by James DeVita
Coose helped Gary into a chair, whispering to Mangan, “Didn’t have to do that.”
“I know,” Mangan said, kind of regretting what he’d done, but not really. He paced the bar, trying to calm himself and his breathing. Once the switch flipped in Mangan, it wasn’t always easy to turn off.
“Sorry about that, bud,” Coose said to Gary. “I should have warned you that he failed that class, you know, that anger management class he was telling you about.” He asked the bartender to call for an ambulance and then grabbed some ice from behind the bar and wrapped it in a towel. He handed the ice-wrap to Mangan and whispered, “Help out a little. It’ll look good in the report.”
Gary flinched when Mangan approached him. “Here,” he said to Gary, placing the ice-wrap in his hands. “It’ll keep the swelling down. You’re okay, it’s just your nose. It bleeds a lot.”
The local EMTs loaded Gary into the ambulance and headed to the hospital, accompanied by a state patrol officer who showed up. Mangan learned then that Gary’s last name was Peterson. One of the other men was a Peterson too—Neal was his first name—both sons of the man that Mangan had been asking about, Leo Peterson.
“I thought he might have had a concealed weapon,” Mangan explained to Faber as the ambulance rolled away. “He said something to my partner, and then made a sudden move, I wasn’t sure, so …”
Faber stared at Mangan for a moment. “You mind if we go back to the station and talk?”
“No. Not at all.”
Wesley Faber didn’t look very happy.
They all have alibis,” Faber said. “Leo Peterson and his sons.” He closed the door to his office as Coose and Mangan stepped in. “They were in Hawaii for two weeks.”
“Hawaii?” Coose asked.
“The whole family goes on business conventions every year. All a tax write-off. Vegas, Aruba, the Caribbean, cruise ships, you name it. They’re the money around here, like their grandpa was. In this town you don’t get a liquor license or a zoning permit, and your kid doesn’t start on the varsity basketball team, unless you have the right name. And that means you better be related to the Petersons.”
“That’s illegal where I come from.”
“It’s illegal here too, just can’t do a damned thing about it.”
Mangan stared at the deer heads on the wall, thinking, plate sin with gold and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks.
“Nobody likes the Petersons,” Faber continued. “Half the town pretends they do, the other half ignores them. Those boys have had anything they wanted since the day they could walk. Pains in my ass. Privileged and stupid. But that doesn’t mean they’re guilty of anything.”
Coose’s cell phone buzzed. “Excuse me,” he said, and left Faber’s office to answer it.
“This thing with Leo Peterson and Debbie,” Faber said, “happened more than two years ago, if it even did happen. Debbie was very messed up at that time, drinking and drugs. Half the boys in town took her home at some time. Just dropped her off or messed around with her in the car.”
“How do you know all this?”
“We follow the drunks home here. We sit outside the Dew Drop at closing time and follow them, make sure that they get home okay. They usually drive a little safer if they know we’re behind them. If they’re really drunk we’ll take them in, but we use a bit of discretion here.”
Coose came back in the office. “That was Mickey Eagan. There was nothing on the security tapes from the Nite Cap, the bar where Mara Davies’s body was found, but he got something else. Those receipts I got from the girls’ apartment? Eagan found a credit card receipt with Fenyana’s signature on it. O’Rourke’s Pub and Grill on Ashland. Looks like three people had dinner. The date on the receipt’s a Friday. August tenth. Deborah Ellison’s body was found early a.m. on the eleventh. It’s from the night she was killed.”
“O’Rourke’s have security cameras?” Mangan asked.
“Yeah. Eagan made a copy. He’s sending us a link.”
“Go get the laptop out of the car.”
“You can use the computer here,” Faber said.
Faber gave Coose the station’s e-mail address and Coose called it in to Eagan. If Deborah Ellison was on the tapes, Mangan knew that he’d have a last known whereabouts for her. He also knew that Fenyana and whoever else had been at the restaurant that night might very well be the last people to have seen Deborah Ellison alive.
Faber led Mangan and Coose to a small media room behind a bank of windows. He called out to the front desk officer on the way. “Hey, Dan, come on over here. I got some computer stuff for you to do.” Faber turned to Mangan. “I can do the computer, I just don’t like it.”
“He still has a flip phone,” Ehrlich said, settling in behind the computer.
“And I’m going to keep it. Don’t need all that other stuff.”
“They’re not going to make those phones anymore.”
“Then I won’t use one.”
“What do you want me to do?” Ehrlich asked.
Coose told him about the receipt found at the apartment, “Chicago’s sending you a video link. We just need you to upload it.”
Dan opened the e-mail program and asked Faber, “You want to learn how to do this?”
“No.”
Ehrlich smiled, shaking his head, and double-clicked the link. “It’s going to take a little bit. It’s a big file.” Everyone watched the percentage bar color itself green as it uploaded. “Got it,” Ehrlich said. He opened another program to play the file. “Here we go.”
The quality of the tape was shit, a long master shot of the dining area rather than a close-up on any one table.
