A Matter of Honor

Chapter Nineteen

Even though he had not gone to bed, Scotty Weir went through the motions of waking up to a new day. The logs in the study fireplace had long since burned down to a white ash and he knew by the chill in the room that there would be a frost on the fields, some ice on the backroads.

He made coffee in the kitchen, careful not to wake Grimes, then showered in his upstairs bathroom, put on his jogging clothes and spiked running shoes, and went back to the study.

The general opened the gun cabinet and took out a Winchester and a .410 Purdy that had been given to him by a British captain he’d served with during the early years of the German occupation. After his run he planned to call Laura Devers to ask if she’d join him for a few hours of pheasant shooting on the grounds. Maybe they wouldn’t shoot at all, much as he loved to kick up a few pheasant from the bramble bushes, but a walk through the fields might soothe his restlessness. He could circle back to the house around lunchtime to check Grimes on whether Stigmuller had called in.

Scotty Weir hooked a flashlight to his waistband and poured himself a half mug of coffee, letting himself out the back door to walk along the graveled driveway toward the entrance gate. He paused there, sipped his coffee and listened to the silence of the predawn day.

From the direction of the house he thought he heard a phone ring and stopped to listen, but he heard nothing.

Scotty Weir hung his empty coffee mug on the branch of a wineberry bush and set off jogging down the road, the flashlight throwing bouncing circles of light to guide his footsteps.

When he turned into the gate again an hour later, the dogs were at the end of the drive to greet him, barking, tails wagging. That meant that Grimes had been up to feed them and open the gates of the kennel run. But it was the sight of John Grimes himself, standing halfway down the drive, that sent a chill of premonition through Scotty Weir’s body.

Grimes was waiting for him, without coat or jacket, head bare to the winds, his face broken and collapsed with emotion. Weir ran toward him and then stood still, hand on the dogs’ heads to quiet them.

“Something’s happened to Mark, is that it, Grimes? Tell me yourself. I don’t want to hear it from strangers.”

“He’s dead, sir. He was shot last night, somewhere in the city.”

Weir put a hand on Grimes’ thick, hard shoulder and gripped it hard. For a moment the two men stood on the open ground between the old farmhouse and the rimed fields, faces firming and hardening gradually, by training and habit, into acceptance of what could not be changed. The hurt and loss and real pain would come later, the general knew, but still he allowed himself a moment now to imagine what this day could have meant if Mark had driven down to see him yesterday as Bonnie Caidin had suggested.

“Grimes, pack me a bag for a day or so, and bring the car around. Can you do that for me?”

“Certainly, sir,” Grimes said. “And do you want me to call Mrs. Devers?”

The general shook his head. “No, I’ll call her myself from Chicago. Let her enjoy the morning. She’ll hear soon enough, good lady.”

The two men drove to the county morgue in an unmarked squad car, Sergeant DuBois Gordon at the wheel, Tarbert Weir in the passenger seat, his bulky overcoat bunched up on his knees.

“You understand, sir, that I already made the official identification, not that there was any doubt. But I checked the morgue myself right after I called you,” Gordon said.

“This is something I want to do,” the colonel said and paused. “I hadn’t been in touch with my son for some time.”

“He told me,” Gordon said. “He was real glad to talk to you yesterday...”

Mark Weir’s body was wheeled into the viewing room and General Weir felt a stabbing memory, an anguished moment of comparison, as he remembered the first time he had seen his boy, an infant behind glass in the maternity ward of a hospital in Paris.

Lieutenant Weir was covered up to his chin with a sheet, and his face looked pale but peaceful, almost healthy, like a strong, young man determined to rest and restore himself.

“All the damage was done in the chest area,” Gordon said. “Right through the ribs and the breastbone, front to back. There’s not another mark on him.”

“He was shot in the chest?”

“Yes,” Gordon said. “Someone surprised him head on. He didn’t even have time to draw his gun.”

“And he was alone, you say?”

“Yes. We were both off duty last night but he got a tip and wanted to follow through. He should’ve waited, but you know Mark — stubborn as a mule. He said he got that from you.”

“He told you he was stubborn like me?”

“And damned proud of it, sir.”

Gordon reached down and rearranged Mark’s hair with one hand, touching him gently, pushing the hair back from the smooth forehead. “We had a laugh about his hair just the other day,” Gordon said. “Mark never liked to wear a hat, but I guess you know that, and we got caught outside in a snowstorm over by Navy Pier. His hair was full of snowflakes and he looked damned funny. I told him I knew just how he’d look when he got to be an old-timer.” He paused thoughtfully. “I’d like to have had a Polaroid with me that day.”

