The Betrayers

by James Patrick Hunt

  For his part, Hastings could not really hate Ted Samster. In general, he was not a hater. And the harsh truth was if Ted had not taken Eileen away from him, someone else would have. Eileen simply did not want to be married to him anymore. Sort of like those people who will vote for anyone but Bush. Ted Samster was childish and materialistic, but he was obviously in love with Eileen and there were no signs that he mistreated her or took her for granted.

  When Hastings pulled the Jaguar up to the house, Amy was standing out front. She was alone. Hastings felt a pang. He said to himself, what did you expect? That Eileen would be standing out there in her bathrobe—the black and white one he liked to see her in—waiting to greet him and ask, whatcha been up to? Again, he felt foolish. The woman stomps on your fingers as you’re hanging off the cliff and you tell yourself, well, she’s not stomping as hard as she could be.

  Amy got in the Jaguar. They greeted each other and Hastings drove away.

  Hastings said, “Do we have time to stop for coffee?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  Sitting at the table at the Clayton Starbucks, a to-go cup sat in front of Hastings, a small bottle of orange juice in front of the girl, her bookbag next to her feet. Pretty morning people came in and out, an old New Order song coming out of the speakers at a respectful decibel. They had about fifteen minutes, at most, to savor there before he took her to school and went to work.

  Amy said, “How old were you when you first drank coffee?”

  “I don’t know,” Hastings said. “Maybe a couple of years older than you.”

  “Did you like it? Then, I mean.”

  “I don’t think so. I started drinking it more when I was in college, to help stay awake in the morning. Then I began to like it.”

  “Then it’s sort of like a drug, isn’t it?”

  Hastings smiled. “No, it’s not a drug.”

  Amy said, “I saw this movie at Hailey’s house the other night. It was black and white. It was just a bunch of people drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.”

  “Yeah? Did you understand it?”

  “No. One of the parts had Meg and Jack White in it; that’s why we rented it.”

  “Who are they?”

  “They’re musicians.” She shrugged, like it was not worth explaining to him. She said, “Another part had Bill Murray in it. I mean, you know who he is.”

  Hastings thought of Stripes.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “He was drinking coffee straight from the pot. I guess it was supposed to be funny, but I didn’t get it.”

  “He used to be very funny.”

  “When you were little?”

  “Yeah,” Hastings said. “When I was little.”

  An attractive woman in her thirties walked past them and gave Hastings a quick smile. It was the sort of thing that happened once in a while; he no longer wore a wedding band and a man with his little girl does not seem to present a threat. He half smiled back, and resisted the urge to turn and look at the lady’s backside. Amy didn’t miss much.

  Even when he behaved.

  She said, “Dad?”

  “Yeah, honey?”

  “Do you think you’ll want to ever get married again?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “It’s okay, you know. If you want to.”

  “Is it,” he said, deadpan. “Can I marry Julia Roberts?” He said it because he and Amy had recently watched a PBS special together where the star had gone to Mongolia and lived with a family of nomads. No makeup or script, and she was still quite a charmer. Though Hastings believed what had truly enamored him was when she played a coldhearted bitch on a Law and Order episode. He had some issues.

  Amy Hastings rolled her eyes.

  “She’s married already.”

  In the car, Amy said, “Mom is saying she wants to be a lawyer now.”

  Oh, sweet Jesus, Hastings thought.

  But he said, “Really? You mean she’s going to go to law school?”

  Amy shook her head. She had seen her mother go through a series of failed career attempts. “Who knows?”

  “Well,” Hastings said, “maybe it will work out.”

  Amy looked over at him like he was nuts.

  He smiled, shrugged, and gestured. “Maybe it will.”

  They got to the school and Amy said, “Oh, I forgot to ask earlier. Is it all right if Jen comes over tonight?”

  “Yeah. As long as it doesn’t interfere with dinner. What I mean is, I’m cooking tonight. If you have a friend over, we don’t automatically order a pizza. We eat what I cook. Okay?”

