SOME DEAD GENIUS

by LENNY KLEINFELD

  “We’re okay.”

  “Heh. So Dalie-boy, who we do next? Gimme a name.”

  “What?!”

  “I figure this time, first we buy three, four pictures, so we make some real—”

  “Fuck no, no, Tommy, I ca—”

  “Fuck yes, this is a good thing. Just settle the fuck down, think—”

  “No! No fucking way. God! I’m sorry. No.” Dale pulled out the twelve hundred, and his envelope containing the six thou, and thrust them at Tesca.

  Tesca sighed and slammed a brick-sized fist into his new business partner’s stomach.

  Dale folded up. Began making gurgling noises.

  Tesca reached across him and opened the passenger-side door.

  “Lean out—you puke in my car, I’m gonna hurt ya.”

  Dale did as instructed, half-fell out of the car and deposited his authentic neighborhood dinner and surprisingly good Amarone on the pavement.

  “Jesus fuck, Dale, whole life I been fuckin’ guys up to make ’em gimme money. You’re the first I hadda hit to get you to take money. Here, rinse.” Tesca handed Dale a bottle of water. “After every score you gonna make me smack you around before you take your cut?”

  Dale shook his head. Carefully. Didn’t want to spew on the dashboard and find out what Tesca meant by hurt ya.

  Not an issue. Tesca was back in ebullient entrepreneur mode as he drove Dale home.

  “So okay, you make a list of which three-four these spazz Michelangelos would see the biggest price bump after the funeral. And no thinkin’ small, heh—I’m gonna kick in seventy-five, a hundred grand. Remember, ten percent of what we clear is yours.”

  • • •

  They pulled up across from Soosie’s posh Gold Coast tower. Tesca gave Dale a shrewd glance. “You live better’n most homeless guys.”

  “Just crashing with a friend.”

  “Friend friend, or a broad?”

  Dale shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “Heh! So that’s how you dug up six grand. Old-fashioned way, with the meat shovel.” An approving wink. “You got hidden chops, my friend.” Tesca’s grin turned cold. “Me too. Tommy Tesca reads minds. Right now you’re thinking you run, get far away as that cash in your pocket will go. Mistake. I’d find you. You know that, right?”

  Dale nodded.

  “Good. And you’re also thinkin’, maybe you go to the cops, tell ’em the whole thing, heh, you didn’t do any crime here, it was all Tesca. Very bad idea. Cops can’t prove who clipped that girl. But say somehow they do get lucky and they nail Tesca? Tesca’s gonna tell ’em this kill-the-artist idea was all Dale Phipps—like some goombah would think to game the art market? Tell ’em how Phipps dimed this Desh bitch then pocketed his cut… But either way, me in jail or not, you in jail or not, this would happen: Someone would stomp your head flat.” A glance at Soosie’s building. “Hers too, just for fun. So, okay?”

  Dale managed a soft affirmative grunt.

  “Awright. Hey—c’mahhhn. We, my friend, have invented a great business.”

  Eleven | 2012

  Doonie scrutinized the JaneDoe Barbie. “You recognized her from this?”

  “Same hair and eyes, same jacket, she and Gilson are both artists. Seemed worth a shot.”

  “Why’d you go over there without me, steada waiting till this morning?”

  “Night owl, best time to catch her.”

  “How’d it go?” Doonie asked, hoping for the best.

  Mark pretended Doonie was asking about the case. “Same as everybody else—said Gilson had no enemies.”

  “Janvier have an alibi?”

  “JaneDoe—she’s now JaneDoe, all one word.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s an artist.”

  “How’s she lookin’?”

  “Old and ugly. Didn’t have an alibi—but also no motive.”

  “She still dealing?”

  “Says that’s histo—”

  “Hey,” Doonie scowled, pointing to the tiny inscription he’d found on the doll’s backside.

  Well, shit, that didn’t take long. Mark handed the magnifier to Doon.

  Doonie read the replicated tat. Held up the JaneDoe Barbie, pointed her butt at Mark, and with a hint of anticipatory relish, inquired, “You make a positive ID?”

  After a moment Mark replied, “I won’t conduct any more solo interviews with that witness.”