“This is a tape of the whole night,” Ehrlich said. “You got a time on the receipt?”
“Give me a sec,” Coose said. He gave Eagan a quick call, then told Ehrlich, “Start around six o’clock.”
Ehrlich fast-forwarded until they saw two women enter the restaurant.
“There,” Mangan said, “right there.”
The men huddled closely around the computer screen. The two women were difficult to make out, but definitely recognizable: Fenyana’s tall, lithe body, and Deborah Ellison, small and tight. The two women walked to a far corner table. Someone else, a male, was following them. Very closely.
“Who’s that with them?” Faber asked.
Mangan whispered, “I don’t know.”
The man’s face wasn’t visible. He walked with them to a far corner booth and slid in first. Fenyana sat next to him. Deborah Ellison, clearly visible now, sat on the opposite side of the table, across from the unknown male and Fenyana.
“Damn it,” Mangan said. “It’s too dark.”
The lighting was bad in the corner booth. They couldn’t make out the male’s face at all. He was tucked tightly into the corner and obscured by Fenyana, who was sitting on the outside of him. The camera angle didn’t help. Fenyana was hard to see also, her long hair hanging loose across her eyes at times.
The men watched the tape.
Mangan studied Deborah Ellison. Always strange, he thought—seeing a murder victim alive, entirely unaware that she was soon going to be dead.
Thou art death’s fool;
For him thou labour’st by thy flight to shun,
And yet runn’st toward him still.
The night at the restaurant was busy; waitresses and patrons passed back and forth in front of their table. There was no sound on the tapes. Mangan could tell, though, from the hand gestures and body language, that the conversation at the table was fairly unremarkable, except for the fact that Deborah and Fenyana seemed to be the only ones talking. The male stayed sitting back, his hands in his lap. A meal was served to him, but he didn’t move. He didn’t drink either, although a drink had been served to him. Mangan watched intently. Deborah Ellison looked distracted. She played with one of the large hoop earrings she was wearing, looking around often, as if she had to be somewhere else, or wanted to be somewhere else. At o
ne point Fenyana reached across the table and touched Deborah’s hand, but she pulled away.
“What was that?” Mangan asked.
Ehrlich played the moment back. They watched it again. Deborah looked scared at that moment, or was it anger? She’d pulled her hand away from Fenyana, then she got up and left the table. And didn’t come back. Fenyana could then be seen waving to the waitress, who brought over a bill. She got up, took the bill from the waitress, and disappeared. The man then hurriedly scooched out of his seat and followed after them.
“Shit,” Coose said, the man’s face clearly visible now.
“What?” Mangan asked. “What, who is it?”
“That’s Baratov,” Coose said. “Savva Baratov. The guy that runs the Bank Street Diner.”
“Change of plans,” Mangan said. “Let’s get out of here. Call Eagan. Tell him to bring Baratov in. Now.”
Chicago.
Three thirty in the morning. Mangan drained his glass. He was sitting in his reading chair in the front room of his apartment, wide awake. Insomnia. It was happening again. It irritated the hell out of him—made him more irritated than usual, that is, for Mangan was well aware that he lived in a sort of perpetual state of irritability. Wakefulness didn’t help matters. He’d had a bad relationship with sleep for most of his life. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept eight hours. Sometime in his childhood, maybe.
Now o’er the one half-world nature seems dead,
And wicked dreams abuse the curtained sleep.
He never looked forward to the night.
He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, not Melville,” Mangan muttered to himself, “not now.” He squirmed in the chair. Melville had a way of sneaking into his thoughts at the most inopportune times, usually when he was exhausted and couldn’t sleep, and that’s not a good time to start contemplating Melville.
Mangan looked out the front window.
He’d been doing pretty well for the last few months. His wife hadn’t been on his mind too much, but he’d been thinking of her a lot lately. The trips to Winsome, probably, to the countryside. She loved getting out of the city. Whole oceans away, he seemed to feel, from that young girl-wife he’d wedded once. They’d been quite happy for a long time, and then … they weren’t. It just changed. The suddenness of it seemed improbable. But it had happened. They stopped liking each other. They’d lost themselves and were desperately trying to find each other again, and then there was the arguing, and the things said in anger, and the small daily cruelties, and the pettiness, and then the phone call that silenced the screaming and shamed them both.
The doctor, routine checkup, not so routine.
There’s a great spirit gone. Thus did I desire it.
Would the hand could pluck her back that shoved her on.
Mangan got up and walked the long hallway of his empty apartment. Restless. Surveying the fortifications of his book-walled citadel. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness—god, he had to get Melville out of his head. He grabbed the new book he’d bought and went back to the front room.
How to Gain Your Parakeet’s Trust
He’d picked it up at the Windy City Parakeet Boutique on the way home from Winsome Bay. Coose thought he was insane. The day that Mangan had found the bird in Fenyana Petrakova’s apartment he hadn’t known what to do with it, so he brought it home with him. He didn’t know why. He didn’t like animals. And now he had to take care of the thing.
