‘Hey, hey,’ Davies said, ‘good to have you back among the living. You’ve got to stop throwing your body in front of bullets. I can’t afford to lose clients.’
‘Thanks, Ed. You talk with DeMarcus Rodman?’
‘It’s taken care of,’ Davies said. ‘I met with the Assistant DA. Heat’s off. No commendations for heroism, but the cops’ll leave him alone.’
‘How did you do that?’
‘A combination of superior intellect, rhetorical skill, and good looks. I also had an extra pair of tickets to the Bulls–Cavs game. The Assistant DA loves the Cavs.’
‘Thanks,’ Kelson said again.
‘I’ll bill Rodman for the tickets.’
‘Send the bill to me.’
‘See, that’s why I’m glad you didn’t die.’
They hung up, and the waitress brought Kelson’s waffle and sausage. ‘The world could be a better place,’ he said, ‘but it could also be worse.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Yeah, bon appétit to you too.’
He ate half a sausage, then set down his fork and called Rodman. ‘Ed Davies tells me you’re clear.’
‘Yeah, so he says. Sometimes I think the only good men are the hustlers. He says I owe him a steak dinner.’
‘He likes the fillet at Gene & Georgetti. But after you buy him dinner, you’ll be his friend. What are you up to tonight?’
‘You kidding? I’m no longer a wanted man. I’m lying in bed with Cindi. You?’
‘Eating a waffle. And trying to work out the answers to some questions.’
‘If you think I’m going to invite you over to join us, you misread my intentions.’
Kelson laughed. ‘Yeah, give Cindi a kiss for me.’
‘But really, you all right?’
‘Sure. I’ve just got the questions.’
Rodman hesitated, as if unsure of his friend’s need. ‘Tomorrow morning, OK? You come here for coffee. We’ll talk about my saving your sorry ass from Renshaw.’
‘It’s a date.’
When Kelson went back out to the cold, an icy snow was falling. He raised his face to the night, letting the snow land on his cheeks. ‘Where are you coming from?’ he said. He looked back at the cold pavement. ‘Questions.’
He got in his car, fired up the engine, and waited for the heat. ‘Go home,’ he said. ‘Rest. Recover. Get up in the morning and drink coffee with DeMarcus.’ He looked at himself in the rearview mirror.
‘I don’t want to go home,’ he said.
‘You win,’ he said.
He went back to Walgreens, picked up his prescriptions, then drove to his office. The snow had started to come down harder.
‘Questions,’ he said, and rode the elevator to the floor he shared with a computer training company.
His office walls were bare except for a framed eight-by-ten photo of Sue Ellen and another of his cats. The desk, some chairs, and a gray file cabinet stood on gray all-weather carpet. The desktop was bare.
Kelson opened the bottom desk drawer. His Springfield XD-S pistol was there. He checked under the desktop. His KelTec hung in its hidden rig.
‘I guess that’s a relief,’ he said.
He went to the window and stared at the falling snow. It was turning the curbside cars as white as ash. ‘What am I doing here?’ he said. His reflection gleamed in the window. ‘Don’t get all existential on me.’
When his phone rang in his pocket, he jumped.
Caller ID said Jose Feliciano.
‘Jerk.’ He touched the answer button. ‘Listen, cowboy, you’ve got to cut this out.’
‘I need your help,’ Jose said.
‘No,’ Kelson said. ‘No you don’t.’
‘You don’t understand. They think my fiancée did it. Wendy. I’m at Jacaranda. In La Villita. You need to come.’
‘What’s Jacaranda?’
‘It’s a bar, man. Twenty-sixth Street.’
‘Are you drunk?’ Kelson said.
The question seemed to surprise Jose. ‘No. Are you high?’
Kelson did feel a little numb from the pill he took before leaving his apartment. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You got to come. They think she did it.’
‘No,’ Kelson said. ‘Sorry, my friend.’
For a moment, Jose was quiet. Then he said, ‘You aren’t a friend of mine.’ He hung up.
Kelson gazed out the window. While he was on the phone, the snow had stopped. Completely. He put his face to the glass. There wasn’t a flake in the air. ‘Huh,’ he said.
