There was scattered applause as the crowd realized that accident victim was still alive. Then the crowd began to disperse.
I returned the handgun to Langdon, who checked it and holstered it. I pointed to the woman’s bloody clothes, which lay in the street where she had been. “You should check those for ID.”
“After you.”
“You’re the cop here.”
“Yes I am, and now I’m going to have paperwork to fill out, because my weapon was discharged.”
“Join the club. I have paperwork on this and on the hospital dispatch. I have no sympathy for you.”
“I’m still holding you to your promise. About coming with me to see Katie Albert.”
“That was a shitty thing to do, by the way.”
Langdon nodded. “Well, if the result is we find Jimmy Albert, then I can live with it.”
There was a noise from the street. It was the accident victim’s cell phone, blasting out a ring tone. We both stared at it for several seconds.
“You going to answer that or what?” I asked Langdon.
She sighed and went to go pick up the phone.
“You okay?” Langdon asked me, as we waited to be buzzed into the apartment Jimmy Albert shared with his wife.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You look a little tense.”
“I don’t usually go with cops to talk to people.”
“Yeah, but that’s not it. It’s something else.”
“I told you it’s complicated.”
The door buzzed, signaling Katie was letting us in. Langdon grabbed the door to open it. “Did you sleep with her or something?”
“What?”
“Jimmy Albert’s wife. Are you having sex with her?”
“No.”
“That would explain the tension.”
“That’s not it.”
“You sure?” Langdon held the door open for me to go through.
“I would remember sleeping with Katie,” I said, and walked in.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you would tell me about it.”
“You’re a cop. You should be able to tell if I’m lying.”
Langdon walked through the door. “You might be a good liar.”
“Is that your assessment of me?”
“No, but that would just mean you’re a better liar than I thought.” We walked up the stairs to the third floor, where Katie Albert was waiting for us.
She met us at the door, and her face darkened when she saw me. “What’s he doing here?” she asked Langdon.
“I thought he might be helpful to me,” Langdon said. “Someone in the same profession as your husband might be able to tell me about things I would otherwise be missing.”
Katie glanced over at me. “Uh-huh.”
“Would you prefer that Mr. Valdez wait out here while we talk?”
Katie was silent for a few seconds before she said. “No,” and opened the door to let us both in. She walked down her apartment hallway, toward the kitchen area in the back, without checking to see if we were following. Langdon gave me a look that said, we are going to have a talk about this, believe it. I shrugged. We walked down the hall, past the living room area of the apartment, which was still in disarray, and which still had blood on the rug and floor. I wondered whether the stain would ever get out of the rug.
In the kitchen Katie had propped herself up near the sink, holding a coffee cup. “Can I get you some coffee, detective?” she asked Langdon. I was aware I was not included in that invitation.
“Thanks, but no,” Langdon said. “We don’t want to take too much of your time.”
“Have you heard anything about Jimmy?”
“Not yet, but other detectives have been over to the Agency. We’re working to reconstruct his official appointments and duties and see if there’s anything there. And there should have been uniformed officers taking statements from your neighbors here earlier.”
“I saw them.”
“We’re working to find him, Mrs. Albert.”
“Thank you.”
“Of course.” Langdon nodded over to me. “I had a conversation with Mr. Valdez here earlier today about the job he and your husband share in common. We talked about the official Agency assignments, but we also talked about private engagements.”
A snort came out of Katie. “Yes, well. Tony would know about those.”
Langdon glanced over at me at this. I looked back at her blankly. “I was wondering if you knew whether your husband had any private engagements or clients recently,” she said, returning her attention to Katie.
“He had some in the past,” Katie said. She jerked a finger at me. “This one got a few of them for him. Real shitty jobs for creepy people. It brought in money but I told him I didn’t want him to do it anymore.”
“Why is that, Mrs. Albert?”
“Because we had people buzzing the door in the middle of the night, needing him to come out for jobs. They would sneak him out and he would come back at six in the morning and tell me he couldn’t say where he was. One time I was up when one of these assholes dropped him off; he came up to the apartment to pay him. All crumpled hundred dollar bills. Then he looked over to me and told Jimmy that I would be the first to go if Jimmy ever said anything about what they’d been up to. That’s when I told him to stop. Whatever money we were getting wasn’t enough.”
“So there were people who meant your husband harm.”
Katie shook her head. “That was a couple of years ago.”
“And your husband hasn’t had any private engagements or clients since.”
“No. Not that I know about.”
“No extra money coming into the house. No strange hours. No one being buzzed in, in the middle of the night.”
“None of that.”
“You’re sure.”
Katie’s face twisted. “No, of course I’m not sure now,” she said. She shot a dagger in my direction. “Ask this asshole about it. If anyone would know if Jimmy’s been doing anything on the side, he would. He’s the one who got him those jobs in the first place.”
Langdon looked at me. “I don’t know anything about what Jimmy’s been doing with his time,” I said.
