The Chicago Way (19 page)

“Helps his God complex,” Rodriguez said.

“Exactly,” Trent replied. “He decides when the fun is over, who gets caught, and when. As for the accomplice himself…”

“Yes?” I said.

“Impossible to say how he would react to Grime’s betrayal. I will, however, say this. It seems more likely than not that he will continue to hunt and continue to attack women.”

“Until he is caught,” I said.

“No, Mr. Kelly. Until he is killed.”

A s I drove home, I thought about what Trent had told us. Rodriguez stared out the window and didn’t blink very much. I had put Nicole aside. At least for the moment. Rodriguez wasn’t entirely there yet.

“Where am I dropping you?” I said.

“I parked on Addison, around the corner from your place.”

I pulled up to his car and stopped. The wind was picking up off the lake. A plastic bag scurried across the street, then straight up, into the tangled branches of a tree. A few drops of rain spattered across my windshield, found their rhythm, and began to fall in a light, steady patter.

“I’m going in after Grime,” I said and flicked on my wipers. “A letter and a request to visit.”

“It’s a long shot.”

“But worth it. Besides, he’ll never sit down with a cop.”

Rodriguez climbed out of the car and stuck his head back in through the open door. A cold, wet draft blew his voice across the front seat.

“Just remember, Kelly. This is a private gig. So go low-key. Don’t use any names. Don’t give up a lot of detail. Inside or outside Menard. And be careful. Trent is right. Grime is good at what he does. And Grime is all about Grime.”

I nodded.

“You all right, Rodriguez?”

“Not really. Not yet. But I will be.”

“I know,” I said. “Just going to take some time.”

The detective slammed my car door shut. I rolled around the corner and down the block. I found a space in front and walked to my building, composing a love letter to a serial killer in my head. A gust of wind pushed me the final few feet toward my front door. She was sitting on the stoop. I almost stepped on her before she said a word.

“Michael.”

I hadn’t heard her voice in a year. It brought back feelings I thought were gone, or at least reduced to memory.

“Annie,” I said.

Now she was up and close, arms around my neck, cheek touching mine. For a moment, everything was as it once was. Then it wasn’t.

“I’m sorry about Nicole,” she murmured.

It had only been a day, but already Nicole seemed dead a lifetime. I held Annie lightly, felt her let loose inside. She had known Nicole. Not as I did, but enough to make it real.

“It’s all right,” I said.

My words hung in the air, glorious in their artlessness, mocking their creator. I fumbled for my keys and opened the door.

“Let’s go inside.”

Five minutes later, we were sitting in two armchairs, looking out my windows, watching the weather. Patches of fog drifted in from the lake, squeezing down side streets and alleys, filling doorways, and curling around the gutters tucked under my roof.

Above the mist sat the heavy artillery. Layers of clouds, veined in purple and full of wind. They blew shop signs against their moorings and pedestrians across intersections. Then the sky split and the clouds emptied themselves in earnest. The October storm was as complete as it was sudden, spending itself against my window, streaming into a crack along the frame, and forming a pool near a cup of tea my old flame had laid on the sill.

“Never got that drip fixed, did you, Michael?”

Annie sniffed a bit, wiped up the forming pool of water with a napkin, and took a sip of tea.

“How are you?” she said.

“I’m okay.”

“Sorry about outside. I read about Nicole in the papers, but it wasn’t until I said her name. I don’t know. Just lost it.”

Then Annie lost it again, gentler this time. I moved beside her, spoke without thinking.

“She loved you, Annie. I know you guys hadn’t talked much in the past year or so, but she loved you a lot. You should know that.”

I felt her lean into me in acknowledgment.

“Something else, Annie. I was there when Nicole died.”

She stiffened and looked up.

“That wasn’t in the paper.”

“I know, and it’s not something we can really talk about. Just understand it was a mean death, Annie. And Nicole was brave. Very fucking brave.”

The sadness I expected to feel inside wasn’t there yet. Well, it was there, just not right up front. Instead there was a coldness, fierce pride for Nicole, and anger. I hadn’t known about the anger until I spoke, but that’s often the way it is. Annie didn’t push it. Maybe she knew better.

