I stood and went to my bedroom, climbed into bed, and closed my eyes.
NINETEEN
THE SUN WAS HIGH and my room was bright. The clock said 11:38. I’d slept for four hours. If I’d dreamed anything, my exhaustion had swallowed it. But when I opened my eyes, I ripped awake like out of a nightmare.
I got up and showered, cleaned the mess in the kitchen, and scrambled three eggs, my second breakfast of the day. Then I straightened Jason’s room. Stuart Felicano had done less of a job on it than he might have. Nothing was broken, nothing hard to clean. He probably hadn’t expected to turn up anything. He’d meant to pressure me. His card sat on the kitchen table. I wondered what would make me call the numbers on it.
I drove downtown to my office and rode the elevator to the eighth floor. The owner of the secretarial school stood at her office door with a student.
“Hi, Roselle,” I said.
She ushered the student inside and closed the door. Before the TV news and the papers had started calling me a cop killer, she’d sometimes flirted with me and once had invited me in to talk with her and allowed me out only when I told her I was still involved with my ex-wife.
In my office, the red light on the answering machine was flashing, and a small brown box and a stack of mail stood on the floor where the building super left them. My bottle of Jim Beam Black and the Baggie of cocaine waited for me in a file cabinet drawer. I ignored it all. I went to my window. The early afternoon sun shined warm on the insurance building across the street. In the distance, through a gap between buildings, Lake Michigan gleamed flat and bright as a golden mirror. From eight stories up, the city looked like a place where you could live a reasonable life.
I picked up the package and stack of mail and put them on my desk, then punched the button on the answering machine. A digitized voice told me I had eight messages. Two of them were hate calls, telling me what the callers thought guys who shot cops should do to themselves, including things that even a contortionist couldn’t accomplish. Three messages were reporters seeking comments. One message was a crank who said he was glad I’d shot David Russo and if I wanted an assistant he was available. One message was from a woman who wanted to hire me to find her runaway son. I figured she must not read newspapers or watch the news. I wrote down her number in case I survived Earl Johnson and the FBI. The last message was from Bill Gubman, who’d called ten minutes before I arrived at my office. He said he’d tried me at home and I didn’t answer, and if I got his message I should call right away-it was important. It must be, I figured, since he was willing to risk calling me when I was setting up Johnson. So I called the 1st District Station. The man who picked up the phone said Bill wasn’t available but he’d relay a message if I wanted to leave one. I told him where Bill could reach me and hung up.
Then I called Corrine at her landscape business. No answer. So I called her cell phone. She said she was heading into a meeting with a client who owned a Lincoln Park town house with a backyard garden bigger than a tennis court, though you would never guess it from the street. The client wanted Corrine to winterize the beds and prepare them to grow prize-winning roses in the spring. While life died around me, Corrine made things grow.
“That sounds like a good job,” I said.
“The client’s wasting her money,” she said. “The garden will never get enough sun for roses. Hey, she’s coming. Can we talk later?”
“Anytime,” I said and we hung up.
Next I dialed Children’s Memorial and asked for Jason’s room. The operator put me through to a nurse in his ward, who told me that they no longer had a patient by Jason’s name. A moment of fear pulsed through me before she added that his doctor had released him in the morning. I called Mom’s house and she said Jason was sleeping and why didn’t I join them for dinner at seven. I said I would be there.
Lucinda picked up her cell phone on the third ring. “You told me you’d call when you got back last night,” she said.
“And you told me you weren’t going to follow me last night.”
“I followed you because I care about you. You didn’t call me because you don’t care about me.”
A nice try. “I told you not to follow me because I care about you. I didn’t call because three FBI agents were sitting in my kitchen when I got home and when they left I passed out for a few hours. So in a way I’m just getting back from last night now and this is your call.”
I’d exaggerated the circumstances but she said, “Oh.”
I filled in some of the details about the hours since Peter Finley walked her from the gang meeting to her car, then asked what she’d been doing.
“For starters,” she said, “Finley asked me out on a date.”
“You’re kidding.”
She pretended to be stung. “Why would I be? He said any woman who could tail Raj for sixty miles without being seen was someone he wanted to know. He asked me out for dinner.”
“How did you tail us, by the way?”
“When you were downtown, you had your turn signal on at Congress Parkway. Then you spotted the FBI van and went straight. I figured you’d be coming back to Congress. So I waited and followed you when you reappeared.”
“You are smart enough to date.”
“I know.”
“You also know that Finley is married with three kids?”
“He said.”
“So what did you tell him?”
“This isn’t about romance, Joe. This is about getting in closer so we can find out more about him and Johnson’s group.”
“I know that. So you said yes?”
“We’re having dinner tonight.”
“I don’t like it.”
“You don’t like it for a good reason? Or you don’t like it because you don’t want me doing this kind of thing even though you’re still with Corrine?”
“Who said I’m still with Corrine?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I just don’t like it.”
“Sorry.”
“You do anything else since last night besides playing girlfriend to a gangster?”
“Yeah, I talked to some friends in the department about Bob Monroe and Raj. Monroe’s worse than his mixed record shows. The story is that when he was in the gang unit he not only buddied up with some of the gang members but he took sides. One guy who got busted for midlevel dealing offered to trade information on Monroe for dropped charges. He seemed credible enough that they sent someone from internal affairs to interview him. The guy supposedly said Monroe had set up two members of La Raza and was present when they died. The guy didn’t have evidence. It would’ve been his word against Monroe’s, and he supposedly already had a long record. But the interesting thing is that right after the guy told his story, the department moved Monroe to vice and they dropped the trafficking charges and let the guy go.”
“A little too much supposedly in there. You think we could find this guy and talk to him?”
“That’s another interesting thing. Two days after he got out of jail, someone shot and killed him. No one’s been charged with the shooting.”
I thought about that for a moment. “Happens all the time to drug dealers,” I said.
“Sure it does,” she agreed. “And to some more than others.”