Brush Back (22 page)

THE TOO-REAL THING

Conrad dropped me
at the commuter train station when we’d finished talking to Father Cardenal. I was furious: he’d had his men bring me the length of the city, but he refused to drive me back, even though the commute on public transport would take close to two hours. But Conrad, who waxes hot and cold with me, or maybe cold and lukewarm, felt I’d been obstructing his investigation. Leaving me to find my way home was punitive in a petty way. Police don’t get paid much, but power is a job benefit most of the rest of us don’t have.

If he hadn’t been so abrasive, I might not have left the station—or if there’d been a train due soon, but they only run once an hour this time of day and I’d just missed one.

The station wasn’t all that far from the Guisar slip. As soon as Conrad’s car turned south, I climbed down from the platform and walked along Ninety-third Street toward the docks. It was hard to keep my sense of direction on the roads that twisted around the Calumet River. My phone’s map app was also baffled. There are a lot of warehouses, scrap metal yards, loading docks, abandoned steel plants and so on along the river and I made a couple of time-wasting detours.

The confusing trail was kind of a metaphor for my conversations this morning, first with Conrad, then with Father Cardenal.

We’d talked to the priest under the crumbling ceiling to his office. The patch I’d watched him install two weeks ago was still in place, but another hole had appeared over the photo of Father Gielczowski.

Cardenal had expressed shock at Jerry Fugher’s death, and had asked if I was involved in it. Of course, that made Conrad jump on me like Mitch on a shinbone, so the conversation, which had not been cordial from the outset, deteriorated further.

When I’d finally persuaded the two men that accusing me of all the crimes in South Chicago wasn’t a recipe for my cooperation, Conrad remembered the woman I’d seen talking to Fugher, or as he put it, that I “claimed” I’d seen talking to Fugher.

I gave Cardenal the same description I’d given Conrad.

“She could be anyone,” the priest said, looking at me suspiciously.

“She could be any white woman with dark blond shoulder-length hair, about thirty years old,” I said. “She called him ‘Uncle Jerry.’ Who was his family?”

“He wasn’t an employee, so he didn’t fill out the forms that people on the payroll do. We paid cash; I don’t even have a home address for him,” Cardenal said.

In South Chicago, this didn’t sound as strange as it might on the Gold Coast: this was a neighborhood where people bartered services or got paid under the table. “How much work did he do for you?”

“It wasn’t like that, I mean not like he’d come every Monday,” Cardenal said. “I kept a punch list that I’d give him when he came around. He knew how to handle wiring in an old building, but he only showed up when he needed money.”

“The day I saw him, two weeks ago, had he been working in the church?”

Cardenal threw up his hands. “I can’t remember after all this time. He might have been.”

He rummaged through the papers on his desk and picked up a sheet. “The light on the lectern, they reported that three weeks ago and it’s still flickering, the circuit breaker on the organ, that keeps blowing. We can’t afford a new panel, so Jerry would reroute wires for us, but he didn’t do either of these projects.”

“So the day I saw him here, he likely chose the church as a meeting place,” I said. “Or the woman chose it. You don’t have any ‘Fughers’ on your parish rolls or teaching at the school?”

Cardenal shook his head. “It’s an unusual name; I’d remember it.”

“You say Fugher came around when he needed money,” Conrad said. “Drugs? Booze?”

“Not that I ever noticed,” the priest said, “but maybe he had other habits, like gambling, or didn’t know how to manage money. Or maybe he was supporting a family, like this woman Ms. Warshawski says she saw, although he didn’t seem like a family man. You could check with the shops on Ninety-first Street; he told me he did some odd jobs for them. Talk to Mr. Bagby, since Ms. Warshawski saw him in a Bagby truck.”

“You
what
?” Conrad’s voice was a whip-crack. “You saw him with Bagby and didn’t think it was worth mentioning?”

“Is this a big deal? Is Bagby connected?” Trucking is a good Mob cover—you can go anywhere and carry anything, including dead bodies to coal dust mountains.

“As far as I know, Bagby is a model citizen. Unlike you,” Conrad said.

I’d pulled out my iPhone to show him the picture I’d taken of Fugher and the gravel-faced man, but that needless bit of sarcasm made me keep it to myself. Probably a mistake, since if anyone had hitman written all over their scarred and pitted faces, it was the gravel guy.

“You could still ask him whether Fugher did any work for them. Although the dispatcher told me he didn’t recognize him.”

Conrad became even more incensed. “You
went
to Bagby?”

“I have yet to meet Vince Bagby, but I did stop at the yard to ask about Fugher. I couldn’t figure out why he was so nervous around me, but the dispatcher claimed not to know him.”

“And you say you were only on my turf on family business?” Conrad demanded. “This is crossing a line, even for you.”

“Excuse me, Lieutenant, but at what point did we morph into Russia or Iran, where a citizen has to get police permission to walk into a business and ask questions? The dispatcher might have lied to me; you could probably charm him into telling you the truth, flashing your badge and your gun and maybe a bullwhip.”

“Vince Bagby has been very generous to our youth scholarship fund,” Father Cardenal interjected. “Please don’t say anything that would make him think we don’t appreciate what he does.”

“What about Rory Scanlon?” I asked. “I know he’s offered to help young Frank Guzzo go to baseball camp. Does he support your youth programs?”

“Mr. Scanlon also does a lot for us. Betty Guzzo talked to me after you left. She’s frightened of you. She thinks you came to the game the other day to ruin Frankie’s chances with Scanlon,” Cardenal said.

“The whole Guzzo family seems to have been sniffing glue or something that rots the brain,” I said. “All I want is for Stella to stop slandering Boom-Boom. I hope Frankie gets his big chance, but he’s only fifteen; you don’t know what he’ll be like at nineteen.”

