by Jim Cliff
“OK, thanks.”
“No problem, Jake. You know, the cold also accounts for the inaccuracy of the time since death. All the standard onset times for rigor, putrefaction, livor mortis and so on are based on an ambient temp of seventy degrees. There aren’t really any reference tables for investigators to show the relationship between temperature and onset times - well, there’s one for body temp called Henssge’s Nommem, which is really quite fascinating, but for the others, an ME has to use his experience. Charles spent most of his career in Florida - he wasn’t used to our winters up here - so perhaps he overestimated the post mortem interval. These days, with resources like the body farm in Carbondale, we have much more information than we had back then.”
I thanked Odin again and we went back to watch the end of the game. Howe and Scott were heads-up and chips were flying back and forth between them. It only lasted a few more rounds until Scott pushed all-in on the flop with a straight draw and Howe calmly called with a pair of tens. Scott didn’t make his straight and we spent the rest of the evening telling our bad beat stories and putting Howe’s success down to beginner’s luck.
Chapter 8
I was on I-94 by ten o’clock Monday. Detective Caines had retired out in Lake Bluff and was prepared to talk to me after he finished his daily round of golf. We met in the clubhouse just before eleven.
He was a gruff, heavyset man in his seventies in a striped polo shirt, a Chicago PD baseball cap and the worst pants I ever saw. He looked like a man you wouldn’t have wanted to mess with back in the day, and the golf kept him fit.
“Like I told Freedman, I’m not promising anything, but I’ll tell you whatever I can remember.”
“That’s all I ask,” I said. “Why don’t you take a look at the report, see if it jogs any memories?”
Caines took the file and pulled a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket. He read for a minute or two and then looked up, nodding.
“Sure, I remember this one,” he said. “Freedman said you think she didn’t kill herself?”
“You have any thoughts on that?”
“Looked like a suicide. We didn’t find anything to say different.”
“Talk me through it.”
“What is this? You’ve read the report.”
“Humor me.”
“We got a call to go out to Thatcher Woods to respond to a suicide. Deputy had spotted the broad’s car, started looking around, stumbled on the body. My partner and I drove out there.”
“Your partner’s name?”
“Doug Kelsey.” I made a note, but he put up his hand to stop me. “He can’t help you. Doug was killed in the line of duty. Shot by a junkie in ‘02.”
“I’m sorry.”
He took a deep breath. “So we get to the woods. Patrol car is in the lot. Only other car there is the broad’s shiny new Toyota.”
“Who else was on the scene?”
“Deputy who called it in, Officer Davies, and his partner, I forget his name.”
“Did you know Davies?”
“Sure, a little. Um... Oscar. Oscar Davies. Last I heard he was working for the CPD. Desk sergeant at the One Nine. Anyway, Davies is waiting for us in the lot, when we get there he takes us to the body. She’s cold, stiff. At first, I think maybe she’s frozen, but the flesh has got plenty of give, you know? It was just the rigor.”
“Any sign of a struggle? Any footprints?”
“Not even hers. If I remember right it had been raining real hard for a couple days. Any tracks were long gone. Even getting to her to check her out I got all kinds of muddy.”
“She wasn’t next to the trail?” I asked.
“Ten, fifteen feet away from it.”
“Was any trace evidence collected at all?”
“Nothing to collect. The body was taken to the morgue, the gun was sent to ballistics, the car was impounded.”
“Anything in the car?”
“No fingerprints except hers, no reason to think anyone else was there. We found the lockbox for her gun in the trunk.”
“What made you think it was a suicide?”
He laughed. “It was obvious. She drove herself out there, took her gun from the lockbox, walked into the woods and offed herself. She was still holding the gun; ME found GSR on her hand. We even talked to the people she worked with. They said she was extra stressed lately. Money problems.”
“Was there anything that didn’t add up? Anything at all?”
He thought. I gave him the space he needed.
“She was dressed for work. But she didn’t go in. She didn’t have any meetings scheduled outside of the office. That was kind of weird.”
“My witness puts the time of death after eight p.m. Did you trace her movements during the day?”
“No, we couldn’t find anyone who’d seen her. We figured she got up to go to work, got despondent, decided not to go in. ME said she probably did it in the morning.”
“OK. I wonder where she went.”
“One thing we know, she wasn’t driving around all day.”
“How’s that?”
“Camry was still full of gas. We found a receipt in the car - she just filled it up that morning.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, about six a.m. at a gas station on Chicago Avenue.”
“Right near the woods?”
“About a mile away.”
“Who fills up their car with gas on the way to commit suicide?”
“I don’t know, have you seen the price of gas these days?”
“Did she zero the trip meter?”
“No. Best we can tell she hadn’t driven more than ten miles; that’s all we know. Maybe it’s like with the outfit. Maybe she filled up before she decided to off herself.”
