by Mark Zubro
“Why are you telling me all this?” Turner asked.
“Because I loved him and somebody killed him. Whoever did it has to pay.”
Turner was still having trouble believing the guy.
“Where were you at the time of the murder?”
A train rumbled into the station. The noise level silenced them. Tresca began to stand up.
“Who called you at the condo?”
“I must leave. Now. Find who killed my lover.”
Turner could have physically stopped him, but to what purpose? Tresca had come without a lawyer, but had implicated other people. The cleric rushed out.
A moment later Melanie arrived with Tresca’s bill. Turner handed her a five and told her to keep the change. He stopped at the table where the other three sat.
Ian raised an eyebrow. “Anything helpful?”
“Hard to tell.”
Graffius slapped a hand onto the table. A bit of coffee sloshed out of his cup. His mashed a napkin in his trembling hand and tried to mop up the spill. Demarco took the napkin and wiped up.
“Thank you,” Graffius said to the younger man. He began to rock in his chair and pointed a shaking finger at Turner. “Do not believe a thing that lying son of a bitch told you.”
Demarco held the old priest’s hand until the rocking and shaking stopped.
Turner said, “Father Graffius, I wish you well. If there is ever something I can do for you, call me.” He took out his palm size notebook and wrote down his number and gave it to Graffius.
“Thank you, young man.”
Turner reiterated how much he appreciated their help and left.
TWENTY-SIX
Monday 1:17 P.M.
The first thing Turner did at headquarters was walk over to Wilson and Roosevelt. They’d caught the case of Shane’s attempted suicide.
“You got any details,” he asked, “from that kid yesterday evening?”
Wilson said, “Your son saved him.”
“Yeah,” Paul said, “but what exactly happened?”
“All evidence at the scene points to attempted suicide,” Wilson said. “Why, is there a problem?”
“No. My son’s been involved in something life-changing. I just wanted to make sure I had as many facts as I could.”
Wilson and Roosevelt outlined what they had. The kid had written a note saying he was sorry. No one had been blamed or accused.
Paul wished his son had talked some more. He didn’t like the silence.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Monday 1:22 P.M.
Turner headed for his own desk. Smack in the middle was a box labeled “Office Paper”. He plunked the briefcase he got from Demarco next to the new container, which was the size that would normally contain ten reams of paper. There were no other markings. Turner lifted the lid.
Fenwick lumbered up to their station. “How’s Brian?” he asked.
“It’ll take a while for him to process what happened.”
“He’s a great kid.” Fenwick used his doughnut to point at the box on Turner’s desk. “You got a gift?”
“I think so.”
Turner peered inside. The top page on the left said, “Financial Statements Archdiocese of Chicago.” He riffled through a number of them. Columns and columns of numbers.
“What is it?” Fenwick asked.
“The diocesan financial records.”
Fenwick whistled and plopped into his chair. “How the hell did you get that?”
“Divine intervention.”
“I’ve retired my goddess who was mostly a pain in the ass. You’re not picking one up, are you?”
“I’ve got better than a goddess. I’ve got Mrs. Talucci.”
As he unpacked the box and Fenwick munched his doughnut, Turner told him about his meeting with the Cardinal.
Fenwick said, “I can’t wait to tell Carruthers.”
“Tell him what?”
“That his beloved Cardinal is a drag queen.”
“Carruthers is Catholic?”
“You didn’t know?”
“I didn’t care. I still don’t.” He pulled another fistful of papers out of the box. “Oh, and this noon I had a meeting with Bishop Tresca along with our buddy Graffius plus Ian and his buddy, a Father Demarco.”
Fenwick dropped his doughnut onto the top of his desk. “More divine intervention?”
“Ian set it all up.”
“See, you’ve got all these inside people. That’s not fair. All without me, I’m beginning to get jealous.”
“You want to grouse or you want to hear what they said?”
“Do I have a choice?”
When Turner finished narrating the stories from the meeting, he said, “I wish I wasn’t so suspicious of all these people.”
“How many suspects do we really believe?” Fenwick answered his own question. “Not many. Why the hell are these people telling us all this? And why now? Somebody grew a conscience?”
Turner shrugged. “In this bunch? Tresca I could sort of understand. His lover died and he wants revenge or at least answers. All I know is we have more stories to add, maybe a few facts. We’ve got to go through this financial crap and the papers that Demarco saved from Kappel’s room.”
“They must have been desperate to order his stuff shredded so quickly.”
“Why didn’t they shred it earlier?” Turner asked. “These people don’t make sense to me. For example, say Kappel jets off to Rome. Why not just go into his room at the Abbey and destroy everything then?”
“These can’t be the only records he kept. He must have backups to these. Everybody backs up things these days, don’t they? I’m practically a Luddite, and I still know to back everything up.”
Turner tossed a stack of papers from the briefcase on to his desk. “Could his enemies be sure they got everything? They’d fear his retribution when he found out, and where is all this back-up stuff?”
Fenwick sighed. “We won’t know until we look.”
“I don’t have any proof anything said so far today was anything but bullshit.”
