Another Dead Teenager Page 5

  He walked into the kitchen, expecting from long familiarity to find Mrs. Talucci sipping espresso coffee and reading a book at the kitchen table. On a Saturday she’d have done the dishes and had bread baking in the oven for any weekend feasts her family had planned. But this time Paul found no warm smell of freshness from the oven and no Mrs. Talucci at the table.

  The niece who met him at the door said that Mrs. Talucci was downstairs. Turner found her in the reconverted basement, one of the many projects he’d done for her in return for her watching Jeff and Brian. It had taken him six months but the result was excellent. He had eliminated any dampness and smell, paneled the walls with pine, and installed floor-to-ceiling bookcases to hold Mrs. Talucci’s ever-expanding collection. The shelves overflowed with everything from weighty tomes to the most recent popular fiction. In the center of the room were the only two chairs. Both black leather with footstools in front of them, a glass-topped table between them, on top of which was a reading lamp with shaded bulbs reaching to both chairs.

  Mrs. Talucci sat in the chair on the left. She wore a faded flower-print house dress and purple slippers. She glanced up at Paul and put her book aside. Paul noted the title: Tolkien’s The Lays of Beleriand.

  He saw tired eyes, listless hands, wisps of white hair not caught and pulled back into Mrs. Talucci’s usually perfectly constructed bun at the back of her head. He seldom noticed her wrinkled face and the flesh drooping on her arms and elbows. Today she looked over a hundred.

  Her “good morning” seemed beyond age and weariness.

  Paul sat down in the other chair.

  “What’s wrong, Rose?” he asked.

  She held his gaze with her dark brown eyes. “I have cancer,” she said. Before he could respond, some of her old fire and command returned. “I do not want sympathy. I do not want pity. I’m ninety-two years old. I certainly did not expect to live forever. The hard part is that after telling the family, they’re going to be over here invading my privacy, slobbering all over. I don’t want tears and confessions. I’ve had a good life, but I’m old. That’s what you do when you’re old, die.”

  “Rose…”

  “And don’t you get all slobbery.”

  Paul felt the tears in his eyes.

  “I’m not going to die today or tomorrow. Before the doctor could say it, I told her there wasn’t much point in painful treatments at my age. The cancer’s beyond the point of doing anything about, anyway.” She ended much more wistfully, “I would prefer, however, not to die in pain.”

  “Rose…”

  “But the doctor didn’t know about that, or how long I’d live. The weasel wouldn’t give me a straight answer. All she’d say is cancer moves slowly in old people.” She snorted. “How lucky for us.”

  “I’ll do anything I can to help,” Paul said.

  She smiled her old lively, affectionate smile, “Thank you. I hadn’t wanted to tell you until all the final tests were done. I met with the doctor yesterday. You’re the first one I’ve told.” She closed her eyes and sighed. “At least I beat old Ethel Watson. She lived to be ninety-one, the old witch.”

  Rose was referring to an old rival who had lived a block over for eighty-five years. Their children had fought when they were little and Ethel had tried to get one of Rose’s daughters sent to an orphanage around 1920. Rose had never forgiven her.

  She stood up. “I’ve been expecting you. You’ll need help with the boys this morning.”

  “It’s not necessary….”

  “I am not about to physically collapse,” she said. “I can do today what I did yesterday and my mind hasn’t developed defects overnight. The kid who got murdered—I saw you on one of the twenty-four-hour Chicago news stations. You’re on the case and you’ve got to go to work. Brian’s got a herd of boys that need ordering. Jeff needs watching. Of course I’ll do it.”

  Paul gave up any attempt at protest. Mrs. Talucci, sick or well, had an air of command it was useless to attempt to override. That she had gone to the doctor on her own and taken the news without family around was typical of the way she’d lived her life.

  In the car on his way to work, Paul found himself unable to control his tears. Instead of driving straight to the station, he took Congress Parkway out to Grant Park, parked on Columbus Drive, put a quarter in the meter, and walked to the pedestrian crossing for Lake Shore Drive. He knew he’d be late for meeting Fenwick, but at the moment he didn’t care.

  He walked slowly along the lake shore. He realized he’d known Rose was old, but understanding she would die because she was old didn’t make the reality of her eventual loss easier to accept. It was hard to imagine her not being there.

  Rose Talucci was more precious to him than anyone except his sons. Paul’s wife, Mary, had died when Jeff was born. In the months before his second son’s birth, Paul had come to accept his own being gay. He’d come to love his wife as a friend and her death had pained him deeply. He sometimes wondered what would have happened had Mary lived and he’d come out to her. Certainly their marriage would have been over. It was one of the great “what if’s” of his life.

  Rose had become a large part of Paul’s family. He loved her fiery spirit and joy in living, her jokes and laughter. She’d had to overcome a tough early life in a dirt-poor hovel in the Taylor Street neighborhood in the early part of the century. He would miss Rose and her fabulous dinners. He loved the late night snacks she’d throw together and insist he eat after he came home very late and she’d put the kids to bed. They’d talk for hours. She had insight and wisdom. He would miss building and fixing things for her. Mrs. Talucci was one of the few people he would trust implicitly in anything. He would miss that and all the rest.

