That made me think. Was Felicano right? Was I so set on shoveling the dirt out of my life that I’d moved into a dirt pit? Did I need to climb out and keep living, knowing that I would never get completely clean?
I called Lucinda. When she picked up her phone, I said, “Am I obsessed with making things turn out the way they never can be?”
“Well, yeah,” she said like it was obvious.
“Is that bad?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
AT 4:45, I DROVE back to The Spa Club. Rush-hour traffic filled the streets. Cars inched toward intersections with men and women strapped into their seats as if a sudden catastrophe might lift them out of the gridlock and hurtle them through the air.
At LaSalle and Division, a traffic cop held his hand up and stopped me so that cross traffic could move through the intersection. He stared through the windshield like he recognized me, and sweat beaded between my shoulder blades and on the insides of my legs. But he waved me through with the rest of the cars.
The valet at The Spa Club building took the keys to Raj’s SUV and welcomed me by name. “Good afternoon, Mr. Kozmarski,” he said. I was coming up in the world. Or going down.
The elevator man greeted me by name too and took me to the fourteenth floor.
The lounge was crowded. I waved hello to the hostess and cut past the tables. Men and women-mostly men-relaxed with drinks, wearing clothes that would be fine at the office if they put back on their ties or buttoned a couple more buttons on their blouses. Spa Club staff mingled with the customers, making small talk, flirting, moving on if the customers weren’t interested. A man in a suit sat at a table with three other men in shirtsleeves. I thought I recognized the one in the suit from TV, forecasting the weather or making political promises. A waitress sat on his leg and he told her a joke that I couldn’t hear, and the other men laughed but she just blushed, which must have taken some effort after working here. A woman dressed in black sat alone at a table in a corner, glaring at everyone else in the room. I wondered who she was waiting for and what she was doing at the club.
No one seemed to be heading toward the hall leading to the back rooms. Maybe that happened later in the evening after the drinks and small talk.
I went alone into the second lobby and into the back hall. The meeting with Johnson would start at 7:00 and Lucinda would climb the stairs to the fourteenth-floor emergency exit a half hour earlier.
No one was around, so I went to the monitor room, knocked once, and opened the door.
Peter Finley sat in a swivel chair with headphones on. Ten screens were on. Six showed rooms where the girls and boys who worked at The Spa Club took clients. Three of the rooms had clients in them now. The seventh screen showed the back door into the alley behind the building; the eighth, which was hazy, the front entrance. The ninth, which I hadn’t noticed before, showed the front lounge and the elevator. The last I also hadn’t noticed. It showed a stairwell. I figured the camera must be outside the emergency exit door.
Damn, I thought, but I grinned and said, “You always have someone in here watching and listening?”
Finley took off the earphones. “Twenty-four seven,” he said. “We can’t afford not to. Plus sitting in here beats the hell out of watching Oprah.”
The meeting would start in just over two hours. In that time, I needed to disable the stairwell camera or the monitor that it fed, and I needed to do it in a way that looked like an electrical or mechanical malfunction, not like someone had damaged it on purpose. If the camera was still working, Lucinda would walk into the hands of Johnson’s crew for a second time in three nights. This time, I figured, no one would walk her politely to her car. She would get hurt, and I would too.
“How are you liking the work?” Finley said.
I shrugged. “Beats sitting at home watching Oprah.”
He gave that an uncommitted smile. “You know, when Earl Johnson invited me to join his crew, I was like you. I resisted. I’d been doing some solo shit, taking a few bucks off the hookers who were standing on the corner and, if they were carrying a little crack, taking that too. Solo treated me just fine, I thought. But Earl had bigger plans and he convinced me. He also got me to clean myself up. No more crack. Now I’m having the time of my life.”
I raised an imaginary glass. “Here’s to Earl.”
He considered that. “To tell the truth, he doesn’t like you.”
I dropped the imaginary glass and smiled. “Then fuck Earl, right?”
His half smile remained. “He’s usually got good judgment about people.”
I shrugged again and looked at the screens that showed the rooms with clients.
In one, a good-looking man I’d seen tending bar was sucking off a nude, balding fat man who looked like he was in his fifties. A woman-also nude, also fat, also in her fifties-sat in a chair a few feet away, watching the two men. She looked bored. I figured she was the fat man’s wife.
In the second room, a man, also in his fifties but thin and well-muscled, was having sex with a big-breasted woman in her thirties I’d also seen around the club. The sex was tender, almost loving, and I wondered why they were here instead of in a bedroom at his home or a hotel room where no one could see them.
In the third room, two men were screwing Tina. One stood behind her and the other faced her mouth.
Finley caught me staring at the screen. He laughed. “You like that?”
I said nothing. I wanted to go to the room and slug the men.
“Tina’s the best we’ve got,” Finley said. “She’ll do anything. Anything and anyone. She makes more in a day than some of the girls make in a week.”
Why did I think she needed me to help? When I’d turned her down, she’d looked like I’d insulted her. Still, I wanted to beat up the men she was with. I also wanted to beat up Finley. I said, “You need to figure out how to install debit card machines on the girls so they vibrate for thirty seconds every time you add cash.”
Finley looked puzzled.
“I’ll see you later,” I said and stepped into the hallway, closed the door behind me.
The hallway was still empty. I waited a moment, then turned to the emergency exit. The sooner the camera stopped working, the better.
As I reached for the door, a voice at the other end of the hall said, “Hey, Joe, I’ve been looking for you.”
I turned, unsure how I would explain myself. Bob Monroe had come into the hallway from the lobby. He’d changed into brown warm-up pants and a matching hooded sweatshirt. Comfortable clothes for taking over the world. “Hey,” I said, “what’s up?”
“Come on.” He nodded toward the front of the club. “We need to talk.”
I followed him to the lounge, down the hall behind the hostess desk, and into his office.
He sat at his desk. “What were you doing back there?”
“I was going to cut the cables to the security camera so my friends could sneak in without paying.”
He laughed but still wanted to know. “What were you doing?”
I shrugged. “Looking around. I like to know a place well, especially if I’m facing down someone like Johnson.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Good idea.” Then he waved an open palm over his desk like he wanted to sell it to me. “What do you think?”
He’d spread the bank receipts that I’d given him across the desktop. Under each of them, he’d placed a couple more sheets of paper. Photocopies of police reports.
I picked up a receipt and a report. The report described an unsolved burglary of a construction site on the Northwest side. It was dated September 10 and said the burglary had occurred the previous night. It said twenty-four thousand dollars’ worth of copper and other metals had been taken. The bank receipt also was dated September 10 and was for seven thousand dollars, a little less than a third of the value of the metal.