Political Poison

by Mark Richard Zubro

  “You sure?” Turner asked.

  “Sort of.” The guy shrugged.

  Turner paused at the bottom of the steps and gazed up. Fenwick ran in. “I stopped to call back.” He gasped, drew ragged breaths, put one hand out to lean against a wall.

  Turner explained what the witness had said. They agreed that Turner would explore the tower while Fenwick would stay at ground level in case Ricken slipped by him.

  Turner drew his gun and proceeded cautiously up the steps. He paused at each landing, listened intently, then inched an eye around the corner to look. The second floor of the tower contained several businesses, all with darkened interiors. At the third landing he heard a floorboard creak. He couldn’t tell if it was himself, the building being old, or the man he was pursuing. He listened for several heartbeats before rounding the corners, but each time he found nothing. As he ascended, he tried every door, but none of them gave way to his twisting of the knobs and pushing at the wood. He crept all the way to the top, checking every crevice and doorway. The last turn led him to a flight of steps that ended in a platform landing. Almost on hands and knees he eased his way from step to step. From what he could see before he began his climb, the room must be an observation deck. He sensed no one else’s presence. His wider view of the room as he ascended the stairs confirmed the feeling. At the top step he made sure to check for any corners, doors, or hiding places before stepping into the room. Nothing. He looked out the windows. No way down except jumping. He saw Fenwick in the street below directing several uniformed cops.

  Turner put his gun back under his coat and hurried down the stairs.

  On the first floor he thought of bellowing a few chosen words at the guy in the deli, then forgot about it. Wouldn’t do any good. He strode toward the entrance.

  Fenwick was just opening the door, when a figure darted out of the shadows on Turner’s left. Turner shouted. It was Ricken. The man ran straight toward Fenwick.

  “Grab him!” Turner yelled.

  Fenwick put up a hand as if he were halting traffic. Ricken plowed into him. Fenwick bellowed as he fell, grasping his wrist in pain and kicking out. Turner couldn’t tell if this last was a reflex or deliberately planned. Whichever it was meant to be, it had the desired effect. Ricken got caught up in Fenwick’s legs and fell to the ground.

  Turner rushed over, whipped out a pair of handcuffs, and snapped them on a thrashing Ricken.

  Fenwick held his wrist and mixed curses at Ricken with grumbling moans. Finally he bellowed, “If this is broken, you dumb shit, I will personally bust your face off!”

  Ricken hunched his shoulders and tried to squirm away from the angry cop. Moments later the backup cops flooded into the station. Turner leaned against a pillar and watched them go through the dizzy dance of overresponse, telling each other everything was fine, staring at the prisoner, and talking to Fenwick and Turner.

  Fenwick bent his hand back and forth. He said, “I think it’s okay.” He pointed a thumb at Ricken and said, “It’d feel a lot better if I could knock the shit out of that creep.”

  “I don’t want to lose a bust because we’re angry at him,” Turner said reasonably. They taught cops to follow procedure. Sometimes it took years of going to court and realizing what judges threw out, to learn how to get a bust as close to perfect as possible. Some of the less-bright ones never learned. They might arrest a lot of people, but their conviction rates were horrible. Turner and Fenwick’s record was excellent, but at times they had to help each other remember to stay calm, although Turner was called upon to perform this service more often than Fenwick. Buck’s temper could be frightening.

  “If you’re okay, let’s talk to him,” Turner said.

  Most of the tenants of the complex had come out to witness the police presence. The manager of the building told them they could use his office if they needed it. They sat Ricken in a wingback chair in a tiny room on the first floor. Turner stood at the window, the light behind his back, and Fenwick nursed his wrist while he sat on a diminutive couch next to the door.

  “Why’d you run?” Turner asked.

  “Am I accused of a crime?” Ricken asked.

  “That attitude could get your face busted up and a trip to jail,” Fenwick informed him.

  “You wouldn’t have caught me if I’d been able to find a back way out of this place,” Ricken said.

