Delacorte had called and asked if I wanted to join him for a return visit to Falcon Fuel. I didn’t mind getting an early start to my day since I had a one o’clock tee time at the Flossmoor Golf Club with my father’s friend who worked as a lobbyist for AT&T. The gas station was packed with cars as I entered the lot, and Delacorte sat in his unmarked, waiting for me.
We walked into the store together. It looked worse than the last time we were there. A short man with a prominent belly stood behind the plexiglass shield. His heavy mustache covered most of his mouth, and his hair was so thick and shiny, it looked like a wig.
“We’re looking for a Mr. Agarwal,” Delacorte said.
“Who are you?” the man said in a tone that wasn’t exactly friendly.
“The fuckin’ police,” Delacorte said, flipping out his shield.
“One minute,” the man said. “I’ll be right back.” He ducked through a door adjacent to a wall of cigarettes and condoms, then returned shortly with a slender, bald man who wore wire-framed glasses and an ample smile.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” he said. “I’m Rohan Agarwal. Is this related to the call earlier this week about the security footage?”
“It is,” Delacorte said.
“I can help you,” he said. “Do you want to see it?”
“We’d appreciate that,” Delacorte said.
“I’ll meet you at the door over there,” Agarwal said, pointing toward the corner of the store at the end of a row of coolers.
We walked to the back of the store, and seconds later, Agarwal opened the door.
We followed him down a short, dark hallway and passed what looked like a bedroom on the right, then entered a tiny office. An old metal desk had been positioned in the center of the small room. Several monitors hung on the wall, streaming videos from various vantage points inside and outside of the gas station. Agarwal took a seat behind the desk and started typing on a keyboard.
“What was the day and time?” Agarwal said.
“Seven days ago,” Delacorte said. “Twelve ten a.m.”
Agarwal ran his fingers over the keyboard and clicked the mouse several times. “The system is a little slow,” he apologized. “One more minute.”
I looked up at the six monitors. All of the pumps were covered, as were the two entrances to the parking lot and the entire interior of the store. It would have been practically impossible for the driver to have avoided being captured on camera.
“Right there,” Delacorte said. “Pause it.”
The time stamp read 12:08:15 a.m. The Bentley pulled into the gas station from Vincennes Avenue with its headlights on. The last three digits of the license plate number matched Kantor’s Bentley. It was his car.
A red Camaro was parked at one of the pumps with an older man standing beside it, holding down the nozzle. The Bentley pulled in on the other side.
“Do you have a camera with a better angle?”
“I’m sorry,” Agarwal said. “But not on that side. This is the best we have.”
The tape rolled for the next seven minutes. We could see the door open, and the driver get out and walk to the pump. It was obviously a male driver, but we couldn’t make out much other than that. He finished pumping his gas, then got into the car. A few seconds later, his door opened, and he exited the car. He walked toward the entrance of the store. The cameras caught him clearly. He was young with a slender build, wearing a large, shiny necklace and a wifebeater. A long tattoo ran down the left side of his neck and halfway down his arm.
“Stop it there,” Delacorte said. “Can you move any closer, so we can see his tattoo better?”
Agarwal tapped a couple of keys, and the video zoomed in a little, but not much. “That’s the best I can do,” he said.
It wasn’t enough for us to clearly see the tattoo. It looked like maybe an anchor and chain, but the picture was too blurry to know for sure.
“Not the greatest,” I said. “But it’s something.” I took out my phone and snapped a picture of the screen.
“Let it roll,” Delacorte said.
The video continued to play. It was difficult to make out his face because of his baseball cap.
“Take another camera,” I said. “You have one inside the shop, pointing toward the entrance. Let’s see him come in.”
“Let me find the right one,” Agarwal said. He made some adjustments, and the video changed from the outside camera to one of the interiors. A new video popped up on the screen. He fast-forwarded the tape to the point where the driver was entering the store. He let it play. The driver walked through the door, his face still hidden underneath the flat bill of his cap. He walked to the counter and had an exchange with the cashier.
“Who is that working the register?” Delacorte asked.
“Ganesh,” Agarwal said. “He only works the night shift.”
