The Truth Can Get You Killed Page 3

  The name still meant nothing to Turner, but the upheld law did. Du Page County was immediately west of Chicago, known for its rock-ribbed Republicans, and legislators who were well in the running for first prize for being some of the most stupid, ignorant, and narrow-minded elected officials in the country. A year and a half ago the Du Page County Board had passed an ordinance forbidding any business or government body from treating gay people equally.

  After the law was passed, outrage and protests had been followed by legal suits. As Hancock had said, the local federal circuit court had ruled last week on the side of the county. More furious protests had followed. Ian had let loose a tirade at their annual Christmas get-together about gays being second-class citizens ending with the declaration that he wasn’t going to go quietly when they came to get him for the concentration camps.

  Turner doubted if six people in the country could name more than a few of the Supreme Court justices much less those from lower courts in the circuits.

  Calvin Hancock slowly stood up. “Judge Meade is dead! I found the body.” He paused briefly and then an enormous smile crossed his face. “Thank god. I can’t think of a dead person I’d rather speak evil of.” The man almost capered around the room. “Wait until I tell everyone. I’ll be a celebrity. I hope I’m on every talk show. Oprah, I’m ready for my close-up.” Calvin hummed several bars of “Ding-dong the Witch Is Dead.”

  Turner understood the feeling. He wondered about the implications of him being gay and investigating the murder. Maybe he should dismiss himself from the case. He could never hope to be objective.

  Fenwick said, “Mr. Hancock, I’ve never seen anyone happier to see someone dead.”

  Calvin smiled at them. “You think my being happy makes me a suspect?”

  “The thought crossed my mind.”

  “Forget it. I’m a lawyer. I know precisely what I’m saying. If you’re going to arrest everyone in the city, or even the country for that matter, who is happy about this piece of shit being dead, you’ll have to haul in every faggot in three thousand miles and some in foreign countries, too.”

  “But you knew who he was after we said his name.”

  “I’m a lawyer and a gay activist. I follow all these cases carefully. I didn’t file the brief in this instance, but I’m head of the local Gay Lawyers Guild. If my being happy he’s dead is going to get brutality from the cops, I’m ready. I dare you to try anything with me. When they come to take me away in the middle of the night, I will not go quietly.”

  “Nobody’s taking anybody to concentration camps,” Fenwick said. “We’re just trying to get some answers.”

  “And you got some. All you’re going to get. I told you what happened. You want to know how I feel about him being dead? Like the Jews in the concentration camps must have felt when told that Hitler was dead. Every gay person you talk to will feel the same way.”

  When they got in the car and got the heater going as best they could, Fenwick asked, “Is that how you feel?”

  “What?”

  “Happy that he’s dead.”

  “I don’t have a history of knowing about him like Hancock did, but I’d be lying if I didn’t think this was one less homophobic asshole on the planet. Hard for me not to be pleased about that.”

  “You gonna ask to be taken off the case?”

  “Ethically, I don’t think I have a choice.”

  “You take yourself off, you’re going to have to do a lot of explaining. By now half the Area Ten personnel know that a prominent judge bought it in the city and that we got the case. People will want to know why you want off. If you don’t say anything, they’ll speculate. If you do tell, you risk repercussions. Commander Poindexter is probably okay and most of the detectives, but I don’t know about this temporary commander we’ve got. Look what happened when Ben called. Whoever wouldn’t help him yesterday is still working in the station. He almost certainly has friends who feel the same way.”

  “Being in or out of the closet, now or ever, is not going to make a difference in my being on a case or not.”

  Fenwick was quiet a minute then said, “Sorry.”

  “Forget it. I understand what you said, and it’s all too possible. The main questions is how can I work on a murder case of someone I’m not sorry is dead? The killer probably deserves a medal.”

  “You can’t quit the case. What if they assign me Carruthers as a partner?”

  “Just shoot him and leave him in a dumpster. If someone bothers to report it, any cops would take one look and walk away.”

  Carruthers was the curse of the Area Ten day shift. He’d spent the week before Christmas with his wife and two kids in Hawaii. To the surprise of no one, he’d returned to work on Christmas Eve in a Day-Glo, flower-print shirt. Everyone had studiously ignored him.

  “I wish the commander wasn’t on vacation,” Fenwick said. “He’d be all right with it. You can’t just up and quit a case.”

  They located the local beat cop in charge of coordinating the neighborhood canvass. Turner and Fenwick asked about the status of the questioning.

  They had gotten to about half of the neighbors, but to only a few of the businesses. Most of the latter were closed. Many of the bars would open in a few hours, especially ones with televisions tuned to the many football games of the day. No one interviewed so far had seen anything in the alley.

  Turner and Fenwick walked quickly down the alley for two blocks south and then north for a block and a half where the large bulk of Children’s Hospital prevented the alley from going through any farther in that direction. They also walked around the entire immediate block.

  As they made their neighborhood survey, the day seemed to be getting colder not warmer. By the time they were done, even the feeble warmth of the car felt good.

