The Bad Kitty Lounge (2 page)

Stone got the picture. He'd balled his hands into fists. Nice fists and only a couple of knuckles looked like they'd been broken, probably hitting the jaws of guys like me.

“The cop faced a hard question. Should he Taser the fellow, knowing one hundred percent he would lose his job in the department and spend the next four years working night shift as a security guard at Sears? Would it be worth it?”

“Listen, you fuck,” Stone said. “I don't know what—”

“I'm Joe Kozmarski, Mr. Stone. Amy Samuelson's husband hired me to keep an eye on you.”

That startled him about as much as a poke in the eye. But he said, “That asshole burned my car.”

“Doesn't seem like something a guy like him would do,” I said. “He's a regular altar boy.” It was true, or almost. Greg Samuelson worked at Holy Trinity Church. When he wasn't burning cars, he surrounded himself with saints and saints-in-training.

Stone showed me one of his fists. “Tell your altar boy I'm going to fuckin' kill him.”

The cop with the notebook returned. “Everything all right here?” He probably saved Stone and me from going a couple rounds.

As I crossed the street to my car, a Mercedes convertible that looked like Eric Stone's, but silver and without the flames, whipped around the corner. The driver was a thin man with a ponytail. A woman sat next to him in the passenger's seat in a bright red vest, looking like a fancy fishing lure. The Mercedes sped toward me, swerved a few feet away, and swung to the curb beside a fire truck.

LATELY I'D BEEN DREAMING
of escape. From Chicago. From the camera I kept in front of me on the counters of cheap Chinese restaurants. From the trouble I got myself into. From my life. I'd heard about a shrimping village just south of the Florida-Georgia border, a place where the sun shined soft through the ocean mist and the air smelled like salt and engine oil and the life that trawl nets raised out of the sea.

I drove down LaSalle, a wide soulless street, banked by soulless residential towers. Downtown, the street dropped into a canyon of dark office buildings and dead-ended into the Chicago Board of Trade, a pyramid-roofed concrete giant that looked like it could rise and march up LaSalle, crushing everything that fell under its feet.

I turned and drove west to the Kennedy Expressway, headed north, and exited at Division, then turned toward Holy Trinity Church, where Greg Samuelson worked when he wasn't lighting Mercedes-Benzes on fire.

Holy Trinity was in an old Polish neighborhood that was
sliding fast to Mexican. A teamsters local, a Duks Red Hots hot-dog stand, and a school of cosmetology shouldered up to La Pasadita Taqueria and little
tiendas
in dirty old brick buildings. Depending on the weather and the mood, everyone might dance or everyone might fight. Holy Trinity Church stood at the edge of the neighborhood with a partial view of the expressway, its Polish name spelled out in gold letters over the door to the sanctuary—
Ko
ció
wi
tej Trójcy
.

Holy Trinity High School stuck out behind the church. A courtyard garden, dying in the cold October air, separated the church from three housing blocks for the priests and nuns who taught at the school. I parked on the street, climbed the steps, and tried the heavy steel doors that led to the sanctuary. They swung open. I had no excuse not to walk through them.

The chapel was bright and painted as fancy as a twelve-year-old in mascara. A painter had climbed a scaffold and covered the vaulted ceiling with fat, rosy-skinned angels frolicking in heavenly blue skies. A portrait showed Jesus and Mary wearing crowns, Jesus dressed like a little prince, Mary in a red and gold getup that made her look like a model from an old Imperial margarine commercial. Still, the place took your breath away—all the color and light in the middle of the graying neighborhood. I hadn't been inside a church since Dad died, but I crossed myself. Old habits and all, I couldn't help it.

A couple of women sat in the pinewood pews, praying or staring into the air. A thin, bald priest with a short beard was fiddling with a lighting fixture embedded in the ornate pulpit.

I went to him and asked if Greg Samuelson was around.

“In his office. Next to Sister Terrano's.” He pointed to a door that led away from the pulpit.

The door opened into a narrow hall with a room on either side. A man in priest's black worked at a computer in one of them. At the end of the hall, another door led to a stairwell that went down to an undercroft and then more offices. The first office door, open a crack and marked by a brass nameplate, was Sister Judy Terrano's. The next door was Samuelson's.

I went in without knocking.

He sat at his desk working at a computer. He'd hung his blue jacket on a coat hook. A picture of Amy Samuelson, taken when she still had something to smile about with her husband, watched over him from on top of a file cabinet. The room smelled like the fruit and ammonia of a hundred years of furniture polish and floor scrubbing. Samuelson looked up from the computer and smiled with the innocence of a man who shared an office wall with a nun. “What's the news?” he said.

