by John L. Work
“Good luck with that.”
“Look, I’ll get back with you later. I have a few more phone calls to make. Thanks.”
“Hey, I never told you anything, remember? That’s confidential information.”
“Got it. Don’t worry.”
“Bye.”
He had already hung up.
43
“Would you care for something to drink?”
“Yes, please. Do you have a good Chenin Blanc?”
“I have Napa Valley Chappellet, 2001.”
“That’ll do very nicely, thank you.”
The First Class section flight attendant opened a bottle with a corkscrew, poured some of the clear white wine into a crystal glass and handed it to Samantha Newsom. She sniffed it, sipped it and nodded to the attendant.
“Yes. It’s very good.”
The attendant filled her glass almost to the brim.
She’d walked from the front sidewalk to the parking lot at the Grayson Hotel, taken off the black coat, gotten into her car and started to drive the few blocks to O’Hare. On her way out of the lot she’d taken off the hat, kicked off the dress shoes, removed the sunglasses, her gloves, the blonde wig, wriggled out of her dress and stuffed them all under the seat. Beneath the dress she was wearing blue jeans and a plain light-blue short sleeved t-shirt with a pocket. She stopped at a filling station outside the airport. Sitting in the front seat at the side parking lot, she rolled down the pant legs on her jeans, put on a light windbreaker and pulled on a pair of white cotton socks and sneakers.
Carrying them into the convenience store section within her purse, she ditched the wig, the forty-five caliber semi-automatic and the spent shell casings in the ladies’ rest room trash can, taking care to pull up about half of the discarded paper towels. She hid the items under the waste.
It took her about ten minutes to drive from the gas station back to the airport and into the long term lot. She put the car in the cheapest parking area, as far from the terminal as possible. It could be weeks before anyone figured that no one would ever be returning to pick it up – even with the Colorado license plates. After walking around to the rear of the car, she put the bulky clothes as far as she could push them into the trunk. Then she pulled her suitcase out and dropped it so the come along wheels were on the pavement. She lifted the carpeting which concealed the spare tire and loosened the large plastic wing nut that held the tire iron and frame jack in place. She lifted the tire and jack upward a few inches, then put Jim McCowell’s wallet beneath all of it. After re-tightening the wing-nut and re-securing the carpet with the Velcro attachment, she closed the trunk and locked the car. She pushed the handle release button on her suitcase and, pulling it behind her, leisurely strolled into the outgoing terminal to see about checking in for her flight.
Inside the building she had to wait for five hours until her departure. She picked up copies of Investor’s Business Daily, People Magazine and The New York Times to occupy her time. She dozed periodically in one of the plastic chairs that are bolted together in rows. When she awoke, some skinny teenaged boy with a mild case of acne was standing in front of her, staring at her bare upper arms and the swell of her breasts beneath the t-shirt. She knew she should have kept the damned windbreaker on. He flushed and walked away quickly when she glared at his eyes.
It would be a long time spent on airplanes. She’d booked a flight on U.S. Airways from O’Hare to Los Angeles, then an Air Pacific hop to Nadi, Fiji, and another to Apia Faleolo, Samoa. The whole trip would take forty three hours.
The Chenin Blanc was very tasty.
44
Welch’s pager went off at two-thirty a.m. on a late September Saturday morning. He looked at the LED display and saw that it was the communications center. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for the telephone.
“This is Welch. You paged me?”
“John, it’s Rose. We’ve had a double stabbing at the Blue Door Tavern. The victims are in the emergency room at United Hospital.”
“Are they gonna die?”
She laughed loudly. “You’re a real asshole. I don’t know what their condition is right now.”
“Okay. I’m on my way.”
Twenty minutes later he was driving and straightening his tie at the same time. He’d showered and shaved before grabbing a freshly pressed dress shirt from his closet and pulling on his suit pants. The Blue Door was a place where a lot of illegals hung out on Friday and Saturday nights, to dance, drink and meet women – but mostly to drink. He wondered if either of his victims would be able to speak English. That would be a plus.
He walked into the Emergency Room and introduced himself to Dr. James Reilinger, the intern who’d gotten the duty for the weekend. Reilinger escorted him to a curtained off space. On the gurney therein was a man of about thirty-five years. The young doctor spoke to him in English, but the man didn’t understand.
“I need to show this detective your injuries.”
The doctor pulled down the sheet which covered the patient’s torso, then lifted a sterile paper backed bandage that was placed loosely atop the man’s belly. Welch was looking at an open hole, perhaps three inches high and an inch or so wide. There was an intestine protruding from the gash.
The man grimaced and made a groaning sound when the open air hit his gut. He said, “Cavron!” You bastard!
