The Black Cage

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘Did you mention we suspect Donovan is tied to McGarry financially?’

  ‘I reminded him that Stemec Henderson and the girls’ cases are heaters, and that your nose is good and Richie Fernandez fits in somewhere. And maybe, I said, so does McGarry, and we need to stay on top of it all.’

  ‘If the paper doesn’t go down next week,’ Rigg said.

  ‘I told him the Trib and the Sun-Times would soon sniff out the fact that McGarry left the country.’

  ‘He was concerned?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘The man has no taste for news.’

  ‘You seem unconcerned,’ he said.

  ‘About my job?’ She sighed. ‘There is that, yes.’

  ‘My goodness, the phantom returns!’ Blanchie said, bringing water to his booth. Things at the diner had improved, hubbub-wise. Three other booths and four of the tables were occupied.

  ‘Busy times,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been reading your posts,’ she said, pointing to the laptop he’d set on the table. ‘Are they going to get him?’

  ‘Wilcox, for Stemec Henderson?’ He nodded.

  ‘And that missing Fernandez, for the girls?’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ he said, instead of saying Fernandez was likely a dead patsy, like Glet.

  She left and he opened his laptop to puzzle again over the piece posted that evening on the Examiner’s website.

  CORNELIUS FELDOTT, QUIET MASTER?

  Aria Gamble, Chicago Examiner

  As the Cook County sheriff’s investigation into the deaths of Beatrice and Priscilla Graves, Jennifer Ann Day and Tana Damm drags on with no discernible results, hopes are turning to Cornelius Feldott, Cook County’s acting medical examiner. Sources say he has begun carefully examining all the previous evidence collected in the Stemec Henderson murders of a year ago, the more recent killings of the girls, and the untimely death of Cook County Deputy Sheriff Jerome Glet. He’s released no new findings but his methodical assembling of previously verified facts offers the best hope that all of these cases will be brought to successful conclusions.

  It might have been the damndest piece of worshipful essaying he’d ever read in the Examiner, but Aria was cunning. She was nudging the Citizens’ Investigation Bureau, the heavies who’d installed Feldott at the M.E.’s office, to get cracking at the sheriff’s department as well, to push Lehman out of the way and put someone else in charge, even a pup like Feldott, to direct a full team of aggressive, intelligent investigators in all three cases.

  He looked through the large front window, out at the parked cars and the railroad station beyond. A slim figure stood across the street and seemed to be looking in, straight at him.

  He got up quickly and hurried to the door, but, when he got outside, the figure was gone.

  ‘You all right, Milo?’ Blanchie asked, clearly alarmed, when he came back in.

  ‘Just peachy,’ he said, of his frayed nerves.

  But, of course, his nerves weren’t peachy at all.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Rigg climbed the front steps to Glet’s neighbor’s brown brick bungalow the next morning and knocked on the door.

  Two bolts slid back in the next instant. Ever vigilant, she must have spotted him getting out of his car.

  ‘I was the one who found him,’ he said. With her antennae, he figured she already knew that – and that he was a reporter.

  ‘You snuck in the back way,’ she said, ‘other side of the porch, where I can’t see.’

  ‘The front door was locked, but the back door was open.’

  ‘Dead of gunshot, according to the newspaper and TV,’ she said. ‘There’s no yellow police tape, and no cops have been back to investigate.’

  ‘They don’t see a crime.’

  ‘Suicide? They’re damn fools.’

  ‘You told them about the visitor?’

  ‘Sheriff himself came over to talk to me.’

  ‘What did you see, exactly?’

  ‘Jerome wasn’t much for electric bills. Night-times, the only light was from his TV, so it was hard to see in. Like I told you last time, whoever came to see him was just a shadow from the street light at the corner, done up in a long coat, high collar, a hood pulled down the sides of the face. Could have been the Grim Reaper himself, come to fetch Glet’s soul, except I didn’t see a scythe and I don’t think Jerome had a soul. One thing’s for sure: the cheapskate didn’t switch on any more lights when the guest went in.’

  ‘Glet let the visitor in right away?’

  ‘He or she was expected,’ the woman said.