“News is that arson gets idiots like you thrown in jail. What were you thinking?”

“Oh,” he said. “You saw that?”

“You paid me to watch your condo.”

“I didn't see you there.”

“You weren't supposed to.”

He brightened. “Did you get pictures of my wife and Eric Stone?”

“I wouldn't worry about the pictures right now. I would worry about torching the Mercedes.”

He put on the innocent face. “I've been here all morning.”

“Stone knows you did it. The cops will figure it out if he doesn't kill you first.”

He was crazy enough to laugh at that. “So, do you have the pictures?”

“I quit,” I said. “I'll send you back your check. Find someone else to take the pictures.”

“Come on,” he said. “What else are you going to do with them?”

“Buy a gallon of gas and make a fire of my own.”

I turned, ready to get back to my dreams of the Florida shrimping village, but Samuelson's boss, Sister Judy Terrano, stepped into the door. She was a light-skinned black woman, a couple years short of sixty, and wore a dress that, for a nun, showed plenty of leg. She had startling green eyes and tightly trimmed black hair curling gray.

Everyone in the city knew her. She kept herself in the news as the founder of a sexual abstinence program for inner-city girls. The press called her the Virginity Nun. A lot of people thought she was a nut, though some thought she deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. She served on the Mayor's Youth Commission and a half-dozen other city committees that dealt with teenagers and young adults. No matter who led the committees, the news cameras always went to her.

Now she stepped into the office, carrying a stack of file folders. She nodded to me and placed the folders on Samuelson's desk. “The clinic proposal and property records,” she said to him. Then to me, “Sorry to interrupt,” and moved again toward the door.

I said, “I have a question.”

She turned and looked at me with her green eyes. They held me like she'd traveled miles just to see me.

“I used to be a cop,” I said, “and a guy in the department had a problem.” I told her the story that I'd told Eric Stone about the man, his wife, and their neighbor. She took it all in like it was a biblical parable. Samuelson sat at his desk with
his mouth open. I ended with the same question I'd asked Stone. “The cop had to decide if he should Taser his fellow citizen. Should he have done it?”

She thought for a moment and said, “Absolutely.”

I turned to Samuelson and said, “Forgiveness to the avenger, I guess.” I followed the nun into the hall.

She paused by her door and turned with a sly smile. “Did your friend Taser the man?”

I shook my head. “He left the Taser in his trunk, packed a bag, and divorced his wife quietly.”

Her smile dropped at the corners of her mouth. “Sad,” she said.

“Is it?”

“Absolutely.” She turned again to her door.

“I've got another question,” I said.

Again the green eyes and the sly smile, as if she'd come to work hoping only to see me.

“Out of all the fights you could take on,” I said, “why sex? Aren't there worse things?”

Her smile widened. “I have nothing against sex,” she said. She put her hand on my arm. “But these girls don't know how to do it right. If a man isn't willing to lose his job as a policeman, if he isn't willing to humiliate himself for a woman he's having sex with, then why should she bother with him? If a woman isn't willing to die for her lover, she should stay home and take a hot bath. These girls don't understand that.”

I blinked. “That's an unusual attitude for a nun.”

She squeezed my wrist. “Is it?” she said, and she disappeared into her office.

I DROVE EAST TOWARD
Lake Michigan. If I turned south into the Loop, I could go to my office and write a refund check to Greg Samuelson. If I turned north, I could stop by the storefront where my ex-wife Corrine ran an urban landscaping business. We needed to talk. In the last couple months, we'd been picking up the pieces, seeing what we looked like together again. Then I'd screwed up and spent a night with my friend Lucinda and, though Corrine didn't know about it, I was pretty sure we were going to fall apart again.

Maybe Corrine needed to Taser Lucinda. Maybe she needed to Taser me.

I kept driving east. A strong wind was blowing into the city from the lake. That meant whitecaps would be battering the limestone slabs that the parks department had dumped to keep storms from undermining the lakefront luxury high-rises. On days like this, I sometimes drove to the lake to watch someone else take a hit. My car was a 1989 Skylark, with 165,000 miles and too little tread on the tires. It felt like home
the way only an old car can. The heater hardly worked, but the afternoon sun on the vinyl felt fine. No place better to watch the lake pound on the city. No place better to dream of escape.