The Shoulders of Giants (19 page)

“Was he ever aggressive?” I asked, finally.

“Huh?” she said, as if she had forgotten I was there. “No. He was strong, but he would never have used it against anyone. He was real gentle.”

“Can you think of anyone that might have wanted to hurt him? Did he have any enemies?”

“I don’t know. He probably owed money all over town, you know?”

“Any ideas who I should talk to about that?” I asked.

“We never really talked about things like that. Argued, but never talked.”

My next stop was a bar downtown called Circle. Being a Sunday afternoon it was almost empty, and I was hoping it hadn’t been too busy the week before when Richard West and his buddies came for a drink after work. The bartender was a young guy with high cheekbones and a ponytail. He looked like the maverick cop who usually gets paired with a grizzled old-timer in those buddy movies. I sat at the bar and ordered a Coke, then I asked him if he was working last Saturday.

“Yeah. I work every weekend,” he said.

I put a picture of Richard West on the bar. “Do you remember this man being in here?”

“Yeah, absolutely. This is the guy from the papers, the guy who got murdered. Soon as I saw his picture in the paper I was telling my girlfriend ‘He was in the bar Saturday’.”

“Was he with a large group of brokers?”

“At first, yeah. Then he got talking to a woman.”

“What did she look like?” I asked.

“Average height, long blonde hair, too much makeup.”

“Attractive?”

“I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers.”

“What were they drinking?”

“He was on straight OJ at first, but when she started buying they both had a splash of vodka in it.”

“She pay by credit card?”

He shook his head. “Cash,” he said.

“Do you remember when they left?”

“Yeah, they were here till closing. His buddies left a couple hours before.”

I arrived back at my apartment around half past five. I made myself a pastrami sandwich and stared at the phone. I was planning on using it later, just as soon as I finished my snack.

The sandwich didn’t fill me up, so I started rooting around in my fridge and my cupboards for something else. I found nothing of interest. I opened a bill which had been sitting on the hall table for almost a week, and for a while I couldn’t decide which to put off longer, paying the bill, or making the phone call.

I sat and stared at the phone, my mouth completely dry, for a full two minutes. Finally I picked up the handset. I dialed. Before it started to ring, I punched the ‘end call’ button with my finger and stood up. I got a Rolling Rock out of the fridge. Dutch courage, I told myself.

Fifteen minutes later, I had finished the beer, and was watching the end of a rerun of
‘I Love Lucy’
on TV. I decided to try again. The phone rang at the other end. Again. I turned the business card over and over between my fingers. She answered.

“Hello?” she said.

“Abby?”

“Yes, who’s this?” She didn’t remember me. Oh my God. What the hell was I doing? It was all a horrible mistake. I couldn’t speak.

“Hello?” she said, again.

“Hi. It’s Jake. Jake Abraham.”

“Jake!” Well, she did at least sound pleased. “How are you?” Damn. I should have started with that one.

“I’m fine, thanks Abby. And you?”

“Very well. How can I help? Surely you’re not working, on a Sunday?”

“Er..” Oh my God. “Actually, no. This is more of a... a personal call.”

“How intriguing,” she said. She was smiling. I don’t know how, but I could hear it. “Go on.”

“I was wondering...” This was it. Now or never. All or nothing. Oh my God. “I was wondering if you were free tomorrow evening.”

“As a matter of fact, I am. What did you have in mind?”

“I thought we might go to dinner. Do you like Italian food?” I could hear Scott in my head, telling me what a bad idea this was. Telling me she had something to hide.

“It’s my favorite.”

In my head, I told Scott to go to hell.

Chapter 30

I should have called it a day. It was getting dark outside, and it was Sunday, after all. But speaking to Abby had made me feel invincible, and there was something I’d been putting off doing. I found a small screwdriver and a hammer, put them in my pocket, and left the apartment.

I drove to Bridgeport, then down South Wallace, to the address Lucy had given me for Tommy Byrne, and looked for his black Camaro. It was parked a few doors down. I went another block south and then turned around and drove past again. I parked half a block away, facing away from Byrne’s building. I sat in the passenger seat, so that anyone who saw me might think I was waiting for the driver to come back from somewhere, and adjusted the rearview mirror and the wing mirror so that I could see the entrance of the building without turning around. After ten minutes, nobody had been in or out, so I made my move.

