The Black Book Read online

  “Because Patti would have seen the name Harney on that page of the little black book and assumed it was me,” I said. “Her first instinct would have been to protect me, to steal the little black book and destroy it.”

  Fresh tears stream down Patti’s face.

  “This whole time since the shootings, while I was in a coma, when I came out and slowly recovered, as I considered how to defend myself against these charges, she’s thought I was the dirty cop. This whole time she’s been trying to protect me. Even though she was sure I was guilty, she tried to protect me.”

  I choke up on those last words. Take a moment. Clear my throat.

  “She loves me, and she’d do anything for me,” I say, “but she worships our father. She never in a million years would have considered the possibility that the name Harney could mean another cop. She never would have suspected that the chief of detectives, Daniel Harney, was the dirty cop.”

  Patti jumps out of her seat in the front row, her mouth open, pure horror on her face. She turns to my father, whose eyes are now focused on the floor before him.

  A second chance, Pop said to me the other day when he tried to persuade me to flee the jurisdiction, to escape to Mexico. You have a second chance. I have a second chance.

  I’d like to think he was sincere when he said that—that he really was going to try to slip me out of the country to Playa del Carmen, then South America. That he wasn’t going to put a bullet in my brain somewhere between Chicago and the Mexican border.

  I’d like to believe that he was hoping for that second chance.

  But I didn’t take it. And so he sent someone to my house last night to try to kill me for the second time.

  And now I’ll never know for sure. Because I will never speak another word to him.

  One Hundred Four

  The Past

  BY THE time my father walked into the bedroom, joining Goldie, I knew that Amy would never get off that bed alive. They might think they could co-opt me into going along with a plan, but Amy? She had seen too much. She’d spent her career being a by-the-book prosecutor, straight as an arrow. And she wasn’t blood, wasn’t family. They couldn’t trust her to keep quiet. They couldn’t let her live.

  “I’m so sorry I ever doubted you,” Amy whispered on a trembling breath.

  “I’m sorry I doubted you,” I said. “I love you, Amy. I love you so much.”

  My father entered the bedroom then, looked down at Kate as he walked in, the way he might glance at a homeless person he passed on the street. I didn’t expect him to be surprised. He had obviously been listening to everything through the eavesdropping device planted in the room. He shook his head as if disappointed.

  “Congratulations, Pop,” I said. “Let me guess. Margaret’s going to make you the superintendent. And the deputy superintendent will be Mike Goldberger.”

  My father blinked several times. Always the stoic demeanor. “If you’re going to ask me to apologize for providing for my family all these years, I won’t.”

  “Providing for your family through bribes and extortion?”

  “Son, you don’t—”

  “And last I checked, Mom’s been gone for years, and all your kids are grown up. So who the fuck have you been providing for other than yourself?”

  My father wasn’t kidding; he wasn’t going to apologize. Not because he didn’t have regret. He just didn’t like to show weakness.

  He put out a hand. “I…didn’t want it to turn out this way. But it’s not too late for you, son. It’s not too late for us. Goldie was right. You can have any job in the department you want. You and Amy, you can be happy together.”

  He might have had more success had he left out that last sentence, the lie about Amy staying alive. But deep down, if he knew me at all, he knew I wouldn’t go along with him and Goldie. Which meant these words weren’t meant as a plea to me. They were meant as salve for his guilt, so he could tell himself, before he killed me—after he killed me, for the rest of his life—that he gave me one last chance.

  I moved directly in front of Amy, put out my arms behind me to barricade her in.

  “They’re going to kill me either way,” she whispered into my ear. “But they don’t want to kill you. Save yourself, Billy. Say whatever you have to say.”

  “No,” I whispered, shaking so hard I could barely speak.

  “Patti needs you, son,” my father said. “You know how she relies on you. She’s always leaned on you. Don’t make me do this. Get on board here.”

