3 The Case of Tiffany's Epiphany Page 5

  I’m walking faster than most joggers, hopefully not fast enough to be confused with a criminal fleeing on foot. Although both guys are big boys, it’s hard to keep them in sight. No matter what you’ve seen on TV shows, tailing anyone by yourself in a big city is an almost an impossible task. There are crowds, stoplights, and construction crews that always get in your way. And if your suspect enters a building with multiple exits, 99% of the time you lose them. When I was a cop we once had six people tailing a guy and we lost him in the first fifteen minutes.

  I’m about thirty feet behind Bruno and his buddy. They’re about to enter the basement level of Marina City where stores, dry cleaners, restaurants and a myriad of other establishments populate the underground pathways. For the people who work and live there, this place is a confusing labyrinth; it’s an unnavigable maze for the unsuspecting. Tourists have been known to get lost in there for days. I know I’m going to lose my quarry once they enter, so I stop, step up on a bench, to get a last clear picture of the two before they disappear into the building.

  I take a second to print the photo and add it to the album in my brain. I sit down, render up the not-so-great image in my head, and view it. Bruno looks exactly like he did in the bar, big, firm, muscled, and healthy; all that’s missing is a martini shaker. The other guy is maybe six feet, bulky, big, but not fat. His face is impossible to see from the distance, but for some reason he seems familiar. I can’t place him.

  I check my Timex, pull out my cell phone, and call my girls for our daily conversation. They tell me they didn’t learn anything in school, have too much homework, who they sat next to at lunch, and other mindless tidbits of their lives. Kelly goes on and on about the clothes she “just has to have,” and Care fills me in on what the Bailouts thought about their last defeat. Not fun to hear. They each ask about Tiffany’s well being, but don’t inquire about mine. After about five minutes, we’re done. I remind them about tomorrow, tell then I love them, and hang up. As pointless, inane, and innocuous as these conversations may be, I enjoy every second.

  I walk back to my Toyota. I stand across the street and gaze upon it resting proudly between a Chevy and a BMW. It’s such a wonderful sight to behold. A perfectly parked car, in a perfectly legal spot, with no time limit sign, no meter, no orange cones of warning. I take it all in, as if I’m seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time. If you have ever lived in an urban jungle, you know how seldom you come across the perfect, free, unobstructed, parking spot. Yes, for once, all my planets are in alignment, my biorhythms are in sync, and my life finally reaches perfection, if in only a very small way. Why can’t cash come my way the same as this parking karma did?

  CHAPTER 4

  I’m too far west to head all the way back to the Drive, so I take Milwaukee Avenue most of the way home. I find a spot about a half a block from my building--great parking karma seldom lasts. I walk up the block and see a guy standing at the first floor entry door. He’s wearing a crumpled black suit and a grey felt fedora. Even I wouldn’t wear a felt fedora.

  My first thought is that he’s a salesman waiting for someone to let him inside so he can peddle an annuity policy that lets you retire when you’re ninety with a three hundred dollar a month income. But I’m wrong.

  “You Sherlock?” he asks.

  “Does Sherlock owe you any money?” I break my own rule about answering a question with a question.

  “No.”

  “Then, yeah, I’m Sherlock.”

  “Let’s take a ride,” he says, and motions for me to follow him.

  “Let’s not,” I answer.

  He’s gruff, billy goat gruff, talking as if he’s chewing on tin cans. “Don’t argue,” he says.

  “I’m not arguing,” I tell him. “I don’t want to take a drive. Traffic is terrible.”

  “Dat’s arguing.”

  “No, it’s not.” Now we’re arguing.

  The man reaches behind his back and pulls out a Glock, a very big Glock. He points it at my nose.

  The argument is over. I concede defeat. “Are we taking your car or mine?”

  “Git.”

  The Thug in a fedora leads me down the walkway to a Cadillac parked right in front of my building; evidently it was his turn for good parking karma. He opens the back door. I take the hint, climb inside, take another hint from the barrel of his gun, and scoot over to the far seat. He slips the gun into its holster behind his back and sits next to me.

