“Got a citizen down here to see Larry Legs about the kid.”
He listened a few moments and then hung up.
“Second floor. Up the stairs, to your left, go down the hall, last door. Says Homicide. He’s the black guy.”
“Thanks.”
As I headed up the stairs I thought about how the cop had simply referred to Smathers as “the kid” and whoever he had spoken to had understood what he meant. It told me a lot about the case, more than what had been in the newspapers. Cops try their best to depersonalize their cases. They are like serial killers in that way. If the victim is not a person who lived and breathed and hurt, he can’t haunt you. Calling a victim “the kid” is the opposite of that practice. It told me that a year later the case still had a strong hold on Area Three.
The homicide squad room was about the size of half a tennis court and had dark green industrial carpet. There were three work pods consisting of five desks each. Two pairs of desks faced each other and the fifth, the sergeant’s desk, was pushed in at the end. Along the wall to my left were row after row of file cabinets with locking bars running through the pull handles. Along the far wall, behind the work pods, were two offices with glass windows looking out on the squad room. One was the lieutenant’s office. The other looked like an interview room. There was a table in there and I could see a man and a woman in the room eating sandwiches off deli paper unwrapped and used as place mats. Besides those two there were three others at desks in the room and a secretary sat behind a desk near the door.
“You want to see Larry?” she said to me.
I nodded and she pointed to the man sitting at a desk on the far side of the room. He was alone in the pod. I headed over. He didn’t look up from his paperwork, even when I got to him.
“It snowing out there yet?” he asked.
“Not yet. But it’s going to.”
“It always does. I’m Washington, whaddaya need?”
I looked at the two detectives in the other pods. Nobody even glanced at me.
“Well, I wanted to talk to you alone, if I could. It’s about the Smathers kid. I have some information on it.”
I could tell without looking at them that this made the others look over at me. Washington, too, finally put down his pen and looked up at me. He looked like he was in his thirties but already there was a dusting of gray in his short-cropped hair. Still, he was in good shape. I could tell that before he even stood up. He also looked sharp. He wore a dark brown suit with a white shirt and striped tie. The suit jacket could barely contain his massive chest.
“You want to talk to me alone? Whaddaya got?”
“Well, that’s what I want to talk to you alone about.”
“You’re not one of these guys wants to confess, are you?”
I smiled.
“What if I was? Maybe I’d be the real thing.”
“That’d be the day. All right, let’s go in the room. But I hope you’re not going to waste my time—what’d you say your name was?”
“Jack McEvoy.”
“Okay, Jack, if I kick those people outta there and you waste my time, they and me aren’t going to be too happy about it.”
“I don’t think it will be a problem.”
He stood up now and I could see that he was shorter than I had thought. He had the lower half of another man’s body. Short, stubby legs beneath a wide and strong upper torso. Thus the name the desk cop had used, Larry Legs. No matter how sharply he dressed this oddness in his physique would always betray him.
“Something wrong?” he asked when he came around to me.
“Uh, no. I was . . . Jack McEvoy.”
I put down the laptop and held out my hand but Washington didn’t take it.
“Let’s go into the room, Jack.”
“Sure.”
He had traded the snub of my stare for one of his own. It was okay. I walked behind him over to the door of the room where the man and woman were eating their lunch. He glanced back once, looking down at the satchel I carried.
“Whaddaya got in there?”
“Computer. A couple things to show you if you’re interested.”
He opened the door and the man and woman looked up.
“Sorry, folks, picnic’s over,” Washington said.
“Can you give us ten, Legs?” the man asked before getting up.
“Can’t do it. Got a customer here.”
They rewrapped what was left of their sandwiches and left the room without a further word. The man gave me a stare that I interpreted to be annoyance. I didn’t care. Washington signaled me in and I put my computer case down on the table next to a folded cardboard sign with the no smoking symbol on it. We sat down on opposite sides of the table. The room smelled like stale smoke and Italian salad dressing.
“Now, what can I do for you?” Washington asked.
I gathered my thoughts and tried to appear calm. I was never comfortable dealing with cops, even though their world fascinated me. I always felt that they might suspect something about me. Something bad. Some telling flaw in me.
“I’m not sure where to begin. I’m from Denver. I just got in this morning. I’m a reporter and I came across—”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. You’re a reporter? What kind of reporter?”
I could see a slight pulse of anger beneath the dark skin of his upper left jaw. I was prepared for this.
“Newspaper reporter. I work for the Rocky Mountain News. Just hear me out and then if you want to throw me out, that’s fine. But I don’t think you will.”
“Look, man, I’ve heard about every pitch in the world from guys like you. I don’t have the time. I don’t—”
“What if John Brooks was murdered?”
I watched his face for any sign that he might already believe this. There was nothing. He gave nothing away.
“Your partner,” I said. “I think he might have been murdered.” Washington shook his head.
“Now, I’ve heard everything. By who? Who killed him?”
