The Black Book Read online

  Picking the lock was the easiest part. A cheap pin-tumbler lock. A suspect she questioned once in a series of B and E’s who wanted her to like him—a lot of suspects did; she had no idea why they thought it would help—showed her how to pick a lock. She held her breath as she went to work and listened intently for any sounds. If someone came out of one of the other apartments on the sixth floor, she would have to put on her game face, quickly raise the phone to her ear again, pretend to be on a call, chat merrily, tell her nonexistent caller I can’t find my damn keys, and laugh. She would have to say and do things that wouldn’t arouse suspicion.

  She was good at this. So good it scared her.

  She worked in private, nobody emerging from any of the other apartments. Patti gently opened the door to Amy’s apartment and waited for the last hurdle—the possibility of an alarm.

  No alarm. No sound when she entered. People in apartment buildings think their locked buzzer door on the ground floor is all the protection they need.

  She closed the door behind her and felt relief swirl through her. She drew a long breath. Removed her winter gloves. Replaced them with rubber gloves.

  Slipped out of her wet, slushy boots, too. They could leave footprints all over the apartment. Later, when it was time to leave, she would clean up the slush at the front door with paper towels and take the towels with her. She would leave no trace behind.

  “Okay, Amy,” she said to the empty apartment. “Let’s get to work.”

  Eighty

  SHE WASN’T sure where to start. A sock drawer. A kitchen cabinet. On the nightstand. Under a pillow. In a medicine cabinet. Under a rug. It could be anywhere.

  She started unconventionally, assuming it wouldn’t be anywhere obvious. She went through the bathroom cabinet and underneath the sink, feeling around the bottom, opening medicine bottles and jars of lotions. She looked under the bed and pulled back curtains. She quietly stomped her foot along the carpeting in the bedroom and on the hardwood in the main room, searching for false bottoms, secret compartments.

  Nothing. She looked over at the small desk perched in the corner of the main room, a laptop resting on top along with some papers. A mini office in a cramped apartment. The obvious place. So obvious she didn’t start there. But now it was time.

  She pulled open a drawer and removed some notepads, a passport, some letters and other documents, a magazine open to an article about Amy’s famed prosecution of the US senator in Wisconsin. Left inside the desk were a few pens and pencils and a small black thumb drive.

  She picked up the thumb drive and stared at it, as if it could tell her anything by itself. It had no markings, no label.

  Patti felt a tremble in her limbs as she removed her laptop computer from the suitcase she’d brought with her. She sat in the chair by Amy’s desk and carefully placed the thumb drive into the slot on the side of her laptop.

  She held her breath as it booted up. A menu screen popped up, revealing the contents of the thumb drive. One document, in PDF format.

  The title of the document was: LEDGER.

  She felt a jolt of electricity sizzle through her as she clicked on the link and her laptop began its wrenching and tugging. The contents suddenly appeared on her screen.

  “My God, this is it,” she whispered. “This is the little black book.”

  Eighty-One

  THERE HAD been various theories on what form it would take. Some people thought that Ramona Dillavou, the manager of the brownstone brothel, would steer clear of computers and simply write everything by hand on a pad of paper. Others figured she wouldn’t have been able to resist the simplicity and flexibility of a computer.

  But everyone agreed on one thing: Ramona Dillavou would absolutely, positively keep some record of the transactions inside the brownstone brothel.

  The computer screen gleamed on Patti’s face, the document lingering before her eyes like the Holy Grail. Hundreds of man-hours had been spent trying to find this document. Several lives had been lost.

  It turned out that both theories were right—Ramona Dillavou had written down her entries in handwriting, on a pad of paper, but those pieces of paper had been scanned onto this thumb drive. Someone had made a copy.

  There were more than forty pages of what looked like an accountant’s ledger, organized by dates that began nearly three years ago. On each line there were codes—letters followed by numbers followed by what appeared to be a dollar amount for services rendered: “BBB-14-5000”; “JJ-21-7500”; “Q-17-10000.” The entries went on for pages and pages. No names, just codes.

