Dirty Fire (9 page)

He again fell silent, almost abruptly. In the sudden stillness, I could think of nothing to say.

“Well, just listen to me,” he said suddenly, and a carefully jovial tone had replaced the previous heat. “See what happens when you get a rabbi talking?” He laughed, not quite apologetically.

At the temple entrance, we shook hands.

“If I can be of any further help, don’t hesitate.”

“I appreciate it. I’ll watch the newspapers to see how you’re doing with the Swiss, and the rest of them.”

“Temple B’nai Abraham has formed a committee,” he said solemnly. “I suspect we’ll organize a letter-writing campaign.”

Then he winked.

“Oh, yeah,” the rabbi grinned, “I
really
miss Stan.”

About the time I was leaving Rabbi Jerome’s office, a conversation was taking place in The Winery, a tavern located conveniently closed to the Lake Tower Municipal Center. It was late in the afternoon, and the darkened room was populated mainly by off-duty cops and other city employees making a decompression stop before heading to their homes.

Concealed in the majority of the booths along the wall are small microphones. This is not generally known, except to the agency that installed them and the establishment’s owner; the latter allowed the installation in exchange for an agreement involving interstate gambling charges.

I would not know any of this until later that day, when I listened to the recording. It was played for me by an FBI agent who had been sitting in a booth with a view that commanded the barroom.

• • •

“The guy is a real asshole,” Terry Posson was saying.

She stared stonily into the smoky depths of a drink she held in a loose two-handed grip on the table. “He thinks I got lead on this case by screwing Nederlander.”

Across from her, slouched on his side of the booth, Mel Bird grunted sympathetically.

“Prick,” he agreed.

“He sits there, tells me to my face that I’m the reason the case turned into a flameout.”

“Dickhead,” Bird nodded. He sprinkled a few grains of salt into his beer glass, and watched the trails of tiny bubbles rise through the amber liquid in unerringly straight lines.

“Hell, he practically accused me of torpedoing the investigation!”

“Dumbshit jerk.”

There was a silence from the other side of the table. It amplified the background sounds of the room. Bird again reached for the saltshaker, and looked up to see his partner glaring at him.

“What?” Bird said defensively.

“What?
” she mocked. “I’m telling you how this bent son of a bitch we’ve got to work with says we’re morons. Thinks we fucked up the biggest case the city’s ever had. And do you have anything to add? Hell, no! You can’t even look me in the eye! What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“Look, Ter—there’s a simple answer here,” Bird said. “Why don’t you just tell him? Or better still, tell Cieloczki.”

“I can’t—not without clearing it through Nederlander first,” she said. “Mel, I don’t know what the hell is going on with this thing. We’re cops, right? So all of a sudden, we’re working for the fire chief…on a
homicide
. And he decides to bring in a crooked ex-cop—a guy who dodged a bribery beef by
this
much. I mean, what the hell?” She raised her glass and drank.

“Yeah, well,” Bird said, “I’ve been asking around about Davey. You know something? There’s a lot of people in the shop who aren’t too sure that bust was on the up-and-up. Nobody wants to come right out and say it. But, dammit, I get the feeling that they think maybe the guy was set up to take a fall.”

Posson looked at him, incredulous. “What do you mean, ‘set up?’ Set up by who? For what?”

“Right,” Bird said. “Like I got any answers for that. I tell you, nobody wants to talk about it. Even his old partner blew me off—you know, that Trombetta guy. It’s like they’re all relieved that his case fell apart when it did. As in, it could have led to some deep shit in the department.”

“Like what?”

Bird looked at his partner with irritation.

“C’mon, Terry—you can’t tell me you haven’t felt something is a little…
off
around here. Jeez, you’ve got to have noticed it. Hell, there’s two kinds of cops on the job around this place—the guys who have been around forever, like Nederlander, and the people who have been hired in the last year or so. You. Me.”

He took a deep swallow from his glass.

“Hell, I know you’ve felt it. That’s why you jumped at that little arrangement when Nederlander gave you the chance to get on the Levinstein case.”

“All I did—”

“I know what you did. I went along with it too, remember? I want a gold shield just as much as you do—explaining I’m ‘just’ a plainclothes cop is getting real old, okay? But when Cieloczki took over the case, everything changed. And this Davey thing—everybody knows it wouldn’t have happened without Evans’s go-ahead.”

Bird shook his head vehemently.

“Anyway, the guy’s right and you know it. Hell, we advanced the investigation more in that one meeting with Cieloczki than we did in the past two and a half months. We had the same information available as he did—we just ignored it and spent all our time shaking the wrong bushes.”

Bird drained his glass and looked around to signal the woman behind the bar. She held up two fingers and raised her eyebrows. Bird glanced at Posson and nodded.

