The Black Cage

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘Younger across the head of the older, forming a cross?’ Benten spoke in a tense staccato, clipping his words as if each one cost him a dollar he didn’t have.

  ‘Like it was somehow satanic?’ Rigg shook his head. ‘I think they just got pitched that way.’

  Benten lit a Camel, oblivious to the smoke curling from the one already burning in the ashtray. ‘Trauma?’

  ‘Glet said there were no obvious signs,’ Rigg said.

  ‘Glet? What the hell? Glet was there?’

  ‘It’s Lehman’s jurisdiction, and Glet’s his most senior man.’

  ‘Glet’s a pig. Not only was he front and center on the Stemec Henderson botch, he’s got that assault pay-off.’

  Rather than risk trial, Cook County had paid out 900,000 dollars to a seventeen-year-old girl who’d claimed Glet sexually assaulted her during questioning for drug possession.

  ‘Alleged assault,’ Rigg said. The girl’s family had dropped the matter once they’d received the payout.

  ‘Glet’s a pig,’ Benten said again. ‘He shouldn’t have been there.’

  ‘Besides Glet, the other same clowns were there, too, except for McGarry. He sent the new kid, Feldott.’

  ‘CIB,’ Benten said, of Feldott’s mentors. The Citizens’ Investigation Bureau, a supposedly advisory-only group, had been formed by the city’s elite following the sharp increase in street violence two years before.

  ‘A miracle child, if the pieces in our own paper are to be believed,’ Rigg said.

  ‘Luther Donovan,’ Benten said. The Examiner’s owner and publisher was a man most solicitous of the moneyed elite, especially those that had formed the CIB.

  ‘Glet’s scared we’ll use our Graves coverage to remind people of the Stemec Henderson fiasco,’ Rigg said.

  ‘Then we should make the link,’ Benten said, a sly smile crossing the deep creases of his face.

  ‘We?’ Rigg had been bereft of a byline for months. And hard news, especially crime, was for Rigg’s old haunt downtown, the Bastion, not for the Pink.

  ‘You were noticed.’

  ‘I saw Wolfe, too,’ Rigg said. Though he’d stayed back from the news herd at the bridge, turf insecurities sharpened the antennae of every reporter. Wolfe, a nervous, twitchy little man, had become the Bastion’s chief crime reporter when Rigg got banished to the Pink. ‘He called?’

  ‘Afraid for his job, unlike you.’

  ‘I already lost my job.’ Working three days a week at the Pink without a byline was not real reporting.

  ‘Then why were you by that bridge?’

  ‘I was just watching.’

  Benten waved the lie away. ‘If it’s the same killer …’

  Rigg nodded. ‘A perverse part of me is hoping it’s the same killer,’ he said, ‘if it forces another look at Stemec Henderson. But I made sure to tell Glet I was off crime. Car dealership openings, PTA meetings, new sewers – that’s me now.’

  ‘And he said …?’

  ‘That I’d always be the conscience of the unavenged.’

  ‘You wore the robes; you were the judge last time. Unsatisfied, forever demanding.’

  ‘They messed it. Lehman, Glet, the other deputies, local cops, forest-preserve security, even the state’s attorney – they all messed it. And us, the queens, we messed it by egging them on for progress they didn’t know how to make, forcing them to chase leads they knew would never pan out. Covering ass got more important than looking for truth.’

  ‘And you? You messed it?’ Benten said.

  ‘Me most of all, and I’m still messing it.’

  ‘Still searching your wall of files?’

  Rigg nodded. He’d told Benten long ago about his twenty-six boxes of notes on the Stemec Henderson investigation. He pored over them during every one of the three nights he spent in his suburban apartment every week, looking for some clue he’d missed.

  ‘You still talk to her?’ Benten asked.

  ‘Who?’ Rigg asked. He talked to two. One was dead. One was alive, wishing she were dead.

  ‘Carlotta Henderson, damn it.’

  ‘You mean the mother of two of the dead boys and the widow of the man that keeled over at the Dead House?’ Rigg said, suddenly furious. The woman hadn’t only lost her kids. She’d lost her husband, and then she’d gotten trashed in the press.

