Detective Fiction

  DETECTIVE

  FICTION

  WILLIAM WELLS

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, unless explicitly noted, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by William Wells

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wells, William—

  Detective fiction / by William Wells.

  pages; cm

  ISBN 978-1-57962-431-6 (hardcover)

  eISBN: 978-1-57962-446-0

  1. Serial murder investigation—Fiction. 2. Suspense fiction.

  3. Mystery fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.E4795D48 2016

  813'.6—dc23 2015034964

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Eddie and Lucy

  “Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.”

  —SIDONIE-GABRIELLE COLETTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Naples is a real city on the Southwest Florida Gulf Coast. The year-round population of about 22,000 residents doubles during the winter months, also known as “The Season.” This creates a town-and-gown kind of situation. The permanent residents dislike the overcrowding during the winter, but the local merchants depend upon the snowbirds and tourists to survive.

  Not everyone who resides in Naples is over-the-top wealthy, of course, but if you are doing a PhD thesis on the growing income disparity in America, Naples is one of the places where you should do your fieldwork.

  As with most, if not all, of the coastal regions of the Sunshine State, overdevelopment and overcrowding threaten the tranquility and natural beauty of the region. But it remains a very nice place to live and a lot of the unpleasant stuff is made up. During the year I was writing this book, residential property values did increase by 25 percent.

  My gratitude to Martin and Judith Shepard of The Permanent Press in Sag Harbor, New York, for publishing my first effort at detective fiction; to Judith, and to Barbara Anderson, for excellent editing; and to Lon Kirschner for his good cover design.

  And thanks also to the pioneers and current stars of the detective fiction trade, whose work has provided not only countless hours of great reading over the years but also a master class as I was writing this book.

  “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.”

  —RAYMOND CHANDLER

  1.

  THE DETECTIVE

  The cold winds of a late October storm front howling in off Lake Michigan drove a cold rain through the skyscraper canyons of Chicago, painting the cityscape with a coat of glistening wetness that made the old city look new, at least for a while.

  The city shrugged its big shoulders and thought: At least it’s not snow, not yet.

  A flash of lightning ripped across the evening sky, illuminating the figure of a man standing on a South Side street corner beneath a streetlamp whose bulb had long been broken, as were all the others in the vicinity, because it was that kind of neighborhood.

  The wind-driven rain drenched the man—Detective Lieutenant Jack Stoney, to be precise—like he was a stockyard side of beef swinging through a car wash. Hatless, his black hair dripped water down his neck. He shivered, turned up the collar of his well-worn Burberry, and reflexively reached into an inside pocket for a pack of the unfiltered Lucky Strikes he’d given up a year ago when, during his annual departmental physical exam, the sawbones showed him a gray, diseased lung floating in chloroform in a jar.

  Nothing in the coat pocket but an empty pack of Juicy Fruit and an old Illinois lottery ticket. Not a winner, or Stoney wouldn’t have been standing there at all, not in that neighborhood, and maybe not in that city, with winter on the way.

  Well, Stoney thought, at least I’ve still got Mr. Jack Daniel’s to comfort me in times of need—that is, until the doc shows me a ruined liver in a jar and spoils the party completely.

  A clog of leaves broke loose up in the gutter of the tumbledown four-flat he was staking out, releasing a swampy Niagara of dirty water that gushed down the drainpipe and spilled onto his shoes and pants cuffs.

  I was too friggin’ old for this drill three mayors ago, he thought, as he shook the rainwater off his coat and stomped the wet leafy crud off his shoes, like a hunting dog coming up out of a marsh.

  He looked up at the windows of the building’s two second-floor apartments. The lights were on in both, but shades blocked the view inside. I have choices, Stoney thought:

  A, keep standing out here like a fuckin’ mook.

  B, call it in, let a SWAT team do the heavy lifting, head home, fill a glass with Black Jack on the rocks, and catch the Bulls against the Lakers on TV.