  “This is a real treat,” I tell the Thug. “My car doesn’t have leather seats.”

  The driver of the vehicle, who is behind a closed, tinted glass divider, a much better divider than the kind you see in cheap taxicabs, pulls the Caddy into the street. I can only see the back of his head. His hair has been professionally styled to come down into a tear-shaped point, and from that point long strands of hair are braided into a neat little ponytail. Not something I would ever wear, but attractive in its own way. The only other distinguishing aspect of the driver is the dark, aviator glasses he wears. I see them via his reflection in the rear view mirror. He doesn’t turn around to wave or motion that he’s glad to have me aboard.

  “Nice day for a drive,” I say to break the ice with Mr. Ponytail.

  The driver’s voice remains frozen, although I’m pretty sure he heard me, because he immediately glanced into the rear view mirror.

  “Can I ask you something?” I ask the fedora wearing Thug sitting beside me, who I’m sure, can hear me.

  He doesn’t respond.

  I ask anyway. “With that gun of yours in the holster behind your back, doesn’t it really hurt when you sit down?”

  He either doesn’t want to talk anymore or he’s in too much pain to talk because of the gun pushing into his spine. I have another question, one that might be easier to answer. “Why do you wear your hat while you’re in the car? Isn’t it customary to take your hat off while inside?”

  Again no answer. Thugs aren’t known for their knowledge of the Emily Post Rules of Etiquette.

  The driver doesn’t answer my question, either. Maybe because he’s not wearing a hat.

  Neither of my captors will ever be successful in the tour bus business.

  The Caddy is approaching Western Avenue, “Ya know, if we’re goin' back downtown, it’s faster to take Western this time of the day,” I say to be helpful.

  They’re not listening. Why should these two guys be any different than anyone else I speak to?

  My phone rings. Lady Gaga. Tiffany’s calling.

  I take the phone out of my pocket, flip it open, and I’m about to say, “Can’t talk right now, Tiffany, I’m being taken for a ride in a Cadillac by one Thug in a grey fedora and another one with a ponytail,” when Mr. Thug in a Fedora reaches over, grabs my phone, looks at it as if it is a factory second, and breaks it in two.

  I hear Tiffany’s voice come out of the phone’s little speaker, until the guy drops that half on the car’s floor and stomps it with the heel of his unpolished wingtip. He hands the other half back to me, the half with the little keypad that is way too small to text with. “Wrong numba,” he says in his usual gruff tone.

  “Wow,” I tell the Thug. “I’ll bet you’re no fun to sit next to in a movie theater.”

  For the rest of the trip I sit back and try to enjoy the soft Corinthian leather.

  We take Fullerton Avenue to the Drive, all the way through the city, and exit just past the McCormick Place Convention Center. Continuing south and west, we enter into a mostly industrial neighborhood; drive down a back street, and into an alley. The Caddy stops. The Thug opens his door, gets out, and motions for me to do the same.

  I figure, what the heck. This is as good a place as any to find out what this is all about.

  The Caddy drives off leaving me and the Thug in a fedora standing between two dumpsters. Behind us is a padlocked, eight-foot, chain-link rolling gate with at least a yard of razor along its top. A non-descript, one-story building i
s about thirty feet away on the other side. There are no signs, no logos and no descriptions of any business on the building. Across the way are a number of junked cars and a sign for Tub Anew We Do, a company in the business of refinishing bathtubs. I conclude this after seeing the clever little before and after tub rendition on the company’s sign.

  “Come here often?” I ask.

  The Thug says, “Sumbuddy wanna chat.” He moves to the end of the gate, takes out one key from his pants pocket, and unlocks the padlock. Pulling the gate instead of pushing, he gets it about halfway open, stops, and motions me to join him. I take two steps forward, and just as I get even with him, a shot rings out from the building in front of us.

