CAKE, CONVERSATION, and actual laughter. Sinkovich turned what I thought would be a difficult evening into something almost pleasant. If someone had ever asked me if Sinkovich could be a ray of sunshine on a difficult day, I would have laughed in disbelief.
But he had, and Jimmy seemed to forget just how rough the day had been. Marvella promised to help Jimmy with the dishes so they could get it done in time for Medical Center.
Normally, I would have mentioned homework. On this night, I didn’t have the heart.
Sinkovich and I went into my office and closed the door. That room always felt particularly claustrophobic with two people in it, but it was the only truly private room in the apartment.
I sat down behind my desk. Sinkovich sat down across from me. I turned on the desk lamp, and bent it away from us. The overhead light was thin, and the desk lamp helped just a little if I pointed it in the right direction.
“So,” I said, “you investigated the Starlite and there’s something about it you can’t tell me on the phone.”
He laughed. “Ah, hell, Grimshaw. You don’t investigate dumps like that. And besides, maybe I just wanted to see your pretty face and find out what the kid got into.”
“Marvella told you about it,” I said.
“She did. That kid, he’s great, but he’s gonna get hurt. You gotta do something about him. He’s gotta learn fists mean nothing. Brains’re the important thing.”
“I know. I’m not happy about any of this.” I didn’t need a lecture from Sinkovich about Jimmy. “But let’s start with the Starlite.”
Sinkovich leaned back in the chair as if it was actually comfortable, and folded his hands over his stomach, hiding some of that ugly sweater. “I done a drive-by on the way back to the precinct. Lucky for you, court got out about three, so I had some time, which I ain’t had a lot of lately, because of that goddamn circus.”
I let him complain. I wasn’t going to ask about it, because we’d have another half-hour digression.
“You ain’t kidding about that dump being close. Jesus, Grimshaw, what’re you thinking, letting your kid go to that school? You know that’s Stones territory too, right?”
“Yes,” I said tightly. “Jimmy’s not the only child in that school. There are hundreds.”
Sinkovich leaned his head on the back of the chair and sighed. “I know. Fucking city. I shouldn’t blame you for that school. I know you’re doing what you can. One reason I ain’t fighting Charlene so hard on the custody is she took my kid to Minnesota and not Minneapolis, neither. To one of them
smaller towns, where they don’t got gangs and drugs and hookers right next to the school. My kid’ll get a public school education, and it’ll be a good one.”
I picked up a pen and ran it between my fingers. I hadn’t realized that Sinkovich had thought through the custody battle with his son. I had simply assumed that he had decided not to fight, like so many men did. I hadn’t realized he wanted his child out of this part of Chicago.
It made complete sense, considering everything Sinkovich saw every day.
He said, “First thing I done when I got back to the precinct today was check the zoning for that block. It is a school zone, which means no bars close by and shit like that. But I don’t know what you know about zoning in the Great City of Chicago, but lemme tell you that it’s designed not to enforce the laws, but to enforce the Machine’s agenda. If they don’t like the Starlite, they’ll use crap like zoning laws to shut it down.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“You think they would shut down the Starlite?” I asked, trying not to sound hopeful.
He held up his right index finger, warning me to be quiet for a moment.
“I think if that sleaze-bag hotel was next to that fancy-pants Catholic school the mayor sends his kids to, then yeah, I think the city’d shut it down in a heartbeat. Have you looked at that damn Catholic school? It’s on the edge of the Black Belt, and the neighborhood is scrubbed fucking clean.”
“I hadn’t looked,” I said.
“Yeah, well, Catholic schools are private and the Archdiocese of Chicago keeps them up. They’re all bragging about the education level and shit.” Sinkovich sat up and peered at me sheepishly. “Me and my lawyer looked at them before we started on this custody thing. It’d cost an arm and a ball to send my kid to private school. I’d love to send the kid there, but even if I didn’t eat and lived on the goddamn street, I couldn’t afford that place.”
