No Show of Remorse (5 page)

She agreed, and I hung up.

Still not convinced cell phones were secure, I was using a pay phone at the Art Institute. It took half a dozen more calls, but I had lots of change and finally found someone able to put me in touch with Jimmy Coletta. I wasn't sure he'd agree to see me.

He did, though.

*   *   *

U
NTIL THAT CALL
, Jimmy Coletta and I had never once spoken to each other, but our fates had gotten intertwined five years earlier through an incident that changed both our lives forever. Jimmy, with his brother Sal and two other cops named Richard Kilgallon and Arthur Frankel, got caught up in a deadly shootout on the West Side. It happened about two in the morning at a squalid two-flat on a mostly deserted block near Garfield Park. A drug dealer and his woman inside the second-floor apartment were shot dead on the scene. According to the cops, a third man in the apartment escaped. Arthur Frankel was carried out with a through-and-through to the thigh. Sal Coletta had multiple chest wounds and was DOA at the trauma center. Jimmy Coletta took just one slug, but he took it low in the spine, and he lost the use of his legs forever.

All I lost was my law license, and that was because I'd told my client, Marlon Shades, that he could talk freely to me about the shootout even though his mother was with us in my office. Marlon was twenty years old, a low-life gangbanger and a street tough, but so scared that day that he wouldn't see me without his mother being there, and had to run to the men's room before we could talk. My bladder and bowel control would have been shaky, too, if I'd been in his shoes, with three cops shot and about three thousand others looking for me with blood in their eyes.

That was after I'd given up handling personal injury clients with Barney Green and gone off on my own. I had only a few clients, criminal cases, and I'd agreed to see Marlon Shades as a favor to his mother, Sally Rose Shades. She was thirty-six and a pretty good person, all things considered. She was a waitress at a diner in Union Station who may or may not have supplemented her income by turning tricks. She was a former client, not well-educated, but pretty bright. I paid her to take statements from witnesses for me, to photograph crime scenes, or to bring people in to my law office. When she brought her son in, I figured she was my agent and her being present didn't affect the attorney-client privilege, and Marlon could talk freely with her in the room.

A month or so later, the supreme court justices—Maura Flanagan not yet among them—took a different view from mine. They said that my client Marlon, who'd disappeared after talking to me, was a material witness—and a possible suspect—in a cop killing; that Sally Rose was his mother and neither my client nor my agent; and that anything Marlon said in her presence wasn't privileged. Finally, the court proclaimed that my explanation for why I wouldn't reveal what Marlon told me was “a contrived obfuscation,” and that I'd rot on my worthless ass in jail until I changed my mind. Or words to that effect.

I understood the court's position, even though it was obviously wrong. What I didn't like was the “contrived obfuscation” remark. I told them, in a response I filed from a Cook County Jail cell, that if anyone was deliberately confusing the issues it was the court, and that the justices could go screw themselves. Or words to that effect.

Shortly after that they suspended my law license “until further order,” and transferred me to a downstate jail to rethink my ethics.

Months went by before they decided it was useless to keep paying my room and board, and let me out. Marlon Shades was already in jail on unrelated charges, had a public defender, and was taking the fifth amendment. Arthur Frankel was back on the job, and Jimmy Coletta was progressing in rehab. Sally Rose, who'd fled after Marlon disappeared, had turned up again. She was dead. Multiple blows to the head, by a person unknown, in a motel room rented in her name near Midway Airport on the southwest side. The police theory was that the perpetrator was a client of hers. As suspicious as I was, it never seemed worth pursuing. It certainly wouldn't have done Sally Rose much good.

Eventually, Marlon got himself murdered in prison. Jimmy Coletta, on the other hand, had turned himself into something of a local celebrity. Not because he'd gotten shot, but because after that he'd gotten religion. Jimmy had joined some charismatic, evangelical church I never heard of. He'd dedicated his life, he said, to “service of the Lord through service of others,” and had started some sort of program for disadvantaged kids. He was touted as a real-life hero, even by some of the cynics of this world.

