The Black Book Read online

Patti’s tear on my cheek.

  And light—blinding, searing light in my eyes.

  Twenty-Three

  “I KNEW it.” Patti’s eyes, welled with tears. “I knew you’d come back.”

  My eyes moving slowly, as if filled with sand, around the room. Brendan and Aiden. Pop. Goldie. All of them surrounding me, each of them touching me, as if they want to embrace me warmly but at the same time recognize my fragility.

  I feel removed from the whole thing, like I’m watching this happen to someone else, my family surrounding me and placing their hands on me, like they’re examining a museum object (“Go ahead, you can touch it”) or participating in some religious revival (“Touch me and you shall be healed”).

  I try to speak, but nothing comes out.

  Am I dead?

  Everything goes black.

  My eyes open again. The same people surrounding me. Patti still crying. Aiden, the musclehead with the big heart, teary-eyed.

  “You’re in a hospital,” says Patti. “You were shot. But you’re gonna be fine.”

  So I heard. At least the part about getting shot. If memory serves, Patti, you told Goldie I might never be the same again.

  “A bullet’s not gonna keep this one down.” Brendan, my oldest brother. Always the cheerleader of the family.

  Everything goes black again.

  Am I dead?

  Light again. My eyes adjusting. The same people in the room. Pop and my siblings, the Three Stooges plus me, the fourth. Plus Goldie. All hovering over me.

  “Not yet,” Patti is saying.

  “She’s right.” Brendan.

  About what? I try to speak but can’t. I can think just fine—but I can’t translate it to my mouth.

  “We need to know.” Pop.

  “Not yet.” Patti, more firmly. “He’s just waking up.”

  Aiden leans over me. “How you doing, pal?”

  I can’t answer.

  “Say something for me. Say this: ‘The Cubs…fucking…suck.’”

  Brendan: “Say, ‘You’re under arrest.’”

  Aiden: “How about ‘Kiss my white Irish fanny?’”

  “Hey, I came all the way from Dallas,” Brendan says to me. “The least you can do is say hello to your big brother. Or maybe I should crack you one?”

  “Don’t listen to that ingrate,” Aiden comes back. “You did him a favor. You ever been to Dallas? They wear cowboy boots and big hats.”

  “Coming from a guy who wears a tank top and shorts to work.”

  “Least I don’t say ‘y’all’ or ‘howdy.’”

  Yeah, this is definitely my family.

  “You could do us all a favor, Billy,” Patti says, “and tell your meathead brothers to shut the fuck up.”

  “Who you calling a meathead?” says Brendan. “I graduated top of my class.”

  “From Wesleyan,” says Aiden out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Yeah? And what’s Roosevelt University? The Harvard of the Midwest?”

  Definitely my family.

  My lips part. Patti, watching my every move, notices it and holds out a hand for silence.

  I feel like an infant whose parents are hovering over him. He’s going to speak! He’s going to say something!

  And my first words come out, with all eyes on me, everyone leaning in for the big moment.

  “Goo goo ga ga,” I say.

  Nobody knows how to react—frozen, confused, eyebrows arched, foreheads furrowed, everyone holding their breath.

  I open my mouth again. They lean in further still, as if examining the contents of a petri dish.

  “Just…kidding,” I whisper.

  A collective release of tension—relief and good humor sweeping the room.

  “Oh, you piece of shit.” Aiden, shaking his head, bursting into tears.

  “Well, you’re definitely back.” Brendan gently shakes my arm. “He’s back! The comedian’s back!”

  “You did it,” Patti whispers to me, overcome with emotion. “You did it, Billy.”

  Twenty-Four

  IN AND out. Light and dark. I drift in and out of consciousness, no concept of the time of day or the day of the week, none of the usual sources to prompt me. My vision isn’t yet good enough to make out the digital clock on the opposite wall. I’m in an interior room in the ICU, so there is no sunlight or nightfall. I’m being fed by a tube, so it’s not like my meals vary from scrambled eggs to chicken with rice. And it’s still hard for me to summon the strength and focus to speak, so I try to reserve that effort for questions more burning than whether it’s three in the afternoon or two in the morning.

