The Bad Kitty Lounge Page 4

  They exchanged a look. Robert slipped the money into the knapsack, slung the knapsack over his shoulder, and turned toward the door. I felt pretty good about myself until Robert spun back. He held a pistol. He pointed it at my belly.

  “No,” he said. His voice was like a dry well. “It works like this. We make an offer, we give you the money, and you take it.”

  Jarik said, “Uh-huh.”

  My Glock was on my desk. If I grabbed it, I probably could squeeze off a shot before I died, but then two of us would be dead and that wouldn’t help anyone.

  Robert put the knapsack on the desk. “You do what you want with the money. You wipe your dick with it or you spend it getting drunk or high ’cause that’s what the word on you is. Are you still into all that, Joe? Or maybe you’re clean now, and you buy football tickets and take that little nephew of yours out for a nice afternoon.”

  I heard the threat in the last bit. They could roll down a window and point a pistol at Jason as easily as at me. “I don’t like you knowing so much about me,” I said.

  “We don’t want you to like it.”

  I thought about that. “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, I’ll take your money. I won’t investigate Judy Terrano.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, then.”

  Robert put the stacks of twenties on my desk again, and he and Jarik left. They didn’t say another word. They didn’t give me a phone number where I could reach them if I had questions or second thoughts. I didn’t ask them for one.

  The sensible thing would have been to put the money in the bank and take a vacation. I’d already quit working for Samuelson, and I’d never planned to investigate Judy Terrano. I could sign Jason out of school for a week and take him fishing in Florida. That would be safe. Sensible.

  I tucked my Glock into my over-the-shoulder rig and slipped on my jacket, leaving the cash on my desk. The lights at the end of the hall said the elevator was at the fourth floor and heading down. A sign warned that if you opened the door to the emergency stairwell next to the elevator shaft an alarm would ring. It was a lie. I took the steps two at a time.

  NINE

  ROBERT AND JARIK DROVE fast through the morning traffic, shifting lanes just before delivery trucks put on their brakes in front of them, accelerating through intersections. I followed a few car lengths back. There’s no such thing as an invisible tail. If a driver is looking for you, you’ll be seen. Apparently Robert and Jarik weren’t looking.

  We went west out of the Loop, glided across three lanes onto the entrance ramp to the Dan Ryan, and sped south. Ten minutes later we exited into Beverly, a tree-lined neighborhood, once middle-class Irish, now mostly middle-class black.

  I figured the money that Robert and Jarik put on my desk came from someone who’d ordered them to persuade me to take it as a payoff. Who was backing them? Who wanted Judy Terrano’s murder to be pinned on Greg Samuelson? The real killer?

  Robert and Jarik pulled up next to a large, yellow house and climbed out of the SUV. I drove past and, a half block away, swung to the curb. I gave them a minute and walked back to the yellow house. The yard was clean and neat, the lawn raked and green, the trees bright with fall color. An autumn wreath hung on the front door.

  I knocked on the door.

  After a long time a very dark-skinned housekeeper in her eighties opened it. The edges of her eyes drooped like they’d been weighed down by a century of tears. She said, “Yeesss?”

  “I’m here to see Robert and Jarik,” I said.

  Her jaw hardened. “Are you certain?”

  I said I was.

  “Very well.” She stood aside, let me in, and closed the door.

  The front hall was bright and tiled with slate. The air smelled like cedar smoke. A heavy mahogany sculpture of a naked girl stood to the left inside the entrance with breasts so perky you could hang hats on them.

  The housekeeper led me up the hall and knocked on a closed door. The door opened a crack and the head of a kid in his late teens appeared. The woman said, “A man is here for Robert and Jarik.”

  The kid disappeared behind the door. I was tired of the show, so I reached for the knob, but the woman stepped in my way and hissed, “Patience.”

  The kid opened the door again.