He took the KelTec from the hidden rig under the desktop. He crammed the barrel inside his belt. ‘As if it’ll do any good,’ he said. He left his office and went down to the parking garage. When he turned the key in the ignition of his car, the roar and purr of the engine reassured him. He drove back to his apartment one handed. Faster than he should have. Sliding around corners. Once almost skidding into an intersection as other cars crossed.
He gunned the engine as he pulled from the street into the parking lot and plowed through a little snowdrift.
He got out and walked to the front of his building, where he stared up the side to his windows. The windows looked cold. ‘Dead man’s eyes,’ he said.
He laughed at himself, went back to the parking lot, and got into his car. When he turned the key in the engine, the engine roared, then purred. He drove out of the lot and headed toward the south side of the city, where a man who was not his friend waited for him at a bar called Jacaranda.
EIGHT
Jose Feliciano had lied. He was drunk. Not so drunk he fell off his barstool. Not as long as his fiancée, Wendy Thomas, propped him up. She looked sober. Some nights, no matter how much you drink, you’re sober.
‘What do you mean, they think she did it?’ Kelson stood at the bar with them.
Blue under-shelf lighting from the liquor display made the bartender’s hands glow ghostlike as he served Kelson a Modelo Negra. The Jacaranda sports bar filled the ground floor of a squat two-story brick house in a rough strip of South Lawn businesses and professional offices – a sweet spot among Cash America Pawn, Gutierrez Dentistas, Boost Mobile, Centro Medico Digestivo, and Great Northern Insurance. A soccer ball hung from the ceiling in a netted bag. A bowling pin was perched above the liquor bottles. A Miller Lite poster featured a giant Chicago Bears helmet. Jacaranda was a hangout for southside working-class immigrants. Tonight, when one came or left, an icy wind blew in from the door.
‘The dead lady,’ Jose said, tottering on his stool. ‘She came in with cramps. Appendix, right? They did the abdominal X-ray. The lady was ruptured. Emergency surgery – clean it all out.’ He brought his glass to his lips and drained the drink from the ice, then signaled the bartender for another. ‘But it was bad. She got an infection. Peritonitis. They shot her up with antibiotics. She responded, right? Then, this morning, she was septic. She went into shock, had a heart attack. Half an hour later, she was dead.’ The bartender set a new glass on the bar. Jose blinked at the drink a couple times, then said to Kelson, ‘Wendy was the lady’s nurse. The doctors say she got the meds wrong.’
‘I never get meds wrong,’ his fiancée said. Her cheeks glistened in the soft blue light. She’d painted her lips with bright-red lipstick. Everything about her – her face, her arms, her hands, her thighs – was small and round.
‘In a pleasant way,’ Kelson said. She also reminded him of his breakfast at the hospital. ‘Tater tots.’
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘With lipstick,’ he said.
She shot a glance at Jose as if to ask, Who the hell’s your friend? ‘Jose says you’re crazy in the head.’
‘He’s not the first,’ Kelson said.
‘This lady at the hospital,’ Jose said, ‘she was OK last night. This morning, she’s dead. Now they want to put it on Wendy.’
‘I got the meds right,’ Wendy said.
Kelson asked, ‘Do you think there’s anything strange about her death?’
<
br /> ‘I didn’t kill her,’ she said. ‘If you’re big and diabetic, sepsis’ll kill you.’
‘So she could’ve died naturally?’
‘She could a lot of things,’ she said. ‘Dr Madani looked at the chart. She says I didn’t give the lady her cefoxitin overnight.’
‘Dr Madani said that? Did you record it on the chart?’
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘It was busy. Two ICU nurses were out.’
‘So you could’ve forgotten the meds?’
‘I never forget meds,’ she said.
‘Never,’ Jose said.
Kelson asked him, ‘What makes you think someone killed this woman?’
‘Tell him, Wendy.’
‘We’ve got the lady on monitors – heart rate, oxygen, blood pressure. One thing happens with septic shock is low blood pressure. With blood pressure too low you maybe get a heart attack. I saw the readout after she died. I’ve seen something like it before. When we get cocaine ODs with hypertension, we give them nitro or phentolamine. The pressure comes down fast. The lady’s readout looked like that.’
‘Like someone shot her up,’ Jose said.
