by Thomas Laird
Perhaps the Anderson Building will be my swan song. Some case will have to do. This is as big as anything I’ve ever been involved in, if it’s the serial killing, mass murder that I think it is. I’ve dealt with killers who’ve murdered in the teens and twenties, but never have I pursued someone who has destroyed the equivalence of a small town. Pick a farming community in Illinois. One of those places you drive through, blink, and it’s history. This guy has decimated such a place in one fell swoop. The Anderson Building, heretofore just a brick structure that housed a bunch of workers in the heart of the Loop. Now it’s the rally cry for intolerance and hatred of all things Middle Eastern, and I know in my soul the mob is wrong on this one.
I even rented The Oxbow Incident just a few nights ago. Natalie watched it with me but fell asleep in my arms right before those innocent men got strung up by the posse. Henry Fonda starred, but it wasn’t one of those Hollywood blockbuster type flicks. It was a quiet condemnation of intolerance, and it worked on me like the scariest of horror flicks, because I was living in the middle of a similar scenario right now. I wondered why there was no outcry about what was happening, but I knew how comfortable good guys/bad guys was. I remember we used to be the bad guys when Vietnam was at its worst in the late Sixties and early Seventies. We came home the bad guys. Everyone spat at the mention of a Viet Vet. It took until the later Eighties before the pendulum swung the other way, and I wondered how long it would be before the Middle Easterners became our close allies. Look how badly we despised the Germans and the Japanese. There’s not even a remnant of that hatred from the Forties around anymore. We’re all good buddies and business partners…
I’m just a Homicide detective. I dwell in the world of the dead and I speak for those who have no voice. I am not well versed in politics or sociology or history. I took a few courses in college. I am not a shrink or an analyst. I don’t have enough faith in human consistency to become a psychologist this late in my career. All I know is my tank is near empty and I don’t have the energy to confront the bastards for much longer.
This is the case. There is no other. I’m putting aside my load, with Tommy’s help, and I’m gearing up for just one more job, and then the hell with it. I can stay home with the baby. I can take the girls to school and pick them up every day. Natalie can be the fulltime breadwinner. My masculine ego is tired out too. I can let her fight her way up the ranks to become a Captain and I’ll be there all the way to back her up. But I’ve had enough. There’s no juice left, or at least not very much. There’s just enough sap left to try and walk up this mountain to find out just exactly what’s on the hidden side, the other side of the moon.
Someone has killed a thousand people and sent their scattered souls to their creator. Someone has to pay for aborting all those full-fledged lives. This is what I have left to do with my professional life, and then I’ll sign the papers, stay home with my beloved family, and the world will definitely go on and there will not even be a burp in the mechanism of anyone’s daily existence.
*
We get no phone calls from Carlo Ciccio, even with the threats I laid on him. I know he saw something on that list of twenty-four I showed him, but it is useless to pursue the Sicilian Capo. He will come to me only if he thinks it’s in his best interests. So far he thinks we can’t connect him to a debtor who killed a grand’s worth of human beings. He thinks he’s uncatchable at the moment, so I have to come up with something to change his attitude.
I go on more interviews with Tommy. Our thirty-one days are almost at a close. Computers haven’t given us more than this list of twenty-four, and even I am beginning to seriously wonder if Bin Laden isn’t responsible after all—
Or maybe some other player hasn’t surfaced yet. Perhaps the insurance angle is a mistake. Maybe I put too many eggs in a single basket, and being very stubborn, I refuse to see the truth of the scenario.
Like a lot of Sicilians, I was taught by my father Jake, the Homicide detective, to try to think the way people around me thought. It is by now a cliché, but it is a workable cliché, in my experience. I try to put myself in someone else’s shoes, just as an empath does, and it allows me to reason from someone else’s point of view. Which is where this current theory evolved in the first place. And deny it as I may, it keeps coming back at me stronger and stronger: This was a crime done out of greed. This is not a part of the current jihad against the West. It is for personal gain, just as most every crime is committed. The real Crusades were about real estate, I kept reminding myself. The holiness of the nine historical events was a lie, just as democracy had never been the issue in both World Wars in the 20th Century. Those two wars were about greed and property, if you cut to the perpetrators in both cataclysms. Hitler wanted the world. The Axis was on a land run as well. It’s always about dirt and who owns it and runs it. That much never changes. That was the crux, the center, of my reasoning. You whacked somebody because there was something to gain. Learn what the prize was and you’d have the name of the pursuer pretty soon afterward. That was how I cracked the cases that I cleared with Doc and now with Tommy. I knew why from the beginning. I just didn’t know what our man was after until we’d solved that riddle along the way.
