The next afternoon, Stryker and I were out for a walk in Grant Park. The winter thaw was long over, so the grass was thick and green and ready to be explored, which Stryker could do for hours on end if you let him. He also enjoyed walking near Buckingham Fountain after his exhausting runs, so the mist would spray and cool him down. He was in the midst of eyeing a mini collie with pink ribbons in her hair when my cell phone rang. It was Burke.
“We found the car,” Burke said.
“Where?” I said.
“Sitting on four cinder blocks over on South Lafayette in Washington Park.”
“Have you moved it yet?”
“No one’s touching it til I get there.”
“I’ll be there in thirty.”
Washington Park was a depressed neighborhood on the South Side, known for its enormous 372-acre park bearing the same name. Hidden in the shadows of the neighboring University of Chicago, this community of wide, long streets and boarded-up houses had once been a thriving hub for its African American residents who had moved here during the apartment construction boom at the turn of the twentieth century. The process of reclaiming the neighborhood had begun in earnest nearly thirty years ago, but progress had been slow as dirt, and the air of hopelessness still hung above the community like a lingering gray cloud refusing to go away long after the rain has stopped.
South Perry Avenue was a small, one-way, north-south street that ran off the biggest thoroughfare in the neighborhood, Garfield Boulevard. I hadn’t been to this area of the city since I was a detective and worked a case where a mother and her two children had been held at gunpoint by an ex-boyfriend in the middle of a drug-fueled mental crisis. He shot and killed all three, then fled, and we eventually found him several weeks later in a crack house on the West Side. The neighborhood looked even worse than the last time I had visited. There were a couple of new buildings along Garfield, but the large grass median was littered with empty bottles, wrappers, and discarded food containers. Every block had large gaps of vacant land between the old buildings, weeds knee-high, and signs posted by the city forbidding trespassing.
I turned onto South Perry. The elevated Metra train tracks, sitting above a long stretch of unoccupied land overrun by wild weeds and dying trees, ran along the right side of the street. I wondered how many bodies had been discovered there over the years. Along the left side of the street were a few dilapidated single-family houses, a couple of them with battered cars parked on the trampled brown lawns. Midway through the block the houses ended, giving way to a great expanse of empty land leading up to a large wooden greenhouse covered by clear plastic tarp. A sign hung on the front door marking it as a project of the Sweet Water Foundation. An enormous garden had been fenced in, and the fresh soil was evidence of a recent planting. Beyond that, the street became increasingly desolate, with more empty lots overrun by wild brush and twisted trees. I imagined few people drove down this street, and those who did were probably lost or looking for a shortcut. This was a perfect location to abandon a stolen car.
I rolled farther down the street. A large brick building rose up behind a concrete wall that had barbed wire running down its entire length. The black rolling gate had been padlocked, and a Maersk shipping container could be seen through the gaps. There were no markings on the building, but a wood sign attached to the concrete wall announced the address and phone number and the name Wah King Noodle Co. It was difficult to tell what was inside, but given the condition of the decaying edifice, I wouldn’t eat any noodles that had been manufactured there.
Across the street sat several unmarked cars and one patrol car. A small group hovered over what remained of the Bentley. Burke met me as I got out of my car.
“Almost stripped to the shell,” Burke said.
“Most of those parts are halfway down to Texas or on a long drive to California,” I said.
Burke handed me a pair of gloves. I recognized one of the detectives, a short stocky guy named Delacorte. Both of his parents had been cops. We had been separated by a year at the academy. He had been a solid detective and widely respected. We nodded at each other. I stepped closer to the frame now sitting precariously on cinder blocks. The seat belts were intact along with the front seats, but the leather was badly ripped and had lots of water damage. I had once read that Bentley sourced its leather from Scandinavian bull cows and dyed it to match any color requested by its customers, then hand-stitched it into its trademark quilted pattern.
I continued my inspection partially for investigative reasons and partially because I was a fan. All of the laminated wood that typically lined the dashboard had been meticulously extracted. My guess was that Kantor had probably chosen the Vavona veneer, the rarest and most expensive of the custom wood assemblies that had been sourced from felled California sequoias. The steering wheel was gone, but the floor pedals had little street value, so they remained like narrow, skinless feet hanging from a skeleton. Surprisingly, the leather-and-chrome gearstick knob with its classic lacquered B logo remained where the stripped center console had once shined. I wondered why it hadn’t been taken as well, considering they ran north of a thousand dollars.
“Had real problems getting the seats out,” Burke said.
“Or they were scared away while trying to do it,” I said. “Seats like these have different assemblies and floor mounts than the old cars. You need special tools to break them free. It’s not easy, and it takes a while.”
