I TOOK MY LEGAL PAD and the two professional flyers into my office. I sat down at the desk and slid the phone toward me. Then I grabbed the fat Chicago phone book off the floor. I opened it to the pages for the police department and stared.
I knew a lot about police procedure, but every city was different. Each city had different traditions and behaviors, unspoken rules and the code that the officers abided by. I didn’t know as much about Chicago’s as I did Memphis’s. Part of that came from the fact that I had an outside-the-law relationship with the Chicago Police, whereas in Memphis, I was a licensed private detective who occasionally had to do things with city officials, whether I wanted to or not.
In Memphis, I had dozens of people to contact or I knew
the right department. Until now, I had let Truman Johnson or
Jack Sinkovich do most of the work with the Chicago Police.
Sinkovich had gotten into trouble in less than an hour by asking about the Starlite Hotel. Laura had a visitor warning her away less than twenty-four hours after she put out her first feelers. If someone wanted to look into the connection
between Sinkovich and Laura, that someone would find that the only point of intersection was me, which none of us wanted.
Besides, I knew better than to go to the local precinct. The information I needed was not about the hotel per se, but about two missing girls. Girls who would be noticed in the white areas of town, but they wouldn’t be noticed in black neighborhoods.
That was where I would start.
I decided that the West Side precincts were the best place to start. They were far enough away that most South Side parents, families, and friends wouldn’t regularly go into those areas. Plus, after the Panther raid, the most people considered the West Side much more dangerous than the South Side.
I started with the precinct farthest west, but still inside the neighborhood.
A bored dispatch answered the phone.
“Hello,” I said in my best Tennessee accent. “My name is Detective Eustace Fittle of the Nashville Police Department. I would like to speak to someone in your precinct regarding a young woman named Donna Loring.”
“Just one moment, Detective Fittle,” the dispatch said and put me on hold.
I knew better than to get excited about this; I was probably being transferred to the precinct’s information officer.
“Detective Fittle?” The voice that greeted me was deep and rich. “I’m Officer Sal DePalma. How may I help you?”
“Officer DePalma, I have here in custody one Mark Jones.” I spoke slowly, conversationally, like so many of whites in Tennessee did. I made certain that I sounded unconcerned and unconvinced. “He says he has some information on the kidnapping of a Donna Loring of Chicago and he is willing to trade that information for reduced charges. He says she’s a colored girl who was taken from her school in 1968.”
“Did he say what school?” DePalma did not sound that interested.
“He did not. He said it was quite a coup because she has a brother who is associated with someone named…” I paused here for effect. “…Jeff Fort. Does that mean anything to you?”
DePalma grunted. It was a sound of surprise. “Actually, it does, detective. Jeff Fort is the leader of one of our largest gangs. He does not operate in our neighborhood, and I’m not familiar with the kidnapping of Miss Loring. You probably want one of the South Side precincts. Let me get you those numbers.”
“Before you do,” I said, “let me add that Jones claims that Miss Loring was taken from her neighborhood so that Mr. Fort’s people could not track her. That is why she has not been found.”
“Did he say if she was alive?”
“Unfortunately, he did not. He was quite cagey about the information. He asked through his lawyer that we check on the kidnapping of Miss Loring first, and then he would give us the information we need. This is a fairly high-profile case, or I would not even be talking to you. We believe that in addition to Miss Loring, Mr. Jones has information on one of our other
suspects, and we are using this Loring angle as a way to check this young man’s veracity. Am I being clear here?”
DePalma chuckled. I had just told him that I didn’t care about Jones’s case, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to deal with my made-up criminal. Because my made-up case was high profile, however, I had also just told DePalma that I could get in trouble with higher-ups if I didn’t do the obligatory research.
“Give me your number, and I’ll call you right back,” DePalma said.
“I would love to,” I said, “but it would be better for all concerned if I just remained on the phone. If you cannot find any information or need to point me elsewhere in a few minutes, well, that’s just fine and dandy with me.”
His chuckle went deeper. “I’m putting you on hold. This should only take a minute.”
He vanished, and that blank, flat sound that marked being on hold replaced the faint precinct noise behind him.