  My eyes bored into his. I should have felt fear. Instead I felt nothing but pure hatred. “Never,” I said.

  Amy’s head resting between my shoulder blades, her heartbeat pounding into my spine. Her entire body hidden behind mine, my arms behind me, trying to envelop her.

  “I love you so much,” she whispered to me, the only time she’d ever said the words to me, as my father moved toward Kate and lifted her gun from her dead hand.

  My father moving closer, holding Kate’s gun. Goldie next to him, holding mine.

  Goldie had already laid out the plan, the jilted-lover theory. It would still work for them, I realized—Kate barging in in a jealous rage, a gunfight ensuing. But my father, holding Kate’s gun, would have to shoot me. They couldn’t sell that story if I were shot with my own weapon.

  I moved one hand from Amy and reached for my phone, touched it. My father’s eyes moved to it.

  “His phone,” said my father, not to me but to Goldie. A reminder that they’d have to dispose of it, take it with them or smash it to pieces.

  “Move away from the girl,” my father said. “It doesn’t have to be both of you, son.”

  “Never,” I said again.

  “Jesus, Billy. She’s worth that much to you, huh? So much that you’re willing to die along with her?”

  I looked into my father’s eyes. Had he ever known love? Love that went beyond love for himself and his own advancement? I didn’t know. I hoped so, for my mother’s sake. I never would know for sure. All I knew was that I had found Amy, and I couldn’t ever let her go. I couldn’t live without her.

  “You always were the softhearted one,” Pop said to me. “I never understood it.”

  Behind me, Amy scooted sideways, separating herself from me. I reached for her, grabbed her arm, tried to stop her, but she had moved out from behind me before I could. She was doing what they wanted. Making it easier for them to kill her but not me. We looked at each other for a moment, probably only one tick of the clock by any objective measure, but it felt like we held that stare forever. So much courage in her eyes, so much love.

  “Shirt off, Amy,” said Goldie.

  She did what they asked. It would make the story easier—we were in bed, fooling around, when Kate stormed in. I didn’t want her to help them, but we were stalling, hanging on to precious seconds. And I needed the distraction.

  Because I had one last move. It was a long shot. The way I was seated on the bed, my legs out in front of me, made my ability to spring forward almost nonexistent. And Pop wasn’t dumb enough to get so close to me that I could reach out and grab the gun.

  But I was out of good choices. I clenched the muscles in my calves and thighs, tried to shift my balance forward without being too obvious, while Amy pulled her shirt over her head.

  I thought of my beautiful little daughter, taken so young, those angelic eyes beaming up at me, and told her that I would see her soon.

  Then I placed my hands on the bed and prepared to spring off it. There was only one way this could possibly succeed. I was counting on one thing and only one thing.

  I was counting on my father not being able to shoot his own son.

  One Hundred Five

  The Present

  I STARE at the floor as Stilson Tomita struggles for the next question. I don’t want to look at Patti, who was ordered by the sheriff’s deputy to sit back down.

  I don’t want to look at my father, either.

  “He didn’t h
esitate,” I say. “He knew I was going to make a move on him. He shot me before I had the chance. Amy must have—she…probably turned away by instinct, and my blood spattered on her bare back. For their purposes, it laid the scene out perfectly.”

  I wipe at my face. The courtroom rings with utter silence.

  “I wish I’d died right then.”

  But I didn’t.

  “They killed Amy, too,” says Stilson, a choke in his voice.

  I nod.

  Eventually, so the doctors tell me, my brain and heart clicked off for a while before I came back to life, but I didn’t check out right away. I heard what they did to Amy. I couldn’t see anything at that point, but for some reason I could still hear.

  “Amy, this can still turn out okay for you,” said Goldie. “They shot each other. You were an innocent bystander.”

  “Just give us the thumb drive, and we’re on our way,” said my father.

