The Black Book Read online

  I make it back to my neighborhood after a good four miles, more than an hour. I feel pretty good. The walk has loosened my muscles and massaged out some of the stress. But the specter of the trial weighs on my shoulders.

  I know how this is going to end. We will put up a valiant battle, and the jury will probably believe that Kate went too far in her pursuit of me. But who’s kidding whom? It will take a miracle to escape all four murder charges, to convince the jury that Kate was responsible for the murders and a frame-up, all because she couldn’t have me.

  That feeling again—

  I stop dead on the sidewalk. Spin around. Nobody in sight. I can’t put my finger on it. I don’t see or hear anybody. But I feel it.

  Somebody is following me.

  I turn back around and keep walking. A gold SUV rolls up to the intersection, seems like it slows. Seems like maybe the driver casts a look in my direction. I don’t get a good look at him, as dusk has settled in, and he drives away before I can confirm anything, before I can even make out the license plate.

  When I turn the corner toward my home, I stop again.

  Somebody sitting on the porch outside my town house.

  I draw closer. It’s just dark enough that I can’t make out—

  Oh. It’s Pop. Didn’t recognize him in the baseball hat.

  “Mind if I join you?” he asks when I approach.

  We keep walking past my town house. The air feels good. We don’t always get this in Chicago. Usually we skip from summer to winter without much of an autumn.

  “Your mother and I used to go for walks,” he says to me. “After you and Patti were off to college and we were empty nesters. She said it calmed me down. It worked out all the demons I built up after a day on the job.”

  The wind kicks up, carrying the smell of rain. Pop twirls a key ring on his finger.

  “I didn’t want you to be a cop,” he says. “Did you know that?”

  I didn’t. I assumed that nothing would make him prouder than to see his son follow in his footsteps.

  “And then,” he goes on, “once you were sworn in, I made a vow that I wouldn’t do anything to interfere. I wouldn’t pull strings to get you ahead. I wouldn’t hover over you.” He nods to himself, lets out a sigh. “I thought that was the best gift I could give you. To let you make it on your own merits, so you’d know that I didn’t smooth your path. But I should’ve watched over you more. I should have made sure…”

  I stop and turn to him. It takes my father a moment to look me in the eyes.

  “Pop,” I say, “I’m not a dirty cop. I never took a dime. I didn’t offer anyone protection. I didn’t kill anybody.”

  He looks me over, gives me one of those meaningful parental appraisals.

  “I know that,” he says.

  “No, you don’t. You hope that. Because if I’m a dirty cop, you think it’s your fault for not watching over me on the job.”

  He doesn’t respond to that. He works his jaw and narrows his eyes. For a moment I think he’s about to lose it, burst into tears, which is not something my father does. But all our emotions are bubbling at the surface right now.

  I can’t imagine what it’s like to see your child stand trial on murder charges. But I can guess. I can guess that Pop is reliving all those Little League games and piano recitals and school plays he missed because of the demands of his job, because of his ambition to advance in the force. All those times he could have taken me in his arms and told me how much he loved me instead of just giving me a stoic nod of approval or a clap on the shoulder.

  He’s playing that cruel game of “what if.” What if he had spent more time with me? What if he had kept a closer eye on me on the job?

  “I didn’t come here for a psychoanalysis,” my father says.

  “No?”

  “I came here,” he says, “because I have a way out of this for you.”

  Eighty-Five

  “A WAY out of this,” I say slowly, repeating Pop’s words. “How?”

  “Not a question of how,” he says. “A question of where.”

  “A question of…” A moment before it clicks. “Are you telling me to run?”

  He takes a breath, shuffles his feet. “If you want to,” he says, his eyes on the pavement.

  “You’re kidding.”

  He looks up at me again, a brisk shake of the head. “I’m not.”

  “You put up your house for my bond,” I say. “If I left, you’d lose—”

  “You think I give a rat’s ass about my house?” he spits out. “They can have my damn house. Don’t need it anyway, not anymore. I’m a widower in a five-bedroom—”

  “They’ll put you in prison.”

  Pop looks up at the sky, scratches the razor burn on his face.

  I step back, appraising him. “You’re serious,” I say.

  “I’ve never been more serious in my life, son. We can get you out tonight. Get you out of the country. Mexico, I was thinking, for starters. A retired cop down there has a place outside Playa del Carmen. We start there. Probably move you to South America.”

  “I surrendered my passport.”

  “Yeah, you did. But we can get you papers. And then we’ll have to—”

  “I don’t want to hear this, Pop. I don’t even wanna—”

  I freeze, midsentence.

  “Who’s ‘we’?” I ask.

  Pop nods to his Toyota, across the street. I hadn’t noticed it parked along the curb. I can just make out Goldie in the front seat.

  Pop and Goldie, willing to put their careers and freedom on the line. It hits me in the throat how much this must be affecting them. That the casualties aren’t limited to the dead bodies or to me, the one facing prison.

  “Billy, we can do this. Tonight. I can get you a car and identification, and you can get across the border before they know you’re gone. I have some money. Not a lot, but some. Enough. We’ll both have burner phones so we can talk, coordinate it. It can be done, son. You know it can.”

