The Bad Kitty Lounge (11 page)

Lucinda had showered and put on jeans and a soft green wool sweater and looked like someone you'd want to cozy up to on a couch. Jason looked like the tall, grinning eleven-year-old he was, except he had a deep bruise on his right cheek.

“What happened to you?” I said as I walked into the room.

They looked at me and their laughter broke. Lucinda said, “What happened to
you
?”

I looked at my jacket, at my hand. Blood had stained them. More blood streaked the top of my jeans. “Oh, this,” I said. I tried a smile, but got back blank faces. “Give me a minute.”

I went to the kitchen, soaked a dish towel, and tamped the skin and hair around the wound, rinsed the towel, and touched it again and again, until the towel came away pink and then clear. I went to my bedroom and put my Glock on the dresser, emptied my jacket pockets, leaned the picture of the teenaged Judy Terrano against the mirror, balled up the jacket to soak in the sink, and changed into new jeans.

Jason and Lucinda gave me the same blank faces when I returned. “Bumped my head,” I explained, and took a seat. They'd finished the tom yum soup and pad see yew but had left a few bites of red curry with shrimp. So I poured the remaining jasmine rice onto my plate and ate. My head hurt when I chewed. They watched me in silence. I swallowed a bite and looked up. “What?” I said.

Jason gave a little shrug. “You're still bleeding.”

I tried the smile again. “A lot?”

A couple of quick shakes of his head.

“Then it will stop,” I said, and ate another bite. “What happened to the cheek?”

Again the shrug. “I bumped it.”

“Don't be a smart-ass. What happened?”

He hesitated, then said, “You remember that guy I told you about who burns other kids' butts with a lighter?”

I nodded.

“You remember how you said guys like him don't get away with that forever?”

I didn't like the direction this was taking. “Yes.”

“I decided he shouldn't get away with it.”

I took another bite, chewed, and thought. If my head hurt when I chewed, it hurt worse when I thought. “You pick the fight with him?”

The little shrug. “Kind of.”

“Could you have stopped him without fighting?”

The question surprised him. “I don't know.”

“You should have thought about it,” I said.

He looked distressed but only a little and only for a moment. Then he ducked his head under the table.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

His head reappeared. “Seeing if you had on sandals.”

“Huh?”

“I thought you might have turned into Gandhi.”

I shook my fork at him. “I'll Gandhi
you
.”

He laughed.

I laughed, too, then said, “This really isn't funny. You'll hurt someone or you'll get hurt yourself. You'll get kicked out of school.”

He looked like he was considering that. “Okay,” he said.

“You're too smart for that. No more fighting.”

“No more fighting,” he agreed.

Lucinda leaned back and gazed at me wide-eyed. “How's it different from you coming in with a bump on your head?”

I glared at her. “It's different.” As if saying it could make it true.

Jason leaned back, too. “How?”

“You're eleven. I'm forty-three.”

Jason looked bewildered. I couldn't blame him.

“It's no different,” Lucinda said.

Jason nodded.

I asked, “What do we have for dessert?”

Lucinda smiled. “You're not going to eat the rest of your dinner?”

“No,” I said. “What do we have for dessert?”

“It's your house. You tell us.”

I brought in a container of orange sherbet and three bowls, and I let them laugh at me while I finished my red curry with the sherbet. When Jason got up to clear his dishes, I saw a singe mark on the back pocket of his jeans.

Lucinda motioned at the wound on my head. “Let me guess,” she said. “William DuBuclet?”

I blinked once at her. “How'd you know?”

“I spent the afternoon reading about him. He has a messy background. In the sixties, he led a radical leftist group. When the Black Panthers were still serving hot lunches to hungry kids and setting up inner-city community centers, DuBuclet's group pushed for immediate change, no matter the cost. That included armed violence.

“One of DuBuclet's sons died in a police raid, a kid named Anthony. He was a young guy, but he'd already taken a leading role in his dad's organization and in a more violent splinter group. The official story is that Anthony's death was too much for DuBuclet and he got religion. He went back to school and got a job teaching at Chicago State, and by that time he was all about peaceful action. That's the man you're going to see on the statues if they ever make them.

“But last December, the
Sun-Times
ran an article that said the old William DuBuclet was rumbling again. He'd made a couple of wild speeches and thrown around some violent language. Mostly the article took the angle that he's a soft-headed
old man who isn't a danger to anyone but himself. But it also said his group is suspected in vandalism against businesses on the South Side and a couple attacks on the owners.”

“DuBuclet isn't soft-headed.”

She gestured toward the gash on my skull. “So what was this about?”

“They paid me five thousand dollars to lay off the Judy Terrano investigation, but they found out I was still involved.” I ran my fingers over my matted hair. “This was their second request for me to get out.”

“And you told them . . . ?”

I smiled. “I said, ‘Okay.' ”

She smiled, too, and gave that some thought. “You know that's also what Jason said when you told him to stop fighting.”

“Damn.”

“He's a smart kid, Joe. He'll learn whatever you teach him.”

“That's what I'm afraid of.”

“Yeah, you should be.” Then, “You want to know about Judy Terrano?”

“What did you find?”

She went to the kitchen and came back with a small notebook. “Not much before 1989. In December '82 she got arrested along with three other nuns during a march protesting Reagan's policies in Nicaragua. This was liberation theology stuff—you know, the clergy on the front lines. The
Sun-Times
ran a photo of her and the other nuns carrying a pro-Sandinista banner and another of them in handcuffs. She got arrested twice more—in '84 and '85. Similar stuff.