I clicked my pen while I waited. My stomach was twisted. I had to play this carefully or he would call the Nashville Police and ask for Eustace Fittle. If DePalma did that relatively quickly, he might send out some kind of alert to the other precincts that someone posing as a Nashville Police officer was trying to get information on Donna Loring.
I had had one phone investigation go awry like that when I was still in Memphis. I had called a precinct in Los Angeles, and had done something so obviously wrong that when I called a nearby precinct, I had already been made. I’d had to try something else to finish that investigation.
“Detective Fittle?” DePalma had returned. “How do you spell your last name?”
That twisting in my stomach had grown worse. “F-i-t-t-l-e. My family has been in these parts for more than 150 years. We lost a goodly portion of the Fittles in the War for Southern Independence.”
“The…what?” DePalma asked, and then before I could answer, said, “Oh. The Civil War.”
“We think of it as uncivil here,” I said.
“I suppose you do.” He no longer sounded amused. More perplexed, as if I were some kind of species of human he did not understand.
I wanted to tell him I had never understood that particular species of human, either, but I couldn’t.
“Unfortunately for you,” he said, “Jeff Fort just got out on bail last night or we could have checked with him about his lieutenants or at least, put you in touch with the Cook County jail and they could have worked with him for you. I did check with one of our gang experts, and he said that Fort does have a lieutenant named Raymond Loring. He has a long sheet. I don’t see anything about a sister, though. At least the name checks out.”
“That it does,” I said. “I thank you, and I’ll take those phone numbers now, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure,” he said. “But before I give them to you, I need to warn you. If there is a sister and if she was kidnapped in fall or winter of 1968, she was probably taken by the Black Panthers. You know we’ve had some Panther troubles here. They were
bitter rivals of the Black P. Stone Nation, which is Jeff Fort’s gang.”
“They were, not they are?” I asked. “Have they joined forces?”
“No one is joining forces with Chicago’s Panthers,” he said. “Aren’t you familiar with what happened to their leader in December?”
“Oh,” I said, dragging out the word. “That is the Hampstead boy, right? I hear you gentlemen handled him the way that he should’ve been handled. A little Southern justice Northern style.”
“Hampton, yes,” he said. “Sometimes the best justice is the kind that saves the taxpayer money.”
“It surely is,” I said. “You think this Jones is a Black Panther?”
“It’s possible,” DePalma said. “If he is from Chicago—” “He says he is,” I deliberately interrupted.
“Then he might also be a Vice Lord. They’re rivals of the Stones, but they’re not as powerful or connected as the Black Panthers. Be careful, if he is with those thugs, all right?”
“I most certainly will. Thank you for that information. And do thank your gang expert,” I said. “I had no idea that this could go that dangerous so quickly. I will inform my chief and the chief prosecutor. We might not want to negotiate with a man like this.”
“Or,” DePalma said, “you might want to find out everything he knows. If there’s anything useful to us here,
please contact me.”
“You can count on me. I thank you,” I said. Then I wrote down the phone numbers he gave me, and hung up.
I stared at them for a moment. Dangerous? The Panthers? I knew that the media liked to portray them that way. I considered that the problem all black men had when they carried guns. When they carried guns and pointed out that they had guns, they automatically scared white people.
I hadn’t liked the Panthers, although Hampton had impressed me each time I’d met him, but they did call themselves the Black Panther Party For Self-Defense. And so far as I could tell, they never initiated an action. They defended themselves when they had to.
Not that they had had a chance on December 4th. That shoot-out had been cold-blooded murder, and I might have been talking to one of the members of the assassination squad. Or maybe, talking to him via DePalma, who probably hadn’t had a high enough rank to go on that particular mission.
Raymond Loring, Jeff Fort’s right-hand man. That was a start.
I could either call the numbers that De Palma gave me as Eustace Fittle or I could continue my trolling for information.
I decided to try a different tack. I contacted the next precinct, not too far from first one I had called.
When the dispatch answered, I said, “I need to talk to someone in Vice.”
I got patched through to a Detective Stan Birns. It only took a moment.
He answered with a curt, “Stan Birns. What can I do you for?”
