by Brian Hodge
The crime scene photos were shot by Rochester Gerber, a ten-year veteran of such dramas. Each shot was listed in meticulous manner, six inches at one second shutter speed, 2/14/93 for the date, time and weather conditions. Each shot numbered and color-coded by direction away from the corpse. Five days had passed and she was still a Jane Doe.
That was what hurt the most.
They no longer winced at the close-ups of the girl, the stark contrast of the burned husk on the white gravel making it look all the more like a tree branch, the small aureoles like whorls in the bark.
The railroad tracks. The bumper jack, once the overzealous cop had placed it back down with her gloved hands. Some shots with the cop's shoes in the background, out of focus, like small blobs of ink.
"What's that?"
"What's what, Meiko?" Szostak held the photo toward Sparrow.
"That."
"Looks like something metal," Felice said. The object was out of focus, as well.
"Looks like a bracelet to me." Sparrow shrugged, making a half frown. "I don't recall that on the inventory."
"Well, sure," Szostak drawled without realizing it. "If it were in the inventory, it'd be dusted and maybe have a name on it."
"Would have a name on it," Felice, veteran of teenage romances, corrected.??? (indented one space?)
"If it were a bracelet," Sparrow sighed.
Not knowing how easy it would be.
On the twentieth, the corpse was identified by a dentist on Milwaukee Avenue. The teeth had been burned, but the girl had a root canal done on the right front molar. The cops were surprised it didn't make the papers right away in screaming twenty point headlines, but there were new suspects in the Brown's Chicken massacre in Palatine. New suspects in a dead crime from January was infinitely better than little news on a dead prostitute.
But she might not have been a hooker, or even a junkie.
Sparrow went to check the family to see if it were possible the girl had been a runaway. And, in doing so, solved the case in a way none of them might have expected.
The dead girl was Sondra Chaney, DOB 5/11/80, bingo on the age. Sparrow gripped the wheel of the Chevy Celebrity tightly, her knuckles white. Assumedly living with a divorced mother and older sister, a modest home on the corner of Prindiville and Fairfield, according to Dr. John Brosnan, D.D.S., who had plenty of good things to say about young Sondra, brave Sondra, who never winced once during the yanking of the nerve in her tooth — but then he never saw her burned and withered.
Stop it, Sparrow cautioned herself. She didn't want emotion to wash over her and block her view of possible signs that might be right there for her to see. God knows they already futzed up by not catching the bracelet, if that's what it was.
She had the photos from the scene beside her, if it meant showing the one with the bracelet, the corpse covered up delicately, for possible hopefulness in identification.
She drove northwest up Milwaukee, passing the dental office. The 'hood went from Polish to Spanish and back, sometimes the beer signs being the only pointer for even a casual stranger. There was graffiti in every Chicago neighborhood now, the Insane Popes flourishing alongside the Latin Kings. The elevated train rumbled overhead like foreboding thunder.
Modest was an overstatement, Sparrow thought, as she turned onto a street of derelict two-flats. The Chaney house was red brick, the lawn brown and raw beneath the melting snow. She pulled up in the squad opposite a '92 Ford Escort, not making the connection yet.
She crossed between the cars jammed on the always too-small residential northside street, avoiding the slush puddles created by the balmy thirty-seven degree temperature. The Chaneys occupied both floors of the brownstone. Sparrow saw a cat in the bay window, and the inevitable picture of Pope John Paul II on the wall behind it.
The door opened on the first ring; a woman wearing hospital whites. Sparrow noticed right away the wrinkles around her mouth caused by chain smoking, most likely during breaks between surgery. Sparrow had been to enough emergency rooms to know how many nurses couldn't kick that habit.
"Make it quick, Officer." The woman's casualness surprised Sparrow. "I've got to pull a double shift. What did Alex do this time?"
Alex?
"Your son didn't do anything."
"I don't have a son, Office," the mother checked her watch. "Alexandra is my daughter. Now if—"
"What about Sondra?" Sparrow heard movement on the stairwell.
