Because the Rain (12 page)

Mike drove the wagon down Addison while Petersen used a napkin from Starbucks to dry the wet spots near his fly. It left flecks of white on the blue wool, but he kept rubbing harder.

“You know,” Petersen said, “this wagon detail isn’t being a cop.”

“That’s true.”

“You just cart bodies and wet drunks.”

“Seven hours’ worth.”

“You don’t get to help people on the wagon.”

“You’re right.”

“I bet no woman asks you for directions in this thing.”

“One time, but she was in a hurry.”

“Mills isn’t loved. You could get off this.”

“I know what I have to do here,” Mike said.

He wanted to tell Petersen that the job had a rhythm, a mind-away-from-the-body buzz, but he’d wait to use this explanation on a cop he might like. The guy would laugh, maybe tease him about being a new age goof. You’re just left of magical, he’d say. He and this cop would know each other by smell, like dogs from the same litter. They’d become good friends.

Mike cruised the lakefront and waited for a call to make a morgue delivery. The coroner’s guys claimed they were too busy to bag and haul a body. They’d show up and declare the citizen dead. Mike spent his days tailing them, this dumpy Pakistani from Devon Avenue, and a South Side Irish with blue dog eyes. They were always getting called onward, northwest for a Jordanian custodian who hung himself with a heavy-duty extension cord, up to Argyle Street for a rainy-eyed Cambodian that got stabbed in the neck. They’d make the death pronouncement, then leave, joking about waking up sick from yesterday’s tandoori chicken. It’s that buffet on Devon, the Irish guy would say. Why do you take me there?

Petersen opened a four-pack of apple bran muffins from a grocery store bakery. He ate fast and the crumbs fell on his lap. He was thin, but he wouldn’t be in a year.

“You really have to kick squirrels off an old woman,” Petersen said. “The guys talk about it. The old squirrel girl, they say.”

“There was a call about some screaming,” Mike said. “The neighbor showed me the two-flat, and the door was unlocked. I went up the stairs, and inside, all the windows were open. There were leaves and sticks on the floor and squirrels sitting on the sofa like house cats. The old woman had fallen and broken her hip and the squirrels were just lying on her chest, keeping her warm.”

“They bite her?”

“No. I told you. She fell and broke her hip.”

“They were wild squirrels.”

“The kind that live in trees,” Mike said.

“I wouldn’t have touched it. That’s for animal control.”

Pretty soon, Mike would ask Petersen about his softball team, then ignore him while he talked about how their bar sponsor got condemned over one rat. I could see if they found five or six, Petersen would say, but not just one. He’d talk loud, wanting Mike to hear him, vaguely knowing he was like an infomercial you glanced while changing television channels.

They were two blocks away from the first morgue call. It was a corner graystone on Webster with stained-glass windows. The trees between the sidewalk and the curb had lost limbs during the first autumn storm.

Petersen stumbled getting out of the wagon. The guys, used to the squad cars, expected the ground to be closer. Mike stopped laying odds on who was smart enough to remember the drop. The fat cops, the chow-hounds, had a junkie’s intelligence that he kept overlooking.

“Mike the Kike lives here,” Petersen said.

“What?”

“Mike Rosen. He’s a defense lawyer. He takes mopers’ money and accepts plea bargains. They know they’re getting time, and they pay him to get less. He never steps into a courtroom.”

Mike Spence breathed up some rain.

“The guy collects lamps. Real fancy ones. You see them on at night.”

“Let’s go,” Mike said.

In the house, he moved ahead of Petersen, the hallway wet with dirty footprints. Cops loved to walk through puddles and track up oak floors. There were mirrors of different sizes, the frames all painted oak, and in them he saw the detectives lighting their Kools off one Zippo. The mirrored shapes sectioned their bodies into parts while they shared the flame. The Mexican detective had just finished telling a joke. He smiled and nodded like a salesman. Mike listened and came closer, holding his radio.

“Kiss my ass, Ruiz,” the black detective said. He wore an olive suit and his head was shaved.

“No,” Ruiz said. “The right kind of black guy, a palomino horse, and you got Leroy Rogers.”

“I can’t see it.”

“Roy Rogers as a black guy would be Leroy Rogers. You must accept that for the joke to be funny.”

The black detective let out his Kool smoke and blew Ruiz a kiss. He showed him some tongue and the red was foamy in the hall light.

“You and your fag shit,” Ruiz said.

