“She’s scared shitless, general, and that’s the truth. Some of those small-town southerners never adjust to the big city. She’s down at Central now with one of our matrons, trying to see if she can remember anything for us. And a couple of men are going through her apartment right now. Mrs. Lewis says Randolph Lewis was the last of her kin.” Gordon swallowed hard, then wet his lips. “She’s an old-fashioned lady, a Bible Baptist, and we’d asked her to call us. I think that’s what suckered Mark last night...”
General Weir turned his eyes to the floor, forcing them to see what he knew he would find there — the outline of Mark’s fallen body, traced with heavy white markings. The shape, legs sprawled, arms outcast, looked strangely diminutive to the general, as if a child had fallen there.
“You sure you want to be up here?” Gordon asked quietly.
“I want to know exactly what happened,” Weir said.
“We don’t know for sure yet,” Gordon said. “We’re building it. Everything’s been dusted for fingerprints but we lifted dozens of them. The bullets were sent to the lab, they were fired from a Luger, that’s a German-made gun with—”
“I know what a Luger is,” Weir said.
“I know you do, sir. The guns that got Mark are 9mm Lugers, we’re not sure of the model, hollow point ammo. The ammo tells ballistics both guns are clean bore, no flaws, no scratches...”
“How many bullets?”
“Two. Both through the front chest but from different distances.”
“How could anyone get the jump on an experienced police officer in this small space?” Weir asked. “There’s nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.”
“Yes there is,” Gordon said. “Look at this.”
He stepped across a narrow hall to the bathroom and put his hands on either side of the mirrored medicine cabinet above the hand basin. He wiggled the mirror slightly and the motion made no sound but the whole cabinet came out in his hands.
“Look, sir,” he said.
Scotty Weir stepped up to the neat, rectangular opening in the wall and looked through it. He experienced a tug at his senses, a deep feeling of disorientation. He found himself looking into the next apartment, and the next and the next, down six empty apartments, right to the end wall of the building. Every medicine cabinet had been removed.
“Here’s how I see it,” Gordon said. “Mark came upstairs alone last night, switched on the lights, saw the place was empty. He checked around the rooms, of course, thought he was early and alone and decided to wait.
“We figure there had to be a couple of guys staked up here. One of them lifted out this medicine cabinet from the next apartment — it comes loose both ways — and then the aim at Mark was like a shooting gallery from any apartment on this floor. Those openings in the wall are on an absolute plumb line. All they had to do was wait until he moved into position and call his name...”
Scotty Weir felt a sudden choking sensation of rage, then the unfamiliar feeling that he might black out. “Why is it so hot in here?” he said.
Gordon shrugged. “The Authority likes to keep the temperature at eighty-two degrees, seems to suit the folk who live here. Lots of white people’d tell you that the jungle bunnies are used to it, it’s like the jungles in the old country. I think different. To me, it’s a sop, a placebo. Overcrowding, roaches, night noises, well, nobody can ever complain they’re cold in here.”
“Everybody in Cabrini is black?”
“No, that wouldn’t be democratic, would it?” Gordon said. “We got a few whites but not many. One couple, real old, brother and sister, and he’s in a wheelchair. She says she feels safer living right with them than getting mugged in a white neighborhood. Now the man who called the police last night, he’s black, black as I am. Lives right below in 1610, full-time warehouse worker with a wife and four kids. He heard the gunshots and did what a citizen should. He called the police and he had to run four blocks to a pay phone to do it.” Tarbert Weir walked to one of the broken windows and leaned toward it, trying to breathe in fresh air. The breeze off the lake was cool and moist. There was a strange sound in the vacant apartment, almost like light music. Maybe that was what had distracted Mark last night, put him off his guard, Weir thought, the rumble and honking of street traffic below and up here the high, thin singing of wind as it came through the sharded glass.
“I really don’t understand,” he said wearily, “why these windows are smashed when no one lives here.”
Gordon looked at him carefully. “I know all about your distinguished record down south during the days of the Freedom Marches. Mark was proud of that, too. I think you’ll understand, general, a phrase some psychologists use — ‘the applause of objects.’ Breaking glass, a farewell gesture of defiance, sometimes it’s the only thing a black man has going for him.”
The two men sat quietly in the third floor waiting room in Henrotin Hospital while the floor nurse made a call to check with Bonnie Caidin’s doctor.
When she was brought into the hospital in the early morning, Bonnie Caidin, battered and savagely bruised, her eyes glazed with shock, had scrawled Sergeant Gordon’s name on a piece of paper. Staff had summoned the sergeant from an emergency room downstairs where he was waiting for word on Mark Weir.
He’d called Miss Caidin, he told the general, because he felt Mark would want her there; they’d always stayed close. She was mugged and beaten in the basement garage of her apartment building. A tenant parking his car had seen her on the ground, called the police. Her assailant was white, big, that’s all she could tell the responding officers. Her purse was found beside her, money and credit cards intact, but no keys. If robbery was the motive, the attacker must have been scared off.
He had lied to the young woman easily, he explained to the general; he had told her Mark was getting along fine.
“There’s a fracture line in her jaw,” Gordon told him. “She can write just a little and talk with her eyes. She put down her address for me and a name — Durham Lasari. I asked her if she wanted me to go there and she nodded. Then she wrote, ‘Tell Mark — the soldier.’ After that, they wheeled her away.
“I went to her apartment around eight this morning. There were coffee cups, dishes in the sink. The bed had been slept in. The whole place looked kinda messy but then maybe she’s not a good housekeeper. There was nobody there.”
“She said — ‘Tell Mark — the soldier’? Durham Lasari?”
“Yes.”
“You sure she didn’t say George Jackson?”
“She didn’t say anything, general. She wrote it out — Durham Lasari. There’s no mistake about that.”
The floor nurse came back to say the doctor preferred Miss Caidin not to have visitors. She was heavily sedated and still in shock.
“Has her family been here?” Scotty Weir asked.
“No, her employer has been notified,” the nurse said, “but it’s our understanding that there’s no immediate family nearby.” She hesitated. “I can’t go against doctor’s orders, but if you gentlemen would like to look in on Miss Caidin from the doorway, I can tell her that when she wakes. She’s been through a lot.”
“Thank you, we’ll do that,” Tarbert Weir said.
Moments later, in the main lobby of the hospital, Weir said to Gordon, “I don’t expect to be here for the funeral, so I’ll want a moment alone now. I want to see where he died.”
The two men walked around to the emergency entrance, a side doorway covered with a portico of squared glass. “They were ready for him here,” Gordon said. “Started work right away. He was on oxygen and plasma before they wheeled him into emergency.”