  I measure the passage of time instead by my sister’s changes of clothes. Since I first opened my eyes, Patti has worn three different outfits, so either I’ve been out of the coma for three days or she likes to change up her wardrobe a whole lot.

  Pop is here less often; being chief of Ds is a big job, and he can only delegate the daily duties for so long. My brothers have stuck around the hospital but spend a lot of time out in the hallway calling home or opening laptops and sending things back and forth to Dallas and Saint Louis.

  The two constants have been Goldie and Patti, who have been by my bedside pretty much every time my eyes are open.

  Everyone has kept it light so far. I’ve asked questions but received no answers, just a lot of evasive responses like Just focus on getting better and We can talk about that later.

  I’ve asked what happened to put me here.

  I’ve asked who shot me. I’ve asked who it was I shot.

  But the question I ask most often is, where is Kate?

  I can think in full sentences—at least I think I can. It doesn’t translate when I open my mouth. The connection between my injured brain and my mouth is like the signal I receive on my phone when I’m driving through the South Side. Sometimes it works; sometimes it’s fuzzy; sometimes it completely disconnects.

  I’m not paralyzed, either. Everything works. Not well, not yet, but I’m okay.

  I remember arresting the mayor now. That memory came back when my sister was wearing a green shamrock T-shirt. Today she’s wearing something brown. So I think it was yesterday. Yesterday the bust came back to me, along with the shitstorm that followed. I remember the superintendent was pissed off, and the state’s attorney appointed a woman—a real knockout—to investigate me and Kate, to look into whether I stole the little black book at the brownstone.

  Every day, every change of Patti’s clothes, I remember a few more things.

  I remember the name of the investigator: Amy Lentini.

  I remember being suspended. Kate, too.

  I remember talking to Goldie at a coffee shop, thinking that this whole thing was a lot bigger than a stupid black book, that it was an excuse to get to me. I remember thinking that someone had figured out that I worked undercover for Internal Affairs and that whoever it was used the mayor’s bust as an excuse to silence me.

  Cut! That’s it. That’s where it ends in a cloud of smoke, like my memory is a car speeding away, leaving me in the dust.

  My doctor, an Indian guy named Pameresh, said most things will come back to me sooner or later, but probably not the traumatic events themselves. You’ll probably never remember the shooting or the events that immediately preceded it, he said. It’s called retrograde amnesia.

  Patti is working her phone, humming to herself, unaware that my eyes have opened again. She looks so tired, so pale, so wrung out.

  It was hard for Patti growing up. She was mostly coddled, three brothers hovering over her, protecting her, but she never shook the insecurity that gripped her, especially when she was compared to me, her twin brother. I never knew what was so special about me, but in her mind, I exceeded her in every way—smarter, more athletic, more popular, better looking. I never understood it. Something grabbed hold of her at a young age and never let go, something that told her she wasn’t good enough.

  But it never came between us. Whatever she fel
t about me, she never held it against me. We’ve been together during highs and lows. When everything happened three years ago, Patti took it as hard as I did; it was almost as if it had happened to her.

  “Kate,” I say, not even trying to put together a string of words.

  Patti looks up from her phone. “Morning, sunshine.” She leans over and carefully kisses my forehead. My head is shaved and heavily bandaged—the top of my skull is still sitting in a mason jar somewhere—and I’m still connected to tubes and electrodes and machines. They’re feeding me, monitoring my brain and heart functions, even massaging my limbs with electric pulses so I don’t lose circulation.

  “Kate,” I say again, my eyes level with hers. “Please.”

  Patti’s eyes drift about, considering the question. We are alone in the room. Not even Goldie’s here.

  She tries to touch my face, my head, but there’s nowhere to place her hand. Her eyes well up with tears. She has probably cried enough to fill Niagara Falls. I’m sorry to do this to her, but I need to know, and I know she’ll tell me if nobody’s around to stop her.