Mike walked between the detectives into the room. The tape outlined where Rosen had fallen dead. The body was moved away from the stencil, the feet on their sides, the toes slack. It was dressed like the Viet Cong in the picture lying on the desk, the black shorts, the plaid shirt, and there was a bullet hole through the temple. Mike watched Petersen look between the print and the body, then understand he didn’t know what he was seeing. His eyes soon lightened. Petersen had probably resumed thinking about cashing his CDs and day trading small.

Mike started bagging the body alone. His partners never knew his rhythm, and it was easier to leave them looking out the window like Eddie Petersen. The job of getting the bodies inside was like changing a hospital patient’s bed with him in it. He also knew the detectives had been waiting for him to take the body to Harrison by the way Ruiz kept looking at his silver Rolex.

“You guys stop for blow jobs?” Ruiz said.

The detective had only been a face from crime scenes until the black detective spoke his name, some squat, loud guy. Petersen was looking out the window like he could see a girl.

“They sweep for prints?” Mike said.

“Why would I let you in here if they hadn’t swept for prints,” Ruiz said.

“They left the picture,” Mike said. He pointed at the dying Viet Cong, and wondered if the guy was already dead when Eddie Adams snapped the camera.

The black detective looked off down the hallway, chewing on a toothpick. Ruiz packed his Kool against his Zippo. He was like an arrogant track coach, his eyes full-wire.

“You see smoke coming out of the picture?” Ruiz said.

Mike saw the body, the bare feet, before the print. “No,” he said.

“Then the picture didn’t kill him.”

Mike looked at the blood on the ceiling near where the bullet hit. It was like fresh paint.

“The body’s dressed like the Viet Cong getting shot,” Mike said.

Ruiz walked over and put the picture in his pocket.

“Rosen brought home sixteen-year-old black girls from Cabrini Green,” Ruiz said to his partner. “He’d sodomize them, then buy ribs and champagne.”

“I bet it was a parolee who shot him,” the partner said. “One pissed-off spic just off ten years fed time.”

“Rosen robs these kids. They’d get the same sentence with a public defender.”

“I bet it was a pissed-off spic.”

“One of those girls did this,” Ruiz said.

“No. She’d want to keep the deal. Your nephew Javier shot him.”

“You wouldn’t give a Mexican your old toothbrush.”

“Javier would just scratch it against the curb until he had a knife.”

“No,” Ruiz said. “He’d thank you from deep. Not all of us chicken flickers are killers.”

Mike zipped the bag shut and watched Petersen step closer to the window as if the glass was an open door. Then he saw that Rosen had changed before he died. His clothes, tan Angel Flight’s and a blue silk shirt, lay in the corner, not even boxed off by the tape.

There were creases in the picture where the killer held it and just stared. Mike imagined his eyes stinging from not blinking while his thumb dented the print. This guy was beyond writing novels. He understood that reading was too much effort for a city that frequented bookstore cafés. He wanted the innocent to know what some men must do so that others can sleep well, and if the sleepers keep ordering more protection, they should understand what happens in the dark. Dressing a defense attorney who never went to Vietnam like the pistol-shot Viet Cong, then staging the execution exactly, showed a killer who wanted the sleepers to feel what orders meant. They must experience being trapped in a lethal violence they cannot escape.

Mike stood nodding. He thought about the man staring at the picture, and wondered if he realized the detectives were throwing away his work like bored insurance secretaries do auto claims. He tried not to smile.

13

Goetzler walked Webster, from the pole lamps outside DePaul’s rectory to slanting Clybourn Street where the buses headed northwest into the lake wind, filled with the babushkas who clean these condos, the Mexicans who bag the gutter leaves.

He held an umbrella and a cell phone so he’d see the green screen blink
BLOCKED
when Nick called back about Annie. Goetzler had rung three times since noon, and the same electronic man spoke on the voice mail, indicating to only leave numeric messages. He’ll call, Goetzler told himself, these people always need money.

Last night, Mike Rosen undid his belt and his fly before he walked into the office. In the dark, Goetzler saw the rain smears on his own glasses. Rosen looked at the floor and made sure not to step on the white rugs. He hit a switch and ten Tiffany lamps lit. Goetzler never noticed the light switch, and guessed the lamps were there for the Polksa in black stockings to dust on Wednesday nights while Rosen watched from behind this desk.

Goetzler saw spots. He blinked his eyes hard. Rosen was a dark shape moving quickly.

He never considered a light switch. The thing was ruined.

