A woman in her early thirties was cuffed to a chair a few feet to my left. She had brown hair with paint-by-number highlights and makeup that looked like it had been put on with the lights off. Her head was slumped to her chest and her eyes were closed. She offered up a delicate yet definite burp as I sat down, mucked her lips together once or twice, and settled back into a light doze. The detective sitting across from her was somewhere north of fifty. He pecked away at a manual typewriter and seemed capable of ignoring everything and everybody in the room. That is, until the woman woke up.
“Why am I here?” she said.
The cop stopped typing and pulled a pair of half-moon reading glasses off his nose.
“You crashed your car through the plate-glass window of a Krispy Kreme.” The cop checked a report on his desk. “At the corner of Paulina and Montrose.”
“I know that,” she said.
“That’s why you’re here.”
“It was an accident. Is that against the law?”
“You’re drunk, ma’am.”
“No, I’m not.”
“I can smell it on you.”
“No, you can’t.”
“We found seven empty liquor bottles in your car.”
“They’re my mother’s.”
“You failed the field sobriety test.”
“What’s that?”
“When they asked you the alphabet.”
“He was confusing me. I have a disability.”
“Ma’am.”
“Is this because I’m a woman?”
“Ma’am, we’re going to administer a Breathalyzer.”
Silence.
“Ma’am?”
“I have a drinking problem. It’s a disease.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I want my lawyer.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We were all waiting for the legal eagle to show up when Masters shouldered his way into the room and sat down at the desk.
“Sorry for the wait.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I forgot how much fun this can be.”
“Yeah.”
“This your desk?”
“I have an office now.”
I hadn’t seen Masters in six months and he didn’t look any better for it. His face was the color of paste. His eyes were rimmed in red and full of water. His hand shook a bit as he moved some papers around, and he might have smelled of gin. Of course, that last bit could have wafted over from Miss Krispy Kreme next door, but I didn’t think so.
“Anyone notice you sitting in here?” Masters talked in an undertone and swung his head around the bull pen. I swung around with him and shrugged.
“Don’t know.”
“No one came up and said hello.”
“Don’t think so.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
I followed Masters down a thin hallway to a solitary door with a sign on it that read room no. 1.
“Step in here.”
I walked into a small room with a wooden table and a row of blue chairs on one side. There was a TV and VCR in one corner and a dry-erase board in the other. The TV was turned off and the board had been wiped clean. Masters dropped a brown file folder on the table and sat in one of the chairs.
“Sit down, Kelly.”
I sat.
“You talk to the press about the body on Hudson?”
“Would we be sitting here if I had?”
Masters nodded at the brown folder on the table between us.
“This is the working file. Tell me what you know and you get a look-provided you keep your mouth shut. Offer up the usual happy horseshit and the conversation ends. Right now. I go to the county and file charges. Tampering with a crime scene. Obstruction of justice.”
“They’ll never stick.”
Masters shrugged. “Maybe not. But you’ll never get inside this file. And you want to get inside this file.”
I looked at the brown file. Then I looked up at the detective. We weren’t friends, but we weren’t enemies. We trusted each other implicitly, except for the times when one of us didn’t. Like I said, Catullus. Right now, Masters’ face was split in half with a nasty sort of grin. Not a good sign.
“You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you, Kelly? How did you wind up at the house on Hudson yesterday? Let’s start with that and we’ll make it up from there.”
Masters was right. I did want to get inside the file. I had no idea why, but that didn’t make me want it any less.
“There are some things I can tell you,” I said. “Some things we just have to leave alone.”
Masters leaned back in his chair and slipped his feet onto the table. “I’m listening.”
“I was tailing someone for a client. The person I followed was in the house for less than a minute. No way he, or she, could have been the killer.”
“Because they weren’t in the house long enough?”
“Exactly.”
“He, or she, could have killed this guy earlier and just been returning when you picked him, or her, up.”
I shook my head.
“I saw this person’s face when they left the house. Scared. Shook. Didn’t expect to find that body inside.”
