I SAT ON THE COUCH as all three television stations signed off for the night. I kept one light on, a yellow legal pad on my lap, but I hadn’t written anything down. I wasn’t sure what there was to write.
Jimmy had gone to sleep after too many chapters of The Hobbit. We’d read it three times already, but he’d talked Marvella into reading it again last night, and he wanted to continue tonight. I didn’t have the heart to argue with him, although I drew the line at singing the songs. It was hard enough to read them aloud, particularly when my attention really wasn’t on it.
Marvella had left with Sinkovich. On the way out, he had turned to me, pointed, and said, “I mean it,” as if I had had doubts about his veracity. I had nodded, thanked him for the surprisingly good casserole, and closed the door.
Then I read to Jimmy, and watched the evening news, wishing, for the first time, that I had more than one television so I could watch more than one channel at a time.
I watched WMAQ, figuring if anyone had found Voss, that channel would have the story.
So far, no news.
That was when I got the legal pad and a pen from my office, and turned on the single light. I had planned to write down all the options I was thinking about, but I couldn’t for two reasons.
The first was simple: I didn’t want a record of anything untoward. The second was related to that: I wasn’t sure what all of my options were.
Still, Sinkovich had made an impression. Twice, I reached for the phone and started to dial Laura before hanging up. Twice, I nearly told her to stop her investigation of that building.
Finally, I had to remind myself that she was the only person who could handle the investigation into the building itself. Sturdy had mob ties. Most people had no idea she was cleaning house.
And, after my discussion with Sinkovich, I wasn’t sure there was enough of a top-down organization that would care about what she was doing. Just because one lieutenant heard that Sturdy was slowly dismissing its mobbed-up members didn’t mean the lieutenant would tell anyone else.
If someone thought it a threat, they would have come after Laura already, and not in the corporate ways that a handful of people had already used against her.
She would have ended up handcuffed to a chair with three gunshots to her head.
The image made me shudder. In December of ’68, we had made plans so that she would survive the takeover, figuring
someone would take her out then if they were going to take her out.
But I had been under the mistaken assumption that the Chicago mob didn’t kill truly well-known people. Sinkovich’s story about Benjamin Lewis changed my mind on that.
I got up and changed the channel as WMAQ signed off. WBBM was still on the air, and I let it talk to me for a while. I started doodling on the legal pad, trying to calm myself. For the second night in a row, I wasn’t sure I would get much sleep.
I hadn’t lied to Sinkovich: I hoped that Laura could buy the Starlite and shut it down. I understood that doing so would move the operation elsewhere. Operations like that didn’t just vanish because they’d lost a home.
But shutting down the Starlite would accomplish at least one of my agendas. It would get the operation away from the school.
It might accomplish a second agenda as well: It might lift the veil of protection for a very short period of time.
Protection was usually tied to location, because cops worked beats, and those beats were neighborhood- and precinct-based. If the operation had to switch neighborhoods, then a whole new group of cops would have to be put on retainer. The old ones wouldn’t protect and the new ones wouldn’t have been enlisted yet.
Who could blame an overzealous cop trying to restore his name if he arrested someone like Turner on prostitution and human-trafficking charges? Once Turner got into the system,
once the newspapers were on it, once stations like WMAQ had covered the story, then the city would have to make some kind of effort to corral this guy.
Plus, if I could get this to happen fast, then the national news would still be here, and this would be one of those stories that might be a feature to accompany the Chicago Seven trial and Black Panther trial stories. Corrupt Chicago and its seedy underbelly. National reporters liked stories like that, particularly when they were handed those stories on a silver platter.
What I found myself doing, though, was doodling the name Jonathan had given me. Donna Loring. Jonathan had said that Donna Loring was the sister of one of Jeff Fort’s right-hand men.
Fort had been featured on tonight’s newscast. He’d been in jail on an aggravated battery charge, and the Blackstone Rangers—or the Black P. Stone Nation, as they were calling themselves now, apparently—had raised $8,000 in less than twenty-four hours to get Fort released. Fort’s $75,000 bond had been a joke.
At least that was what the slime Hanrahan had said, and for once, I agreed with him. Edward V. Hanrahan was the murderer in the form of the state’s attorney who had ordered the attack on the sleeping Black Panthers a month ago. On tonight’s newscast, he had stated that the speed with which the Blackstone Rangers had put up bail—so fast that Fort’s attorney had gone to court to ask for more time only to find out that Fort had already been released—showed the power of the street gangs.
I’d seen that power several times already. I’d gone up against it more than once. I’d harnessed it a few times, but it had been like holding onto a tornado.
Donna Loring.
I kept underlining her name, and thinking.
I had investigating to do.