“In '89, she started the abstinence campaign, and the
Tribune
ran a short article on her in the religion pages. They said she was a well-known figure in civil rights battles and Latin
American social rights, though I don't remember hearing her name back then. Six months later a
Sun-Times
editorial praised her for her plain speech about sex, though she'd apparently gotten into trouble with the archdiocese. By '94, she'd gone more extreme and the papers started calling her the Virginity Nun. She collected a bunch of awards and a bunch of ridicule. She made big claims about the success of her programs. The people who wanted to believe them did, and the people who didn't like her said she was full of it. No one doubted her commitment, though. She appeared at hundreds of school assemblies, church conferences, fund-raising banquets, and youth rallies.”

“What about more recently?”

She flipped the page in the notebook. “Three years ago she got in trouble again, or almost. The
Trib
ran an article that said the Diocesan Finance Council, which is the group that keeps an eye on church finances, was looking at her after a hundred ninety thousand dollars went missing at Holy Trinity. There was no follow-up in the paper, so I'm guessing the money turned up or the Council realized they'd made a mistake. Or,” she added, “the Church decided a cover-up was cheaper than bad publicity.”

I considered that. “The room she was living in says she wasn't skimming from the offering plates. She was the kind of woman who saved soap slivers so she could pack them together and make a new bar.”

“Yeah,” Lucinda said, “but she also hid a stack of twenties in her desk. That doesn't look like a vow of poverty. What was she up to?”

I shrugged. “Something with William DuBuclet. If he was paying her off, she probably knew one of his secrets. Maybe that secret was worth killing for.”

“Okay, but what was it?”

“Don't know,” I said.

“I also Googled Judy Terrano's name,” Lucinda said. “I got eleven thousand hits, so I didn't look too deep.”

“Did you Google her name along with ‘Bad Kitty'?”

She nodded. “Came up dry. What else did
you
come up with?”

I went to the bedroom for the picture and placed it on the dining room table in front of her.

“Who's that?” she said.

“Judy Terrano as a teenager.”

“Wow.” She ran a finger down the picture. “When I was eighteen, I wanted to look like that. Why the hell did she become a nun?”

“It's not like good-looking girls never do.”

“She's more than good-looking,” she said, and she held the picture close. “She's a sex kitten. I bet a lot of guys fell in love with her.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“How about William DuBuclet?”

“In love with her? He's thirty-five years older than she is.”

“
You're
twenty-five years older than she was in this picture. Don't you want to sleep with her?”

“You're talking about a dead nun,” I said.

She nodded like she knew it. “You do. Jesus,
I
almost want to.”

I cocked my head at her. “You get a chance to research Eric Stone?”

“Not yet. The archives were closing. You think he's involved?”

“I wouldn't swear it, but yeah. Something's strange about him paying me five thousand dollars to keep an eye on DuBuclet.
He could afford one of the big security firms. The only reason to hire me is I'm already in the middle of this mess. I think he wants to keep a leash on me.”

She nodded. “So what's next?”

“Tomorrow one of us looks at the archives for Eric Stone and one of us talks to Amy Samuelson to find out what she sees in Stone and what she's after.”

“I'll take the librarians. I don't like ex-wives.” The way she said it made me think there was something in it for me. We sat quiet for a moment and I felt her eyes on me. “Are we done?” she said.

“I suppose so.”

She gave that a few seconds and then said, “You want to go to bed?” Like a surprise gift in the mail.

“Now?”

“If we're done talking, what else is there?”

“Jason's in his room.”

She took my hand in hers. “He'll go to sleep sooner or later.”

Three weeks earlier we'd spent the night together, the night she'd heard that she could either leave the department or spend the fourteen years leading up to pension in a police warehouse repairing radios, so far behind-the-scenes she wouldn't even hear sirens. She'd shot a man to death. It didn't matter that the man she'd killed was a killer himself. She'd used her service revolver and shot him outside city limits, breaking seven department regulations along the way. She was too hot for the higher-ups ever to put back on the street.

“Corrine is still—” I started, but I didn't know where I was going, so I shut up.

She pushed her chair back from the table and stood. “I told you I don't like ex-wives.”

I stood, too, and reached for her, but she picked up her dishes and walked into the kitchen. I left mine on the table and followed her. When she turned from the counter I was there in front of her. I could hardly stand looking into those eyes. There was pain in them. I wondered if there was pain in mine.

Then she came to me and kissed me. She lifted herself onto the counter, opened her legs, and I moved close. I kissed her forehead, her eyes, her neck.

“I don't care about Corrine,” she said.

“Shh,” I said. We kissed. But then her eyes got big and she pulled away. “What?” I said.

An eleven-year-old boy's voice answered from behind me. “Can I have more orange sherbet?”

Jason stood in the hall doorway. I looked at my watch. It was 10:25. “Too late for dessert. You should be in bed.”

He pointed at Lucinda. “Not until I see what happens here.”

“Jason!”

He gave me innocent eyes and said calmly, “Joe?”

Lucinda climbed off the counter and straightened her shirt. She put a hand on my arm. “I should go home and let you get this guy into bed.”

“I should lock this guy in—”

She stopped me with a quick kiss. Then she scooped her jacket and car keys from the counter and headed for the front door. I shook my finger at Jason and followed her.

“We've got plenty of time,” she whispered as she slipped into her jacket. “Tomorrow night. The next night. Long drawn-out school days when we should be working.”

She stepped outside into the cold.

When I went back into the kitchen, Jason had disappeared into his room. I went down the hall after him and knocked on
his door. He was in bed, covers over his head, the lights still on. I sat on the edge of the bed.

“That was a rotten thing to do,” I said.

From under the covers. “You could have told her to stay.”

“You pretty much ruined that possibility.”

“Sorry,” he said.

“You'll understand in a few years,” I said.

His head emerged from the covers. “I already understand.”

“You do? Well, good, then—”

“I probably know more about it than you do.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I don't doubt it.”

“Yes, you do,” he said.

“Look, you're eleven years old and—”