Back at Area Ten headquarters they piled their lunch of take-out deli sandwiches on top of Major Crime Worksheets, Daily Major Incident Logs, and Supplementary Reports—all waiting to be filled out. The tedious process of documenting everything they’d done that day and catching up on what they hadn’t had time to fill out earlier could take as much time as all they’d done so far.
Randy Carruthers bounced in as Fenwick took his last bite of dill pickle. Randy had his butt aimed for the edge of Fenwick’s desk, but the bulky older cop had a glare and an open fist ready to swat the young cop away. The annoying detective stood next to the desk. He bounced on his toes.
“This is great. We’ve got all this overtime because everybody’s so caught up with your murders.”
“I’m glad you’re happy,” Fenwick said.
“I’ve never seen so many reporters outside,” Carruthers said. “If I were you, I’d take one into your confidence and leak positive stuff to the press. That way you’ll have one friend for sure with them.”
“When’d you become a press relations expert?” Fenwick asked.
“There’s supposed to be openings coming up in the department press office. You can get a promotion and work with the public. You don’t have to worry about dead bodies all the time.”
“Commander approve your transfer yet?” Fenwick asked.
“I talked to him once. He didn’t encourage me.” Carruthers shook his head. “Nobody around here ever encourages me.”
“You tried the latest yet, Randy?” Fenwick asked.
“What?” Randy asked, eager that someone was taking a slight bit of interest in him.
“I heard it’s all the rage, Bungee jumping without a cord.”
Carruthers smiled for a moment, then a frown began to cloud his round features. Before he could respond, Carruthers’s partner, Rodriguez, marched into the squad room, saw Carruthers, gave a sigh audible through the entire room, came over and clamped his hand around his partner’s upper arm. “We’ve got a dead homeless person, Randy. Just your type of crime. Let’s go.” They trudged off together.
Fenwick wadded up the paper from his lunch and sailed it into the trash basket five feet away. He rummaged on top of his desk. “We got preliminary reports here someplace?”
Turner picked up an inch-thick pile of computer printouts from the top of his desk and handed half of them to Fenwick.
“Blessing’s too damn efficient for his own good,” Fenwick opined.
Beat cops had already talked to a number of people connected with the case. The canvass of the neighborhood, abandoned and deserted as it might have seemed, would take quite a while. Owners of businesses and buildings anywhere nearby would have to be tracked down. Turner and Fenwick would have to do follow-ups on many of these.
Of the documents Fenwick was grumbling his way through, Blessing had flagged those of the most important people for immediate interviews. If at all possible Turner and Fenwick would contact the most significant ones today.
“Look at this shit,” Fenwick growled after ten minutes of scanning reports.
“What?”
Fenwick held one up. “I don’t even have to read this one. I know what it’ll say.”
“Who is it?”
“This is from the fast-food franchise employee. I can hear it now. It’ll be this kid with huge zits. He’ll tell us he saw somebody come in covered up to his elbows in blood and gore and that the guy ordered a Big Mac, fries, and a soft drink. He leaves and the kid doesn’t tell anybody. People come into this McDonald’s all the time for their after-murder snack.”
Commander Poindexter entered and asked for an update. They told him what they’d done so far that day.
“What’s next?” Poindexter asked.
Fenwick sighed, “We talk to”—he glanced at the forms—“the owner of the building, fast-food employees, the kid who found the body.”
“Parents are bringing him in,” Poindexter said.
“Probably want to pamper their little tyke,” Fenwick said. “And we’ve got the owner of a nearby business and….”
“I’ve got the idea,” Poindexter said. He sat his butt on the edge of Fenwick’s desk. Randy Carruthers would have gotten a swat; Poindexter received a thin smile. “This whole thing is hell,” he said quietly. “I know you guys are busting your rears, probably haven’t slept more than a couple hours.”
They nodded.
“Can’t be helped. We’ve got famous kids dead. Public doesn’t like athlete heroes who are good kids to get killed for no reason. I don’t like that.”
“I’m not real fond of it either,” Fenwick said.
Poindexter sighed. “I know. We’re pushing everybody as hard as possible. Whatever you need, it’s yours.”
“I could use a signed confession from somebody,” Fenwick said.
Poindexter often found Fenwick amusing. Not today. “You got people to talk to, get back out there,” the commander ordered.
Turner and Fenwick plodded out to the car. “Who first?” Fenwick asked.
“How about the owner of the building?”
“Who’s he?”
“She. Arancha Bizerkowitz.”
“There’s an ethnic joke waiting to happen.”
“Just think, if she married you, she’d be Arancha Bizerkowitz Fenwick.”
“Lucky her, maybe I’ll stick with Madge. Where to?”
“Lake Shore Drive just north of Oak Street.”
At the exclusive address a block away from the Drake Hotel, they spoke with the doorman who then phoned the woman they needed to talk to. They took an oak-paneled elevator up to the eighth floor, then walked down the hall to a wide-open door. Arancha Bizerkowitz bustled up to them from inside, “Come in, come in, you wonderful boys.” She smiled and patted their arms and marched beside them, all the while making little squeaking and chirping noises. Arancha Bizerkowitz must have been sixty years old. She wore red plastic frame glasses, a flower-print blouse tucked into jeans that would have been fashionably tight on someone forty years younger and twenty pounds lighter.
