The Black Book Read online

  Without having taken a single bite of the food he had so viciously sliced up, Goldie picked up the check and threw some cash down. I tried to add a ten, but he batted it away as though it were an insult.

  When he had settled the bill, he looked me squarely in the eyes. “Just remember that someone’s out there killing people to find that little black book,” he said. “So if you have it, my friend, you better watch your back.”

  Fifty-Nine

  WHEN I left Goldie, I headed to my car, ready to go to work. I checked my phone almost automatically, just as everyone does these days. In my case I was checking the news online.

  I stopped in my tracks. Kims Beans had posted a new photo, her weekly scandalous pic of a client entering the brownstone brothel. She had promised—what had she said to me?—that the next photo would blow my socks off.

  She was right.

  In many ways, there was nothing different about this photo. Most of the poses were the same—head down, surreptitious, not wanting to be noticed. There were dozens of them by now, celebrities and power brokers, some famous, some not so famous.

  This photo was of a member of the Chicago City Council, which would make, by my count, four of them caught on camera—in still photographs, anyway—and publicly exposed by Kim Beans. I didn’t recognize the person by face or by name. There were fifty members of the council altogether, and I didn’t know the roster by heart. According to the article, this one represented the Northwest Side.

  So there would be the usual buzz, the usual denials. A photograph doesn’t prove anything; walking down the street in the Gold Coast isn’t a crime; I don’t specifically remember that night—I may have been shopping. One guy caught on camera, an appointee to the Chicago Board of Education, claimed he was walking his dog—off the leash, of course—and that the photographer had cropped the pooch out of the photograph. Another person caught, a B-list actor, someone who was a child TV star but failed as an adult, claimed that his picture had been Photoshopped and that his face was put on someone else’s body.

  This one, too, would likely come up with some version of a denial, specific or otherwise. Nothing unusual about that.

  But there was one thing unusual about this particular photograph, which was why Kim had made her comment.

  This one was a woman.

  Alderwoman Patricia Bradford, who, according to Kim’s article, was a divorced mother of three and in her fourth term on the city council.

  A woman. Well, why not? Why would a sex club, where people go looking for a discreet place to play out their fantasies, be limited to men?

  Sixty

  I STARTED to stuff my phone in my pocket, but then my thought of the Gold Coast and shopping reminded me of a joke. I hadn’t left Stewart a joke in a long time, and the poor guy checked our shared Facebook page every morning in the nursing home, according to his daughter, Grace.

  I hit the Record button on my phone, the one Patti had installed for me, and spoke into the microphone.

  “A guy walks into a store and says to the female sales clerk, ‘I’m looking for a pair of gloves for my wife, but I don’t know her size.’ The sales clerk, a real good-looking lady, says, ‘Here, I’ll try them on.’ She sticks her hand inside a glove and says, ‘It fits me. Is she about my size?’ The man says, ‘Yes, she is about your size, so that’s very helpful, thank you!’ The sales lady says, ‘Anything else?’ The man says, ‘Yeah. Come to think of it, she needs a bra and panties, too.’”

  I pushed the icon again, instantly sending it to our Facebook page and deleting it from my phone. Not the funniest joke I’ve ever told, but Stewart liked that kind of humor.

  My cell phone buzzed as I held it. I almost dropped it.

  The caller ID said Stewart.

  Wow, that was weird. Weird that he was just on my mind and weird that Stewart would call me. He never called me. He would sometimes post a comment on the Facebook page, but our interactions were mostly limited to my visits to the nursing home. It was up north, in Evanston, and these days I rarely got out there.

  Anyway, I answered the phone. “Stewart?” I said, propping up my voice with cheer.

  “Billy?”

  A woman’s voice. His daughter?

  “It’s Grace,” she said. Yep, his daughter, Grace, the one whose own daughter was in the intensive care unit back then.

  “Hi, Grace,” I said, as a chill of dread spread through my chest.

  “Billy, I have some bad news. My father passed.”

  “Oh, Grace. Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “Listen, I’m sorry for the late notice—I couldn’t find your number. You’re unlisted. I finally figured out that Dad had your number in his phone. It’s just that—he never used that phone, and we were distracted—”

  “Grace, it’s no problem.”

  “Well, the wake is tomorrow,” she said. “He died four days ago, and I’m just now calling. I think…well, considering how you two met and what you went through, I think he’d understand if it was too hard for you to come. But I wanted to give you the choice.”

  Tomorrow. Bad timing. Amy and I were going to do an entire run-through of my direct examination at trial and then a complete cross-examination. But that didn’t matter.

  “Of course I’ll be there,” I said.

  Sixty-One

  THE FUNERAL home in Winnetka was like all of them, everything muted and clean and tasteful. The people working the place were wearing gentle, noncommittal expressions. The walls were painted soft shades of purple or pink. Flowers were arranged just so.

  The large photo of Stewart resting on an easel when I walked in was striking to me because it didn’t look like the Stewart I remembered; it was a black-and-white photo from his wedding day, I presumed, taken in the early fifties. There were hints of the Stewart I knew in that photograph—the eyes, that crooked smile—but here he had a head full of hair and athletic shoulders.