  “Taking off like that could still get you a couple years in prison,” Fenwick said.

  Ricken squirmed in his chair. “Do I have to have these cuffs on?” he asked.

  “Be happy you aren’t already in a holding cell,” Fenwick said.

  “I didn’t kill Gideon Giles,” Ricken said.

  “What were you doing in the office yesterday?” Turner asked.

  “I went to clean out my files.”

  “You were told to stay away,” Turner said.

  “I knew they’d all be at the press conference. I still had my key. I wanted to get my stuff without a hassle.”

  “Why’d you leave before we could question you? Why’d you run today?”

  Ricken thought for several minutes before answering. He said, “I knew you’d find out I’d quarreled with Giles and the stuff. I wanted to be ready for any questions. I didn’t want to deal with the police. I was scared. I didn’t think straight. I don’t know. I’m not sure. I’ve never dealt with the police before.”

  “What’d you fight with Giles and the staff about?” Turner asked.

  First Ricken gave them a history of his work with the alderman and the rest of the staff. Turner could see Fenwick’s impatience, but they had Ricken talking. He wasn’t demanding to see a lawyer. They hadn’t read him his rights, because they hadn’t charged him with a crime.

  Ricken told them he started working for Giles in the alderman’s first primary campaign many years ago. In college he’d majored in political science at the University of Illinois, Chicago. As an adult he’d wanted to be politically active. From the beginning, he and Giles hit it off. The staff for the first primary fight had been idealistic and dreamy-eyed. They’d lost, but four years later, the knowledge they’d gained paid off and they won. Giles hired Ricken as campaign manager just after the first unsuccessful primary fight.

  “We always had a split in the office, between those of us who wanted to be realistic, get elected, be effective in the council, and those who wanted to put all the causes above everything else. The philosophically rigid and politically correct crowd usually had Gideon’s ear, but the rest of us got through to him often enough to get him elected. Sometimes I thought Gideon actually believed in the causes, other times, who knows? I believed in him implicitly when I started. After ten years I began to have doubts. I expressed them. The true believers didn’t like it. They capitalized on the ill feelings built up between the two factions to squeeze me further and further out of the mainstream. I thought I was the realist about office politics and internal bickering, but those do-gooders managed a vicious campaign.”

  “Anybody with specific grudges against Giles?” Turner asked.

  “Not really. Most people liked him. He could be very charming.”

  Turner decided to go with a hunch. “You ran today because you’ve had trouble with the police before,” Turner said.

  Ricken stared at him, turned his face away to look out the window at the traffic on Dearborn Street.

  “I like it that you’re an ex-con,” Fenwick said. “You may not want to tell us, but it will only take a couple seconds back at the station, but I’d especially like it if you tried to run again.”

  At the station they tried questioning him some more, but they got nowhere, and after a while Ricken started demanding to speak to a lawyer. Turner was for letting him go. “We don’t really have anything on him,” he said.

  “What if he triest to run again? He did once,” Fenwick said.

  “Right now, let’s let him go,” Turner said. “We can have him followed. This case is big enough that we’ve got plenty of me
n assigned to it. I think it’ll be interesting finding out where he goes.”

  Fenwick grumbled a bit more, but Turner convinced him. The minute after Ricken left, before he was out of sight, they had a tail on him.

  They decided to try the neighbors of Laura and Gideon Giles. They lived in the middle of the block on Kenwood Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth.

  Fenwick parked the car in the driveway of the Giles’s home. It was one of the few in the neighborhood with a driveway. They started with the house to the immediate north of the Giles’s. A woman in a beige Christian Dior suit offered them tea, but knew little of the Giles. She said, “I don’t get involved with University people.” Turner thought she might have been referring as easily to cockroaches as to university professors.

  To the south a woman in jeans and SAVE THE WHALES t-shirt welcomed them enthusiastically. She offered tea and gossip. About the woman in the Christian Dior outfit, she said, “Don’t mind Sophie. She’s had her nose in the clouds since her husband inherited half of some oil company. She’s originally from some lower-class suburb. Got snubbed by University people long ago. Refuses to move, so she can be nasty to them. Nobody pays attention to her.”

