The Truth Can Get You Killed

by Mark Richard Zubro

  “We didn’t find any tapes of a back elevator.”

  “You were supposed to have them. I’ve checked here carefully. I’ll look again, but if you don’t have them, that probably means the tapes are gone. Or maybe they were never working.”

  “Or someone tampered with them or took them.”

  “Maybe, but as you know, we’ve had glitches with this building. For a week, the metal-scanning device at the entrance worked only sporadically. We had to use hand-held scanners. The lines were horrendous. It could simply be gone or never been working in the first place.”

  “You can’t mean you’re missing a whole series of tapes.”

  Turner glanced at Fenwick and shook his head.

  “Missing or never taken. Either way, I’m sorry. I’m sure they aren’t here, but I promise I’ll check again.”

  Turner told Fenwick the news.

  “Maybe Leo Kramer took them and destroyed them,” Fenwick said.

  “Possible.”

  “Who’s in charge of them?”

  “Caldwell claimed she’d investigate.”

  “Maybe she’s covering up for somebody,” Fenwick suggested.

  “For who?”

  “One of the judges?”

  “Wadsworth or Malmsted come to mind. One of them the killer? Or maybe they’re in a conspiracy?”

  “Don’t start that conspiracy shit,” Fenwick said. “I hate conspiracy shit. There are no conspiracies. It’s just assholes being stupid.”

  “I don’t picture Caldwell being part of some evil cabal. She seemed solid, sensible.”

  “So, maybe Carl Schurz wasn’t lying. We’ll have to find him to ask him which entrance he was near.”

  “Maybe this isn’t Meade?”

  “Who then?”

  Turner shrugged.

  Carruthers bustled into the room and hurried over to them. “I hear you guys arrested Judge Meade’s son. It’s on all the newscasts. The kid did it. Wow! Can you prove it? You better be careful. Look what happened to those cops in LA when they screwed up a high-profile case.”

  Fenwick stood up, put his arm around Carruthers’ shoulder, and shouted directly into his ear, “Fuck off.”

  Carruthers jumped. He backed away. “Hey, what’d you do that for? I was just trying to be friendly and supportive.” He cupped his hand over his ear, listened for a moment, and shook his head. “I think you hurt something permanently.” He twisted a finger in his ear. “Hey, that wasn’t very nice. I was trying to help.” He stalked away.

  “I think I may have gone a bit far that time,” Fenwick said.

  Turner said, “You’ll have to apologize.”

  “No.”

  “I think so.”

  Fenwick grumbled deep in his throat, “After this case is over.”

  They went back to viewing the tapes. The only person who wasn’t a security guard was at that one spot. For half an hour, frame by frame, they ran that portion of the tape backwards and forwards. They got no nearer to identification than before.

  “Let’s turn this over to the electronics experts at Eleventh and State,” Turner said. “Maybe they can get something. For all we know they may have the dates or timing wrong. Somebody could have doctored it. Maybe this isn’t what we needed at all.”

  Fenwick nodded agreement.

  “We let the kid go?” Turner asked.

  “We have a choice?”

  Turner shook his head.

  They met with Mike Meade in the gray-painted conference room on the fourth floor.

  “Are you going to let me go?” Meade asked.

  “If your dad followed you to the bar, how come we have you on tape at the Federal Building?”

  “You couldn’t have. I wasn’t there. Let me see it.”

  They took him to the third floor and showed him. “That could be anybody.”

  “You said he followed you.”

  “That’s what I figured. I wasn’t monitoring his movements that night. I just went to work.”

  He stuck with that story and a half hour of questioning got them no further.

  Minutes later they hustled Mike Meade into the back of an unmarked car. They took him to his mother’s house. They said little to each other on the way over.

  On the return trip Turner said, “I still think he’s lying.”

  “Sure is possible. We’ve got to prove it.”

  “We’ve got to find Carl Schurz.”

