Authors: Thom August
Nine Fingers (3 page)
Inside the 1812 Club
Thursday, January 9
It is the last night of my last shift on the last rung up the ladder back to Homicide when the call comes in.
“Attention: All Units.”
I am thinking about Narcotics, about how I hate it, about how I am trying to claw my way out of it. I am thinking how I am
almost there, just at the lip, about to shimmy over the edge, and my first thought is—oh, no, not another idiotic drug bust.
The thing is, most dopers are too stoned to stay out of trouble. You might say, it’s a victimless crime, they’re only hurting
themselves, what’s the point of locking them up? Won’t get any argument from me, in principle. But in reality, they throw
themselves in front of the cops. Guy goes to score some blow, he’s in a hurry, so he leaves his car parked in front of a hydrant,
and the badge on the beat has no choice but to ticket him and toss him, and oh, is that a crack pipe in your pocket or are
you just happy to see me? Or that pothead basketball player who was in the papers a while back. Going on a road trip, has
to bring his half-ounce of weed with him, because you just know there’s no dope anywhere in New York or Atlanta or L.A. And
he has to wrap it up for safekeeping. In aluminum foil. Which even the assholes at the airport can’t help but notice, first
when he tries to walk it through the metal detector—duh—and then when he puts it into one of those little bins and sends it
through the X-ray.
What are you gonna do? It goes with the territory.
So my first thought when the call comes in is, these junkies are going to get me killed on the last night I have to deal with
them. After all I am going through to get back, it’s all going to stop in some nasty alley with some filthy mook who can’t
stop sniffling, can’t aim a weapon well enough to shoot the wall behind me, but who is wasted enough to drop it on the ground
and have it go off and kill me by accident.
But it isn’t that. It’s:
“Shots Fired, Possible Homicide, 1812 North Lincoln.”
And then I have to listen to it again. Because I remember this address—this is a club I used to know, from back in the day.
And because it is only six blocks away. And because I am not a homicide detective yet, not until midnight. And so I am thinking—will
I piss somebody off for poaching on his turf before I even get on the job? Thinking—will I somehow manage to screw up a simple
crime scene and give them second thoughts before they have time to think their first ones? Thinking—how can this go wrong
on me, just when I need something to go right? Maybe I can drive around, let a couple hours pass. Maybe the radio is not working
in the storm we are having here. Maybe I am out getting a cup of coffee and I’m not hearing it.
And I am thinking all this when the car suddenly glides up in front of 1812 North Lincoln and I am applying the brakes and
opening the door and clipping the badge to my lapel. And by then it is too late to think of anything because here I am. My
blue lights are on and I do not know when I turned them on, and a squad room full of uniforms is standing right behind me,
looking at me the way the linemen look at the quarterback in the huddle—ready, hopeful, expectant.
It is chaos inside, people buzzing all around, throwing on their coats, trying to get out. All except for the band; most of
them are standing in front of what used to be the window.
I flash the tin, summon up the big voice, say, “All right, everybody take a seat where you are and we’ll get to you as soon
as we can. No one leaves until your statement is taken by an officer. We’ll need names and addresses, so get your ID’s out.
Might as well stay calm. Looks like it’s all over but the paperwork.”
I get the patrons settled, set the troops in motion. It’s a routine, a process, a dance we all know how to do. We settle into
the rhythm of it.
I check the vic. He is dead. Whoever did this is either one good shot or one lucky bastard—one in the middle of the back of
the head, from ten feet away, in the middle of a driving snowstorm, through a thick plate glass window—that is some good shooting.
This is someone who put in some effort. There is no collateral damage—everyone else is fine. This is no crime of passion,
no sudden impulse. This looks professional.
One of the plainclothes guys is going through the vic’s clothes and fishes out a wallet. He holds it up like a twenty-pound
fish he caught with five-pound line. “Driver’s license for…” he holds it up…“one Roger Tremblay—Los Angeles address.
Baggage stub from O’Hare, Flight 631 arriving from L.A. at five
P.M.
Lucky he was able to land before the storm hit.”
Irony. Black humor. It’s a cop thing. We’re supposed to be jaded.
