Public Murders

by Bill Granger

“He’s a good-looking kid,” said Terry Flynn. He was not very good at talking at the moment. He looked at the drink in his hand and tried it.

  “Why don’t you sit down, Terry?”

  “Sure.” He sat on the couch and she sat on the chair opposite him. The apartment was spectacularly clean. A large black-and-white television set was on the window wall, and it was plain that the couch and chairs had been arranged to watch television. On the wall above the two upholstered chairs was a picture of Tim in shirt and tie and white trousers and blue coat—his first communion picture, no doubt, thought Terry Flynn. And there was a good print of Picasso’s guitar player.

  “I’m afraid to put my drink down,” he said. “This place is so clean I feel dirty just being here.”

  “That’s Mrs. Krabowski. Don’t be intimidated. She likes to clean the way some people like to play cards. It passes the time.” She smiled. “Believe me, I’m not so neat.”

  To prove it, she placed her drink down on the coffee table between them. A damp spot formed on the wood.

  “Good. That makes me feel better.”

  “She made stew.”

  “Good. I’m Irish, you know.”

  “No. I didn’t,” she said. She felt at ease with him. It seemed like a long time since she had felt at ease with anyone. Especially a man.

  “It’s warming up.”

  “I like to be with you, Karen.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “You see, no subtlety. Just knock down the door and start bashing heads in.”

  “Yes. It’s obviously a good thing you decided not to become a diplomat or a politician. You would have been very unsuccessful.”

  They were quiet. They were both aware of the moment and neither of them had been prepared for it, for the emptiness of the apartment, for their being together alone.

  “Terry, I appreciate you standing up for me on this tavern thing. I don’t know why Lieutenant Schmidt was so opposed to it.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s easy.” He started to reach for a cigarette and then glanced at the clean ashtray beside him. It was too clean. He withdrew his hand. “I think I got Matt figured on that.”

  “What is it?”

  “He likes you.”

  She stared at him.

  “No. Not like that,” he said. “He really likes you. He got you into the squad, you know, after you went back on patrol.”

  “How?”

  “He dropped a word to the chief of detectives. While Ranallo was on furlough. So they moved you back in. Matt’s got a lot of clout in the department in a quiet way. Which is the only way to have clout, I suppose. He’s a good dick. One of the best I’ve seen. You work with him, you really begin to understand what this work is supposed to be about.”

  “But why didn’t he want me to work that decoy? He let me work it in the park.”

  “Because when you went into the park the first time, with me, he didn’t know you from Adam. He was just trying to catch a killer. And then the second time he let you work in the park, he was convinced that Bremenhoffer was the killer and that he wasn’t going to go after you.”

  “So it was all wasted, all those days in the park. And you knew.”

  “Hell no, I didn’t know anything. I just figured it out eventually. By that time, he liked you. Enough to get you into homicide. But that’s why he really didn’t want you on this decoy operation in the tavern. He’s afraid you’ll get hurt.”

  “So why did he get me in homicide?”

  Terry Flynn thought, what the hell. He pulled out his package of cigarettes and then discovered he was out of them. He crumpled the package and threw it in the ashtray.

  “I told you. He likes you and he thinks you’re smart. If he didn’t think you were smart, he wouldn’t have stuck his neck out for you. Because one of these days, Leonard Ranallo is going to find out he’s got a broad in homicide, and he’ll chew Matt Schmidt out a new asshole.”

  She waited.

  “Homicide isn’t dangerous mostly. You just go around and talk to people who tell you lies. But in this case it is dangerous, and Matt just didn’t want anything to happen to you. He knew it was a good plan and a good idea. I think he was probing at it to find some flaw in it. So you wouldn’t have to do it.”

  “He wouldn’t worry about you.”

  “Sure he would. He’s a nice guy. One of the genuine sort. He’s got a nice wife and he’s got a nice kid who is a nice certified public accountant and does my taxes for me for nix. Even before I came into Matt’s squad. There are nice people in the world.”

