by Jim Cliff
“Maybe he didn’t see it that way.”
He shrugged.
“What happened next?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“After you lost your man on the inside?”
“Lizzie said it was no big deal. Said she had a plan. I never found out what it was.”
Chapter 11
There was no answer at Terry Sorensen’s apartment on Clark, but a neighbor told me three bars I could try and he was in the second one. He looked like he’d been there a while. Months, probably. He was still tall, but his blond hair and beard were now gray. His nose took a left turn halfway down.
Once we’d established I wasn’t a cop, Sorensen agreed to talk to me in exchange for a bourbon with a beer back. I asked him about Elizabeth Weber. He downed the shot before he answered.
“That bitch ruined my life. What else do you want to know?”
“How did you get involved in her fraud scheme?”
“We met at a networking group she ran, kind of hit it off. After a few months, she asks me if I want to go for coffee after the meeting.”
“And she told you about the scheme?”
“No, she played me. She acted like she was interested in me. Coffee turned into lunches, then dinners, then sex. She got me hooked on her, then she took it away.”
“The sex?”
“Everything. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. When I finally got her to talk to me she said she was too busy at work. She was having money problems and she needed to focus on the business. I asked if there was anything I could do. That was my first mistake.”
“That’s when she told you about it?”
“She practically begged me to help her. She was real grateful if you know what I mean.”
“What did she want you to do?”
“She needed me to sign off on a home loan without looking too hard at the documentation. She said the couple she was working with could afford the payments but they didn’t have the kind of proof we usually needed, so she massaged the figures a little.”
“How true was that?”
“Oh, it was total bullshit. She didn’t massage anything, she faked every document.”
“And you looked the other way?”
“I would have done anything for her. It wasn’t my money.”
“So when she asked you the second time, you were OK with that too?”
“It was like a cycle. Oh, she was such a manipulative bitch. She was all sweet until the loans came through, then she would go all distant again and I was too stupid to walk away. I was waiting for my chance to help her again so she would need me.”
“Tell me about what happened when you got fired?”
“I got called into the office. The savings and loan had foreclosed on two properties I’d approved which had never had any payments made, and my boss pulled the file. I made out like I didn’t know what he was talking about and walked the fuck out.”
“Did you go straight to Mark Platt’s office?”
“No, I went straight to a bar, got good and liquored up. Then I went to Platt’s.”
“What were you hoping to achieve?”
“Who knows? I wasn’t thinking straight. I blamed him because I couldn’t see that Elizabeth was pulling the strings. I barely got through the door. I was yelling at him, and I think I took a swing at him, but he flattened me. Broke my nose. He told me if I had a problem I should take it up with Elizabeth.”
“So you went to her office?”
“Tried calling first. For a couple days, actually. Work, home. She wouldn’t pick up, wouldn’t return my calls so, finally, I went round there to have it out with her.”
“You were angry?”
“Damn straight, I was angry. As far as I could see, I was never gonna get another job and she didn’t give two shits about it. I went in there guns blazing and she bundled me out into the parking lot, and damn if she didn’t calm me down. To this day I don’t know how she did it, but five minutes later I was apologizing. To her! Man, she was something else. I loved her and I hated her at the same time, you know?”
“That’s some pretty powerful emotion,” I said. He nodded. “Where were you the day she went missing?”
“I didn’t kill her. I sure thought about it, but she beat me to it.”
“Where were you?”
“I was in jail.” He finished his beer and immediately gestured for the bartender to bring him another. “I was heading for Canada. I figured it was only a matter of time before they connected the other loans and came after me so I was getting out while the getting was good.”
“You were in jail in Canada?”
“Never made it. I got as far as St. Paul. I stopped off at a bar, had a fair few drinks, got back in the car and headed north. A cop pulled me over for doing ten miles an hour on the freeway. When he tried to give me a breathalyzer I punched him in the face. I spent the next thirty days in jail.”
“I’ll be checking the dates on that.”
“Be my guest. Can I get back to my beer now?”
“One more question. How good were the documents?”
“They were OK. Nothing special.”
“Would they fool anybody?”
“Nobody who was doing their job. Maybe if she got real lucky and found someone lazy and incompetent. Easier to pay someone off.”
It was getting late. I felt like having a beer myself, but I was done talking to Terry and it felt awkward staying in the bar and not talking to him, so I headed out.
When I left the bar I thought I heard a camera shutter click. I turned my head and I saw a big guy with a navy watch cap pulled down over his ears slump down in the passenger seat of a Chevy Impala. I couldn’t see the driver. Watch Cap said something to his friend and the Chevy pulled away and headed north on Clark.
Chapter 12
I got a Rolling Rock from the fridge and cracked it open while I looked over the notes I’d taken so far.
Scott wasn’t answering his cell, so I turned on the Bears game and opened another beer.
