No Show of Remorse (19 page)

“One pulled the trigger. Maybe they all murdered him.” I drank some coffee. “They were narcotics detectives. Lonnie was a drug dealer.”

“I don't think you're saying they killed him just because they don't like drug dealers.”

“No.”

“So? Go on.”

I shrugged again. “Heroin, speed, coke, acid—all these chemicals and their various formulations. Most of us can't even keep track of them. What everyone knows, though, is that there can be more money involved in one illegal drug transaction than most people see in their lifetime—and it's all cash.”

“And you think the cops were doing a drug deal with Lonnie.”

“It's a plausible theory.”

“Did your client tell you this?”

“Marlon Shades didn't tell me one thing that I plan to tell you or anyone.”

“Okay.” She seemed to be thinking. “You don't believe there was any unknown person up there who got away.”

“That's my theory.”

“So then, where did the drugs go?”

“And the money, too,” I added. “I don't know.”

“You won't say?” she asked. “Or you really don't know?”

“I really don't know.” I did have a theory on that, too, but to explain it I'd have to tell her what Marlon Shades had told me.

“God, what a mess!” She shook her head and poked at the pen that lay on the table in front of her, as though studying it. I didn't think she saw the pen at all, though, and I was hoping I knew what was going through her mind. “There's a part of me,” she finally said, “that wishes I hadn't convinced you to tell me what you think happened.”

“You didn't
convince
me to tell you,” I said.

“You mean you planned to tell me all along?”

“I was thinking about it on my way here,” I said. “But I wasn't sure, not until we talked, and you figured out who your secret helper is.”

“Wait a minute.” She frowned. “I didn't say I figured anything out.”

“No, but I think you did.”

“Well, is it … my grandfather?”

“You didn't hear it from me, or he'd be very unhappy with me.”

“But I never even met him. I—”

“Wait.” I held up my hand. “You said one part of you wishes I hadn't told you my theory about Lonnie Bright. So tell me about the other part.”

“Other part?”

“Yeah, the part that's glad I told you.” I paused. “Tell me about the part of you that wants to help me find out if I'm right.”

CHAPTER

30

N
O QUESTION ABOUT IT
. Stefanie couldn't help hoping I was right about what happened at Lonnie Bright's. She'd understood at once that if I was, and if it ever got out in the open, her no-good ex-husband would be up to his ear lobes in bad-smelling stuff. And way too busy to worry about Stefanie and her plan to move back home to Albany, New York, with their little girl.

On the other hand, she had difficulty believing Breaker Hanafan would want to help her. She'd learned as a child not to talk about, or even think about, her mother's father, Francis Gilmary Hanafan. She'd never seen him, never communicated with him in any way. When other kids, or teachers, pressed her for information, she'd say he died before she was born. When she came to Chicago for law school, she'd had a vague notion to find out more about him. But at first she was too busy with classes and exams, and eventually with a job and a kid and a major headache for a husband. There was a touch of fear, too, knowing Breaker supposedly had “underworld connections.” So, if anyone ever asked, she stuck with the story she'd used all her life, and claimed her maternal grandfather was “deceased.”

She knew I had no reason to lie about it, but couldn't believe Breaker actually cared what happened to her. I told her he'd gotten it into his mind somehow that it was up to him to punish Richie for what he'd done to her. I told her how badly he wanted Richie in prison—skipping the part about wanting him “bent over a bench”—and how he'd leveraged me into getting enough dirt on Richie to put him there. I didn't tell her the leverage was his threat to kill Yogi, or that her caring grandfather planned to flat-out kill Richie himself if I didn't succeed before the cancer had him too far gone to do it. I didn't mention his medical condition at all.

“Oh,” I said, “about your being followed? Or in danger? I mentioned that to Breaker. So if someone does follow you, or bother you, it's
them
I'd worry about … not you.”

Her hand went to her throat and her eyes widened. “My God!” Despite her shock, though, she seemed happy about it, too. “Do you think I should … contact him or something?”

