Trigger City (2 page)

L
ieutenant Mike Angelo, commanding officer
of the Area 4 Homicide Section, leaned back in his squeaky chair and patted his belly, which threatened to pop the buttons of his polyester shirt. “You take the gig?”

I slid a book across the desk to him.
The Guards,
by Ken Bruen. “Brought you something,” I said. “An Irish detective novel. Great book, you'll like it. Full of bent cops, very realistic. Present company excepted, of course.”

A gentle tease, and I wouldn't even go that far with any other cop I knew. But Mike Angelo and I had built a good working relationship based upon earned respect. To call us personal friends would be a stretch, but I knew Mike was good people and I'd like to think he'd say the same about me.

Mike sent me a deadeye cop stare. “Cops make convenient punching bags the world over, why should Ireland be any different?” He picked up the book and flipped the pages and his eyes grew wide. I'd inserted his finder's fee, spread throughout the book. Hundred-dollar bills. Twenty-five of them.

“Thanks for the referral,” I said. “Richmond wants eight weeks, exclusive.”

“No shit?”

“Even paid in advance.”

“I figure two weeks at most to confirm everything we already know,” Mike said. “What the hell you gonna do with the next six?”

“It's not like that. Richmond says he doesn't doubt the CPD.”

“So what does he want?”

“I think he wants to know his daughter better. He wants me to bring him the
capital-T
truth of her death, beyond the pertinent facts.”

“Oh Christ.”

“I know. I tried to turn him down but he wasn't having any.”

Mike shrugged, “Ah, what the hell, he's rich. Bring him a few tidbits that he didn't know about his daughter, make him happy and spend the money with a clear conscience.”

“Nothing's gonna make him happy,” I said. “His daughter will still be dead and he still won't know her any better.”

“Not your problem.” Mike plucked a black three-ring binder off the stack on his gray metal desk and dropped it in front of me. “Joan Richmond's
deceased file
. Just about as open and shut as I've ever seen.”

“Anything bother you?”

“Read the file, you'll see. Steven Zhang was a paranoid headcase who killed his boss. Case closed.” He stood, picked up the book I'd given him, and headed for the door. “I'm gonna make dinner reservations for Susan and me at Anna Maria's. God bless her, she prefers great food to fancy.”

“You're a lucky man.”

“Back in twenty. Happy reading.”

The binder wasn't as thick as most. Not surprising, given the circumstances. The cops had responded to a 911 gunshot call. They found Joan Richmond, dead of multiple gunshot wounds, in the foyer of her condo. A signed confession lay next to the body, written on
Zhang IT Consulting
letterhead. Naturally, the cops headed for the address on
the letterhead. On the way there, the radio dispatcher announced a gunshot at the same address. The cops found Steven Zhang dead of a self-inflicted gunshot from the same caliber gun that had killed Joan Richmond. Ballistics later confirmed that it was the same gun. And the handwriting on the confession matched Zhang's.

Steven's wife, Amy Zhang, arrived on the scene in a state of panic. She told of Steven's strange phone call, and phone records later confirmed it. Understandably, she had a meltdown when she saw what was left of her husband and she wasn't much use to the police. But they came back a couple days later for a follow-up and she confirmed that Steven had recently been acting secretive and paranoid and had been launching into verbal diatribes that made no sense. She'd begged him to see a doctor but he had insisted that the doctors were all part of a conspiracy to poison him.

The detectives interviewed Joan Richmond's boss and subordinates at HM Nichols. Joan was well liked but no one professed to know her very well. She had hired Zhang on contract and for the first couple of months all went well and she was happy with his job performance. She and Zhang often lunched together and coworkers said they seemed to be friends. None thought there was anything sexual between them. In the couple of weeks prior to the murder, Zhang started to display erratic behavior, acting fearful of his coworkers, not combing his hair or shaving his face, holding loud arguments with voices that seemed to exist only in his head. For the last week of his life Zhang wore the same clothes every day. When a coworker commented on it, he explained that someone was putting poison in his laundry soap, to control his mind.

