Dirty Fire (7 page)

I could not remember the last time I had slept well, or easily. Over the past year, even before my arrest, I had found untroubled sleep increasingly elusive. Since then, most nights had been spent like this one: alone in a rented room intentionally kept dark, a tumbler of vodka held loosely in my hand.

Usually, the vodka worked sufficiently well. It would drug me into a rough approximation of sleep. But in treating the insomnia with alcohol, I found myself plagued with dreams—most of them terrifying, all of them vivid. In the ones I remembered, I was usually alone.

I reclined on the sofa, occasionally taking a long pull on the drink. The rest of the time I stared wide-eyed at the ceiling, listing to the restless sounds of nocturnal traffic. My father had been an insomniac too, even before he had been dismissed from his job as a Chicago police detective. He had also been a borderline alcoholic, though sufficiently functional to operate the tavern he had inherited from my grandfather in Bucktown, just off Armitage Avenue.

He had been wildly popular with the clientele, largely policemen and firemen—in those days, there were few policewomen and virtually no women firefighters—from around the neighborhood.

At least until his trial, if someone alluded to the circumstances of his dismissal, his reaction would be a devilish, if rueful, grin. As often as not, he would then launch into an unrelated story that soon had everyone within earshot convulsing in laughter. My father had accumulated a wealth of stories, most of then involving his experiences as a cop—cases that, in his tales if not in his life, never went unsolved.

Gerald Davey was lively and entertaining and a devastatingly attractive man: that is, between the weekly binge blackouts, when his world turned into a dark and frightening place for those of us who inhabited it with him. It was during these periods that my father revisited those other cases—the ones where he had slipped the unmarked envelopes into his pocket, where he had bartered away whatever honor he had accrued along with his badge. He would relive every detail, his eyes burning with the intensity of a man trying to justify, or at least expiate, his past sins. He never could, not even at his most drunken moments; instead, he railed, lost in a helpless rage at his own weakness and guilt.

By the next afternoon—occasionally a little longer—he would again be the Gerald Davey his friends and customers knew.

He never fully remembered what he called his “episodes,” and neither my mother nor I ever told him the truth about what he had done or said. As a result, he thought it a trip he had taken alone, though nothing could have been farther from the truth.

Tonight, as in so many nights over the past year, I lay in the dark and pondered both heredity and the definition of irony.

Talking with Chaz Trombetta had done nothing to lull the demons that walked night sentinel in my mind. I had hoped for Trombetta’s assistance, expected it as a matter of course. But even more, I had needed someone to trust. I was on a dark road, and I had counted on Chaz to walk it with me. Now that was gone, too.

“Maybe,” I said aloud to the dark room, “I ought to have another drink.”

As if to answer, there was a quiet tapping at the door.

I frowned. It was too late for a call by Jehovah’s Witnesses, and none of my neighbors had the appearance of people who socialized easily or well. I had half-decided to ignore it when a voice, low and tentative, spoke my name.

I opened the door. Even in the dim light, I recognized the figure who stood there.

“All the lights were off,” said a voice that had once been familiar to me. “I wasn’t sure you were here. I’m glad you’re still awake. Or have you started sleeping in your clothes?”

“Hello, Ellen,” I said. “Come in.”

Ellen was dressed in a blue oxford shirt that was too large for her slight form. I wondered if it was one of mine, though a darker corner of my mind suspected it was not. She had rolled the sleeves to just below her elbows. The shirttail was tucked into a pair of soft khaki trousers that emphasized her trim figure. Many women might have pulled their hair into a ponytail to match the gamine look of the outfit. Not Ellen: hers fell in a fine ashen cascade that emphasized the compact beauty of her face. It made me remember how soft her hair had felt beneath my hands.

She walked directly to the sofa and sat in a way that invited me to sit beside her. Instead, I drew a chair from the dinette set. I settled across from her at what I hoped was a safe distance for both of us.

We sat in silence for a long moment as Ellen surveyed my lodgings. Before she could speak, I did.

