“Who sent you?” I unlocked the door and we went inside and I switched on the lights.

  “You kidding? Shit, Sal would kill me if he knew. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Always welcome,” I said. “You want a beer?”

  “That’d be great.” Vinnie squeezed his large frame into one of my client chairs and I got two bottles of Goose Island Christmas Ale out of the little bar fridge that doubled as a table for my coffeemaker. I opened the bottles and handed one to Vinnie as I went around my desk. I sat and took a pull off the bottle and lit a cigarette.

  “Those things’ll kill ya,” said Vinnie. “You should give ’em up.”

  “Yeah, I know, I’m trying.”

  Vinnie drank some beer and took in the room. “Man, this place is cool. Like going back in time to one of them old movies.”

  “Thanks. It helps sell the image.” Which was true. Selling the image is a big part of success for a private detective and I had decorated the office with that in mind.

  All of the furniture was pre-1960. There was a burgundy leather couch along one wall, a matching desk chair and a couple of oak captain’s chairs with leather seat cushions, for visitors. On the wall above the couch hung a framed replica of the Declaration of Independence and a map of Chicago, circa 1871, the year of the Great Fire that may or may not have been started by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow. On the facing wall there were built-in bookshelves and an up-to-date map of the city. Back by the door there were some cupboards and a sink and the little bar fridge with the coffeemaker on top. The door itself was my favorite part. An old oak door with a frosted window, and RAY DUDGEON INVESTIGATIONS painted on the window in gold.

  Behind me were large windows, which looked out over Wabash Avenue. On the little bit of wall between the windows hung my bachelor’s degree in journalism, my certificate from the American Security Training Institute, and my State of Illinois private detective’s license. Below them stood an oak filing cabinet that matched the desk. An old Turkish rug covered much of the hardwood floor.

  Truth be told, I couldn’t have afforded to decorate the place with new furniture, at least not of any quality. So I’d put the office together, piece by piece, over time. Garage sales, estate sales, flea markets—that sort of thing. You could see it as a bunch of used junk, but I liked to think of it as a collection of pre-antiques. I was perhaps overly proud of it but it did help to sell the image. I had even removed the fluorescent bulbs and scattered old lamps around the place. The only nods to modernity were the laptop computer, the all-in-one printer/scanner/fax gadget, the combination telephone–answering machine and the coffeemaker. And there wasn’t much I could do about that, since I needed all those things.

  But Vinnie Cosimo had not come to help with the Surgeon General’s fight against tobacco or to compliment my abilities as an interior decorator. He took another swig of beer and so did I.

  “You know, I think I could be a pretty good private eye,” he said.

  “You come to fill out a job application?”

  “I guess you don’t think I’d be any good.” His face held a worried look I’d never seen on him and I wished he would just get on with it. He took another long draw on the beer.

  “I think you’d be fine,” I said. “Could you pass a background check?”

  “I’ve never even been arrested,” Vinnie said, with some pride.

  “Would the Outfit let you walk away?”

  “Mr. Greico would be okay. He knows he can trust me and I think he knows I’m not that happy with what I’m doing.” Another swig of beer emptied the bottle. “Besides, I’m just thinkin’ out loud…I’m not goin’ anywhere while he’s around.”

  “But he’s not getting any younger and you don’t want to work for Sal,” I guessed.

  Vinnie sat and looked past me out the window. The brakes of a northbound El train screamed at us from below as it pulled into Washington Station. I took Vinnie’s empty and went to the fridge and got him a fresh bottle. It seemed to me that he was wrestling with how much to tell. I sat back down and we both drank. I swallowed a bunch of aspirin with my beer.

  “I got a theory about Sal,” said Vinnie. “My theory is, Sal has a hard time living in Mr. Greico’s shadow. So he comes on like a hard guy, more than he should. But that don’t make him a bad guy. My theory is, maybe when, God forbid, Mr. Greico’s gone, then Sal will ease up a little.” Vinnie was no dummy.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe he has even more to prove when he tries to fill the old man’s shoes. Maybe he gets worse.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Vinnie drank some more and looked out the window again. He was having trouble with eye contact. He needed a gentle push.

