Nobody's Angel (14 page)

"What's funny about that?"

"It's not like it's Yellow Cab 6-3-4-5-7-8-9. His goddamn name is on the door. Somebody had to see him but we haven't gotten one fucking call. You guys are the worst. Don't you want us to catch this guy?"

"Look, you're a cabdriver," Foster said. "How could somebody get in your cab after you'd decided to call it quits?"

"Well, if you're heading home and somebody flags you, sometime's you'll ask 'em where they're going, and if it's on the way you'd probably take 'em."

"Okay," Foster said. "How about another?"

"Well, sometimes you're gassing up and somebody'll need a cab. Or maybe you stop to pick up a loaf a bread or something, and somebody in the store or maybe the guy behind the counter ."

"Got anybody special in mind?"

So I told them my theory about Rollie at the 24-Hour Pantry. Foster scribbled some notes. Hagarty had me describe Rollie as best I could. They both liked the gold tooth.

"Was there anything in the cab that might have come from a convenience store?" Hagarty asked.

Foster picked up a file and began to go through it. An eight-by-ten photograph now lay exposed on the desk.

Lenny was stretched out like a V, his legs and his head at different corners of the floor. He was lying on his side, his ass still on the front seat. His pockets were pulled out and papers were scattered around. There was blood everywhere. One side of his face was almost gone. But the eye had survived and stared back at the camera. The meter was frozen at $16.20, and I could hear Ace asking how much Lenny had died for.

Hagarty followed my eyes. "Shit," he said, and he reached over and turned the picture face down. "No reason for everybody to get sick."

"A roll of peppermint lifesavers," Foster said, reading from a sheet of paper.

"Half a roll, wasn't it?" Hagarty asked.

Foster consulted the paper. "Check," he said.

"It was just a thought," I shrugged.

"We'll check it out," Hagarty said. "You never know. Smigelkowski might have had a whole bag of groceries and whoever shot him grabbed it along with the money. We're pretty sure whoever did him got in his cab somewhere around that store."

"Why's that?" I asked.

Hagarty looked over at Foster. Foster shrugged.

"An Indian named Raj got it about three months ago. We're pretty sure the same guy did them both."

"Why?" I asked, and I wondered if Raj was the guy that Rollie had known. The guy so skinny you could blow him over like a leaf.

"Well, for one thing, Raj was last seen gassing up at Devon and Ridge. Your buddy was last seen heading up the same way. They were both going home. Raj only

had three blocks to go from the station to where he parked the cab. Who knows? He might have stopped by the 24-Hour. The only thing wrong is, Raj didn't gas up until after two, so if this Rollie gets off at midnight he would have been long gone by then."

"Was Raj the guy they found on the South Side?" I asked.

"No, that's one of the other connections," Hagarty said. "They were found within a half-mile of each other. Raj was over in Old Town on Goethe Street." He pronounced the street, go-thee.

Foster corrected him, pronouncing it ger-ta.

"The guy behind the Oscar Mayer plant," I remembered.

"That's the one," Hagarty said. "What do you say?"

"Huh?"

"Ger-ta or Go-thee?" he asked.

"Whatever the passenger says," I let them in on my system, "I say it the other way."

"You must be hell on wheels," Hagarty said.

"It passes the time," I said.

"You still lugging that mace around?" Foster asked.

I nodded.

"You think it's gonna do any good?"

"I'm not planning to use it against a gun, if that's what you're worried about."

"What all the bad guys are packing," he said.

"Maybe I should get one," I said. This wasn't the first time that thought had crossed my mind.

"I wouldn't advise against it," Foster said.

"You ever hear about the cabdriver took out a fifth of the Most Wanted list?" Hagarty asked.

I shook my head.

"Must of been six, eight years ago." He glanced at Foster.

"Something like that," Foster agreed.

"They'd been doing 7-Elevens and liquor stores. Two jokers just out of Pontiac, cellmates. Killed two clerks. Anyway, we were staked out all over town waitin' for 'em so they decided to switch to cabs, but they sure picked the wrong driver. Clayton something "

"Thomas."

"Yeah, that's it. Clayton Thomas, nice old black guy. They pistol whipped him a bit, just for fun, and told him to drive way the fuck out to Harvey. Well, Clayton wasn't any fool. He knew they were never gonna let him make the return trip, and the thing was, he had a gun tucked away under a cigar box on the front seat. He managed to slip it out and then at a red light he turned around and just smoked 'em. They never got off a shot.

"We'd been looking for the guys for a week and Clayton solved all our problems in about half a second. And then he delivers 'em. He drives right to the station with the stiffs in the cab. We wanted to give him a medal. This was one tough hack. But a couple of months later he calls us. The city won't renew his license. Wouldn't tell him why. We went downtown to see if we could help out. They told us no dice. What was it that guy said?"

