The Cop Read online

  Also by R.J. Ellory

  Ghostheart

  A Quiet Vendetta

  City of Lies

  A Quiet Belief in Angels

  A Simple Act of Violence

  The Anniversary Man

  Saints of New York

  Bad Signs

  Copyright

  This electronic edition first published in the United States in 2013 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected], or write us at the address above.

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Orion Books

  Copyright © 2012 R.J. Ellory Publications Limited

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-0653-8

  Contents

  Copyright

  Also by R.J. Ellory

  Chapter 1

  About the Author

  Believe it or not, I knew Paulie Marcinkus personally. He was born right here in Cicero, just like me. And just like me he grew up hearing tales of Capone, Jake Guzik and Frank Nitti. Paulie was a big old lunk from the get-go, fists like ham hocks, head as hard as a hammer, and he could have stayed in the neighborhood, or shipped out of here one of three ways, just as all us Cicero kids did back then. It was cops, crooks or church. If families had three boys, you’d find one of them gone to each, and if there was a fourth kid, well he never seemed to make it out of his teens. Why? Hell knows. You’d find the cop brother would never bust the crook-brother, and the priest-brother would always take his confession, and so it went. Hands washed hands, backs got scratched, and the Irish kept away from the spics, and the spics kept away from the blue-gums, and the blue-gums stayed away from everyone but their own kind. So Paulie went to the church, all six foot three and two hundred pounds of him, and he went with his nickname already sewn in his shirts and coats. He was “The Gorilla.” Paul “The Gorilla” Marcinkus. How he even got to be a priest, how he got assigned to Rome, how he became an archbishop, how he became so unbelievably corrupt, well all of those things are a different story, and will just join the long catalog of tales that will always be told about us Cicero boys. All I can say is that I witnessed Paulie Marcinkus put the caulks to a few heads in his younger years, but I still can’t see how that’s gotten him a ticket to the seminary, let alone the Vatican. Or maybe it has. Maybe that’s what they’re after in the priesthood. The threat of ten Hail Marys ain’t dissuading anyone from a life of crime these days, and they need to get their hides thrashed by someone like Paulie.

  Me? Well, I went to the PD. That was my calling, just like my father before me. And when I graduated the Academy in the fall of ’44, me and a whole host of other greenhorns went right out onto the streets to get our asses kicked by the runners and dealers and soldiers and thugs from the 42s, the Outfit, Torrio’s Five Points Gang, and all the other offshoots that loan sharked and hounded people for protection money, all those scumbags and shitheels that lost their livelihoods when Volstead was repealed in ’33 and who had to figure out some other way of taking honest dollars out of decent, hard-working folks’ pockets for no work at all.

  I could have gone to the war. Perhaps I should have gone to the war. I could have fought at Messina, at Anzio, at Los Negros when MacArthur began the Pacific assault by cornering fifty thousand Japs on the Bismarck Archipelago, and then set his sights on the Philippines. I could have, but I didn’t. I was already married, me and Evie were planning kids, and I saw the future ahead of me with some kind of eye for making it past a quarter century.

  Now, looking back, I don’t think I made the wrong decision. Sure, there were a lot of guys that made it out, but there were a great deal that didn’t. The more time that passes, the less people ask what I did in the war. If Evie is with me, then she just pipes right up with, “He survived, that’s what he did . . .” and she smiles that Evelyn Maguire smile, and she changes the subject. It’s a misdirection, but it ain’t a lie.

  And now it’s 1956, and a great deal of water has passed beneath a great many bridges. Evie and me, well we planned on kids in ’44 and ’45, did the necessary homework, if you know what I mean, but the first one didn’t arrive until ’48. That was Dougie, seven years old now, bright as a lightbulb, smart as a whip. Then his sister, Laura, followed on behind in November of ’51. We named her after one of Evie’s maternal aunts. The one who died young. In fact, Aunt Laura died younger than our Laura is right now.

  Anyway, that was all a while back, and this is today. It’s a Monday evening, and when the phone call comes, Evie is trying to bathe both kids and get them into the sack, and it’s running about as smoothly as a Chinese fire drill. They’re up late because we drove out to see Evie’s folks in Galena, and—as is always the case when we visit with Evie’s folks—leaving at lunchtime became leaving after dinner, and now it’ll be midnight before those kids have their heads on their pillows. I have a mind to hammer up the stairs and coldcock the pair of them. I have to shout for Evie to quiet them down so I can hear what my partner, Pete Quinn, is saying.

  Which leads me to where I am now—Chicago PD 9th Precinct Homicide Division—which, to be frank, is about as life affirming as a flat tire in a hailstorm. That is to say, it ain’t.

  I tried Robbery, I even tried Fraud, considered Vice, but then had second thoughts. That’s not something a man can do all day and then go play happy families. Hell, being a cop isn’t something one can do all day and then go play happy families, but there are some places in this job that are worse than others.