  “How would you know?” she said smiling.

  He sometimes thought her smile would make him choke or say something odd or just hurt.

  “Listen, there’s nobody’s got an eye for nice people like a guy who ain’t nice.”

  “So you think it’s dangerous?”

  “The operation? Sure, there’s some danger. At the minute he makes his move—if he makes his move. On the other hand, Sid Margolies may talk like a zombie, but he’s good man. He’ll be behind you all the way. So there’s risk, but what the hell. You only live once.”

  “So you don’t care if I risk my neck?” she asked. She was still smiling and Terry Flynn felt warm, even safe, in this cocoon of an apartment on the Northwest Side with the rain beading the windowpanes.

  “Sure,” he said. “But you want to do it, you should get a chance.”

  “You sound like a women’s libber.”

  “Fuck that shit,” he said. “I hate all that talk.”

  “Don’t you see how hard it is though?” she asked earnestly. Her voice was very husky now. She had caught a cold in the middle of the week that gave timbre to the natural depth of it. “Matt Schmidt is afraid for me because I’m a woman, not just because I’m a cop in a bad position. You see? He’s a nice guy but if you were the decoy, he wouldn’t have said anything. Don’t you see that it’s always like that, even when someone means well, they’re putting you aside, on the shelf, out of the way?”

  “No.” Flynn looked at her. “Yes. Yeah. Sure I see it. Everyone does. But it turns out, you are a woman, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “I like you. As much as Matt Schmidt does. And I didn’t stand in your way.”

  “No. That’s why I said—”

  “Don’t say it again. I hate all that radical stuff. It gives me a pain in the ass.”

  “It’s not radical,” she said.

  They ate the stew, which was a good deal more Polish than Irish, and when they had finished, they brought the bottle of wine she had bought for the meal into the living room. He sat on the couch again, and this time she sat beside him. It was still raining.

  “I really like this wine. I never drink wine. Except Dago red when I go out to the West Side. What the hell is it?”

  “Zinfandel. It’s a kind of California wine.”

  “You know about wines, right?”

  “A little, I think. I read a book from the library. I try out wines.”

  “Yeah. I happen to know all about beer.” He paused like a comic. “It’s wet and when you drink it, it makes you feel very good. And the next day, after you drank about fifty or sixty beers, you don’t feel as good.”

  She laughed. Out loud. “You’re the most natural man I’ve ever met.”

  “Yeah?” His face reddened. But not with anger. He felt warm again. “Well, all us South Side boys got that quality. When we’re swinging through the trees like natural men.”

  “Please kiss me.”

  Of course, he had kissed her before. There had been that time at the party when she had been sent back to patrol. And one other time.

  She led him back into the dark part of the apartment, to the bedroom. They did not turn on the lights. For a moment they lingered and kissed, and then they moved toward the bed. He was afraid of her at first, as though she were fragile.

  But that didn’t last.

  22

  She became a regular in t
he Lucky Aces tavern on Irving Park Road on the northwest side of the city.

  She stopped in four times the first week and, at Donovan’s suggestion, took four days off.

  They called her Karen. She said she had moved into the neighborhood a few months before and that she hardly knew anyone. She played the bowling machine with the construction worker she had met on her first visit. He had four children and showed her their pictures in his wallet.

  The two fat women who had been in the bar the first day also developed personalities. They were called Alice and Lou, and they came to the bar to drink. Lou was a widow and Alice was her friend. They usually got their load on by six P.M. and staggered out of the tavern into the fading autumn twilight, holding each other’s arms.

  The bartender on days was Jerry. The owner was Homer, and he worked nights. He said he preferred to work nights. He would come in after five P.M., to handle whatever rush-hour after-work business there was.

  Karen usually arrived at four P.M. and usually left by seven P.M. She tried to arrive before Bremenhoffer and to leave after he left.

  The owner, Homer, lived in Arlington Heights and commuted in a new Buick Electra 225. One night he offered to visit Karen at home, but she declined.

