Joel’s clock started to chime the hour. Sixty minutes to get something up on Facebook. Sixty minutes to save Bernadine. If she was still—of course she was still alive. She was the terrorists’ bargaining chip.
We left Joel standing in the middle of his living room, the half gallon of Grey Goose in one hand, a half-drunk glass in the other. He tried to keep us there—he wanted to talk about Mandel, did I really think Mandel had killed Annie, but I brushed him off.
“The only thing I care about this morning is saving Bernadine Fouchard. We’ll worry later about Spike and Scanlon and whether Mandel killed Annie.”
As we walked out the door, he called after me that he wanted me to talk to Ira. “Tell him his old pal Sol was a criminal and a murderer.”
I shut the door, pushed the elevator button over and over.
“He only thinks about hisself,” Mr. Contreras fumed when the car finally arrived. “Don’t he care about Bernie?”
When we were back on the street, I took a precious minute to phone Conrad. He’d gotten a search warrant for Sturlese but they hadn’t found Bernie.
“What about the Sturlese brothers? Were they all there?”
“Two were on job sites, at least according to dispatch. One claims he was home with the flu, but his wife said he felt so sick he’d gone to the hospital. We’re trying to track them all down.”
“Anything on Sebastian?”
“No one’s spotted him yet. We went to the sister, what’s her name? Viola? Told her where you’d found him, tried to get her to cough up someplace he might be hiding. I don’t know if she’s scared stupid or really doesn’t know. I had my guys take her in, but all she does is sit and cry. Give me a bright idea, Warshawski.”
“Scanlon,” I said. “He’s got a slush fund under cover of his Say, Yes! foundation. He’s connected to this—”
“What I meant was a smart idea.” He hung up.
I put the car in motion. I’d come up with only one idea and it wasn’t necessarily bright or even smart, but I talked it over with Mr. Contreras and he agreed to try it.
We found the nearest copy center, down on Jeffery, and dug up photos of Scanlon and Sol Mandel online. We used free software to create a new website that we called “Annie Guzzo’s Murder.”
Stella Guzzo spent twenty-five years in Logan Correctional Center for killing her daughter. In the words of the Chicago Mob, she wore the jacket. Only she never agreed to. She didn’t know she was covering up for two smooth operators: Sol Mandel and Rory Scanlon.
When a police officer tried to put an end to a campaign of terror against South Chicago’s small businesses, Scanlon sent money to the police widows and orphans fund and got the officer sent to Chicago’s highest-crime district, with a target painted on his forehead for his fellow officers to aim at. Here’s the cocky note Rory Scanlon sent to the officer when the old Fourth District watch commander got rid of the meddlesome cop.
We scanned the letter and added it to the site. I also e-mailed it to Freeman Carter, my own lawyer, with the login and password for the website. Do your best, Freeman, in case I’m not around to do it for you, I wrote. I’m putting the originals in the mail to you.
We posted Scanlon’s and Mandel’s photos, spun a narrative based on my guess about the use of Say, Yes! funds, to send Hurlihey to the state legislature, and finished by writing, Stay Tuned for More Details.
We finished at 8:56. At 8:57, while we were still at the copy center computer, my phone rang again.
“Not seeing anything on your Facebook page, Contreras,” the ugly voice growled.
“Not there,” my neighbor said. “Got a website. You check it out. For the next hour, you can only get to it with a password. You turn over Bernie—Bernadine—and if she ain’t been hurt, I’ll take it down. You screw up, the whole world will see it and I’ll be adding details. Password is ‘ScumbagYes.’”
There was a pause while the caller went online. “We won’t meet you in Calumet Park, too exposed, too easy for you to get cops into the Coast Guard building. We’ll wait for you on Stony, where it dead-ends at the river. Be there in thirty with that letter you’re saying Scanlon wrote.”
“Sixty,” Mr. Contreras said. “I’m ten miles away from you.”
We heard muted talk in the background. “Forty-five. We see cops coming, the kid goes over the retaining wall into the Cal.”
“They’re already there,” I said flatly to Mr. Contreras when he’d hung up. “It’s the perfect ambush spot: there’s only one way in.”
I put the original of the “widows and orphans” letter into an express pack and sent it off to Freeman.
“Don’t be calling the cops,” Mr. Contreras begged as we hustled back to the car, “’cause they won’t know to come in quiet and next thing you know, these bastards’ll toss little Bernie overboard.”