Public Murders

by Bill Granger

  “Here’s to ya,” said Karen Kovac. She saluted him with her raised glass. “Good health.”

  “Yes.” He sipped his brandy. “Do you live with your husband?”

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  She wore a wedding band. It was part of the story she had worked out. Actually, when she had been married to Timothy’s father, she had never worn the band. He had given her a handsome ring, which she still had in her jewelry box. The wedding band she wore belonged to her grandmother and was made of delicately wrought gold.

  “ ‘Live.’ That’s a good word,” she continued. “You might say that.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Frank Bremenhoffer. His eyes were deep and cold despite his smile.

  “It means what it means.” She slurred her words. Not on purpose. “Hey. You buy a girl a drink and you wanna go home with her right away. Am I right, Frankie?”

  Her voice was hoarse now from the intervening weeks of heavy drinking. And somehow she could not shake her cold.

  He turned away from her.

  She knew she had gone too far. She eased back; it was a delicate situation.

  “Hey, come on, Frankie. I’m just kiddin’.” She turned to look at her drink and picked it up and slid over one stool closer to him. “Just a joke.” It was hard to say that; the words slurred again. She wondered if she were getting drunk. “Listen, Frank. I’ll tell you. I gotta make a joke about it sometimes because it makes me wanna cry.”

  Actually Karen Kovac never cried. Except for the time when the final divorce decree came through. And when her father died a long time ago.

  “Y’see, Frankie, my husband’s a paraplegic. You know what that it?”

  Bremenhoffer turned to look at her.

  “He got this muscle disease about eight years ago. Sure he still gets around. But what the hell am I supposed to do? I’m twenty-five-years old. Look at me, I even look older. But I got my whole life. What do you figure I oughta do, Frank?”

  He regarded her.

  She rattled on. She hoped it sounded all right. “I don’t mind telling you. You look like a sensitive guy, not like some of these bums. What the hell am I gonna do? I’m still a woman, you know? Don’t you think so? I got my needs. I’m healthy, you know? He’s just this… I don’t even figure he misses it anymore, with his medication. It isn’t like I was messin’ around before, but you figure I ought to sit around all day and watch him work his stamp collection? Drives me crazy, that goddamn stamp collection. You know he’s got a part-time job still and he can drive himself around with one of those cars with handles. But what about me?”

  He inspected her as though she were an insect impaled on a pin. The summer before, she remembered, Tim had bottled a lightning bug. And let it die. Frank Bremenhoffer’s eyes were large now and they appeared nonjudgmental. Just curious.

  She turned toward the bar and let her nyloned leg brush against his gray work pants. For a moment there was pressure and then nothing.

  She leaned back on the stool and she knew her breasts strained against the material of the dress.

  “Got an eyeful?”

  Bremenhoffer was staring at her. He finally said, “The poor bastard.”

  She looked at him. “Who? You mean him? You mean my husband, my own private vegetable in a wheelchair? What about me? Don’t I get a chance for someone to feel sorry for me, Frank?”

  Alice and Lou entered the bar, arm in arm. Their dark coats were covered with snowflakes. Alice’s arm was still in a cast, and she leaned on her friend. They wore rubber boots and appeared to be drunk.

  “Oh, ho,” said Alice. “Little Miss Karen. And Frank. Hiya, Frank.” The old women giggled and staggered to their customary stools on the west side of the bar, near the end. Jerry the bartender moved down to them to get them beers.

  Frank Bremenhoffer drained the last of his beer.

  “Let’s have another, Frank,” said Karen Kovac.

  He got up from the stool. “That is your husband’s money,” he said. He pushed the stool neatly against the brass rail that encircled the bar.

  “So what?” she said. “It’s mine now. You wanna drink?”

  “Schwein.” He said it almost to himself.

  Pig. She stared at him. She remembered the voice on the tape now, the voice recorded at the moment Bonni Brighton was killed in the movie house. The special recording laboratory could only pick out two meaningless words “shhhhhh.” And “vvvve.” Not “schwein.” But she knew now it must be his voice.

