High Chicago

by Howard Shrier

  “You don’t have to keep this, do you?” Dennis asked. “It’s got my footage of me in front of Soldier Field.”

  “Sorry,” Barnett said. He held out his hand for the cassette, pocketed it and told them they could go. I tried to look contrite for causing them to lose their vacation footage and thanked them for coming forward. It struck me as odd that we weren’t all going down to a precinct to sign statements and look at mug books. But mentioning that would have been like asking the teacher why she hadn’t popped a quiz.

  It was clearly no coincidence that Barnett had appeared on the scene. My guess was he had been there for two reasons: to confirm the kill, and to provide an official version of the events: probably as a mugging or robbery gone wrong. Either way, I knew now that he was in Simon Birk’s pocket, which made me more sure than ever that Birk had set up the robbery at his home.

  Barnett undid my handcuffs and said, “How many murders a year you get in Toronto?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “About eighty or ninety, I guess.”

  “We get at least five or six hundred,” he said. “Used to be like a thousand a year. But still. Five, six hundred is a lot of killings. And there’s a lot that go unsolved.”

  “Which means what?”

  “That Frank Sinatra had it all wrong. Chicago ain’t your kind of town.”

  CHAPTER 36

  “Back so soon?” asked Jericho Hale.

  I held out my wrists. “See these marks?”

  “I’m a black man in America,” he said. “I know cuff stripes when I see them.”

  “Want to guess who put them there?”

  “I don’t have to,” he said, “because I can see you’re dying to tell me.”

  He had me there. “Tom Barnett.”

  He leaned forward so fast his chair almost tipped. “You shitting me?”

  “I shit you not.”

  “Detective Thomas Barnett had you in cuffs.”

  “I think I’m lucky that’s all he did.” I told Hale what had happened in Grant Park.

  “All right, Geller. Walk with me.”

  I followed him to the far end of the newsroom, where a young Hispanic reporter sat at a desk covered with police band scanners.

  “Alvaro,” Hale said.

  “Sssh.” The reporter had his head down, listening intently to one of the scanners. “Damn,” he said. “I can’t make half this shit out.”

  “That’s the code for armed robbery,” Hale said. “South Hermitage, 6000 block.”

  “How’d you—”

  “I started on this desk, man. You’ll develop an ear for it, you give it enough time. Alvaro, this is Geller. He has a question for you.”

  “Make it quick,” he said. “I miss a call—”

  “I’ll listen to your scanners,” Hale said. “You answer his question.”

  Alvaro looked at me. He was in his early twenties, tops, wiry and full of nervous energy, one knee pumping away beneath the desk.

  I said, “There was an assault in Grant Park today. Just over an hour ago. Did anything go out over the police radio? Call for assistance?”

  He flipped through a notepad. “Grant Park … no. Had a shooting in Humboldt Park and an assault in Hyde Park … nothing in Grant.”

  I beamed a pleasant smile at Hale.

  “What?” Alvaro asked. “What’s that look? There a story in this?”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing happened.”

  “Seriously?” Alvaro flipped to a clean page in the notebook. “I haven’t had a decent byline in a week.”

  “Um … Alvaro? Better get back to your scanner,” Hale said. “You just missed a Homicide call on West 25th. Probably the Latin Kings.”

  “What? Shit!” Alvaro said.

  Hale tugged on my shirt sleeve and steered me back to his cubicle.

  “So,” he said. “Barnett responded to a call that never went out.”

  “He knew it was going to happen. So dish,” I said. “What do you know about Barnett that I ought to know?”

  “Well, his rep is he’s a tough cop, even by Chicago standards. Bit of a head-breaker. But honest enough. Nothing too rancid following him. No whispers he was ever on the take.”

  “Until now.”

  “The only thing I recall …”

  “Yes?”

  “You know there’s another newspaper in this town?” he said. “One without the, uh, high journalistic standards to which we here at the Tribune aspire?”

  “The tabloid.”

