A Bad Night's Sleep (3 page)

Every time I’d seen someone die I’d felt the world go a little quieter like I’d lost part of my hearing, and sooner or later the singing, laughing, and screaming would fade into a hushing wind of white noise. That had happened when my dad died. It had happened when Kevin, a boy I was supposed to be protecting, ended up twisted and broken on his mother’s kitchen floor. It had happened. Shooting the cop felt worse. I’d ripped a little hole in the universe and I wondered what sound would fly out through it.

For three days I stared at the three cinder-block walls, the bars that formed the fourth wall, and the concrete floor. I stared at myself too but I preferred the walls, floor, and metal bars.

On the afternoon of the fourth day a guard unlocked the cell door and pointed his thumb over his shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Detective Chroler wants to see you.” We went through the next cell block where the prisoners jeered and cheered me like they knew something about me that I didn’t know. Then we went through two security doors and were back among the living. Cops in uniforms or plainclothes walked the corridor, laughed with each other, or stood outside office doors talking on cell phones. It made me dizzy.

We went around a corner, into a stairwell, and up some stairs. Detective Jane Chroler had an office next to the stairwell. She sat at her desk looking unhappy, though I guessed she had been spending her days and nights in nicer places than I had. A stack of newspapers rested on the corner of her desk with a copy of the morning
Sun-Times
on top. The headline to the lead story read,
NO PROGRESS IN SOUTHSHORE KILLINGS
. A headline to a sidebar story next to it read,
ROGUE INVESTIGATOR JAILED
. The article included a small color photograph of me. It was the photograph from my detective’s license. In the paper it looked like a mug shot.

I knew Chroler had positioned the newspaper for my benefit. “Sit,” she said.

I took the chair across the desk from her, and the guard left us. A steam heater hissed softly, but the tile floor and the walls were bare and the room felt cold.

I said, “Ballistics confirmed what I told you?”

“More or less,” she said.

“More or less?”

“You fired your gun once, like you said. The bullet was in Officer Russo, like you said.”

“He’s the one who was helping the thieves?”

“According to what you’ve said.”

“And who says anything different?”

“No one.”

“So where’s the ‘more or less’?”

“Officer Russo’s gun was unloaded.”

“Huh?”

She nodded. “You say he aimed it at the other officers, but there were no bullets in it. So why would he do that?”

That made no sense. “He was on duty and his gun was unloaded?”

She shrugged. “A lot else remains unknown. We haven’t caught the others. When we do, they might tell us something about you.” She kept her eyes on me like she was expecting me to sweat.

The thieves couldn’t say anything about me. I sweated anyway. “I don’t think they’ll tell you anything very interesting.”

She cracked a small, mean smile. “I spent a little time over the last three days looking at records and getting to know you. And I’ve got to say, I don’t like you. When you were in the department you had a habit of breaking the rules and the habit got worse after you were fired. You’re a drunk. You use drugs. You—”

“I quit all that a long time ago.”

“Number one rule of AA: Once a drunk, always a drunk. You might not be drinking but you’re still a drunk, just waiting for life to get bad enough again to start you up again. Same thing for an addict, from what I’ve seen. Never a cure, just occasional vacations.”

I gave her a hard stare. It didn’t make her sweat.

She frowned. “This isn’t the first time you’ve been present when a cop has gotten shot, is it?”

“You know it isn’t.”

“You know where Detective Gubman is now?”

Two months earlier, my friend Bill Gubman had asked me to go with him to stake out and ID a robbery suspect I’d seen. I couldn’t ID the guy, but he’d shot Bill in the stomach. If I’d moved faster, I could’ve shot the suspect first. It was getting to be an old story.

Bill had spent three weeks in the hospital and another three in rehab. The doctors had taken out half of his upper colon and a couple other spare parts, but he’d lived. Far as I knew, he was at home recovering with his wife Eileen.

I said so to Chroler.

She shook her head. “First day back. He’s sitting at a desk downstairs.”

That made me happy, kind of. “Welcome him back for me.”