Ganesh turned and pulled a pack of cigarettes from the shelf behind him. The driver then walked over to one of the coolers and pulled out what looked like a couple of bottles of beer. He returned to the counter. He and Ganesh had another short exchange. The driver made gestures with his hands as if they were having a disagreement, then he turned and walked out of the store. Ganesh watched him.
“Back to the outside camera,” Delacorte said.
Agarwal went to work on the keyboard and brought up one of the exterior cameras. He rolled through the tape until it picked up the driver returning to the car. The driver got into the Bentley, then drove away.
“Can you get Ganesh on the phone?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Agarwal said. “He’s working his day job right now.”
“What’s that?”
“He drives for Uber and Lyft.”
“Call him and see if he picks up,” I said.
Agarwal took out his phone and dialed the number. He said something in a language I didn’t understand, maybe Hindi, then handed the phone to me.
“Ganesh, we are investigating a stolen car,” I said. “We’re looking at the video of last Saturday night. You had a customer who came in during your shift. Thin Black guy wearing a baseball cap and white tank top with a large chain. He had a big tattoo on the side of his neck and arm. He came in just after midnight. It looked like the two of you had a disagreement. He was going to buy cigarettes and beer, then the two of you had words, and he walked out.”
“I remember him,” Ganesh said.
“What happened?”
“He looked really young. I told him I had to see some identification. He said he never been asked that before. I told him it was state law, and if I didn’t see it, I couldn’t sell it to him. I could lose my job if I didn’t follow the rules. He said to me that he was the proper age. He told me to look at his ride. If he wasn’t the proper age, would he be driving that? I looked outside. Very expensive car. I only see a car like that once or twice before. But I tell him, no matter how nice the car, I have to follow the rules. He get upset and leave the store and never come back.”
“Had you ever seen him before?”
“Not that I remember, but I see so many customers, I’m not sure.”
“And he never came back?”
“He drive away and leave for good.”
“Did you get a good look at the tattoo on the left side of his neck?”
“It was big,” Ganesh said. “It had two chains wrapped around each other, like DNA.”
“DNA as in genetics?”
“Yes. Double helix. But I couldn’t see what was at the bottom.”
“Did you see any writing?”
“No words,” he said. “Just letters, like they were base pairs.”
“Base pairs?”
“You know, the base pairs for DNA.”
“Are you some sort of scientist?” I said.
“Yes,” Ganesh said. “I was a doctor back home in India, but too hard to pass the test here. I’m still trying. I knew it was a double helix as soon as I saw it. You can’t miss it.”
“Had you ever seen it before?”
“The double helix? Of course. Lots of times.”
“No, what I mean is, had you ever seen it as a tattoo?”
“Never. First time.”
“Thanks for your help,” I said.
“Did the owner get his car back?” Ganesh asked. “Very nice car.”
“He didn’t,” I said. “He’s dead.”
Delacorte and I had come up with a plan to try to identify the driver. He was going to talk to the gangs squad and see if any of them recognized the tattoo. Neither one of us had worked gangs, and there were so many new crews popping up all the time, we would need help from the cops who did this work every day. While Delacorte checked with his sources, I decided to go check with mine.
Lanny “Ice” Culpepper was the widely feared leader of one of the toughest, most murderous gangs in Chicago, the Gangster Apostles. Rumor had it that he had gotten the nickname Ice because he moved more crystal meth on the street in just a month than anyone else in the city moved in a year. I had also heard he had gotten the nickname as a teenager for his ruthless, cold-hearted manner of killing his enemies. Either way, with his vast, complicated network of street soldiers who had built his drug business into a multimillion-dollar empire, Ice knew what was moving on the street better than anyone.
Ice ruled his lucrative kingdom from a suite of offices located above Mr. Knight’s Laundromat in one of the deadliest zip codes in the city, a neighborhood called K-Town. I didn’t bother calling ahead, because once I pulled up out front, his security team and his phalanx of surveillance cameras would let him know in a matter of seconds that I had arrived. I parked next to a fire hydrant and didn’t bother locking my car. The mayor’s personal parking spot in front of city hall couldn’t be safer.
Two armed men the size of Russian tanks patted me down, then allowed me to pass through the door and up the stairs, where I was met by Dexter Barnes, Ice’s head of security, a man who only tipped the scale close to a hundred pounds because a quarter of it was the weight of his jewelry.
“You don’t have an appointment,” Dexter said, patting me down. “Chairman is busy today.”
