one he had just handed to Stacy. The columns were lined up exactly the same way with initials and dates and amounts on the right-hand side of the page. “That looks like it. What can you tell me about it?”
Stacy paused for a second. “I want to help but I want to make sure that it’s not going to jeopardize any of our ongoing investigations. You know, the pressure is always to close these things.”
“I get it. But I owe Emily.”
“All right,” Stacy said with a sigh. “Okay, so, we are seeing more and more of our off-the-books gamblers go back to paper. It’s old-fashioned stuff, that’s for sure. We haven’t been able to figure out whether they’re using a combination of technology and paper to keep the records or not. This is a relatively new phenomenon we’re trying to adjust to.”
“They are one step ahead of us again, huh?” Lou knew that one of the biggest challenges working Vice was the criminals changed how they did business, everything from the places and locations to their methods and their people, almost daily. It was one of the best ways for them to keep law enforcement off balance and their people out of jail. “Any idea whose journal this might be? Or which bookie?” Lou knew it was a long shot that Stacy would know the owner of the journal. From Emily, he already had a good idea it belonged to Vince. But what he didn’t know was which bookie it might belong to. The underground families in Chicago tended to stay the same — they had been in business for generations — but which one was the question that rattled through Lou’s mind.
Stacy shook her head. “I can’t tell you who the gambler is, but this looks a lot like bookie sheets I’ve seen from the Battaglia family.”
Lou leaned back in the chair, crossing his arms. “Battaglia? Who’re they?”
Stacy scratched the side of her neck, “Old-time family. Had ties to Capone. They went underground for a long time. Word on the street was they didn’t like prostitution or drugs. Real old school. Into the omerta and all that stuff.”
“Really? How did they get back on the scene?”
“I’m not sure they ever left,” Stacy said, looking at the keys of her computer. “One of the Battaglia’s took over for Capone when he went to jail. Couple of years later, that guy went to jail, too. That was in the heyday of the RICO cases. Then they disappeared.” She turned her screen back towards Lou, the picture of a man on the screen. “This is Frank Battaglia. He heads up the family now. Real dangerous folks. They keep their business model quite simple. From what we can tell, high-stakes gambling, a little protection money on their real estate, imports -- that kind of stuff.”
Lou looked down at the sheet of paper in front of him on the desk. “So, you’re thinking that this might come from one of their tables?”
Stacy nodded. She pulled up a couple of other images from the online file. Pointing with her finger, she said, “See these notations here?” Vince squinted to see the screen. He nodded as she continued, “Those seem to be unique to the Battaglia’s tables.” They were the very notations that Lou hadn’t been able to decipher when he first looked at the sheet when it came off the printer. A series of numbers and symbols were at the end of each line.
“What do you think they mean?”
“Not sure.” Stacy turned the screen back toward her.
A wave of confusion washed over Lou, “No idea at all?”
“My guess is they have something to do with the person they lost the bet to.”
“How does that figure in?”
“The bookies use other peopl
e’s buy-ins to finance a lot of the game. That means the gambler owes not only the bookie but the person whose money they lost.”
Lou’s head started to swim with the possibilities. Emily’s target, Vince Olivas, could owe the bookie a lot of money, and other people as well. The number of targets that could be after Vince expanded exponentially with that information. “So, the guy Emily’s looking at might owe more than just the Battaglia family, if that’s who holds the debt?”
Stacy nodded, “That’s right.”
Vince got up and started to pace. “Who else is big in gambling? Any profile I can work off of?”
Stacy chewed her lip, “Well, there are the typical high rollers. Some adult kids of the typical gazillionaires in the city who have nothing better to do than lose Daddy’s money. There are some addicts — that’s for sure – and players who have a lot of cash and nothing to do with it. We’ve seen a recent uptick in gang leaders bringing in their drug money, too.”
“Any other ethnic groups that are frequenting the tables?”
Stacy furrowed her eyebrows as if trying to see where he might be going with his question. “Primarily Cubans and Ukrainians. They seem to love the stakes and have money to lose.”
Lou stopped behind the chair in front of Stacy’s desk and leaned his hands on the back of it. “Your best guess is the Battaglia’s?”
Stacy nodded, but a shadow of concern covered her face. “Probably, but you have to remember that there are a lot of fingers in the pie. That’s what makes it so hard for us to catch them. The bookies start up the game, but then the minute someone wins or loses, they are tied to the table. That’s how the bookies keep them locked in.”