She waved them forward dramatically into a room furnished in basic plastic, all created in primary colors. A bright yellow couch with red cushions and orange chairs with fuschia cushions were set around a blue coffee table on which were brightly colored candlesticks from Cec LePage. The carpet was a checkerboard pattern of pink and green.
She offered them coffee, tea, cookies, sandwiches, beer, or hard liquor.
Fenwick said, “Ms. Bizerkowitz, we need to ask you about what happened at your warehouse.”
“Oh, my, yes. It was awful. Can you imagine? Those poor, beautiful young boys. Such nice families. I watched every game the father won for a championship. All the hugging among those boys! I think it’s wonderful that men can hug today. We have too many macho men afraid of touching.” She put her fingers in front of her mouth and squeaked.
Turner wanted to say, “Just the facts ma’am.”
Fenwick asked, “Did you kill Jacob Goldstein and Frank Douglas?”
One hand dropped to her lap; the other flew to her chest. She made inarticulate burbling noises for half a minute. When she finally got her breath, she gave them a cheery smile and said, “Don’t you boys try and be amusing. I’m just shocked that such a thing could happen. Why just last week I was talking to my neighbor Floribunda. She had an operation last year and doesn’t get around much any more, but she almost got mugged walking right outside our building. You just can’t walk anywhere any more.”
She offered them refreshments again. Turner declined but Fenwick told her yes, please.
“You hungry?” Turner asked as she left.
“Anything to get her out of the room and not listen to that voice.”
“Reminds me of the less pleasant aspects of fingernails on slate.”
“I don’t recall any pleasant aspects of fingernails on slate.”
They heard Arancha returning. Before she was halfway into the room, Fenwick stood up
and used his don’t-fuck-with-me tone. “Ms. Bizerkowitz, we’ve got a murder to solve. I want one- or two-word answers to my questions.”
One of the cardinal rules of detective technique was that when you had a witness or suspect talking, you never shut them up. In this case, however, Turner had no quarrel with Fenwick’s method.
Arancha began to speak, but Fenwick took a step closer to her. He towered over her.
“One or two words,” Fenwick growled.
She gulped as she gazed up at his massive bulk. She placed the tray of goodies on the blue plastic coffee table.
Fenwick asked, “How long have you owned the warehouse?”
“Well, my husband bought it before he died….”
“How long?” Fenwick asked again.
She folded her arms over her chest, glared at Fenwick, and said, “Two years.”
“How often are you there?”
“Never.”
Turner said, “Ms. Bizerkowitz, it would help if we could have as much of a history of the building as we can get. As current owner, anything you can tell us might make a difference in our investigation. We can get the official records from the county, but if you could tell us a bit, it might help catch the killers.”
She smiled at Turner but looked warily at Fenwick. “We lived in fifteen different states in twenty years. My husband began selling computers for a number of different companies, before he moved into developing interactive programs. We did well and he started investing in real estate around the country. Before we moved to Chicago, we lived mostly on the West Coast.” She listed all the cities. “My favorite was El Paso. They had the nicest people. Once you’ve seen all the pretty neighborhoods, you realize that setting is nice but really, it’s the people you meet, the ones who become your friends. That’s what really counts.”
She drew a breath and Turner quickly asked, “When did you move to Chicago?”
“About a year and a half ago. My husband bought the building a few months before we moved to town. He thought it might be a good investment. He died before he could do anything with it. I’ve been trying to sell it, but I haven’t had any luck.”
“Who was the previous owner?”
“I have no idea.”
“And you have Illinois Safe Serve as security?”
“I think that’s it. They look after a bunch of old warehouses and factories. They have offices in this dingy low-slung affair way on the west side of the city. My Alfred, he was my husband, took me there once. It was filthy. Dirt on the floor that hadn’t been cleaned in years. They made a very bad impression on me, but they were cheap.”
“A little more expense might have prevented a murder,” Fenwick said.
She gave him a mystified look, but before she could launch into another spiel, they left.
As they drove to the McDonald’s at 18th and Halsted, Turner said, “She would have stopped talking some time this century.”
“She would have been dead long before then. If we had a tape of a conversation with her, no jury would convict me.”
At the McDonald’s they found that the “kid” they were supposed to interview was the thirty-five-year-old assistant manager. He was Hispanic, slender, with soulful eyes and what in nineteenth-century Europe would have been known as a dueling scar on his right cheek running from his ear to the corner of his mouth.
After introductions, they sat at the front of the restaurant.
“What happened Friday morning?” Turner asked.
“Guy came in here about one, just before we close. Really excited. Breathing hard. Arms waving around. Demanded all kinds of stuff. The other employees had rung off their registers. I took care of him.”
“Can you describe him for us?”
“I’ve thought a lot about it since those two uniformed officers stopped in. He was white, probably in his thirties, thin. Short, black hair, I think. No glasses. Dark clothes, but I don’t remember if they were jeans or anything. When he left, he got in a truck. It wasn’t new. It looked real beat-up.”