Gordon pulled at the morgue sheet, flattening out the wrinkles where the coarse cloth lay over Mark’s chest. Underneath, Weir could see the outlines of heavy bandages.

“I guess I told you last night was my old man’s birthday,” Gordon said. “That’s why the lieutenant couldn’t reach me.”

“No, you didn’t,” the general said and turned toward the exit door of the viewing room. He had longed to lift his hand, to touch his son’s face one last time, but Tarbert Weir knew too well how the memory of cold, inert flesh can linger on the fingertips.

The aging housing development called Cabrini Green, named after the canonized saint. Mother Cabrini, who had once worked in Chicago, stands stark and forbidding, one-and-a-half square miles of isolated and dangerous real estate in center city, located a few blocks from the picturesque shoreline of Lake Michigan and the elegant, expensive apartment buildings on the city’s Gold Coast.

A low-income, low-rent City Housing Authority project, Cabrini Green is comprised of a number of tall, boxlike brick buildings set on broad lawns of black asphalt, faintly traced here and there with the painted boundaries of shuffleboard courts and white free-throw lines facing rusted basketball hoops with tattered nets. The Green is home to more than thirteen thousand people, couples, singles, families and a collection of rent-paying floaters, pushers, junkies or pimps, street people who need a crash pad or a base.

Doobie Gordon nosed his car into a parking space in a row of blue and white police cars, each lettered with the slogan, “We Serve to Protect,” and two large, black unmarked vans.

“Mobile labs,” Gordon said. “They’ve been working since we got the call.”

He got out of the car, locked his door and walked around to check the passenger side. “It may seem awful quiet around here to you, general, for such a big place. But except for some workers and the school kids, Cabrini is mostly night people and there’s nothing to send folks outta sight like a cop killing. Of course, some of them got an early wakeup call from the fuzz today.”

“All those squad cars?” Weir asked.

“Yes. We don’t take the killing of a fellow officer lightly in this town,” Gordon said grimly. “The order came through from the commissioner first thing this morning: ‘Everything within the law, but if a knock doesn’t open a door, that door comes off at the hinges.’ ”

Inside the shabby foyer, Gordon said, “We’ll walk up to the third floor, then push for the elevator. I like to be sure it’s coming up empty before I get in.”

The stairs were cement, painted a dark green, steep and narrow, without handrails. “The Authority has given up replacing them,” Gordon said. “Those metal handrails can be sawed up and made into street weapons. Same thing is true of the stuff in the laundry rooms. People just took the machines apart, used the pieces for other things. The basement area in every building is boarded up now. Tenants can use the kitchen sink or find a laundromat.”

The two men stepped out into a hallway on the third floor and Doobie Gordon pushed the elevator button. Tarbert Weir was aware of a strange, disturbing odor in the building. He took out his folded handkerchief and passed the clean cloth over his nose and mouth. There was a sensation of tasting the disquieting reek as much as smelling it.

“I hope the tenants get used to it,” Gordon said, glancing at Weir. “I know I never could. It’s a combination of sweat, disinfectants, roach powder, and a little garbage let sit too long. It’s a poor smell, not country poor or Eskimo poor, or Haiti poor, but American, big-city poor. It’s something my people know a lot about...”

Little daylight filtered into the long, narrow corridors. Random light bulbs sheathed in wire casing played dim illumination over paint-chipped walls and hallways of closed doors, several covered over with accordion-steel meshings, reinforced by padlocks.

“It’s legal,” the sergeant said, gesturing at the heavy door protections. “Either they’re trying to hide something inside or keep someone out. But it’s their space, the Authority respects that.”

The elevator, with a floor base no more than three feet by five feet, lurched to a stop and Sergeant Gordon slipped open the door, looking down to examine the floor before he said, “It’s okay, general. Sometimes there’s stuff in here you wouldn’t want to step in.”

On the seventeenth, top floor of the building, two policemen stood on either side of an apartment door. One of them nodded at Gordon, pulled a tagged key from his pocket and unlocked the door. Tarbert Weir and the sergeant stepped into an empty apartment.

It was a small layout, with low ceilings and squared corners, a living room and adjoining kitchen, two bedrooms with a shared closet and a bathroom with a stall shower. In the bathroom there was a toilet and a sink with a mirrored medicine cabinet, but the kitchen had a ravaged look, as if it had been gutted, the appliances wrenched out of the walls. The rooms were painted green and yellow and pink and the windows of the living room, two of them broken and jagged, looked out over Chicago’s crowded inner city streets, narrow concrete canyons that ran through to Lake Shore Drive.

