Sorry Now?

by Mark Richard Zubro

  “No,” Bruce said. “We’re an activist group for gay rights and more help for people with AIDS, but we don’t do that kind of shit. We believe in creative nonviolence.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Fenwick asked.

  Bruce had the grace to blush. “I’m not sure. I guess it means, we want to push people around and we hope they don’t push back.”

  “How about members of the group who would want to go beyond creativity? You got any hotheads who might act on their own?” Turner asked.

  “They’re all talkers,” Davidson said. “The most vocal ones are the ones who can’t organize for shit. They want to be politically correct. The rest of us want action.”

  “Who are some of the most politically correct ones?” Turner said.

  Bruce shrugged.

  Ian said, “Come on, Bruce.”

  “Rusty, for one,” Bruce said. “Nobody else, really. We’re pretty radical, but in the beginning some people were really nuts. The more vocal ones usually just drop out after a meeting or two. Rusty’s stayed a lot longer than any others.”

  “How about any other person or group in the community?” Turner asked.

  “Well, you always hear talk about what people would like to do to bigoted straights. It doesn’t mean anything. Every gay person does it. You know, get revenge, get the oppressor. Couple guys I knew who tested positive swore they’d get even with members of the FDA who didn’t approve drugs fast enough. They got too sick and weak to do anything about it. They died a couple months ago.” Davidson rotated his empty beer glass between his fingers as he talked.

  Ian said, “Paul, you’d have to arrest yourself and most of the rest of the gay community if you wanted all the people who’d ever wished nasty things to happen to bigoted straights.”

  Turner shrugged. “Any rumor in the community of any kind?” he asked. “The smallest hint of any person in the group who might turn to violence?”

  Bruce shook his head.

  After a few more minutes of fruitless questions and useless answers, Turner said, “Let’s try Rusty.”

  Rusty took Bruce’s place in the corner of the booth. Ian sat next to him, Turner and Fenwick opposite.

  Rusty slumped even more tightly than his friend against the wall. Turner saw green stains on the back of the shoulder strap of his tank top.

  “I told you the other night I’m only talking with a lawyer present.”

  Ian said, “But I’m not a cop, and I’m willing to beat the shit out of your arrogant ass.”

  “He threatened me,” Rusty said. “You both heard him. He can’t do that. You have to stop him.”

  Fenwick said, “We don’t have to do shit.”

  “I’ll call for help,” Rusty said.

  “We are the police,” Fenwick pointed out.

  “Shit,” Rusty said. “I’m leaving.” He looked at Ian and even tried a brief shove.

  Ian simply let his six-foot-six frame respond to the push as if it came from a playful cat.

  Rusty looked around wildly. No possibility of the U.S. cavalry racing to the rescue. At the far end of the room the owner ignored them, keeping himself busy with his bartending duties. Anger and frustration nearly brought tears to the hardened hustler’s face.

  Turner said, “Look, Rusty. We don’t mean you any harm. We don’t want to bust you. We just need any help we can get in solving the murders.”

  “But I don’t know anything,” Rusty said.

  His voice grated on Turner, a teenage whine reminiscent of Brian at his worst.

  “Just a few questions,” Turner said.

  Rusty crossed his arms over his chest and set his lips in a firm line. If he’d been a fifty-year-old madam with tons of makeup, he might have made the cool defiance he wanted to portray work. As it was, he looked like a petulant little brat.

  Turner said, “You’re pretty serious about FUCK-EM and what they stand for.”

  “You would be too, if you weren’t a fucking cop, a traitor to your own people.”

  Fenwick asked, “How do you justify being a hustler and being an activist?”

  Rusty snorted at him. “You don’t know shit. I’ll rip off the world any way I can. I’ll especially screw anybody who’s antigay and make them pay for it. That’s why I got Do—”

  “That’s how you stumbled onto Donald Mucklewrath,” Turner finished for him.

  “I didn’t say that,” Rusty said.

  “Give it a rest,” Turner said. “We know you’re the one who turned him over to the outing crowd. Gill Garret told us Tuesday. Where’d you meet Mucklewrath?”

