The Bad Kitty Lounge (15 page)

“And you didn't call me when you first heard from Samuelson. Why?”

An honest answer probably would have included a long discussion about Corrine and maybe a short one about his promotion to lead detective in the Chicago Police Department while I was terminated without benefits. So I shrugged.

He drummed his fingers on his desktop, then made a decision. “Are we going to find any more dead nuns or priests?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Any other bodies that mysteriously died during the night?”

“I don't think so.”

He drummed his fingers some more. He looked at me like I deserved no more sympathy than Samuelson. “Okay,” he said.

“Okay?”

“For now.”

I watched through a one-way mirror as he went to talk to Samuelson. But as I expected, Samuelson wasn't talking. Stan raised his hand and threatened to hit his face and Samuelson shrunk away, but Stan didn't hit him and Samuelson soon learned the trick. After twenty minutes Stan came out without hearing a word, not even another request for codeine.

Stan sat in the chair next to mine and watched Samuelson through the viewing glass. “We're going to need to get him back to the hospital,” he said. “Don't want him dying in the station house.”

“Seems like a smart move,” I said. “You mind if I go home?”

“You're not going to tell me where he was all night?”

“Are you charging him?” I said.

“Yeah, for burning the car,” he said. “We don't have enough for the nun or the priest yet.”

“Then last night is confidential. For now.”

He shrugged and waved at the door. “Get the hell out of here.” He was tired of me. I understood why. I was tired of myself.

I went out a back door at 9:30. If I headed straight home I would get there by Corrine's ten o'clock deadline. I could even stop for a take-out coffee and bagel. If I swung by my office, I would be a half hour late.

I dialed my home number on my cell phone. After three rings Corrine picked up.

I said, “Jason's a great kid, isn't he?”

She thought about that a moment. “Yeah,” she said. “How much longer?”

“Another hour?”

She growled, “Joe!”

“Forty-five minutes?”

“This is what I hate about you.”

“I know.”

“Then why do you do it?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I admitted. “People keep dying. I don't want them to. It happens.”

She laughed. I didn't know if that was good or bad or if she was laughing with me or at me. So I laughed, too, and said, “I'll be there soon.”

 

I DROVE DOWNTOWN TO
my office, parked, and went into Grandma's Kitchen and ordered the three-egg breakfast special
to go. Alexandros looked hard at my face and my hair, matted with blood from Robert and Jarik. He leaned over the counter and beckoned me close. “You know my cousin, the one that wants a date with you?”

I nodded.

He shook his head. “She changed her mind.”

I took the breakfast up to my office, put my five thousand dollars back in a drawer, turned on my computer, glanced at the red light blinking on the answering machine, and ripped open the bags containing my food. I ate my scrambled eggs, toast, and sausage while the computer warmed up. I tickled the computer mouse and brought up Google, then stepped out of my office to the restroom across the hall. I ran water over my face and arms and shampooed the dried blood from my hair with soap from the dispenser. When I was done, the face that stared back at me from the mirror needed a good night's sleep, a three-week vacation, and a month in a woman's arms, but other than that it looked fine.

In my office, I sat and thought. I needed to know more about the Stones and their business. I Googled
LCR
and
Lakeview Commercial and Residential Real Estate Development
, and got twelve hundred hits. I sighed, pushed back my chair, looked at the screen, and thought about other terms I could add to narrow the search.
Judy Terrano
or
William DuBuclet
might be interesting.
Eric Stone
or
David Stone
would make sense. So would their mother's name,
Dorothy Stone
. I wondered what would happen if I typed the name of David Stone's daughter,
Cassie,
and added
bikini
.

I was too tired for this. I needed to go home and sleep, and I needed to let Corrine get to work. When I woke, I could play computer games all I liked.

I put on my jacket. But as I closed my office door behind me, the red answering machine light winked at me. I stepped back inside and hit the Play button.

