A Bad Night's Sleep (11 page)

“What can I do for you?” she said.

“I need a gun.”

She frowned. “I was afraid you’d say that. You know I can’t help you. You’re on TV, and I don’t sell high-risk. The cops find a gun on you and trace it to me, and I’ve got to go into early retirement.”

“I’ll pay twice what you’re asking.”

She rolled her eyes. “Jesus! Do you think I’m that easy?”

“Yeah, usually. I’ll pay whatever you’re asking.”

“Wow,” she said and she looked at me, worried. “You’re hungry for a gun.”

I admitted I was.

“You know, if you find yourself a girl for a night, that can sometimes take care of the itch, and it’s a lot less dangerous.”

“I’m not planning to shoot anyone. I’m trying to keep from getting shot.”

She stared at me awhile and then flipped a wall switch behind the counter. I’d seen her flip that switch before. It automatically locked the front door. Anyone who wanted to come in now would need to hit a buzzer.

She reached under the counter and removed a small Ruger .38 semiautomatic. The grip had some wear but the gun looked like it would shoot just fine.

“It holds six, plus one,” Susie said. “I’ll charge you three-fifty. I could ask for more.”

“You got anything else?”

She looked irritated. “Take it or leave it.”

“I’ll take it. And a box of fifty rounds.”

I paid cash, which she slipped into a pocket in her jeans. She slid the gun into a soft case and handed it to me. “Happy shooting,” she said. “Or not.”

“Thanks, Susie.”

I turned to go.

“You sure you don’t need a girl?” she said.

I turned back. “I’ve got all I can handle right now.”

She leaned on the counter. “Tell.”

I smiled at her. “Another time.”

*   *   *

LUCINDA HAD LET HERSELF
into my office. When I walked in, she was sitting at the desk, working at the computer.

She’d set my mostly empty bottle of Jim Beam at the edge of the desk to make it conspicuous. She’d also fished through the desk drawers. The Baggie of cocaine was propped against the bottle.

It was an accusation.

I went to the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and took a drink. The Baggie fell to the floor and I left it there.

“You bastard,” she said without looking up from the computer.

I drank again.

She said, “I don’t work with drunks or cokeheads.”

“Good policy.” I took another drink.

She spun from the computer, her eyes full of fire. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Where do I start? I shot a cop because I figured that if I didn’t he’d kill some innocent men. Then the innocent men threw me in jail for three days. For trying to save them, I guess. When they let me out they convinced me to join up with the guys who were shooting at them. Why would anything be wrong?”

She shook her head, disgusted. “Since when did you start feeling sorry for yourself?”

“I’ve always felt sorry for myself!” I said.

She looked at me long. Then she laughed. When she caught her breath, she said, “You’re hysterical.”

I drank. “See? No sympathy.”

She nodded at the bottle. “You keep that up, you’re going to sleep tonight facedown on the floor.”

I thought about that and thought about my evening plans with Earl Johnson’s crew and Chicago’s gangs. I screwed the cap onto the bottle. “You’re probably right.” I dropped the bottle in the trash can.

Lucinda’s eyes were doubtful. “Really?”

I shrugged. “If the cleaning service doesn’t empty the garbage tonight, I’ll probably dig it out tomorrow.”

That seemed enough for Lucinda, or almost. “What about the coke?”

I picked the Baggie off the floor. “You want it?”

She shook her head no.

I dropped it in the garbage on top of the whiskey bottle, though it felt like lighting a fire in front of an exit door.

She sighed. “Now tell me what’s up.”

I filled her in on the meeting I’d agreed to attend and the illegal Ruger I was carrying even though the rules were against bringing guns. When I finished, she glanced at the garbage can like she might need a drink.

“You want me to tail you?” she said.

I shook my head. “Too dangerous. Johnson and his crew are going to be watching. If they see you in the rearview mirror they might get the idea that La Raza or the Latin Kings are making their own plans for the meeting.”

“You going to tell Bill Gubman about this?”

“I wasn’t going to. You think I should?”

“I don’t think you should get in a car with Johnson’s guys and go hang out with gangbangers unless you’ve got backup.”