  4

  They decided to visit the judge’s wife first. The address they had from the beat cop was on Belle Plaine Avenue. This was a street in a small enclave of wealthy homes between Sheridan Road and Clarendon, just north of Irving Park Road.

  The as yet unfrozen water of the lake steamed as they took the Drive north. They turned off on Irving Park, drove several blocks west to Sheridan, and took it north to Belle Plaine. The short street was lined with giant trees, bare of leaves, fronting mansions that would have done a stretch of southern plantations proud. This was a bright spot of gentility in a neighborhood generously referred to as eclectic. In a few years, the surrounding area of the city might be totally gentrified but, for the moment, it could have its dicier areas.

  They walked up to the two-story, red-brick Regency house. The door was answered by a white-haired woman who looked, Turner guessed, to be in her late fifties. She wore gray pants and a pin-stripe coat over a white blouse.

  Turner said, “Mrs. Meade?”

  “Yes.”

  Turner introduced himself and Fenwick and showed his identification. “May we come in?” he asked. “We need to speak with you.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  Turner wasn’t about to give her tragic news while standing in the doorway as a winter wind whipped off the lake and rushed the cold around them and into her house.

  “Please, Mrs. Meade. I’m afraid I have bad news. If we could come in.”

  She looked from one to the other, frowned, then nodded, and held the door open for them to enter.

  They set foot in a front hall with a highly polished hardwood floor. Directly in front of them, a red-carpeted stairway swept upward in a narrow curve. A highly polished suit of armor stood in the corner on their right. On their left was an Enfield cupboard in stained cherry. She brought them into a parlor on the left with a dark-brown-and-purple Persian rug, white walls, and black-leather furniture.

  After they were seated, she asked, “What’s wrong? Has something happened to my children?”

  “No, ma’am,” Turner said. “We have unfortunate news. Earlier today we found a man with your husband’s identification. He was dead.”

  �
��Here, in Chicago?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “That’s impossible. My husband is in Montreal at a convention of jurists.”

  Fenwick described the body.

  When he finished, she held up a hand to her face. “I can’t understand it,” she said. “How can it be him?”

  Turner showed her the driver’s license and other identification from the wallet they had found.

  “Someone must have stolen it from his wallet. Albert wouldn’t lie to me. He’s in Montreal. I’ll call him.” She bustled out of the room, returning moments later with a slip of paper in hand. She picked up the receiver and pressed in the numbers. When she hung up she said, “He never checked in.”

  As gently as they could, they got her to accompany them down to Cook County Morgue. The ride occurred in strained silence. Once there, the identification was brief and complete. She took one look, gasped, and burst into tears.

  They led her down the hall to a quiet office. Upon entering she said, “I have to call the children.” She sat in a green vinyl-covered chair. “How can I tell the children? What can I tell them? What happened?” She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue that Turner had provided from a nearby desk.

  “Someone murdered him.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s what we need to find out,” Turner said. “If we could ask you a few questions. The first hours of a case are important. You might be able to give us some information that could lead to the killer.”

  “I can’t imagine I know anything. What happened to my husband? I don’t know if I can talk.”

  “Please, Mrs. Meade, if you’d make the attempt. We’ll help you call your children, or get someone to come down and assist you, but if you could answer a few questions, it might give us directions to pursue in the investigation.”

  Her nod of acquiescence was more numb shock than aware willingness to help.

  “You said he was supposed to be in Montreal,” Turner prompted.

  “Yes, he left yesterday for the convention. He was scheduled to return Sunday.”

  “How was he planning to get there?”

  “He had a seven o‘clock flight out of O’Hare. He loved Montreal and was leaving a day early so he could enjoy some of his favorite sights.”

  “Who took him to the airport?”

  “He rode the El. He always said it was silly to pay good money for a taxi or a limo or waste the time fighting traffic. It’s less than two dollars. The El takes you right to the terminal. I don’t know why I care about that right now. I’m a wreck and I’m confused and I’m frightened.”

  ‘Why are you frightened?” Fenwick asked.

  “Because now I’m alone.”

  A general round of throat clearing and pausing occurred before Fenwick asked the next question. “You didn’t see him get on the plane?”

  “He went by himself.”

  “How did you know he was in Montreal?”

  “When he’s on a business trip, he usually calls when he gets in, but there were delays in Montreal. He called me from the airport here. For a while, he thought he might have to wait until tomorrow for a flight. He got the last one out. He wouldn’t get into Montreal until after two in the morning, so he said he would call today. He never did.”

  “Did he have any unusual problems recently? Any sign of tension?”

  “No, nothing. We’d had a good Christmas with the children. He said it was silly to go north in winter for a convention, but he was looking forward to it. He would see lots of old friends. It was a convention on international law. It was something he loved.”

  “Did he receive any threats recently, have any disagreements with people he worked with, any fights? Criminals he put in jail threatening him?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. Certainly nothing he told me about. He would have told me. We were happily married. He confided in me. We used to get a few threats after his pro-life rulings a while back, but we have an answering service, and our mail is screened. He hadn’t received any threats in the past few years that I know about.”

  “Fights in the family or with co-workers?”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “We’ll need to speak to your children.”