"We let cabdrivers carry guns," Foster mimicked some Consumer Services bureaucrat, "next thing you know, they'll be shooting little old ladies in fare disputes."

"See, Clayton's mistake was he told the truth about the gun," Hagarty said. "What you need is something that isn't registered. Then if you ever use it, just say you took it off the other guy. Nobody's gonna really care."

"Or find yourself a nice dark alley," Foster advised.

"Now don't give him any ideas." Hagarty said. "We've got enough work already."

Any driver who refuses a fare on grounds of NOT KNOWING where passenger's destination is, in addition to being charged with refusal of service under S28-28 Mcc and this rule, shall be retested. Failure to pass the written test shall result in recommendation for revocation.

City of Chicago, Department of Consumer Services, Public Vehicle Operations Division

It was one in the morning when I headed east towards the lakefront. Relita was a whore. Didn't that just figure?

I laughed at my own disappointment. What had I expected to find in an alley in the middle of the night, a choir girl?

On Sheffield Avenue, a cab light was flashing. People were milling about under a nightclub canopy. The ladies were in long dresses; the men in suits and ties. One cab was loading up and three empty cabs waited, blocking half the street.

I was going around the whole mess when an older guy stepped out from the crowd and pointed straight at me. I stopped and waved him over. The waiting cabs started honking their horns, the drivers yelling out the windows, but the guy didn't pay any attention. He shook a few hands, hugged a woman and walked right past the cabs and opened my door.

"Madison Street," he said, sliding in.

"Long street," I said as I started away. "Where to?"

"I'm not exactly sure," he said. "But I'll let you know when we get there."

"Gotta know where I'm going, pal." Rule number one.

He was a rugged looking guy, fifty or sixty, with thinning grey hair and a slender white scar that ran straight down from one baggy eye. He caught my eye in the mirror, then a ten dollar bill came sailing over the back of my seat. "Humor me a little, okay?"

"Sure," I said, and I tucked the ten away. "But it really is a long street. Can you at least give me a hint?"

"Why don't we start at the beginning," he said.

The guy didn't say a word all the way down Lake Shore to Randolph Street. I turned left on Michigan, then made the next right. "Madison Street," I said.

"It's nice to get a white guy for a change," he said as we went under the elevated tracks.

We went through the Loop and across the river and then the highway. "Where'd they all go?" he asked a couple of blocks later. There were blocks of nothing but empty lots. Then several blocks where a few buildings had survived. Then more empty lots. "Christ, this used to be wall-to-wall winos," he said. "In the summer they'd be sittin' all up and down the sidewalk. I mean, there wouldn't be one empty spot. They'd be passing bottles of cheap wine back and forth. The smell was really something."

"Those were the days," I said. And I remembered that sickening smell, being trapped on a Madison bus on a hot summer afternoon trying not to breathe.

But the flop houses and the bars, the missions and soup kitchens, pawnshops and liquor stores, the little hole-in-the-wall joints, and the winos who had patronized them all, had been gone for years. One lonely day-labor house was the only hint that--not too many years ago--the largest Skid Row in the country had been right here.

"Probably all dead," he said.

"More than likely," I agreed. Dead and buried in Potter's Field, one on top of another in a long trench, cheap pine boxes, no marker, no mourners, the We Haul Anything Cartage Company instead of a hearse. Where have all the winos gone?

The surviving buildings were mostly dark brick and covered with old, rusted burglar gates. There were a couple of restaurant supply houses that looked like they'd

been there before Skid Row. They'd waited out the bad times and now the rebirth of the Near West Side was approaching.

There was one new building right on Madison and a couple of remodeled storefronts. But for the most part the signs of the future were hidden away on the side streets, where several brand new office buildings stood. They were almost all one- or two-story jobs; secure-looking brick places, surrounded by large, fenced-in parking lots, illuminated by floodlights and monitored by closed-circuit TV's.

There were some people wandering around near Ogden Avenue. There was a drugstore, a liquor store, a Chicago Housing Authority senior citizen highrise, and a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

St. Lucy's Hospital was a few blocks south, just over the expressway. Relita was down there in Intensive Care. A typical Chicago success story. A trick baby who'd grown up too fast and followed in her mamma's footsteps.

Soon we were back to the empty lots. Some of these were actually paved or covered with gravel, parking lots for the Chicago Stadium. There was block after block after block of nothing but parking lots.

"The hockey team still play here?" the guy asked.

"Yeah," I said. "Basketball too."

It was a big grey-stone place that had been there forever. It had been the site of political conventions and prizefights, circuses and ice shows. It was about the only reason I ever ended up out this way. There were housing projects to the north and south; beyond it lay what was left of the West Side.

I hit the power door locks. "How much farther?"

"I'm not really sure," he said.

"The further we go, the worse it's gonna get."