Jarik spoke with a calm, quiet voice but it had danger in it. “Hey, Mr. Kozmarski,” he said. “We picked up your girlfriend when she left your house last night. A little girl named Lucinda. She's doing fine, just fine, chilling with me and Robert. But she's missing you. And Robert and me, we are, too. We're all missing you. We'll be calling you soon, all right?”

The message ended. He left no phone number. He left nothing but the vague threat. They had Lucinda. And I no longer felt tired. I felt angry and cold.

I SPED SOUTH OUT
of the Loop. The Dan Ryan Expressway had enough lanes to land a jet, and I used them all. On the side of the highway, the shell of Sox Park was dead and would be until the spring, the players flown south for the winter. Brown low-rise apartments and warehouses always would look abandoned, no matter how much life was in them.

I exited and shot through the streets of Beverly until I reached William DuBuclet's brick house. The lights were off but I pounded on the front door anyway, rattled the doorknob, and pounded some more. I was reaching for my gun, figuring the butt against the wooden door would get the attention of anyone in the house and probably the neighbors' houses, too, when the woman who had answered the door the last time I'd been there opened it again and peered at me from sad, drooping eyes. “Yeesss?” she said, like she'd never seen me before.

“I need to see William DuBuclet.” I started inside without an invitation.

She stood her ground and shook her head half a shake. “Mr. DuBuclet's not available,” she said slowly.

I could knock her over. “He'll want to see me. It's about Jarik and Robert.”

She stared at my mouth like I might have something more to say. I didn't. “Very well,” she said, and she turned from the door. She led me up the hall to DuBuclet's office, knocked on the door, and cracked it open. “Joseph Kozmarski is here to see you,” she said.

“Let him in,” said DuBuclet.

He sat at his desk, reading a book bound in cracking black leather. His tall, dull-eyed, dully smiling grandson sat across the room from him in a wheelchair. Last time, the grandson had worn striped pants and a striped shirt and had clapped silently. He still clapped silently, though now he wore jeans and a sweatshirt.

DuBuclet opened the top drawer of the desk and slid the book into it. A stick of cedar incense burned on a metal tray in front of him. He motioned to a chair facing his.

“I've been following the news on TV and the radio,” he said. “I understand that Greg Samuelson is back in custody.”

I waved that away. “Robert and Jarik have my partner, Lucinda Juarez.”

He looked at me, perplexed.

“Don't give me that look. They do what you tell them to do.”

He shook his head. “I'm afraid that's not entirely true. Please explain what happened.”

I said, “Last night they paid me a visit.” He nodded like he knew that much. “They took me for a ride and told me again that they wanted me to stop investigating Judy Terrano's death. They'd found out I'd agreed to help the cops, and they
didn't like that.” DuBuclet frowned. He already knew about the cops and didn't like it either. “They said your interest in Judy Terrano was personal, a deep dark secret from an earlier life. They didn't like me digging into that. Jarik clubbed me on the head to make the message stick. Then I clubbed him and Robert to let them know I didn't appreciate that kind of reminder. Later, to remind me again, I suppose, they grabbed my partner as she left my house.”

“I wasn't aware of that part of it,” he said.

“They still have her. I don't like this kind of reminder either.”

He put two fingers to his lips. “Are you planning to grab me to make the point?”

“The idea crossed my mind.”

He looked down and shook his head. “Don't ever go into business with the people you love,” he said.

“That's the second time in two days I've heard that.”

“It's good advice.”

I thought about what Lucinda had found in the files about DuBuclet's son, dead in a police raid. “How about Anthony? Was he in the family business?”

He flinched. “What do you know about my son?”

“Just that he got killed about forty years ago. And afterward, you changed your heart about the best ways to fight.”