"What about her? Sondra's big enough to think she can live with a friend, who am I to stop her. You hear any stories about this being one happy home, let me tell you it's all family fiction. It's all bullshit. Now, if you'll excuse me. I do have to go."
"I'll walk with you to the car," Sparrow said as the elder Chaney lit up an Eve menthol before she had taken three steps. She was going to walk back to the house to talk to Alexandra after the mother had driven off, when she saw the thing dangling from the rearview mirror. An ID bracelet.
"Does Alexandra ever use this car?" Sparrow asked.
"Whenever she damn well pleases," Chaney said around her cigarette as she slammed the car door.
Sparrow went back to squad to radio for assistance.
Before the catching car arrived, Alexandra would have already confessed.
She explained it to Szostak and Felice while Alex Chaney was cuffed and sitting in the back of Sparrow's beat car, her long black hair spilling over the headrest, the shoulders hunched with her sobbing.
"She just fell apart," Sparrow said, her face still somewhat pale. "I mentioned the stuff about the bracelet missing from the scene and the Alex call, threw the St. Mary of Naz connection into the mix—"
"Where her mother works," Felice explained to a befuddled Szostak.
"— and she just, like I said, just fell into pieces."
"She says she didn't do it?" Felice raised an eyebrow.
"No," Sparrow said. "That's why I'm not worried about her confession as being tainted. The way she took it, I knew she never expected it to turn out like this."
"Well, quit keeping us in suspense," Szostak said, looking like he wanted to mete out some justice of his own.
"Her friend isn't going to rabbit right away. Here's the strange thing, guys. She was having sex, right, the sister, with Sondra, fairly regularly. I made a face, too." Sparrow nodded towards the car.
"When Sondra moved away because of the mother's indifference, it pissed Alexandra off royally. She thought Sondra was having sex with the girl she had moved in with. Might have been just a casual thing since the new friend never bothered to call the cops when Sondra went missing."
"The sister gave her the bracelet?" Felice asked. The sun had long since gone behind the buildings. Szostak was scratching the base of his skull, digesting it all.
"Yep." Sparrow shivered. "When she complained to the girl who did the killing, this bull-dyke supreme, I've got it all in my write-up, she told the dyke that she said for Sondra to take the bracelet and, well, shove it up her cunt."
"Shit," Felice said.
"I would have shown her the photos," Szostak said, sickened.
"That's you," Sparrow said.
"That's most of us," Szostak corrected.
Sparrow and Felice would ride together with Alex Chaney back to the Wood Street station house. As they opened the squad's doors, Szostak's radio squawked.
"...reported domestic dispute, 1617 Stave, second floor.."
"More family fiction,” Szostak muttered. "Officer, I just fell, no, my husband didn't cause these bruises, no, why would you think—"
That's most of us.
"I loved her, I really did," Alexandra Chaney snuffled, hunched over in her nicotine-faded leather jacket. "I did."
Sparrow and Felice looked back at Szostak, reaching in to cup the mike, identifying himself.
"Beat car responding," he said, slamming the sobs away as the door closed and the engine started.
Love and money, he had thought long ago. It scared him th
at he now hoped it had been a psycho.
Shelbyville:
29 January 1993
Don's Last Minute
He hadn't wanted it to end this way.
Monday, February 22nd. 7:58 a.m. The Burlington Northern station at 32nd and Stanley in Berwyn, Illinois. Snowing a blizzard. Not from off the lake; that was where he was headed. Toward the lake, downtown. Waiting for the 8:01 commuter train. Watching the girl in the plaid skirt and lavender boots running up Harlem Avenue towards the station through the snow that would make her invisible if she were wearing solid pastel colors.
The train might be late, the snow was that bad. Other commuters rolling up their trench coat sleeves to look at their watches. He did not bother, as he had no fixed schedule, as these other suburban wage slaves to Chicago had. Don DuBois made his own schedule as a graphic artist on the other side of the river from the gunbarrel grey Loop. He liked to get an early start in the week, to be true, but could easily catch the next train. Or the one after that.
