The Bad Kitty Lounge (22 page)

“So DuBuclet and the nun shared a secret from back then. A big secret, I think—one worth killing for. I think Greg Samuelson figured it out and threatened to go public with it. So the killing started. Judy Terrano. The priest. Samuelson took a bullet in his face—not enough to kill him, but enough to keep him quiet for a while.”

“You know, I really could use specifics—like what this secret is.”

It involved the fire at the Bad Kitty Lounge, I figured, and the millions of dollars committed to the construction of Stone Tower forty years later on top of the ashes of the old building, but I didn't know what else.

I said, “I'm working on it.”

I FIGURED SAMUELSON KNEW
the details about the fire at the Bad Kitty Lounge, details that could shake the Stones' hold on the land where they were building Stone Tower.

But he wasn't talking.

Who else knew the details?

Judy Terrano had known.

But she was dead.

DuBuclet probably knew.

But, like Samuelson, he wasn't talking.

Judy Terrano's old friend, Louise Johnson, seemed to know more than she'd told me.

But she wasn't talking either.

The priest I'd found dead in Judy Terrano's bathtub might have known at least some of the details, enough to draw him into her room.

Dead.

Who else would know?

Maybe someone at Holy Trinity.

The crime scene tape was gone from the church entrances. The forgiving and forgetting would take longer, maybe a lifetime or more. I opened the heavy steel doors to the sanctuary and stepped into the end of morning Mass. A couple dozen parishioners—all women—sat in the pews, some still bundled in the dark wool coats they'd put on against the cold, though the inside of the church was warm enough. A priest stood at the front. He was in his young fifties and dressed in black, swinging a censer, chanting in Polish. I sat in a pew in the back and closed my eyes.

When the priest finished the service, he came down the aisle to greet the parishioners. The women, some with tears in their eyes, got up and clasped his hands, and he seemed to reassure them that the hardest days at the cathedral would pass. They shuffled out through the steel doors until only the priest and I remained. He considered me, then came and sat by my side.

“Does something trouble you?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Can you do anything about a dead nun?”

He shook his head with practiced sorrow. He must have been hearing a lot of this from people who had known and loved Judy Terrano. “She's with God now,” he said, “and she's at peace.”

“I've gone to too many funerals to believe it,” I said.

“Nonetheless—”

“If a guy dies after ten years of cancer, you can call it peace. But when a woman gets choked to death with her clothes pulled up to her shoulders, don't call it peace and heavenly rewards.”

The priest said, “Death is nothing to a woman like Sister Terrano. It opened a door to a bright beginning.”

“Bright, huh?”

He nodded. “Brilliant.”

I stared at his eyes. “I'm carrying a Glock,” I said. I lifted my jacket to give him a peek. “If I took it out, pointed it at your forehead, and put my finger on the trigger, and you looked into its barrel, would you say death is brilliant?”

He didn't squeal, but he squirmed and sweat broke out on his forehead. “I hope so. Do you plan to shoot me?”

“Me?” I barked a laugh. “No no. I'm sorry, I've had a couple of rough days.”

He gave a feeble smile and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. “Yes, we all have.”

“Just skip the consolations, okay?”

“Sometimes they're all I've got.” He stood.

I said, “What happened to the hundred ninety thousand dollars that Judy Terrano skimmed from her charities?”

The priest flinched and sat again. “Who are you?”

I handed him one of my cards.

He looked it over, then glanced at me nervously. “There can be authority in one's sins as well as in one's redemption.”

“You can justify anything that way.”

“Justify, no. Accept and forgive, yes.”

I shook my head. “It's a cop-out.”

“It's the oldest story in the book. Mary Magdalene . . . Augustine . . . Amazing Grace—all the converted sinners. Why would you expect faith to be clean?”

“Not clean. But a little less bloody.”

“The blood of Christ is the purest—” He gave me another nervous glance. “Skip it.”

I said, “What did she do with the money?”

