“You told me last week they met up at UW when they were students there. Where did they go next?”
Beth had to consult her files, but she came back on the line in a few minutes with more details. Gerstein came from a small Long Island town. He met Lisa when they were both Wisconsin juniors, campaigning for W’s first election in 2000. They’d married three years later, just before moving to Chicago. Politics and TV kept them together for another three years after that.
Brian rented an apartment in Rogers Park on the far north side of the city.
“And that’s typical of him,” Beth added as she gave me his address. “He won’t own a home since they split up: he can’t afford it, his life was ruined, and he doesn’t feel like housekeeping, I’ve heard a dozen different whiny reasons from him. Not that everyone has to own, but you don’t have to rent a run-down apartment in gangbanger territory when you work for the networks, either.”
“So he could have been peevish enough to kill Lisa?”
“You’re assuming he swathed himself in skirts and furs and told Reggie Whitman he was V.I. Warshawski? It would take more—more gumption than he’s got to engineer something like that. It’s not a bad theory, though: maybe we’ll float it on the four o’clock news. Give us something different to talk about than all the other guys. Stay in touch, Vic. I’m willing to believe you’re innocent, but it’d make a better story if you’d killed her.”
“Thanks, Blacksin.” I laughed as I hung up: her enthusiasm was without malice.
I took the L up to Rogers Park, the slow Sunday milk run. Despite Beth’s criticism, it’s an interesting part of town. Some blocks you do see dopers hanging out, some streets have depressing amounts of garbage in the yards, but most of the area harks back to the Chicago of my childhood: tidy brick two-flats, hordes of immigrants in the parks speaking every known language and, along with them, delis and coffee shops for every cuisine.
Gerstein lived on one of the quiet side streets. He was home, as I’d hoped: staking out an apartment without a car would have been miserable work on a cold day. He even let me in without too much fuss. I told him I was a detective and showed him my license, but he didn’t seem to recognize my name—he must not have been editing the programs dealing with his ex-wife’s murder. Or he’d been so stricken he’d edited them without registering anything.
He certainly exuded misery as he escorted me up the stairs. Whether it was grief or guilt for Lisa, or just the chronic depression Beth attributed to him, he moved as though on the verge of falling over. He was a little taller than I was, but slim. Swathed in a coat and shawls he might have looked like a woman to the night doorman.
Gerstein’s building was clean and well maintained, but his own apartment was sparely furnished, as though he expected to move on at any second. The only pictures on the walls were a couple of framed photographs—one of himself and Lisa with W, and the other with a man I didn’t recognize. He had no drapes or plants or anything else to bring a bit of color to the room, and when he invited me to sit, he pulled a metal folding chair from a closet for me.
“I always relied on Lisa to fix things up,” he said. “She has so much vivacity and such good taste. Without her I can’t seem to figure out how to do it.”
“I thought you’d been divorced for years.” I tossed my coat onto the card table in the middle of the room.
“Yes, but I’ve only been living here nine months. She let me keep our old condo, but last summer I couldn’t make the payments. She said she’d come around to help me fix this up, only she’s so busy. . . .” His voice trailed off.
I wondered how he ever sold himself to his various employers—I found myself wanting to shake him out like a pillow and plump him up. “So you and Lisa stayed in touch?”
“Sort of. She was too busy to call much, but she’d talk to me sometimes when I phoned.”
“So you didn’t have any hard feelings about your divorce?”
“Oh, I did. I never wanted to split up—it was all her idea. I kept hoping, but now, you know, it’s too late.”
“I suppose a woman as successful as Lisa met a lot of men.”
“Yes, yes she certainly did.” His voice was filled with admiration, not hate.
I was beginning to agree with Beth, that Gerstein couldn’t possibly have killed Lisa. What really puzzled me was what had ever attracted her to him in the first place, but the person who could figure out the hows and whys of attraction would put Dear Amy out of business overnight.
I went through the motions with him—did he get a share in her royalties?—yes, on the first book, because she’d written that while they were still together. When she wanted a divorce his lawyer told him he could probably get a judgment entitling him to 50 percent of her proceeds, even in the future, but he loved Lisa, he wanted her to come back to him, he wasn’t interested in being vindictive. Did he inherit under Lisa’s will? He didn’t think so, I’d have to ask her attorney. Did he know who her residuary legatee was? Some conservative foundations they both admired.
I got up to go. “Who do you think killed your wife, ex-wife?”
“I thought they’d arrested someone, that dick Claude Barnett says was harassing her.”
“You know Barnett? Personally, I mean?” All I wanted was to divert him from thinking about me—even in his depression he might have remembered hearing my name on the air—but he surprised me.
“Yeah. That is, Lisa does. Did. We went to a media convention together right after we moved here. Barnett was the keynote speaker. She got all excited, said she’d known him growing up, but his name was something different then. After that she saw him every now and then. She got him to take his picture with us a couple of years later, at another convention in Sun Valley.”
He jerked his head toward the wall where the photographs hung. I went over to look at them. I was vaguely aware of Barnett’s face: he was considered so influential in the nation’s swing rightward that his picture kept popping up in newsmagazines. A man of about fifty, he was lean and well groomed.
