The Bricklayer of Albany Park

by Terry John Malik

  Morning - Wednesday, May 27

  The sedative Micah administered was effective. Francis appeared to sleep soundly for the remainder of Tuesday afternoon and into the evening. Around 10:00 p.m., I gave him three mg of lorazepam, an additional dose of prazosin, and a small dose of ketamine per Micah’s instructions. As Micah predicted, Francis slept through the night.

  I was sitting in my father’s old upholstered rocking chair at the foot of the bed when Francis opened his eyes, looked over to me, and said in a barely audible whisper, “Foster?”

  I clicked on the floor lamp next to my chair. “I’m here. How do you feel?”

  “I’m not sure. A little groggy, I guess. What time is it?”

  I checked my watch. “It’s five o’clock Wednesday morning. Do you know where you are?”

  He sat up in bed, looked around the room, and then back at me. “Yeah, you told me. I’m at your apartment. This is your bed, right?”

  “That’s right.” I prodded, “What do you remember about the last few days?”

  He ran his fingers through his hair and said, “Well, I recall Sean and Keisha putting together a team to follow a suspect . . . wait, what do you mean what I remember about the last few days?”

  “You showed up at my door around 2:00 a.m. yesterday. When we talked then, you couldn’t recall anything about the weekend. You’ve been seen by a doctor, a friend of mine who—”

  “You mean the shrink that was here . . . yesterday?”

  “A psychiatrist. Dr. Micah Feldman. He concluded, as I did, that you are experiencing short-term memory loss, a common symptom of post traumatic stress disorder.”

  “Did you tell me this before?”

  “I didn’t, but Dr. Feldman did.”

  “I don’t remember him telling me that, but, of course, I know what PTSD is. It follows a life-threatening or other type of traumatic event. What traumatic event?” Francis’s voice trailed off, as he seemed to be searching his memory.

  “The fatal shooting of Tony Protettore. The police believe that Tony was the killer the press called The Bricklayer.”

  “But I haven’t seen Tony since—” A blank stare overtook his face, and we sat in silence for a few minutes. “I didn’t think that Tony could possibly . . .” Finally, he laid down, rolled over, putting his back to me, and placed a pillow over his head. “Foster, I’m tired.”

  Without saying another word, I quietly left the room.

  Good to his word, Micah arrived at 9:00 a.m. As he removed his tan Burberry raincoat and tossed it on my couch he asked, “How did he sleep?”

  “Better than I expected.”

  “Have you spoken to him this morning?”

  “Yes, but he did not have much to say. He still has a look of distrust and fear in his eyes, and he seemed to react defensively to trivial matters, but he is far more subdued than yesterday and his hand tremors have stopped.”

  After a ninety-minute session with Francis, Micah joined me at the kitchen table for coffee. As I poured him a cup, I asked, “Well?”

  “He’s moved from agitated and anxious to feeling emotionally numb and disconnected, but I got him to talk.”

  “And the depression?”

  “There is a lot going on here, a lot that I’m unsure of.”

  Micah looked back toward the bedroom where Francis slept. “I’m confused about a couple of episodes he related to me.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  Micah gave me a disapproving look. “You know I can’t tell you anything he said to me in confidence. I want to discuss it with one of my colleagues, though.”

  Micah checked his watch, stood, and finished his coffee. “I’ve got to run. I’m going to be late for a luncheon engagement. I’ll call you this afternoon.”

  About an hour after Micah left, Francis emerged from my bedroom and announced that he was hungry. He had been nibbling at peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the last twenty-four hours, so I was encouraged by the return of his appetite. As we walked together to the kitchen in the rear of the apartment, I asked, “How did it go with Dr. Feldman?”

  He ignored the question and eased himself into the kitchen chair that faced the small window above my sink and its view of the backyard and the garage. Without turning away from the window, he said, “I don’t understand what’s happening.”

  “We eat first. Then we talk.”

