CHAPTER 1
LAST NIGHT
David Siskin wondered why he bothered checking into the Courtyard Marriott on his bimonthly trips to Chicago as he always worked late into the evening at the office suite off North Dearborn. A cot in the copy room would save the business money as well as save Siskin mucho time since booking a room at the Marriott for the equivalent of a lengthy nap didn’t help the bottom line.
And, as a real estate investor, David Siskin was all about the bottom line.
His wife, Cherie, had knighted Siskin a workaholic decades ago, before the two had even tied the knot, but she didn’t mean it in a bad way. Cherie had her book clubs, her quilting classes, her floristry, her fundraising for the Alzheimer’s Association—the disease that first stole her mother’s mind and then her life—as well as a half dozen other public-service hobbies that never registered on Siskin’s radar but kept her busy now that the kids were grown. By contrast, outside of work, Siskin had no hobbies. Sure, he suffered through endless rounds of golf as that was part of the game you played to rub elbows with investors and property financiers, but the actual pastime never took hold of him. However, when Siskin hit middle age and began fretting over the expansion of his midsection, he took up biking. Siskin even dumped a couple grand into a Cannondale CAAD. Siskin’s hobby lasted all of a week. He was biking around Lake Nokomis one beautiful summer evening, enjoying both the exercise as well as life in general—until the debacle. Some hothead in a yellow Corvette laid on the horn and didn’t let up. It startled Siskin, sending him into the curb and from thence ass over teakettle onto the sidewalk. Bruised and bleeding, Siskin glanced up in time to witness the Corvette speed past with a middle finger salute held high out of the driver’s side window.
The road bike had been gathering dust in the garage ever since.
Siskin lived in Minneapolis, had all of his life, and—like loads of other business commuters in the Twin Cities—he took the United Airlines puddle jumper to O’Hare and, two or three days later, took it home again. Siskin’s Chicago partners, venture capitalists one and all, didn’t burn the midnight oil like he did. Siskin’s Chicago partners were more clock-watchers—golf-playing nine-to-fivers.
That didn’t bother Siskin. There were no hard feelings.
Siskin’s Chicago partners did their jobs.
They made money. They invested money.
Rinse. Repeat.
Siskin heard sounds from the outer office and wondered who in hell that could be. Margie, the spinster admin who drenched herself in so much perfume that her fragrance lingered long after she’d exited your office, had waved goodbye hours ago. And the night janitor, Juan or Raul or whatever, had already passed through the office suite with his trash cart and vacuum cleaner and dust wand. Siskin glanced at his Rolex Explorer—a gift from Cherie given about the time of his biking debacle—and figured it was time to head over to the Marriott for his nightly siesta.
It was then a throat cleared and Siskin’s head snapped up.
An impossibly large man filled the doorway of Siskin’s office. The unannounced visitor was not basketball-player tall but appeared to be seven feet in height, possibly aided by the pointed-toed cowboy boots on his feet as well as the black fedora on the top of his head. The unannounced visitor was dressed in a classic black suit, cut well for his size and height. The unannounced visitor also sported an unbuttoned brown raincoat that hung down to his ankles and appeared to contain enough fabric to sail a small skiff to China. The man was a living chiaroscuro, a Goliath of light and shadow, and looked as though he’d just muscled his way out of an old black-and-white Humphrey Bogart movie.
“Is this a bad time?” the unannounced visitor said.
Siskin hadn’t been this startled since the unfortunate biking incident at Lake Nokomis. “The office has been closed for hours.”
The unannounced visitor glanced about Siskin’s twenty-fifth-floor office. “You don’t say.”
Siskin saved and exited the Excel sheet he’d been working on and leaned back in his chair. “What can I help you with?”
“Do you mind if I sit?”
Siskin motioned to the guest chair in front of his desk, hoping it was sturdy enough to support the man’s bulk. Mike McCarron flickered through Siskin’s mind. Michael J. McCarron was one of his Chicago business partners and the president of the investment company in which he currently convened with the unannounced visitor. Michael J. McCarron and that Irish sense of humor of his, always ready with an off-color joke, always filling dinner conversation with the high jinks he’d pulled on his wife and children, friends and neighbors, and even some of the raunchier practical jokes he’d pulled during his years at Columbia University. Siskin thought he heard light rustling coming from the outer office and imagined McCarron and one of the other partners hiding behind the door, keeping their chuckles to a minimum after imbibing a single malt or four at a nearby tavern where, evidently, they’d met this guy who looked like a film-noir version of Paul Bunyan and convinced him to participate in some kind of office prank.
“So…” The unannounced visitor spoke again after cramming his heft into the cushioned armchair. “You’re the Jew from Minneapolis?”
“Yes,” Siskin replied, now convinced this stunt was more of McCarron’s tomfoolery, “I’m the Jew from Minneapolis.”