The written confession gave further evidence of these same delusions. Apparently Zhang came to believe that Joan Richmond had been co-opted into the vast conspiracy against him. The tasks she assigned demanded that he read computer code that was designed to reprogram his brain so that he wouldn't be able to carry out his “vital mission, imperative to saving American democracy.” Having been infected by the computer code, Zhang now received auditory instructions from
“Them”—instructions that arrived as Joan Richmond's voice, even when she was nowhere near. Killing her was the only way to silence the instructions, so he could carry out his mission.

The detectives interviewed Joan Richmond's neighbors, none of whom recognized a photograph of Steven Zhang. Similarly, none of Zhang's neighbors recognized a photo of Joan Richmond. They interviewed Isaac Richmond but he knew nothing about Zhang, had never heard of him.

I examined the crime scene photographs taken at Joan Richmond's condo. Joan lay on her back. Her legs, slightly bent at the knees, lay to the right, crossed above the ankle. Her right arm was down by her side, while her left went straight out from her shoulder, like she was signaling a left turn. She wore blue jeans and a turquoise T-shirt. The first bullet had entered through her left cheekbone, and the tissue above the bullet hole was enlarged. There were three more entry wounds in the center of her chest. She'd been shot right in the heart, so there wasn't a lot of blood. Her eyes were open, but there was nobody home.

Next came the photos from Steven Zhang's town house. Zhang sat on a blue sofa, legs spread out in front of him, arms down by his sides, hands palm up. His head lay back to one side and his mouth hung wide open, like some drunken dinner guest, passed out and snoring in the middle of your party and making everyone uncomfortable.

He'd put the barrel in his mouth, shot up through the soft palate. That doesn't slow a bullet very much and it had exited out the back of his head and splattered blood and brains and skull fragments all over the cream-colored wall behind him.

Mike Angelo returned just as I was closing my notebook.

“Get your fill?” He sat and his chair squeaked.

“And then some,” I said.

 

I picked up two beef sandwiches at Al's #1 Italian and took them back to my office on Wabash. Vince Cosimo was sitting in my chair when I entered.

“Just test-driving it,” he said.

“Yeah yeah. Other side, rookie.” Vince squeezed his muscular frame into one of my client chairs while I grabbed two bottles of Capital Wisconsin Amber from the little bar fridge. I gave him a sandwich and he dug into it like the next day was Lent. Gave him one of the bottles, sat at my desk, and took a swig of beer.

Vince Cosimo had earned his blue card that summer and was working for me part-time. At first there wasn't any work to give him. Isaac Richmond had been right—after the big ruckus and my four-month exile, I'd returned to Chicago to find that most of my clients had purged my name from their Rolodexes. Hard to blame them, really. They had to think of their own safety, and that of their families.

So it was strictly B-list gigs for a while. Process serving and petty insurance fraud and a couple of divorces to get me over. But I stuck with it and eventually word got around that I'd managed a truce with Chris Amodeo, and some A-list clients returned, followed by a surge of new clients. My pseudo-celebrity status was a hell of a draw, once everyone knew they could hire me without running afoul of the Outfit.

So now I often had work for Vince, but he lacked experience. I was bringing him along as fast as was prudent. I'd recommended him to an agency that specialized in serving subpoenas and they gave him about twenty hours a week. I gave him another twenty, but almost half of it was unpaid, since more than half of the time he was just observing how the job was done. I was trying to be a nice guy but I wasn't looking to put Santa Claus out of business. Anyway, Vince made enough to get by while learning the trade. And Mary had left him, which significantly reduced his living expenses.

Vince wiped beef drippings from his chin, said, “How'd the job interview go?”

“It wasn't a job interview,” I said. “It was a meeting with a prospective client.”

“Yeah, how'd it go? Any work for me?”

“Probably not. Too early to say.” I moved the second half of my
sandwich to the paper in front of Vince. “Anyway I've already got you on a paying gig.”

“I'm still on that?”

“Did I tell you to stop?” I held Vince's eyes until he looked away. “Then you're still on it.”

“Yeah, but Ray…”

“I don't want to hear it, Vince. Really.” I took another bite of my half sandwich and chewed, not tasting it. Washed it down with some beer. “Look, in a perfect world none of us would ever have to do divorce work. But I promise you, if you're gonna make a career out of this, there will be ups and downs and you'll have to do them.”

“This isn't even a divorce.”

“Extended surveillance. One subject. Working solo. It's the same profile as 90 percent of domestic surveillance jobs and most workman's comp, too. It's good experience for you.”