  “I said all I’m going to say,” Rusty said.

  “Let’s take him down to the station and book him,” Fenwick said.

  Turner recognized the tactic instantly; unfortunately Rusty did too. The kid sneered. “Arrest me for what? And don’t try playing good cop, bad cop with me. It won’t work.”

  Fenwick let irritation creep into his voice as he said, “You little prick. You might think you’re a lawyer, but you don’t know shit.”

  Rusty turned to Ian. “You heard a cop threaten me. Aren’t you going to make that into a headline in your paper?”

  “It’s not my paper,” Ian said. “I’m only a reporter and you’re an uppity little creep. Now answer the man’s questions.”

  They got the story out of him, along with a great deal of unattractive whining and complaining. He’d met Donald Mucklewrath at a very high-class businessmen’s dinner party given in a Lake Forest mansion. One of the businessmen thought it would be a lot of fun to bring Rusty and say he was his nephew from out of town. Rusty thought it was a stupid idea, but the man was a faithful, well-paying customer, so he went. He’d run into Mucklewrath coming out of the john. One thing led to another and by the end of the evening Rusty had another customer. From one of the other guests at the party, Rusty found out his conquest was Donald Mucklewrath. He’d hardly been able to contain his glee. They’d gone to bed a week later and Rusty’d reported this to FUCK-EM.

  “I didn’t know anything about the meeting with Mucklewrath to out him. The rest of them do that kind of stuff. They don’t trust me because I have a temper.”

  Minutes later they left, learning nothing else new.

  They dropped Ian off back at the paper. Fenwick drove back toward the station. “Now what?” he said.

  “I’m not sure what else there is to check,” Turner said. “We’ve interviewed several zillion people, all of whom know nothing. All we’ve got are the victims. I thought the outing angle would get us somewhere, and we don’t know anything more about the Mucklewrath family based on the Donald-isgay rumor.” He shrugged.

  For several minutes they rode in silence down Halsted Street. At Chicago Avenue Fenwick said, “I wonder how Wilmer got the virus.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s an old guy and not attractive. The report said he wasn’t an addict. I didn’t see anything in the medical report about a blood transfusion. So who would have sex with him?”

  Turner said, “A mystery we’ll probably never solve.”

  Occasional bursts of wind stirred the air as they ran into a late afternoon traffic snarl in Greektown. While they waited for the light at Jackson and Halsted, Fenwick said, “Where could Wilmer meet somebody? Any bar he went in, would throw him out. You told me Ajax said he wasn’t part of any group.”

  “At the hospital?” Turner guessed.

  “Maybe he had a close friend, or lover, or fuck buddy there,” Fenwick said. “Maybe that person would know about Wilmer’s movements that day or what he knew.”

  “We had that with Ajax, I thought,” Turner said.

  “It’s an idea.”

  Turner said, “We only talked to the eight-to-four shift at the hospital. We should have gotten back to them before this.”

  “I can’t today,” Fenwick said. “I gotta get home. I promised to take the girls for doctor’s appointments. Madge can’t be home.”

  “
Nothing wrong with the girls?”

  “No, regular stuff, but I have to do it. Madge’s been ragging at me lately with all this overtime. If I thought we’d actually learn something, I’d go with you.”

  “No problem. I’ll handle it. I’m sure you’re right. It’ll be another dead end.”

  Before driving to City Hospital Turner stopped at home. At four o’clock Brian was downstairs playing Nintendo with some buddies. Turner spotted the patrol car outside. He waved to the cops keeping watch. They wouldn’t be able to keep a patrol car by his home indefinitely.

  He listened to the radio on the way over and heard that beyond a severe thunderstorm warning, a tornado watch had been posted for the Chicago area. For now, the muggy air stirred restlessly, with occasional gusts of wind attacking more vigorously. As he walked from the parking lot into the hospital, he observed unpleasantly black clouds filling the western horizon.

