Trigger City (5 page)

M
ike Angelo said he'd let me buy him lunch
but he didn't want to see me at Area 4 HQ. I suggested Lou Mitchell's, mainly because you can't get any privacy there. That Mike didn't want me in his office was a red flag—or at least an orange flag—and if he rejected Lou Mitchell's and suggested some place more obscure, then I'd know there was real trouble on the way. But Mike agreed and we met at eleven-thirty and sat side by side at the long counter.

We made it through lunch on the Bears' impressive defense and weak offense and Rex Grossman's latest injury. The waiter cleared our dishes and refilled our coffee mugs. I brought out my notebook.

“Not here,” said Mike Angelo. “Meet you outside.” He stood and left the restaurant without waiting for a reply.

I paid for our lunch and found Mike in front of the building, smoking in the warmth of the midday sun. It had rained overnight and the sky was clear and blue and reflected bright against the Sears Tower and the rest of Chicago's skyscraper skyline.

The sunlight landed heavy, a physical force touching my skin, warming my face. I always loved that feeling.

Mike held a pack of Marlboro Lights out to me. I shook my head and he stuffed the pack into the patch pocket of his brown blazer.

“You got that fancy little car around here someplace?” said Mike.

“Left it at the office,” I said.

Cops tend to be more aware of their environmental conditions than civilians but as we walked west on Jackson, it seemed Mike was casing the surroundings with even greater than normal care. His eyes never settling, always scanning, like he halfway expected to discover that we were under surveillance.

I had enough paranoia of my own these days. I said, “You want to tell me what's going on?”

He stopped walking and hit me with the patented cop stare. They give them out with the badges, but thirty years of police work had seasoned Mike's to concrete perfection. He tossed his cigarette butt in the gutter, started walking again. We turned north on Jefferson, walked a block, and came to his car, parked in a tow-away zone. No ticket. The car was an unmarked blue Chevy Impala. Unmarked, but obvious.

“Get in,” he said.

I did.

 

“Tell me what you've learned about Daddy's little dead girl.” Mike Angelo piloted the car east on Lake Street, over the Chicago River, and hung a sharp left onto Wacker Drive. He drove like a maniac, even by Chicago standards. Most cops do. I avoided looking at the speedometer. Steering with one hand, he cracked open the side window and lit a cigarette, and now I wanted one.

I flipped open my notebook. “Joan Richmond's boss says her employment records, and those of Steven Zhang, were turned over to the CPD. But they weren't in the Deceased file you showed me. Nor was there any notation that they ever had been. Also, Joan's assistant made statements to the detectives, which seem to have been redacted out of her interview transcript.”

“Sloppy police work,” said Mike with a smile just shy of sardonic. “Next?”

“The missing statements and employment records point in the same direction: Richmond and Zhang worked together last year at Hawk River.”

“That a fact?”

“It is. And there's more.”

“Of course there is.” Mike swerved a right turn onto Wabash and headed south, under the El tracks. “Shoot.”

“For Hawk River, the timing of Joan Richmond's death was extremely fortuitous.”

“You don't mean fortuitous,” said Mike. He slammed the brakes and screeched to a stop for a red light and raised his voice to compensate for a passing train that rumble-rattled over our heads. “Fortuitous just means
by chance,
it doesn't necessarily imply a positive development. You mean fortunate, or maybe even serendipitous, but not fortuitous.” He flicked ash through the opening in the side window and said, “Why was it fortunate for Hawk River that Richmond was murdered last month?”

“You don't know?” Mike didn't answer. “Joan Richmond was supposed to testify before Congress. The Oversight and Government Reform committee is looking at the billing practices of military contractors, and Joan would be answering their questions right now if she weren't dead.”

Mike tossed the rest of his cigarette out the window and made a sucking sound through his front teeth—this was news to him. Car horns blared behind us. The light had changed to green. Mike glared at the rearview mirror and shouted, “Go pound sand up your ass!” and waited another ten seconds before stepping on the accelerator, just to make a point.

“Go pound sand up your ass? A minute ago you sounded like you'd swallowed a dictionary.”

Mike shrugged, “I can go either way.” We crossed the intersection and he pulled to the curb half a block down, across the street from my office building. He put the car in Park.

I nodded across the street. “Got beer in my office.” Mike just lowered his window, lit a new cigarette. This time, I took one. “If you don't want to come up, we could do this in a bar. I'm buying.”

