Burke's War: Bob Burke Action Thriller 1 (Bob Burke Action Thrillers)

by William F. Brown

  “I’m sure. And you are certain it was Greenway?”

  “I might forget my wife’s birthday or our anniversary, but I’ll never forget the look on that bastard’s face. It was him all right.”

  “Excellent,” O’Malley commented. As the US Attorney looked down at the photographs again, Burke swore he could hear the wheels turning inside the man’s head. “What about these other women?” he asked. “Do you recognize any of them?”

  Bob leaned forward and looked at the photos a second time, finally pointing to the one on the far right, the one of the young woman in the bar, dancing with a can of beer. “This one. She looks like the CHC receptionist. What was her name?” he asked himself, trying to rub the headache out of his temple. “Sylvester, Linda Sylvester. Yeah, that was it. I saw it on the nameplate on the reception desk.”

  “Very good,” O’Malley smiled, sounding pleased. “She’s a fairly new hire and a friend of the dead woman. As I’m sure you realize, a receptionist can be a valuable source of information on any business these days. One way or another, everyone and everything passes by their desks, going in or out.”

  “I’ll have to remember that, but she looks like she knows how to have fun,” Bob replied, staring more closely at the photograph, and her face.

  “That photo is seven or eight years old. She has a daughter, is divorced now, and started working at CHC a couple of months ago.”

  “Last night, when I said that the woman on the roof was wearing a white dress, she looked at Greenway and said, ‘That was what Eleanor was wearing.’ And she looked scared.”

  “She should be… and so should you. These people are not to be taken lightly,” O’Malley warned, and then turned toward Travers. “Lieutenant, would you mind stepping outside for a few minutes?” Travers couldn’t move fast enough, as he quickly excused himself from the room.

  When Burke and O’Malley were alone, the US Attorney leaned forward. “What I’m about to tell you must be held in strictest confidence, Mr. Burke. I have impanelled a Federal Grand Jury, which is looking into Organized Crime and its role in the massive Medicare and Medicaid fraud in the Chicagoland area. This is not penny-ante street crime. It involves tens of millions of dollars, money that is being denied to the poor and elderly in this community who badly need it. By definition, Grand Jury proceedings are secret. They must be, if we hope to crack the syndicates who are perpetrating the crimes. I am telling you these things in order to enlist your cooperation with my investigation, but the specifics of the case must remain secret.”

  “Sure, so who was she?” Bob pointed to the dead woman’s photo.

  “Eleanor Purdue. She is, or was, head of accounting for CHC. She’s scheduled to testify to my Grand Jury next week, but she appears to have gone missing. She was supposed to meet me last night and turn over more of their financial and business records, but she never showed. Then, when I saw the TSA report regarding what you allegedly saw and the details of your subsequent visit to the CHC building, some very unfortunate pieces fell into place.”

  “You think that’s why Greenway killed her?”

  “Him or the people he’s working for. No doubt about that. You see, Consolidated Health Care began a dozen years ago as a storefront clinic serving the homeless and indigent in one of the worst neighborhoods on Chicago’s infamous South Side. Greenway bootstrapped it into two or three more clinics, all legit and doing good work. For what he did back then, ‘Larry’ Greenway, as he was called, should be commended. Unfortunately, clinics like his on Medicaid and Medicare funding live hand to mouth. When the wrong people knocked on his door and offered to fill his pockets with cash and build him a dozen more clinics, he never looked back. In the best of circumstances, the ill-trained and badly overworked HHS financial management staffs in Springfield and Washington can’t keep up with the paperwork. When you flood them with clever scams, slick accounting techniques, and massive overbilling, it’s no contest. That was when ‘Larry’ Greenway became Doctor Lawrence Greenway in two-thousand-dollar suits.”

  “French cuffs, Italian leather shoes, and silk ties?”

