Political Poison Read online

“You know, Myra was right,” Paul said. Ben watched Paul’s eyes. He reached for Ben’s hand and held it on top of the table. “I do love you.”

  “Myra’s too smart for her own good,” Ben said. He patted Paul’s hand. “I love you, too.”

  Ben dropped Paul off at his doorstep. They whispered and kissed briefly before parting.

  Paul checked his sleeping sons, Brian lightly snoring, Jeff peacefully quiet. Paul sat on Jeffs bed watching his son sleep for ten minutes before he mounted the steps to his own room.

  The next morning Brian made omelets with spinach filling. His eldest son had been on a health kick for two months. Paul didn’t want to discourage this voluntary vegetable ingestion, but sighed inaudibly. He’d have to eat it too.

  Paul and his sons ate breakfast together every weekday. They rose a half hour early to share at least the one meal together. Last night’s supper had been something of a rarity. They used the time in the morning to talk, compare schedules, settle family squabbles. Paul’s workday started at eight-thirty, and as much as he tried to stick to a set schedule the amount of overtime required of a detective in Area Ten made this almost impossible. Brian’s spring baseball practice began next week and would keep him out until six most nights. Jeff’s schedule varied because of his physical therapy. Paul wanted them together at least once a day for a meal one of them cooked. They each took a week and rotated assignments. One cooked, one set the table, one cleaned up. Jeff’s meals were, understandably, simple. The kitchen had special chairs, hooks, and pulleys to aid Jeff, although Paul stood ready to help and often assisted Jeff if things got complicated.

  At Area Ten headquarters, Turner half listened at roll call. He leaned against a now-silent radiator. The spring weather had warmed sufficiently to ensure the blessed silence from the aged heating system. The atmosphere in the station would be much improved until the rush of summer humidity drove them nuts.

  The building housing Area Ten was south of the River City complex on Wells Street on the southwest rim of Chicago’s Loop. The building was as old and crumbling as River City was new and gleaming. Fifteen years ago the department purchased a four-story warehouse scheduled for demolition and decreed it would be a new Area Ten headquarters. To this day, rehabbers occasionally put in appearances. In fits and starts the building had changed from an empty hulking wreck to a people-filled hulking wreck. Wild rumor had it that the conversion from radiators to more modern heating would be done sometime before the end of the century. Maybe they’d get air-conditioning before the beginning of the century after that.

  Area Ten ran from Fullerton Avenue on the north to Lake Michigan on the east, south to Fifty-ninth Street, and west to Halsted. It included the wealth of downtown Chicago and North Michigan Avenue, some of the nastiest slums in the city, along with numerous upscale developments. It incorporated four police districts. The cops in the Areas in Chicago handled homicides and any major nonlethal violent crimes. The districts mostly took care of neighborhood patrols and initial responses to incidents.

  Turner spent most of roll call leafing through notes from a previous case he was due to testify in at nine-thirty. He enjoyed being on the stand and after years was good at it, but he hated the waiting. The State’s attorney had assured him he would be first on the stand this morning. He was testifying in what the other cops in the squad had named the “Doggy Doo Murder.” Police often give nicknames to murder cases, a gallows humor that helped them distance themselves from the realities of their jobs. As soon as they’d heard the medical examiner talk about feeding dogs parts of the body to try to get rid of the evidence, somebody had come up with the nickname. Turner thought it stupid, but even he thought of the case by its nickname. Finding the murderer had been simple enough. They’d questioned the neighbors around the alley where pieces of the partly eaten body had been found. They didn’t discover anything until they’d expanded their search to a four-block radius. At the first house Turner had gone to with the new perimeter, two Doberman pinschers and a pit bull terrier had nearly flung themselves through the front window of the house.

  Even with the dogs on tight leashes, Turner and his partner Fenwick had been reluctant to walk in the door, but the man insisted. He’d let them in, and within fifteen minutes he’d told them the entire story. He’d murdered his wife. She didn’t like dogs. She’d given him an ultimatum, her or the animals. Contrary to television murder mysteries, most criminals like to talk. Often you can’t shut them up. It’s rare that cops have to work hard to solve a mystery. Unless it’s gang- or drug-related, the vast majority of the time, the killer knows the victim—hus—bands, wives, relatives, friends—whom in one moment of passion, they destroy.

