The Shoulders of Giants (7 page)

“Right. We’re going to build this face together. I want you to relax and take your time. Let’s start with the bigger guy. We’ll focus on what he looked like rather than what he did. Close your eyes and try to picture him. When you’re ready, we’ll start with the shape of his face.”

I closed my eyes and thought about Muscles. His face was wider at the bottom than at the top, like he’d worked on his jaw muscles as much as his biceps. Scott and I scrolled through the head shapes, which were the top of the head down to the ears, and then the jaw shapes, until we found the right combination. Scott asked if I wanted anything made bigger or smaller and then we chose some hair, made it blond, and moved on to the eyes. For each feature there were several categories and then a ton of little thumbnails to choose from. More than a few times we chose an element and it just didn’t look right, so we changed the size and the position or swapped it for another one. Eventually, after a little over an hour, we had a picture that looked like Muscles. A bit too symmetrical, but good enough to see it was him. When I looked at the finished product, something clicked.

“Cicero.” I said.

“What?”

“He said something about Cicero.”

“This guy?”

“Yeah. I remember now, he said ‘I told Cicero and I’m telling you, stay out of Patterson’s business’. I think that was it.”

“Who’s Cicero?”

“Got me.”

“Maybe Patterson would know,” suggested Scott. “Shall we start on the second guy? Maybe you’ll remember the bit where they told you who killed Susan.”

We made much quicker progress on the composite of Muscles’ friend but I had trouble with the eyes. Everything else was done, and we’d been through lots of different pairs of eyes before we finally settled on Deep Set pair number 221, which were the closest but were sadly lacking in crazy. Scott said he didn’t know how to add crazy, so we settled on what we had and he sent both images to the printer in the squad room. By the time we got out there, Sgt. Freedman already had the image of Muscles in his hand.

“What’s Tommy Byrne got to do with this?” he asked.

“You know who he is?” I said.

“Sure,” said Freedman. “He runs the drugs trade across most of the South Side.”

“He’s a dealer?” I asked, confused at why a drug dealer would warn me off the Patterson case.

“He mostly gets involved with the larger shipments, splits them up amongst the local street level dealers at a premium and then collects street tax from them if they want to sell in his territory.”

“How does he get away with that?”

Scott was already at his desk, studying Byrne’s details on his computer. He provided the answer.

“He’s connected. Irish Mob.”

“The Irish Mob? But I thought the bosses all went down last year when Patterson got off.”

“It’s not like the Italians,” said Freedman. “There’s no
capo di tutti capi
. Irish Mob these days is more like a collection of gangs. There’s a loose hierarchy, but those convictions barely made a dent in the bigger picture. Byrne’s father-in-law is Michael Coughlin, one of the gang bosses that pretty much runs the South Side.”

“But the gangs are linked? I mean he warned me off the Patterson case and Patterson was accused of getting in bed with the Irish Mob. It’s pretty obvious there’s a connection. Do you know who this guy is?” I asked Freedman, showing him the composite of Byrne’s companion.

“Face doesn’t ring a bell”, he said, “but if we look at Byrne’s known associates I bet we’ll get an I.D. Maybe we should pick them up for questioning.”

“Based on them beating me up and me identifying them? And what happens when you can’t hold them? I don’t like my chances.”

“Jake’s right,” said Scott, leaping to my defense. “We need to have something more solid before we get into it with them. We’ll hold off for now. But thanks, Jake. It’s a good start.”

Chapter 10

I didn’t sleep much. I rarely do. The alarm went off at 8.30, but I was already in the bathroom. My joints had stiffened since the night before, and I ran myself a hot bath for the first time in ages. As I soaked, I began to wonder exactly how the killer could have killed Richard West.

Scott said the M.E. wasn’t sure where West drowned – could be the lake or a pool. I tried to imagine how I would drown someone in Lake Michigan and, short of knocking them out and dropping them off a boat, which would make the body pretty hard to recover, I couldn’t think of an easy way. In a pool you could probably hold someone under water if you were strong enough, and then I wondered if you could do the same in a bathtub. I wondered whether the M.E. could tell bathwater from lake water or pool water. Surely if someone drowned in a pool they’d have chlorine in their lungs, and I guess lake water would be dirtier than bath water. I would have to ask Scott.