She shook her head some more. “He hates that desk. But that’s where he’ll be until he retires.”

I said, “Are you letting me go?”

“Got no reason to keep you.”

“You had no reason to keep me for three days.”

She shrugged. “We forgot about you.”

“I wish.”

“You need a better lawyer.” She reached under her desk, came up with a plastic bag, slid the bag across the desk to me.

I laid the contents on the desktop. My cell phone, the battery dead. My keys. My holster—without my Glock.

“My gun?” I asked.

“Impounded.”

My wallet. I flipped it open. Four twenties, a five, and two ones inside—probably what I was carrying when the police took it from me. Also my Visa card and driver’s license.

Something was missing.

“My detective’s license?”

“Under review,” Chroler said, like it was no big deal.

“What’s that mean?” There was no review process that the police were part of, not that I knew of. “The Department of Professional Regulation handles complaints, you don’t. Only the DPR can revoke a license.”

“The DPR gave this one to us.”

“Bullshit. They don’t do that.”

Chroler shrugged. “Your license is under review.”

Fighting with her would get me nowhere. I would ask Larry to do what he could. Or I would get a better lawyer.

I stood up.

“Take the newspapers too,” Chroler said. “You might learn something.”

“About?”

“Yourself.”

I picked up the newspapers, turned to go, stopped at the doorway. “You could have had me released downstairs. Why did you call me up here?”

“I wanted to give you the newspapers personally. Also I wanted to be the first to tell you that one of the wounded officers died. So that’s three dead now and two still in the hospital. Congratulations.”

FOUR

THEY’D PARKED MY SKYLARK
at the curb outside the station. Couldn’t do better with a parking attendant. They hadn’t washed it, though.

I sat in my car and fingered through the newspapers while the November sky grayed against the afternoon.

The first copy of the
Sun-Times
ran a front-page headline that said
SOUTHSIDE MASSACRE
and showed pictures of the five men killed and wounded. David Russo, Tom Stanley, and Marvin du Pont, dead. Christopher Pelman and Emelio Fernandez, wounded. The article said they were experienced, dedicated cops. It mentioned the thefts at the construction site but didn’t say that officers Russo and Stanley were in with the thieves. According to a police spokesman quoted by the paper, all five were heroes who died or had been wounded protecting the city. The spokesman also said the thieves had gotten away in two dark-colored vans. A third van, left behind, was stolen. As far as the newspaper reporter seemed to know, I didn’t exist.

The
Tribune
had the same information, though it included a diagram showing where the cops fell and biographical sketches of the dead and wounded. David Russo, the cop I’d shot when he pointed his gun at the others, was married but had no kids. I breathed easier at the no-kids part. But his sister said he’d grown up wanting to be a cop like his dad, a story I knew too well.

By the third morning, frustration was starting to show. The
Sun-Times
ran a sidebar titled
BLOODBATHS IN BLUE
about the psychological effects of shootings on the men and women in blue. They’d also gotten my name and described me as a private investigator who’d phoned the police with news of the Southshore robbery. They mentioned that I had a checkered past but other than that they left me alone.

The
Tribune
was ahead of them. They’d gotten their hands on the 911 tape of me reporting the Southshore theft and broke the news that officers Russo and Stanley were involved in it. They said I was an ex-cop with a drinking problem. They’d dug through their files and come up with a photo of the newsstand I’d wiped out with my cruiser the night before the department fired me. Last time I’d seen the photo it was deep in the Local News section of the paper. Now it was page one.

This morning’s
Sun-Times
went hard into the story about departmental corruption, questioning if only Russo and Stanley were involved in the thefts. An op-ed article noted that no one had been arrested, wondered about a conspiracy of silence in the department, and called for an investigation. In the “Rogue Investigator” story, Detective Jane Chroler called me a
person of interest
. The article also connected me to Bill Gubman’s shooting two months earlier.

The
Tribune
article gave most of the same information and provided a time line of the shootings and investigation. It called me a
person of interest
again, said I was in jail, uncharged, quoted Larry Weiss calling me innocent, reminded readers of my drinking habit, and quoted an unnamed former detective calling me “dirty.”