  A tall black man, dressed all in gray, his broad head shaved bald, stood by a large, dark-wood desk. He looked ninety or ninety-five years old at least, but his chest was broad and he stood straight and solid. Robert and Jarik stood behind the tall man. If they were surprised to see me, they didn’t show it. Another man, about forty years old, sat in a wheelchair. He was an enormous man in vertically striped pants and a horizontally striped shirt. He stared at the tall man with dull eyes and a dull smile, and slowly and silently clapped big long hands. Saffron drapes, bunched at the bottom, were pulled shut over what must have been a large window. A black-and-gold-patterned mud cloth hung on the wall behind the desk. A stick of cedar incense wafted into the air from a tray on a sideboard. The room looked like a movie set for a 1970s film about an island dictator.

  “Ah, Mr. Kozmarski,” said the old man with a warm smile, as if he’d expected me.

  I nodded. “And you are?”

  “I’m William DuBuclet.”

  His name flashed back to me from when I was a kid. William DuBuclet had been a controversial leader in black Chicago from the early sixties until the eighties, starting in the civil rights movement when he’d pushed for a mix of violent and peaceful action, mostly violent. Later, if I remembered right, DuBuclet had gone back to school and written a book on ghetto politics. He’d eventually become a power broker who’d helped elect Chicago’s first black mayor.

  “I thought you were dead,” I said.

  With a gentle smile, he admitted, “A common misconception. Some mornings even I’m not certain. But as you see, I’m still here.”

  “And still stirring the pot.”

  He nodded. “When I think the pot’s worth stirring and I have enough energy to stir it.”

  “Like now, for instance. Why are you concerned about Judy Terrano’s death?” I asked.

  With the same gentle smile, he asked, “Did you know her?”

  “Barely,” I admitted. “Mostly what I read in the paper. I take it you knew her?”

  “Very well. She was an extraordinary woman, one of the most brilliant I’ve known. Her death is an enormous loss. Everyone loved her and not with a normal love either. With passion. I never knew a man who refused to give her what she asked for.”

  “You’ll have to sign up to speak at her funeral.”

  He nodded once, ignoring my tone. “Yes, I may have to.”

  “Why don’t you want me investigating her killing?”

  “Like everyone else, Sister Terrano lived a complicated life.” He emphasized the word complicated like it carried a history of grief. “In recent years, it became more complicated. It’s sometimes better to be able to think about our heroes in simple terms.”

  “What exactly complicated her life?”

  He gave me a knowing smile, like he figured I already was in on the secret. “This is my pot to stir,” he said. “If too many people stick their hands in, everything gets messy. I want to resolve this my way.”

  “You’ll have a hard time convincing the police to keep their hands out.”

  He shook his head impatiently. “They won’t look further than Samuelson.”

  I looked at him unconvinced.

  “I know that your father was a policeman and that you, for a time, were, too,” he said, “but I—”

  “How did you learn about me and my dad?”

  “I have deep connections and old ones to this city. I make a few telephone calls and I find out what I need to know.”

  “I don’t think I like your knowing about me.”

  He smiled a thin smile. “No disrespect, but I also know the police from a time when a dog could ge
t more justice in this city than a black man—or a black woman, even a famous black woman. The police will take the fastest path, and that path is Greg Samuelson.”

  “How do you know Samuelson didn’t do it?”

  “I’m not naive. I made my calls and heard details that weren’t widely reported. About the writing on her stomach. About the events leading up to the killing. And about the medical examiner’s conclusions. The man they’ve charged had no history and no likelihood of doing this kind of—”

  “He’d just torched a Mercedes.”

  “He burned the car so that he wouldn’t have to confront his wife’s lover. He didn’t wish to hurt another person, or, if he did, he didn’t have it in him to do so.”

  I said, “I don’t know his psychology but it seems to me that you don’t either.”

  “For similar reasons I don’t believe he would have raped her.”

  “She wasn’t raped.”