‘Or maybe she just died,’ Kelson said.
‘I don’t know,’ Wendy said. ‘I wanted to check inventory – see what’s missing, who took it. But Dr Madani sent me home. She said they need to investigate me. I told her I gave the lady her meds. If anyone needs investigating, it’s them.’
‘Do you think Jose’s right about the other dead people? Patricia Ruddig, Josh Templeton, Daryl Vaughn?’
‘I don’t know what to think,’ she said.
Then, in a room behind the bar, Latin jazz started to play – horns, percussion. No one in the bar except Kelson seemed to notice.
Then Jose smiled. ‘That’s Proyecto Libre – a Chicago band. This is the place you come when the world feels like hell.’
‘Yeah, it’s nice,’ Kelson said.
Jose glanced around the bar, tilting as if he sat on a bull instead of a barstool. ‘You ever seen a jacaranda tree? It’s Mexican – the best kind of tree for hot days. Jacaranda flowers, they look like that.’ He pointed at the light around the liquor display. ‘Blue. More than blue. What do you call that color?’
‘Violet?’ Kelson said.
Jose shook his head. ‘The other one.’
‘Lavender,’ Wendy said.
‘They should call that color jacaranda,’ Jose said.
‘It’s lovely,’ his fiancée said, like she meant it. Maybe she was drunk.
‘That’s what it is,’ Jose said. ‘It’s the color of love.’
Kelson felt his resolve failing. Something about sitting in a southside bar with a bull-riding nurse and his Haitian fiancée, talking about murder and trees and love, listening to warm music while a winter wind blew outside, shook him. He said, ‘I’ll go back and ask around.’
Jose looked uncertain what Kelson was promising.
He said, ‘I’ll see what the doctors say.’
Jose grinned. ‘Really, amigo? You’ll take a look?’
‘I know what they’ll tell me. They’ll say I’m imagining things. When I tell them you sent me after them, they’ll think you got kicked in the skull too many times at the rodeo. And you’ – he looked at Wendy – ‘they’ll say you made a terrible mistake with the lady who died. Maybe my talking to them about it will make it worse for you. It’s harder to pretend it didn’t happen once someone starts asking questions. Harder to forgive. You sure you want that?’
‘She does,’ Jose said.
‘Jose told you about me, right?’ Kelson said. ‘When I start asking questions, people ask questions back. It happens every time. Then I answer. I can’t help it. I tell the truth as far as I understand it. Is that what you want?’
She frowned. ‘We need to know what’s happening,’ she said.
‘Even if it means losing your job?’
‘No lie, I don’t know if I have a job right now.’
Jose held her hand. ‘Wendy’s tougher than any rider I ever knew.’
She said, ‘Maybe somebody kicked my head too.’
The band in the back room started into a cover of ‘Oye Como Va.’
Jose took a deep breath, as if relieved someone took his suspicions half seriously. He nodded his head to the music.
Kelson said, ‘Three hundred a day or seventy-five an hour, whichever is less. Plus expenses. Do you have that kind of prize money to throw at this?’
‘These are people’s lives,’ Jose said. He pulled a roll of twenties from a pocket and counted out enough for three days’ work. ‘For my sister’s little girl, right?’
Kelson let him lay the money on the bar, then waved it away. ‘Tell you what. I’ll talk to the doctors. If I hear anything worth pursuing – and I won’t – you can pay me then.’
Jose said to Wendy, ‘I told you he’s a good man.’
‘I thought you told her I’m crazy,’ Kelson said. ‘I know you told me on the phone I’m not your friend.’
‘That doesn’t mean you aren’t a good man.’ The bull rider drained his drink to the ice and signaled the bartender.
When Kelson walked out of the bar into the freezing night, the air bit at his cheeks. He looked up at the sky, where all but a thin layer of clouds had cleared and stars shone dimly through the black. ‘The hell am I doing?’ he said. But for the first time since getting shot in the arm, he felt good, and he told the stars so.
NINE
At 9:30 the next morning, Kelson climbed two flights of stairs to DeMarcus Rodman’s apartment. Rodman lived with his girlfriend Cindi in the Bronzeville neighborhood, across an alley from the Ebenezer Baptist Church. He answered the door in a pair of red sweatpants and a sweatshirt that looked big enough to camp in but somehow still seemed tight on him. He was barefoot. ‘It’s the Yeti,’ Kelson said.