  “Only the best. The man you saw last night is not the same one who worked down on 63rd and Cottage Grove six years ago. His operation remains centered in Chicago’s inner city, but he now has 22 clinics in five cities and three states, and is heavily into prescription drugs, switching the good stuff with substandard foreign concoctions, shoddy medical devices, neck and back trauma, physical therapy, ‘mobility’ devices, outpatient surgery, traffic accidents, in-home services, and anything else they can dream up. Those are the ‘soft’ medical services that are very hard to police, and wide open for fraud. Unfortunately, it’s like stealing candy from a baby if you don’t care whom you hurt.”

  “I assume that’s where the guy with the gold chains and muscles comes in?”

  “His name is Anthony Scalese, ‘Tony Scales,’ in Mafia-ese. He is an underboss and occasional muscle for Salvatore DiGrigoria, ‘Sally Bats,’ who is the current Capo of what used to be the Accardo–Giancana crime family here. Unlike New York, there’s been only one mob ‘family’ running Chicago since Al Capone, even though it’s now split into three branches of the DiGrigoria family.”

  “ ‘Tony Scales,’ ‘Sally Bats’ — I thought they only talk that way in the movies.”

  “No, they’re all too real. In the late 1970s, a burglary gang was dumb enough to hit Tony ‘Big Tuna’ Accardo’s house in River Forest while he was vacationing in Palm Springs. Reportedly, Accardo was one of Capone’s gunmen on St. Valentine’s Day in 1929. Anyway, these burglars really messed up Accardo’s house. Sal DiGrigoria was one of his lieutenants. He was called ‘Sally Bats’ because he liked Louisville Sluggers, and not to play baseball. Within a month, all six burglars were hunted down and savagely beaten to death. The word is that Scalese is every bit as vicious, but his weapon of choice is a 9-inch stiletto, not a baseball bat.”

  “I don’t have a nickname, Mr. O’Malley, and I don’t scare easily.”

  “I gathered that, but I wanted you to understand the kind of people you’re dealing with. Remember, many of the top city, county, and state officials around here, especially the police, and that includes your friend Sheriff Bentley and half the other elected officials in Indian Hills, have been on their payroll or taking campaign contributions from their ‘front’ businesses like CHC for years. If they can’t buy someone, they’re pretty good at intimidating anyone who gets in their way. If that doesn’t work, people disappear.”

  “So you think that’s what happened to your witness?”

  “It’s beginning to look that way. I have a fallback meeting with Eleanor tomorrow night, and there’s the Grand Jury hearing on Tuesday. I hope she shows; but if she doesn’t, I’ll know she was the woman in the white dress you saw on the roof.”

  “My money says it was; and from the expression on Linda Sylvester, she knows it, too.”

  “They were friends. Did she say anything else to you?”

  “No, Scalese hustled her out of the lobby before she could.”

  “They can be very scary people for a young woman,” O’Malley reflected.

  “But it was Greenway up on the roof strangling her, not Tony Scalese.”

  “That has me puzzled too. I know she was trying to get more documents to turn over to us. I told her to be careful, but maybe Greenway caught her. Then again, that man has raised sexual harassment to an art form. Eleanor told us he’s chased, seduced, or raped half the women in the place; unfortunately, Eleanor included. That’s why most of them are terrified of him, but not Eleanor. With her, it turned into a white-hot hatred and burning desire for revenge. In the end, that might have caused her to take one risk too many. Or maybe he went after her again, I really don’t know.”

  “None of the other women have done anything about it?”

  “They’re too scared. Like Purdue and Sylvester, most of his employees are single women and they are very vulnerable. That’s who Greenway hires a
nd he pays them well. Besides, who can they can complain to? The Indian Hills Police? Chief Bentley? Or CHC corporate? Old Sal DiGrigoria? With Scalese backing Greenway up, the women put up with it and hope he picks on someone else. They learn to never go anywhere alone, especially not to his office, or they start carrying pepper spray or a box cutter in their purses.”

  “Sounds to me like you need to talk to Linda Sylvester,” Bob told him. “You said they were friends, and she might have been one of the last people to see Eleanor alive.”

  O’Malley leaned forward and looked across the desk at him. “If I go over there and try to question her or call her in front of my Grand Jury, they’ll be on her before I get out of my car. I would have to go in with badges, warrants, subpoenas, and Witness Protection, but Sylvester may not even know anything. No, that’ll only scare her off and I’ll end up with nothing.”