  It was not very long before Karen Kovac went to the Lucky Aces tavern six nights a week, and if she missed a night, they asked her the next night what had happened. Or they said they had missed her.

  At first Frank Bremenhoffer came only two or three times a week. And then something seemed to impel him to come every night. When he arrived at the tavern, he drank two or three beers (as Karen related in her report) and sometimes had a single shot of brandy. Afterward he went directly home (according to Sid Margolies who followed him), and he never missed a night of work.

  It was a routine assignment, deadly dull.

  All these things happened every day, week after week; which is to say, nothing happened at all.

  But they accumulated details. More and more.

  Frank Bremenhoffer went to his doctor three times in the period of their observation. A fellow worker at Halsted Graphics said he suffered from angina pectoris or chest pains caused by heart problems. But the doctor apparently could not discover a physical cause for the pains. When the police interviewed him, he refused to tell them what was wrong with Frank Bremenhoffer.

  They learned that Bremenhoffer sometimes visited Post Office News, an old magazine store on Monroe Street downtown, and bought the Abendpost, a German-language paper published in the city. He also picked up his copies of Stern there.

  The details seemed to mean nothing and the days went on. All the details were recorded on sheets of report paper and filed in a gray metal cabinet in Matt Schmidt’s office. Details and details and nothing happened.

  Gradually the investigation team set up by the politicians become nonexistent. On October 14, Jack Donovan closed up his temporary office downtown and returned to the Criminal Courts building on the West Side.

  Gratefully Mario DeVito slipped back into trial work. The people who worked in the various departments of Criminal Courts rarely mentioned the Grant Park murders or the murder of Bonni Brighton in a movie house in the Loop. Too many other crimes, current crimes, intruded on their consciousness.

  Terry Flynn was assigned to a particularly grisly homicide on the South Side involving the deaths of three young black children found butchered in an apartment.

  Flynn cleared the case in a week. They had been killed by the boyfriend of the mother. It wasn’t very difficult.

  Leonard Ranallo asked Matt Schmidt what he was doing besides the Grant Park case. Matt Schmidt showed him a file drawer full of new cases that had come into Area One Homicide in the past six weeks. He said he was very busy on the murder of a dentist on the twenty-third floor of a downtown medical building.

  Ranallo was satisfied.

  In fact, Matt Schmidt did not have the slightest idea of how to proceed in the case of the dentist. No one had seen the murder, and robbery had not been the motive.

  Maurice Goldberg was transferred to Criminal Courts in September at the insistence of Jack Donovan. He began to work for Mario DeVito and wished he wasn’t.

  And nothing happened.

  One afternoon Leonard Ranallo asked whatever had happened to Sid Margolies, and Matt Schmidt said that Sid Margolies was working on a couple of cases that kept him out of the office. One involved the murder of the dentist. And the other involved the murder of a white female.

  “Not that goddamn Bonni Brighton case?” asked Ranallo.

  “Yes,” said Matt Schmidt.

  “Okay. It’s your funeral.” Whatever that meant.

  Each afternoon Sid Margolies parked outside the Lucky Aces tavern on Irving Park Road and watched Karen Kovac walk inside a few minutes later. And then watched—on most days—Frank Bremenhoffer come down his side street and walk across the street at the traffic light near the expressway and continue to the same tavern.

  Jack Donovan continued to check each morning with two calls to his friends at police headquarters.

  The first was to Matt Schmidt, because the murders were still on his mind and, technically, he was still in charge of the investigation. The order from the mayor’s office had never been rescinded.

  The second call was for word of his wife.

  There was no information to be gathered from either daily call. Rita O’Connor Donovan had completely disappeared. As a courtesy to Donovan her picture had been reprinted on the daily bulletin distributed to the thirteen thousand men of the department each morning. Still they had not spotted her. There were so many runaways. So many people who had to escape.

  Each day that passed, the tension seemed to go out of the park murders case. It was like rubber that had been stretched too far and too long; each time it was returned to its original shape, it was a little more slack. The case was slack and they all knew it.

