Turner loved it when technicians confirmed his observations.
A uniformed cop came in. “Nobody else home on this floor. Nobody on the floor above or below heard anything. With the temperature up, lots of people are out getting groceries and stuff.”
Just after they took the body away, the technicians left.
They returned to the bathroom. “Cool in here,” Turner said.
“Broken windows in January will do that,” Fenwick commented.
Turner touched the radiator. “Feels kind of cool.”
Fenwick reached out to touch it.
“Wait,” Turner said. He noted the spots where paint flecked off and dust was scattered on it. “Let’s get the techs back in here. I want this examined. If they struggled, the killer might have brushed against this.”
“Or touched it inadvertently,” Fenwick suggested, “or simply brushed up against it.”
The bathroom cabinet had a toothbrush, toothpaste, an electric razor, and a comb. The only drawers were the ones in the hallway, which doubled as a clothes closet. Turner and Fenwick opened them. One of them contained what would generously be called his outfits for dancing. Clean, neat, skimpy, and no clues to murder.
“These things all his?” Fenwick asked.
“Presumably.” Turner held up a fishnet G-string. “I’d like to see Ben in something like this.”
“Or Madge,” Fenwick said.
They finished their brief inspection and returned to the main room.
“I get to ask the question of the hour,” Fenwick said.
“I don’t know,” Turner said.
“I didn’t ask.”
“One killer or two? The question isn’t much more obvious than the sunrise, and I don’t know the answer. Thought I’d save you the energy.”
“You’re a pal.”
“Let’s get to Mrs. Meade. This is not going to be pleasant.”
It was worse than they imagined. When they told Mrs. Meade, she collapsed on the floor and moaned. They helped her to a couch. Her daughter, Pam, entered the room.
She hurried to her mother. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
Mrs. Meade continued moaning.
Pam turned to the cops. “What’s happened?”
They told her.
Abruptly she sat on the edge of the couch. She continued to pat her mother’s hand absently. “I don’t believe it,” she whispered.
“We’re sorry,” Turner said.
She nodded.
“We need to look in his room,” Turner said.
She pointed to a hallway on the right. They eased out of the room and down the hall. The first door was a bathroom—the second a bedroom.
“Got to be his?” Fenwick asked.
Turner gazed at the four posters of male sports stars on the walls. Baseball, basketball, hockey, football. All Caucasian males. All with poses that emphasized their crotches. Mike Meade’s parents weren’t the only ones who missed the obvious.
They inspected the room carefully. Under the right side of the mattress, they found two male pornographic magazines with several pages in each stuck together.
“At least he was normal,” Turner said.
“How’s that?”
“He beat off.”
Fenwick inspected the closet while Turner started on the desk.
“These all his?” Fenwick called.
“What?” Turner joined him.
Fenwick showed him the label on a pair of pants. “I’ve got size twenty-eight waist and thirty length on most of these, but I’ve got two with thirty-inch waists and thirty-four length.”
“The change in waist I can see,” Turner said, “not in length. Not that much.”
“He had a boyfriend stay the night here?”
“I don’t remember him mentioning any boyfriends.”
“You don’t remember it because he didn’t mention it.”
“I want to know more about Mr. Boyfriend. Why wasn’t this stuff at his place in Rogers Park? Why here? It isn’t the usual practice for severely closeted gay men to entertain their lovers in their parents’ house, or for them to leave clothes behind.”
“Maybe there’s a logical, nonintimate explanation.”
“I’m listening.”
“I didn’t say I had one. I just said there might be one.”
Turner returned to the desk. He found paper clips, pens, pencils, blank notebooks, college papers, a bank book, and a package of glow-in-the-dark condoms.
“I didn’t know they made these,” Turner said.
“What?”
Turner showed him.
They found nothing else that led to either an explanation for why father and son should be dead or any lead to who the boyfriend might be.
“We’ve got to talk to the mother and daughter,” Turner said. “Something is going on connected to them. They must know something.”
Pam was at her mother’s side. She was crying softly and holding her mother’s hand.
Turner and Fenwick walked over to them.
“Please,” Turner said, “if you could answer a few questions.”
“I’ve phoned my mother’s best friend. She’ll be here any minute. My mom is not going to be able to talk. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to talk.”
Mrs. Meade stared straight ahead. Her blinks seemed to come minutes apart and seemed to take hours to complete. She responded with silence to questions. She did not move when touched. Turner suggested to Pam that she call the family doctor as well as the friend.
She spent several minutes making calls.
When the friend arrived, they managed to maneuver Mrs. Meade so she was lying down on the couch. They left them and moved to the next room.
When they were seated again Pam said, “I wish I could yell at you again, as I did the other day. I don’t know why I’m not screaming myself into insensibility. I loved my brother. We were very close.” She began to cry. A large number of tissues later, she was composed enough to speak.
“I don’t know what I can tell you.”
“Your brother claimed you knew he was gay,” Turner said.
“Yes, he told me last summer. We have a cottage in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He and I were there for a week before our parents came up. We both brought boyfriends.”
