He had fucked up. Royally.
Daniel leaned back in the chair. He felt as if he had just been kicked in the solar plexus.
Until now, he’d had no idea that Czarcik knew about the judge. Why would he? The whole press conference, that patsy Fenton Oakes, their conversation up to this point—it was all about the Fernandez murders.
Daniel tried to stop the panic welling up inside him, even as he searched for a plausible way that Czarcik could have connected the cases. Right now, clairvoyance seemed the most logical explanation.
He played the time line of recent events over in his head. As a BJE detective, Czarcik was assigned to the Fernandez case. Check. Through solid police work, however faulty, he and his fellow officers had identified and apprehended a suspect. Check. With that suspect in custody, a press conference was scheduled, both out of protocol and for a little chest pounding. Check. There was nothing, nothing that could have connected the Fernandezes to Judge Robertson. But that’s what they were. Connected.
Maybe this detective was simply a lot smarter than Daniel had given him credit for. But if this were true, surely he wouldn’t have mentioned the judge, making such an egregious mistake. And that’s what this was. A mistake. Czarcik’s expression betrayed him the moment he uttered Robertson’s name.
This posed another problem for Daniel. Were he to acknowledge the slip, he would be admitting, however tacitly, that Czarcik was right about the connection. This he wasn’t ready to do. Not yet.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Groucho said.
“Doesn’t matter. I believe you. I believe you killed the Fernandezes.” Czarcik was aware he was lying poorly. And because he had fucked up, there wasn’t any reason to continue to play dumb. The effect that Judge Robertson’s name had on Groucho was obvious. “But I also believe—hell, I know—that you killed Judge Jeral Robertson.”
Groucho hesitated. “Assuming I know who that is—and I don’t—what makes you think that?”
“DNA.” The faster he answered, the more truthful he hoped to appear. Otherwise, it might seem he was making it all up as he went along.
Daniel frowned. It was theoretically possible, of course. Specialists were becoming more and more adept at lifting trace DNA from the most unlikely places. But he believed he had taken all the necessary precautions. He doubted he would have left DNA evidence at even one of the crime scenes, much less two, which is what investigators would have needed to connect the cases. And if they really had his DNA, they would have had his identity. APBs would have been sent out across multiple states. There would have been no false arrest. Fenton Oakes would still be a free man.
“We’re a couple of bad liars,” Daniel admitted, talking to himself but loud enough for Czarcik to hear.
Czarcik could tell Groucho was rattled. Frustrated. This wasn’t how he had planned it. Not at all. And thus far, he had been a man who relied on meticulous planning. “We both know you’re not a professional killer. You’re not some maniac. Just between the two of us, I might not even call you a murderer.” Czarcik waited for a reaction and then continued. “You might even be brilliant. But even the most brilliant ones eventually get caught. Slip up. You’re no different. But I promise you, turn yourself in now, and it will be better for everyone.”
Daniel smiled, his confidence creeping back. “Appealing to my vanity is a fool’s errand, Detective. As I have none.” He leaned in, again fully engaged. “And if I had contemplated turning myself in, if I had even a shred of doubt about my mission, I never would have found it necessary to pay you this visit.”
Daniel’s head began to throb. The verbal sparring wasn’t helping. Thus far he had held off taking any medication in front of Czarcik. Who knew what the detective might use to identify him? But now the pain was coming back, and unless he addressed it immediately, he feared becoming incapacitated before he had a chance to put a safe distance between himself and Czarcik.
Daniel glanced over at the bedroom window. The sun would soon be up. “I think I need to be leaving now, Detective. As we discussed, my first stop will be the three mailboxes to retrieve those inconvenient photos.”
He paused, wanting to make sure that Czarcik appreciated the gravity of the situation. “I hope I don’t see you down the line. For your sake.”
The outside world, which for both men had ceased to exist for the past hour, began to awaken, the sporadic bleating of car horns on the expressway mixing with the low rumblings of the garbage trucks in an urban symphony.
“I have to come after you. And eventually, I will find you.”