  And still, doggedly, Karen Kovac returned in the afternoons to the Lucky Ace tavern. She became a champ on the bowling machine and some of the men liked her.

  When the construction worker stopped coming (he had completed his job on the Northwest Side), she became even more popular.

  One afternoon Lou came into the tavern alone. Alice had fallen at home and broken her arm.

  In October Terry Flynn took Karen Kovac and Timmy to a resort called the Red Lantern in Indiana, on the shore of Lake Michigan. For the sake of propriety, or to avoid making Tim uncomfortable, he took a separate bedroom. The three of them walked the cold, pounding beaches, and felt the spray from the chill lake waters. There wasn’t much to do, but they seemed to have a good time. When Tim asked Terry Flynn if he was in love with his mother, Terry Flynn didn’t know what to say. So he said nothing.

  On October 29, two days before Halloween, it snowed for the first time in the season.

  The snow began early in the morning, falling majestically in large, wet flakes that quickly covered the pavement and then the rooftops.

  Traffic was treacherous. Residents in the upper apartments of the one hundred-story John Hancock Building complained that clouds obscured the street below. On the other hand, the sun was shining into their apartments. Generally people cheated of their autumn felt the snow was unfair.

  Karen Kovac caught cold again, from her son, who had brought the virus home from school. She missed two days at the tavern. Timothy was supposed to have been the Great Pumpkin at the school Halloween tableau and felt keenly disappointed by his illness.

  Karen watched television with him at home.

  When his father came to see them on Saturday, Timothy told him about Terry Flynn.

  Karen’s ex-husband asked her later if she intended to get serious with this man. She said, quietly, that it was none of his business, and he left angrily two hours early.

  On October 31, police in Johnson City, Tennessee, near the North Carolina border, arrested a suspect in an armed robbery of a gasoline station. A routine check revealed he was Norman Frank, wa
nted in Chicago, Illinois, for the murder of Albert C. (Shorty) Rogers.

  Norman Frank did not fight the extradition proceedings. In fact, the Johnson City detective who turned him over to Sergeant Terrence Flynn of the Chicago police department said, “This here boy seems like he just gave up and quit on himself.” Flynn noted that in his report.

  They flew back to Chicago, and Norman Frank asked him if they had caught the killer of Maj Kirsten.

  “We know who it is,” said Terry Flynn. “We’re going to get him.” As it turned out, neither Flynn nor Norman Frank really believed that.

  23

  An unusual thing happened on November 2, nearly five months after Maj Kirsten was murdered.

  Frank Bremenhoffer bought Karen Kovac a drink in the Lucky Aces tavern. It was nearly five P.M.

  The third snowfall of the season had started at noon, and by five o’clock the tavern was empty and the jukebox silent. Jerry the bartender stood at the end of the bar, near the television set, talking quietly to a liquor salesman.

  “It’s goddamn lousy weather,” said Frank Bremenhoffer.

  She sat two stools away from him.

  “Typical Chicago,” she said. “Snow in July and one hundred degrees at Christmas. All screwed up.”

  “I hate it,” he said. He spoke so suddenly that she did not really know what he referred to.

  Frank Bremenhoffer drained his glass and looked at her. “You wanna drink?”

  “Sure,” she said. She finished her Scotch too quickly and it hit her. “You’re Frank, right? I know nearly everyone’s name and I seen you plenty of times but I never talked to you.”

  “Yes,” he said. Very quietly. He looked at her oddly for a moment and then turned to the bartender at the end of the U-shaped bar. “Jerry.” He signaled. “A drink for both of us.”

  Jerry came down the creaky wooden slats slowly. He poured Karen a Scotch and soda in a six-ounce glass and gave Frank Bremenhoffer a beer from the tap.

  “Gimme a shooter too,” said Bremenhoffer.

  Jerry carefully measured a shot of Christian Brothers brandy into a shot glass. He picked up the money lying in front of Bremenhoffer on the bar and went to the cash register.