  “Not until we close this thing, so we gotta move fast.” Doonie grinned hungrily, a man on a mission to protect his vicarious sex life. “We bust our humps we make an arrest in forty-eight hours.”

  • • •

  Two days later they were in Lieutenant Husak’s office delivering the daily no-progress report.

  “Re-interviewed Helen Gilson, twice. Tossed the house, her permission. Nothin’,” Doonie groused.

  “You really think Mrs. I Only Stabbed Him Once Gently had no problem with hubbie screwing sixteen live Barbies, and playing with dirty dolls?” Husak wondered. “Having him whacked and the Ken shoved in his mouth seems a wife kind of message.”

  “If she hired the hit she did it telepathically,” Mark said. “We just don’t like her.”

  “We don’t like anybody,” Doonie admitted.

  “This morning’s the funeral,” Mark said. “We’re gonna go stare at people.”

  Maybe they’d get lucky. Some hinky dude would snicker during the eulogy, then piss on the grave.

  • • •

  Bob Gilson had taken a piss on religion, but his infirm eighty-eighty-year old father wanted a funeral mass for his son, and Helen Gilson was as obliging a daughter-in-law as she was a wife. She booked her husband’s final personal appearance at Holy Name, Chicago’s toniest cathedral. Bobby was a devout atheist but Helen knew he’d’ve been willing to do this for his dad.

  • • •

  Doonie eyeballed arriving mourners on the sidewalk outside, while Mark slipped inside and studied them from the gallery during the service.

  Nothing. No secret gloating grins. No vengeful glares.

  Only guy interrupting the eulogy was a sobbing eighty-eight-year-old in a wheelchair.

  The cops tailed the cortege to the cemetery, got out and observed from a respectful distance.

  Doonie perused the six Barbies who’d attended the mass and were now arrayed by the grave. “You weren’t shitting me, all six of Gilson’s Barbie boinks went up to the widow in church and kissed her?”

  “Takes a village to raise a child, takes a harem to bury an artist.”

  “Tall, long black hair,” Doonie, said, indicating the most striking Barbie; four years back Doonie had spoken to then-Janvier on the phone a few times, but they’d never met. “That must be her.”

  “Yes it must.”

  JaneDoe felt eyes on her, looked up. Spotted Mark. She was wearing shades, he couldn’t see her eyes. But her lips eased into a serene hint of amusement. He knew why.

  • • •

  The other night Mark had gotten out of JaneDoe’s bed at 4 A.M. and started pulling his clothes on, saying, “Listen, ah… Sorry.”

  JaneDoe shrugged. “You have to get home to change clothes.”

  “Not apologizing for not staying the night. Apologizing for staying at all.”

  JaneDoe raised an eyebrow.

  Mark explained, “Now I have to recuse myself from the case. Or hide this from my boss.”

  “Fine by me either way,” JaneDoe said.

  “And, either way… Can’t see you again, in private, until the case is cleared.”

  “That part, what’s the word, sucks.”

  “Lots. And it’d be best, for both of us, if you don’t tell anyone about this—friends or police. With the cops, never lie, just don’t volunteer. But if they do ask, always be completely straight with them.”

  JaneDoe broke into a teasing sing-song chant: “Marky fucked a sus-pect, Marky fucked a sus-pect.”

  “You’re not a suspect. Still, Marky is having no luck finding
a way to apologize for being stupid enough to sleep with you, without having that sound like an insult.”

  JaneDoe sighed, got out of bed and gave Mark a good kiss. Prophesied, “Someday you’re gonna stop thinking your job is more fun than I am.”

  • • •

  Now Mark was standing in yet another cemetery for yet another stranger’s funeral and thinking, maybe JaneDoe had a point—shit—Laurie Desh. He’d been too busy to pull the Desh file, then it slipped his mind. Might as well take a look. Desh’s alibi for the Gilson murder was that she’d been dead seven years, but maybe she’d have something interesting to say.

  Twelve | 2012

  Mark got on it soon as they got back to the office after the funeral.

  The Desh and Gilson cases did share similarities. Both vics were painters. Murdered at home, died from neck wounds. In both cases the cops had fuck-all to show for their efforts.