  “The very one. They go for stories with a certain flavour. The kind their readers can follow without spraining a lip.”

  “Mee-ow.”

  “They ran a story about Barnett two, three years ago. He was heading up the mayor’s anti-drug task force then. Cleaning up Englewood, other parts of the city that were basic open-air markets for drugs and guns. We didn’t run it because it was personal and it didn’t strike us as fair game.”

  “Go on.”

  Hale turned to his computer and tapped something into a search engine. “I want to call this up because the headline, as I recall, was gutter fucking poetry and I want to do it justice.” We waited a moment until the item appeared on screen: “Cop’s Kid Caught in Crack Crackdown.”

  “Barnett’s son?”

  “Colin James Barnett, age seventeen. He was arrested by police in Brookfield—that’s a suburb out west—selling crack cocaine at a strip mall. Nothing big-time. Basically financing his own habit. Buy seven grams, sell six, get one free, that kind of thing.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “First-time offender and white? He got probation and an order to get treatment.”

  “I’m guessing drug treatment is expensive here?”

  “Yeah, we don’t have your socialized Canadian medicine. Costs an arm, a leg and a pint of blood for any decent program.”

  “Which your average detective can’t afford.”

  “Unless he comes into contact with a Simon Birk, who has lots of money and needs a friendly cop.”

  “You going to look into this?” I asked.

  “Like a proctologist.”

  “You’ll keep me posted?”

  “That may not be my top priority.”

  “But you’ll fit it in somewhere.”

  “I told you before, I’m here to gather information, not dispense it.”

  The tabloid story was still up on Hale’s screen. I looked at the byline under the lurid headline. Paul Vrabowski. “All right,” I said. “Think Paul Vrabowski will give me the time of day?”

  “Think and Paul Vrabowski don’t belong in the same sentence,” he said. “Let me make some calls and get back to you.”

  “Book your flight yet?” I asked Jenn.

  “Tomorrow morning,” she said. “Same one you were on.”

  “All right. In the meantime, see what you can find out about a Chicago cop named Tom Barnett. Detective with the Bureau of Investigative Services.”

  “What about him?”

  “Everything you can find. His record, who he reports to, details about his son’s drug treatment.”

  “What’s the connection?”

  “I think he wants me dead.”

  “Jonah …”

  I gave her the same précis of the day’s events I’d given Hale.

  “So you think Birk has Barnett in his pocket.”

  “Which goes a long way toward confirming the theory that the home invasion was an inside job.”

  “Which will do you no good if you’re dead or in jail.”

  “For the moment,” I said, “I’m safe in my room. Both locks locked and the chain on. Hear from Cantor yet?”

  “Yes. He couriered his statement about an hour ago. I read through it and it looks pretty complete.”

  “Okay. Call Hollinger and—no, wait. I’ll call.”

  “Thought you might.”

  “Make a copy and ship it over to her on a one-hour service. I want her to have it in front of her when I ta
lk to her.”

  Hollinger sounded remote and not just because of the hundreds of miles that separated us.

  “I’m willing to concede that Cantor’s story sounds plausible,” she said.

  “That’s it?”

  “It’s hardly a deposition,” she said. “There’s nothing legally binding about it. And it’s totally hearsay, not to mention self-serving. One participant in a conspiracy to commit fraud accusing another alleged co-conspirator.”

  “Call him in.”

  “I have,” she said. “First thing tomorrow.”

  “What else have you found out?”

  “That I’m able to share with you?”

  “Katherine—”

  “Don’t Katherine me. I can’t tell you anything I wouldn’t tell a reporter.”

  “You wouldn’t have known about Martin Glenn’s fight with Cantor if I hadn’t told you. You wouldn’t have known about Will Sterling’s connection either.”