“This is Detective Michael Larew,” I said, making sure my vowels had flattened. I pitched my voice higher than it usually was. “I’m calling from Gary, Indiana. Last night, two of our officers picked up a strung-out young woman who says her name is Donna Loring. She says she’s from Chicago, and she’s telling quite a story. She claims she’s been kidnapped and taken across state lines. Because she is so strung out, I am disinclined to believe her. She’s dressed like a hooker. She smells like a hooker. I believe she’s saying these things so that we do not arrest her. But my captain wants me to contact Chicago PD to see if she has an arrest record there.”
“How did you end up calling this precinct?” Detective Birns asked. “You should contact headquarters and request something from the department of records.”
“I have,” I said. “They tell me it will take a week or more to get the paperwork I need if indeed she has any records with the Chicago Police. I then asked for the numbers of precincts in your colored neighborhoods, hoping that someone there might remember a girl with this name. She’s very thin, about 5’4”, and has one of those kinky hairdos the colored girls like so much now. She says she has family in Chicago, a brother who is associated with some stones? She actually wanted me to contact him, as if I would do that. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you….”
“It rings a bell, actually,” Detective Birns said. “I’ll call you right back.”
“How about I call you?” I said. “That way the charges are not on you. I don’t know about your district, but ours is getting quite rigid about long-distance telephone charges.”
“All right,” he said, and he sounded distracted. He was thinking of something. “Give me about fifteen minutes.”
I promised that I would call back shortly. Then I hung up and wondered if I dare call another station. I decided to wait.
I got up, made myself that cup of coffee I had skipped, and by the time it was poured, my fifteen minutes were up. I called him back in twenty, just so that I wouldn’t seem to eager.
“Found the file I was looking for,” he said, without preamble. “I don’t think your girl is Loring, but the story she tells is pretty curious.”
“What were you looking for?” I asked.
“We pulled up a body in November, dumped in on West Madison. We have a lot of burned-out properties there from the riots in ’68.”
“At the Democratic Convention?” I asked.
“Naw,” he said. “The niggers went nuts when King got shot, burned half their neighborhoods, which I guess you gotta expect.”
A wave of anger flowed through me. I had to take a deep breath, mentally reminding myself this was why I used the phone. He automatically assumed I was white, and automatically assumed I agreed with him.
If I tried to agree with him, my voice would betray me. So I said, “You found her in a burned-out building?”
“Naw,” he said. “A lot of ’em were just bulldozed. Empty fields that the mayor wants someone to invest in but with the gangs and the Panthers and the crime, smart money is staying away.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess it would.”
“So she was in one of them burned-out lots. She’d been dumped.”
“And she’s—?”
“Donna Loring,” he said.
“You know that for sure?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “We didn’t say nothing about it though. Her brother’s big in the Stones, and they’re at war with the Panthers. We were afraid something would get set off. But the brother more or less ID’d her anyway.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“We all knew her as La Donna, which one of the guys said in Italian meant ‘the lady’ and we thought it was funny because it was kinda true. She acted like hooking was beneath her. She didn’t call guys, she didn’t go up to cars unless she had to, she didn’t do nothing, never smiled, never looked at anyone. If you wanted to pay for a strung-out warm body, you got it with her.”
I shuddered. Hadn’t Jonathan said everyone loved her? He compared her to Norene, always happy, always effervescent.
“Wasn’t even worth my time to arrest,” he said. “Just a skinny piece of meat.”
A series of thoughts went through my mind. Wouldn’t someone like Donna have been an opportunity for Vice? If she was clearly unhappy in the life, then she would have been a prime target for helping the cops go after the pimps or the organization that she worked for.
Then I realized what he meant, exactly. He worked Vice, because he got what he considered benefits.
“Never took her in, never made her promises?” I asked, trying to sound like a comrade.
“No point,” he said. “Usually it’s tit for tat if you know what I mean. And there wasn’t tit there, let alone tat.”
He confirmed what I thought. I swallowed coffee-tasting bile.
“But you said her brother identified her,” I said.
“Oh, yeah. When we found her. We had to figure out what to do about her—Potter’s Field, send her home, you know. And one of my guys remembered some flyer the brother’s lieutenants were putting up about a year before. We actually got one in the file. She had some mark on her wrist…”
I could hear papers fluttering.
