3 The Case of Tiffany's Epiphany (19 page)

“Anything else you find that I should know about?” I ask him.

“No, not about this,” he says.

“There is something we have to talk about, Jack.”

“What?”

I swallow hard and take a deep breath. I’m sure Jack is not going to like what comes out of my mouth next. “Jack, “No-No” wants to know if you still have feelings for her.”

“Damn it, Sherlock,” he snaps back at me. “I invite you over here to help you out, and you turn into Cupid.”

“I had to ask you, Jack. I didn’t have a choice. “No-No” was going to charge me with breaking and entering if I didn’t.”

“She was bluffing. How naïve about women are you?”

“Really, really naïve,” I tell him.

Jack’s dander is way up. “Let me tell you two things about women, Sherlock.”

“Okay.”

“You can’t live with ‘em,” he pauses for effect. “And you can’t live with ‘em.”

I can only wonder: where was my mentor when I met my ex-wife?

“Jack,” I say as calmly as I’m able. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“And you can’t make me, Sherlock.”

I give it a minute or two for the subject to dissipate then get up to leave.

“Where’re you going?” he asks.

“I got to pick up my kids. Thanks for letting me in on the new wrinkles.”

“That’s not why I brought you over here. Sit down.” Jack opens his tattered briefcase, pulls out a stack of money, and tosses it on the table my way. “I need you to do something.”

“What?”

“Buy me some drugs.”

“Why? I already cured your gout.”

“Not that kind of drugs. I need some cocaine.”

“Jack …”

“Here’s the address,” he hands me a slip of paper. “Make sure you use the top ten bills.”

I look down at the wad of cash. I only wish.

CHAPTER 13

The girls come down the escalator at eight minutes before five, both loaded down with rope-handled bags from some well-known expensive stores. “I thought I told you four o’clock.”

“You did,” Care admits.

“But we wanted to make sure we spent all the money you gave us so we wouldn’t have to waste any of it going home on the ‘L’,” Kelly says.

“How did you afford all that?” I ask, pointing to their stashes.

“Shopping,” Kelly says. “It’s an art.”

We walk to the Chicago Avenue station and catch a train heading north. It’s dinnertime by the time we get into our neighborhood, so I decide we stop at a local spot and eat. They have burgers. I have fish. They tell me of their shopping forays and describe each item they purchased. They are truly happy. It’s amazing what having a little money in your pocket can do for you and your family. I even feel pretty good about it.

We walk to our apartment, and, once in the door, I tell them, “I have to run an errand tonight. I don’t want you fighting over the TV remote.”

Neither listen. They’re both playing with their cell phones.

I go into my bedroom, change into jeans and a sweatshirt, and return to the girls who have taken their purchases, spread them out over the furniture, and are taking pictures with their cell phones to send to their Facebook friends.

“Keep the doors locked and don’t let anybody in,” I say this extra loud. “If anybody knocks, call me on your phone and I’ll tell you what to do.”

I hope they’re listening; sometimes all I can do is hope.

---

The address “Wait” Jack Wayt gave me is on the Westside. The one-story brick building is on a street off Madison Street, a particularly crummy neighborhood that’s a mile or so west of the United Center. The entrance to the building, which was previously a retail operation selling retread tires to owners of cars like my Toyota, is off the rear alley. It's a perfect retail location—if you’re in the drug business.

If you’ve ever considered delving into the sale of illegal substances, you might want to reconsider. It’s not a great line of work. It has a business model that is structured like a pyramid. The enormous base is made up of uneducated street kids who have flunked out of school and have very few other employment options available to them. The drug lords at the top of the pyramid realize these dumb, impressionable punks are ripe for picking, so they hire them at a minuscule wage with no fringe benefits and make them salesmen. The middle section of the pyramid is composed of the drug distributors. Although they’re paid much better than the sellers on the street, often in 18-Carat bling instead of cold cash, these Johnny-come-lately entrepreneurs run the greatest risk of all. If they get busted, they wind up in the slammer for a very long time.