He was serious. He had looked at every single way he could afford to send his son to a Catholic school.
“I can’t afford it either,” I said.
“Yeah, but you got Laura and she loves Jim. You might wanna—”
“Tell me about the Starlite.” I’d been having this conversation all day, and I didn’t want to continue it with Sinkovich.
He nodded, realizing I was shutting him down. He rubbed a hand over his mouth, thought, remembered where he was (although I had no idea how, since his conversation had been all over the map), and then he said, “The Starlite’s a longtime operation, been handed from man to man since Prohibition. It was a Black Belt speakeasy and specialized in policy back in the day.”
When I was growing up, policy had been the most popular form of gambling in the black community. It was a three-number lottery system, and the policy sheets or cards or
whatever the local system used, were sold for pennies, nickels and dimes, all of which added up to a small fortune.
There were policy operations in Chicago still, but they had decreased in importance, especially since some lottery games had gone mainstream. The Chicago Defender was running what I considered a policy type giveaway, printing the winning numbers in every issue. Jimmy wanted to play because he was convinced he’d win the $500 prize.
So far, I hadn’t let him. I didn’t want him to learn how to gamble.
“So, there are policy games at the Starlite?” I asked.
“Not now,” Sinkovich said. “Policy cleared out about the time Lewis got murdered.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Ah, jeez,” Sinkovich said. “Sometimes it seems like you know more shit about this town than I do, and then I realize you don’t know nothing. Benjamin Lewis, alderman, 24th Ward—that’s Lawndale, West Side, you know?”
“I know.” I had been learning about local politics.
“February, 1963. He’s found in his office, handcuffed to the chair and shot through the head three times. Everybody knows it was the Outfit, ain’t nobody gonna do nothing about it.”
“The Outfit?” I asked.
Sinkovich rolled his eyes. He had more in common with Jimmy than I realized. “You know, the Mob, the Mafia, the Syndicate, you know, like that stupid Puzo book, the whatsis…”
“The Godfather,” I said. It was a bestseller that held no interest for me. “I didn’t know the Chicago mob was called the Outfit.”
All of this time with Laura, knowing her father was connected to the Chicago mob, and I had never heard the phrase “the Outfit.” It actually made me wonder how many references to the organization that I had missed because I didn’t know the slang.
“That’s Chicago’s name for it, because you know us, we always gotta have different names for the same old shit. Anyway, Lewis apparently got too big for his britches and decided after his election he’d take out the white precinct captains and install his guys—”
“Wouldn’t that anger Mayor Daley?” I asked. “He was mayor then, right?”
“Oh, yeah, it did piss him off, and we don’t none of us talk about the mayor and the Outfit, okay?”
“Not even in the privacy of my own apartment?” I asked.
“No,” Sinkovich said with great force. “You want your kid repeating shit we say about that fat slug? You don’t say nothing. I don’t say nothing. It’s dangerous.”
I was a bit surprised at his vehemence. He was afraid of Daley. Or Daley’s Machine. Or both.
“But you’re saying the Outfit killed Lewis.”
“It was a hit, simple as that. Ain’t many groups in this town what do a hit. In addition taking out the precinct captains, this brilliant jiga—sorry, Jesus, sorry.” He blushed.
He would never have caught himself in the past, nor would he have blushed. Still, the fact that he probably used such words when I wasn’t around irritated me.
“You say you’re sorry, and yet that filth still comes out of your mouth,” I snapped.
“I am sorry, but you know that name is what we used to call that clown. It just snuck out from habit. I don’t think like that no more. In fact, I’m talking to you like you’s one of the guys. Because I don’t think of you as, you know—”
“Black,” I said.
“Different from me,” he said at the same time. “Hand to God.”
Even though I shook my head, I believed him. We’d fought about his language before. We would probably fight about it again.
“So, this Lewis,” I said, prompting Sinkovich.