“Business card,” he says. holding up an ivory-colored rectangle, “Firm of Shields, Manfreddi, and Goldfarb, the Practice of
Law” he adds. “He doesn’t look like the Goldfarb.”
“Or the Manfreddi, either,” another chimes in.
“One less of them—it’s tragic,” he says.
“One less what?”
“One less lawyer.”
Another detective is going through the coat, draped on the back of the bar stool where the vic had sat:“Card key for the Marriott,
downtown. Taxi receipt—Checker number four-nine-three-nine, from the Marriott to here, eight bucks, plus a good tip. Cash—maybe
a hundred. Pack of Tic Tacs—peppermint. Picture of what looks like the wife and kids. Ad cut out from the
Reader
for this place. Drinking…” He picks up a half-empty glass and sniffs it, rolling it around in his gloved hands…
“Scotch, rocks. J&B? Cutty?”
I remember precisely how each smells—the distinctive medicinal aroma of the J&B, the oily tones of the Cutty Sark. I taste
them in my mind as he says their names.
I turn and walk over to the band. There are three of them sitting on the front edge of the bandstand, a big furry bear of
a guy, a tiny Asian female, and a sweaty Irish American male. The trumpet player, a tall African American male about thirty-two,
is standing right in front of the window, his horn at the ready, snowflakes beginning to coat his short Afro. There is another
guy off to the side of the bandstand, by some equipment over there, a wiry guy with dark hair and a beard. We take down names
and addresses first. Then it is all the same questions, questions so standard I can recite them by heart.
Their answers come across all snotty. Maybe they all watch too many cop shows on the TV. Maybe it’s what they call a distancing
mechanism, a defensive thing. Then one of them chuckles. I can go with the black humor, trust me, but we are standing here
and there is blood on the floor, and that deserves some respect. I give him a look. He shuts up.
We go around and around and finally, the trumpet player jumps in, bypassing the other detectives and talking straight to me.
Is it this obvious, that I am the one?
“Officer, we’re all going to tell you the same thing. The man walked in here a few minutes before nine o’clock, as we were
about to start the first set. He seemed to be a professional man of some sort, conservatively dressed. He had one drink at
the bar, and sipped it very slowly. He listened to the first set very attentively. At nine forty-five, during the break, he
came up and asked if he could sit in on piano, just one or two tunes. He said he used to play when he was in school in New
York. He mentioned a couple of people in the business, not top rank but recognizable, and said that if we didn’t like his
playing he’d sit his ass right back down. He looked like a very sober sort of guy. I checked with Vinnie,” he cocks his long
neck toward the guy by the equipment, “and he agreed. He played fine on the first tune, so we let him play another. We had
just started in on that, and were in the middle of the second chorus when there was this noise. Then there was glass and blood
everywhere and he was dead. None of us knew him at all. I don’t think he had ever been here before. At least, not when we
were here.”
There are people who will tell you that this detecting thing is like filling in a puzzle. Don’t believe them. It’s not like
that at all. With a puzzle, you already know what the picture is—it’s right on the box. So you work from the outside in, from
the background to the foreground. With this, you have no idea what the picture is supposed to look like. And you start with
the central figure, because he is dead, and you work your way outward, toward the context.
Somebody tells you, “Hey, I saw the dead guy alive around eight forty-five, on the street out front, having a fight with another
guy,” and you ask what the other guy looks like. Someone else says, “Hey, Roger Tremblay? I met him at the convention and
he said some guy was threatening him,” and you ask about that. It’s not like you have a pattern and you have to find the pieces
that bring it to life. It’s like you only have this one piece, and you try to find another piece that connects to it, then
other pieces that connect to them. So you see if there’s another piece that leads you somewhere, and another one that fits
that one, and it may cover one little corner of the picture and it may wander all across the frame, and it may go straight
to the piece with a picture of the killer standing in the snow with a gun. (It happens, sometimes.) And you can’t just look
at all the pieces and see what fits where, because the pieces aren’t there, you have to find them, one by one. All you can
see is what you already know, and when you really look at it it’s not much, a few pieces here and there. And outside of that
is everything you don’t know, and that’s most of it. Most of that you’ll never know—what the vic was like with his wife, whether
he was good at his job, what he did on the weekends, what he did to get to sleep at night. Most of that is part of a larger
puzzle anyway. So it’s like you’re crawling around in the dark, feeling for one or two pieces that can maybe connect you to
one or two more, until all of a sudden one piece locks into place and a pattern emerges, and there you are.
