One Dead Drag Queen

by Zubro, Mark Richard

  I asked, “Did Borini and Faslo have anything to do with the explosion?”

  “Not that I know of. They sure never talked to me about it.”

  Scott and I looked at each other. I said, “I think we need to pay a visit to Borini and Faslo.”

  “I think we need to plan and be organized,” Scott said.

  “You’re really going over there?” Morty asked. “Maybe they’ll just deny what’s been going on. Then I’d be hung out to dry. I’ve got nothing in writing. I’m not even sure why you’d believe me.”

  “I’m not usually into conspiracies,” I said. “At least not big, evil governmental ones, but I’m willing to buy this one.”

  Scott said, “I can believe some of the owners would be behind this.”

  Morty said, “I’ll do what I can to make it up to you.”

  “A press conference,” I said, “now, before they find out we know. Before they have time to organize damage control.”

  “What does that accomplish?” Scott asked. “We can’t prove anything. They don’t know there’s damage to control, yet.”

  I was frustrated with Scott. “What good is caution going to do now? We’ve identified the bad guys.”

  “It wasn’t some evil cabal of right-wing nuts,” Scott said. “These are rich men.”

  “The country-club set has just as many right-wing nuts as anybody,” I said, “maybe more.”

  “We should talk to a lawyer,” Scott said. “We should talk to the police. We don’t have any proof beyond what Morty says.”

  “I’m not lying,” Morty said. “I feel awful about what I did. I’ll do whatever you guys ask.”

  “This would give Kearn the scoop he needs,” I said. “We haven’t been able to give him much. He’ll owe us. He’ll get his face back on national television. The right-wing conspiracy unmasked.”

  “How is melodramatic posturing going to help us now?” Scott asked.

  “I admit it,” I said. “I am going over the top. I think it’s justified. I’m elated. I’m ecstatic. This is our chance to stop a whole lot of crap. I want to make as big a splash as possible. You can be calm and reasonable. I’m not feeling that way. I want to get even in huge front-page headlines from coast to coast, and I think it will get headlines, great, big, splashy headlines that will put a stop to what’s been happening to us.”

  Scott shook his head. “We need to think and plan. If we hold a press conference, they just deny everything. We need proof.”

  We both hate it when we disagree in front of others. I used to think of it as hypocrisy when my parents put on their party faces in front of company. Morty hardly rated as company since he was the resident traitor. Still I didn’t want to continue arguing in front of him. We walked a few paces off, keeping ourselves between him and the shore end of the pier.

  Scott said, “This is our chance to have the moral high ground. A real conspiracy, by at least some of the asshole owners.” Scott loves to talk about seizing the moral high ground. I’m not sure being morally superior is all that it’s cracked up to be. Say you’ve got a monopoly on truth and beauty. And if you’re really well connected, you might have a hot line to whoever or whatever you consider to be God. The next guy can claim the same thing with as much authority. It’s like the Bible being divinely inspired. Who said so? Some guy who claimed a direct link to God. With that many direct links, maybe God hires out, and instead of connecting with God, one day somebody got a secretary and not the genuine entity. I don’t see the rise of righteousness in this country as a sign that Christianity has grown or that anyone is more morally superior.

  I said, “I don’t care about moral superiority. What difference does it make? I want the fear to stop.”

  “Tom?” Scott put all he could of the annoyed thrum of his deepest voice into that one syllable. It was his call for me to be reasonable. Calm. I’d been getting ridiculous and out of control. I needed to be sensible and rational. Plotting and conniving cleverly wouldn’t be bad either.

  I took a deep breath. “Do you have a plan?”

  “The obvious way to get proof would be to have them on tape talking to Morty.”

  “We send him back to Borini and Faslo?”

  “What they’ve done has got to be criminal. He could try to get them to admit something incriminating.”

  “Does that ever work outside the movies?”

