The Unspoken

car here or there, nothing stirred. A few lights burned in the back of some of the tired houses, but for the most part an eerie sense of gloominess blanketed the desolate neighborhood. I inched my way along, passing St. Paul’s Church and the apartment building directly across the street. Driving east, we crossed Union, then Lowe, and that was when his words came back to me. When Novack had asked him why he’d driven down South Wallace, JuJu had said he had never even heard of the street before. He had said he didn’t know it, because that was not the street he normally took when leaving the neighborhood. He was attempting to go down Union, but it was blocked by a tow truck. So, he backed up onto Seventieth Street, then drove farther east until he found a street that would take him to Sixty-Ninth. South Wallace was that street, but he didn’t know its name. It looked more like an alley than a street.

“Sonuvabitch,” I said.

“You talking to yourself again?” Mechanic said.

“I missed it the first time we were here. Look down at Wallace. What do you see? Better yet, what don’t you see?”

“This a trick question or something?” Mechanic said. “There’s a helluva lot I don’t see. Where do you want me to start?”

“There’s no street sign,” I said.

“Which proves?”

“It explains why JuJu said he had never heard the name of the street even though he admitted to driving down it to get to Sixty-Ninth. Which leads to the next thing that was bothering me. He said he backed up out of Union because he couldn’t get around a tow truck. The killer could’ve backed out of South Wallace the same way JuJu backed out of Union. I was so damned focused on the exit from South Wallace that I didn’t think about the entrance. I completely missed it. The killer could’ve driven in, dropped the body, then backed up.”

“We got a little company to your left,” Mechanic said.

A car had quietly pulled up to the side of us with its lights off, an old white Lincoln sitting low to the ground. Two kids with bandanas and metal grills in their mouths looked over menacingly. The back seat was empty. The passenger smoked a long thin blunt. I nodded. They kept staring. I lifted my hand slowly in a gesture to let them know we didn’t want any trouble. They kept staring.

“Move back just a little,” Mechanic said.

I leaned the back of my head against the seat, clearing enough space for them to see down the barrel of his .500 Magnum. I looked at them and smiled. The passenger dropped his blunt. The car jerked forward, and the tires squealed as smoke poured out the dual exhaust.

“I like when you do that,” I said.

“Element of surprise gets them every time.”

Once the Lincoln had cleared, I continued to drive down Seventieth and hung a left on South Wallace. I pulled in about fifty feet, stopped for a few minutes, and took in the grimness of the alley and the depressing houses waiting for a good storm to put them out of their misery. I backed up onto Seventieth Street and continued driving all the way east, passing another church, Antioch Baptist, which anchored the northeast corner of Stewart Avenue. Seventieth Street fed all the way to Vincennes Avenue, leading into the Dan Ryan and I-94 Expressways.

“God has our answer,” I said when we were on the Dan Ryan heading back home.

“You’re not getting all religious on me now, are you?” Mechanic said.

I shifted the Porsche into fourth gear and opened her up on the empty road. “One or both of those churches knows our killer.”

38

REVEREND ALBERTA THOMPSON WAS a serious woman with a high-sitting arrangement of jet-black hair interrupted with a shock of gray that gave her an air of seasoned gravitas. She wore one of those complicated clergy robes, matte black with crimson-colored chevron velvet panels and a matching velvet front. A pair of decorative yoke panels ran the full length of her nearly six-foot frame. She might have been ministering a wayward flock in the middle of Chicago’s toughest neighborhood, but her dress was worthy of an audience at the Vatican. Bishop J. T. Samuelson, the lead pastor of St. Paul’s, was away for two weeks on a charitable mission in Cameroon, so Reverend Thompson was temporarily calling the shots. After a terse phone conversation, she had agreed to meet me.

We sat in her immaculate office surrounded by museum-quality African artwork. Little black dolls dressed in colorful kente cloth lined the bookcases, while intricately carved wood masks hung prominently on all four walls. She sat behind an enormous ebony desk and leaned back in an equally enormous leather chair. Her folders and papers looked as if they had been organized with a ruler’s edge.

Her baritone voice filled the room when she spoke. “So, you say you’re a private investigator?” She felt no need to disguise her skepticism. I was on her turf.

“I know I probably don’t look like one,” I said. “Truth is I was supposed to be a tennis star, but the practices were too long, and the girls were too available.” I pulled out my business card and slid it across her polished desk. There wasn’t much to look at, just my name and cell number, but she picked it up and considered it with great scrutiny, something I was going to learn she did with almost everything.

“Ashe Cayne,” she said, still inspecting the card. “Ashe, like Arthur Ashe?”

“So the story goes.”

“My father cried for an entire week when he won that Wimbledon,” she said, her eyes softening. “He thought it was one of our people’s most significant accomplishments on the world stage. If only he had lived long enough to see our president get elected.”

“There wouldn’t have been any Kleenex left to sell in Chicago,” I said.

She smiled. We were bonding. She pulled her card out of an