“Bill would want to do the same thing as you—tail me. I think I’m safer without that.”

She looked unhappy but said, “Okay.”

“What have you found?” I asked.

“A lot. Some of it interesting.” She picked up a stack of paper from the computer printer. “Earl Johnson finished third from the bottom of the same academy class you were in. You finished third from the top. Nice symmetry.”

“That’s on Google?”

She shook her head. “I called records. Johnson’s gotten four commendations and two complaints. Nothing unusual for a vice detective. Most of the other guys have records that look about the same.”

“What were the complaints for?”

“First, a hooker says he made an agreement with her—she has sex with him and he doesn’t arrest her. She says they did it a couple of times. But then he took her money and arrested her anyway. Internal affairs investigates but the hooker disappears. Complaint file is closed. Second, a pimp says Johnson beat him up and took his money. Internal affairs investigates again but the pimp disappears too. Complaint file closed.”

“Yeah, that sounds like Johnson.”

“The commendations are all from good citizens whose neighborhoods he cleared of prostitutes. Bob Monroe’s record on vice is shorter, one complaint and one commendation. He came over from the gang unit two years ago. His gang record is clean—officially—but I made another call and the word is he got too friendly with some of the guys he was supposed to be policing. It never went to internal affairs but that’s why they moved him to vice.”

“Who told you that?”

“I’ve still got friends in the department. A couple of them anyway.”

I told her about Victor Lopez, the kid Bill Gubman told me about, who had complained about Monroe and then vanished and was presumed dead. Then I asked, “What else?”

She leafed through her papers, pulled out a few sheets. “The one I can’t figure out is Raj. He’s basically an eagle scout. Six service commendations. No complaints. Fast track to detective. Unless there’s another Farid el Raj in Chicago, he also coaches his son’s Little League team and is a member of the Lebanese-American league, serving as Chicago-area chairman of philanthropic outreach. What’s he doing with Johnson and Monroe?”

I shrugged. “Greed is greed. He looks happy enough when he’s at The Spa Club.”

“I Googled the club name and got hits for a chain of spas in Utah and a stand-alone in Minnesota—straight places, unrelated to Johnson’s. Johnson’s club doesn’t appear at all, not even on the adult chat boards.”

“It’s not like they’re advertising next to the escort services.”

“Yeah, but it’s hard to keep quiet about a place like that,” she said. “Sooner or later, some guy’s going to boast about getting laid, even if he paid a thousand dollars for it.”

“The guys who run The Spa Club have a lot of incentive to keep the place a secret. The people who go there have a lot to lose too. If they slip and it comes out, they fall hard.”

Lucinda gave me a half smile.

“What?” I said.

“I think I see them slipping.”

A little after 6:00, we walked out and had dinner at a Chinese restaurant called Opera, which made the best garlic black bean shrimp in the city. We split an order of the shrimp, some Hainanese mussels, and the black tiger prawn Singapore noodles. For an hour, the city seemed far away. Outside the window, the November wind sucked away the last warmth and life from the leafless branches of the trees in the curbside planters. It swung the metal and plastic sign that hung over the door of the bank across the street. Yellow cabs shined their headlights into the back windows of other yellow cabs as they took their passengers to whatever happiness or sadness was waiting for them at home. But inside the restaurant, the air was warm and smelled of garlic and chili peppers, and the light was low and comforting. A waiter brought a pot of tea, then plate after plate of hot food. He said to let him know if there was anything else he could bring us. It would be his pleasure to bring it, he said. Like we deserved it.

Afterward, we stood outside my building. Lucinda looked at me close. “Be careful tonight,” she said.

I nodded.

She moved in closer. “Give me a call when you get back.”

“It’ll be late,” I said.

She nodded. “Give me a call.”

“Okay.”

She looked at me with her dark eyes. She was wearing jeans and a brown leather coat that she’d zipped up to her chin. She looked small and warm and self-contained.

Already I felt the cold wind seeping into my skin.

She leaned onto her toes and gave me a quick kiss on the lips.

Then she was gone.

