A Bad Night's Sleep (19 page)

He thought about that and looked defeated. He said, “I don’t know what you’re up to. But when it comes down, you’re going to say I did the right thing, okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll do that.”

TWENTY-THREE

I SPENT THE MORNING
driving around the city in Raj’s SUV. Raj said every patrolman in the city knew about my Skylark, down to the scratches on the bumpers, so my car stayed in the parking garage fourteen floors below The Spa Club.

I cruised for awhile through the side streets near my house. The sun was burning through the clouds. The light played off the last leaves hanging on the tree branches and glared off the windshields of parked cars.

At 9:30, I called Lucinda. “Hey,” she said when she heard my voice. “Is this your one call from jail?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Have the police been there?”

“Still here—parked on the street. Last night they came in and tried to sweet-talk me into helping them find you.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I offered them coffee and talked sweet to them too.”

“Yeah?”

“So they stopped the sweet talk and threatened me with everything in the book and a little that they made up. They seemed to forget that I used to be a cop. I threatened them back and kicked them out of my apartment, and now they’re sitting outside in the cold.”

“Can you slip away from them?”

“Are you kidding? Where do you want to meet?”

I told her and added, “Bring a pen and paper.”

“You going to write your last will and testament?”

“Something like that.”

“I’ll see you in a little bit,” she said.

“Hey, how was dinner with Peter Finley?”

“He spent the whole time trying to convince me to work at The Spa Club. He said selling me as an ex-cop would bring in big money. Guys would like that, girls too if I was willing. He said I could make five times what I made in the department.”

“I believe it. Did you find out anything useful?”

“Nothing new. He’s got little love for Bob Monroe, less for Raj, and none at all for you. I think he’s got ambitions to replace Monroe as number two, behind Johnson.”

“Anything else?”

“No, he was too busy looking down my shirt and putting his hand on my thigh.”

“At least he’s got good taste. When are you going out again?”

“Not funny,” she said.

Next I called Corrine. She answered on the third ring and sounded like I’d woken her.

“Hi,” I said.

She was quiet, then asked, “Where are you?” She said it like she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

“Driving around.”

That was enough of an answer. “They’ve got you on the news. And in the papers.” She sounded as if she was holding back tears.

“I know.”

“Are you going to turn yourself in?”

“No,” I said. “Do you think I should?”

“I don’t know.” Then, “Are you going to come over here?”

“No,” I said again. “Not right now.”

We were both quiet for awhile. She said, “Why did you call?”

Because I’d wanted to hear her voice. Because I’d wanted to ask where she’d been last night. I said, “To tell you I love you.”

She said nothing to that.

“Corrine?”

She said, “I love you too, Joe, but I don’t know if I love you
this
much.”

At 10:30, I walked into the Lincoln Park Conservatory, a four-room greenhouse that looked like an enormous glass-roofed pagoda. A concrete path snaked through gardens of ferns and tropical flowers, under palm trees, past hanging baskets of orchids, and past an artificial waterfall. The air was warm and moist—the weather from a tropical rainforest. Lucinda was sitting on a bench under a palm tree.

I sat next to her.

“It’s nice here,” she said.

I nodded. “I’m thinking of taking off my clothes and swimming in the waterfall.”

“I can see the headlines now.”

“Any trouble getting away from your apartment?” I asked.

She smiled. “I left the cruiser boxed in at a stoplight two blocks from my place.”

“You’re good,” I said.

She looked me in the eyes. “Yes.”

“Did you bring the pen and paper?”

She reached into a brown leather bag and handed them to me.

I told her about the meeting that Monroe was scheduling for the evening, and, as I did, I drew a sketch of The Spa Club.

The sketch showed the front lounge with the hostess desk, the hallway that extended behind the desk, and the two offices and the conference room that the hallway led to. I drew another hallway too, which led to a lobby and then the back rooms where you could get anything that money could buy, the room with television monitors, and the door to the emergency exit at the end of that hallway. I put an
X
on the conference room and another on the emergency exit. The meeting where Monroe confronted Johnson would happen in the conference room, I figured. If Lucinda was willing to take the risk, I wanted her to get into the building and up to the fourteenth floor, and to be standing in the stairwell outside the emergency exit when the meeting started.