There were still a few holdouts, though, like me.

*   *   *

I
HAD SOME RESEARCH
I
WANTED TO DO
, about Stefanie, before meeting her that evening, but there'd be time for that. I dug out the Art Institute membership card the Lady had given me for Christmas and went through the turnstyle to spend some time with Whistler and Winslow and Hopper and the gang.

And to think about Jimmy Coletta. He'd agreed on a time and place to meet me the next day, without even asking what I wanted to talk about—which meant he had a pretty good idea already.

CHAPTER

8

A
T THE WEST END
of the Prudential Building lobby were three revolving doors out to Beaubien Court. But to the left of those doors was an escalator down to the “pedway,” a below-street-level system of pedestrian tunnels. Yogi was to lead Stefanie that way, to the underground station for Metra southbound commuter trains.

Arriving at the station by a different route, I bought a
Rolling Stone
and stood where I could watch people stream in. At about five-thirty Yogi showed up, sporting an ancient pair of Reeboks and a jacket that looked like a Harris Tweed—threadbare, but a perfect fit over his Bob Marley T-shirt. His dreadlocks were tied back into a sort of pony tail, and in the bustling crowd he looked surprisingly ordinary.

A few yards behind him came Stefanie, dark-haired and trim, in a navy pants suit—also a perfect fit, and on a far more interesting frame. She was an attractive woman, for sure, but wore a look of chronic hostility and suspicion, as though she'd been dealt a long series of bad hands and had given up expecting anything better.

Rush hour was going strong, with the noise and confusion of hundreds of people in a hurry, some to board trains, others merely passing through on their way to more pedway tunnels, headed for the subway or somewhere else on the north end of the Loop. Not far to my left, eating frozen yogurt with a pink plastic spoon, a uniformed security guard leaned against a pillar and watched people try not to run into each other. Yogi was weaving and elbowing his way in a zigzag pattern through the crowd, headed toward the far end of the station area. He may have nodded just slightly once in my direction as he passed, or he may not have seen me at all.

As for Stefanie, she was focused on keeping up with Yogi and I was certain she hadn't seen me—and equally certain she was unaware of the man who stood off to my right and who'd spent the last few hours focused on keeping up with me. A thin, fiftyish, intense-looking guy in stylish wire-rimmed glasses, I'd first spotted him when I left the Art Institute. He wore a tan raincoat and held a cell phone pressed to his right ear.

I stepped into the crowd, moving toward the man and against the flow of commuters. When I reached the man, I flipped my wallet open and shut in front of his face, too quickly for him to read my Art Institute membership card. “Excuse me, sir,” I said. “The use of cell phones is prohibited in the station area.”

He stood there for an instant, eyes wide, then just stepped to his right to go around me and join the moving crowd. I sidestepped to stay in his way, smiling and shrugging my shoulders. “Sorry,” I said. “Federal regulations.”

By then we were doing a little side-to-side dance together, and blocking people in a hurry to get home. When some of them started to jostle us and complain, the man finally jammed the phone into his coat pocket and poked his finger at me. “Listen up, bud—”

“Thank you very much.” I turned and saw the security guard staring at us, even as he scraped for the last trace of yogurt in the depths of his cup. “Officer!” I called. “Quick! Over here!” Instead of approaching, the guard dropped the cup in a trash receptacle and started talking into his radio. No dummy, that one.

I moved in close to my dancing partner. “Whatever it is you're doing,” I said, “I don't think you want to explain it if the security guy calls for assistance.”

He opened his mouth, closed it, then turned and walked away, pretty much an admission that he couldn't afford to draw attention to himself. By the time he disappeared through the entrance to the tunnel to the Prudential Building he was on the phone again.

“Got a problem here?” The guard had finally thought it safe to come over.

“Yeah, I mean, the creep bumped into me, y'know?” I said. “And I swear he was going after my wallet. But like he says, I still got it, so…”

“Didn't look like our usual pickpocket,” the guard said. “But hey, man, you oughta keep your wallet in your front pocket.”

Oh sure, blame the victim.

