The Violence Beat

by JoAnna Carl

  I decided not to give anything away. I’d better act as if I’d never before heard a hint that Irish Svenson had been killed.

  “Yes, I’m here,” I said. “Irish Svenson’s death happened a few months before I moved to Grantham, so I didn’t cover it. I was trying to remember whether or not there was anything suspicious about his accident.”

  “The timing. That was what convinced me.”

  “The timing? What do you mean?”

  “Irish was just about to drop a bomb on a major case. Then he just happened—” The voice broke off, then went on. “Just happened to run off the road on the only steep hill within a hundred miles of Grantham.”

  “That doesn’t make a lot of sense,” I said. “Irish Svenson was chief of police. Police chiefs aren’t usually out solving cases. Someone else in the department should have known about anything he was working on. So why hasn’t that someone else dropped the bomb?”

  “Because it was an internal investigation—inside the Grantham PD. He’d kept it secret from everybody in the department.”

  “Except you.”

  This time the breathy voice was silent. So I went on. “How do you know all this?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “I’d have to have some sort of proof,” I said. “Some facts. For beginners, who is this?”

  “Oh! I don’t have to tell you that, do I?” The voice sounded panicked.

  “Eventually I’d have to know.” I said. “Knowing your connection helps me judge how credible your information is.”

  Silence again. Should I hang up? I decided to try a different tack. “Just what kind of a problem was Chief Svenson investigating?”

  “What kind?”

  “Yes. Was it bribery? Sexual assault? Tip-offs to drug dealers? Cops have lots of opportunities to go bad. What was going on?”

  “Oh.” The voice sounded younger than ever. “I guess we—I guess it would be fraud.”

  “Theft from the department?”

  “No.” Now she sounded uncertain. “Not really.”

  “Well, then—” Hell’s bells. Across the room I saw Ace coming out of the library, aiming his jackass grin in my direction.

  “Listen,” I said, “I really can’t talk here. Not now. Can I go to a private phone and call you back?”

  “No!” For a minute I thought she was going to cry. Her breath sounded ragged. Then she took a deep breath and went on. “I can’t let you call me. I could call tomorrow afternoon. Maybe. I could call tonight, but you won’t be at the office, I guess.”

  She probably didn’t know a darn thing. But I’d better try. I gave her my home number. “I’ll be there after six,” I said. “But I’d sure like to understand what your connection with this is. Do you work for the Grantham PD?”

  Silence.

  She hadn’t said no. “Are you a police officer?”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Secretary? Clerk? Just what was your connection to Irish Svenson.”

  She breathed an answer so quietly I almost missed it.

  “Friend,” she said. “Good friend. He was the best friend I ever had.”

  The connection was broken.

  When I looked up, Ace was standing at the end of my desk. He held a sheaf of printouts. “You got a lotta stuff in that library,” he said.

  “Have you read it all?”

  “About half.”

  “Let me have the half you’re through with. I’m going to take a long lunch and hide out from the scanner. I’ll read it.”

  “Good! We can go to Goldman’s. Talk about it.”

  Goldman’s is a downtown sandwich joint, popular with the city hall and courthouse crowd. A reporter can pick up a lot of gossip there. But I shook my head. “Not today. Let me read up on this before we talk.”

  Ace wasn’t too happy, but he didn’t have a lot of choice. I told the switchboard I wouldn’t be back until two, took half of Ace’s printouts and drove home. I parked in my regular slot behind the house, opened both the locks on the kitchen door, then wandered into the front hall and picked up the packet of mail on the floor under the mail slot. I sorted it at the hall table and took my three ads and two bills upstairs. When I reached the door of my room, I tossed the mail at the bed and went back two steps to the bathroom.

  As I turned the water off after I’d washed my hands, I thought I heard a noise downstairs. I was surprised to discover how much it annoyed me. I’d been looking forward to having a couple of hours alone, and the noise probably meant Martha was home. It had to be Martha, because Rocky worked all through the lunch hour every weekday, and Brenda taught preschoolers all day. But Martha was researching her thesis, so she didn’t have formal classes, and she worked strange hours in a big department store. She always wanted to chatter, and I wasn’t in the mood.

  I called down the stairs, and to my pleasure, Martha didn’t answer. When I went down, I discovered the mail I’d sorted had slid onto the floor. Hurrah, I thought. That must have been the sound I heard. It wasn’t Martha. I fixed a sandwich, turkey and sprouts on cracked wheat. I was a little ashamed of being so pleased that Martha wasn’t there. But I had a lot of thinking to do, and I needed solitude to do it.

  The city editor on the first paper I worked on—in a town of under 30,000—taught me a bunch. And one of the first pieces of advice he gave me was never to accept information off the record.

  “First off,” he said, “most news sources won’t offer to tell you until they really want to talk. So, nine times out of ten, they’ll tell you on the record. Usually they’ll insist on it. They’ll force the information on you. The more you say you don’t want to hear something off the record, the more they’ll insist on telling you on the record.

  “Second, if you’re like most of us, you won’t be able to remember what’s on the record and what’s off. Say you learn something in December—off the record—and you leave it out of the story you write for Christmas. Then the same topic arises around Labor Day. Can you remember what you knew on the record, and what you knew off the record after nine months? After a couple of years? Nobody’s notes are that good.”