The Bears were down 9-7 by half-time. Josh Huff was running the first kick of the second half back up the field when the door opened. It was Scott.
“You called me?”
“You know how those phone things work, right? When it makes the funny noise you can push a button and speak to me.”
“I was in the neighborhood, smartass. The game on?”
“It is. Beer?”
“Have I ever turned down a beer?”
“Only during your ill-advised whiskey phase.”
“I don’t think you can call one terrible, terrible weekend a ‘phase.’”
We watched the next couple of drives in relative silence, broken only to rant at Cutler for fumbling. Then Scott remembered my call.
“What did you want to talk to me about?”
“I’ve gotta go and talk to a desk sergeant at the One Nine tomorrow. I thought it might go more smoothly if you called first to let him know I was coming. Otherwise, I’m just some schmuck off the street.”
“Otherwise?” He grinned. “What’s it about?”
“He’s the one that found the body back in ‘93. The real estate agent.”
“How’s that going?”
I told Scott about the FBI investigation and my conversations with Platt and Sorensen.
“They both have alibis?” he asked.
“Sorensen was in jail in St. Paul. Platt says he was probably at work, but he doesn’t remember. I don’t see him having anything to do with it though.”
“So where does that leave you?”
“The way I figure, given the location and the fact she probably owned the gun that killed her, either she arranged to meet someone in the woods and took the gun for protection or she was grabbed somewhere else and forced to drive to the woods.”
“And she managed to get to the gun and tried to fight them off?”
“Right.”
“Was she in the habit of taki
ng the gun with her places?”
“Her colleague says it wasn’t in the trunk a week before.”
“Any other suspects?”
“I figure her fraud caused problems for a lot of people. Maybe one of them was pissed enough to do something like this.”
“Wire fraud makes it a federal case. Doubt the investigators will talk to you. You’ll have to request the court records to find out the victims’ names. Probably take a while.”
“You got any other ideas?”
“Mind if I take another look at the file?”
The football game forgotten, Scott and I had another beer while we went back over the meager case file. Scott was studying the crime scene photos when something struck me.
“Can I see that?” I asked, sliding the one wide shot over to my side of the couch.
“What have you seen?” Scott asked, noticing my expression.
“Something that isn’t there.”
“Alright, quit the ‘dog in the night-time’ crap and tell me what’s missing.”
“The report says they identified her because she fitted the description of a missing woman and her car was in the parking lot.”
“So?”
“What’s the first thing you look for when you’re trying to ID someone?”
“ID” Scott smiled and nodded. “No purse.”
“No purse. None in the photos, none in the car. At least none that’s mentioned in the report.”
“Oh, it would be mentioned if there was any ID in there. Good catch, Jake. So somebody took it when they killed her.”
“It’s not a robbery, though. So why would they take the bag? To make it look like a robbery?”
“Or because something in the bag would lead the cops to them? Or they thought it might. Did she have a diary where she wrote down appointments?”
I shook my head. “All appointments went on the office database. She wasn’t due to meet with anybody that day.”
“Maybe she kept a journal. Or some papers that proved somebody was involved in the fraud.” Scott stood up and stretched. “Well, good luck figuring it out. I’ve got an early start.”
After Scott left, I sat staring at the police report, searching for anything else I’d missed. In the background, the Eagles celebrated a narrow victory.
Chapter 13
Sergeant Oscar Davies was a tall, wiry black man in his early fifties. His salt-and-pepper hair was close cropped and he had a little goatee like the evil twin in every evil twin movie ever made. He looked up from his paperwork when I came through the door of the 19th District station. His face managed to look bored and welcoming at the same time. It was kind of impressive.
“Sergeant Davies?” I asked. He nodded once. “I’m Jake Abraham.”
“The private dick. Some detective from Area North called about you. Is that supposed to give you some kind of special status?”
Well, this was already going great.
“I thought it might help you to know I’m not a crank who’s going to waste your time.”
“Get to it, then.”
“November 4, 1993. You responded to an abandoned car call that turned out to belong to a missing woman.”
“I remember. I found her in the woods. Been there for a while.”
“Can you talk me through how you found her?”
“Frank, my partner, he started looking around the perimeter of the parking lot and I headed down the trail into the woods. Seemed like the obvious place to look. About a hundred yards in I saw something blue off to my right. It was the sleeve of her jacket.”
“What did you do then?”
“I checked her pulse, then I called it in and secured the scene.”
“You called it in as a suicide?”
“Yeah, that’s what it was.”
“Was that standard procedure? For a uniformed officer to state the manner of death in the initial call?”
He brushed off the question. “I’d seen suicides before. It didn’t take a detective to figure out what happened there.”
“Did Frank see the body?”
“Nah, he stayed in the parking lot and waited for the suits to arrive. He didn’t want to get dirty.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mud. I had that shit all over my shoes, all up one pant leg where I knelt down to check her pulse. It was a mess.”
