A Picture of Guilt (11 page)

“Karen, the water district released it. They knew all about it.”

“But you were the one who initiated it. The lawyers say you overstepped your boundaries. It’s a bad precedent.”

“But there was nothing proprietary on it.”

“That may be, but the problem was you made the decision for them. No corporation wants their hand forced—especially by a third party. It wasn’t your tape to begin with. No one’s going to do anything about it, but they are saying it’s indicative.”

“Indicative of what?”

“Of—well, let’s just say they’ve lost confidence in your professionalism.”

I stiffened. “I can’t believe this. What do you say?”

“Ellie, come on. What do you think?”

Through my shock and anger, I could tell this was hard for her, too. “Jesus, Karen. The man was accused of a murder he probably didn’t commit. What was I supposed to do? Look the other way? Pretend it didn’t happen?”

“I know, I know. But you know as well as I do, whether you actually did anything wrong doesn’t matter. Appearance is everything. You weren’t a team player.”

“But I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Karen sighed. “Look Ellie, I don’t have to tell you that people in corporations have blinders on when it comes to their own interests. Or perceived interests. They’ll do whatever it takes to protect themselves—and their jobs. The bad news is as long as I depend on them for my paycheck, I have to toe the line. But there is some good news.”

“Yeah? What?”

“It won’t last forever. Memories are short. A few months from now, this will all blow over. Call me in the spring, and we’ll talk. In the meantime, why don’t you take some time off? After what you went through, I bet you could use it.”

“Thanks.”

I disconnected. Now I understood why no one was calling me back. The Chicago video community is small, and word travels fast. Particularly when it passes through corporate communications. And, to be honest, the water district hadn’t been all that happy about releasing the tape in the first place.

But this was my livelihood, and spring was six months away. What if it didn’t “blow over”? I could be blacklisted indefinitely. They might never let me back on the “team.” Given that Barry’s child support was, at best, erratic, how was I supposed to make ends meet?

I started pacing, a white hot anger skimming my nerves. Years ago, I would have been lauded as someone who, by virtue of suffering at the hands of the power structure, had become a person of value. But those days were gone, and I needed the corporate establishment—at least their largesse—to survive. Damn the suits. Damn Kirk Ryan. And damn Chuck Brashares.

It took six hours of self-pity, a hot bath, and two glasses of wine before I realized that Karen was right. No one had coerced me onto the stand. I’d come forward voluntarily. In a way, I had initiated the chain of events that destroyed my credibility. Karen was right about something else, too:
they
didn’t care if I ever worked again.
They
had their interests to protect.

But I had mine.

I pulled back the sheets and climbed into bed. I’d gotten myself into this. I’d just have to get myself out.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

You hear a lot about the North, South, and West Sides of Chicago, but no one talks much about the East Side, which was where I was going early Monday morning. Hugging Lake Michigan on its southeast side, the area includes working-class neighborhoods like South Chicago, South Deering, and Hegewisch.

A gassy odor filtered through the car as I got off the highway at 130th. If Chicago is the city of big shoulders, this is the meaty part. Farther east are streets with tiny bungalows, a bar on one corner, a church on the other, but 130th and Torrence is the industrial hub. Factories, warehouses, and cranes crowd together, abandoned rail cars line the streets, and smokestacks belch grit and God knows what else into the air.

I’d made a strategic choice. If the objective was to restore my credibility, I had a couple of options. I could try to verify Rhonda Disapio’s story. The problem was, I wasn’t sure how to go about it, short of setting up surveillance at the boat launch. Plus, if the boat men really did kill Mary Jo, I wasn’t anxious to put myself on their turf. The other option was to ferret out Santoro’s background, in an effort to prove he didn’t kill Mary Jo. I already knew his haunts: the bar and the docks.

It wasn’t a tough decision.

The Calumet River flows southwest from Lake Michigan to Calumet Harbor and eventually to the Mississippi River. Through yet another miracle of Chicago engineering, the harbor was dredged and transformed into a deep-water port so it could accommodate freighters from the St. Lawrence Seaway. Leading off the harbor are inlets that make the docks between them look like tines on a giant fork. It’s at these docks that commodities are off-loaded. Years ago they were transferred to rail cars and shipped across the country. Now most of the cargo travels by truck.