  I learned a lot about him over those several weeks in the ICU. I knew he married his college sweetheart, Ann Marie; they were married forty-six years, had four children and thirteen grandkids. At the time I probably could have named all seventeen of the offspring. The names escaped me now, three years later, and for some reason it made me feel guilty.

  The place was full, which made me feel glad for Stewart. Times like these, I always asked myself questions incapable of being answered, like whether any of this meant anything; whether Stewart even knew we were gathered here for him; whether he was looking down on us or was just a dead body in a coffin.

  Stewart once told me, when we got around to discussing funerals—a morbid topic but an unavoidable one at the time—that funerals weren’t for the dead, they were for the living, to give them an outlet to grieve.

  But I wanted to tell myself that I was doing this for him. I didn’t want to be here, but I owed it to him. In many ways, Stewart saved my life in that ICU.

  I found Grace, his daughter, the one whose own daughter died in that ICU. Her face was washed out from so many tears, her body language showed she was worn down, but she smiled sweetly at me, and we hugged. She introduced me to her siblings, one of whom I’d met before. “This is the guy I was telling you about, the police detective,” she said, and they all knew me that way. They all thanked me for the jokes. They reminded me, each of them, that the first thing Stewart did every morning when he got up was turn on the laptop computer and look for Facebook videos from me.

  “You kept him going when Annabelle died,” one of his sons said to me, pulling me aside, referring to the granddaughter Stewart lost. “He said he couldn’t have made it through without you.”

  I made my way into the visitation room and waited my turn at the open casket. He looked like some semblance of my Stewart, a bit waxy and artificial, but the makeup artist did a pretty good job. I touched the casket and said a prayer, not knowing if it made a difference but covering the bases all the same. Then I took a seat in one of the chairs and sat quietly. I didn’t know anybody else there and
didn’t plan on staying long. I needed to leave, in fact, but I wasn’t ready to let go just yet.

  I thought of what Stewart’s son said to me. It didn’t feel like I was propping Stewart up in the ICU. It felt like the other way around. He gave me an outlet, someone to talk to, a shoulder to cry on. He let me crack off-color jokes so I didn’t have to sit there every waking moment for more than twenty-three agonizing days—561 hours, to be precise—wondering how in God’s name it made sense, how it was okay, how it could possibly be part of God’s plan that my beautiful angel, my three-year-old daughter, had to die.

  Oh, was Stewart a feisty, foul-mouthed ball buster. He used to demand the straight scoop from the doctors. Stop coddling me, he’d always say, and just tell me what’s what. He always told me that at some point in your life you get tired of bullshit. You just want the truth. You just want what’s real. Decide what matters in life, he said, and focus on that. The rest is bullshit.

  I was wondering if I was reaching that stage myself, though I was less than half Stewart’s age. I was so tired of the lies. It was enough that I spent my career chasing bad guys—and sometimes bad cops. The bad guys I could deal with. Somebody needed to separate us from them, and I was as good as the next person to do it.

  But now people close to me were in my line of sight, and what was just as bad was that I was in their line of sight, too. Patti and I had all but accused each other of killing Ramona Dillavou. Kate and I had all but accused each other of stealing the little black book. Amy initially wanted to tear my head off, and now we set off fireworks every time we touched.

  I didn’t know whom to trust anymore. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to love. Even Stewart, my friend Stewart, even someone for whom I had nothing but the deepest gratitude and affection. Sure, I kept in touch, but I did it remotely, not visiting him in the nursing home and brightening his day, not taking him out to lunch or grabbing a beer or getting some fresh air. No, I sent him videos of my stand-up routines and random jokes, bringing sunlight into his day, sure, okay, but doing it from a distance, over the Internet. I was the comedian, the guy who made you feel good from a stage, holding a microphone and talking to a crowd shrouded in darkness or sending videos over Facebook. I felt good doing it—but it was nothing intimate, nothing up close and personal.

  Everything from a distance. Because it hurt too much to get close.

  I got up on shaky legs and turned to leave.

  Amy Lentini was sitting in a row of chairs three south of mine, dressed in black.

  I walked over to her.

  “Just in case you needed someone,” she said.

  She put her hand in mine. I took the other hand, too, gripped them tightly, and looked directly at her. When the words came out of my mouth, they were rough, like sandpaper, coming as they were from a throat garbled with emotion. They came out as a whisper, maybe because of our surroundings, but more so because I meant them more than ever, and I was afraid of the answer she would give.

  “Can I trust you?” I said. “I mean, really trust you?”

  She peered into my eyes. She didn’t know what was swimming through my head, but under the circumstances, knowing how I met Stewart, knowing my backstory, she could take a pretty good guess. She seemed to recognize the weight in my question, that I’d never said anything more serious in my life.

  “You can trust me, Billy,” she whispered. “I promise.”

  Sixty-Two

  I DROVE my car behind Amy’s, following her. Tomorrow the pretrial hearing would begin—the case of the brownstone brothel, which had ensnared the mayor and archbishop of the nation’s third-largest city as well as a dozen other of its VIPs. The entire country would be watching. All eyes would be on the prosecutor, Amy, and me, the star witness, as defense attorneys from across the United States, some of the highest-paid lawyers in the business, took their turns trying to dissect my testimony like Lieutenant Mike Goldberger had dissected the eggs on his breakfast plate.