  But at the end, after scrolling through nearly forty pages, she found the key to all the coded language. Each number referred to a different prostitute, her first name and last initial only. The number 14 was for a girl named Ava J. The number 21 referred to a Marnie B. In all, there were more than fifty prostitutes—Krista K., Courtney G., Leann L., and so on—who had worked at the brownstone brothel over the last three years.

  Every letter was assigned to a client, his last name only, and once the alphabet was exhausted, the letters were doubled, then tripled. She found Archbishop Phelan under the letter K, which must have made him one of the earliest clients. RR was for Delaney—the now disgraced former Mayor Francis Delaney.

  And YY was for Tedesco, which had to be none other than Congressman John Tedesco, the man who had just handed over the keys to the mayor’s office to Amy’s boss, Margaret Olson.

  Patti read through the list of clients, some of whom had already been exposed by the flashy photographs that Kim Beans had published. But there were plenty more names, nearly a hundred in all.

  When she got to the last of the client names, Patti paused. She was at page 40 of 42. There were two more pages to read. She wasn’t sure what was coming next, but she had a pretty good idea. Ramona Dillavou had obviously been very conscientious in recording all her other transactions, the clients coming in and out of the brownstone, paying in anonymous cash for their anonymous fantasies. Why wouldn’t she be just as diligent in recording the payouts she made to the cops to protect her illicit enterprise?

  Patti took a breath and scrolled down to the next page. The heading of the page, in Ramona’s handwriting, said, Payments Out.

  Yep. The payoffs. The bribes. Ramona recorded them, all right.

  And there was the same name, line after line, over the last three years, monthly payments, originally in the amount of $2,000, later doubling to $4,000, and by the end reaching $10,000 a month.

  The same name on every single line, receiving every single payment.

  “So Amy knows,” she whispered to the empty room. “That’s a problem.”

  Patti stared at the computer until the words began to blur, until they began to move and twitch on the screen. She kept staring even as the screen saver activated, asteroids hurtling across the black screen. She stared until darkness began to hover outside the windows of Amy Lentini’s apartment.

  She stared until she decided what to do.

  Then she gently closed her laptop, as if it were explosive, and removed the thumb drive from the slot on the side.

  She slipped the thumb drive in her pants pocket. “I think I’ll be taking this off your hands now, Amy,” she said. “Finders keepers and all that.”

  She placed the laptop back in the suitcase she had brought with her and zipped the suitcase closed.

  “Don’t you worry, little brother,” she said as she put her boots back on. “I’m going to clean this all up. You can thank me later.”

  The Present

  Eighty-Two

  “DETECTIVE KATHERINE Fenton was a woman scorned,” says my lawyer, Stilson Tomita, leaning against the window ledge in his office, a view of the Chicago River and the Wells Street Bridge behind him. “A woman who wanted Billy Harney but couldn’t have him. And if she couldn’t have him, nobody could.”

  Wow. That’s harsh.

  “She had a brief affair with Billy, but she wanted more, and Billy didn’t. Billy, i
n fact, started dating another woman, Amy Lentini. Kate couldn’t handle it. So she lashed out. She tried everything. Think Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Except she’s a cop who lives in a world of guns and violence. So instead of boiling a bunny on the kitchen stove, her version of getting back at Billy was murder. She killed Ramona Dillavou, knowing Billy would be a suspect. She killed Joe Washington after seeing him with Billy in the subway—again, knowing Billy would be a suspect. Then she planted the murder weapons in Billy’s basement, knowing that would do him in. If he was going to ruin her life, she was going to ruin his.”

  And I thought his opening lines were harsh.

  “Just a few days before the shootings, she was texting Billy half-naked photos of herself, including one with a gun to her head, threatening suicide if he didn’t respond. And when he didn’t return her affection, what did she text him? ‘You had your chance. Remember that I gave you the chance.’”