“When is the funeral?” she said.

“Tuesday. At Graceland, one o’clock.”

She nodded and wiped her nose. I stood up and moved to the windows. Gave both of us some space. After a minute or so, she spoke again.

“You look good.”

“Yeah, right. I look like hell and you know it.”

I turned around. Annie was curled in now, blond hair still damp from the rain, blue eyes perched over a cup of tea, searching mine for answers to questions she’d never asked.

“Fine, you look like hell,” she said. “I look great.”

The humor was quiet, soothing, easy to fall into. I sat back down in my chair and waited. The hard part was over. I had a feeling the impossible was only about to begin.

“I’m sorry about how it ended,” she said.

“I know.”

“It was the best way.”

“I know.”

“I’m not a coward.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

I thought about that day. I had left Annie in the kitchen. She said she was going to make some lunch and read. She had been distant. I had been distant. We both knew it wasn’t working and didn’t want to talk about it. So it sat there. The relationship. Like a great, grinning eight-hundred-pound gorilla. In the corner of each and every room in our two-bedroom flat. Peeling away the skin of our collective life. Grinning and eating. Piece by piece. Getting bigger. Getting harder to ignore every day.

That particular morning, however, had been better. We talked about her work. I made a joke. She laughed. We even talked about what we might do for Christmas, a conversation that made the considerable assumption there was another Christmas together in our future. I remember she reached out and held me close before I went out the door. Thought that was a good sign. I was only half-right.

I ran seven hard miles along the lake. Felt loose and fast. Fell into an easy rhythm. Then I walked for a bit, enjoyed the scenery and the sweat. Just like always. It was a little over two hours by the time I returned to the apartment.

I came in through the back door. The kitchen was dark, the counter wiped clean. I remember walking to the sink and feeling the sponge. Still wet. A single bead of water hung off the faucet and then fell. I wanted to yell her name but stopped myself. Instead, I walked into the living room. Like the kitchen, it was dark. I could hear a clock ticking on a table next to the sofa. We had bought it at a barn sale in Wisconsin because it looked old and cool. Now it just sounded loud.

Beyond the living room was our bedroom and a closet. Open and half-empty. Near the front door, a table. On it a solitary pool of soft light warmed the sharp, white creases of a single envelope. I walked over and picked it up. My name was scratched across the front. In a comfortable, familiar scrawl that hurt to look at. I ticked the envelope open and found myself back in the kitchen, reading in the late-afternoon darkness. The words ran together as my eyes tore over the pages, picking out the operative phrases. It was beautiful. It was elegant. It was heartbreaking. It was seven pages. It was the speech. Annie was moving on. And I was not moving with her.

I hated her. Hated myself for hating her. Hated being in the apartment. Being in that moment. I’d get over it. Sure. But still, a year later, the ache doesn’t forget.

“It’s not that big of a deal,” I said.

“I could have told you. Face-to-face.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“What do you think would have happened? If we had talked it out?”

I had thought about a lot of things in the past year. But never that.

“How many times had we broken up?” she said. “How many times in the last year had we agreed it was over? Eight, ten, once a month?”

I smiled. Sad, but a smile.

“At least,” I said.

“Exactly. Neither one of us had the strength to do it face-to-face. Neither of us could have ever walked away. Not like that.”

“But we had to.”

“Yes.”

“So that was the best way?”

“It wasn’t the best way, Michael. It was the worst. But it was also the only way. Like I said, I’m sorry.”

She wiped away a lonely tear, took a sip of tea, and looked back out at the storm. I noticed that she jiggled one foot against the ground and the cup shook lightly in her hand. Our relationship had taken its pound of flesh. I hoped it wasn’t hungry for more.

“You did what you had to do, Annie. What you thought was right. I know that now. Pretty much always known that, I think.”

She didn’t respond. So we sat and listened to the wind. Two people, comforting a relationship that left town a long time ago. And wasn’t coming back. After a while she got up quietly, found her coat, and headed to the door. I followed. Annie turned.

“You’re a good person, Michael. That’s why I loved you back then. That’s why I love you right now. For a long time I thought that would be enough. For both of us. Turns out it wasn’t enough for either.”

