The cops sat quietly.
“You know, when we’d make out. I knew.”
“We found several sex toys in his room,” Fenwick said. He listed them.
She gaped at him.
“He ever show them to you?”
“I’ve never…. Jake? I don’t believe it. He wasn’t that kind of guy.”
They let the ensuing silence build for half a minute, then Turner asked, “Anything unusual about him at all?”
“He was just an all-around good guy.”
They let her go a few minutes later. “I’m going to get real tired of this real quick,” Fenwick said. “Saints don’t get murdered.”
Douglas’s girlfriend told about going with him for two years. Claimed never to have fought with him. She knew nothing about a possible interest in Satanism.
Bob Elliot was a teacher who had known both boys since freshman year. “I taught them English freshman year, and they came out for the school play last year. I drove them home once after play practice when Frank had forgotten to tell his parents they needed a ride.”
“How’d the two of them get along?”
“I never heard of any fights between them. They’d laugh and make jokes in an easy way. Frank could tease a little too much at times, but Jake was always a good sport about it, if not an actual antidote to Frank’s strange sense of humor.”
“No fights ever?” Fenwick asked.
“No. Great kids. The kind you’d like to have for friends when they’re adults.”
Jake and Frank’s best friend on the team was Bob Talbot. They talked to him about four o’clock. He was the size of a defensive lineman on a pro football team. He kept wiping tears on the sleeve of his letterman’s jacket.
“They were both cool,” Bob said. “Best friends a guy could want. We hung around together a lot.”
“Any enemies?”
“Nobody. Even on the team. They were the leaders. Everybody looked up to them. Whether we won or lost, they led the line for congratulating the other players.”
“How about Jake breaking up with his former girlfriend?”
“Caroline? She was nice enough, but she was on her way to college. Guess she didn’t want some high school guy dangling around her neck.”
“He wasn’t mad?”
“He was real broken up. One night after a few beers he cried for hours.”
“He drink often?”
“Hey, it was no big deal. Most of the guys have a beer or two at a party. Nobody got uptight about it.”
“Any problems with gangs? Drugs? He turn somebody in?”
“Nah. Most real athletes don’t have time for that drug stuff. Neither of those guys would touch anything illegal.”
They asked about sex toys and Satanism.
Talbot simply looked confused. “They never talked about that kind of stuff. Guys brag about sex, but nobody talks about intimate stuff like that. That religion stuff doesn’t sound like Frank.”
“Anything you can tell us about either one, anything at all that seemed odd in the past few weeks, no matter how unimportant you think it is?”
The boy scratched his burr-cut head and finally said, “Frank and Jake were the two straightest arrows ever. I’ll miss them.” And he began to bawl.
At five, they talked to the coach of the football team. He continued the litany of sainthood that everyone else had repeated. Kept their grades up. No problem in class. No problem on the field.
At six, Turner and Fenwick looked through the files the school district kept on the boys. Each folder bulged with registration forms, standardized test scores, medical reports, IQ scores, and notes from teachers. They were both B students with IQs in the lower 120s. The cops found nothing but glowing praise about the two boys’ characters. Immediately after finishing with that paperwork, they met with the cops who had been conducting the other interviews.
Half an hour later Fenwick said, “They were saints.”
Everybody nodded heads. Fenwick exhaled a gargantuan sigh. “Get the paperwork to us as soon as you can.” He and Turner left to talk to the families.
In the car, Fenwick said, “I am depressed.”
“We get everybody’s movements for Thursday night?”
Fenwick pointed to a box in the back seat. “Somebody handed that to me as we left.”
A Kenitkamette cop had asked each interviewee about their whereabouts on Thursday night. They tried to make it a routine and simple thing so that no one would take umbrage. The teenagers had been generally cooperative, a few of the adults hostile, but all had complied. Turner reached back and picked up the box. Each piece of paper had a person’s name, address, and probable whereabouts, for that night.
Turner riffled through them. “We’ve probably got a couple hundred here.”
“I dare you to rip them into a thousand pieces and throw them out the window.”
Turner tossed them into the back seat. “Later.”
“We should interview that former girlfriend of Goldstein’s.”
“Yeah. You know, I wonder if the Douglas kid still had his underwear on?”
“The killer says, ‘Excuse me, would you take off your pants, give me your underwear, put your pants back on, and by the way, pow, you’re dead’?”
“I am not in the mood for kinky on this.”
“I’ll let the killer know.”
Four
A block away from the Goldstein home a clutch of reporters were gathered around several squad cars. The local cops had the street blocked off. Turner and Fenwick showed their identification to the cops on duty. One of the reporters began drifting over and the others followed. Fenwick sped off before they could overrun the car.
At the house they found the Goldsteins in the same room as the day before. A woman in a red wool suit shook hands with them. She was introduced as the family lawyer, Jennifer Edwards.
After they were seated, Turner said, “I’m afraid we haven’t been able to find out much today.” He gave them an outline of what they’d done.
“There must be something,” Mrs. Goldstein said when he was finished.