  I heard her sigh deeply into her phone. “All right, Jonah. There are a couple of things we have that lend credence to your version of things. Your partner forwarded me the email Maya Cantor sent to Sterling the night she died. It would seem to contradict the mindset of a person who was about to kill herself. We’re opening an investigation into her death. A forensic team is going through her apartment as we speak and the scope will be far beyond what the coroner did. We’ve also asked Jenn to bring in Maya’s laptop. Our people can probably do a more thorough search of its contents than you could.”

  “What else?”

  “We found phone calls made from Sterling’s house to Cantor’s office that fit the timeline you suggested. And calls from Cantor to Simon Birk that followed closely on the heels.”

  “You’re starting to believe me, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll follow up any lead that could help me close these cases,” she said.

  “Anything new on Glenn?”

  “Our financial analyst traced payments made from Cantor to Martin Glenn that seem beyond the scope of work billed by EcoSys. Which supports the theory Cantor was trying to buy a clean bill of health for the Harbourview site. What about you?” she asked. “Anything coming out of Chicago I should know about?”

  “You could say that. Birk tried to have me killed today.”

  “What! Why didn’t you—”

  “Because I can’t prove it was him. I also can’t prove the sun’s going to rise in the east tomorrow, but I know it, just like I know this.”

  I told her my theory that Birk had staged the robbery at his house when he was at his lowest financial ebb; how he had co-opted the lead investigator, Tom Barnett, who needed money to get his son off drugs; how I had been granted an audience with His Birkness and the naked ape, Francis Curry; how Barnett had appeared on the scene seconds after the Stalin look-alike had tried to gun me down.

  “Come back to Toronto,” she said. “Let me see what I can do through official channels.”

  “No way.”

  “Jonah—”

  “Don’t you get this way when you’re working a murder?” I asked. “Don’t you feel like you have to keep going, not stop, not take a step back until you find out what happened and why?”

  “I have a badge,” she said. “I have a gun. I have an entire police service behind me. I have powers granted by the province.”

  “I have a black belt.”

  “Don’t joke about it. I know things got off on the wrong foot with us the other night but I want … I don’t want … I—”

  “You care about me?”

  “Yes, and damn you for making me say it.”

  “I fully intend to come back in one piece,” I said. “And take you to a restaurant not owned by anyone remotely notorious.”

  “So be careful.”

  “Everyone keeps telling me that. Even Barnett.”

  “But are you listening?”

  CHAPTER 37

  Jericho Hale called and asked if I had an expense account.

  I said I did.

  “Then get ready to abuse it. I’ve got something on Tom Barnett I think you’ll find interesting.”

  “How interesting?”

  “Interesting enough for you to buy me a steak dinner and a glass of red wine and a shot or two of the Macallan for starters. There’s a pretty good joint right in your hotel.”

  “Kitty O’Shea’s?”

  “Naw, that’s more of a lunch place. I’m talking the Buckingham Steak House. Or if you want to get out a little, there’s Petterino’s over by the Goodman Theatre.”

  “I wouldn’t mind getting out. In the meantime, there’s something else you might want to check.”

  “Like I got the time?”

  “Put young Alvaro on it.”

  “And have to share a byline? Maybe when the lake freezes over.”

  “Never mind. Run a check on unsolved homicides for the … I don’t know, three months after Birk’s home invasion. See if any were a white male, six feet or so. Ideally he’d have a connection to Birk or Francis Curry. Maybe a security guard at one of the buildings or construction sites. Hell, maybe someone who worked for a carpet cleaning company.”

  “You think they bumped off the guy who helped rob the place?”

  “They don’t seem to like loose ends.”

  It was dusk when I left the hotel. I thought about taking a cab—limiting my exposure to whatever assassins might lurk in the lowering darkness—then said fuck it. Walking in a city like New York or Chicago is one of the great pleasures in life and no one was going to take it away from me.

  The restaurant was at the corner of Dearborn and Randolph, a block or so north of City Hall.

  See? Getting to know my way.

  Madison is the north-south split, State the east-west. The lake is on the right going north.

  Definitely getting it.

