Calumet City (17 page)

Metro is the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the G’s own prison, a twenty-seven-floor high-rise downtown on Van Buren. That’s where city cops go when the U.S. Attorney makes charges they think will stick. Sonny waits a beat to see if I’ll fold, then walks back around his Ford, mindful of the traffic this time. At the driver’s door he spits again and tells the inside of his car, "I’ll meet you for the meth chemist at four o’clock, if you ain’t in federal handcuffs."

I’m surprised, like I was the third day in junior high when a boy asked me to a school dance—
Jesus, where’d twelve years old come from?
Sonny fires up his Ford and I wonder if I’d step into this disaster for my friends. I’d like to think I would, that big parts of the old me weren’t a lie. Sonny pulls into traffic, and like that one good day in junior high, I wish I were with him. Or he was with me.

More than anything, I wish I were somebody else.

   I’m not going to "pretty up" as suggested, but since I’m only three miles from my duplex, "clean" would be reasonable after a night in the car. Stella agrees when I arrive but has customers coming and can’t do anything but mention my never-ending wardrobe failings. While I’m checking my phone, hoping Gwen has called, Stella adds that the black man has been by again.

The who?

The same man who was here before. Have I lost my mind, having a black boyfriend?

"Stell, honey, hold it a sec. What do you mean,
before
?"

Stella harrumphs and cocks her head on shoulders that are mostly padding. "
Before
. Jesus, God, are you drinking again?"

I check every room, then she and I count back Home Shopping Network days until we determine that "before" is the day of my B&E.

   Black man at my duplex. Private eye Harold J. J. Tyree’s voice mail sounded black.

Idaho-Arizona whiteboy. White ComEd "torches." Those three crews fit, but how? All with Roland Ganz?

Roland Ganz has Gwen’s little boy. And now’s he’s probably got her too.
He wants us all
—Goddammit, why didn’t she call back? Like Richard Rhodes, this city’s too big to find anyone without clues. Unless they throw them on the mayor’s lawn.

Shiver.

My Celica’s not steering well. I change lanes and eye the asshole with the horn, then push a clean shirtsleeve up my arm. The shower at my duplex felt good but not clean. The jeans and flannel shirt are mine. Jez and Bathsheba looked happy. Cubs won and the Sox lost. I’m sober.

As good thoughts go, that’s as good as I can think.

I’m almost downtown, hoping for the courage to be Joan of Arc when I get there. This isn’t as easy as it looked in the movie, probably because when they turned on the houselights I got to go home. Two squads scream past. They’re westbound on Thirty-fifth and leading a fire engine. I can see the driver’s eyes. I could see Joan’s eyes too, as the flames leapt up her clothes. She faced burning at the stake without folding—there’s comfort in that—and the fact that they rarely burn anyone in Illinois anymore. But my real comfort is that I don’t believe I’ll go through with this. Prison sounds better. Swallowing my pistol sounds…about the same.

More fire engines scream west; maybe they need me there instead? Each block east finishes faster than the last. All my lights are green. And there it is, five stories on ten acres. Headquarters, the new building at Thirty-fifth and Michigan, now close enough to USCF Comiskey to catch a home run if the White Sox could hit one. CPD headquarters is a new building in a bad neighborhood, a new building that looks a bunch newer than it acts.

I park on the street. IAD offices here too, the grand inquisitors with their rule books and unfired revolvers. Every cop who crosses this threshold feels their presence, an insult in my opinion, to the stars that ring the first-floor lobby. Stars of cops who died on the line. That’s how I felt yesterday, before I knew who I was. Now I know why we need IAD.

Instead of facing the elevator bank, I walk the wall-mounted stars and realize how proud I am—was—to be part of these people, how much it meant to me. It’s the first time I’ve done it this year. Bobby Grapes dead on Thirty-eighth Street, saving two black kids from a dad with a shotgun; John Sharpe, dead on Wilson Avenue—I went through the academy with John, finished my first full year sober with him on a park bench arguing about the Cubs. He died fourteen months into his new uniform and the shortest haircut he’d ever had. Carl Medrano, dead on a cracked sidewalk three doors down from a liquor store holdup in Cicero.