I think you should know there’s a great disconnect between the distributors in the middle and the chieftains at the top. The exclusive few who import the dope and supply it to the distributors seldom get busted because they keep their distance from the down and dirty aspects of the trade. For them it’s quite simple. If anything goes wrong they merely walk away, go back to the massive labor pool at their disposal, and start over.

These kingpins are just like a lot of America’s respected corporate CEO’s who sit in their ivory towers, sip 12-year-old scotch, and order their MBA generals to use cheap, foreign, sweatshop labor to reduce costs. So what if a fire breaks out in a Bangladesh factory making battery acid and hundreds of workers are killed. They simply blame it on the locals in charge and move the operation to some other factory in Katmandu.

It works the same way in the drug business. In order to keep their distance, the big bosses establish phony corporations and rent abandoned buildings to use as retail “outlets.” It works out great because it’s easy to keep watch on the operations at a safe distance, maintain quality control of the products, supervise the employees, offer an easy access to the product for their customers, and most importantly, it allows them to totally control the enormous amount of the cash generated by the transactions. If one of these “outlets” gets busted, the supplier merely picks up, moves to another building and sets up shop there.

Transporting the cash from the “outlets” to the “bank” works in almost the same way it does in the “legitimate” business world—only with a great deal more caution. Under the cover of night and when the coast is clear, somebody drives up to the “outlet,” picks up the money, and drives off.

The last thing a major drug supplier wants is to be in any way involved when a turf war breaks out, where kids are shooting each other at will, and innocent people are getting caught in the crossfire. He wants complete deniability. And he often says with a straight face, “Hey, they’re independent contractors. It isn’t our fault.” If you look at the business from the top, it’s a moneymaking machine. If you look at it from the bottom, it’s a nightmare on any level—business or otherwise.

I pull up in my Toyota and wait with the engine running. The building is similar to the one where the felt fedora Thug took one in his Kevlar vest. Less than a minute later, a kid not much older than sixteen comes up to my open window. “Yo,” he greets me.

I show him the ten bills “Wait” Jack Wayt gave me to use and say, “Blow.”

The kid takes my money, runs inside the building, and two minutes later runs back out to my car. He drops a baggie of white powder in my lap, and walks away. He doesn’t even bother to say “Thanks.” And people wonder why customers have so little retail loyalty.

I drive directly to the precinct station in Cabrini-Green, where “Wait” Jack Wayt is waiting.

“Wait, he says.

“What?”

“The toe on my other foot is hurting.”

“Did you loosen that shoe?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer. I hand him the recently purchased baggie and pull out what’s left of the wad he gave me in Bruno’s apartment.

“Will you let me know where the trace ends up?” I ask.

“If it ends up anywhere,” he tells me.

I hold out the cash for him to take.

“Keep it.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” He’s not merely being polite, but merely playing the game. In reality, this is a small price to pay for the services I rendered.

“Don’t worry,” I assure him. “I won’t.”

Jack knows that I know the unwritten rules of this game.

I feel the thickness of the stack of bills, try not to smile, but in my head all I hear is …
Cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching.

---

I’m home. The kids are asleep. Personal shopping can be exhausting, although I wouldn’t know since I do so little of it. I pull the wad of money out of my pocket and add it to the bills Mr. Rogers gave me. The total is $1,700. This is more cash in hand than I’ve had since my divorce two years ago. Feeling those bills between my fingers, seeing how green, and how comforting they are; it's a feeling I haven’t had in a long, long time. It’ll buy me a new muffler, new winter boots and new jeans, and a full refrigerator. It’ll also pay off my credit card debt. No more pink statements in my mailbox. Hallelujah!

I fold the bills in half, wrap two rubber bands around them, and place them in the bottom of a small tin recipe box I keep in the upper kitchen cupboard. The money from Mr. D’Wayne DeWitt is already there. Now the total is well over $2,500.

While I’m at it, I take out a stack of blank 3x5 recipe cards, find a pen that works, and retire to the living room, which doubles as my bedroom when the kids are with me. I fix the couch up with a sheet and blanket. I do a couple of back exercises before lying down. I feel pretty good. I have one last thought of the stack of money safely tucked away in my kitchen cupboard and fall asleep with a grin on my face.