  He brushed past her.

  “Siddown, Frank.” She had the sensation of being very high in the air and of almost falling.

  He buttoned his coat at the door and looked back at her.

  “See ya, Frankie,” she said.

  His eyes were deep and full of hatred.

  “Shut the door, Frank,” said Lou. “It’s cold. In or out.”

  “Yeah,” said Alice.” “In or out.” They laughed.

  “Or in and out,” said Lou. They laughed again.

  “You wanna ’nother?” asked Jerry the bartender. He had already removed Frank Bremenhoffer’s glass and shot glass.

  “Sure, Jerry,” she said. What did it mean, this first contact with Bremenhoffer?

  Probably nothing.

  She thought to call Matt Schmidt but decided against it. Why bother him? It probably didn’t mean anything. They had waited so long. It would take time to lure Bremenhoffer to the bait. He had been so careful since he killed his daughter.

  She got up after she finished the final Scotch and soda and buttoned her coat slowly. Then she started for the door, saying her goodnights. She felt drunk.

  Tomorrow she would be off. She and Terry Flynn were going to dinner together.

  She wondered about him now. He was so undemanding, so relaxed in her company. She wondered how long it would last until they would have to resolve something. She was afraid that resolution of their little happiness would have to mean it would end badly.

  Karen Kovac pushed open the door of the tavern and looked down the street. As usual, Sid Margolies was parked at the curb in the brown Dodge. In a no-parking zone halfway up the block. She didn’t look at him.

  They had a usual route.

  She would walk to Keeler Avenue on Irving Park Road and then turn south for two blocks to the apartment building managed by Art Shay. She would let herself into the vestibule, open the downstairs door with a key, and then wait in the hallway. When she heard two blasts on the auto horn from Sid Margolies, she would know it was clear again, and he would give her a ride home.

  It was the same routine every night.

  It would be good to be home tonight, she thought. She was tired and more than a little drunk and the cold weather depressed her.

  She turned down Keeler Avenue.

  She did not even look for Sid Margolies behind her. He was always there.

  It was absurd.

  Sid Margolies, that most careful of men, would always regret it, but it was absurd all the same. Especially because it had not been his fault.

  As usual he had watched Frank Bremenhoffer leave the bar at five fifteen P.M. He noted the time—he had two notebooks full of Frank Bremenhoffer’s times in and out of the Lucky Aces tavern. Then Margolies turned on the ignition and carefully pulled into the stream of traffic on Irving Park Road.

  When he was struck by a bus.

  The CTA bus, which was westbound, had suddenly swerved to avoid a pedestrian darting into the street from the north side, and the bus skidded on the fresh snow in the middle of the roadway. The large green bus then plowed into the front of Sid Margolies’s eastbound car just as he pulled wide into the slick street.

  In a moment the auto engine was torn from its mountings by the force of the collision and hurled into the firewall, which collapsed, and on into the dashboard, while Sid Margolies strained forward to meet the engine.

  Margolies’s face registered surprise as his head slammed into the windshield, shatter
ing it. The glass cracked severely and part of it sprayed across his startled face.

  As he fell back, unconscious, his hands twisted the steering wheel into an odd shape.

  A few moments later the fire ambulance screamed past the Lucky Aces tavern and Jerry the bartender, who had been watching the accident from the window, looked at Lou and Alice and said, “These goddamn buses. They act like kings of the road.”

  Terry Flynn took the case report and returned it to the file cabinet next to Matt Schmidt’s desk.

  “That’s it, Supremo,” he said. “All the paper work on Norman Frank is now complete.”

  “Fine,” said Matt Schmidt. “Poor little bastard.”

  “Yeah, that’s funny,” said Terry Flynn. “I feel the same way about him. I rode with him on that plane and I almost liked the little creep. Not that I want to go on a hunting trip with him, but he wasn’t… well, that’s not it either. He was a bad guy. He killed his buddy. But he wasn’t a bad guy.”