  They sat in a room with polished wood floors and all solid teak furniture covered with an enormous variety of multicolored pillows. In contrast the walls were stark white and unadorned.

  The woman’s name was Dorinda Matthews. She brought out plates of cookies. Turner munched contentedly. They’d found the community gossip, generally one of the greatest sources for information.

  Dorinda spoke with very little prodding. “I thought the police would be around. That Gideon Giles was a lunatic. Supporting all the fringe causes. We’ve got enough things in this neighborhood to fight for without worrying about obscure animals in the Yukon. Tenants rights, the homeless in the less well-off parts of the ward. Giles would be off after international politics. I mean we all care about human rights everywhere, but it starts at home. Don’t you think?”

  Turner let her ramble for several minutes then asked, “How did Mr. and Mrs. Giles strike you as a couple?”

  “On the scale of one to ten of happily married, ten being wedded bliss, I’d have to give them a nine.”

  “No fights,” Turner asked.

  “Not while I was around and I’m here fairly often. I like to know my neighbors, and Laura and Gideon weren’t too friendly. At first I thought it was because they had something to hide. Brought her an apple pie the first day. You’d of thought I was offering raw worms. I let them be. Only thing to mention was occasional late parties. Fund-raisers for some cause. You’d think they’d have invited the neighbors, but they didn’t. No children, but this isn’t the best kid neighborhood in the city.”

  In essence her information was that the Giles were a loving and devoted couple who as far as Dorinda knew rarely had fights.

  Turner asked if the Giles’s got along with the rest of the neighbors.

  Dorinda said, “I think it was mostly like with me, not too close. They had their causes. This isn’t a close-knit neighborhood, although a couple years ago they had a problem with Bruno Phelps, who lives across the alley from them.”

  “What was that about?” Turner asked.

  “Trash cans. Somebody stole Bruno’s. Never did find them. Accused Giles for some reason. Then when Giles became alderman, Bruno took every chance he got to say what a crook Giles was.”

  Next they tried the houses across the street. They got the same story about the Giles’s aloofness from these neighbors but little more.

  Bruno Phelps turned out to be an enormous man in his late seventies. He answered their knock and invited them in. Bruno spared little time explaining his dispute with Giles.

  “I’m sure he had something to do with taking the trash cans. They’d just moved into the neighborhood. Snooty as all hell. Tried to get them in the neighborhood watch program. Wouldn’t give a minute’s time. Not interested in helping the guy next door. Don’t like those kind of people.”

  Bruno had been on his fourth set of new trash cans, which he’d had to buy himself, when they were stolen again. “Giles didn’t even care. Practically slammed his door in my face. Told me to get a life. I’m sure he had something to do with it.” Bruno spent fifteen more minutes adding illogic to silliness about the trash cans. Obviously the incident had been one of the seminal experiences of his retired life. He’d been a low-level administrator at the University for forty-two years before he retired ten years ago. He knew nothing of its current politics.

  “Crazy old guy,” Fenwick said as they left.

  Turner looked at his list of people left to interview and sighed. “It’s going to take forever,” he said. “I wish that secretary Gwendolen was back in town.” They’d found out yesterday that the secretary was on a European tour and wouldn’t be back for several days. Turner wondered if the killer knew that and somehow took advantage of it.

  They drove back to Area Ten headquarters. Turner had to be in court and Fenwick agreed to make some background phone calls and computer checks on the people they’d talked to. Turner thumbed through his messages. A number to call that he didn’t recognize and a message with it that said “urgent.” He tried the number and got a busy signal. At Twenty-sixth and California, he listened to the testimony of the medical examiner. The case involved a drive-by shooting witnessed by eleven people, five of whom had the presence of mind to write down the license number of the car that the shots burst from. The shooters had the ill luck or stupidity to drive around in the car for the next few hours. Turner and Fenwick had caught up with them at State and Congress Parkway when the beat cop reported the car double-parked outside the Burger King. The case was simple enough, but he had to testify.

