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By Root 784 0

the side. He didn’t laugh when Karen told him about her dreams, but instead offered her an office job at his firm. She took it, and suddenly Karen was not only talking about becoming a cop again, but she and Art were hanging out with them at weekend barbecues. At first Art was supportive; he thought becoming a cop would be good not just for her, but for him as well. Cops could be useful. One of his friends, Cyrus, was CPD, and back in his drug-pirate days Cyrus would run plates and names for Art. That usefulness, however, extended only as far as their friendship, and the more Art saw of Ned Fagan, the more he became convinced he was a facing an enemy.

Spoken or not, Fagan’s name seemed to pop up in every conversation Art had with Karen. He would have been a perfect antithesis except that in Art’s experience, half of Bridgeport cops were dirty. Art asked around and heard stories that Fagan’s side business sheltered corrupt cops who’d drawn too much attention on the force. When he told Karen about the rumors, she interpreted it as another attack on her dreams, which of course it partially was. In the ensuing fight, she took the baby and moved out, but according to Karen, the irony was that she still loved Art. “He was so paranoid about Ned Fagan that he couldn’t see it. Nothing was happening between me and Ned. I loved Art, but all of a sudden he became fixated, convinced that he was losing me to Ned. And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The rivalry came to a head when Fagan called Karen’s apartment one day while Art was visiting. Art answered the phone, and when he heard Fagan’s voice he decided it was time to draw a line.

“I don’t care if you’re a cop or not, motherfucker,” Art hissed. “If you don’t stay away from my family we’ll both go down, you and me together.” Fagan hung up without responding.

Art’s threat completely backfired: Karen banned him from her apartment, and within a few weeks she was seeing the only man who seemed to understand her, Ned Fagan. Incensed with jealousy, Art began tailing Fagan, studying his patterns the way he used to surveil drug dealers. He noticed that the cop passed a dark stairway on his way to his apartment—and began planning an ambush. He went out and bought some piano wire, then looped the ends through two wooden handles he made in the Dungeon. His plan was to hide under the stairway by Fagan’s apartment, and as soon as the cop passed by, he’d drop it over his head, tug him back into the shadows, and quickly strangle him, leaving a minimal crime scene. He’d then throw the piano wire into the South Branch of the Chicago River and it would be done.

Art was on the verge of executing his plan to garrote Fagan when he received a phone call from his mother in Texas. Word had reached Malinda that Art was on the verge of losing it, and when she spoke to him she was at her best, with a lucidity and compassion that was worthy of the crisis. She was terrified for her son and would not take no for an answer. “She told me, ‘Listen, baby, will you please just come to Texas? Just come here and give it a shot, leave the city today. I feel something bad going on with you, please come.’ And I listened to her. I went, packed my clothes, went to the Greyhound bus station, and took a bus to Texas.”

6

TEXAS

Things haven’t worked out quite liked we planned, but that’s all right, because there’s no better place than Texas to start over. . . .

—JOHN CONNALLY, FORMER GOVERNOR OF TEXAS

Art sold off his printing equipment and vacated the Dungeon prior to leaving Chicago. In his anguish over losing Karen, he wanted to cut all ties to his old life. Counterfeiting and crime, he realized in a depressive epiphany, had caused him to lie, and lies were a major reason why his relationship had failed. Like that of a smoker throwing away a full pack, shutting down the Dungeon was a gesture intended to help propel him into a new life without temptation.

For a big-city criminal, Valley View, Texas, was a desert monastery. An eyeblink of a town about sixty miles north of Dallas, it consisted