“These streets mean and stupid as fuck,” Chico said.
“Chopper stopped running the streets a while ago,” I said. “He was a smart kid. Graduated from DePaul. Made dean’s list his last two years. Quoted Shakespeare quite easily.”
“A real fuckin’ Einstein,” Chico said. “Smart in the books don’t mean smart in the streets. Knowing a bunch of trigonometry and all them shapes ain’t stop his ass from getting killed before his twenty-fifth birthday. What you in this for?”
“That would be geometry, not trigonometry,” I said. “I’m looking for a missing girl.” I pulled out a photo of Tinsley and handed it to him.
“Damn she fine,” Chico said. “What she got to do with Ice nephew?”
“They were copulating,” I said.
Chico looked puzzled. “Speak English, man,” he said, pulling the toothpick out of his mouth. “What the fuck you tryin’ a say?”
“Exactly what you just said.”
“They was fuckin’?”
“And maybe even in love.”
Chico took another salivating look at Tinsley and nodded in approval.
“So, it’s safe to say you’ve never seen her before,” I said.
“If I had, you wouldn’t need to be lookin’ for her.” He smiled a mouth full of platinum. “She’d be right here by my side.”
I turned to Mechanic. The corners of his mouth moved ever so slightly.
“Any chance one of your crew went rogue and took out Chopper?” I asked.
“Zero. None of my people is stupid enough to do something like that. It would start a fuckin’ war that we don’t need right now. Everyone stickin’ to they own turf. Everyone makin’ plenty of money. I’m a businessman first. Killin’ Ice’s kin would be really bad for everybody business. Don’t nobody make a fuckin’ move less I say so.”
I had figured as much.
“Who would try to set you up for this?”
“How the fuck I’m supposed to know?”
“Any beefs right now?”
Chico flashed an easy smile. “Always gonna be beefs, but ain’t no shit bad enough to rise to this level.”
“Somebody wants you to go down for it. Left your signature. His left ring finger was missing, cut completely off at the knuckle. And your crown was drawn under his rib cage.”
“Which side?”
“Left.”
“You got a picture?”
I took out my phone and opened it to the photo I had taken. I zoomed in, so he could see it clearly, then handed it to him.
He examined it for a few seconds and started laughing. “It’s a sorry-ass fake,” he said. “Whoever did it don’t know what the fuck they doin’.”
“Care to expound upon that?”
“You supposed to be the detective. Can’t you figure it out?”
“I never worked gangs,” I said. “Wasn’t tough enough. Big guns and decorous tats tend to scare me, especially when the ink is crawling all over the neck.”
“You’re a real wiseass,” Chico said.
“People keep telling me that.”
Chico shook his head. “The crown ain’t right. We put our numbers in the crown. Two and nine. Real small. You gotta look real close to see it.” Chico turned the phone so that I could see the tag. He had opened it to full zoom. “The two goes in the bottom left of the crown and the nine in the bottom right. It represents Canóvanas, our motherland back in Puerto Rico. The zip code is 00729, but we only use the last two numbers. Whoever the fuckin’ amateur was who did this forgot the numbers or didn’t know how to use ’em.”
“Sloppy work,” I said.
“Real sloppy,” Chico returned. “But do me a favor. When you find out who did this shit, let me know first. I’m gonna personally put some lead in his ass for trying to fuck with my business.”
23
MECHANIC AND I COLLECTED our hardware and made it back to the car. A group of kids were ogling my ride, then began to walk away nonchalantly as we approached. The leader of the crew turned around and said, “What year is that?”
“Eighty-six,” I said.
“That’s what’s up,” he returned, before nodding and walking away.
“You up for a little spin in my that’s-what’s-up ride?” I asked Mechanic.
“As long as I get home by dark,” Mechanic said. “I got some business tonight.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“The female kind,” he said.
It took us just under twenty minutes to work our way south to Englewood, and on the way Violet had checked in to let me know they had been given legal authority to examine Tinsley’s accounts. Once they had, they’d found her trust money untouched except for a few thousand dollars. She’d also discovered that Tinsley hadn’t used her credit or ATM cards since she had gone missing. It wasn’t exactly easy to survive this long with none of your own money. If Tinsley wasn’t dead, maybe someone else was paying her way.
I turned my attention back to the road and started at the intersection of Halsted and Seventy-First Street. I turned left on Seventy-First and traveled east toward the viaduct and elevated train tracks, then kept going until I reached the Dan Ryan Expressway. I turned and looped back, coming up Sixty-Ninth all the way west back to Halsted. It was a depressing ten minutes. Condemned buildings, abandoned cars, blocks upon blocks of vacant lots and dilapidated row houses. After I had completed the loop and had gotten my bearings, I did it again, this time more deliberately, paying attention to the streets running parallel to South Wallace and making a grid in my mind to better understand the typical flow of traffic. I made note of certain landmarks, such as churches, schools, and fire stations.
Running from west to east on Seventy-First Street, we passed the Martin Luther King Junior Academy of Social Justice, an elementary school with weathered pale brick and a tired marquee precipitously leaning toward the sidewalk. The Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church sat across the street, a lumbering structure of heavy, impenetrable stone. We passed Lowe Avenue, which meant South Wallace was the next block. But it wasn’t. The Lily Gardens Park ran right up against the embankment of the elevated
