Blood of Paradise (50 page)

“Fox Valley,” Jude said, “that's the women's prison.” The name was a statewide joke.

“Adult Transitional Center. It's out in the woods, nice job-training operation, an HIV peer group program.”

Aha, Jude thought. “She's sick.”

“I'll get to that.” Pitney took a moment with the picture, as though to remind himself of something. “Almost all the information we had on your father and Bill Malvasio and Phil Strock came from Lolly. She had a thing for cops. At least seven officers got involved with her at one point or another, including—”

“My father,” Jude said.

“You know this story.”

“Strock told me a little about it on the flight down here. Up till then—”

“Your father was something of an exception, you know. He got serious.”

“Yeah. I heard. Two years.”

“He fell in love, was what I meant.”

Jude sat back, thinking: Don't let this guy wind you up.

“I realize it may be discomfiting to hear a psychological profile of your father as told by a speed-freak hooker with AIDS, but bear with me. I found Lolly's take rather compelling.”

“You've spoken to her recently.”

“Yes. But that, again, is getting ahead of things. Lolly was fond of your dad. She said he was a good-looking man—I see a lot of him in you, actually—but, according to Lolly, he had no sense of that.”

He was married to my mother, Jude thought. You need a program?

“He compensated with the bull cop routine and, like most guys of that ilk, all it took was somebody to light up the lamps, say she understood. ‘I see the real you.' I'm not saying she played him for a complete fool—Lolly's pretty straight that it was mutual, at least for a while. But your dad fell fast and hard. She said he spent money on her like it was gas and they were going somewhere, and I'm not talking a big Friday night on Rush Street every now and again. He put her up in an apartment on Riverside Drive, paid the monthlies, bought her implants and a butt makeover, even a full-length mink.”

Jude noted the sad breasts again, then remembered the fights, his mom and dad, the ones over money always the worst.

“We were surprised to find the twenty grand hidden in your house, actually, couldn't imagine he'd have any to spare. But he'd talked a lot about the two of them running away. He'd get a divorce, leave your mother.”

Leave us all, Jude thought. It seemed oddly anticlimactic, learning that. But he was pretty hard to impress on a lot of levels at that moment.

“You want to spend money like that on a cop's salary, you need a sideline—that's right around when your dad and Strock and Malvasio started going out on their little capers. I don't mean it was your dad's idea. Malvasio had been nudging him for a while. They worked something out with the Gangster Disciples running Cabrini Green, which meant the Stones and Vice Lords were fair game, and that was who they went after.

“This went on awhile, then things with Lolly took a turn. Your dad was a talker. It started out like bragging then felt like confessing then just turned woe-is-me. Lolly got scared—a sloppy cop who hates his life and tells you way more than you ever wanted to know. That's poison.

“Being who she is, she did about as dumb a thing as she could come up with. She figured she better start saving a little of her own money, so she pawned a charm bracelet he'd bought her. He found out, of course—she'd picked his favorite thing—so he kicked her around, a bad habit he'd formed, then took the ticket, bought the bracelet out of hock, and gave it back to her to say he was sorry. That's when she got in touch with Hank Winters.”

“The cop who was killed.”

“She'd had a little whirlwind with Winters right before she hooked up with your dad, and he seemed the safest harbor she could hope for. She vanished from the apartment your dad had her in, and Winters put her up. But Winters was, if anything, the worst choice she could've made. Once he bled the story out of her, he started blackmailing everybody—your dad, Strock, Malvasio. He particularly hated Malvasio, it was mutual, and suddenly there was talk about killing. Lolly caught on she'd made blunder number two. Meanwhile, your dad was leaving calls with every escort service on the near north side, trying to hunt her down.”

And kill her, Jude thought, wondering if he finally understood the old man.

“She got in touch with the bureau then—on the sly, not so Winters knew. Took a week just to coax her in for a sit-down. I was her handler. She wasn't all that forthcoming, at least not at first—she haggled, got weepy, played games, the whole time trying to see how much she could buy and how little I'd make her pay for it. Bit by bit, though, we began to make some headway.”

“But then Winters got killed,” Jude guessed. “And she disappeared.”