Every one of these guys is better than me. Every one of them.

Especially these two, George Pulaski and Irish Mike Constance. Irish Mike was Greek and should have been a counselor or a priest. The GDs shot him twice, once in ’85 when he was a rookie and once in ’97 before they killed him and George on Gilbert Court two years ago, lured there by a little girl who said her brother was trapped in a basement.

I remember the funerals too; the nervous feet, the blowing leaves, bagpipes just beyond the hill, and the crows on the tombstones. It’s always winter at a cop’s funeral and there’s nowhere to put the anger. All you can do is hold on and don’t betray your friends. Ever. I try to remember that as I pass the wintry mural that covers the lobby’s south wall and hides the elevators.

Superintendent Smith’s office is on the fifth floor. The secretary staring at me, not at my clothes, is the superintendent’s; she makes no bones about how she feels. Gertruda Parsons thinks I am now, and always have been, radioactive for her boss. Her "good morning" was not meant to be comforting, nor was her request for the reports I don’t have. She is a gatekeeper, a vigilant one with mouse-brown hair and a bull matron’s posture. On the street she would be formidable; in here, surrounded by wood paneling and the power of office, she is often the last career light a ranking officer sees.

"Please sit over there." Her eyes cut me to the distant corner, the table by the kitchen if this were a restaurant. "The superintendent will see you shortly."

The corner has a lamp but I don’t turn it on, don’t wish to illuminate how nervous I am. The best role I could play would be TAC cop, which I no longer am, running in fresh off the street to—
Bullshit
. Everyone in this building knows why I’m here.

"Superintendent Smith will see you now."

Gertruda Parsons stands sideways to the internal corridor and nods left. We walk down the deep-pile blue carpet without speaking. At an open door she raps the jamb and says, "Officer Black." Chief Jesse is without coat and standing, a phone tight to one ear. Downtown’s money and power fills the window behind him. I can smell the bleach in his shirt, see the veins in his neck, and the job’s weight under his eyes. He points me inside without smiling, but not at upholstered furniture to sit; for sure he knows there are no reports. I check my sneakers; they look shabbier in here, as do my jeans. I remove the charred Cubs hat, wishing I’d done that in the waiting room, and have never wanted a father more than I do now.

Chief Jesse booms: "That-will-not-happen."

Nothing rattles; this office was built to be heavy. Everything in here is dark and polished and regimented and Chief Jesse looks out of place.

"No. That’s final," he tells the phone.

His shoulders roll while he listens, the other hand is a fist on his desk, the weight of his right side jammed on the knuckles. They’re white and the color is traveling up his arm past the rolled cuff.

"No. Pat Camden at News Affairs.
Only
News Affairs."

He listens again and I recheck the view from the top, if five floors can be called the top, while lost in nerves I try to hide from him and me.

"Why?" Chief Jesse is no longer on the phone. He’s staring bullets at me.

I mount the best explanation I have: "Huh?"

"Why?"

"Um, I ah, don’t have an answer, sir."

"You don’t have a job either."

This is not that big a surprise, but I try to look it. Worse, his "why" could be about a number of things, not just the phantom reports.

"There’s substantial interest in this, in you. Many of your friends, including me and the mayor—not that he’s your friend—have a serious interest in putting this to rest. You are aware of that, correct?"

"Yes, sir."

"Are you willing to report orally, or is that out of the question?"

"No, sir."

"No, sir, what?"

"I can…can report orally. Sir."

"Well, do it, for chrissake."

I tell him that Calumet City PD’s 1987 homicide file has nothing in it that focuses attention on Mayor McQuinn, CPD, the superintendent, Danny del Pasco, or…. I want to add "me," but don’t. I explain that the file is, however, loaded with Richard Rhodes detail as a murder suspect.

"Did he do it?"

"Doesn’t look like the local prosecutors thought much of it, sir."

"Good news for Mayor McQuinn. Richard Rhodes was his boy before he switched sides to the governor."

"Sir, is the State’s Attorney’s task force—?"

