The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [173]
73
REGGIE’S CAB couldn’t get any closer than LaSalle and Division before it was stopped by police barricades and standing traffic. He walked through the hot night, following sirens and smoke. As dark as the street was without lights, the air felt even blacker in his lungs, and by Clark and Schiller he could see the tops of the flames, and by Dearborn he could even hear them, hissing and popping, licking and puckering. On State Street, he realized the extent of the devastation, all the second-and third-floor windows golden with fire, spewing smoke. A Chicago landmark, one of the first magnificent downtown homes built after the Great Fire of 1871, was eating itself from the inside out.
Reggie was halted for five minutes or more by a fire department barrier, until he found Della Dickey pacing on the other side. “What are you doing here?”
“Bobby’s inside the house.” Her voice was full of worry.
“Was there really a riot?”
She said, “I’ve seen them pull three bodies out so far, and I don’t think they’re done. What are you doing here?”
Reggie’s phone rang in his coat pocket, surprising him. “Can’t tell you.” Into his phone: “Yes?”
“Where are you?” Elizabeth Gold.
“I’m as close as they’ll let me.”
“Inside the gate?”
“No.”
“I’ll send somebody to bring you back to the coach house.”
“Is Canada all right?”
“Yes. She says she knows who killed Solomon.”
Reggie hung up.
She says she knows who killed Solomon. Jesus.
“Is Bobby okay?” Della asked.
Reggie said he didn’t know. “How come you get to stand on that side of the sawhorses?” he asked.
Without embarrassment, she said, “You mean whom did I have to sleep with?”
That stung a bit, although Reggie wasn’t sure why.
“Reggie …”
“Yeah.”
“Are you going in there?”
“In where?”
“You’re meeting with them.”
“Meeting with who?”
She studied him until her head was nodding slowly. “You really don’t know.”
“What are you talking about, Della?”
“Take me with you.”
“What? No.”
“I can help you.”
“How can you help me?”
She said, “I know what they want.”
Reggie exhaled through his nose. “Della, I’m here to meet a client, and from the sound of it, she’s in a world of trouble. But I don’t even know what she wants.”
Della put a hand on his arm, perhaps to hold him there while she thought about it. “The most famous lawyer in Chicago is summoned to Gary Jameson’s house in the middle of a riot. A fire. A civil emergency. City-wide chaos. The cops don’t even know what’s going on. They’ve been told to sit tight from somewhere so far up the chain, you can’t see it from here.” She apparently didn’t find what she was looking for in his stoic expression, so she continued. “Whatever trouble your client is in, the people in there have the ability and the juice to make it go away. You just have to give them what they want. The problem is, they won’t ask for it because they don’t know you have it.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“The Thousand,” she whispered.
“The Thousand?”
“You really don’t understand what you’re walking into, do you?”
“And you do?”
“Yes.”
“How? How do you know what they want?”
He could see her building the wall of courage inside, brick by brick. She drew a deep breath. “Because I want it, too. Because this might be as close to them as I’ll ever get. It’s the only reason I was ever interested in the Gold case. It’s the reason I came to work for you. But I didn’t figure out that you had it until just the other day. Not until Bobby told me you wouldn’t let him look in your briefcase. That’s not a detail that was in the news. Not in the police report. Not in your book.”
Briefcase? What’s she talking about? “Della, you should go home.” He scanned the yard for Kloska.
The next thing they heard sounded like an animal. A giant bear maybe. A bear thirty stories tall awakening from a long sleep and stretching his jaw as far as it would go and letting out a loud, tired, groaning yawn.
One by one, the restaurants and houses and apartments along Lincoln Park West lit up, like a Christmas tree on its side. The streetlights were