I said, “I can think of about a dozen ways this meeting could blow up. If it does, I wouldn’t mind having backup—the more the better. Drive a tank up the stairs if you can. Or at least bring a couple guns and be ready to use them.”

Lucinda studied the diagram. “Do any of the TV monitors show the stairwell?”

“Not that I noticed,” I said, “but I’ll check. If there’s a camera, I’ll disable it. If I can’t, I’ll call and tell you not to come.”

“Do they have guards?”

I shook my head. “Not when they’re open for business. They probably figure it would wreck the mood.”

“They’ll be open this evening?”

“They’re always open.”

“Is there anything else that could stop me between the emergency exit and the meeting room?”

I thought about Tina, who’d offered herself to me twice. I thought about the women at the hostess desk. “Nothing you can’t brush aside.”

She put the paper and pen in her bag.

Then I told her about the conversation I’d had with Raj after we left Monroe’s office.

“Can you count on him to stay quiet?”

I shook my head. “He’s one of the ways this could blow up. He’s seriously spooked. Odds are equal that he keeps his mouth shut or tells everything to Monroe.”

“Of if he figures Monroe is a lost cause, he could run to Johnson,” Lucinda said.

I thought about that. “Could be, but so far he’s always stood by Monroe. Finley seems to be Johnson’s closest friend. The other guys, I don’t know. Monroe expects them to line up behind him when he shows that Johnson’s been ripping them off.”

Footsteps approached on the concrete path. Lucinda and I shut our mouths and gazed up at the yellow fruit that hung in clusters from a palm tree. Gray light filtered through the foggy glass above the tree. More footsteps approached from the other side.

Stuart Felicano, the lead FBI agent, stepped into view on one side. The bridge of his nose was bruised where I’d hit him. But he wore a pressed blue suit and looked like he’d gotten a good night’s sleep. Felicano’s heavyset partner stepped into view on the other side, also in a suit. There was nowhere to run.

I looked at Lucinda.

She shook her head, her eyes stunned. “Jesus! I’m sorry. I didn’t think anyone—”

“Good morning, Mr. Kozmarski,” Felicano said. “You look surprised to see us.”

“No more than if you’d swung in on vines.”

He smiled. “Do you have a moment to talk?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Still smiling. “We met with your friend Bill Gubman this morning.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. He seems to be under the mistaken impression that he can make Earl Johnson’s crew disappear. No arrests. No trials. No scandal. He wants to bury them in an unmarked grave.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

His smile broadened. “So, that made us wonder about you. You’re at the Southshore shooting. You’re seen stealing from another site in Wisconsin. You’re working with Johnson’s crew. There’s a warrant out for your arrest. But you’re also hanging out with Gubman. He might be an old friend but he looks like the last guy you’d want to be found with. So what’s between him and you?”

“What did he say?”

“He said he wouldn’t know about you.”

“Makes sense. Most of the time I don’t even know about myself.”

His smile fell hard from his face. “Don’t be that way.”

I shrugged. “I don’t think I can help you.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “You could help a lot. Have you learned anything more about Johnson?”

Other than that he was about to fall off a wall? I shook my head. “Nothing.”

“What about Farid el Raj?”

“What about him?”

“We hear he might be making a play on Johnson for control of the crew.”

Unless a lot more was happening than I knew, they’d heard wrong or gotten Raj mixed up with Monroe. “Are you listening to them on a wire?”

The other agent said, “That’s none of your—”

Felicano patted the air to quiet him. “No wires,” he said. “Johnson’s planted as much sound equipment in his time as we have. We wouldn’t get away with it.”

“That makes hearing things hard.”

“We still hear them.”

The other agent said, “So what about el Raj?”

“I don’t know about him either.”

Felicano shook his head. “You’re making a big mistake.”

“Welcome to my life.”