He was usually smiling with affable superiority. In Sun Valley he must have eaten something that disagreed with him. Lisa was smiling gaily, happy to be with the media darling. Brian was holding himself upright and looking close to jovial. Although Claude had an arm around Lisa, he looked as though thumbscrews had been stuffed under his nails to get him into the photo.
“What name had Lisa known him by as a child?” I asked.
“Oh, she was mistaken about that. Once she got to see him up close she realized it was only a superficial resemblance. But Barnett took a shine to her—most people did, she was so vivacious—and gave her a lot of support in her career. He was the first big booster of her Nan Carruthers novels.”
“He doesn’t look very happy to be with her here, does he? Can I borrow it? It’s a very good one of Lisa, and I’d like to use it in my inquiries.”
Brian said in a dreary voice that he thought Lisa’s publicist would have much better ones, but he was easy to persuade—or bully, to call my approach by its real name. I left with the photo carefully draped in a dish towel, and a written promise to return it as soon as possible.
I trotted to the Jarvis L stop, using the public phone there to call airlines. I found one that not only sent planes from O’Hare to Rhinelander, Wisconsin, but also had a flight leaving in two hours. The state’s attorney had told me not to leave the jurisdiction. Just in case they’d put a stop on me at the airport, I booked a flight under Sestieri, my mother’s maiden name, and embarked on the tedious L journey back to the Loop and out to the airport.
4
Lisa’s new book, Slaybells Ring, was stacked high at the airport bookstores. The black enamel cover with an embossed spray of bells in silver drew the eye. At the third stand I passed I finally gave in and bought a copy.
The flight was a long puddle-jumper, making stops in Milwaukee and Wausau on its way north. By the time we reached Rhinelander I was approaching the denouement, where the hea
d of the American Civil Liberties Union was revealed as a major baddie. He had fired one woman staffer for threatening a sexual harassment suit, fired a second for surreptitiously listening to Lisa’s heroine, Nan Carruthers, on her headphones at work.
The two women banded together to expose their ex-boss’s reason for opposing a crèche at city hall: he secretly owned a company that was trying to put the crèche’s manufacturer out of business. The women gave the information to Nan Carruthers, who promptly made all the information public.
The book had a three-hankie ending at midnight mass, where Nan joined the employees—now triumphantly reinstated (thanks to the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by the EEOC and the ACLU, but Macauley hadn’t thought that worth mentioning)—in kneeling in front of the public crèche.
I finished the book around one in the morning in the Rhinelander Holiday Inn. The best-written part treated a subplot between Nan and the man who gave her career its first important boost—the pastor of the heroine’s childhood church, who had become a successful televangelist.
When Nan was a child he had photographed her and other children in his Sunday school class engaged in forced sex with one another and with him. Since he held a threat of awful reprisals over their heads, they never told their parents. However, when Nan started her broadcast career she persuaded him to plug her program on his Thursday night “Circle of the Saved,” using blackmail to get him to do so. At the end, as she looks at the baby Jesus in the manger, she wonders what Mary would have done—forgiven the pastor or exposed him? Certainly not collaborated with him to further her own career. The book ended on that troubled note. I went to sleep with more respect for Macauley’s craft than I had expected.
In the morning I found Mrs. Joseph Macauley’s address in the local phone book and went off to see her. Although now in her midseventies, she carried herself well. She didn’t greet me warmly, but she accepted without demur my identification of myself as a detective trying to find Lisa’s murderer. Chicago apparently was so convinced that I was the guilty party they hadn’t bothered to send anyone up to interview her.
“I got tired of all those Chicago reporters bothering me, but if you’re a detective I guess I can answer your questions. What’d you want to know? I can tell you all about Lisa’s childhood, but we didn’t see so much of her once she moved off to Madison. We weren’t too happy about some of the friends she was making. Not that we have anything against Jews personally, but we didn’t want our only child marrying one and getting involved in all those dirty money deals. Of course we were happy he had the right kind of politics, but we weren’t sorry when she left Brian, even though our church frowns on divorce.”
I let her talk unguided for a time before pulling out the picture of Claude Barnett. “This is someone Lisa said she knew as a child. Do you recognize him?”
Mrs. Macauley took the photo from me. “Do you think I’m not in possession of my faculties? That’s Claude Barnett. He certainly never lived around here.”
She snorted and started to hand the picture back, then took it to study more closely. “She knew I never liked to see her in pants, so she generally wore a skirt when she came up here. But she looks cute in that outfit, real cute. You know, I guess I can see where she might have confused him with Carl Bader. Although Carl was dark-haired and didn’t have a mustache, there is a little something around the forehead.”
“And who was Carl Bader?”
“Oh, that’s ancient history. He left town and we never heard anything more about him.”
All I could get her to say was that he’d been connected to their church and she never did believe half the gossip some of the members engaged in.
“That Mrs. Hoffer always overindulged her children, let them say anything and get away with it. We brought Lisa up to show proper respect for people in authority. Cleaned her mouth out with soap and whipped her so hard she didn’t sit for a week the one time she tried taking part in some of that trashy talk.”