  “Okay.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Bye.”

  He watched her walk to the school and become absorbed into the mass of uniformed children. You really can’t complain, he thought. You really can’t.

  He was driving east on 64, downtown in view now with the St. Louis Arch looming beyond, when his cell phone rang. It was a number he did not recognize but he answered it anyway, keeping one hand on the wheel. Reckless driving habit, though most cops did it.

  “Hastings.”

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Yeah. Lieutenant Hastings. Who is this?”

  “This is Justin Elliott, Lieutenant, narcotics.”

  “Oh, hey. What’s up?” Hastings had met him before at a training seminar, but they hadn’t said much to each other. The narcs sat at one table and the homicide dicks sat at another, tribes within a tribe.

  Elliott said, “I understand you’re heading the investigation on Hummel.”

  “Yeah, both of them.”

  “Okay,” Elliott said. “We need to talk to you.”

  “All right. What is it?”

  “Can you meet with us?”

  It irritated Hastings, dodging the question. “I suppose,” he said. “You guys are on the fourth floor, right.”

  “No, not at the PD. There’s a bar in Fenton, Duke’s. It’s where the second shift from the Chrysler plant goes after work. You know it?”

  “Fenton? That’s a forty-minute drive.”

  “Yeah, I know,” the narc said. “Can you do it? We’ve got a lead. In fact, I think we’ve got your case solved.”

  Well ain’t that sweet, Hastings thought.

  Elliott said, “You know Chester Gibbs, assistant U.S. attorney?”

  “I know who he is.”

  “It’ll just be me and him. Can you come alone?”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “We’ll see you there at ten thirty.”

  The guy clicked off and Hastings clicked off and dropped the cell phone on the passenger seat. Hastings sighed and took the exit ramp off the highway by the Purina dog food building. Narcotics. In love with a sense of mystery. Hastings remembered a guy in college who was studying aerospace engineering and working part-time for McDonnell Douglas; this was during the defense buildup of the eighties. The guy, who was all of twenty at the time, had a habit of telling people he was working on a “black project” at “Mack Doug” and when people would ask him what it was, he would say, “Can’t tell you. Secret stuff.” Earnest young fool, letting people know he was important. Yeah, you better put your dark glasses on in case Brezhnev is watching. Hastings imagined he had probably helped design some sort of clamp.

  Narcs could be like that. Shrouding themselves in mystery and intrigue as they nabbed a series of mid-level dope dealers and forced them to become informants on the bigger dealers and so on and so forth, forever and ever and ever and ever. Hastings himself had mixed feelings about the war on drugs. He wondered if arresting scores of people did any good. Yet he believed that even marijuana use should remain illegal as long-term use did its damage to the spirit. He didn’t pretend to know the answer and he didn’t have the energy to argue with people who cried hypocrisy and pointed out the damaging effects of whiskey, cigarettes, and over-prescribed Prozac. He believed everybody needed at least a little hypocrisy just to get through the day.

  He made a series of turns and got bac
k on the interstate to head west, out of town. Once he was in steady traffic, he called the station.

  Stacy, their secretary, answered.

  “Homicide.”

  “It’s George. Let me talk to Murph.”

  Murph came on and said, “George?”

  “Murph, I got a lead. I’ll be in around noon.”

  “Yeah? What is it?”

  “Secret stuff.”

  “What?”

  “No, I’m kidding. It may not be anything. I’ll tell you when I get back.”

  SEVEN

  Duke’s was an ugly, empty little place run by an anvil-faced man who had come from South Philly. The carpet was rough and stained and there was a smell of pickles and hamburger grease and smoke. UAW signs and a picture of labor leaders, including George Meany. But it didn’t need to be pretty. In fact, being pleasant-looking would probably have been bad for business. Men and women coming off eight- and ten-hour shifts of doing the same thing over and over would want beers and whiskey in a place that didn’t feel too good for them.