Edwards said, “I’ve talked with Chief Robsart in Kenitkamette, and after listening to her and what these two officers have said, I’m of the opinion that everything is being done that can be done. The police are trying their best.”
Turner didn’t know if he appreciated or was annoyed by the vote of confidence.
Edwards continued. “You need to ask my clients questions that may be painful to them. I’ve let them know what is standard procedure in this type of case. As they said last night, they wish to cooperate any way they can. You already know that they were at a dinner in Kenosha until late?”
Turner nodded.
“How else can we help?” Edwards asked.
“Who knew the boys were going to the game?” Turner asked.
“It wasn’t a secret,” Ken Goldstein said. “I suppose their friends. I was given the sky box tickets for all the home games by alumni of St. Basil’s University. None of them would know whether or not I’d be at a specific game. I often gave the tickets away. I let my son use them once before. That time he took his girlfriend.”
“Who knew they were going to stop by and talk to the team members afterwards?”
“The same people who knew they were going to the game, I’m sure. The boys had been talking about the game for quite some time.”
At that moment the Douglases arrived. While Edwards was not their lawyer before the incident, she said that she had talked with them and would be acting in that capacity for the moment.
Turner and Fenwick asked the same questions of the Douglases as they had of the Goldsteins with the same results. No helpful information.
“All day today we got extremely positive comments about both your boys,” Fenwick said. “They were well liked by everyone, which doesn’t help us pinpoint anyone who might want to do them harm. Is there anybody you can think of any time in their lives who didn’t like them, had a
bad experience with them?”
All four parents thought for a minute, but when they spoke it was with weary bafflement. None could remember anything the boys had done that could in any way be connected to murder.
After further fruitless probing Turner and Fenwick left, ran the gauntlet of the press, and drove off.
“Gonna be a mob of those back at the station,” Fenwick said.
“Something to look forward to,” Turner said.
“It’s only nine. We got time to look for Goldstein’s girlfriend?”
“She’s at Northwestern, which is on our way back. She’s living in a college dorm. I hope she’s around. I doubt if it’s too late to visit.”
“Is it ever too late in a dorm to visit somebody, and when it’s a murder case, do we care?”
Caroline Toomey lived in Ingles Hall on the Northwestern campus. Turner and Fenwick reported to the security office first and then proceeded to the dorm. It was between the drama and film building and the library.
A few students lounging in the lobby looked at them curiously as they asked for Caroline. The switchboard operator called up to her room. In a few minutes she bounced down the old wooden stairs. They sat in an alcove of a room that had wood-paneled walls and multicolored leather chairs.
Caroline turned out to have long, honey-colored hair and a slender figure. Her skin was flawless, with only the merest traces of makeup to emphasize the perfection. She greeted them with a cheerleader’s smile and enthusiasm. She wore a T-shirt that clung to what even Turner recognized was a figure that Fenwick would refer to as a “header.”
Caroline said, “I heard about Jake. It was awful.”
“We’re hoping you can tell us something that would help us catch the killer,” Fenwick said.
“I’ll do what I can,” she said. She tucked her feet up under her and gazed at the detectives evenly.
“When was the last time you saw him?” Fenwick asked.
“Months ago, at a party. We talked a little. He seemed friendly. I met his new girlfriend.”
“Why did you break up?” Fenwick asked.
“Jake was really sweet, but he was such a kid, really. He cared about sports so much. I enjoyed them, but not like he did. Plus I was going away to college. He was nice, but I’d started to meet a more serious crowd. I have my future to think about. He took it pretty well. I know some of my friends have to put up with some of that ‘I-can’t-live-without-you’ crap, but Jake seemed to be okay. He felt bad, and so did I, but I knew it was over.”
“Northwestern isn’t that far away from Kenitkamette,” Fenwick said. “I wouldn’t call it ‘going away’ to college.”
“It was such a different world. It might as well have been a thousand miles.”
“He have any enemies that you know of, anybody with any kind of grudge at all?”
She thought a minute. “Well, me maybe, because of our break-up, but I don’t think I was ever an enemy. I think he got over it. I mean, we talked and stuff after. If I hadn’t gone to college, I think we’d have stayed friends.”
“Anybody else?” Fenwick asked.
She drummed her nails on the leather armrest. “I know one gay guy came on to him at a party. Jake told me about it later. Said he turned him down. Don’t know if the gay kid was upset or not.”
“You know his name?”
“Ed Simmons. He’s still a senior there.”
“Did getting propositioned upset Jake?”
“I’m not sure. He was always so polite to everybody, but he acted a little odd about it, like maybe it did bother him but he didn’t want to talk about it. I know gay and straight guys here and it’s no big deal about who asks who out. Jake was just a little inexperienced, I think.”
“How well did you know Frank Douglas?”
“Barely at all. He was sort of creepy.”
“How so?”
“I think he was into Satanism-type stuff. He wore some symbol pinned to his leather jacket. He said it was for a rock band, but I thought it was some Satanic thing. I mentioned it to Jake once, but he laughed and said Frank liked to shake up other kids.”
