Trouble in Mind Read online

  ‘Got it,’ he said, when Kelson finished. ‘Each of the killings is a life sentence. With two together, courts like to go exponential.’

  ‘You’ve got rotten bedside manner.’

  ‘You want me to hold your hand, or you want me to do my job?’

  ‘I want you to get me out of here.’

  ‘Would this afternoon be too early? I mean, if everything you say checks out?’

  ‘You’re not that good.’

  ‘Even a bad lawyer could do it,’ Davies said. ‘If what you’re saying is true, it’s a sloppy arrest. Plenty of drama. A lot of flash. A big effort to shake you up. But easily undone if Jaipal Minhas has the gun.’

  ‘The guy seemed too nervous to kill Christian Felbanks.’

  ‘That’s what I’m guessing. And it would make no sense for him to kill his daughter and then show up at your office like that. So let’s work with the idea he didn’t kill Felbanks and he might not even know that his gun is the one that did it.’

  ‘How about the cousin?’ Kelson said. ‘I didn’t get much of a read on him.’

  ‘He’s worth looking at,’ Davies said. ‘I’ll talk to the father first.’

  ‘What can I do from here?’ Kelson asked.

  The lawyer shrugged. ‘Get some rest. Think happy thoughts.’

  Kelson said, ‘So, you can do bedside manner after all.’

  Kelson spent the afternoon in the same holding cell where he’d slept after Felbanks’s death. It smelled like a dank basement until a cop brought a disheveled man down the steps and put him in the cell next to his. Then it smelled like sweat and urine. ‘Monkey house,’ Kelson said.

  He lay down on his bunk and tried to think happy thoughts, though all he could think of was Sue Ellen waiting for him to pick her up at the end of the school day as he’d promised and then Nancy rushing from the Healthy Smiles Dental Clinic to get their sad daughter. ‘Bad dad,’ he said. ‘I’m a bad, bad dad.’

  He was still lying on the bunk when a cop slid a dinner tray into his cell.

  At eight that evening, the cop came back and opened his cell. He led him up the steps and along a corridor to the Homicide Room. In Dan Peters’s office, the detective and Edward Davies sat at a desk looking as if they’d just finished a heated argument. Davies smiled as Kelson came in. Peters didn’t.

  ‘Detective Peters owes you an apology,’ Davies said. ‘It seems your arrest this morning was based on a … what did you call it, Detective? A misunderstanding? A miscommunication?’ When Peters gave no answer, he said, ‘Let’s call it both. A misunderstanding and a miscommunication. Seeing that this is the second time the detective has locked you up for a crime you didn’t commit, less charitable people might call it harassment. People might suspect the motives of the detective. Lawsuits have been filed for less. But I’ve assured him you’re in no way vindictive. I hope I haven’t overstepped. But I’ve also told him you would like an apology and an assurance that he’ll avoid this kind of action in the future – a complaint or lawsuit remaining an alternative.’

  ‘I don’t need an apology,’ Kelson said.

  ‘Do you see that?’ Davies said to Peters. ‘He’ll save you the embarrassment.’

  Peters stared at Kelson. ‘Stay out of the way. I’ve got two killings. If you step out, I’ll run you over.’

  ‘I’m already flattened,’ Kelson said.

  ‘And I’ll flatten you again.’

  Davies said to Peters, ‘From a criminal defense standpoint, that’s a bad tactic.’

  Peters kept his eyes on Kelson. ‘Leave. Now.’

  Davies smiled at Kelson. ‘From all standpoints, that seems like a good idea.’

  Davies took Kelson out for a second dinner – this one at Benny’s Chop House. ‘Jail food lowers the spirits,’ he said. ‘Just walking into the station lowers mine. I’ll bill you for this dinner by the way. Get the filet or the rib eye.’

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ Kelson said.

  But Davies insisted on ordering first – a ten-ounce filet for himself, a ten-ounce filet for Kelson, and a bottle of Bordeaux because, he said, ‘You don’t walk out of jail so easy every day.’