Fatigue seemed to weigh him down, the fatigue of a man who was pushing hard toward a hundred years old, the kind of fatigue that might stop an old man's heart. “It was 1969,” he said. “December 4. Three days before Pearl Harbor Day. My boy was sleeping with some friends in an apartment on Fifty-ninth Street. If you want the truth, they had a gun, just one, and about a dozen lightbulbs and some kerosene. You can break the neck off a bulb, fill it with kerosene, and you've got a
handy, little Molotov cocktail. They weren't innocent. None of us were. I'll never pretend we were.

“Four in the morning, the police broke into the apartment and shot my son dead. Ninety-nine shots. And you know how many shots my son's friends returned? One. One shot. You do the math. They shot my son in the doorway to his bedroom. His girlfriend was lying in bed behind him. Pregnant, you know. He was wearing boxer shorts, and the police shot him in the head. The newspapers showed the picture. Press conference the next day called him ‘vicious,' called him ‘violent,' like an animal. Maybe he was, I don't know. But I do know that if he was violent and vicious it was because the police made him so. Because I know where he came from. I know that much. And I know that this supposedly violent, vicious man died in boxer shorts, without a gun in his hand. Pitiful. He was twenty-one years old.”

I watched him talk. I listened to a voice that had come through a pain that I thought I understood, a pain that smelled of infection and guilt. He was ninety-six years old and he'd come through that and there was something extraordinary about him sitting at his desk telling me his story, weighed down by decades of grief, but still talking. I said, “Where's my partner?”

He shrugged, picked up a telephone, and dialed. He listened to it ring. I watched him listen. He said, “Robert, call me right away.” He hung up and dialed again. He left a similar message for Jarik. “They're not answering their cell phones.”

“Not good enough,” I said. “What are you going to do to find her?”

He looked at me level. “Not much else I can do. If I were thirty years younger, they wouldn't have done this. If I were
your age, they wouldn't even have dared to
think
about doing it. But I'm old and sick, and when the boys don't listen to me there's not a lot I can do about it.”

“You don't fool me. They do whatever you tell them. I want Lucinda Juarez now.”

He nodded and a small smile crossed his lips. “Undoubtedly you do. But as you must have learned by now, we protect ourselves and our own first, and only then, if we're able to do so, we protect others.”

“I'm amazed that you consider Robert and Jarik your own.”

“They're what I have,” he said. “Just as you have Lucinda Juarez—and that nephew of yours.”

I heard the threat in that. He knew too much about me, about my family, about all I loved. “You won't have Robert and Jarik much longer if they've done anything to hurt her.”

His smile turned grim. “I understand that, and it would sadden me terribly.”

“Me too,” I said. “Call me the moment you hear from them.” I stood and turned to the door but stopped. “What's the connection between you and Judy Terrano?”

He looked astounded that I didn't already know. “She was my son's girlfriend.”

The look on my face made his eyes glint with a small pleasure. “In 1969,” he said. “She was involved.”

I needed a moment to sort out what I was hearing. “You're saying Judy Terrano was the girl who was in the apartment when the cops shot your son?”

“Yes.”

“And she was pregnant?”

“Hell, yes.”

“Wow!” I said.

He laughed.

“Is the—Where's the child now?”

“He's sitting right behind you.”

I turned and my eyes met the dull eyes of the tall, clapping man in the wheelchair.

DuBuclet spoke gently to his grandson, “Tony, say hello to Mr. Kozmarski.”

The man said nothing, but a big baritone laugh erupted from his mouth.

William DuBuclet laughed, too, and said, “He's the love of my old age.”

I needed a moment to think. “Then why would you want me to stop investigating his mother's murder?”

DuBuclet sighed. “You're part of the problem, not the solution.” He said it gently, like he was easing me into bad news.

“Huh? Why? Because I'm white?”

“For a starter, yes. And because you were a cop and your daddy was a cop, and for all I know your daddy's daddy was a cop. And your friends are cops. You might not want to be, but you're blind.”

“That's bullshit,” I said. “It's worth pistol-whipping me and kidnapping my partner to get me to quit?”

He laughed at me. “You made the world, I didn't.”

“Me? I'm just trying to survive in it.”