Yes, this killer or these killers had the prize in mind, and I was sure it was cash, insurance money or other, but it was about lucre. It always was.
This was a more hard case murderer than the usual sex deviate who wanted power over his victims. This perp was into cold blooded mass murder for profit. Or it was, as I thought, to save his ass from people like Carlo Ciccio. Carlo knew something but he wasn’t telling yet. He felt he was still invulnerable.
We went back at several people on the list. Gerald McMahon was first. Tommy and I talked to him on this cold, early day in November, but we quickly got nowhere. He seemed to still be grieving for his lost wife, Marion, a lawyer at the Anderson Building and a partner in Smyth, Andersen, McMahon and Pierce. He had a comfortable brick home on the northwest side in a very solid neighborhood, and I couldn’t really see him as our guy. He had plenty of money from a wealthy construction company he headed. He didn’t need his wife’s money, although he received a half million from her life policies. We checked on Gerald and found that he had no vices that were apparent to anyone—no women on the side, no gambling, nothing with drugs. We put his name through all our computers and we came up empty.
Then we arrived at the front door of Walker S. Hansen, a resident of the Gold Coast and close neighbor of the famous media maven, Oprah Winfrey.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Walker S. Hansen didn’t live in opulence, exactly. His wealth was in his taste, I thought, as we entered his full floor condo here on the Gold Coast. The Monet might have been the real thing, not a print, but I wasn’t astute enough to know and I didn’t ask either. Tommy eyeballed the numerous paintings that adorned his long, white wall. Everything was white in this living room, the carpeting, the furniture…The only contrast was the rich oak of a coffee table that lay before a five-section white couch that looked too pristine to sit on top of. But Walker S. Hansen directed us to sit on this magnificent couch of many parts, and Tommy and I sat.
“Your wife Greta left you three quarters of a million in life insurance. Is that correct?” I asked.
Walker S. Hansen was six-four and fit. He was athletic without being bulky. He could’ve been a forward on a basketball team if he were about four inches taller. He might have been a graceful diver or swimmer, perhaps an elegant, sleek tennis player. He would’ve been popular with women. He would still be a favorite among the middle-aged ladies, it appeared to me. I thought he might be the type who might cheat on his wife, so I kept that angle in mind.
“Yes. You asked me the same question about ten days ago, I recall,” he said.
His hair was brown and he had a full head of it. It reached about midway down his neck, but I was betting he went to the same hair stylist that my cousin Carlo went to.
Perfect hair, just like Carlo Ci
ccio. Not a wisp out of place.
“Do you mind if we take this out onto my deck?”
“No,” I told him.
Tommy and I rose and followed him to the sliding glass doors in the middle of that long white wall in his living room that overlooked, spectacularly, Lake Michigan, the Gold Coast and the Loop. I couldn’t imagine what this property went for, but it had to be in the millions.
It was early November, but the temperature was in the low 60’s. It was light jacket weather near the Lake, and Tommy and I wore jackets to cover our weapons as well as to keep the slight chill of the Hawk, the east wind off the Lake, off our flesh.
We sat on his white, of course, patio chairs. They looked ornate enough to have graced a Grecian garden somewhere near the Acropolis. They had a classical look to them, I mean to say. I expected to see a sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite somewhere close to this furniture. Hansen had a basket of fruit laid out on a glass table that sat before the chairs. There was a full bar, also a gleaming white porcelain. A bartender stood ready behind the slab of ivory.
“Would you like something to drink, gentlemen?”
“A Diet Coke,” I said.
Tommy asked for the same. Walker S. Hansen smiled graciously, but I think he was disappointed we didn’t challenge his bartender. Hansen ordered a banana daiquiri. The barman attended to Hansen’s drink first, throwing ice and stripped bananas into the blender. When everything was crushed in the blender, he reached in the fridge beneath the bar and drew out two Diet Coke cans. He put ice in two tall glasses, and then he brought over the three drinks on a tray. The bartender was a tall black man who looked as if he were recently a chieftain of a Zulu tribe in Africa. He was a black African American. There were no mixed strains in his face, and he was an extraordinarily handsome man, dressed in (what else?) a white linen suit.
The bartender walked back to his slab.
“Do you think I killed Greta? Is that why you’re back again?” he smiled.
“We’re interviewing a number of people from the Anderson tragedy, Mr. Hansen. You’re one on a long list.”
“I’m glad I have company…Why should I want to kill my wife? I’m already far richer than she was.”
“She ran an export-import business out of the Anderson?” