“Sounds like fun.”
“The good news is that people leave their cell phones on pretty much all the time. A couple of warrants for cell phone data and tower access and I can tell you where both of them ate, slept and took a dump for the last six months. If they connected at any point, I’ll find it.”
“You don’t need me for this, then.”
“No. You’re on your own for the evening. Go…do whatever dispatchers do when you’re not doing this.”
“I think I’ll go home and sleep.”
“Bold choice. Tell me how it works for you. See you tomorrow.” Langdon waved me off and then started to shove Calhoun back into his drawer.
Out on the street I started walking and looking for a cab. A black Mercedes rolled up next to me and a window rolled down.
“I’m not looking for a limo,” I said. I preferred real taxis over the less legal kind. Always seemed like a good way not to get robbed.
The man on the other side of the window smiled at me. He had nice teeth and a good suit and a handgun small enough to be unobtrusive but more than large enough to do me a lot of damage. “I think you’re going to want to take this ride, Mr. Valdez,” the man said.
I stopped walking. “Who are you?”
“I’m an associate of someone whose interests you and Detective Langdon have been asking about today. That someone would like to speak to you, if you don’t mind.”
“And if I do mind?”
“He’d like to speak to you anyway.”
“And if I refuse?”
“I’ll persuade you.”
“What does that mean?”
“That means that one way or another you’re coming for a ride with me, Mr. Valdez. You can take that ride in the back seat of this car, or the trunk. It makes no difference to me. So, you choose. Make it quick, or I choose for you. You won’t like my choice.”
My appointment was on the 43rd floor of a high-rise going up on the corner of Wabash and Van Buren. The floor was unfinished and the evening air vented through the places where windows had not yet been installed. There were two folding chairs. I was placed in one by the men who invited me for a ride. Fifteen minutes after I had been seated, another man arrived to take the other. He was smartly dressed and flanked on either side by two bulky-looking men, one of whom looked vaguely familiar. They stood while he sat.
“Mr. Valdez,” the man said. “A pleasure. Thank you for taking the meeting.”
“I couldn’t miss it,” I said.
“No, I don’t suppose you could. I take your trip here was not uncomfortable.”
“Aside from being kidnapped and frisked, it was fine.”
“Good.”
“One of your people took my wallet and keys and phone.”
“There are reasons for that. I’ll make sure they are returned to you after our discussion.”
“If I find hinky charges on my credit card, I’m going to be upset.”
The man smiled. “You won’t. Now, do you know me?”
“No.” I looked in the direction of the guy who threatened me to get in the car. “This charming associate of yours seemed to imply that I was being taken to meet Fintan Tunney. But you’re too young to be him.”
“You are correct. I’m Brennan Tunney.”
“I’m guessing this means you’re his son.”
“Correct again. His son and CEO of Tunney Holdings.”
“So you’re the legit side of things.”
“It’s all the legit side of things now.”
“I keep being told that. And yet we’re meeting in a building under construction after I’ve been kidnapped by a dude with a gun.”
“There was urgency in our meeting.”
“You could have just asked me to come into your office.”
“Not secure enough.”
I looked around at the open air 43rd floor. “And this is?”
“Yes.”
“If you say so. I’d think if you were that worried about security, you wouldn’t have a meeting in a building you own.”
Tunney smiled. “That’s just it, this isn’t our building. It’s being built by someone else entirely. I called in a favor. I don’t even like the fact it’s being built. My favorite parking lot in the Loop was here. Convenient to my interests. Now there’s just going to be another goddamn high-rise and nowhere to park.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. I will find a way through the pain.” Tunney motioned to the vaguely-familiar-looking man flanking him. “Cody here tells me you were asking after our business today. You and a detective.”
I looked up at Cody and then recognized where I saw him before: He was the security guy in the butler suit at the Wooldridge mansion. “That’s right,” I said. “We asked Orval Wooldridge if Jimmy Albert had been talking with the security folks.”
“Jimmy Albert being the dispatcher who was working with his wife.”
“That’s right.”
“What did Wooldridge say?”
“He said he wouldn’t know and to ask his assistant.”
“Why were you asking after Albert?”
“Because he’s missing. Going on three days now.”
“And you think we have something to do with that.”
“Well, you know. Before I was kidnapped it might have been just a theory. Now I’m feeling pretty sure about it.”
This got a chuckle out of Tunney. “I’m sure you do. But you’re wrong.”
I held out my hands and looked around. “Convince me.”
Tunney glanced up again at Cody, and then back at me. “Cody says you also asked Wooldridge if he spoke with Jimmy Albert after his wife died.”
“Yes. He said he told him to get his final payment and that was it.”
“Cody,” Tunney said.
“That’s not what happened,” Cody said. “I was there. I saw the whole thing. Heard the whole thing.”
I looked up at Cody. “So what happened?”
Cody looked down at his boss and then back at me. “It’s complicated. I mean, I have to tell you more than just about the last day.”
“All right.”
