He said, “Bill Gubman wants to talk to you.”
Lieutenant Detective Bill Gubman-my closest friend in the department and maybe outside it too. We’d gone through the academy together, stood side by side at graduation, and become rookies in the same district. We fell away from each other for awhile when the department fired me. But then he called one night, crazy worried about his wife Eileen, and asked me to connect her with the substance-abuse counselor who’d helped me with my habits. Then we were close again. But two months ago he’d taken a bullet I should’ve stopped, and now I had a tank full of Jim Beam, and three or four lines of coke waiting for me in my desk drawer.
“I’ve got nothing to say to him,” I said.
“I didn’t ask if you did. I said he wants to talk to you.”
I shook my head, turned away.
They came at me fast, grabbed my arms, and threw me against a building. I tasted brick. I could’ve fought but saw no use in it. They cuffed my hands behind my back and shoved me toward their cruiser, the headlights of passing cars in my eyes. Fifteen minutes later, we pulled into a spot at the 1st District Station. The place was starting to feel like home.
Bill Gubman sat at a desk on the first floor. The plaque outside his door called him Liaison to the Board of Ethics. The Board of Ethics was an independent unit in the city government, set up after a Sun-Times series of articles exposed three cases of corruption in the department’s own internal affairs division and a citizen action group collected over a hundred thousand signatures calling for external oversight. Now, when a cop used too much force against a citizen, or stole copper wire from a construction site, or got wasted and plowed his cruiser into a newsstand, the board made sure the department cleaned the dirt instead of just sweeping it out of sight. The department had a number of liaisons who kept relations with the board happy and sometimes alerted department higher-ups in time to sweep dirt out of the way before the board could point it out. The liaison job was a cushy chair reserved for guys too burned out to return to the street but who were a few months or a couple years short of pension, or guys who’d taken a bullet in the line of duty but were too restless to stay at home watching Oprah on administrative leave.
The job was a long way from the homicide squad where Bill had worked for the past twelve years and I figured the cushy chair would be chafing him.
The cop who’d cuffed me unlocked my hands outside the door and knocked.
Bill waved me in and signaled to the cop to close the door behind me. His cold face said nothing about the meals I’d eaten at his house or the ones he and his wife had eaten at mine. He sat uncomfortably at his desk. His body had the lopsided shape of a man who’d gotten wounded in the gut and the surgical patchwork was tugging on one side, or else something was missing in the middle and he couldn’t help sagging into it.
“Have a seat,” he said.
I shook my head. “I’ll stand.”
His lips twitched like an unseen pain stabbed him, but he stared hard at me.
I shrugged and sat in the chair across the desk from him.
He said, “In the eighteen years that Professional Regulations has been keeping track, you know what percentage of licensed private detectives have been disciplined?”
I shrugged again.
“Just over seven percent. Mostly it’s for something small-improper completion of an affidavit or, at worst, impersonation of a peace officer. The PIs do their probation and return to active status or they move on to something else.” He kept the hard eyes on me. “You’re the first private detective to shoot a police officer, clean or dirty. No one else like you on the record books. What do you think will happen to you?”
I knew he was doing his job, figured he might even have asked someone to assign me to him so the bad news could come from a friend. Still, I didn’t like bad news.
I gestured toward his gut. “How are you feeling, Bill?”
“Fuck how I’m feeling. You don’t shoot a cop, even a bad cop, and go back to work. Not in this city.”
“I understand,” I said.
He sighed. “What were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t thinking. I was just dealing with the situation as well as I could.”
He cracked a grim smile. “You know, after I took a bullet and now this, a lot of guys around here think you’ve got a grudge against cops and you’re gunning for us. Evidence looks pretty strong to a lot of them. These guys think you need to be stopped.”
I thought about the white Honda SUV. “Yeah, I’ve maybe met a couple of them.”
He let that pass. “So the smart thing to do would be to leave town. Go fishing for a month or two. Or longer, much longer. You can run away now but I don’t know about later. I say this as a friend.”
I’d never told him about the Florida fishing village but he seemed to know. Maybe we all had a place like that. “And what do you say as a cop?”
He sat back, folded his hands gently over his lopsided belly. He stared at me awhile like he was putting words to his thoughts. “There’s another option,” he said. “Right now, you look dirty. Hell, with all the shit that flew at Southshore Village, you are dirty. You could make that dirt work for you-and for us.”
“Tell me.”
Again the long stare. “You remember a guy named Earl Johnson?”
“Sure. He was in our academy class-a bit of a screwup. Barely made it through. He did all right afterward, though. Vice detective, last I heard.”
“Still on vice, though he spent a few years on the gang unit before that.” Bill looked at me square. “He’s behind the Southshore thefts.”
I shook my head. “He wasn’t there.”
“Not there, but he was behind it. He leads a group of eight other cops-ten until our guys dropped one of them and you dropped the other. They’re into anything that makes money. Mostly industrial theft and prostitution. Industrial theft because one of them has a brother-in-law who owns a re-processing company. Prostitution because of Johnson’s vice connections. We’ve been aware of them for the last eight months, and we’ve gotten a good sense of who’s involved and what they’re doing. Right now, they’re getting greedier and trying to expand.”
He pushed a stack of photos across the desk. They included nine men. Earl Johnson was one of them. I recognized another two as the guys who’d shot at me from the white Honda SUV. The four guys who’d driven into the Southshore construction site and loaded copper wire into their vans until I called 911 were there too. In the pictures they wore police uniforms.
I pulled out the four photos and put them on the desk. “These guys were there.”
Bill nodded. “We know.”
“So arrest them and you’re done.”
“Not that easy. If the size of this group goes public, the department is screwed. We’ll be busy for the next ten years explaining that we’re not Juarez, Mexico, with cops playing both sides of the law. The mayor doesn’t want that. The chief doesn’t want that. Fuck knows, I don’t want it.”
“This is what you do for the Ethics Board?” I said.
“If the Ethics Board found out, they wouldn’t want it either. Too big. Too messy. Everybody wants these guys to disappear.”
“That’s where I come in?”
Bill nodded, picked up the stack of photos, and pulled out a picture of a dark-skinned, balding man. “This guy here, his name’s Bob Monroe. Also on vice. Used to be on the gang unit, which is where he met Johnson. Last summer he went toe-to-toe with Johnson for control of the group. Lost out to him and he’s unhappy-doesn’t like being number two and he’s looking for an excuse to make a move. Most of the other guys don’t trust him, though. He comes across at first like a nice guy but he’s crazy. When he was on the gang unit he had a run-in with a kid named Victor Lopez. Victor started talking to the Ethics Board, but then he disappeared-with some unwanted help from Monroe. We couldn’t find even a bone fragment. The other guys know Monroe’s a hothead but he thinks they’ll line up behind him if he takes Johnson down.”