When Georgia was still a cop, her boyfriend, Matt, a detective on the force, had come home with one of the strangest stories she’d ever heard. He and his partner, Mike Green, now happily retired and fishing in Wisconsin, were running down a burglary ring at Northbrook Court, an upscale mall on the North Shore. The targets included jewelry and high-end apparel stores as well as a wildly successful electronics store. They were sure it was an inside job—apparently the thieves had keys to the stores—but they didn’t have enough evidence. They’d been brainstorming how to proceed when Green had an idea.
A few hours later Matt found himself with Green in front of a modest ranch house tucked away on a nondescript residential Northbrook street.
“Why are we here?” Matt had asked.
“You’ll see,” Green replied.
Green rang the doorbell. The woman who opened the door was middle-aged and plump and wore enough jewelry on her wrists, fingers, and ears that she jangled when she moved. Her eyes narrowed when she saw them. Matt had the feeling she knew they were police.
“You have appointment?” she said in a thick Slavic accent.
Mike Green nodded. “Tell him it’s Mikhail.”
The woman turned toward a door on one side of the hall and opened it. Matt could see a flight of stairs. He heard her jangle as she took the steps down.
“What’s going on?” Matt said quietly.
Green put his finger to his lips.
The woman returned, beckoned them inside, and closed the front door. Then she threw an imperious wave toward the open door. “You go down.”
They did. She closed that door too. Matt, halfway down the steps, promptly let his hand stray toward his holster, but Mike shook his head. “You’re not gonna need it.”
Georgia interrupted Matt at that point. “What the hell was going on? Where were you?”
“We had entered the throne room of one of the most powerful Mafiya leaders in Chicago.”
“The what?”
“The throne room,” Matt said. “You remember in the Godfather, how on the day of his daughter’s wedding, Marlon Brando received people who wanted favors in his office?”
Georgia nodded. “Right. He wasn’t supposed to say no because it was his daughter’s wedding. I always thought that was just Hollywood bullshit.”
“Not really,” Matt said. “This guy saw people in his basement. They called it the throne room. And it kind of looked like one. He sat at one end in a La-Z-Boy recliner, and there were chairs and things set up theater-style in front of him, like he was the pope granting an audience. That’s where he did business.”
“And you were there because…”
“We needed a favor.”
“Huh?”
“We told him we knew he wasn’t behind the burglaries, and—”
“Wait a minute. How did you know that?”
Matt grinned. “We didn’t. But Mike played to his ego.”
Georgia raised her eyebrows.
“He said he was sure the guy wouldn’t have been involved in such an amateur job. That the people who ripped off the stores didn’t even have the brains to fence the stuff in Milwaukee or Minneapolis. That we’d already found a lot of the goods in Chicago. And that it was just a matter of time before we got to the source.”
“Was any of that true?”
“Of course not.”
“But he believed you?”
“Not a word,” Matt went on.
Georgia scowled. “I don’t get it.”
“He knew what we were saying and why we were there. It was a kind of code.”
“In what way?”
“He knew we were getting heat from the village and the mall developers and the chain stores inside the mall. We needed an arrest,” Matt said.
“You told him that?”
“We didn’t have to. He reads the papers. Or someone read them to him. He knew.”
“So what happened?”
“He gave up the guys who did the job.”
“So it was him who did the job?”
“Probably.”
“And you let him skate?”
“He was clearly in charge. The boss. Maybe the boss of bosses. The burglaries were penny ante stuff. He knew we needed him to scratch our back, and we all knew we’d have to scratch his somewhere down the road.”
Georgia felt a chill. She knew there was a thin line between lawmakers and lawbreakers, but she’d never thought that applied to the people she worked with every day.
“But…,” she’d stammered, searching for something to say, “I thought the Russians weren’t that well organized, you know, not like the Outfit.”
“They’ve had twenty years to learn,” Matt said. “Anyway, the guy told us he’d done his good deed for the decade…and not to come back.”
“Did you?”
“Nope. And of course, his lead was good. We cracked the case.”
Now Georgia ran her hand up and down her arm. She got up from her desk and went to the window. Another frigid night, the moonless sky threatening to close in and swallow everything on the ground.
After telling her the story, Matt had sworn her to secrecy, and she’d respected that. She hadn’t thought about it at all.
Until this morning.