“It’s amazing how many other people Tresca managed to throw suspicion on. Turns him into a prime suspect in my book.”
“And what better book could there be than yours,” Turner said. “For a grieving husband, he didn’t seem all that sad. I’m not sure I believe a word he said.”
“This is kind of nuts. I got the same question about Tresca, the Cardinal, and all these people. Which one, if any of them, is telling the truth?”
“I listened to them all. I just don’t have a good handle on them. If we want, we can doubt Demarco and Graffius. We have what Demarco took from the room. What did he bring and why did he bring it? Was he editing as he stole? Or were all of them standing there, the Abbot, the Cardinal, the whole crowd, picking and choosing and laughing at us?”
Fenwick grimaced. “Fuck-a-doodle-do.”
Turner said, “I’ve got to write it all up. They certainly had a lot of information. The stuff from Tresca gives all kinds of other people motives for killing his lover.”
“Which is good?”
“Which is suspicious, at least to me. Many of those people are really rotten, and yet, we’ve got Tresca, right there in the thick of all this, and we’re supposed to believe he’s lily pure? I think not. In fact what he said raised him to near the top of my list.”
“Who’s at the top?”
“The Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago and the Provincial Abbot of the Sacred Heart of Bleeding Jesus Order, but Bishop Tresca is right there with them. I’d prefer physical evidence tying any one of the three of them, or anyone else for that matter to the killing.”
“See, there you go again, wanting real evidence,” Fenwick said.
“We’ve got this box of papers to go through.” Turner tapped the top of the stack from the briefcase. “And all these papers.”
“And nothing on who he got that call from when we met him in the condo?”
“He rush
ed out before I could press him on the issue.”
Fenwick said, “We also need to find this Hal guy at The Proletarian Workers Sandwich Works.”
“We better go through this stuff to see if there’s anything we could use, but I bet it’s all useless.”
Turner wrote up reports on his conversations while Fenwick began on the financial forms. They’d start on the briefcase materials together.
A half hour into their work, Turner said, “I’m going to make a spreadsheet with all this information on it.”
“Spreadsheet?”
“A huge chart with everybody he investigated, with everybody we’ve talked to, with everything that’s connected to Chicago, with all the data we have from the Internet, names, dates, times, cross references. I’m going to start with what we’ve got on his credit card expenses.”
“It’ll take hours.”
“I know, but sorting this crap is useless unless we have it organized. I’ve got to be able to see who is connected to who.”
“To whom.”
Turner ignored Fenwick’s almost automatic grammatical correction.
Five minutes after he began setting up the spreadsheet on the computer, Commander Molton showed up. Barb Dams trailed him with a stack of the day’s new memos. They asked after Brian. Turner told them what little he knew. Wilson and Roosevelt wandered over. Molton pointed at the materials on Turner’s desk. He asked, “What is all that?”
“The Chicago archdiocese financial records.”
“How the hell did you get those?”
He told the Commander the story.
When Turner finished, Molton said, “A drag queen?”
“Fenwick wants to tell Carruthers.”
Molton laughed uproariously. “I’ll be damned. We should put Mrs. Talucci on the payroll.”
Turner said, “She’d solve too many crimes, and we’d all be out of jobs.”
Fenwick said, “His new best friend is the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago.”
“Kind of trumps that goddess bullshit you were pushing,” Molton said.
“Is anyone going to give that a rest?” Fenwick asked.
Dams, Molton, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Turner gave him a spontaneous chorus of loud nos.
Fenwick sighed. “I try to make your lives a little brighter.”
“Ah,” Wilson said. “You’re right about that one little thing. You are trying. I can’t tell you how trying you are. And do us all a favor, stop now.”
Fenwick replied, “It’s my version of torture. Be glad I don’t tell St. Olaf stories.”
Roosevelt said, “You started this goddess shit.”
Fenwick stuck his tongue out at him.
The others left. Turner checked his email and found a preliminary report from the ME on the debris at the crime scene. He found page after page of single spaced details. Other than the smallest rocks, they seem to have taken everything from the scene and begun to examine it. Nothing Turner saw in the report gave him a hint about the killer.
When they finally got to the briefcase, after a cursory examination, Fenwick said, “Didn’t we get most of this investigation stuff from the Internet already? We’re being hosed. This is nonsense.”
Turner thumped the stack he’d been working on. “The ones I’ve got are from around the world and years ago.”
“Around the world?”
“Peru in the late eighties. It must have been one of his first investigations.”
“Maybe there’s a Peruvian mafia. Everybody else has a mafia, why can’t they?”
“That investigation was to get evidence from and about,” Turner peered at the report, “some bishop and his buddies looting antiquities from a mission that dated back to just after the Incas got wiped out.”
“Might have been valuable.”
“In the disposition section, it says they all went to jail.”
“Maybe they all got out and came after him.”
“You want to take a trip to Peru to find out?”
“Is Peru nice this time of year?”
“I have no idea.”
Fenwick grumbled. “We don’t even think about going unless all of this other shit turns up a bunch of nothing.”