“My name is Cordov Woods, as in a cord of wood.” The big man smiled. “I shit you not. My father laughed his ass off every time he introduced me. But everybody calls me Cord.”
Siskin definitely heard rustling in the outer office. “What can I do for you, Mr. Woods?”
“Do you like idioms? You know, a turn of phrase that contains a special meaning?”
Siskin shrugged. “I haven’t given them much thought, one way or the other.”
“I find idioms fascinating—what they mean, how they came into being. And you’ve no doubt heard the one that goes ‘don’t upset the apple cart’?”
Siskin nodded.
“It’s basically the same expression as ‘let sleeping dogs lie.’ Both idioms generally mean—and pardon my French—don’t fuck with the status quo. Because, if I’m selling apples, I’ve stacked my cart in a tidy structure—an orderly manner—which keeps the merchandise from rolling off the cart and all over the street. Do you see what I mean?”
Siskin nodded again. He felt goose bumps forming, the hair on the back of his neck began to prickle, and he was no longer so certain this encounter was a Michael McCarron–hatched gag at all. He began to suspect that other thing … the one he’d been assured—not assured but promised—would be kept in the strictest of confidence.
“So, if I’m out selling my apples, trying to make a decent living for myself and my family, and then some shit-hog comes along and pulls an apple out from where he shouldn’t. And before you can say fuckity-doo-dah, my employer has me chasing runaway apples all over the goddamned street.” The unannounced visitor stared at Siskin a long moment. “Now why did you have to go and yank that apple off my cart, Mr. Jew from Minneapolis?”
It took Siskin a second to speak, but when he did, he spoke fast—a nervous habit that kicked in whenever he came under pressure. “This is insane. You had to have checked in with the lobby guards at the main desk. They’ve got cameras all over the building … they even track your card in the elevator at this time of night.”
“Tell me about it.” The big man shrugged. “Makes me pine for the olden days. A simpler time. I’ve got several friends, colleagues to be more exact, I’ll never see again unless I visit them at the Stateville Correctional Center. And I ain’t visiting Stateville. Now, all these old colleagues of mine had to do was stay current; just enter the twenty-first century for crying out loud, and they’d have never seen a second inside of SCC.” The unannounced visitor who called himself Cord Woods tried leaning back in his chair. However, considering his bulk, there wasn’t much room to maneuver. “But to your point, I didn’t come in through the lobby and I didn’t sign in at the guard station. As for cameras and elevator cards and all that jazz—another idiom by the way—I’ve got a world-class IT guy that has my back.”
“You’ll never get away with this,” Siskin spoke again, not so fast this time, now feeling as though he were about to vomit.
“You don’t know Jethro. The guy’s an awful conversationalist—don’t even get me started on the lost art of conversation or I’ll wax on all night—but Jethro’s a true magician, he really is, although he may be somewhat autistic or, what’s that other thing that’s not as bad? Asperger’s syndrome? Jethro’s probably more Asperger’s than autistic, but, bear in mind, I’m no expert, and I doubt Jethro’s ever been tested. You see, as long as Jethro kept fetching daddy’s ice beer from the fridge, his parents didn’t give two shits about any irregular behavior on his part. A sorry state of affairs that was, quite frankly, but they’re both now out of the picture—figuratively and literally—since back when Jethro proved his worth. Dear old dad’s ice-beer days are gone forever.” The big man added, “I saw to that myself.”
“What do you want from me?” Siskin knew he’d never be able to retrieve his iPhone from the breast pocket of his suit jacket, so he inched some fingers toward the desk phone.
“First off, I’m not going to hurt you.” The unannounced visitor flicked his head toward the outer office. “Jethro’s going to town on your network server. And he’ll need your laptop, of course, when he’s done with that. If I were you, I’d just sit back and relax.”
Siskin closed his eyes and thought of Cherie. He thought of that crooked smile of hers, and he thought of the kids—the kids who were now adults but would forever be his kids—and he knew that sitting back and relaxing was out of the question. Siskin seized the phone off the cradle, pressed the number nine with a forefinger, but that was as far as he got before the unannounced visitor towered above him, guest chair flying backward into the wall.
“I told you I wasn’t going to hurt you.” The giant who called himself Cordov Woods kicked at Siskin’s desk with a boot, sending desk, phone, laptop, yellow notepad, and a couple of Mont Blanc pens soaring across the room.
There was now nothing between the two men.
“But I am going to kill you.”
CHAPTER 2
That was the year that was, that was
And I am the was of time
Vira and I made our way toward the northwest side of Chicago. Vira sat in the passenger seat of my F-150, her face outside the window, soaking in the sun of another beautiful April morning. We listened to my smartphone as it slid about the dashboard and cranked “The Was of Time”—a Grammy winner from decades back. I caught myself singing along with the chorus I somehow knew by heart.