  ‘You heard nothing unusual …?’

  ‘Gunshot?’ She shook her head.

  ‘And you never saw the visitor leave?’

  ‘The TV went dark, so there was nothing to see in his front room. I figured they were off to do the hooty-tooty in one of the bedrooms on the far side, where I can’t see. One thing’s for sure: nobody went out the front; the street light would have told me that. And Jerome’s back porch door is on that same far side, as you damned well know from sneaking in. I was thinking his visitor must have left that way, out to the alley, meaning she was a hooker and took off on account of him having some peculiar requirements and lacking even the most basic of masculine charms. Of course, now I’m thinking he was murdered, and I don’t know what to imagine.’

  ‘I’m going to look around inside.’

  Comprehension tightened the wrinkles around her eyes. ‘You don’t want me to call the cops that you’re snooping.’

  ‘As you said, there’s no yellow cop tape. Case is closed for them.’

  ‘But not for you?’

  ‘I want to know about that visitor.’

  ‘Jerome would kill others before he’d kill himself,’ she said, and closed her door.

  Lehman’s deputies had locked the doors, but they’d not checked the windows. The lowest one in the gangway between the two houses was unlatched. He raised the sash and crawled into the dining room, the empty room he remembered from the morning he’d discovered Glet. He took a breath and went to the front of the house.

  The living room had two chairs. One, upholstered green in a nubby fabric and greasy at the arms, was splattered dark with dried blood at the top and side. It was where Rigg had found Glet slumped back against the cushion with his right arm dangling over the armrest, above the revolver on the floor.

  The other chair was smaller and had been orange before it faded into a dirty beige. Too narrow for Glet’s bulk, it held a stack of newspapers two feet high. On top was the first section of an Examiner. Once again, Rigg was startled by his paper’s thinness and narrowness. Long gone for all the queens was the broadsheet thick with national coverage, in-depth local reporting and investigative reports. But, even before the hatchet-wielding Donovan had taken over, the Examiner had been shrunk more than its remaining competitors. Donovan had reduced it even more, into a ribbon of blurbs and fast paragraphs.

  One of Rigg’s short pieces was on the front page, right below the fold. It typified the paper’s new age. It wasn’t solid reporting so much as a news blip written for restricted attention spans.

  A scratched pine table was between the two chairs. It held a green ashtray the size of an automobile hubcap, filled with a half-dozen foul-smelling stubs of Glet’s cigars. One stub looked to still be damp. Glet’s last rope, Rigg supposed.

  A can of Miller Lite was next to the ashtray. Rigg pinched its top with his thumb and forefinger and raised it. It was almost full. Rigg doubted the crime-scene team wondered about that in their rush to conclude they were seeing a suicide.

  Across the small room, a big-screen television was aimed at the greasy green chair. A small artificial Christmas tree rested on the floor next to it, either a month late to be taken down, or – more likely, given the indifference of the slob that was Glet – it was a year-round accoutrement of the bungalow’s front room.

  Rigg looked again at the newspapers piled on the orange chair. Glet hadn’t cleared them
away to offer his visitor a place to sit down. That, and the fact that the neighbor saw the living room darken immediately when the TV was switched off, could have supported her theory that Glet, a bachelor, had welcomed a visitor whose expertise was not best conducted sitting down.

  Or Glet had been ordered to sit back down by a visitor who’d come with a gun.

  The front bedroom opened off the living room. Rigg hadn’t looked in it, the morning he’d found Glet; he’d seen only the body slumped in the chair before he ran out the back. The double bed was made, sort of, its peach-colored coverlet pulled carelessly over the pillows and sheets.

  There could have been activity there, if Glet had been the type to welcome a working girl, but it didn’t seem logical that he would have made the bed afterward and then gone to sit in the living room and kill himself.

  The dresser and nightstand looked to have been found in the same alley as the junk furniture in the middle bedroom. Rigg looked through the drawers and saw two frayed sweaters, huge underwear, and socks. A Hawaiian shirt festooned with tropical birds and flowers was balled up on the shelf in the closet. Below it hung several garishly bright blue, green and yellow shirts, and three dark suits.