  He found himself at the foot of the Adler Planetarium. Already complements of school buses were disgorging school kids for visits here and at the Field Museum across the street. Even on Saturdays, hordes of kids descended on the place in vast multitudes. The shouting children’s voices punctuated by adult commands brought him out of his reverie. He turned back toward the car.

  Rose was still alive and would make the most of every moment, now and as she had throughout her life. When the time came, he’d do everything he could to ease any suffering. As he pulled up to the station, he realized he’d have to tell his own kids about Rose’s illness. He closed his eyes and shook his head. Sometimes an enormous day’s work ahead wasn’t a bad thing.

  He found Fenwick, the commander, and six uniformed cops on the fourth floor shoving desks aside, dragging cabinets hither and yon, plugging in phone jacks, and toting piles of paper. The fourth floor of the old complex was mostly storage space for musty police department records which they kept promising would some day be put on computers. They could wait until the turn of oblivion for such a happenstance.

  Fenwick said, “We’ve got a ‘task force.’ The police in Kenitkamette and Chicago will be cooperating.”

  “And good morning to you,” Turner said.

  “You’ll need to start sorting assignments,” the commander told them. “Spend some time on that and then begin on the interviews out in the suburbs.”

  “We’ve got nothing in the city?” Fenwick asked.

  “You tell me. You’re still in charge. Do it.”

  Turner and Fenwick trooped down to their desks one floor below.

  “We got trouble, right here in River City,” Fenwick said.

  “I’m the one who’s supposed to quote show tunes,” Turner said.

  “You know, you never do.”

  “Maybe one of my gay genes is defective.”

  “I thought it was the anterior hypothalamus.”

  “You memorized that?”

  “I read all the gay shit in the papers.”

  “And I’m eternally grateful and not interested at the moment. This case is going to be a pain in the ass. All calls connected to it are being directed to…?”

  “I’ve got somebody screening them already. The wackos have begun to report in.�
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  In any high-profile case the absence of leads was seldom a problem. Every nut case in the city, from people who spotted UFOs to those who got the shakes and vapors waiting for the end of the world, would call in with their theories, sightings, facts, wayward thoughts, and tales of aliens. A few you might be able to discard, but almost every one of them had to be followed up. If you didn’t, you risked the danger of missing the one call that was actually genuine and could give a real clue or maybe even break a case wide open.

  “We have the people to cover the crazies?” Turner asked.

  Fenwick hunted through a pile of papers on the left side of his desk. “For all the follow-ups for all calls from the public. Commander gave me a list of five people for today. We’ll get more tomorrow.” He found the list and handed it to Turner.

  “We have to get organized,” Turner said. He stood up and reached for the bulletin board on the right side of his desk. He took down the scattered notes and wanted posters and put up Fenwick’s list on the now blank three- by five-foot cork. In an hour it was filled with lists of people and their assignments. Cops would return to the scenes of both crimes. Every employee of the parking garage would be questioned. The neighborhood around Lumber Street would be canvassed. The owners of the building would be found and talked to. Someone would speak again with the kid who found the body. Every playmate and friend of his who might have gone there that day or any other would be questioned. Every employee of any nearby McDonald’s would be interrogated in case the wrappers in the building had anything to do with where the murderer might have been beforehand.

  All these people would be asked about anything or anyone suspicious that they had seen or noted prior to or on the day of the crime. If the murderer had staked out the killing space, then he or she might have been noticed.

  Every kid who knew the dead kids at school would have to be talked to. It was a tremendous task, but each interview had to be recorded on paper. Anything promising would be passed to Turner and Fenwick, and even then they’d have to find time to read over all the unpromising reports. They had to have a handle on every aspect of the case: something a uniformed officer might consider unimportant could turn out to be significant, but Turner and Fenwick would probably be the only ones to know that. So they’d read everything that came in.

  They’d asked the Crime Lab to return to the abandoned factory at Lumber Street and go through every room on every floor for any more traces of what had happened.

  It was noon before they left the station. They grabbed a sandwich at Fred’s Deli, under the Metra train tracks on Harrison Street. They ate in the car as they drove north. As they crossed the border into Evanston, Fenwick asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Huh?”

  “You haven’t said a word since we finished eating. You’ve been preoccupied all morning. I thought it was the case, but something’s bugging you.”

  Turner told him about Rose Talucci.

  Fenwick listened quietly. When Turner finished, he said, “I’m sorry, buddy. I know how close you and your kids are to her. If I can help, let me know.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You going to tell the kids?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know how.”

  “It’s going to be tough. She’s been the closest thing to a mother they’ve had.”

  “I know.”

  They let a companionable silence, borne of many years as partners, pass between them for the next few miles. Finally Turner said, “What do we have first?”

  “List is in the notebook,” Fenwick said.

  Turner dug through the official papers and found the notes written on tiny graph paper. He and Fenwick had gotten into the habit of writing on graph paper and ordering all their notes not requiring an official form on the small squares. These often seemed an oasis of orderliness amid the violence and chaos that filled their days.

