‘Again, Richie Fernandez!’ Aria said, throwing her arms up in mock exasperation.
‘For now, and maybe for quite a while,’ Rigg said.
‘Feldott caught you by surprise with his announcement?’ Aria asked.
‘He gave no hint of taking over when we talked, even going so far as to pretend confusion about where McGarry might be.’
‘And about Beatrice Graves being penetrated?’
‘He didn’t flinch at that, either.’
‘How do we find out if the Day girl was sexually assaulted?’ she asked.
‘She was in the water for a long time. Even if evidence survived, I bet he’d quash it. He wouldn’t want Sex Crimes anywhere around.’
She turned to her keyboard, tapped keys and sent Rigg’s piece off. ‘You can’t say that last business about Richie Fernandez. You have no witnesses now.’
‘Fernandez is a story.’
‘A story that has no corroborating witnesses. You said Greg Theodore is watching you. He’ll sniff out the weakness and crucify you for sloppy reporting.’
‘McGarry is complicit in Fernandez’s disappearance. His hinges are coming loose. That’s why he’s pretending to be sick.’
Her desk phone rang. She picked it up. It was a short conversation, consisting twice of, ‘I’ll tell him.’ She hung up.
‘The Bastion beckons,’ she said.
He hadn’t been back to the Examiner’s headquarters since Donovan exiled him under the shadow of Carlotta Henderson, early the year before. Never as foreboding as the Chicago Tribune’s Gothic tower, as detailed as the Art Deco magnificence of the old Daily News headquarters or as boxily efficient as the former Sun-Times building, the majesty of the six-story, fortress-style brick Bastion always held, for Rigg, the scrappy resoluteness of the city’s third-largest newspaper.
‘Milo!’ Edna, the woman behind the reception desk in the Bastion’s grand marble lobby, smiled. She loved all the Examiner’s reporters.
‘I’m back!’ he said.
‘To stay?’
‘Probably just for minutes. I’m here to see Donovan.’
Her smile disappeared. Things had got steadily worse for print reporters since Rigg’s first day at the paper. Fresh-faced out of Chicago’s Columbia College, the school for scrappy but broke aspiring journalists, he’d realized only when he came through the doors that first day that he’d never thought to ask what his salary was going to be. It had been of no matter; he was going to be a reporter at Chicago’s third-largest paper and that was all that counted. Not that many years had passed since then, but they’d been years of brutal transformation, and, by now, Edna must have been seeing reporters leaving in greater numbers than ever before.
He got out of the elevator at the newsroom, three floors shy of his destination. At eleven fifteen, the floor should have resonated with keyboard clacking, shouted snippets of conversations and muttered profanity. Maybe long gone were the days of ‘Hat and coat!’ – meaning, Get your ass out on the street – or ‘Get me rewrite!’ but there should have been more modern incantations of a live, bustling newsroom crackling across the low-walled cubicles. But the third floor, the reporters’ floor, was now a ghost town. Half the cubicles were empty and the other half was occupied by bent-over people speaking in whispers, as if to avoid notice that they were speaking at all. There was no mystery to their futures. More lay-offs were coming – there at the Examiner, but also at the Trib and the Sun-Times. People no longer read the ink of the news; more and more, they wanted less and less of it, and they wanted that in tiny bits on screens that they could delete in an instant if it was too upsetting or demanded too much concentration, bits like Rigg himself had been reduced to writing.
He walked through the newsroom, stopping at almost every occupied cubicle with a smile. He knew them all and they knew him. He’d never ruled this room, but he’d been a force at one time, before Carlotta.
Several people stood in front of a giant electronic screen that showed the day’s online stories and the number of hits each had received. It was the new age of readership accounting, assessing which stories drew attention – and, as Rigg and everyone else on that floor knew, which reporters didn’t draw much attention and were likeliest to be axed in the next round of lay-offs.
He paused in front of his old cubicle in the corner. It was still empty, never filled.
A rumpled, gray-haired fellow in corduroy pants and a plaid shirt walked up. He was the Examiner’s City Hall reporter, and was, he often proclaimed, too old to fire. ‘What the hell have you done now?’ he asked with a smile.