  Of course, that advice doesn’t always work around the cop shop. I know lots of stuff I don’t print. I knew which drug dealer the cops think shot Bull Williams in the scuffle behind the Choo-Choo Lounge. And our copy editor says getting shot in the scuffle is real painful. I know which bank refused to prosecute which assistant vice president when they found out just why the First Baptist Church’s average weekly collections dropped after he took over the chore of counting the money. I know which prominent Grantham surgeon is going to go to jail if he drops out of counseling for battering spouses one more time. The charges are sitting on the DA’s desk, ready to be filed if either his ex-wife or his ex-girlfriend reports one more harassing phone call.

  But this stuff is not that hard to remember. Lots of people around Grantham know about the banker and the surgeon, for example. As long as neither one of them has actually been arrested, I can’t put it in the paper. But if I make a slip of the tongue in Goldman’s, it’s no big deal.

  But I hate knowing things I can’t talk about with the city editor. And I was realizing I also hated knowing things I couldn’t mention to Mike.

  But I was definitely not going to tell Mike I’d had a call from a woman who claimed to be his father’s “good friend.” Should I even tell him that such a person had called? She probably didn’t know anything. And I wasn’t going to tell him Ace Anderson thought his dad had taken kickbacks on the contract for the Central Station. The whole thing was completely unproven, but it wouldn’t be fair to Ace—the ass—to tip off anyone who could sabotage the story before he had time to get the facts. Should the facts turn out to exist.

  But I was in a bad position with the newspaper, too. Once I’d deciphered Bo Jenkins’s message, I had realized he�
�d given me a hot tip. A serious crime might have been committed, and I had promised Mike I wouldn’t tell anybody, wouldn’t investigate. I obviously hadn’t been thinking with my head when I did that. But, supposing I told the city ed or the ME, what then? All we could do would be to go to the Grantham cops—Chief Jameson or the chief of detectives, Hammond, or maybe the DA. We really had no way to launch an investigation on our own. We could look at the PD records, but if Irish Svenson had kept private files, they probably wouldn’t be there.

  Actually, I decided, Mike had a better chance of finding out something than the newspaper did. Maybe it was best to leave it with him—for the moment. Maybe it was linked with Ace’s investigation. Maybe Irish Svenson had been killed because he threatened to expose some kickback scheme, rather than because he was involved in one. Maybe the “friend” knew something. Maybe she really would call tonight.

  I couldn’t do anything about it. And I couldn’t talk to Mike until that evening. So the next thing to do was read all those printouts on the contract for the Central Station.

  Yuk. Dull. Dull. Dull. I put my dishes in the dishwasher, spread the printouts out on the kitchen table and started reading.

  The librarian had done a complete job for Ace. The earliest story dealt with Irish Svenson’s first proposal for a new police headquarters, a proposal he made six years before a contract was finally awarded.

  At the time, the Grantham Board of Education had just declared the old Central High School building as surplus property. It hadn’t been used for classes in years, but thousands of Grantham people had gone to school there, and there was an immediate outcry against demolishing the building. To add to the problem, the school building sat in a run-down area on the edge of the downtown. To the east and south, it adjoined substandard housing. To the west and north, it adjoined substandard business property.

  Irish Svenson was the first person to say publicly that it should be reconstructed and become a new-central police headquarters.

  Irish had envisioned a facility devoted to community-based policing. It would include meeting rooms for clubs and committees, a youth club, offices for social service agencies, and a park area on the old baseball diamond, as well as the police department’s administrative offices. A new wing, much of it built underground, would hold standard police facilities—desk for complaints, detectives’ offices and interrogation rooms, central evidence storage, squad room, even a garage for the combined city-county vehicle maintenance operation. A section of the underground area would house a thirty-cell holding area, easing traffic at the main city-county jail several blocks away. This would adjoin a city court area, so that misdemeanors could be handled there. The reconstructed building would replace an outgrown police headquarters built during the 1930s.

  The chief had proposed this at a workshop session on city goals. No one could deny his idea was a good one. Still, the city council took a year before it okayed hiring a consultant. The consultant took nine months to come up with two proposals.

  The first one was pretty close to what Irish had originally wanted. Under it, the city would build all these wonderful things and save the architectural elements of the historic school, with portions of the original building still open for general community use. It would cost a bundle.

  The second plan was for a completely new building, using land the city already owned, adjoining a drainage canal on the northern edge of downtown. It abandoned the neighborhood concept almost entirely, since it was a mile from the commercial center and across the canal from any residential neighborhoods. It would cost two-thirds of a bundle.

  So Irish Svenson had his work cut out for him. Even his worst enemy on the city council, Harley Duke, admitted Irish’s idea was best, but it was also the most expensive. Irish argued that it would be cost effective, because it would reduce crime by putting the cops right in the center of where they needed to be, not off in an area which would be extremely inconvenient for the Central District residents and businessmen to visit.