“It used to be a motel,” I said. “A long time ago. Now they rent rooms by the week.”

She nodded. I wondered if she had noticed the vodka on my breath.

“I found a job,” I said in the tone of two acquaintances catching up with each other. “Temporary, but it pays the rent. I’m back on the city payroll—as a fire marshal.”

Ellen looked at me. “A fire marshal,” she said, as if I had told a joke with a punchline she could not understand.

“It’s an arson investigation,” I said. “More or less. A couple of people died in the fire.”

She frowned. “So you’re working with the police again. With Bob Nederlander’s people. Davey, why? I know the way you feel about them. About
him
. ”

I felt my anger rise.

“A job is a job,” I said, “and I needed one. But let’s talk about
you
, shall we? You look well—or is it ‘you look good?’”

I leaned back and pretended to ponder.

“Doesn’t matter. You’ve always looked great, as I remember. Of course, I haven’t seen you in months, not since the divorce hearing. That’s right, isn’t it? You even missed my trial. Then, last week, you call me about a late check—”

“And you fixed it,” she interrupted. “Thank you for that.”

“Thank Gil Cieloczki,” I snapped. “He gave me the job.” I drew in a breath. “For months, we’ve only communicated through lawyers. Suddenly, I hear from you twice in one week. Why is that, Ellen?”

She flushed, and was silent for a moment.

“I’ve been approached by the government,” Ellen said, finally. “Yesterday, two people from the IRS were waiting for me when I came home. They wanted to talk about the bribes they say you took. They offered me a deal.”

I shook my head in confusion.

“What deal? What is there
to
deal? I never took a payoff. You
know
that. How could they give you—” I stopped short, and looked closely at my former wife. “Ellen, what do they want from you?”

“Almost nothing,” she said, too quickly. “They just want me to sign a statement that you handled all our finances. That I wouldn’t have known about anything you…may have been doing.”

She looked up at me, and a familiar petulance was in her voice.

“And really, isn’t that the truth, Davey? Okay—not about money, maybe. But everything else. I didn’t know what you were doing or who you were doing it with. Now you’re back to playing policeman, and I
still
don’t know.”

Ellen’s voice broke, and her hands flew to cover her face.

“If I cooperate, they promise to remove my name from their case,” she said from behind her hands. “They’ll take the liens off. They’ll even unfreeze our bank account—at least, partly. The part of it that belongs to me.”

Ellen’s hands dropped. I saw her lovely eyes glitter, even though they were curiously dry of tears.

“Maybe I won’t have people looking at me as if I was some kind of criminal. Or was married to one.” She bent her head. “That didn’t come out the way I meant. All I’m saying is—”

“If that’s what you came to tell me,” I said, “I understand. Go ahead, Ellen. Do the deal.”

When she looked up, she had stopped crying, or perhaps pretending to. But now there was something new in her expression.

“I wanted to come here tonight,” Ellen said, “to tell you I would. And to be with you.”

She rose from the sofa and stood over me. The scent of her was a memory—earthy, compelling, full of hungers and delights only partially recalled. But mesmerizing, nonetheless.

“We were in love, once,” she whispered. “Remember?”

My voice was hoarse. “Ellen,” I said. “That’s over. We’re over.”

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

She took me by my hand and led me toward the bedroom. I followed as if in a dream.

There, Ellen bent to remove the coverlet. Her legs were slightly spread, stretching the khaki trousers tight over her hard, rounded bottom. It was, intentionally or not, an exquisitely provocative stance.

In that instant, I knew how badly I wanted her, wanted the connection to my past life that she represented to me. Even more, I wanted to rip the clothes from her body, to move inside her like a wild animal in heat. I wanted to hear her voice, pitched high in passion, cry in my ear when she came. My pulse pounded in my temples, and I found myself rise.

I moved close behind her, put my hands on her shoulders. For a moment, Ellen was still, almost pensive. Then she slowly arched back into my embrace, and my body responded to the feel of her pressed against me. She turned her head over her shoulder, eyes already closed and lips slightly parted. We kissed deeply. I felt the blood rush to her face, burning beneath my hands.