  The guy with the dogs figured the animals had mangled the body enough so it could never be identified, but since the killing, he’d been consumed by guilt. The guy had wound up pleading not guilty, and although it would probably be a simple case, Turner still had to testify.

  Before he left for court he filled Fenwick in on his date last night. Paul’s sexual orientation had never been an issue for Fenwick or his wife Madge. Their families had yearly picnics in the summer and get-togethers at holiday times. If Turner was dating someone, he often brought him over.

  “Madge wanted me to be sure you brought him along next time you come,” Fenwick said. “She hasn’t met him yet.”

  Turner said he would. He checked to make sure no calls had come in, then headed for Twenty-sixth and California. He didn’t get away from the criminal courts building until after twelve-thirty. He’d been third on the stand after two dog experts testifying to whether a dog would eat a human. It would. Back at Area Ten he picked up Fenwick and went out to grab some lunch, over most of which Fenwick grumbled. He was on a new diet. Over the years his bulk had increased significantly. His periodic weight regimes ran from the exotic to the marginally nauseous. This week it was lots of steamed vegetables.

  As they walked into the squad room Sergeant Felix Poindexter spotted Turner and hurried over.

  “A murder at the University of Chicago,” Poindexter said. He pointed at them. “The commander wants you guys on it.” If a case had the possibility of being politically sensitive or controversial, the commander liked to put Turner and Fenwick in charge. They had a solid reputation for avoiding the pitfalls of swarming reporters and nervous politicos out for their own skin.

  “One of the students?” Fenwick asked.

  “Professor,” Poindexter drew a deep breath, “and alderman.”

  He didn’t need to say any more.

  Everybody in Chicago knew Gideon Giles, university professor, liberal alderman, self-appointed devil’s advocate, committed gadfly, and headline grabber.

  Turner and Fenwick didn’t waste time asking what happened. They’d find out all they needed to know at the scene. Turner took the paper with the address from Poindexter, grabbed his regulation blue notebook, and hurried toward the door.

  Fenwick snatched the keys to one of the cars and signed it out. Turner was used to Fenwick’s race-car tactics. They roared to the on ramp for the Dan Ryan Expressway at Eighteenth Street. The exits in the local lanes crawled by to Fifty-fifth Street. To avoid the traffic, Fenwick rode the shoulder, even on one occasion streaking into the regular lanes to bypass a state cop giving some guy a ticket. Fenwick eased himself onto the campus on University Avenue and down to Fifty-eighth Street. He parked behind a blue-and-white in the cul de sac in the middle of the university quadrangle.

  The first golden leaves of spring softened the stark grayness of the university buildings surrounding the quadrangle. Turner found the campus pleasant and soothing amid the bustle of the city. Mike Sanchez, a beat cop Turner knew, waved to them from the doors of a building just to the southwest of the turn around circle. He met them on the steps and walked up with them to the third floor. As they climbed, they spoke about Fenwick’s golf game, the Cubs’ chances this season, and Sanchez’s possibility of making detective. None looked very promising.

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sp; As they ascended, the wooden stairs echoed with their footsteps. He led them down a gray-tiled hallway. Most of the office doors they passed remained closed. From a few openings, people gaped. Turner guessed the ones trying to look above it all were professors and the ones looking uncomfortable, slightly embarrassed, or frankly curious to be secretaries, grad students, and assorted hangers-on.

  Another uniformed cop stood outside one of the offices.

  “You the first ones here?” Turner asked.

  “We didn’t touch anything,” Sanchez said to the unasked question. Turner had worked with Sanchez before, and knew the statement to be true. Sometimes it seemed that cops screwed up a crime scene more than any criminals. What they drilled into you at the academy over and over was: Don’t touch anything. A few of them actually learned the lesson.

  “Didn’t much matter, though,” Sanchez added.