I threaded my way around the Ford plant at Torrence and turned on 122nd. Turning again, I drove down a road that had been patched and repatched, and from the groan of my suspension, could stand yet another go-round. A mile down the road, a battered black and white sign said I had reached the Ceres Terminal. I swung into a lot studded with chunks of broken concrete and stopped behind a shabby brick building with a roof of corrugated metal. Two cars were parked at haphazard angles in front.

It was a cool October morning, and condensation coated the cars’ windshields. Pulling on my Sox hat—I knew better than to wear a Cubs hat this far south—I wandered over to a group of longshoremen standing in front of a warehouse. Perched above them on a rusty steel scaffold was a fleshy, graying man with a clipboard. Most of the men looked old. Dressed in canvas coveralls and scuffed, steel-toed boots, several waved union cards in the air.

“Sorry, guys, that’s all I need for today,” the man with the clipboard said. “But I got a barge of steel coils coming in Friday. Be work for about a dozen of youse.”

A collective grumble went up from the men, but it was surprisingly docile, as if they were used to disappointment. I shouldered my way through to the man with the clipboard, but he climbed down off the hiring stand and pretended not to see me. Pulling a tin out of his pocket, he opened it and pinched a wad of Red Man with his thumb and forefinger.

“Excuse me,” I said as he packed it in his mouth. He squinted in my direction, one cheek plumped up like a chipmunk. “Do you know Johnnie Santoro?”

His eyebrows shot up, but he kept chewing.

“I know he used to work down here.”

He spat out a clump of black goop, which landed a few inches from my left sneaker. “Haven’t seen him in over a year. Don’t expect to.”

I stood my ground. “But you knew him, right?”

He looked me up and down. “You a cop?”

“No.”

“Lawyer?”

“No.”

“From the union?”

“No.”

“Then I ain’t got nuttin’ to say.”

He gave me his back and walked away. A few gulls swooped down in parallel arcs above his head, their bellies tinged with the morning sun. I considered groveling, beseeching him with the fact that my livelihood was at stake unless I could clear my name, but after glancing at the unemployed longshoremen still gathered by the warehouse, I reconsidered. I pulled the brim of my cap farther down and started back to the car. As I skirted a second warehouse with peeling paint on its sides, a flicker of movement caught my attention.

“Got a match?” A burly man with white hair, a bulbous red-veined nose, and skin the color of a dried apple drew a cigarette from behind his ear. The scent of booze clung to him, and there was a suspicious bulge in his pocket. I dug around in my purse and pulled out a frayed matchbook from the Italian Gardens, my favorite neighborhood restaurant.

He lit the cigarette with pudgy fingers and took in a deep drag. Then he blew it out so contentedly I was tempted to bum one, even though I haven’t smoked in fifteen years. He grinned at me as if he knew what I was thinking, and slipped the matches into his pocket. “You’re that dame I saw on TV.” He studied me. “You stuck up for Johnnie. That took guts.”

He could keep the matches. He knew Santoro. I tried to suppress my excitement. “It didn’t seem to do much good.”

“You never know.” He brought the cigarette back up to his lips. “Why you come all the way down here? You ain’t had enough?”

“I—I have some questions about him.”

“Yeah.” He spread his arms. “But how you know to come down here?”

“Oh.” I’d misunderstood his question. “I called the union and asked where my best chance was to find some longshoremen. They said Ceres was the only place hiring today.”

He nodded, then motioned for me to follow him to the edge of the dock. A barge was tied up a few yards away, its contents hidden under several tarps. Water lapped against the side of the barge. Across the inlet a freighter had tied up, and I heard shouts and saw men bustling to off-load materials. The smell of rotting fish was strong.

He flicked his ash into the water and took another drag, his belly ballooning in and out. “I’m Sweeney. What is it you wanna know?”

This was the best offer I’d had in weeks. “I’m not sure how to begin, but, well—tell me how you knew Santoro.”

Sweeney inhaled. The tip of his cigarette glowed orange. “His daddy and me were buddies.”

“Santoro’s father is a longshoreman?”