“I know.”

She tilted her head.

“You do?”

“I ran into you the other day. By accident. With the guy.”

She blushed, more than I wanted, and pulled her coat tight.

“Wow. Didn’t know that.”

“Serious?”

She looked up at me. This time she told the truth. No matter how much it hurt.

“Yeah, Michael. Pretty serious.”

“I’m happy for you.”

I didn’t know if I meant it until I said it. Then I knew it was right.

“I won’t be at the funeral,” she said. “Don’t think I can take it. But I’ll stop by the grave next week. Say my good-byes.”

Annie hugged me. Then she left. I sat by the window and watched as the Hawk blew her down Lakewood and across Addison. In a small frame, on a table by the window, was a picture of myself and Nicole, snapped at a Cubs game last summer. Saturday afternoon in the bleachers. I picked up the photo and lingered, if only for a moment, in a newfound sense of freedom, joined at the hip with freedom’s ugly cousin: an all-encompassing sense of isolation otherwise known as loneliness.

N icole was buried two days later. On a Tuesday afternoon. She had two sisters. I stood between them at the grave and held their hands. Rodriguez stood behind me, dark glasses shading a face of stone. I didn’t see Annie. I didn’t need to look.

Rachel Swenson offered a reading at the service. Bennett Davis was in the back of the crowd. Tight-lipped, he gave me a nod at the edge of Nicole’s grave, dropped a rose into the hole, and drifted away. Bennett would be okay. I’d check up on him in a day or so.

Nicole’s death was a run-of-the-mill tragedy, nothing more than a one-day story in Chicago. Young black woman, forensic scientist, dedicated her life to catching killers, done in by the same. Nice angle, but ultimately, just another random act of violence. Or so it went. Rodriguez kept my name out of the public record and I appreciated it.

“You haven’t returned my calls.”

I was walking away from the service. Alone. Diane came up from behind. She was dressed in black and looked every bit the part.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s been tough.”

“I know. She was my friend, too.”

I held her close. Diane cried for more than a moment. I waited and felt the first bit of peace inside. It surprised me.

“You want to come over?” I said.

She pulled away, almost embarrassed, and moved back within herself.

“I can’t. I’ve got to do the six o’clock.”

“How about after? We can get some dinner.”

Now she was far away. Or at least seemed that way.

“Let’s see how it goes. I’ll give you a call.”

I nodded and turned to go. Diane reached out and touched me at the elbow.

“Kelly.”

I paused but didn’t look back.

“You okay?” she said.

“I’m okay.”

Her fingers slipped off the sleeve of my coat.

“Good. I’ll talk to you later.”

I heard her move away and continued walking. Phillip’s grave was at the very back of the cemetery, in a section neither the groundskeeper, nor anyone else, visited very often. I didn’t have any flowers to leave, not even a cigarette to lay on top of my brother’s headstone. He would have liked that.

Instead, I stood there and remembered. Flickering moments of childhood memory, ground into dust by the gears of fate and time. Phillip had been dead too long for me to really miss him. But I could still be angry, still wonder why. My brother and Nicole lived at the heart of what was once my youth. Now they’d be buried together. If nothing else, it was convenient.

After a minute or so had passed, I made the sign of the cross, ran my fingers along his name carved in the rock, and left. As I walked back to my car, I stole a glance through the trees. The backhoe was at work. Pouring dirt on my friend’s coffin, sending her on her way through eternity.

I left the cemetery and drove to the Century City Mall at Diversey and Clark. I pulled into a no-parking zone, put on my flashers, and got out. It was midafternoon and the mall was pretty empty. There was a bass line playing inside my head, a hiss of static underneath, pulsing just below the skin. I pushed a button and waited for the elevator. Just as the doors opened, a guy and his girlfriend brushed past me and into the car. The guy was wearing a cut-off T-shirt and a Red Sox hat on backward. He punched a button and the doors began to close. I was still outside. The girl was laughing. The guy gave me a little finger-wave through the six inches of space left between the doors. I stuck my foot into the gap, reached through, and began to pry. I could hear the guy stabbing at the buttons, but it wasn’t working.