by Thomas Laird
“Hasn’t it ever happened before?”
“Yeah. When I was much younger. Lately I been on a roll.”
She smiles at me and her head disappears under the sheets.
“Jesus!”
“There is nothing religious about what is about to happen, Jimmy P.”
“Jesus!” escapes my lips as I grab the headboard behind me with both hands.
*
I talk to the doorman at Walker S. Hansen’s condo building. He knows of nothing off key in the relationship between the Hansen’s.
I interview one of Mrs. Hansen’s co-workers at the export-import building who wasn’t in town when the blast went off on the twelfth of September. We’re at a fancy hotel downtown in the Loop. Her name is Trudy Carson. She’s a sales rep from the West Coast division. She only comes to town three or four times a year. She’s a dazzling brunette with long legs and ponderous bosoms and an elegant neck and a magazine cover complexion and face.
“Greta wasn’t a player, but she could play. Her old man was known to go off on adventures from time to time…What stood out most for me is how competitive they both were.”
“Say again?”
“They were both highly competitive…Tennis, golf, Christ, ping pong. Anything. They competed. Who made the most money in a thirty day span. Things like that…Anybody ever told you you look just like Al Pacino?”
“How far do you think it went? They ever get physical with each other?”
“Don’t think I knew her that well. Never saw any bruises, if that’s what you mean…You think he murdered his wife? And…Oh my God! All those other people?”
“We’re just looking into a lot of possibilities.”
“You married?”
“Yes.”
“Loyal, too, I suppose.”
“Are you tempting me, Trudy?”
“I’d love to, but I can tell you’re straight. All the good ones like you are always true blue to their old ladies. Why can’t I find a man like you?”
“I’m sure you can find any man you like.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“You’re very beautiful. You must get hit on all the time.”
“Greta Hansen was gorgeous. Better looking than I am by a long ways, and I’m not trying to sound modest. She had perfect features. Me. My tits are too big, and someday soon they’ll hang.”
“I doubt it. There are surgeons who’ll put a stop to any of that.”
She smiles.
“You think you know me, huh?”
“I think you take very good care of yourself and you won’t allow anything to sag that you don’t want to sag. But as far as sagging goes, I’m in pretty bad shape already.”
“You’re a liar, Lieutenant. You look great to me.”
“You ought to see me in my Jockeys.”
“You set the time and place.”
“My wife’s a Homicide detective too.”
“Oh oh.”
“I didn’t mean it like a threat.”
“You could’ve fooled me.”
I smile and I take her hand, and she smiles as I kiss that hand.
“So you don’t think there was any serious cheating going on between them?”
“Was that your curve ball, Lieutenant? I never saw it coming.”
“If I weren’t married…”
“Yeah yeah. I know…”
This whole conversation at the bar at the Ambassador East in the Loop is coming to a finish. I feel a flush rising to my cheeks. It is difficult to talk to a beautiful woman, for me, let alone try not to hustle her.
“Please. Is there anything else you know about the two of them that might help me? A thousand people died, along with Walker S. Hansen’s wife.”
“Jesus, I know…Like I said, the only thing that sticks out about them is how aggressively competitive they both were toward each other. I mean obsessively competitive. That was always my first impression of the two of them.
“But Walker a murderer? No. He’s got too much to lose. He wouldn’t have murdered her. He would have litigated and divorced her. I’m sure she signed a pre-nup. She wasn’t stupid. She was an alpha female to his alpha male. They were both wolves, Lieutenant. Just like his gray eyes…She had eyes the same color. They were a pair, all right. The he wolf and the she wolf. She used to scare the hell out of me, sometimes, watching her rip into someone at a sales conference.”
I bought her a manhattan, which she has scarcely touched. I bought a Diet Coke, as is my custom. The bill was twelve dollars. All I can afford is the one drink apiece.
“If I weren’t married…” I smile.
I kiss her left hand, this time. Then I leave her inside this watering hole in the Ambassador East. This is the place Sinatra stayed at with Ava Gardner, I’ve been told. It’s where Harry Carray, the old Cubs’ broadcaster used to live during the season.