  Hastings saw the black man wave at him when he walked in. Elliott. There was a white guy with him who looked a little like Dennis Miller from his Saturday Night Live days, but with glasses. The guy had an intense look on his face, the face of a man who doesn’t want to relax. When he shook Hastings’s hand, he introduced himself as Chester Gibbs.

  Justin Elliott was tall and slim, in his early forties. He wore expensive cowboy boots, jeans, and a black leather jacket. Handsome fellow. He shook Hastings’s hand after Gibbs had done the same, though it was apparent that he would not have otherwise.

  The three of them took a booth. Hastings ordered a cup of coffee. Elliott lit a cigarette and pulled a red plastic ashtray toward him.

  Gibbs said, “Hummel was undercover.”

  Hastings waited a moment, looking between the white lawyer and the black cop. Two very different looking men, color aside, but they seemed to share a common seriousness and purpose.

  Hastings said, “You mean in narcotics?”

  Elliott said, “Yeah.”

  Hastings said, “But he was in uniform.”

  “No,” Gibbs said. “We’re not talking about the night he was killed. Before that, he was undercover. Long-term. Deep. For about—” He turned to the cop for an assist.

  “Fourteen months,” Elliott said.

  “Fourteen months,” Gibbs repeated, in case Hastings hadn’t been listening. Gibbs said, “He was on a joint task force with DEA and SLPD. We wanted to bust a meth-lab ring run by Steve Treats. You know him?”

  “I know of him,” Hastings said.

  “He was one of the big ones,” Gibbs said. “Ran most of the crank labs in South County. White trash guy. But smart, very smart. So we borrowed Hummel from the county sheriffs and sent him in. He was brilliant. A natural.”

  Elliott said, “When it began, only four people were in the loop. Me, Chester, Chris, and my captain.”

  “Roger Bejma?” Hastings said.

  “Yeah,” Elliott said. “Like Chester said, Chris was a natural. In shorts and a ball cap, I didn’t recognize him. He made buys, got active, got close to Treats. They became friends. Good friends, according to Chris. When Chris testified against him at the end, Treats couldn’t believe it. He was sure that Chris was just another dealer turned informant because no cop could have fooled him. He was too smart for that.”

  “Even at trial,” Gibbs said, “the look on Treats’s face when Chris testified against him, it was like he was seeing his brother wear a dress.”

  Hastings said, “You convict him?”

  “Yeah. Eighteen to twenty. Treats is in Marion now.”

  Hastings leaned back against the red padding of the booth. Mid-morning gray light came in through the front window. Waylon and Willie and the boys on the jukebox, singing we’ve been so busy keeping up with the Joneses, the volume set low at this hour so you could hear I-44 traffic in the distance, east to Illinois or west to Rolla and beyond.

  Hastings said, “So you think Treats had Hummel killed?”

  Elliott tapped embers into the ashtray. He said, “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Hastings said. “But what about the young cop that was with him?”

  Elliott said, “Wrong place, wrong time.”

  Hastings said, “Yeah, but to put a hit out on a cop …”

  Elliott said, “You doubt that he did it?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Elliott said, “Steve Treats is a piece of shit. He’s killed before. Rival dealers, but nothing we could ever hang on him. I know what you’re thinking, detective. You’re thinking this ain’t Colombia or Sicily and crooks don’t put out hits on police officers. But do not doubt for one minute that Treats is capable of that. He’s got eighteen years to spend in prison. Not much to do and a lot of time to think about vengeance.”

  Hastings said, “I’m not discarding it, Elliott. It’s a lead and I’ll work it. All right?”

  Lieutenant Elliott stared at Hastings for a moment. Hastings let the stare bounce off his forehead and then said, “Why did he go back to patrol?”

  Elliott said, “What?”

  “Why did Hummel go back to uniform patrol?”

  Elliott said, “You ever work undercover?”

  “No.”

  Elliott nodded a yeah, that’s what I thought and Hastings fought the urge to tell the guy to calm down and put his dick back in his pants because they were both on the same side. He told himself that the narcotics officer had lost someone he knew and liked and maybe deserved the benefit of the doubt. Homicide detectives had a reputation for being snobs who resented the proles telling them their business. There was some truth in this generalization and Justin Elliott probably knew it. Hastings said it again. “No, I never worked undercover.” Telling him he won the point so they could move on.