I walked back on the far side of the street to where Tommy’s Camaro was parked and kicked it to see if it was alarmed, ready to run. No alarm. I looked around to make sure nobody was watching and then I hunched down at the back of the car. I held my screwdriver against the Camaro’s taillight and gave it a tap with the hammer. The glass broke and I took a small piece out. I’d managed to do it without breaking the bulb. I stood, looked around again, and headed back to my Saab.

I sat for nearly another hour, looking in the mirrors, before anything happened. Then I saw them. Tommy Byrne and Dean Dugan came out of the building and started towards their car. I scooched over into the driver’s seat and turned the key. But when I re-adjusted the mirror I saw that they’d gone past the car and kept walking.

Following people on foot is pretty hard. Ideally, you’d have two or three people who could keep swapping positions so that the mark didn’t get suspicious. One might follow behind while another tried to stay parallel, and the third would hang back in a car in case the mark took a taxi or something. With one follower the main difficulty is distance. Too close and you’re easy to spot. Too far and you lose them round the first corner. And if they get in a car, forget it. I was on my own. To make matters worse, the guys I was following were criminals, and therefore naturally paranoid, and they knew me. If they spotted me I’d have some trouble explaining what I was doing there. On the plus side, it was now completely dark. So I stayed on the far side of the street, in the shadows, about half a block back, and hoped to God they didn’t look round much.

As it turned out I didn’t have to stay behind them for long. They turned onto West 32nd Street, walked two blocks east and went into a bar. I looked for somewhere to sit until they came out. As I watched, more people arrived. They came from different directions, mostly on foot, and greeted each other warmly before going in. It wasn’t the usual Sunday night bar crowd. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say they were having a meeting. It occurred to me that I should have a camera. What the hell kind of detective goes on surveillance without a camera?

Less than a half hour later, people started coming out. With so many people coming onto the street alongside Byrne and Dugan, it would have been hard to leave my hiding place without drawing attention, so I stayed where I was and watched as they walked up the street and turned onto South Wallace. When the coast was a bit clearer I moved out of the shadows and walked slowly and calmly to the corner and, straining my eyes, I could just make out Byrne opening the door of his Camaro. I broke into a jog and reached my car just as they turned right onto West 31st.

I was around the corner in half a minute, and met with a sea of red taillights. Then, signaling for a left turn onto LaSalle, I saw it. The white light streaming out of the broken taillight like a beacon. I made the turn and followed the chink of white up the ramp onto the Dan Ryan.

If following people on foot is hard, following by car is a nightmare. The traffic conditions, the weather, overzealous highway patrols, stoplights, car trouble, all conspire to make it hard to do on your own before you even get to the question of how far back to stay. Thankfully, due to my slight criminal damage earlier, I was able to follow Byrne and Dugan from half a mile behind, switching lanes occasionally, dropping back when the traffic got light and moving up when it got heavier. There was no way they could have spotted me, and the beam of white light amongst all the red was like a flashing neon arrow over their car.

We stayed on the Expressway all the way to O’Hare, and I wondered if they were getting on a plane, but instead of going into the airport we headed south and followed the road round the perimeter. Irving Park Road was much quieter than the Dan Ryan, and I had to stay well back. I only just had the Camaro in sight when it turned left into Bensenville. I stayed as far back as I could, and turned my headlamps off while I tried to keep the car in sight. We were the only two on the road, and when they turned onto Orchard Street they slowed down like they were looking for an address, so I pulled into the driveway of a house that was boarded up.

The street was eerily empty. The streetlamps were on, but the houses were dark all the way down the block, and most of the windows were boarded up. This was the City of Chicago’s property. They’d been buying people out for months to make room for the O’Hare expansion project; adding another two runways to what was already one of the world’s busiest airports. A few residents were stubbornly staying put, hoping the project would never get the clearance or the funding to build and they would somehow get their neighborhood back, but the City had just won a 7th Circuit appeal to say they could move a cemetery to make way, so it looked like it was a done deal. Most of the people in the area had accepted better than market value on their homes and gone elsewhere, so the village, and Orchard Street in particular, were like a ghost town.