“Let me explain something to you,” Gordon said. “No one lives on this floor. The Authority agreed to clear everyone out more than four years ago. It was a trouble area, just too high up. Any sign of trouble, the tenants could throw things down on the police cars. If the elevators jammed, it was a hell of a long run up those steps for a cop.”

“Yet someone asked Mark to meet them here?”

Gordon nodded. “This address and apartment 1710, top floor, that’s the numbers we took off Mark’s radio tape.”

“And Mark would follow up on a tip like that?”

Doobie Gordon looked thoughtful, then nodded. “It must have sounded kosher to Mark. It was a man, nervous, sloppy talker, no name, just said he was kin to Mrs. Amanda Lewis and she’d asked him to call. They had something to tell us about how her nephew got killed...”

“And what does this Mrs. Lewis say?”

“She’s scared shitless, general, and that’s the truth. Some of those small-town southerners never adjust to the big city. She’s down at Central now with one of our matrons, trying to see if she can remember anything for us. And a couple of men are going through her apartment right now. Mrs. Lewis says Randolph Lewis was the last of her kin.” Gordon swallowed hard, then wet his lips. “She’s an old-fashioned lady, a Bible Baptist, and we’d asked her to call us. I think that’s what suckered Mark last night...”

General Weir turned his eyes to the floor, forcing them to see what he knew he would find there — the outline of Mark’s fallen body, traced with heavy white markings. The shape, legs sprawled, arms outcast, looked strangely diminutive to the general, as if a child had fallen there.

“You sure you want to be up here?” Gordon asked quietly.

“I want to know exactly what happened,” Weir said.

“We don’t know for sure yet,” Gordon said. “We’re building it. Everything’s been dusted for fingerprints but we lifted dozens of them. The bullets were sent to the lab, they were fired from a Luger, that’s a German-made gun with—”

“I know what a Luger is,” Weir said.

“I know you do, sir. The guns that got Mark are 9mm Lugers, we’re not sure of the model, hollow point ammo. The ammo tells ballistics both guns are clean bore, no flaws, no scratches...”

“How many bullets?”

“Two. Both through the front chest but from different distances.”

“How could anyone get the jump on an experienced police officer in this small space?” Weir asked. “There’s nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.”

“Yes there is,” Gordon said. “Look at this.”

He stepped across a narrow hall to the bathroom and put his hands on either side of the mirrored medicine cabinet above the hand basin. He wiggled the mirror slightly and the motion made no sound but the whole cabinet came out in his hands.

“Look, sir,” he said.

Scotty Weir stepped up to the neat, rectangular opening in the wall and looked through it. He experienced a tug at his senses, a deep feeling of disorientation. He found himself looking into the next apartment, and the next and the next, down six empty apartments, right to the end wall of the building. Every medicine cabinet had been removed.

“Here’s how I see it,” Gordon said. “Mark came upstairs alone last night, switched on the lights, saw the place was empty. He checked around the rooms, of course, thought he was early and alone and decided to wait.

“We figure there had to be a couple of guys staked up here. One of them lifted out this medicine cabinet from the next apartment — it comes loose both ways — and then the aim at Mark was like a shooting gallery from any apartment on this floor. Those openings in the wall are on an absolute plumb line. All they had to do was wait until he moved into position and call his name...”

Scotty Weir felt a sudden choking sensation of rage, then the unfamiliar feeling that he might black out. “Why is it so hot in here?” he said.

Gordon shrugged. “The Authority likes to keep the temperature at eighty-two degrees, seems to suit the folk who live here. Lots of white people’d tell you that the jungle bunnies are used to it, it’s like the jungles in the old country. I think different. To me, it’s a sop, a placebo. Overcrowding, roaches, night noises, well, nobody can ever complain they’re cold in here.”

“Everybody in Cabrini is black?”

“No, that wouldn’t be democratic, would it?” Gordon said. “We got a few whites but not many. One couple, real old, brother and sister, and he’s in a wheelchair. She says she feels safer living right with them than getting mugged in a white neighborhood. Now the man who called the police last night, he’s black, black as I am. Lives right below in 1610, full-time warehouse worker with a wife and four kids. He heard the gunshots and did what a citizen should. He called the police and he had to run four blocks to a pay phone to do it.” Tarbert Weir walked to one of the broken windows and leaned toward it, trying to breathe in fresh air. The breeze off the lake was cool and moist. There was a strange sound in the vacant apartment, almost like light music. Maybe that was what had distracted Mark last night, put him off his guard, Weir thought, the rumble and honking of street traffic below and up here the high, thin singing of wind as it came through the sharded glass.

“I really don’t understand,” he said wearily, “why these windows are smashed when no one lives here.”