“Yeah, here it is. ‘Distinctive mole on her left wrist.’ And she had one. Big as a bruise, ugly thing.”
“Flyer,” I repeated. “You had a flyer?”
“She disappeared. The brother wanted her back. We figured the Panthers or the Vice Lords or someone took her for a few
days, made him upset. Then he got her back and she was damaged goods, so he put her to work.”
“You know that for a fact?” I asked.
My tone might have been off, because he snapped, “Well, yeah, of course. You know your neighborhoods too. Girls like this, they work for gangs, bringing in money. She got broke in somewhere, then got sent home, and they put her to work.”
“I thought you said she was in a new neighborhood.” I hoped he had said something like that, because I needed to confront him on this. I needed to confront him on something.
“Stones are South Side, this is West Side, we figured they were just making inroads to piss off the Panthers.”
“Who had kidnapped her in the first place,” I said.
“What’s it matter?” he said, his voice going up. “She was just a hooker.”
She was someone’s sister, someone’s daughter. Good friend, great sister, beloved daughter. Hadn’t he seen that on the flyer as well?
“What did she die of?” I asked.
“Who the hell knows?” he said. “What they always die of. The life killed her.”
That much was probably true. “You didn’t do an autopsy.”
“Dunno about you, but if your superiors are breathing down your neck to save phone costs, then they really don’t like it when you order an autopsy on a dead hooker.” He sounded angry now.
“I was just wondering, considering what my girl was telling me. It sounds like there was something strange going on.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sounds like your girl’s trying to get out of whatever lockup you got her in, thinking you might know some of the Chicago stuff because Gary’s almost a suburb, right?”
I had a hunch those were fighting words to someone from Gary. “Look,” I said, letting a low level of the fury I felt at him into my voice, “you’ve been helpful, and I know I was taking quite a bit of your time. If we find out something about this girl or your dead hooker, you want me to let you know?”
“Naw,” he said. “Hookers die. Gangs fight. The monkeys burn their neighborhoods. And we let them. If they kill each other off, things get better in the Great City of Chicago.”
I hung up. I couldn’t do anything else. Let him think I was pissed about the Gary comment. I simply couldn’t deal with that level of inhumanity.
Was this what Sinkovich was talking about when he said that cops learned to take small victories? They ignored girls like Donna Loring, girls taken just a few miles from their homes, destroyed, and then put to work. Their deaths weren’t even worth an investigation? They weren’t pretty enough to arrest. Hell, Birns didn’t even think he should contact her family when they first figured out who she was.
Maybe she could have been saved. Maybe she would still be alive now, and maybe she would be on the road to some kind of recovery.
Then I shook my head. I could almost hear Sinkovich. You think a girl like that, with her brother, coulda gone home and become a citizen? Birns’s right. She’d just keep hooking. Can’t save them all, Grimshaw, and sometimes you gotta cut your losses.
I knew for a fact that the Blackstone Rangers had brokered a truce with the Panthers by the time her body had been dumped. She’d been dumped on West Madison, which put her body right near the house where Hampton died. Or maybe on the same road.
Would the Stones have retaliated against the Panthers?
I wouldn’t have put it past them.
The cops seemed to believe in Panther involvement. But no one had told Conlisk or any of the higher level members of the department. Because if they truly believed that Donna Loring had been killed by Panthers, they would have leaked that information to the Stones and hoped that the Stones took out the Panthers.
The cops had tried several times to do it themselves last year, and succeeded only when they raided that house in December.
People on the West Side only knew her as La Donna, not as Donna Loring. The fact that she ended up there, on the low end of the hooker ladder, meant either she hadn’t worked out or the operation was more low-end than Sinkovich thought.
Although it would make sense that the operation had prostitutes of all levels, from the high-end ones to the streetwalkers who barely knew their own names.
I thought of Jonathon’s fingers, tracing that image of her face.
I thought of her infectious smile.
I stood up. I had one of the links I wanted. A direct line from the school to the hotel to a dead prostitute on Chicago’s West Side.
I wasn’t sure what to do with it all yet, but I would figure it out.
I always did.