“Okay, but Ray…”

“What? You want to continue to apprentice under my license, or not?” I put the beer bottle on the desk a little harder than intended, which sent my Ernie Banks bobble head doll into a spasm of bobbling.

“You're a bastard today.” Vince stopped eating and picked up his beer. We drank in silence for a minute and I made the executive decision to light a cigarette. I was mostly nonsmoking now but the time seemed right. I drew smoke into my lungs and felt the way you feel when you slip into that favorite sweatshirt you've had since college. Vince opened his mouth to speak, closed it, tried again and said, “I'll do the job until you say it's over.”

“Good.”

“But I'm your friend, so I gotta say what I gotta say. If you fire me, you fire me.”

I couldn't deny him that. “Go ahead, unload. But I don't want to have this conversation every week. Hit me with your best shot and then we're done with it.”

Vince swallowed some beer. “It's a little creepy, Ray.”

“A little creepy? That's your best shot?”

“More than a little creepy. Paying me to spy on your ex-girlfriend? Solidly creepy.”

“Whoa. Did I not specifically instruct you to terminate surveillance
any
time Jill shows up?”

“Yeah but—”

“Then I'm not spying on her.”

“Spying on her boyfriend then. Still creepy.”

“I just want to be sure Dr. Feelgood isn't bad for her,” I said. “Once I'm reasonably confident he's a straight-up guy, I'll pull you off the job and leave them to their blissful coexistence. But if he
does
turn out to be a bad guy, then I'll warn Jill. And I know that doesn't mean we'll get back together. I just want her to be safe.”

“You're rationalizing and you don't even know how lame that sounds,” Vince said. “You gotta move on and forget about her.”

Actually, I was keenly aware of how lame I sounded. But I wasn't just rationalizing, I was in rationalization overdrive, and I just didn't care. It just didn't matter.

“Thanks for sharing,” I said. “Hope you feel better.”

“Well that's how I feel about it,” Vince shrugged. “I've had my say, do what you want.”

I stubbed out my half-smoked cigarette. “You can pick him up at Rush tonight. His shift ends at six.”

“I know when his shift ends,” said Vince.

“Good for you,” I said.

J
oan Richmond's blood had been mopped up
six weeks ago, but between sand-colored floor tiles, the grout bore dark stains where her body had lain. I stood for a minute, making mental comparisons between the hallway and my memory of the crime scene photographs.

Then I worked my way through the apartment, room by room, assembling an impression of the woman who had lived here. Earth tones predominated and the decor was tastefully generic and fairly gender neutral. It looked like the catalog photos for a midpriced furniture store. Clean, orderly, coordinated, and completely soulless.

There was still food in the fridge, some of the leftovers moldy. It was clear that Joan's father had simply locked up the place after her death and had not returned to deal with the fact that she wasn't coming back. The freezer held a bag of frozen peas, a pint of chocolate ice cream, and five microwavable low-calorie meals. And two blue bottles of Skyy vodka. I pulled the bottles out and now saw that one was three-quarters empty, the other waiting on deck. Most people would wait until the first bottle was empty before putting the next in the freezer. Hell, most people probably wouldn't even
buy
the next bottle until
the first one was empty. Joan Richmond was a drinker and, from the absence of appropriate mixers, I guessed she took her vodka straight. The five ice cube trays suggested she liked it to stay cold in the glass.

The bedroom was forest green with natural oak trim. Mission-style furniture. A masculine room, but for the duvet cover and pillowcases, which boasted a fiercely cheerful floral print by Liberty. Joan Richmond favored the right side of the bed, the side nearest the door.

The bedside table offered
Accounting Today, Vanity Fair, The Economist.
In the drawer, a pen, a notebook, and a pair of reading glasses. The notebook contained innocuous “to-do” lists—the sort of things jotted down to clear a busy mind at the end of the day and make room for sleep.

The matching table on the other side of the bed was vacant. No magazines, empty drawer. Like it was waiting for someone to move in and put his (or her) personal stamp on the place.

The bathroom contained all the requisite unctions, ointments, and creams that women employ as weapons in their foredoomed battle against nature and time. And the usual over-the-counter drugs. And sleeping pills. Consult your doctor, use as directed, for occasional use only…

For use when vodka isn't enough to dull the loneliness.