  I needed to get off the street. Not because I was scared of streets, but because it was the same damned thing every damned day. Parking violations, bag-snatchers, B&Es, small fry with body odor and a list of misdemeanors that would run from Chicago to Martha’s Vineyard. No, there was a limit on that one, and anyway, anything big got handed up to Vice, to Homicide, to the Feds. So, like I said, I gave Robbery and Fraud a try, found they weren’t to my liking, and then a guy got killed, a mob hit in a bar downtown, and it all wound up back on my desk because someone knew someone who knew someone, and that someone might have been the brother of a guy in city jail who knew the killer intimately. I took a trip over there and listened to that bird tweet for two and a half hours. Man, he talked a blue streak like no one I’d ever heard. Anyway, it wasn’t the talking bird that got under my skin, but the guy they eventually nailed. I mean, this guy was twenty-five pounds short of flyweight. Slick breeze would have knocked him flat on his keister. But he was a mean son-of-a-bitch. Took three welters and a cruiser to haul him from the van, and they had to lock him in his own cell in the basement—otherwise he’d have torn a new asshole for anyone sharing.

  I had to go down there and watch him for a while, and he talked some crazy kind of thing about how everyone had been out to get him all his life, how he never got a break no matter what, and that this was just one more bad deal and bum’s rush in among all the other bad deals and bum’s rushes that he’d been handed on a platter since the day he first drew breath.

  And then, after a good healthy while of this caterwauling, he stopped suddenly, as if reminded of something real important, and then broke into this joke about
a baseball pitcher and a chicken that still makes me laugh to this day.

  The whole experience was one thing, and then something else, and I talked to Evie about how it had intrigued me.

  “The man blew hot, then cold, then hot again. There wasn’t nothin’ to him, and yet he was strong as a mule and twice as bad-tempered. He killed another man by just rolling up a newspaper and jamming it into his throat until the guy’s neck was busted—”

  “Psychotic,” Evie said.

  “And then a good helping of crazy beyond that,” I said.

  “You should go into Homicide,” she said, and she said it without looking up from where she was fixing a button onto one of Dougie’s shirts.

  “Homicide?”

  “Sure. Then you could go to work every day and meet interesting folks like your newspaperman there.”

  “It’s an idea,” I said.

  She looked up then. I’d gotten her attention when she’d not expected it.

  “It is an idea,” she said. “But is it a good one, that’s the question.”

  “Well, I’m not doing beat any more, and Vice is out, as are Fraud and Robbery, so unless I want to be one of those cops that investigates other cops, then it’s the Murder Squad for me.”

  “Right,” she said, and went back to the stitching.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I just said ‘Right,’ ” Evie replied. “Didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Wasn’t what you said, but the way you said it. I know that tone.”

  “Oh you do, do you?”

  “Yes, I do. That’s your disapproving tone.”

  “Is it now?”

  There was silence for a little while, and then she set down the shirt and the thread and she looked at me with those big old Evie Maguire eyes, and she said, “Sometimes you are such a galoot, Robert, and sometimes you are the smartest man I know. There has never been a decision you’ve made where you needed my approval, and I don’t think there ever will be. Single-minded is a word that was designed for you, and until you find what you want, well, it’s going to be a matter of trial-and-error. Go apply for Homicide, and see what it’s like. If you’re happy there, I’ll be happy.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Oh, come on. Seriously, if I even thought for a moment that you honestly cared a single damn for my viewpoint . . .”

  “How can you say that, Evelyn? How can—”

  “How can I wind you up so easily?” She looked up, she smiled.

  “You—”

  “Nope,” she interjected. “You fell headfirst into that one. Now go make me a Gibson, and fetch the cigarettes from my purse in the kitchen.”

  The following day I applied for Homicide. A week later I transferred. That was in the late fall of ’52, just a couple of months after Dougie turned four.

  Been there ever since. Don’t meet such interesting guys as the flyweight newspaperman every day, but there are some characters, you can be sure of that.

  Most deaths are pointless. They are about money or sex or both, more often than not. They’re about one guy having something some other guy wants, or vice versa. They’re about some dumbass character saying he’ll do one thing, and then doing another. They’re about people getting mad as hell for no real reason, and then somewhere along the line it flips over into a crazy, irrational belief that the only way the world is going to be habitable is for some other poor schmuck not to be in it. And then bang, it all goes to hell in a handbasket. Someone grabs a knife, or goes and gets a shooter, and one person’s life is over in a heartbeat. Then the perp gets dragged through the courts and down to death row, and he loses his life, too. Or she does. Because there’s dames that off folks as well. This ain’t just a male domain, especially not in a big city like Chicago.

  I am thirty-nine years old, as of last March, I got a beautiful wife and two little rascals of my own, and every day I’m looking into the drains around Chicago’s 9th Precinct to see what lowlifes and losers might be hiding there with bad attitudes and worse intentions.