‘The things that go through your head, man,’ Rodman said. ‘Come in out of the cold.’
Years ago, Rodman, Kelson, and Kelson’s ex went to police academy together – Rodman and Nancy competing for the top spot in the class, Rodman usually beating her. Kelson watched them from somewhere back in the pack. Then, on a terrible evening a mile from the house where Rodman grew up, a police officer shot and killed Rodman’s little brother. When the board ruled the incident accidental, Rodman bailed from the academy.
Nancy and Kelson became cops, and Rodman disappeared. Then, after Sue Ellen was born, Nancy quit and returned to school. Kelson went undercover on the narcotics squad, alone and lonely. Then Bicho shot him in the head.
So here they were. Standing in Rodman’s living room, Kelson gazed at pictures of Martin Luther King Jr, Cindi, and Malcolm X hanging on the wall behind the couch. ‘The consequences of our history,’ he said.
‘Yeah, whatever,’ Rodman said. ‘You want coffee?’
‘You think I came for your company?’
Rodman went into the kitchen to make a pot.
Kelson followed him to the doorway. ‘Cindi at work?’
‘Early shift – since four a.m. How’s the arm?’
‘Throbbing.’
‘Means you’re alive. How about the rest of you?’
‘Twisting and turning.’
‘Glad nothing’s changed.’ Rodman got a bag of coffee beans from the cabinet next to the refrigerator. ‘You said last night you had questions.’
‘Yeah – how’re you doing?’
‘Fine since your lawyer got his hands on me.’ Rodman poured beans into the grinder. ‘He’s like Houdini. Cops look at me and see a big black monster. Davies puts me in a hat, pulls me back out, and makes them think I’m a little white bunny. I got a call a half-hour ago from the DA. He apologized for the trouble they put me through. A regrettable mistake, he said. A misunderstanding. I took the apology because what else am I going to do?’ He pressed a button on the grinder, and the blade pulverized the beans.
As he poured the grounds into a filter, someone knocked on the door. ‘Get that, will you?’ h
e said.
Kelson went and put his eye to the peephole. ‘Huh,’ he said, and opened the door.
Homicide detectives Dan Peters and Venus Johnson stood on the landing.
Peters did a double take. ‘You,’ he said.
‘Me?’ Kelson said.
‘What are you doing here?’ Venus Johnson said.
‘Funny, I asked myself the same thing last night,’ Kelson said. ‘But I wasn’t here. I was there. I mean, I was at my office. But it was late, and I had no reason to be there – which was here, at the time. So I went to a bar.’
Peters and Johnson stared at Kelson, their lips parted.
‘As if that explains anything,’ Kelson said.
‘Where’s DeMarcus Rodman?’ Peters said.
‘I thought Ed Davies took care of that.’
‘That’s not an answer,’ Johnson said.
‘I thought it was,’ Kelson said.
Then Rodman was beside him. ‘What do you want?’
Johnson gave him a thin smile. ‘A quick conversation. Mind if we come in?’
‘Without Davies here, I have nothing to say.’
‘No need to be like that,’ Peters said, and he moved toward the door.
Rodman stepped toward him, filling the doorway with his bulk. ‘Uh-uh. Unless you’re made of cartilage like a rat.’
‘That’s a myth,’ Kelson said.
‘Huh?’ Rodman said.
‘Huh?’ Peters said.
‘A myth. Sue Ellen did a school report. Rats have bones, like us. They’re just really good at small holes.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Peters said.
‘Sue Ellen’s interest in animals.’
‘Not the time for this, Sam,’ Rodman said. He turned back to Peters and Johnson. ‘What do you want?’
Johnson said, ‘The gun you shot Renshaw with. Where’d you get it?’
Rodman seemed to chew on that. ‘A trade. A man I know wanted my chainsaw. He had no money. He traded me the gun for it.’
Peters kept from laughing at him. ‘A chainsaw? You a ghetto lumberjack?’
‘Careful,’ Rodman said. His voice was calm, low.
Peters heard the danger and lost his grin.
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