  Late Night - Wednesday, May 27

  We talked well into the night. For all the years I had known Francis, and for all the secrets he had shared with me, he had never told me what he described that night, although I had always sensed that he had suffered a deep trauma that he had hidden from me. I was sure he was caught in a perpetual state of what he called “sadness,” although more than once he had rejected my belief that it was severe depression and should seek counseling. I knew of the tragic death of his mother when he was four, and, although he spoke to no one else of it, he had come to learn that the fatal car accident that took her from him was caused by his father’s drunk driving. He had finally admitted that he was trapped in an unhappy marriage born of a futile attempt by Beth to marry someone below her so-called social status solely to spite her Santa Barbara socialite mother. He had no answer for the loveless marriage. Beth found her answer in a string of affairs and cocaine. He had acknowledged that he still drank too much, but thought he hid it well. And I had known for some time of his jealousy of the growing relationship between Sean and Keisha and shared his concerns about Sean’s eagerness to tie Tony Protettore to the string of murders, claiming that Sean was looking for a scapegoat. He viewed himself as isolated and incapable of a lasting relationship. But his description of an event on a warm spring night when he was seven years old and its lifelong consequences still haunts me.

  “Tony and I were playing in the alley behind our garage—Tony was my only friend. Anyway, it was getting late. The street light in the alley had come on a half-hour earlier. That was the signal that it was time to go in. Tony tried to talk me into staying out later, and I wanted to, but I knew that I’d feel my father’s belt against my naked butt if I didn’t head in. Tony called me a baby, and I watched him run into his yard and up the gray wooden stairs into his house.

  “I closed the gate behind me and walked along the narrow sidewalk that ran next to the garage. There was only a space of twelve feet or so between our garage and our neighbor’s—it was dark and isolated there. It had rained that morning and I could still smell the odor of wet wood from the small pile of firewood that lined the side of the garage. Suddenly, my father appeared from the side door of the garage, grabbed me by the back of my neck, and pushed me against the side of the garage in the shadows. He yanked my pants down around my ankles and bent me over the pile of firewood, pushing my face hard against the brick wall of the garage.

  “And then he raped me. At the time I was too young to understand what was happening. But, I knew it hurt. It hurt a lot.”

  Francis paused, touched the side of his face, running his finger across a faint scar that suddenly became more protuberant. “When I screamed in pain, he pushed my face hard against the rough bricks and the hardened mortar that had oozed from between the bricks when first laid in place. He pushed my face so hard against the bricks that it opened a gash on my cheek. Blood trickled down to my chin.”

  Neither of us spoke for several moments.

  “When he was done, he went into the house. I slept in the garage that night on a blanket I pulled from his camping equipment. The next morning he said nothing about it or questioned where I had spent the night.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. He must have sensed my feeling of helplessness.

  “Foster, I buried that pain deep away. I have no idea how or why I remember it now, or why I told you.”

  When he finished, he simply got up from the couch, and, without saying another word, retreated to my bedroom, and closed the door.

  Morning—Thursday, May 28

  Francis was still asleep wh
en, shortly after 8:00 a.m., Eddie and Sean came by. I had provided reports on Francis’s condition to Eddie twice daily, keeping him at bay and facilitating Francis’s extended medical leave. Eddie had called ahead and asked to talk to Francis, saying that there was a development of which Francis should be informed. He also advised me that Sean had been cleared to return to limited duty pending a final written report. According to Eddie, IA’s investigation wrapped up quickly because more than a dozen witnesses in the alley that night supported Sean’s account that Tony stopped, turned toward Sean in an aggressive manner, and retrieved a gun from his jacket pocket. Curious, I agreed to the visit.

  They sat uncomfortably on my couch. I pulled up a dining room chair, placed it directly opposite them, and took a seat.

  “How is he?” Sean asked.

  I hesitated for a second and then explained his condition. I finished by saying, “I have filled most of the gaps in his memory, but not all. He doesn’t recall all the details about Tony, but I told him that Tony was the so-called Bricklayer and that—” I hesitated again and looked at Sean, “—and that he had been shot and killed.”