“Was. He’s passed on now. Died of cancer.”

So did my mother. “Did he—Johnnie—come from a large family?”

He took another drag. “Not so big. Four kids, I think. Three girls and Johnnie.”

“Do they live around here?”

“Not far.” He flicked his cigarette off the dock. It landed in the water with a tiny hiss. “What is it you want, lady?”

I sucked in a breath. “Mr. Sweeney, I don’t think Johnnie Santoro killed his girlfriend. But the jury didn’t believe me, and unless I can prove it, I may not ever work again. I’m trying to find any information, any evidence, anything that would help prove he didn’t do it. I figured I’d start by coming down here.”

He stared at me, sizing me up for another long moment. Then, “In that case, I dunno if I’m gonna be much help.”

“Why?”

“I—well, let’s just say I didn’t much like Johnnie.”

A small boat chugged down the waterway. The barge rocked gently in its wake.

“Why not?”

“Johnnie was one of those guys who always wanted something for nothin’. You know what I mean? Thought just because his father worked down here, he was—entitled.” He folded his arms.

“Did he work regularly as a longshoreman?”

Sweeney scoffed. “Not much. And when he did, he was always struttin’ around like he owned the place. Mouthing off, too.”

“About what?”

“His friends. His deals. How he was gonna score big. Bullshit like that.”

“Deals? Was Santoro dealing?”

“Don’t know.” He looked off onto the water.

I waited.

He coughed hard, a smoker’s hack, and took out another cigarette. “But seems to me, a couple months before he got busted, I can remember him sayin’ he wouldn’t have to be doing this much longer.”

“Doing what?”

“You know. Scroungin’ work down here.”

“Why not?”

“Said he was working a big deal.”

“But you never asked about the details.”

He looked at me under hooded eyes. “Ain’t none of my business, now, was it?”

“Did he ever mention a guy named Sammy?”

He dug out the Italian Garden matches, frowning. “Not so’s I remember.”

He lit another cigarette, waved out the match, and let it drop to the cracked concrete.

I cleared my throat, phrasing my next question carefully. “Did Johnnie have a union card?”

“Oh yeah, his daddy made sure of that. That was part of the problem. Charlie couldn’t say no to Johnnie.”

I paused. “Well, given the way things are down here, you think he might have been mixed up with the wrong people? People who didn’t like the way he behaved, and—”

“You mean like the people what still control who gets hired and how much of our pension they’re gonna rip off, even though there ain’t no work? Those kind of people who you mean?”

I nodded.

He hesitated. “I couldn’t say. All I can say is Charlie and I weren’t never mixed up with that crowd. Those guys’ll bleed you dry.” He sniffed. “Of course, twenty years ago, it didn’t matter. There was plenty of work. You could still make it. But now…it ain’t never been this bad. A boat don’t tie up but maybe once a week. No way you can live on that.”

He stole a glance at me, then unexpectedly grinned, baring a set of yellow, stained teeth. “Now, I ain’t gonna deny that Charlie and I mighta helped something fall off the back of the boat once or twice. Like the time a bunch of Corvette engines came in on a freighter. Some of ’em ended up in cars all up and down the South Shore. I heard the FBI took to casing the McDonald’s over at Seventy-ninth and Phillips, making all them high school kids lift up their hoods so’s they could check out what was inside their Chevys.” His belly shook with quiet laughter. “But those days are gone. There ain’t nothing left to steal. I mean, who’d want a load of steel coils?”

“So, it’s not likely Johnnie was—”

“Like I told you. I keep my head down.”

“I understand.” I looked out over the waterway. The sun was sewing the surface of the water with tiny bursts of light. “Tell me something, Mr. Sweeney. Has anybody else come down here asking questions about Santoro?”

“Like who?”

“Cops, investigators, lawyers. Anyone.”

“Not so’s I’d notice. But this ain’t the kind of place people come if they don’t have to.”

“Yeah. Well, thanks. You’ve been a big help.”

He straightened up. “Like I said, Charlie was my friend.”

I headed toward the car. Just before I rounded the corner, I turned around. Sweeney was gazing out over the water, as if the docks had stolen his soul, but it wasn’t worth the effort to get it back.