  17

  Fenwick pulled off Lake Shore Drive at Wacker and took it west. Lower Wacker Drive, one of the fastest ways around downtown Chicago, made a half circle a level below surface streets from southwest to northeast around the Loop. Open on one side to the Chicago River, the other side contained a warren of underground nooks, crannies, and deadfalls to crawl into, fall down, or die in—the basements, garbage bins, and secret recesses of the steel and concrete behemoths that soared above the streets.

  They found the corner Roman Ayres had told them Carl Schurz or his dope dealer might inhabit. They saw several abandoned refrigerator cartons, wind-whipped bits of cardboard, plastic paper wrapping, and torn fast-food containers around the darkened area. The lights on lower Wacker Drive seemed more to infringe on the darkness than to provide illumination. They found the opening Ayres had indicated.

  The passage was dim and sloped slightly downward. The wind died at the entrance to the narrow walkway. They stepped over the leavings of the homeless: rolled-up newspapers, grime-encrusted towels, rusting outdoor grills, yellow-and-brown-stained mattresses, empty tin cans, cold embers of fires never warm enough in the first place to keep the Chicago winter at bay.

  About twenty feet farther on they came to an opening. If people were doing drugs, it wasn’t here. This space may have been out of the direct wind, but it was still bitterly cold. Near the rear of this collective hovel, an air shaft led up to street level far above. It let in the only light, street dimness from high overhead. Garbage covered the entire floor of the thirty-by-twenty living area. As far as Turner could tell, this could be the Ritz for the homeless. Fenwick and Turner began poking their way through the debris. Turner didn’t expect to find anything, at the same time he feared what they might. Near the back they found a baby carriage a child might use for its dolls. Inside were tattered doll-size clothes neatly folded.

  “My butt is almost frozen,” Fenwick said.

  “Let’s at least hunt through the larger mounds of stuff. Hate to think the kid crawled in here tonight.”

  “I don’t like it that no one else is around,” Fenwick said. “Makes me shiver, and not from the cold.”

  Fenwick began prodding the largest mound of debris in the corner under the best light while Turner unearthed mounds of garbage near the baby carriage.

  Fenwick said, “Carl Schurz is going to make a very poor witness.”

  “He was probably lying,” Turner said. “Won’t be surprised if he denies everything.”

  “Lying witnesses I don’t like,” Fenwick said, “but dead ones depress me. You better come here.” Fenwick pulled away several layers of cardboard.

  The body looked like it was sleeping peacefully. Turner took off his gloves, leaned down, and touched the face. Carl Schurz was dead.

  Fenwick returned to the car to call for backup. Turner remained standing over the body. “You poor kid,” he muttered at the body and the cement walls. “Nobody ever loved you enough, or maybe there was never enough love to give you, or maybe you weren’t very lovable. And there was nothing any of us could have done about it.” The cold seeped into his consciousness and prevented further emotional speculation. Almost automatically, Turner began the investigation.

  Turner and Fenwick and the technicians inspected the area carefully. They found several needles and less than an ounce of marijuana. They could find no wounds on Schurz’s body. The ME said he’d get to the autopsy as quickly as possible.

  “I thought Lower Wacker cleared out when it got this cold,” Turner said to one of the uniformed cops. />
  “Usually does. We know a lot of drugs go down around here. We try to clean it out. They always find some place. They seem to be able to sense if something has gone wrong.”

  “Did he die from the cold or someone kill him?” Turner asked the ME.

  “Not sure. Probably cold, just like a lot of the other homeless.”

  “Maybe he just got tired of living,” Turner said. “Crawled into a hole and let himself die.”

  “We’re all freezing our butts off,” one of the Crime Lab people said. “Let’s blow this dump. He was just a homeless dead kid.”

  “He’s not just a homeless dead kid,” Turner said. “His life was important. It made a difference that he was alive.” Turner felt awkward defending Carl Schurz. He also wished that what he’d said was true.

  Turner went through the pockets. He pulled out a wallet. He would inspect it back at Headquarters.

  In the car on the way back to Area Ten, Turner said, “I’m really pissed. He shouldn’t be dead. There was no reason for him to be on the streets. There are places he could have gone for help.”

