Dirty Fire (24 page)

“Those goddam movies have it all wrong,” Chaz Trombetta grinned at me, pulling the T-shirt over his head. He wadded it into a ball and tossed it onto my coffee table. “You know—all that bullshit about some unwritten code, that no cop would ever wear a wire to catch another cop.”

With thumb and forefinger, he picked gingerly at a strip of clear surgical tape under which his chest hair matted in flattened curlicues.

“Brother, is
that
a load of it,” he said. “Give a guy the choice between wearing a wire and going to the slammer, there’s only one question.” He looked up from under the black arch of his eyebrows, waiting for me to pick up my cue.

When I didn’t respond after a beat, he provided the punch line himself. “‘Where do you want me to stick the microphone, boss-man?’ Alimentary, my dear Watson.” He looked at me, clearly peeved. “Chrissake, J.D. You’re starting to turn into a real
dull
SOB.”

“It’ll hurt less it you don’t play with it, Chaz. One fast pull, just rip it off.”

“Fuckin’ Santori. Bastard’s giving me a little early payback.”

He stared dourly down his torso. The thread-like microphone lead was taped down his chest all the way to the tiny recorder—itself taped, snugly and intimately, where Chaz’s leg joined his torso.

The arrangement minimized the chance of discovery should anyone decide a pat down was in order. But adhesive tape pulls painfully with each movement, particularly when the wearer is possessed of the Mediterranean genes of my former partner. Earlier this morning, when he had met with Chaz to prepare the hidden wire, Santori had not thought to bring a razor to provide a smooth clearing in the jungle of follicles on Chaz’s chest and lower belly. Or so the FBI agent had claimed.

But that was just physical discomfort. Worse was the strain of trying to manipulate the conversation so as to get statements that would be admissible—or even relevant—in court. In the event, Trombetta had found what countless moles and informers had always discovered: left undirected, most discussions tend to focus on irrelevant minutiae. It was seldom easy to lead the discussion to a review of the criminal activities in which the other party was engaged; at least, not without sounding both comic and suspect.

“So I says to him, ‘How’s the crooked-cop business going for you?’” Trombetta was saying. “‘And while you’re at it, could you please speak a little more clearly into my chest?’”

I was finding it hard to match Chaz’s bantering tone.

“What did you get?” I asked. “Anything we can use?”

“Mostly crap,” Chaz said, and then a look of satisfaction came over his features. “And then I went up to see Dixon.”

This, supplemented by the recording he had made, is the story Chaz Trombetta told me.

• • •

Chaz had, throughout the day, compiled a litany of his fellow officers’ complaints—windy bitch sessions that were largely unworthy of the miniaturized computer chip on which they had been recorded.

In fact, most were just like the conversation Chaz was having now with Sergeant Dahl Dixon, seated in the windowless evidence lockup that—in casual violation of the access limitation regulations—doubled as a lunchroom for many of the Lake Tower cops.

Dixon’s voice was surprisingly high-pitched for one with a physique so wide.

“Ever wonder why I’m still a sergeant?” he asked plaintively. “I mean, hell—I’ve got twenty years on the job here, and Nederlander couldn’t blow his nose without me. So how come I’m not a captain? Or hell— ‘least a goddam lieutenant?”

“Might have something to do with your record, maybe,” Chaz’s voice speculated. “As I recall, there was a public protest—right out there on the steps of the Municipal Center, wasn’t it? All those citizens, upset about some bumper sticker you had. Refresh my memory: what did it say, exactly?”

“It was your basic, valid political comment.” Dixon said. “And it was pretty damn funny, too.
‘If I knew it was going to be such a problem, I’d have picked the goddam cotton myself.’
Ever hear of free speech?”

“Sure,” Trombetta said. “It’s just that not many captains, or even lieutenants, drive around with something like that on their personal car, even. Let alone on a squad car owned by the city.”

Dahl Dixon shrugged.

“Judgment call,” he said philosophically. “Did I complain when they torched that store mannequin? The one they dressed up like a cop? No, I goddam did
not
. Not even after that sign they put around its neck. You remember what they called me?”

Chaz nodded. “Racist Dixon,” the sign had said, with a swastika in the place of the “x.”

“Hell, they want to burn a dummy, that’s their right, okay?” Dahl said, oblivious to the irony of his statement. “Free speech. But if they get it, I ought to get it too.”

“You oughta file a complaint, Dahl. You’re being discriminated against.”

