Dante's Poison Read online

  A few blocks on, my phone told me I was thirty, then twenty, then ten yards from the Double L.

  The Double L, aka the Lucky Leprechaun, is my favorite drinking establishment, a dive that probably saw its last paint job when Mike Ditka was a tight end for the Bears. Fly-spotted photos of dead celebrities fill its walls, and Christmas lights wink above the bar in all seasons. Adding to the period charm, the beverage menu studiously avoids anything that might be mistaken for a premium brand. On the plus side, the drinks are cheap, and except for the hospital employees who pour in after the day shift, the place is never heavily populated.

  I stopped in front of the door, shifted my cane to a pencil grip, and held it out while I pushed my way in. The barkeep on duty was Hallie’s cousin, Jesus.

  “Hola, mi Freddy,” he called out cheerfully. “Empty barstool at your two o’clock.”

  I gleaned there were few other customers, which meant that Jesus would be eager to chat. I searched out the seat he’d indicated and asked for a double, adding, “I’ll pay for the good stuff, if you have it.” Jesus kept a bottle of twenty-year-old Maker’s Mark not on offer to the general public in a cabinet under the bar.

  “Yeah? Something to celebrate?” he asked meaningfully.

  “You could call it that.”

  He reached over and clapped me on the shoulder. “That’s fantastico, bro. I was wondering when it was going to happen. ’Course Jackie will be all pissed off, but that’s her problem.”

  “Jackie?”

  “My aunt, Jacinta. She and Hallie are only a year apart and they’re as tight as tortillas.” Jesus finished pouring and pushed a tumbler across the bar.

  “And what would Jackie have to be pissed about?” I asked without thinking, picking up the glass and putting it to my lips.

  “Well, don’t let on that I told you, but Jackie’s decided she doesn’t like you.”

  “Like me?” I repeated quizzically. “She’s never even met me.”

  “Yeah, but ever since she broke up with her ex, she’s had this thing against divorced dudes. Thinks they’re all liars and cheats.”

  I almost spit out the mouthful of bourbon I was on the point of swallowing. “Wait a minute. Back up here. Who says I’m divorced?”

  “Hallie. At least that’s what I overheard her say at my nephew Ramon’s First Communion party. Jackie was pretty worked up over it. ‘Orralay, girl,’ she was telling Hallie, ‘why are you going within ten feet of him?’” Jesus paused as if maybe he’d spoken out of school. “You are, aren’t you? Divorced, I mean. Hallie’s sources are usually pretty accurate.”

  I should have anticipated something like this. “Which sources?” I asked shakily.

  Jesus leaned over the bar and said in a conspiratorial tone, “You know, prosecutors and their friends on the force, here and across state lines. It’s a professional courtesy they extend to one another. Call it an unofficial background check. Hallie won’t go anywhere with a guy until she’s vetted him. Makes sense. If you’re a gal, you don’t want to find yourself alone with some pinchero whose ex has got a court order against him.”

  I was starting to feel ill. “And what did this ‘unofficial’ background check reveal about me?”

  “I don’t know the particulars, but Hallie said that except for the decree you were clear. And current on your support payments.”

  So Hallie knew about Louis too? I downed the rest of my drink in one swallow. All this time I’d been worrying how to come clean with her and . . . I wasn’t sure whether to laugh hysterically or run outside and throw myself under a speeding truck. What must she think of me, keeping Louis a secret all this time? Of course, the fact that I’d been married and had a child was only part of it. And the not-so-debatable part. “You better give me another shot,” I said, pushing my glass forward.

  “Sure,” Jesus said, taking the glass and pouring again. “But why all the nervios? It’s not like it’s any big deal. Shit, a guy your age? If you hadn’t been hooked up with somebody before, Hallie’d probably think you were gay.”

  I almost spit out another mouthful. I needed to put an end to this conversation in a hurry. “Listen, Jesus, I think we’re operating under a misconception. I like your cousin, really I do. She’s a very fine lady. But there’s nothing happening between us.” Or ever would be, I thought dispiritedly.