  “You’re taking this hard,” Fenwick said.

  “He was a troubled gay kid. He didn’t have to die. He was bright, nice looking. Not that long ago, he was an innocent little kid, playing with toys, asking somebody to read him a book, trying to get a little attention in the best way he could, just like the rest of us. I’m going to see Ian. Maybe he knows something about what happened.”

  “Why not call him and talk first?” Fenwick asked. “He’d have phoned us if he’d seen the kid.”

  “I guess I’ll call.”

  “Paul, why aren’t we considering Ian a suspect?”

  Paul stared out the window in silence.

  “Paul?”

  “I’ve thought of it. He isn’t the killer.”

  “You mean he didn’t do it, or you hope he didn’t do it?”

  “Both.”

  “He’s known a lot of information from mysterious sources. I don’t like mysterious sources.”

  “I know,” Paul said. “My years of friendship with him and all that I know about him says he wouldn’t kill.”

  “Anybody’s capable of it.”

  “Yeah.”

  Fenwick let the subject drop. Back in the squad room, someone had had pizza delivered. Turner tried a piece and almost choked on it. Even Fenwick found his prodigious appetite blunted.

  Turner went through the wallet. There were two driver’s licenses, both made out to Carl Schurz. One said he was sixteen, the other that he was twenty-one. One address was for Lubbock, Texas, the other for Rapid City, South Dakota. He found an identification card for the Kennedy Federal Building. Schurz had two dollars in change. No social security card, no credit cards, no voter registration, no medical card, no pictures, no hidden compartments with keys or addresses.

  He called both cities. Lubbock had one listing for a Jack Schurz. Turner realized it was near midnight, but he phoned anyway. The person who answered said he didn’t know any Carl Schurz. He sounded like he’d been asleep. He gave brief, terse answers to Turner’s questions. The Rapid City operator had no listing for any Schurz. Turner wondered—had the parents moved away, had a smart kid gotten two fake IDs? He suspected that the one that identified him as sixteen and dated the year before was the accurate one.

  Turner tried to do paperwork, but his mind wouldn’t focus. He was used to death, but Carl Schurz was different. He’d touched him, held him, felt the kid’s needs. He didn’t think he could have ever met them.

  Turner gave up writing reports. He picked up and began reading one of the dissents the judge had written in an abortion case. After two paragraphs he put it down. He wasn’t sure if it made sense or not. Right now, he didn’t care.

  Molton entered the room. He said, “I heard you got bad news.”

  “We’ve had a fucked-up day,” Fenwick said.

  “It’s tough to lose a witness in a murder case,” Molton said.

  “We’re not sure what he knew,” Fenwick said.

  They discussed the case with him for several minutes. After he left, Turner tried calling Ian at home. There was no answer, so he tried his private number at the paper. Ian picked up on the third ring.

  “It’s Paul. Carl Schurz is dead.”

  Ian was silent.

  “You there?” Turner asked.

  “Yeah.” Ian’s voice was subdued. “What happened?”

  Turner explained.

  Ian said, “There was no reason that kid had to die.”

  “I know.”

  “What can I do?”

  “I don’t know. I wanted to tell you.”

  “Thanks. I doubt if anybody knows any family. If I can’t find anyone, I’ll try and work it out so that he gets some kind of decent burial. Maybe his parents put out a missing kid’s notice?”

  “I put in a search on him. Nothing turned up. If they threw him out, they wouldn’t turn in a report.”

  “This is such shit,” Ian said. “Goddamn kids don’t need to die.”

  “I’m tired and depressed,” Turner said.

  They were silent for several moments. Finally Ian said, “How badly does this hurt your investigation?”

  “I’m not sure. Geary says the judge was at Au Naturel. Schurz confirms and adds information about the Federal Building. Now he’s gone. The son gave us more details. Maybe we wouldn’t need Schurz after all. Hurting the case is a pain in the ass, but that boy should not have died.”

  Ian agreed, but there was nothing either one could do at the moment.

  “Why are you still at the paper?” Turner asked.