Mike reached between the seat and the center armrest, pulled out a stainless steel flask. He twisted the top loose and took a swig, handed the flask to me. This was not what I had in mind. The fact that Mike didn't want to have this conversation in public, or even be seen visiting my office, bothered me more than a little bit. I took a swig from the flask. Vodka. Cops who drink on duty tend to prefer vodka because it doesn't announce itself on your breath as strongly as any other spirit. The taste reminded me of Joan Richmond's lonely and incomplete diary. I handed the flask back to him and he put it out of sight and said, “Cut to the chase, I gotta get back.”

“Okay, check this out: Joan's boss lied to me, pretended not to remember Joan's previous employer, and emphasized that HM Nichols gave
all
their original paperwork on Richmond and Zhang to your detectives. He said if I wanted to learn about their previous employers, I'd have to ask the CPD. And he seemed nervous.”

“So?”

“So I find out that your detectives removed everything relating to Hawk River from the binder—”

“Or never put it in, in the first place,” said Mike. “You're making assumptions.”

“Either way, there's a lot missing.”

“None of which would change the identity of Joan Richmond's killer.”

“No, but you've got the, uh,
serendipitous
timing of her death, and now the fact that every mention of Hawk River is missing from the case file. Taken together, it's suggestive.”

The flask came out again and Mike took a swig and handed it to me. I took a swig and handed it back and it disappeared again. We smoked and said nothing as a couple of trains shrieked their brakes above.

When the trains had passed, Mike said, “You know what percentage of murders we clear?”

“Slightly less than half?”

“Slightly more, 53 percent, last year. The Richmond murder puts us one to the good. Why would I want to fuck with that? You're not telling me that someone other than Steven Zhang pulled the trigger.”

“But there may be more to it,” I said.

“So what? Zhang killed her, killed himself, and the case has been cleared. I've got the other 47 percent of murder victims and their families crying out for justice—which they'll probably never get—and you want me to reallocate my detectives' time stirring shit in a cleared case? Even if there is more to it, Zhang is dead. And without him our chances of getting anywhere go from slim to none.”

“That doesn't explain actively tailoring the case file to cover up any connection to Hawk River.”

Mike took a deep drag on his cigarette, blew it out. He said, “That's a heavy accusation and if I were you I wouldn't make it in public. Think about it. They find a dead woman with a signed confession by her killer who then killed himself. Ballistics match, nice and neat. They go through the routine to dot and cross the appropriate letters, and witnesses confirm the guy was crazy. Even the guy's wife agrees. So maybe they aren't too careful preserving all the paperwork, since the case was closed and cleared from day one.”

“Detectives under your watch just aren't that sloppy, Mike. I've known you too long for that line.”

Mike Angelo's façade cracked and now he just looked tired. “You get to play Lone Ranger but I gotta work within a system.”

“That's what worries me. The system. Did an order come down from on high, to bury the connection to Hawk River?”

Mike tossed his cigarette butt out the window and I did the same with mine and he rolled the windows up. “'Course not,” he said, “they're not that stupid.”

“Then what?”

He didn't offer the flask this time. Just took a swig for himself and
put it away again. We sat in silence for about a year, me staring at Mike and Mike staring out the front windshield at nothing in particular. Finally he said, “God, I hate this job sometimes. Fucking politics.” He glanced my way, then stared back out the window again. “What I say now goes no further than this car.”

“Yeah, and if I ever said anything, you'd call me a liar and never speak to me again. I know.”

He looked at me hard. “You ever say anything, I'll do a hell of a lot worse than that. We clear?”

Mike had never threatened me like that before. He'd threatened our relationship a few times and he'd threatened my license more times than I could recall, but this was something else. I knew what he was saying, and I knew he meant it.

“We're very clear, Mike,” I said.

“Okay. I tell you this, and then I'm out of it. The case looked like a no-brainer from the get-go. My dicks didn't need me holding their dicks for them, you know?”

“Everybody's careful not to micromanage nowadays,” I said.

“Yeah, whatever. It was an easy case, a smoking gun. Nothing to it, open and shut. Then during a briefing, one of my dicks says he's not so sure, maybe there's more to it. I tell him to bring me the Deceased file the next day and we'll talk it through. That night, I get a call at home.”

“Who?”

“I'm not giving you names. Let's say, someone far above my pay grade. Wants to know exactly what I know about the case. I tell him the truth—I don't know anything yet but I'm having a meeting with my guys in the morning and I'll let him know what I think after the meeting.” Mike reached into his pocket, fired up another cigarette, but kept the windows rolled up. “Fuck it, I'll be a chain-smoker. Want one?”

