“How did you know that was going to happen?” I asked Indro as the courtroom cleared.
“Simple,” he said. “Marco is dead. The cops killed him.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Indro
The flurries had turned to big, fat flakes muffling the city sounds as they laid down a white carpet over rooftops and streets. Parked cars turned into amorphous white hills as it continued to come down.
Sophie and I chilled in her car, the heat going full-blast and keeping us relatively clear. Once in a while the wipers would swish over the windshield, clearing away the melted snow. The day took on a gray darkness which perfectly suited our mood.
“Do you think you could identify these undercover cops?” Sophie asked.
“Sure, for all the good it would do. I’m certain they’ve got rock-solid alibis in the form of a dozen other cops willing to testify they’d been in a sports bar all day.”
Sophie’s pretty face scrunched up in disgust. “Did you see what happened to Marco’s body?”
“No, but I’m sure it’s long gone. Probably threw it in the lake.”
“With the way the wind is blowing, I can’t see them heading out all that far.”
I nodded. “Good point, but there’s miles of coastline. They could have dropped it anywhere.”
“Don’t you have resources you can tap for information? Someone in the Chicago PD?”
I let out a short bark of utterly mirthless laughter. “Hell no. Don Maloik’s got his sources, but I’m too low on the totem pole for that kinda noise. I do have some folks I can hit up, though it won’t be pleasant.”
Sophie sighed. “I don’t see where we have a lot of options. Without Marco’s body, we’ve got no way to prove unequivocally that he’s Glen Gilberti.”
“Right.” I picked my phone up out of her center console and dialed Sal’s Place, the same greasy spoon where I’d run into Diego what seemed like forever ago. “Hey, Mitch? You on kitchen duty today? Yeah, this is Indro. I need the Snow Day Special. Nah, no rush. I’ve got to run a couple of errands. Say, in an hour? Sweet.”
“Snow Day Special? Is that some kind of code?”
“You could say that.” I was having a good time being cryptic. Sophie cocked her eyebrow at me but didn’t press the issue.
We swung by a dollar store and cleaned them out of flannel blankets. Ugly ass mother fuckers, plaid and baby-shit brown and dull black. They were plenty warm though, which was all that mattered.
Next we hit the liquor store. Sophie’s indulgence hit its zenith when I filled up a shopping cart with bottles of Fireball and cheap scotch.
“Are you planning on going on a bender? How’s that going to help us?”
“It’s not for me. Well, mostly.” I showed her a bottle of Jameson. “You can have your Jack Daniels and your fancy ass shit; this right here is the good stuff as far as I’m concerned.”
“I’m a Tullamore Dew kind of gal.”
“Ha! That stuff’s not bad. Maybe later I can try and convert you, and we can… heh heh… debrief each other.”
Her cheeks turned red, and not from the cold. Like she wasn’t a total demon in the sack.
We finally hit Sal’s about an hour and a half after I’d put in my Snow Day order. When I came out bearing a cardboard box full of chopped beef sammiches, steam rising from the top, Sophie’s incredulity had about snapped.
“Here,” I said. “Eat up. Then we’re taking a little trip down to skid row.”
“Skid row?”
“Uh huh.”
With full bellies and hearts full of hope, we drove down to those places where the people who fall through society’s cracks wind up. “Grab the blankets, I’ll get the booze and the sammiches.”
“You’re going to distribute these to the homeless people!”
“You’re one smart cookie, Miss Vercetti.”
“But why?”
“Because homeless people get overlooked. Constantly. People learn to look right through them. That makes them the perfect eyes and ears, if you treat them like they’re actual human beings.”
“Do you do this often?”
“Most days when it snows, yeah.”
“Even when you don’t need information?”
“Doll, I always need information.”
Sophie grinned. “Indro, you big softie.”
“Hey, don’t let that get around, all right? I gotta rep to maintain.”
We approached a group of bums standing around a weak fire flickering from the top of a rusted barrel. They saw us coming and gap-toothed grins spread over their cold-numbed faces.
“Indro Mother Fucking Lastra!” An old timer named Charlie Coal approached and shook my free hand. “Always a pleasure.”
“Likewise. How you holding up, Charlie? You go to the clinic about that cough yet?”
“Yeah, they said it was bronchitis, not pneumonia. Gave me an RX, but I ain’t got the dough to fill it.”
I reached into my pocket and extracted my Jewish bankroll. I flicked about fifty into his ashy palm.
“That should cover it.”
We dispensed the blankets, booze, and sammiches. Turned out nobody in that particular alley knew anything about the police disposing of bodies, but Charlie knew a guy named Switchyard Sam who might have spotted something.
I drove us to the switchyard, where the homeless had a little camp set up just out of range of the rock-salt-loaded rifles the road crew carried. Switchyard Sam pointed us in the direction of a cat named Nicky, who actually saw something worthwhile.
“Yeah, I was down by the Double-Eye-Pee-Dee, and I done seen these two pigs dumping something off the pier.”
“You sure they were cops?”
“They swung their arms out to the side like they was packing heat. Besides, I can smell a pig from a mile away.”
He went on to describe the two shitstains what killed Marco. I gave him a hundred to go with the booze and sundries before Sophie and I split.
“What’s the IIPD?”
“Illinois International Port District. Right up on the edge of the Indiana border. Makes sense. Don’t know why the piggies didn’t take the body out on the lake