  “Vince,” I said, “you come here to see me and you sit in my office and drink my beer and talk about your career options…which is fine with me, but that’s not why you’re here. My face looks like it lost an argument with a meat tenderizer and you don’t even mention it. So I have to assume that the two are connected. As much as I enjoy your company, can we get to the fucking point?”

  “I shouldn’t even be here.”

  “Yeah, but here you are and you know I’m not going to drop a dime on you. So spill.”

  Vinnie examined the label on his beer bottle as if it could tell him what to do. Apparently, it told him to spill his guts. It all came out in a rush of words. “Yesterday after you leave, Mr. Greico calls Frank DiMarco in. He tells him not to be a numbskull. He says that you’re protecting this Loniski guy and Frank should just take his chances in court and that he wouldn’t get by you anyway and he shouldn’t a been freelancing to begin with. And Frank says, ‘You can’t tell me what to do, I got Paul Tortelli backing me.’ And Mr. Greico says, ‘Fine, you can work for Paul, because you don’t work here no more.’ And he picks up the phone, right there, and calls Tortelli and tells him about it. I don’t know what Tortelli says but I can see that Mr. Greico don’t like it. Then Frank says ‘go to hell’ and marches out and Mr. Greico is pissed. He tells me and Sal to take a walk, he wants to think.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “So I thought I should warn you that Frankie’s off the leash”—he pointed at my face—“but I guess I’m a little late.”

  “It’s the thought that counts,” I said.

  “I guess. So, you okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “How many were there?” That he assumed there was more than one pleased me.

  “Two. The big guy was almost as big as you and maybe five years older. Has a broken jaw now. The other guy was about my size, fights with his feet. He’ll be walking funny for a while. You know who I mean?”

  “Think so. Both Tortelli’s guys, but not his personal guys. Probably work for Frank now.”

  “That’s a safe assumption.”

  We didn’t seem to have any more to say to each other and Vinnie had already said more than he should, so I thanked him again and reminded him he was always welcome and he left. When he picked up his book, I caught a glimpse of the title. Covert Surveillance & Electronic Penetration, Volume 2. It was a standard text in the field and it was not a light read. Vinnie Cosimo was no dummy. And he probably would make a good private eye, if he could ever bring himself to leave the Outfit.

  After Vinnie was gone, I sat and smoked and thought about what he had said. Frank DiMarco was off the leash. More than that, DiMarco told Johnny Greico to go to hell. No matter how much of a punk he was, he wouldn’t have stood up to the old man without Paul Tortelli’s okay. Not a chance. But why would Cousin Paul allow DiMarco to quit Greico? As far as I knew, Tortelli’s position in the Outfit was a few rungs down the ladder from Greico and this would be seen as a major slap in the face. It didn’t make sense. And whatever Tortelli said to Greico on the phone had reinforced the point. Could Tortelli have designs on Greico’s operation? It seemed unlikely, but I had no other theory.

  The two knuckleheads who had tried to put the arm on me were Tortelli’s guys. Even if they were on loan to DiMarco, they would surely report to their real boss. So Tortelli must also be sanctioning DiMarco’s plans for Bob Loniski. That didn’t make sense either. Why wouldn’t Tortelli just tell DiMarco to keep his mouth shut and do his time? Five years, out in two.

  I had no answers for these and other questions that occurred to me over the course of three cigarettes and two mugs of coffee. And I found myself wishing that I’d known all this before my visit to Booker Washington. I called Terry and got his voice mail. I told his voice mail that I’d see him at midnight, unless he heard from me between now and then.

  I unlocked my desk drawer and got my everyday gun, a Para Ordnance P10 Limited, and put it on the desk. Thinking, Jill doesn’t approve of guns. Jill was a nurse, she had that luxury. But this gun had saved my life.