In one corner of the living room, a computer on a small desk. There was a television, a stereo…and music. Like lonely people everywhere, Joan Richmond owned a lot of music. A woman after my own heart.

The Stones, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, and James Taylor…Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, and Sheryl Crow…Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner…a large collection of Bowie…Pink Floyd, early Genesis…The Clash, The Psychedelic Furs, The Replacements…Blondie, The Cars, and Cheap Trick.

A few disco and Europop albums, which seemed out of place for a woman who listened to prog-rock and punk and new wave. But we all have a few albums we keep for an occasional nostalgia trip, even though we know better. Disco had arrived when Joan Richmond was a teenager and those are prime years for midlife nostalgia trips.

I decided to select something that I'd never heard before. Something of her life, but not of mine. When I opened the stereo's CD tray, there was already a disc loaded.
The Cure
. The first time around, I'd dismissed them as a
makeup and hair
band. Then in college, my friend Terry Green had insisted that I give them a fair listen and I'd had to admit they were good. But their latest album was virgin territory for me. And this was probably the last music Joan Richmond had listened to before her death. I pressed Play.

I filled a glass with ice, poured cold vodka over the ice. I was listening to the woman's music…I might as well drink her booze.

I called Vince Cosimo at home. I knew he was on surveillance and I could've called his cell but it's easier to apologize to an answering machine.

I waited for the beep and said, “Vince…Ray. I, um, I know you're not having fun on this gig but I appreciate you doing it for me and I want you to stay focused. You're learning important skills…and I'll have some better work for you pretty soon. Okay? Thanks. See you tomorrow.”

Some apology.

Vince was probably right—I should forget about Jill and move on with my life. But I'd never let anyone get as close, never told anyone as much as I'd told Jill. I'd even allowed myself to envision spending the rest of our lives together, and I liked the view.

But she ended it. As much as I'd told her, it was far less than what normal people share of themselves and she said she needed me to trust her. But that wasn't the only problem. Jill couldn't get comfortable with what I do for a living.

We met in the hospital, just after I'd taken a beating. I convinced her that the job was not usually like that and she agreed to go out with me. It was intense. It was love. But she was uncomfortable with the gun, so I started going around without one. I got into the habit of leaving my gun locked in the office and only wearing it when I thought I might need it.

But the thing is, you never know where and when you'll need your
gun. If you did know, you'd simply arrange to be somewhere else at the appointed time. And then you wouldn't need a gun at all.

In my effort to ease Jill's concerns, I ignored that logic. And it cost me another beating.

Having learned that lesson the hard way, I now carried all the time. I didn't know how or if Jill would ever be comfortable with it, but I wanted the opportunity to try to get past her fears. I'd returned to Chicago in May but it took a month to work up the courage to call her. Whereupon she informed me that she was involved with someone.

No use rehashing it. I picked up the phone and called Terry Green at the
Chicago Chronicle
. I figured to get his voice mail but he was working late so I got him on the line. I asked him to search the archives for anything on Joan Richmond and Steven Zhang.

“There a story in it?” he said.

“Nope. But next time we go drinking it's on me and I'll throw in a couple good cigars.”

“I'll do it,” he said, “if you come for dinner on Thursday. Angela hasn't seen you in ages and you're becoming a hermit.”

“I'm not a hermit,” I said, “I just haven't been socializing.”

“Which is the definition of a hermit,” said Terry. “Thursday, our place, dinner, seven o'clock.”

I poured another vodka and turned up the volume. Robert Smith seemed furious with the state of the world and his place in it, and the music matched. Great album, on first listen. I wondered what it had meant to Joan Richmond. It was in her current rotation, so I assumed it spoke to her. But I may have been looking for too much meaning in it, as I sometimes do. Maybe it was just the latest album from a band she really liked. Maybe there was no deep meaning here.

I sat at her desk and booted up her computer. It all looked pretty straightforward. No password-protected partitions or files, no cryptic file names.

The Excel files of Joan Richmond's personal finances told of a successful single woman in her forties. As the head of payroll for HM
Nichols, Joan made $96,000 a year. She'd bought the condo five years ago for $328,000, minus a 25 percent down payment. Mortgage companies were offering huge loans with little or no down, but Joan was an accountant and didn't fall for that con. She took on a mortgage she could afford, had premium quality health insurance, drove a Toyota Corolla, and put money away for retirement. The picture of fiscal responsibility.