  “Have you read this morning’s paper?”

  “Robert and Jarik interrupted me before I got around to it.”

  “She was raped.”

  “Not from what I know.”

  He shrugged. “He would have shot her, not strangled her.”

  I nodded. “Robert’s argument, too, and not a bad one.”

  “I’m confident in my assessment.”

  “Overconfident.”

  “What do you think, Mr. Kozmarski? Did Samuelson do it?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know what to think.”

  He considered me for a while. “They say the bruising is consistent all the way around her neck. You don’t get that from using the hands. Only a garrote will do that.”

  “So?”

  “The police found nothing that could have made that bruise. Unless Samuelson raped and strangled her, left to hide the garrote, then came back to the office and shot—”

  “Okay,” I said, “so Samuelson didn’t do it.”

  “But the DA will charge him.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’m guessing you’ve also heard that Samuelson was threatened by Eric Stone.”

  “Of course. But what did Stone have against Sister Terrano?”

  “I thought you might tell me.”

  He dismissed that with a wave.

  “Why didn’t you come to my office to see me yourself?” I asked.

  “I’m ninety-six years old. I spend my days caring for my grandson.” He gestured to the big, smiling man in the wheelchair. “I don’t get out a lot.”

  I looked DuBuclet up and down. He wore the unworried expression of a man used to getting things his way. “I don’t know who you are,” I said.

  “You can find out all you want to know about me from the newspaper files.”

  “And what’s with the show here? The closed drapes. The incense. The staff opening and shutting your doors for you.”

  He smiled. “The sunlight troubles my old eyes, Mr. Kozmarski, and so the drapes remain closed at my optometrist’s orders. The ‘staff’ are my family, biological and ideological. It means a great deal to me to have family near at this time in my life. As for the incense, it may be a pretension, but it’s one I won’t easily give up. I find that as I’ve grown older the city stinks to me. The South Side, and this neighborhood, and my neighbors—they smell like a rotting animal. If the incense doesn’t cover the stink completely, it allows me to forget it for a while.”

  DuBuclet had plausible reasons for thinking Samuelson was innocent of Judy Terrano’s killing. But I didn’t trust him. He didn’t fool me with his tired old-man act. His eyes were alive—he was thinking and scheming like he planned to be around for fifty more years. And like he planned to operate the city from behind the big closed curtain of his house. He was no Wizard of Oz who would shrink into a laughable midget once you pulled his curtain away. His smile scared me. But it also attracted me and I found myself wanting to get close to this man who, at ninety-six, saw reason to stir the pot of this big, stinking city and maybe had the energy and money to make things happen that could and should have happened years ago.

  I said, “So you want me to forget about Judy Terrano?”

  He nodded. “That’s what I want.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  The big man reached out a large hand and shook mine with a heavy grip. He said, “You do that.”

  TEN

  THE SECRETARIAL SCHOOL STUDENTS kept their eyes to themselves when I walked back down the corridor alone to my office. Three stacks of twenties waited on my desk for me to riffle them, but I left them alone. The morning paper, its pages still creased, was lying on the desk near the money. The red light on my answering machine flashed but I ignored it.

  I went to the window and looked east. Across the street through the crack between the insurance building and the building to the north of it, the waves on Lake Michigan danced in the late-morning sunlight. The wedge of light and water looked like a path to somewhere I would like to go if only I could step through my window and float through the gap without falling. Just looking at the wedge made me feel good. I stood watching the light and water for a long time until I noticed a man in the corner office across the street staring at me from his window. I waved. He flipped me off and went to his desk.

  I figured that meant it was time for me to go to mine.

  The front-page headline in the Chicago Tribune said, VIRGINITY NUN KILLED, with a subhead, CHASTITY ADVOCATE ASSAULTED. In the article Stan Fleming got his name mentioned twice along with some punchy lines about the shock this murder had caused to himself, the city, and the world. Without using the word rape, he mentioned “an especially disturbing sexual assault on Sister Terrano.”