  “The park murders have been weird,” said Matt Schmidt. “We cleared one homicide accidentally, and got two other bad guys in prison for molesting kids. And found one runaway.”

  “A lot of good we did for that runaway,” said Terry Flynn. “They put her in one of the state nuthouses so she can grow up to be a vegetable.”

  Schmidt couldn’t disagree.

  “But we got Brother Luther off the streets for at least eight years and we got Brother Seymour in so much hot water with the outfit that they’ll probably give him a job licking the inside out of garbage cans when he comes out.”

  Schmidt smiled. “You’ve got a way with words, Terry.”

  “I know. It’s my good education. Good Catholic education does it every time. I spent four years in a boys high school thinking about nothing but cunts and tits.”

  “Without ever seeing one.”

  “No, the librarian was a woman. She was about fifty and weighed three hundred pounds and she had tits like watermelons. I thought I’d go crazy thinking about her during study period.”

  “You’ve outgrown that, I hope?”

  “Sure. But I still can’t go in a library without getting a hard-on.”

  Schmidt smiled. He had decided a few weeks before that Terry Flynn would make a good detective, and when Ranallo routinely decided to move him to another area—Area Five on the Northwest Side—Schmidt blocked the transfer after a long talk with the homicide chief. He wanted to show Flynn all the things about the job he could show him.

  When Terry Flynn heard about it, he smiled. “So you want to be my Chinaman, Matt? “Chinaman” was Chicago slang for “sponsor.”

  “Something like that. Despite your obvious vulgarity and the fact that you still wear polyester sports coats, I think you have possibilities.”

  Terry Flynn looked at the clock on the wall next to the calendar from the Federation of Police.

  It read five oh nine P.M.

  “I’m supposed to meet Jack Donovan over at Ladner Brothers for a drink. You wanna come around? I can arrange it so they give you milk.”

  “No thanks. I got a little work here, and then Gert is going to make me supper early. We’re going to a film festival.”

  “On the South Side?”

  “At the University.” Matt Schmidt had lived in Hyde Park for forty years; it was the home neighborhood of the University of Chicago and was a cultural island in the South Side sea.

  “Oh. Yeah. Well, I guess I’ll go.”

  “Terry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You still seeing Karen?”

  “Sure. Once in a while.”

  “She’s a good kid,” said Matt Schmidt.

  “Yeah.”

  “I like her a lot.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wish you’d come out to the house sometime. The both of you. For dinner.”

  “Sure,” said Terry Flynn. “That’d be nice. But I don’t think your wife likes me too much.”

  “Why do you say that?” Matt Schmidt was surprised.

  “I don’t know. When I talk to her on the phone. When I gotta call you. And the night I sent out the squad when we thought we got Bonni Brighton’s killer sewed up.”

  Schmidt looked at the report on his desk. He looked at the word “Urgent” and then pushed the report aside with a sigh. “No, don’t worry about that. That’s just Gert’s professional jealousy. She doesn’t want me to spend too much time with cops.”

  Terry Flynn grinned. “Yeah. I understand. “They’re a bad bunch.” He gave Matt a gentle slap on his back. “Okay. You ask Karen sometime.”

  “I just asked you. Why don’t you set it up?”

  “Okay.” He paused. “If she wants to. She’s kind of funny, Matt, and I don’t want to crowd her about it. Or anything. I like her the way it is. You know, she really wants to be something in the department, I think. She really wants to be a cop.”

  “She is a cop.”

  “Yeah. But you know. She ain’t just serving her time.”

  Schmidt smiled. “See you tomorrow.”

  “No. Sunday. I got Friday and Saturday off this week.”

  “And Karen?”

  “She’s got Friday and then three days next week.”

  “Okay. Say hello to Karen. Have a nice weekend.”

  “I will.”

  Dominic Lestrada pulled over to the curb on Franklin Street. It was five fourteen P.M.

  Since Jack Donovan had moved to the Northwest Side, he rarely took Dominic Lestrada’s standing offer of a ride downtown. But tonight he was going to meet Terry Flynn at Ladner Brothers saloon, and after they had finished a few drinks, they were going on the town together.