“Morons?” he muttered. “Hell, he’s being kind.”

“Jesus, what a mess this is turning into,” Posson said. “I even threw the bastard out of my car today, on the way over to re-interview that rabbi. I was so ticked off I was ready to go to Cieloczki and quit the case right then.”

“Whoa!” said Bird. “This case is the biggest game in town. I want to stay in, even if we have to eat humble pie for a while.”

“Yeah. Me, too, I guess.”

“So?”

“So I guess I apologize and kiss his ass tomorrow,” she said. “Not that I have much of a choice. Nederlander wants to be filled in on everything Cieloczki’s got us doing. Especially, he wants to know what that shit Davey is up to. I am to, quote, ‘report in detail who, what, when, where and why.’ So now I’m undercover on my own investigation, for God’s sake.”

“Well,” Bird said, “you know I’m with you. Any way you want to play it, okay? But I gotta tell you, I think Gil’s got the right ideas. Don’t forget it was Nederlander who was telling you what doorknobs to try the past couple of months. And we were going exactly nowhere with it.”

“Yeah, but now it’s a question of who I want to piss off the most,” Posson said. “The guy who’s heading up the investigation? When you get down to it, he only runs the fire department. Or I can get in the crapper with the police chief—
our
boss, a guy who’s been around so long he’s also Director of Public Safety. Which, by the way, makes him the fire chief’s boss, too. Sweet suffering Christ!”

The barmaid brought over the two fresh drinks and picked the correct change from the bills and coins on the table. Terry waited until she was gone before speaking again.

“And when this is all over, we’ll still be working for Nederlander.”

Bird looked into the foamy head of his beer as if he could, with just a little more effort, read the future in its opaque depths.

“Glad to hear you think so,” he said. “Me, I’m not so sure about anything anymore.”

The Lake Tower Health and Racquet Club caters to the bottled water and designer sweatsuit crowd. In addition to indoor tennis and racquetball courts, it features exercise machines in gleaming chrome. The club can accommodate the radically different needs of the aspiring triathlete or the
poseur,
here more to socialize than to risk salt-staining his Spandex.

Like most such facilities, it is frequented throughout the day by several distinct groups. There are the early morning crowds who time their workouts to the schedules of trains that take them to their downtown jobs. There are the young mothers, the senior retirees and the assorted work-at-home types who make up the bulk of the banking-hours crowd. And there are the evening exercise habitués of both sexes, many of them optimists on the prowl who see one type of sweat and heavy breathing as foreplay to another.

At 6:15 p.m., I pulled into a space marked “GUEST” in the parking lot. The club was at that slack-water period between tides, one cycle having ended and the next not yet begun. I hoisted the gym bag I had collected from my apartment and walked inside. There, a smiling woman barely out of her teens checked my name against a list on a clipboard and buzzed me through.

“Men’s locker room to the right,” she said, handing me a thick white towel embroidered with “
LTHRC
”
in discrete blue script. “Our juice bar is upstairs on your left, just past the meeting rooms.”

I waited until the door closed behind me before turning to the left. At the top of the stairway, I opened a conference room door and stepped inside.

Talmadge Evans and Gil Cieloczki sat talking at the oak-veneered table that filled most of the available space. At the back of the small room, looking through a window at a hardwood court below, stood a well-dressed man with carefully combed dark hair. He turned when I entered, and gestured a welcome with a glass of a pale liquid, stringy with pulp.

“Hi, Davey,” said FBI Special Agent Ron Santori. “Good to see you again. So, you have a chance to talk to”—he looked at a pad on the table “—this Rabbi Jerome? Did we finally find a person who knows something relevant about this case?”

I shook hands with Cieloczki and nodded to Evans. Gil pointed to one of the bottles of mineral water and raised his eyebrows. I nodded, and Gil passed it to me.

“No coffee,” the firefighter said with an apologetic smile. “The health club fellow almost fainted when I asked for a cup.”

Santori sipped at his glass and grimaced. “I got this from him. He said it was a very healthy drink. Good for my energy level.” He placed the glass carefully on the table and pushed it as far away as he could reach.

“The rabbi said he didn’t know anything about an art collection,” I said without preamble. “He’s the kind of guy who likes to talk; he enjoys letting you in on all the inside details he’s picked up. If he knew anything about a Levinstein collection, he’d have made sure to mention all the times he’d seen it.”

“There you have it,” Evans said. “It’s just like the other interviews our officers did when all this happened in the first place.”

He looked at Santori, then around the table. “I suppose it’s not conclusive, but doesn’t it indicate that there is no police cover-up? After all, we’re basing all of this on the credibility of a convict—a known criminal, for God’s sake. Am I the only one here who thinks that this may all be simply the fantasies of a man in prison? Or a hoax he’s pulling for revenge, or because he’s bored?”