  The first time I shot another human being was just after I got into the investigation business. I was serving papers on a guy who was being sued for beating someone unconscious in a bowling alley. The lawyer who hired me had warned me to be careful—the guy had a short temper and a long history of assaults to prove it. I found the guy in his driveway working under a rusty Trans Am. I called him by his first name and he wiggled out from underneath. I dropped the subpoena on his chest and said, “You’ve been served, sir. Have a nice day,” and walked away without waiting for a reply. But his reply came from behind in the form of a crowbar blow to the head. A simple “fuck you, buddy” would have sufficed. Luckily, his aim was imperfect and the iron bar glanced off the back of my head and came down on my left shoulder. I fell to the ground and rolled on my back and drew the gun and shot. The bullet entered through his upper lip and the back of his head came off in a shower of blood and brains and skull fragments. He stood frozen for an eternity, the crowbar still poised to strike again, then crumpled on top of me in slow motion. I rolled out from under him and began to hyperventilate. A woman across the street saw the whole thing from her window and called the police. It didn’t take them long to ascertain what had happened, and they ruled it justifiable homicide. I didn’t like being connected to the word “homicide,” so I called it “self-defense,” which is the same thing.

  I’d shot a few other well-deserving people since then but the first one sticks in your mind forever, like the death of your first dog. It gets easier as you go along.

  I got up and went to the fridge for a beer. From the cupboard over the sink I got a roll of paper towels and spread them out on the desk. I opened the bottom drawer and took out a gun-cleaning kit. I popped the magazine out of the pistol, ejected the round from the chamber and emptied the magazine. I put the bullets off to one side, counted them, and then stripped the gun and scrubbed it thoroughly, leaving just a thin coat of oil where necessary. I reassembled the gun, loaded the magazine, jacked a round into the chamber, applied the safety, popped the magazine out again, inserted one more round and reinserted the mag.

  I was mindful and methodical about the work and it took almost fifteen minutes, start to finish. But I once knew a guy who shot himself while cleaning his gun. He had been around guns all his life, had even served in Vietnam, and could strip, clean and reassemble a weapon while blindfolded. He just got careless one day and it cost him three fingers from his left hand. I wasn’t going to make that mistake. I might get shot one day, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to shoot myself.

  Okay, so Jill didn’t approve of guns. It was hard to blame her. But to me, disapproving of guns was simplistic and naive. Like disapproving of violence, without making any distinction between an aggressor and a victim acting in self-defense. What I disapproved of was the initiation of violence.

  And this gun had saved my life.

  I wasn’t going to shoot myself but I didn’t really want anyone else to shoot me either, and that was something I could not completely control. Control the things you can, and don’t be distracted by the things that you cannot. So I did what I could, and arrived at McSorley’s Gun Shop just after 4:00.

  McSorley’s is on West Madison, on the border between declining Puerto Rican and black neighborhoods. Low income but not destitute. At least not yet. Being where it is, the clientele is a mix of cops, drug dealers and solid citizens. Until you assess which group you’re dealing with, you keep to yourself. There is a palpable tension when different types of client share the range.

  The shooting range itself is a dump. The lighting is terrible, the walls are decorated with bullet holes and graffiti and ventilation is nonexistent. The acrid odor of spent gunpowder, brass and sweat hangs heavy. But all of this lends to a more realistic practice session. In the real world, there will be more than a palpable tension to deal with and the lighting is rarely perfect.

  I had the range to myself, so I set up in the middle lane. On the shelf in front of me were a stack of paper silhouette targets, a box of .45 caliber bullets for the Para-Ordnance, and a box of .32s for the little Seecamp that I sometimes carried as a backup piece. The Seecamp isn’t powerful enough for a primary weapon; it would only come into use if someone got the .45 out of my hand, and in that case they’d be standing close enough for the .32 to do its job.

  I attached a target to the bulldog clip and wheeled it out along the clothesline-type mechanism to about ten yards. The range was twenty five yards long but most shootings take place at about ten feet, so ten yards seemed plenty to me.

