“Execution style,” Turner said, “like the others. We’ve got one killer, and he or she is very systematic.”
Fenwick asked, “Why Blundlefitz? He’s not a member of the band.”
“Most logical deduction,” Turner said, “is that he was investigating and he was getting close to the killer, knew too much, and had to die.” He paused.
“Or he was a moronic asshole and there was a whole line of people ready to kill him in a grotesque way. Start with every band member he’s ever savaged and work up from there.”
“Want to bet our boy Blundlefitz did not get screwed?” Fenwick asked.
“His clothes weren’t disarranged. The ME can tell us for sure.”
“Who found the body?” Fenwick asked.
Two members of the permanent crew looked pale and shaken. Both claimed they’d simply been checking for anything small enough to move without the union crew. They vouched for each other.
“Where’s his notebook?” Turner asked. He put on his plastic gloves then carefully inched open Blundlefitz’s lapel. He reached into the inside pocket and took out a pad of paper. All the pages were blank. He showed it to Fenwick. “Pages have been torn out.”
The ME and the evidence techs showed up. They got together with the detectives after they finished their work.
The ME said, “Hasn’t been dead long. The blood isn’t dry. It’s cool in here. He bled a lot so it would take a while to congeal.”
“Shot here?”
“No sign that he was dragged. No blood spatters. No prints in the blood. No smearing. All those heavy clothes caught most of it. The backs of his sweater, shirt, T-shirt, long winter underwear, coat, and ass of his pants are damp.”
“Anybody else’s blood?”
“Not that we can see.”
“Shot first or tied up first?”
The evidence tech said, “Shot on the spot. Probably didn’t know the killer was behind him. Wasn’t hit from up close, but I can’t tell from exactly how far away.”
“He wouldn’t turn his back on a killer.”
“Not if he knew he was there.”
“Must have been sneaking up.”
“A meeting?”
“Why meet a killer here?” Fenwick asked.
“Why meet with someone you think is a killer anywhere?” Turner asked.
“He was out for glory,” Fenwick said. “He was going to solve this himself.”
“All the suspects were with us until two hours ago,” Turner said. “The killer could have left that meeting and have had plenty of time to get over here and do this. Or he had just committed another murder and sat calmly through that meeting.”
The ME said, “I’ll get you an approximate time of death as soon as I can.”
“Why tie him up?” Fenwick asked.
“Dramatic effect?” Turner asked.
Fenwick said, “The killer had time or was sending someone a message or the killer is a raving loon or the killer had some extra rope and was practicing knots.”
“Jesus,” the ME said, “cop banter. Everybody hates it but you.”
“I live for cop banter,” Fenwick averred. “I think it’s funny.”
The ME said, “Not to me and most of the rest of us.”
Turner and Fenwick inspected the immediate area of the killing. Beat cops were detailed to examine the rest of the interior. The detectives didn’t hold out much hope that they would find anything. They took their time climbing the platform to the other end of the rope. None of the janitors or guards on duty had seen or heard anything. One of them said that he had noticed various strands of rope lying about. Several beat cops were dispatched to talk to members of the crowd to see if anyone had seen people entering or leaving the building. They got a preliminary report back before they left that no one had.
“How’d Blundlefitz and his killer get in and out with the security?” Fenwick asked.
Aaron Davis the equipment manager, Pastern, Hinkmeyer, and Eudace had joined them. Davis said, “Almost everybody in the band crew was here earlier. No one wanted to be left alone. Paranoia has gotten the better of us. A huge clump of people connected with the band tromped over here before the meeting at the police station. Many stayed while your meeting went on. A few came back after. They finally had permission to start boxing things up. They were starting with all the stuff in the locker room, lots of personal things. It takes a while to pack up one hundred eleven semi-trailer trucks. The union guys from the arena would dismantle the stage tomorrow morning. There was no need for anybody to come up here. They had lots of stuff to get.”
Pastern said, “As long as the guys were protected, I didn’t care who was in here.”
Hinkmeyer said, “Mr. Blundlefitz had permission to be here.”
Pastern said, “I wasn’t supposed to be guarding Blundlefitz. I had no responsibility for him. I didn’t even know he was here. I was guarding the guys.”
None of them and no other members of the entourage admitted to seeing Blundlefitz. None of them had heard a shot. Zawicki and other members of the inner circle were beginning to appear in large numbers as the detectives prepared to leave. Zawicki, Pastern, et al. claimed they had alibis. In the presence of lawyers the detectives took statements from the major players, then set the uniformed cops to interview the others.
Turner and Fenwick visited stadium security. Frances Strikal, the stadium representative was present.
“How can this happen?” Strikal demanded.
The nameplate on the uniformed guard read SMITH. He was old, grizzled, but alert. “How the hell should I know?” Smith said. “They told me to let the band in to begin taking things down. There were a million people in here. There were all kinds of people on these screens.” He pointed to the numerous monitors. “The band people were supposed to have their own security. I don’t know who all of them are. Talk to them. I didn’t see or hear anything. There’s no camera on the main stage. We watch entrances and exits. We’ve got one on every hallway.” He pointed to the rows and rows of monitors.
