by Bill Granger
He opened the door of the drugstore and looked down the street, in the direction Karen Kovac had glanced. He saw a large car pull out from the curb and watched the CTA bus collide with it in the middle of the street. The crash startled everyone for a moment; even the kid who had asked to use the telephone ran out the door. “Jesus, someone’s been killed I bet.”
Bremenhoffer shrugged and started away.
Toward Keeler Avenue.
He saw her in the ghostly light of the lamppost scarcely two hundred feet ahead. In the soft snow his footsteps scarcely made a sound.
She was a whore, he had decided.
Donovan pushed his way out the door of Ladner’s just as Terry Flynn pulled the car up on the corner of Wells Street. “Get in,” said Donovan, and Terry slid back into the driver’s side. He leaned over and opened the lock for Donovan. The car was dirty and old and wrappings of fast-food sandwiches littered the floor.
“Matt Schmidt just called over to the tavern,” Donovan said. His face was white. “Sid Margolies got hit by a bus.”
“Jesus Christ. Is he dead?”
“No one knows. But Matt got the word and they’re looking for Karen.”
“Oh.” He seemed very calm. “I don’t suppose anything will happen tonight.”
Donovan stared at him. “But what if it does?”
“When did this happen?”
“Twenty minutes ago.”
“And Karen left the tavern?”
Donovan shrugged.
“It’s rush-hour. It’ll take us a half hour to get up there.”
Donovan said, “Fuck the car. We’ll grab the El. Go over to Dearborn. If we’re lucky, we can be there in twenty minutes.”
Flynn gunned the car into life and backed wildly away from the curb. He turned on the hazardous flashers and began hitting his horn. He swung wide into Wells Street, shot down an alley, and turned into Monroe Street a moment later. In two minutes he had pulled up at the Milwaukee Avenue–Kennedy Line subway station on Dearborn Street. They fell out of the car and ran down the steps.
As luck would have it, they caught the train just pulling into the station.
It was five thirty-one P.M.
24
Karen Kovac saw the apartment building just ahead, through the thick curtain of fat snowflakes falling rapidly on the side street. She had done this nearly every working night for six weeks now; it was almost like coming home.
Just like coming home, she thought and smiled to herself. Coming home drunk. She fumbled in her purse for the key to the downstairs door. Her head felt thick, and the afternoon Scotches had dulled her perception. Drinking on duty, she thought. They’ll court-martial me. She couldn’t find the key.
She staggered across the cross street.
Sid will be scandalized, she thought. Drunk again. She giggled to herself.
Then she had the key in her hand. And dropped it into the snow.
She did not see him.
It was five thirty-one P.M.
Her throat. She felt a tearing at her throat.
She staggered in the snow. Then she felt the hand on her neck. She was being pulled back, down, into the snow.
She kicked out her right leg and struck the leg of her attacker. But she fell anyway, tumbling helplessly into the wall of the gangway between two apartment buildings.
There was a snap, like the sound of a twig breaking. And then the incredible white streak of pain blinded her for a moment as she tumbled down three steps into the deep gangway.
I’ve broken my arm, she thought calmly, and then was nearly overcome with a wave of nausea.
There was warmth on her cheek.
It was her own blood.
He pushed her back then and she turned and fell onto the damp concrete. The snow eddied into the well between the two buildings. She threw up suddenly and violently onto her arm and at the same time, through some instinct, she pushed against him with the soles of her shoes. One shoe struck him in the groin.
“Schwein!”
He cried a deeply rumbling curse and seemed to explode backward into the steps and the snow bunching at the top of the steps.
Gone. The pressure was gone. She felt warm. She could sleep.
She kicked again, ripping her nyloned legs against the rough pebbles embedded into the gangway sidewalk. She twisted to one side and began to crawl away. This was madness. She could only crawl and he was behind her and he could—
Her useless left arm brushed against the pebble-grained walls of the gangway and she screamed hideously in fright and pain.