“Well,” he said, looking relieved that we had moved on, “in addition to taking out them captains, he decides he’s gonna rewrite the splits on policy and pocket most of the profits himself. That’s why he got killed, at least that’s what the rumors say, and it’s a pretty good reason when you think about it. What nobody knows is who leaked the information on his changes. I don’t think Daley had something to do with it because he was up for election against Adamowski, who wasn’t no saint neither. Although, everybody knows nothing happens in Daley’s city, especially to one of his pols, without him knowing about it.”
I was trying to follow Sinkovich’s point, and wrap it back to something that mattered to me.
“Whoever was managing the Starlite, then, got out of policy,” I said.
“Well, not quite,” Sinkovich said. “Back in the day, the Starlite was known for escorts, you know, the upscale girls, because it was an upscale place, and if your taste went to— forgive me—chocolate,” and then he did a little bow, deciding, apparently, that he had said something offensive when it was probably the least offensive thing he’d said, “then you’d go down to the Starlite. Clientele was mostly what do you call it now? Black, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“But lotsa big time white guys showed up too, because the girls were choice. After the war, the neighborhood went all to hell, and the girls went from high rent to low rent, and policy was where the money went.”
“You know a lot about this for one hour’s research,” I said.
“Ya think?” He opened his hands in a don’t-blame-me gesture. “I’ll tell you why in a minute. But lemme get the history lesson out first.”
I settled in my chair. “All right.”
“So, Lewis dies. It’s all over the news. The mayoral candidates are squealing about it, the press is eating it for lunch, everyone’s talking about the corrupt mayor, and no one’s looking at the policy wheels, which go right on spinning and the cash goes right into the pocket of the Outfit, like it done since the war.”
“And the Starlite?” I asked.
“Well, here’s where it gets interesting, least I think so. The guy what owned the Starlite, Arnold Garon, he ends up in a ditch, three shots to the head, about the same time as Lewis. Dead as the proverbial doorknob. And he ain’t the only one. Lots of dead club owners around the Black Belt and the West Side, prob’ly the guys what paid Lewis for policy and looked the other way when he pocketed the cash. The Outfit can be pretty unforgiving if you don’t tell them someone’s screwing with them.”
I felt cold. “You’re saying that the Outfit, the mob, owns the Starlite.”
“They don’t own nothing, Grimshaw. That’s the beauty of the whole thing. They let some guy run his own business, and then that guy pays protection or a percentage or gets his supplies from the Outfit, and that’s what we call mobbed up. Sometimes they bring up a guy who’s low rent, ya know? Someone trying to make his bones with the guys upstairs and if he done a good job, then he gets promoted.”
Like Laura’s father. He owned Sturdy Investments outright, but he had gotten his start in Chicago as a mob enforcer—at least, that was what we believed and what the evidence implied. Over the years, he became even more respectable. However, it was his goal to make Laura as respectable as possible. He kept her in the dark about all aspects of his life. She didn’t find out his connection to the mob until her mother died, years later.
I was still trying to wrap my mind around the things that Sinkovich had told me. Because I really hadn’t paid a lot of
attention to the Chicago mob, even with its affiliation with Sturdy.
All we had been trying to do was get the mob out of Sturdy. We hadn’t really—or maybe I hadn’t really—focused on what the mob was.
“I’m confused,” I said. “The mob would work with a black businessman in the Black Belt? I thought the mob was white only.”
“In other cities, yeah, but imagine some white guy coming deep in the Black Belt and trying to get stuff done. He might own a building, but he couldn’t run policy or handle the girls in a way that didn’t arouse suspicion.”
“So the mob has black members,” I said.
“In Chicago, yeah, sure,” Sinkovich said. “They ain’t lieutenants, most of them, but if they got juice, they got connections.”
I was still frowning. I hadn’t realized that. It challenged a lot of my assumptions about life on the South Side.
Sinkovich could see that I was still grappling with this.