  I don’t remember that text message. I don’t remember those sexy photos she texted me, either. It’s part of the black hole of my memory. The only reason we know about them is that the prosecution turned them over to us in discovery.

  “Two days later,” Stilson continues, “she goes to Amy Lentini’s apartment, where Billy and Amy are in bed. It’s the last straw. She draws her gun. Billy, whose gun is close by on the nightstand, reaches for it to return fire. His gun goes off, and Amy is hit by accident, in the heat of the moment, just before Kate and Billy shoot at each other.”

  Stilson pulls down on his tie, works his collar open. I’ve known Stilson Tomita since I was a kid, when he and my dad were rookie cops working a beat, before he finished law school and became a prosecutor, later turning to the defense side when he needed college tuition for his four kids. Stilson is a classic melting-pot Chicagoan: his father is a first-generation Japanese American who opened a tailoring business in Lincoln Park; his mother is a hundred-and-fifty-percent Irish South Sider who had cops in her family going back to the Depression. To look at him, you see more Ireland than Asia, but his features are dark enough to make it hard to place his heritage. He used to joke that people couldn’t decide whether he was Italian, Greek, or Latino.

  But regardless of nationality, he still looks like the cop he once was—the ruddy complexion, the deep-set eyes of someone who’s seen the messy sludge of the criminal justice system, its ugliness and desperation and bitterness and, ultimately, its hopelessness. He has put away people, and he’s defended them. Each side has its costs, and it shows on his weathered face.

  I look around the room at the others, my trusted inner circle: my sister, Patti, my father, and Lieutenant Mike Goldberger, as close to a second father as anyone could get. Each of them is batting around what’s just been said, Stilson’s summation of my defense.

  We are less than a week from trial, and the prosecution’s evidence is all in. Stilson and I have kicked around defense theories for weeks, but now the rubber has met the road. Now we know everything they have against me. Now it’s time to finalize our plan, then test it and retest it—kick the tires, so to speak, mold it like clay into the best argument we can make.

  “My gun accidentally went off and shot Amy?” I say. “It was an accident?”

  “Well, your gun killed Amy, not Kate’s. They can prove that.” Stilson shrugs. “If you have a better explanation, I’m all ears.”

  When your best explanation sucks eggs, things aren’t looking up.

  Stilson cocks his head, nods, seeing the look on my face. “We play the hand we’re dealt,” he says. “This is the best theory we have, Billy.”

  “It’s the only theory,” says Patti.

  “No, it’s not,” I say. “They’re saying I was a crooked cop, right? They’re saying I shook down the brothel for protection money, that the state’s attorney was investigating me, and that I killed everyone to cover it up. We could say the exact same thing about Kate. Or Wizniewski. Or both.”

  “But there’s no proof of that.” Patti pushes herself off the wall, uncrosses her arms. “There’s no proof of a protection racket. There’s no little black book. It’s a fantasy.”

  “There’s no little black book?” I say.

  “They never found it,” she says. “As far as the jury is concerned, it doesn’t exist.”

  “I agree with Patti,” says Stilson. “Listen, Billy. We start by saying the prosecution is full of shit. They can’t prove a protection racket, and therefore they can’t prove a cover-up of a protection racket. Then we give the jury a plausible alternative.” Stilson grabs blowups of the photos that Kate texted me, the sex-kitten poses. “This is a woman whose heart has been broken, who’s trying desperately to get your attention. All the jurors in that box, I guarantee you, at some point in their lives have had their hearts broken. They know the sting of rejection. They may not have committed murders and frame-ups as a result, I’ll grant you that, but they can relate to how she was feeling.”

  I look at Goldie, who grimaces as he stares at the floor.

  At my father, who narrows his eyes and brings a hand to his face.

  At Patti, who nods in agreement.

  “Kate was an unstable woman who went off the deep end,” she says. “That’s your story. There was no corruption. There was no little black book.”