  Those lawyers would spend today sharpening their knives, engaging in mock cross-examinations with their colleagues, looking for any hole they could find in the dam of my testimony, probing for any possible way to show the judge that I had no reason to raid that brothel, that my arrests violated the Fourth Amendment, and that all their clients should go free on a legal technicality.

  So Amy and I were going to do a final practice round, too.

  But Amy, heading down Lake Shore Drive from Winnetka, did not make it all the way downtown to her office. She turned off earlier, at Irving Park, and I followed her through some of the side streets in Wrigleyville until she parked.

  She got out of her car, hiked her purse over her shoulder, and walked up to a low-rise condo building. I got out, too, and followed her. She typed a number onto a pad, and her door popped open with a buzz.

  I followed her without saying a word. We walked through the foyer to the elevator, then took it up to the sixth floor. We walked down the hallway to her apartment. She opened the door and walked in. As soon as she was inside, she turned to me and pressed her lips against mine.

  We undressed slowly, savoring it, my hands running over her shoulders as I eased the blouse off her. Dropping to my knees to slide off her pants, running my hands up the curve of her leg. She smelled so fresh, not a particular scent I could identify, but fresh, clean, new.

  We walked together, her forward, me backward, into the bedroom and fell into bed. We kept our slow pace, enjoying every moment, every touch of the skin, every gentle moan. She held me in her hand and left it there, just feeling it, feeling me, taking it all in, before it was time to accelerate. But I didn’t want to accelerate, didn’t want to speed this up; I wanted to remember every moment, wanted time to stand still so this could be all that was happening in my life—not the lies, not the suspicion, not the pain. Just this.

  She sucked in her breath as I entered her, looking me in the eye until her head lolled back and her breathing escalated. I felt so much heat, so much energy inside me that I felt like I would explode, but as we moved in sync, as our bodies rose and fell together, I felt something else, too, something I could only describe as peace.

  I felt safe, for the first time I could remember.

  When it happened, when I couldn’t hold back any longer, I fought off the urge to push the pace. Instead I let it happen on its own, allowed it to slowly release from me. I heard myself cry out while Amy did the same. It was less like we were engaged in sexual intercourse than like we were hanging on tight while the roller coaster plunged downward, out of control.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered when it was over.

  We didn’t get a lot of practice in that afternoon or evening. We were ready for their best shot, Amy told me, and she was probably right. Instead we ordered Chinese food and ate kung pao chicken and noodles on her couch. We talked about things other than the trial, about music and literature and travel. I learned that she was once a concert violinist, that she spent a year studying abroad in Florence, that her younger brother qualified for the Olympics in speed skating, that she didn’t know how to swim and was too embarrassed, at her age, to take lessons.

  It was the best afternoon I’d had in a long time.

  We had another go-round in bed, this time less tentative, more familiar, but very different, more confident, more animal aggressive. I had the distinct feeling that every sexual encounter with Amy Lentini would be an experience all its own, every one unique, like a snowflake.

  We decided it was better not to spend the night together. We had to be ready bright and early the next day for the hearing, so we made plans to meet at the courthouse at 26th and Cal an hour beforehand.

  I drove back to my town house, a song on my lips, my limbs rubbery, feeling weightless. Something felt different now. It felt like maybe I had “turned the corner” that everybody, with good intentions, had promised me I would turn sooner or later.

  When I got home, I pulled my mail from the slot. Perched against my door was an envelope,
the full-size, eight-and-a-half-by-eleven kind. Blank, nothing written on the outside.

  I set down the mail and slid my finger under the envelope’s flap. Inside was a single glossy photograph. It didn’t take me long to recognize the brownstone and the steps leading up to it. It was another one of those scandalous pics, the ones I’d seen previously under Kim Beans’s byline. The individual in the photograph was trying to be discreet, head down, coat collar pulled up high, not wanting to be seen or noticed.

  But the camera wouldn’t be denied. The photographer got a nice zoomed-in shot of the person’s face.

  There was no denying who it was.

  The person in the photograph, taking her first step up the stairs of the brownstone brothel, was none other than Amy Lentini.

  The Present

  Sixty-Three

  “HERE. EAT.”

  I glance at the bowl of pasta Patti sets in front of me. I nod at her but don’t reach for the food. She’s trying to distract me, more than anything, from what I’m seeing on television.

  Margaret Olson, front-runner for the race for mayor, before a bank of microphones, the white and blue stripes and red six-pointed stars of the city’s flag behind her. She looks like a pro, scrubbed and coiffed, her blue suit impeccable, trying for the perfect combination of serious crime fighter and chief executive.

  “While my candidacy for mayor will continue in full force,” she says, “my job as the Cook County state’s attorney has not ended, and I won’t allow politics to get in the way of my duty. The crimes committed by Detective Harney strike at the heart of the problems in this city. When a sworn police officer not only breaches the trust of our citizens but also kills to cover up that breach—I can think of no greater crime. I have vowed to stop this kind of corruption.”