  In the AIDS ward he found a nurse who looked to be about nineteen, all pink in good health. He explained why he’d come. “I really guess I don’t expect to find anything, but I thought I’d give it a try.”

  “No problem,” she said. “It’s quiet right now on the floor. Let me get anybody who’s around. You can ask all of us at the same time.”

  Minutes later she assembled four people at the nurses’ station. All of them remembered Wilmer.

  After getting introductions and pleasantries out of the way, Turner asked, “Did he have any good friends?”

  Three shook their heads no. The fourth said, “I saw him most often.” His name was Tommy Smith, about twenty-five with the lightest blond hair Turner had ever seen. “He always teased me about being young and attractive. I’ve got a wife and two kids. I’m as straight as they come, but I let the old guy tease and have his fun. He tried to pinch my ass a couple times, but he stopped after I had a firm talk with him. He always asked for me. Anyway, I guess his best buddy was that Dr. Manfred who deals with lots of the people with AIDS.”

  “Was he a member of any of the AIDS support groups?” Turner asked.

  “No. He was an independent old guy. I admired that.”

  “How about friends, anybody he might share confidences with?”

  The twenty-five-year-old said, “He always did one odd thing, I thought. He’d visit the sickest person with AIDS who was in the hospital. Or at any rate he tried to. Wilmer wasn’t the prettiest visitor for people, and some of the families tried to drive him away, but the abandoned ones, people whose families wouldn’t accept that they were gay or that they were dying, those are the ones he visited. They liked his visits. I never got any complaints.”

  “Anybody he talked to more than others?” Turner asked.

  Smith shrugged. “Most of the ones he visited are dead. He’d sit with them for hours and read, or listen to them. Wilmer always talked my ear off. It surprised me that he listened to them so well.”

  The other nursing staff had drifted off one by one during this conversation. Tommy Smith said, “I guess the one who’s still alive that he talked to most was old Mr. Gravelstone. I didn’t see him here the other day. I thought he died. At the end of my shift yesterday, I found out he’d improved enough to be sent home on Monday afternoon.” Smith gave him the address, an apartment in Calumet Park, a south suburb just outside the city.

  “You know, a couple of people asked the same questions you just did about Wilmer this week. Who he knew and talked to.”

  “Who asked?” Turner asked.

  “One was a phone call. Said he was a member of the family trying to set up funeral arrangements. Wanted to be sure everybody knew about it.”

  “He leave a name?”

  Tommy Smith thought a minute. “No, said he was with some mortuary. I don’t remember which one. Funny he didn’t say.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him everybody knew about it, because, like I said, I thought Mr. Gravelstone died. We lose so many of them.”

  “Who else wanted to know?” Turner asked.

  “Dr. Manfred,” Smith said.

  TEN

  Turner’s mind whirled around the name Manfred. He tried to keep his attraction for the man out of his thinking. Before leaving the hospital, he tried calling the doctor’s answering service. They told him that Manfred was unavailable, that he might call in later if Turner wanted to leave a message. He decided against this. If his suspicions proved groundless, he’d feel like a fool.

  Turner remembered the doctor’s warmth and caring, the stirring of desire when they embraced. He tried to put another interpretation on the nurse’s words, and found enough innocent ones to satisfy him for the moment. Many people had told him of the doctor’s great caring and thorough concern for his patients and their loved ones. This connection to Wilmer had to be the same thing.

  Turner saw the storm before he reached the electronically activated doors. The trees that lined the parking lot bent double with the gusts of wind. Sheets of rain blew in waves over the parking lot. Claps of thunder, followed ten or more seconds later by crashes of lightning, told Turner in the folklore he’d learned as a kid that the center of the storm had a ways to come. He dashed through the storm to his car.

  Turner tossed his drenched sport coat into the back seat. He debated visiting Gravelstone that night. The witness probably wouldn’t know anything. The rain would tie up traffic miserably on all the rush-hour-clogged expressways, but his suspicion of Manfred nagged at him. He’d give it a try. He had to know the truth.