“Who the hell puts quilted seats in a car anyway?” Burke said.
“People who have more money than they know what to do with,” I said.
I walked to the front of the car and looked in the engine well. The hood had also been unbolted and stolen, along with the entire bay of parts. Only a few hoses and wires remained, but they had been cut to free the more expensive hardware underneath. The front hood latch remained, as well as a chrome placard centered and anchored to the front lip. The number twelve had been stamped on the placard with the words Twin Turbo underneath it, indicating the engine had been a rare W12. I continued walking around the body of the car and was surprised by how immaculate it remained. No scratches in the paint or any dents in the metal frame—except for all the missing parts, it looked like it had just rolled out of the dealer showroom.
Two crime scene techs went to work dusting for prints, but I was confident that in the unlikely event they found anything, it would be of little help to the investigation. This car had been chopped up by experts, not a bunch of juvenile vandals getting their cheap thrills destroying property. I walked to the back of the car. They had even stripped the taillights, which, as a pair, could set you back a few thousand dollars.
Delacorte met me behind the car. “You’re looking great, Ashe,” he said. “Retirement looks good on you.”
We hugged each other.
“You should try it someday,” I said. “Does wonders for the skin.”
“For the bank account too by the looks of your ride,” he said. “What is that, early nineties?”
“Eighty-six,” I said.
“All original?”
“Only way I like ’em.”
“Man, I’ve been figuring out my own plan B. Another ten years and I can take early retirement.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Been doing a little trading on the side and looking into all this cryptocurrency stuff. One of the sergeants who got me into it just retired last year. Said he was losing too much money coming to work, so he turned in his shield, kept his union benefits, and now he spends half his day on the computer, looking at charts and graphs, and the other half looking at investment properties.”
“Better than dodging bullets,” I said. “My best advice is to go find a young financial person who’s hungry and understands all this complicated investment shit. I was lucky enough to find this little brainiac from MIT. Worth his weight in gold.”
“Speaking of gold, nice watch,” he said, pointing to my wrist.
“Doesn’t tell time any better than a quartz,” I said. “But it looks good on a golf course.”
“You ever miss this?” he asked.
“All the time,” I said. “But not everything. The fieldwork like this, being out and gathering evidence, trying to connect the dots—that’s the stuff that charges your adrenaline. But all the politics and hierarchy and inside-outside shit? Don’t miss it for a second.”
“Is it true?” he said, lowering his voice and leaning into me.
“What?”
“That case against the deputy superintendent last year. Was it you?”
I had taken on a case to protect one of the city’s popular evening news anchors, who was also investigating the suspicious killing of an unarmed Black man. What first had been reported as a case of mistaken identity turned out to be the final ruthless act preceded by a web of lies and a vicious attempt to cover them up.
I smiled. “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear,” I said.
“Word travels,” he said. “That anchorwoman is good, but we all know she needed help to piece that together.”
I shrugged.
“So Burke has you looped in on this case?” he said.
“Unofficially. Just offering an outside perspective. What does it look like for you on the inside?”
“I’m not the lead on this, but they asked me to come out and take a look. Another set of eyes. But from what I’ve been told so far, a lot of it doesn’t add up. There’s something else going on.”
“Like?”
“Feels like a setup to me. I can’t say what exactly is making me feel that, but it’s just strange. One of the richest men in the city goes out like he did, and he’s got loads of meth in his system and a prostitute who came by to get freaky with him. Then someone steals his Bentley the same night he dies, and it ends up on blocks way over here, in a neighborhood like this. Something’s missing.”
“I keep trying to figure out the motivation,” I said. “Who wanted him dead and why?”
“That’s one perspective,” Delacorte said. “Then there’s the possibility he was into kinky sex, took some dirty drugs, and his heart stopped. Whoever was with him panicked and bolted from the apartment. Maybe they took his car to escape.”
“There’s no video of anyone entering or leaving the apartment,” I said.
I didn’t mention the secret door I had found, because I wanted to process it more before talking to Burke about it.
“We got something,” one of the techs called out.
We all walked over to the other side of the car. The tech pulled out a crumpled piece of paper that had been wedged between the seat and the console frame. He opened it and held it up to the sky.
“A gas receipt,” he said. “Five days ago. Twelve ten a.m. Just over fifteen gallons for sixty-three dollars.”
Burke took a look at it, and then it was carefully passed along by the rest of us who had on gloves. When it got to me, I took out my phone and shot a picture of it.
“Let’s go take a ride over there,” Delacorte said to me. “It’s a gas station. They definitely have video.”