“That's your decision,” I said. “But I don't see what help it would be. The man's moods are, let's just say, erratic. I'm not even sure it's
your
interests he's concerned about. Or if it's simply to satisfy some need of his own.”

“You make him sound like … like someone I don't want to know.”

“Which is what the people who knew him well taught you as a child,” I said. “But for now, I'm just hoping you'll help me to help him help you.” I shook my head. “Does that make sense?”

“I guess so. I mean, this whole thing scares me to death,” she said, “but I'll do whatever I can. How will your talking to Maura Flanagan bring out what really happened the night of the shooting?”

“I don't know,” I said, which was the truth. “I'm just gonna put pressure on her, then wait and see what happens. The first problem, though, is how to get close enough to her for a private conversation, without getting arrested in the process.”

We kicked it back and forth awhile, and finally came up with a plan. On the one hand, we were in luck because Flanagan was to be back at the disciplinary commission for a meeting on Wednesday, just two days away. On the other hand, it wasn't a very good plan. But, hey …

*   *   *

O
N THE WAY OUT
, I filed a notice with the commission's clerk that I'd subpoenaed Jimmy Coletta to appear and give a deposition on the coming Friday. Then Stefanie let me use a phone, and I called my own number to pick up my messages.

My main strategy was to keep the ball rolling. I'd had the subpoena served on Jimmy over the weekend, along with a letter from me. It was a polite, lawyer-speak letter—in case it ever got public—stating that we might be able to “obviate the necessity for sworn deposition testimony” if we met in person to discuss the issues. I gave him my phone number and wrote that the meeting could be “at any such time and place as is convenient to you,” but by Tuesday at the latest. “If this good-faith attempt to avoid the time and trouble of sworn testimony is not acceptable,” I concluded, “the deposition will go forward as required by law.”

The only message on my machine was Jimmy's response. He said he'd meet me that night at the same south side gym where we'd talked the previous Thursday. He said to call him, and left his number. “That's the gym,” he said. “I'll be there all day.” He sounded tired, stressed out, impatient.

Feeling pretty much the same, I punched out the number. A man answered. “Beale here.”

“I want to talk to Jimmy Coletta.”

“Who's this?” He didn't sound friendly.

“Just get Mr. Coletta.”

“Y'all ain't talkin' to nobody, 'less y'all tell me your name.”

“Foley,” I said, “now just—”

“Hold on.”

I waited a few minutes and Jimmy came on the line.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Who was who? Oh, you mean answering the phone? Preston Beale, the janitor. He thinks he runs this place.” There was some cheering in the background, then silence, and I imagined Jimmy getting someone to close a door. “Tomorrow I have physical therapy, all day. I can't miss it. But I'll meet you tonight, here at the gym. Eight o'clock.”

“It's just one-thirty now. I can be there in forty-five minutes, maybe less.”

“No, I can't. We're having sort of a tournament.”

“I can watch. We'll talk between games.”

“Listen to me, will you? There are too many people around now. Come at eight o'clock. Except for my … my driver, everyone will be long gone by then. I don't want anyone to know we're talking. Don't you understand?” Tired, stressed out, impatient. For sure. And frightened, too.

“I understand perfectly.”

Jimmy Coletta had been a bad cop. Then he'd taken a terrible blow, survived, and grown into a different person. Now he was afraid the new life he'd painfully constructed for himself and his family over the last five years was about to be suddenly demolished, and the pieces hauled off to a landfill.

I was scared, too. My fear was that Jimmy might be right, and that I'd be the one wielding the wrecking ball.

CHAPTER

31

T
HE
C
AVALIER WAS IN
a parking garage a few blocks east of the disciplinary commission, on Randolph, and I had six hours to kill before my meeting with Jimmy Coletta. I walked back to the car and slid into the driver's seat.

Ten minutes later, I was still sitting there, thinking.

I climbed back out, slipped off my sport coat and laid it on the roof of the car. I got the Beretta out of the trunk, snapped it into a shoulder holster and slipped the harness over my Chicago Symphony Orchestra Radiothon sweatshirt. Just then a white Cadillac DeVille came around the corner from the next level up, and a gray haired, wide-eyed woman slowed to a stop and stared at me.

