Authors: marshall thornton
“No, I think I say everything.” The way he bit his lip told me he had more he wanted to say.
“What?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I go to Paradise Isle every once in a while. I remember you standing at the door.
You don’t remember me, do you?”
“I see a lot of people.”
“Still, my feelings are abused.”
“Next time I see you, I’ll remember you. How about that?” He huffed at the meagerness of my offer. With a nod, I picked up my jacket and walked out of his apartment.
I didn’t figure I’d get much out of the people on the fifteenth floor, and I was running late, so I headed for the elevator. The elevator hadn’t been updated since the building was built. You opened a door with a handle, then slid a collapsible cage to one side. That allowed you to step into the coffin-like car. It gave a little each time you stepped in. I had the definite feeling it was going to drop fourteen floors.
When I miraculously got out on the first floor, I slipped my jacket back on, heading for the lobby. Ross wore an impatient look on his face. “What took you so long?” he asked the minute he saw me. “I’ve been waiting almost half an hour.”
“It’s a big building.”
He leaned over, sniffed me, and rolled his eyes. “Nice cologne. Whose is it?”
I hadn’t realized, but Hector’s fresh and lemony cologne was now all over me. I couldn’t help but blush.
* * *
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Ross had turned up the same flyer I’d gotten from Hector, but not much more. Certainly he hadn’t found anyone who’d seen the arsonist in a dark cap and a down coat leaving the building.
By this point, I’d begun to doubt whether Ruthie was a valuable witness or not. Thinking she saw the guy go into The Shore when that was impossible lessened her credibility. I wondered how seriously I should take her description.
The night before, Davey had called and asked to meet in front of Paradise in the morning. I keep regular office hours, so ten o’clock Monday morning wasn’t a hardship for me. For Ross, it was painful. Used to going to bed at four or five in the morning, he looked something like a junkie on the tail end of a three-day binge.
Davey drove a dusty blue 1976 Cadillac Eldorado that he’d bought when The Cellar was at its peak. He’d parked illegally in front of the burned-out bar and had takeout coffee and donuts spread out on the trunk. Ross was already halfway through his coffee.
“Anyone from the arson squad been here?” I asked as I picked up a Styrofoam cup full of steaming brew.
Davey nodded. “Came around eight. Just left a little while ago.”
“They say anything interesting?”
“Just that they’ve got a suspect.”
“That’s great,” said Ross, a little too enthusiastically. I could tell he wanted to go back to bed.
“Who do they think did it?”
“Me,” Davey said flatly.
We went silent. I pulled out a box of Marlboro reds and lit one up. The smoke filled my lungs with a familiar rush; it’s stupid, I guess, but a chest full of smoke always makes life seem a little more manageable. “Any word on Bernie?”
With a frown, Davey told us about Bernie. “He’s gonna make it. But there are burns on twenty percent of his body. A lot of it’s on his face. He’s gonna be...” He looked down at the pavement, as though he was looking for something to kick. “He’s not gonna be the same.”
Ross mumbled, “Ah, shit,” under his breath.
Bernie was only a kid, twenty-two years old, and he had great face. Big, crooked smile, creamy cheeks, big brown eyes. His body was okay, but Davey had hired him for his face. Customers left big tips because of his face. Guys chased after that face. It was going to be tough on Bernie figuring out how to get through life without it.
“When can I talk to him?” I asked.
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“Soon. He’s still pretty doped up. He’s not making much sense.”
“What do you think happened here, Davey?” I wanted to get him talking first. Direct questions would come later.
“I dunno. I keep going over it in my head. Who would do this to me? I have no idea.”
“Have you been greasing the right palms?” I asked.
“My, uh, municipal payments are up to date. I don’t think there’s a problem there. A bagman comes by once a month for The Outfit. Picks up four hundred bucks.”
“And you’re current?”