  Eighty-Three

  PATTI RUNS north along the jogging path, violent wind slapping her skin, Lake Michigan lashing out like an insolent child to her right, the cars cruising by on Lake Shore Drive to the left. The weather is still warm, but this close to the lake it feels like a different climate altogether. It’s one of the things she’s always loved about Chicago—the ability to escape the concrete jungle and be so close to a beach and a massive body of water; the way the roiling lake waters and car traffic on the outer drive produce their own combination of sound, their unique symphony.

  She is not alone, not physically. There are bikers and Rollerbladers and other joggers, gaggles of people hanging out along the concrete promenade, the smell of marijuana reaching Patti’s nostrils more than once during her run.

  But she is alone in every other way. She feels completely, utterly alone in the most important way.

  She follows the path into Lincoln Park, the wind easing up, her feet appreciating the soft cinders in contrast to the unforgiving concrete next to the lake. Feeling a good runner’s high now. The burn through her chest feels right, like punishment. Part of her wants to run until her legs catch fire, until her heart explodes.

  Billy’s trial starts in two days.

  As she continues north, through Lincoln Park, past Lakeview, she veers off to Montrose Harbor. She takes a minute, catches her breath, her hands on her knees.

  The harbor is still nearly full of boats, as summer has drawn to an end but the weather has stayed warm. Most boaters will try to wring every last temperate day out of the season before they put their boats away for the winter.

  She walks along the dock, a thin sliver of concrete, a perpendicular extension a good hundred feet out into the water, a lighthouse at the end. Nothing out here but this narrow strip of pavement, the whipping wind, and the lake waters, deep and turbulent.

  She stops and looks out. To the south, the city looms, massive and imposing. Overwhelming, too. Sometimes overwhelming.

  And the lake water, an endless black hole beneath her.

  I could do it, she thinks to herself. Just one quick, impulsive surrender to temptation, and it would be over. Nobody would ever know.

  She and Billy came here once, after graduating from high school, so young and full of energy and hope. They sat on this very dock, opened a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, and sipped it as their feet dangled over the side and the wind lifted their hair. They told each other they’d be cops like their father, and they’d work together, and they’d have each other’s backs, always, forever.

  She is shivering now, her body temperature cooling rapidly against the violent wind, the chilly air.

  The lake, dancing up around her, calli
ng to her.

  I could do it. Nobody would know.

  Yes, she decides. I should have done it a long time ago.

  She reaches inside her running shorts, into that skinny front pouch big enough to hold only a key or a small wad of cash. Or a thumb drive.

  The thumb drive she stole from Amy Lentini’s condo the day before Amy’s death. The thumb drive containing the little black book.

  Just do it, she tells herself.

  She holds the tiny thumb drive in the palm of her hand. Wraps her fingers around it, makes a fist. Cocks her arm back like a pitcher winding up, looking out over the dark, endless lake. The wind will catch it, but it’s not so light that it won’t sink when it hits the water. Sure, it’s just heavy enough. It will sink deep down to the floor of Lake Michigan, a hundred feet below, carried away in the undercurrent, lost forever.

  She cocks her arm back farther still. She always had a pretty good arm—for a girl, everyone would always add. But Billy was the better athlete.

  Billy was the better everything.

  But not anymore.

  Eighty-Four

  THE NIGHT before my trial is to begin, I go for a walk.

  I walk north and east toward Bucktown, mingle among the crowd, searching out signs of life—the animated chatter in open-air restaurants, the smell of sizzling carne asada and onions, the squeal of car tires and the blaring of horns. Sometimes I still see a glimpse of Amy’s face in the crowd or hear her voice in my dreams, but it’s fading, less frequent and more distant as each day passes.

  My legs feel good; my limp is nearly gone. My hips ache these days, mostly because I’m overcompensating for my bad leg, the docs say, but otherwise I move pretty well. Stilson, my lawyer, wants me to walk into court with my cane, limping and stooped. He wants me to look wounded—a victim, not a killer. Like all those mobsters who spend their entire lives robbing and intimidating and killing and when they finally get hauled into court, they’re bent over in wheelchairs and using oxygen tanks.