The Black Book Read online

  I don’t respond. I don’t move.

  She turns and looks at me, eyebrows raised. I break eye contact.

  “You’re broken,” she says. “You know it, and I know it. But I can help put you back together. Who knows? I might even help you get your memory back.”

  I look at the door, even reach for it with my hand.

  “Go ahead and walk if you want. I won’t stop you. Make a decision, Billy.”

  I draw my hand back from the door. I slowly swivel around and look at the shrink. Then I return to the chair and sit down.

  “You can get my memory back?”

  “No guarantee,” she says. “But I’m your only shot.”

  The Past

  Twenty-Seven

  “MORE BAD news for us,” said Kate as she drove the Tahoe with me in the passenger seat. I pulled up the website on my phone and immediately spotted it. Another story from the online rag ChicagoPC, once again courtesy of Kim Beans, the formerly disgraced TV reporter making a spirited comeback with the photographs she obtained from the brownstone brothel.

  The heading of the article read PEEKABOO, FRANCIS! The photo captured Mayor Francis Delaney walking up the steps of the now infamous brownstone, only he wasn’t bundled up; he was in a light jacket and wearing a baseball cap. It was taken in warm weather, in other words—not during the night two weeks ago when we made the bust. The point being that the night I caught the mayor of Chicago with his pants at his ankles was not the first time he’d visited the brownstone.

  “You’re right: this is absolutely outrageous,” I said. “How could the mayor wear a Cubs cap?”

  Kate shot me a look. Not funny.

  See, Kate considered this photo of the mayor bad news because she considered anything in the news about this story to be bad. And she was right. In the two weeks that had passed since we arrested the mayor and everyone else at the brownstone, the national media had caught wind of this story, and once it did, it held on like a pit bull on a mailman’s leg. When the 24-7 news outlets—CNN, Fox, MSNBC, Bloomberg, whatever—sink their teeth into a story, they demand further juicy details and gobble up every little nugget, big or small, verified or unverified. It turns up the heat on everyone under the microscope.

  Consider, for example, our state’s attorney, Margaret Olson. Last week a reporter from CNN looked at her campaign-contribution reports and realized that she owed her election as the top prosecutor to Mayor Delaney, who provided her with significant financial support. Under a news segment entitled “Conflict of Interest?,” the anchor questioned whether Maximum Margaret would go easy on the mayor because of all he’d done for her.

  That prompted the state’s attorney to hold a news conference in which she announced that she would be accepting no plea bargains for any defendant accused of soliciting prostitutes that night in the brownstone, whether that person was someone of prominence (read: Mayor Delaney or Archbishop Phelan or the Green Bay Packers QB) or an ordinary Joe. And she would be seeking maximum sentences for all of them.

  The sex-club case was headed to trial soon, and everyone involved was hunkering down, bracing for the next splashy revelation to emerge, hoping that it wouldn’t be their ox that got gored.

  And every news outlet, every reporter covering this case, was looking for the little black book that mysteriously disappeared from the brownstone that night.

  So things were tense, but Kate needed to look on the bright side, too; there’d been some good news. The disciplinary board that oversees police-officer cases ordered that Kate and I be reinstated to duty while we waited for the hearing on our alleged misconduct. The police superintendent, Tristan Driscoll, had suspended us immediately, on the spot, but the board said we got to remain on duty until he proved his case against us.

  So after taking an unplanned two-week vacation, I was a cop again—at least for now—and so was Kate.

  “I can’t believe we have to go and play nice with that bitch,” she mumbled.

  Amy Lentini, she meant—the special investigator assigned to the sex-club case, who’d been trying to prove for the last two weeks that either Kate or I or both of us stole the little black book naming customers at the brownstone brothel. Since Kate and I were the arresting officers, we would be required to testify at the trial and prepare for it with Lentini in advance. Personally, I’d rather have my wisdom teeth pulled without Novocain, but nobody asked me my opinion.

  “It won’t be so bad,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m sure you won’t mind.” Another look shot in my direction. “The Italian beauty, fluttering those eyes at you.”

  “That’s not fair at all, and you know it,” I said. “It’s her ass I like the most.”

  “This isn’t a joke, Billy.”

  There it was again, that jealousy thing. Kate and I had been partners for years, and I never seriously considered anything between us. Then it flared up after the brownstone arrests, and I admit it was pretty great—crazy and kinkier than I was used to, but great. But then we were suspended, and though we talked every day for those two weeks, nothing else happened. It was like the suspension of our official relationship pushed the Pause button on the sex part, too. Now that we were back together as cops, I wondered if we would hit the Play button again. And I couldn’t decide if it was a good idea or not.

  “Amy Lentini is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Kate. “She’ll draw you in nice and close, then stick in the knife.”

  Kate pulled the car over next to Daley Plaza. Parking wasn’t ordinarily allowed there, but the cops looked the other way for one another. That was one of the perks of the job. The pay sucks, the pension is shaky, people curse at you and try to goad you into anger while recording you on their smartphones, and you never know when someone might stick a gun in your face—but hey, the parking is great.