“There are stories. I don't know if they're true—”

“Try them on me.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I want to find the killer, and I can't do that unless I understand why she got killed.”

“Greg Samuelson didn't do it?”

“The police haven't charged him and they won't.”

He looked at me, doubtful. “If that's true, it will go a long way toward consoling the congregation.”

“What stories did you hear?”

“Sister Terrano was more experienced and worldly than many nuns. She had a background in political activism and her motives, beliefs, and actions were never quite orthodox.”

He was avoiding my question, so I asked again. “The stories?”

He hesitated, then said, “The rumor is that she had a child—out of wedlock—before entering the Church, and she was using the money to support him.”

I nodded. “There've got to be worse sins than that.”

He shrugged. “For a nun advocating teenage chastity? Her credibility would have been shot if the press had found out.”

“So much for the authority of redemption.”

He sighed. “That's only if the penitence is sincere and complete.”

“Hers wasn't?”

“There were other rumors—involving her relationship with a group whose beliefs are at odds with Catholic teaching. Questions about her financial dealings continued after the audit revealed the missing hundred ninety thousand dollars.”

I figured the group was William DuBuclet and his followers. “Do you have access to her records?”

He shook his head. “The police have most of them. They took her computer and files. I don't know what's on them. After the audit, the church asked Greg Samuelson to oversee her
accounting and to act as a second set of eyes on her expenses and the donations she received.”

“You say the police have
most
of the records. Could I see what you've got?”

He frowned, but he stood and I followed him up the aisle and through the door to the narrow hall that led to Judy Terrano's office. He let us into a small office with a desk and a computer. He opened a series of documents, selected one, and hit the Print command. He handed me the eight pages that scrolled out of the printer.

The printout showed an annual summary and detailed listing of the funds Judy Terrano had received from donors over the past eighteen years. The funds totaled twelve million dollars and change. A Mrs. Arthur Fenton had bequeathed more than a million when she'd died. A number of national and local companies had contributed anywhere between two and twenty-one thousand dollars a year. Mrs. Stone first wrote a check for ten thousand dollars the year that the records began and most recently had written one for thirty-five thousand dollars. Most of the list named small donations of fifty or a hundred dollars. One man had contributed fifteen.

There was one unexpected donor. For more than a decade the ex-hooker Louise Johnson had donated between thirty and a hundred dollars a year. When I'd talked with her, she'd said that she didn't know where Judy Terrano was, but for ten years she'd been saving pennies and nickels for her. She'd kept donating her money while living in a cheap basement apartment and drinking Bacardi. I saw only two reasons why she would pretend she'd lost touch with Judy Terrano: She had something to gain if she kept quiet or she had something to lose if she talked. Greed or fear. Someone would pay her off or someone would hurt her.

I handed the priest the printout. “Have you met many of the private donors?” I asked.

He glanced at the sheets of paper. “Most of the smaller donors live in the neighborhood and attend services here. The larger donations come from all over the city and country. Some of the donors have visited. Some met Sister Terrano on her travels or saw her on TV and wrote a check.”

“How about Louise Johnson?”

“Louise, yes.” He smiled. “She's an exception. She rides the bus in every Sunday. She seems to live modestly but she's been generous with the little that she has. She became very attached to Sister Terrano and the work she was doing.”

“Do you know what drew her to this church?”

“I do. One of the other donors brought her the first time.”

I considered the names I'd seen on the list. “Who was that?”

“It was one of our largest private donors, Dorothy Stone.”

I laughed.

The priest looked at me uncertainly. “Mrs. Stone and her family have been extremely generous.”

I shook my head. “I don't think so.”

“They've given more—”

“Thank you,” I said. “You've helped a lot.”