The doc said, “Yeah, I know. Sorry.”
In the next room, there was another Spanish-only patient, with a smaller similar injury, but no protruding bowel. Nevertheless, the wound was open, enabling both men to see into his peritoneum and view the small intestine. This man was not so cross with the doctor and didn’t curse when the doctor lifted his bandage. Welch thought perhaps he’d had more to drink and wasn’t so sensitive to the pain as the first man. Or maybe he’d done some cocaine, too.
Neither of the two had an American ID or a resident alien green card. Nor did either of them have a driver’s license.
He walked out to the lobby and met Deputy Hector Sanchez, the first cop to arrive at the bar fight. Fluent in Spanish, Sanchez had interviewed the few remaining bystanders at the Blue Door and asked them what happened. Welch was very conversant in the language, but not fluent. As expected, many of the drinking patrons left the bar when they heard the sirens in the distance. Sanchez said that witnesses told him the two stabbing victims were drinking and dancing with one of the local women, both apparently hoping to get lucky at the end of the evening. Another man, who was a stranger to them, began to buy her drinks and dance with her. Not about to allow their mating territory to be infringed, they took issue with the fellow who would have their lady friend to himself and began to punch him. They knocked him to the floor and kicked him about his face and head. Somehow, he reached into his pants pocket, produced a little folding knife, a pen knife, opened it and while still on his knees began to jab upward at his assailants. Both of them went down and the bartender called the cops. The stabber, whom one of the witnesses thought was named Juan Navarrona, ran out the back door before the cops arrived. He didn’t even get his new lady friend’s phone number. She also took off before the cops arrived and no one seemed to know her name.
Welch was amazed. A little pen knife opened those gaping wounds in their bellies and caused a gut to pop out. He’d have to completely re-think his opinions of pen-knife wielders. He’d been through officer survival training where he learned that some American police departments actually had policies in place, telling their cops that if anyone came within twenty-one feet with a knife in hand, the officer would be justified in shooting him. It would take only about a second to sprint that far, almost quicker than an officer with a weapon already drawn could pull the trigger. By the time the cop got a round off, he could very well have his belly or throat cut open, like these two men in the Emergency Room. But people in civilian life who’d never been in life and death fights didn’t understand any of that. And most newspapers would never print it if the reporte
rs did know it. The inane question that’d be posed to a cop who shot and killed a knife-wielding suspect was, “Why didn’t you just shoot the knife out of his hand? Why’d you kill him?”
The detective was up all night doing an arrest warrant for Juan Navarronna, which would probably turn out to be just one of the man’s ten or fifteen aliases. Juan was probably already on his way back to Mexico until things cooled down in Colorado. Or he might never come back again. Who could know? There were other places to go in the United States where an illegal alien could find employment from Monday through Friday and saloons on Friday nights – about forty nine places, to be exact. Many of these men worked hard in the fields during the week and played hard on Friday and Saturday nights. They came from countries where most boys don’t go to school past the fourth grade – where for their tenth birthdays they get a shovel and sent out to find a job for a few bucks a day. As wealthy as the nation of Mexico might be, for most of its citizens it remains a place of abject poverty. There are two classes – the masses of very poor and the few very rich. The opportunity for the common people to find a better life, and more money to send home to their families in Mexico or Central America, is to the north en Los Estados Unidos.
But even so, Welch had to admit that as early as the 1980s, while he’d worked in uniform for the Calhoun County Sheriff’s Office, he soon grew weary of dealing with illegals who got into drunken bar fights, or imbibed heavily and drove their cars without licenses or insurance. Then they ran away from the accident scenes after they crashed. If the cops did manage to make a drunk driving arrest, it was very difficult to find out what the driver’s name really was. The custom among people from Spanish speaking nations is to use their mothers’ maiden names behind their fathers’ last names – with a hyphen separating the two. Consequently, when legal troubles might come along in the form of a traffic collision, a stabbing, shooting, or an assault, they often transposed their fathers’ surnames and their mothers’ maiden names – or just used friends’ names to identify themselves – if they were still around when the cops arrived to clean up the mess.
Thus, a man from Latin America whose legal identity at birth might have been Tomás Bernardo Santillan-Ramirez, had within his real name the options of identifying himself to the authorities as, Tomás Santillan, Bernardo Santillan, Tomás Ramirez, Bernardo Ramirez, Bernardo Ramirez-Santillan, Tomás Ramirez-Santillan, Bernard Santillan, Thomas Santillan, Bernard Ramirez, Bernard Ramirez-Santillan, Bernard Santillan-Ramirez, and so on. It could go on to make a long, long list of names for the same fellow. All of the available also-known-as (aka) names made it difficult to prosecute a serious crime committed by someone who was in the country illegally because the defendant might be known by so many different aliases. Sometimes, even the federal immigration authorities had trouble finding out who someone really was.
