The Red Book Read online

  He’s pretty happy with himself. But it’s all a show. He’s feeling serious heat. The Hustlers don’t have the firepower to take on the Nation. Andre knows that better than anyone.

  Problem is, it won’t stop him from retaliating. He doesn’t have a choice now. Jericho killed two of his men in audacious fashion. If he doesn’t answer, his blood’s in the water.

  “Give us the shooter,” says Carla, “and we tie it back to Jericho. Put your competition outta business. Without you guys shooting each other up.”

  Andre puts a finger to his temple. “Now, why didn’t I thinka that?” He leans back against the couch, puts his feet up on an ottoman.

  I kick the ottoman out from under his legs, forcing him forward.

  “Andre, use your brain,” I say. “You go to war with Jericho, you lose. What you’re not seeing is that you have a chance to win.”

  “We catch the shooter,” says Carla, “maybe we flip him. He gives up Jericho.”

  Andre’s not buying it. “Ain’t nobody gonna flip on Jeri-Curl.”

  “You sure?” I ask. “Why not give it a chance? If we can make that happen, you don’t have to do anything. We do your work for you. We put Jericho behind bars. And you don’t lose any more soldiers.”

  He takes his time. It’ll be on his terms, after he runs his tongue over the inside of his cheek some more, pops in a toothpick and works it around.

  “Give us forty-eight hours,” I say. “Don’t do anything for forty-eight hours. Give us time to catch the shooter.”

  He pulls out the toothpick, looks at the floor. “Twenty-four,” he says. “And then there has to be an answer, know what I’m sayin’?”

  I look at Carla. Twenty-four hours before both sides start shooting.

  “Think we can solve this in twenty-four hours?” Carla asks me once we’re back in the car.

  “I can think of one way,” I say. “But it’s a long shot.”

  I look through my phone directory for a beat reporter with the Sun-Times. “I need a favor,” I say. “I need a phone number.”

  Chapter 15

  DISCO CURBS his car along Monticello in Albany Park, the city’s northwest side. Gets out of the car, buttons his suit jacket, and walks down the alley. He passes four garages. The fifth one is open, a Range Rover parked inside. He stands still for a moment to make sure he isn’t surprising anyone.

  Then he walks into the garage and gets in the car, hit immediately with the scent of aftershave.

  “You fucked up. You fucked up royally.”

  Disco hasn’t even planted his ass in the seat before the rebuke comes. “The little girl was inside the house. I did not see her.”

  Dennis Porter is dressed in a cotton shirt and dark slacks, a baseball cap on his head of gray hair. He was at home having dinner with his family, apparently, when Disco called him from the restaurant. “Well, it’s a fuckin’ shit show now. They’re running it out of SOS, the shiny new top-notch crew. You better find a way to fix this.”

  “You better find a way,” says Disco. “You’re the cop.”

  Second in command of Internal Affairs, to be precise. Captain Dennis Porter has proved himself both useful and resourceful. Disco is going to need both of those traits.

  Porter wags a finger. “You don’t pay me enough to work miracles. You killed a fuckin’ toddler. You didn’t even tell me you were gonna do this.”

  “I need your permission now?” Disco comes back. Always the battle over who’s in charge—the dirty cop or the gangster paying him.

  “You got some nasty business you gotta take care of, yeah, you tell me first. Maybe I can show you a better way. And you couldn’t have picked a worse way.”

  “It was an accident. A mistake.”

  “Yeah, your mistake, not mine. Not my problem.”

  Always the negotiator, Porter. He’s not really saying he won’t help. He’s saying it won’t come for free. He’ll want a bonus.

  Disco grabs Porter’s forearm, a vise grip. Porter turns and looks at him, first with a cop’s indignation, aggression, but his expression quickly softens, adjusting to the reality that the situation is a lot more complicated than that.

  “My problem,” says Disco, “is your problem.”

  “The fuck are you doing?”

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  “Let go…of my fucking arm.” Jaw clenched, lips hardly moving, watery eyes.

  “Not until you say it, Denny. Say it for Amy. Say it for Jay and Laura.”