“I was in the neighborhood,” I said. “Thought we might have a little tea.”
Dexter smiled an array of gold-capped teeth and shook his head. “Man, you still got that mouth,” he said.
“And both eyes and ears.”
Dexter nodded for me to follow him. I walked down a short hallway, through a large reception area still helmed by the same well-appointed woman I had met on my first visit a couple of years ago, when I worked a case involving Ice’s murdered nephew. She winked at me quickly as I walked by, and I replied in kind.
Ice’s door was open, and he sat reclining behind his enormous hand-carved desk, talking on his cell phone. A large Picasso had been permanently centered on the near wall, surrounded by bookshelves crammed with rare editions of literary masterpieces. He ended his conversation abruptly with “I want a fuckin’ answer before I take my next shit.” He then rested his phone on his meticulous desk and said, “Now, you just think you can come up here anytime you want without making an appointment?”
“I thought maybe we had moved beyond those formalities.”
“Assumptions don’t always become realities.”
“True, but according to Asimov, they are the windows to the world, and if you don’t scrub them every once in a while, the light won’t come in.”
“Well, I got plenty of damn light in here already,” he said. “I don’t have time for your philosophical shit today. I’m busy. Tell me why you’re here.”
I took out my phone and pulled up the photo of the driver’s tattooed arm. I pushed the phone toward Ice. “I’m looking for that tattoo,” I said.
Ice picked up the phone, stared at it for a moment, then said, “I don’t run no damn tattoo parlor.”
As he continued examining the photo, I studied the new Basquiat hanging on the wall behind his desk. It was a colorful depiction of what looked like a human skull in a style that was unmistakably Basquiat. Heads and skulls had been an obsession of the late painter of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent. A Japanese businessman had paid $110 million at auction for one of the skull paintings. I wondered how much Ice had paid for his.
Ice caught me staring at the painting.
“I own five of his pieces,” he said proudly. “I didn’t care for his style much at first, then someone told me he was Black, and a lot of his art was about the underground culture. Our painters will never become commercially successful if we always set our goals to buy the old white masters and their protégés. So I also buy our people. That’s the only way to drive up the market for them.”
Burke had once told me that estimates put Ice sitting on more than a quarter of a billion dollars. No one knew the exact number, and he wasn’t publicly flamboyant about his wealth, but the few who had been to his mansion in a gated cul-de-sac in suburban Burr Ridge said it made the White House feel small.
“Have you seen that tattoo before?” I asked. “Maybe it’s gang-affiliated.”
“I don’t know anything about gangs,” Ice said. “I run an organization.”
“Understood,” I said.
“And for the record, I’ve never seen it before,” he said.
Ice nodded to one of his men posted in the corner of the office. The enormous man trudged his way over, and Ice passed him my phone. He looked at it carefully, nodded his lack of recognition, then handed the phone back to Ice.
“What’s the business with the tattoo?” Ice asked.
“Less the tattoo and more who’s walking around with it,” I said. “The guy stole a Bentley Continental from the North Side.”
“Nice ride. Business so slow, you’re now chasing car thieves?”
“The owner of the stolen car died minutes before the car was taken. I think he was murdered, maybe by this guy with the tattoo.”
“And the name of the car’s owner?”
“Elliott Kantor.”
Ice smiled. “The big kahuna,” he said.
“You knew him?”
“Not personally. But everyone knew who he was.”
“That tattoo isn’t just any midnight special. It’s a double helix.”
“What the hell is a double helix?”
“The shape of our DNA under a microscope.”
“You a damn scientist now?”
“Hardly. But someone who saw it recognized what it was.”
“So it’s a tattoo of DNA?”
“Or meant to look like that.”
Ice picked up my phone and looked at the photo again pensively. “Text the photo to me,” he said, returning my phone. “I’ll ask around and see if anyone knows anything.”
“Between you and me, Kantor really died from a bad dose of Molly that made his heart explode,” I said.
Ice raised his hands, proclaiming innocence. “Not my trade,” he said. “That was probably some Albanian shit.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because that’s the shit they run through the nightclubs.”
“Kantor didn’t go to nightclubs,” I said.
“Maybe he didn’t, but you need to find out about the people he was partying with. Ten to one, the Albanians were supplying.”