CHAPTER 23

The fifth floor of City Hall looked a lot like the fourth and even more like the sixth. The difference lingered in the shadows. There you could catch a glimpse of ambition, the faintest whiff of avarice, and the footsteps of those who curried favor. Sometimes lost, sometimes won, but always curried. Because that’s what the Fifth Floor was all about. A court of intrigue, inside a building of stone and a city of red blood and muscle. At its center sat the only door along the entire hallway that mattered. A plain and simple door. Brown and wooden. The exact same door closed off the Office of the Bureau of Planning on the fourth floor and the Assistant Commissioner of Water on the sixth. Here on the fifth floor there was no such ornate title. Just simple letters, gold leaf, five in all, hammered into the wood with tenpenny nails. Five letters that spelled mayor. Anyone who needed any more of an introduction to this door need not bother stepping through its crooked portal.

I got off the elevator and turned left, away from the door and down the hall. There, if you knew how to find it, was an archway of sorts, leading into a cubbyhole that was more hole than cubby. A green metal desk was pushed up against a beige wall. The desk’s occupant had his back to me and was leaning over a filing cabinet.

“Hey, Willie,” I said.

The mayor’s unofficial assistant straightened up and spoke without turning. “It’s not who I think it is.”

“Turn around,” I said.

“Be happy to. Once I hear your boots backing down the hallway.”

I took the only seat available, a folding job with one leg that was missing its rubber stopper, and tilted back.

“Nice chair, Willie. Come on. Turn around. You know I’m not going anywhere. Or maybe you’d rather I pay Himself a visit.”

Willie Dawson turned and looked. Not in a way that made me feel fuzzy and infused with civic warmth.

“Kelly.”

“Willie.”

I hadn’t seen Willie in more than a while. Time had not been unkind. Mostly because it didn’t need to be. Willie Dawson was somewhere between forty and dead. His skin was black to the point of shiny and stretched tight over his skull. He was mostly bald and specialized in dandruff, a blizzard of white flakes drifting down onto his shoulders, desk, and environs. Environs now including me.

On most days the layer of scurf only enhanced Willie’s wardrobe. Today was no exception. His suit was light brown, of the leisure variety, and worn through in all the proper places. His shirt was yellow, although I doubt its hue was of natural origin. His tie smacked of maroon, with little yellow figurines on it. I squinted and the figurines morphed into Marilyn Monroe. For the first and probably last time during my visit, Willie smiled.

“Sure it’s Marilyn. Like it, huh? Actually I can plug it in and she takes her clothes off. But, you know.”

Willie looked around. I nodded. Willie actually wasn’t a bad guy. In fact, he was a good guy. Good as in connected. In fact, if you dressed like Willie did, there was more than bad taste behind it. It was Willie’s way of telling all the Giorgio Armanis to park their asses and pay attention. Simply put, if Willie could dress like that and still carry water to the mayor…well, Willie could carry water to the mayor.

“What’s the problem, Willie?”

Dawson gave his head a shake and turned back to his filing. “You know what’s the matter. It’s been what—two, three years and he can’t even stand the mention of your name.”

“When has my name been mentioned?”

“Never.”

Willie turned around and leaned across his desk. The smell hadn’t gotten any better. Cheap cigars, bad teeth, and something like Vitalis. If they still made Vitalis. If not, Willie probably had some stashed away.

“And it’s not going to get mentioned,” he said. “Not by me, anyway.”

“Got an election coming up.”

“Thanks for the news flash. Mayor got eighty-six percent of the vote last time out.”

“Mitchell Kincaid wasn’t the other name on the ballot.”

Willie chuckled and shuffled some papers. “Mitchell Kincaid. Fuck Mitchell Kincaid. He’s a nobody.”

Willie Dawson was black. Mitchell Kincaid was black. Kincaid, however, didn’t sign Willie Dawson’s checks. The mayor did.

“Is that what you came up here for? Talk to me about Mitchell-fucking-Kincaid?”

“No, Willie, this isn’t about Kincaid. Just a feeling I got.”

Willie had stacked and restacked all the paperwork he could find. Now he sat down, propped a pair of green Converse high-tops on his desk, and stared out a window he didn’t have.

“A feeling, huh?”

“Yeah, a feeling.”

The first line of sweat decorated Willie’s upper lip. He wiped it away, pulled his feet to the floor, and angled closer.

“Your last feeling, half the sheriff’s office went upstate.”

“Six guys, Willie. There were a lot more should have been with them.”

“Six was enough, Kelly. Six senior guys. Joe Dyson, two months from retirement. You know what he’s doing now? Let me tell you.”

Willie’s chair creaked and his voice dropped to a hiss. “He’s pissing through a tube and crapping into a bag. Know why? He had a stroke. Second month in the joint. A stroke. Paralyzed. No bodily functions. Doing his five years in a fucking prison hospital. Not that it matters.”

I’d heard about Dyson. Even felt bad about it. But not bad enough. The back of my neck began to burn a bit. I pulled a pen and a pad of paper from across Willie’s desk and began to write.

“This is the address of Kim Bishop. She lived over on the West Side. Henry Horner Homes. Joe Dyson sat her husband, Ray, on a radiator. Inside a prosecutor’s office. Ray confessed to three separate murders. Hell, he would have confessed to killing Jesus Christ himself. See, Willie, his flesh was cooking. And it was going to cook until he talked.”

I pushed the pad back across the desk.

“I was there when they gave Ray the needle. So was Kim. The needle for three murders Ray had nothing to do with. Thanks to Joe Dyson, a cop who just wanted to get ahead. You go tell Joe’s story to Kim. Maybe you two can go to church together.”

Willie ripped out the page and threw it into a wastebasket under his desk. Then he turned his back on me again. The burn subsided, the pulse slowed. I had overplayed my hand.

“Listen, Willie, I don’t expect any warm welcome up here. I’m just telling you, there’s something going on you want to know about. You didn’t listen last time. I’m telling you now.”

Ever so slowly, the chair turned. Willie was nothing if not shrewd. He didn’t have to like me to be that.

“Could be bad, Willie. Worse than Dyson. Could be flat-out murder.”

“Coming out of the Fifth Floor? Murder? What, the mayor is whacking people now?”

“Willie, listen.”

“No, Kelly. You listen. What is it with you? Every time you come around, you got a hard-on for the mayor. What did he ever do to you? You think you lost your badge ’cause of him? Wrong. You brought that on yourself. He didn’t necessarily want you out. That was the county’s call.”

“He didn’t stop it.”

“Not the fucking point,” Willie hissed. “So you do have a hard-on for the mayor. You know what, get the hell out of here. You could be wearing a wire right now, for all I know. Murder. Get the fuck out before I call downstairs.”

Willie stood up. I had worn out my welcome, which wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

“I need to see Johnny Woods,” I said.

“So go see him. He’s not my fucking problem.”

“Where’s his office?”

Dawson gestured down the hall.

“Thanks, Willie. I’ll see you around.”

I left Dawson in his cubbyhole, head again deep in his filing cabinet. Willie’s mind, however, wasn’t on his paperwork. He was thinking about murder. An election. And the mayor. Pretty soon Willie would start talking. Probably about all three. Sometimes, that was all it took to get things going.