I dropped the stack of papers onto the passenger-side floor.

Dirty.

I pulled my car into traffic. Across the street, a woman with a German shepherd was going into a redbrick building that had a sign advertising dog boarding, grooming, and training. The building had steel doors and glass-block windows that started about eight feet up from the pavement. Another prison. A white Honda SUV pulled from the curb in front of the building, made a U-turn, and fell in behind me.

At the corner, I turned west onto 18th Street and cruised in the shadow of the El tracks. I checked the rearview mirror. The SUV followed me. We crossed the brown water of the old Sanitary and Ship Canal—the rusting steel skeleton of a railway bridge in the near distance, the downtown skyscrapers beyond it. We crossed the tracks of an empty railroad yard. We passed vacant lots with broken-down trucks and piles of scrap.

The stoplight at Canal Street turned red. Afternoon rush hour was starting even in a lousy part of the city like this, and the SUV pulled close behind me. My rearview mirror showed two men. They looked thirty or thirty-five, both with short, receding dark hair that they’d messed up so it needed a comb. One of them wore black, the other a camouflage jacket. Like anyone still wore camouflage. That probably made them plainclothes cops. They stared out the windshield with faraway eyes as if I wasn’t there, which meant they probably were watching me close.

I waited until the line of cross traffic approached, then punched the accelerator. The truck at the front of the line blew its horn but I slipped in front of it. The SUV lurched and tried to follow. It had nowhere to go.

My car shot up Canal, past an old warehouse converted into a self-storage business, then past factories and more vacant lots. I searched the rearview mirror. Far as I could tell, the SUV was a half mile away.

There were no stoplights on this stretch of Canal. I blew forward to Roosevelt Road, swung around the corner, and headed east. More railroad tracks. Back across the Sanitary and Ship Canal. More vacant lots. Across Clark Street, and suddenly million-dollar condos, tennis courts, and trees surrounded me. I sighed, let the tension go.

Then I glanced at the mirror.

The white SUV had fallen in two cars back.

Traffic had thickened but the SUV wedged into the right lane and pulled within a car length. I wondered what the rush was. The men had caught up with me, so they must’ve figured out where I was heading to begin with. The SUV slid back into my lane, with a VW between us.

The stoplight at State Street turned red and I hit the brakes. I considered getting out, tapping on the driver’s window, telling the men to get lost, but the SUV pulled into the left-turn lane, rolled next to me, stopped.

The passenger-side window rolled down. The man in the black jacket gave me a tight-lipped smile.

I rolled down my window, said, “What the hell—”

He lifted a black pistol, pointed it at my head.

I didn’t need to think. My body moved on its own. My hand reached for my holster.

No gun in it.

I looked for a way out to the left, right, front, and back. Cars boxed me in.

The pistol fired—a huge sound. My vision narrowed.

I waited for the pain, thought I felt it coming. Where? I wiped my hands over my face, stared at them. No blood.

The SUV pulled away, bounced over a concrete median, completed a U-turn, and disappeared behind me.

The other cars didn’t move, though the light had turned green. A big man climbed out of a red Camry and ran toward me, shouting. I watched his hands for a weapon, saw none. Was he with the men in the SUV, coming to finish me off? I looked around frantically. What could I hit him with? My cell phone? A shoe? A newspaper?

He was outside my window, shouting. What was he saying? I forced myself to listen.

“Are—you—all—right?”

I ran my hands down my ribs, over my belly. No pain. I put my hands on my neck, looked at my arms and legs. No blood.

“Are you all right?” the man was asking.

I stared at him, said nothing.

He leaned toward me, his hands on my door, his fingers curling through the open window. “Are you—?”

I lifted his fingers away from my car with my fingers. I rolled up the window.

He was a good man, a saint.

I had nothing to say to him, no use for him at all.

The cars in front moved. The man stepped away from my Skylark, bewildered. I let my car roll forward, accelerated through the intersection.

The next corner was Wabash. I turned, drove up the street, and turned again into a parking lot.