*   *   *

I
CAUGHT UP WITH
Y
OGI
and Stefanie in the lower level of Marshall Field's, in the cookware department. Yogi was planted amid a half-dozen women watching a silver-tongued, smiling young man demonstrate the joy and ease of greaseless, fat-free stir-frying in a pan as slick as he was. “Not plastic, not Teflon,” he proclaimed, “but a space-age miracle destined to revolutionize cooking forever.”

Stefanie stood off to the side, arms folded.

“Come here often?” I asked. She spun around and I slipped my arm through hers and walked her away from the cookware. “Has anyone ever mentioned,” I said, “how often you have that hostile and suspicious look on your face?”

“Yes,” she said. “My ex-husband.”

“Ah, an observant man.”

“Not at all. Just a self-centered, mean-tempered man, with the emotional maturity of a twelve-year-old.” It slid out so easily, it had to be a line spoken many times before.

“Oh, another one of
those,
” I said, steering her into a left turn. “Field's has a food court down here somewhere.”

They were about ready to close, but we ordered from the Mexican counter and went to a table in a corner of the nearly deserted dining area. Not a very secluded spot, certainly, but staying out of sight is all a matter of percentages. I hadn't spotted anyone tailing Stefanie, and the chance of there being more than one person on me was pretty slim. Even Yogi had disappeared.

I peeled the foil wrappings from a ground beef taco and a vegetarian quesadilla, pulled the tops off two little containers of salsa, and slipped a straw through the plastic lid of a cup of root beer. Stefanie had an easier time of it. She added a tablet of sweetener and was ready to sip her supper—decaf coffee.

“I guess you'll eat when you get home, huh?” I said.

“Maybe some popcorn.” She glanced around the room, then looked down at her cup. “I'm beginning to wish I hadn't called you last night.”

“Uh-huh.” I poured salsa over the taco filling. “I've been wishing the same thing.” I bit into the taco. Not bad. Not very Mexican-tasting, but not bad. “What I'm wishing now is that you'd tell me some things you haven't told me yet.”

She made a point of stirring her coffee—which she'd already done once, quite thoroughly—and arranged her paper napkin at just the right angle to the edge of the table. “What things?”

“For instance, you told me your daughter was staying with her father on the night you overheard Justice Flanagan talking to your boss. I checked with the court clerk's office. Why don't I find any divorce action involving a Stefanie Randle in the last ten years?”

“You don't even know whether I'm divorced or not.”

“You just called him your ‘ex-husband.' In my trade we call that a clue.”

“Why would you check? Why would it make any difference?”

“Just fishing,” I said. “It's what I do. And maybe it doesn't make any difference.”

“Actually, it
does,
or it might, but I had no idea there was any connection. That is, I…”

“Just slow down and tell me.”

“I was divorced two years ago. The divorce case was in our married name, which I no longer use.” She rotated her cup on the table. “He was a Chicago police officer. I mean, he still is, but he's not my husband anymore. He…” She stared off over my shoulder for a moment. “In law school I got involved in a crime victims advocacy program and started meeting lots of police officers. They were so … I don't know … exciting or something. Richard was one of them and before I knew it we were married.”

“And it didn't work.”

“I tried, you know, but I couldn't adjust to … to the whole cop thing. The dark humor, the cynicism, the negativity, the—”

“There are lots and lots of good cops.” I almost said
some of my best friends are cops,
but caught myself.

“I didn't say he wasn't a good cop.”

“That's true. And what I meant was that if your husband's ‘a self-centered, mean-tempered man, with the emotional maturity of a twelve-year-old,' it's not necessarily because he's a cop.”

“He's my ex-husband.”

“What's his name?” I'd finished the taco and was working on the quesadilla.

“Kilgallon.” She sighed. “Richard Kilgallon.”

“Jesus.” I set down my plastic fork. “You said you'd read the police reports about my case.”

“Yesterday, for the first time.” She shook her head. “Look, before that it never occurred to me that there was the slightest connection between Richard and … between my ex-husband and you.”