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“You think I have it,” I said. “You think I took the little black book. That’s the only reason you’d be worried about it.”

Suddenly Goldie took a keen interest in his coffee, draining the mug and adding some more from the copper-colored pot the waitress had left on the table.

“I never asked you that,” he said. “Never once.”

“Go ahead and ask me.”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Whether you did or not, you’re the best cop I know and a credit to the force and one helluva fuckin’ kid, by the way.” A flush of red came to his face, genuine emotion in his eyes. Goldie never had kids of his own. His wife died of cancer at age twenty-nine, and they never got around to having children before she got sick. He was Pop’s best friend and our surrogate uncle. But he was still a copper’s cop, the tough exterior, not one to show emotion like this. I had to admit it disarmed me.

“Sounds like you’re writing my obituary,” I said.

He allowed a brief smile. “If you did take it, you had your reasons, and I don’t wanna know them. Okay? Leave it at that.”

“Ask me,” I said. “Ask me if I took it.”

“Shut the fuck up already. I’m not gonna ask ya.” He put a hand on the table. “Just do me this favor, okay? Don’t let anyone else ask you, either. Not Patti. Not Kate. And definitely not Amy.”

Without having taken a single bite of the food he had so viciously sliced up, Goldie picked up the check and threw some cash down. I tried to add a ten, but he batted it away as though it were an insult.

When he had settled the bill, he looked me squarely in the eyes. “Just remember that someone’s out there killing people to find that little black book,” he said. “So if you have it, my friend, you better watch your back.”

Fifty-Nine

WHEN I left Goldie, I headed to my car, ready to go to work. I checked my phone almost automatically, just as everyone does these days. In my case I was checking the news online.

I stopped in my tracks. Kims Beans had posted a new photo, her weekly scandalous pic of a client entering the brownstone brothel. She had promised—what had she said to me?—that the next photo would blow my socks off.

She was right.

In many ways, there was nothing different about this photo. Most of the poses were the same—head down, surreptitious, not wanting to be noticed. There were dozens of them by now, celebrities and power brokers, some famous, some not so famous.

This photo was of a member of the Chicago City Council, which would make, by my count, four of them caught on camera—in still photographs, anyway—and publicly exposed by Kim Beans. I didn’t recognize the person by face or by name. There were fifty members of the council altogether, and I didn’t know the roster by heart. According to the article, this one represented the Northwest Side.

So there would be the usual buzz, the usual denials. A photograph doesn’t prove anything; walking down the street in the Gold Coast isn’t a crime; I don’t specifically remember that night—I may have been shopping . One guy caught on camera, an appointee to the Chicago Board of Education, claimed he was walking his dog—off the leash, of course—and that the photographer had cropped the pooch out of the photograph. Another person caught, a B-list actor, someone who was a child TV star but failed as an adult, claimed that his picture had been Photoshopped and that his face was put on someone else’s body.

This one, too, would likely come up with some version of a denial, specific or otherwise. Nothing unusual about that.

But there was one thing unusual about this particular photograph, which was why Kim had made her comment.

This one was a woman .

Alderwoman Patricia Bradford, who, according to Kim’s article, was a divorced mother of three and in her fourth term on the city council.

A woman. Well, why not? Why would a sex club, where people go looking for a discreet place to play out their fantasies, be limited to men?

Sixty

I STARTED to stuff my phone in my pocket, but then my thought of the Gold Coast and shopping reminded me of a joke. I hadn’t left Stewart a joke in a long time, and the poor guy checked our shared Facebook page every morning in the nursing home, according to his daughter, Grace.

I hit the Record button on my phone, the one Patti had installed for me, and spoke into the microphone.

“A guy walks into a store and says to the female sales clerk, ‘I’m looking for a pair of gloves for my wife, but I don’t know her size.’ The sales clerk, a real good-looking lady, says, ‘Here, I’ll try them on.’ She sticks her hand inside a glove and says, ‘It fits me. Is she about my size?’ The man says, ‘Yes, she is about your size, so that’s very helpful, thank you!’ The sales lady says, ‘Anything else?’ The man says, ‘Yeah. Come to think of it, she needs a bra and panties, too.’”

I pushed the icon again, instantly sending it to our Facebook page and deleting it from my phone. Not the funniest joke I’ve ever told, but Stewart liked that kind of humor.

My cell phone buzzed as I held it. I almost dropped it.

The caller ID said Stewart.

Wow, that was weird. Weird that he was just on my mind and weird that Stewart would call me. He never called me. He would sometimes post a comment on the Facebook page, but our interactions were mostly limited to my visits to the nursing home. It was up north, in Evanston, and these days I rarely got out there.

Anyway, I answered the phone. “Stewart?” I said, propping up my voice with cheer.

“Billy?”

A woman’s voice. His daughter?

“It’s Grace,” she said. Yep, his daughter, Grace, the one whose own daughter was in the intensive care unit back then.

“Hi, Grace,” I said, as a chill of dread spread through my chest.

“Billy, I have some bad news. My father passed.”

“Oh, Grace. Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“Listen, I’m sorry for the late notice—I couldn’t find your number. You’re unlisted. I finally figured out that Dad had your number in his phone. It’s just that—he never used that phone, and we were distracted—”

“Grace, it’s no problem.”

“Well, the wake is tomorrow,” she said. “He died four days ago, and I’m just now calling. I think…well, considering how you two met and what you went through, I think he’d understand if it was too hard for you to come. But I wanted to give you the choice.”

Tomorrow. Bad timing. Amy and I were going to do an entire run-through of my direct examination at trial and then a complete cross-examination. But that didn’t matter.

“Of course I’ll be there,” I said.

Sixty-One

THE FUNERAL home in Winnetka was like all of them, everything muted and clean and tasteful. The people working the place were wearing gentle, noncommittal expressions. The walls were painted soft shades of purple or pink. Flowers were arranged just so.

The large photo of Stewart resting on an easel when I walked in was striking to me because it didn’t look like the Stewart I remembered; it was a black-and-white photo from his wedding day, I presumed, taken in the early fifties. There were hints of the Stewart I knew in that photograph—the eyes, that crooked smile—but here he had a head full of hair and athletic shoulders.

I learned a lot about him over those several weeks in the ICU. I knew he married his college sweetheart, Ann Marie; they were married forty-six years, had four children and thirteen grandkids. At the time I probably could have named all seventeen of the offspring. The names escaped me now, three years later, and for some reason it made me feel guilty.

The place was full, which made me feel glad for Stewart. Times like these, I always asked myself questions incapable of being answered, like whether any of this meant anything; whether Stewart even knew we were gathered here for him; whether he was looking down on us or was just a dead body in a coffin.