Turner examined the picture on each of them. Several were pointed at the crowd outside. “Can somebody get in here without being seen?”
“Not possible.”
Turner asked, “Where’s the picture of the special parking for athletes and performers?”
“We don’t need a security camera for that entrance. They have their own security. No one can get in there except the performers. They have a special code.”
They took Blundlefitz’s address from his driver’s license and drove over.
Blundlefitz lived in the middle of the block across from the Salvation Army Headquarters on the first street south of Addison. He owned an entire house. As Turner and Fenwick experimented with the keys they’d taken from Blundlefitz’s pocket, a man got out of a car parked near the intersection and hurried toward them. It was Ned Lummy, the reporter from Hot Trends magazine. He rushed up the stairs.
“What’s going on?” Lummy asked.
“What are you doing here?” Fenwick asked.
“I got a call from Blundlefitz early this evening. He told me to meet him here at midnight.”
“Did he say why?” Turner asked.
“Nope.”
“He make that kind of request often?”
“No.”
“Why honor it?”
“Rolt called. He’s supposed to be here, too.”
“Exactly what time did he call?” Turner asked.
“About six.”
“You need to wait in your car,” Fenwick said.
“Is something wrong?” Lummy asked.
“Blundlefitz is dead,” Fenwick said.
“What?”
“Shot at the All-Chicago Sports Arena.”
“Another killing? What is going on?”
“If you could wait in your car,” Turner said. “We’d like to talk to you in a little while.”
Lummy retreated to his vehicle.
They entered the house. O
nce out of the cold, Turner said, “My guess is Blundlefitz was going to have a planning meeting. He knew who the killer was or thought he did.”
“What he knew or thought he knew got him killed,” Fenwick said. “There’s no point in the whole arena scenario unless it’s connected to these killings.”
“I don’t know, killing a critic in and of itself might not be seen as a bad thing. My guess is he’s got a whole lot of enemies who’d be happy to see him dead.”
“Great, a list of all the enemies a critic has. I’m not in the mood to write a phone book.”
“Blundlefitz disliked all the boy bands,” Turner said. “I wonder if that was an honest appraisal, or he was getting even for something.”
“Or he was just a jerk.”
“Always possible.”
Fenwick asked, “If he hated boy bands, why steal those guys’ underwear?”
“Pappas or Galyak said he was a perv. Maybe he had a thing for underwear. I bet there are lots of people gay and straight who are into underwear and who aren’t pervs.”
Fenwick said, “I prefer equal opportunity sexual dysfunction.”
“Why?” Turner asked.
“I get to dislike more people that way.”
The downstairs of the house had a large entryway, steps on the right leading up to the second floor. A hall straight ahead led to a kitchen. An opening to the left revealed a living room with a dining room behind it. The downstairs was clean and spartan: a pricey antique vase in one corner of the living room, brass pole lamps in two other corners, a brown velvet couch, not much else.
The kitchen drawers and cabinets revealed kitchen drawer and cabinet stuff. The basement was unfinished with a pile of dirty clothes sitting in a hamper next to a washer and a dryer that looked less than a year old. They found boxes of old mementoes stacked against one wall. They inspected several.
In one they found yearbooks from high school and junior high. Turner flipped the pages of several of these. “Funny,” he said.
“What?”
“There’s nothing written in these. I thought everybody had their yearbooks written in.”
“Maybe he was unpopular as a kid. Wouldn’t come as a surprise to me.”
“Maybe he became a critic to get even with the world.”
They found box after box of Blundlefitz’s own columns; the entire newspaper on the day something of his appeared with the clipping of the day’s article encased in plastic on top of it. Upstairs they examined a bedroom cramped because of the king-size bed that dominated it, a walk-in closet with clothes neatly lined up, and an office.
“Just what I was looking for,” Fenwick said. “A room of a dead person’s soon to be oozing clues.”
Fenwick started with the file drawers. Turner switched on the computer. He hit the MY DOCUMENTS icon and got hundreds of articles listed by title and date. He found the most recent ones: reviews of numerous bands, groups, and solo acts. Each article had a listing under a title. The same title was also listed with the letter N after it, listed again with the letter F after it, and a fourth time with the title and a letter R. After calling up only a few files, Turner realized the N must mean notes for the article, F for future things to go into the article, and the R for research for an article. In the few lettered categories Turner looked into he found extensive material. Whatever his strengths or weaknesses as a critic might have been, Blundlefitz certainly did his homework. In one file Turner found articles about a group that was coming to Chicago. He found tour dates and corresponding articles or reviews from each city the band had performed in. He checked Blundlefitz’s reviews against a few of the others. Turner wondered if perhaps Blundlefitz might have plagiarized other critics. A few minutes’ perusal revealed no hint of such a thing. Positive or negative, in Blundlefitz’s reviews hardly an adjective existed without a superlative ending. His ability to find the smallest fault and make it a major failing seemed uncanny. Generally he packed his venom into the space of one or two paragraphs for any given group. Turner could examine more of these at his leisure, but Blundlefitz sure looked like the queen of the hatchet job. Turner wasn’t familiar with rock or many other kinds of critics around the country, but a great many of Blundlefitz’s remarks that Turner glanced at seemed gratuitously cruel.