“Is that a threat?” Cardenal asked.

“You mean you’re taking Betty’s rantings seriously? Of course it’s not a threat. When my cousin was fifteen, there were other kids his age who looked as good as him. They worked just as hard as he did or maybe even harder, but they were as good as they were ever going to be when they were fifteen. I don’t know what Scanlon’s quid pro quo is, unless community goodwill helps turn out the vote in the Tenth Ward, but if he gets young Frank into a quality baseball camp, that will be a big help in the kid’s development.”

“Why can’t community goodwill come because someone cares about the community?” Conrad demanded. “Why does it always have to be something ulterior with you?”

“Conrad. Dear, kind, naive Lieutenant Rawlings: this is Chicago, Scanlon’s a fixture in the Democratic machine, Tenth Ward committeeman for starters—”

“Scanlon’s a
fixture
down here,” Conrad interrupted. “Gives to our widows and orphans funds, takes part in our programs against gang violence. The quid he wants personally is a piece of the insurance action. We let him sell life insurance to any of our cops who want more coverage than the union offers. It’s a fair deal in exchange for all he does for the community.”

“Frank Guzzo told me he takes boys off on solo trips if they need special counseling. Do you ever see any change in them when they come back?” I asked.

Conrad and Cardenal both blew up at that suggestion, which left me uneasy, not reassured. It sounded as though they were hearing the same warning bells I had, only they didn’t want to acknowledge them because they needed Scanlon’s support. When I said as much, it only made them angrier. Conrad and I left soon after that, with Conrad giving me a biting lecture on outside agitators coming into a community and getting everyone hot and bothered.

“I remember that language directed at civil rights workers,” I said.

“No one’s confusing you with Ella Baker, so don’t get a swelled head. What are you really doing down here? Don’t ask me to believe crap about your family. You don’t have relatives here anymore.”

“Where families are concerned, it doesn’t matter if they’re alive or dead, you’re always carrying them with you. Frank Guzzo brought me down here to talk to his mother. Who responded by digging up this alleged diary. You followed the story, I assume.”

“I called up the old case files on Anne Guzzo’s murder after I saw your cousin’s name in the papers. The crime scene photos were eye-popping. Stella must have gone completely off the rails. I don’t know what you think you’re doing digging through it after all this time.”

I made a face. “Me either, but after watching the kaleidoscope spin for a while, I’m beginning to think Frank was trying to divert my attention. Something about him or his wife or even his mother is going to come to light because of Stella’s determination to get an exoneration. He’s afraid I’ll get wind of it, so he was trying to preempt me.”

“What was going to come to light?” Conrad asked.

“I don’t know. Betty, Frank’s wife, said something odd when I was down here on Friday to watch her kid play—it almost sounded as though she was admitting she played a role in Annie Guzzo’s death.”

“I’ve got enough active gang murders down here to keep me busy until I retire and even then I won’t have made a dent. I can’t care much about an old woman who’s done her dime. I talked to a guy I know at Logan, and Stella Guzzo was one of the wilder inmates. She’s not a noble soul. Highly unlikely she covered for a daughter-in-law. Unless you think they were lovers?”

I stared at him, astounded. “With your imagination, you should be writing lurid romances, Conrad.”

“You tried to smear Rory Scanlon with a pedophile rap just now, and you’re offended? You can dish it out, but you sure can’t take it.” He put the car in gear and drove four blocks to the Metra Electric train station. “End of the ride for you, Warshawski. I’m sorry Stella Guzzo is trying to offload her guilt onto your cousin, but why don’t you let that dog sleep in the dirt with her own fleas instead of dragging a priest and a good community figure into the mess?”

“Oh, to hell with you, Conrad. I’m not dragging anyone anywhere. You’re the one who dragged me down here without a car, so you can drive me to the Loop.”

“You can find your way, Warshawski, you’re a big girl.”

I tried not to keep replaying the conversation as I slogged along—anger is a terrible way to make decisions. On the other hand, anger kept me moving around the mud holes and broken bottles at a good clip.

At one point I remembered Murray. I was still annoyed with him over Boom-Boom, but we have been colleagues of a sort over the years and it’s better to have a friend than an enemy in the media. While I was texting him Fugher’s name, I stumbled over a piece of rebar and grazed my forearms in the gravel. I put my phone in my hip pocket—definitely not the place to walk distracted.

I started coughing and sneezing before I actually saw the pet coke mound. When I turned at the next bend, I found myself at the locked gates leading to the Guisar slip. A guard station was at the entrance but the guard wouldn’t talk to me, just waved a hand at me to go away.

I backed away from his sight lines and followed the fence where it skirted the river and the train tracks. Signs along the fence warned that the area was under high security, but not all the slips had guardhouses. I found a set of gates with just enough leeway in the chains that I could wriggle through. I now had rust stains on my red knit shirt, but there is no gain without some pain, at least not in my life.

The potholes were filled with water from last night’s rain. The surface was that purple-greeny color you get when your transmission fluid leaks all over the street. As I squelched through the oily mud, I cursed my impulsiveness. I could have watched this on Murray’s cable show. I also could be downtown by now—the next train to the Loop had taken off while I was being waved away from the Guisar slip’s gate.

I came at the coke mound from the back. A police van for the forensic techs was parked on the lip and a crew in hazmat suits seemed to be taking the top of the mountain apart. I moved around to the water side of the mountain. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find, since the techs were going over the area, but I was trying to imagine how Fugher’s body got to where it had ended up.

I peered over the edge of the dock. Besides the usual waterfront garbage—bottles and cans, remains of McDonald’s and Popeye’s, tampons and Pampers—pieces of drywall, two-by-fours, a car fender, Styrofoam cups, swirled around. The Cubs would be in the World Series before anyone sorted through this muck for clues about Fugher’s death.