  Elliott was quiet for a moment, shifting his mood and posture out of a defensive position. Finally, he said, “Well, if you do it you’d know that you get burned out quickly. You live on doper time, tweaker’s hours. They don’t start the day until nine or ten o’clock at night; go to bed at seven or eight A.M. And you gotta move when they move because if it’s going down, it’s going down now. You don’t get to make appointments, schedule lunches. There’s no structure to the life. And half of the buys don’t pan out. Everybody lies. Everybody’s a player. Informants who are dealers double dealing cops and other dealers. Try living like that for fourteen months. Chris almost got divorced.” Elliott leaned back in his seat. “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Hastings said, “So he wanted to go back to patrol?”

  Gibbs said, “He wanted to go back to patrol about three months after he started the job. But he said he made a commitment to the job, that he would stay until we got Treats.”

  And who filled the void left by Treats? Hastings wondered. Probably a thousand applicants. He could ask these guys, but it would offend them and it wasn’t his place anyway.

  “Okay,” Hastings said. “Can you give me your file on Treats?”

  Gibbs said, “Anything you need.”

  “You bring him down,” Elliott said.

  Hastings didn’t respond to the order.

  EIGHT

  Rex Reed’s voice was coming out of the radio. Not the sound system that was set in the bar; not the jukebox, but a little Sony radio that Kate had on the rail behind the bar so she could listen to it during the slow hours. Rex Reed was on a talk show guesting with Roger Ebert and it was supposed to be some sort of watershed event; Reed saying nasty things about Jennifer Aniston—“Rumor Has It Aniston stinks”—and so forth, Ebert responding that she was actually a very talented comedienne … a fop and a movie nerd talking about the girl as if they knew her from high school.

  Kate listened to bits and pieces of it, wondering if the gay guy was a permanent replacement for the critic who had died a few years earlier. She thought that might be okay; being gay wasn’t his
fault and the things he was saying were kind of funny even when they were mean.

  She was wiping the bar when the telephone rang. She turned down the radio before she picked it up.

  Answering the phone, she said, “McGill’s.”

  “Let me to talk to Jack, please.”

  “Hold on,” Kate said.

  She was an attractive woman. On the low side of her thirties, tall, ruddy cheeked, and firm-bodied. She wore her red hair in a ponytail and rarely put on makeup. Jeans and a green T-shirt tucked in at the waist, flattering her form. It was early, between ten and eleven in the morning, and the bar was quiet and clean.

  Kate Regan was co-manager of McGill’s, a pub in the Bridgeport/ Canaryville neighborhood of south Chicago. The bar was in the 11th Ward, approximately ten blocks from the Nativity of Our Lord Catholic Church, where they had Mayor Daley’s funeral in 1976. Kate had vague memories of that day, holding her mother’s hand as they stood outside the church with the rest of the neighborhood. Kate’s mother said the man had built Chicago and that was the main thing to remember.

  Kate called out for her husband, twice, before he came out of the back room.

  Jack Regan was a big man. He did not exercise and he still smoked a pack a day, but his appetite was modest and he had not gotten a stomach in middle age. In his mid-forties now, he had streaks of gray in his thick black hair. Black Irish, wearing black slacks and a white collar shirt with the cuffs rolled, more handsome now than when Kate had fallen in love with him. At least, that’s what Kate thought.

  Kate said, “You got a call.”

  Jack Regan did not ask who it was. He never asked and neither did she.

  Regan picked up the receiver.

  “Yeah.”

  The man on the telephone said, “Can you meet me today?”

  It took Regan a couple of moments to place the voice. Alan. Alan Mansell. The lawyer.

  Regan said, “We got lunch coming up. Can you wait till two?” Two meant four. Mansell understood this.

  “Two will be fine,” Mansell said.