  During a break in the court proceedings he called Fenwick, but other than the delivery of all the papers from Giles’s office nothing new had happened. Fenwick had three cops checking through the papers. He didn’t hold out much hope for finding anything useful in them.

  Turner tried the urgent message number again. He was almost ready to hang up, but on the seventh ring, an out-of-breath person answered. Turner didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the phone. He identified himself.

  “This is Clark Burke. I’ve got to see you.” The university student sounded out of breath and worried.

  After being sure the kid wasn’t in immediate danger, Turner agreed to meet him at Ann Sather’s Restaurant in Hyde Park, near the University. Turner testified for half an hour, called into the station, and drove to meet Burke.

  He parked across the street from the restaurant on Fifty-seventh street and got out of the car. He saw Burke standing outside the front door of the restaurant. The kid wore a black leather jacket, faded jeans at least a size too small, and white running shoes. Pale spring sunlight peaked through gray clouds and glinted off the gold rims of Burke’s glasses. Burke caught sight of the cop, gave Turner a beatific smile, quickly replaced by a nervous frown.

  They sat in a booth next to the windows on the east side of the restaurant. Burke took off his black leather jacket to reveal a skintight t-shirt that showed off a slender, muscular frame.

  I’m being seduced, Turner guessed. The first thought that crossed his mind was a cop’s suspicious why, the second a tingle of flattery, and the last the memory that he had a son only a couple years younger than Burke.

  Turner ordered coffee and a cinnamon roll, Burke a vegetable platter.

  “You sounded pretty worried on the phone,” Turner said.

  “I was out of breath because I was talking to some guys in a room down the hall, and I had to run to catch the phone. I’m afraid to go to my room.”

  Turner raised an eyebrow. Burke’s gray eyes followed the older man’s continuously, maybe looking for approval, Turner thought, maybe reassurance.

  Burke explained, “I got back to my room from class at noon. Somebody trashed the place.”

  “Did you call security?”


  Burke shook his head. “I found this on the floor.” He held out a three-by-five card.

  Turner held it by the edges. The note threatened Burke by name with bodily harm, giving details of the pain that would be inflicted. Burke stared out the window. Turner glanced back at the note. The writer accused Burke of being a faggot and said he’d get the same treatment as Gideon Giles, saying that all left-wing intellectuals, faggots, feminists, and liberals had better beware.

  Turner layed the note carefully on a napkin. All fingerprints of value had probably been long since destroyed, but he’d have it checked anyway.

  Burke sat erect with his arms resting on the table. “I’m scared,” he said. “I thought it would be better, coming to the city and being gay. That I’d left all that prejudice shit back in Chatsworth, Iowa.”

  “The University’s had some trouble in the past few years with attacks against gays,” Turner said. “This could simply be part of that.”

  Burke pointed to the card. “It mentions the murder.”

  “It could be part of that, or it could be a nut case trying to frighten people.” Turner sighed. “Who has access to the dorm rooms?”

  “We’ve got sort of security. Somebody down at a front desk. You can’t get upstairs unless they know you or you’ve got some identification.”

  “So somebody living at the dorm did this?”

  “Probably, but it’s not that hard to get in without being noticed. Not if you’re determined.”

  Their food arrived. Turner sipped at the coffee, Burke left his vegetables untouched. “They trashed my room. They busted my computer.” Burke had tears in his eyes. “My parents spent a lot of money getting me one. They had to do without a lot, but they wanted me to have the best.”

  “I’m sorry about your computer. I’ll have a look at your room. We’ll also call university security. Did you have a roommate?”

  “He dropped out last month.”

  “Any problems with him?”

  “We were friends. He just couldn’t hack the work.” Burke picked at his food for several minutes. Turner ate some of his roll and waited for the kid to talk.