"They’re chasing the Outfit and the casino license." His eyes stop melting me and wander to the window. He hesitates in the face of the city he polices, then tells it: "Something’s seriously wrong in this entire combination, and our mayor hasn’t shared it with me."

I leap at the possibility that this isn’t all about me and Calumet City. "Wrong enough, sir, that the Outfit would kill the ASA and try for Mayor McQuinn?"

"You have trouble with his name, don’t you?"

I stutter, surprised, and say, "Rhodes."

The superintendent returns from the window angry and distant and tells me to finish my
oral
report. I finish the part that avoids all the instances in which I have underperformed his expectations and mine. But at each sentence break I just want to blurt what I’m afraid I did blackout drunk on my son’s birthday. And if Little Gwen’s call isn’t fear fantasy, what kind of monster could be out there now?

Instead, I move on to Danny del Pasco, explaining that while he has said he does not intend to talk to the FBI unless he’s given a full pardon and set free, he did talk to me. The superintendent already knows this, from me, from the FBI, and from the State’s Attorney’s task force briefing he has to be part of. I’m stalling, and he knows that too; he was a street cop before he was a suit.

"Cut to it. What’s your
direct
connection to Mr. del Pasco?"

I stare.

"Your job, your career, is on the line right now. The whole thing, everything you care about other than rugby and those two goldfish."

No words form that begin a sentence and lead to the answer he wants. Just cow eyes I’m ashamed of and glad I can’t see. He inhales; his jaw muscles roll and he glances at his watch. "IAD first, then the FBI. You have, to state your situation correctly, no chance of surviving today. None."

My lips tremble. Patti Black, gunfighter, little girl lost.

"Who’s representing you from the union?"

Shrug and headshake.

He leans across the desk at me as his voice fills the office.
"You don’t have a lawyer?"

I try to read the thread count in his carpet and wish I could talk, say something, anything. Funny that he keeps it so hot in here, being that he’s a big man. He’s talking again but it must be to Gertruda since the words kind of float.

"Sorry, sir, what was that?"

His neck is fiery red, as is his face. And he sits down. I want to sit down too but don’t. He looks at his desk. I take up space, saying nothing, looking out his windows, deciding zero. I don’t know why he hasn’t thrown me out. Previous to the last three days this would have been the oddest of moments, an impossibility of insubordination. But now it’s just one of many impossibilities that seem to flow together like a river, all connected in a big, grand indecipherable gush.

There, that was a thought. I’m thinking, making unspoken sentences—I hope to God they’re unspoken.

"You can’t do the FBI without a lawyer. Tell them and the U.S. Attorney you had no idea what the meeting was about. She can reschedule or go fuck herself."

"Yes, sir."

The U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois is Helen Holden. For the last nine years she’s been the archenemy of the Chicago Police Department. A graduate of leafy, lakefront Northwestern, Helen is as tight with the Republican governor as one can be and not share turkey dinners on all the holidays. A very well-connected CPD deputy super from the last administration is in federal prison because of her. And of course, his own malfeasance.

The advice on handling Ms. Holden sounds almost friendly, fatherly.

"IAD’s different," Superintendent Smith says.

"Yes, sir."

"Tell me what you’re hiding and I might,
might,
be able to save you."

Both my hands are trembling and I clench them white behind my back. He glares until I spend the last of his patience and friendship, then waves me out of his office with a disgusted flip of his hand.

   The pre-IAD bathroom spruce-up doesn’t help. The woman who steps out of the second stall looks at me but doesn’t speak; she checks her lipstick in a mirror I don’t want to test, glances at me again, and leaves.

Ten o’clock sharp and Internal Affairs begins in a windowless fifth-floor conference room under office lighting that’s tucked into a drop-down ceiling. Most street cops believe IAD hides cameras up there, legal or not. I figure IAD would rather show you the camera, let you know you were being recorded, but I check the fixtures anyway.

The detective across the table from me is more deferential than expected. He’s thumbing through my file, the record of arrests, commendations, citations, and letters of appreciation from mostly black, mostly ghetto citizens. He smiles at the Paul Elledge magazine cover and shows it to me, then eases it back into the folder.

"Officer of the Year. Twice. That’s never been done before."