The aftermath of what some press wag labeled the Winnetka Wipeout was bigger and more intense than either of my previous brushes with homicide had been. Both Kiki’s life and mine were changed, if not forever, at least for the immediate future. Everyone wanted to use us for fun and/or profit. That included the police; district attorneys; my agent, Wally Wing, who seemed to think he was now representing Kiki, too; the network, who insisted I become a semipermanent part of Hotline Tonight while signing Kiki to a new contract that would kick in as soon as the show returned to New York.
During our final week in Chicago, we both needed security guards to get us through the media throngs at the hotel, our temporary site in Millennium Park, police headquarters, and—long story short—any place we tried to show our faces in the city. This made it difficult for me to run a couple of crucial errands. Difficult but not impossible.
On the last Tuesday, just after noon, the first time since the Winnetka Wipeout when I’d had more than a moment to myself, I donned a Cubbies cap, a chambray work shirt, rumpled khaki pants, and, the perfect touch, a battered backpack, and made an incognito escape from my hotel room, down the elevator, to a basic gray two-door Ford Fiesta in the hotel’s subbasement.
From there I had no problem driving to North Sedgwick Street in Old Town, parking only a few feet away from the alley leading to the house that had been shared by the late Larry Kelsto and Nat Parkins. I entered the yard through the rear fence gate.
The house was still wrapped in yellow CPD tape. That was fine with me. What I wanted wasn’t in the house.
I approached the chrome naked man and chair. As I’d realized, the man was seated in pretty much the same position as the Shakespeare park statue that Nat had sketched in such detail.
When I’d first seen the chrome man, I’d been a bit distracted by its protruding penis. Now I ignored that in favor of the gap in the chrome where Nat had been planning on placing the missing right leg. It was an ostrich egg–shaped cavity, approximately seven inches across. Its edges should have been jagged, but they weren’t. I hoped they’d been purposely smoothed by one of the tools Nat had been in too much of a hurry to put away.
Gingerly, I poked my hand into the gap. Nothing. I moved it higher. I was into the sculpture up to my shoulder when my fingers touched something that felt like a rolled magazine. Eager now, I pushed one more inch of my shoulder into the gap, got the edge of the object between fingers and thumb, and yanked.
It was the first red file, folded in two. Three others, dislodged, came tumbling after.
Like a miser—hell, like Scrooge McDuck finding a pot of leprechaun gold—I carried my treasure back to the car. There I immediately examined my find. The folders’ tags carried three-digit numbers, their significance lost on me. Two-eighty-four contained a DVD disk and xeroxed pictures of a naked Carrie Sands. In some, she energetically worked the pole in a strip club. Others were considerably less wholesome.
File 137 featured pages from an accountant’s ledger and copies of two sets of matching fingerprints. Damned if my guess at Baker’s hadn’t been on the money. One set was marked “Polvere—back cover financial records, Windy City Industrials, September 3, 1987.” The other: “Baker—pencil from office, construction site North Franklin and West Monroe, May 4, 2011.”
So he had tied Baker to Polvere over a year ago. Why did he wait to confront him? Had it been something I said, as he told Baker? I doubted I’d ever know. Not that it mattered anymore.
My file was numbered 112. Its contents were the original pages and the Xeroxed copies that Patton had shown me that morning at the hotel.
The final red file, 283, was devoted to Derek Webber. There was another Xerox, this one of a check made out to Onion City for one hundred fifty thousand dollars and no cents. It was signed by Jonathan Baker. A notation on the page said that it was for two points in the feature film The Thief Who Stole Trump Tower. “Onion City’s connection to Outfit,” Patton had written. This was something Webber should see, I thought. Considering the number of people in the city who did business with Baker, Patton’s smoking gun wasn’t even a cap pistol.
But then I noticed another of Patton’s notes in the folder. There was a paper-clip indentation at the top. My guess was that at one time, it had been attached to the film script Nat shoved under my door.