  I heard her voice as though it were far away, a muted, low mumble. I could hear Amy’s desperate whispers:

  “Incline, O Lord, thine ears to our prayers, in which we humbly beseech thy mercy, that thou would place the soul of thy servant Billy, which thou hast caused to depart from this world—”

  “Amy! Work with me here. Focus. Give us the little black book.”

  But Amy was no longer listening. As these two predators closed in on her, ready to steal away her life at any second, Amy wasn’t thinking of herself.

  She was thinking of me. She was praying for my soul.

  “We don’t want to shoot you, Amy.”

  I had forgotten how to pray after I lost my wife and daughter. I had rejected God and lost my faith. But now I prayed. Inside my wrecked brain, I prayed that Amy’s death would come quickly and without pain. I prayed that God would take Amy into his kingdom and surround her with all the love she deserved.

  “She’s not gonna talk,” said my father. “It’s in here somewhere. We’ll find it. Just get on with it.”

  I felt no pain. I felt nothing but Amy’s love wrapped around me, the warmth spreading through me. I didn’t feel the touch of her hand or her breath on my face or her lips on mine. I felt all of her, all at once.

  I heard the gunshot, the startled gasp escaping Amy’s mouth.

  And then I heard nothing at all.

  I look up at Stilson Tomita through blurry eyes, my face soaked with tears, unable to speak, my heartbeat banging against my shirt.

  Right now I feel her again; I am filled with her. A feeling that wants to be pain, but I won’t let it hurt. She wouldn’t want that. Amy would want me to feel the joy of her love, not the sadness.

  I will never forget you, Amy. I will move on, because I know you want me to. But you will always be part of me.

  Stilson Tomita clears his throat, wipes at his eyes.

  “No further questions, Your Honor,” he says.

  One Hundred Six

  “MAXIMUM MARGARET” Olson moves from the prosecutor’s table and slithers toward me, her eyes on me, filled with hatred. This trial has been about me. I’ve had to fight for my life. But now this trial is about something else, too. It’s about Margaret Olson, front-runner in the race for Chicago mayor. In every way that counts, she is now fighting for her life, too.

  “That was quite a story, Mr. Harney. Lots of revelations!” She makes a show with her hands. “Little black books and cover-ups! But let me see if I understand this.”

  She stops only a foot away from me, puts her hands on the wooden frame of the witness stand, bracing herself, leaning forward toward me. I’m half expecting a serpent’s tongue to lash out and pluck out my eyeballs.

  It’s all I can do not to lunge forward and grab her throat. Margaret didn’t commit murder, but her ambition and corruption were part of this, too. She is just as much to blame as my father and Goldie.

  “Amy Lentini isn’t here to corroborate your testimony, is she?”

  I inhale and exhale. I am in a court of law, and I am still on trial. I think of Amy, and what she would want, her by-the-book, respect-the-law way.

  Fine, Margaret. I can hurt you without ever laying a finger on you.

  “No, Amy is not here,” I say, drawing out the words.

  “Neither is Kate Fenton, is she?”

  “No.”

  “Now that they’re dead, you can say whatever you want about them, can’t you?”

  “If you say so.”

  “And I assume that two of the most decorated members of the Chicago Police Department, Chief of Detectives Daniel Harney and the chief of the Bureau of Internal Affairs, Michael Goldberger, can—”

  “I’m sure they’ll deny everything,” I say.

  She didn’t expect me to agree so readily. “And when the police searched the crime scene afterward, they didn’t find any eavesdropping devices, did they?”

  “No. They would be easy to remove.”

  “The point is there’s no evidence of that, is there?”

  “That’s correct, Ms. Olson.”

  She nods. Feeling a little adrenaline now. Scoring some points. Finally getting to fight back after I testified for four agonizing hours.

  “And nobody ever found a little black book, did they? I mean, there’s no proof it ever existed, is there?”

  I look over at my sister, Patti, in the front row, who has her face in her hands. At this last question, her face pops back up, and peeks at me through her splayed fingers.