  Or C, go inside and up to the second floor, kick in both apartment doors if necessary, and then try to persuade one Marcus Lamont, if in fact that shit-for-brains loser is really up there, that the Criminal Code of the City of Chicago is not to be taken lightly.

  Stoney’s plan had been to spend the evening at the Baby Doll Polka Lounge on West Cermack. He liked the Baby Doll for its generous pours, the kielbasa with kraut sandwiches, and the antique Wurlitzer jukebox, with its flashing rainbow of neon lights, and its stack of 45-rpm vinyl discs embedded with old Chicago bluesmen like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, and Buddy Guy.

  Stoney was seated on a stool at the Baby Doll, sipping his drink and chatting up a waitress named Doris when a snitch he knew named Jake The Snake slid onto the stool beside him. Jake had a last name, like everyone, but he’d been called The Snake so long maybe even he’d forgotten it.

  The Snake offered Stoney the location of Marcus Lamont’s hideyhole in return for his usual fee: A shot of Four Roses with a beer back and a favor in the bank for when The Snake got into trouble, which he always did, sooner or later. Usually sooner.

  Lamont had robbed the Jewel Supermarket at Division and Clark two weeks earlier. That, by itself, was not enough reason to leave the convivial warmth of the Baby Doll on a nasty night. Homicide detectives didn’t chase robbers. But Lamont had shot and killed an off-duty cop working as a security guard at the Jewel. And that, my friend, is a definite no-no.

  Stoney knew the cop: Lenny Wadkins, good guy, wife and three kids, a departmental Medal of Valor, eight months from retirement, with plans to move down to Vero Beach to fish and play golf. So Lamont had to go down, with “Dead or Alive” implied, if not printed, on his wanted poster.

  There had been no leads on his whereabouts until The Snake’s tip.

  “I know a guy who knows a guy who told me that Lamont is at his girlfriend’s place as we speak,” the snitch had said. “Her name’s Lucinda. Strips at the Funky Monkey. Lives in an apartment at Saginaw and Ninety-Third, second floor. Don’t know which of the two units, though.”

  Good enough. Stoney took a twenty from his wallet and slapped it onto the bar.

  “Thank you, my man,” The Snake said as he made the bill disappear with a magician’s slick sleight of hand.

  Stoney put down another twenty for his drinks, took his trench coat from a hook by the door, and went outside. He was driving his classic red 1963 Corvette Stingray convertible, and not the department’s unmarked brown Taurus that had his shotgun and Kevlar vest in the trunk.

&nbs
p; You took drinking money and a roll of Tums to the Baby Doll, and your service revolver, but not a Kevlar vest and a shotgun. The first and last time some asshole had tried to take all the fun out of happy hour at the Baby Doll, by walking in with a sawed-off shotgun concealed under his coat, demanding the contents of the register and the customers’ pockets, it had not ended well for the perp.

  Leon Kramarczyk, the owner, who’d been a paratrooper with the Polish army, had shot the dickbrain through the neck with the Vis 9 mm pistol he kept near the cash drawer. Word got around the neighborhood that there were much easier ways to make a living than by sticking up the Baby Doll Polka Lounge.

  Stoney looked up at the second floor again. The rulebook called for choice B. Call in backup. Why be a hero? At some point, when you’re burned out by the job, divorced, middle-aged, and gun-shot on three occasions, enough should finally be enough. The citizens he’d sworn to protect and serve, as it said on the sides of the squad cars, didn’t care about the daily life of a cop. Instead of gratitude, you got a shield, a service sidearm, and a salary that paid for three hots and a cot, as they said in the marines. But no more than that, unless you counted the adrenaline high you got from the job, sometimes. The times when your life was on the line.

  If you survived the mean streets, and the inevitable Internal Affairs investigations about your conduct, you also got a pension. Maybe you would save enough to chase the standard-issue cop dream of moving somewhere where the sun shined year-round and you were safe from the bite of The Hawk, which is what Lou Rawls called the winter wind off the lake.

