Dirty Fire (2 page)

Gil Cieloczki moved gingerly over the ground, trying to avoid the worst of the ice-coated rubble. He glanced back at me, his expression wordlessly repeating the warning he had given in the car.

It was an unnecessary caution. A slip, I knew, would mean more than just a painful fall; everywhere I looked, a wide assortment of impalements awaited the unwary, the inexperienced, the impatient.

It was a surreal landscape, painted in stark tones of blacks and grays and dirty white.

Razor-edged shards of plate glass; steel reinforcing rods broken and contorted by intense heat; shattered brick and concrete: all jutted from mounded-up ice that in places rose almost knee high. Spray from the fire hoses had frozen on the tangle of pipes that had burst from the heat, their ends jagged and menacing. What once was, by all accounts, a showcase of North Shore architecture was now reduced to just so many scorched and sharpened mantraps. Even the steel-shanked boots I had borrowed from the firefighter were scant protection.

And, of course, making everything geometrically more difficult was the wind—a hard, flat and relentless rush of frigid mid-January air TV weather reporters like to call an “Alberta Clipper.” Firefighters and other unfortunates forced to work outside in the Chicago winter call it “The Hawk,” a term of wary bravado that included no allowance for contempt. The Hawk dared us to keep our heads up and slapped tears from our eyes when we tried.

Alongside Cieloczki, a short and stocky figure whose firefighter’s helmet bore a lieutenant’s shield, also picked his way, hunch-shouldered against the icy gale, toward the burned mansion.

“We lost this one big-time, Cappie,” said Jesús Martinez, his heavy turnout coat crackling with sooty ice. “We lost it before we even
got
here.”

“Yeah,” Cieloczki said flatly. “All we did was make a lot of steam. Somebody wanted to build a vacant lot here.” He eyed the ruins and shook his head. “And did a damn good job of it.”

At the one remaining wall, a thin figure watched us approach. His face was owl-eyed where goggles had shielded him from grit and soot, and he stood with the overly stiff posture that signals extreme exhaustion. A cigarette hung on his lip as if forgotten. He nodded as we stopped, sharing the windbreak of the wall.

“Chief Cieloczki. Lieutenant. I see you brought the cops with you. How’s it going, Mr. Davey?”

He did not offer to shake hands. Instead, he took the cigarette from his mouth and waved it vaguely in the direction of a half-dozen men, one of whom was holding the leash of a black dog.

“Not much yet. It’s a mess, naturally. We had to wait for things to cool down, and our prelim search didn’t turn up anything. The dog got here an hour ago, just after sunrise. They’re still looking.”

“Any thoughts, Roy?” Cieloczki asked. “What’s your guess on cause and origin?”

“Careless smoking,” the firefighter replied automatically and grimaced at the callousness of his own reply.

“Sorry. Bad joke, Gil. When my guys got here, the ground floor was already completely enveloped, and before we even got off the truck we had breakthrough flames on the roof. This one went fast. The house had one of those systems that ring through to Emergency Services automatically when the smoke alarm goes off.”

“Arson?”

Roy nodded, grimly.

“If the log is right—and we got no reason to doubt it—I’d bet there was one helluva load of accelerant in there. We’ll know soon. You can’t put that much stuff in a house without leaving a lot of evidence around.”

Martinez had been watching the dog and its handler. “Directory says this place belonged to a couple named Stanley and Kathleen Levinstein. Any sign of them? Anything to indicate somebody was still in there when the fire started?”

Roy shook his head. “Lieutenant, all I can tell you is that by the time we arrived, anybody who was inside wasn’t coming out alive—for sure, not on the ground floor. We got a ladder team up to the second floor as soon as we could, but there was no way to get access.”

He stopped, and written on his smoke-smudged face was every firefighter’s recurring nightmare: the horror of having done something wrong that cost a life—or worse, the lingering self-accusation that he had
not
done everything possible to have saved one.

“I don’t know—maybe somebody could’ve been in a bedroom on the second or third floor…”

Cieloczki reached out and grasped the firefighter’s arm.

“Roy,” he said with a gruffness meant to mask the compassion. “Don’t go there, son.”

“They’ve found something,” said Martinez.

As one, we turned.