There was no punch clock to his destiny. No bunched up bowels and hang-dog look, walking into a tiny office late, ready to get reamed by some jackass who signed the paychecks, played the horses, and reeked of Aqua Velva and house bourbon. The damnable punch clock making a sound like a guillotine as it clocked him thirty minutes late.
The girl swimming into focus, her boots kicking up snow as she came slip-sliding across Stanley.
The train nearing, its horn barely heard against the wind. He knew it was close because the vibrations of the tracks caused the snow to fall from the rails in globs.
It had to be on time, no one seemed impatient. All the shivering was from the cold; no caffeine nerves, no frantic tip-tapping of Totes or women's insulated flats.
The bells of Mother Mary in Heaven church, three blocks distance. The wind howling around the first bong.
The running woman cutting past the parked cars on the second.
No one but DuBois paying attention on the third.
On the sixth toll, she simultaneously tried crossing the tracks, presumably because the sidewalk had not been salted down, and then fell forward. The right heel of her lavender boot caught between the ties. Her face red from the cold. The white of the snow on her black hair.
The train honking again, even though DuBois was certain that the conductor couldn't see the woman on the tracks, effectively stuck for all to see and none to act.
One of the benefits of being your own boss — or whore, as DuBois more often thought of himself — was that you could dress as you please. He could move quite easily on the snow in his sneakers. Two pairs of socks for warmth, though.
He jumped down to the tracks, actually feeling gravel under his feet. Forgot about the people either staring or ignoring him. The woman whimpering. It wasn't time to scream yet.
The church bell had stopped tolling.
He didn't concentrate on anything but the heel of the boot. Then, when that failed, on getting the woman's foot free from the boot. He never introduced himself, never asked her name. He stayed right there on the tracks. Don DuBois wore no watch. He was his own boss. Of his own destiny, as he always said proudly.
The cold numbing his hands, once the gloves were off. He could smell the cheap vinyl of the lavender boots,
The woman's foot was slowly coming free. Out of sight to DuBois, the train's headlight broke through the fog west of the platform like a trout surfacing on Lake Michigan.
Not paying attention to the woman's screaming, the woman whose name he would never know, he kept at his task, knowing he had enough time.
Chicago:
22 February 1993
With The Wound Still Wet
In this city, you get used to the word unseasonable. It's always one or the other, too cold or too warm for the norm. On Tuesday, 16 January 1990, it was 53 degrees at ten in the morning, and by that time, I had already heard the "U" word on a half-dozen weather reports over the radio. With the temperature, balmy for Chicago, being what it was, fog had fallen over the streets like a coffin lid. The rain would come soon enough.
When Loudon called me just before noon, I had already turned on the kitchen lights. Clay Loudon was a staff reporter for the Northside Herald, and he had tossed the idea of doing a story on me to the city room a few weeks back. He got the go-ahead, and had called to say that the fog outside would make for some great photo shots to accompany the piece. Graceland Cemetery was just across the elevated tracks from my apartment on Belle Plaine.
The horror of the day would come later, with the rain. But, there in the fog that was thick as a brain fugue, the two of us had some serious thoughts on death while we wandered past the rows of tombstones. The subject matter was right there in front of us, but Clay was first to make mention of the gravesites. Many housed the remains of Chicago's last century of movers and shakers, and we both scanned inscriptions to find a stone with CASSADY or NESS, hoping to find a "prop" for me to stand against.
Clay noticed how so many of the interred had been dead more than seventy years, and that many of the stones had most likely gone unvisited in years, all the family members dead or incapacitated now.
It has always been my belief that most gravesites are recognized by complete strangers rather than by family members, over the course of years. Who hasn't looked at other stones when paying respect to their own dead? Who hasn't touched another concrete cross in hopes of leaving behind some of their own private grief? The dead don't care.