  I always shoot respectably well but today I had flow, practicing Zen shooting, putting nice, neat holes in the X-ring. I put a new target out there, then walked two lanes over and wheeled out a second target, about six feet past the first. Back in my lane, I alternated between the two, putting a double-tap in each, back and forth, with the precision of Benvenuto Cellini carving a gold pendant.

  I was good and I liked to be good, because this was something that was important to be good at. Benvenuto could always melt down the gold and start over, but I might not get a second chance if I missed my target. And I couldn’t take back a stray bullet that might kill a bystander.

  After I’d put a box of ammo through the .45, I set a new target at about twelve feet and went to work with the little Seecamp. I shot both right-handed and left-because if the first gun was gone I might not have a right hand. The left-handed groups were not as tight but they hit the silhouette and that’s all that mattered. With the target up close, I kept seeing the faces of Tortelli’s thugs on it. I didn’t feel one way or the other about shooting them. If I had to, I would. There was no like or dislike.

  I felt like Yoda.

  Bob Loniski was staying at the Balderstone Apartments, a modern sixteen-story building on Oak Street, in the fashionable Gold Coast neighborhood. The building was quite secure. The rear emergency exit only opened from inside and the elevator from the underground parking garage only went to the lobby. To get up to the apartments, you had to pass a security desk on the way to the main elevators or stairwells. If your name was not on a list of expected guests, the guard called up to the tenant. The tenant could tune his television to channel one and see closed-circuit video of the lobby, so he could be sure before giving the guard permission to let anyone up. On the guard’s desk was a video monitor that displayed four multiplexed views of the underground garage.

  It was a good system. The only flaw in it was that the guard did not wear a sidearm. But I doubted that DiMarco would be coming in hard, anyway. Easier just to write off the apartment as a target and take Loniski out when he was in transit.

  Loniski introduced me to the guard and told him that I was to be allowed access whenever I wanted, but no one else. The guard was a skinny black man in his middle sixties, but he looked scrappy and he seemed like a retired cop. Despite his age and size, I figured he could look after himself.

  The guard’s name was Sylvester. I asked if he’d been a cop and he said no, but he was in the military for over thirty years. He’d seen action from Vietnam to Grenada and had retired a major.

  “I’m still one tough Marine,” he said with a confident smile. I agreed that he was.

  “All the guards in this building are retired military,” he added. “You don’t have to worry about us.”

  I showed Major Sylvester my identification and explained that Loniski had received a threat, so special attention was in order. He took a Polaroid of me and put it beside his monitor for the guards on the other two shifts.

  The apartment was on the eleventh floor, second door to the right of the elevators. There were stairwells at either end of the hallway. The apartment had a metal door with a wide-angle peephole and a useless chain and a better-than-average dead bolt. It was one of those generic-furniture executive suites that rent out to traveling business folks who are in town for an extended stay. Loniski’s lease was for nine months, with six left to go.

  I searched the apartment and found nobody hiding in the bathtub or under the bed or in a closet. Large windows spanned the living room wall. Through them, Chicago’s Magnificent Mile glittered greedily, proffering all the requisite garbage for another consumer Mc-Christmas. The John Hancock Building towered over everything, its roof antennas sticking up like ice picks threatening to blind the sky. I closed the drapes and told Loniski that they were to stay closed.

  He was still nervous as hell. On the drive from the studio to his apartment he had chattered incessantly and asked repeatedly if we were being followed. I had assured him that we were not.

  I didn’t tell him that Tortelli’s thugs had been watching from a car across the street when I picked him up. Different thugs from yesterday, but it was the same green Ford and they made sure that I noticed them. Still, they hadn’t followed us and there seemed no reason to rattle Loniski’s cage. He was already a mess.

  “You think this building’s good enough, I–I mean safe enough?” Loniski stammered.

  “It’s fine. Better than most. Just keep the drapes closed and the door bolted.” From the fridge, I got us each a beer.

  Loniski sat on the couch and drank his beer. I took off my jacket and draped it over the back of a chair. He stared at the gun on my hip.

 

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