Dixon laughed, a sharp explosion that sounded like the single bark of a large dog. “Right. Discrimination. I’m Anglo-Saxon, I’m male, I’m straight and I’m a cop. Hell, Trombo—I’m probably the last person left in America you
can
discriminate against.”

Chaz grunted in what he hoped sounded like agreement, or at least appreciation. He decided to force the issue, lowered his voice confidentially as he leaned forward.

“Dahl, what’s your take on where we stand?” Chaz asked, as if he truly valued the other’s observations. “Things are starting to feel real loose around here, if you get my meaning. I even heard that this Levinstein case bullshit with Cieloczki is a cover—something to keep us on the rag while they’re really looking at what we’ve been running here. Is it true? The fireman—is he getting close to chilling out Nederlander’s action?”

Dixon looked at Trombetta for a moment without speaking.

“Chaz, my friend—the trick is that you gotta stay cool…cool as a cucumber, right? Look, you ain’t been in as long as most of us. Trust me. Nederlander ain’t gonna let anybody shut us down. Far as Cieloczki running the murder case—Nederlander’s doing what needs to be done, okay?’

Chaz stitched a frustrated look on his face.

“None of us are virgins sitting here,
Sergeant
Dixon,” he said. “You don’t have to rub grease on it for me. But I’d feel better if I knew our fearless leader was doing more than just waiting for the roof to cave in. Think what you want about Davey—he’s a damn good investigator. And Gil Cieloczki strikes me as a guy who won’t just go away.”

“Cieloczki gotta be one cool character, I’ll agree with you there,” Dixon said.

He made a show of looking around the room as if searching for an eavesdropper.

“Look, things are in the works, okay? Week ago, I took one of the video cams out for a little exercise. Nederlander told me to shadow Cieloczki’s wife and shoot some footage. Normal shit, you know? Walking down the street, going into stores—just stuff to show we had been watching and knew where to find her. Then I sneaked it into Cieloczki’s office. Put it right on his desk.”

“And?”

Dahl’s lips twisted in a disgusted expression. “And Nederlander’s been on my ass every other day since. Yesterday, I got fed up and told him, ‘Look—I shot the tape and put it where he couldn’t
not
find it. I can’t help it if he’s hasn’t run in to you shittin’ bricks over his poor, endangered wife.’”

Dahl rolled his eyes and took a bite from his meatball sandwich.

“I mean, Christ! Maybe Cieloczki’s got balls of steel where his wife’s concerned,” he said. “Or maybe he’s just tired of the ol’ ball and chain and wouldn’t mind if somebody did take her off. Fuck do I know, huh?”

Chaz frowned in shared puzzlement. “You sure he even
saw
the damn thing?”

Dahl shrugged. “I put it on his desk. It ain’t there; hasn’t been since the day after I did it.”

“Threaten a guy’s wife, you got to expect some reaction,” Chaz said, hoping he was getting all this on the FBI recorder. “Especially when you’re trying to shake him off a double homicide case.”

“Who cares, anyway?” Dahl said, almost yawning. “Hell of a note, giving one of our cases to a goddam fireman. Nederlander wants to rattle the guy’s cage, fine. But you ask me, Nederlander’d do better comin’ up with something to make up for the car thing. It’s starting to hit me where it hurts.”

“Same here. You got anything going on I can maybe get a taste of?”

Dahl shook his head sadly. “Nah,” he said, and his face brightened with the joke. “Not a
cotton-pickin’
thing. Cotton picking, huh? Get it?”

“Got it,” Chaz replied, and summoned up a half-hearted laugh.

Cotton
pick
this
, you asshole,
he thought, very aware of the recorder taped against his groin.

• • •

The quality of the videotape was poor, like much of the surveillance footage I had seen in my career. The image blurred as it moved in and out of focus, occasionally bouncing as the camera was shifted by the unseen operator. It would never win a
Palm d’Or
at Cannes. But then, it was never meant for widespread distribution. The intended audience for this movie was only one person.

Kay Cieloczki sat across from me at an angle to the television/VCR in her living room. During the few minutes it took for us to watch the recording, she had not taken her eyes off me.

“Davey, what’s this all about? Is somebody following me?”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Kay,” I said, trying to sound calm as well as calming. “Yes. You were followed, and somebody wants us to know that. Has Gil seen this?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. He would have said something. I found it in the den under a stack of things he must have brought home from the office. There was no label, no marking—I didn’t know if it was a program he had taped here or one of the training tapes Gil’s people use.”

She looked at me intently.

“Davey, what should I do?”