‘Meeting with Donovan on the sixth floor,’ Rigg said.
Those that had turned at the sound of their voices frowned. No one went up to Donovan’s floor simply to chat.
The rumpled fellow stuck out his hand, no doubt in farewell. ‘Ah, hell, Milo.’
Rigg took the stairs up one floor and poked his head in at the advertising and sales department. No matter how good any newspaper was editorially, it was nothing without the money to pay for its people, ink, paper and Internet sites. The Examiner’s fourth floor had always been filled with hotshots, snappy dressers talking fast on the phone to potential advertisers. Now, the fourth floor was even more deserted than the newsroom. The battle had been lost; the advertisers had gone away. A woman he didn’t recognize sat in a cubicle halfway across the floor. She didn’t look up.
He climbed the last two flights. There were no cubicles on the top floor, just polished old oak secretarial desks and private offices behind polished old oak doors. Most of the doors were closed on empty offices. Donovan’s cost-cutting had decimated his own executive floor as well.
The publisher’s office was in the corner. Donovan was lanky, narrow-faced and had the small eyes of a ferret. Anecdotes abounded about the driven bastard who’d made great wealth in commercial real estate. He was an everyday tennis player with his own key to a downtown club so he could practice his serves at six in the morning. He drove hyper-expensive Porsches that his secretary traded in for new ones every six months and, when she wasn’t doing that, she took frequent cab rides to the bank, because Luther Donovan wouldn’t touch paper money unless it had never been touched before.
But, nowadays, word was that Luther Donovan was scrambling for any kind of money. The sense of invincibility that had taken him past real-estate development into newspaper publishing, thinking his roughshod managerial style and relentless cost-cutting would turn the teetering Chicago Examiner into a profitable business, like every financial endeavor he’d approached before, had gotten him into deep trouble. He and his minority investors were getting creamed by the Examiner’s falling circulation and rising printing costs.
Donovan’s door was open. His secretary, who’d been with the paper through three publishers, two of whom had cared not one whit for tennis, Porsches and pristine paper money, managed to force a smile and waved for him to go right in.
Unlike the venerable old oak paneling and furniture that was everywhere else on that historic sixth floor, Donovan’s inlaid walls had been painted over in flat white enamel and a desk had been brought in consisting of two bright chrome pillars supporting a smoked glass top. The computer screen on the adjacent, matching glass and chrome table was blank.
‘Milo,’ Donovan said without inflection, not glancing up from the sheet he was reading. Donovan’s rudeness was a tactic, a delay meant to be unnerving and give the publisher an advantage. No doubt it had worked with contractors, listing agents and the other denizens of his real-estate world, but Rigg didn’t see much point in allowing it to work on him. His career had already plummeted to the Pink.
‘Luther,’ he said, sitting down and crossing his legs with what he hoped was the nonchalance of a man about to doze.
Donovan finally looked up. ‘Back in the game?’ The publisher was a man of millions of dollars, but only a few words.
‘The usual at the Pink.’
‘More than that.’
Rig
g shrugged. ‘Car wash openings and murders. Such is the news.’
‘Your treatment of them is off-putting.’
‘Which? The car washes or the murders?’ Rigg said.
The great man did not frown at the sarcasm. ‘This, in particular,’ he said. He turned to his computer, tapped a key to bring the screen to life and began to read aloud. ‘“The status of Richie Fernandez, who, according to witnesses, was arrested as a person of interest in the Graves case by Cook County Sheriff Joseph Lehman in the company of McGarry, remains unknown.”’
It was a surprise and a delight. He’d thought Aria had deleted the offending last sentence.
‘Part of the big story,’ Rigg said. ‘Lehman and McGarry busted Fernandez, but never booked him. That’s important.’
‘They deny it and, according to your boss, Mrs Gamble, you have no corroborating witnesses to the supposed Fernandez arrest.’
‘Lehman made them disappear.’
‘You know this?’
‘I conclude this.’
‘I say again: you have no witnesses.’