She tried to turn to face him. The gangway was so narrow. She could not see him any more in the swirling snow. And then she saw his grayness coming out of the snowstorm. He was speaking to her in angry, methodical, vile words.
Karen turned again in the narrow trap of the gangway and pushed herself backward into the darkness. But Frank Bremenhoffer was coming for her, limping, deliberate, his arm raised.
“Whore,” he said.
She saw the knife then. In the lamp from the street. The blade glittered along its ten-inch length. She thought she could see his eyes clearly through the haze of the stinging pellets of snow that blew into the gangway as though they were lost.
His eyes were cold and drowning.
She kicked him in the leg.
It would be easier to fall back, she thought. She was so tired. She wondered if death came like this, as tiredness. He was speaking again, but he was far away.
It didn’t matter.
He kicked her very hard in the right leg and then again, inside her leg, in the thick part of her thigh. Her skirt was torn and the pain sickened her. She wanted to retch, but she had nothing more. She smelled her own vomit on her coat.
Then she saw her purse on the wet concrete floor of the gangway. It was open. She remembered now. She had opened it to remove the keys. Where was Sid Margolies?
“Spread your legs, you whore,” he said. He knelt down on the pavement. He reached for her leg and held the knife in the other hand.
“Tell me, whore, how much—”
She couldn’t hear him. She reached out her right arm for the pistol. He was over her. She felt his legs crowd between her legs.
Poor Tim, she thought. No mother, no father. Well, his father would be there, she supposed. And no more visits from Terry Flynn. Was that bad? Sid Margolies was sitting in the car, and they would never accept her into homicide.
No, she thought.
The pistol was in her purse and the purse was open but it was two feet beyond her grasp, and she would be dead in a moment. This is the way it was for all of them, she thought. Maj Kirsten. And Christina Kalinski. And Bonni. And now poor Karen Kovac.
She hit him again, above his penis, in the bladder. The blow was not delivered with much power because he was between her legs, on his knees, and she could not get leverage.
He cried out and the knife fell, ripping into the fabric of her coat. She felt warmth again, on her arm. Had he stabbed her? She struggled to remain sitting. She hit him again, in his throat.
He grunted and fell back just for a moment.
She rolled onto the gangway floor and reached for her purse.
She felt the pistol. Pushed at the safety with frozen, frightened fingers.
“You whore.” He struck her in the mouth with his hand. Once and again. Her vision blacked out for a moment. Blood oozed from between her lips.
He raised the knife above him.
She looked at him, over her, blotting out the snow and the light, all the grayness looming over her vision.
The sound of the shot in the narrow gangway between the two buildings deafened them both for an instant.
The .25-caliber bullet exploded upward from the short barrel of the pistol and entered the underside of his jaw, hurling up into the softness of his mouth, splitting his tongue. Then the bullet exploded off a perfectly formed upper back molar. A chip from the bullet drove up through the palate into the bottom of the brain.
The rest of the bullet angled sharply off the molar through the soft tissues in the nasal cavity and out the right eye.
Frank Bremenhoffer’s eyes were wide open, surprised.
He seemed to rise for a second, as though to reposition himself over the woman on the floor of the gangway. He scraped his hand against the pebbled wall as he rose. He held the knife tightly. After a moment he ceased his upward rise and fell forward.
She opened her eyes, and he was still beside her. But someone had thrown a piece of cloth over his face. There was blood on the white cloth.
Who was talking to her? She tried to move, but someone held her.
She opened her eyes.
It was Jack Donovan. And Terry Flynn held her. She stared at Jack Donovan’s white face. She thought she heard his voice. Terry was brushing at her face, keeping the snow away.
“I killed him,” she said flatly. She thought her own voice sounded odd.
“Yes,” said Terry Flynn.
“Where’s Sid?”
“He was hit by a bus. Don’t talk, Karen. We’re waiting for the firemen.”
“He wanted to kill me,” she said. She was crying but there were no tears in her eyes.
