I’m done with you, I told James on the phone two nights ago. I wasn’t really sure what that comment meant; it was just my turn for a lob in the verbal tennis match, an attempt to regain some momentum in the conversation.
But now I’m ready to give those words some meaning. I’m done with you, James Drinker.
“I’m going to call the police,” I tell Alexa. “I’m going to tell them everything. Even if it gets me disbarred.”
“Oh, Jason, really?”
No, as a matter of fact, not really, but that’s what I need to tell her, that’s what she needs to think. She can’t be involved in what I’m going to do.
It’s not that I would mind losing my law license over this. It would be well worth it. The reason I’m not going back to the cops is that it wouldn’t work. There’s nothing I can tell them that I haven’t already told them. James Drinker probably has no more of a connection to Samantha Drury than he has to President Obama. And somehow I know that he has covered his tracks. I just know it.
No, the police aren’t an option.
“I’ll call you later,” I say. I punch out the call and dial up another one.
Joel Lightner answers his cell on the second ring.
“Jason-I was just about to call you. We just saw the news. I don’t know what happened. Our people were on him. They swear he never left the apartment building after he got home from work. They swear it.”
“He snuck out somehow, Joel. He probably spotted the tail. He probably slipped out a fire escape or something.”
“My people are better than that.”
“Well, his better is better than their better, I guess.”
“Are we sure Drinker was the one who did it last night? I mean, maybe he isn’t our offender.”
I realize I’ve been holding my breath, my head getting dizzy. “It was him,” I say. “There’s no doubt.”
“Shit. I’m sorry, Jason. We fucked up. It won’t happen again, I can prom-”
“Joel, I think we’re done with the surveillance. I want your guys to stand down.”
“Stand down?”
“No more surveillance on James Drinker. Effective immediately.”
“We won’t lose him again, Jason.”
“No. I want it over. As of right now. Stop the surveillance.”
“Why?”
“Tactical reasons,” I say. “He’s smart enough to know when we’re tailing him. He’ll be smart enough to know when we’re not. Maybe he’ll drop his guard and make a mistake.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s what I want,” I insist. “I’m the client, you’re my investigator. Do what I ask.”
Joel doesn’t speak. He has a brain cell or two himself, and he knows me too well. He knows I’m not telling him to remove the surveillance detail for any tactical reason.
“My client sometimes has stupid ideas,” Joel says. “Very stupid ones. What are you planning to do, Counselor? And why don’t you want my people watching when you do it?”
“Just do it,” I say. I hang up before he can say anything else.
Because there’s nothing left to say. I can’t involve Joel any more than I can involve Alexa. I have to do this myself and let the chips fall where they may.
And I can tell myself that I tried. I tried to follow my lawyer’s oath, giving my client the benefit of the doubt, hoping that if Drinker was the offender, the police would figure it out without his own attorney selling him out. When they didn’t, I violated my oath and gave them a very large nudge, pointing them directly to Drinker, and still they’ve turned away from him. I don’t have any other choice, as I see it.
For a reason all his own, James Drinker is intent on killing women in this city, and the only person who can stop him is me.
36
Jason
Saturday, June 29
The problem with summer in the Midwest is that it stays light outside for so long. Just my luck, we’re only slightly over a week removed from the solstice, so today is the ninth-longest day of sunlight in the entire damn year.
Ideally, the best way to ambush somebody is to catch them outside their house-either inside their garage or on their walk up to their door-when it’s dark. You have the element of surprise, you have the cover of darkness, and you don’t have to hassle with details like house alarms, locked doors, or bolted windows.
But conditions have to be ideal, and for me, they are not. James Drinker doesn’t live in a house with a garage; he lives in a high-rise. And he leaves Higgins Auto Body at half past five, six at the latest, according to the surveillance team that has followed him over the last week. So that’s nowhere close to dusk, not this time of year.
All of which leaves me with only one option: walking up to his fourth-floor apartment, forcing my way in, and taking care of business.
When I was a kid, the intersection of Townsend and Kensington was a decent place to live, part of a middle-class Eastern European neighborhood called Power’s Park, named after a steel company owner who built a plant here in the 1930s and hired Polish immigrants. There was a place not two blocks away from this intersection where my dad sometimes took us after Mass on Sunday called Magyar that served Hungarian food, my father’s ancestry. We always knew it was coming after Mass when we piled into the beater station wagon and Dad would look at us in the rearview mirror and ask us if we were “Hungary.” Laughed like hell at that joke, he did.
Dad would speak what little of the native tongue he knew with the owners and would order food like money was no object-which meant he probably had just scammed somebody out of something and he actually had some dough. He went nuts over the paprika stew and dumplings. Mom always ordered the same thing, veal crepes. Pete and I kept it safe with debreceni sausage with mustard and cabbage.
My dad was always happy there, probably because he only took us there after he’d scored in some way or another-the track or a card game or some grift he’d pulled. My dad’s moods went up and down that way, depending on that week’s income. He was a pretty good con artist, I assumed, but he was even better at conning himself into believing he was a winner on those rare occasions when his takings outgained his expenses. Would have been nice if he’d left a little of that money for Mom. But in the Kolarich household, it was all about Jack’s mood. Would it be dinner at Irish Green and brunch at Magyar and flowers for Mom? Or would it be cold cuts and leftovers and Jack staggering home at two in the morning, half in the bag, looking for a boy to swat?
This neighborhood is no longer called Power’s Park; now it’s Old Power’s Park. The steel plant moved out in the seventies, and Magyar is now a pawnshop, next to a payday loan center, next to a secondhand clothing store. The whites mostly fled this neighborhood when the mayor decided, twenty years ago, that this area would be an excellent location for subsidized housing projects-far, far better than, say, the available acreage on the near-north side close to all the affluent white neighborhoods.
So now it’s a forgotten neighborhood, the streets littered with potholes and busted-up curbs, drug deals taking place in open view in dingy alleys or drive-ups at street corners. I can blend into this neighborhood if I wish-my hair’s pretty long now, I have two days’ growth on my face, and with an untucked T-shirt over blue jeans, I can basically play the part of the down-on-his-luck white guy.
I’m being overly cautious, but I don’t have a surreptitious route into James Drinker’s apartment, so the least I can do is make sure I’m in disguise while I case the neighborhood. I pass by his apartment building at 3611 West Townsend long enough to realize that there’s a door controlled by a buzzer, but it seems to be broken and people are freely entering and exiting. I see an elevator, a necessity for an eleven-story building, but I don’t plan on using it. I see mailboxes and a beat-up tile floor in the entryway.