‘To which I say again: Lehman made them disappear. He’s dirty on this. So is McGarry, which is why he’s pretending to be sick. He needs to be squeezed.’ Rigg paused, knowing he was about to do wrong, and then went ahead anyway. ‘I don’t know the man, Luther, but I hear you do.’
It was a feint and it worked. Donovan’s face flushed red. ‘Only from business dealings. Real-estate partnerships, trade associations and the like.’
The desk phone buzzed, no doubt a prearranged signal from Donovan’s secretary that the time allotted for an annoying pebble like Rigg was up. ‘McGarry is to be removed from your reporting, do you understand?’ Donovan said.
‘You’re the publisher.’
‘We don’t want a flare-up,’ Donovan said.
‘There are no Carlotta Hendersons here, Luther. There was no Carlotta Henderson the last time, either.’
‘And there is no McGarry now, because there are no witnesses to Fernandez.’
Donovan’s phone buzzed again, insistent. Rigg got up.
‘Be wise, Milo,’ Donovan said, without bothering with the pretense of picking up his phone to a dead line. He’d turned back to the sheet he’d been studying when Rigg came in. The sheet was filled with numbers. Likely, they were bad numbers.
‘Wisdom – of course,’ Rigg said, and stepped out, but it was way too late for that.
TWENTY-FOUR
Aria called just as he got to the Examiner’s rear parking lot, a prime piece of downtown real estate with a huge For Sale sign in one corner.
‘Perfect,’ Rigg said, before she could speak.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘Your timing,’ he said. ‘I just finished with Donovan.’
‘How’s that perfect?’
‘I assume you, too, just finished with Donovan.’
‘As a matter of fact, he just called me,’ she said.
‘You left in my last sentence about Richie Fernandez.’
‘Futile. Donovan deleted it,’ she said.
‘As you were sure he would.’
‘I’m in your corner, Milo, even when it’s futile. You’re coming in?’
‘I need to clear my head,’ he said.
‘You’re thinking another drive will help?’ She was smart, damned smart.
‘Glet’s managing Stemec Henderson. Lehman doesn’t appear to be managing anything.’
‘Leaving McGarry managing to be sick in his city house?’
‘And leave Richie Fernandez unattended? I hope not,’ he said.
She hung up, laughing.
He called Pancho Rozakis before starting his car. ‘Are you free right now?’
‘I’m free almost always.’
Rigg told him what he wanted. ‘Probably nobody’s home and nothing will happen,’ he added.
‘Whatever,’ Rozakis said.
The long driveway up through McGarry’s estate was thick with six inches of the new snow. The Escalade was still parked at the end of the drive and was also thick with snow. It hadn’t been moved since he was last there. Rigg hoped that meant McGarry was remaining vigilant.
He left his car at the side of the highway, climbed over the gate and high-stepped in street shoes up to the long porch, stomping the snow from his feet loud enough to be heard. He rang the front doorbell. When there was no answer, he beat on the door with his fist. Still no answer.
He walked around past the Escalade and knocked on the side door. When no one answered, he began to wonder if McGarry really was ill and had been taken to a hospital. If so, Rigg was wasting his time. But he reminded himself that he was already scraping by on part-time wages and frugal withdrawals from Judith’s small life insurance. And his shoes were already soaked. He had little left to waste.
The sky was clear, and that was good. He resisted the urge to look up as he crossed the snow in back to the mound.
As he’d seen in Pancho Rozakis’ drone photos, the fresh snowfall had obliterated any footsteps and sweep marks, but not the rise of the mound itself. It rose up a good eighteen inches above the ground, several inches higher than when Rigg had snuck on to the estate.
Footsteps crunched on the snow, back by the house.
‘Mr McGarry,’ Rigg called out, ‘you look splendid.’
‘I’m ill.’ McGarry cradled a shotgun in the crook of his right arm, pointed down. He wore high boots, a long black coat and, incongruously for a man who worked in a morgue, a red knit hat with a purple pom-pom on top.
‘I knocked on all the doors I could get to.’
‘I gave the staff the day off,’ McGarry said, trudging closer.