Twelve dollar drinks. Natalie’ll kill me. I won’t tell her about kissing anybody’s hands, however.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The devil is in the details. An old saying, but it has its merit. We’d had dozens of Homicide investigators sifting through all the few known facts about the Anderson Tragedy. The facts that troubled me were the same as before. How did a 50 gallon drum of fertilizer/explosive get stored in the maintenance room on 9/12?
When I looked over the list provided by the Anderson Building’s Maintenance Supervisor, I saw that we’d got the wrong date. The barrel had been accepted and stored on 9/11—but it was during the late afternoon when R. Crealy, Maintenance Supervisor, signed for the drum. It was marked Cleaning Solvent, he told Jim Casper, another Homicide dick. He never thought anything of it. There were too many items being stocked in his maintenance room on the first floor. There were four other underling supervisors working here, and he couldn’t or didn’t keep tabs on all their purchases. He supposed he should have taken inventory on 9/11, but he never thought the Arabs would blow the Anderson building. There was nobody famous housed in this old brick structure, so he didn’t do a thorough check on the contents of his own maintenance floor.
I heard R. Crealey was fired for his incompetence, four days later, on September 15th. It was among those details in the report Jim Casper had prepared.
Natalie and Tommy and I figured we ought to hear it all from the mouth of R. Crealey, so we drove out to Orland Park, a southwestern suburb, where R. (Raymond) resided in a modest ranch house.
Raymond lived alone.
“My wife is dead. Pancreatic cancer, six months ago. My kids are grown—they both live out west near San Fran…And now this. And I lose my job because I didn’t do a thorough search of the stores.”
“I’m sorry to hear all that,” I told the balding, middle aged, going-to-fat man. He had the ‘hyancith’ hairdo, with a single long strand of brown hair trying to give the effect of a full head of hair on top of his pate.
“You received this barrel on the eleventh, in late afternoon?” Natalie asks.
“It didn’t look sinister ‘er nothing. It just said ‘cleaning solvent.’ It looked just like all the other barrels of that shit that we take in regularly. You wouldn’t believe the spills and stains we…used to take care of. Fucking slobs in those offices.”
“What was the name of the construction suppliers who delivered the barrel?” Tommy asked.
“Norton Construction, out in Mokena.”
We asked him a few more questions, but he was so bewildered by the blast, its aftermath and losing his job that we didn’t have the heart to press him any further.
“I was at that goddamned building sixteen years, and now it’s a hole in the fuckin’ Loop. I’m living off unemployment, Lieutenant.”
We left the poor man to attend to his own misery.
“It can’t be his fault. You saw all the crap in that storage area,” Natalie reminds me.
“I’ll have a talk with the owners or somebody. I’ll see what I can do.”
“It was delivered the same day as the bl
ow in New York,” I think aloud. “So they knew about the Towers. Whoever he was had the time to run down to Mokena at the construction company and he could purchase all the goodies that go into an Oklahoma Special. So it was part of the plan. If they’d bought it before the explosions in the Apple…It was done purposely, just the way we thought. They were hiding behind the big blasts on the East Coast.”
“That’s your theory,” Natalie corrects me. “It could have just been coincidence.”
I smile grimly at her because I know she’s right. She’s coloring a deep red because she knows she stuck another pin in my theoretic balloon. This could all be an unlikely coincidence. The perp could’ve bought the bomb some time before the explosion and only just had it delivered on the eleventh.
Maybe I was smelling conspiracy when there really was none. Yet I still knew it was someone other than the Arab from Saudi Arabia who was responsible. Here I was, it suddenly came to me, forcing the pieces into the puzzle. I was muscling the pieces to fit my personal portrait of the day of the twelfth.
“Maybe we’ll get some answers in Mokena,” I mumbled.
*
“Guy bought a barrel of fertilizer from you, back here.”
I show the deskman a purchase order that Casper had secured in the early interviews.