  I took Michigan Street as far as Washington, then cut west across the foot of Daley Plaza, every different angle of the Picasso statue offering a different possibility, a different beast. A woman with parted hair or a ram with crushing horns. An eerie orange glow rose from the fountain tonight, the water itself bubbling up orange as if contaminated. I was around it, already looking north for a Goodman sign or banner when I heard footsteps.

  Fast steps.

  Thought, “Here we go,” and turned to see a man in a hockey mask running at me, something down at his side just like the gunman today. Another gun? No, a knife—better than a gun here, able to go in and out silently, cut through organ meat and leave a man drowning in his own blood.

  As he got close to me, he moved to my left as if to attack from the side, maybe push the knife through my ribs and into my lungs—a quick and quiet method. I moved with him to keep him in front of me and rolled at the last minute into his legs, sending him tumbling down hard onto the concrete surface. He grunted loudly as he hit. A woman behind me yelled, “Christ!” I jumped onto his back and punched him hard in the kidneys. He yowled. I grabbed his hair and knelt on the hand that held the knife. I was forcing it loose when someone jumped on my back and started pounding my head with small fists.

  “Let him go,” she screamed. “You’re hurting him, you fucking asshole.”

  Of course I was hurting him. Wasn’t that the point with knife-wielding assailants in hockey masks?

  I got up fast and spun around, grabbed the fists of the woman—the girl—who was trying to claw me. She looked eighteen at the most. And was dressed as a witch, complete with pointy black hat and an alarming hairy wart on her otherwise smooth face.

  “He was trying to kill me!” I yelled.

  “You’re crazy!” she yelled back. “Chris, are you okay?”

  I pushed her away and turned to see the man getting up slowly. His mask had come off. He wasn’t any older than the girl, a curly-headed kid with a nasty scrape on his chin, grimacing as he held the spot on his back where I’d hit him.

  The knife, on closer inspection, was made of rubber.

  “Oh, shi
t,” I said, taking in the orange water gushing out of the fountain. The pumpkins mounted on poles. The girl’s costume, the other people in the plaza dressed as cowboys, pirates, scarecrows and superheroes.

  The festive banners that said “Chicagoween.”

  The date: October 31.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, picking up the knife and handing it back to the kid. “I forgot it’s Halloween. I thought you were for real.”

  “Asshole,” the kid said. “You really fucking hurt me.”

  “I should call the cops,” the girl said.

  I said, “Don’t do that.” My luck, Tom Barnett would answer the call. I apologized again to him and to the girl. I reached into my wallet and handed him three twenties. “Please,” I said. “Have dinner on me.”

  “Like I could eat after what you did to me.” But he shoved the bills into his jeans pocket. Pointed the rubber knife at me. Said, “You’re lucky this isn’t real.”

  Didn’t I know it.

  They walked off toward the fountain. She put her arm around his waist. He winced.

  I headed for Petterino’s. As I crossed Randolph, a cab nearly rear-ended a car that had stopped without signalling and blared his horn. Maybe that’s why I didn’t hear footsteps coming up behind me again. Didn’t hear anything at all. Just became aware of the car at the curb, the man at my side, the hard press of a gun in my ribs. The shove into the back seat, the door slamming, the car exiting quickly from the curb lane into traffic. The short ride through city streets, just two turns, then over a bumpy terrain that had me bouncing on the floor of the car, a man’s knees forcing me down behind the driver’s seat, a gun in my neck the whole time.

  Then we stopped and for the second time today I had my hands cuffed behind me. This time by Francis Curry.

  CHAPTER 38

  To call it an elevator was an insult to other elevators. It wasn’t even a lift. A hoist, pure and simple, a technology that dated back to the building of pyramids, one weight descending to pull another upward. The higher we went, the harder the wind blew, waves of it rocking the hoist. The view was probably magnificent but obscured by walls of Plexiglas smeared with months’ worth of dirt, handprints, dried drops of rain. Maybe even tears.