As I lay in the tub I thought about how I would defend myself if someone came in and tried to push me under water. I braced my feet against the inside of the tub and tensed up. There was no way anyone would be able to push me under, and I still had my arms free to fight with. With the tub full, you could probably kneel someone down at the side and push their head in from behind. You’d have to cuff or tie their hands behind their back first, but it would be doable. There would be a fair amount of struggling and I would guess there would be bruising at the back of the neck and around the wrists where the cuffs were. Scott hadn’t mentioned any marks like that. But there were bruises around the ankles.

Something clicked and I remembered reading about a serial killer who murdered several of his wives while they were in the bath. I couldn’t bring the details to mind, but I remembered the gist of how he did it. He grabbed their ankles and pulled upwards, so their heads went under water quickly.

I stuck my feet out of the bath water and thought how it could be done, and I couldn’t picture why West would be having a bath, away from his own apartment, and in the presence of the killer. I think I’d probably leap up and grab a towel if some guy came in while I was bathing. Unless I wanted him to be there. Unless I was in a relationship with him.

That would explain a lot of things. It would explain more readily why Lee Collins would go to such great pains to cover up what happened on Saturday. Not just to spare Marie West’s feelings, but maybe to avoid a scandal that could cause the firm to lose business. MARRIED LEITZ BROKER KILLED IN GAY LOVE TRYST. If the killer had picked West up, or if they had been having an affair, he would have been much easier to catch off guard. If the killer was gay, it would explain how he might have met Susan if he was in Dutch’s on Friday. I began to wonder about Melissa Adams’ and Julie Campbell’s sexual preferences. Perhaps their murders weren’t as random as they seemed.

It was a hot day already, at least for September in Chicago, so I drove out to Joliet with the top down. The former Captain Patterson opened his door wearing the same clothes he had on the day before, and stinking of bourbon. I needed him to talk, so I headed straight for the kitchen and put on a pot of very strong coffee. I’ve never tried it myself, but it always sobers people up in the movies, so I figured it’s worth a shot. Two cups into the pot, it seemed to start bringing him out of his fug. Maybe it was just the caffeine buzz, but I took my chance where I found it. I showed him the composite sketches of Byrne and his friend that Scott had printed out.

“Do you know either of these men?”

He perked up noticeably. At first I thought he recognized them, but then I realized it was just hope for a lead.

“Are they suspects?”

“Maybe. See this?” I asked, pointing at my bruised face, which was now a curious shade of purple. He nodded. “They did this. To warn me to stay away from you. Do you know who they are?”

“No.”

“Does it help if I tell you they’re connected to Michael Coughlin?”

Patterson sobered up, like flicking a switch. “What did they say to you?”

“Just to stay out of it. They said they’d told Cicero the same thing.”

He nodded. “So that’s what happened to him,” he said. I waited, but he just sat there.

“You want to start telling me what’s going on? Who’s Cicero?”

“Joey Cicero. He’s a P.I. I hired about a year ago to find out who set me up. We met, he took the case, and that was the last I heard from him. He wouldn’t return my calls and when I went round to his office his neighbor told me he’d left town for a while”.

“And you left it at that?”

“I couldn’t get anyone else to take my case. Cicero needed the money. Everybody else thought I was a dirty cop.”

“Any reason they might think that?” I asked. I expected him to get angry, but I guess he’d been accused so often it didn’t have the same effect anymore. Instead, he calmly laid out his defense.