“Jimmy was hired to dispatch Mrs. Wooldridge. He’d done it before and it all became pretty rote. It always went the same way. Jimmy would use that thing he called an ‘applicator’ and she would disappear from the third floor room and reappear in the master bedroom on the second floor.”
“How many times did Jimmy dispatch her?”
“A couple three dozen times, maybe. Maybe more.”
“Jesus.”
“That’s an unusual number,” Tunney prompted me.
“Yes.”
“How so?”
“It sounds like Jimmy was doing remediation. Resetting the client when some medical therapy or procedure isn’t working out. That can happen two or three times, or even more than that. But I’ve never heard anyone being remediated more than a dozen times.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s fucking cruel, that’s why not. You’re killing someone. If he’s using the applicator, it’s pushing a payload into that woman’s head and detonating it, every single time. Have you ever been dispatched?”
“No.”
“I have,” the other guy flanking Tunney said.
I looked up at him. “You remember it, right? All of it? Up to and including the minute you died.”
“Yeah.”
“How was that for you?”
“It was pretty fucked up.” The guy glanced down at Tunney. “Sorry, boss.”
Tunney actually reached up and patted the guy’s hand, then turned back to Cody. “Keep going.”
“So that’s how things went,” Cody continued. “The doctors would try something, it wouldn’t work. Jimmy would dispatch her. She’d come back on the second floor. Me and whoever else was on duty would go get her. Bring her back to the third floor. And then the next day or the day after they’d try something else. But then one day Jimmy dispatched her and
she didn’t show up on the second floor.”
“What?” I said.
“That’s what we said. She wasn’t there and we didn’t know where she was. Mr. Wooldridge flipped out and yelled at everyone, and especially Jimmy. We started tearing the house apart looking for her. And then we got a phone call from the security at the Columbia Yacht Club. Mrs. Wooldridge was on the Fairy Tale. Their sailing yacht. She was there and she was naked and we needed to come get her.”
“What happened?”
“Well, me and another guy grabbed one of her gowns and went to go get her.”
“No. I mean, why did she appear there and not back on the second floor?”
“I don’t know, man. But I will say that when we went to get her, she was doing something I never saw her do before.”
“What was that?”
“She was smiling. She had laid down, naked as a jaybird, on the deck of the yacht, arms spread out, eyes closed. Big ol’ smile. And I came up to her with a gown and I said ‘Mrs. Wooldridge, we have to go.’”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Oh, let’s not. I’m so happy here.’”
I didn’t say anything to this. After a minute Cody figured out I wasn’t going to say anything, so he kept going. “So we finally get her dressed and into the car and back to the house, and Mr. Wooldridge is seriously pissed and is crying at her and yelling at us. Jimmy is watching all of this happen and then when things settle down a bit he comes over to me and asks me what happened.”
“How did he respond to it?”
“He didn’t. He just stood there and then thanked me and walked away. And then the next time he was there, Mrs. Wooldridge died. And when that happened, Mr. Wooldridge exploded at Jimmy. Yelling and cursing and screaming at him. Threatening him. He tried to attack him but one of our guys stopped that. I mean, not that he would have done anything to Jimmy. You’ve seen him. He’s not in the shape to do anything to anyone. But it wasn’t anything like he told you it was. It wasn’t anything like that at all.”
I nodded and turned my attention to Tunney. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Now it’s my turn to tell you a story,” Tunney said to me.
“All right.”
“Once upon a time there was a man who grew up in Chicago, and whose father and grandfather were part of the old Irish gangs that were part of the city even earlier than Prohibition. This man was pretty smart and pretty lucky and by the time he was thirty was running most of what was left of the Irish gangs’ interests in the city and most of the state. You with me so far?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because what eventually happens is this man has a son. And the son says to the father, come on, Pop, stop being lucky and start being smart. So together the father and son start moving the family’s interests toward the legitimate side. It takes a while, it’s not a smooth process and—” here Tunney smiled as if to acknowledge the current situation, “—certain old habits die hard.”
“Like inviting people to discussions at a point of a gun,” I offered.
“Sure, like that. Or, for another example, like using dispatchers under the table to help out certain employees who have gotten themselves in a bad way and need to be saved from themselves.”
“Someone who might have overdosed, for example.”
“That’s a very good example. And as you know, dispatching isn’t a one hundred percent perfect science. Sometimes people die and stay dead.”
“Yes, they do.”
“And then that’s a mark on the dispatcher’s permanent record.”
“I suppose so.”
“Okay. So, let’s say in this story that this company, which is mostly straight but still has some kinks to work out, was sharing a dispatcher with a certain older gentleman who had a sick wife. The association, as it happens, is completely coincidental—the dispatcher came to the jobs through entirely separate channels.”
“That’s some coincidence.”
Tunney cocked his head at this. “Is it? Or is it that, ultimately, business—legitimate or not—is a small world, and sooner or later everyone knows everyone. You’ve seen both sides of the business world, haven’t you, Mr. Valdez? Can you say there’s a bright line where one side ends and the other begins? Or is it that there’s a big fat gray area in the middle? A gray area you yourself have spent a lot of time in?”