  “Working on the Meade case. I’ve been at it eighteen hours a day. If you need to talk, let’s meet.”

  “In an hour or so. I’m going to stop at the autopsy.”

  Turner thanked him and hung up. He stared at the papers strewn on the top of his desk, the remnants of pizza next to the space heater by his feet, then back at Fenwick. His friend met his gaze.

  “Time to go home,” Fenwick said. “We’re not going to get any more done tonight.”

  “I guess.”

  Fenwick had never heard his friend sound so defeated. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Fenwick gazed at him carefully. “That sounds more like you mean you’re not okay, but you don’t want to talk about it.”

  Turner really liked Fenwick, but at the moment he wanted to talk to a gay person about what had happened to Carl Schurz. Fenwick was a good friend, probably his best nongay friend, but sometimes you needed to talk to one of your own, someone who had shared the strains of being a gay person in America at the tail end of the twentieth century.

  Turner gave Fenwick a brief smile. “I’m going to be fine. You’re right. Let’s call it a day. I’m going to stop at the morgue, see if they started the autopsy.”

  “Want me to go with?”

  “If they find anything important, I’ll call you.”

  Outside the wind was dead calm. Turner could feel the cold against his face. The weather bureau predicted the temperature would hit twenty below zero by midnight but then begin to climb before morning. The prediction was for near freezing by the end of the weekend.

  After he started the motor, Turner shivered in his car for a few minutes. He watched Fenwick pull away. He needed to get home. He hadn’t seen Jeff or Ben all day. Ben would have long since picked up Jeff and brought him back to the house. He wanted to feel the warmth of his home, his family, and the arms of his lover, but he couldn’t get Carl Schurz out of his mind.

  Turner drove over to Cook County Morgue. He walked past the half-tile, half-glass entry room. A body lay there on a gurney waiting for transportation to the back. He walked down the corridor toward the autopsy room. As always, the room was pristine clean except where they were doing the current autopsy. Every surface was gleaming stainless steel.

  The ME working on the body looked up. It was Hamilton Trout, who was short
, stout, black-haired, and enormously competent. At the moment Hamilton was holding a liver in his left hand. Turner looked at the face on the table. It was Schurz. The body cavity gaped open. The naked corpse looked waxen, cold, dead. The ME weighed the liver and placed it carefully on a table.

  “This one yours?” Hamilton asked.

  “Yeah.” Turner wasn’t exceptionally squeamish after all these years of viewing autopsies. He was not ready, however, to jump into a vat of corpses either. He approached the body. He noted the smell. Same as all the others, chemicals and body odors.

  “You know how he died?” Turner asked.

  “Think so. Freezing was the immediate cause of death, but not the first cause.”

  “Come again?”

  “Kid was on his way to being very dead. He’d taken enough pills to put himself away. If somebody would have found him before he froze, they probably could have saved him. A little stomach pump and he’s fine. He took more than enough to ease whatever pain he was in, crawled into the cold, fell asleep, and died.”

  “Killed himself.”

  “Tried to. Cold finished it for him.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Pretty much. I’ve got more tests to run, but that’s my best guess now. I doubt if it’s going to change. Does the way he died make a difference to what you’re working on?” As he spoke, the ME began examining and weighing more organs. Sometimes he paused to cut off bits of tissue to be labeled, stored, and examined more thoroughly later.

  “No, no difference. It bothers me that there’s another dead gay kid.”

  “He was gay?” Hamilton pointed at the body. “Can’t tell it from the corpse.”

  “No difference when we’re dead. He a drug addict?”

  “No needle tracks anywhere. I’ll have to check for other drugs. You know this kid?”

  “Only briefly as a witness.”

  “Some bother you more than others.”

  “Yeah. Something else comes up, let me know.”

  “Sure.”

  Paul met Ian at the Melrose Restaurant on Broadway. They sat in the corner front booth. Watching the parade of hot men stroll past was one of the great joys of a summer evening spent in this booth. Now, at midnight on a bitterly cold Saturday in January, the streets were mostly deserted. Traffic was sparse and pedestrians nonexistent.