Two women in their sixties came down the path, talking about bromeliads. They wore dresses and canvas hats, like they were on a safari. One had a camera hanging around her neck. The FBI agents stepped aside and let them through.

When they’d passed, one of the agents said, “We could take you in on the warrant.”

I agreed. “You could.”

He tipped his head toward Lucinda. “We could take her in as accessory.”

Lucinda held her wrists toward him like he might want to cuff them. “You could.”

Felicano said, “Or we could leave you out on the street and see what happens. Guys like you don’t live long.”

“Whatever you prefer,” I said, like he’d offered me a choice between white meat or dark.

My attitude didn’t fool him. “I’ve dealt with guys like you before,” he said. “You can work with us and come out a little dirtied but alive. Or you can do it alone with one chance in a hundred of coming out clean, ninety-nine chances of coming out dead or filthy. I’d think the choice would be easy. But guys like you take that one chance. I don’t think you’re courageous and I don’t think you’re just a bad gambler. I think you’re afraid, scared to death of just getting by if getting by means compromising a little. Guys like you make no sense to me but that’s what I think.”

I tried a smile. “You nailed me.”

He shook his head again, disappointed, maybe disgusted. “One chance in a hundred. Is it worth it?”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

He shook his head again. “We’ll be keeping our eyes on you,” he said.

“That’s reassuring,” I said.

He looked at me like I was being a smart-ass, but with the trouble I was in I realized I might mean it.

When they were gone, Lucinda and I sat together for awhile without talking. A siren passed outside, then was quiet, and the city was far away.

Lucinda said, “Could Raj be up to something?”

“No,” I said and thought about it some. “No.”

Behind us, water dripped from a pipe near the ceiling onto a hard surface. The waterfall trickled down an artificial stone face and collected in a basin.

TWENTY-FOUR

I DROVE NORTH AND
bought a hot dog at Byron’s, then cruised for forty minutes looking for a place to park and eat. I went south and west and drove across Blackhawk Street until it dead-ended at the North Branch of the Chicago River. Five unofficial parking spots faced a thin strip of grass with leafless trees and then the river. One of the spots was open. I slid Raj’s SUV into it. The hot dog was cold.

When I finished eating, I tilted the seat back, closed my eyes, and thought about the mess I’d gotten myself into. I had plenty of time to think and plenty to think about. Too much time and too much to think about. I tilted the seat up again and watched the river.

The sunlight glinted off the tree branches. The river moved so slow you would never know it moved at all.

In the summer, now and then, a heron would stand on the banks looking for a meal. I’d never seen one catch a fish. Supposedly an eagle or two had tested the air above the water. But on a cold sunny afternoon in November no birds stood on the grass, flew in the air, or perched in the brown branches, not even a sparrow.

In the 1990s, when most of the factories closed, fish swam back into the lower reaches of the river. The EPA forced the remaining factories to treat their waste before dumping it and to put toxic chemicals into metal drums and ship them to a dumpsite in Indiana. A river advocacy group got excited and started imagining bass jumping in the shallows and beavers building dams in the shadows of the old smokestacks. They convinced the city to dredge the chemical waste off the river bottom. Except the dredged chemicals clouded the water and the fish that had returned went belly up and washed onto the riverbanks.

That made me think. Was Felicano right? Was I so set on shoveling the dirt out of my life that I’d moved into a dirt pit? Did I need to climb out and keep living, knowing that I would never get completely clean?

I called Lucinda. When she picked up her phone, I said, “Am I obsessed with making things turn out the way they never can be?”

“Well, yeah,” she said like it was obvious.

“Is that bad?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

*   *   *

AT 4:45, I DROVE
back to The Spa Club. Rush-hour traffic filled the streets. Cars inched toward intersections with men and women strapped into their seats as if a sudden catastrophe might lift them out of the gridlock and hurtle them through the air.

At LaSalle and Division, a traffic cop held his hand up and stopped me so that cross traffic could move through the intersection. He stared through the windshield like he recognized me, and sweat beaded between my shoulder blades and on the insides of my legs. But he waved me through with the rest of the cars.