  This argument raged for two years. During that time Irish Svenson became a fixture at Grantham civic and political meetings, lobbying the city’s movers and shakers and its voters to promote his idea. At the end of that time, the city council put the proposal on the ballot for a bond election. And Irish redoubled his campaigning. He gave interviews, took the press on tours, helped with voter registration campaigns in the Central District, talked the project up anytime he could get as many as three people together.

  I could see why Mike said that the idea of his father meeting with an informant was unlikely. Irish Svenson hadn’t had time to do anything but hustle for the Central Station project for years. Looked at from another angle, his preoccupation with this might have made it awfully easy for him to overlook problems in the department.

  That was the point where the printouts ended, but I knew the end of the story. Grantham voters had okayed the bond issue funding the renovation, and the Central Station had opened for business two years after their vote. After Irish’s death, the community-service wing of the building had been renamed in his honor—the Carl Svenson Community Center of the Central Station of the Grantham Police Department. I’d had to write that lengthy title often enough.

  Councilman Harley Duke had proposed calling the substation “Svenson’s Palace.” He was the most obnoxious loudmouth on the city council, and the Gazette’s city hall reporter, Tom Quincy, made a point of quoting his most obnoxious loudmouth remarks.

  But if it was a kickback scheme, which city councilman might be involved? Harley Duke seemed unlikely, since he’d opposed the project. Darn. It would be fun to nail Ol’ Harley with something besides being an S.O.B.

  James Montgomery had been the substation’s biggest backer, at least in the early stages of the project. But he was a multimillionaire, a member of the current generation of Grantham’s most prominent family. Why would he get involved with a kickback scheme?

  Oh, well. There were six other councilmen. I assumed Ace’s source would finger one of them. And speaking of Ace, it was nearly two P.M.

  I ran back upstairs before I left for the office, and for the first time I noticed the flashing light on the answering machine in the hall. The message was from Mike.

  “I forgot I have a seminar from six to eight-thirty tonight,” he said. “I’ll come by about eight-forty-five, if that’s okay. I want you to go with me to talk to somebody who might know something about . . . the puzzle we were discussing last night.” He hesitated, and I thought the answering machine had cut off. “Eight-forty-five,” he repeated. “Take care.”

  A seminar. In spite of the pile of books and the computer in his living room, I’d forgotten that Mike was doing graduate work. And he’d thought of someone to question about his dad. Who? Who? I was wild to know.

  There was no way to find out. Mike was on duty, and I wasn’t going to call the dispatcher and tell her to have Mike call me. She probably wouldn’t do it anyway. I just had to wait.

  I drove to the office, steeling myself to face Ace-the-Ass. I did not want to fool with his big expose on the kickback scene over the Central PD. I did not believe Irish Svenson had been involved in such a scheme. I wanted to investigate Irish Svenson’s death. And between my pledge to Mike and my job responsibilities, I couldn’t do it.

  I resolved to make Coy’s briefing on Bo’s death at four P.M., whether I was still on the Bo Jenkins story or not.

  As soon as I came into the newsroom, I knew I was off the Bo Jenkins story. J.B. was there. That meant he’d been called in early to take over the routine coverage on the violence run. My heart sank.

  J.B., looking as boyish as ever, was sitting at his desk. He’s actually two years older than I am, but J.B. manages to look as if he’s about sixteen. He uses this youthful quality to good advantage. Sources want to help him out, so they pour information on him.

  Ace was doing his star reporter act, lecturing J.B
. on how things should be done. Ace could strut sitting down. I don’t know where I heard that expression, but it sure described him.

  “Hi, Nell,” J.B. said. “We were just speculating on the cause of death for Bo Jenkins. Ace is betting on heart failure, brought on by the drugs he’d been taking. What do you think?”

  “Cyanide.” My answer seemed to surprise the two of them, and I realized it surprised me, too. Why had I answered so definitely? I hadn’t said, “Poison.” I’d said, “Cyanide.”

  Ace squinted suspiciously. “You’ve been talking to somebody in the department,” he said.

  “No.” I could hear the hesitation in my voice. Why had I thought cyanide was the cause of death? “That was a purely off-the-top answer, but I guess I based it on two things. The first one I learned from a story I covered.”

  “What story?” Ace sounded angry.

  “A year ago, I covered the Boucher case. Remember? She poisoned her husband with cyanide. They nearly passed it off as suicide, but she teetered over the mental brink and confessed. The charges are still officially pending, in case she ever gets out of the state hospital. And second, the PIO out at Grantham State Mental Health Center told me a few details about suicide watches.”

  “And?” J.B. sounded skeptical.

  “Well, during a suicide watch, they keep the patient in a room with a big glass window. The attendant stays either in the room with the patient, or just outside the window. So that means Bo didn’t vomit or pass out or go into lengthy convulsions. He died real fast. The attendant couldn’t get medical help there soon enough to do anything. That points to cyanide.”

  “It’s always that quick?” J.B. was still having trouble believing me.

  I nodded. “I talked to a poison expert in Michigan and she said that cyanide antidote kits are almost never used. By the time they figure out they need one, it’s too late to use it. And we know that this guy disguised in a Salvation Army uniform got in to see Bo. That’s too big a coincidence for it to be anything but poison.”