Drop Dead

by Mark Richard Zubro

  Several evidence techs were dusting for fingerprints. Turner asked them to examine the bedroom. The detective looked over the edge down into the street. He wasn’t sure how accurately he could pinpoint specific movements of pedestrians. Could their witness be certain he had seen someone? He claimed he’d seen a face as well.

  “Find anything?” he asked the evidence techs.

  “A little bit less than nothing.”

  “I want you to wave to me when I get down to the pavement. I want to check out what can be seen.”

  When he was on the street, Turner stood where Clark Nemora claimed he’d been. He watched the evidence tech waving for several moments.

  “Seems a little tough to see,” Turner said to himself. “We need more evidence.”

  SEVEN

  On their way to Area Ten headquarters, Turner and Fenwick made two stops. One was at the caterer’s at Belmont and Racine to pick up the addresses and the other at Aunt Millie’s for a late lunch.

  Aunt Millie’s Bar and Grill was on Dearborn just south of Congress Parkway. The place was more than half empty. Millie herself greeted them at the door. She was a tall woman in her late fifties with a bouffant hairdo. She was wearing a pink muumuu.

  “You guys are a little late, today,” she said.

  “Dead bodies wait for no man,” Fenwick said.

  She said, “If I wasn’t so fed up, I’d make the kind of crack that line deserves.”

  “What’s wrong?” Turner asked.

  “They’re going to construct another one of those goddamn upscale developments in the neighborhood. This used to be a part of town with character and depth. Now it’s all these trendy rich people. I had somebody in here at lunch asking for a vegetarian menu. I suggested they order the french fries and mashed potatoes.”

  “An excellent choice of vegetables,” Fenwick said.

  “Not good enough for them. They wanted to know what kind of oil we cooked our fried foods in.” She shook her head. “If I had the energy, I’d retire.” She nodded toward the back booth where Area Ten detectives traditionally sat. “You think I’m down, better get over there and talk to Area Ten’s perfect couple.”

  At the back booth were Ashley Devonshire and Dwayne Smythe, the two newest detectives on the Area Ten squad. They’d started as the most know-it-all, been-there-done-that pair Turner could remember.

  Each was reading notes and barely looked up at Turner and Fenwick’s approach.

  “Problem?” Turner asked.

  Ashley sighed. “I’ve never heard of detectives having this kind of problem.”

  Even their problems were bigger than anybody else’s. Turner managed to look concerned.

  Fenwick didn’t bother to conceal his contempt. He said, “Finally found out detective work isn’t a picnic?”

  Smythe said, “The commander keeps giving us these gang shootings. There’s no glamour in that. No headlines. No mystery. It’s just more gang crap. We want real murders.”

  “A gang shooting is a fake murder?” Turner asked.

  “You know what we mean,” Ashley said. “We want the high-profile stuff like you guys get.”

  “Yeah,” Dwayne said. “This fashion stuff would be great. I could get a few tips. Maybe they’d want me to model.”

  “We get as many gang shootings as anybody,” Fenwick said.

  “Doesn’t seem that way to us.”

  “Talk to the commander,” Turner said. “The dead bodies don’t care who investigates their murders and neither do I.”

  “The press does,” Ashley said. “We deserve some media exposure.”

  “I’ll try to care,” Fenwick said.

  Their food arrived and as usual, the mounds of glop tasted delicious. Turner could almost hear his arteries clogging as he wolfed it down.

  Turner and Fenwick drove back to Area Ten headquarters. The building housing Area Ten was south of the River City complex on Wells Street on the southwest rim of Chicago’s Loop. The building was as old and crumbling as River City was new and gleaming. Many years ago the department purchased a four-story warehouse scheduled for demolition and decreed it would be a new Area Ten headquarters. To this day, rehabbers occasionally put in appearances. In fits and starts, the building had changed from an empty hulking wreck to a people-filled hulking wreck. The conversion from the original radiator heating to a more modern system was scheduled to begin the first warm day this spring. No one believed this.