Gordon looked at him carefully. “I know all about your distinguished record down south during the days of the Freedom Marches. Mark was proud of that, too. I think you’ll understand, general, a phrase some psychologists use — ‘the applause of objects.’ Breaking glass, a farewell gesture of defiance, sometimes it’s the only thing a black man has going for him.”

The two men sat quietly in the third floor waiting room in Henrotin Hospital while the floor nurse made a call to check with Bonnie Caidin’s doctor.

When she was brought into the hospital in the early morning, Bonnie Caidin, battered and savagely bruised, her eyes glazed with shock, had scrawled Sergeant Gordon’s name on a piece of paper. Staff had summoned the sergeant from an emergency room downstairs where he was waiting for word on Mark Weir.

He’d called Miss Caidin, he told the general, because he felt Mark would want her there; they’d always stayed close. She was mugged and beaten in the basement garage of her apartment building. A tenant parking his car had seen her on the ground, called the police. Her assailant was white, big, that’s all she could tell the responding officers. Her purse was found beside her, money and credit cards intact, but no keys. If robbery was the motive, the attacker must have been scared off.

He had lied to the young woman easily, he explained to the general; he had told her Mark was getting along fine.

“There’s a fracture line in her jaw,” Gordon told him. “She can write just a little and talk with her eyes. She put down her address for me and a name — Durham Lasari. I asked her if she wanted me to go there and she nodded. Then she wrote, ‘Tell Mark — the soldier.’ After that, they wheeled her away.

“I went to her apartment around eight this morning. There were coffee cups, dishes in the sink. The bed had been slept in. The whole place looked kinda messy but then maybe she’s not a good housekeeper. There was nobody there.”

“She said — ‘Tell Mark — the soldier’? Durham Lasari?”

“Yes.”

“You sure she didn’t say George Jackson?”

“She didn’t say anything, general. She wrote it out — Durham Lasari. There’s no mistake about that.”

The floor nurse came back to say the doctor preferred Miss Caidin not to have visitors. She was heavily sedated and still in shock.

“Has her family been here?” Scotty Weir asked.

“No, her employer has been notified,” the nurse said, “but it’s our understanding that there’s no immediate family nearby.” She hesitated. “I can’t go against doctor’s orders, but if you gentlemen would like to look in on Miss Caidin from the doorway, I can tell her that when she wakes. She’s been through a lot.”

“Thank you, we’ll do that,” Tarbert Weir said.

Moments later, in the main lobby of the hospital, Weir said to Gordon, “I don’t expect to be here for the funeral, so I’ll want a moment alone now. I want to see where he died.”

The two men walked around to the emergency entrance, a side doorway covered with a portico of squared glass. “They were ready for him here,” Gordon said. “Started work right away. He was on oxygen and plasma before they wheeled him into emergency.”

The emergency room was vacant. Three gurneys, in white sheeting, stood in a row ten feet apart, every inch of the wall behind them arranged with the tubings, masks, and rheostats of life-saving equipment.

“Mark was there,” Gordon said, pointing to the third gurney at the far end of the room. “I’ll wait for you outside.”

General Weir walked to the empty gurney and stood beside it, his eyes closed, his head bowed, trying to make a communion with his son, willing himself to accept the fact that on this spot, breathing this same antiseptic air, Lieutenant Mark Weir had ceased to be.

A voice behind him said, “Can I help you, sir? I’m the nurse on duty here.”

The general turned to see a stocky, fair-haired man, about thirty-five, standing near the door. Weir introduced himself and explained why he was there.

“I wasn’t on duty when the lieutenant was brought in,” the nurse said, “but I read the records this morning. Everything medically possible was done, sir, please believe that, but there was little chance. The bullets had penetrated the back and traveled through the lung cavities. There was bone splinter, tom tissue, heavy bleeding. Your son was unconscious, sir, if that helps. He didn’t suffer after the first few moments.”

Sergeant Gordon was already behind the wheel in the hospital parking lot when Scotty Weir slid into the passenger side.

“You lied to me, Gordon,” he said. “Why in hell would you lie to me about something like that?”

Gordon tightened his hands on the steering wheel until the knuckles turned nearly white. “Would it occur to you that I didn’t want to admit that my buddy was shot in the back when I wasn’t there? Does it occur to you that I didn’t want to even say those words?”

The sergeant turned the key in the ignition, made a sharp right and then maneuvered the car through the parking lot out to West Oak Street. He said, “Well, are you glad you know? How do you feel now that you know that Mark was bushwhacked, that your boy didn’t even see who shot him?”

“I feel like hell,” Tarbert Weir said. “Or I’m in hell. I think they’re the same thing.”