She said she never saw Jake wear any Satanic symbols or do anything but poke fun at Satanism in a mild way. She also didn’t know any of Frank’s friends who might know more about his connection to Satanism.
“When we found Jake, he didn’t have his underwear on.”
Caroline laughed.
Both detectives raised quizzical eyebrows.
“I shouldn’t tell you this,” she said, “it’s a little embarrassing, but well….”
“Go ahead,” Fenwick said.
“When we went out on dates or when Jake thought it was a big occasion, he wouldn’t wear his underwear. He told me he wanted to feel completely unencumbered.” She laughed again. “He had a thing with wearing dress pants so that no lines showed. His pants would hang without the slightest wrinkle from his hips to his shoe tops. I think he thought it was studly. For a while I did too. Seeing him in his tux at the junior prom last year and knowing he didn’t have his shorts on was a little bit of a turn-on then. Now I think it was just part of his getting used to being a man. Men are funny about stuff like that, but I think he wore his underwear most of the time. I don’t think he wanted to undress in the locker room and have the guys see he didn’t wear any. Guys are funny.”
“He do anything else unusual that was kind of personal that might have bothered him?” Fenwick asked. “We found several dildos and some leather clothing among his stuff.”
“Like a leather jockstrap and a studded belt?”
The detectives nodded.
“Well,” she said, and looked at them from lowered eyelids, “I don’t know how unusual this was, but he….” This time her hesitation lasted more than a minute.
The cops waited as they’d been trained to do. Waiting for someone to talk and trip themselves up was second nature after this many years as detectives.
“He…I’m not sure how important this is.” She looked at them but they waited for her.
“Well, he…when we’d start to make love, he couldn’t last very long. Most of the time…he’d, you know, a few seconds after we’d be naked, he’d be done.”
“Did this bother him?” Fenwick asked.
“I think it did. I tried to be nice about it. One of his friends on the team gave him the leather stuff. Said it might make any sex he had more enjoyable. I managed not to burst out laughing. I refused to use any dildo. It was gross. Jake put on the leather stuff once, and it seemed to make him a little more confident, but the next time, well, the old problem came back. I told him the kinky stuff wasn’t one of the reasons we were breaking up, but it was. I just didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Boys are so fragile.”
“Where were you Thursday night?” Fenwick asked.
“Play practice until late and then talking with friends until about two.”
She gave them the name of the kid who gave Jake the sexual materials. Other than the personal peccadillos, she knew nothing helpful.
In the car Turner said, “I don’t know if I’d be happy or not, being dropped by somebody like that.”
“Nobody that beautiful ever gave me more than one look,” Fenwick said. “They’d never date me. Hell, if I dated somebody as beautiful as she is, I’d probably blow my wad after a few seconds, even at my age.”
“You’ve got Madge. She looks great.”
“She’s nearsighted and refuses to wear her glasses unless she’s driving. Did that even when she was a kid. I made sure I drove everywhere while we dated. She never got a good look at me before we got married.”
“What did she do when she did get her first good look at you?”
“It was too late by then. We were in love.”
“Kid wore his underwear for his new girlfriend,” Turner said, “and didn’t show her any sex toys.”
“Maybe Caroline’s rejection made him shy.”
Turner leafed through his notebook for the list o
f kids who had been interviewed. “The guy Caroline Toomey mentioned as our porno peddler isn’t here,” he said.
“We’ll have to talk to him. Probably means another trip back here tomorrow, but I don’t have the remotest faith that these people up here will give us the slightest clue.”
They got back to the station five minutes after midnight. Since they had left this morning the number of newspeople had expanded. Even at this late hour they clustered around Turner and Fenwick’s car. The questions were pointed and the persistence with which they were asked almost irrational. Cameras and microphones were poked and shoved in their faces. This was not a good way to get a quote out of Fenwick.
He bellowed angrily when one of the cameras banged into his side. The crowd stepped back when his animal roar split the night. The cops took the opportunity to rush into the station.
The commander met them on the fourth floor. “Anything?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Turner said.
They told him what they’d done that day.
“You’ve got half a million more reports to go through.” The commander indicated the stacks piled on the tables next to the corkboard, which filled an entire wall on the fourth floor.
A third of the corkboard was filled with still photographs from the scenes of both crimes—the dead bodies from every possible angle, shots of the entire room in the first case and the surrounding garage in the second. The pictures were silent sentinels of death hanging over everyone who worked on the fourth floor.
Turner and Fenwick had seen thousands of death scene photographs. They would go over them shot by shot later. For now they glared at the mounds of work below the pictures.
“I had them do some sorting as they put the stuff up here. Evidence reports and Crime Lab examinations start on the right. I’ve got you lined up to talk to the Bears players the boys spoke with after the game. You’ll be going to tomorrow morning’s practice. Uniforms have canvassed a three-block radius from the scene. Not many people around. They got admitted to the surrounding buildings. Most are abandoned and in about the same shape as the one the murder happened in. Didn’t find anything.”
Another Dead Teenager Page 6