  “Really? De pinga!” He sounded genuinely disappointed. “I’m sorry, man. It’s just that when you came in here smiling and looking all lighthearted for a change, I assumed it was because you were getting laid. . . . Anyway, I’m sorry for Hallie, too. I always thought you two would make a great couple.”

  “I’m sure there are a lot of other men out there who would make her happy,” I said.

  “I dunno about that,” Jesus replied. “Though I guess this clears the way for Bjorn.”

  “The investigator she’s using?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. Have you met him?”

  No, but I might as well know the worst. “Uh-uh. What can you tell me?”

  Jesus was always forthcoming with the minutest details. “Comes from African American royalty. Youngest kid of the Reverend Aloysius Dixon and his Swedish wife, Ingrid. Dixon’s got one of the biggest congregations on the South Side, rakes in enough dough every week to float a bond issue. Family’s got connections all over the place, which is probably why baby Bjorn decided to go into private investigation. Mostly he does big corporate cases—cybercrime and stuff like that—but he met Hallie at a party and offered her his personal attention, if you know what I mean.”

  “You seen him?”

  “Only on the news when he was busting that hacker who shut down ComEd in July. Paper-bag complexion, eyes the color of an Alaskan Husky. He’d look at home in a Calvin Klein ad if that tells you anything.”

  It did, and a lot more than I wanted to know.

  The next morning, Mike was still missing when I made a brief stop at my office before heading over for my new medication. I called the Streetwise offices to see if anyone had seen him, but the staff member I spoke to said he hadn’t picked up his paper stock in over a week. They were mildly worried and had called around to several homeless shelters to see if he’d shown up, but without luck. I wasn’t surprised. Mike disliked the shelters, which were usually miserably crowded, and only used them when the mercury dipped into the single digits.

  It took most of the day to get my pills. I first had to take off my clothes, step on a scale, open my mouth and say “aaaah,” get strapped to a blood-pressure cuff, pee in a jar, give a blood sample, and be generally poked, prodded, and manhandled until I was at last deemed an acceptable specimen and not on the verge of death. Then it was on to yet more eye tests. Ophthalmology residents waved various objects before my face, my fundus—the medical term for the back of the eye—was dilated and photographed, a perimetrist mapped my visual field, electrodes were placed on my eyes to test their responsiveness to light. All of these things had been done to me many times before, and on far less sunny occasions, but the routine was still well past its expiration date. By late afternoon, when I was sitting down with a nurse practitioner to go over my instructions, I was feeling as strung out as Malcolm McDowell after a session of the Ludovico technique.

  The nurse, whose name was Abby, wanted to be sure I understood what a placebo was.

  “Sure. They’re like the ‘ones that mother gives you,’” I said, dredging up the old lyric from Surrealistic Pillow.

  Abby was perplexed. “Huh?”

  “They don’t do anything at all.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Abby said.

  Was there anyone in the younger generation I could communicate with? “You’ve really never heard of Jefferson Airplane?” I asked.

  “Are they like Virgin Air or something? And I don’t understand what planes have to do with my question.”

  “It’s not important,” I sighed.

  I explained what a placebo was and answered her further questions as patiently
as I could until it was finally time for her to hand over the goods—a small bottle with a tamper-proof cap that Abby told me was filled with a four-week supply. I was to take the tablets inside three times a day, preferably with meals, starting first thing tomorrow. I was to return for a check-up and a new bottle when I’d used up the contents. I was to contact the team immediately if I experienced any of the following: headache; stomach upset; rash; itching or swelling (especially of the face, tongue, or throat); fainting; dizziness; trouble breathing; fast or irregular heartbeat; ringing of the ears; nausea; difficulty standing, walking, or getting up; confusion; inability to concentrate; nervousness; changes in urine; drowsiness; increased sweating; hallucinations; or seizures.

  At least I didn’t have to worry about sudden loss of or changes in vision.

  Melissa came in then to shake my hand and wish me luck.