  “We can try. We can stage a dramatic, accusatory press conference if this doesn’t work. For now, we could contact Pulver.”

  I said, “Okay. This is great. We’ll need less protection now that we know the source of the attacks.”

  “Are you sure we need less protection?”

  “Double conspiracies? Borini, Faslo, and McCutcheon? Even the most hardened nutcase would find that hard to swallow. I’m not ready to think they could plan that massively, that every protection we’ve tried has been tainted with our enemies.” I hesitated. I was sure of that, wasn’t I?

  Scott said, “We’ve got to go with what we’ve got. Pulver must know people with access to taping equipment.”

  It wasn’t hard getting hold of Pulver. He could help us, but there was a lot more red tape than I thought. On television, don’t they just pull the taping equipment out of a drawer and go to work? Seems that way. We set up a meeting in the Twenty-third District police station at Halsted and Addison, just three blocks from Wrigley Field. Morty accompanied us. Every few minutes he apologized. He looked like a mortally wounded bear ready to bawl at the slightest provocation. He kept promising to make it up to us.

  Pulver called in his superiors and a state’s attorney. Once officials began to assemble, help began to happen quickly. I knew with this many people involved there was no way we would keep it out of the media. That was fine with me. I’d come over to Scott’s side that we needed to get more proof, but I was ready to do some denouncing from as many podiums as I could mount. Scott says when I get like that, I need a good slap upside the head. I do tend to get overdramatic, and I love cheap sentiment.

  It only took a couple hours to set it all up. Pulver told us we were lucky. They were eager to cooperate for several reasons: Scott’s fame, the possibility of lots of good publicity for the cops, and a possible career-making moment for the state’s attorney if all of this proved to be true. Plus, several of Pulver’s superiors were eager to take Borini and Faslo down. They’d been burned in court by that firm and would be happy to see huge headlines with pictures of them being hauled away in chains. I’m not the only one on earth who can be overly dramatic.

  In a lull while we were waiting, I asked Pulver if he knew anything about Myrtle Mae’s interview with the police.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “A drag queen whose real name was Bryce Bennet.”

  “Oh, I heard. They didn’t know he was a drag queen when he first came in. When the cops arrived to question him, he was wearing a very expensive suit. He didn’t seem to know anything.”

  From long experience, Myrtle Mae wore his most conservative outfits when dealing with the police. He may have been an outrageous queen, but he wasn’t stupid. We’d asked Pulver to find out why the police were going to be questioning Myrtle Mae again.

  Morty had demanded and gotten an appointment with Borini and Faslo for late that afternoon. We were permitted to sit in the back of a police car and stay out of the way. Only Jessica Fletcher gets to do the good stuff. In reality we were lucky to get that much.

  The state’s attorney practiced with Morty before he went up. He told Morty which things he had to try to get them to say. “Insist that you have to meet with the owners,” the state’s attorney said. Morty agreed to everything. He practiced his lines numerous times, like a high school jock who was in the school play for the first time. Typecast once again.

  25

  Being in the back of a police car was odd. There really were no handles for the doors or windows. We weren’t going to get out unless somebody let us out. I don’t think we were particularly recog
nizable, but people craned their necks in that I’m-not-really-looking-I-just-happen-to-walk-in-this-nearly-hunched-over-way-staring-into-the-backseat-of-parked-cop-cars look. The surveillance van with the bugging equipment was almost out of sight around a corner.

  We were sitting on Wells Street under the el tracks a couple blocks from Sears Tower. While we sat, the uniformed cop who drove us walked over to a deli across the street and ate a sub sandwich at the counter. I hoped he didn’t decide to go far. I didn’t want to be stuck in the backseat with no possible exit and no person around to let us out.

  In the back of the cop car, for the first time in hours I had time to reflect. Giddy relief at the end of our fear mixed with the residue of our argument.

  “I shouldn’t have walked out,” Scott said. “How is that supposed to help?”