  “Kate’s dead, Billy. The shooting. You survived, she didn’t.”

  Something expels from my mouth. A low moan.

  I thought this was coming. It was hard to think of another reason why Kate wouldn’t have been here to visit me. But hearing it—confirming it—something snaps inside me like a twig.

  “We aren’t sure what happened,” she tells me.

  I let her down. I was supposed to cover her back. That’s what a partner does. I didn’t do that.

  Oh, Kate. Oh, Kate…

  “Who…who…”

  Patti watches me, dreading the question. Injured brain or not, I can read her like a book. She knows what I’m trying to ask: Who killed Kate?

  “We don’t know what happened,” she repeats, this time less convincingly, a robotic repetition, like a shield against further inquiry. “We don’t know.”

  The more she says it, the clearer it is to me that she’s lying. And why would she lie about that? Why wouldn’t she want me to know who shot Kate?

  No. No. It can’t be.

  Poison through my veins, a weight crushing my chest, stealing my breath. Some of the machines start making noises, bells and whistles. Patti pushes a button and calls for the nurse.

  The door pops open, and doctors and nurses rush in.

  Before Patti steps aside, she leans into me.

  “Whatever anyone tries to tell you about what happened,” she whispers, “don’t believe it.”

  Twenty-Five

  “THIS IS a bad idea,” says Patti. “It’s a terrible idea.”

  It’s the best idea I’ve had in the fourteen weeks I’ve been here.

  I fit my arm through the sleeve of my button-down shirt. “I don’t care. I’m not spending another night in this place.”

  Nothing against the hospital, which has treated me more than well. The room to which I was transferred had a window overlooking the lake, which was nice, though it reminded me of the view from Kate’s condo in Lakeview. The people doing my rehab were good souls, too, exhibiting more patience with me than they would with a child, coaxing me into “one more step” or one more bicep curl with a ten-pound weight or one more recitation of “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” or one more round of counting backwards from 20.

  It was brutal at first, but they got me back on my feet. I can dress myself and feed myself and walk (albeit with a cane). I can speak in full sentences and read and write. My vision is almost as good as it used to be. My sense of humor, for better or worse, is still intact.

  And my skull is fully reattached, thank you very much. My hair is growing back a little straighter than it was before and right now is the length of a buzz cut. I have lost about twenty pounds. I have a scar where the bullet entered my brain, but the rest of the repairs the doctors did to my noggin are covered by hair. Yes, if you look closely enough, you can see scars that read like a road map all across the top and back of my skull, but I can live with it. The fact that I can live at all, I realize, is a small miracle.

  So I’m leaving! Ninety-eight days after taking a bullet to the brain.

  “You need another month of rehab, at least,” Patti says.

  “So I’ll do it as an outpatient. Or I’ll do it at home. It’s not like I’m going back on the job right away.”

  I need medical clearance before they’ll let me back to work, even at a desk. A lot of coppers I know would take the disability leave without complaint, as though it were a paid vacation, but not me. I can’t bear the thought of watching game shows and daytime talk shows and soap operas. I’ll think of something. Mostly I’ll work on getting myself back in shape to get back to my job.

  But none of that is why I want to go home.

  Yes, I’m stir-crazy in here. Yes, I want to be a cop again.

  But the real reason is that I want control again. My family—Patti in particular—has controlled my access to information and the news. All I know about the shooting, after fourteen weeks, is that three people were found shot, and two of them—Amy Lentini and Kate—were already dead. I was clinging to life. And I know that the shooting happened in Amy Lentini’s apartment.

  And though neither Patti nor anyone else has ever actually confirmed it, it sounds like everyone thinks I shot Kate.

  I haven’t pushed the issue. Once I came up against resistance, once everyone started deflecting the issue, I decided to lay low. That’s where I’m at my most effective, when I’ve receded into the background, when I’m the funny, harmless guy, the comedian, the baby brother, the fourth stooge. I’m at my best when everyone underestimates me.