  After he wiped salad dressing from the corner of his mouth, he said, ‘Jaipal Minhas admits he shot the gun. He bought it and the cousin’s pistol two days ago from a woman who looked a lot like the one who identified you in the lineup – dirty blonde, skinny. She went to the father’s house to offer condolences for Raima’s death. She said she was a college friend.’

  ‘And what?’ Kelson said. ‘She brought guns instead of flowers?’

  Davies shrugged. ‘I guess she brought flowers too. Jaipal’s angry about his daughter’s death. The woman encouraged the anger. She could help him do something about it.’

  ‘The guns were lousy,’ Kelson said. ‘The kind I used to take from kids on the street. Nothing professional.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Davies said. ‘I found out a little about the woman. She’s a twenty-six-year-old named Barbara Lisle – goes by the name Raba. The witness report – which I wasn’t supposed to see but did because I’m smart and persuasive and also good-looking – lists her occupation as “adult entertainment.” No porn – I Googled her. She used to dance at a club up by the Wisconsin border. Now she’s an escort who, the reviews say, will do anything and then some, at a price.’

  ‘Including identifying me in a lineup.’

  ‘It looks like it. The police will put out a warrant for her, but it’ll be low priority. I’m sure she’s already disappeared – to LA or somewhere else nice if she’s got a good ticket, Cleveland or Detroit if she doesn’t. You don’t pull a stunt like this and sit tight.’

  An hour later, Davies dropped Kelson at his apartment. As Kelson got out, Davies said, ‘Hold on, I’ve got a present for you,’ and he popped the trunk. In a cardboard box, he had Kelson’s KelTec. ‘They couldn’t reasonably keep it once forensics cleared you,’ Davies said.

  ‘How about my Springfield XD-S? They took it off me at Christian Felbanks’s condo.’

  ‘See? That’s what I mean,’ Davies said. ‘The assholes never told me they had it.’

  Kelson released the KelTec magazine, thumbed it, and slid it in again. ‘This’ll do the trick for now.’

  Davies said, ‘Do me a favor. Don’t shoot anyone tonight. I’ve got other clients to deal with.’

  Kelson went up to his apartment and called Nancy’s house.

  The call woke her – and he knew he’d made another mistake. He asked anyway, ‘Can I talk with Sue Ellen?’

  ‘It’s almost midnight.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘She’s been asleep for two hours. Use your so-called head.’

  ‘Tell her I love her – in the morning.’

  ‘You were supposed to get her from school. Where were you?’

  ‘In jail.’

  ‘Again?’ She was wide awake now.

  ‘Funny, huh?’

  ‘No, not funny at all.’ The line went dead.

  ‘I still love her,’ he said to Payday.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The next morning, Kelson woke up without a headache but popped a Percocet with breakfast just in case. He went to his office early, strapped the KelTec under the desk, and took his laptop from the drawer. ‘The problem is,’ he said to it as it booted up, ‘you can’t stop people who go after you like this. Unless you kill them.’ He considered the idea. ‘But you can’t do that.’ He connected to the internet and brought up Google. ‘Can you?’ He looked up news articles about Bicho Rodriguez – the boy’s shooting of him, his own killing of the boy. Again, he felt the haunting, sickening question – Who shot first? He could live with the knowledge that he returned fire if Bicho meant to kill him, but if Bicho only meant to scare him with his tiny Beretta and then Kelson panicked and killed the kid, that knowledge would rip him apart. During his months in the hospital and rehab, he hadn’t wanted to see the details. If they clarified that one blot in his memory, they m
ight destroy him. But after he got out, Dr P encouraged him to do all he could to understand what happened because knowing could help him heal.

  ‘It would be like peeling back my skin and looking inside,’ he told her.

  The metaphor didn’t put her off. ‘How else are you going to clean out the wounds?’

  But now others were peeling back his skin anyway, and so he read every word he could find. He expected the stories to give him pain – maybe pain he couldn’t bear, if they revealed him as a trigger-fingered coward – but they sounded cold and dead. The articles painted the shooting scene as Kelson wished he remembered it. They said that, struck in the head by a bullet, he managed to take a gun from inside his jacket and plug the boy once in the chest. He skipped the profile articles about his history in the department and his family life and the day the mayor, the police superintendent, and his district captain came to his hospital room with a service medal and news cameras. He lingered on the Tribune profile of Bicho’s hard-luck childhood. When he finished it, he wrote notes.

