“Not that I noticed,” I said, “but I’ll check. If there’s a camera, I’ll disable it. If I can’t, I’ll call and tell you not to come.”
“Do they have guards?”
I shook my head. “Not when they’re open for business. They probably figure it would wreck the mood.”
“They’ll be open this evening?”
“They’re always open.”
“Is there anything else that could stop me between the emergency exit and the meeting room?”
I thought about Tina, who’d offered herself to me twice. I thought about the women at the hostess desk. “Nothing you can’t brush aside.”
She put the paper and pen in her bag.
Then I told her about the conversation I’d had with Raj after we left Monroe’s office.
“Can you count on him to stay quiet?”
I shook my head. “He’s one of the ways this could blow up. He’s seriously spooked. Odds are equal that he keeps his mouth shut or tells everything to Monroe.”
“Of if he figures Monroe is a lost cause, he could run to Johnson,” Lucinda said.
I thought about that. “Could be, but so far he’s always stood by Monroe. Finley seems to be Johnson’s closest friend. The other guys, I don’t know. Monroe expects them to line up behind him when he shows that Johnson’s been ripping them off.”
Footsteps approached on the concrete path. Lucinda and I shut our mouths and gazed up at the yellow fruit that hung in clusters from a palm tree. Gray light filtered through the foggy glass above the tree. More footsteps approached from the other side.
Stuart Felicano, the lead FBI agent, stepped into view on one side. The bridge of his nose was bruised where I’d hit him. But he wore a pressed blue suit and looked like he’d gotten a good night’s sleep. Felicano’s heavyset partner stepped into view on the other side, also in a suit. There was nowhere to run.
I looked at Lucinda.
She shook her head, her eyes stunned. “Jesus! I’m sorry. I didn’t think anyone-”
“Good morning, Mr. Kozmarski,” Felicano said. “You look surprised to see us.”
“No more than if you’d swung in on vines.”
He smiled. “Do you have a moment to talk?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Still smiling. “We met with your friend Bill Gubman this morning.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He seems to be under the mistaken impression that he can make Earl Johnson’s crew disappear. No arrests. No trials. No scandal. He wants to bury them in an unmarked grave.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
His smile broadened. “So, that made us wonder about you. You’re at the Southshore shooting. You’re seen stealing from another site in Wisconsin. You’re working with Johnson’s crew. There’s a warrant out for your arrest. But you’re also hanging out with Gubman. He might be an old friend but he looks like the last guy you’d want to be found with. So what’s between him and you?”
“What did he say?”
“He said he wouldn’t know about you.”
“Makes sense. Most of the time I don’t even know about myself.”
His smile fell hard from his face. “Don’t be that way.”
I shrugged. “I don’t think I can help you.”
“You’re wrong,” he said. “You could help a lot. Have you learned anything more about Johnson?”
Other than that he was about to fall off a wall? I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“What about Farid el Raj?”
“What about him?”
“We hear he might be making a play on Johnson for control of the crew.”
Unless a lot more was happening than I knew, they’d heard wrong or gotten Raj mixed up with Monroe. “Are you listening to them on a wire?”
The other agent said, “That’s none of your-”
Felicano patted the air to quiet him. “No wires,” he said. “Johnson’s planted as much sound equipment in his time as we have. We wouldn’t get away with it.”
“That makes hearing things hard.”
“We still hear them.”
The other agent said, “So what about el Raj?”
“I don’t know about him either.”
Felicano shook his head. “You’re making a big mistake.”
“Welcome to my life.”
Two women in their sixties came down the path, talking about bromeliads. They wore dresses and canvas hats, like they were on a safari. One had a camera hanging around her neck. The FBI agents stepped aside and let them through.
When they’d passed, one of the agents said, “We could take you in on the warrant.”
I agreed. “You could.”
He tipped his head toward Lucinda. “We could take her in as accessory.”
Lucinda held her wrists toward him like he might want to cuff them. “You could.”
Felicano said, “Or we could leave you out on the street and see what happens. Guys like you don’t live long.”
“Whatever you prefer,” I said, like he’d offered me a choice between white meat or dark.
My attitude didn’t fool him. “I’ve dealt with guys like you before,” he said. “You can work with us and come out a little dirtied but alive. Or you can do it alone with one chance in a hundred of coming out clean, ninety-nine chances of coming out dead or filthy. I’d think the choice would be easy. But guys like you take that one chance. I don’t think you’re courageous and I don’t think you’re just a bad gambler. I think you’re afraid, scared to death of just getting by if getting by means compromising a little. Guys like you make no sense to me but that’s what I think.”
I tried a smile. “You nailed me.”
He shook his head again, disappointed, maybe disgusted. “One chance in a hundred. Is it worth it?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
He shook his head again. “We’ll be keeping our eyes on you,” he said.
“That’s reassuring,” I said.
He looked at me like I was being a smart-ass, but with the trouble I was in I realized I might mean it.
When they were gone, Lucinda and I sat together for awhile without talking. A siren passed outside, then was quiet, and the city was far away.
Lucinda said, “Could Raj be up to something?”
“No,” I said and thought about it some. “No.”
Behind us, water dripped from a pipe near the ceiling onto a hard surface. The waterfall trickled down an artificial stone face and collected in a basin.
TWENTY-FOUR
I DROVE NORTH AND bought a hot dog at Byron’s, then cruised for forty minutes looking for a place to park and eat. I went south and west and drove across Blackhawk Street until it dead-ended at the North Branch of the Chicago River. Five unofficial parking spots faced a thin strip of grass with leafless trees and then the river. One of the spots was open. I slid Raj’s SUV into it. The hot dog was cold.
When I finished eating, I tilted the seat back, closed my eyes, and thought about the mess I’d gotten myself into. I had plenty of time to think and plenty to think about. Too much time and too much to think about. I tilted the seat up again and watched the river.
The sunlight glinted off the tree branches. The river moved so slow you would never know it moved at all.
In the summer, now and then, a heron would stand on the banks looking for a meal. I’d never seen one catch a fish. Supposedly an eagle or two had tested the air above the water. But on a cold sunny afternoon in November no birds stood on the grass, flew in the air, or perched in the brown branches, not even a sparrow.
In the 1990s, when most of the factories closed, fish swam back into the lower reaches of the river. The EPA forced the remaining factories to treat their waste before dumping it and to put toxic chemicals into metal drums and ship them to a dumpsite in Indiana. A river advocacy group got excited and started imagining bass jumping in the shallows and beavers building dams in the shadows of the old smokestacks. They convinced the city to dredge the chemical waste off the river bottom. Except the dredged chemicals clouded the water and the fish that had returned went belly up and washed onto the riverbanks.