  One cop Stoney knew did end up owning a bar in Reno, but he’d been on the take and put his added income into tax-free municipal bonds.

  None of that for Jack Stoney, however. Honest and poor, that was his fate, he had concluded early on. He knew that he’d never get rich on the public payroll, but what the hell, it sure was fun prowling the city streets with a badge and a gun.

  Stoney reached under his coat and touched his Smith & Wesson Distinguished Combat .357 Magnum in the leather holster clipped to his belt. The department had issued him its standard 9 mm Sig Sauer, which he used exactly once and returned to the armaments clerk when a shot through the thigh failed to stop a badass dude high on crack cocaine coming at him in an alley off West Madison.

  Apparently the perp’s central nervous system was so anesthetized by the drug that he didn’t even realize he’d been shot until Stoney put another round into him, center mass. That finally stopped him. He looked down with terminal surprise at his chest, a red stain blooming on his white tee shirt. He dropped to his knees, saying “Ohhh fuck me . . .” and toppled over frontward, dead before his head bounced off the pavement.

  After filling out his after-action report, and being interviewed by Internal Affairs, Stoney had gone home and found the Smith & Wesson wrapped in an oilcloth at the bottom of his old USMC trunk, beneath the proud uniforms of his youth.

  The S&W was only a six-shot versus the semiauto Sig with seventeen rounds in its clip. But the big-bore bullets would always do the trick, whether the dickweed was stoned or sober, creating an exit wound you could drive a Ford F150 with double-wide tires through.

  Stoney looked up and saw a shadow move past one of the second-floor windows of the front apartment, too big to be a woman. Maybe that wasn’t Lamont, but The Snake has never given me bad info, so he’s up there, Stoney thought. Warm and dry and gettin’ it on with some poontang whose taste is as bad as her luck while I’m out here freezing my sorry butt in the goddamned rain.

  He decided. Choice B. Call in the badass young guns of SWAT. This time, the rulebook had it right. He fished his cell phone out of his pocket. But then he paused, sighed, and put the phone away, thinking, what the hell, I’m already here, I’m already wet, that cocksucking, motherhumping Lamont killed a cop and maybe he’d be gone by the time the SWAT boys arrive.

  So lock and load. It’s C.

  He moved up the three cement steps to the front door of the old building, named The Lakeview Apartments, a sign mounted on the brick wall beside the door announced, even though the lake was nowhere in sight.

  He found the door locked and shouldered it open, easy enough given the weakness of the rusted lock and the decayed wooden frame.

  He stepped into the lobby: peeling, puke-green paint on the walls, worn brown linoleum on the floor, and one bare-bulb light fixture hanging from the low ceiling. There were doors to the right and left for apartments 1A and 1B, and a stairway leading up to the second floor to 2A and 2B.

  Stoney left the outside door wide open, just in case he’d need to exit the building in a hurry, and started up the creaky wooden stairway, straddling his feet onto the outside of each step so as to reduce the sound of his footsteps. That was part of the tradecraft a cop had to learn if he wanted to make it to that boat and bar down south.

  He paused in the second-floor hallway and unscrewed the lightbulb in the wall fixture so he wouldn’t be backlit when he made his move. The S&W came out, held barrel down along his right leg.

  He touched the thin fabric of the black tee shirt under his trench coat where his Kevlar vest should be. Well, you play the hand you’re dealt, he reflected, which pretty much summed up his philosophy of life.

  The Snake hadn’t known which second-floor apartment. So roll the dice: 2A or 2B? If Stoney guessed wrong, maybe he’d give a family having dinner one hell of a surprise.

  He mentally flipped a coin, turned toward 2B, and gave the door a prodigious cop-kick with his size twelve hand-tooled cowboy boots, like a pizza delivery boy from hell: Anyone here order a large sausage and mushroom, motherfucker?

  The door flew inward and hung open. By way of greeting, a shotgun blast from inside ripped through the air, splintering the wood of the jamb, telling Stoney he’d guessed right.