  “I push too hard. I don’t listen.” I joined the orgy of apology. “I feel rotten. I’d have been really upset if you’d been hurt.”

  “I made an adult decision. It was my choice. Not a very good one. I just had to get away for a few minutes. I was coming back.”

  “I always want you to come back. I always want to be there when you do.” We held hands in the backseat of the car for a while.

  Half an hour later, we got the cop to let us out so we could get ourselves some coffee and sandwiches at the deli. Finally, after two hours, the state’s attorney walked up to where we were leaning our butts against the car.

  “Did you get what you needed?” I asked.

  “Yes. A surprisingly nasty amount. Your buddy did a great job. That, and Mr. Faslo has a tendency to brag.”

  “What did Morty do?” I asked.

  “Played his script perfectly. He asked for a meeting with some of the owners. Demanded a guaranteed contract with a specific minor league team with a clause to move him up to the majors in five years. For such a high-powered firm, they were pathetically vulnerable to someone like Morty turning on them. They tried threatening him and weaseling around, but he’s got a stolid doggedness that worked better than any threats or bluster. He was pretty persuasive. We owe him some.”

  I said, “He owed us a great deal to begin with.”

  “I guess you’re right,” the state’s attorney said.

  Clayton Pulver drove up in a white 1965 Rambler. The car seemed totally out of place for Pulver. With him was Morty.

  The first words Morty said to us were “I’m sorry.” They were also the last and most of the words in the middle. I appreciated the sentiment, but I wasn’t ready to forgive yet. I remembered all too clearly the hurt and the fear we’d been through.

  “What happened?” Scott asked him.

  “They kept reassuring me,” Morty said. “I talked about how scared I was after the bombing. I said you’d nearly caught me today. I just pushed until they called one of the owners and got him on the phone. It was great.”

  “Did you get the phone conversation taped?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t necessary,” the state’s attorney said. “We have plenty without it.”

  “Now what?” I asked.

  The state’s attorney said, “We hold a press conference. They don’t know what we’ve got. We want to use the element of surprise on them.”

  “Isn’t that kind of quick?” Scott asked.

  “You want the threats to stop?” Pulver asked.

  I said immediately, “Definitely.”

  We arranged for Brandon Kearn to get an interview before the press conference. He and his station got an exclusive for half an hour. I don’t understand why getting the scoop is so important these days. It seems as if every media outlet spends hours beating to death every single detail of even the most insignificant story. After the overkill and often useless live reports, they trot out the talking heads. That whole shtick never makes sense to me. But then I think talk radio is a lot of moronic blather led by and fed by people who desperately need to get a life. But people are paying attention to them. It’s hard for me to imagine anything dumber than setting policy because of comments made on talk radio.

  When I called, Kearn explained that he’d been interviewing the survivors who lived in the same building as Thornburg. He’d been unable to interview Omega Collins as he was hot on the scent, often finding people before the police did. It was still not definite that Thornburg had set off the explosion.

  On the way to the interview, Scott and I agreed we could drop McCutcheon and his services or at least go back to using him and his company only for public appearances. At least until we were able to hire a new one. I had the pleasure of giving McCutcheon the news.

  McCutcheon and I spoke in the corridor outside the room where the press conference was being held. Besides telling him about the cutbacks, I asked, “How come you never noticed these guys following Scott around?”

  He shrugged. “It was a teammate. Someone he trusted implicitly. Scott confided in him about his schedule or casually mentioned where he might be going. Hiding something, or in this case someone, out in the open is always preferable when you can do it. Remember, my firm is mostly designed for public events. No one thought you needed round-the-clock protection until this whole latest mess began. I’m glad you found who did it. I wish I had found them first. I’m going to be sorry not to be working for you guys.”

  I felt like kind of a heel since he wasn’t the guilty party.

  We also called our lawyer to discuss a possible lawsuit against the owners and Borini and Faslo.

  “Possible?” he asked. “After we’re through with them, you’ll be able to buy a small country.”