  Kathleen had suggested it to him.

  “You come home every night and you don’t have to,” she had told him.

  “I want to,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “A man needs some time off with his friends. Why don’t you go out one night.”

  He had said he did not need any time off from her and then he had asked Kathleen where she had picked up her sociology.

  “It’s not sociology. It’s psychology. And we study that now,” she said in a very grown-up voice. Kathleen continued to astonish him. She managed the house now with a grown-up dexterity. She even did the shopping and, on some nights, relieved the housekeeper of the chore of the evening meal.

  When he had mentioned her startling suggestion to Terry Flynn one afternoon early in the week, he had said, “Yeah. Kid’s right. Take time off. If you don’t have any friends any more on the West Side, I’ll take you out and get you loaded.”

  He agreed. Mario DeVito had also been invited but begged off at the last minute.

  Jack was looking forward to it.

  It was not snowing in the Loop and he walked the wet, rain-swept street a block down Madison to Ladner Brothers old saloon in the shadow of the El tracks. He pushed his way in and found a place at the bar.

  It was five nineteen P.M.

  “Vodka and tonic,” he said. “No lime.”

  At five twenty-one P.M. the telephone rang on Matt Schmidt’s desk. He picked up the receiver.

  “Hiya, Matt?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Haggery over by Area Five.”

  “Hiya, Jim,” said Matt Schmidt.

  “I got some bad news for you.”

  He waited. His hand was on the desk, flat on the report he had set aside.

  “Your man Margolies was in an accident with a bus.”

  “What time?”

  “About eight minutes ago. We got it so fast because the fireman on the scene knew it was an unmarked car, and he pulled Margolies out. Sid said something about homicide and he called us right away.”

  “How’s Sid?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Fucked up, I guess.”

  “What about Karen Kovac?”

  “Who the hell is that?”

  “Where did they take Sid?”

  “Swedish Covenant—”

 
“Listen Jim, Sid was on a tail for us. We had a woman working the Lucky Aces tavern. A policewoman named Karen Kovac. Can you get someone over there to see if she’s in the place?”

  “What if she is?”

  Yes, he thought. What then?

  “Nothing. Just go out. See if you can get one of the district men in there fast. Just in and out. Look for a blond, blue eyes, short haircut. I can’t believe there will be two in there.”

  “A looker, huh?”

  “Yes,” said Matt Schmidt.

  “And what if she ain’t?”

  “In there? Go to 3787 North Keeler Avenue. That’s a three-story apartment building. If she’s not in the tavern, she’ll be waiting in the vestibule of the building. Just have your man signal her by honking on his auto horn twice. She’ll come out, and then you can tell her what happened to Sid.”

  “Okay.”

  “Listen. I’d appreciate it if you handle the second part with one of your guys. Just tell the district man to take a look around the tavern and walk out and call you. But tell him not to blow the operation. That’s why I want you to handle the second part. In case. I don’t want it all over the district that we’re running an operation there. Word gets around.”

  “Yeah, Matt. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

  “I know. I’m coming up there now. Myself.”

  “Sure, Matt.”

  They broke the connection simultaneously.

  Frank Bremenhoffer watched Karen Kovac leave the tavern at five fifteen P.M. He stood in the window of Alger’s Drugstore on the corner away from the tavern.

  He felt in the jacket of his coat for the knife. The blade felt flat and wide in the pocket. He placed his thumb against its razor edge.

  Pain encircled his chest again. He found it difficult to breathe. He waited at the telephone booth next to the window and watched Karen Kovac look to her left and then start down the street in the opposite direction. She turned the corner at Keeler.

  “Can I use the phone or what?”

  It was a kid with a stocking cap. He couldn’t guess if it was a boy or a girl. The kid had long hair and a thin, pale face. There were traces of snowflakes on the stocking cap.

  “Sure,” said Frank Bremenhoffer. He smiled. “I was leaving anyway.”