“I take your point,” I said.
“I thought you might. So, coincidence, but it hardly matters. Because the chairman of the mostly-straight company and the older gentleman with the sick wife are friends. Have been since high school. And after the wife passes the chairman goes to visit his friend, and the friend discovers that the dispatcher who couldn’t save his wife also didn’t save the company’s employee. And what are the odds of that? Two failed dispatches one right after the other?”
“One in a million.”
“One in a million,” Tunney agreed. “Or something like that. And so this man, this old man who lost his wife, the one person in the world he loves more than anyone or anything, is enraged. It’s impossible this has happened like it did. It can’t be an accident. Somehow this dispatcher is at fault. He’s to blame. And he has to be punished.”
I was silent again at this. Tunney was mirroring Wooldridge’s own words to me earlier in the day. “And then what?” I asked Tunney, when I finally remembered to.
“Then the old man who has just lost his wife asks his friend for a favor. A lifetime favor.”
I pointed at Tunney. “So you are involved.”
Tunney shook his head. “You’re not listening. Listen to what I said. The old man asked his friend for a favor. Not the friend’s company. Just his friend.”
“That is a very subtle distinction.”
“It’s very subtle, yes.”
“I’m not sure it’s a distinction law enforcement would care to make.”
Tunney spread his arms wide. “And now you know why we’re here.”
“Can we stop telling stories and get to it, then, Mr. Tunney?”
“Yes, of course.” Tunney leaned forward and clasped his hands together. “Let’s get to it.”
“You’re telling me your dad helped Orval Wooldridge abduct Jimmy Albert because Jimmy failed to dispatch Elaine Wooldridge.”
“Yes.”
“You’re telling me that he did this under his own steam, without using any resources from any of your companies.”
“Yes.”
“And presumably you’re telling me this because somehow you want me to pin this all on Wooldridge and not on your dad.”
“That’s about the size of it, yes.”
“Why?”
“You mean, besides that it’s my Pop and that I love him?”
“Yes.”
Tunney looked shocked. “Isn’t that enough?”
“No. Sorry. I just met you, but. No.”
Tunney smiled at this. “Fair enough. Let’s just say that we have some business with the city coming up that, if the contracts are successful, will allow my family to finally cut ties to anything that might even hint of racketeering. Everything above board, everything legal, everything safely in the realm of the white collar, where even if you do something wrong the worst you get is a fine. We’re done, finito, out. Wooldridge asking my father for a lifetime favor this week has been…inconvenient to these goals.”
“May I be honest with you, Mr. Tunney?”
“Of course.”
“We’re already looking at your company. There’s already a connection. Brodie Calhoun, your employee, is in the morgue.”
“A suicide.”
“Come on.”
“You’re a dispatcher, Mr. Valdez. And an ethically shaky one, historically speaking. You know how it’s done. You know they’re not going to find anything that makes it look like anything other than a suicide. It’s nicely arranged and anything that would be able to suggest otherwise has been compromised by a few days in the lake. You know it.” br />
“Maybe.”
“And as to the company, go ahead and look at it all you want. Scratch that—I want Chicago PD to look at the company as much as they want. Hell, I’ll open the file cabinets myself. Because the company is one hundred percent clean in this.”
“And if they’re looking at the company, they’re not looking at your dad.”
Tunney clapped his hands. “There you go. Everyone who does business knows our past. They expect we’ll get looked at from time to time. That’s a sunk cost, in terms of our business. That won’t strike anyone as unusual. And we’ll come out clean.”
“But your dad is chairman and if something comes out about him, everyone will assume the company rots from the head.”
“Yes. Nothing would stick, of course. Nothing ever sticks to Pop. The city and feds were after him for decades. But perception matters. The company’s clean. Dad isn’t. I want to focus away from him.”
“There’s a hitch to this plan of yours.”
“Tell me.”
“Jimmy Albert is still missing. We can’t find him. And if the only way to find him is through your dad, then you have a problem.”
Tunney glanced over at Cody again.
“What?” I said. “What is it?”
“I’ll give you something that will help you,” Tunney said. “But I need your word.”
“You need what?”
“Your word. That this thing gets steered to Wooldridge and not to my father.”
“Are we children here?”
Tunney sighed. “No, Mr. Valdez, we’re not. We’re two ethically compromised businessmen trying to find our way to a deal. You want to find your friend. I want to keep my dad from jail and my company off the rocks. I’m not stupid enough to try to bribe you and you wouldn’t be stupid enough to take it. Threatening you doesn’t serve my interests and won’t bring you to my side. All that we have at this point to offer each other is trust. So: Give me your word and when you go I’ll make sure you have information. And I will owe you a favor. That’s the deal.”
“And if I break the deal?”
The smile was back on Tunney’s face. “You know it’s hard to murder someone these days. I mean, I know you know that, given your job. But it’s not impossible. No, it’s not impossible at all. All it really takes is patience, and time, and silence. So let me assure you, Mr. Valdez. I am patient. I have time. And I am very good at silence.”