  Kearn was nearly as grateful as Morty was apologetic. Two hours later as the news conference was breaking up, I asked Kearn if he had any more news on the bombing or on Myrtle Mae. He didn’t.

  “I’m going to go over the tapes again when I get home,” I said. “There’s got to be a clue there. Myrtle Mae was no dummy. He saw something on those tapes. I’m sure of it. Someone who doesn’t belong or something that is out of whack.”

  “You’re sure he said it was on the tapes?” Kearn asked.

  “That’s what his message said.”

  “I’ve got something else for you. I have it on good authority that the Tools of Satan terrorist group was in fact a real organization. That they did have an office in a building across the alley. It is possible that some of the workers in that organization were bringing in a bomb to use, and it blew up prematurely. Or someone could have been trying to bomb them.”

  “Why take out the whole damn block?” I asked.

  “Getting a huge impact is at least as important as setting the bomb in the first place. Or it could have been supplies that went off accidentally. Rumors are starting that they could have been planning to bomb that banquet of protesters, but they blew themselves up.”

  “That sounds like a crock.”

  Kearn shrugged. “You’d like it to be about your friends or your causes because then it makes more sense to you. But it doesn’t have to be about you or the clinic. Chaos happens and innocent people are caught in the middle of it.”

  We decided to drive over to our penthouse for the tapes. I wouldn’t feel comfortable about staying there until we had debugging experts comb the place thoroughly. We could watch the tapes and be careful what we said. Better yet we could take them to my place out in the country. Morty had told us where the one bug he planted was, but we weren’t going to take any chances. Kearn would follow us. Our lawyer was already working with the phone company and the police about the illegal tap on our line.

  In the car Scott asked, “Are we going to give up the notion of finding out who the bombers were?”

  “I guess I would, but I’m wondering who killed Myrtle Mae. Why would he be dead? Why would he give us a message about looking at those tapes? He didn’t see them.”

  “I don’t think we’re ever going to discover who did either one,” Scott said. “We’ve got the weekend still to get away. I know it’s not a lead-lined bunker, but I could hire a jet and we
could get away for a day or two. You’re not due back to work until Monday.”

  “And I have my doctor’s note to prove my illness.” I still experienced a little dizziness at times, and I was often tired. I figured a few more days of rest and I would be ready to face the hordes of teenagers in my classroom. Going back after a sub has had your class for a week can be a hassle. Even the best substitutes usually manage to mess things up.

  As we ascended in the elevator to the penthouse, I said, “Before we go to my place I think I’m going to look at those tapes one more time. If Myrtle Mae thought there was something odd about them, then there has to be.”

  Scott said, “If we’re going to be at your place, I want to take a few tools and some lumber with me.”

  The quiet in the penthouse was broken only by the hum of distant appliances. We found the bugging device Morty had mentioned. I wanted to take one of Scott’s hammers and smash it into smithereens, but it was evidence. A cop and a state’s attorney met us to do a preliminary search of the apartment. They took it away with them.

  Kearn followed me to the electronics room. “I may not be able to let you keep these,” he said. “The station is getting anxious to make sure everything connected with the case is accounted for.”

  “What’s the big deal?” I asked. “We’ve only got copies.”

  “I wonder what it was that Bryce Bennet saw? I want to look through these again myself.”

  “He watched the overnight news. It was a joke among his friends.” A thought struck me. “Maybe he didn’t want the tapes of the event. Maybe he wanted the tapes of the coverage. What exactly did he say on his message?” I couldn’t remember.

  “The coverage on the news?” Kearn asked.

  “Or maybe he wanted to compare the two. He must have been onto something.”

  “I’m inclined to Scott’s position that Bryce Bennet didn’t have a clue.”

  Hearing Myrtle Mae referred to by his real name always startled me, doubly so with the repetition. “Who was your source in the department about what Myrtle Mae knew?”