Groucho rolled his shoulders, stretching. He pressed his thumb into his temple as if tightening a screw. “You do what you need to do, Detective. I came to you tonight to tell you that you had arrested an innocent man. I, on the other hand, am not innocent. But those I visit, they are far less innocent than I am. I think you know that. And I think you agree with me.” As a milky dawn pushed through the shades in Czarcik’s bedroom, Groucho got out of his chair. He struggled a bit to get to his feet and placed a hand on the wall. As he reached the door, he turned back around. “In another world, at another time, I think we’d be friends, Detective. I really do. I think I’d enjoy talking with you. And you wouldn’t even have to pay for it.”
Czarcik’s anger bubbled up like a witch’s cauldron. “It’s not too late for me to put a bullet right above that stupid fucking mustache,” he replied, fingering the gun.
Groucho nodded and slipped out of the room, leaving Czarcik staring at the black rectangle of the doorway.
Daniel walked briskly down the street. As he approached his car, he removed the disguise and stuffed it into a plastic bag. He would dispose of it in a far less conspicuous place.
Once he was comfortably behind the wheel and well outside the city limits, he pulled over to the side of the road and began to cry. He wasn’t surprised at this release. He loathed confrontation, and his visit with Czarcik had left him physically and emotionally drained, much more than his visits to the judge and the Fernandezes had.
Still, it was a necessary step. He was obligated to warn Detective Czarcik.
But if the detective tried to stop him before his work was complete, he would be obligated to kill him.
TWELVE
Czarcik remained in bed for a long time. He had plenty to think about.
Part of him wished he would have just blown the fucking head off the most talented of the Marx brothers. It was as clear cut a case of self-defense as one could hope for: a perpetrator breaks into a private home, wearing a disguise to avoid identification, and threatens the victim at gunpoint. Even those bastards in Internal Affairs would have to rubber-stamp this one.
But then there was the matter of the photographs. There was little reason for Czarcik to doubt Groucho’s sincerity. Somewhere out there, three mailboxes held Collected Vices of Detective Paul Czarcik.
But what if he had killed Groucho and the photographs had made their way into the right (or wrong) hands? How detrimental would it have been? After all, a dangerous serial killer would have been liquidated. Surely that would have bought him a little leeway. Maybe he could even use that “Get Out of Jail Free” card? But Czarcik could also picture that punctilious son of a bitch Watkins, sitting behind his imperial desk, saying something condescending and asinine like “Fulfilling our oath to protect and serve the citizens of this fair city doesn’t absolve us of our duty to do so within the boundaries of the law.” And would Parseghian go out of his way to take on Watkins and defend Czarcik? Parseghian was loyal to his men, but he was as much a politician as a cop and was unlikely to do anything to endanger his future career in glad handing and baby kissing.
Furthermore, Czarcik was still bothered by the way his conversation with Groucho had ended. It wasn’t the questioning of his moral compass. It was that of his competence—an insult he couldn’t suffer quite as easily.
Groucho had, in essence, dared Czarcik to catch him. His ability to tr
ack and kill—or at least capture—his quarry was something in which Czarcik still took an enormous amount of pride. He had yet to be bested in any of his biggest cases, the ones into which he put his heart and soul. Not by the Argentados, those slippery Italians who had thought they could muscle out the black gangs for the heroin market. Nor by Feaster Hand, the pharmaceutical magnate who poisoned his first two wives and would have done the same to the third if Czarcik hadn’t found the vial of ricin in the basement of the CEO’s vacation home on Mirror Lake.
And certainly not by Groucho Marx.
Groucho’s Travis Bickle comparison was accurate, however. He was washing the scum off the streets. What bothered Czarcik was that he was doing it on his own terms. Saying “Stay the fuck out of my way.” And this wasn’t something that Czarcik could simply abide.
He turned his attention back to the window.
The garbage trucks were out in full force. He could hear their metallic concerto as they raised overflowing dumpsters to the heavens before smashing them down, now empty, on the cool concrete not yet warmed by the rising sun. Soon the streets would be teeming with commuters, joggers, meter maids—none aware that a very dangerous game was playing out among them.