  “It didn’t scare Eleanor Purdue.”

  “Eleanor has no kids or family in the area, and she was out for revenge for what Greenway did to her. Sylvester’s a whole different story. She has a young daughter, and apparently, Greenway hasn’t gotten around to her yet. That makes all the difference. That’s why I need your help.”

  “My help? I’ve already told you everything I know — you, Travers and Bentley,” Bob said. “So I don’t know what else you think I can do.”

  “You can talk to Linda Sylvester. She heard what you said last night. You’re a Good Samaritan who saw something and is seeking the truth. Unless I miss my guess, that girl needs someone to talk to about now; and maybe she’ll open up to you. Perhaps you can nose around, remember a few more details than you did before, you and your finance man, Charlie Newcomb. That will rattle them a little, even if you have to make it up.”

  “Excuse me, don’t they call that perjury?”

  “It’s my ball, my court, my game, and I’m the one who makes all the calls.”

  “I don’t work that way.”

  “You will, Bob, you will; because you don’t like what happened to Eleanor Purdue any more than I do, and you are in a unique position to help me stop them.”

  “Maybe, but if they’re as dangerous as you say they are, why should I get involved?”

  “Because I can get that Department of Defense contract back for you. Guaranteed. One phone call, and I can get that Summit Symbiotics proposal tossed out and yours reinstated. But if you don’t help me, you’ll never see it again.” O’Malley leaned across the desk, his eyes cold and calculating. “I know all about your business problems, Bob. I know about the DOD contract, how you got screwed, and what’s been going on between you and that crazy wife of yours. My people have only been checking you out since last night, but in another day or two, I’ll know everything there is to know. Everything. If you help me, I can be very, very appreciative. Or, I can be your worst enemy. It’s your choice.”

  “That sounds like a threat.”

  “In Chicago? I prefer to call it reality. As I said, I’m up against some very bad people and I am asking for your help to bring them down. Besides, you don’t like them either, especially Greenway. You saw him. You know what I’m talking about, and I think you want to bring him down every bit as much as I do.”

  Bob stared at him, his eyes as cold and hard as O’Malley’s. Finally, he shrugged and said, “I’ll think about it.”

  “I thought you might. The key is Linda Sylvester. Maybe if she sees you again, that might loosen her up and get her to talk.”

  O’Malley finally stood up, put the photographs back in his briefcase, and looked down at Bob’s desk chair. “That’s comfortable; I think I should get one of those,” he said as he snapped the briefcase shut with a flourish. “Stay in touch, Mister Burke. Call me if anything comes up or you get any ideas. I have an army of people I can call in to help you, but you need to let me know. Chicago isn’t the kind of place where you want to be out there on the high wire working alone without a net.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  When O’Malley finally closed his briefcase and left, Bob Burke leaned back in his desk chair and ran his fingers through his hair, scratching an itch that refused to go away. He would rather have kept his old Army buzz-cut, but Angie pouted for at least a month, sticking out her lower lip and whining, “Bob-by, ‘Army hair’ is ugly. It makes you look like a dumb goober.” That girl knew how to pout, almost as well as she knew how to do many other things, too. Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of her personal “Project Bobby.” She dressed him in custom-made $2,000 suits, handmade $200 shirts, and $150 ties, and he became her personal Ken Doll. He hated the clothes even more than the haircut, but he was stuck wearing the business suits she bought until the day she walked out. Since then, he only wore what he wanted to wear, and the hair was next on his list.

  He met Angie when he was on leave at Hilton Head. He was a tired, burned-out grunt and she was nine years younger with no “off” button. She relit fires he forgot he had; and for the next two years, they were as hot as two teenagers on Prom night. Like a moth drawn to a flame, he couldn’t resist her or her father’s subsequent job offer, so he put in his retirement papers and never looked back.