File me a memory
And put me in your past
File me a memory
Never meant to last
The song continued playing for another minute. I grew melancholy and blinked back moist eyes.
That was the year that was, that was
And I am the was of time
That was the year that was, that was
You left me far behind
Throughout the separation and eventual divorce from my wife, Mickie, and in the immediate aftermath—or aftershocks as it felt like at the time—no matter what station I had the radio tuned to, a one-hit wonder song would come on and knock me on my ass. I’d be minding my own damned business, maybe even having a mediocre day, and then I’d take a right hook to the chin by “Seasons in the Sun.” Then, a day or two later, I’d take a shiv to the guts from “Brandy.” Then, I’d be driving home with a bag of tacos for dinner and “In a Big Country” would come on and dropkick me in the seeds.
However, the one that tore out my guts and tossed them back in my face was “The Was of Time” by Jonny Whiting and The U-Turns. Whiting’s theme, as far as I could decipher, was how time wasn’t necessarily linear but more reliably measured in intensity of feeling and, as such, even if I lived to be a hundred, Mickie’s leaving—her kicking of me to the curb—would always be first and foremost in my mind … my reality … my cross to bear.
Freaking music.
Of course, per Officer Kippy Gimm’s hushed phone call, that very same Jonny Whiting of Jonny Whiting and The U-Turns now lay dead on the tile floor in the kitchen of his Avondale condominium, evidently battered to death with his own electric guitar.
I grabbed my iPhone, tapped a few times at my Maps app so it could zero in on the address Kippy had provided, and tossed it back on the dashboard so the voice could wave us in like an air traffic controller. Kippy worked out of the 17th District—Albany Park—on North Pulaski. Her and her partner, Officer Dave Wabiszewski—or Wabs if you’d managed to advance to his inner circle—had been dispatched to Whiting’s address after a hysterical 911 call from the singer’s condominium manager and immediately discovered that the condo’s manager had every right to dial 911 and had every right to be hysterical.
Jonny Whiting was quite dead.
The singer-songwriter grew up a north-sider—local boy makes good—and moved back to his old stomping grounds after a couple decades of making music in New York City. He’d bought a top-floor condo off Addison Street, overlooking the north branch of the Chicago River. Whiting had been back five years and set up his nest in Avondale as part of Chicago’s process of renovating deteriorated neighborhoods per the influx of more well-to-do residents—gentrification I heard a newscaster once term it.
I parked my pickup in front of a fire hydrant, the only open spot I could find on Addison Street, half a block away from the mounting bustle of police activity. Kippy and her partner were nowhere to be found, so I Googled Jonny Whiting, came back with a million hits, and began tapping open articles of interest.
I was the Daily Double under One-Hit Wonders—fuck you Alex Trebek. Ain’t nothin’ the matter with being a one-hit wonder. You write “Tainted Love” or “Take On Me,” and Soft Cell and A-ha should get their asses kissed forever. The Proclaimers and their 500 miles, Nena and her red balloons, The Knack, even Looking Glass, their songs—their one-hit wonders—are fucking great. But I’d quibble with Trebek as “Bar Maid” was on the Billboard chart for a week or two and “Chainsaw” did okay as well.
I looked up from the interview Whiting had given Rolling Stone magazine back in the day. For the life of me I couldn’t place any songs called “Bar Maid” or “Chainsaw,” but I sure as hell could—and without the aid of a karaoke display—belt out maybe two-thirds of the lyrics to “The Was of Time” correctly. I figured Whiting was deluded and that the Jeopardy! answer had been spot on.
Jonny Whiting should have embraced his status as part of a late-eighties one-hit wonder band.
I stared at Vira, who shot a questioning look my way, and then hung the CPD notice from the rearview mirror. The notice would keep my pickup from being towed away as the closest spot I could pull into for the brief time Vira and I would be here was, in no uncertain terms, a no-parking zone.
Officer Gimm, Vira, and I had found ourselves in a bit of a pinch last fall—had come face-to-face with a man of most unpleasant means—but we’d fought back and, with no small assist from Vira, had somehow managed to stay alive. Kippy and I had since become friends and even chummed about for a few months—catching a dinner here, a movie there, even explored some off-leash dog parks about the city. But—as just friends—it’d become more and more difficult for me to be around her … and I’d pulled back since the first of the year.
So, with recent personal dynamics in mind, imagine my surprise when Officer Kippy Gimm called my cell phone first thing this morning and requested our presence at the scene of Chicago’s latest homicide … at the scene where rock-and-roller Jonny Whiting had, in fact, become the was of time.
Kippy stepped out onto the building’s stoop, stood next to the officer who’d been stationed there, and glanced toward my pickup truck.
That was our cue.
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey B. Burton