“Yeah, but here’s the thing. He’s the only one I’ve ever seen. I don’t know where the money goes. I don’t even know that it gets where it’s going. I never thought that was a problem before, but maybe it is?”
“What’s the bagman’s name?”
“Mickey Troccoli.”
“Mickey?” said Ross. “I know him. I think he hit on me once.”
Davey shrugged. Then he looked at me. “Mickey might have started keeping the money, you know? Maybe The Outfit’s trying to teach me a lesson I didn’t need to learn.”
“I’ll find out.” I was going out on a limb. I still had a few connections, but they didn’t always pan out. I wasn’t all that sure I
could
find out. “Tell me about The Surfside Neighborhood Association.”
“Who?”
Ross pulled out a flyer and handed it to Davey. He looked it over. “Oh, yeah, these jerks. Pain in the ass, that’s all.”
“You sure?”
“They make a lot of noise, but they can’t do anything to me. Like I said, I greased all the right palms.” The way he said it made me think that greasing palms was a skill that took years to develop. And it may well have been.
“So, they’re frustrated,” I speculated.
“Naw, they’re do-gooders and church ladies. Not arsonists.”
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I nodded like I agreed with him, but I didn’t. My experience as a cop, not to mention what I’ve picked up as a PI, told me that anyone was capable of anything. With the right mental gymnastics, a church lady could burn down a gay bar and walk away feeling like she’d just done God’s work. I tucked the possibility away for later.
“Can we look around inside?”
Davey looked in both directions and said, “Sure. I don’t see why not.”
A company had come out and nailed large pieces of plywood to the busted-out front doors.
Taped to the wall next to the doors was a Chicago PD sign that told us in very official language not to enter. Ignoring it, Davey opened the door and led us in.
We stood for a moment in the wide foyer where Davey and I set up on Fridays and Saturdays to collect the cover and check IDs. The place smelled smoky, but it was a stale smell, the smell of old, dead smoke. The power was off, so other than the light that came in through the door and a hole the firemen had chopped in the roof, there wasn’t a lot of light. Apparently, Davey had gone out and gotten a couple industrial flashlights, because two of them sat there in the foyer. He handed me one.
A lot of the bar is dance floor -- expensive dance floor. Thirty feet by thirty feet and made of Plexiglas, the floor lit from the bottom up, and was attached to a fancy light board kept in the DJ
booth that controlled the patterns made by colored lights underneath the floor. Now, though, half the dance floor had melted and fallen in on itself.
The tables and chairs that usually sat next to the dance floor had mostly been knocked down, probably by the force of the water hosed onto the fire. One table had the chairs set upside down on top of it. This was one of the side-work duties of the closing bartender. It was done so that a cleaning crew could come in at six o’clock every morning and mop the floor. Sunday morning they’d ended up with the day off.
I made a mental note that Bernie had obviously finished his side work, which suggested he hadn’t been interrupted. Nothing prevented him from following his normal routine. Nothing out of the ordinary happened until after four-fifteen or four-thirty.
The booths along the wall seemed relatively undamaged. In keeping with the tropical theme, there were two neon palm trees tacked to the walls. Both of them were destroyed. It was hard to tell if they’d been wrecked by fire or the pressurized water used to put it out. I started taking a good look at the floor. A heavy-duty industrial carpet had been laid through about half the place.
The foyer wasn’t carpeted. That would be crazy in Chicago -- you’d only get through half a winter before it was ruined. The carpet started about fifteen feet into the club and continued around the dance floor and the table area. It ended at the bar.
Near the bar, most of the stools had fallen over. I moved one of them. Where the stool had lain during the fire, the carpet was untouched. It looked like a weird stencil of the stool. I moved a
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couple nearby stools and noted the same patterns. But the stools further away didn’t have the unburned pattern – they’d been knocked over later.
I walked back over to the chairs near the tables and moved them around. Nothing.
“What are you doing?” Ross asked.
“Three stools at the bar were knocked over either as the fire started or just before. Everything else was knocked over while the fire was being put out.”