  Area Ten ran from Fullerton Avenue on the north to Lake Michigan on the east, south to Fifty-ninth Street, and west to Halsted. It included the wealth of downtown Chicago and North Michigan Avenue, some of the nastiest slums in the city, and numerous upscale developments. It incorporated four police districts. The cops in the Areas in Chicago handled homicides and any major nonlethal violent crimes. The police districts mostly took care of neighborhood patrols and initial responses to incidents.

  Across the street from the station Turner spotted two photographers hefting more cameras than a herd of tourists. He pointed them out to Fenwick. “You recognize them as any of the regulars?”

  Fenwick glanced at them. “Nope. Possibly paparazzi.”

  “Furyk was famous,” Turner said. “We could have a flood of press people before this is over.”

  When he arrived at his desk, Turner called his friend Ian Hume at the Gay Tribune. He wanted to find out as much about Kindel as he could.

  Turner and Hume had been cops together many years before. Back then they were lovers for a short while and had remained good friends.

  After exchanging greetings Turner asked, “We’re working on the Cullom Furyk murder.”

  “The model?”

  “You know him?”

  “I know of him. In the small pantheon of gaydom in this city, he has achieved the most fame of any gay person in the area.”

  “You ever meet him?”

  “No. He was supposed to be pretty. I don’t run in fashion circles. Most of those people think they are terribly important.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “Other than the overly rich, does anyone care about those people?”

  “I’ve never been overly rich so I’m not sure. Tell you what, I’ll try being overly rich awhile and get back to you on that.”

  “Cullom is dead. I’m trying to care. The paper will probably do an article on him, but I’m not sure why I should be concerned. I didn’t know him.”

  “You know Sean Kindel?”

  “Writes for the paper. He’s a weird guy. Just a stringer here. He does the fashion, gossip, and a couple of porn columns.”

  “He only mentioned the fashion and gossip to us.”

  “He writes the porn stuff under a pseudonym. One column he calls ‘Masturbating With.’ In the other, he reviews one porn movie a week. It’s called something absurd like ‘Lust and Thrust.’”

  “‘Masturbating With’?”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of an odd column. The new owner thinks mixing news with porn sells. The lawyer who meets with the staff once a month insisted on those kinds of columns. At one point he specifically ordered the editor to make space for it. He claimed the new owner wanted it.”

  “You still don’t know who the new owner is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not the lawyer?”

  “I checked him out thoroughly with my best reportorial skills, which are legendary. It’s not him.”

  “Your legendary reportorial skills weren’t enough to find out who does own the paper.”

  Hume let that comment pass and said, “At any rate, Kindel happened to be around on that day, and he volunteered to write a couple of the columns. He’d just done the fashion and gossip stuff before. The editor didn’t much care who wrote them, so he gladly accepted Kindel’s offer.”

  “How were the columns odd?”

  “‘Masturbating With’ was kind of a gay man’s fantasy column. The premise for one was a two-hour finale for Melrose Place in which it was revealed that in actual
fact all the male characters have had affairs with Matt Fielding over the years, and they were putting it over on all the women all that time. Another column might be interviewing a sports star after a championship win, but with lots of personal questions mostly revolving around sex. Like asking John Stockton, ‘Now that you’ve won the game, how long is your prick?’ or ‘Could you tell our listeners about the first time you beat off?’ And then he’d make up answers to the questions. Sometimes the columns would be fantasies about making love to movie stars. I don’t know how he got away with that kind of stuff. It had to be libelous, but it kept getting printed. At one of our meetings, the editor complained. He said this should be a newspaper, not the perpetrator of some salacious drivel. The lawyer simply said there would be no discussion and the columns would continue. Even Kindel expressed worries at some meetings about what he wrote, but the lawyer always okayed it.”

  “Kindel claimed he was Cullom’s lover.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  Ian chuckled for a few moments. “Maybe in his fantasies he was, but I find that hard to believe.”