  “You don’t want to threaten me, my friend.”

  Porter can play it tough, but he has to know that Disco’s right. He can trust Disco for one thing and one thing only—to pay him handsomely to protect Disco’s business. If he fails in that regard and Disco goes down, why wouldn’t Disco make life easier on himself and cut a deal to implicate the cop who protected him?

  The dirty cop’s dilemma: once you’re in with the bad guys, you’re in all the way.

  “Yeah, we gotta figure this out together, okay? Fuck.” Porter yanks his arm free, Disco willingly releasing it. It was close enough to a full concession.

  The stick having been shown, it’s time for the carrot. Disco hands over an envelope full of cash. “This is double the usual. Because of our problem.”

  The money usually helps Porter’s attitude. Porter takes it, counts it, confirms it. Nods his head with reluctance.

  “You have someone in SOS?” asks Disco.

  It takes a moment for Porter to recover his pride. “I got someone everywhere,” he says. “It’s the benefit of my position.” As Porter always likes to say, Internal Affairs knows everything.

  “Who is your source at SOS?”

  “My source is my source. You don’t need to know. I ever let you down before?”

  No, he hasn’t. If Porter’s capability wasn’t clear before, it certainly was after he managed to survive the fallout of the recent CPD scandal, which took down several members of the Bureau of Internal Affairs.

  “I got an idea,” Porter says. “I got a way to fix this. But it’s gotta be quick. And it’s gotta be you that does the heavy lifting.”

  “Me? That will not work.”

  “Well, it’s gonna hafta work, pal. This thing’s a fuckin’ nightmare. My people can’t be anywhere near it. We’ll put the finishing touches on it. But the legwork? It’s gotta be you.”

  No sense in arguing. This is where Porter excels. If Porter says it has to be Disco, it has to be Disco.

  “And it’s gotta be tonight,” says Porter.

  Chapter 16

  THE VIBE is off tonight, she notices as soon as she walks in.

  The Hole in the Wall is a copper’s joint, co-owned by three guys who were on the job and put in their twenty. Half-off drinks for the men and women in blue, which is around 90 percent of the population in here, so it’s not so much a discount for cops as it is a double charge on civilians for the privilege of mingling.

  The mood’s typically loud and merry, a place to blow off steam, to bitch about department politics or the YouTube crowd just itching to catch coppers in a bad moment, out of context, so they can post it on social media. You’re among friends at the Hole.

  But it’s tense tonight, and Detective Patricia Harney knows why. The shooting in K-Town. It’s got every politician in Chicago spooked, so it has the department spooked, too.

  She’s not here to drink. She had a couple with two of her friends in Lincoln Park before coming here, and that’s enough for her these days, now that she’s gotten serious about marathon training. She has a six-miler planned for tomorrow morning.

  She’s here to see her twin brother. But Billy isn’t here. She half expected to see him on the makeshift stage in the corner, where anyone can grab the microphone and do a few minutes of stand-up. Billy’s the best. He’ll grab the mike and just start being funny, without prep; she doesn’t know how he got that gene for fearlessness and quick thinking, the one that escaped her entirely.

  Lanny
Soscia’s here, though, holding court with some young ones, drinking out of a tall glass, something that looks like cola.

  “Patti-Cake!” he says, throwing an arm around her. “Haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.”

  “Got a minute?” she says.

  They find their way to a booth in the corner. “Rookies, scatter,” he says, and the new patrol officers clear out of the booth, just like that. It always amuses Patti how the seniority system works in here, as if they’re still at the academy. “And get us a couple whiskeys.”

  Sosh drops into the booth like a load of bricks. “I can have one,” he says.

  “Just one?” That would be a first for Soscia.

  “Just got here from the station,” he says. “This shooting. Jesus.” He runs a hand over his thinning hair.

  “And Billy’s lead?”

  The whiskeys drop on the table, one for each of them.

  “He’s doing fine,” says Sosh. “I admit I was worried, too. But he just hopped back on the bike and started pedaling.”

  “You guys partners?”