I wondered if Kay sensed that I was the worst possible person to ask. I liked Kay and respected Gil’s determination and commitment. But I also understood how Gil felt about his wife. He was a firefighter, not a policeman; I had no illusions about his probable reaction. Gil had not envisioned a situation where his family would be in danger.

In all likelihood, he would pull the plug on the investigation.

I recognized how selfish I was being. I wanted Nederlander badly; I wanted him badly enough to barter everything I possessed and almost everything I was.

But I did not want the responsibility Kay was asking me to take.

“Kay,” I said, slowly, “I believe this is a real threat against you. Somebody’s trying to pressure Gil by implying that you can become a target.”

She nodded, a hint of impatience in the gesture. The significance of what her husband was involved in obviously had not escaped her, nor had the implications of this tape, sent anonymously to him.

“Gil would do anything to protect you,” I said. There was a cautionary tone in my voice; I did not say it to provide comfort, and she knew it.

“You mean he might withdraw from this investigation,” she said, and it was not a question. I nodded.

“He’s told me some of what’s going on, Davey,” Kay said. “Maybe more than he thinks he has. I know how important all this is to everyone involved.” Her eyes took on a sudden new intensity and looked piercingly into mine. “Especially for you.”

I felt a sudden sharp emotion and recognized it as shame.

“Kay, Gil should know. Whatever…whatever the consequences.”

There was a moment of silence that seemed to stretch forever. Then Kay’s posture changed, and she shook her head.

“No, Davey,” she said. “Not now. Not yet.” She looked at my face, and I understood part of what Gil must have seen the first time he met her.

Before I could speak, she did.

“Try not to look so guilty,” Kay said. “I’m doing this because I think it is the best thing to do.”

“Kay, I don’t know what kind of protection I can arrange, but I’ll—”

“Finish all of this, Davey—finish it quickly,” she said. “That’s the best protection any of us have.”

I nodded and rose to leave. “The people who did this. We’re going to get them, all of them. I promise you. And when I do, somebody is going to be very,
very
sorry.”

Kay Cieloczki looked at me with eyes that saw more than I wanted to reveal.

‘Davey,” she said, “have they tried something like this against you?”

I shook my head.

“There’s nobody that I—”

I stopped short, the words stillborn in my throat.

From her seat across from me, I saw Kay’s face furrow with sudden concern; her lips moved, but I no longer heard her voice.

Instead, in my mind I heard Ellen’s voice, tinny over the cellular phone she had taken to carrying, making an appointment with me that I thought she had not bothered to keep.

Lenny Washburn once told me that he approached the writing of his books as if they were construction projects. Assemble the needed tools. Procure the nails, lumber, the trim. Clear the time and
write
the goddam thing.

There were no flashes of deep insight, no nuances of writing style to carefully hone, no painstaking seduction of the muse. Washburn was a craftsman, not an artist. He knew this, accepted it and had even come to revel in the fact that his books were built on story, not style.

In his writing, Washburn was aggressively nonjudgmental: he laid out the facts with the precise accuracy of a master craftsman, and the facts communicated the only story they could possibly tell.

But every craftsman knows that there has to be a blueprint. All the corners must square with each other, and every structure must exist in symmetry and logic. The best craftsmen have a sixth sense that triggers alarm bells when a design—even one that, on the surface, looks rock-solid—somehow fails to make sense.

That was the problem with the story that was, by now, dominating his every waking moment.

What I had known, the facts that I had given him—to the author, they felt loose, sloppy, at best incomplete.

And that troubled Len Washburn deeply.

Which was why he was seated on a bench upwind of Buckingham Fountain, watching the less wary of the midweek tourists and midday office workers try to dodge the swirls of chilly spray shed by the choreographed, synchronized water jetting high into the air. The sun, high in a cloudless sky, warmed the back of his neck.

Had he turned his head slightly to the north, he would have been rewarded with one of the most impressive cityscapes in the world. If he had turned to the south, the broad greenbelt of Grant Park would have directed his eyes to the classical architecture of the Field Museum of Natural History, the world-famous Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium. And directly behind him, had he looked, the broad-shouldered heights of the Sears Tower soared high above the gritty hustle of the South Loop and its Sullivan-era historic buildings.

But that was the direction from which his source would approach this prearranged meeting site, and Washburn knew the strict protocols the man insisted the writer follow. He had even specified the bench on which Washburn now sat. It faced east, where the expanse of sparkling water that is Lake Michigan touched the horizon in three directions. In the foreground, a river of vehicles streamed past, their exhausts layering a shimmer over the clear April airs.