  While he’s been speaking, I’ve backpedaled. I throw up my hands. “And what happens to you?”

  “Don’t worry about what happens to me. I’ll…” His shoulders rise and fall. “They’ll suspect me. I know that. We just have to be smart. Not leave a trail.” He nods. “I’m willing to take the chance.”

  “And Patti? I don’t even say good-bye to Patti? I never see her again?”

  Pop looks off in the distance, wincing. When he shows pain, he reminds me of my sister.

  “Your sister would rather see you living on some beach, tending bar and banging the local women, than visit you through a glass window in Stateville the rest of your life. She’d be happy that you have a life.”

  I pinch the skin above my nose, let out some kind of noise.

  Freedom. Like a warm breeze. I can taste it on my tongue, feel it flow through my blood. Another chance. A new life.

  And then my father is on me, his hands gripping my biceps.

  “Let me do this for you,” he whispers, trying to hide the tremor in his voice. “You came back for a reason, son. You could’ve died in that bedroom. You should’ve died. But you didn’t. You fought all the odds and came back. You didn’t do that so you could spend the rest of your life in a concrete cell. You have a second chance. I have a second—”

  I break away from him.

  Above us, murmurs from the sky, the first hint of unrest, the clouds darkening.

  He clears his throat, wipes at his eyes with his sleeve, collects himself, letting the emotions recede once more to their familiar hiding place.

  “You have no case,” he says. “You’re going to lose. The judge’ll have to give you life. If you run and get caught, what’s the difference? They can’t give you more than life.”

  It’s not like we both don’t know it. My case is shit because I can’t remember anything. I’m crippled. I’m being pushed into the boxing ring with both hands tied behind my back.

  “It’s what your mother would
want,” he says.

  “No, don’t—don’t.” I raise a finger. “Mom wouldn’t want me to admit to something I didn’t do.”

  My father drops his hands, looks at me the way he did when I was a child—a kid who had done something that completely exasperated his parent.

  His expression slowly changing from frustration and pleading to something darker and colder. Something haunted and profoundly sad.

  “How do you know you didn’t do it?” he whispers. “How do you know?”

  Eighty-Six

  STATE’S ATTORNEY Margaret Olson stands before the jury, buttons the jacket of her soft gray suit. There is standing room only in the courtroom. It is utterly silent, crackling with anticipation. It is late in the day, after a morning and early afternoon spent picking the jury. There will be time today only for the prosecution’s opening statement.

  Olson angles herself slightly, allowing her to gesture in my direction. She will point at me, Stilson warned. She will point at me and accuse me.

  “Detective William Harney was a crooked cop,” she says. “A dirty cop who knew he was about to be caught. So he tried to cover it up the only way he knew how. He killed the star witness, he killed fellow police officers who were on to him, and he killed the prosecutor in charge of investigating him.”

  She turns and points at me, her wrist snapping down, her index finger extended. “The defendant killed four people, and he is charged with four counts of murder.”

  I shake my head, not in an exaggerated, I swear I didn’t do it fashion but rather in bemusement, as though her claims are so preposterous that they aren’t deserving of a reply.

  “The defendant ran one of the oldest scams in the book,” she says. “He was offering protection. If you’re a cop, and someone’s doing something illegal, you tell them: throw a little money my way, and I’ll make sure nobody busts you. I’ll protect you.”

  She nods, lets that sink in for the jurors. Convincing a jury of Chicagoans that a city cop is crooked is about as difficult as convincing Donald Trump that he’s an impressive guy. And half these jurors come from suburban Cook County. A lot of suburbanites just assume that everything we do in Chicago is corrupt.

  Olson tells them about the brownstone brothel in the Gold Coast, shows them a picture, reminds them of what they already heard play out in the media over the last year about the former mayor, the archbishop, and all the rich and famous clients.

  “The defendant was protecting that high-end house of prostitution,” she says. “He was this close to being caught.” Her index finger and thumb are an inch apart. “The Cook County state’s attorney’s office—my office—was investigating that brothel. The lead prosecutor in charge of the investigation was a woman named Amy Lentini.”

  Olson places an enlarged photo of Amy in professional attire, a pleasant smile on her face, on an easel.

  “Amy was about to break it wide open. She was about to raid the brothel. We will show you the request for a search warrant she was drafting. It will show you what she was looking for, above all else: records. A little black book. You run a business, you need to keep records, right?”

  Several jurors nod in agreement.

  “But it’s an illegal business,” she continues. “You’re accepting money from clients for sex. You’re doling out some of the money to a cop for protection. All of it illegal. Not the kind of records you file with an accountant or share with the IRS.”

  A couple of the jurors laugh. I’ve always viewed Margaret Olson as having a stick up her ass, but I can’t deny that she’s drawing in this jury, speaking to them plainly, a nice blend of drama and folksiness. She’s a good politician.

  I underestimated her, and I couldn’t have picked a worse time to do so.