“I was a fourth generation cop. My great grandfather came over after the potato famine and settled in Chicago. Most Irish were met off the boats in New York by whores and mobsters and shown the only way they could survive was hustling or joining a gang. The only legitimate jobs for Irish were ditch digging and construction, and access to those jobs was controlled by the Mob anyway. After the Civil War the murder rate went up, what with all the unemployed, traumatized soldiers on the streets, and the Police Department started hiring. It was a dangerous job with long hours that paid shit. My great grandfather joined up with all the other Irish who wanted a better life, and by the time my grandfather joined at the turn of the century half the force was Irish. My father followed him into the job and I grew up knowing that it was the only thing I wanted to do. I never took a bribe, looked the other way, shook anyone down or planted evidence. I was never drunk on the job and I never beat anyone up who didn’t hit me first. The worst I ever did was accept free coffees and donuts in a diner, which we weren’t supposed to do. All that stuff they said I did in the trial? The only true part of it was that I grew up in the same neighborhood as Jimmy Moran and we played together when we were kids.”

“It’s been a long time. Is there any reason they might think you’d be starting this up again?

He hesitated. Not long, but long enough. “Look, I don’t want you wasting your time on this. This has nothing to do with Susan. I’m sorry you got beat up, but I’m not paying you to clear my name.”

“You’re paying me to find out what happened to Susan. I don’t know much about the other victims yet – maybe they did something to piss off the Mob too. Or maybe a family member of theirs did. For all I know, they killed Susan to warn you to leave your case alone.”

“But I am leaving it alone,” said Patterson.

“But there’s a reason they might think you’re not. It’s more than just hiring me. Why do they think you’re going after them?”

He still looked reluctant. “I don’t know if it is anything, really,” he said.

I waited. It was a long wait, but finally he broke.

“Deputy Chief Hennessy. He died last month. Heart attack. I always figured it was him.”

“Him?”

“The one who did the things they accused me of. I never had any evidence, never really anything but suspicion, but I spent a lot of time when I was on trial thinking about who it could be and he made sense. He spent a lot of time at the station house around the time it was all supposed to have happened, made a big thing about how he was keeping in touch with the officers on patrol, making out like he wanted to help us make everything work better. He had access. I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure he was there the day the call was made from my office. The one giving up the witness. Then there were the rumors.”

“What rumors?”

“Well, everyone knew he was a powerful man – you didn’t want to get on his bad side or you’d be shipped off to some godforsaken corner of the city on traffic duty. But it was more than that. People said he made problems go away. That some cops in Internal Affairs had tried to build a case against him but their witnesses suddenly clammed up and then the case was dropped. They said one of the I.A. guys retired soon after, bought a boat.”

“You think he paid them off?”

“I don’t know. It’d take some balls to offer I.A. cops a bribe. But if you knew Hennessy… Well, I could believe it.” He paused. “There was another rumor, too. That Hennessy had a mobster for a C.I.”

“I’m sorry, what’s a C.I.?”

“Confidential Informant.”

“Isn’t registering C.I.’s allowed?”

“Sure. It’s encouraged. We let some low level street thug stay on the streets and he uses his criminal contacts to get intel that helps us take down rapists, murderers and drug lords. It’s a great system. But it’s not a guarantee of immunity. Word is, Hennessy turned a blind eye to extortion, murders and worse. Word is, Hennessy’s C.I. was Michael Coughlin.”

Chapter 11

I had some thinking to do. I needed to clear my head, and I knew the best way to do it. On the way to the practice range, I swung by my office to pick up my S&W and some ammo.

I started with the Glock 17. It hurt a little to keep my left eye closed, even though the day before I hadn’t been able to open it. To begin with, I fired five rounds on the fifty foot range. The Glock’s polymer frame absorbs a lot of energy, and although it’s lighter than most other nine millimeters, it doesn’t recoil nearly as much. With my first five, I managed a one and a half inch grouping. It wasn’t bad, but I could do better, and my mind was still full. I pushed the button to my right to send a fresh target down the range.

I tried to clear my mind. The ear defenders cut out a lot of the background noise, although I could still hear the pop, pop, pop of the shooters on the adjacent lanes. I focused on the target at the end of the range. I tried to picture Tommy Byrne, the mobster formerly known as Muscles, but I couldn’t keep the image in front of me for long. I stared at the center of the black silhouette, took a breath, and let it out as I brought the sights of my gun down into view. I fired five shots into his chest. I put the gun down, took off my goggles, and then pressed the button which made the target fly towards me. A three quarter inch group. And my mind was clear.