“Don’t worry. He’s dead.”
“I killed him.”
“Easy, Karen, honey,” said Terry Flynn. He looked as though he would cry. His face was white.
“My arm hurts. He hit me.”
She felt so cold. And wet. The snow was lighted by the orange streetlamps. There were people crowding around the gangway entrance. She heard sirens.
“My God, my God,” she said. “I didn’t know I would shoot him. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” Now there were tears. “I didn’t know.”
“You did all right,” said Terry Flynn.
“He’s dead,” she said.
“It’s over,” said Flynn. “Over, Karen.”
“No, no, no,” she said. Her voice was weak. “He hit me. He hit me. He broke my arm. Is my arm broken? Oh, I got the gun. I kicked him and I got the gun and I shot him and I thought he was going to kill me with the knife. Oh, God, I really hurt, oh God. I killed him.”
Jack Donovan looked at Karen’s face. It was very pale and he thought she was in shock. The blood from her mouth had dried on her chin. There was vomit on her coat and now it was on his and Terry’s coats as well.
“Take it easy,” he said. He realized then that he was always trying to comfort someone and that it never worked.
“I want to go home.”
“It’s all right, Karen,” said Terry Flynn. “Honey. Honey.” He repeated it like an incantation.
Please, she thought. Tell them I’m sorry. And then she closed her eyes.
The firemen crowded down into the narrow gangway behind Jack Donovan. It was firemen who came to the scene because in Chicago, firemen handle the living; police, the dead.
He heard them but he could not see them. “She broke her arm,” he said. “I think she’s gone into shock.”
“Just get outta the way, buddy. We’ll take care of her.” Jack thought the fireman had a gentle voice. “Just put her down, buddy,” the firemen said to Terry Flynn. He looked up at him as though he didn’t understand.
Jack Donovan stood up. “Put her head down,” said Jack. Terry did as he was told. He stood up and moved back, further into the gangway.
She was stretched out beside the body of Frank Bremenhoffer.
The firemen were quick. They maneuvered the stretcher between the two forms and bent down and picked up Karen Kovac as though she were as light as a child. They put her on the wooden-framed stretcher and threw a blanket over her.
“There’s two dead people,” a woman on the sidewalk cried. She was answered by a wave from a neighbor across the quiet street. The squares of windows on the block were all lighted. The white-and-red fire department ambulance lights whirled lazily and menacingly, mingling in the shadows of night with the blue circling Mars lights on the squad cars.
They carried her into the ambulance.
Two policemen moved down the gangway steps and threw down a rubber body bag next to the corpse of Frank Bremenhoffer.
Terry Flynn followed her to the door of the ambulance where Matt Schmidt stood with the watch sergeant from Area Five Homicide, in which the death had occurred. Almost shyly Schmidt came to look at her. She opened her eyes.
“Everything is all right,” he said. “You did fine, Karen. Better than fine.”
“But Sid.”
“Sid is okay. He has some broken ribs and a concussion. He can sue the CTA and become a rich man.”
The firemen slid her into the ambulance.
Terry Flynn impulsively climbed into the ambulance beside her.
“I’m so sorry,” she told him.
He nodded. “I know.” He took her hand. “Don’t worry any more.”
The ambulance began to crawl away.
Schmidt looked at Donovan. “If Karen had been killed—”
Jack Donovan shrugged.
Neither of them said it again.
25
Nine days after the death of Frank Bremenhoffer in a gangway on the Northwest Side, the Cook County coroners jury returned a routine verdict of justifiable homicide.
Ulla Bremenhoffer had told police that she had witnessed her husband burning bits of clothing in the old incinerator in the back of the building one afternoon. She had never questioned him about it. Police concluded that her report cleared the mystery of what happened to Christina Kalinski’s clothing.
A day later they at last understood about Christina Kalinski.
The man’s name was Ivan Yurokovich. He was a short man with a bald head and the circles around his eyes suggested he had not been sleeping well.