  “Amy had information that the manager of this sex club was keeping records right there in the brownstone—that she had a little black book. Amy was only days away from raiding that brothel and getting her hands on it—days away from having the proof that she needed against a corrupt Chicago cop.” Olson takes a step to her right. “We will show you the request for a search warrant that Amy was preparing. You will hear from one of the other prosecutors assigned to the investigation. But you won’t hear from Amy, the prosecutor in charge of the investigation. You won’t hear from her because the defendant made sure nobody will ever hear from Amy again.”

  She turns and glares at me. Then she slowly nods her head.

  “The defendant was smart,” she says. “Very smart. He learned about the state’s attorney’s investigation. He knew we were about to raid that sex club. So what did he do? He did something very, very clever.”

  A dramatic pause while the jury wonders what I did that was so clever.

  “He raided it first,” she says. “That’s right: the defendant, a homicide detective—someone whose job and rank had absolutely nothing to do with vice or prostitution or anything close to it—suddenly raided that brothel himself and arrested everyone inside.”

  She opens her hands. “It was brilliant. It accomplished two goals, really. One was misdirection. Of all the cops in the world whom you might suspect of protecting a house of prostitution, the last one you’d suspect is the person who raided it, who exposed it—right? It made him look innocent.”

  Several jurors nod, scribble in notepads.

  “Smart,” says Olson. “And the second goal, which was even more important, was to find the brothel’s records. By storming into that brownstone before Amy could, the defendant beat her to the little black book. He stole it and destroyed it.”

  Jurors nodding, the pieces coming together.

  “But there’s still the sex-club manager herself, right? I mean, even if the little black book is gone, the manager can still testify about her payoffs to the police. Ramona Dillavou was her name. Ramona Dillavou ran that brothel.”

  She puts an enlarged photo of Ramona Dillavou, taken at some party, on the easel next to Amy’s picture, part of the parade of victims.

  “Ramona was still a threat to the defendant. More than ever. But Ms. Dillavou will not take the witness stand in this case, either. Because the defendant silenced her, too.”

  I do another head shake, but I know—everyone in the courtroom knows—that Margaret Olson is doing a masterly job of pinning me down.

  A lawyer once told me that 90 percent of trials are won or lost in the opening statement.

  Olson holds out her hand, counts off on her fingers. “Fact,” she says, popping her thumb. “The defendant was under investigation for corruption.

  “Fact: the defendant used his position to break into that brownstone before the investigators could, and the most damning piece of evidence up and disappeared.

  “Fact: the lead prosecutor investigating him was murdered.

  “Fact: the principal witness who could testify against him was murdered.”

  Margaret Olson takes a moment, nods.

  “And we’re just getting started,” she says.

  Eighty-Seven

  “I TOLD you the defendant was smart,” says Olson to the jury. “Very, very smart. He knew Amy was on to him. He knew she suspected him of stealing that little black book. You will hear from the chief law enforcement officer in this city, the top cop—police superintendent Tristan Driscoll. He will take that witness stand, he will swear an oath, and he will tell you that Amy accused the defendant of stealing that little black book when she questioned him after the brownstone was raided.”

  Olson strolls a step or two to one side for a segue. For someone who spends more time in a political campaign office than a courtroom, she’s doing very well. It’s obvious that somebody prepared her. She is performing like a seasoned pro. She is giving her opening statement to the jury at my trial, but she’s also giving her closing argument to the media and the public in her campaign for mayor.

  “So what did the defendant do? This very smart, clever man? He struck up a relationship with Amy. He charmed her. He seduced her. You know that old saying ‘Keep your f
riends close and your enemies closer’? The defendant took that to heart. He kept his enemy closer. He kept tabs on Amy and her investigation. The relationship became sexual, and it became very intense. Amy fell in love with the defendant.” Olson puts a hand on her chest. “You won’t have to take my word for it. Amy’s mother, Mary Ann Lentini, will take that witness stand and tell you that Amy told her all about the defendant. Amy told her mother that, for the first time in her life, she had fallen in love.”

  The words hit me like a punch to the gut. I look away from Olson and the jury, as if doing so will somehow distance me from her words.

  “Keep it together,” Stilson mumbles to me.

  “But was it a real relationship? Did the defendant really have feelings for Amy, or was it all a con, a scam, just to keep an eye on her investigation? Well, ultimately, that’s for you to decide. But consider this: Amy wasn’t the only woman the defendant was taking to bed. He was sleeping with another woman, too. Guess who that was?”

  Olson places an enlarged photograph of Kate on the third easel.

  “Detective Katherine Fenton, his partner,” she says. “His partner for more than six years. All those years it was strictly platonic. A close relationship, sure, but not romantic, not sexual. But then there was the raid of the brownstone. Katherine was with him the night of the raid. Of course she was. She was his partner. And afterward, she was in that room in the state’s attorney’s office when Amy accused the defendant of stealing the little black book. Katherine even knew that she might be under the umbrella of suspicion. Sure. Guilt by association, right?

  “So Katherine Fenton started looking into things on her own. And she began to believe that maybe her partner wasn’t what he seemed, that maybe what Amy was saying was true. Maybe the defendant had stolen the little black book.”

  Olson claps her hands together. “And how did the defendant respond when he realized his partner was having second thoughts about him?”