“Gonna make things ticklish for me, just so you know.”
“Lynch, this turns out, you can get your ticket punched any way you like. It don’t, Captain’s the least of your problems.”
Lynch paused a minute, stared Riley down. Not like he didn’t know that, didn’t mean he had to like it.
“OK,” Lynch said finally, “so what are we doing today?”
“The old man, he was telling me that Junior was catching some shit from this one nigger group – the AMN Commando. Panther types. Wanted that looked into.”
“Yeah,” said Lynch. “Interviewed Hastings Clarke yesterday. He brought them up. Seemed like he wanted to raise the radical black angle and shoot it down at the same time.”
Riley nodded. “Junior was a little sensitive about race stuff. It’s all the rage with these guys, brotherhood of man and all that shit. So Clarke wants to keep the coloreds on his side. The thing, though, is the old man, he hears maybe some of these guys had a hard on for Junior, he checks em out, calls Riordan, who runs things past our buddies from Washington here, and God knows who Zeke runs things past. Thing is, this comes up,” Riley nodded his head at the tape deck, “and we thought you should hear it.” Riley nodded at the Feds, and MacDonald clicked the tape on.
Negro voice, sounded like anyway. Giving a speech in front of a pretty raucous crowd. “We ain’t waitin’ no more. We ain’t askin’ no more. Rights ain’t some scraps we wait for from the massuh’s table. We don’t need them from nobody – we own them. We was born with them. All we need to do is keep Whitey from takin’ them away. Pursuit of happiness? You ask any Black man wants to work for what any white man gets for free. They be takin’ it away. Liberty? You ask our brothers locked up in white jails because they march for their rights or fight for their rights. They be takin’ that away. Life? You ask Fred Hampton bout that when you see him, shot in his bed by the Chicago pigs. Butchered in his bed. They be takin’ life away. But we gonna let them take ours? No. By any means necessary. Fight in the streets if we gotta. By any means necessary. Butcher the pigs if we gotta. By any means necessary–” The Fed clicked the tape off.
“Butcher the pigs?” said Lynch.
“Thought that might ring a bell,” Riley answered.
“Who’s on the tape?”
Zeke Fisher sat forward in his seat, folded his hands in front of him on the table. “He calls himself Simba now, which is Swahili for lion. His real name is Harold James, Jr. Born August 3, 1948 to Rosa and Harold James in Mobile, Alabama. Moved to the south side of Chicago in September of 1955. He was a player with the Black Panthers here, mostly with some of the social programs they were running around the South Side. After the Hampton shooting, he turned severely militant.”
“He’s organizing the gangs,” Riordan said. “We got some informants on the inside of that. Hampton had that supposed gang truce, all that crap about the niggers gotta stop fighting each other, gotta fight us instead, so this James guy knows that crowd. What’s he’s doing now is trying to turn that into his own little army.”
Harris, the FBI guy, spoke up. “We’ve obtained tapes of other speeches in which this butcher the pigs rhetoric has come up. He’s very hostile to the police – to any authority, really.”
Lynch felt like he was sitting through a sales job – everybody in the room adding his piece to the pitch.
“The thing is,” Lynch said, “why would some guy who’s known for this butcher the pigs line go and paint it on a wall?”
“That’s a valid question,” said Fisher. “I don’t think we can look at this like a traditional crime where the intent is to avoid detection. This was a political act. I believe that James wants to create a direct conflict with the political authority, and especially with the more liberal politicians that, in essence, are his competition. He wants to create an unbridgeable barrier between the radical movement and traditional political solutions. In essence, he wants a rebellion.”
“Sounds like a death wish,” said Lynch.
“Hey, he wants to die, I want him dead, I got your racial harmony right here,” said Riordan.
Lynch stopped Riley in the hall outside the conference room. “Listen, couple of things I want to run past you without the audience.”
“OK,” said Riley, pushing open the door to the men’s room. “Step into my office.”
Riley walked over to a urinal and started taking a leak. “So what’s up?”
“ME found something on Hurley once he got him in the shop. No easy way to put this. Looks like Junior was a fag. He had semen in his ass. Stefanski’s semen, so far as the ME can tell.” Lynch was watching closely to see how Riley took this.
Riley kept pissing. Finished, zipped up, turned around.
“This on paper?”
Lynch decided to play a little dodge ball on that one. “Not in the ME’s report. He wasn’t sure this had anything to do with the murder. Didn’t want it out there if it doesn’t need to be. Kind of a hard thing to overlook, though.”
“Yeah. Jesus. Fuckin’ Stefanski. I mean, I knew he was a goddamn pervert, but a turd burglar? Damn.”
“I know. So this colored shit? Could be. But then I got this fag thing, and I gotta wonder.”
“Yeah. I can see that. So where you going with it?”
“Gotta run it out.”
“Yeah. Old man know?”
“Haven’t told him.”
“Let’s hope you don’t have to. He’s got a little kill-the-messenger streak in him.”
“Anyway, wanted you to know, just so nothing comes at you out of leftfield. You can decide what the mayor needs to know. Speaking of which, you want me to fill in the Fed twins or your pet spook?”
“The Feds are just here to help out with the nigger shit. Don’t tell them nothin’ on this other stuff. Fisher? Don’t even talk to that bastard you don’t talk to me first. That son of a bitch makes my sack shrivel up. As far as what the mayor needs to know, I ever gotta tell him the kid was taking it up the ass, we’re both screwed.”
Later, Riley and Ezekiel Fisher walked through the plaza, past the Picasso statue.
“ME got the fag stuff,” Riley said.
“We had to figure that was possible,” said Fisher. “Is it being pursued?”
“This Lynch guy, he’s got the bit in his teeth. I’ll leave that with you.”
“I understand,” said Fisher.
CHAPTER 14 – CHICAGO
1971
Declan Lynch pulled up the alley behind the house on Neenah and parked the Impala next to the garage. He was working on the upstairs bathroom with his boy and had all kinds of crap in the garage. His wife Julie was kneeling down, facing the house, working at the strip of flowers she always kept along the wall. Her butt sticking out at him in a pair of tight plaid Bermudas.
“Damn, yard looks better already, long as you stay bent over like that.”
She sat back on her haunches, flicked her dark hair out of her face, and turned to look at him over her shoulder.
“You are just a fiend, Declan Lynch.”
“Trust me on this one, doll, I’m way down on the fiend scale.”
She got up and walked across the small yard, meeting him at the gate, quick hug and peck.
“So, big shot, how’s life down at City Hall?”
Lynch blew out a long breath. “Baby, month from now I’m either gonna be commissioner or I’m looking at life on traffic duty.”
She gave him a quick squeeze, just letting him know how things stood with her. Felt good.
“You should get upstairs and see the kids. They’ve got a surprise for you.”
“That good or bad?”
She smiled. “I haven’t checked yet.”
Lynch walked past Missy, their old black lab, sleeping against the fence next to the dog house he and Johnny had built a couple years back, went in the side door and up the stairs. House was the typical quasi-bungalow that filled up the whole northwest side. Upstairs had one big unfinished room when he bought the place, with two bedrooms, kitchen, one bath, and a parlor down. Last summer, he’d roughed in the plumbing to put another bath upstairs, Johnny working right there with him. Kid had a real talent for it, picking up stuff just watching. Through the winter, he and Johnny had roughed in the walls, turned the rest of the upstairs space into the new master bedroom, put the shower and toilet and sink in. All that was left was getting the tile down on the bathroom floor and painting.