“With Winters dead we had to move. That's why the arrests and the search at your house came down that day. But Lolly was our case and, yeah, she hit the wind. We tried to get evidence off the bangers your dad and Strock and Malvasio had chumped, but that was a dead end. We didn't believe half what they were telling us and knew the grand jury wouldn't, either. Meanwhile Malvasio was on the run. Your dad and Strock worked out deals. That ended it, more or less.”

“Where'd Lolly end up?”

“Detroit. I didn't know that at the time, though.”

“But somebody did.”

“Your old man. Lolly didn't have two twenties to paste together, and friends in Detroit are like enemies anywhere else. When she heard your dad walked away with a deal that meant no jail time, she saw an opportunity. Winters had schooled her well. She started calling, hitting your old man up for cash. One minute she'd threaten, tell him she was going to come forward with everything she knew, then she'd turn around and say the two years with him were the best of her life, she hadn't been happy since, they could still make it work. Regardless of how it got there, the conversation always ended up in the same place: Send money. Your dad didn't have that kind of scratch anymore, had no way to get it. She wouldn't hear that. Her threats got freakier, more personal. In the last call she made to him, four days before he died, she told your dad if he didn't come up with five thousand dollars by the end of the week, she was contacting a reporter for the
Sun-Times
. She'd tell him everything, down to the kink. And she meant it.”

The small room felt even smaller. “And so,” Jude said, “my dad went fishing.”

“Not before he sent Lolly a wire.” Pitney reached down into his briefcase again, this time removing an old telegram that had been folded up for years, the paper soft as tissue, creases ready to tear. Gingerly, he spread it out on the table and turned it so Jude could read. The message consisted of two words:
Forgive me
.

“Lolly believes your old man got himself good and drunk, then dove over the side and tied himself to something underwater. It was planned, he killed himself, she has no doubt about it whatsoever.”

Get in line, Jude thought. He wanted Pitney to put the telegram away. Ask your strung-out hooker squeeze to forgive you, but not your family. Of all the ways to die …

“She blamed herself for your dad's death, and the next ten years were a long, slow fall. Her peculiar gift for bad company took several nasty turns, but the drugs kept her moving. She ended up back on the street in Chicago, turning twists for crystal. Meanwhile, the bureau kept getting hints that Malvasio was coming across the border every year or so, staging hits for a variety of clients, then vanishing again. It was smoke and rumor, nothing could get proved, but an MO developed. We figure he's been involved in as many as thirty homicides, about a dozen of those connected to a fire a year ago in California. He hides down here in between trips north. We have pretty good ties to the PNC, but Chicago's not the only place with twisted cops. Given what they pay their people down here, it's a miracle they're not all on the take. Any event, we could never get our hands on him.”

“Can I stop you for a second?” Jude felt light-headed. He'd been in this room with its ungodly light for how many hours now? But it wasn't just that. He'd heard some of this from Fitz but the thing just got worse every time it came up. “Why didn't McGuire tell me any of this? When he came to question me, I mean.”

Jude sensed from Pitney's reaction that he'd struck a nerve. “When Ed called for a briefing, he reached the agent of the day and got a pretty stock response. Nobody bothered to connect him to me, and I didn't find out about his interest till a week ago. You've heard about the bureau's computer problems. Believe me, they're real. And communication between offices is a sore point, regrettably. Between regions it's worse, and between the States and here …” He let the rest hang.

Too bad, Jude thought. Maybe, if McGuire had been brought up to speed before he met with me, I wouldn't have stonewalled. Maybe I'd have told him the truth, Axel would still be alive. And maybe that's giving myself far too much credit.

“In any event,” Pitney said, “back to Lolly. About a month ago, she contacted the bureau again. Asked for me personally. About a year ago her latest excuse for a boyfriend got popped for exposing himself to some tourists, and he handed Lolly and another street hooker up to buy himself a pass. She got sent to Dwight down south first then transferred to Fox Valley. She was a mess on intake: tweaked, broke, sick. Apparently someone or something turned her around. She got clean, made a searching and fearless moral inventory, as they say—and, among other things, decided she no longer wanted to live with being the sole witness to an unsolved murder.”

