I realized that I never considered that Brooks might be a black man. There was no photo in the computer printouts and no reason to mention race in the stories. I had just assumed he was white and it was an assumption I would have to analyze later. At the moment, I was trying to figure out what Washington was trying to tell me by taking me here.
Washington pulled into a lot next to one of the buildings.
There were a couple of dumpsters coated with decades of graffiti slogans. There was a rusted basketball backboard but the rim was long gone. He put the car in park but left it running. I didn’t know if that was to keep the heat flowing or to allow us a quick getaway if needed. I saw a small group of teenagers in long coats, their faces as dark as the sky, scurry from the building closest to us, then cross a frozen courtyard and hustle into one of the other buildings.
“At this point you’re wondering what the hell you’re doing here,” Washington said then. “That’s okay, I understand. A white boy like you.”
Again I said nothing. I was letting him run out his line.
“See that one, third on the right. That was our building. I was on fourteen with my grand-auntie and John lived with his mother on twelve, one below us. They didn’t have no thirteen, already enough bad luck ’round here. Neither of us had fathers. At least ones that showed up.”
I thought he wanted me to say something but I didn’t know what. I had no earthly idea what kind of struggle the two friends must have had to make it out of the tombstone of a building he had pointed at. I remained mute.
“We were friends for life. Hell, he ended up marrying my first girlfriend, Edna. Then on the department, after we both made homicide and trained with senior detectives for a few years, we asked to be partnered. And damn, it got approved. Story about us in the Sun-Times once. They stuck us in Three because it included this place. They figured it was part of our expertise. A lot of our cases come outta here. But its still on rotation. So we just happened to be the ones catching on the day that boy turned up without no fingers. Shit, the call came in right at eight. Ten minutes before and it would’ve gone to night shift.”
He was silent for a while, probably thinking about what kind of difference it would have made if the call had gone to somebody else.
“Sometimes at night when we’d been workin’ a case or on a stake or something, me’n John would drive out here after shift, park right where we are now and just look the place over.”
It occurred to me then what the message was. Larry Legs knew Jumpin’ John hadn’t pulled the trigger on himself because he had known the exact struggle Brooks had experienced coming out of a place like this. Brooks had fought his way out of hell and he wasn’t about to go back by his own hand. That was the message.
“This is how you knew, isn’t it?”
Washington looked across the seat at me and nodded once.
“It was just one of those things you know, that’s all. He didn’t do it. I told them that in MIU but they just wanted to get it the fuck away from them.”
“So all you had was your gut. There was nothing out of line anywhere else?”
“There was one thing but it wasn’t enough for them. I mean they had the handwriting, his history with the shrink, all that in place. It fit too nicely for them. He was a suicide before they zipped up the bag and took him away. Cut and dried.”
“What was the one thing?”
“The two shots.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s get out of here. Let’s get some food.”
He put the car in drive and made a large circle in the lot and then out onto the street. We headed north on streets I had never been on. I had an idea where we were going, though. After five minutes of this I was tired of waiting for the next part of the story.
“What about the two shots?”
“He fired two shots, right?”
“Did he? It wasn’t in the papers.”
“They never put out all the details on anything. But I was there at the house. Edna called me after she found him. I got there ahead of MIU. There was one shot in the floor and one shot in the mouth. The official explanation was that the first shot was supposed to be him seeing if he could do it or something, like a practice. Gettin’ the courage up. Then the second time was when he went ahead and did it. It didn’t make sense. Not to me.”
“Why not? What did you think the two shots were for?”
“I think the first one went in the mouth. The second one was for gunshot residue. The perp wrapped John’s hand around the gun and fired it into the floor. John’s hand gets GSR on it. The case goes suicide. End of story.”
“But nobody agreed with you.”
“Not until today. Not until you turn up with this Edgar Allan Poe thing. I went to Major Investigations to tell them what you’ve got. I reminded them of the problems with the suicide. My problems. They are going to reopen it and take another look. Tomorrow A.M. we’ve got a start-up meeting over at Eleven-Twenty-One. The MIU chief is going to get me detached and put on the squad.”
“That’s great.”
I watched out the window and was silent for a while. I was excited. Things were falling into place. I now had the presumed self-inflicted deaths of two cops in two different cities being reinvestigated as possible murders and possibly connected. That was a story. A damn good one. And it was something I could use as a wedge in Washington to get into the foundation records and even the FBI. That is, if I got there first. If Chicago or Denver went to the bureau first, I’d likely be squeezed out because they wouldn’t need me anymore.
“Why?” I said out loud.
“Why what?”
“Why is somebody doing this? What exactly are they doing?”
Washington didn’t answer. He just drove through the cold night.
We had dinner in a booth in the back of the Slammer, a cop bar near Area Three. Both of us ordered the special, roast turkey and gravy, good cold-weather food. As we ate, Washington gave me a rundown on the MIU plan. He told me everything was off the record and that if I wanted to write anything, I had to get it from the lieutenant who would eventually head up the squad. I had no problem with that. The squad was going to exist because of me. The lieutenant would have to talk to me.
Washington kept both elbows on the table while he ate. It looked like he was guarding his food. He spoke with his mouth full at times but that was because he was excited. So was I. I was also wary of protecting my place in the investigation, in the story.
“We’ll start off with Denver,” Washington said. “We’ll work together, get our ducks lined up and then see what happens. Hey, did you talk to Wexler? He was mad at you, boy.”
“How come?”
“Why you think? You didn’t tell him about Poe, Brooks, Chicago. I think you lost a source there, Jack.”
“Maybe. They got anything new there?”
“Yeah, the ranger.”
“What about him?”
“They did the hypnosis thing. Took him back to that day. He said your brother was wearing only one glove when he looked in the window of the car for the gun. Then that glove, with the GSR, somehow gets back on the hand. Wexler said they’ve got no doubts about it now.”
I nodded more to myself than to Washington.