We shot through a roll of b & w, with a couple of wide-angle shots near the Gorshin Needle for effect, and it certainly was eerie enough. The trees with their bare branches were like minimalist sketches, the ground itself stretching back into a thin-lipped, bloodless grin. When we left the cemetery, the dew on the grass had soaked my jeans past the ankles.
Driving down Ravenswood Boulevard, Clay mentioned that he would pop for a hot chocolate at the White Castle on Belmont, and ask me a few questions over the sliders, instead of doing a phone interview later.
The interview wasn't going to happen that easily, though, because as we turned onto Broadway, we found ourselves at the scene of an accident. Though it hadn't begun raining yet, the streets were slick, and you could see the skid marks where the Ford Econoline van had smashed into the rear of a Liquid Carbonics truck.
The fire engines and ambulance could be heard in the distance, from opposite directions. Clay looked at me and reached for his camera case in the back seat, telling me to slip the visor down over the passenger seat. Pinned to it was a green and white PRESS card, identifying Clay as working for Virlik Publications, the State of Illinois emblem affixed to the lower right corner.
"It's my job," Clay said to me, almost apologetically. We parked in the lot of a Dunkin Donuts. I followed him to the twisted mess.
My job, too, I thought. With my horror writings, there are all kinds of ways to get away with being ghoulish. As I'm writing this, I don't know if the guy Clay photographed will live. His head completely shattered the windshield. Black hairs were stuck to webbed glass by streaks of blood.
I looked down at his ruined face, the left side sliced away as cleanly as in any passage I could ever hope to write. I was transfixed in wondering how it was his eye did not fall free of its socket.
Loudon snapped an additional roll of film, it took so long to cut the guy out of his seat. He knew the men from the Wellington Street firehouse, so they let him click away from all angles, as long as their work wasn't impeded. I helped a bit by taking down names and descriptions. This, to justify my standing there close enough to see the steam coming away from the blood in the guy's chest, instead of back with the other gaping monsters in the lot across Broadway.
The rain started coming down as we trotted back to the car. I wasn't beyond shivering as we drove on to White Castle.
"Sometimes you get lucky," Clay said, grinning at me.
"Right place at the right time." Hey, it sells papers. No one bought the Herald for its articles on neighborhood
bake sales and church bingo extravaganzas. Those "news" items were simply a bonus to the carnage.
We were even more soaked by the time we crossed the lot into the restaurant. Clay sprung for the hot chocolate and we ended up making a pass on the sliders when we saw what the grill looked like. The Styrofoam cups still read HAPPY HOLIDAYS.
"How's this look so far?" Clay let me read as he went back to the counter for a plastic stirrer. I read the opening line to his article from the tiny note pad he carried: Hunched over his journal on the elevated trains or buses like a pained cadaver, he grips his pen like a lunatic playing she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not with the limbs of a dead rodent...
"I like it," I said. And I did. An unusual beginning for an article in the Herald, but it rang true. Every time I write story, I tear out another piece of my heart.
We were sitting near the front windows; in the distance, because the fog had let up when the rain came, we could both see the flashing cherries of the fire engines, still at the scene even after the body was removed.
Clay took down all the basics for the article — they were doing the article because I was a neighborhood resident for a quarter-century — and then asked me, apologizing for it ahead of time, where I came up with my story ideas.
I told him that much of what I write is based on fact, that if a certain thing occurs to me at just the right time, well, the subject matter, or possibly the emotion it creates in me, is enough to get me going. In many cases, I told him, I write something to answer a question in my mind. Loudon grinned again, his teeth big and white against his full, black beard.
It was funny — I didn't mention it aloud — but, there we were, talking about terror and, sitting across the aisle, was a young woman with three young children, playing with french fries. Straight out of a television commercial.
And beyond them, still visible, the carnage on Broadway. Yet they were unaware of it. Maybe that was why the mother was playing with the fries, that the children not see the accident scene.