When her weight shifted, I sensed rather than felt her right leg bend at the knee. She pulled one of my hands downward.

My flattened palm cupped, teased her breast in passing, not stopping; slipped lower, across the toned flatness of her stomach, not stopping; brushed the edge of a hip, still not stopping. She moved into my touch, and I heard her breath catch in her throat as she pressed back against me even harder.

We were like that for what seemed an eternity, our lips and tongues lightly probing, seeking, our bodies responding to featherlight touches and caresses. Then she broke away, violence in the movement. She stared at me, neither of us moving, while thoughts I could not decipher swirled apace behind her eyes. Finally, her expression slipped into one that looked as if it had confirmed a questioned fact, verified a secret knowledge.

I heard the rasp of a zipper, the rustle of cloth being pulled free. Then she stood before me, a naked and sensuous silhouette.

She came again into my arms, kissing me hard while her fingers tore at my buttons. When I stepped out of the last of my own clothes, we clutched and fumbled in a frenzied need for each other. My hand slid along the smoothness of Ellen’s back, tracing a contour lower and lower into her dark, secret places. This time she did gasp, a high-pitched inhalation quickly cut off. Her breathing became fevered, so loud it was almost a low, keening moan feverish against the side of my face.

We slipped to the floor, ignoring the narrow bed. Her arms reached up for me, hot and passionate, her hips pumping involuntarily, grinding against me. I felt an impatient hand reach between them, guiding me. We both shuddered in a pleasure so tight, so deep.

I could feel every gyration, every intake of breath, every hoarsely whispered exhortation that escaped her swollen lips. Again and again we moved against each other, a mounting syncopation of physical heat. Her face grew crimson with lust, her eyes squeezed shut, her mouth wide in the need to cry out her passion. I could feel her thighs clenched tight against my hips, her ankles crossed at the small of my back. Her fingernails raked hard along my sides, dug deeply into my shoulders.

The pleasure was incredible, indescribable.

Now she was grunting with each stroke, a wordless and hungry sound that was both demand and plea. It spurred me, pushed me closer to my own release. I thrust again and again and again. Her cries were louder now, joined by a second, deeper voice that I dimly realized was my own.

I took her hands and forced them down to the floor over her head and held them there. Suddenly she arched up, her little cries loud in my ears as she came, once and once again. I exploded along with her, and violent shudders tore through both our bodies.

For a long time afterward we lay together as the sweat cooled, chill on our bodies. Our breathing slowly returned to a regular rhythm. My arm was around Ellen’s shoulder. I moved to stroke her arm and felt her shrug away my touch. Her body, I realized in alarm, had turned stiff, angry.

“What are we doing, Davey?” she asked, and her voice was cold. “Is there a point to all this?”

“I don’t know.”

Silence.

Then:

“You don’t know,” she said, mockingly. “Once again, you get to be the nice guy, and I get to be the slut?”

“You came here, Ellen.”

“Yes, throw that at me, Davey; you’ve been standing on my doorstep enough times. Do you think it’s going to be like this from now on? I drop by your place, we’ll fuck and then go our separate ways? Until the next time?”

Her voice had risen, and she pulled away from me.

“Ellen,” I began, hearing the confusion in my voice, “I don’t understand why you’re angry. I thought that we—”

“We? There is no ‘we,’ Davey. If you think hard enough about it, maybe there never really was.”

In stony silence, Ellen dressed with her back to me. I heard the door slam behind her as she left.

I do not know how long I sat there, the air around me still pungent in the shadow of our lovemaking. My mind was blank, adrift. If I thought about what had happened, or why, it was not consciously.

And then, with a force that was almost physical, I understood.

Ellen had always reacted to her infrequent attack of the guilts in the same way: with anger, though never directed toward herself. For reasons I still could not fathom, various enforcement agencies of the United States had targeted me, personally. The deal with Ellen could only be part of a larger campaign. My innocence was irrelevant—and the enormity of that realization momentarily left me breathless.