  Alejandro Rodriguez – Bicho

  Father OD’d/DOA when B was 8

  Mother died when B was 9

  Raised by grandmother and uncle – Names? Other family? Neighborhood?

  Amundsen High Sch – Damen Ave. – dropped out 9th grade – Friends? Teachers?

  Drug charges at 16 – Juv Detention 7 months – Friends? Guards?

  Girlfriend – Francisca Cabon

  Then he searched social media sites. If Bicho had accounts, they were deleted after his death. Francisca Cabon had posted a picture from the funeral, though – Bicho stretched in a casket, wearing a white suit coat with a white carnation boutonniere, his dark hair slicked back, his thin lips stretched in a smile.

  Kelson searched for more on Francisca and found an address on West Lawrence three blocks from where he and Bicho shot each other.

  Then he put away the computer and left a voicemail message for his friend Greg Toselli at the police department. ‘I need to see the Alejandro Rodriguez file,’ he said. ‘I want to know about his relatives and friends. I want to know who supplied him with the coke.’

  When he hung up, he looked at his window. Drizzle was spitting on the glass. ‘Might as well,’ he said. He holstered the KelTec and left his office.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Francisca Cabon lived in an apartment above a storefront west of Seely Avenue. Kelson pulled to the curb and cut the engine. The business that had once occupied the storefront was long gone, and the sign-mount hanging over the door was empty and rusting. Kelson jogged through the drizzle to the street entrance. When he read the display of tenant names, he froze. At the top, a little plaque said Stevens Group Rental Properties.

  ‘What’re you doing here?’ Kelson asked, before deciding it didn’t necessarily mean anything since Dominick Stevens owned properties throughout the city. But he said, ‘What are the odds?’ before pushing the button for Francisca Cabon.

  A woman answered through the intercom, and Kelson said, ‘I need to ask you some questions about Bicho Rodriguez.’

  ‘You one of his friends?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m the guy who killed him.’

  ‘Oh.’ She buzzed him in.

  The woman at the third-floor landing looked about eighteen. She wore jeans, flip-flops, and a blouse she’d knotted above her belly. She’d bleached a blonde streak in her brown hair. She held a diapered baby against her shoulder. As Kelson came up the last step, she held a free hand to shake his. ‘Elena,’ she said. ‘Francisca’s roommate. You’re the guy that did Bicho?’ She invited him into the apartment and said, ‘Francisca’s in the shower – worked late. You want orange juice?’

  The front room was fitted out with a mix of furniture, the kind you buy used or scavenge when one of your neighbors gets evicted. When Kelson turned down the drink, Elena sat on a brown couch with the baby.

  Kelson took a chair that once might’ve been part of a set, and Elena said, ‘Don’t believe what Francisca tells you. She’ll say she wasn’t with Bicho anymore, but that pendejo got her pregnant. You want the truth, ask me.’

  ‘Is this their baby?’

  ‘Si, this is Miguel. He’s the only good thing that ever came out of Bicho.’ She turned the child so he faced Kelson. He had the brightest blue eyes Kelson had ever seen.

  ‘Wow,’ Kelson said.

  ‘Muy hermoso, yes?’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘He was born the day before you killed his daddy,’ she said. ‘If Bicho had been at the hospital with Francisca instead of selling drugs, he would be here with his little boy, and I would—’

  A voice spoke from a doorway behind Kelson. ‘Bicho was making money for Miguel and me.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Elena.

  Like Elena, the woman in the doorway was about eighteen. She’d wrapped herself in a white bath towel. Otherwise, she was golden and naked, but with eyes as dark as the baby’s were blue.

  Kelson asked, ‘Francisca?’

  She took the baby from Elena. ‘Yeah, and who are you?’

  Elena smiled and said, ‘He killed Bicho.’

  Francisca seemed to pale. She held the child close. ‘You’re the cop?’

  ‘Ex-cop,’ Kelson said. ‘But he shot me, and I shot him.’

  ‘Why are you in my apartment?’