  I trusted Stan but I wondered what he was up to. He’d said that the forensics cop had told him that no rape had occurred. Either the forensics cop had changed his mind or Stan had figured on his own that Judy Terrano’s naked body justified the accusation. Or, with Greg Samuelson already lying in the hospital in custody, he might have figured he could benefit from the public thinking Samuelson was a sexual monster.

  The article didn’t mention the black cat tattoo or the Magic Marker on Judy Terrano’s body. I hadn’t expected it to.

  It did say Greg Samuelson was in critical condition at Rush Medical Center, under police guard, and an unnamed source said he might make it. He’d lost blood and he would stay in the ICU for a couple of days, but they’d seen worse. With him in that shape, the district attorney’s office could take their time about charging him. For now, the article described him as a suspect and said the police weren’t hunting for anyone else. The article referred to me as an unnamed private investigator who had discovered the nun and Samuelson.

  I dropped the paper into the garbage and punched the Play button on the answering machine. The machine said I had four messages. Stan Fleming had left the first. He said, cheery as morning coffee, “You’re a friend, so I’m wondering why you left the party early yesterday.” I kicked my feet onto the desk and listened. He yelled at me for leaving Holy Trinity before he gave me permission to go, then calmed down again at the end before adding, “You know, this case isn’t about you and me and Corrine, so everything would go better if you didn’t fuck around. Call me as soon as you get this message, okay? We’ve got more to talk about.” More noise, I figured, and I deleted the message. I was curious if he planned to try to hang Judy Terrano’s killing on Greg Samuelson, but he didn’t sound like he was in a friendly and giving mood.

  The second call was from Corrine. She said she’d seen me on television and was worried about me. She didn’t mention Stan Fleming and I wondered if she knew he was heading the investigation. She also didn’t mention my smacking my Skylark into the news vans.

  The next message was a blank, a click followed by static and background traffic, then a hang-up.

  The last message made me take my feet off the desk. “Hello, Mr. Kozmarski,” the caller said. “This is Eric Stone. I’d like to talk with you.” He was more polite than I would have
thought he could manage and more than I deserved. I figured he still would want to sledgehammer me into the pavement. He left his number and hung up.

  I dialed Corrine on her cell phone, but the call rang through to voice mail. “Yeah, hi,” I said. “Thanks for the call. I’m okay—I’m all right.” It wasn’t quite true and it wasn’t a love poem, but it told her what I needed it to. I added, “I would like to see you,” and hung up.

  Then I called the number Eric Stone had left me.

  A receptionist answered, “LCR Real Estate.”

  I told her who I was and she made me listen to reruns of eighties pop music while I waited to talk to Stone.

  He came to the phone with a voice full of concern. “Mr. Kozmarski, thank you for calling.”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Stone?”

  “Two things actually. I’d like to know what you said to the police about me yesterday.”

  “I told them you threatened to kill Greg Samuelson.”

  Unhappy now. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because you did, and because Samuelson took a bullet in the face.”

  Less happy. “He burned my car. I was angry. I obviously didn’t mean that I would kill him.”

  “So you didn’t shoot him?”

  “No.”

  “Have you told that to the police?”

  “My lawyer and I are meeting with them in an hour.”

  “Okay.”

  “Anyway, Samuelson shot himself. That’s what the paper says.”

  “Maybe. You said you wanted two things from me. What’s the other?”

  “Actually, I’d like to talk with you about working for me.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Are you available to meet with me at my Loop office this afternoon?”

  “Just talk? No brawling?”

  “Just talk.”

  I sat at my desk and considered Eric Stone. No matter what he said about playing nice, he was throwing a surprise punch and I wondered what kind of fight he was looking for. No, he hadn’t shot Samuelson, he said. Yes, I was curious to know where he was when Samuelson took the bullet and Judy Terrano got killed.