In 1987, to the best of Welch’s memory, President Ronald Reagan had announced an amnesty, granting citizenship to about seven million illegals. Little did anyone know that after twenty or so years went by, there’d be another twelve to fifty million invaders inside the U.S.A., demanding the same rights as American citizens. Before he retired from law enforcement, a whole lot of situations would arise that neither Welch nor his fellow cops could ever imagine in the United States of America. So, in this particular double stabbing case, Welch correctly figured that he’d never see Juan Navarronna face to face, and that Juan Navarronna would never see the inside of an American courtroom.
At the same time, the detective thought Juan actually might have had a good self defense case, because two men ganged up on him and were kicking him in the head as he lay on the barroom floor. And all he’d really wanted to do was dance and get laid by the plump lady in the tight dress. Yet again, the whole thing couldn’t have happened with these particular players if Navarronna and his assailants hadn’t been in the country illegally. It was another arrest warrant that would never be executed by an actual arrest. It’d lay dormant in the Court files and the National Crime Information Center computer system forever, long after Welch and his contemporaries were gone from law enforcement.
45
Jim McCowell’s body was flown to Altoona, Pennsylvania for burial. His daughters, Kim and Adrienne, were still in there with their grandparents when Marnie called them on Saturday afternoon to announce their father’s death during his business trip to Chicago. There was a large turnout for the funeral, not just because of his business and financial successes, but because he’d been born and raised there. His parents were shocked and suspicious of the circumstances surrounding his death. Convinced from the beginning that he’d had nothing to do with Sheila’s murder, they immediately believed that their son’s killing revolved directly around his bank accounts.
He left his entire estate to Marnie. As his wife, she was, after all, the next of kin. The children got nothing. In life he’d received a personal promise from his new wife that she’d provide for his daughters’ welfare and eventually leave all of the money to them if something ever happened to him.
Welch decided he had to put Jim’s death out of his mind and concentrate solely on Sheila’s murder. There was too much material and information swirling about among the cases for him to try to keep up with all of it. Of the three killings, Sheila’s was his alone. Steve Reilly would have to take care of Jimmie Slaikovitch’s killing and Frank Stanley was in charge of Jim McCowell’s. All the same, Welch fully understood that there’d be information gathered among the detectives that would be common to the three cases – so, it was inevitable that at some point they’d have to share some of it with each other. Undoubtedly, there would eventually be a crucial three-way telephone conference.
Samantha Newsom was now much more than just a person of interest in a murder investigation. She was a fleeing suspect. And she’d vanished into the night – a Wednesday night two weeks ago, to be precise. He had no idea which cell phone carrier she might currently be using. Her regular phone had been shut off. He called Janet Rogers again.
“Janet, it’s Welch. Can you talk?”
“Yes, for a minute or two.”
“Do you have Sammie’s old cell and home phone numbers? I know she’s had the services discontinued but I need them for a subpoena.”
“Hang on.”
He waited for about thirty seconds.
“Do you have a pencil?”
“Go ahead.”
“Her cell number was 303-555-2928 and her home number was 303-555-7201. Need me to repeat them?”
“No, thanks. I’ll be in touch.”
“I’ll be looking forward to that. Goodbye, and please be careful.”
“I will. Bye.”
His face felt flushed and he noticed an uncontrollable increase in his heart rate when she told him to be careful. He thought he detected something in the tone of her voice when she said it. Could this be the start of something between them? Well, if there was to be anything like that, it would have to wait until the McCowell murder case was done.
46
Frank Stanley was staring at the coroner’s report on his desk. God damn it! He was going to have to call that detective in Colorado. McCowell had died of three gunshot wounds. The copper-jacketed projectiles removed from his body were two-hundred thirty grain, fired from a forty-five caliber semi-automatic pistol. Two of the shots were non-fatal – the ones that hit his lower belly. The third one that went into the middle of his forehead probably would have killed a moose.
It was a felony in Chicago to even own a weapon like that. Hand-guns were banned and no one had yet successfully challenged the law in a Court case. He didn’t care about the laws of the State of Illinois stomping on the Second Amendment. Criminals would get handguns anyway, no matter what the law said. Law abiding citizens would have to fend for themselves with whatever they could find at hand. His job as a cop was to enforce the law, Constitutional or not. So, this blonde woman who was dressed like an expensive hooker had carried and used a forty-five semi-automatic
handgun in his city and he didn’t like it, especially since she’d killed a man of some reputation and stature. And now, trying to solve it was giving him a headache.
He picked up the phone and dialed the number.
“Detective Welch.”