  “Why?”

  “Kindel is a loser. The kind of guy who stays home watching porno tapes and beating off. He is a sleaze.”

  “Losers can’t have lovers? Aren’t you being a little harsh and judgmental?”

  “That was the effect I was trying for,” Ian said. “I suppose they could have boyfriends and lovers, but of the stature and fame of Cullom Furyk?”

  “I don’t know. Why not? I’ve never had the stature and fame of Cullom Furyk. I don’t think I want to.”

  “Wise man.”

  “Is Kindel a killer?”

  Turner trusted Ian’s instincts almost as much as his own.

  “Kindel, a killer? I can’t picture it, but I’ve been surprised before.”

  “He have another job besides working for the paper?” Turner asked.

  “I think he’s mostly a freelance writer. A lot of the stringers try to make it on a tight budget and working their butts off. That doesn’t work very often.”

  “Do you know someone who’s up on fashion? I think I need to talk with an expert on the inner workings of the industry but who isn’t connected with the case.”

  “I’ll see who I can find for you.”

  After he hung up, Turner filled Fenwick in.

  Fenwick said, “Beat cops said there was no one home at Kindel’s address. Was he at the paper?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  A quick call back to Ian confirmed Kindel’s absence from the paper as well. Turner then called the three numbers on slips of paper in Furyk’s wallet. One was an ice cream parlor on Belmont Avenue. One was a restaurant in the north suburbs. No one in either place remembered Cullom Furyk ever being there. The last number was for the penthouse at the Archange. Both Turner and Fenwick began filling in their Daily Major Incident Log.

  Half an hour later Randy Carruthers bustled up to them. Randy was the curse of the Area Ten detectives. Their nickname for him was “Bratwurst” since he wore such tight clothes on his bulging frame. Of late, Turner was less inclined to be impatient with him. Carruthers had turned out to be far less homophobic than expected.

  Fenwick, however, grumbled at the bejowled presence. Carruthers knew better than to try and set his butt on either of their desks.

  Carruthers said, “You guys get all the best cases. All the reporters are calling. People care that Cullom Furyk is dead.”

  “You heard of him?” Turner asked.

  “Sure. People magazine had a cover article on him. My girlfriend, Janice, thinks he’s really cute. She buys me the clothes he modeled.”

  “In tent sizes?” Fenwick asked.

  “I know I don’t have a figure as svelte as yours,” Carruthers said. This was a reference to Fenwick’s ever-expanding bulk—a sensitive area to Fenwick and not one that Carruthers normally had the nerve to bring up. The young detective had been digging in his heels lately.

  The new commander of Area Ten walked in. Lately, Drew Molton had been acting commander, but had just been given the top job in what Turner considered a long-overdue promotion.

  At the sight of the commander, Carruthers wandered off in search of Harold Rodriguez, his partner.

  “Anything good on this Furyk thing?” Molton asked. Molton felt quite comfortable plopping his butt on the edge of Fenwick’s desk. The detective kept his mouth shut.

  “Might have a suspect in a guy who says he was the lover,” Turner said.

  “I think we should shoot some of them,” Fenwick said.

  “You had Judge Cabestainey today, right?” Molton asked.

  “Asshole judges need to be beaten with sticks after we shoot some of these fashion people.”

  “Problems?”

  “Supercilious, snotty, self-important,” Fenwick said.

  “Judges or suspects?”

  “Both.”

  “I got a call from the mayor’s office on this one,” Molton said.

  “The fashion industry in this town has grown into big business. Lots of prestige for the city along with lovely tax-paying companies. Jobs, upper-middle-class people moving into the city.”

  Fenwick snorted, “Bull pizzle! It’s just a case.”

  Molton ignored him. “Plus the dead guy was involved in lots of good causes. I remember those pictures on the buses. Good-looking and a saint. Think Princess Diana. A crowd has gathered and people are already bringing flowers to the hotel to lay on the street.”

