Calumet City by Charlie Newton

working building and become a cop again. The deep breaths, harsh lights, and linoleum help reduce the dungeon effect to tolerable. Not much has been spent on décor for the inmates’ visitors, about like community hospitals but without the two-year-old magazines. The staff looks at me closer, though, like I’m an accident that hasn’t happened yet.
    My escort stops, apologizes, and says we have to backtrack back through Gate 1 to the warden’s conference room. We do. Three gentlemen in dark suits are waiting. One interrupts my trip.
    "Officer Black?" He offers his hand. "Special Agent Stone, FBI, Organized Crime Unit."
    We shake. My escort watches; she knows that often these meetings don’t go well.
    Special Agent Stone says, "We should talk before you see Mr. del Pasco." He hands me a copy of an old Tracy Moens article. "And then right after."
    "Sorry. I report to my boss; it’s procedure. You can talk with him."
    "Would that be Kevin Ryan in District 18 or the superintendent?" He adds what might be a leer with "superintendent."
    "Pick ’em." I don’t mention the second phone transfer.
    The guard waves me forward; either she’s impatient or she has the same animosity for the G that most cops do. "Sorry…my appointment."
    We walk through linoleum halls that smell the same as most city buildings before they open; the walls are as blank as the floors. The interview area we’re using is between Gate 2 and 3 in the attorney visitation rooms. Mine is 9 x 14 with a glass door. A worn, wooden table sits long-ways in the center, separating two chairs. My escort points me inside and turns to leave.
    I touch her shoulder. "There a problem in here…today?"
    She purses her lips and nods, finishes her turn, and walks down the wide hall. Alone in the room it feels, I don’t know…odd? Like I’m the one who’s guilty. I notice Tracy’s Op-ed article in my hand and read while I wait.
     
ŠTracy Moens,
Chicago Herald

January 16, 1996

Danny del Pasco already had a name in Canaryville.

But he carved it in stone on Christmas Day, 1995. And that’s hard to accomplish south and west of Comiskey where the channel workers and slaughterhouse stockmen live cramped and angry, the Irishmen who built this city but were too poor to live in it.

On that Christmas Day Danny del Pasco had been drinking just the one Harp for an hour and slowly smoking Pall Malls to his fingertips, lighting one with the other. Tobin’s Corner Bar was humid with sweat and full of loud conversations. The stools on either side of Danny were empty. No one knew it yet, including Danny, but he’d kill nine people before Dallas beat the Cardinals 37–13. He said he thought it would be two dead, maybe three. But it all depended on them. Under his leather jacket he wore a sleeveless denim with
Gypsy Vikings MC
in an arch and
Chicago
at the bottom. He washed it in 1990, "had to, DNA thing."

Like Danny, Canaryville and this pub had history, Chicago’s version of Hell’s Kitchen and the Five Points, a neighborhood that housed and hid Irishmen who fought overseas, as well as contract killers who did, and do, the Outfit’s bidding when the Italians want their hand hidden. There are good people here, poor and hardworking, who keep out of the bad business unless they’re forced into it. They knew Danny, knew him all his life, just like the bad ones knew Danny. That’s why the stools were empty.

By halftime the sun was down and Dallas had covered. Danny left five silver dollars stacked in a pile, walked outside into 28 degrees, added tight gloves, and waved up an ’82 Bonneville. Inside he pointed the 24-year-old driver west to Cicero. Over his shoulder he was handed a second Glock that he checked, and a hand grenade. The pin was tight and he loosened it.

At the trial the family of the victims testified that Danny del Pasco walked into the house after knocking twice and dislodging their Christmas wreath, pulled the grenade’s pin one-handed, and asked for