But that’s what they mostly had after another hour. They searched the Internet. They made lists of those investigated in the Chicago area. Turner filled in the ever-expanding spreadsheet with relevant people, events, and details from all that they’d discovered. He cross-referenced the phone logs and credit card records they had from Fong. This way he had a summary of all their current information and thoughts in one spot. He made electronic copies, emailed a copy to himself, and printed out a copy. Turner always backed up everything three ways.
About five thirty he went down to Fong’s lair. The lanky tech genius was switching between three screens at once. Turner said, “I’d like to borrow your biggest monitor. I’ve got a spreadsheet, and it’s too big for my screen.”
He and Fong lugged the giant thing up to the detectives’ area on the second floor. On the first landing, Turner asked, “How did you get such an expensive thing on the police department budget?”
“I knew a guy who knew a guy who got me a deal.”
As good an explanation as one was likely to get in the CPD.
They pulled two unused desks together and put two heavy straight back chairs on top of them. They rested the seventy-two inch screen on the desk top and leaned it against the chairs which stood at the far end of the desk against the wall. Fong set up the connection with his computer so Turner could work on both screens at once, or switch to doing one thing on his smaller screen, while saving what could be seen on the larger screen. Fong got ready to plug the screen in.
“This going to blow a fuse?” Turner asked.
“Maybe not.”
Their doubts were eased as the screen came to life. Fong showed him where to push on his computer to switch from screen to screen, or see the same thing on both screens at once, or to have different things on both screens at once.
Fong left and Turner put what he had so far on the large screen. There were already columns and rows of dates, times, and people, and he still had stacks of documents to go through.
Fenwick walked up to what he had so far. He said, “Damn that’s good.”
“Yes, I know,” Turner replied. “Now it just has to help us find a killer.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Monday 5:57 P.M.
Sanchez gave them a brief call reporting the absolute nothing he and the other beat cops had come up with on the canvass of the people on the boats that went by and the businesses in the neighborhood.
After more sorting and examining, Turner and Fenwick took what they had to make copies of all the originals. The stuff on the computer they had backed up, but they wanted multiple electronic and hard copies.
They had to spend half an hour with the copying machine with all the documents from the diocese and Demarco. Before they even pressed copy, they turned the machine on and off twice, opened and closed the top cover once, fanned the paper numerous times before putting it in the tray, and thumped the machine hard just past the eternally blinking needs toner display. The proper sequence of thumps and incantations was on a piece of paper taped above the printer. Fenwick would have willingly sacrificed several suspects on the altar of technological intransigence. Even after all that, it might have taken less time if the copier didn’t tend to jam every twenty pages. As always at Area Ten nothing worked as it should.
Then they took a copy of the financial records to Jeanne D’Amato. She’d agreed to stay late to meet with them. Her office was on the top floor of the Algonquin Building, one of the earliest sky-scrapers in Chicago. It was now dwarfed by much newer buildings. Turner liked the wrought-iron stairs and faded tile.
They placed the financial documents on the accountant’s desk. D’Amato and her agency had the most respected reputation in the city. She refused most governmental work, but did occasional favors for Molton’s distr
ict.
Her secretary brought beverages as they exchanged pleasantries. For a minute or two D’Amato glanced inside the box at the mounds of papers then sipped from her tea. She put the cup into the saucer and said, “You’re being lied to.”
Fenwick said, “You’ve barely looked at them.”
D’Amato gave him a pitying smile. “Think for a minute. The Chicago Archdiocese is a full-time, big time organization. Everything would be on spread sheets on computers. They gave you paper. It’s useless.” She pointed at the stacks. “You could get that all onto a four-bit jump drive. I’ll have my best people look at what you have here, and I’ll glance at it some more as well, but…” She shook her head. “Whatever you want is not going to be in there.”
They left.
“Mrs. Talucci is going to be pissed,” Fenwick said as they sat in their unmarked car on Dearborn Street. “I’m going to have to eat chocolate for days to get over it.”
“We all know the Catholic church lies,” Turner said. “Ask all the kids who’ve been molested about the clergy’s level of honesty. Hell, ask all the lawyers and insurance companies in the past few years dealing with their deception.”
Fenwick said, “The Cardinal would know we’d have them checked.”
“Delay. Obfuscation. The church has been around a long time. They don’t care how long it takes.”
TWENTY-NINE
Monday 7:11 P.M.
They drove to The Proletarian Workers Sandwich Works on Belmont. The rain had let up to a light drizzle and the traffic was reasonably unsnarled.
As they pulled off the Drive and headed west, Fenwick said, “I hope this Hal guy is big and burly and goes to work in a big limousine.”
“We don’t get that lucky.”
There were few sandwich shops in the city Fenwick hadn’t eaten at. Fewer still that he’d only visited once. The Proletarian Workers Sandwich Works was one of these. The establishment’s first sin was that they emphasized trendy, with it, vegetarian ingredients. Fenwick’s main philosophy was that if the food at an establishment wasn’t filled with artery clogging glop, what was the point? Pushing vegetarian glop, as far as he was concerned, was a mortal sin. He liked his glop pure, that is health-food free.