The Terrorist Next Door (10 page)

Chapter
17

THE “HEART OF SOUTH CHICAGO”

Gold pressed the Disconnect button on his BlackBerry and pushed out a sigh.

“Katie Liszewski?” Battle asked. They were driving past the Jackson Park golf course at eight-forty on Monday night.

Gold nodded. He didn’t want to talk about it.

“You talk to her a lot.”

“At least twice a day. I go over there a couple of times a week.”

“Must be hard.”

“It is.” Gold shrugged. “What else can I do?”

Battle had no answer. He shot a glance at Gold, then his eyes returned to the empty road. “Mind if I ask you something?”

What now?
“Ask away.”

“How long have you and Assistant State’s Attorney Silver been seeing each other?”

The question caught Gold off guard. “What are you talking about?”

“Are you going to make me do this the hard way?”

No.
“How could you tell?”

“By the way you looked at each other.”

Gold was beginning to appreciate Battle’s powers of observation. “On and off for about six months,” he said. “Mostly on. I’ve known her since we were in law school.”

“You went to law school?”

“For one miserable year.”

“You don’t strike me as a law school guy.”

“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“So you decided to become a cop in South Chicago?”

“It’s what I wanted to do.”

“And she married somebody else.”

“The biggest asshole in our class. He does antitrust litigation for a big firm downtown. She finally walked out after she caught him in bed with his secretary—not an earth-shatteringly original scenario.”

“Nope. Maybe she’ll have a chance to fix her mistake.”

“We’re taking it slowly. It’s complicated.”

Battle grinned. “Is she a Cubs fan?”

“My wife was a Cubs fan.”

“Then what’s the big deal?”

How much time do you have?
“Lori’s divorce was just finalized. She has a six-year-old daughter, and her mother has Alzheimer’s. I live with my father, who has health issues, too.” Gold left out the real reason: he was still dealing with the death of his wife and unborn daughter.

“Maybe it is complicated,” Battle said. “I hope you can work things out.”

“So do I.” Gold hesitated. “Does anybody else know about this?”

“Not as far as I know.” Battle smiled. “I’ll keep it to myself.”

They drove in silence for a moment. “Mind if I ask you something?” Gold said.

“Ask away.”

“Why did you go to bat for me with the chief?”

Battle’s expression suggested that he hadn’t expected the question. “This case seemed important to you.”

“It is.”

“Then it’s important to me. And Christina Ramirez was my neighbor, too.”

Gold lowered the passenger-side window of the Crown Vic and inhaled the warm evening air. The thunderstorms had passed, and the setting sun was blocked by the mid-rise apartment buildings on the west side of South Shore Drive. It was like a snow day in the middle of the summer. There wasn’t a single car on the road or pedestrian on the sidewalk as they drove through the once-fashionable area known as Jackson Park Highlands. To their left were the manicured fairways of the South Shore Cultural Center, the public golf course along the lakefront opened in 1906 as the South Shore Country Club. It was sold to the Park District when the Country Club disbanded in the seventies.

“You ever play over here?” Gold asked.

Battle shook his head. “I’m not a golfer. The founders of the Country Club would be doing cartwheels in their graves if they saw me strolling down their fairways.”

“They didn’t let Jews in either. After they sold out to the Park District, my dad played golf for the only time in his life with three other teachers from Bowen: another Jewish guy, an African American, and a Mexican. I think he shot a hundred and twenty-seven. He had a great time.”

Battle smiled. “I’m going to like your dad. Michelle and Barack had their wedding reception in the ballroom. Michelle grew up a few blocks from here. I knew her father.”

“Times change.”

They continued along South Shore Drive past the rundown apartment buildings overlooking Rainbow Beach, the site of a near riot in 1961 when a handful of African American families staged a “wade in” to integrate the only strip of open coastline between the Country Club and the old steel mills. They passed Saint Michael the Archangel, the magnificent Catholic church built in the Gothic Revival style in 1907 as the seat of Paul Rhode, the first American bishop of Polish descent. Its steeple was still the tallest on the South Side.