  “Why not?” Turner asked.

  Sanchez filled them in on the details.

  “I got here about thirty minutes ago.” He pointed toward six people sitting in chairs farther down the hall. “Most of them had been in the room, were running around spreading the news, or doing their best to be out of control.”

  “Scene screwed up.”

  “Pretty much. The guy who gave the alarm doesn’t remember what they touched. Half these people have had training in cardiopulmonary resuscitation, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and probably the Heimlich maneuver. They tried all of them. The body’s probably been moved half a dozen times.”

  Fenwick said, “Dumb academic shits.”

  Sanchez said, “Somebody managed to call the campus cops. One of them’s around here somewhere. He ran to call us and did nothing to preserve the crime scene. At least a dozen people have been in the room since.”

  Sanchez had secured the scene as much as possible on arrival, but knew little else of the details.

  “How do they know it’s murder?” Turner asked.

  “Could be suicide, I guess, but I’ve seen enough corpses,” Sanchez said. “I don’t think he killed himself.”

  “Natural causes?” Turner asked.

  “You can see for yourself,” Sanchez said, “But I’m putting my money on murder.”

  In Chicago, detectives are taught always to treat any unexplained death as if it were homicide, until and unless there is overwhelming evidence that it is a suicide. Making the mistake of calling a murder a suicide was one quick way to get yourself dumped as a detective. If you erred, you erred on the side of caution—the death was a homicide until proven otherwise.

  Turner and Fenwick strode into the office. Dark mahogany paneling halfway up the walls matched that in the hallway. A desk barred their way; also a telephone, papers, cup for coffee with the words NO ONE KNOWS I’M A LESBIAN printed in red on it. A three-by-four-foot calendar took up the space on the wall to the right of the desk. Immediately behind the desk, against a back wall, a table neatly filled with stacks of papers, above the table an enormous map of the Fifth Ward, which included the University and stretched along the lake from Fifty-third Street on the North to Seventy-ninth Street on the south with its furthest west boundary irregularly drawn, but never going beyond Cottage Grove. The boundaries included the area for the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and large parts of the old South Shore neighborhood, once heavily Jewish, now mostly black.

  The Fifth Ward had a long tradition of maverick politics and politicians, often pains in the ass to the old Democratic machine. The most famous graduate of the ward was Paul Douglas, slated by the Democrats for the United States Senate in 1948, his victory was almost as much of a surprise as Truman’s. The Democratic machine had run him for Senate because, as an independent, he caused them too much trouble in the City Council.

  Gideon Giles came out of the same tradition, only more so. The first University of Chicago professor to be elected to the City Council. He never let pass an opportunity to tweak the noses of regular Democrats. The machine may not have been what it once was, but it knew how to handle political outsiders. They ignored him. Giles could call for investigations, denounce unliberal actions, and decry the evil of the right wing, but not a resolution, proposal, or idea of his ever received more than a handful of votes in the City Council.

  Giles participated in everything. If there was a save the whales, antinuclear energy, pro-choice, antidiscrimination, or any kind of march, sit-in, or protest, he was there, somehow managing to worm his way in front of the cameras. Now the media sought him out for the quick interview, the easy quote.

  The desk and back table took up seven-eighths of the room. A door to the left led to an inner office.

  From the outer office Turner saw the body, clothes ripped, face distorted, laying faceup on the floor, head toward the door.

  TWO

  Both cops stood silently just inside the doorway. The room smelled of old books and vomit. Turner blocked the smell from his mind. He’d sensed worse at more horrific scenes. From long practice they let their eyes examine everything in the room first. One of the truisms of cop lore is that the murderer always leaves a sign ofhis presence. As screwed up as this crime scene obviously was, they needed to note every detail they saw.

  “Triple fuck,” Fenwick said. Turner knew that Fenwick’s expletive was the highest rating anyone or anything could get in his partner’s classification system. Usually Fenwick reserved this sacred category for inept Bears quarterbacks when they threw game-losing interceptions, or Cubs pitchers who walked in winning runs. The system proceeded through three levels of “shit” to the highest “fuck” category. This crime scene certainly rated the most negative classification.