On the far side of the gutted structure, the black dog was sitting on his haunches. His tail wagged as his handler squatted beside him. The rest of the search team had gathered around the pair, and even at a distance I recognized the peculiar attitude they struck. It was a not-quite-embarrassed, not-quite-awestruck, fascinated-yet-repelled posture that even experienced firefighters assume when they see what flames do to human flesh.

Suddenly the air seemed even colder. Without a word, we began walking through the rubble.

It was the last case I would work as a police officer. Two days later, I was handcuffed and placed under arrest.

There is a psychology to the penal system that to me had always seemed either deviously subtle or crushingly blunt. The placement of what is perhaps its most notorious penitentiary, as I neared its grounds, appeared to cover both extremes.

A few miles outside Joliet, as you approach from the north over the rural roads that wind past sprawling car auction markets and the staked fields of undeveloped subdivisions, you come upon a sight that seems puzzlingly out of place. Dozens of white and gold squad cars are lined up in front of a modest-sized yellow brick building. A sign identifies it as District 5 Headquarters of the Illinois State Police, whose primary responsibility is patrolling the vast miles of expressways and Interstate highways that crisscross the Land of Lincoln. Here, miles from the nearest Interstate exchange, so much law enforcement so prominently displayed seems incongruous, a mistake.

And then, almost before you know you are upon it, the massive complex that is Stateville Penitentiary rises up from the prairie as if to pounce. Always faceless, always menacing, the mismatched collection of 1930s-style masonry and 1960s-style concrete construction stands as coldly impassive as a street tough in a stare down on his own turf.

Civilians driving past unconsciously ease off the pedal and shoot a guilty glance at their speedometers; parents instinctively use it to quiet children unruly in the back seat, transferring the sudden tightness in their own stomachs to a new generation. A few irate taxpayers might, a moment earlier, have expressed outrage over the apparent excess of armed police support so readily available; now, on a far more elemental basis, they suddenly worry if there is nearly enough.

I turned my aging Pontiac onto the long driveway that runs past the guard booths and checkpoints in an unbending line. Before me was the Main Administration building, built of brick the color of dried blood, constructed back when there was no debate over whether incarceration was meant to rehabilitate or to punish.

People come to Stateville for a litany of reasons and motivations. Most have no choice. Some, a few, come on their own volition out of some sense of duty or charity or personal obligation. But once inside Stateville, the effect it has on each of them is uniformly similar. It is a malevolent shadow, a silent chorus of violence and fear and hopelessness.

I felt it, considered how close I had come to a sentence here or somewhere much like it. It was not a pleasant thought.

• • •

My lawyer had shaken my hand, though his enthusiasm was blunted by a confusion he was unable to completely conceal.

“Lucky break, that,” he said a little too genially. “One doesn’t often have videotape evidence ruled inadmissible—at least, not because of a missing report in the case file. It made our entrapment claim much more difficult for them to disprove.”

I had nodded, staring through the rain-spotted courtroom window at a raw day in early March; I was trying hard not to look like a man either surprised by an unusual legal decision or relieved by it.

Everyone involved had played their assigned roles to perfection. For example, there was the prosecution’s primary witness, a veteran Cook County detective. The assistant state’s attorney led the man through a recitation of his background and expertise. But despite years of undercover experience on his résumé, the detective had been surprisingly inexact in his recollection of the bribery solicitation made to him only months before.

The transaction had been dutifully recorded by a hidden surveillance camera. Video evidence usually made for a powerful case.

But at that point my lawyer had moved to suppress the recording, on a technicality that had sounded weak even to me. There had been only a cursory objection by the prosecution; as the judge ruled in his favor, my defense counsel was unable to hide his own surprise.

The State had called one other witness, a county deputy who testified that he had known me for years. Now, responding to curiously lackluster questioning from the prosecutor, he testified he could not positively identify the defendant as the man he had observed accept the bribe money.

There was no cross-examination of the county deputy. There was none needed. Without the tape itself in evidence to bolster his testimony, the judge had acted quickly upon my attorney’s motion to dismiss all charges.

“
Without
prejudice, Mr. Davey,” she had emphasized. “Should the state’s attorney decide to re-file these charges at a later date—on the basis of admissible evidence—that option is open to them.”

