Burke looked at me as I stood. “Latin Warlords,” I said. “The missing finger and the crown. It’s their signature.”
In the late eighties the Latin Warlords had migrated from their origins in South Central LA to the struggling neighborhood of Pilsen on the West Side of Chicago. They had started out smuggling illegals across the border, then that grew into drugs, prostitution, and anything else that could generate revenue. The Gangster Apostles didn’t take them seriously in the early years, but as the Warlords’ numbers swelled and their penetration into other communities deepened, they began to threaten GA’s dominance. A guy by the name of Alejandro Rivera was the top Warlord. Everyone called him Chico. He was a lifelong thug who had notoriously climbed the ranks by killing anyone who stood in the way of his rise. Many believed he was the one who put the lethal bullets in his predecessor, Pablo “Tin Man” Gomez. Still, no one had been able to prove it, and those who knew the truth weren’t stupid enough to talk.
“If it’s them, this might be more than a message,” Burke said, concentrating on the body. “This would be personal.”
“What does OCD say?”
“It doesn’t make sense to them. Their people on the inside say there haven’t been any real beefs between the gangs for almost a year. Everything’s been quiet. Everyone’s making money. This seems random and unprovoked.”
“Because they probably didn’t do it,” I said.
Burke and I stepped away from the body and let the techs go back to work. As we stood there silently, I looked down South Wallace in both directions, then up toward the elevated train tracks. Had anyone seen anything that night? I turned and faced north. South Wallace emptied onto Sixty-Ninth Street. Behind me was Seventieth Street to the south. The vacant lots and decrepit houses were to my left, while the train tracks were to the right. There was nothing worth coming back here for, at least nothing that was good. Anyone who ventured into this part of Englewood had a specific reason for doing so.
“Explain,” Burke said.
“The motivation and timing don’t work. OCD says there’s been no recent action between the GA and Warlords. I mean they’re rivals, so a skirmish here and there, but nothing that would rise to the level of taking out Ice’s nephew, who everyone knows was like a son to him. They execute him and then dump him over here in the middle of nowhere? Why start a war now when everyone is making money?” I looked around the desolate buildings and vacant lots. Inanimate objects couldn’t speak, but they still had a way of talking.
“Whoever killed him wanted us to think it was the work of the Warlords. But the Warlords wouldn’t do it now and in this way. There’s a code in these streets, and this breaks it. Big time. Trying to finger the Warlords was a miscalculation by the real killer or killers. Question now is what other mistakes they made.”
Several unmarked cars rolled up to the tape. More white shirts from high up the food chain coming to stick their noses in it so the cameras could see.
A second helicopter had joined the first. They looked like dragonflies flirting with each other on a hot summer day.
“Has anyone told Ice yet?” I asked.
“I drew the short straw on that one,” Burke said, shaking his head. “Gonna be a bitch of a notification.”
I took one last look at Chopper McNair and remembered how tough, yet vulnerable, he had been in my office several days ago. Full of hopes and dreams one minute, now nothing but a minuscule footnote in Chicago’s notoriously rising murder count. The inescapable clutches of street life. Even when you tried to do right and get out, it always found a way to drag you back in.
I’d liked Chopper. There was something about him that made me root for him. I looked at the softness of his face and could hear him quoting that line from Othello. I needed to know who killed Chopper McNair and why.
19
I HAD A PLAN. Calderone & Calderone was located at 680 North Lake Shore Drive. To most of Chicago this was known as the address of the Playboy Building. When it had been completed in 1926, the building was the largest in the world and home to the American Furniture Mart. As business tides changed, it was converted into condominiums and offices in the late seventies. In 1989 Playboy moved into the building and requested an address change, and it’s been known as the Playboy Building ever since, even though the company had long since departed for the sunny landscapes of Beverly Hills.
Many of the offices now belonged to doctors who were affiliated with nearby Northwestern Memorial Hospital. I took the elevator to the ninth floor and walked through the glass doors of suite 910. It was packed mostly with women blossoming through various stages of pregnancy. There was a sprinkling of men playing up their fatherly roles. They held hands, fetched glasses of water, switched out magazines when the expecting mother was finished, and valiantly carried out an assortment of other trivial tasks that soothed and comforted.
Still standing just inside the door, I surveyed the long reception desk to the left of the waiting room. It had eight or more cubicles with women sitting there quietly talking to administrators and filling out paperwork. Each desk had a vase of fresh flowers. This was where I was hoping to hit pay dirt. It took me a few minutes, but I found my target. She was a well-dressed black woman with a generous amount of makeup, black shoulder-length hair with red frosted bangs, and enormous gold hoop earrings. She was probably somewhere south of thirty-five. She chomped on her gum while typing intently on her keyboard.
I waited until her