  Turner and Fenwick pulled out pens and began making notes starting with the time of the call, the unit numbers of the cops, and the time of their arrival. Turner did a quick sketch of the outer office and the perspective of the body. He’d have pictures of all this later, but he wanted his own memories. He noted items on the desk, walls, and floor. Finished he slowly walked toward the corpse.

  He seethed with anger as he did this. One thing a detective hates is a contaminated crime scene. This one looked like a herd of buffaloes had been through it. You got your feel for a crime from what you saw, and what Turner saw wasn’t the crime but the aftermath of well-intentioned people trying to help. His anger cooled when he realized the horror they must have gone through trying to save the dying man.

  As Turner approached the corpse, he was barely aware of the process his mind whirled through asking the myriad of questions that viewing of hundreds of crime scenes had engrained on his mind. Why did the person die here? How? He was already drawing his picture of this room. No blood trail. From the doorway he stared at the body, searching for meaning and sense. Jewelry still on. Pockets not turned inside out. The room was strewn with papers. Careful not to disturb any of them, Turner eased around the room. Where was the body before the rescuers got there? Did the killer come back as part of that group? Did the murderer leave glaring mistakes behind? In more than ninety percent of the cases, this was the saving grace for the cop, the killer’s tendency toward making a dumb mistake.

  Turner spent fifteen minutes filling his notebook with observations and details. A blue cup in back of the desk contained the dregs of a vile-smelling greenish liquid. An electronic juicer on the table near the door had remnants of a similar fluid.

  The trash can proved to be the source of the vile odors. Vomit flecked tissues, remnants of the frantic efforts to help the dying man, half filled the receptacle. Turner would keep his notes. The schematic drawing Fenwick was working on would be for the official file.

  Turner gazed at the body. Giles hardly looked to be at rest. The body was on its back, muscles rigid in convulsion, the eyes wide open, and an extreme facial grimace. He touched the body. Rigor already set in.

  Fred Nokosinski, the bearded dwarf who took crime scene pictures, stood in the doorway holding his Canon AI-1s. “Ready for pictures?” he asked.

  “Start in the outer room,” Tur
ner said. “Make sure you get the positions of all the papers there and in here.”

  Fred jerked his thumb over his shoulder, “You got visitors.”

  “What the hell?” Fenwick said. He looked through the doorway. He saw the case sergeant, the commander of the local police district, and a cop from the superintendent’s office he recognized but whose name he didn’t remember.

  “Nuts,” Turner muttered. He and Fenwick hurried to the door of the outer office. As detective in charge of the crime scene, Turner knew that technically he had more power than any cop in the city in these few square feet. That didn’t stop the brass in a case like this from trying to trample over every square inch of territory.

  Fenwick planted his large bulk in front of the mass of brass and said, “I’ll give you all you need.”

  Turner turned on his heel and returned to the body.

  He found Fred Nokosinski on top of a nicked-up wooden chair, focusing his camera down on the body.

  Sam Franklin, head of the crime lab unit, entered the room. His sharp eyes took in the scene, barely glancing at the body. He snorted in derision. “Stupid politicians will go off like demented fire alarms over this.”

  Turner nodded.

  “You ready for us?” Franklin asked.

  Turner scanned the room carefully. “I want to examine the papers. That’ll take a while. I’ll handle them as little as possible and send them along.”

  Franklin directed his minions in their tasks. Dusting for fingerprints, vacuuming the floor—contents to be sifted later, doing everything delicately so that every bit of human existence in the room could be carefully examined later.

  The space from which Gideon Giles ruled his domain was about ten by ten. Posters advocating his favorite causes filled the walls. A bulletin board to the right of the door covered the entire wall, floor to ceiling. It contained business cards, a mass of eight-and-a-half by eleven multihued circulars and press releases announcing specific dates and times for meetings of the groups advertised around the room. Next to a notice for the Flat-Earth Society was a flyer giving the time for a meeting of ACT-UP.