---

The Original Carlo,
a particularly bad painting I bought years ago at an outdoor art sale for eight dollars, hangs on my living room’s biggest wall. It’s a rendition of a dilapidated barn with four red mailboxes in front of it, all set against a lemon yellow background or maybe it’s a lemon yellow sky. Why the sky is yellow, or why a barn would ever need one, much less four, mailboxes, only adds to its artistic allure. I consider the work so bad, it’s good.

When I’m on a case,
The Original
Carlo
serves another purpose. It becomes a bulletin board for my handwritten index cards
.
It helps me to keep everything I know about a case in one convenient place and see it at a glance. I add row upon row of easily movable 3x5 cards which I stick on the picture with push pins. It’s easy to add, subtract, mix and match, whatever. Hardly high tech, in no way artistic, and the process makes
The Original Carlo
look like it has shingles. But hey, it works for me.

Sunday morning, a little after nine, the kids are snoring away, and I go to work. I start scribbling away on the recipe cards. I write one item on each card—a thought, a fact, a suspicion, an instance, a happening, a question, or a conclusion. When I have prepared about fifty cards, I begin push pinning them into
The Original Carlo.
All with the purpose to make some sense of the case at hand.

Tiffany
is at the top of my first column. Beneath her name, I have the when, where, how, and what concerning her drug induced state. I have a card for each person either around her or close to the situation when she took a header off the barstool at the Zanadu—Alix, Bruno, Monroe, and the blocker. I left the “C” word off so my impressionable daughters won’t see it and ask me any embarrassing questions.

My next column is headed
Gibby Fearn
. Beneath his name is a card for the Behemoth, his comic book-reading comrade-in-arms. I have cards listing what Gibby does and what he doesn’t do. I also list the times of his inside and outside money pick-ups and drops. I’m not sure why I do this, but for some reason it seems to make sense.

The third column is headed
D’Wayne DeWitt.
I list his rap sheet, his two girls, his job, and his digs at the Zanadu on separate cards. I also have a number of cards for what I don’t know about him—where he lives, his finances, his hangouts, his friends, and his business associates. There's also a card with the amount of money I have received from him so far, $1,900. I usually don’t use
The Original Carlo
as a spread sheet, but the money is coming in so fast and furious it’s kinda fun to have it up there to see my finances flourishing for once.

I make two more columns. One for
Bruno Buttaras
, which lists everything I know about him and his murder. His is the longest list by far. The second is for
Mr. Rogers
, the shortest of the listings. I have very little to report on my latest client except for the $1,000 he gave me.

Lastly, I put up random cards on which I’ve written aspects of the case for which I have no clue where they fit in. These include my two kidnappings, the Non-Brink’s Brinks truck, the Brink’s truck and each of their destinations; Monroe’s CEI company, the shooting at the first retail dope location, the blood on that floor, the gang/turf war currently in progress, Neula “No-No” Noonan’s suspicion of a male murderer, “Wait” Jack Wayt’s steroid find, and the baggie of blow I picked up for him in that crummy neighborhood off Madison Street on the Westside.

I consider adding a final column that will chart the relationship status of “Wait” Jack Wayt and Neula “No-No” Noonan, but I decide against mixing business info with personal info.

I sit for about an hour staring at the partially covered painting before me. What I have is Tiffany getting roofied, a murder, money being laundered through the Zanadu, a shooting, a drug buy, a potential murder scene, two new employers who pay me in advance, the Behemoth, a Thug who used to wear a fedora, Mr. Ponytail, the absence of a Mr. Capellino, and Bobo Bling’s horrible MF rap CD. I know in some way, shape, or form it’s all connected, but there’s not yet a thread stitched between any two. I don’t get far in figuring any of it out because I’m interrupted by a just risen Care.

“Good morning.”

“What are you doing, Dad?”

“Trying to make some sense of nonsense.

“Why?”

“Because that’s my job.”

“Care wipes the sleep from her eyes, looks up at the first column on
The Original Carlo
. “Are you going to find out who did that to Tiffany?”