“By the same person who killed my brother.” I stalled a moment and looked at him until I had his full attention. “He was a homicide cop. He worked in Denver. He was killed about a month ago. They thought at first it was a suicide, too. I started looking into it and I ended up here. I’m a reporter but this isn’t really about that. It’s about my brother. And it’s about your partner.”
Washington creased his brow into a dark V and just stared at me for a long moment. I waited him out. He was at the cliff. He either went over with me or he threw me out. He broke the stare and leaned back. Out of his inside coat pocket he took a pack of cigarettes and lit one. He pulled a steel trash can over from the corner so he could use it for ashes. I wondered how many times he had heard people tell him that smoking would stunt his growth. He cocked his head when he exhaled so that the blue smoke went up and hovered against the ceiling. He leaned forward across the table.
“I don’t know if you are some nut or not. Let me see some ID.”
We were going over the cliff. I took out my wallet and gave him my driver’s license, press card and DPD police pass. He eyed them all closely but I knew he had already decided to listen to the story. There was something about Brooks’s death that made Washington want to listen to a story from a reporter he didn’t even know.
“Okay,” he said as he handed the IDs back. “So you’re legit. It still doesn’t mean I have to believe a word you say.”
“No. But I think you believe it already.”
“Look, you going to tell your story or not? Don’t you think if there was something not right that I’d be on the fucking thing like . . . like—What do you know about it, anyway?”
“Not much. Just what was in the papers.”
Washington stubbed the cigarette out on the side of the trash can and then dropped the butt in.
“Hey, Jack, tell your story. Otherwise, do me a big favor and just get the fuck out of here.”
I didn’t need my notes. I to
ld the story with every detail because I knew each one of them. It took a half hour during which Washington smoked two more cigarettes but never asked a question. Each time he kept the cigarette in his mouth, so the smoke curled up and hid his eyes. But I knew. Just like with Wexler. I was confirming something that he had felt inside his guts all along.
“You want Wexler’s number?” I asked at the end. “He’ll tell you everything I just said is legit.”
“No, I’ll get it if I need it.”
“You have any questions?”
“No, not at the moment.” He just stared at me.
“Then what’s next?”
“I’m going to check this out. Where you going to be?”
“The Hyatt down by the river.”
“Okay, I’ll call you.”
“Detective Washington, that’s not good enough.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, I came here to get information, not just to give it and then go back to my room. I want to ask you about Brooks.”
“Look, kid, we didn’t have any kind of deal like that. You came here, you told the story. There was no—”
“Look, don’t patronize me by calling me ‘kid’ like I’m some kind of hick from the sticks. I’ve given you something and I want something back. That’s why I came.”
“I don’t have anything for you now, Jack.”
“That’s bullshit. You can sit there and lie, Larry Legs, but I know you’ve got something. I need it.”
“What, to make a big story that’ll bring the rest of the jackals like you out?”
I was the one who leaned forward this time.
“I told you, this isn’t about a story.”
I leaned back and we both looked at each other. I wanted a cigarette but didn’t have any and I didn’t want to ask him for one. The silence was punctuated when one of the detectives I had seen in the homicide room opened the door and looked in.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Get the fuck out of here, Rezzo,” Washington said. After the door was closed, he said, “Nosy prick. You know what they’re thinking, don’t you? They’re thinking maybe you’re in here coppin’ to doin’ the kid. It’s the year anniversary, you know. Weird things happen. Wait till they hear this story.”
I thought of the photo of the boy in my pocket.
“I went by there on the way over,” I said. “There’s flowers.”
“They’re always there,” Washington said. “The family goes by there all the time.”
I nodded and for the first time felt guilty about taking the photo. I didn’t say anything. I just waited for Washington. He seemed to ease up some. His face became softer, relaxed.
“Look, Jack, I gotta do some checking. And some thinking. If I tell you I’ll call you, I’m gonna call you. Go back to the hotel, get a massage, whatever. I’ll call you one way or the other in a couple hours.”
I nodded reluctantly and he stood up. He held his arm across the table, his right hand out. I shook it.
“Pretty good work. For a reporter, I mean.”
I picked up my computer and left. The squad room was more crowded now and a lot of them watched me go. I guess I had been in there long enough for them to know I wasn’t a crackpot. Outside it was colder and the snow was beginning to come down hard. It took me fifteen minutes to flag down a cab.
On the ride back I asked the driver to swing by Wisconsin and Clark and I jumped out and ran across the snow to the tree. I put the photo of Bobby Smathers back where I’d found it.
12
Larry Legs kept me twisting in the wind the rest of the afternoon. At five I tried calling him but couldn’t locate him at Area Three or Eleven-Twenty-One, as the department’s headquarters was known. The secretary in the homicide office refused to disclose his whereabouts or to page him. At six I was resigned to being blown off when there was a knock on my door. It was him.
