The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [76]
Only when he spoke did Bea notice the man sitting behind Don on the big plush chair she used for reading and for slipping on her shoes. He was tall and broad and dressed in a black sweatshirt and new jeans. A stocking mask that must have covered his face earlier had been lifted up to his hairline. He had an angular nose, full lips, a boxy jaw, and small, intense eyes. He had muscles in his neck that must have been developed on some specialty machine at the gym.
He said, “Where is Canada Gold?”
24
WEDNESDAY, JULY 28
“THREE DAYS. No pay.”
Kloska was wearing a green softball jersey. Although it was a size too tight and soaking with sweat, he thought it still looked decent on him. Coach Reggie’s team of lawyers, the Nolo Contenderes, was playing a team from the Chicago Reader. The Nolo Contenderes were short a few players—Reggie’s seventeen-year-old son, Louis, was even playing left field, although you wouldn’t know they were related by the number of words they exchanged. Della had asked Kloska to sub for a first-year associate who couldn’t make the game, and while they waited for their turns to bat, Bobby was explaining to Reggie why he had time to be playing softball even though he had a long month of paperwork bottlenecked on his desk and a heater like the Falcone murder was still screaming through the newspapers.
Reggie spit sunflower-seed shells between his feet. “Suspension? You must have really whacked the guy.”
“There’s this software—they call it ‘the Brain’—and it keeps track of all the complaints against cops, every single one, whether it’s bullshit or not, and it assigns each one a score, and they add up over time. When they put this one in, I guess it and all the other crap the Brain has on me spit out three days. I could get a hearing, but what the hell. I pushed the guy. With my fist. Probably harder than I should have. Not harder than he deserved, but harder than I should have.”
Despite the heat, the softball diamonds just south of Grant Park were completely occupied with sixteen-inch Wednesday night league play—coed, no gloves. Beyond the outfields, the city seemed to have been built in layers—the grass and low leafy trees of the park and the concrete and steel of downtown and above it all the ceilingless blue sky under which they’d all been baking alive for two straight weeks. Some of them were still alive anyway. According to the news, twenty-six elderly and homeless had been killed by the heat. And it was still only July.
“Did you get anything from the doctor before you slugged him?” Reggie asked.
Bobby shook his head. “It seems weird to me that someone with Marlena Falcone’s résumé would go to work at a place like that. One of her neighbors told me they thought it was strange, too. Executive Concierge is where doctors go to semiretire. They see a couple patients in the morning and then go work on their putting. Falcone was a lab rat. She was all about the research. She had twenty-three patents.”
Kloska shut up as Della Dickey stepped into the batter’s box. In her ill-fitting jersey, she looked a little shapeless from the back, but a better indicator of the body underneath was the way the script of her jersey was contoured over her breasts. He’d been flirting with her since she dropped by Area 3 for a copy of much of what, but not everything, he had on the Falcone murder. She hadn’t yet told him to go to hell, and the invitation to today’s game had been promising.
“Your gal has gotten me some good stuff,” he told Reggie.
“Oh yeah?”
“She tracked down a whole bunch of crap on the Internet about this group the math professor was telling me about. The Thousand.” Kloska waited for a visible reaction from Reggie and got none. “Crazy stuff, most of it bullshit. Hardly any mention of it in legit news sources. She found these videos of protests, people with signs with that symbol—the tetraktys—showing up at Fortune Five Hundred shareholder meetings, and the G-Twenty summit last year.” Della fouled off a pitch. “You ever hear of these things