“What does that mean?” Davey asked.
“I’m not sure. There might have been a struggle. Or the arsonist was angry, throwing things around.”
I aimed my flashlight down a hallway to the right of the bar. Off the hallway were several doors: two for the restrooms, one for the office, and one that led up to the DJ booth. I slipped up to the booth first. The darkly tinted window that allowed Miss Minerva to watch the crowd had been busted out. The electronics had been soaked in water and were now useless junk. Miss Minerva’s five milk crates full of albums sat by the wall. I leaned over and pulled out an album from the top. It was Sylvester’s
Living Proof.
The cardboard casing fell apart in my hands. The record itself might be playable. But without the album covers, Miss Minerva’s collection would be scratched and unusable in no time.
I went back downstairs and took a quick tour through the restrooms. Both bathrooms fronted the alley and had windows near the ceiling. The firemen had broken them out. I stood on a waste can in the men’s room and tried to inspect the hook on the window. It was broken, but there was no way for me to tell if that had happened before or after a fireman stuck an axe through the window.
The office held even less information. It was a tiny room and had very little smoke or water damage. Squeezed in there were a desk, a filing cabinet, and a safe. The papers on the desk were largely undamaged. That was a good thing for Davey. He’d have all the necessary paperwork he needed to put the place back together.
I went back out to the bar and stood for a minute or so just staring at it. The most severe damage was here. The bar itself was wooden and nearly twenty feet long. I remembered there was some story connected to it. It might have come from The Cellar. I wasn’t sure. It wouldn’t be going anywhere else, though -- except to a landfill somewhere.
It was charred, more so in some places than others. That suggested that there had been several points used to start the fire -- if the fire had indeed been started on the bar. But if it hadn’t, what would explain the variations? It looked as though someone had taken a bottle of something very flammable -- probably alcohol, or several bottles of alcohol -- and poured them onto the bar in different spots. While doing this, they may have knocked down a couple stools and not bothered
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to pick them up. Or someone else had tried to stop them. Either way, they then lit the puddles of liquor.
“What are you looking for?” Ross asked.
“I’ve never done arson before, but the fireman said it started at the bar. I’m guessing that you look for places where there’s a lot of damage.”
“You mean the place with the most damage is probably where the fire started?”
“Yes.”
He stood next to me, looking at the bar. Davey was wandering around staring at everything. He seemed to be calculating what needed to be redone in order to open again. The bad news that pretty much everything needed to be redone seemed to be sinking in.
“No,” Ross said abruptly. “It wouldn’t be like that. Not this time.” He flipped open the service bar and pulled me behind the bar.
The rubber mat on the floor that prevented the bartenders from slipping on spillage had melted and reformed into a lava-like puddle. Behind the bar, there had been glass shelves in front of a mirror where the liquor was kept. Now, the shelves were shattered and the bottles had burst with the heat of the fire. The mirror was cracked and covered in soot.
Ross pointed at the area where the shelves had been. “The worst damage is back here. This would be the hot spot. But not until the bottles started to blow up.”
I looked up at the ceiling. The fire seemed to have spread there quickly, with severe damage above the bar. The hole that had been chopped into the roof was over the dance floor. I asked Ross, “If you were going to burn the place down, how would you do it?”
After thinking about it, he said, “I’d start with the bar. I’d pick out a high-proof liquor and pour it all over the place. I might use a few stacks of cocktail napkins to get things going. But I’d definitely want to be out of here before the bottles started to blow.”
I nodded. It confirmed my original thoughts. At the far end of the bar, a door led to the storage room. I walked down and took a look. There was a lot of damage. The walls had burned down to the studs, and the studs were charred. The floor looked dangerously unstable.
The doorway I stood in was the only entrance to the room. That might have been against code, but Davey greased the right palms. Beyond the storeroom, reached via the hallway, were the bathrooms and Davey’s small office. Those rooms had windows. The storeroom did not.