“But you did,” Katie said. “You and Jimmy and your goddamned ‘bowling team,’ Tony.”
“That was a long time ago, Katie,” I said.
“Oh, bullshit, Tony.” Katie slammed her coffee mug down on the counter she was leaning against. “You’re dirty. You’ve always been dirty. And now maybe whatever it is that you got Jimmy into has gotten him killed.”
I held up my hands. “Katie. I’m clean. I got out the same time you told Jimmy to. I know you don’t believe me—I know you don’t want to believe me—but it’s the truth. I got out and I’ve been staying out. If Jimmy got himself into something, whatever Jimmy got himself into, I’ve got nothing to do with it.”
Katie picked up the coffee mug from the counter and threw it at my head. Coffee arced in the air. I ducked to avoid the mug and got coffee drops down my neck. “You were the one who got him into it in the first place, Tony!” Katie yelled. “You were the one who brought this to our door. And I promise you this, Tony. Whatever’s happening to Jimmy now, if it’s because of whatever you brought him into, if he ends up dead, you better hope I don’t find you at a crosswalk while I’m driving. Because I will fucking go up on the sidewalk to get to you.”
“You wouldn’t kill him,” Langdon said, after that statement had hung in the air. “Not permanently.”
“No,” Katie agreed. “But it would hurt like hell.”
“Explain,” Langdon said.
“It’s complicated,” I said.
“That much I get. But explain it anyway.”
We were at a Greek restaurant on Damen, close to the Alberts’ apartment. We came in two minutes before closing and the owner made the universal gesture for “kitchen’s closed.” Langdon flashed her badge, ordered two coffees and pointed to a booth. The
owner sighed, nodded, brought coffee to the booth, and got back to closing up the rest of the shop.
I fiddled with my cup. “I didn’t think Katie would still be that pissed at me.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Langdon said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have tried so hard not to come with me when I asked you to. I’m pretty sure you knew she would still be that pissed with you and would try to blame you.”
“Yeah, fair enough.”
“Is she right?”
“That it’s my fault?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
Langdon gave me a look.
“Probably no,” I allowed.
“I think you need to go back to the beginning of this for me,” she said.
“I told you that private gigs are a legal gray area.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Well, some of them are more gray than others.”
“Give me examples. Start with something only sort of gray.”
“All right. So, let’s say I take a gig working for a film crew here in the city, which is something that I’ve done before. They’re filming a complicated stunt, and I’m on hand in case something goes wrong. This part is totally legal and above board. The studio and the insurance company and the producers all want me there so they don’t have any fatalities on set.”
“Not gray at all.”
“Right, until it all goes wrong and the stunt person breaks their neck. The injury is serious—that stunt person isn’t ever going to walk again—but they’re not going to die from it. My job is to prevent fatalities. To dispatch the people who are clearly going to die if I don’t intervene. It’s not my job to dispatch people who are critically, horribly injured but aren’t going to die from it.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming on.”
“The ‘but’ here is this: No one in this situation, not the studio, the insurance, the producers, the director, the union or especially the poor bastard it’s happened to, wants this guy to go on living like this. It’s bad publicity for the movie, the stunt person will never work again in their chosen field, and the union’s insurance will have to pay out hundreds of thousands in medical bills, and ultimately someone somewhere’s getting sued.”
“So what happens then?”
“So what happens then is the first assistant director or the on-set producer calls you over and quietly hands you an envelope with forty thousand dollars of cash in it and asks you to take care of it. And you go over to the poor bastard, make an assessment that, surprise, the injuries actually are fatal after all, and pop one into their skull. The stunt person shows up at home, neck unbroken, gets on a plane to Chicago six hours later and everyone’s back to work the next day.”
“And you’re forty thousand dollars richer.”
“And with a clear conscience because honestly it’s better for everyone.”
“Unless it’s that one time out of a thousand.”
“That’s the risk. But then it’s only bad for me and the stunt person. Everyone else is off the hook, liability-wise.”
“This is something that’s happened to you.”
I smiled. “I am offering this strictly as a hypothetical.”
“Give me something less gray now.”
“Another hypothetical, you mean.”
“Call it what you want.”
“All right. Down on the far South Side, we’re talking a couple streets inside the city limits, there’s a restaurant that’s been shut down for years. And every Thursday night, there’s a fight club that goes on in it.”
Langdon smiled. “What, like the movie? ‘The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club’ sort of thing?”
I smiled back. “Not exactly. In this one, the fighters go after each other with hammers and baseball bats.”
“Jesus.”
“And it’s not run by Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. It’s run by a pack of hardass motherfuckers who used to run dog fights until they figured out this is safer and more profitable.”
“Okay, but who the hell volunteers to fight like that?”
I looked at Langdon. “Are you from Chicago? I mean, born here.”
“I am, but what does that have to do with anything?”