The houses and two-flats became more neglected as they drove into the working-class area known as the Bush. The Irish, German, Swedish, Polish, Croatian, Slavic, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants who had found their way to Chicago’s Southeast Side in the late nineteenth century had built communities with names such as Irondale, Slag Valley, the East Side, South Deering, and Hegewisch. They worked grueling hours in the mills at the mouth of the Calumet River, the largest of which was the U.S. Steel South Works, a self-contained city on six hundred acres of prime lakefront property. They saved their pennies and went to church or synagogue every week. If they were a little flush on Saturday night, they’d treat themselves to a show at one of South Chicago’s numerous theaters, and have a couple of pops at one of its countless saloons. Their kids were told to keep their mouths shut except to say “please,” “thank you,” “yes sir,” and “no sir.

They crossed the Metra tracks and made their way to Commercial Avenue, where limp green banners on the lampposts bravely proclaimed that they were driving through the “Heart of South Chicago.” Despite the efforts of an idealistic community organizer named Barack Obama, the shopping boulevard that once housed dozens of thriving stores, auto dealerships, banks, theaters, hotels, and restaurants was now home to a ragtag lineup of liquor stores, currency exchanges, burrito stands, cut-rate groceries, burnt-out buildings, and empty lots. Most of the descendants of the original immigrant families had fled to the suburbs in the sixties and seventies, giving way to a second influx of newcomers—mainly Mexican and African American. By the time U.S. Steel finally shuttered the South Works in 1992, South Chicago had become a crime-ridden, impoverished, and forgotten shadow of its proud past. The South Works site became a ghostly expanse of toxic-laden emptiness. The huge smokestacks were a fading memory, and the sky no longer glowed reddish orange when they tapped the massive furnaces at midnight.

Gold pointed at a nondescript building housing a Dollar Store on the corner of 87th and Commercial, where the hand-lettered signs were in Spanish. It was down the street from Hyman’s Ace Hardware
and Auto Supply, whose founder had been the best man at the wedding of Gold’s grandfather. “That’s where my great-grandfather had his store.”

“In that building?” Battle said.

“No. They tore it down when I was a kid.”

Battle saw the neighborhood as it was. Gold could still envision how it had been.

“How old was your great-grandfather when he moved here?” Battle asked.

“Nineteen. He came over in steerage on a cargo ship with four thousand people.”

Battle listened attentively as Gold laid out an abbreviated family history. In 1894, his great-grandfather had found his way from a shtetl in a backward corner of what was now Belarus. The man born as Chaim Garber was re-christened as Harry Gold by an immigration clerk at Ellis Island. Harry opened a dry goods store at 87th and Commercial. When he died in 1919, his only son, Marvin, took over the business. He and his wife, Miriam, bought a traditional bungalow on 89th, between Muskegon and Escanaba, a block from Bowen High. During the Depression, Marvin had to choose between shutting the store or losing the family home. He kept the house, and he spent the next three decades selling men’s suits at the Goldblatt’s department store that anchored the corner of 91st and Commercial for eight decades. The site was now a strip mall with a currency exchange, a burrito shop, and a coin-op laundry.

Gold’s father, also named Harry, was a radio operator during the Korean War. After his discharge, he took advantage of the GI Bill and graduated from the U. of I. in 1955. He moved back to South Chicago and spent the next forty-seven years teaching science at Bowen. Harry and his wife, Lil, raised their two sons in the house that Harry inherited from his parents.

Gold glanced up at the imposing black brick steeple of Immaculate Conception, the Polish Catholic church where many of his great-grandfather’s customers had been baptized. They turned left at 89th, then made a right onto Houston. A half-block south, Gold pointed at an unpretentious yellow brick structure with two Moorish copper spires and ornamental red brick trim wedged between a couple of crumbling two-flats. A flickering neon sign announced that it was the Christ Life Church. A closer look revealed the silhouette of Hebrew letters above the arched doorway. “Ever been inside?” Gold asked.