  I jump almost out of my skin. I hate guns, I hate bullets, and I really hate bullets shot out of guns in my direction. The Thug in a fedora is knocked squarely off his feet. I can see a hole right in the middle of his chest; his cheap, striped tie ruined forever.

  I hit the deck and roll to my left, like a kid rolling down a grassy knoll, as another shot rings out. I manage to get behind the dumpster just as I hear the third shot. I do a split-second check of my front body and find no holes. That’s something to be thankful for. To my right, I see the grey fedora, sitting, but it has no body or head underneath it. The hat sits on the ground alone like a dropped pacifier on a day-care-center walkway. My head goes back down when the fourth shot pings off the other dumpster like a pinball hitting the free game target.

  Being the coward that I am, I cower behind the dumpster, and wait. What else can I do? I punch 911 into the half of the phone that I have left, but discover the cell phone doesn’t work without the other half. So much for modern technology.

  Two more shots ring out.

  I have completely sweated through my clothes. I’m glad I don’t have a mirror, because I must be whiter than a Clorox bleached ghost. I have no clue how much time elapses before I hear a siren followed by the sound of screeching rubber as a patrol car speeds into the alley. I'm about to run out and wave my hands for the patrolman to stop, but that could be akin to wearing a pair of antlers on the first day of deer season. Instead, I push the dumpster into the middle of the alley. The cop car doesn’t see it in time, and BOOM! The resounding thud is louder than a howitzer. The impact sends the metal square rolling down the alley faster than Ursain Bolt doing the hundred meters. It hits a dilapidated couch waiting for pick-up, flips over, destroys a discarded toilet, flips again, and finally comes to a stop half-way up on the hood of what was once a Ford Taurus before road salt took its toll.

  The cop car, with a now heavily-dented front end, stops. The patrolman leaps out, whips out his gun from his holster, takes up a position behind the front door on the driver’s side, and aims his weapon straight at me. Being a target twice in one day is not a good thing.

  “Freeze!”

  Yes, cops actually do yell “Freeze” in these situations.

  I hold my hands to the sky. “I’m not the shooter. I’m the guy getting shot at.”

  “Don’t move.”

  “I’m not planning on it.” I watch him relax just a bit and add, “The shots came from that building.” With only my index finger moving, I point at the structure behind the open gate. “There was another guy with me,” I tell him. “He got shot.”

  The cop comes out from behind the patrol car door, his gun still aimed at my heart. “Where’s he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said he got shot,” the cop says, approaching me slowly.

  “He did.”

  “Where?”

  “In his chest.”

  “No, where was he when he got shot?”

  “Right there, next to the other dumpster.” This conversation is lasting way too long. My arms are getting sore; all the blood is running down out of them.

  “I don’t see any blood.” He makes a good point.

  Another police car enters the alley.

  The cop moves closer; soon he’s beside me. “Don’t move until I tell you to move.”

  “No problem.”

  The back-up blocks the alley from the other direction and that officer comes out with his gun drawn too. The third time’s the charm.

  “Slowly put your hands behind your back,” the first cop orders.

  I do as I’m told and feel the cuffs go on. “I’m the shootee, not the shooter,” I explain on my way over to the squad car where I am thrown against it belly first, bent over, face pushed down onto the hood, legs spread, and frisked rougher than by an overzealous, TSA agent searching through questionable luggage.

  “Ouch.”

  I feel my wallet come out of my back pocket. I hope they don’t take my last six dollars.

  “You a PI?” the first cop asks.

  “Yes.”

  “We hate PI’s,” the back-up informs me.

  I can’t blame them. I hated PI’s when I was a cop. They were always popping up unannounced and always getting in the way. And most of them made more money than the detectives on the force. Since I became a PI, I’m doing my best to reverse the final reason.

  I'm placed in the back of the recently dented squad car, where it’s very hard to get comfortable with your hands, behind you, bound in carbon steel shackles.