“Maybe. But then why did she have the gun in the trunk?”
Chapter 9
Stone Realty on Wabash was a high-end place. I guess people planning on spending a million plus on an apartment like a lot of white marble. I asked for Valerie Stone at the first desk I came to. Before the guy could answer, an older lady towards the back of the office looked up and headed my way.
“I’m Valerie Stone, can I help you?” she asked. Her hair looked like it had been cut that morning, layered and straightened and a couple shades lighter than those copper bottomed pans your grandma used. Her glasses were designer - I could tell because the designer’s name was discreetly embossed on the frame. Her suit didn’t have any names on it, but I figured clothes designers were just more humble.
“I’m Jake Abraham,” I said. “I’m a private detective.” No reaction. Maybe she met a lot of private detectives. Or maybe it was uncouth to look intrigued. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”
She took me through a door in the back of the office, to the coffee room. No white marble here. Just Formica tables, plastic chairs, and a coffee machine. All the money was out front.
“What’s this about?” she asked. Polite, not defensive.
“You worked for Elizabeth Weber some years ago?”
“Well, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. Yes, I worked for her for nearly four years.”
“I’m looking into her death. I just have a few questions.”
“But she killed herself.”
“That was the verdict. There’s some question over that now.”
“Oh my goodness. What do you think happened?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“Of course. Well, how can I help?”
“Do you remember the day she went missing?”
“Absolutely. When I got to the office it was still locked. That was unusual, because Elizabeth always got in first. She was an early riser and she liked to get an hour of work done before the rest of us came in.”
“She have any meetings that morning?”
“No. We checked the calendar when she hadn’t shown up after a couple of hours.”
“Did you try calling her?”
; “I tried her home number. She didn’t have a cell. Hardly anybody did back then.”
“Where did you think she might be?”
“Well, we didn’t know. It was most unlike her not to let us know where she would be.”
“Might she have had an early call and gone to look at a property?”
“No way.”
“How can you be sure?”
“She had a policy. We were never to go to a property alone without putting it on the calendar, and if we were out of the office for more than two hours at viewings we had to find a payphone and check in. There was a real estate agent in England a few years before, who was lured to a property and kidnapped. Elizabeth was a little paranoid about it.”
“Is that why she kept the gun in her car?”
“What?”
“When she was found, the lockbox for her .38 was in the trunk of her car. Was she in the habit of keeping it in there?”
“I didn’t even know she had a gun. She gave me a ride home a few times when my car was in the shop, and I know her trunk was empty because I had a big bag with me one time that only just fit in.
“When was this?”
“Maybe a week before she went missing.”
“You told the detective at the time that Elizabeth had been more stressed than usual leading up to her disappearance.”
“That’s right. I mean Elizabeth was always overworked. Believe me, running your own business doesn’t give you a whole lot of downtime.”
“You said she was worried about money?”
“That’s what she said.”
“But I understand she bought a new car?”
“That’s right. It didn’t make much sense at the time. None of us could figure out what she was so worried about, and she really didn’t seem suicidal. I mean that was a real shock. Of course, it all started to add up when the FBI came along.”
“The what?”
“The FBI.” My face conveyed the “what the hell are you talking about” message before my mouth had a chance to join in. “Wait, you didn’t know about that?” she asked.
“No. When was this?”
“A few months after she died. They were investigating some kind of bank fraud. They wanted to know if any of the rest of us were involved, but it was only one developer they were interested in and Elizabeth kept that one strictly to herself.”
“Do you remember the developer’s name?”
“It was three initials, then ‘Construction’, like PCM Construction, or PMC... No, it was CMP. CMP Construction. It was run by a cousin of Elizabeth’s, apparently.”
“What kind of scheme was she running?”
“They never told us the details. We figured she must have found out she was being investigated and killed herself rather than face jail.”
“Did she have any enemies?”
“No. Well, I mean, nobody who would want to kill her.”
“But people who had a problem with her?”
“There was a man who came to the office about a month before she went missing. He was really angry with her. He came in shouting that she’d lost him his job, and he was going to get her back.”
“He said that?”
“Yes. She took him out into the parking lot after that, so we couldn’t hear what they said, but it was a big fight. He was not happy.”
“Do you know who he was?”
“I’d seen him before. I don’t know his name, but he worked for a bank downtown, in the Loop. He was a mortgage guy.
“What did he look like?”
“Really tall. Sandy hair and a beard. And a broken nose.”
“Like bent?”
“No, he had one of those metal splints on it, like he’d just done it.”
“You didn’t mention this at the time?”
“Why would I? He never came back, and they said she killed herself.”