  ‘Easy, easy,’ Benten said. ‘I wasn’t referring to …’ He let the thought trail away. Carlotta Henderson had become scandalous along with Rigg.

  ‘She doesn’t call much anymore,’ Rigg said. Not much meant no more than two or three times a week, but only on the landline in his apartment. He’d refused to give Carlotta his cell phone number because he didn’t want her to get at him in the dunes. The dunes were Judith’s place.

  ‘I just meant it would be natural to stay in touch,’ Benten went on, probing a little more now. He’d been known as a newsman with a renowned sniffer before he got old and booted to the Pink.

  ‘Carlotta’s never given up hoping for good leads,’ Rigg said. She’d begun getting crank stuff – false leads, rants, judgments of those who spoke directly to God – beginning the day after her husband collapsed over the body of one of his two murdered sons. She began calling Rigg to report all of them, usually in the middle of the night, when she was most vulnerable. And he listened, every time, for by then he was vulnerable, too, trapped by his nightmares of a black cage that kept him from touching the arms of the woman who’d been shot beside him.

  Benten cleared his throat. ‘Perhaps you could write a short piece?’

  ‘To poke a stick in the Bastion? Crime is for downtown, not for us at the Pink.’

  ‘Something to let them know we’ve still got game.’

  ‘Even under your byline, they’ll suspect it’s me, and that will stop it from getting past any copy editor downtown.’

  ‘All is chaos at the Bastion, fearing more lay-offs,’ Benten said, getting up to put on his topcoat, and forgetting for once to make a comic show of dropping his brown fedora at what he always took for a jaunty angle, but which only made his head look like it was on crooked. Today he just tugged the hat on like a helmet. ‘Around a thousand words, recap and update, digestible for the limited attention spans of our website readers,’ he said. ‘No need to research.’

  He walked out fast then, maybe because he was in a hurry to get a space in a bar. The gin mills would be crowded that day.

  Rigg stubbed out both of the Camels Benten had left burning in the ashtray and went out to the desk jammed against the back wall. It was tiny and it was red and it was all that was available for a part-time reporter.

  The television coverage had ended. The two lady reporters and the advertising peddler were gone. Only Eleanor, the copy editor, remained, to tend to Rigg.

  He pushed aside the clutter of notes on the middle-school expansion he still hadn’t written up, sat down and opened his laptop.

  A hand touched his shoulder from behind, making him jump. He hadn’t heard her get up. ‘Not like before, Milo,’ Eleanor said softly, meaning he should not get caught in the teeth of the old gears.

  He nodded without turning around. Not like before? Two more children had been found. Disappeared after going to the movies, like before. Naked, like before. Lying atop one another, jumbled like pick-up sticks, like before. Left just a few feet off a road, like before. In Cook County, to suffer its incompetent sheriff’s jurisdiction, like before.

  His fingers began to tremble above the keyboard. He dropped his hands to his lap before Eleanor could see and kept them there until she turned and walked away. Sweat stung into his eye. He wiped at it. There was no ‘before’ to it, no past. It was still all so damned present. Kids dead again.

  Just like before.

  THREE

  GRAVES SISTERS FOUND DEAD

  Harold Benten, Chicago Examiner

  The nude bodies of Beatrice and Priscilla Graves were found yesterday, January 21, beside a low bridge along German Church Road in suburba
n Willow Springs. The discovery ends the largest missing persons search in Cook County history. Sheriff Joseph Lehman and Cook County Medical Examiner Charles McGarry were tight-lipped, saying that no further information would be released until after McGarry’s office conducted autopsies on the two sisters.

  As reported at the time, the girls left their home on South Damen Avenue in Chicago at 7:15 Friday evening, December 28. They were headed for the local premier of the latest Star Wars movie, playing at the Brighton Theater on Archer Avenue, a mile and a half away. Fifteen-year-old Beatrice had planned on going alone that evening, but her mother, Leona Graves, 48, insisted she take along Priscilla, 12, thinking both girls would be safer if together. She gave her daughters fifteen dollars to add to the Christmas money they planned to use for bus fare, tickets to see the movie, popcorn and candy.