  “Watch yourself around her is all I’m saying,” Kate warned me as she threw the car into park. “You could get us both in trouble.”

  Twenty-Eight

  “DETECTIVE HARNEY, Detective Fenton, good morning.” Assistant state’s attorney Amy Lentini was all business when we walked into her office. She was decked out in a crisp blue suit that hugged her nicely, a perfect blend of professionalism and flattery. She cleaned up good, I had to admit.

  She showed us to seats and stood by the window, overlooking Daley Plaza. The fact that she had an office with a window said something about her status here. I still didn’t know her story, how she moved up the chain, whom she knew. Hell, for all I knew, she got where she was on her merits. There was a first time for everything.

  “Congratulations on your reinstatement,” she said with no trace of irony.

  “It’s only temporary, until the board rules on the merits of our case,” I said. “Something about the presumption of innocence. I think we have that in this country.”

  “That sounds familiar,” she replied, deadpan.

  “Some people still want us kicked off the force. Oh, wait.” I snapped my fingers. “That someone is you.”

  Her head inclined to the right, the beginning of a smirk on her face. “It’s a delicate situation.”

  “A delicate situation,” Kate said, mimicking her. “You really are a lawyer.”

  “I’m a lawyer who’s not going to lose this case,” said Amy. “And you, Detectives, are my case, whether I like it or not. So putting this business about the little black book aside, we need to be ready for the attack.” She opened her hands. “Although believe me—any time you want to tell me what happened to that black book, I’m all ears.”

  Sure she was. She must have assumed that other celebrities and politicians and power brokers were featured in that tell-all book. She was an ambitious prosecutor who had stumbled on a career-maker of a case. The bigger the fish, the bigger the boost to her career.

  “We don’t know what happened to that book,” said Kate.

  Amy narrowed her eyes at Kate but didn’t answer. Nothing was going to be resolved between her and us, probably ever, on th
at score. “You’re going to be attacked,” she said. “The defense doesn’t have much else to say. The mayor, the archbishop, all the men you caught—they have no defense to this crime. You caught them, in some cases literally, with their pants down.”

  Yeah, it wasn’t the archbishop’s finest moment. I didn’t remember the mayor coming off so well, either.

  “So their only avenue is to attack the police,” Amy went on, pacing by the window. “They will challenge the constitutionality of your entry into the brownstone. They’ll say you lacked probable cause.”

  “Piece of cake,” I said. “I had information that that brownstone was a brothel. They weren’t going in there to play bingo.”

  “Oh, okay, so this case will be easy,” Amy said, dripping with sarcasm.

  I sat back in my chair. “Easy as Sunday morning.”

  “So you won’t mind if I ask you a few questions about it?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Okay.” Amy looked up at the ceiling, as though she were recalling events. “So you went to that brownstone to confront a man whom you suspected of murdering that student at the University of Chicago.”

  “That’s how it started. That’s why we were there in the first place. But then it all changed.”

  “Suddenly you were a Vice cop. Suddenly you didn’t care one iota about that suspect. Suddenly you wanted to bust up a prostitution ring.”

  “Yeah, the focus changed. I was witnessing a crime in progress—”

  “What crime did you witness in progress? Did you see some prostitute screwing some guy? Did you see money changing hands?”

  “Obviously not,” I said.

  “Obviously not. You were outside in your car. So you saw a bunch of individual men walking into a brownstone.”

  “A brownstone I knew to be a brothel.”

  “Run that by me again—how’d you know it was a brothel?” She scratched her cheek in mock curiosity.

  “I had been following my suspect. I saw him going in there the week before. I had a suspicion about what he was doing, but I wasn’t sure.”

  “You weren’t sure because all you saw the week before, when you were trailing the suspect, was a man walking into the brownstone and then coming back out later.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s not a crime to walk in and out of a brownstone, is it?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “You didn’t hear him say, ‘Gee, I just had sex with a prostitute.’”

  I gave her a cold smile.

  “He wasn’t wearing a sign around his neck that said ‘Just got a blow job,’ was he?” she asked.

  “It was more like one of those sandwich boards,” I said. “One side said ‘I just paid someone for sex.’ The other side said ‘I also killed a U of C undergrad. Arrest me!’”

  She stared at me.

  “You’re correct, Counselor,” I said. “When I was following the suspect, all I saw was him going in and coming out.”

  “So you had no idea what was going on inside that brownstone.”

  “But then I sat on the place,” I said.

  “You did recon.”

  “Sure, recon. I sat on the place. I saw young beautiful women going into the place and older men going in, too.”

  “Did you know for a fact that any of those young women were prostitutes?”

  “For a fact? No. But the way they were dressed made me think so.”

  “Well,” Amy said, opening her hands. “How were they dressed?”

  “Like hookers,” I said. “Showing a lot of leg. Hair teased up. Lots of makeup.”

  “So all women who dress provocatively are hookers?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Most of them are?”

  “No,” I said, leaning forward. “But I watched maybe a dozen young women walk into that place and then a bunch of much older men.”