Nobody responded. I looked at the ceiling, working at keeping my face impassive.

Finally Santori broke the silence.

“If there is any possibility that Lake Tower police are involved in murder, arson and felony theft,” the FBI man said, “then certainly we can’t afford
not
to investigate. Don’t you agree, Mr. Evans?”

“That’s the only reason I agreed to participate in this,” Evans said flatly. “That’s why I let you talk me into taking Bob Nederlander out of the investigation. I’m cooperating, Agent Santori. But I also want to protect the reputation of my people and my city, as far as I can. To date, I see no evidence that this purported artwork ever existed, let alone was stolen. How do we resolve that question?”

Again, there was a moment of silence around the table.

“Maybe it’s time to bring the artwork issue out into the open,” Gil said, finally. “I think it looks like the most likely trail to follow.”

“Why not?” Evans responded. “After all, who are we keeping it from? Whoever killed the Levinsteins knows what was in there. Or, for that matter, what was not there.”

“The house was burned to the ground to make sure nobody could be certain what had been in there or had been taken out of there. The killer may not know that we believe paintings are missing,” Santori objected. “And that gives us an advantage—the only one we have.”

I shook my head. “I’m with Cieloczki. Look, we had to find out if the Lake Tower cops knew about the missing artwork and tried to cover it up. But the rabbi was the last name on the list of original interviews Posson and Bird did. I’ve re-interviewed every one of them. Not one knew about Levinstein’s art collection. It wasn’t pursued as a lead simply because it never came up in the original interviews. Without the Lichtman story,
we
wouldn’t know to ask about it.”

Gil spoke up again. “Let’s assume there is some kind of cover-up of the theft aspect going on. Is there any reason to think whoever’s behind it is going to make the mistake of being impatient? I doubt it. He can sit back and wait. If no one even knows he stole the art, that works for him. Clearly, if nobody’s looking for it, nobody’s looking for him.”

“We’re the ones making a mistake if we tip our hand.” Santori’s voice was stubborn. “This is the best opportunity we’ve had in two years. We have a real shot at breaking up the official corruption mess out here!” He turned his appeal to me. “Davey, I’d think you, especially, would understand that we can’t afford to waste the opportunity—not by moving before it’s time.”

I stiffened.

“Let me tell you what I understand, Ronnie. I remember when your people came to me with something called ‘Operation Centurion.’ Classy name. As I recall, the Justice Department was going to focus on public malfeasance and clean out the bad cops and corrupt officials out here in the ‘burbs. Just like Operation Greylord targeted the federal judiciary in Chicago. Just like Operation Silver Shovel caught all those city aldermen lining their pockets. A real, big-time investigation by the Feds.”

I stood and walked to a window that looked out at one of the indoor racquetball courts.

“I understand a lot of things, Ronnie. I remember listening to an assistant attorney general you guys flew out from Washington. What was it he said? Something about how it just wasn’t the right time to act on what I brought you? Something about how ‘we’ were going to hold off, try to get more? Maybe even make a deal so ‘we’ could go after the bad guys higher up on the food chain.”

“Davey, be fair,” Santori said, and even with my back turned I could hear the admonitory tone in his voice. “What happened to you had nothing to do with our probe.
You
freelanced, on your own. And you took the money from those dealers.”

“You tried to squeeze a bad cop with the information I gave you,” I said. On the court below, two T-shirted women weaved back and forth, caught up in the rhythm of their own game; I turned back to mine.

“I’ll give the FBI the benefit of the doubt. I don’t
really
think you gave Nederlander my name, just to put a little extra twist to the screws. But I think your people drew him a picture that was just complete enough. He knew it had to come from somebody in the department. And I was his leading candidate, wasn’t I?”

I turned back to face the group. Evans had the look of a man impatient at the bickering of two strangers. Cieloczki looked uncomfortable and tried hard to look impartial. Santori was trying hard to look both unfairly accused and magnanimous.

But I was not finished.

“Fair enough; I know the rules. Still, it might have been…
polite
to let me know about that conversation,” I said, and heard my voice become hoarse and tight. “It might have influenced my decisions. I might have thought twice about a few things. Like meeting with a couple of low-lifes who were supposed to have half the squad on their payoff list. Certainly I might have reconsidered going in alone, right? Or putting five thousand dollars in marked bills in my pocket for evidence.”

“Or stashing it in your house,” Santori retorted, “until the county Sheriff’s Police went in with a search warrant. Three
days
later, Davey. Okay, you think we screwed you? Gil may not have heard all the bloody details yet, Davey. Let’s let him decide, okay?”