Groucho Marx had thrown down the gauntlet. Detective Paul Czarcik was about to pick it up, just as soon as he did another bump and took a shower so hot it was nearly intolerable.
He leaned his head against the tile. The condensation dripped onto his face as the steam rose from his cherry-red shoulders.
He thought about Groucho. And Genevieve Kuzma. It had been a long time since he’d thought of her.
THIRTEEN
1985
Officer Paul Czarcik of the CPD stepped into the gloaming.
His eyes were still red, even though he had stopped crying in the theater. It wouldn’t do for a cop to be caught bawling on the street, even a twenty-three-year-old rookie just a few months out of the academy.
He walked through the glass doors of the Esquire Theater where he had just seen Mask, a tearjerker about Rocky Dennis, a teenager who suffered from craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, a rare genetic condition that left him horribly disfigured.
The advertising had led Czarcik to believe he was in for a film about motorcycle gangs, not the heartbreaking true story of a modern-day Elephant Man.
It was just after Thanksgiving in Chicago. Czarcik wore his leather police department jacket not because of the weather, but because he was proud of it, even prouder than he had been of his high school letterman jacket.
He crossed over Oak Street, maneuvering through the throngs of well-heeled shoppers, like the shifty tailback he once was. He took a left and headed down Rush, where he had found a free parking spot for his beloved 1977 Pontiac Bonneville. It was the color of diarrhea, had two broken taillights, a door that wouldn’t open, and was in need of a new transmission. But as a graduation gift from his parents, it was his. All his.
First-generation Polish immigrants, Czarcik’s parents had never wanted him to become a cop. His father wanted him to go into banking. As a union millwright, the elder Czarcik knew little about high finance. But he knew of growing up hungry in Eastern Europe, behind the Iron Curtain. As a result, he wanted his only son to make as much money as possible.
His mother harbored more romantic notions of employment. She had hoped that Paul would become an educator at one of the city’s great universities, preferably a professor of literature. She came from a family of teachers for whom there was no higher calling than the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge.
She had also inadvertently set her son on the path of law enforcement.
As a child, Paul had been surrounded with books. His mother would read to him for hours every night, dazzling him with tales of Arabian nights and death-defying voyages on the seven seas. Hardly surprising, then, that her son became a voracious reader.
But despite her best efforts to introduce him to the works of Dickens, Tolstoy, and Twain, Paul gravitated to Poe, Agatha Christie, M. R. James, and his favorite, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose fictional resident of 221B Baker Street had an indelible impact on his childhood. When he was an impressionable eleven-year-old, Paul slept an entire month with a chair wedged under his doorknob, convinced the hound of the Baskervilles was pawing at his door during the night.
As he got older, he devoured the great American hard-boiled authors—Chandler, Hammett, Cain—and especially the pulp novels of Mickey Spillane, Fredric Brown, and Cornell Woolrich. In 1972, he dressed as Popeye Doyle for Halloween, earning him plenty of curious looks from the parents of run-of-the-mill vampires, ghosts, and baseball players.
At the moment of truth, he sat his parents down at their kitchen table. This was where anything of importance was discussed. “Mom, Dad, I want to be a cop,” an eighteen-year-old Paul declared.
His mother had wept. “But you can make a living—a good living—teaching Proust,” she pleaded.
Once she had calmed down, his father pointed at him with a gnarled, arthritic finger. “You’re sure?” he asked. Paul had nodded. “Then you be the best goddamned cop you can be. You make us proud, you hear me?”
Paul had smiled from ear to ear as his mother continued sobbing.
Czarcik piloted the Bonneville down Lake Shore Drive as the first chords of Starship’s “We Built This City” came through the radio, a catchy tune that Czarcik didn’t mind. As a classic-rock junkie, however, he found it hard to believe the track came from the remnants of Jefferson Airplane, one of the truly transcendent bands of the sixties. Marconi playing the mamba was hardly as profound as the surrealist musings of a hookah-smoking caterpillar.