Byrne’s Camaro pulled up a few hundred yards from where I parked, and I saw the outline of another car across the street from theirs. As I watched, Byrne and Dugan got out of the car and went into a house. I saw a faint glow of light as they opened the boarded up front door, but then the street was dark again. Something was definitely going on. I really wished I had a camera.

The streetlamps’ beams covered the sidewalk, but the front yards all along the street were set back far enough to stay dark. I kept low as I crossed the yards towards the house. If they came out unexpectedly I wanted to be able to dive into a bush or something. I made it all the way in the darkness without anyone spotting me and listened at the wooden board covering the window. I could hear shouting, but not much else. I edged around the back of the house, looking for some way to figure out what was going on inside. When I got to the far side I got lucky. The board on the window this side was a bit short, and they’d nailed it in place with a tiny gap at the bottom, no more than a quarter inch.

The first thing I saw was a candle on the floor, and then the two men, kneeling down next to it. They were lit from below by the candle and looked like statues at first. When one of them lowered his head I saw Byrne standing behind him, gun in hand. The kneeling men had their hands behind their backs, tied or handcuffed I guessed, and Dugan was circling the three of them, twirling a butterfly knife around and around like a bad guy in a Bruce Lee film. The shouting had stopped. Byrne was now talking to one of the men softly. So softly that I couldn’t hear, but from the look on the guy’s face he wasn’t apologizing for shouting earlier. Then, barely flinching, Byrne fired his gun into the back of the man’s head.

I think the man fell slowly. That was how it seemed. The crack of the gunshot made my ears ring and I jumped back, but through the gap I saw the man fall forwards. I wanted to run. I couldn’t be sure that I hadn’t made a noise; that I hadn’t given myself away. When I looked though the gap again I saw the man on the floor. The candlelight reflected off a pool of blood by his head. The second man was whimpering. Begging. Byrne calmly turned his gun on him and took a breath.

“Tell me what I want to know,” he said.

As quietly as I could, I moved away from the window, to the back of the house next door. I couldn’t hear Byrne anymore, so I figured that if I spoke quietly he wouldn’t be able to hear me either. The 9-1-1 operator asked me to speak up, but I insisted I could not.

With the police on the way, I wondered what was the best thing to do. Obviously going in to save the guy would get both of us killed, so that was out of the question. Sitting by and waiting for him to die didn’t seem like the right thing to do either, so I hit on a plan. I would create some kind of diversion. One that would make a noise outside the house but didn’t involve them coming out to find me there, so I had to trigger it from further away. I was looking for a rock to throw when I, and the man in the house, ran out of time. The second gunshot was every bit as shocking as the first, and when Byrne and Dugan came out into the night I had not hidden myself. Had they turned around before they got to their car, the cops would have found three bodies instead of two when they eventually showed up. By the time they reached the car I was in the shadows behind the neighboring house. I heard a siren in the distance.

The Camaro started up and instantly drowned out the faint siren noise. Byrne and Dugan sat talking for a moment before they reversed into a driveway to turn around. It was enough time for me to decide what I had to do.

As the car accelerated away I stepped out from behind the cover of the house, onto the sidewalk, pulling my Glock from its holster as I went. I jacked the slide back and let it spring forward, chambering a round. I exhaled as I lowered the sights of my gun into view, and fired one shot.

At first I wasn’t sure I had hit it. The tire didn’t explode. But then the car swerved wildly across the street and stopped suddenly with its front wrapped around a utility pole. The sirens were getting nearer, but that was the only sound. The Camaro’s engine had cut out, and there were no people to rush out of their houses to see what had happened. No dogs barked at the noise of the crash. The driver side door swung open suddenly and Byrne staggered out, gun in hand, shouting. In the light from the streetlamp I saw he had blood on his face. I tensed, ready to fire, but he didn’t see me. He stumbled a few steps and fell down in the street. I kept watch until the cops arrived, but neither he nor Dugan were going anywhere without help.