I launched Thunderbird and went into her e-mails, found nothing unusual. The computer was new and the e-mails only went back six months, so not a lot to search through. She'd kept in occasional contact with a handful of girlfriends from college, sending congratulations on new husbands, new babies. The e-mails she received were a little more restrained. There was no new husband, no new baby, and there didn't seem to be a lot of congratulations. She did her job, lived her life alone, and put on a brave face for the rest of the world.

I searched for Steven Zhang's name. She'd contacted him six weeks before he came to work at HM Nichols, saying she might have a gig for him. The e-mails were informal and she did not ask for credentials or references, and I got the impression that she'd used his services before. And she asked him to give her best regards to Amy, so she at least knew of his wife. Zhang's replies were sane enough—he seemed eager to take the gig and appreciative of her offer.

I went into her Firefox history file and browsed the cookies on her system. No unusual surfing habits, no fetish porn or online gambling sites. She was a regular visitor at the
Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal.

Nothing in Joan Richmond's computer suggested a double life, or any reason for Steven Zhang to kill her.

The music ended. I looked for something to change my perspective. Something I knew and loved, something equally righteous but less angry. She had a little reggae. A very little. Black Uhuru, Jimmy Cliff, and of course some Bob Marley. I put
Exodus
on the stereo.

I refreshed my vodka, wrapped the bag of frozen peas in a dish-towel. My shoulder had started barking around noon and I'd ignored
it since. The vodka helped some, but not enough. I popped a couple of Percocet.

I sat in the living room, holding a bag of frozen peas to my shoulder, drinking cold vodka and waiting for the Percs to kick in. Thinking about the dead woman whose life I'd invaded.

The computer told me little, the music a little more. But what had I really learned about her? The apartment itself didn't say much. And maybe that said a lot. Generic decor, no evidence of guests, lonely bedroom.

No personal photos on display. Which reminded me of my own apartment, but was definitely not normal. I searched for a photo album, found none.

The bookshelves held some literary fiction and thrillers, but mostly biographies and current events. Almost a dozen books on 9/11 and the war in Iraq. Not wing-nut conspiracy stuff, all mainstream, but all critical of the administration. The top two shelves held books she'd kept from her college days.

I pulled Albert Camus's
The Myth of Sisyphus
off the shelf and took it back to the couch. The book had meant a lot to me, years ago. It had helped me make sense of things at a time when nothing made any sense, helped me navigate the bumpy transition from adolescence to adulthood. Most of all, it had enabled me to intellectualize the worst experience of my life, giving me the emotional distance I desperately needed.

Maybe Camus could help me again. I opened the book and read:

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

Maybe not. I closed the book, dropped it on the coffee table, and listened to Bob Marley sing about the movement of Jah people. The Percs had gone to work inside my brain and the pain was now dull and distant. When the music ended, I tossed the peas back in the freezer and brushed my teeth. I didn't think Joan would mind me using her toothbrush, given our increasing intimacy.

I stripped off my clothes, climbed into bed on the side opposite
where Joan had slept. I lay on my back and stared at the motionless ceiling fan. And was immediately gripped by a sense of dread. Thinking
Just look under the bed. What's so hard about that? Just look.

I looked under the bed. And there it was. I pulled it out and opened the leather cover, recognized Joan Richmond's handwriting on the lined pages.

Anger coursed through my veins and my face burned. I tossed the book aside, thinking
What is it with diaries kept under the bed, a fucking rite of womanhood? Goddamnit.

I knew it was totally irrational, but I was livid with Joan Richmond for keeping a diary under her bed. For making me feel like the thirteen-year-old boy who found his mother's cold body naked on top of the sheets, an empty pill bottle beside her, a half-empty bottle of Sambuca on the nightstand. For making me feel like the thirteen-year-old boy who crawled under his mother's bed, squeezed his eyes tight and stayed there an hour, pleading with a nonexistent God:
I'll do anything…Please, just make her wake up…I'll never do anything bad again…I'll do anything you want…Please…Kill me instead.

The thirteen-year-old boy who found his dead mother's diary under the bed.