  At the concession stand, the sisters ran into a young girl friend from the neighborhood, who was there with her 6-year-old sister. The four girls sat together for the movie’s first showing, then the girl left to take her sister home. The Graves girls stayed for the second showing, and were seen leaving the theater at 11:30 p.m.

  Nothing is known for certain about their whereabouts after that.

  Once news of the girls’ disappearance was reported on Sunday, December 30, leads came seemingly from everywhere. A Chicago bus driver thought they got off his bus at Archer and Western Avenues, along the correct route to their home, though several exits prior to their usual stop.

  A young male acquaintance of Beatrice’s, seeing them leave the theater, is certain they did not take a bus, but rather began walking home, several yards behind him. Hearing a screech of brakes, he turned to see a late-model green Buick slow beside the two walking girls. He reported that the girls hesitated, as though they knew the occupants of the car, but then the car pulled away and the girls kept on walking. When he stopped to look in the window of a men’s clothing store, they passed him by. Several blocks later, he saw another vehicle, a black Ford Explorer with two teenaged boys inside, pull alongside the girls. The passenger rolled down the window and said something to the girls. Beatrice’s acquaintance reported that the girls laughed and kept walking.

  Two other young men, ages 17 and 15, were driving around close to midnight and claimed they saw the sisters four blocks from their Damen Avenue home. The boys knew the sisters from the neighborhood and observed them giggling and jumping out of doorways at each other, playing what appeared to be a sort of hide-and-seek.

  A pizza delivery driver reported he’d seen both girls that night getting into a dark-colored car with three men inside when it was stopped in front of him at a red light on Western Avenue.

  The loud voices of occupants of a Ford Escort parked on Archer Avenue and well beyond the route the sisters would have taken if they’d headed directly home drew a car salesman to his upstairs apartment window after midnight. He went down to the sidewalk and saw two girls wearing bright scarves, like those worn by the Graves sisters that night, talking to two men inside the car. The car salesman could not describe the men other than to report that the one sitting in the passenger’s seat was blond. He also noted that one of the girls was wearing a dark cloth coat similar to that of Beatrice Graves.

  Farther afield, a cashier reported seeing the sisters leaving her theater on Clark Street in Chicago at 12:45 a.m. on Saturday, 75 minutes after they were known to have left the Brighton Theater. A clerk at the 24-hour Walgreens at 63rd and Halsted was certain the two girls bought sodas there, early Sunday morning. That same day, a junk dealer in downstate Gilman is certain he saw the sisters riding with two men in a dirty maroon car bearing Tennessee license plates and a Chicago vehicle sticker.

  Readers following this case know that Captain R.J. Hudson of the Brighton Park Police District, in charge of the local search for the Graves sisters, gave the greatest emphasis to this last report, and to two reports placing the girls in Nashville, Tennessee. An employment agent there identified photographs of the girls and said they’d applied for work on Wednesday, January 9. A week later, a woman reported encountering the sisters in a Nashville bus station. Captain Hudson believed the accuracy of both Nashville sightings and thought it likely the pair was headed to Elvis Presley’s home in Memphis, Tennessee.

  Mrs Leona Graves gave no credence to the distant sightings, steadfastly maintaining that her girls had suffered harm, or were being held against their will, close to home. Tragically, she has now been proven correct.

  Throughout the 25 days the girls were missing, as many as 150 local Chicago police officers at one time conducted searches of the Brighton Park Theater neighborhood and the area surrounding the girls’ Damen Avenue home. Garages, schools, vacant lots and railroad yards were searched.

  Among the hundreds of leads pursued, the cruelest may have been the telephone tip received by Angeline, the Graves girls’ older sister, instructing Mrs Graves to bring $1,000 to a church in Milwaukee. The caller promised that Beatrice would come to collect the money from her mother and, once it was turned over to the kidnappers, Priscilla would then be freed and both girls could join their mother. Mrs Graves journeyed to Milwaukee, but no one showed up at the designated church. Like many of the calls received by the Graves family, it was a horrid hoax, this one perpetrated, it was later learned, by an inmate of a Milwaukee mental hospital.