“Okay,” he said. “Think it through. Chicago had a syndicate long before the Outfit, and before that, we got gangsters up the wazoo. Y’know, the Depression? Capone? There was a big Irish contingent in the Chicago Syndicate. We got Yids, we got Micks, we got Wops—”
“Now you’re just doing that to piss me off, aren’t you?” I snapped.
He grinned, then shrugged. “Hey, I’m your basic Polack.
Whaddo I know?”
I shook my head. “Stop now, all right?”
“All right,” he said. “But what I’m telling you is this: We’re clannish and bigoted in this city, but we’ll go to bed with whoever we need to go to bed with to make money. The Outfit is mostly I-tals and Jews, but they ain’t gonna get a lot done in parts of this city with that background. So there’re Irish in the mob, which is where you get your connection to the mayor. And then, here in the Black Belt, they ain’t got no qualms about working with the right blacks. Rumor says they do it through Dawson.”
“William Dawson?” I asked. “The United States Congressman?”
“One and the same,” Sinkovich said. “He used to approve whatever went on down here, but after the Lewis shooting, folks was saying that Daley defanged Dawson, put some power white guys over him, and let him think he was still in charge. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds true, and in this city, what sounds true usually is.”
“Okay,” I said as I tried to clear my head of all the racist slurs mixed in with the strange history lesson. “You’re telling me that the Outfit has an interest in the Starlite.”
“I know Eddie Turner, owner of the Starlite, used to run numbers for the Outfit. I know he had a way with systems, and I suspect he got rewarded big time when Garon bit it. Turner ain’t small potatoes. He shows up at all kindsa functions all over the city.”
“And he’s black?” I thought I would have known about black men who received city-wide attention.
“E-yup. He don’t get his name in the papers much, but you see him, lurking around the edges of events, kinda like. Camera-shy. Like you.”
It surprised me that Sinkovich had noticed that. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, since he was a cop, and a better one than I usually gave him credit for.
“Camera shy because of his mob connections?” I asked.
“You got mob connections?” Sinkovich asked, and then answered himself. “’Course you don’t. Because one don’t follow the other. I think there’s some other reason this guy’s not letting his mug get into the papers. But I ain’t been curious enough to investigate.”
There could be a million reasons for Turner’s unwillingness to be photographed, although the main one might be exactly the same as mine: His name didn’t match the name others knew him under.
“And this Eddie Turner,” I said, “he owns the Starlite. He doesn’t just run the operation.”
“Oh, he runs the operation,” Sinkovich said. “Not that you’d find that out from any newspaper or legal document. On paper, the Starlite hotel and its restaurant are the only businesses he owns.”
“On paper,” I repeated. “Meaning those are his only legitimate businesses. What else does he do?”
“Your kid stumbled into it, my friend,” Sinkovich said. “It ain’t just about the by-the-hour girls. It’s about selling them
off like so much meat.”
The casserole rolled over in my stomach. I stood, unable to sit with that image, especially since my brain immediately applied it to Lacey. I walked over to the window and stood in front of it, but didn’t see anything except my own reflection, a big grim man who looked vaguely defeated.
“You knew about this,” I said after a moment.
Sinkovich’s reflection raised its hands like I had pulled a gun. “I just found out today, Grimshaw, because you asked.”
“That’s a lot to find out in one hour,” I said.
“That’s the second time you said that. You implying something?”
“This morning, you said you didn’t know anything about the Starlite,” I said.
“And I didn’t.” Sinkovich moved the chair with a scrape so that he faced my back. “I’m in deep shit because I was looking into this.”
His expression, reflected in the glass, looked frightened. He wasn’t putting on a show for me because he didn’t know I could see him.
“Someone told you all of this?” I asked.
His expression had changed as I turned around. He hadn’t wanted me to see how scared he was.
“Well, some of this I did know,” he said. “You know, Lewis, the death of his policy guys, shit like that. It was big news in my circles, not that it all hit the papers.”
“But you didn’t know about the Starlite,” I said.
He shook his head.