Turner checked all the information he’d gotten on Boys4u. He discovered a vast array of information that Turner suspected a teenage girl might love, but which had no interest for him. Blundlefitz had pictures and complete files on all of the band members.
In separate files they also found extensive notes with backgrounds on all the major players: Zawicki, Pastern, Ralph Eudace, Aaron Davis, Ethel Hinkmeyer, Frances Strikal, Murial Arane, and Sherri Haupmin.
Turner found a blank disk and downloaded the file and then printed out two copies of the entire thing. He and Fenwick sat and read the bios.
“Most of these people wanted to be in bands,” Turner said when they finished. “None of them had any success, which bears out the idea that most bands don’t make it. I think I knew that before somebody explained it to me. I don’t see anything in these backgrounds that would make any of them a murderer. Although Pastern and Eudace were in a band named Damn Skippy in college.”
“Is that one that Zawicki turned down?” Fenwick asked.
“Let’s ask. If it is, did Eudace or Pastern refuse to put out for Zawicki?”
“Could Blundlefitz have killed the two band members?” Fenwick asked.
“If so, he was investigating himself. It would take a very self-possessed killer to be playing that game.”
“When’s the last entry?”
“Six in the morning today.” He glanced at his watch. “Yesterday now. If he found something from six A.M. until he was killed, he never recorded it.”
After checking all the files that looked promising, Turner announced, “I think this is all we’re going to be able to find. We can get the computer guys down here to go over this in case there’s something hidden.”
“No porn,” Fenwick said. “No tapes. No magazines. No hidden underwear souvenirs. I always get disappointed when there’s no porn involved in a dead person’s life.”
“You keeping a list?”
“No. Just hoping for something salacious. You figured if he kept underwear, we’d find some more of those kinds of things.”
Turner said, “Maybe he didn’t really plan to take the kid’s stuff. Maybe it was just an impulse.”
“Or maybe he was a fucking moron.”
Fenwick knelt down over the last file cabinet drawer and reached far in back. “I got something.” He pulled out a thick, pink notebook. Fenwick flipped it open. “It’s Dexter’s diary.” The two of them clustered around it.
The doorbell rang.
22
Turner stuffed the diary into his regulation blue notebook and followed Fenwick downstairs. Rolt and Lummy were at the door. The detectives let them in. Everybody sat down in the living room.
Turner said, “We understood you both got phone calls tonight.”
“Yes,” Rolt said. “Randall called just after six. He said we had to talk. He said to meet him here at midnight. He wouldn’t tell me what it was about.”
“Me, neither,” Lummy said.
“I can understand why he’d want Mr. Rolt here,” Fenwick said, “but why Mr. Lummy as well?”
“I don’t know,” Lummy said. “Maybe because I’m the only permanent reporter on staff, just like he’s the only permanent reviewer on staff.”
Rolt said, “Sometimes he craved an audience. He liked to show off.”
“Did he say he’d found the killer?”
“No,” Rolt said, “just that we had to be here, that it was important news.”
Fenwick asked, “And you just showed up when he summoned you to his home late at night? Had he done this before?”
“Well, no,” Rolt said. “He did say it had something to do with the murders, but he didn’t say if he knew who the killer was. I asked wh
at was going on. He said our reputations were going to be made.”
“How come you got down here an hour after Mr. Lummy?”
“On my way here, I got a call on my cell phone from a reporter at the All-Chicago Sports Arena. Word was out that they found his body. I hurried there, but I couldn’t find out a thing. Ned called me on my cell phone and said you were both here so I came by.”
They heard a commotion in the street. Vans from two local television networks pulled up outside.
“Great,” Fenwick said. “More circuses.”
Rolt said, “You’re only going to get more of that until you solve this.”
“How could he afford this place?” Fenwick asked.
“He wasn’t being paid by the music industry, if that’s what you’re implying,” Rolt said.
“Just asking a question,” Fenwick said.
“He was cheap,” Lummy said. “If you went out for drinks, he’d ask for water. If you were out for lunch, he’d order the smallest, least expensive thing on the menu. If you were out in a group, he was the one who always underpaid. I can’t tell you how many times he said ‘I only had a salad so I don’t owe as much.’”
“That’s nickel and dime stuff,” Fenwick said. “This place is probably worth half a million. How could he afford this place on the salary at a two-bit magazine?”
“We are not two-bit,” Rolt said. “We make a very handsome profit. We sell plenty of ads. Blundlefitz was part owner, a minority shareholder. He was also a freelancer. He wrote many articles. He’s had more articles in the Trib magazine section than any other author for the past three years. He’s had numerous articles in the New York Times and other prestigious media outlets. He may have been frugal, but I think that was from habit.”
Dead Egotistical Morons Page 21