  On January 15, an anonymous caller dialed the police, saying that the sisters could be found in Santa Fe Park in the village of Tiedtville, about a mile and a half south of where the girls were found a week later. Stock car and motorcycle races are held there, and the park is frequented by local gang members. Police converged to search the grounds, but no trace of the Graves girls was found.

  The anonymous call was traced to a tavern on South Halsted Street, where it was learned that Klaus Lanz, an unemployed pipe fitter, had used the phone booth at the time the anonymous call was placed. Lanz admitted placing the call, explaining that he was descended from generations of psychics, and that it came to him in a dream that the girls were being held in Santa Fe Park. Lanz was arrested and subjected to a lie-detector test. The results were inconclusive, and he was released.

  Since the girls were found in unincorporated Cook County, investigation into the homicides falls under the jurisdiction of Sheriff Joseph Lehman.

  Rigg eased back in his chair, mulling the last sentence. It was direct, truthful and, he hoped, horrifying. Sheriff Joe Lehman, a rough, streetwise and crooked cop, was going to be in charge, like when the Stemec Henderson boys were found. Like when nothing more had ever been found.

  Behind him, Eleanor drummed her fingers on her desk. The print deadline for the next morning’s Examiner loomed, though the piece would be posted shortly after midnight on the paper’s online site.

  He typed one more sentence: Sheriff’s police are steadfastly stressing that, so far, there is nothing to link the deaths of the Graves sisters to the murders of Bobby Stemec and John and Anthony Henderson, the three boys found in Robinson Woods, fifteen months ago.

  He sent his words to the editor, grabbed his coat and ran down the stairs to the street before he could dwell on what he hadn’t written.

  FOUR

  Since Judith was killed, the Rail-Vu Diner in Lisle had become his one-night-a-week custom, but only a one-night-a-week custom. He wasn’t going to become one of those newly single men who huddle over a plate, eating noodles on the cheap, in the same restaurant every night. So it was that, on one of his three nights in Chicago from Indiana, he ate dinner – though sure as hell, never noodles – in Lisle, across from the train station.

  That night, it was as if something nuclear had exploded, vaporizing all life. Lisle was a ghost town. The flakes that had started to fall on German Church Road that afternoon had thickened, blanketing the empty streets and sidewalks with three inches of new snow, with more forecast. He parked directly in front of the diner. His footfalls made the night’s only noises, hushed soft crunchings, the few feet to the door.


  The Rail-Vu was as empty as the town. There were no customers. Blanchie, one of the diner’s two veteran waitresses, got up from the table where she’d been reading a newspaper. ‘A Monday?’ she asked, crossing the empty diner with a pitcher of water. ‘You’re here on a Monday?’

  But her face belied her pretense at surprise. She knew why he was in town earlier than usual.

  He slipped into the middle yellow plastic and green vinyl booth along the wall. Blanchie’s hand shook, spilling a little water as she filled his glass.

  He pulled a paper napkin from the chrome dispenser and blotted up the few drops.

  ‘The usual?’ she asked.

  ‘I have no usual,’ he said.

  ‘Mushroom burger, fries and coleslaw?’

  He tried to summon up memories of his other nights there. They came with tastes of mushroom burgers and fries and slaw. He couldn’t remember ordering anything else. Maybe he’d avoided the noodles of a solitary man, but he’d been just as stuck in routine, only with something else.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, because a mushroom burger really didn’t matter.

  ‘You ought to try something different.’ Though she stood right next to his booth, her voice echoed across the empty, throwback diner, unchanged decor-wise for fifty years.

  ‘Like McDonald’s, up the street? I can eat big there for five bucks and still get change,’ he said, trying for a grin.

  ‘Yellow damn arches? Hamburgers thin as a dime?’ She snorted as she wrote up his order, though the ticket, like his banter, was for show. The grill cook behind the window had heard them just fine. There was no clatter that night at the Rail-Vu.

  ‘So, top my burger with olives this time,’ he said.

  ‘Wild man, Tarzan,’ she said, changing the order on the pad as she walked back to slide it through the grill window.

  Five minutes later, she came back with the water pitcher, though he hadn’t taken a sip. ‘No one’s out,’ she said.

  ‘The snow,’ he said, like he believed it.