say it was the only time when you had to take the elevator up when you were going to hell.”
I just nodded. This was out of my realm completely.
“And that’s only if the elevators were working,” he added.
I realized that I never considered that Brooks might be a black man. There was no photo in the computer printouts and no reason to mention race in the stories. I had just assumed he was white and it was an assumption I would have to analyze later. At the moment, I was trying to figure out what Washington was trying to tell me by taking me here.
Washington pulled into a lot next to one of the buildings.
There were a couple of dumpsters coated with decades of graffiti slogans. There was a rusted basketball backboard but the rim was long gone. He put the car in park but left it running. I didn’t know if that was to keep the heat flowing or to allow us a quick getaway if needed. I saw a small group of teenagers in long coats, their faces as dark as the sky, scurry from the building closest to us, then cross a frozen courtyard and hustle into one of the other buildings.
“At this point you’re wondering what the hell you’re doing here,” Washington said then. “That’s okay, I understand. A white boy like you.”
Again I said nothing. I was letting him run out his line.
“See that one, third on the right. That was our building. I was on fourteen with my grand-auntie and John lived with his mother on twelve, one below us. They didn’t have no thirteen, already enough bad luck ’round here. Neither of us had fathers. At least ones that showed up.”
I thought he wanted me to say something but I didn’t know what. I had no earthly idea what kind of struggle the two friends must have had to make it out of the tombstone of a building he had pointed at. I remained mute.
“We were friends for life. Hell, he ended up marrying my first girlfriend, Edna. Then on the department, after we both made homicide and trained with senior detectives for a few years, we asked to be partnered. And damn, it got approved. Story about us in the Sun-Times once. They stuck us in Three because it included this place. They figured it was part of our expertise. A lot of our cases come outta here. But its still on rotation. So we just happened to be the ones catching on the day that boy turned up without no fingers. Shit, the call came in right at eight. Ten minutes before and it would’ve gone to night shift.”
He was silent for a while, probably thinking about what kind of difference it would have made if the call had gone to somebody else.
“Sometimes at night when we’d been workin’ a case or on a stake or something, me’n John would drive out here after shift, park right where we are now and just look the place over.”
It occurred to me then what the message was. Larry Legs knew Jumpin’ John hadn’t pulled the trigger on himself because he had known the exact struggle Brooks had experienced coming out of a place like this. Brooks had fought his way out of hell and he wasn’t about to go back by his own hand. That was the message.
“This is how you knew, isn’t it?”
Washington looked across the seat at me and nodded once.
“It was just one of those things you know, that’s all. He didn’t do it. I told them that in MIU but they just wanted to get it the fuck away from them.”
“So all you had was your gut. There was nothing out of line anywhere else?”
“There was one thing but it wasn’t enough for them. I mean they had the handwriting, his history with the shrink, all that in place. It fit too nicely for them. He was a suicide before they zipped up the bag and took him away. Cut and dried.”
“What was the one thing?”
“The two shots.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s get out of here. Let’s get some food.”
He put the car in drive and made a large circle in the lot and then out onto the street. We headed north on streets I had never been on. I had an idea where we were going, though. After five minutes of this I was tired of waiting for the next part of the story.
“What about the two shots?”
“He fired