I leaned against the big wooden filing cabinet. “They’re paying protection.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“So they’re in bed with the cops and the Outfit.”
“No,” he said, and sighed. “The cops don’t care about some lowlife in some hotel in the Black Belt. No offense, Grimshaw.”
“None taken,” I said. “Although he would pay protection right? Some cop in the area is on the take.”
“Not just some,” Sinkovich said. “More than I like to think about. They figured I wanted in. I had to do some pretty dancing to get my so-called colleagues outta my face.”
I hadn’t expected him to get into trouble with one simple question. “Clarify something for me,” I said. “If a bunch of cops get protection money from an operation like that, then either the powers that be are looking the other way or taking part of that cash, right?”
“There’s been a lotta lookin’ the other way,” Sinkovich said. “The law says you can’t practice prostitution within one thousand yards of a school. If you do and get caught, it raises the charge one felony grade.”
I frowned. “And they let the Starlite stay in business? How much would that cost on weekly basis?”
Sinkovich sighed. “I ain’t with internal affairs. I don’t know that shit. I never took money from no businesses. I thought you knew that.”
“I do know that,” I said. He was getting testy. I didn’t mean to insult him. He had done me a favor, apparently at a great personal cost. “You wouldn’t be a continual guest in my home if you were that kind of man.”
“If I were that kinda man,” he muttered, “my kid would be going to De La Salle for fucking free.”
He was right; some people were uncorruptible, even when it benefitted them. Maybe that was what I liked about Sinkovich. He was raised to be a bigoted hard-ass, and he had gotten disturbed by the things that attitude had brought him. He didn’t like how it made him feel, and with just a little support from a man he barely knew, he changed enough to destroy much of his life.
“So,” I said, “I’m not asking you this because I think you’re involved. I’m asking you because you’re the only person I can ask who might actually have a clue. An accurate clue. Do the powers that be just look the other way or do they make money too?”
“Depends on what you call the powers that be. That fat slug of a mayor, they’ve been trying to bring him down on corruption charges for years. He ain’t interested in money. He don’t stockpile it. He wants the freakin’ city to bow down to him and kiss his tiny little feet.”
I smiled at the image. “I didn’t really mean the mayor. I meant within the police department. If cops are on the take, then how high does it go?”
Sinkovich shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. I can tell you this much, though. With businesses like the Starlite, the orders we get come from one of two places.”
“The Outfit or the Machine,” I said. “Yep,” he said. “One or the other or both.” “In this case, you think what?” I asked.
He bit his thumbnail like a little boy. He thought for a long moment before answering me.
“Grimshaw,” he said, “I got an order to stop looking after an hour. One fucking hour. And everyone’s nervous. Okay? I stopped asking questions. I got a little scared so I bought me some comfort food and decided to share. Decided that the mayor and the department and that stupid Judge Hoffman wasn’t going to ruin my day. I was gonna see you and your super-duper kid and that pretty neighbor of yours, and I was gonna enjoy my night. You should too.”
Loops upon loops. Sinkovich said one thing and often meant another. Or everything. He wanted me to stop asking questions, even though he knew I wouldn’t.
What I did know was that I had to stop asking them of him.
At least for now.
When I didn’t respond, he tapped his forefinger on my desk. “I mean it. You lay off this one. The little girl’s safe. Your kid’s a hero. You’re done now.”
I nodded. “You’d think I would be.”
“Jesus,” he said. “Let it go.”
“I can’t,” I said. “That hotel is right next to the school.
What am I supposed to do?”
“Move your kids,” he said. “Jim, them cousins of his, everybody.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Hell, I don’t know,” Sinkovich said. “Borrow money from your rich girlfriend. It’s worth saving your kid’s life, right?”
I bowed my head. There were days—months, years really —where it seemed like nothing would ever go right. Ever since Martin died, it felt that way. Ever since I fled Memphis while the entire damn country burned.