  Ed Toler desperately needed decisive new leadership to move his company forward and found in Bob Burke exactly what he was looking for — someone who knew how to lead and who valued the company and its people as highly as he did. Angie was his only child and would inherit the business, but she was hopeless as a business manager. She liked good things and good times, but she always viewed the company as her personal cookie jar. Ed knew that as soon as he was gone she would be digging into it with both hands, and would run the company right into the ground. Bob Burke, on the other hand, hit the ground running. He learned the business from the bottom up, and provided Ed the succession he so desperately sought. Unfortunately, that put Bob and Angie on a bitter collision course from which their marriage would never survive.

  Well, it was too late for regrets, and he never fretted over things he had no control over. There were meetings he needed to schedule with key staff over the DOD contract and he needed to put in some serious face time with his accountants and lawyers. There were also two idiot congressmen with whom he needed to have some blistering phone calls. In the end, Bob realized getting screwed by the colonels at DOD was largely his own fault. Not having been forewarned by the politicos was all on them, of course; but he knew you get no more than you pay for with a congressman. Obviously, Symbiotic Software spent a lot more on them than he had.

  However, the first thing he needed to do was talk to Charlie. One of Bob’s favorite quotes was from Dirty Harry, who said, “A man’s got to know his limitations,” and Bob Burke was painfully aware of his. He was a decent manager, a people person, and a good leader. What he was not, was a finance or a numbers man, and there was no need for him to try to become one. All that was necessary was for him to know what he didn’t know, and then hire people who did. That was where Charlie Newcomb came in. He was overweight, sloppily dressed with at least one shirttail hanging out, and had more pens and pencils in his shirt pocket than an MIT electrical engineer. For the next two hours, he and Charlie remained bent over Bob’s conference table, staring at lines of red numbers. While Bob made the occasional phone call to their bankers, lawyers, and some of their larger remaining customers, Charlie continued to comb through spreadsheets as his fingers pounded his laptop’s keyboard. By 3:00 o’clock, you could see the desperation in the room running down the walls.

  “We’re toast, aren’t we?” Bob finally concluded as he let his subconscious doodle on a yellow legal pad. That was what he usually did when he was thinking; but this time, he came up with nothing, and so did the doodles.

  “Bottom line?” Charlie squinted at the machine, “By the end of this fiscal year, we need to either go out and find $1.5 million in new business… or right now, today, begin to shed $500,000 in current, hard-dollar expenses. There’s a continuum of choices in between, of course, and maybe we can get a couple of loans, b
ut those are the most workable numbers.”

  “I expected something like that.”

  Charlie nodded, finally asking him, “You sorry you got out of the Army?”

  “Every minute of every damned day,” he answered with a smile. “But no, not really. It was time. I was burned out, and I needed to get away from all that.”

  “I think I understand. Do you think there’s any hope we can get the DOD contract back?”

  “I plan to talk to them, light a fire under our congressman, yell, scream, and generally raise as much stink as I can, but I’m not optimistic. Maybe we can get a piece of the business back, or get Symbiotic to throw us a bone and subcontract some of it to us, but none of that’s gonna do very much in the long run,” Bob said with a heavy sigh. “Wait a minute, though. Aren’t we insured? What if we kill one of us? Would that help?”

  “The corporate Key Man insurance policy? Actually, I was staring at the ceiling last night and came up with the same idea,” Charlie answered. “It would only get us about halfway there, and the survivor would have to go to jail; so, no, I’m afraid we’re going to have to shed a lot of payroll and expenses, and not you or me.”

  “It isn’t the payroll shedding that bothers me. We were small and efficient before, and we can get that way again. It’s letting a lot of good people go that I hate. That’s not why I took this job. I wanted to build the business up, not tear it down.”

  “You know, it really would help if we could get Angie off the payroll.”

  “Angie?” Burke laughed.

  “Her salary and her ‘expenses’ are a big nut we’ve been carrying ever since Ed died.”

  “We’d need a hit man, and we could never afford one who was good enough.”

  “Or brave enough to try?” Charlie added, and they both began to laugh. “It would be like going after a big grizzly bear; what if he missed or only wounded her?”

  “Actually, I was thinking more like Godzilla, in the last movie.”