Despite the mild weather, the lake looked angry, fixing for a storm. Miniature whitecaps smashed against the concrete rib cage of Navy Pier, the three-thousand-foot eyesore that reached into Lake Michigan, as if it wanted no part of the city. It boggled Czarcik’s mind that what should have been the country’s most attractive piece of real estate was allowed to remain deserted like a postapocalyptic playground. Then again, he was just a beat cop, not a city planner.
As a rookie, Czarcik was assigned to the night shift. The crazy eights—from eight in the evening until eight in the morning. Even though the shift was supposed to be the least desirable, he didn’t mind it. The darkness suited him. He was usually back home and in bed by nine in the morning. If he was up by three in the afternoon, that was a good night’s sleep, and he still had a few hours to kill with movies, exercise, or other recreational pursuits before he was required to check in for work at the First District on South State Street.
Darkness had fallen by the time Czarcik pulled into the station. He had time for a quick dinner before his shift began, so he walked over to Galway’s, an Irish pub on Wabash just under the L tracks. The place was crowded, and Czarcik saw two cops from his precinct—one he knew, one he only recognized from around the station—drinking in a back booth. He turned to avoid them just as Bill Clemens, his acquaintance, caught his eye and waved him over.
“Paul! Paul, over here,” he called out, gesturing frantically. Czarcik pretended to notice Clemens for the first time, lifted his head in recognition, and headed over.
Clemens was perfectly bald and obese. He reminded Czarcik of the wrestler King Kong Bundy, whom he had seen earlier in the year at some newfangled event called WrestleMania. “Hey, Paul,” he said, smiling deviously, “how come women have two holes?”
“So when they get drunk you can carry them home like a six pack,” Czarcik answered. Clemens looked disappointed. “I heard that in like seventh grade. Truly Tasteless Jokes.”
“Well, sit down anyway, you son of a bitch.” Clemens opened his hand and gestured to the opposite side of the booth. Even if Czarcik had wanted to sit next to Clemens, there wouldn’t have been enough room.
“I’m Paul Czarcik,” he said, extending his hand. “I’ve seen you around the station.”
“Bob Tibbett,” the other cop said as Czarcik plopped down next to him. He
was around the same age as Clemens but good looking, with a full head of dark brown hair. Unlike his colleague, he hadn’t allowed his body to resemble that of a beluga whale.
Both cops had whiskey tumblers in front of them, halfway filled with a brown liquid. “Join us?” Clemens asked, pointing to his glass.
Czarcik shook his head. “I’m on nights. Shift starts in less than an hour.”
A beat of silence and then Clemens and Tibbett erupted in laughter. Czarcik smiled uneasily.
“He’s a rookie,” Clemens said to Tibbett.
“I never would have guessed,” Tibbett replied.
“Good Christ,” Clemens said, still laughing, “the hell you come in here for, then? The ambiance?” He pronounced the word like “ambulance.”
“Thought I’d grab a quick bite before my shift.”
“Stay with the burgers. They’re safe. Avoid any of the Irish food. Trust me,” Tibbett warned. “And you’re talking to a couple of Micks here.”
Clemens nodded, corroborating. “Who they have you partnered with now?” he asked.
“Klein.” The two men exchanged a look that Czarcik couldn’t quite read.
A waitress came over. “What can I get you, sugar?” she said to Czarcik.
“Uh, just a cheeseburger with bacon, please.”
“How ’bout to drink?”
“Water is fine.”
“Bring ’im a double rye,” Clemens chimed in.
“No, I really—” Czarcik began.
“Don’t worry, rookie,” Clemens assured him. He dismissed the waitress with a flick of his wrist. “I’ll drink it.” Then he winked at Czarcik. “But you can still pay.”
Again he and Tibbett roared, only stopping for Clemens to ask, “What’s the difference between Antarctica and a clitoris?”
Ed Klein had hair like a politician. Thick, graying in all the right places, and held perfectly in place by an invisible force of nature. He was also brutally honest, condescending, unambitious, and hated children. All things considered, he was better as a cop.
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