  “No. I got Mat Rodriguez. Good seed. Good cop. Your brother, he, uh…” Sosh shakes out a laugh. “She’s a real piece a work, that one.”

  “She?”

  “Yeah. She’s about as fun as a case of hemorrhoids. I don’t know much about her, except that I didn’t see her smile once today.”

  “Huh,” says Patti. “A quadruple murder, including a dead little girl, and she didn’t find a reason to smile? That’s weird.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  She knows what he means, sure, but does anyone say that kind of thing about a man? A guy who keeps a stiff upper lip is stoic, maybe rough around the edges. A woman who does it is a frigid, humorless bitch.

  “Okay, look,” Sosh says, after he throws the whiskey back. “No, it wasn’t a festive occasion today, but she hardly said two words. I mean, we’re a team, right? We jaw a little. We gotta have, y’know, camaraderie. Get to know each other. She didn’t say shit.”

  “Who is she?” Patti takes a sip of the whiskey, makes a face, slides it across the table to Sosh.

  Sosh takes it and downs it. “Name’s Carla Griffin,” he says.

  Patti does a double take, falls back in her seat. No way.

  “She’s from Wentworth,” he continues. “She worked Narcotics—”

  “I know who Carla Griffin is,” she says. She puts a hand over her face.

  “You know something I don’t?”

  This is a first. Sosh knows everybody in the department. He’s privy to the gossip, the grapevine. He is the grapevine. This seems to be the exception. He doesn’t know about Carla Griffin.

  But every woman in the department does.

  Billy said all along the superintendent would try to screw him. He figured he’d get some crap traffic assignment or a desk job. Instead, he got Carla Griffin.

  “Shit,” she mumbles to herself. “He’s being set up.”

  Chapter 17

  THE CHURCH looms large and silent near midnight, with its massive arches and sharp angles, looking much like a beacon on the city’s South Side.

  The massive parking lot is not empty. A black Cadillac is parked near the entrance. Flanking it on both sides are Chevy Blazers filled with heavily armed men.

  Mike Spaulding, one of the city’s top defense lawyers, who’s made splashy appearances in political corruption cases, mob prosecutions, and celebrity trials, greets us on the sidewalk in front of the church, shaking hands with Carla and me. He is dressed down, having taken my phone call from his home in the Gold Coast, rushing out here on short notice.

  Not that I gave him a choice. Either produce Jericho Hooper within the hour, I told him, or we come looking for him. He quickly agreed that a covert meeting was preferable for any number of reasons.

  “We met in court,” Spaulding says to Carla. “You worked Narcotics? The thing out of Cal City a few years back?”

  “Don’t remind me,” she says, trying to make that sound friendly.

  “He’s inside.” Spaulding heads up the stairs to the door.

  “They open churches for him now, do they?” Carla mumbles to me.

  Apparently. We follow Spaulding through massive oak doors. The interior is spacious, covered in red carpet, filled with stained-glass windows and oak pews. On the carpeted steps leading up to the altar sits King Jericho, dressed all in black silk—matching shirt and pants—and sandals.

  “Pajamas?” Carla whispers out of the side of her mouth.

  “Who knows? He’s probably telling us how unimportant we are.”

  “Doesn’t help that we’re coming to him,” she jabs.

  True, but we need to handle Jericho differently from the leader of the Hustlers. We just asked Andre Oliver to give us some breathing room before he retaliates. We’re going to ask Jericho for a lot more than that.

  Jericho stands slowly, shorter than I expected, no more than six feet, and extends lanky fingers in my direction. He’s nothing impressive to look at, but everything about him—his posture; his impassive, calculating eyes—radiates power as if it were a distinctive cologne.

  “I’ve explained to my client that he’s here to listen,” says Spaulding.

  Jericho nods his head, covered in gray braids, a soul patch on his chin.

  Jericho Hooper committed his first murder when he was fourteen, too young to be prosecuted as an adult. He learned well in juvenile detention. He beat a second murder charge when he was twenty-two—the witnesses had sudden changes of heart—and was in and out of Stateville on convictions for residential burglary, aggravated battery, witness intimidation, and possession with intent to deliver heroin. But for the last seven years, Jericho has had no arrests. He thinks of himself as untouchable now. The feds estimate his net worth at eighteen million dollars. He launders the gang money through the typical avenues—two nightclubs, three convenience stores, and a handful of laundromats.