Outside, November assaulted the windows of Area One Homicide. The temperature was twenty-five degrees and it had snowed again during the night. The city was covered by dirty, piled-up snow, and the streets were breaking up under their burden of ice and rock salt.
When Ivan Yurokovich entered the office, only Terrence Flynn was available to talk to him.
It was not the first time he had spoken with police. Two months before, an investigator from general assignment briefly assigned to the Kalinski investigation had interrogated him, but he had asked Ivan Yurokovich all the wrong questions.
“Siddown,” said Flynn. He felt friendly. It was Wednesday and he would be off for three days after five P.M.
Karen Kovac was at home, recuperating, and he had promised to take her and Tim to dinner on the West Side. To a restaurant he knew that was owned secretly by another policeman and a former lawyer.
“I see this in papers. This man Frank Bremenhoffer. You kill him. It was good. He was bad man.”
“You bet,” said Terry Flynn. “We always get the bad guys.”
“You say he kill Christina.”
“Who?”
“Christina. You say he kill Christina.”
“Yeah. Christina Kalinski. Sure.”
“Are you sure?”
“Fuck yes. You think the cops would kill someone unless he was a bad guy?”
“Then I was a bad man too.”
Flynn did not speak.
“You know this man Michael Kalinski.”
“Yeah,” said Flynn. “Christina’s father.”
“He is my friend. I do bad thing to him.”
“Why?”
“I kill his daughter.”
Flynn sucked his cigarette and didn’t make any further move. Yurokovich had his head bent down. The bare light in the room illuminated his scalp. When he looked up again, there were tears in his eyes.
“Michael Kalinski and me, we are friends. I go with him to Susy-Q place. We find Christina. She is doing bad things. Her father yell, but she no come home with her father. I feel for him. Michael is old country like me.”
Flynn nodded.
“I am just janitor. You know. Downtown. Some days, you know. I go to have beer in morning down to this place.”<
br />
“Yeah.”
“Some day, I talk in tavern. This place, workers go. I see janitors there like me, other men. Also printer man. We talk. I tell him about this woman. “Christina bad girl,” I tell him. This man is Mr. Bremenhoffer, German man. I tell him about Christina. Now I see he kill Christina.”
So Karen had been right. And they had missed him. They had questioned all those people and they had missed this man who put Bremenhoffer onto Christina Kalinski.
“He kill girl because I tell him. Is that right?”
Flynn shrugged.
“No. Probably not. Just let me type up a statement and you sign it, okay?”
“But I am guilty.”
Flynn looked at him, at the tears at the corner of the old eyes.
“No.” He pulled a piece of paper into the typewriter. “Not really.” He began to write the man’s name.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
An award-winning novelist and reporter, Bill Granger was raised in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. He began his extraordinary career in 1963 when, while still in college, he joined the staff of United Press International. He later worked for the Chicago Tribune, writing about crime, cops, and politics, and covering such events as the race riots of the late 1960s and the 1968 Democratic Convention. In 1969, he joined the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times, where he won an Associated Press award for his story of a participant in the My Lai Massacre. He also wrote a series of stories on Northern Ireland for Newsday—and unwittingly added to a wealth of information and experiences that would form the foundations of future spy thrillers and mystery novels. By 1978, Bill Granger had contributed articles to Time, the New Republic, and other magazines; and become a daily columnist, television critic, and teacher of journalism at Columbia College in Chicago.
He began his literary career in 1979 with Code Name November (originally published as The November Man), the book that became an international sensation and introduced the cool American spy who later gave rise to a whole series. His second novel, Public Murders, a Chicago police procedural, won the Edgar® Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1981.
In all, Bill Granger published twenty-two novels, including thirteen in the November Man series, and three nonfiction books. In 1980, he began weekly columns in the Chicago Tribune on everyday life (he was voted best Illinois columnist by UPI), which were collected in the book Chicago Pieces. His books have been translated into ten languages.