“I'll just breathe your exhaust,” I said. “So the next day…”

“Next day, the two dicks working the Richmond-Zhang case are nowhere to be found. I'm told that they were summoned to head
quarters and they took the deceased file with them. I call down to Thirty-fifth, get bounced around to nowhere. Ten minutes later I get a call from an asshole assistant state's attorney telling me to hang tight and I'll be briefed soon enough. I tell him to go fuck himself and give me back my men. An hour after that I get a visit—a heavy suit from the governor's office. Tells me there are federal implications but won't say anything more. Couple hours later, my dicks show up along with a CPD lawyer
and
the asshole ASA. Lawyer tells me they've been reassigned to Area 3, effective immediately, and the case goes with them. My guys clean out their desks and off they go. Can't even look me in the eye. And the case was cleared the next fucking day.”

“But you showed me the file,” I said.

“They sent me a copy for records, since it was our case for a while. But I tell ya, my binder is about half as thick as the original. And here's the kicker: both detectives made sergeant a week later.”

“Damn, Mike.”

He put the car in Drive, kept his foot on the brake. “Seems to me you've got a choice to make. This can still be a simple gig and you can make some easy money. Or you can make it complicated. You go that way, I wish you good luck. But I cannot help you, not even a little bit. I won't brainstorm it with you, I won't vouch for you…and if you break the law this time, I sure as shit won't cover for you. I mean it.”

I didn't know what to say to that. I said, “I paid a visit to Amy Zhang yesterday. She acted like she'd never heard of Hawk River but she's a lousy actress. And she's scared to death.”

“Somebody threatens her, she can go to her local district station and file a complaint, like any other citizen.”

“At some point during my visit, she decided I wasn't really working for Isaac Richmond. She was petrified. We're way past someone threatening her.”

“Sorry. Nothing I can do about it.”

“Well I can't just leave her to twist in the wind,” I said.

Mike said, “She's not your client, Ray.”

“Duly noted.” I got out of the car and slammed the door.

The passenger window lowered and Mike said, “Don't call me again about this case.”

The window went back up and the Impala screeched off down Wabash.

M
y office door was unlocked,
but Vince was not sitting behind my desk. I drew my pistol and flattened against the wall. I scanned the room. The percolator on top of the little bar fridge was making burbling noises. Beneath the coffee aroma I caught the smell of Aqua Velva and my head started swimming and the room began to slip away from me and I felt like throwing up. The taste of blood flooded my mouth and a wave of heat rolled over me and my skin broke into a clammy sweat
.

You killed the guy. He's not here. It's just in your head…

I forced a long deep breath and fought against the surging flashback images and managed to stay out of the torture chair. After a minute of deep breathing, I was relatively normal again.

The office was obviously empty and the only thing I was sure of was that I was losing my mind. I got a beer from the fridge and sat in my desk chair and put the gun on the desk. I swallowed half the beer and lit a smoke. Vince came into the office, started for the coffeemaker, saw me and said, “Hey, you want some coffee? Just made a fresh pot.”

“How many times am I going to tell you to lock the door?”

“I had to drain the main vein,” he said. “I was just down the hall.”

“You leave the office, even to go to the can, you lock the door. Next time I find it unlocked, I dock twenty bucks from your pay. Got it?”

“All right, okay. Sorry.” Vince poured coffee into a mug and planted himself across the desk from me. “You okay?”

“Your aftershave smells like Aqua Velva.” I pulled a wad of bills out of my pocket.

“It isn't. It's a new one, called—”

“It smells
similar
to Aqua Velva.” I tossed three twenties across the desk. “Go buy some good cologne. Nothing from the drugstore, go to Field's.”

Vince picked up the money with a confused look on his face. “Thought you were mad at Field's 'cause they're selling out to Macy's.”

“I don't care where you go, just get something that smells better.”

Vince shoved the money in his pocket with a shrug. “Thanks, I guess.”

“Don't guess. It'll improve your love life. And don't thank me, I'm doing it to improve the atmosphere around here.”

I got another beer from the fridge and Vince gave me a verbal report on his recent surveillance of Dr. Boyfriend. While half my brain listened to Vince, I considered the implications of what Mike Angelo had told me and how it related to what I'd learned from Terry and Kate Weinstein and Douglas Hill. And how it related to Amy Zhang's fear and Isaac Richmond's grief.

I wanted to toss it around verbally, as I would've with Mike if he hadn't so elegantly recused himself. I liked Vince and he was smarter than most people realized, but he was still too green to offer any useful advice and, anyway, our relationship hadn't developed far enough for me to lay this on him. I pushed it out of my mind and refocused on what Vince was saying.