Thing was, the flames hadn’t made the country any better. It wasn’t worse either. It was just the same, mired in the same old shit, and no matter what happened, we couldn’t seem to escape it.
“Eddie Turner and his operation recruits girls out of that school,” I said softly. “Those girls not even in high school yet.”
“And you are not the savior of the entire world, Grimshaw,” Sinkovich said in a tone I’d never heard him use before. “First thing you learn as a cop is that you can’t clean up all the filth. You just gotta rejoice in the small victories.”
“What victory do we have here?” I asked him. “Lacey’s in the hospital, the entire family’s traumatized, and in the Starlite, there’s some joker who is making a boatload of money off girls just like her.”
“I told you. Your kid’s a hero. The girl’s safe. Those are victories,” Sinkovich said.
I shook my head.
“Jesus, Grimshaw. Think. When I solve some murder, I don’t bring back the dead. I put some scumbag away, get him off the street, and maybe save some other person he’d’ve
touched. Does it stop murder? Hell, no. It don’t even stop murder on that block maybe even for that day. But it’s a small victory.”
“Lacey knew one of the other girls,” I said. “I’ll wager that the Grimshaw children know a lot of the girls who’ve disappeared into this ‘operation’ as you call it.”
“And there’s fucking hookers in the Bible,” Sinkovich said. “Each one—each hooker from then to now—has some sob story about how she got there.”
“So, if we hadn’t rescued Lacey, she would have had a ‘sob story’?”
Sinkovich knew he had misspoke. But he wasn’t backing down, and he usually backed down when I pushed him.
He tapped his finger on the desk again. “You don’t mess with the Outfit. You don’t mess with the Machine. They got protection, Grimshaw. Good enough protection that I got warned away in less than an hour. There ain’t no cavalry here, and if you go after this Turner guy, then you’ll end up in a ditch somewhere.”
He ran a hand through his thinning hair. He sighed, and gave me a set look. I realized that the fear I had seen reflected in the window was behind his eyes now.
Sinkovich was terrified.
“I thought you was smart enough to know how to pick a fight,” he said. “You can’t win here. You’ll leave your kid without a dad, and you’ll make sure that the attention comes down on the whole family. You can’t do that. You can’t.”
I thought about the Panther house, shot up and still filled with dried blood. I thought about how I had taken Lacey there, and how she thought I was exaggerating about the way the world worked, how she thought such things didn’t apply to her.
And they shouldn’t have.
Then I thought about her blood-covered go-go boots, about Keith’s determination to call the police, about Franklin’s anger, and Althea’s heartbreak.
And Jimmy, who knew it was all going to happen because he had grown up with it. I believed I had rescued him from a life like that, and maybe I still could if I did the right thing by him.
But he was one kid, among hundreds of kids, thousands of kids, all of them at risk.
I couldn’t go to the city government. Parents had been fighting the city all along, trying to get better schools, trying to improve education and security and get rid of the gangs and the drugs. It never seemed to end.
No progress got made, and the fights continued, year in and year out.
“There’s gotta be something we can do,” I said, more to myself than to Sinkovich.
But he heard me. “Yeah, there is something we can do. We can walk away.”
I hated that. I had fled here because I had to save Jimmy. I’d been running for years. And it didn’t matter. The worst things still caught up to me.
To us.
“You walk away,” I said. “I still have a few things to try first.”
Sinkovich rocked back in his chair and ran his hand over his face. “Son of bitch, Grimshaw. You don’t get this. If something happens to you, I can’t take care of your kid. I can’t even take care of my own. And what’ll happen to the other kids, the ones you drive to school every goddamn day? What happened to that poor little girl, it’s just the tip of a very nasty iceberg. Walk away, Grimshaw. Please.”
He wasn’t going to let go, and he wasn’t going to be able to help me.
“I will walk away,” I said. “I promise. After I try two things, I’ll walk.”
“That might be two too many,” Sinkovich said.
“Yeah,” I said. “But right now, I tried enough.”