Chapter 1105: Pool Deck
June 1997
Five-thirty in the morning. The deck was still wet from the sprinklers, and Old Mike had been out there an hour already in a windbreaker, with two cups of coffee going cold on the iron table.
Tony carried the wheelchair down the steps with his cousin still in it and set it down.
"Game Three tonight. Salt Lake. Mama's doing wings. You want the big set wheeled up here or you coming down?"
The Bulls were up two games to none on Utah in the Finals.
"Ask me at six," Alex said.
Tony didn't go anywhere. "Tip's at eight, man. I need to know how many wings. You eat like a bird now, it changes the math."
"Go back to bed, Tony. Mike and I are talking."
"It's cold out here, you got no meat on you, you'll catch pneumonia and then who's gonna watch the game with me? Mama? She roots for Utah to make me mad."
"Tony, I swear to God, I'll have Mike throw you in the pool."
"Okay! Okay, okay. Jeez. Nobody appreciates me." Tony went, loudly, like he'd been doing since they were kids, with one look back from the door.
Old Mike watched the door until it shut. "That boy's gonna wake up the whole neighborhood."
"He always did."
Then the old man got up and walked the whole edge of the deck with his hands in his pockets, checking the hedge, the boathouse roof, the neighbor's dock, and the gap in the trees where the shore path came through. He came back and sat on the far side of the table, where he could see the door.
"Okay. Tell me again."
"Steve Haines."
"I don't mean the name, kid. Tell me the rest of it."
So Alex told him. Mottola and Stringer. Pellicano's four years of wiretaps: the houses, the studio, the phones. The fifty-one boxes Old Mike had driven to the vault on Wacker himself the spring before last, in a van, at night, with Muffler behind him in the Toyota. The badge that had walked those boxes back out in July. The group Haines belonged to.
When he got to the vault, Old Mike's hands went flat on the iron table and stayed there.
Those boxes had been his job. He'd put them in the vault himself, and a man with a badge had walked them out on his watch.
He listened with his face toward the water and didn't move until it was all out.
"You said something about Vic."
"He's been digging since February. I want him off it."
Old Mike's chin came down. "Go on."
"He's a cop with no jurisdiction anywhere that matters, Mike, and one of the guys in this carries a federal badge."
A cop off a small-town desk, off duty, in another state, was just a private citizen with a gun and a strong opinion. His badge was worth nothing past the Indiana line, and the man he'd be going after could call an office in Washington from the passenger seat of his car.
"If he goes in alone, it comes back as a shooting in some town nobody's ever heard of, and somebody in Springfield reads the report and gets it cleaned up."
"Somebody with a title."
"Christ, kid. Say it plain."
Alex didn't. Old Mike turned his head and looked at him for a while. "The governor?"
"I don't know that it's him. I know Peter Florrick was the Cook County State's Attorney before he was governor, and he worked cases with those same FBI men for eight years. And I know his wife wants my files. That's why I wasn't going to hand Alicia the keys."
The old man breathed out through his nose, long and slow, picked up the nearer coffee, and put it back down without drinking any. "You can't prove a word of that."
"I don't want to prove it. I want Vic sitting at a desk."
"He'll go anyway. Alone. And that's worse."
"Then you tell him yourself. Tonight. Give him the name."
"The real one?"
"Haines. Vic knows the name, he does nothing with it. And Haines gets paid to do nothing too." Alex shifted in the chair and his waist pulled. "Three thousand a month."
Old Mike chewed on it with his mouth shut. Three thousand a month was a man's mortgage. It was a bribe, whatever anybody called it, and it was something Vic would have to carry to an FBI man on the first of every month.
"And the guys who actually did it?"
Alex kept his eyes on the water. "That's Haines's problem. Let Haines keep them."
"Yeah, that'll go over great."
"It doesn't go anywhere, Mike. It stays on this deck."
"Phillips sitting up in Canada, and a Townley with no face I don't buy. And they just walk."
"They don't just walk. They belong to somebody. Let him worry about them. I'm not sending anybody after anybody."
Old Mike turned that over and didn't like any part of it. But he didn't argue.
The sun was coming up over the lake behind the trees. The pool had gone from black to gray, and a moth that had been floating in it all night went round once on the current from the filter.
"One more thing, and then we're done out here. The vault. Who signs, who carries, where the key sleeps at night. All of it changes this month."
"It changed in October. I changed it myself." Old Mike looked at the water. "Three months too late."
"Do it again, on paper this time. And the house too. Nobody works in here that I haven't met."
"I'm putting Muffler on it. Head of house security."
Alex looked up from the blanket. "Does he know?"
"He'll know at seven. McGill fired him in April and he stayed on the hospital door anyway, for nothing. He was off with Tony the day it happened. He won't be off again."
Alex nodded slowly. "Do it."
Old Mike stood and stretched until something in his back cracked. "Six o'clock tomorrow."
"Every day this week," Alex said.
The old man grunted and went to get Tony, and left him on the wet deck with the filter pump running.
