The Bad Kitty Lounge

THE
BAD
KITTY
LOUNGE

 

 

 

 

 

 

IN THE JOSEPH KOZMARSKI SERIES

 

The Last Striptease

 

NONFICTION

 

Romantic Migrations: Local, National,
and Transnational Dispositions

 

Romantic Geography: Wordsworth
and Anglo-European Spaces

MICHAEL
WILEY

MINOTAUR BOOKS

A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK
NEW YORK

 

 

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

 

A THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin's Publishing Group.

 

THE BAD KITTY LOUNGE
. Copyright © 2010 by Michael Wiley. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

 

www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.minotaurbooks.com

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Wiley, Michael, 1961–

The bad kitty lounge / Michael Wiley. — 1st ed.

      p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-312-59300-1

  1. Private investigators—Illinois—Chicago—Fiction.

2. Nuns—Crimes against—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3623.I5433B33 2010

813'.6—dc22

2009041134

 

First Edition: March 2010

 

10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

Por los niños

I'm grateful to those who've made the party happen at the Bad Kitty Lounge:

Toni Plummer at St. Martin's, whose editorial insights have been unerringly true, and Ruth Cavin, who prodded me first and hard.

Philip Spitzer, Lukas Ortiz, and Luc Hunt, whose goodwill, good-spiritedness, and good sense are all that I could hope for.

Julia Burns and Sam Kimball, who've helped me past many rough beginnings.

Beryl Satter, who knows these streets and yards.

THE
BAD
KITTY
LOUNGE

I SAT IN TOMMY
Cheng's Chinese Restaurant facing a window onto North LaSalle Street and watched a four-story condo complex where Eric Stone was screwing another man's wife. Not the kind of work I look for, but it always seems to find me. I kept my eyes on my client's condo and ate egg foo yong.

Behind me in the kitchen, Mr. Cheng cooked something that sizzled in the wok. He wore an apron and a white baseball cap. My Pentax, its telephoto screwed into focus, rested on the counter in case Eric Stone showed his face outside.

I squinted into the glare. The little birch trees that the city had dumped into sidewalk planters flared October yellow. The condo complex was stucco and had the kind of Spanish arches and wide balconies that belonged far from Chicago in a place where the sea was always clear and the breeze blew as warm as a woman's breath.

A man walked onto the balcony in front of the condo.

Eric Stone.

I dropped my chopsticks, readjusted the lens on the Pentax,
and snapped a photo. The man had a caterpillar of a beard under his bottom lip. The rest of his head was shaved. He looked somewhere in his early fifties but his arms and body were thick—all muscle. He flexed the arms over his head. He wore white shorts and a white T-shirt on a forty-degree autumn day. He looked like a pirate in tennis whites.

A woman joined him on the balcony.

Amy Samuelson. My client Greg Samuelson's wife.

She was dressed in khakis and a sweater, her blond hair in a ponytail. She wrapped her arms around Eric Stone from behind.

Mr. Cheng came from the kitchen and stood next to me. “Every day the same thing,” he said, laughing. “She never gets enough of him.”

She slid her hands down the man's stomach. One hand disappeared into the front of his shorts. Stone looked proud of himself.

Mr. Cheng said, “Some people've got no decency,” and I snapped more photos. “What do you do?” he asked. “Blackmail them?”

I pulled out my wallet, let him read my detective's license.

“Joe Kozmarski?” he said.

“I'm helping her husband get a divorce.”

He laughed. “You blackmail them.”

Amy Samuelson and the man went back into the condo, closing the door behind them.

I ate more egg foo yong. The bean sprouts were fresh, the shrimp as big as walnuts. Mr. Cheng stood and watched the balcony as if he expected them to come back out naked and screw in the open air.

Another man walked across a parking lot next to the condos.
He was thin, wearing blue jeans, an oxford shirt, and a navy blue jacket, no tie. He carried a two-gallon gas can. He looked in no hurry. He crossed to a yellow Mercedes convertible that was parked facing the street.

I knew the car. Eric Stone drove it when he wasn't flexing his muscles on the Samuelsons' balcony in his tennis shorts.

