The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [69]
A crowd gathered—doctors, nurses, receptionists, at Executive Concierge they all dressed with similar refinement—and Kloska waited until Russo was looking at him again before placing his still-vibrating right hand on the disputed office door. He didn’t push it open, but invited Traden to follow him out instead.
21
TUESDAY, JULY 27
WALKING DISTANCE to Chinatown, under a concrete knot of expressway exchanging east and west for north and south, was a racially mixed neighborhood of folks with just enough money saved to own a home here and not enough leftover to fix it up. That’s where Reggie Vallentine found the man who had sent him the note, in a house with splitting gray shingles and cracked windowsills and a small square yard of hard soil and burned grass. Reggie stepped over the crumbling walk to the door as if it were a shallow stream, gingerly placing each toe.
He’d always wondered. Reggie guessed that in the twenty-four hours between Solomon’s death and Michael Liu’s, there might have been someone Liu had confided in. He figured there could be someone out there who was keeping his secret.
Now he knew who it was.
The Lius had been a comfortably middle-class family when Erica was growing up. Michael Liu had a good job as an engineer for a bottle-manufacturing company in the suburbs. His wife had been an elementary school teacher. Erica’s murder and Michael’s suicide had been tough on the family bank accounts. Linda Liu pursued a lengthy civil wrongful-death lawsuit against Solomon Gold’s estate, a case she would lose. It would cost her tens of thousands of dollars.
Linda moved to San Francisco, leaving behind her only surviving child, Erica’s twin brother, Derek. Derek Liu had unsuccessful careers as an artist and graphic designer, some minor scrapes with the law. He accepted work as a barista for a big coffee chain, mostly for the health insurance. A few years back, the Sun-Times had filed an update on his personal tragedy and Reggie had quietly followed the story.
In ten years, Reggie had never contacted Derek Liu. Never phoned. Never even passed by the coffee shop, even though he had been in the neighborhood several times.
Derek Liu answered the door and stared at Reggie for a long time, squinting as if at a mirage. Then, his head making sense of it, he nodded.
The living room was a collage of unread newspapers and take-out containers. The house smelled like it hadn’t been opened in weeks. A soap opera mumbled on a newish television, the sleeve of a dirty shirt obscuring a portion of the screen. An undersized air conditioner rattled in the window like a pocketful of keys. The home was so hot and thick with despair that, except for the lack of light, the place reminded Reggie of a prison.
Derek Liu, in his early thirties but looking much older, sat on a cluttered couch without offering Reggie a seat. Reggie picked up a days-old newspaper, still rolled up in blue delivery plastic. “You said the police have been here.”
Derek nodded. “Enough detectives for a poker game, including that Kloska. The one who thinks my dad was a murderer. You and I know better, though, right?”
“I never said your dad killed Solomon.”
“You haven’t really gone out of your way to set them straight, though, have you?”
Reggie answered by not answering. “What did they ask you?”
Derek sank into the mildewed couch. “They wanted to know what happened to the gun that killed Solomon Gold. And to that, um, song. The requiem.”
“What did you say?”
“I told them I didn’t know.” He laughed. “Which is half true anyway.”
This kid hated him, but he’d kept his mouth shut for a long time. Reggie wondered why. “What happened to the gun?”
“I didn’t know you cared so much.” Reggie let the silence answer for him. Silence is your best friend when you want the truth. Derek said, “I needed money.” On the soap opera, two men were planning the burglary of some small-town politician’s office. “A man came to me at the coffee shop about three years ago. A collectibles dealer. He said there was a market for items related to famous murders—especially