She waved in the direction of the court stenographer. “Off the court record, and as a personal observation—sir, you are a very fortunate man. Crooked cops have a very hard time in prison, which is where I certainly would have sent you. We’re back on the record. This case is dismissed.” And she rapped the gavel once, hard enough to signal her displeasure with the outcome.

From the corner of my eye, I noted the figure who had risen in the back of the courtroom, a well-dressed man with hair that showed careful attention by an expert barber. He slipped out the frosted glass door without a backward glance.

• • •

I walked down the black-and-white tiled corridor, marching in an unintentional lockstep with the uniformed corrections officer who had introduced himself as Orval Kellogg. Kellogg had dispassionately watched me sign the fanned-out forms that absolved the State of Illinois of responsibility should any mishap occur inside the facility. One of the various papers that now bore my name had assured me that, in the event I was taken hostage, there would be no attempt to negotiate my release.

Kellogg was gray-haired and middle-aged, built strong with a thickness throughout his body that displayed no hint of softness. Corded muscles in his forearms pushed against the starched white twill of his uniform shirt. A set of green sergeants’ chevrons on each sleeve had the muted look of many washings since they had first been stitched on. Kellogg’s skin was the color of lightly creamed coffee, his cheeks pocked with purplish nodes of ingrown beard.

He also had a look not uncommon here, one I had seen in people on both sides of the bars. Orval Kellogg had witnessed everything imaginable in this place; in some bleak moment of his soul, he had granted it permission to forever fester in the darker corners of his mind.

“He says he’s ready to cop’erate, and the li’l taste he gave up was good enough for your people to want the rest,” Kellogg said, in a voice that carried undertones of red clay and kudzu.

“They’re not my people anymore,” I replied. “Does he know I’m not a cop now?”

Kellogg shrugged. “He knows. Tol’ the guy they sent here first he don’t care if you was law or King of the fuckin’ Gypsies—he was going to talk to you or nobody. Says the rest of us could kiss his sweet white ass. His words, exac’ly.”

I nodded. It sounded like vintage Sam Lichtman, a man who truly believed himself gifted in expressing his every thought or desire. And why not? So many people had always appeared so anxious to comply. Often, it had taken nothing more than a pointed glance to have people stumbling over themselves on his behalf.

Sam Lichtman had convinced himself that he had a lyrical streak, the soul of a poet. But during a long and increasingly violent career, a series of prosecutors, judges and juries had decided that any poetry in Lichtman’s soul could not be detected with then-current technology. Even if it had existed, it would have been the sole characteristic of his personality that was remotely more than reptilian.

“I never knew we were all that close,” I said. “The last time I talked to him was four, five years ago. He skated—a theft ring we couldn’t tie him to. He didn’t give up word one back then. What makes him so talkative now?”

Kellogg snorted. “They didn’t tell you? He’s dyin’.” He walked on a step or two before realizing I had stopped dead in my tracks.

“Yeah, ain’t
that
a kick? Man’s on death row for three years, fin’ly gets his sentence turned over. Lawyer convinced some judge they fucked up on evidence in th’ first trial, lets him cop to manslaughter two. He was maybe lookin’ at parole in another year, tops. Then, whaddaya know?—man finds out he’s got a brain cancer. They give ‘im a month or two. Me, I figure he’s mean enough to last three.”

Kellogg passed the paperwork through the grillwork to a guard and nodded in the direction of an interview room on the secure side of the steel grate.

“Kinda makes you b’lieve there really is a God, y’know?” he said with a cold thin smile in which his eyes played no part.

• • •

As a species, Sam Lichtman was not unique. Mutant varieties have spawned themselves on the streets of every major city, individuals who used a native cunning and instinctive viciousness to find their own definition of success outside the pale of civilized society. Lichtman was freelance, operating on the periphery of what newspapers tend to call “organized” crime. He had carefully threaded his way through the often complex boundaries, rules and fiefdoms of the criminal underworld. He was considered a solid citizen of his particular universe, paying without complaint the street taxes levied by bosses. In turn, they granted him permission for the incidental warehouse theft, extortion or robbery he engineered in their territories.