I found my way out of the church. The sky outside was graying, heavy, and cold. It looked like snow. I turned the key in the ignition of my car and cranked on the heat. The Gandhi bobblehead bobbed on the shuddering dashboard. Forty years had passed since Louise Johnson hung out at the Bad Kitty with Judy Terrano, Anthony DuBuclet, and the Stone brothers, but they still formed a tight little community, living and dead. I wondered if Mrs. Stone would invite Louise Johnson over for tea and a slug of rum when winter came.

I SPED DOWN THE
Kennedy toward the Loop, then out the Dan Ryan and into the South Side. Twenty minutes after leaving Holy Trinity, I parked three doors up from Louise Johnson's apartment. A couple of kids in winter parkas walked past. They were a year or two older than Jason and they should have been in school. They were smoking cigarettes and trying to look tough.

I buzzed Louise Johnson's apartment but got no answer. It was 10:30, time for a tall glass of Bacardi and orange juice unless she'd drunk so late last night that morning wouldn't start until noon.

I buzzed again.

Maybe she'd run out of rum and gone to the store. Maybe in her retirement she drank her breakfast at a local bar. Maybe she was making the rounds at the city's churches, donating her pennies and nickels.

I held the buzzer.

Nothing.

The kids in parkas disappeared around a corner. I rattled the outside door. The tongue bolt gleamed in the gap between the door and the frame. A hard shove would splinter the frame, but I hated to expose the building to the cold air and to any twelve-year-old thugs-in-training who were prowling in it. I slid my car key into the gap and worked the bolt until it slid partway into its casing, far enough for me to ease the door open.

The entrance hall smelled of cooking and garbage. Loud music played against a crying baby. I went down a half flight of stairs into the hall where Louise Johnson lived and stopped outside her apartment.

Her door was open.

There's nothing worse than a door that's open when it should be closed and locked. It might mean nothing. I knew that. Before I quit drinking, I sometimes stumbled home and left my door open all night while I slept on the floor. And some buildings are so friendly that people leave their doors open in case the neighbors want to visit. But I hated that open door.

I knocked but got no answer. I didn't expect one. I knocked harder. Then, because I had to, I pushed the door open further and stepped inside.

The apartment looked the same as the last time I was there, with the same plain, brown furniture, the same two bottles of Bacardi and the coffeepot on the counter. The only difference was the rum bottles were empty now and Louise Johnson wasn't sitting at the kitchen table.

I wanted to leave the apartment and go back outside into the cold air. But I walked into the hall that led from the kitchen toward the bedroom. No matter how hard Louise Johnson had scrubbed it, the hall smelled sour and the carpet showed old
water stains. Three framed, studio-style portrait photographs hung on the hall wall. A fourth frame leaned against the wall at the floor. The cardboard backing had been torn away, the picture removed.

I stepped past a bathroom into the bedroom and switched on the light. Louise Johnson was lying on the bed, her head on a white lace pillow. A bullet hole pierced her brow. The wound was clean, mopped so the skin around it was free of blood. Only the smallest hole remained, with a lip of pale flesh punched inward. She looked as pretty as a body in a gift box.

Her mouth was closed, and her lips formed a vague smile. Her eyes were closed, too. Black flecks dusted her chin, cheeks, and the pillow under her head. Over a blouse she wore the green cardigan sweater she'd had on when I'd last seen her. She wore nothing else. I watched her chest for the slow heave that marks the breathing of deep sleep, but I knew there would be none.

“Damn,” I said, and the word felt dull in my ears.

I searched the bedroom, more or less. The closet had clothes and shoes but no bundles containing the memories of a hooker or of the life she had led as a girl, no secret diary. I opened the top drawer of her dresser. It was full of underwear, far more than any five women could need. That did it for me. I closed the drawer, left the room, and walked back into the kitchen.

The coffee cups we'd drunk from a day earlier were gone—clean and back in the cabinet—but a couple of empty glass tumblers stood in the sink. That probably meant she'd been drinking with company yesterday evening or today, some time after Lucinda, Terrence, and I left. The company could have been her killer. I left the glasses where they were.