  He fingered the newest of them, the shiny black suit with the manufacturer’s sleeve tag still attached that Glet had worn to his impromptu press conference on the stairs of the sheriff’s headquarters. Frugality like Glet’s was reflexive, deeply ingrained. He would have spent money on a new suit only if he thought he was about to draw substantial press attention from breaking something big.

  Rigg walked back through the barren dining room and cluttered kitchen to the rear bedroom Glet used as an office. The rubber wastebasket was empty. Giveaway advertising pens, paper clips and small scratch pads were jumbled in the desk’s center drawer. Paid utility and property tax bills, income tax returns and other financial documents filled the two drawers on the right side.

  The two drawers on the left side of the desk were as empty as the wastebasket. Jammed-full desk drawers on one side and empties on the other meant things like Glet’s checkbook, cancelled checks and bank statements had been removed by Lehman’s deputies. And maybe Feldott. He remembered the bulge in Feldott’s left coat pocket the day Rigg had discovered the body. The acting chief medical examiner had taken something, too, in an evidence bag.

  The basement was empty, the place of a man with no hobbies. It held only a rusting washing machine, a dryer and a tiny metal workbench with a cluster of cheap hand tools lying in its center.

  He went back upstairs and outside, locking the kitchen door behind him, and crossed the small lawn to the peeling white clapboard garage. The side door was unlocked.

  Glet’s black county car was still inside. Rigg reached in to open the glovebox. It was empty. No papers or pockets were jammed under the seats. That Glet had an immaculate automobile was inconceivable. Lehman’s people had searched the car and scooped up everything to take it away.

  A push-type reel lawnmower, good enough for the tiny lawn, was leaned in the corner next to a cracked red plastic snow shovel. Glet, forever penurious, had bought none of the things – garden tools, fertilizer, salt for winter sidewalks – that typically cluttered suburban residential garages.

  Rigg left the garage. As he went up in the narrow gangway between the brick sides of the two bungalows, he fought the urge to wave at the lace next door. He understood lace curtains. They were thick enough to conceal interested eyes, yet thin enough to see a visitor who should have left by the front door.

  He got in his car. He’d seen nothing and maybe a lot in an almost-full can of Miller Lite. He doubted anyone about to kill himself would open a beer and take only a tiny sip before pulling the trigger.

  What he did not doubt was Glet’s nose. A feral hunter, Glet had smelled something major, something that would give him redemption and praise enough to perhaps become the next sheriff. He’d said several times that he was on the trail of explosive, career-rocketing things. Such a man would not have offed himself, certainly not in fear of a pup like Feldott threatening to accuse him of pinching DNA.

  But it was the visitor that trumped everything. The visitor left by the back door. Front-door arrivals didn’t leave by back doors.

  He called Feldott from his car. ‘Got a verdict?’

  ‘I pronounce the Examiner delightful. Thank you.’

  ‘Check the byline. Aria Gamble wrote it.’

  ‘I thank everyone at the Examiner,’ Feldott said.

  ‘She wrote that you’re becoming the go-to guy in the investigations.’

  ‘For the record, I merely want to support Sheriff Lehman. I want to help in offering the citizens of Cook County absolute assurance that all these matters are being investigated fully.’

  It was a nascent politician’s speech, a chick emerging from the egg.

  ‘So, a verdict?’

  ‘Not for publication.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘I was there when the doctor tested the swab. GSR was on Deputy Glet’s right hand.’

  ‘Officially, it will go down as him firing into his own temple?’

  ‘I’m not going to put out a release, Mr Rigg. Deputy Glet was a good man, an honorable man. Let this fade away.’

  ‘You tipped Lehman?’ Rigg said.

  ‘Of course. The sheriff is heading that investigation as well, and Deputy Glet was his most senior deputy. But Sheriff Lehman is no more anxious than I am to stir up anything embarrassing.’

  ‘Glet’s house reeks with evidence that contradicts suicide. Lehman – and you, if you’re serious about a thorough investigation – must comb it for evidence. And the neighbor’s got to be questioned exhaustively about the visitor she saw.’

  ‘You went back?’