He kept his eyes fixed on me as he addressed the firefighter.

“Gil, a Cook County task force had been running a sting operation for six months, targeting stolen cars being cut up for parts to resell. Part of the setup was they spread the word it was a ‘protected’ operation—paid off the local law on a regular basis, right? Davey gets wind of this right after we tell him Centurion isn’t ripe enough yet. He’s feeling impatient, figures he’ll speed things up for us.

“They had a nice little chop-shop deal going—a front counter where they’d do business, with video surveillance out the wazoo. They had enough hidden cameras to broadcast a football game. In back, just in case somebody got suspicious, they had a couple of deputies in overalls with cutting torches, making sparks like they were stripping a couple of confiscated cars.

“Really, it was a beautiful setup. They had creeps from the city, all over the suburbs, you name it—all of ‘em lining up to bring in parts cut from cars they had boosted. It looked like the automotive department at K-Mart on a Saturday afternoon. Now, all of this is happening with marked money, okay? Then our boy here shows up, flashes his badge, and goes into a back room with the head guy. All this is being recorded on videotape, remember.

“Well, lo and behold, Davey tells our guy he’s the new Lake Tower bagman—asks for five grand and puts the money in his pocket.” Santori shook his head as if he hadn’t heard this story before. “Marked bills, of course. Plus, one of the county cops in the back was watching the video monitor and recognized Davey right off. Well, you combine that with the surveillance tape, and you can see how it looked. Especially when Davey neglected to turn in the cash. Or even report the meeting to his supervisor.”

“Just who was I supposed to report it to?” I spat through gritted teeth. “Who was I supposed to trust?”

Santori shrugged and put on a placating face. “Okay—you know
I
believe you. You were trying to get us a better case and you stepped into the toilet. And you know how much we appreciate the way you kept Centurion out of it all. Hellfire, Davey—we’re the reason you’re not in jail right now. Didn’t we get you out when we got the chance?”

Gil interrupted before I could respond.

“This isn’t helping resolve the question we’re dealing with now,” he said. “If we take the Lichtman story at face value, the missing artwork is the key. And when we find this Sonnenberg person, I don’t see how we can compartmentalize it anyway.”

“Exactly,” Evans said. “Agent Santori, we appreciate your situation. No one shares your concerns about corruption in government more than I. But you are working on a much larger canvas than we can afford to do. We have two murdered persons whose killer is at large.” Evans’s voice rose for a moment. “My God. I had
met
Stan Levinstein once or twice. He struck me as a decent man. He—they—didn’t deserve to die like that.”

The city manager shook his head sharply.

“No,” and his voice was firm. “We must move ahead on whatever basis is necessary to protect the lives of our citizens. Can you convince me that we can do that without following what appears to be a critical lead? No? Then I’m afraid that your Operation Centurion must take a subordinate position here.”

Santori looked around the table and found no allies. He raised his hands in a sign of reluctant acquiescence. “All right. The artwork is no longer off-limits, okay? We’ll provide whatever assistance we can—with the provision that you will protect our investigation in every possible way.”

He turned to Gil. “How do you intend to proceed?”

Gil looked at me.
Are you ready to handle this like an adult?
his eyes asked.

I took a deep breath. The desire to commit a felonious act on a federal officer had been strong, and the memory of it had not completely faded. But the intent was gone, at least for the moment. It was a sign, I hoped, of my late-developing maturity.

Still, when I twisted my head slightly, my neck popped audibly as the taut muscle flexed. I drew a deep breath before I spoke.

“To quote the late, lamented President Nixon, we’ll go the ‘limited hang-out route,’” I said, relieved to hear my voice sound normal.

“Gil and I will brief Bird and Posson. We’ll tell ‘em that stolen artwork may be the motive. But we keep it sketchy: one of several theories. I think maybe it’s best to keep Lichtman out of it.” I considered for a moment. “For now, at least. Let’s play it by ear. Until then, the information is attributed to an ‘unconfirmed-but-reliable’ source.”

“I don’t know much about art, let alone stolen artwork,” Gil said.

“Maybe we can help there,” Santori said. “Again, without tipping our interest in the Levinstein case itself.”

“You may have to help with a lot of the background information we need,” Gil replied. “The files I ask for from our esteemed police department seem to take a hell of a long time just to make it across the hall. And there’s been a few gaps in them that even
I
have picked up.”

“I can talk with Bob Nederlander,” Evans volunteered. “Perhaps a direct order to—”

“Frankly, I don’t know how productive that would be, Talmadge,” Cieloczki interrupted. “I don’t know how much I could trust the information he or his people might supply. Not while all this is unresolved.”