“Was he a lover or boyfriend or casual acquaintance?”
“More than a casual acquaintance, but maybe not a boyfriend. They slept in the same bed, but from what Mike said, I didn’t think they were in love. They certainly had a good time together. This was a guy named Frank. He might have met him at dad’s office.”
“Francis Barlow?” Turner asked. “Tall, hair combed back and greased down.” Tall and slender enough to be a thirty-inch waist, thirty-four-inch length.
“Yes. At first I thought he might be kind of standoffish, but he turned out to be great. We listened to old Anna Russell albums or played silly board games. We laughed and had a great time.”
“Did you know about Mike’s apartment in Rogers Park?”
“Mike had an apartment in Chicago?”
Mike Meade had obviously not told her everything.
“Yes. He wasn’t living in Bloomington. Did he tell you he was a dancer at a strip bar, and maybe making extra money on the side with the customers?”
She looked genuinely bewildered. “Mike would never do anything like that. There would be too much danger in doing harm to dad’s career, and to his own future, for him to do something that stupid.”
“How did he and your father get along?”
She hesitated.
They waited. The hesitation told Turner almost enough.
“Now that they’re both …” she stopped. “I wouldn’t have told you this if it was just my dad. I would never implicate Mike. He wouldn’t have killed our dad.” She sighed. “They fought a lot.”
She sniffed and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “They fought about politics mostly. I think a lot of Mike’s anger came from his bein
g unable to be open about his sexuality. It got worse the last year or so. I would never have said anything to either of my parents about Mike’s sexuality without Mike’s permission. Mike wanted very badly to come out to dad. His desire for his dad’s approval was enormous. He spent his childhood trying to please him. I felt helpless. I’d do what I could to keep them apart here at home, which wasn’t hard because Mike wasn’t around that much. If other people were in the house, they were very civil to each other. I always seemed to have friends over. I could do other little things for Mike, like make sure he had a chance to be with his friend at the cabin. I’ve never seen Mike happier than that week last summer. He wanted to tell my dad about his sexuality this vacation, but with the Du Page County decision, it just didn’t work out. They fought almost every time they saw each other.”
Fenwick said, “Mike wanted his dad’s approval, but they kept on fighting?”
“Is that so odd? It was Mike’s way of saying he’d grown up. That he was an independent person. My father was a very strong personality.”
They told her what Mike had said about him and his father’s actions on New Year’s Eve.
“I know nothing of this,” she said. “Mike said nothing to me. Was he really a stripper?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “Telling Mom all this is going to be hell.”
The doctor arrived. After examining Mrs. Meade, he advised against sedating her. The friend agreed to stay as long as necessary.
Turner and Fenwick left. Light snow had begun to fall as they made their way to the car.
“Malmsted or Barlow?” Turner asked.
“Which one’s closer?”
“I don’t have the master list. Let’s stop at Area Ten and get Barlow’s address. We have to go through the Loop to get to Malmsted’s anyway.”
At Area Ten, the hallways were a bit less jammed. The warmer temperatures had allowed most of the locals to wander back to their inadequately heated homes or hovels. A much larger crowd of reporters had taken their place. Cameras from three local stations were present.
The blond cop who’d apologized, Jason O’Leary, said, “You’ve both got a meeting in the commander’s office. The superintendent is in with him.”
Turner and Fenwick trudged down the hall toward the commander’s office in the rear of the building. Fenwick hummed the melody from the grand march from Aida.
“I’m the one who’s supposed to know opera. Why are you humming that?”
“Some commercial was using it for a jingle—carpets or hemorrhoids or something. I like the tune. You don’t like opera anyway, how do you know what that tune is?”
“My gay opera gene may be defective, but I know some of the basics. Dated an opera queen for two weeks once. I even attended one. At the end of two weeks, I disliked him more than I did the opera.”
They knocked at the commander’s door. Neither the acting commander nor the superintendent smiled at them as they entered.
Drew Molton introduced the superintendent then said, “We need an update on the Meade case. I filled the superintendent in on everything up to when you left this morning. The son dying complicates everything. The media frenzy is going to be overwhelming.”
They gave them everything they’d done that day. They included the difficulties with the judges.
“I had calls on that,” the superintendent said. “One from Judge Wadsworth and one just before I left to come here from a Judge Wright. Neither of them has any pull in the city that I’m aware of, so count yourself lucky. Wadsworth was very angry. He thinks he’s got clout. Good thing for you he’s not a criminal judge. I got an odd call from the FBI. They don’t like you either, but none of us likes them, so I don’t care. I haven’t been a detective in a while. I understand your style. I understand your reputation. I understand your results. If you can be more gentle, I’d recommend it. What I need you to do is catch me a criminal.”
If they didn’t, Turner figured they could be writing traffic tickets in Hegewisch for the rest of their careers.
“We’re on our way to talk to Malmsted and Barlow.”