Or it never does, and you never know, and you file it away with the cold cases and you move on.
And as I am thinking about this, another cop is
doing
it, and chimes in:“Detective, this lady says she thinks she saw someone outside walking past, staring in the window a few
minutes before the shooting, headed…”
I traffic-cop my hand to him, turn to her, lean in.
“What did you see, ma’am? What did he look like?”
The woman volunteering this information is tall but shy about it, like a lot of tall women are, hunching her shoulders forward,
slumping down. I squat down to get to her level. They teach you to do this, to make it a peer thing, not an authority thing.
Her eyes flick across mine. “It wasn’t a he, it was a she,” she says. “She looked like, like a…a bag lady.”
And just like that, a piece clicks into place, maybe a big piece, maybe half a puzzle all by itself. I feel a sudden heat
on the back of my neck, instant sweat in the hollows of my armpits, a tightening around the edge of my scalp. A bag lady?
“Heading which way, ma’am?”
She points.
I turn, single out three uniforms who are busy taking up space. “Heading south,” I tell them. “Use caution—he’s armed. And
don’t mess up the footprints.” They reach for their weapons and step gingerly outside, looking left and right.
I turn back to the woman, squat down to her level. “A bag lady? Stocky build? Scarf on her head? Rolled-down stockings?” The
woman nods to each of these, surprised, except the last one, saying “I couldn’t see her legs,” but can’t add anything else.
“Does it mean anything?”
“Did you get a look at…the face?”
She lowers her head. Her hair is longish and a little matted, and it cascades in hanks over her eyes. I read that as a “No.”
Two of the other detectives give each other a look, ask the room in general, “Did anyone else see this bag lady?” No one says
anything.
I look around the room, and the skinny guy is still squatting over in the corner. He has headphones on his head, and is staring
at the floor. At all the electronic equipment.
Equipment like a tape recorder.
Inside the 1812 Club
Thursday, January 9
The cops herded us together and kept asking the same questions, over and over and over. We muttered and mumbled and said what
we could. Paul ended up doing most of the talking; he’s good at that.
A pack of cops broke off from the herd and tiptoed out. They left in a rush and came back at a crawl.
I started to feel cold, the wind whipping in harder off the lake and whistling in the broken window. When the cop with the
used face got around to me, I told him the basics: Vince Amatucci, I live in Hyde Park, I have a taxi license, I play piano
with the band. I’m also sort of the manager; I book all the gigs and tape all the sets. I had my headphones on and was trying
to get the balance right and had my head down. Didn’t see a thing. Did I tape the shot? I don’t know, I must have…
I crab-walked over to the Uher, rewound, pressed PLAY, focused in. I heard it, a burst like a loud cough, then stopped, rewound
the tape a few turns, held out the headphones. The guy with the long face, the detective in charge, slipped them on, looked
at me, nodded. I hit PLAY. I could see him following it. With what must have been the gunshot he blinked.
I touched REWIND, let it run a bit. I hit PLAY. After he blinked again, he said, “Rewind it one more time. No, don’t play
it. Just stop there, right before the shot.”
He leaned back and turned to one of the uniforms. “Bag this tape and give this man a receipt. Maybe the lab can turn something
up. And maybe all we’ll find out is how good a piano player the vic really was.”
I started to protest, but realized he was going to let me keep the Uher, when he could have taken the whole system. Besides,
there was something in his eyes that I couldn’t identify, something lurking at the edges. I popped the tape out and held it
in my hand. A cop in a uniform came over with a plastic bag and opened it. I dropped the tape inside. He sealed it, took out
a Sharpie, wrote something on it, then asked me for my name and address or a card so they could get it back to me. The detective
with the sagging face said, “Already got it. It’s noted.”