  ‘The neighbor says Glet’s visitor came in the front and went out the back. What innocent person does that?’

  ‘A hooker.’

  ‘A hooker would arrive at the front and leave by the front, or arrive at the back and leave by the back. Focus on what Glet was chasing. He was on to things that were explosive.’

  ‘He stole Johnny Henderson’s foreign DNA like he was trying to ruin the case. When news of that got out, it would probably have forced his resignation and maybe resulted in his prosecution.’

  ‘I’d just tipped him that witnesses could put Bobby Stemec and other boys at the stables, and that meant right to Wilcox. Yet he was excited about bigger things than that. He didn’t kill himself.’

  ‘Maybe the fireworks didn’t pan out,’ Feldott said.

  Rigg took a breath. It was time. ‘I’m assuming Lehman’s team was in charge of removing evidence from Glet’s house?’

  ‘Standard procedure.’

  ‘I’m correct about that, right? Only Lehman’s team would have removed evidence?’

  Feldott paused for only a second, but it was long enough. He’d sensed what Rigg had not said, that Rigg had seen Feldott leaving Glet’s bungalow with an evidence bag jammed in his coat pocket.

  ‘Please, Mr Rigg, mum’s the word on the gunshot residue,’ Feldott said, and hung up.

  The acting M.E. had dodged. Whatever he’d taken was important enough to still keep hidden.

  Milo sat in Aria’s office twenty minutes later. ‘So that’s it,’ he said, after briefing her. ‘Feldott’s not going to release an official finding, but he’s ruled Glet a suicide.’

  ‘Which you doubt because of a full can of beer?’

  ‘And the fireworks he was chasing, and the fact that his visitor left by the back door.’

  ‘And the uncleared chair?’ she asked.

  ‘Who invites a visitor into his house, doesn’t clear off a place to sit?’

  ‘Someone who takes a woman directly to bed, as the neighbor suggested?’ she said.

  ‘Who doesn’t rumple the bed?’

  ‘So, he’s a neatnik, or—’

  ‘Glet?’ he interrupted. No one had ever thought of Glet as being neat.

  ‘Or,’ sh
e said, a faintly suggestive smile forming on her face, ‘maybe he likes the floor.’

  He fought the urge to say that his was a mattress, not just a floor, but said instead, ‘Feldott left Glet’s bungalow with a small evidence bag stuffed in his pocket.’

  She opened her mouth to say something, but her desk phone rang. She picked it up, still looking at Rigg.

  ‘Of course, he’s right here.’ She handed the handset over to Rigg.

  ‘You got your call, Rigg,’ Agent Till said.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Yellow police tape was strung across the gate to McGarry’s estate. Beyond it, three blue-and-white Winthrop County sheriff’s patrol cars, a black Chevrolet Suburban, a white crime-scene investigator’s van and a red ambulance were lined up along the snow-packed driveway behind McGarry’s Escalade. Uniformed officers and crime-scene investigators were bringing tarps and shovels to the van and the cars, getting ready to leave. The ruckus, if there’d been one at all, was over. Rigg parked on the road and walked up.

  A sheriff’s deputy saw him and came down to the gate. ‘You can’t be here, sir.’

  Rigg showed his press ID.

  ‘Your credentials don’t matter,’ the officer said. ‘This is private property. You can’t be here.’

  The sheriff must have spotted Rigg, because he came walking down the drive. The Winthrop County sheriff was a tall man, blond, with a ruddy complexion. His name was Olsen. Rigg had interviewed him once, several years earlier, about a missing persons investigation. ‘The famous Milo Rigg?’

  ‘How are you, Sheriff?’

  The sheriff told the deputy he could leave and said to Rigg, ‘Not at all delighted to see you, Rigg. You trashed us, some months back.’

  ‘Only those who weren’t helping in Stemec Henderson, and that wasn’t you. That case was off your turf.’

  ‘Trash one, trash all, and now you’ve come to do him?’ Olsen said, jerking a thumb toward McGarry’s mansion.

  ‘He must be livid, you guys showing up,’ Rigg said, for the show of it. McGarry was in Paris, or at points far from it, but that had not been published, thanks to Donovan.