  ‘It seems some of Bicho’s friends want to finish what he started. I don’t know what it’s about, but they’re coming at me hard.’

  ‘Good,’ she said.

  ‘Pretty bad,’ he said. ‘They killed two others. Innocent.’

  ‘How do you know I’m not one of these people coming after you?’

  ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘So I’m carrying a gun.’ He showed it to her. ‘I hope I’m good enough to shoot you without nicking Miguel. I used to be, though when I first came out of rehab, I couldn’t hit the body silhouette at the gun range, much less the concentrics on the head and chest.’

  She hugged her child.

  He said, ‘If you’ve got friends hiding in the back and you call them out, I’m screwed.’

  Elena said, ‘You don’t sound like a killer.’

  ‘What does a killer sound like?’ he asked.

  Elena and Francisca looked at each other and said, ‘Bicho.’

  ‘I’m sorry I shot him,’ Kelson said, ‘I’m sorry he isn’t here with you and the baby.’

  Something eased inside Francisca – not enough to lessen her anger at Kelson but enough for her to say, ‘Some people think Bicho had it coming. But you just got lucky.’

  ‘I never saw the luck in it,’ he said. ‘He took off part of my forehead. I lost my wife and my job.’

  ‘He shot people before you,’ she said.

  ‘I figured as much.’

  ‘You’re the only one who ever shot him.’

  ‘Lucky me.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Do you know a woman who’s around thirty and has short red hair, parted on the side?’ he asked. ‘She calls herself Trina Felbanks … or Jillian Prindle … or something else.’

  ‘No, no one like that.’

  ‘How about someone around that same age? Blonde. Skinny. Barbara Lisle. Raba. Works as an escort.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Really no? Or no because you don’t want to talk to me?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to you, but really no. I don’t know a Barbara Lisle.’

  ‘How about Bicho’s friends? Have any of them talked about getting even for his death?’

  ‘If they did, I wouldn’t tell you.’

  ‘Do you know what it’s like to have a man point a gun at your face?’

  The baby struggled in her arms. She hushed him. ‘Bicho wasn’t a man. He was a boy.’

  ‘He shot like a man.’

  ‘You killed a boy,’ she said.

  ‘I wish I hadn’t,’ Kelson said.

  ‘Easy to wish that now.’

  ‘Which of his friends would want to
get even?’ he asked again.

  ‘Maybe all of them.’

  ‘Two people are dead. They planned to get married.’

  ‘I’m not telling you the names of his friends.’

  Elena said, ‘Hugo. Esteban. A guy they call Chango. He hung with them.’

  Francisca said, ‘You bitch.’ The baby started crying.

  ‘Talk to Hugo,’ Elena said. ‘They call him Chilito – little dick. He’s like four feet tall.’

  ‘Puta,’ Francisca said.

  ‘Shut up,’ Elena said. ‘They’d mess you up if they could.’

  ‘You have last names for them?’ Kelson asked.

  ‘Hugo Nuñez,’ Elena said. ‘Esteban Herrera. I don’t know Chango’s last name.’

  ‘You talk that way, you get hurt,’ Francisca said.

  Kelson asked, ‘Who was Bicho dealing coke for?’

  Elena shrugged.

  He looked at Francisca.

  ‘Yeah, like I would tell you.’

  Elena said, ‘She don’t know. Bicho didn’t talk about that.’

  ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t tell.’ Francisca glared at Elena. ‘Girls who talk get hurt.’

  Kelson said, ‘Girls who hook up with guys like Bicho get hurt.’

  That seemed to sting her. ‘I do OK,’ she said. ‘No one messes with me.’

  ‘We all get messed with sooner or later.’

  ‘Not me. Get out of my apartment. I got nothing more to say. Elena either.’

  But he had one more question. ‘How’s your landlord here? Dominick Stevens.’

  She glanced at Elena.

  ‘He’s OK,’ Elena said. ‘Nice. And muy generoso.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Kelson said.

  Francisca glared, but Elena said, ‘When Bicho died, he heard about Francisca. She had a new baby, and he had an empty apartment here. He let her stay in it. No one lives upstairs, and the store downstairs is empty. We watch the building for him.’