  Fifteen minutes or so later, the door on my left opens. “Sherlock, what the hell are you doing here?”

  Just my luck, out of the hundreds of detectives in the Chicago Police Department, I get “Wait” Jack Wayt.

  Jack Wayt has been a detective in the CPD since Capone was a kid--actually not that long, but long enough to see a lot of guys, like me, come and go. He's been a detective going on forty years, and has the rings to prove it--rings that are similar to those of a redwood tree, only his are around his protruding stomach. He’s worked every precinct, every division, every crime, and every angle. He’s solved more cases alone than most squad rooms have with a dozen cops. Murder, larceny, gang crimes, bunco, shoplifting, he's handled them all.

  I got to know Jack in my first detective duty as a traffic investigator. This is the spot all detectives start or at least they should. Because traffic investigations have a set time, place, action, suspects, and rules of the road to follow. The incident happened between this street and that street. One car was going this way, the other that way. They collided here. One driver says this. The other says that. Now figure it out.

  Jack was a good mentor in my early years. He’d sing my praises when I made the extra effort, thought out-of-the-box, or discovered something that no one else saw. He would also kick me in the rear when I missed the obvious or went off on one of my tangents that made no sense whatsoever. Our paths crossed frequently over the years, as did the paths of almost every other detective on the force. One reason was because Jack had more partners than a porn star. He couldn’t work with anyone. He was consistently late, complained about everything, forgot more than most remembered, and would zone out during conversations faster than an Alzheimer’s patient. If that wasn’t enough frailties, Jack had one more that put him over the top. He had more diseases than the Center of Disease Control. He would complain about having bursitis, rhinitis, phlebitis, ileitis, and colitis. All self-diagnosed, of course. Whenever a drug began advertising, Jack would eventually see the ad, and immediately claim he had the exact symptoms of whatever disease the drug claimed it alleviated or cured. Listening to Jack, you’d swear Stephen Hawking was a picture of health.

  “Unlock me, would ya?” I plead with him.

  “Wait.”

  “Why?”

  “Sherlock, I think I got COPD.”

  “What’s COPD?”

  “I don’t know, but I think I got it,” he says, sitting down next to me. “Some days it feels like there’s an elephant sitting on my chest.”

  “Have you ever had an elephant sit on your chest?”

  “No.”

  “Then how would you know what it feels like?” I ask.

  “Because after I came down wit
h that case of meningitis and my brain swelled up,” he says, “my mind’s ultra-sensitive to certain stimuli.”

  “Like elephants sitting on your chest?”

  “So to speak,” Jack says.

  “Get me out of these things, they hurt.” I turn my back to him with my hands outstretched.

  He unlocks the cuffs. I rub my sore wrists. “Do you want to know what happened?” I ask turning back towards him.

  “Not really,” he says. “What I want to know is what I can do for my sciatica.”

  We get out of the squad car. The uniforms are busy stringing up yellow crime scene tape. One tech has picked up the fedora and is admiring it. “That’s the guy’s hat, the guy who got shot,” I tell Jack.

  “Where’d he get shot?”

  “Right here.” I point to the middle of my chest.

  “No, I meant where, where.”

  I take him to the spot between the dumpsters where the gate remains open. “What did he get shot with, a BB gun?” Jack asks.

  “No, a real gun with a big bang.”

  “No blood,” Jack says. “Usually when you get shot in the chest with a big gun, there’s blood.” He pauses, then asks, “Didn’t I teach you anything in all those years?”

  “Maybe he was wearing a vest.”

  “Kevlar or the third piece of a suit ensemble?” Jack asks.

  “For the sake of argument, let’s go with the Kevlar.”

  For the next hour, I follow Jack walking up and down surveying the scene. He asks me to start at the beginning and tell him everything I remember. I comply. One second before I finish, he says, “Wait.”

  I pause.

  He asks, “What was the license plate of the Cadillac?”

  How stupid can I be?