When the dots became smears, Goetzler fired the silenced pistol, still blinking his eyes when the body fell. It sounded like a fat man stepping from bed. He couldn’t see and forgot he held the .38 for a long minute.

He never meant to kill him. He’d only wanted Rosen to change clothes, then show him the picture, asking him if he got the joke. Do you see the connection, he’d say. But Goetzler wore a William Westmoreland mask, the eyeholes cut big. Rosen wouldn’t remember him anyway, but he would know the picture, and he might recall the photographer’s name. He could have an opinion about how it ended the American Century; some University of Illinois poly-sci reel about how Vietnam was the direct result of … Goetzler would explain the your side, my side irony of the picture, the cops versus the not-cops, and then ask him why he didn’t understand more quickly. You made three million by getting cops mad in court, he’d say while Rosen looked for an answer. You should know what this is about. In the picture, you are on the dead guy’s side.

It took Goetzler ten minutes to dress the body. But he felt giddy, even pleased with himself. Kerm would see Goetzler as Kerm, and if Annie could know he shot Rosen, the odds were short that she’d see him for nothing.

*   *   *

The light at Barnes and Noble was white as paper. Goetzler held a book,
The Autobiography of U. S. Grant,
open to the Shiloh pages, and imagined the general bourbon drunk and tied to his horse. He was a failure at thirty-four. Goetzler loved a second-chance story, and Grant was the phoenix.

He watched the blond girls in the café cram for the GMAT. He stared until they blurred with their books, their fingers wound in ponytails, and imagined himself in a restaurant bar filled with Weber Industrial Supply management, a trattoria on the Gold Coast, some subtle place on a loud street. Goetzler would force the general president into conversation by paying with fifties. He’d count the money out, an inch of bills folded in half. Grant was a sot, Goetzler would say, pointing at the thick-faced portrait, but the man never got lost. He killed to keep hold—Indians, Mexicans, the whole of the Confederate Army—because he remembered being a failure who counted cow hides for his little brother. He made himself indispensable to more powerful men. He even wrote his autobiography when he was dying of throat cancer, all to keep his family in money. The MBAs would become quiet and look at Goetzler without half watching ESPN on the television. They’d want to know more about Grant’s story, and never once look back at Sports Center while Goetzler talked. You really got a handle on where to find leadership lessons, they’d say. Can you jockey that into a team building exercise?

He stood among the books and dreamed of giving the management seminar on Grant. The suits would be sitting along three tables in the blue room of white noise, and he’d be explaining Shiloh. He wouldn’t talk about how the dead were white with peach blossoms knocked from the trees by the rifle fire. The guys would write that down and ask him during the break what the flower petals had to do with anything. They’d be interested in the way Grant got water and gunpowder to the lines and all the steps in that process. In the end, he also knew they wouldn’t care about the formations of the battle, or how Grant was lucky enough to have his greatest Confederate adversary, General Albert Sidney Johnson, get killed on Shiloh’s first day. They’d want to know how Grant approached the subject of evaluation with his senior staff officers.

He put the book down and walked to the chairs before the podium. People were sitting and waiting for ex-Rainman Will Avers to give his
Tribune
advertised reading—aging men with ponytails and liver-spotted baldness, gray women wearing the residue from too many bead fairs. Like Goetzler, they wanted to see the sixties radical with earrings in both ears and a real neat goatee smeared black by Just for Men. He was ten minutes late. Goetzler quit looking at his watch when he noticed nobody else was doing it.

Avers had written a book about being a fugitive from the federal government for thirteen years. Goetzler read it in this store, beneath this hard light. Avers claimed Manson knew shit from shinola. You got to kill the pigs, he joked about once saying. He made bombs, taught black kids on the West Side how to sing and hold hands, met with the Viet Cong in Canada, got implicated in a conspiracy after blowing up two ROTC offices, Madison and Iowa City, then went underground and swapped women like baseball cards until his father’s lawyer cut a deal with the FBI. He took a Ph.D. in history. He got an NEH fellowship to study the effects of Reaganomics on urban school reform, but instead wrote a memoir of his time on the lam. His publisher advanced him. He bought a three-bedroom condo in Lincoln Park, the lake and the maple trees beyond bay windows, granite countertops, a hot tub with jets that could dent car doors. He had parties for his graduate students. He was heavy into yoga and went to a place in Ravenswood and cruised divorced schoolteachers. He gave interviews on local NPR, plug for the book, and they treated him like the Left’s Audie Murphy. If I had the stuff, I’d be you, they almost said.