  “How do you know they didn’t go to separate floors of that brownstone?” Amy asked. “How do you know that the women weren’t having a party in the garden apartment and the men weren’t a bunch of old college buddies watching the Bulls game together in a different apartment?”

  I shook my head. I was playing a hunch that night, the law of probabilities, going with instinct. That’s what cops do. No, I wasn’t positive that brownstone was a brothel, but it sure as hell looked like it.

  Still, I had to admit she had just tied me in knots. I was beginning to think I’d underestimated Amy Lentini.

  Amy moved away from the window, came around the desk, and stood against it, facing me head-on. “And I was being gentle,” she said. “The mayor and the archbishop have hired two of the best defense lawyers in the country. If you didn’t have probable cause to enter that brownstone, our whole case is gone. And they won’t blame me for that.”

  No. Everyone would blame me, the cop who muffed the search.

  “So believe it or not,” she said, “like it or not, I’m on your side.”

  Twenty-Nine

  TWO HOURS later, Kate and I were in the elevator, heading out of Daley Center. Another person got in with us but checked out two floors below, leaving us alone.

  The moment the doors closed and it was just us, Kate punched me in the arm.

  “Ow. What’s your problem?”

  “You’re my problem,” she said.

  I rubbed my arm. The kid could pack a punch.

  When the elevator door popped back open, we walked through the lobby, full of lawyers and cops and sheriff’s deputies—even a small group protesting police brutality, which was probably allowed to come inside because it was so freaking cold out in the plaza.

  I zipped my coat up to my neck and pushed through the revolving door.

  “So how am I your problem?” I asked. “Because I ‘played nice’ with the prosecutor?”

  “Because you’re an idiot,” Kate answered, walking so fast I could hardly keep up with her.

  “Hey,” I said, stopping, hoping she’d stop, too.

  She did, turning around, something in her eyes suggesting concern, maybe hurt.

  “My ass is on the line,” I said. “If the search gets tossed and I blew the arrest on the mayor of Chicago, then I really look like an idiot.”

  “I see. So the prosecutor is helping you.”

  I nod. “I thought she had a point, yeah. She’s smart. She’s thorough.”

  “Oh, she’s smart, I’ll give her that.”

  I opened my arms. “So…”

  Kate smiled, but not a smile of happiness—more like a grin-and-bear-it smile. “She is playing you like a fiddle, Detective.”

  “Oh, now it’s ‘Detective.’ Not Billy?”

  Kate walked over to me. “In case you hadn’t noticed, my ass is on the line, too. And my fate is basically in your hands. Which means I have to sit and watch while she leads you around wherever she wants you to go. You have a serious blind spot.”

  “I don’t see that,” I said.

  She leaned in nice and close, her mouth next to my ear. “That’s why they call it a blind spot.”

  She stepped back and shoved me, this time in the shoulder.

  “So yeah, now it’s ‘Detective,’” she said. “We’re partners on the job, and that’s all we are. We always said it was a one-nighter, right? Even if it was more than one night.”

  She tossed me the keys to our car, still parked in the fire lane on Clark.

  “C’mon, Kate,” I said. “You’re not even going to ride with me?”

  She started away but turned again, facing me, giving me a good long once-over. “Did you take the black book?” she asked.

  “What?” It felt like a punch to the gut. “I can’t believe you’d even ask me that.”

  She was only about five yards away from me, but suddenly it felt like the distance between us was measured in miles. The woman who rode with me for almost five years, who went through doors with me, who solved murders and rapes with me, who cried in my arms when her father died two years ago, who spent ho
urs in the hospital with me three years ago, when everything happened—that woman was gone. Now all I had was a partner who didn’t trust me.

  “Did you take it?” I asked back.

  I felt something break between us. She did, too. Her reaction wasn’t anger but sadness, loss. She broke eye contact with me and walked away.

  And she never answered the question.

  But then again, neither did I.

  Thirty

  “THERE HE is,” Lieutenant Mike Goldberger said. “The newly reinstated detective.”

  We met at a pub by the station, though it was for lunch only, not beers.

  “Congratulations,” he said.

  I bumped fists with him. Goldie was saying all this as though he’d just heard the news. I seriously doubted that. I had a sneaking suspicion that Goldie had something to do with my reinstatement. Did he know somebody on the police disciplinary board? I wasn’t sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Goldie had a gift for networking. His current position, heading Internal Affairs, was really a perfect fit for him. He was the consummate behind-the-scenes player. He never sought credit, but you always knew that when things happened, somewhere behind a curtain, Goldie was turning the levers.

  And if he did know someone on the disciplinary board, if he did pull a string or call in a favor to get me reinstated, he’d never tell me. It wasn’t his way.

  I never thought I’d work for BIA. Most cops don’t. Most cops, you put a gun to their head, they wouldn’t work in the bureau that investigates other cops. I was resistant myself—I only agreed to do it because it was Goldie who was asking and because he promised that it wouldn’t involve rinky-dink stuff. My job wasn’t to catch cops doing little things like fudging a time sheet or tardiness or missing a court appearance or uttering a politically incorrect word or two at the station.