The therapist came at seven. She was a square woman named Deneen, and she set a rolled towel and a rubber ball on the iron table and didn't so much as glance at the pool. She'd worked on two stroke patients, a jockey and a Bears lineman, and hadn't been impressed by any of them either.
"Squeeze."
He squeezed. The ball gave a little and stopped.
"Hm. That's the same number Princeton wrote down."
"Princeton measured after lunch," Alex said.
"It's the same number, honey." She turned his wrist over and pressed her thumb along the tendon, watching his face. He gave her nothing. She pressed harder. "Open. All the way. There's a man in there somewhere who used to play the guitar, and he's in there being lazy about it."
The ball sat in his palm. "He's retired."
"Well, he's on my clock now." She put the ball down, took the hand in both of hers and walked the fingers open one at a time. The last one came slow and shaking. "What's my name?"
"Deneen."
"And the nurse?"
He worked at it with his mouth shut. It didn't come. "Ramona. No. Something with an R. Rosa-something."
"Rosaria. Hand me a dollar every time you get it wrong and I'll be rich by Friday." She rolled the towel out flat under his forearm. "My jockey forgot his own horse's name for a month. Cried about it. You're not gonna cry on me, are you? And don't think I didn't hear you were out on that deck at five-thirty with the old man. Rosaria told me."
"Rosaria talks too much."
"Rosaria works for me one hour a day and she likes me better than she likes you." She turned the arm over. "Listen. Your brain's tired by four o'clock. You get halfway through a sentence and lose the back end of it, and then you blame the wheelchair. So no calls after four. Take them in the morning, when the hand's warm and the words come easier."
"I've got a call Thursday."
She put the ball back in his palm and closed his fingers over it for him. "Then Thursday it's in the morning. Squeeze."
He squeezed.
"Again. Who's the nurse?"
"Rosaria. Who talks too much."
"Good. Now I'm moving the thumb. If you want to say a bad word, say it. Don't hold it in. The ones who hold it in are a pain in my ass."
She moved the thumb.
"Fuck!"
"There you go," said Deneen.
She let the thumb go. "Better than yesterday. Don't let it go to your head. Rosaria's sister reads the Star, by the way. Out loud, on the bus. You want to know what you are this week?"
"No."
"You got the witch-doctor treatment. Same one Michael Jackson gets. Some man in a hut who charges a million dollars a visit, and that's how come you woke up." She tapped his wrist, which hadn't seen the sun since January and looked it. "And you're bleaching. Like him. That's the other half of the page."
Alex laughed so hard the ball rolled off the table. "What's the hut look like?"
"They didn't have a picture of the hut, honey. They had a picture of you on the stretcher and a picture of him under an umbrella."
Tupac was dead on the West Coast and Biggie was dead on the East, and he'd been shot six times and lived, and every conspiracy theory the gossip tabloids could carry had come looking for somewhere to land. Past the old standards of the rap world, just about every rumor that had ever stuck to Michael Jackson had been rewritten with his name in it and parked on his doorstep. Five months indoors had done the rest for the skin-bleaching one.
"Tell Rosaria's sister it was the University of Chicago," he said. "And Princeton-Plainsboro. She can call them and check."
"She's not calling anybody. She likes the hut." Deneen picked the ball up off the deck and put it back in his hand. "Squeeze."
At seven o'clock that night, in Salt Lake City, two men jumped for the opening tip.
In the family room in Highland Park, Tony stood four feet from the television with a plate of wings in his hand and didn't sit down for the entire first quarter.
"GO— hey. Hey! That's a foul. That is a foul, man—"
"Sit your butt down," Aunt Susie said.
"Mama, he walked! Everybody in the building saw it!"
"You sit down or you eat on the porch."
"Pippen's playing on one leg, Mama. On one leg."
"So's your cousin, and he ain't hollering about it."
Alex was parked at the end of the couch with a wing he couldn't hold properly and didn't much want. He watched Tony yell at the Zenith for a while, and then he ate the wing after all.
That night Vic Mackey came in through the kitchen, because Vic Mackey had come in through kitchens his whole working life.
He'd come through the door of the old house in Hyde Park in 1991 to bust it, and put his hand on Mike's ribs on the way in. Old Mike met him at the kitchen door and took him down to the basement, where the full-size baseball arcade machine stood next to the empty guitar stand. The two of them talked a long time with the machine switched on and pitching to nobody, its little recorded crowd cheering for a batter who wasn't there, so nobody upstairs could hear a word.
At the end Vic put his bald head round the study door. Fifty-something, short and thick, flat pale eyes. He took in the wheelchair, the blanket and the unread book on it in about a second and a half.
"Mike told me. The name, the three thousand, who carries it." He didn't say whether he was going to do any of it. "I had my ass in a car in Gary three nights last week while you were lying in bed drinking milkshakes, kid."
He had a box of plates and phone numbers and bar napkins in the trunk of the car he was supposed to be driving to Alaska at the end of the month to see his daughter. "Guess Alaska's off, then."
"Fly up. I'll pay for the ticket."
"Smart-mouth little shit," Vic said. He went back down the hall and out through the kitchen, and the screen door banged twice behind him.