“Many times,” Battle said. “I’ve known Pastor Adesanya since the church was on 79th.”

Gold also knew Pastor Emmanuel Adesanya, who was a civil engineer for the city when he wasn’t saving souls. In 1998, the native of Nigeria and his wife had opened a ministry in a storefront in Chatham. In 2004, they raised enough cash for a down payment on the old synagogue in South Chicago. “Do you know Rabbi Funnye?”

Battled nodded. “Everybody knows Rabbi Funnye.”

Rabbi Capers C. Funnye, Jr. was born in South Carolina in 1952. His family moved to Chicago’s South Side when he was in grammar school, and he was raised in an African Methodist Episcopalian church. He discovered Judaism while studying at Howard University, and he converted a few years later. He was ordained in 1985, and eventually became the first African American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis.

Rabbi Funnye’s first pulpit was Congregation Bikur Cholim, the little synagogue on Houston Street that boasted more than 500 members when Gold’s great-grandfather was its president in the early 1900s.
From the late twenties until the mid-fifties, it had been the home of the legendary Rabbi Hirsh Harrison. After the Jews fled to the suburbs in the sixties, Bikur Cholim had to share its building with a Baptist Church to make ends meet. The charismatic Rabbi Funnye declared the block surrounding his temple a gang-free zone, and he built his predominantly African American congregation by the force of his personality. When his expanding flock outgrew its modest quarters, he orchestrated a merger with another African American synagogue. Eventually, they sold the building on Houston Street to Pastor Adesanya’s church, and Rabbi Funnye’s congregation bought a larger building at 66th and Kedzie that once housed the Lawn Manor Synagogue. Nowadays, Rabbi Funnye was the Senior Rabbi of Beth Shalom B’Nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation, one of the largest African American synagogues in the U.S. He also happened to be Michelle Obama’s first cousin.

“What does Bikur Cholim mean?” Battle asked.

“Visiting the sick. Chartered in 1888. My great-grandfather was the president when they put up this building in 1902. My father was still on the board when they finally sold it. It was the oldest continuously operating synagogue in Chicago.”

“You guys really were here first.”

They continued down Houston and turned onto 91st. They drove past the refurbished South Chicago branch library where Lil Gold had taught generations of South Chicago children about the joys of reading. Across the street was the South Chicago Y, where Gold and Paulie had played countless hours of basketball. It looked the same as it did when Gold’s grandfather had attended its dedication in 1926.

Battle found a parking space near the corner of 91st and Brandon across the street from the brick façade of Our Lady of Guadalupe. “I know this is going to be difficult,” he said, “but we need to keep it short.”

* * *

The red dot stopped at the corner of 91st and Brandon. The young man had guessed right. Gold and Battle had made the pilgrimage to South Chicago to visit the mother of the victim at the Art Institute.

Impressive.

He fingered the cell phone inside his pocket. His instructors had told him to be respectful of the dead. He would give Gold and Battle a few minutes.

Then he would resume his mission.

Chapter
18

“WE WON’T MISS NEXT TIME”

Gold took a seat next to Christina Ramirez’s mother in the worn front pew of the musty church in Chicago’s oldest Mexican parish. “I’m so terribly sorry,” he whispered.

Theresa Ramirez clasped her hands tightly as she fought back tears. “Thank you, David.”

Gold’s throat was scratchy from the votive candles flickering near the altar. Our Lady of Guadalupe had neither the majesty of Immaculate Conception nor the grandeur of Saint Michael’s, but its simplicity and warmth embodied the essence of South Chicago. The parish was founded in 1923 to serve the Mexican immigrants who had come to work in the mills during the steel strike of 1919. It was first housed in a wooden structure at 90th and Mackinaw. By 1928, the parish had outgrown its original building, and a sturdy brick replacement with an onion-shaped dome was constructed at 91st and Brandon. Except for the wear on its dark red bricks, Our Lady looked the same as it did when the cornerstone was laid, and it was always full on Sundays.