Andrew Glassman had continued to be a good doctor and son since the last report. He and Jill had not gotten together but she'd switched
to the night shift, so they probably wouldn't see a lot of each other until she went back on days two weeks from now.

Vince flipped the page of his notebook. “So the subject had coffee with another doctor in the cafeteria at Rush and I sat at the next table…”

“I hope you didn't get made.”

“Not a chance,” said Vince with some pride. “I was careful. And doctors are too full of themselves to notice civilians, anyway. Hey, I heard two nurses talking and one told a great doctor joke: Most doctors think they're God, but God thinks he's an invasive cardiologist. Funny, huh?”

“A riot,” I said. Thinking
Maybe it's time to give it up, Dudgeon. You're starting to look pathetic.

“Well I thought it was funny,” said Vince. “Anyway, so our subject is having coffee with this other guy and he's talking about Jill. Saying how he thinks Jill is the one and maybe he's ready to make a commitment…”

It felt like a punch in the gut. I wanted to tell Vince to stop right there. But I just said, “Oh yeah?” I swallowed some more beer, lit a new cigarette with the butt of the old one.

“Thought you were quitting.” Vince caught my look, went back to his notes. “Anyway, he says he's got some concerns. First he says they've been fighting a bit because she won't stop smoking.” Vince conceded the obvious with a smirk in my direction. “Then he says he wouldn't want the mother of his children to work outside the home and he isn't sure how she'd react to that, 'cause she loves being a nurse. Finally he says that, at the end of the day, all relationships are about who has the power, and this worries him because he thinks he loves Jill more than she loves him, so the balance of power will always be in her favor.”

For the first time I was hearing things about Andrew Glassman that made me dislike him. And call me shallow, but it offered new hope. I said, “That's a terrible way to look at love.”

“I think he was just talking, I don't think it bothers him that much.”
Vince closed his notebook. “The way their conversation ended, I think he's getting ready to propose.”

So much for new hope. “Okay. Thanks,” I said.

“Yeah. Sorry.”

 

Vince left to go serve some court papers for his other employer and I switched from beer to coffee. I called a flower shop and had a “bright and cheery mixed tulip bouquet” sent to Angela Green. The woman on the phone asked what I wanted on the card. I opened my notepad and read aloud what I'd written there earlier:

Then I called Terry at work and got his voice mail, on which I left a full and unabridged apology complete with offers of self-immolation.

 

What do you want me to say?
Amy Zhang had pleaded.
I said everything right.
And then,
I don't like being tested.

 

Given what I'd learned from Mike Angelo, it was easy enough to conceive that Amy Zhang might be under pressure to stick with some official version of events…to
say everything right
. She came to believe that I'd been sent to test her, to make sure she could still sell that official version. That now seemed obvious. And the way she said it suggested that it wasn't the first time she'd been tested. And it scared the hell out of her.

The pressure may have been applied by a bent cop or other government official involved in the cover-up of whatever the hell it was they were covering up. But Amy Zhang wasn't frightened at the front door, when she thought I was a cop. More likely, she thought I'd been sent by Hawk River. I had no evidence that Hawk River was behind it, but the company was at the very least a cobeneficiary of the cover-up, along with some part of the government.

If…If
Joan Richmond knew anything damaging to Hawk River, and
if
she was willing to testify about her knowledge before the congressional Oversight and Government Reform committee. And
if
they knew she knew. And
if
they knew she was gonna spill to Congress.

That's a lot of ifs.

After a half hour of research online, I picked up the phone, dialed Hawk River's head office, and asked to speak with Joseph Grant. Grant was the CEO and I knew I wouldn't get him on the line, but the CEO's secretary is one of the true power positions in any company.

I told Grant's secretary who I was and who my client was and explained that I was on a fool's errand to collect information about Joan Richmond so that her father could come to terms with her death. I asked if Mr. Grant could spare me a few minutes, just to tell me what he remembered of Joan.

The secretary assured me that she would relay my request and asked me to please call back in an hour.

I spent the hour surfing the Net, reading what I could about Hawk River and its place in the world of government contracting, and about the congressional hearings into military contractors and their alleged billing abuses. It looked like a rat's nest but Washington had been a rat's nest for a long time now. Maybe it was ever thus. And besides, you can't always believe what you read in the papers.