I rode the elevator to the eighth floor. During the day, the hallway would fill with students from the secretarial school. Roselle Turner cashed the students’ federal loan checks and sank a few pennies from each of them back into the school. Half of the computers were broken and the other half were ten years old. Still, the students dressed up for school each day and you could hear the hope in their voices.

Now the hallway was silent, the classroom lights off.

I let myself into my office and went straight to the garbage can. I took out the Baggie and the bottle, put them in a file cabinet drawer, and locked it. No telling when Lucinda would poke around again.

Then I sat in my desk chair.

The steam radiator clanked twice and went silent. Traffic passed on the street below with a hush as soft as waves breaking on a distant beach. A car horn honked far away.

I turned the chair to the window and sat with my feet on the sill. In a lighted window of the insurance building across the street two men were arguing. In another window, a cleaning woman mopped a floor with her eyes turned downward. Most of the other offices were empty.

I swung the chair back to my desk and loaded the Ruger.
Be careful,
Lucinda had said. Good advice.

What were the dangers?

The police department was like a small town when it came to secrets. Sooner or later Johnson would learn that I was working with Bill Gubman. He already knew I was Bill’s friend. Unless he was sloppier than he looked, he would already be asking questions. His crew couldn’t have lasted a month unless he knew people in the department who would give him answers. What would he do when he found out I was helping Bill set him up to take a fall? Putting a bullet in my head might seem like a justifiable defense. Throw Chicago’s street gangs into the mix and I had another dozen angles to protect. Whatever else Johnson and his crew called their scheme, they were extorting the gangs. Taking a few bucks a week from each member sounded harmless until you did the multiplication. When Johnson introduced me as a money collector, the gang members would see me as an enemy and they had a long history of killing enemies.

At 7:40, I went back to the file cabinet where I’d stashed the bourbon and cocaine and unlocked it. Another drawer held shorts, a T-shirt, and a pair of running shoes—for mornings when I had time to jog through Grant Park—and a pair of baggy black pants and a black Windbreaker, for nights when I needed to be invisible. Under the clothes were a small toolbox, a ball of twine, and a roll of duct tape. I took out the pants and tape and re-locked the cabinet.

I stripped off my jeans, taped the gun to my inner thigh, and put on the black pants. Reaching the gun would take some work, but most body searches stick to the outside of the legs. Ripping off the tape might sting but not as bad as taking a bullet.

I went out to the men’s room that I shared with the secretarial school and splashed cold water on my face in the sink. The eyes that stared back at me in the mirror looked tired and scared. I tried to flatten my emotions, make my face say nothing. Corrine used to say that I looked like Lech Walesa from Poland’s Solidarity days, but forget the moustache. Maybe if I grew the moustache I could pull off a cool Eastern European look.

I went back to my office and stared across the street at the insurance building. The arguing men were gone. So was the cleaning woman. The building was a slab of concrete and glass, like a monument to the people who spent their lives there.

At 8:03 the phone rang. Raj was waiting in a car outside the building. I told him I would be right down.

FOURTEEN

WE DROVE WEST FROM
my office in Raj’s SUV. He put a Cal Tjader CD on the stereo and tapped the steering wheel to the beat. He glanced at the rearview mirror, back to the street, and at the mirror again.

“Someone following us?” I asked.

He glanced again, then cut hard to the left, crossed the oncoming traffic, and shot down South Clark Street. At the corner, he stopped and looked at the mirror. “No,” he said.

We turned right and, a block later, right again. At Congress Parkway, we stopped at another stoplight. Raj flipped on his left-turn signal and I glanced over my shoulder.

A white GMC van pulled close behind us.

Even in the dark, I recognized the men in the front seat—the lead FBI agent who’d stopped me and Lucinda after we left the Daley Plaza memorial service, and the man Lucinda had elbowed in the throat. The van had on its left-turn signal too.

When the stoplight turned and Raj pulled into the intersection, I said, “Go straight.”

He gave me a look.

“A van’s following us.”

He continued straight across the intersection and glanced in the mirror.

“Fuck,” he said and accelerated.

“They’re following me, not you,” I said.

He turned left at the next corner as a light turned red. After three cars passed, the FBI agents got a chance and the van ran the light and fell in behind us.