Chapter 10
After several attempts with different initials, I found a news report from 1994 about a guy named Mark Platt who had been indicted on six counts of bank fraud along with a savings and loan officer named Terry Sorensen. Back then he ran a property development business called MCP Construction. Now he sold hot dogs from a cart on Navy Pier.
“What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?” Platt said, handing me a dog wrapped in a paper napkin.
“I don’t know.”
“Make me one with everything.”
I smiled and took a bite of my dog. It was pretty good.
“You’re Mark Platt, right?”
His smile faded. He didn’t answer, but his face told me I’d got the right guy.
“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about your cousin Elizabeth?”
“Lizzie killed herself. Twenty-some years ago.”
“Maybe. I’m looking into that.” I showed him my license and he softened a little. “Tell me about Elizabeth.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Were you close?”
“We pretty much grew up together. My old man left when I was young. Mom worked two jobs so she wasn’t home a lot and I spent all my time at Lizzie’s house. Catherine really looked out for me.”
“Elizabeth’s mother?”
“Right.”
“Was Elizabeth involved in the fraud scheme you went to prison for?”
He hesitated. I wasn’t sure if he didn’t want to speak ill of the dead, or if he was trying not to think about a part of his life he had moved on from.
“It would really help me to know what she was mixed up in before she died,” I offered.
“Yeah,” he sighed. “She was involved. It was her idea.”
“The news reports on the case didn’t mention her.”
“Part of my plea deal was to keep her name out of it.”
“After she died? What did it matter then?”
“Couldn’t do that to Catherine. She’d been through enough.”
“Did Elizabeth have any other family?”
“No, it was just us.”
“Do you think she knew the FBI were investigating her?”
“If she did, I like to think she would have warned me. First I heard about it was early ‘94. Couple, two, three months after Lizzie died.”
“Where were you the day she died?”
“Twenty-three years ago? How the hell should I know? Was it a weekday?”
“Tuesday.”
“Then I would’ve been in the office or on a site. I never went anywhere else.”
“What can you tell me about the fraud scheme?”
“It was supposed to be a one-time thing. You have to understand the situation. The eighties were boom time for business. The property market was amazing. We couldn’t build houses fast enough to keep up and the money just kept rolling in. Summer of ‘87 we bought a tract of land outside of the city - real commuter paradise. Borrowed the money to build more than two hundred houses. Then the market crashed. I mean real bad. You remember?”
“I’ve heard about it.”
“At first it didn’t look like the property market was going to be hit too bad. I mean, houses ain’t shares, right? All the analysts were saying it was going to be OK. We kept building and the houses started selling, but not enough. By 1990 we still had over a hundred houses we couldn’t shift. It was like a ghost town. I was up to my ass in debt, Lizzie’s business was going down the tubes. That’s when she came to me, and she goes ‘I got an idea.’”
“How did it work?”
“She had a couple looking for a house. They didn’t have a hope of getting a mortgage for the amount they were looking at, they didn’t earn enough, they didn’t have anywhere near the kind of deposit they needed. She told them she could help, for a fee. She valued one of my houses. High. It was way out of their league. She told them it was OK, she’d talk to the loan officer on their behalf. I put up the deposit, she got them the mortgage, the savings and loan gave them the money, I got paid, split some of the profits with Lizzie.”
&nbs
p; “How did she get them the mortgage?”
“Faked a bunch of stuff I guess. Employment details, earnings reports, bank statements. I never knew all the specifics. And she paid a loan officer not to look too close before signing off.”
“And after the first time?”
“We didn’t do anything for a few months. Didn’t want to draw attention. But it all played out fine, so one day Lizzie came to me and said she’d got another couple and did I want another big payday.”
“There were six counts of bank fraud. You did it four more times after that?”
“We got a bit greedy. There were two more couples, then two of the sales there were just straw buyers.”
“What?”
“There were people who signed the documents - Lizzie paid them so she could set up sales in their names and use their credit reports, but they never had any intention of living in the houses. I didn’t care. The savings and loan released the money, I got paid. Nobody ever paid the mortgages and the lenders foreclosed a few months later. I think that’s when they started getting suspicious. Started looking at that loan officer.”
“Terry Sorensen?”
“Right. Viking-looking asshole.”
“You met him?”
“Once. Jagoff came barging into my office one day, bitching about losing his job. He was drunk, angry. I told him to beat it.”
“Did he?”
“He needed some encouragement. Started pushing me, getting in my face, so I clocked him.”
“You break his nose?”
“Maybe. I did get him pretty good,” he said, smiling at the memory.
“I think he went to see Elizabeth after that.”
“Makes sense.”
“Do you think he was angry enough to hurt her?”
“Man, I don’t know. Way I see it he made a choice, right? She didn’t force him into anything. He lost his job it’s because he messed up.”