“I went through all of this…Hey!”
Carlton Atkins stood six feet three in his cowboy boots here at the desk in Norton Construction Supplies in this little town not far from Indiana called Mokena It was also close to Joliet and the famous prison.
“We’d like to go through it again. Maybe your memory’s better,” Spencer told him.
“My memory ain’t changed. Guy walks in, makes an order for fertilizer. So I’m no chemist, and this shit ain’t illegal, no matter what they done with it in Oklahoma.”
“We’re not here to jump you, Carlton,” I tell him.
“Then why are you here?” the construction salesman asks.
“What’d he look like, the guy who bought this barrel of animal shit?” Tommy demands.
“I told the other guy—“
“Detective Casper.”
“Yeah. I told him I couldn’t remember the guy’s looks. He was young, anywhere from twenty-five to forty. How the hell do I know?”
“You had all this time to think about it. A thousand are dead and you don’t seem like you’re trying,” Tommy warned him.
“All right! He was blond, with a ponytail, like some teenaged girl. But this guy was no kid, not when you looked into his eyes. He had some kind of flecks in those green pools in his eyes. Yeah, now I think I can remember better.”
“How much was on the bill?” Natalie asks.
He tells us.
“He paid you in cash and showed you ID. What was the name on the ID?”
“I already told Detective Casper…Didn’t he tell you? The man paid cash. I told him I’d take a check, but he refused. Said he was into cash business. He paid in fifties.”
“You think you still might have one of those fifties?”
“No chance.”
“You sure you don’t even have one on hand?” Tommy went on.
“Why would we still have them in the register? They’re scattered to hell by now.”
*
“Pretty vague, Jimmy,” Natalie says as we drive back to the city. It’s ten o’clock already. We were lucky he was open until nine to accommodate all the drunks who wanted to demo something—their cars, their kids, their old ladies. Casper had found out that Norton’s outfit had been in numerous scrapes, doing jobs for some shady type people.
“The barrel was in the building on the day it went down on the East Coast. The other explosions in the Apple were going to allow our boy his freedom. He had a perfect alibi: some nut was trying to bring down a piece of this country, a heavy piece called ‘national security.’ The people would be frightened by all the carnage, especially if the bucolic Middle West got it from a blast. It would be indirect, but all these explosions would cover one more minor boom.
“I know I know. We don’t have anything except what’s going on in my feeble little brain.”
Natalie walks over to me and hugs me. Spencer puts out his arm and slowly walks over to me.
“Not a chance,” I tell him. “Not a fucking chance.”
“So the barrel was premeditated all along,” Natalie says on the ride back to the Loop from Mokena. “You were right about it not being there coincidentally. They put it there in late afternoon, so they knew about what happened in New York City in the early morning. It was done intentionally to look like a part of the day’s terrorism.”
“There’s still a chance that the bad guys from the Middle East did it,” Tommy offers.
“But why with fertilizer? Why not with C-4 like everyone else in Chicago?”
My partner looks at Natalie.
“That’d be pushing the coincidence scenario, if you’re talking the shit they used to detonate,” he tells my wife.
“More than pushing it. Jimmy’s right that it wasn’t Al Qaeda or whatever they call themselves. The Feds just want to fuel the fire so they can do whatever they want to find these fucks,” Tommy agrees.
“Even if it means letting a murderer slide,” Natalie concludes.
Tommy doesn’t answer this time, and the ride back to Chicago becomes quiet.
So we’re covering the details. We checked out the guy who got shit canned for not checking the goods in his care at the Anderson Building. So I called the owner of the Loop properties which include the Anderson structure. I talked to a Mr. Gary Merton for twenty minutes and finally convinced him to rehire Raymond the maintenance guy.
Next we checked with the explosives people in the CPD. They weren’t given much opportunity to examine the spot where the big bang went off, but they had a few days in the hole that the fertilizer-bomb had made in that chunk of the Loop.