  Turner entered the Dan Ryan at Roosevelt Road, and was immediately sorry he’d decided to go. Bad weather screwed up traffic; a major storm snarled it hopelessly. He almost gave up driving to the end of the city, but it would be one less thing to do tomorrow, and they were already up to their nipples in paper work. Maybe it would be a brief shower. This turned into a false hope. As Turner inched his way south, the storm increased in intensity. His windshield wipers, on fast, barely kept up with the sluicing downpour. On occasion the viaducts on the expressways in the city filled with water after an intense rain. If they did, his drive back home could turn into a major adventure.

  An hour and fifteen minutes later, nerves frayed, exhausted from his lack of sleep in the past few days, Turner took the 127th Street exit. As he waited for the light to change at the corner at the top of the ramp, the radio weatherman informed him the National Weather Service had just issued tornado warnings for the entire metropolitan area. Numerous funnels had been sighted fifty miles west of the city.

  He drove four blocks and almost missed his turn because he couldn’t see the street sign through the downpour. He turned right up Lincoln Avenue and drove three blocks. Just before the road ended in a clump of underbrush and trees, he found the apartment building. Through the rain he could see many of the outside lights broken. Crumbling bricks and cracked cement formed an outer perimeter of decay. Lights filtered out of numerous apartments. Some had only sheets covering the picture windows, through which he could discern the yellow of a lamp gleam or the blue of the TV screen.

  He fought the urge to go home. He’d come this far, he might as well stick it out.

  A small parking lot sat between two identical apartment buildings. He pulled in and found a slot second from the end, then stayed in the car a minute listening to the rain pound on the roof and watching it rush off the second-story balcony of the apartments. Wishing for the millionth time that he’d bought an umbrella to leave in the car for just such occasions, he grabbed the door handle, yanked up, tossed the door open, threw himself out, slammed the door, and ran to the shelter of the overhang. The number he wanted, twenty-eight, was on the second floor, necessitating a dash up two flights of stairs tacked onto the end of the building and open to the unfriendly elements. His jacket still lying soaked in the back of the car, he dashed up the stairs in his white shirt and tie. What the rain hadn’t plastered to his skin in the brief dash from the car, this new venture into the elements finished.

  This has got to be one
of the dumber things I’ve done in a while, Turner thought as he tapped at the door to number twenty-eight. No answer. He knocked harder, thought of giving it a good solid pound or two when he heard a feeble voice, barely audible over the crash and bash of the storm.

  He put his ear to the door, waited for a respite from the thunder, and knocked again. He definitely heard the voice this time. After a brief hesitation, he turned the knob. The door opened and he entered.

  A gust of wind nearly blew the door out of his hand. Black and stormy as it was outside, it was almost better than inside the apartment.

  He saw an old man in the middle of a bed that took up two thirds of the tiny room. “Who?” the man on the bed asked. His voice rattled wheezily.

  Turner shut the door and said into the relative quiet, “A friend. I’m a police office.” His eyes took a moment to adjust to the total dark. A glow of light from the few fixtures around the building penetrated through the thin sheet over the window to give off some light. The flashes of lightning provided more.

  The old man barely flickered a nod at him.

  “Is there a light?” Turner asked.

  The old man raised a finger off the bed to point toward a shelf several feet above him and to the left. Turner inched his way toward it, unsure of what might be on the floor. On the shelf, by feel and by waiting for a lightning flash, he found the stubs of several candles. Next to them he found a pack of matches.

  He lit the candle. Its flickers barely added to that provided by the lightning, and nature’s display brought far more illumination to the room. At least now Turner could see with some degree of consistency.

  The shelf divided the apartment. He stood now in a combination livingroom-bedroom. The other side of the shelf contained a narrow kitchen, with a stove but no refrigerator. Two glasses, a plate, and a spoon rested unwashed on the narrow cupboard. A door off this to the right led to a tiny bathroom. The only furniture in the apartment was the bed. He eased himself down onto it, placed the candle carefully on the arm of the sofa.

  The old man said, “You shouldn’t get close. I have AIDS.”