  Dunbar looked to Sean and then back to me. “Tommy, that’s why we’re here. There’s a strong possibility Tony wasn’t The Bricklayer.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Dunbar leaned forward. “When I saw the photos of Tony’s supposed home under the Addison ‘L’ tracks, I thought the cardboard boxes looked staged. It was all too neat. We ran prints on the bolt cutters and the tarp package—no prints.”

  “That’s to be expected.”

  “Yeah, but my gut wouldn’t let me buy it. I took a look at the bigger picture and reasoned that Tony would’ve required a van or pickup truck to transport his victims, and he’d need a very private place away from crowds where he could torture and kill his victims. I had teams of patrolmen canvass the neighborhood around Tony’s street home— about two miles in each direction—in search of an abandoned van or pickup and I had them look for a shed, garage, or abandoned building, but they couldn’t find any of those either. Besides, if he had a van or a garage, why wouldn’t he have slept there instead of on the street?”

  “Makes sense. Go on.”

  “After that search turned up nothing, we tracked down the homeless guy who had ID’d Tony for M’Bala and brought him in for additional questioning. Keisha finally got him to admit that late on the night of the shooting, a stranger wearing jeans and a gray hoodie had paid him $100 to feed us false information.”

  I threw a disapproving glance at Sean. He must have sensed my growing irritation with him.

  “What about the .38 Protettore had on him?”

  “The gun wasn’t loaded. The cylinders, filthy. The forensics guys say it hasn’t been fired in years. Besides, none of the victims had been shot, so in a way, the gun is irrelevant.” Sean continued. “Look, Foster, I realize now that I was so convinced that Protettore was The Bricklayer that I ignored Frank’s warnings about jumping to conclusions. Frank’s instincts are usually right, but there were so many little things that pointed to Protettore. I thought Frank had lost his objectivity because of their childhood friendship.”

  I looked at Eddie. “So why did Tony stop running and confront Sean in the alley with a gun he knew couldn’t fire a single shot?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps suicide by cop? Frank told Sean that Tony’s life had turned into a damn mess. Maybe he thought he had no future or maybe he couldn’t tolerate the thought of going to jail.”

  Sean was still trying to justify his suspicions about Tony. “I’m not sure whether Frank ever told you, but when he moved back into his father’s house, he discovered that a squatter had broken into the house and made himself at home. I was convinced the squatter was Protettore and was hiding out there between kills—the pieces fit. It all made sense at the time.”

  “Francis never mentioned anything about a squatter.”

  “We still can’t completely rule out that Tony was The Bricklayer,” Dunbar observed. “But it seems to me that the question for now is: who’s the guy in the gray hoodie, who, three hours after Tony was killed, showed up and gave an old wino a hundred bucks to try to convince us of what we already believed, namely, that Tony was The Bricklayer?”

  “Where does that leave your investigation?”

  “For now, we’re still taking a hard look at Protettore. The homeless guy’s lie doesn’t completely exonerate him, but we will shift our focus slightly and take a look at other possibilities. To start with, we need to re-canvass the area around Wrigley to track down the guy in the hoodie.”

  “But, you really don’t have any other suspects, do you Eddie?”

  Eddie paused and looked over to Sean. “There’s one other possibility—the tech from the M.E.’s office, a guy named Allison. He had made a big deal out of the Anderson murder, asked a lot of questions, and threatened Frank and me. Out of the blue, he showed up at the morgue yesterday demanding to see Tony’s body, but security wasn’t able to detain him.”

  Eddie got up to leave. Sean looked over to me. “How will Frank take the news?”

  I stood, looked over to Eddie and then back to Sean. “Perhaps relieved that Tony may have been innocent after all. I’m not sure. There’s no telling how he’ll react or what he might do.”

  After they left, I thought, Damn! How the hell did I miss all that? Did I just want the case to be closed to give Francis some modicum of peace no matter how short-lived? Was my judgment impaired by my fondness for Francis? A loss of objectivity—a detective’s worst enemy. Or, was I just getting old?