Drew Constantine is in charge of the bomb squad, as they’re generally known. But they’re more sophisticated than the guys you see on TV. These guys are academic types, most of them, with degrees in chemistry and physics and various other sciences. We’ve got several PhD’s in the crew. They’re more cerebral than some SWAT team that crashes onto a scene and then begins blasting away at bad guys. The explosives investigations people are highly educated, patient and studious people, eggheads who love to find out if stuff is going to blow the hell up, to put it bluntly.
“We couldn’t find no detonation device anywhere near the barrel,” Lieutenant Jake Jacoby says.
“What?” is all I can ask.
“We couldn’t find no—“
“And why the hell weren’t we told?”
“I reported the whole deal to your Captain, Jimmy. A week ago. The Feds found out, and it leaked to us. The FBI’ll tell you they have such a device in their evidence department, but I know for a fact they never picked it up out of the rubble.”
“So how did they set off the explosion?”
“My guess would be that there was a fire in that maintenance room. All those solvents—alcohol, kerosene, ammonia. They’d help light up that fertilizer. It’d make a bomb big enough to do what we saw down there.”
I look at Jake. I’ve dealt with him before. He’s not well-liked because of his blunt demeanor, but his directness always helped the two of us to get along.
“Jimmy, the feds have been sitting on this case from the beginning…You want to hear my half-baked theory?”
He’s got Tommy’s and Natalie’s full attention now as well.
“I think the FBI concocted the stories about the C-4 in those other buildings. I haven’t got a goddamned blade of evidentiary grass to back myself up, but I’ll bet the mortgage they made all that up to keep the national heat on the camel jockey and his jihad soul brothers.”
“They wouldn’t go to…”
I look in Jake’s face and see that it all works as far as he’s concerned. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has created its own scenario to
reinforce the notion that Osama Bin Laden has his hand stuck in the Anderson explosion.
“Bin Laden didn’t do it, you’re saying,” I tell Jake.
“You were right, Jimmy. And your Captain is just doing his bit in the Big Picture. For National Security. It’s a fucking lynching. They want to hang Bin Laden by his nards, I say fine. Just hang him for all crap he’s actually pulled.
“If you’re going after someone else, Lieutenant Parisi…Well, I’d say you have the higher moral ground, and no you may not quote me on it. I got three kids who need to go to college in a few years, so I’ll just assume the position for the guys downtown, and then someday I’ll watch them get strung up themselves for letting somebody walk on this one.”
“No one’s going to walk,” I explain to him.
“Oh yeah? And how’s that going to happen?”
“I’m going to catch the miserable son of a bitch, Jake,” I inform him as we leave his office at the Loop Headquarters.
*
“You’re right, but nobody wants to hear it,” Tommy says. It’s more like a lament than a statement.
“I’ve never seen policemen behave this way in the more than thirty years I’ve been on the force,” I tell my wife and Spencer, sitting in the navy blue Taurus outside the HQ in the Loop.
“Neither have I,” Tommy says.
“We’ve all seen corrupt policemen, but never like…” Natalie adds.
“Everyone’s afraid to go against the wave, and it’s as big as the Anderson Building now. No one wants to put their job at stake. Look at all those American flags on all those family cars. Every time we get a dose of all this ‘patriotism’, something very bad happens,” Tommy said.
“More to come, partner. I’m afraid there’s a whole lot more to come before it’s all over.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I pore over Jim Casper’s report because I keep thinking that I’ve missed something important. The only thing I can come up with is the fact that Raymond the maintenance guy was not there to be blown to smithereens on September 12th with everyone else.
I take the drive by myself at noon because I think I’ll catch him when he gets back from lunch. Tommy works his regular day shift in Homicide this week and so does my wife. I can handle Raymond on my own, since my omnipresent mother is at the house when the girls come back from St. Margaret’s Pre-School. They get home around 3:15, and my mother is always there to greet them at the door. She’s there even when Natalie is home because my mother loves my wife like the sister I never had. They talk behind my back too, and they have a great time together. So Red likes her to be around all the time. She thinks of her as the anti-mother-in-law.