Masters dropped his feet off the table, scratched the side of his jaw, and pulled a copy of a police report out of the file.
“Start with this. I’ll be right back.”
He left the room, undoubtedly to talk to whoever was watching me on the closed-circuit camera secreted in the wall paneling to my right. I had read about a half page of the report when Masters came back into the room. He wasn’t alone.
“Hello, Kelly.”
Vince Rodriguez was wearing a soft brown Italian suit with a striped shirt and olive-green tie. He had a gold watch on one wrist and carried a second file folder under his arm. This one was thick with paper. He dropped it on the table and took a chair to my right.
“Detective Rodriguez,” I said, and gave him my best profile. “Tell me. Is this really my good side?”
“Shut up, Kelly.”
That was Masters. He slumped back in his chair, poured some coffee from a thermos, and offered me nothing. I had tasted cop coffee before so that wasn’t a problem.
“Taken a look at the autopsy report?” Rodriguez said, and began to unpack the file on the table in front of him.
“Not yet. Why don’t you give me the highlights?”
“Water found in the lungs. Appears Bryant might have drowned somehow.”
“So the sand in his mouth was postmortem?”
Rodriguez nodded. “Probably staged by the killer. Why, we have no clue. Now, tell me this, Kelly. What do you know about the Chicago Fire?”
“The Chicago Fire?”
“That’s right.”
Rodriguez flipped open a manila folder tabbed history and began to read.
“Started on the night of October eighth, 1871. Burned for two days. Destroyed most of the city, more than seventeen thousand buildings.”
I looked over at Masters, who offered the slightest of shrugs. Rodriguez kept talking.
“The fire started at 137 East DeKoven Street, current home of the Chicago Fire Academy. In 1871, it was the home of one Catherine O’Leary. The fire is believed to have started in her barn. The theory for years was that a cow kicked over a lantern and the whole thing just got out of control. Now, however, people aren’t so sure.”
“You mean the cow wasn’t good for it?” I said.
This time it was Rodriguez who looked toward Masters. The veteran cop cracked his knuckles and grunted.
“Told you,” Masters said. “Guy knows nothing. And if he knows something, it’s still nothing.”
The detective was right. I didn’t know much about 1871. Still, I could fake it with the best of them.
“The house on Hudson predates the fire,” I said. “You think there’s a connection.”
Rodriguez grinned thinly and held out his hand. Masters reached into his pocket and pulled out a couple of twenties. Rodriguez pocketed the cash.
“I told him you’d see it. Straight off.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s anything,” I said.
“But you see it,” Rodriguez said. “Just like we did. There were only a dozen or so buildings that survived the fire of 1871. A hundred-plus years later, we have a body turning up in one of them. A guy, by the way, who happened to be an expert on the fire.”
“Coincidence?” I said.
Rodriguez shook his head and pulled a single sheet of paper from the murder file.
“There’s more. Best we can tell, this is the only item missing from the house on Hudson. First edition of a book written by Timothy Sheehan in 1886. Titled Sheehan’s History of the Chicago Fire.”
Rodriguez pushed the page over so I could take a look.
“How the book fits in,” Masters said. “Whether it has any connection to any of this. No real idea.”
“And you guys are sitting on all this because the brass says so?”
Rodriguez nodded.
“The press would have a field day with it,” Masters said. “You know that.”
“Fifth Floor showing any interest?” I said.
“Why do you ask?” That was Rodriguez again.
“Just thinking that might be where the heat is coming from. No pun intended.”
I smiled. Masters leaned forward, letting his bulldog features swell with blood. It wasn’t pretty. Then again, it wasn’t supposed to be.
“Why don’t we cut the bullshit here, Kelly. Tell us all about your client. Starting with why they’re so interested in Johnny Woods.”
I hadn’t figured on Woods’ name coming out of Masters’ mouth. I think he enjoyed the moment.
“So you know about Johnny.”
“We know,” Rodriguez said. “Again, we don’t understand.”
