“He told me,” Gordon said. “He was real glad to talk to you yesterday...”
Mark Weir’s body was wheeled into the viewing room and General Weir felt a stabbing memory, an anguished moment of comparison, as he remembered the first time he had seen his boy, an infant behind glass in the maternity ward of a hospital in Paris.
Lieutenant Weir was covered up to his chin with a sheet, and his face looked pale but peaceful, almost healthy, like a strong, young man determined to rest and restore himself.
“All the damage was done in the chest area,” Gordon said. “Right through the ribs and the breastbone, front to back. There’s not another mark on him.”
“He was shot in the chest?”
“Yes,” Gordon said. “Someone surprised him head on. He didn’t even have time to draw his gun.”
“And he was alone, you say?”
“Yes. We were both off duty last night but he got a tip and wanted to follow through. He should’ve waited, but you know Mark — stubborn as a mule. He said he got that from you.”
“He told you he was stubborn like me?”
“And damned proud of it, sir.”
Gordon reached down and rearranged Mark’s hair with one hand, touching him gently, pushing the hair back from the smooth forehead. “We had a laugh about his hair just the other day,” Gordon said. “Mark never liked to wear a hat, but I guess you know that, and we got caught outside in a snowstorm over by Navy Pier. His hair was full of snowflakes and he looked damned funny. I told him I knew just how he’d look when he got to be an old-timer.” He paused thoughtfully. “I’d like to have had a Polaroid with me that day.”
Gordon pulled at the morgue sheet, flattening out the wrinkles where the coarse cloth lay over Mark’s chest. Underneath, Weir could see the outlines of heavy bandages.
“I guess I told you last night was my old man’s birthday,” Gordon said. “That’s why the lieutenant couldn’t reach me.”
“No, you didn’t,” the general said and turned toward the exit door of the viewing room. He had longed to lift his hand, to touch his son’s face one last time, but Tarbert Weir knew too well how the memory of cold, inert flesh can linger on the fingertips.
The aging housing development called Cabrini Green, named after the canonized saint. Mother Cabrini, who had once worked in Chicago, stands stark and forbidding, one-and-a-half square miles of isolated and dangerous real estate in center city, located a few blocks from the picturesque shoreline of Lake Michigan and the elegant, expensive apartment buildings on the city’s Gold Coast.
A low-income, low-rent City Housing Authority project, Cabrini Green is comprised of a number of tall, boxlike brick buildings set on broad lawns of black asphalt, faintly traced here and there with the painted boundaries of shuffleboard courts and white free-throw lines facing rusted basketball hoops with tattered nets. The Green is home to more than thirteen thousand people, couples, singles, families and a collection of rent-paying floaters, pushers, junkies or pimps, street people who need a crash pad or a base.
Doobie Gordon nosed his car into a parking space in a row of blue and white police cars, each lettered with the slogan, “We Serve to Protect,” and two large, black unmarked vans.
“Mobile labs,” Gordon said. “They’ve been working since we got the call.”
He got out of the car, locked his door and walked around to check the passenger side. “It may seem awful quiet around here to you, general, for such a big place. But except for some workers and the school kids, Cabrini is mostly night people and there’s nothing to send folks outta sight like a cop killing. Of course, some of them got an early wakeup call from the fuzz today.”
“All those squad cars?” Weir asked.
“Yes. We don’t take the killing of a fellow officer lightly in this town,” Gordon said grimly. “The order came through from the commissioner first thing this morning: ‘Everything within the law, but if a knock doesn’t open a door, that door comes off at the hinges.’ ”
Inside the shabby foyer, Gordon said, “We’ll walk up to the third floor, then push for the elevator. I like to be sure it’s coming up empty before I get in.”
The stairs were cement, painted a dark green, steep and narrow, without handrails. “The Authority has given up replacing them,” Gordon said. “Those metal handrails can be sawed up and made into street weapons. Same thing is true of the stuff in the laundry rooms. People just took the machines apart, used the pieces for other things. The basement area in every building is boarded up now. Tenants can use the kitchen sink or find a laundromat.”
The two men stepped out into a hallway on the third floor and Doobie Gordon pushed the elevator button. Tarbert Weir was aware of a strange, disturbing odor in the building. He took out his folded handkerchief and passed the clean cloth over his nose and mouth. There was a sensation of tasting the disquieting reek as much as smelling it.
“I hope the tenants get used to it,” Gordon said, glancing at Weir. “I know I never could. It’s a combination of sweat, disinfectants, roach powder, and a little garbage let sit too long. It’s a poor smell, not country poor or Eskimo poor, or Haiti poor, but American, big-city poor. It’s something my people know a lot about...”
Little daylight filtered into the long, narrow corridors. Random light bulbs sheathed in wire casing played dim illumination over paint-chipped walls and hallways of closed doors, several covered over with accordion-steel meshings, reinforced by padlocks.
“It’s legal,” the sergeant said, gesturing at the heavy door protections. “Either they’re trying to hide something inside or keep someone out. But it’s their space, the Authority respects that.”
The elevator, with a floor base no more than three feet by five feet, lurched to a stop and Sergeant Gordon slipped open the door, looking down to examine the floor before he said, “It’s okay, general. Sometimes there’s stuff in here you wouldn’t want to step in.”
On the seventeenth, top floor of the building, two policemen stood on either side of an apartment door. One of them nodded at Gordon, pulled a tagged key from his pocket and unlocked the door. Tarbert Weir and the sergeant stepped into an empty apartment.
It was a small layout, with low ceilings and squared corners, a living room and adjoining kitchen, two bedrooms with a shared closet and a bathroom with a stall shower. In the bathroom there was a toilet and a sink with a mirrored medicine cabinet, but the kitchen had a ravaged look, as if it had been gutted, the appliances wrenched out of the walls. The rooms were painted green and yellow and pink and the windows of the living room, two of them broken and jagged, looked out over Chicago’s crowded inner city streets, narrow concrete canyons that ran through to Lake Shore Drive.
“Let me explain something to you,” Gordon said. “No one lives on this floor. The Authority agreed to clear everyone out more than four years ago. It was a trouble area, just too high up. Any sign of trouble, the tenants could throw things down on the police cars. If the elevators jammed, it was a hell of a long run up those steps for a cop.”
“Yet someone asked Mark to meet them here?”
Gordon nodded. “This address and apartment 1710, top floor, that’s the numbers we took off Mark’s radio tape.”
“And Mark would follow up on a tip like that?”
Doobie Gordon looked thoughtful, then nodded. “It must have sounded kosher to Mark. It was a man, nervous, sloppy talker, no name, just said he was kin to Mrs. Amanda Lewis and she’d asked him to call. They had something to tell us about how her nephew got killed...”
“And what does this Mrs. Lewis say?”