He flipped the book open to a random page.
“When you first take your new parakeet home, expect him to be terrified. This anxiety and stress may make him bite.”
Mangan looked at the sullen parakeet in the cage. “You bite me, and you’re out of here. You understand me?”
The bird cocked its head slightly.
“Reassure your parakeet in a calm voice and with slow movements.”
“Reassure yourself,” he told the bird. “Life’s tough, get used to it.”
“Whistle to your parakeet.”
“Not a chance.”
He read on, skimming through chapters.
“Parakeets are extremely social birds and they must be kept in pairs to avoid harmful behavior problems.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen. We’re bachelors here. Or you’re a—whatever—a bachelorette, a bird bachelorette.”
The bird was most likely a female, if Mangan understood the book correctly. Something about the color around its beak. Anyway, he decided it was a girl whether it was right or not.
“Phoebe,” he said to the bird. “That’s your name now.”
The book had said that parakeets make a lot of noise, but Mangan hadn’t heard a chirp since he’d found her in the bathtub of the apartment. He leaned back into the armchair and watched the bird for a long moment. She watched him too. Gloomy little thing, he thought, probably traumatized somehow. A line of poetry came to him—Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. Mangan leaned forward and tapped the cage.
“Hey. You okay in there?”
Phoebe scooted sideways on her perch.
“Relax, I’m not going to hurt you.”
She backed farther away, pressing up against the side of the cage.
Mangan tried a calmer voice and then realized he was talking to a bird.
“Jesus.”
He put the cage on a table near the bay window, then went into the kitchen to make another drink. He cracked some ice into a glass, gave himself a two-finger pour of gin, hesitated a moment, and made it three. He splashed in a little soda and joined Phoebe in the front room. She skittered away as he flopped into the chair next to her. He took a long, deep breath and thought of nothing for exactly two seconds. He looked out the window.
“In the morning,” he told Phoebe, “you’ll see sparrows.”
Mangan checked the time. Mickey Eagan would be bringing Savva Baratov in for questioning in about five or six hours. He drank deep and ran the scenario in his head. Baratov, Ellison, and Fenyana at dinner together. Coose said that Baratov definitely was not mob affiliated, but he might still be trafficking women. Most of the lowlifes involved in the sex trade in Chicago weren’t associated with organized crime syndicates. They were most often part of the plague of entrepreneurs that had spread like pond scum around the world after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways,
A scum of base lackey peasants,
Whom their o’er-cloyed country vomits forth.
Their disregard for human life was unfathomable.
Mangan could imagine Deborah Ellison getting mixed up in the sex trade when she’d moved to Chicago; that wasn’t such a stretch. Now, whether she was being trafficked against her will was another question. It wasn’t uncommon to see trafficked women beaten or killed if they resisted. Maybe Fenyana wasn’t her lover. Maybe she’d been assigned to watch Ellison, to keep her in line. Some of the more senior prostitutes sometimes did that. Mangan considered if he should be looking at the Fenyana woman more closely. She was on the run.
Had Ellison been made an example of ? For some offense?
But why had Ellison’s body been dumped in her hometown if somebody wanted to make an example of her in Chicago? If she was being trafficked, the killer, or killers, would want the other girls to see her, to scare them. Or maybe Winsome Bay was merely where they finally caught up to her, maybe she knew she was in trouble and was trying to get home.
Whither should I fly? I have done no harm.
But this still didn’t shed any light on the motives for the brutal slayings of Mara Davies and Jillian McClay. Ellison’s murder could certainly have been some form of retribution or punishment, but it didn’t make sense with regard to the other victims. If it was a sex ring, why kill the other women?
Unless someone was afraid
that the American Forum articles might bring attention to their operation. Unless the men running the ring wanted the police to think there was a serial killer murdering these women. All they’d have to do was to write a few weird notes and leave them for the police to find, try to make everyone think it was personal, some lone figure wronged by these women. That was a stretch, though, and Mangan knew it. The sleazebags who ran these operations weren’t that smart. They preyed upon the innocent and the vulnerable, the immigrants, the drug addicted, the poor and abused, children.
Mangan checked his watch again. Shit. He knew he had to sleep. He turned to Phoebe. She was staring at him and had inched the littlest bit closer.
“What do you think?” he asked her.
She scooched away again, looking slightly panicked.
“You’re no help,” he said, and stared up at the ceiling.
Why? Why were these women murdered?
If he could figure out the why, he could maybe figure out the who.
The man sat in his truck, in the parking lot, the engine running. The radio playing, quietly. Country music. The sun just up. The lake so crispy blue, so different from his lake, the one to which he would lead them later. This lake was much bigger, much wider.
A sea-lake.
He could make out a dock to his left. The boats there, bobbing. Fishermen waiting on the dock, in small huddles, coffee cups in their prayerful hands, steaming. Their mouths moving mutely.
He rolled down his window and dropped the note out. It clinked on the pavement. It was too windy, though, he thought. It might blow away. He got out and picked it up. He placed it under the wiper blade of another car.