  “If there is going to be an improvement, you should start noticing something in the next few weeks. In the meantime, try not to think too much about it. There’s some evidence that the therapeutic effect is weakened when the patient is anxious or under stress. Enjoy all your normal activities and get plenty of rest.”

  I pledged that I would.

  “And doctor?” she said, as I was pocketing the bottle and picking up my cane to leave.

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t let me down.”

  The next day, a Friday, found me in one of Boris’s town cars, going over my notes for Jane’s bond hearing.

  Boris was Yelena’s ex, a taciturn man who runs an independent limousine service. Perhaps out of lingering affection, or more likely so that she wouldn’t be cheated out of support payments, Yelena still managed his books and appointments, another diversion from her secretarial duties though one I didn’t mind because it meant I always had a ride when I needed one. Cabs were cheaper, but their drivers weren’t always trustworthy—either about taking the least circuitous route or returning the correct amount of change—and I never had to fear what health hazards might be lurking in Boris’s upholstery. He’d picked me up at 1:00 p.m. sharp, and we’d cruised down the Drive before turning onto the Stevenson Expressway and proceeding a few miles on to the exit at California. We were now parked on a side street, waiting for Hallie to call from the courthouse several blocks away. It was a warm September day, but Boris had all the windows up and the doors firmly locked, not trusting the neighborhood.

  I was then six hours into my drug trial.

  I’d tumbled out of bed at daylight after a mostly sleep-tossed night before heading for my kitchen and boiling some water, which I used to make tea and a packet of instant oatmeal. I wasn’t hungry, but with Abby’s admonition about meals still fresh in my mind, I forced myself to clean the bowl and the dried-out—and hopefully mold-free—remnants of a container of blueberries. Then it was on to a slice of toast and orange juice. As I was finishing up, I remembered something I should have done earlier and went back to my bedroom for my phone, which was charged up and ready to go on the nightstand. I brought the phone back to the kitchen, turned on all the lights to get the clearest possible picture, and using another one of my blink apps snapped a photo of the pill bottle with its label facing the camera. Bypassing the Internet search feature, I gave the photo a moniker—White Rabbit—and stored it in the app’s database of images. Later, if I had trouble distinguishing the bottle from something else that felt similar, all I had to do was point the camera at it and the app would sing out its name.

  With these preparations behind me, I figured it was time for lift-off.

  The tamper-proof cap gave me some trouble, but I eventually guessed that I was supposed to push down on the top while simultaneously twisting it to the right. There was the obligatory wad of cotton inside, which I had to pick out in clumps before the bottle would yield its treasure. With the contents finally freed, I turned the bottle over and shook one into my palm, holding it there a few minutes like a Communion wafer. Then I popped it into my mouth like I was Michael Jordan putting one over the rim and washed it down with a swallow of the tea. As it slid down my throat, I said a little prayer that I was getting the real thing. One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small.

  I knew better than to expect anything so soon, but it was hard to temper a sense of excitement as I bided my time in Boris’s car. On top of that, I was experiencing my usual pre-court jitters, similar to being a Christian anticipating a pride of hungry lions before opening ceremonies at the Colosseum. Hallie said that preparing for trial was like rolling every anxious moment in your life into one. I could tell her a thing or two about anxious moments, but I understood what she meant. Even old court hands told me they always experienced a case of the butterflies before an important hearing—or did if they were any good. It was only when a lawyer was too stupid or lazy to care that he could walk through a courthouse door and not feel like he was wearing a neon “Hit Me” sign on his forehead.

  In the town car, my phone played the opening bars of Rikki Don’t Lose That Number, and I scrambled to answer it. It was Hallie, informing me that we’d be up in an hour’s time. She sounded as pumped up as I was. “I’m going to try to get a few minutes with Jane in the lockup, so I may not be in the courtroom when you get there,” she said. “Just sit someplace where I can find you.”

  Like I had a prayer of vanishing into the crowd.

  “Time to get moving,” I told Boris.