The man set the gas can on the hood of the Mercedes and undid the cap. He screwed a spout onto the can. He poured gasoline over the car's hood, over the convertible roof, onto the trunk.

Mr. Cheng said, “What the hell—”

The man shook gasoline onto the car doors. He stooped by the tires and poured gas over them. He took his time.

“Take—pictures,” Mr. Cheng sputtered. I left my camera on the counter.

The man splashed the rest of the gasoline under the Mercedes, then stepped back to appraise his work.

He touched the fabric convertible roof with a lighter and leaped away. The car burst into flames. Thick black smoke fingered into the air. The convertible top flared and fell into the interior.

The man with the gas can watched the fire, then pulled a cell phone from his pocket, dialed, and talked into it. When he hung up, he walked slowly away. The empty gas can dangled in his fingers. The car made a hollow popping sound and the windshield fell into the front seat.

Mr. Cheng glared. “Why don't you take pictures?”

I looked him up and down. “That was the husband—my client.”

Mr. Cheng stared at me with blank eyes and nodded, then returned to the kitchen and called 911. He told the operator
that a car was burning and gave the street address. When he hung up, he came back and sat on the stool next to mine. “You like the egg foo yong?” he asked.

“Best egg foo yong I ever ate,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said. “It's my mother's recipe. It gives you long life.”

We sat together and watched the Mercedes burn. Giant flames angled out of the interior. The car roared like an open furnace. Heavy black smoke, dense as dirt, clouded above it. The smell of burning rubber and something worse—the leather interior, something that once was living—made its way into the restaurant. By the time we heard sirens, the fire had blackened the car's exterior, and whatever was feeding it from inside was gone. The flames shortened. Then the gas tank exploded and the fire roared again.

I pushed away the egg foo yong. Long life it would give me, said Mr. Cheng. I'd lost my appetite.

THREE FIRE TRUCKS AND
a squad car crowded the curb in front of the Samuelsons' condo. A couple of firefighters sprayed foam on the burning car. The hot metal smoked and steamed. A young uniformed cop with a notepad talked to Eric Stone on the sidewalk. The October air was cold and Stone was still in his tennis whites, but he looked like he was sweating.

I waited until the cop left him and then I wandered across the street. Stone pulled out a cell phone, punched some buttons, and yelled into it. Up close he still looked like a pirate, but I added five years to the young fifties I'd estimated from a distance. He was driving hard at sixty, but he was sixty years of muscle. I was forty-three years old, six foot one, and just under two hundred pounds, but I didn't want to bounce my muscles off of his.

I stepped next to him and we watched the firefighters deal with the remains of his car. It looked like a burned carcass, a large grazing animal, a buffalo, maybe a small elephant—bury
it in a pit with hot coals for a week, buy buns, invite the neighbors. Stone didn't seem to notice me.

“I used to be a cop,” I said.

He glanced at me like I was an innocent nuisance. “That so?” He looked back at the car.

“Yeah. Got fired. I plowed my cruiser into a newsstand at three in the morning. I was drunk—I did that back then—so something had to give. No one was hurt and my car, unlike yours, didn't burn. But magazines and newspapers filled the air like a blizzard.”

He glanced at me again, barely tolerating me. “Do you mind?”

“Sorry,” I said. I nodded at his car. “Tough luck.”

He nodded once, apology accepted.

“I'll tell you a story, though,” I said and he grimaced. “I knew this guy in the department—”

“Look,” he said, “I'm sure you're a fine guy but my car burned and there's nothing you're gonna tell me that'll make me want to talk with you.”

“Got it,” I said.

We stood together and watched the firemen and the smoking car. “So this guy in the department,” I said and Stone's shoulders tensed. “This guy had a problem. He played in a department softball league and every time he had a game a fellow in the neighborhood was screwing his wife.”

Stone turned slowly from the car to my face. His eyes were cold, hard, dark.

“Now, this cop kept a Taser in his trunk. Against department regulations at the time, but he kept it. So his problem was this. He came home early from a game and found the neighbor in bed with his wife. Well, not in bed—they were in
the kitchen, the wife on the kitchen counter and the neighbor—you get the picture.”