“Did you find her purse?”
He thought for a moment. “I don’t recall seeing a purse. Maybe it was in the car.”
My brain had been working on something else in the background and suddenly it pushed to the front and formed into a question.
“Wait, did you say a hundred yards?”
“What?”
“You said you found her a hundred yards into the woods?”
“Somewhere around that, yeah.”
“You mean feet, right? A hundred feet?”
“I was a wide receiver in college. I know what a hundred yards looks like.”
“My witness says he went from the parking lot to the body, found her in the dark, checked to see if she was dead, and got back to the car in less than four minutes.”
“In the dark? Your witness is lying.”
Chapter 14
My car was parked in the lot of the Lutheran Church across from the 19th District station. As I crossed Addison, a huge bald guy in a Falcons warm-up jacket threw a cigarette down and stamped it out while trying not to look in my direction. He folded himself into the passenger seat of a dark blue Honda Civic.
I pulled out of the lot and headed west on Addison. When I stopped at the lights on Sheffield, I checked my mirror. The Honda was two cars behind. I kept one eye on the mirror all the way up the Kennedy onto the Edens. They stayed in sight, but there was always a car between us. When I slowed, so did they, and when I stepped on the gas they kept up. I took a completely pointless detour through Skokie and for a moment I thought I’d lost them, but by the time I was back on I-94 there they were again.
Just south of Lake Bluff I pulled into a BMW dealership off I-41. There was nowhere for them to stop without being obvious about it, so they sped past. Before I wrote down the plate number I managed to catch a glimpse of the driver. Or at least his navy blue watch cap.
I sat for a while in the dealership parking lot and tried to figure out what to do next. It was a good thing, I decided, that I was being tailed. It meant somebody had something to hide. The license plate might get me closer to who, but I still had to find out what.
I’d spotted them the previous night after I spoke to Terry Sorensen, but I had no idea how long they’d been following me, or who sent them. I could confront them and ask, but they weren’t doing any harm at the moment, so I figured I’d let them follow for now, keep asking questions and see what they did. Maybe if I spoke to the right person they might show their hand.
Detective Caines did not look happy to see me when he finished his round. I was waiting at the door to the clubhouse, looking out for him.
“This again?”
“I just have a couple follow-up questions sir, I promise I won’t take up much of your time.”
“You’re lucky you caught me in a good mood. I just got a hole in one on the 17th. What is it?”
I resisted the urge to say ‘it’s when the ball goes in the hole on the first hit, but that’s not important right now’ and asked my question.
“Sergeant Davies says the body was around a hundred yards down the path into the woods. Does that sound about right to you?”
“Sure. Hundred sounds about right. Maybe even a little further.”
“You’re sure?”
“Far as I can remember. That it?”
“One more thing,” I said, trying not to sound like Columbo. “There’s no mention in the report of you finding her purse anywhere.”
“There’s a reason for that. We didn’t find one.”
“That didn’t strike you as odd?”
“She probably didn’t have it with her that day.”
>
“Are you married, Detective Caines?”
“Forty-two years, next month.”
“Does your wife ever go out without her purse?”
“Look, it looked like a suicide,” he said. “There’s no way it was a mugging. There was no purse on the scene. Maybe she just didn’t have it with her.”
“So how did she pay for her gas that morning?”
Caines went quiet.
“You have a theory?” he asked, after a while.
“Only the obvious one. Whoever killed her took her purse. Don’t know why yet. Don’t know who.”
“Do me a favor. When you figure it out, you let me know.”
Chapter 15
The Honda Civic was nowhere to be seen on the drive back into Chicago. On the way, I tried to figure out how my two witnesses placed the murder within shouting distance of the parking lot while two cops placed it a hundred yards or more away. Somebody was lying. Maybe two somebodies. I just wished I could figure out why. I did have a theory, but it didn’t make any sense at all, and that’s the worst kind of theory.
Grady acted as pleased to see me as the first time I’d visited his office. We sat on his black couch and his secretary brought a coffee for him and a mineral water for me. I don’t drink coffee, and I figured they probably didn’t have any beer.
“So, any leads?”
“Well, I’ve got a few very interesting angles I’m struggling to fit together right now.”
“Intriguing. Anything I can help with?”
“I don’t know, maybe. It turns out Elizabeth Weber, the woman who died in the woods, was involved in a mortgage fraud that was being investigated by the FBI.”
“Oh my God. She was a criminal? Well, I imagine she must have made some enemies doing that.”
“I’m sure she did. She used people who were referred to as ‘straw buyers’. They’re… what am I saying, you probably know a lot more about this kind of stuff than I do.”
“Well, that’s not really my field.”
“Fraud? No, of course not, but I’m sure you know a lot about mortgages from your work. You were dealing with mortgages around that time, weren’t you?”