  So that’s what I’ll do. I’ll be the guy recovering from the brain injury. The guy with the limp. The guy who moves and acts and thinks slowly. The guy who probably, likely, will never be the same again. The guy who’s no longer a threat.

  Let them all think that.

  I don’t know how I got to Amy’s place the night of the shooting. I don’t remember any of the circumstances leading up to it. I’ve lost days and weeks before that point in time. And I can’t for the life of me figure out why on God’s green earth I would shoot my partner.

  But I’m going to find out.

  Twenty-Six

  “DETECTIVE.” THE woman who enters the room is tall and thin, with ash-colored hair pulled back, wearing black-rimmed glasses and a sleeveless red dress and heels. I try not to stare, because I’m a gentleman.

  “I’m Dr. Jagoda,” she says.

  I rise from my seat and shake her hand. “Billy Harney.”

  She sits across from me. Lush, high-backed leather chairs. Like something in a reading room somewhere. All we’re missing is a fireplace and a snifter of brandy.

  She doesn’t just look nice—she also smells nice, her perfume fresh and clean, not overpowering.

  On the dark walls: diplomas from Harvard and Yale, certificates from various psychology associations.

  “So how does this work?” I ask. “I tell you my mommy didn’t show me enough affection? And then I realize…” I shake my fists and bite my lip, as if in a moment of self-discovery. “I realize that…I’m not a bad person! And then we both have a good cry, and I go find happiness.”

  She observes all this with a poker face. No tell whatsoever. “How do you want it to work?”

  “The truth?”

  “Preferably.”

  “I don’t want to be here at all.”

  “I never would have guessed.”

  “But I have no choice. The department says I gotta see a shrink. Y’know, on account of my traumatic experience and all.”

  Her eyes narrow. That psychologist-appraisal thing. “You did this before,” she says. “Three years ago.”

  “Three years ago I didn’t wanna do it, either.”

  “But did it help?”

  “Not really.”

  “So.” She claps her hands and leans forward. There is a table separa
ting us, a small round wooden job with a design on it that looks Middle Eastern. “What do you hope to get out of it this time?”

  “I hope to get out of here, period,” I say. “No offense. But I don’t need a shrink.”

  “Why don’t you think you need a shrink?”

  I look at her. “Do you just ask questions? Do you ever make affirmative statements?”

  “Do you want me to?” She allows a small curve of a smile, her face otherwise deadpan. At least that time she was joking.

  “What kinda name is Jagoda?”

  She sits back in her chair, crosses her legs. “Polish,” she says.

  “You know how many Poles it takes to screw in a lightbulb?” I ask. “Three. One to hold the bulb and two to rotate the chair he’s standing on.”

  “You know how many cops it takes?” she replies. “Three. One to screw it in and two to violate the civil rights of a black guy standing nearby.”

  Well played. “You wanna know the thinnest book ever written? The Complete List of Polish War Heroes.”

  “Oh, but the Irish have made a real contribution to the world.”

  I could mention beer and potatoes, but I don’t.

  “How about you just give me a diagnosis and send me on my way?” I say. “Let’s go with post-traumatic stress disorder. Write me up a prescription, and I’ll promise to take my meds.”

  She cocks her head. “I’m good at what I do, Detective, but somehow I don’t think I’m prepared to make a full diagnosis after meeting you for five minutes and simply reading your file.”

  “I’ll settle for a partial diagnosis, then.”

  “Oh, a partial one? That’s easy,” she says. “You’re batshit crazy.”

  I actually let out a laugh. The first one I can remember. Okay, she’s good for a chuckle or two, but this is still a waste of time.

  I get out of my chair. “See you around, Doc,” I say.

  “You’re extremely intelligent,” she says as I’m headed for the door. “Far more so than you’re willing to let on. You’re emotionally wounded, probably from what happened three years ago as well as what just happened, but you bury it all underneath this facade of being the smartass, the comedian. Humor is your shield. You’re hiding. You’ve probably been hiding for so long that you don’t even realize it anymore.”