“Hey, Jack,” he said without stepping in. “Let’s take a ride.”
Washington had his car parked in the valet lane in the hotel drive-up. On the dash he had placed a Police Business card so there was no problem. We got in and pulled out. He crossed the river and started north on Michigan Avenue. The snow had not abated as far as I could tell and there were drifts along both sides of the road. Many of the cars on the road had a three-inch frosting on their horizontal surfaces. I could see my breath in Washington’s car and the heater was on high.
“Guess you get a lot of snow where you come from, Jack.”
“Yeah.”
He was just making conversation. I was anxious to see what he really had to say but thought it better to wait, to let him tell me at his speed. I could always pull the reporter act and ask questions later.
He turned west on Division and headed away from the lake. The sparkle of the Miracle Mile and the Gold Coast soon disappeared and the buildings began to get a little more seedy and in need of repair and upkeep. I thought maybe we were heading toward the school Bobby Smathers had disappeared from but Washington didn’t say.
It was completely dark now. We went under the El and soon passed a school. Washington pointed at it.
“That’s where the kid went. There’s the yard. Just like that, he was gone.” He snapped his fingers. “I staked it all day yesterday. You know, a year since the disappearance. Just in case something happened or the guy, the doer, came back by.”
“Anything?”
Washington shook his head and dropped into a brooding silence.
But we didn’t stop. If Washington wanted me to see the school, the view had been quick. We kept heading west and eventually came upon a series of brick towers that somehow looked abandoned in some way. I knew what they were. The projects. They were dimly lit monoliths against the blue-black sky. They had assuredly taken on the appearance of those that were housed within. They were cold and despairing, the have-nots of the city skyline.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“You know what this place is?”
“Yeah. I went to school here—I mean in Chicago. Everybody knows Cabrini-Green. What about it?”
“I grew up here. So did Jumpin’ John Brooks.”
Immediately, I thought of the odds. First of just surviving in such a place, next of surviving and then becoming a cop.
“Vertical ghettos, each one of them. Me and John used to say it was the only time when you had to take the elevator up when you were going to hell.”
I just nodded. This was out of my realm completely.
“And that’s only if the elevators were working,” he added.
I realized that I never considered that Brooks might be a black man. There was no photo in the computer printouts and no reason to mention race in the stories. I had just assumed he was white and it was an assumption I would have to analyze later. At the moment, I was trying to figure out what Washington was trying to tell me by taking me here.
Washington pulled into a lot next to one of the buildings.
There were a couple of dumpsters coated with decades of graffiti slogans. There was a rusted basketball backboard but the rim was long gone. He put the car in park but left it running. I didn’t know if that was to keep the heat flowing or to allow us a quick getaway if needed. I saw a small group of teenagers in long coats, their faces as dark as the sky, scurry from the building closest to us, then cross a frozen courtyard and hustle into one of the other buildings.
“At this point you’re wondering what the hell you’re doing here,” Washington said then. “That’s okay, I understand. A white boy like you.”
Again I said nothing. I was letting him run out his line.
“See that one, third on the right. That was our building. I was on fourteen with my grand-auntie and John lived with his mother on twelve, one below us. They didn’t have no thirteen, already enough bad luck ’round here. Neither of us had fathers. At least ones that showed up.”
I thought he wanted me to say something but I didn’t know what. I had
no earthly idea what kind of struggle the two friends must have had to make it out of the tombstone of a building he had pointed at. I remained mute.
“We were friends for life. Hell, he ended up marrying my first girlfriend, Edna. Then on the department, after we both made homicide and trained with senior detectives for a few years, we asked to be partnered. And damn, it got approved. Story about us in the Sun-Times once. They stuck us in Three because it included this place. They figured it was part of our expertise. A lot of our cases come outta here. But its still on rotation. So we just happened to be the ones catching on the day that boy turned up without no fingers. Shit, the call came in right at eight. Ten minutes before and it would’ve gone to night shift.”
He was silent for a while, probably thinking about what kind of difference it would have made if the call had gone to somebody else.
“Sometimes at night when we’d been workin’ a case or on a stake or something, me’n John would drive out here after shift, park right where we are now and just look the place over.”
It occurred to me then what the message was. Larry Legs knew Jumpin’ John hadn’t pulled the trigger on himself because he had known the exact struggle Brooks had experienced coming out of a place like this. Brooks had fought his way out of hell and he wasn’t about to go back by his own hand. That was the message.
“This is how you knew, isn’t it?”
Washington looked across the seat at me and nodded once.
“It was just one of those things you know, that’s all. He didn’t do it. I told them that in MIU but they just wanted to get it the fuck away from them.”
“So all you had was your gut. There was nothing out of line anywhere else?”
“There was one thing but it wasn’t enough for them. I mean they had the handwriting, his history with the shrink, all that in place. It fit too nicely for them. He was a suicide before they zipped up the bag and took him away. Cut and dried.”
“What was the one thing?”