“Winters,” Jude guessed.

“She'd been waiting for Winters for over an hour—a man with many hats, he was her connection at that point, on top of everything else. Bit of a control freak, that Hank. She was pacing back and forth, biting her nails, smoking, near midnight. Winters turned into the alley. It was dark but there's a sodium lamp at that end. He looked up, spotted Lolly in her window. He didn't even see it coming—Malvasio slipped out of a doorway and just glided on up. Lolly saw the muzzle flash and Winters went down. Malvasio leaned over him, fired an insurance round, then turned toward her building. He was coming for her. She ran to a friend's place the next floor up, stayed there till dawn. Then left for Detroit.”

Jude thought better of sharing what Strock had told him about his and Malvasio's first, botched attempt on Winters's life. Why complicate the thing? And he mentally compared this version of what had happened with Malvasio's, could almost see how two people, Bill and Lolly, could remember the thing so differently, though he had every reason to believe both of them were lying. But none of that mattered to Pitney, Jude supposed. “You've finally got a witness.”

“Be nice to get him on everything, but one's a start. It's Illinois, he won't get death, not now. But maybe something will shake out once we get him under wraps.”

“What does she want?” Jude asked. “Lolly. In trade, I mean, for testifying.”

“She gets released soon. Medicaid funds are getting cut and she's going to need protease inhibitors. They're expensive. Plus living expenses, relocation. That's acceptable to us.”

“All you have to do is find Malvasio.”

“Which leads me back to you.” Pitney collected the telegram and photograph and tucked them back into his briefcase. “Not every cop with the PNC buys into the kidnap-gone-wrong scenario. Not that they'll come forward—do that, might as well quit the job. Some very influential people have their hands around this thing. But a few straight cops have passed on a thing or two to Ed McGuire, and he and I have hashed it through. In particular, we find it interesting that one of the neighbors said the shots that killed Mr. Odelberg came well after the gunmen were already down. This neighbor hadn't heard gunfire in a while, so she was looking out her window, she could see the street. The
mareros
were dead. None of them fired at Mr. Odelberg, at any rate. The shots seemed to come from somewhere else, she said. And she saw you looking off, down the street, after Mr. Odelberg went down. You looked stunned. But she also wondered why you weren't shot too. You threw yourself over Mr. Odelberg's body. You were a perfect target. But nobody fired. Whoever the shooter was—my money's on Phil Strock—he didn't want to kill you.”

Jude swallowed. Counted to five. Here we are, he thought. “What do you want?”

“Unfortunately, given the fact you brought Strock down here, that suggests you might have been in on the killing. You have to admit, it could be looked at that way. If I were you, I'd want to do everything in my power to dispel such a notion.”

42

They took a car from the embassy, and twice within a matter of blocks the driver ducked into a parking lot, chose a space, and waited. Once it seemed clear no one was following—the Salvadorans and even the State Department frowned on the FBI tooling around the country at will—they headed out again for the heart of the capital.

Jude had to think hard to remember a time he'd ridden in back. Pitney, sitting beside him—rear right side, Axel's usual place—said, “The rumor mill down here's been as active as it has up north when it comes to Malvasio. Though we could never pin it down, word's trickled in over the past year he's been working as a glorified bagman for Hector Torres.” A chastening glance. “The man you so boldly confronted at his restaurant.”

“There was a little girl involved,” Jude said. “Axel felt pretty strongly about it.”

“Oh, I know the story. Lazarek over at ODIC won't shut up about it. He's incensed, the cheek. How dare you. Slandering decent men doing honest business in a dangerous place. And look where it got you.”

I don't need reminding, Jude thought. Out the window, he spotted the Mercado Nacional de Artesanías and it brought Eileen to mind. Harriet Handicraft. In between interrogations and bouts of self-condemnation, she'd been on his mind almost incessantly. He'd been told about her med-evac to the naval hospital at Camp Pendleton, where she'd been met by her parents. How odd it must have been, to have their anthropologist daughter in El Salvador, not their marine son in Iraq, flown home wounded. She was recovering well, he'd been told, no further word.