  The Cook County Circuit Courthouse, known to Chicagoans as “Twenty-Sixth and Cal,” processes some 28,000 criminal cases annually. Given the sea of humanity that passes through its portals each day, it couldn’t be more unhappily located. Tucked away in a remote corner of the Southwest Side, miles away from anything resembling a business district or even a fast-food outlet, it has been the butt of jokes ever since it opened on April Fool’s Day in 1929. Local lore has it that the site of the courthouse was dictated by Anton Cermak, the father of the Chicago Machine, who wanted it on his turf as a cottage industry for his ward organization. Whatever the reason, it had never done anything to boost the surrounding real estate, and jurors unfortunate enough to be summoned to its blighted precincts were advised by the Sheriff’s office to bring plenty of quarters for the vending machines if they didn’t want to go hungry all day. Visitors to the courthouse often remarked on the imposing reliefs carved aside its seventh-story windows, symbolizing law, liberty, justice, truth, might, love, and wisdom. The only thing not represented was the American Way.

  Boris dropped me off in front, and I scraped across a concrete walk to a short flight of shallow steps, divided into six sections by iron railings. I took one of the sections in the center and then angled toward the hydraulic whoosh of the heavy brass doors another ten yards off. Once inside, I prepared myself for a long wait: the line to get past the metal detector usually resembled the entrance to a Wal-Mart just before opening hour on Black Friday. Amazingly, it took only fifteen minutes to get to the head of the queue. Equally astounding, when my cane set off the alarm (as it always did) the guards did not insist on a full-body pat down. “Doesn’t look like a Ruger,” one of them said in apparent seriousness as they nudged me roughly ahead.

  I took the elevator to the fifth floor. Normally, bond hearings took place in one of the airless lower-floor rooms called the “fishbowl” because of the bulletproof glass partitions separating visitors from the proceedings. But because the prosecution intended to put on evidence, the clerk had assigned us to the judge who would eventually try the case: one Eugene Cudahay, known in legal circles by such nicknames as “Cuddles,” “Cudgel,” and “Conundrum.” According to Hallie, none of the names did justice to his reputation as a meticulous jurist with no bias in favor of either the prosecution or the defense, which was probably the reason he had one of the highest case backlogs in the county. This was good news for Jane but probably meant we had a long afternoon ahead of us.

  I asked a passerby for help locating the correct courtroom and stepped through the door. I tried to pick out Hal
lie’s voice above the din inside—Jane’s hearing had evidently aroused the customary fascination with celebrities accused of a major crime—but apparently she was still in the lockup. This presented me with a dilemma: should I remain hovering by the entrance or inch my way up the center aisle in search of a seat? I was saved from thinking too hard about it by a friendly voice calling my name. “Angelotti, get over here—by the jury box.”

  It was Tom Klutsky, the Sun-Times reporter who covered legal affairs. I headed over in his direction, narrowly avoiding several outstretched limbs along the way. Klutsky exited the box and met me halfway. He shook my hand and offered me a beefy elbow before guiding me up the steps and past multiple other body parts to a place in the front row, where members of the fourth estate often sat when there was no jury present.

  Klutsky had befriended me the previous spring, partly out of kindness but also to sell me on giving him a story. For a reporter, he wasn’t a bad sort, and I’d eventually agreed to be the subject of one of his features in exchange for a hefty donation to a low-vision foundation and his solemn promise not to overdramatize the situation. Klutsky had managed to keep half of the bargain. In his telling, I was practically the Lou Gehrig of blindness, bravely coping with a turn of fortune that would have felled many a less-noble soul. At least he didn’t quote me as saying I was the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

  “So to what do we owe the pleasure of your company?” Klutsky asked in his nasally Chicago accent when we were settled in.

  I filled him in on the particulars.

  “That’s a hoot,” he said when I was finished. “You’ll have fun with the ASA. He looks like he just got out of nursery school. I watched him try a case up in Lake County last month. You remember the one where the guy cut up his wife and used her to angle for bass in Fox Lake? He might have gotten away with it if he hadn’t forgotten to get a fishing license.”