I was in a bit of a spot and my two cop friends knew it. Johnny Woods appeared to be a key to whatever was going on. Throw in the fact that he was one of the mayor’s guys and the stakes rose considerably all around. Masters and Rodriguez wanted answers. I had plenty. Problem is, none of them were going to be what you might call good.
“What exactly do you know about me and Woods?”
“You’ve been asking about him,” Rodriguez said.
The image of Fred Jacobs flickered through my head. I should have figured as much.
“Okay, I’ve been asking. It’s a personal thing.”
“Personal?” Masters said. “Just so we’re all clear. You’re telling us Johnny Woods had nothing to do with your presence at 2121 North Hudson yesterday.”
The corner I was in seemed to be getting tighter by the minute. “I didn’t say that.”
Masters got up from his chair and clasped both of his hands on top of his head. “Maybe we need to take a statement from this guy, Vince.”
“I don’t think so,” Rodriguez said, and looked at me. “I think we can get what we need and still make Kelly feel good. Right, Kelly?”
“I’ll tell you what I know,” I said. “You keep my client’s name out of it.”
Rodriguez looked at Masters, who shrugged, then smiled. “As long as Mrs. Woods is not our killer, you won’t have any problems, Kelly.”
“Fuck off, Masters.”
“So that’s it, then.”
Some days you just can’t win. Inside a Chicago cop shop, make that most days.
“Yeah, that’s it,” I said. “Woods’ wife asked me to help her out, so I tailed hubby to the house on Hudson. Just wanted to talk to the guy. See what his day was like. Woods rang the doorbell. No answer. He looked around, rang again. Then he pushed the door open.”
Rodriguez was taking notes now. Masters was asking the questions.
“Did he force the door?”
“No. Looked like it was ajar. He just pushed it open. Like I said, he was nervous.”
“Then what?”
“He went into the house. Less than a minute later, he came out. White face, big eyes. Scared. Ran right by me. Got himself a cab and never looked back.”
“Then you went in,” Rodriguez said.
“I went in. Saw the body. Didn’t touch anything and left.”
It went on for a while longer. Details of the body. The house. The Johnny Woods angle one more time. Just to see how many different lies I could tell. It wasn’t hard. Never is when you didn’t do anything and are mostly telling the truth. Finally, they were done. The big question, of course, remained unanswered.
“So why was Woods there?” Rodriguez said.
“No idea.”
Rodriguez held up a photocopy of the title page to Timothy Sheehan’s book. “You didn’t see one of these in there?”
I shook my head.
“Johnny Woods didn’t walk out with one?”
“Not that I saw.”
“You ever talk to Woods about his wife?” Masters said.
“What do you know about that?”
“We’ve had a couple of calls out to their house. Domestic stuff.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “No one ever filed a report.”
“Janet Woods didn’t want any paperwork filed,” Masters said. “We accommodated her request.”
I looked from one cop to the other and back. “Sounds like you know as much about my client as I do.”
“Wasn’t hard to figure out how you might be involved, Kelly, if that’s what you mean.” Masters picked up the Bryant homicide file. “Either way, when you talk to Janet Woods, you leave this out.”
“Leave what out?”
“The house on Hudson. Leave it out. And don’t talk to any of your friends in the press. About any of this.”
Masters dropped the file back onto the table and turned to Rodriguez. “We done here?”
“Yeah,” Rodriguez said.
Masters left without another word. Rodriguez and I walked back through the bull pen and out to my car.
“What was that about?” I said.
“What?”
“Masters. Laid it on a little heavy at the end there, don’t you think?”
“A lot of people watching this case, Kelly. Kind of people who turn working cops into memories. In a hurry.”
“So the heat is coming from the Fifth Floor.”
“Yup.”
“What do they want?”
“They want us to bury it. Right now, Bryant isn’t even classified as a homicide. ‘Undetermined cause,’ I believe, is the phrase we’re using.”
“‘Undetermined cause,’ huh? And now I put one of the mayor’s guys in the middle of it.”