“Are you from the South Side?”
“Oh, Valdez, tell me you’re not about to get racist on me. My own black self was just beginning to like you.”
“My point is that Chicago is still super-segregated and racist, and there are lots of young men who can’t find work because of it, and you would know it if you were from the South Side. And that there are hardass motherfuckers like the ones who run this fight club who are happy to give these young men fifty bucks a fight to bash each other’s brains in with a hammer, and they’ll take it because what else have they got.”
“Jesus,” Langdon said again, and took a swig of her coffee. “And dispatchers are involved in this shitshow somehow.”
“Yes. Because everyone who fights, even the winners, have the living hell beaten out of them. Broken bones, tendons shredded, gouges, eyes out of their sockets, all of that. None of them are going to the hospital to get themselves taken care of, are they? First rule of fight club, and all that.”
“So, what? The dispatcher just shoots everyone at the end of the fight?”
“That’s the standard operating procedure, yeah.”
“They don’t need a dispatcher for that. They could just give a gun to a flunky.”
“These guys use dispatchers for the same reasons they drive fancy cars and pay for bottle service in clubs.”
“As status symbols? You have got to be kidding me.”
“There are other reasons. But, yup. That’s a big one.”
“How much could a dispatcher get for this?”
“Five hundred a night, plus tips.”
“Tips? Tips?”
“If everyone was dispatched safely, you’d get a hundred dollar tip. Or more.”
“Tell me you never did this sort of shit.”
“I’m offering a hypothetical.”
“Hypothetical my ass, Valdez. Tell me you never did this.”
“I never did this.”
“But you’ve done things like this.”
“I’m going to plead the Fifth from this point on, I think.”
Langdon looked disgusted. “What about Jimmy Albert?”
“What about him?”
“Did he ever work one of these hammer fights?”
“I don’t think it’s my place to say.”
“So, yes.”
I spread my hands, placatingly. “I never said that. That’s your assumption.”
Langdon glowered. “Why?” she finally asked.
“Why do this stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“For the money, of course. Why do you think?”
“So this shit doesn’t bother you.”
“Private gigs? No,” I said, and then held up a hand because I could see Langdon about to go off. “Most private gigs aren’t like that. Most of my private gigs are things where I’m hired by rich people to attend polo matches or sailboat races, so if they fall off a horse or a boat I can get them home safely. Last weekend I went skydiving so I could dispatch this guy if his parachute didn’t open. Ninety percent of all the private gigs I have ever done are like that.”
“But then there’s that other ten percent.”
“Well, it’s like I told Katie. I don’t do those anymore. I got out of it.”
“Because it stopped being fun to watch poor black men beat each other’s brains out and then shoot them in the head when they’re done.”
There was no good way to answer that. “Something like that,” I allowed.
“You mentioned that you and Jimmy Albert went ‘bowling,’” Langdon said. “Then tonight Katie Albert mentioned something about your ‘bowling team.’ I guessing your team didn’t actually go bowling, did you?”
I shook my head. “No, it was an actual bowli
ng team at first. Me and Jimmy and Judd Montgomery and Mason Schilling.”
“You were all dispatchers.”
“Yes. Me and Jimmy were in the same class. Judd and Mason were in the class after us.”
“Go on.”
“Mason always complained about living inside a state government salary and started looking for private gigs. He wasn’t picky, so he found them. And then he started getting more work than he could handle himself, so he’d parcel them out to the rest of us on league nights. Eventually we stopped bowling and just got together to get gigs from Mason.”
“So this Mason character was the ringleader.”
“‘Ringleader’ is a little grand for what he did, but sure.”
“But Katie Albert blames you.”
“I asked Jimmy to join the bowling team. That was back when it was just bowling.”
Langdon smiled at this. “No bowling team anymore.”
“No. I stopped taking certain gigs and Katie told Jimmy to stop taking them. Judd left dispatching and went to law school. I get most of my private gigs now by referral from other clients. That’s why I work with so many rich people now. I’m reliable and confidential.”
“What about Mason Schilling?”
“I’m pretty sure he’s still not too picky.”
“Could Jimmy still have been getting gigs from him?”
“I don’t know. Mason and I don’t talk much anymore.”
“Falling out?”
“We just run in different circles.”
“And yours don’t involve hammers.”
“Something like that.”
Langdon glanced over to the owner of the restaurant, who was giving us pained expressions. “I’d like to talk with this Mason character.”
“You won’t get anything out of him.”
“I’m persuasive.”
“He’ll lawyer up the instant he sees you coming. I guarantee it.”
“I can make his life difficult if he doesn’t talk. It’s hard to work the shady side of the street if a cop is shining a spotlight on you.”
“Mason has been doing this a long time. He can probably wait you out.”
“Fine. Then you talk to him. Ask him if he’s been giving any work to Jimmy Albert. He’ll talk to you. You’re an old pal.”