I called back and the secretary told me that Mr. Grant would be happy to give me fifteen minutes at three o'clock tomorrow, if that was a convenient time for me. I assured her that three o'clock was perfect for me and thanked her for her help and hung up with a sour taste in my mouth.

Fifteen minutes
. Joseph Grant ran a company with private soldiers servicing hundreds of government contracts in at least fifteen countries. Although most of the business was with Uncle Sam, some contracts were with other sovereign states. Plus dozens of contracts with several multinational corporations. All together Hawk River was billing three-quarters of a billion dollars, give or take a few bucks. Billion, with a
b.
And Joseph Grant can give me fifteen minutes of his time? He shouldn't have fifteen
seconds
for me. Some half-assed gumshoe taking $800 a day from a grieving father? Grant should've had his secretary pass me off to a public relations lackey with instructions to shine me on.

But Grant had time for me, so obviously he saw things differently. Perhaps he saw a gumshoe asking questions about Hawk River's former head of payroll who was murdered just in time to stop her from testifying before that congressional committee. The murdered former head of payroll whose every connection to Hawk River was quietly scrubbed from the CPD's case file by the concerted effort of several Chicago cops, a police department lawyer, an assistant state's attorney, and a lawyer from the governor's office.

I unplugged the percolator and put on my jacket, thinking
Don't wander too far down Speculation Alley, Dudgeon. Even if Hawk River is a beneficiary of some cover-up, you don't know that Grant even
knows
of it. Stay within sight of the established facts.

I left the office. And locked the door behind me.

 

Back at my apartment, I changed into my sweats and did an hour on the recumbent bike with the stereo blasting Stiff Little Fingers. You don't get much better than SLF, and the music kept me motivated on the bike. I toweled the sweat off my face and got down on the floor. I lay on my left side, with a three-pound dumbbell in my right hand, and struggled through the exercises prescribed by my physical therapist, isolating muscles and feeling them tremble under the strain of such incredible weight.

Nothing so humbling as a contest lost to three pounds.

Having just barely survived the workout, I shaved and showered and put on jeans and a Columbia College sweatshirt. Padded barefoot into the kitchen and swallowed two Percocet and a pint of water, opened a can of Beefaroni and ate it right out of the can,
cowboy style
. Poured three fingers of Mount Gay Extra Old over ice. Added a splash of water. Took my drink to the living room and faced the stereo.

Over half my music collection was jazz but for the last nine months I hadn't been able to listen to it. Jazz had been my musical anchor since I was sixteen. But now, every time I tried, it just made me angry. I hoped that I'd be able to return to it someday.

But not yet.

I put on Lurrie Bell's
Blues Had a Baby
. To my ears Bell had the most soulful voice and inventive guitar on the Chicago blues scene. And that's saying a lot.

I drank the rum slowly and let the music wash over me and waited for the Percs to kick in. My shoulder hurt like a bastard, and it took some effort to stay in the present tense. The pain was a houseguest you never invited, who doesn't know when to leave and insists on retelling the story of how you met, over and over. A trip down a specific memory lane that I'd just as soon never take again.

The thing about being tortured is, there comes a point where you just want to die. You don't care anymore. You just don't give a fuck. All that exists is pain and self-hatred and the only way to make it stop is to tell them what they want to know. Or die.

So you want to die. You want it more than you want to tell them what they want to know, or you'd have told them by now. You want it more than you've ever wanted anything in your life. The desire for death actually strengthens you, buys you a few more minutes of resistance. You know you're going to break soon, and you beg death to come sooner.

It's sick, I know, but that's how it is.

Talk about ultimate tough guy credentials. That's what you'd think, right? You made it through that and you never told them a goddamn
thing. But here you are almost ten months later, still waking up crying in the middle of the night like a small child with night terrors. Or freaking out because you catch a whiff of cheap aftershave.

Some tough guy.

I finished the rum in my glass and poured another and returned to the stereo.

Next up, Dylan's
Blood on the Tracks
.

The pain was dull enough that I could use my arm again, so I started packing books into cardboard boxes while listening to Bob get tangled up in blue. I hadn't been in complete denial about my upcoming move and I'd actually bought packing boxes. But only a few were packed. I had less than six weeks to find a new place to live and I hadn't even started looking in earnest.

As I looked around the apartment, I realized that this place was part of the problem. My belongings were part of the problem. The back of the couch had loose threads where my cat used to sharpen his claws. The cat died seven years ago. And the old battered piano bench that served as a coffee table? I'd had that thing since college. I'd bought the big reading chair as a gift to myself, to mark my second year working as an investigative reporter at the
Chicago Chronicle
.