Word was that he was available as the occasional button man when an outside enforcer was needed. The fact that he played no favorites on such assignments gave him a measure of immunity among the various families and factions who utilized his services.

In the
quid pro quo
of the street, this also earned him entrée to many otherwise unadvertised opportunities in his selected field. By the time he went down for killing a Jamaican whose ambitions had included part of Sam’s action, there was no doubt that he was one of the more active freelancers in the very active Chicago area.

In the outside world, he had been a sharp dresser, favoring dark, expensive suits and custom-made shirts. When it suited him, Lichtman could display a rough-edged charm that belied whatever prowled the subterranean levels of his mind.

But the people he did business with, even the ones with their own reputation for violence, tended to avoid working a second time with Sam. Many of them, in fact, would cross a busy street if they saw him on the sidewalk ahead. They knew Lichtman as one of their own: a street-smart tough with a reputation for muscling his way into a wide variety of “deals” that had as their common denominator a tendency to turn nasty.

But they also knew him for more, for what he really was. Few men—at least sane ones—were not, on some very personal level, afraid of Lichtman.

There was still some of the old Sam Lichtman in the convict who sat behind a steel table in the interview room. He still had the full head of black hair, though the temples were now fringed with silver just above each ear. The set of his mouth, lips twisted in a vague, superior smirk, was unchanged. The eyes were still a chilling blue, and they still never seemed to blink when he pointed them at you.

But there were new lines on his face, and an unhealthy pallor to his skin that was somewhere between gray and yellow. It came from something even darker than confinement in a sun-starved cellblock.

Sam Lichtman looked up into my eyes and raised both his hands in an awkward gesture.

I took it to be a greeting until the convict twisted his head to put the cigarette into a corner of his mouth. The wrist manacles, attached to a chromed chain that led to a ring eye solidly bolted to the table, glinted in the room’s hard institutional light.

Lichtman fumbled with a book of paper matches until I took it from his hand and lit the cigarette.

“Been a while, Sam. I’m sorry to hear about your problem.”

He took a long, pensive drag, and blew out the smoke in a sharp exhalation. “Yeah—well. You know, shit happens. This time it happened to me. Maybe I was overdue, you think?”

It wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have.

“C’mon, Davey—now’s your chance. Don’t you want to know if I’ve found Jesus? You wonder if I wake up screaming a couple times a night, maybe? You want a little payback for the old days, go for it. Take your best shot.”

I looked over Lichtman’s shoulder at the raw concrete wall and pretended to look bored.

The convict barked a single harsh laugh. “Yeah, I know. Life’s tough all over, right? ‘Sides, you got your own troubles, don’t you?”

“You know I’m not a cop anymore, Sam. I’m also not a priest, or a shrink, or a social worker. If I had anything better to do, I wouldn’t be here now.”

“But here you are.”

“Give me a reason to stay, Sam. What do you want from me?”

Lichtman’s mouth twisted in derision. “I want to see a cop, all I got to do is look around,” he said. “I want to talk about my goddam immortal soul or my bad upbringin’, I got people for that, too. You’re here ‘cause maybe I want to do you a favor, okay?”

“Same question, Sam. Why me?”

He was silent for a moment in a way that I sensed was uncharacteristic for the convict.

“Remember Hugo Castile?” he asked, almost noncommittally. “Made man, ran a crew for the Morelli family up by Waukegan?”

“I remember how he looked stuffed in the trunk of his Chevy,” I said.

Lichtman nodded.

“Then maybe you remember there were a lot of people who wanted to see me tagged for it. Bullshit. You whack a made man, you either got a death wish or a license from the top guys. Way I heard it, some people on both sides of the fence had a real hard-on to tie me into it. Word was, you kept it off my head. That the way it went?”

“The way it went, Sam, is that we arrested the guy who did it. That time, it didn’t happen to be you.” I glanced pointedly at the manacles Lichtman wore. “Next time, it was.”

“Uh-huh. They tell you that I got the murder rap reduced? Six months, maybe less and I’d have been out on time served.” He shook his head. “This fucking thing I got growing in my brain. It’s called a
glioblastoma
. After the doctor told me what I had, I had her write it down. Looked it up myself in the prison library.”