  “Give me a break,” Fenwick said. “This gets no more attention than any other case.”

  “Gossip columnists from around the world and all the big-time tabloid newspapers and television shows have called. Remember what happened when Versace was killed.”

  “But that was connected to a high-profile spree killer,” Fenwick said.

  “Protest all you want, Buck, but I’m telling you, it’s a big deal. I’m just giving you information. You’ve got an added dimension to the case.”

  Fenwick sighed. “I love information.”

  “We saw some photographers on our way in,” Turner said.

  “I’ll check it out,” Molton said. “Before today, I never knew that this was high-fashion season in Chicago, or so I have been informed by any number of overwrought gossip columnists. Every local television station has this death as their lead story.”

  “Always dreamed of being in a tabloid,” Fenwick said.

  “I can see the headline,” Turner said. “‘Annoyed detective mows down snotty suspects.’”

  “I like it,” Fenwick said.

  “I’ll field calls from reporters,” Molton said. “We may have to have a press conference or two.”

  “And my picture in the paper,” Fenwick said. “If I’d known all this when I woke up, I’d have worn my good suit.”

  “You only have one suit,” Turner said.

  “And it’s a good one.”

  With that, Molton sauntered off.

  “I’ll call the ME and see if she’s got anything,” Fenwick said.

  “Not quite yet,” Turner said. His gaze was fixed behind Fenwick on the entrance to the squad room.

  Fenwick turned around. A woman stood at the top of the stairs surveying the room. She wore a purple floral dress, purple boots, a purple Naugahyde jacket, and carried a purple briefcase. Accompanying her was a man wearing a white cotton tank top, cotton jeans, and a deerskin jacket.

  “I believe we have visitors,” Turner said.

  “We’re looking for detectives Fenwick and Turner,” the woman announced. “I’m attorney Betty O’Dowd and this is my client, Mickey Spitzer.”

  Turner called them over. He didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone with broader shoulders and a narrower waist than Spitzer. The face was more crags and lumps than handsome. The black eyebrows formed one continuous line. He looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties. His jacket was artfully open to show off the torso u
nderneath.

  O’Dowd continued. “My client would like to make a statement about the Cullom Furyk incident. My client may have information helpful to the case.”

  “Why wasn’t he questioned at the hotel?” Turner asked. He wondered which beat cop had screwed up.

  “Mr. Spitzer was not at the brunch. He had an important photo shoot this afternoon. There was no other time he could be there to work with the client. As soon as he was finished working, he phoned me. We hurried here immediately.”

  “Murder is more important than his goddamn pretty pictures,” Fenwick barked.

  “You want help or you want to complain?” O’Dowd asked.

  “I think I’ll complain for a while and see how I like it,” Fenwick retorted.

  Turner ushered them all into a conference room on the fourth floor. “What have you got for us?” he asked when they were all seated.

  “My client has rented the penthouse on the west tower of the Archange Hotel for the week.”

  “The whole thing?” Fenwick asked.

  “Yes, is that a problem?”

  “Not yet,” Fenwick murmured.

  “Mr. Spitzer had them install some simple gym equipment,” she said. “It is an amenity my client needs for his work. He must remain in top shape. The workout area was on the northeast side of the west tower. Because it was pleasant out today, he had them move it outside.”

  Both detectives were more than a bit interested.

  O’Dowd said, “Mr. Furyk was walking on the top of the wall opposite. Mr. Spitzer saw Mr. Furyk pushed from the wall. He did not see clearly who did it. He believes it was a white male, but he is unable to be more precise than that.”

  “Definitely pushed?” Turner asked.

  “Definitely,” she said.

  “Can’t he answer?” Fenwick asked.

  “He speaks very little English. Until a few years ago, he was a field worker outside his native Kiev.” She spoke a few words in a foreign tongue to her client. He nodded at her. “I would be happy to have another translator work with him as long as I am present—that is, of course, unless you gentlemen speak Russian.”