In my mind’s eye, I could clearly see the bull’s-eye that had been painted on my back; the weight of it, and perhaps of the suspicion of who had put it there, crushed down on me.

As a young Catholic sent to the parish school, I had been taught by the nuns that the Original Sin committed by Adam and Eve was their discovery of the sex act. Once this had been communicated as unassailable fact, the teaching Sisters brooked no additional analysis or discussion of the subject.

For the most part, we were too young or too innocent to question our teachers further; still, the lesson stuck, adding an element of dark and delicious taboo to much of our adolescent courtships and experimentations.

It was only later in life, when I started to relate the events in my personal and professional life with the dogma I had absorbed, that I began seriously to question the nuns’ interpretation.

For God to have expelled from Eden those He created in His own image was a horrendous chastisement—one that must have required a act of defiance equal to the punishment. Banishing man for an act He had made compelling—not to mention essential—seemed far too frivolous for an otherwise All-Merciful Deity.

As a police officer, I had come to believe that the sin of Adam and Eve had nothing to do with either orgasm or progenation, though it clearly involved the loss of their innocence. I am convinced that Original Sin, and perhaps all sin, involves the loss of faith—a wholesale abandonment of belief in God’s capacity for mercy. It is a collective guilt, born of acts that, whether performed or only witnessed in the deeds of other humans, are so black and so evil that they drive us to deny His very existence.

This was a truth that my father, whose sins I seemed determined to have visited on me, would certainly have embraced.

Gerald Davey had been a detective on a police force that was institutionally corrupt from bottom to top. The price of services rendered rose exponentially and by rank, so that lieutenants and captains and commanders routinely calculated their pay grades on an unofficial scale far more generous than the civil service schedules.

Not all Chicago officers were dirty, of course; but at the very least, most were complicit through their silence. They accepted the corruption as readily as one accepts the occasional sour whiff from a down-alley dumpster.

But Gerald Davey was an active participant; he had been so his entire career.

In his early years as a uniformed cop, he sold his share of traffic-stop pencils, routinely passing a share of the take upstairs, slipped to those higher on the food chain; when he made lieutenant, he celebrated the taste he, in turn, was provided by those on the ladder below.

• • •

“He once described the system to me as a crooked-cop Amway pyramid,” I said. “An organizational structure that ensured graduated, orderly profits up and down the line, but mostly up.”

“Your father certainly had a way with words,” Father Frank said, jabbing his garden trowel at a particularly stubborn dandelion root. On the portable radio near his knees, it was the bottom of the third inning at Wrigley; Sosa had just stroked one onto Waveland Avenue, cutting the Mets’ lead to six. Both the priest and I were trying, unsuccessfully, not to think about it.

“By the time he made detective, Gerald was pretty well established as a player on the force,” I said. “When he was assigned to the Vice & Morals squad, it was like becoming a vice president at IBM.”

The priest looked puzzled.

“He’d bring home bonuses that were four or five times his city paycheck. Except that the bonuses were always in cash.”

Father Frank stood up and brushed the dirt from his hands. He studied the plot critically, bending once to realign one of the stakes.

“So what happened to him?” he said, trying to sound casual.

“He got caught,” I said. “He started to skim too much off for himself. So the cops higher up the ladder decided to make him an example of what happens when you stiff the brass. One day, he went to work and Internal Affairs was waiting for him.”

“He went to jail?”

“No,” I said. “It took about a year for the case to go to trial. He was found guilty, but sentencing was set for a week later. Somebody in IAD had the bright idea of trying to flip him, get him to turn on the people who had turned on him. But he had been a cop all his life, you see.”

Father Frank nodded. “He was too loyal to implicate other policemen. I’ve heard that happens.”

“Not too loyal: too proud,” I corrected the priest. “Three days after he was convicted, I came home and found him upstairs, in bed. He had put on his dress uniform. Then he ate his gun.”