  Afternoon—Thursday, May 28

  Francis woke shortly after Eddie and Sean left. His agitation had returned, and he was short-tempered. “Did you take the medication I laid out for you?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah. I’m only taking it because you told me to.”

  As I prepared breakfast, we exchanged terse small talk. While we ate, I avoided conversation about the events of the past few days; instead, I tested his memory by invoking recollections of his years as a student. Those memories remained. His amnesia seemed to be limited to the events of the past week or so.

  As he rinsed off his plate, he asked, “Dunbar and Sean were here this morning, weren’t they?”

  “Yes, they were here. They wanted to talk to you. I said no.”

  Placing his plate and silverware in the dishwasher, he added, “Good. I’m glad you didn’t come get me. I’m not ready to see Sean yet.”

  I sat at the kitchen table. Without getting up, I turned to Francis and said, “Pour yourself another cup of coffee and come sit down.”

  He did as I asked, and as he studied the cup of coffee on the table in front of him, he asked, “They had news?”

  “They now believe Tony wasn’t The Bricklayer.”

  I spent the next few minutes repeating the explanation that Eddie and Sean had provided. Francis sat silent and motionless for a moment after I finished and then, with a blank expression on his face, he looked over my left shoulder at the small basement window. “I said all along it couldn’t be Tony, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  Francis looked agitated and stood abruptly, pushing his chair to the side. “I’ve been thinking about it. It’s all coming back to me. Clear images are returning. I’ve figured it out and need to get back on the street. I have a hunch I know how to find this guy. Can you get me my clothes?”

  “No. You’re in no condition to hit the streets again—hunch or no hunch.”

  He finished his coffee in one large gulp. Walking away toward the bedroom, he said, “You’re wrong this time, Foster. I can handle this. It’s all coming into focus now. You’ve gotta help me.”

  I called after him. “Look, take some time to think it through. If in a couple of hours you still want to act on your hunch, I’ll go with you.”

  He came to a sudden halt, paused as if he was considering my admonition, and turned back to me. “OK. But only because it’s y
ou. Only because you’re asking.”

  I trusted Francis. He’d think it through like I asked. He wouldn’t be happy about it, but I knew he’d map out his plan and if he found fault with it, he’d reconsider. I had taught him the folly of impulsive behavior.

  Only minutes after Francis disappeared into my bedroom, Sean called. His tone telegraphed that he was still upset about his missteps regarding Protettore, but I immediately deflected his concern.

  “I think we found the killer’s vehicle. You need to see it.”

  “Where?”

  “O’Hare.”

  “No, I mean where is it now?”

  “Central auto pound on Lower Wacker. I’m there now.” Sean hurried an explanation that the vehicle had been found at O’Hare in one of the long-term parking lots. Judging by where it was parked, it had been there since the night of the shooting. It was a fifteen-year-old Toyota Tacoma pickup truck with a small homemade fiberglass camper top added to it. It had been set afire after the license plates had been removed and stripped of everything of value. The Chicago Fire Department had extinguished the fire before it consumed the vehicle; and it was subsequently towed to the city’s auto pound.

  “What causes you to believe that it’s the killer’s vehicle?”

  “When the pound’s civilian employees took custody of the truck, they inspected the interior of the camper. It wasn’t badly damaged by the fire, and even though it’s covered with a thin layer of soot, the supervisor recognized graffiti on the walls as relevant to our case. Foster, you need to get down here and see it for yourself.”

  “Wait a second.” I checked on Francis. He seemed to have fallen asleep in my father’s chair. I looked over to where I had laid out his medication and a glass of water. The pills were gone, the glass empty. Good. I’d rather he’d sleep on his idea of charging out and following his so-called hunch. “I can’t leave Francis alone.”

  “I thought of that. Keisha and Alvarez are on their way to your place. She can babysit Frank for a little while and Alvarez can drive you back here.”