envelope. Then I gently reached over and went through his pockets. In his shirt pocket, I found a set of reading glasses. The rest were empty. I thought about searching the house. Then I thought about Johnny Woods. Maybe he ran away. Maybe he ran to the nearest phone and dialed up Chicago’s finest. I figured my work here was done and headed for the exit.
The street was as quiet as I’d left it. No cops waiting at the curb. No neighbors peeking through the shades. I decided to push my luck and took a quick turn around the yard. The back door was locked. The windows looked undisturbed. Facing into the alley, I found a garage with a Lexus parked inside. Near a corner of the building, I saw what looked like fresh scratches in the dirt. The soil underneath was loose and quick through my fingers. I pulled out the envelope and checked the sample I’d taken from the crime scene against the soil from the yard. Close, but no cigar. My victim had been suffocated with what looked like beach sand, which meant whoever killed the old man had come prepared for the job. I walked back to the front of the house and was about to step onto the sidewalk when I noticed a small plaque. It was set a few feet off the ground, just to the right of the porch. I moved close and read the inscription.
THIS IS POLICEMAN BELLINGER'S COTTAGE.SAVED BY HIS HEROIC EFFORTS FROM THE CHICAGO FIRE.OCTOBER 1871.
I made my way back to Clark Street and walked five blocks north, to a steam shop called Frances’. It had been in business since 1938, which was long enough for me. I ordered a bowl of chicken noodle soup, the old- fashioned kind, with thick noodles, real chunks of chicken, and broth that warmed from the inside out. I loaded it up with pepper and enjoyed. When I was finished, I stepped to the back of the shop and found one of the few pay phones in existence on Chicago’s North Side. I dropped a quarter and called in the body on Hudson to the police. Then I went back to my table and ordered a corned beef sandwich on marble rye and coffee. Whatever Johnny Woods was up to, it wasn’t good. I didn’t think, however, it added up to murder. Then again, there was at least one corpse in a house on Hudson that might beg to disagree.
CHAPTER 8
T he next day I got to my office early. Broadway was being repaved for the fifth time in the past three years. The Vatican had Michelangelo, a single man lying on his back, painting a chapel. Chicago has city workers, four to a shovel, filling potholes and pulling down twenty-five bucks an hour. Either way, it seemed to be a lifetime’s worth of work.
I closed the blinds in an attempt to shut out the noise. The jackhammer, however, would have its way. I sighed, put my feet up on the desk, and opened up the Tribune. David Meyers’ afternoon at Hawkeye’s had dropped to page two. The body on Hudson was buried, literally. An inch or so of column space on page thirty-four. No hint of foul play. No mention of a mouth full of sand. Just a dead guy found inside a house. His name was Allen Bryant. He was seventy-five years old and lived alone, an amateur historian with a special interest in the Chicago Fire. Bryant, it seems, was the great-great-grandson of the home’s original occupant, a cop named Richard Bellinger, and kept the house as a tiny monument to the fire. I didn’t know where any of this was going. Except nowhere. I also didn’t know why the police seemed to be covering up a homicide. I knew, however, where I could get some answers. Or at least some creative outrage. I picked up the phone and dialed.
“What do you want?”
Dan Masters was named in the article as a working detective on the Bryant case. He wasn’t exactly a friend. More like the Catullus poem I had shared with my client. I hate and I love. In Masters’ case, it was mostly hate.
“You in the office today?” I said.
“Depends. Are you planning on coming in?”
“I was.”
“Then I’m out.”
“You may want to stick around.”
“Why?”
“The homicide on Hudson. I read in the paper you’re working that.”
“I caught the call. Not sure if we’re going to work it as a homicide yet.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You find a lot of seventy-five-year-old guys in their homes with their mouths stuffed with sand?”
No response.
“Didn’t think so.”
“Fucking Kelly. You called it in.”
“I’ll be over in a half hour.”
“Bring your lawyer.”
“I won’t need one.” I hung up the phone and headed out to see my pals at the Chicago PD.
CHAPTER 9
M asters was working out of the Nineteenth District, at the corner of Belmont and Western on Chicago’s North Side. I got there a little after two p.m. and was ushered into a large room jammed with detectives and their desks, in varying states of decay and disarray. Cops call it the bull pen.
A woman in her early thirties was cuffed to a chair a few feet to my left. She had brown hair with paint-by- number highlights and makeup that looked like it had been put on with the lights off. Her head was slumped to her chest and her eyes were closed. She offered up a delicate yet definite burp as I sat down, mucked her lips together once or twice, and settled back into a light doze. The detective sitting across from her was somewhere north of fifty. He pecked away at a manual typewriter and seemed capable of ignoring everything and everybody in the room. That is, until the woman woke up.
“Why am I here?” she said.
The cop stopped typing and pulled a pair of half-moon reading glasses off his nose.
“You crashed your car through the plate-glass window of a Krispy Kreme.” The cop checked a report on his desk. “At the corner of Paulina and Montrose.”
“I know that,” she said.
“That’s why you’re here.”
“It was an accident. Is that against the law?”
“You’re drunk, ma’am.”
“No, I’m not.”
“I can smell it on you.”
“No, you can’t.”
“We found seven empty liquor bottles in your car.”
“They’re my mother’s.”
“You failed the field sobriety test.”
“What’s that?”
“When they asked you the alphabet.”
“He was confusing me. I have a disability.”
“Ma’am.”
“Is this because I’m a woman?”
“Ma’am, we’re going to administer a Breathalyzer.”
Silence.