  The big difference: Mark and Doonie made an effort. The detectives who caught the Desh case had waved at it as if it were a passing train, then filed a report on the noise it made as it went by.

  Desh’s apartment had been robbed, half-heartedly; a piece of lazy theater the investigating officers chose to believe. The half-assed Homicide detectives emailed a memo to Robbery asking them to drop a line if they ever busted a burglar with a garrote in his pocket. Declared their work done.

  There was one Desh acquaintance who had a glimmer of a motive; an art dealer who’d gone bust after Desh hit it big and took her business elsewhere. But he had an alibi. And he was bankrupt, so the cops assumed he couldn’t afford to buy a hit.

  “Not that they bothered to run his financials,” Mark informed Doonie. “If they did they didn’t mention it—these two weren’t into cluttering reports with facts. Or words.”

  “Who were these guys?”

  “Vassily Winokurov and Philip Ada—”

  “Adams!” Doonie chuckled. “Phil and VW got away with more murder than they solved. Phil’s got a Chinaman at the Hall, and his Lieutenant at the time—um, Terry Schmidtlander—Schmidtlander was smarter than to fuck with Phil Adams over small stuff like working a case the right way.”

  “How the hell big is Adams’ Chinaman?”

  “Cousin Eddie.”

  “Fuck,” Mark commented, impressed.

  Cousin Eddie Strick was a Fifth-Floor guy; desk on the same floor as the Mayor. Officially Eddie was something like third assistant sub-mayor. What mattered was Eddie was the Mayor’s third cousin and go-to guy for making things happen, and not happen, and un-happen, in untraceable ways.

  “Adams still on the job?” Mark asked. “I wanna talk to him, find out what isn’t in the file.”

  “Waste of time. Sensitive type, ain’t much for criticism.”

  “So we go at Winokurov.”

  “Nope. Big-time steroid-sucker. Cartoon muscles, cartoon brain, perfect partner for Phil. Until a stroke turned him into asparagus.”

  “So we go see the art dealer. Dale Phipps. I got his current address.”

  “Course you do,” Doonie groused. The big man hauled himself to his feet. “After this wild goose shit, we’re stopping for a Jack and you’re picking up the first three rounds.”

  “Doonie, Bergman!” Husak barked, erupting from his office. “We got another dead artist. Area Four, but you get over there.”

  Thirteen | 2005

  “Richard Struger.”

  “Why?”

  “He lives in Milwaukee.”

  “That’s his big appeal? I gotta drive ninety miles to pop him?”

  “Yes. Tommy, Laurie Desh gets killed, it’s a random act. But if another Chicago artist gets killed, the cops will see a pattern.”

  “Heh.”

  “And Tommy—can you, can this one look like an accident?”

  “Trickier. And more expensive.”

  “Worth it.”

  “Why not stick with another fucked-up break-in robbery, like Desh? Sad shit, happens alla time.”

  “If two artists get murdered the same way, only ninety miles apart, it still looks like a pattern. But if it’s not a murder… Much safer.”

  “Heh. Dalie-boy, you got a brain when you put your mind to it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And we buy the paintings under your name. That’s safer, too.”

  • • •

  Richard Struger liked to ride his mountain bike, alone, through a rural county northwest of Milwaukee. Had a regular route.

  Late one afternoon Struger apparently took a spill while peddling over a railroad crossing on a remote country lane. May have hit his head on the rail. Wasn’t enough skull left to be certain.

  It was dusk when the freight train barreled through. By the time the engineer saw the cyclist splayed across the tracks it was too late for anything but a quick curse and sensible braking. Derailing wouldn’t have improved the poor bastard’s chances.

  The condition of the body parts suggested—the M.E. couldn’t say for sure—Struger might have died a few hours before the train went through. Taking a hard fall and smacking his skull on a steel rail, or breaking his neck, could easily have done it.

  The coroner’s call was accidental death, probably caused by Struger falling off his bike. That ruling comforted his family; it was a mercy, having official sanction for the probability Struger had checked out before the train disassembled him.

  Also comforted the railroad. No grounds for a suit.

  • • •

  For Dale Phipps the coroner’s verdict on Struger was comforting, and profitable and tormenting.

