I found nothing that looked even promising until late in the day when I found an item about the slaying of a prominent drug dealer near a housing project Several witnesses said that he had been shot dead by a white woman who seemed to resemble very much the description I’d been given of Carla DiMonte.
I spent yesterday walking off the blocks around the development where the killing had taken place. I had interviewed a few dozen people but learned precisely nothing. Nobody, it seemed, had ever heard of John Wade, the drug dealer who’d been murdered, nor had anybody seen a well-dressed white woman down here. “She wouldn’t’a stayed white for long, man,” one man told me around a silver-toothed grin.
Around nine the next morning I walked into Charlie’s, the restaurant I’d been told about by my mysterious late-night caller.
Neither black nor white faces looked up at me as I came inside out of the raw gray cold and stood in the entranceway watching a chunky black cashier in a pink uniform stab out numbers on a cash register with deadly efficiency. Presumably, this was Charlene.
I stood there ten minutes. It took that long for the line to disperse. Then I went inside.
“Charlene,” I said over the Phil Collins record assaulting the smoke-hazed air.
She looked up at me from under aqua eyebrows that seemed to be the texture of lizard skin. “Yes?”
“My name’s Parnell.”
“So?”
“I just wondered if I could ask you some questions.”
“You law?”
“Indirectly. I’m a private investigator.”
“Then I don’t have to answer?”
“Right. You don’t have to answer.”
She shrugged meaty shoulders. “Then get lost.”
“You mind?” a white guy said to me. “Jesus.” He pushed into place at the cash register and handed over a green ticket. He only glared at me maybe three times while Charlene did her killer routine with his receipt. “You have a nice day, Charlene,” he said to her when she handed him back his change but he was staring at me. He was no more than thirty and obviously he could see that I was about twice his age. He had the energy of a pit bull. Energy wasn’t something I had in plentiful supply these days. He made sure to push against me as he went out the door.
Two more guys came up and handed her tickets. During her business, she glanced up at me twice and scowled.
When the guys were gone, I said, “Did you know a man named John Wade?”
Her eyes revealed nothing but her full, sensuous mouth gave an unpleasant little tug. She was maybe forty and twenty pounds overweight, but she was an appealing woman nonetheless, one of those women of fleshy charms men seem to appreciate the older they get, when the ideal of femininity has given way to simple need. You no longer worry about physical beauty so much; you want companionship in and out of bed. Charlene looked as if she’d be a pretty good companion. “You know what I do when I get off this ten-hour shift?”
“No. What?”
“I go home and take care of my two kids.”
“Hard work?”
“Real hard.”
“But I’m afraid I don’t get your point.”
A black guy came over. He was little and seemed nervous. He kept coughing as if an invisible doctor were giving him an invisible hernia checkup.
“You have a nice day, Benny,” Charlene said to the little man as he pushed out the door. She looked at me again. “What I’m saying is that I’m too busy for trouble. I work here and then I go home. I don’t have time to get involved in whatever it is you’re pushing.”
“You get a break?”
She sighed. “Nine forty-five Belinda comes out from the bookkeeping office and spells me for fifteen minutes.”
I nodded to the long row of red-covered seats that ran along the counter. But it was a booth I wanted. “I’ll go have some breakfast over there. By nine forty-five I should have gotten us a booth. All right?”
“I get anything for this?”
“Fifty dollars if you tell me anything useful.”
She shrugged again. It was the gesture of a weary woman who had long ago been beaten past pain into sullen submission. “Guess that’ll pay a few doctor bills.”
The food — bacon, two eggs over easy, a big piece of wheat toast spread with something that managed to taste neither like butter nor margarine — was better than I had expected.
Afterward, I read the Tribune, all about Richard Daley, Jr.’s new administration, and drank three cups of hot coffee and was naughty and smoked two cigarettes.
Charlene appeared right on time.
She had brought a big plastic purse the size of a shopping bag with her. She slipped into the other side of the booth and said, “He’s been dead several months. Why're you interested in him now?”
“You knew him?”
“You’re not going to answer my question?”
“Not now. But I need you to tell me about him.”
She tamped a cigarette from a black and white generic pack and said, “What’s to know? In this neighborhood, he was an important man.”
“A pusher.”
Anger filled her chocolate eyes. “Maybe, being a black man, that’s the only thing he knew how to do.”
“You really believe that?”
She cooled down, exhaled smoke, looked out the window. “No.” She looked back at me. “He was the father of my two boys.”
“Did you live with him?”
“A long time ago. Not since the youngest was born.” She smiled her full, erotic smile. “That’s the funny thing about some men. You have a kid for them and all of a sudden they start to treat you like you’re some kind of old lady. Right after Ornette was born, John started up with very young girls. Nineteen seemed to be the right age for him.”
“Was he pushing then?”
“Not so much. Actually, he still had his job at the A&P as an assistant manager. Then he started doing drugs himself and—” The shrug again. “It changed him. He’d always had a good mind, one of the best in the neighborhood. He decided to put it to use, I guess.”
“Pushing?”
“Uh-huh.”
“The newspaper accounts said that several eyewitnesses saw him being shot to death by a white woman. You know anything about that?”
She hesitated. “I was one of the eyewitnesses.”
“You saw him being shot?”
“Right.”
“He was getting out of his car—”
“He was getting out of his car when this other car pulled up and a white woman got out and said something to him and then shot him. She got back in the car and took off before any of us could do anything about it.”
“Would you describe the woman?”
The description she gave matched that in the newspaper. While it could Fit a lot of women, it could also fit Carla DiMonte.
“You’d never seen her before?” I asked.
“No.”
“So you wouldn’t have any idea why she shot him?”
“No.”
“How’d your boys deal with it?”
“I don’t want to talk about my boys.”
“They don’t know he was their father?”
“Why is that important?”
“Just curious, I guess.”
“My boys didn’t have nothing to do with this.”
“So John was a big man in the neighborhood?”
She looked relieved that I’d changed the subject. “Very big.”
“Feared or respected?”
“Both. In the ghetto, nobody respects you unless they fear you, too.”
I laughed. “I don’t think that applies to just the ghetto.”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“Sure.”
“He had a big blue Mercedes and he had a reputation for having never been busted and he lived over near Lake Shore in this fabulous condo and when he’d come back to the neighborhood the kids would flock around like some rock star had shown up or something.”