“FBI,” I said, and gave her a stern, governmental glare. She drove away.

I put the jacket back on, slid an extra seven-round magazine into the left pocket, and closed the trunk. Back in the driver's seat I checked my watch. Great. Now I had only five hours and forty-five minutes to kill. Maybe I'd go find a forest preserve and sit in the parking lot and stare out the windshield.

The advantage of doing that was it would bore the hell out of the guy hiding behind a newspaper, about a block away on Randolph in what looked like the same car Yogi had tipped me to a week earlier, a dark green four-door Crown Vic. The disadvantage was that I'd be equally bored, and I'd still have to shake him off before I drove out to see Jimmy.

I left the Cavalier where it was and departed the parking garage on foot, by way of an alley that opened onto State Street. At Barney Green's office I told his secretary I needed a car. I'd have to come up with a client to send Barney pretty soon. He was way ahead of me in our exchange of favors.

*   *   *

I
T WAS SEVEN-THIRTY—HALF AN HOUR
early—when I pulled up in front of the Ellison Community Center in Barney's wife's car, a mocha-colored Lexus LS400. She was in Paris for the week and the rental agency Barney uses couldn't deliver anything right away that he thought I'd fit into comfortably. Barney's big on comfort, and I didn't remind him my usual ride was the Cavalier. I also didn't tell him I'd be leaving the car unattended on a barren, rundown street in Englewood.

I parked a car-length back from a full-sized Ford van with disability plates, and right beside the
No Parking
sign. I couldn't imagine anyone would care. The gym was on the west side of the street, at the north end of the block. To the south there was a wide vacant lot, then a couple of boarded-up two-flats, and finally, on the corner at the far end of the block, an apartment building with a tavern called the Tahiti Inn on the first floor.

Directly across the street from the gym was a factory building sprayed with intricate gang graffiti at ground level, and a faded sign higher up that said
Borkman Tool & Die.
South of that was a fenced-in parking lot for factory employees. In the glow of the street lights I could see tall weeds growing up through the broken concrete behind the chainlink fence. My guess was that no one had worked at Borkman Tool & Die for a decade or two.

Before I parked I'd circled around for a while, getting a feel for the neighborhood at night. When I was there Thursday it had been a gray, stormy afternoon, the streets empty and depressing. Now, after dark on a warm evening, the feeling was altogether different. Not any less depressing—at least to an outsider like me—but filled with frenetic noise now: kids hollering and dogs barking on overcrowded residential blocks; raucous laughter and ear-pounding music from too many bars on streets where there should have been shops and businesses; and behind it all the din of traffic on 63rd Street—two blocks to the south—including wailing sirens that never seemed to stop. The atmosphere seemed somehow strangely brighter with the sun down, a psychological brightness charged with tension and hysteria, ready to erupt into rage and violence at any moment.

Then, again, maybe most of that came from me.

Twice I'd driven past the Tahiti Inn, a dingy-looking bar with a little neon palm tree in the window. The odors of beer and reefer hung heavy in the air and there must have been twenty people milling around outside the place—most of them young men, many wearing identical athletic warm-up jackets. Whatever nation the jackets announced—whether “People” or “Folks” or some other alliance—didn't really matter much. Those certainly weren't all Steelers fans out there lounging on the hoods of double-parked cars; drinking, smoking, trying to outshout the deafening rap that poured out the bar's open door. Just your average bunch of palm-slapping, crotch-grabbing gangbangers, celebrating a warm Monday night and wondering why that white motherfucker in the LS400 keeps driving by … and refuses to look intimidated.

Now, though, I'd completed my final circuit and there was nobody nearby when I got out of the Lexus at the gymnasium end of the block. No lights showed behind the tall windows high above the sidewalk. Except for the Ford van—which I'd seen Thursday and which had to be Jimmy's—I'd have wondered whether he was even in there waiting for me.