  Tommy Tesca had come up with the hundred grand.

  Dale acquired three Struger paintings, in three cities. On behalf of an anonymous client. A common practice.

  Four months after the final purchase Tesca visited Struger. With hands-on help from Dale Phipps.

  Part of Dale was sickened by collaborating in a murder. A larger part of Dale was sickened by the possibility of getting caught. He hadn’t liked Tommy’s plan, which was to stage a hit-and-run accident while Struger was riding his bike.

  The loan shark had a business to run, so the unemployed art dealer went to Wisconsin and followed the target around. Came up with a better plan. Checked train schedules. Picked the spot.

  And was there when Tesca killed Richard Struger, because moving and placing the body was a two-man job.

  The next day the newbie murderer considered suicide. Settled for morose lethargy, punctuated by random vomiting. Tufts of hair began deserting Dale’s scalp, unprodded by any comb.

  Soosie noticed Dale seemed a little down and whisked him off to Salt Cay.

  Caribbean luxury did lighten Dale’s mood. But not his skin. It got sun-burned. It blistered. The blisters left red blotches, which, despite determined efforts by multiple dermatologists, never went away.

  • • •

  Over the next six months Dale sold the Strugers. San Francisco, Miami, Berlin. Net profit, ninety-four grand.

  Tommy Tesca announced he’d double down, spend two, three hundred thousand on the next project. Make some real money.

  Dale Phipps said that given the amount of work he was doing, including murder-planning and corpse-wrangling, they should split the profits 50-50.

  Tesca glowered but Dale didn’t melt.

  They settled on 60-40.

  Dale dove into research on artists who lived outside Chicago, and were old enough so that death might seem natural.

  Dale dove even further into research on offshore corporations and accounts. No way he’d ever again put his name on a transaction. Or use a bank whose records the cops could get a peek at.

  He developed gum disease.

  Fourteen | 2012

  When Mark and Doonie arrived there was a small crowd of camera jackals and gawkers outside the crime scene, a modern townhouse in Wicker Park. Word had gotten out Gerd Voorsts had been murdered; this being the second killing of a major artist in a little over a week, the social and news media had
leapt into serial killer heat.

  One look at the corpse and Mark and Doonie took that same leap.

  The murder weapon was different; this vic had been treated to a bullet through the temple. But the toy in his mouth was a persuasive bit of stylistic consistency. It was a Yellow Submarine dildo. Beatles peering out the portholes.

  • • •

  Wendy Hsu and Jim Montero, the Area Four detectives who’d caught the case, ran the details. TOD was about 11 P.M. last night. Ligatures indicated Voorsts had been handcuffed. Shooter marched him down to the basement guest suite and put him where he was found, fully clothed, in a bathtub. The small entry wound and lack of an exit wound, plus the basement bathroom location, said the weapon was a .22; turn on the exhaust fan, flush the toilet, pull the trigger and the pop wouldn’t play louder than a percussive fart.

  Voorsts was fifty-seven, Dutch national, here on a work visa. The body was found this afternoon by the vic’s boyfriend, Hal Taylor, twenty-nine, who was returning from kayaking the Grand Canyon.

  According to Taylor, Voorsts had no enemies, stalkers, threats, debts or batshit ex-boyfriends.

  And no Yellow Submarine. Had to be something the killer brought with him. Which gave the cops a lead to run down. Couldn’t be that many places you could buy that dildo.

  • • •

  Hal Taylor was in the kitchen, drinking chamomile tea and eyeing his constantly vibrating cell. He turned the phone off. If he returned even one of the calls or texts that were flooding in, he’d lose it. He was determined to keep his shit together in front of the cops. Partly because that’s what the street taught him growing up black on the south side. Partly because he wasn’t about to play the weepy gay. Mainly because that’s how Gerd would handle it.

  “Mr. Taylor?”

  Two plainclothes cops. Big, disheveled, paunchy but powerful middle-aged Irish polar bear. And a thirtysomething dude with a lanky gunslinger thing going on, and a scary-smart face, starting with striking gray eyes.

  Taylor stood to shake their hands—Ants! Or was he just imagining—