More she wouldn’t say, so I took the picture with me to the library and looked up old copies of the local newspaper. In Slaybells Ring, Nan Carruthers was eight when the pastor molested her, so I checked 1985 through 1987 for stories about Bader and anyone named Hoffer. All I found was a little blurb saying Bader had left the Full Bible Christian Church in 1988 to join a television ministry in Tulsa, and that he’d left so suddenly the church didn’t have time to throw him a going-away party.
I spent a weary afternoon trying to find Mrs. Hoffer. There were twenty-seven Hoffers in the Rhinelander phone book; six were members of the Full Bible Christian Church. The church secretary was pleasant and helpful, but it wasn’t until late in the day that Mrs. Matthew Hoffer told me the woman I wanted, Mrs. Barnabas Hoffer, had quit the church over the episode about her daughter.
“Caused a lot of hard feeling in the church. Some people believed the children and left. Others figured it was just mischief, children who like to make themselves look interesting. That Lisa Macauley was one. I’m sorry she got herself killed down in Chicago, but in a way I’m not surprised—seemed like she was always sort of daring you to smack her, the stories she made up and the way she put herself forward.
“Not that Louise Macauley spared the rod, mind you, but sometimes I think you can beat a child too much for its own good. Anyway, once people saw little Lisa joining in with Katie Hoffer in accusing the pastor no one took the story seriously. No one except Gertie—Katie’s mom, I mean. She still bears a grudge against all of us who stood by Pastor Bader.”
Finally, at nine o’clock, I was sitting on a horsehair settee in Gertrude Hoffer’s living room, looking at a cracked color Polaroid of two unhappy children. I had to take Mrs. Hoffer’s word that they were Katie and Lisa—their faces were indistinct. Time had fuzzed the picture, but you could still tell the girls were embracing each other naked.
“I found it when I was doing his laundry. Pastor Bader wasn’t married, so all us church ladies took it in turn to look after his domestic wants. Usually he was right there to put his clothes away, but this one time he was out and I was arranging his underwear for him and found this whole stack of pictures. I couldn’t believe it at first, and then when I came on Katie’s face—well—I snatched it up and ran out of there.
“At first I thought it was some wickedness the children dreamed up, and that he had photographed them to show us, show the parents what they got up to. That was what he told my husband when Mr. Hoffer went to talk to him about it. It took me a long time to see that a child wouldn’t figure out something like that on her own, but I never could get any of the other parents to pay me any mind. And that Louise Macauley, she just started baking pies for Pastor Bader every night of the week, whipped poor little Lisa for telling me what he made her and Katie get up to. It’s a judgment on her, it really is, her daughter getting herself killed like that.”
5
It was hard for me to find someone in the Chicago Police Department willing to try to connect Claude Barnett with Carl Bader. Once they’d done that, though, the story unraveled pretty fast. Lisa had recognized him in Sun Valley and put the bite on him—not for money, but for career advancement, just as her heroine did to her own old pastor in Slaybells Ring.
No one would ever be able to find out for sure, but the emotional torment Lisa gave Nan Carruthers in her book must have paralleled Lisa’s own misery. She was a success, she’d forced her old tormentor to make her a success, but it must have galled her—as it did her heroine—to pretend to admire him, to sit in on his show, and to know what lay behind his flourishing career.
When Barnett read Slaybells, he probably began to worry that Lisa wouldn’t be able to keep his secret to herself much longer. The police did find evidence of the threatening letters in his private study. The state argued that Barnett sent Lisa the threatening letters, then persuaded her to hire me to protect her.
At that point he didn’t have anything special against me, but I was a woman. He figured if he could sta
rt enough public conflict between a woman detective and Lisa, he’d be able to fool the night man, Reggie Whitman, into believing he was sending a woman up to Lisa’s apartment on the fatal night. It was only later that he’d learned about my progressive politics—that was just icing on his cake, to be able to denounce me on his show.
Of course, not all this came out right away—some of it didn’t emerge until the trial. That was when I also learned that Reggie Whitman, besides being practically a saint, had badly failing vision. On a cold night any man could have bundled himself up in a heavy coat and hat and claimed to be a woman without Whitman noticing.
Between Murray and Beth Blacksin, I got a lot of public vindication. Sal and Queenie took me to dinner with Belle Fontaine to celebrate on the day the guilty verdict came in. We were all disappointed that they only slapped him with second-degree murder. But what left me gasping for air was a public opinion poll that came out the next afternoon. Even though other examples of his child-molesting behavior had come to light during the trial, his listeners believed he was innocent of all charges.
“The femmunists made it all up trying to discredit him,” one woman explained that afternoon on the air. “And then they got the New York Times to print their lies.”
Not even Queenie’s reserve Veuve Clicquot could wipe that bitter taste out of my mouth.
Note
I wrote “Publicity Stunts” for Women on the Case, Marty Greenburg, ed. (Delacorte Press, 1996). In the original version, V.I. is using old media, newspapers, and radio. I haven’t updated technology and media for most of the stories in this collection, but this one depends so heavily on the use of mass media that I changed radio to streaming—it felt clumsy to leave it in the original. I kept the old newspapers, though—nostalgia for print, I guess.
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