  “Mike, our son, went back to school early. He’s just turned twenty-two. Pam, our daughter, is on vacation in California. She’s twenty-six.”

  They wrote down the address of the son and the name of the hotel the daughter was staying in.

  “Where did you spend last night?” Fenwick asked.

  “I went out to a restaurant for an early dinner with some friends. They wanted me to go out to a party, but I came home early and read a book.”

  She called a friend to meet her at her house when she arrived. They arranged for one of the local beat cops to take her home. Turner and Fenwick walked with her out to the police car. As Turner held the door for her Fenwick said, “If you think of anything, please call us.”

  As she entered the car, she nodded distractedly at him. She tapped the young officer on the shoulder and murmured, “Take me home, please.”

  5

  Turner insisted they detour to the Speedy Electronics store at Broadway and Belmont. There, he picked out the same kind of beeper that Fenwick wore for Madge.

  Turner and Fenwick returned to Area Ten Headquarters. 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 the new Area Ten Headquarters. Planned renovations occurred at random intervals. Lack of air-conditioning in the summer, was somewhat ameliorated by a huge numbers of fans nearly blowing their paperwork to uselessness. For the winter, all of the detectives, most of the clerks, and over half the uniformed cops, had brought in space heaters, making the entire complex a disaster waiting for a fire to destroy it.

  Heavily bundled-up newspaper reporters huddled together just inside the doors to the station. As Turner and Fenwick walked in, the acting commander was giving a statement. Every time the doors opened, a swoosh of wind swirled in and lowered the temperature around the reporters ten degrees.

  Turner and Fenwick hurried past the milling mob and up the stairs. At their desks on the third floor, they took out the beginnings of paperwork: Major Crime Worksheets, Daily Major Incident Logs, and Supplementary Reports.

  Minutes later, the acting commander entered the room and strode over to them. The regular commander was on vacation in Cabo San Lucas. The acting commander was a Hispanic-American named Drew Molton, a sensible man who’d run afoul of the upper echelon of the Police Department. Last summer he’d had a one man show of his paintings in a local art gallery. While the money he made, from the sale of the pieces, had silenced most of the razzing from his cop buddies, neither the art, nor the amount of money earned kept the police brass from being leery about his artistic activities. A person achieving fame outside of the establishment made them uneasy.

  Drew Molton sat down on the corner of Fenwick’s desk. He said, “I hate it when famous people die. Makes the case a pain in the ass.”

  “I think I’ve got a problem with it,” Turner said.

  Molton gazed at him calmly and waited for him to explain.

  It wasn’t that Turner was unwilling to be open about his sexual orientation, he just wasn’t eager to add another coming-out experience to his day’s work. Unfortunately, coming out is a process, engaged in every time a new person or situation is met in which being openly gay is significant. It may be perfectly safe to come out, but each time it takes an emotional toll. Turner pulled in a lungful of air. “I’m gay and the dead guy was notoriously homophobic.”

  Molton looked at him in silence for several moments. Finally, he said, “And your point is?”

  “I might not be able to be objective. What if some prosecutor tries to bring my feelings against him up at tria
l, like they did with that cop in Los Angeles?”

  “That was negative feelings about the alleged killer, not the victim. It’s not the same thing.”

  “In the same ballpark.”

  “I expect every cop in this command to respond to every situation professionally. If you want to tell me you can’t handle it, then you’re telling me you shouldn’t be a detective. I’m sure that’s not what you want to tell me. African-American cops investigate the murders of white bigots. White cops investigate the killings of angry African-Americans.”

  “This is an awfully high-profile case.”

  “That’s why I’m glad you two are on it. I don’t have to worry about screw-ups or prejudice. If you arrest somebody, it’ll be done right, and I’ll know we’ve got our killer. You two have the best conviction rate in the squad for the past three years.” He pointed at Turner, “You ever make bigoted, antijudge, antistraight comments?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’ll be a fine witness when we catch the asshole who did this.”

  Turner gazed at the Commander for a few moments. The vote of confidence made him feel good.

  “I’m ordering you to stay on the case,” the Commander finished. “Give me a full report after you’re done today.”

  They nodded.

  Molton added, “FBI might be nosing in on this one.”

  “Didn’t happen anywhere they have jurisdiction,” Fenwick said.

  “Just the same, they’ll probably be around. If the need arises, be as gentle with them as you can.”

  “Can we use anybody we want on the case?” Turner asked.

  Milton said, “Within reason. Take Roosevelt and Wilson first. They’re the best. A famous person is dead. I get pressure. You get pressure. We all get pressure. Let’s get this over with as soon as we can.” He left.

  “Guess I’m on the case,” Turner said.

  They found Joe Roosevelt and Judy Wilson in the coffee room. Joe was red-nosed and short, with brush-cut gray hair and bad teeth. Judy was a fiercely competitive African-American woman. They had a well-deserved reputation as one of the most successful pairs of detectives on the force. When Turner and Fenwick entered the room, the other two detectives were arguing over what was appropriate to bring as a wedding gift when you were invited to a bachelor party or bridal shower but not to the wedding or reception itself.