His source was late. Washburn was no longer accustomed to waiting for tardy sources. In normal circumstances, he might have blown off the appointment: he had done it before with other tardy informants. But these were not normal circumstances, and this was not a normal source.

“
Mister
Washburn,” a deep voice intoned from behind the writer, a mild chiding evident in its tone. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your…what? Should I call it a ‘summons?’”

Washburn felt the bench settle heavily as his source sat beside him.

“Call it a cry for help,” Len said, staring at the swaying masts of the sailboats moored in the Grant Park basin. “I need your reaction to two words:
Operation Centurion
. And just so you understand that I’m not just on a fishing expedition, I already know it’s an investigation to root out corrupt cops.”

Silence, heavy as a secret sin, settled on the two men.

“Not my operation,” the deep voice finally said.

“But you know whose it is. In fact, you’re working with him these days, aren’t you?”

Again, there was a momentary pause.

“You’ve been talking to some people you shouldn’t.” There was a measure of amusement in the words. “Or more likely, they’ve been talking to
you
.”

“Operation Centurion,” Washburn repeated. “It’s targeted on the mess in Lake Tower, isn’t it? You know I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important. Since when is Ron Santori concerned with busting dirty cops out in the suburbs? Somebody get demoted, or what?”

The bench shuddered slightly, rhythmically. Washburn was surprised; his source was quietly laughing. Then the shaking stopped, and Washburn waited with an unaccustomed patience.

“You’re skating pretty close to interfering with an ongoing Federal investigation. Doesn’t that worry you?”

“Not much,” Len shot back. “What worries me is a government agency that uses people like they were Kleenex. One that plays fast and loose with the judicial system and suborns perjury when it’s convenient. One that dicks around in a case where people are getting tortured and murdered—just to protect an ‘ongoing investigation.’ That kind of bullshit worries me a helluva lot. I thought it worried you.”

Again, there was a pause. Then the man seated beside Len Washburn sighed deeply.

“I was around when we used to do black-bag jobs, breaking and entering, planting illegal mikes, building files on the sex lives of political radicals,” he said ruefully. “
Now
I start growing a conscience.” Then he laughed, with only a slightly bitter edginess to it.

“Look,” Washburn said. “I’ve been researching this almost since the start. I was in the courtroom the day the judge dismissed charges against John Davey, and I’ve been around too long not to smell a case that’s been fixed.”

“You’re asking me to maybe blow an important investigation.”

“I haven’t asked you to do anything you didn’t offer when you first talked to me,” Washburn retorted. “If I was out to screw you, or the FBI, I’ve had a year and a half to do it. I’m going to write the book on this Lake Tower thing, and I’m going to write it straight—but I’m convinced it’s not the book I started. Things have gone wrong, gotten out of control. And I think you know it.”

Washburn’s voice rose in irritation. “I’ve talked to Davey, so I know a little of what going on now—at least, what he
thinks
is going on. Hell, thanks to you guys he’s ready to start shooting at shadows.”

“Davey. Yeah, you might say he’s a little rattled. I reached under a car seat the other day and found a little tape recorder he had planted—he’s all the way to bugging FBI vehicles now.”

There was a heavy silence for a moment. “What do you think you know, exactly?”

“I know about the Russian Mafiya going after some kind of rare paintings. I know about the rich couple who burned up in that house. I know Nederlander is mixed up in it, up to his neck—and I know this is bigger than a probe aimed at crooked cops. This Operation Centurion of yours.”

Both men fell silent as a pair of young women walked by, one of them pushing a baby stroller.

“Centurion isn’t aimed at corrupt cops,” the man said, when the woman had passed beyond earshot. “Oh, if we find a few when we turn over the rock, fine. But Operation Centurion is designed to hunt bigger game, Mr. Washburn.”

“Meaning?”

“Centurion’s whole objective is to identify whatever crook is highest on the ladder. And, of course, pull him down. Hell, why do you think the Bureau has spent the past two years on the damn thing?”

Len nodded solemnly.

“And of course, even a police
chief
wouldn’t be high enough on the pecking order to justify that kind of investment.”

It was not a question, and the writer expected no answer. For that reason, he was surprised to get one.

“Maybe not,” the voice replied, softly. “But the guy he’s working with might be.”

For the first time, Len Washburn turned to look up at the outsized man on the bench with him.

“I think maybe it’s time I got all the facts, Charlie,” Len Washburn said.

“Yeah,” said Charlie Herndon, “I do, too.”