Gordon had felt more comfortable in this building in the old days. As a rookie cop he was excited by the shabby atmosphere of the neighborhood, a tangle of railroad tracks just across State Street and rows of honky-tonk movies, church missions, burlesque houses and pawnshops in the surrounding blocks. That had felt like the real city to him. The railroad yards had long since been replaced by the angular modern architecture of the Dearborn Park condominium development. Between that project and the rows of blue and white police cars lined up at headquarters, the traffic on State Street moved through the area at a horn-honking pace. The neighborhood had become prosperous and middle class.
To Gordon’s sharp eye, nothing inside the lobby or outside in the streets seemed out of the ordinary. Then he realized what was tugging at his attention.
Among the glassed-in cases of police citations and memorabilia on the south wall, an addition had been made. Gordon walked to the section marked by a lettered plaque in gold: IN SUPREME SACRIFICE.
To this display, row on row of photographs of Chicago police officers who had lost their lives in the line of duty over the last decades, the Honors Committee, sometime in the last few hours, had added the picture of Lieutenant Mark Weir. The eight-by-ten glossy photo appeared to have been placed in the gallery in haste. All other officers’ pictures were in muted color, set off by distinctive, matching frames. Mark’s unframed photograph, in full uniform, was in black and white, pinned on a background of dark velvet, his numbered brass badge imposed beneath.
Gordon looked at the familiar face with a new sense of rage and disbelief. In time Mark Weir’s likeness might blend and fade into the ranks of honored dead, the sergeant knew, but this morning the glossy photo, the velvet background and the smudge of fingerprints on the glass paneling were as conspicuous as damp soil on a new grave.
Gordon walked to the bank of elevators, picked a crowded car, then pushed the button for the twelfth floor. He kept his eyes on the blinking floor lights above the door, unwilling to make eye contact with anyone else in the car. His frustration, his anger, were so corrosive he did not want to share those emotions with any man.
“Goddamn it, Mark,” he thought bitterly, “one thing I am not going to do, and that is I am not going to mention this to your old man when he calls. You got my word on that, friend, and on everything else that counts. The honored dead is bullshit. The only way to honor a fellow officer is to get the bastards who did it...”
Lieutenant Weir’s office on the twelfth floor was now the unofficial command post for the investigation into his death. The desk had been cleared of all Weir’s reports and personal papers. They were in a special corner file. Plants from the window sill, his favorite coffee pot, and an oil portrait of a racehorse he’d once owned part of had been removed and sent to his apartment. The desk top was aligned now with a dozen wire file baskets stacked with bound account books. A tape recorder and amplifier had been arranged on a nearby table.
Sergeant Gordon sat at the desk and broke a large Hershey bar into four pieces. The first two pieces would be breakfast, the second two lunch. Mrs. Lewis had offered him coffee and a sweet roll but the overheated atmosphere of her apartment had made him feel confined and thirsty, not hungry. He had asked for a glass of water.
Lieutenant Weir’s corner office was one of two on the twelfth floor with a view of Lake Michigan. The water was choppy today and from this distance Gordon could not tell if he was looking at whitecaps or the breakup of ice.
Life was moving too rapidly and in all the wrong directions, the sergeant thought. He would have more of it. He had been up, at work, for hours, but already the clock had ticked past noon and was edging toward tomorrow. Mark Weir had been dead only days, yet every sunset that passed without an answer to his killing seemed a new affront to the victim himself. Before long, the days would lengthen and it would be spring...
Doobie Gordon’s father liked to fish Lake Michigan in the spring, casting for steelheads and lake trout off the stone breakers that bulwarked the shore. Mark Weir had laughed and said he couldn’t believe it when Gordon first told him about the big fish still in the lake, and the very next day the man standing next to Mr. Gordon had caught a twenty-five pound Chinook salmon.
Gordon felt an almost uncontrollable sadness and popped chocolate into his mouth, hoping the sweetness would send a rush of energy through his body.
The sergeant had spent most of the morning with Amanda Lewis in her south side apartment, a third-story walkup in a building so covered with pink and green graffiti, it looked almost tropical. Mrs. Lewis had called the sergeant at the number he had given her. The ring of the phone woke him at home a little before seven.
It was the last letter from Randolph Lewis that had got her thinking. With the funeral of her nephew and the lieutenant’s murder, well, she hadn’t been concentrating right and that bothered her. She got the letter out and read it over and over again. The reason she had called the sergeant was one sentence she couldn’t make sense of. “... I’ll maybe be sending you gifts, Auntie. I’ll know when I see you.”
Randy had never sent gifts before, she told Gordon, and, in fact, no gifts had arrived. She hadn’t thought too much about it till whoever that was who had called Lieutenant Weir and used her name. She’d felt so badly about that, she’d tried to remember and think of everything. That’s when the question of the gifts began to worry her. She’d asked the mailman and he said he’d delivered everything that had her name on it, which was nothing much at all, since that last letter from Germany. She’d bused herself down to the main post office and talked to a lost and found clerk. He’d explained to her that they couldn’t put a tracer on a package until they knew a package had actually been mailed. Chicago’s was the busiest postal center in the world, he’d told her. It was the mail order center of the United States and more than ninety percent of everything ordered through catalogues went through Chicago. With all those packages coming and going, and the fact that her nephew’s letter was so vague... well, there was nothing to go on.
The sergeant thanked Mrs. Lewis and told her she was right to contact him and to call again about anything, anything that might occur to her.
Now, back in the office, Gordon picked up where he had left off late last evening, and spent the next few hours going over tenant rental records dating back five years for buildings in Cabrini Green, the building in which Mark was murdered and the four others closest to it. He worked deliberately, using a red plastic ruler to slide down under the column entries, studying names, sizes of families, lengths of stay, moving patterns and payment records. Whoever had shot Mark was familiar with the buildings, the apartment layouts, the elevators, the stairs...
At a quarter to three Gordon put aside the Cabrini Green files and shut the office door. He told the switchboard operator to hold all his calls except one he was expecting from Tarbert Weir. Then he switched on the tape from Mark’s police car, the tape with the anonymous voice asking for a rendezvous at Cabrini Green. The amplifier swelled the words and threw the voice into every corner of the office.
Sergeant Gordon laced his fingers together over his vest, shut his eyes and tilted back the office chair, almost in an attitude of repose. He let the tape play over and over again, allowing every word, inflection and tone quality stamp its impression into the auditory-response neurons of his brain. He began to wonder briefly if the man’s voice seemed familiar because he did know it, or only because he had heard it so often that it was becoming routine. No matter, he thought, listening to the repeated tones as intimate as if he held a seashell to his ear, no matter, I will know it if I hear this man again.