Then he took me by the elbow and wheeled me around to a small table. He motioned for me to sit. I did. He flipped open a notepad,
steno size. “Mr. Amatucci, we’ve run your name on the computer—you’re clean, aside from some…‘vehicular incidents.’
” He paused, his left eyebrow arched. “Can you think of anyone who would have a reason to shoot you?”
“I hear you,” I said, “I’ve seen the movie—Truffaut, wasn’t it?” He stared at me. The guy wasn’t playing along at all; he
was making me do all the work.
“I can’t think of anybody. I’ve had some angry customers, sure, but murder? Assassination?”
He looked at me. “Your choice of words…What makes you say ‘assassination’?”
I turned around, stared at Roger Something. I turned back to the cop. “Look at him.”
He did, and soon turned back toward me. He was wearing an expression I couldn’t read, either that he was impatient to get
on with it, or that he had all the time in the world. It was like he was excited, and also bored. And it wasn’t like two opposite
expressions flickering back and forth, but more like wearing both on his face at once.
“We’ll be in touch,” he said. The other cops were wrapping it up as well. He stood up and slowly pushed his chair back in.
Louie, who manages the club, didn’t seem to know what to do, and kept looking at the cops, trying to make eye contact with
one of them. The tall cop saw him and stepped over.
“Looks like you’d better call it a night. You got insurance, right? I was you, I’d get some plywood and some nails and at
least close it up temporarily until you can get a glazier in in the morning. Doubt you can reach one this time of night.”
“A…a…glacier?” Louie knows how to pour a decent drink and how to count the house, but he’s not exactly Mensa material.
“A
glazier,
a glass guy. There’s a place down off Sixteenth Street if you need a reference.”
“No, I got the number of the guy who installed it last time. I can call them.”
“Don’t leave anything in the register or behind the bar. This is a safe neighborhood, but…” The guy wasn’t looking at
Louie; his eyes seemed to be scanning the long rows of bottles behind the bar, almost as if he were cataloging them.
“I’ll stay here myself tonight,” Louie said. “I got protection.” He nodded toward the bar.
“That’s nice for you,” the cop said. “You have a permit to go along with it?”
Louie raised his eyebrows, reached into his back pocket, and pulled out a wallet the size of a campaign chest, brimming with
layers of mysterious papers and cards of many colors. He located a particular piece of detritus, pulled it out, smoothed it
flat against his considerable stomach, handed it over.
The cop looked at it. Louie reached out his hand, but the cop pulled it back a bit. “This expires next week. You’ll want to
get that taken care of while you’re getting the window fixed.”
“Sure, officer. Right away.”
The cop handed him the permit. Louie stuffed it back into the wallet, and somehow managed to wedge it back into his hip pocket.
When he looked up, the cop was holding out his card, so Louie went through the whole routine again to feed it back into the
jaws of all that chaos.
And then, just like that, it was over. People were starting to straggle out, hanging on to each other. Some were quiet, others
had gotten all excited and were jabbering away.
I looked at my watch. Shit. Almost 10:30. I was supposed to take an eleven-to-seven shift in the Fat Man’s cab and I was going
to have to hustle to get there in time to pick it up, especially in this weather. The Fat Man hated anybody being late, and
some guy getting shot wasn’t going to get me a hall pass, especially since it wasn’t me who got shot. I closed up the sound
system, packed it under my arm, nodded at the guys, told Paul “Duty calls,” and booked out to my car. The snow was starting
to get serious, coming down sideways in big fat flakes.
Not your average night.
After fishtailing down Lincoln and sliding down Michigan I got to the cabstand at 10:58. I gathered up all my stuff, locked
up my car, walked over to the cab, found the clicker for the cab, flicked the doors open, started her up, got behind the wheel,
wipered off the snow, and eased into traffic, heading back downtown. I didn’t get two blocks when some guy flagged me over,
hopped in, said “Airport,” and we were off.
Great, I thought. O’Hare Airport, land of the fifty-dollar fare.
“Midway Airport,” he said.
Shit, I thought, Midway Airport, land of the long and pointless wait.
First it’s one thing, and then it’s another.