  I try to leave weekends clear. Sometimes we get Evie’s cousin over and she sits with the kids while we catch a movie. Last one we saw was that Guys and Dolls thing with Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando. Not my kind of thing, but Evie likes it. That was back in November, so you can see it ain’t a frequent thing. Personally, I can’t get over Ol’ Blue Eyes being mob. Can’t take him seriously doing all the singing and dancing stuff.

  Evie and me, we do the best we can. We don’t fight—never have, never will. We ain’t built like that. We don’t go to sleep on a disagreement. We always work it out before we get our heads down. Folks ask us how get along so well. Evie says it’s because she recognizes that I’m the head of the household, and I understand that she’s the neck. She turns the head any which way she pleases, see? It’s an old joke, but it’s kind of true in our case, and it’s worked out fine so far. When I met her she was working at a picture house. She was like the floor manager or something, stepping in to sort out rain check tickets, calling up a mechanic for the busted popcorn machine, getting the marquee rigged upfront when it rained so queuing folks didn’t get wet. I went back and saw some terrible movies just to get a glimpse of her. Became quite a regular, so much so that one evening she asked me if I had ever considered a season ticket.

  “A what?”

  “A season ticket. You pay ten bucks for the year, and every ticket is discounted by fifty percent.”

  I thought for a while. It was the first time we had spoken directly, up close and personal if you will. She was even prettier at three feet than she was at ten. “So, that means I can come back here and see you as often as I like for half the price for a whole year straight.”

  “Not me,” she said. “You aren’t coming here to see me.”

  “Says who?”

  She blushed then. I seen it fair and square.

  “But you’re here all the time,” she said.

  “’Cause I have this condition, see?” I said, kind of trying to be a wise guy, but not be too upfront. I mean, I didn’t know whether she had a boyfriend or a husband or what. She didn’t wear no wedding band, but some girls don’t these days, right?

  “You have a condition?” she asked, and she kind of had this distasteful expression on her face, like all of a sudden I was going to start talking about some medical disorder.

  “Yes, but I suppose it’s more a syndrome than a condition, like a deficiency kind of thing.”

  “A deficiency?”

  “Yes, it’s real simple, see? I go two or three days without seeing you, and I get headaches, right? I get headaches, and I get this dizzy feeling, and there’s like a hollow feeling in my chest. And then I come here and I see you and it all goes away pronto.”

  She frowned again. “Who are you? Are you a comedian or something? Is this a joke? Did one of my friends put you up to this, mister?”

  “No, I don’t know any of your friends. And I’m a cop, not a comedian.”

  “You are not a cop.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, and then I showed her my ID card.

  “You are a cop.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you’re serious? You come here to see me?”

  “Well, sometimes a little bit to see the pictures, but mostly to see you.”

  “How do you know I’m not married?”

  “I don’t.”

  “And why didn’t you ever ask me out?”

  That got me. I didn’t know what to say.

  “So,” she said. “You’ve been coming here—what?—three or four months, maybe once a week or so, and you’ve never asked me out?”

  “Seems that way.”

  “And if I hadn’t spoken to you this evening, then would you have ever asked me out?”

  “I was working up to it,” I said. “Would’ve taken me a while, but I would’ve gotten there eventually. If I feel someplace is really worth arriving at, I tend to go the long way round to appreciate th
e journey.”

  “So you actually do want a season ticket,” she said, “but not for the theater, right?”

  “Just so long as you’ll be punching it,” I said, which was a bit dangerous, but I was in a What the hell? kind of mood. She made me feel that way. She made me feel taller and funnier and smarter and better in a bunch of different ways.

  “You’re damned lucky I’m single,” she said, “otherwise I’d have my boyfriend come round and slug you for saying something like that.”

  I knew I’d crossed the line then, because she looked at me hard and stone-faced, and then that face cracked a smile, and she started laughing.

  “You wind up easy, don’t you?”

  I knew then, just as I know now, and that was how we met.

  I took her for coffee, and then for dinner, and then we started seeing one other regular. Before I knew it, her father and I were sharing cooking duties at a barbecue over at their place, and me and Evie were talking about getting married. You always know you’re in good when your girl’s old man lets you help with the barbecue.

  That was all of twelve years ago, and we’re still here, still hanging in and making good, and the pay grade I’m looking at next will give us enough to get a bigger place, maybe a new car, and it seems things are going in the right direction.

  Anyway, so back to where we were. The call came that Monday night. The kids were hammering and hollering all over the place upstairs, I’m shouting at Evie to get them wound down and into the sack, and Pete Quinn is telling me that some girl’s gotten herself killed and I need to get over there.

  “Jeez Pete, it’s damned near midnight,” I said, and then Evie is asking me who’s on the phone at this time of night, and I’m waving my hand at her to quiet her down too.

  “Pete, seriously, you really need me?”

  “Robert, you’re the lead here,” he said. “You’re the detective. You gotta get out here and organize this before it gets all outta hand. I got a corridor full of neighbors, I got the ME on his way, I got people taking pictures and all sorts of craziness going on. I called you half an hour ago, but there was no answer.”