  He pressed himself flat as paint against the hallway wall and rubbed his right cheek with the back of his left hand. It came away smeared with blood. Just a flesh wound from the flying wood splinters, and not the shotgun pellets, but it’d hurt like hell when shaving.

  All right Lamont, now you’ve gone and done it, Jack Stoney thought. You’ve put me in a real bad mood.

  He raised the S&W, crouched low, and rolled into the apartment, firing as he went . . .

  2.

  SHOOT ME AND I BLEED

  Spoiler alert: Jack Stoney will survive that gunfight because he’s a fictional detective, and he needs to be around to appear in sequels to the novel you’ve just been reading. A character made of ink and paper does not die unless the author wants him to.

  But I do bleed when shot, and have, on more than one occasion. So, unlike Detective Stoney, I would not blast my way into Apartment 2B, Lone Ranger style. I’d call in a SWAT team with their full body armor, flash-bang and tear-gas grenades, assault rifles, and bring-it-on attitudes, while I hung back, way back, and supervised.

  In fact, in a strikingly similar situation, I did exactly that. While staking out a real Chicago South Side four-flat, and seeing the bad guy I was after walk past a window, I pulled out my cell phone instead of my gun. It seemed like half the precinct turned out to catch the cop killer, who didn’t survive the “arrest attempt,” which was how the official after-action report described what was essentially an execution. You want your constitutional right to a fair trial, don’t kill an officer of the law, at least not in Chi Town.

  Because of prudent decisions like that one, I am alive and sitting in the galley of my houseboat in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, a red Sharpie in my hand, reading through the manuscript of Stoney’s Last Stand, which is William Stevens’s new Jack Stoney novel.

  Bill Stevens is the Chicago Tribune’s veteran police reporter. He has me edit his best-selling books before they are published to help him get the cop stuff right. I get a nice fee for this work, but I’d do it for free because I have a vested interest. The stories are all based upon my own career as a Chicago homicide detective.

  If Bill gets somet
hing wrong, as he did a few times before asking for my assistance, he inevitably receives letters from readers taking him to task. For example: Jack Stoney’s 1911 model .45-caliber handgun was a semiautomatic, not a revolver, wrote one reader from Minneapolis; Jack Stoney could not have driven a 2012 Ford Crown Victoria with the police interceptor package because Ford stopped making that model in 2011 and switched to the Taurus for law enforcement work, commented a retired cop from San Diego; the Chicago Police Department calls it the Homicide Division, not Robbery-Homicide as they do in some other cities, explained a man in Prague. How in the world a man in the Czech Republic knew that arcane fact is beyond me, but he was, in fact, correct.

  I considered making a note in the margin of Bill’s manuscript describing how that South Side stakeout actually went down. But I decided against it. Jack Stoney would have kicked in the door and gone in alone. Nobody wants to read about a hero who plays it safe.

  It’s a cliché, I know, all those cops you read about in detective novels. They are inevitably cynical; burned out after too many years on the job; recovering alcoholics struggling to stay on the wagon; divorced, because their ex-wives finally couldn’t take the drinking and the stress of the cop life anymore; estranged from their kids because they put the job first and weren’t around for the school plays and soccer games; mavericks, always in hot water with their captains/police chiefs/mayors, but (just barely) tolerated because they have the best close rates in the department.

  ALLOW ME to introduce myself. I am Mr. Cliché in the flesh, aka Chicago Homicide Detective Sergeant Jack Starkey (retired). You’ve just read my résumé.

  After being shot for the third time, once while a marine involved in an overseas operation that didn’t officially exist, and twice more while on the payroll of the City of Chicago, I retired on full disability to the little town of Fort Myers Beach on Florida’s Southwest Gulf Coast, where I own a bar and live on a boat. Living the cop dream, and loving it. And no, I wasn’t on the take. Bill Stevens makes a lot of money from his novels. He is my partner in the bar, The Drunken Parrot. He put up the cash and I manage the place.