  I say, “I don’t have a copy of the little black book, if that’s what you mean. My guess is that both the original and the thumb drive have been destroyed.”

  “How convenient,” Olson says.

  “Not for me, it isn’t.”

  “So no witnesses to corroborate, no little black book to corroborate.”

  “Correct.”

  “So this whole thing,” she says, and with that her hands leave the witness box, and she turns toward the jury, toward the gallery, toward the reporters who have breathlessly tweeted out these juicy, scandalous revelations, “this entire thing you’ve just told us—we only have your word to take for it.”

  She pauses on that.

  I clear my throat.

  “Margaret, I recorded the whole thing on my smartphone.”

  She does a half turn in my direction, as if afraid to fully confront what I’ve just said.

  “My sister was good enough to install an icon on my phone so I can just hit one button and start recording. I hit it when Goldie first walked into the apartment and Kate’s head turned away from me for a moment. One touch, and it started recording. And just before my father shot me I touched the icon again, to stop it.”

  By now, Margaret has retreated to the prosecution’s table, where she is huddling with her team. They’re showing her something in a manila folder, whispering to her feverishly. Finally she looks up at me. “Your phone was smashed in the bedroom,” she says. “Destroyed. Nothing could be recovered from the physical phone. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “You’re aware that we tried very hard to penetrate that phone and couldn’t.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t have one of those save-to-the-cloud functions, did you? The platform that allows you to store records in cyberspace?”

  “No, I didn’t. I’m pretty clueless when it comes to those phones. If it wasn’t for the icon Patti installed, I never could have recorded anything.”

  “So this…this recording you tell us about…it wasn’t recovered from your physical phone, and it’s not on any cloud.”

  “Correct.”

  “So once again, Mr. Harney,” says the prosecutor, fully recovered, her arms out in a theatrical gesture, “we have only your word to take for these claims you’ve made here today.”

  I look three rows back in the gallery and make eye contact with Stewart’s daughter, Grace, who was kind enough to show up today after I called her this morning. Grace gives me a sweet smile. Her father, my good friend Stewart, had died by the time I
made the recording in Amy’s bedroom. With Stewart deceased, and with my having no memory of recording what happened in the bedroom, nobody else in the world would have bothered to check that private Facebook page that Stewart and I shared, the one to which I uploaded all my jokes and comedy routines with one click of an icon. I certainly wouldn’t. Why would I want to listen to a bunch of my old jokes? And Grace wouldn’t; there were no memories of her father on that page—just a bunch of one-liners and humorous observations and sometimes a few minutes of stand-up at the Hole in the Wall. It was between Stewart and me, nobody else.

  All this time, the audio recording was posted right there on that private Facebook page.

  I think Grace enjoys the fact that, even after his death, Stewart was able to lend me a hand in my moment of need. I do, too. I feel his presence now, the man who comforted me while my daughter was dying, the man who was more of a father to me in the short time I knew him than my real father ever was.

  The courtroom erupts when I mention my smartphone’s automatic link to Stewart’s Facebook page—when the reporters and jurors realize that sometime soon they are going to get hold of that recording and be able to listen to what transpired, blow by blow, in that bedroom.

  Needless to say, Margaret Olson, Goldie, and my father don’t take the news very well.

  One Hundred Seven

  “WITH 27 percent of the precincts reporting in the special mayoral election, WGN News is now projecting that County Commissioner Estefan Morales will become the first Latino mayor of Chicago…”

  As we stand in my family room watching the TV, we four Harney kids clink our beer bottles together and take a congratulatory swig. We don’t quite smile at one another. We haven’t done a lot of smiling in these last three weeks. We’ve cried, argued, denied, and questioned. We’ve mourned, accused, and hugged. And we’ve drunk enough beer to fill a small reservoir.

  “…the tremendous fall of Margaret Olson, the Cook County state’s attorney and onetime favorite in the race, finishing in a disappointing sixth place…”