  Turner read through the list. “The Kenitkamette School District people are cooperating in letting us use the high school.”

  “That Chief of Police, Robsart, said they’d been real helpful. Best place for it.”

  Turner nodded agreement.

  “They also said they were going to have grief counselors ready for any kids who needed it,” Fenwick said.

  “They were well liked and popular?” Turner asked.

  “That’s what somebody said last night. I wish they weren’t. It would be great if the first kid or teacher we talk to says he hated the both of them and he’s the killer.”

  “I’d say you’d been listening to fairy tales, but I’ve barely said a word.”

  “You got the directions someplace?”

  Turner pulled them out. Kenitkamette High School put all the other schools on the North Shore to shame. New Trier could brag, but Kenitkamette was the equal of any private high school in the country in facilities, scholarship, test scores, and alumni as graduates of Ivy League schools and heads of corporations.

  The campus seemed more like a college’s, with wide spaces between buildings, brick walkways among swards of green grass, and trees bountiful with October’s harvest of red, gold, orange, and brown leaves. Today the winds were down and a hint of summer’s warmth had returned to the air.

  They met the Kenitkamette Police Department brass in the superintendent’s office. Turner thought he’d entered the plush palace of an ancient emperor. Lavish wall hangings, solid teak desk, genuine antique lamps and knickknacks, including a nineteenth-century Chinoiserie lacquer tea caddy. The carpet matched the hues of the autumn afternoon that Turner could see through an enormous picture window.

  Chief Robsart said, “I’ve managed to get a huge number of people here, or coming in for interviews. Everybody wants to help. Lots of people think of the North Shore as clannish or snobbish, but these people knew and liked the Goldsteins and Douglases. Community groups, parents, kids—everybody’s spread the word. We’ve had over three hundred volunteers for preinterviews. I’m afraid no one in this crowd is going to have anything bad to say about those boys. Maybe nobody thought negatively about them.”

  “It would be a first,” Turner said.

  “Somebody felt negative enough about them to kill them,” Fenwick said.

  “Well, you’re not going to find that among the people we’ve had in here. I’ve got the people who knew them best set up to talk to you.”

  “Prior to last night, any problems with the families?” Fenwick asked. “Domestic calls?”

  “I checked to be certain. None. These are good people.”

  “No way to confirm when they got where they got, and if they stayed there?” Fenwick asked.

  Robsart shrugged. “I have no reason to doubt them.”

  They discussed logistics. The Kenitkamette cops would continue interrogating people and weed out the ones who knew very little or were just hangers-on. Anyone with something negative to say would be moved up to the top of the list of people for the Chicago cops to talk to. Until somebody with something rotten to say was found, Turner and Fenwick would interview the closest friends and teachers.

  They asked the Kenitkamette cops about the presence of sex toys and mentioned the notebook filled with the Satanic alphabet. None of them had heard the remotest thing out of the ordinary connected with these two boys.

  “We can ask around and see if anybody knows anything about that on the force,” Robsart said.

  They thanked her for checking.

  “You interviewing the families again?” Robsart asked.

  “Tentative meet at six, I think,” Fenwick said.

  “I heard their lawyer’s going to be there,” Robsart said.

  Both Chicago cops raised inquisitive eyebrows.

  “This is the North Shore. They’re good people, but they can afford expensive lawyers. Up here being a cop is too much like being social arbiter most of the time. Real crime….” She shook her head. “I don’t envy you guys. To be honest, I’m glad it’s not me in charge of this one.”

  The first teenagers they
talked to burbled with information confirming that both boys had been well liked and popular. They were kind to other kids in that aristocratic-athlete way that long-familiar popularity, good looks, natural athletic ability, and experience with girls gave to some boys at an early age. All expressed, as did everyone they questioned that day, astonishment about sexual toys or Satanism. All said they’d never heard either boy discuss or even hint about such things.

  Jake Goldstein’s girlfriend, Sally Baker, came in around two-thirty. She wore gray sweat pants and sweatshirt. She carried tissues in one hand. Her eyes and nose were red.

  “We’d like you to try and help us find whoever killed Jake and Frank,” Turner said.

  “I don’t know if I can help,” she said in a wispy voice. She wiped her eyes with a tissue. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “When did you meet Jake?”

  “In freshman year, but we didn’t start going out until this August. He dated another girl for a couple years, but she left for college this year and she dumped him this summer before she left.”

  “He feel bad about that?”

  “He cried on my shoulder. We’ve been friends a few years, but I didn’t get him on the rebound. Our love was genuine. He was the most attentive guy I ever dated. He brought me only the nicest little memory gifts of our first kiss, first date.”

  “Did he have any enemies at school?”

  “None. Nobody was even jealous. He was always kind to everybody.”

  “Any gang activity he might have gotten involved in? Upset somebody?”

  “No. That’s impossible.”

  “He ever do drugs, have drugs?”

  “No. He was really clean. He was an athlete and took pride in it.”

  “Alcohol?”

  “No. He was always concerned about driving sober.”

  Fenwick asked, “Do you know if he always wore his underwear?”

  “As far as I know. He always did when….”