‘And the days before, judging by all the unshoveled snow.’
‘Didn’t you see the No Trespassing sign by the road?’ McGarry got to within ten feet and stopped.
‘Ah, but we’re associates, you and I. Fellow seekers of the truth. Friends even, I like to think. I’m concerned about your sudden illness.’
‘And when there was no answer at the door, you thought to come all the way out here to see if I was playing in the snow?’ The shotgun wavered in his arm, but did not rise.
‘You have lovely grounds. Surely you don’t maintain them all by yourself?’
‘Why are you here, Rigg?’
‘As I said, I was concerned about your sudden illness.’ He reached into his coat pocket and brought out the can he’d bought on the drive out. ‘Chicken noodle soup, generic, the cheapest I could find.’ He held out the can. ‘Plus, Glet’s been talking to us in the press. I want your comment. Do you think ATF has bagged the boys’ killer?’
‘I hope so.’
‘How is your analysis of Wilcox’s DNA progressing?’
McGarry stared at him, but said nothing.
‘What about the boys?’ Rigg prompted.
‘What about them?’
Rigg gestured down at the mound. ‘Or was Richie Fernandez able to tell you anything about the girls?’
McGarry tilted the shotgun up just an inch or two, but it was enough.
‘Interview’s over?’ Rigg said.
The shotgun rose another inch.
Rigg risked another gesture at the mound. ‘A toboggan hill, or something more?’
McGarry didn’t answer. He just met Rigg’s eyes, but that was fine. Rigg put the soup can back in his pocket and high-stepped around the man, through the snow, back to the house and down to the highway. He didn’t look back, but he didn’t need to. He could feel McGarry’s eyes and both barrels of the man’s shotgun hot on the back of his neck all the way to his car.
And that was fine, too.
HEALTHY ENOUGH?
Milo Rigg, Chicago Examiner
Cook County Medical Examiner Charles McGarry appeared in the snow outside his far west suburban mansion to express hope that Cook County Sheriff’s Deputy Jerome Glet’s claim that Kevin Wilcox, being held in custody by the Chicago office of ATF on charges of illegal gun distribution,
is also the prime suspect in the murders of Bobby Stemec, Johnny Henderson and Anthony Henderson a year ago last October. But he refused to confirm that Wilcox’s DNA has been submitted for comparison to evidence found on their bodies. The interview was cut short without McGarry commenting on whether Wilcox is suspected of being involved in the murders of the Graves sisters and Jennifer Ann Day, or whether that investigation led to the arrest of Richie Fernandez by Lehman, accompanied by McGarry.
‘You’re not yet forty, Milo,’ Aria said. ‘You’re sure you can afford to retire at such an early age?’
‘I’m already semi-retired.’
‘You’re back in full swing.’
‘At half-wages,’ Rigg said.
‘Which delights Donovan, and, these days, is better than no wages at all.’
‘What publisher warns a reporter off a key angle to the biggest story in the Midwest?’ Rigg asked. ‘He’s protecting McGarry.’
‘It’s the way of the world,’ she said.
‘Or is it just the way of the North Shore?’ he said. ‘Your turf, Aria.’
She fingered her pearls. ‘My family isn’t like Donovan and McGarry. Steel companies and an oil refinery were very lucrative for my grandfather, but my father made bad investments.’ Then, ‘Why doesn’t McGarry want to talk about comparing Wilcox’s DNA to the Stemec Henderson samples?’
‘I wanted to think it was because he was in a hurry to get me off his property, but nobody wants to talk about matching Wilcox’s DNA to the boys. Glet avoids talking about it and Feldott’s evasive about it, too, though he did say that only one foreign DNA sample was being compared to Wilcox’s. Two foreign DNA samples were recovered, one from Bobby Stemec and another from Johnny Henderson. Running both foreign DNA samples against Wilcox would be standard procedure, but, for some reason, only one is being analyzed.’
‘There’s problems with the Stemec Henderson DNA?’ she said.
‘Of course.’
His cell phone rang. He glanced at the number, stood up and stepped out of Aria’s office.
The Black Cage Page 14