“Have somebody bring the kid in,” Molton said. “You can probably get Malmsted just as fast by going yourself. Getting the suburban cops to go out there and then sending somebody to get her is a pain in the ass. Just let them know you’re coming.”
“Always do,” Fenwick said.
They got Barlow’s address and gave it to several uniforms so they could pick him up.
“If he’s not home, stay there until he arrives,” Fenwick ordered.
20
Malmsted was in. They sat in the same room as yesterday.
“Mike Meade was murdered this afternoon.”
She gasped. Her hands flew to her mouth.
“Where were you today?” Fenwick asked.
“You can’t think I killed them.”
“Where were you?”
“Here.”
“Any witnesses to that?”
“My husband went to the hardware store for several hours this morning. He’s fixing up part of the basement. We all know I hated the judge. Why would you think I killed the son? I may have met him once or twice at the most. I’m sure I wouldn’t remember him if he passed me on the street.”
“We believe the two murders are related,” Fenwick said.
“Do you have proof of that?”
Fenwick said, “Two members of the same family happen to be shot by strangers who did not rob them? Doesn’t rank high on my coincidence meter. What are the odds on that happening?”
“What are the odds of a killer murdering two people in the same family? I think you have to look to the family itself. I admit I quarreled with the judge. If everybody who quarrels with a co-worker is to be accused of murder, the line would stretch from here to the moon.”
“According to what we learned,” Turner said, “your quarrels with Al Meade were more than just disagreements with colleagues. You had words with him the day of the Du Page County decision.”
“Judge Wright told you that.”
Turner said, “Judge Malmsted, we expect as much cooperation from judges as we do regular people when working on a homicide. That means the truth as often and as soon as possible.”
“I’m trying to be helpful.”
“When we were here before, you said the judge was stupid, that he didn’t write his own decisions.”
“Yes.”
“Our research doesn’t back that up,” Turner said.
“I don’t care about your research. I know what’s true. Have you read any of his decisions yourselves?”
“Yes,” Turner said.
“What did you think?”
“I didn’t agree with them, but they made sense. Nothing I couldn’t understand. Of course, I wasn’t reading obscure rules on federal land grants.”
“You read the ‘socially significant’ decisions?”
“Only two so far, but our researcher says …”
“I don’t care about your researcher. I know.”
“Neither Judge Wadsworth nor Judge Wright agrees with you.”
“Ask that clerk of his, Barlow. I had some conversations with him. The ones who really know what’s going on are the clerks. Judges don’t have a clue most of the time to what they’re doing. They’re politically connected lawyers who may or may not know the law.”
“Barlow told you the judge didn’t write his own decisions?”
“Yes.”
“What if he was wrong?”
“What do you mean?”
“We talked to him. He was supercilious and snotty. Why would you believe him and not your colleagues?”
“All of them are supercilious and snotty. I guess we believe what we want to believe. Never in my presence did Meade follow a legal argument to its logical conclusion. He was an idiot.”
“Was he an idiot?” Turner asked, “or was it that he disagreed with you, and you couldn’t stand that? That made you nuts and you decided
to get even.”
“There is not one shred of evidence that I was in town New Year’s Eve. I have my parents, my brother, and my husband to prove it. They were all here. I didn’t leave the house.”
“Would they all lie for you?” Fenwick asked.
“I would never ask them to, nor is there any reason to. I didn’t kill him.”
“Do you own a gun?”
“No. I don’t permit them in the house.”
In the car Fenwick said, “She’s got witnesses. I hate it when they’ve got witnesses.”
“Seemed to be a heck of a lot of meetings between these people the day of the Du Page County decision. What was going on? We’ve got Meade, Wright, Malmsted, and Wadsworth in various combinations.”
“Maybe they met like that all the time.”
“I bet not. We’ll have to get copies of everybody’s schedule. We can check Meade’s at Area Ten.” Which they did as soon as they arrived. Turner found the appointment book, and he and Fenwick perused it for several minutes. Some days the judges had numerous meetings, most often not.
“Number of meetings means shit,” Fenwick said.
“I’m not sure,” Turner said.
They were told that Francis Barlow had not been found. The beat cops had staked out his apartment. The calls to Barlow’s friend in New York had gotten them a number no longer in service. Turner had a message to call Ian. He dialed his friend at the paper.
Ian said, “The Meade kid is dead?”
“yelp.”
“Unbelievable. Who’d have it in for both father and son?”
“Gosh, golly, I don’t know yet. When I find out, I’ll be sure to call you first. Have you found anything recently?”
“I’m looking for a guy named Francis Barlow.”
“Where’d you get that name?”
“From a list of people who worked in the office. He lives on the north side. If it’s the same guy, Carl told me he’d been flirtatious a few times.”
“I’m not surprised. Francis is gay.”
“Flirtatiousness does not a faggot make.”
“Sayings from Ian the wise. You could get a nine-hundred number and call it ‘Ask Mr. Wisdom.’ You think Carl was telling the truth? He was insightful enough to recognize he was being flirted with?”
The Truth Can Get You Killed Page 17