  Forty-two years old, and this kid from Cabrini-Green is rich beyond what he ever imagined, the head of an empire.

  I only have one chance to do this, so I better do it right.

  Chapter 18

  “I’M NOT here about justice,” I say. “I’m here to talk about business.”

  Spaulding and his client Jericho remain impassive.

  I pull a photo of LaTisha Moreland out of my jacket pocket and hand it to Jericho. “That photo’s everywhere,” I say. “The papers. The local news. The national cable networks. Everyone wants justice. The mayor, the superintendent, they aren’t going to stop until they get it. It’s a political thing. The superintendent, he’ll lose his job if we don’t get a solve and get it quickly. I will, too.”

  “Not to mention Andre Oliver,” says Carla. “The Hustlers are gearing up for battle with you.”

  Spaulding nods, impatient. “There’s a point to this?”

  “The Nation was behind this,” I say. “Jericho wants the Hustlers’ turf. And if a little girl hadn’t been killed, this case never would’ve made it to SOS. It probably never would’ve been solved. But you did kill a little girl. And now it has to be solved.”

  Spaulding opens his hands. “If you’re suggesting that my client was responsible for this—”

  “I’m not suggesting it, Counselor. I’m saying it. It’s not up for debate. So the question is, what’s Jericho going to do about this?”

  “Sounds like you’re about to tell us.”

  “I am. Jericho’s going to give us the shooter, and we’re going to arrest that individual.”

  A chuckle bursts from Spaulding. “That’s—I mean, listen, Detective—”

  “If he doesn’t by tomorrow, we’re holding a press conference,” I say. “We will announce that we like the Nation for this shooting. The turf war, the whole thing. Easy for the public to understand. And the mayor will demand that CPD declare war on the Imperial Gangster Nation. Jericho’s name will be plastered all over the papers. He’ll be famous.”

  Jeri
cho blinks, looks away. There is probably some appeal to Jericho’s ego in that. But there’s a reason why Jericho has been successful. He’s flown under the radar, quietly building his empire. He doesn’t want to be a household name.

  “This conversation is ridiculous,” says Spaulding, “and it’s over.”

  “We’re here to listen. So let’s listen.” Jericho finally speaks. Just a few words, but enough to sweep the legs out from under his lawyer.

  Spaulding has no choice here but tries to recover some of his dignity by saying, as if it was his idea, “I guess you might as well finish your ridiculous proposal.”

  “I have all the resources I need,” I continue. “For this case? With this kind of heat? I could post a patrol car on every corner of every block of your turf. We’ll have a battalion of officers itching to knock down doors.”

  “Feds would want in on this, too,” Carla adds. “So add the FBI, DEA, ATF. We’ll come at you from every angle.”

  “We’ll miss as often as we hit, but so what?” I say. “We don’t have to bat a thousand. Christ, you hit .333 in the bigs, they give you a twenty-million-dollar contract. The point is, we’ll be watching every move you make. The other street gangs will know that associating with the Nation is bad for business. Your own people will start to wonder whether it’s worth it. Any new territory you’ve been adding to your little fiefdom, that’s over. And you’ll probably have a mutiny on your hands.”

  “Maybe so,” says Jericho, still a wall of stone. “Maybe not.”

  “Yeah, but you’re nothing if not a smart businessman,” says Carla. “You’re risk-averse. You have to be. Why bring all this on yourself when you can cure it by giving up a couple of your men?”

  “Men who fucked up royally,” I add, “by killing that innocent little girl. By bringing all this heat on you.”

  Jericho doesn’t speak, but he inclines his head, taking our points.

  What’s left unsaid, and will remain that way, is that we all know which lawyer’s going to show up to represent the shooters if we arrest them: Michael Spaulding, Esquire. He’ll protect his meal ticket. He won’t let those boys utter one word about Jericho.