Gold nodded respectfully to Father Ramon Aguirre, the energetic young priest sitting on the opposite side of Theresa in the front pew. Father Aguirre had grown up in South Chicago and brought new energy to Our Lady when he’d returned to the community five years earlier. Gold took Theresa’s hands and held them tightly. Her husband had died ten years earlier in a forklift accident at the Ford plant at 130th and Torrance. Her four surviving daughters ranged in age from eleven to seventeen. The older children were watching their younger siblings in the back of the church. Supportive friends and relatives spoke quietly in Spanish. The altar was filled with hand-cut flowers from the neighbors’ yards.

Theresa clutched Gold’s hands as she cried. “How could this happen?” She repeated it several times—trying to make sense of the harsh reality. “How could God let this happen to my beautiful girl?”

Gold felt a lump in his throat. His words couldn’t stop the pain. He could only try to provide a little comfort.

Theresa’s anguish became more palpable as she spoke to Gold about her eldest daughter. Christina had been an honors student who had avoided the temptations at Bowen, where the drop-out and pregnancy numbers were often higher than the graduation rates. “I’m never going to get over this
. It’s such a waste.”

“Yes, it is.” Gold felt helpless. He was relieved when Battle came forward. “This is my new partner, Detective Battle.”

“A.C.,” he corrected him, holding out a hand. “I’m terribly sorry about your loss, Mrs. Ramirez. You have my deepest sympathies.”

“Thank you, A.C.”

Battle’s large frame made the pew shake when he sat down next to Theresa. He explained to her that he, too, lived in the neighborhood. “I lost a son in the first Gulf War. I got a little comfort knowing he died doing something he loved—serving our country.”

“He must have been a fine young man.”

“He was.” Battle tapped her hand softly. “And I’m sure your daughter was a fine young woman.”

She took a couple of deep breaths as she turned and spoke to Gold. “People are scared, David. The children are afraid to go outside.” Her eyes narrowed. “You’re going to find the animal who did this. You’re going to stop him before he kills
anyone else.” She fought to maintain her composure. “Please tell your father I’ll find somebody to look after him for the next few weeks.”

* * *

“I can’t imagine what she’s going through,” Battle said.

Yes you can
. “She’s tough,” Gold said. “She’s raised five kids by herself.”

“We need to find the person who killed her daughter.”

“We will.”

They were walking down the steps of Our Lady when Mojo and her cameraman approached them. “Any update on the identity of the bomber?”

Gold held up a hand. “Please, Carol. We just paid our respects to the mother of the victim at the Art Institute.”

To her credit, Mojo instructed her cameraman to lower his camera.

Gold and Battle were halfway across 91st Street when the ground rocked again. Gold ducked as he saw a Plymouth minivan parked a half-block south on Brandon explode into flames. The warm evening air filled with smoke.

Gold pulled out his BlackBerry and punched 9-1-1. “This is Detective David Gold of Area 2. There’s been an explosion in a car parked on Brandon, a half-block south of 91st, down the street from Our Lady of Guadalupe. Need police and fire assistance now.”

Sirens immediately pierced the night. Gold and Battle enlisted several passersby to keep people away from the flames. Mojo and her cameraman set up on the steps of the rectory, and they went on the air live. The mourners from Our Lady came outside to check out the commotion.

The first squad cars arrived within minutes. They were followed by a pumper truck, a hook-and-ladder, and an ambulance. As Gold was directing them toward the fire, he felt
his BlackBerry vibrate. He had a new e-mail. He immediately hit the reply button and pressed Send. Then he opened the message.

It read, “Free Hassan. We won’t miss next time. IFF.”