“Did you get the license number, color of the truck?”
“No, after he started his engine, I forgot about him. I wanted to get out of here, and I had a lot to do to shut the place down for the night.”
Back in the car, Fenwick asked, “Is that a description of our killer?”
“Eating a full meal after committing murder? Beats the hell out of me. We’ve had killers who’ve eaten parts of victims, so I suppose a little snack after torturing and killing a couple guys can’t be completely ruled out in the life of a deranged murderer.”
“It could happen.”
“We’ll add it to the computer data. Hard to run around the city looking for a thin thirty-year-old.”
When Turner and Fenwick got back to Area Ten headquarters, they found the parents of the kid who’d discovered Goldstein’s body in the warehouse. They were talking to Commander Poindexter on the first floor of the station.
After the introductions, the mother asked, “Is our boy going to be safe?”
They were a Hispanic couple in their middle thirties.
“We just want to talk to him, see if he can give us some memories. Maybe think of something important.”
“We punished him for playing where he wasn’t supposed to and for skipping school,” the mother said. “Our boy, Herman, says that the kids in the neighborhood hung out there all the time, up to the killing. Nobody goes there now. Herman will never play there again.”
“I told him to be honest with you,” the father said, “but I’m worried about how this is going to affect him. He found a dead body. He tried to brag to his friends when he thought we couldn’t hear. We put a stop to that.”
“We’ll be careful, Mr. and Mrs. de la Vega. We’ll want to talk to him and all of his friends to learn as much as we can about that building.”
The two detectives and the commander moved away from the parents.
“We got the rest of the kids who used the warehouse?” Fenwick asked.
“Yeah, we have a detail keeping them happy in the squad room,” Poindexter said.
“Let’s talk to junior finder first, then the rest of them,” Turner said. “Do we have the preliminary reports on all of them?”
After glancing at the reports, they returned to the third floor. The kid who found the body sat in Fenwick’s chair trying to bounce on the cushion long since flattened by Fenwick’s substantial bottom. He must have been thirteen or fourteen. He watched the two cops walk toward him, his eyes alert. He grinned at them.
Any adult nonwitness or nonboss Fenwick would have roared at and unceremoniously dumped from the chair. Now he simply pulled another one over from the desk next to his. Turner grabbed the chair from behind his desk and brought it around to face the kid.
Herman de la Vega eagerly shook hands with the detectives.
“This is really cool,” Herman said.
“Aren’t you scared?” Fenwick asked.
“This is a police station,” Herman said. “This is like television. I’m safe.”
“How about when you found the body?” Turner asked.
The boy’s face clouded. “It was awesome,” he whispered. “I was a little scared, but I still looked. All my friends think it was really cool. I was really lucky. I’m glad they weren’t with me. Now I’m a celebrity. If my parents let me, I think I can be on television.”
Turner wanted to say all kinds of parental things about not playing in that kind of place and being careful, and make dire predictions about what could happen, but Herman was as close to a witness as they had so far. These cops would let Herman prattle on for hours. They might want to shut up Mrs. Bizerkowitz, but Herman could do anything short of reading aloud from the phone book and Turner and Fenwick would smile encouragingly.
“My mom and dad said you might arrest me for being in there. I’m not going to get arrested, am I? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Turner let the boy feel uncomfortable for a minute, then said
, “You need to tell us all that you can. If you’re honest, you won’t be in trouble.”
The boy nodded eagerly.
Turner asked, “How long have you been playing in that building?”
“We started going inside about two years ago. Nobody ever guards it. Sometimes homeless people sleep there. They try to chase us out sometimes. Once in a while we chase them. One of the gangs had it as a headquarters for a while so we couldn’t play there. Then they found a better place, and we could go back.”
“What happened last Friday?”
“A bunch of us were supposed to ditch school. I got away first.”
“You ditch school often?”
“No. Once in a while. When it’s too boring.”
“So what happened?”
“Nobody else was there. The room where we usually hang out is way down the corridor and one floor up from the room the dead guy was in, but I could see the body from the hallway. I remember I was scared and I almost ran, but I called out and nobody answered and the body didn’t move, so I figured the guy was dead. I didn’t go in there. I ran for the cops.”
“Did you see anybody in the street when you arrived?”
“Nope. There’s no traffic around those buildings. That’s why we play around there. Nobody bothers us.”
“Did you notice anything unusual at all any time? Hear anything strange?”
“Nope. Just saw the body.”
“How about in the last couple weeks? Seen any cars or trucks around the place? Anybody hanging around even last summer? An adult asking questions?”
The kid thought for a minute. “I can’t remember that kind of thing. I for sure don’t remember an adult asking us questions. I’d remember that.”
“How about your friends?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. They’d have said something, I think.”
“We’ll talk to each of them in a few minutes.”
They assembled the kids outside a conference room in the rear of the fourth floor. Six kids, including Herman, sat eating doughnuts at a six-foot brown folding table. Their chatter and activity hushed as the detectives neared them. Herman seemed to be pleased with his position as the one introducing the cops.
Another Dead Teenager Page 9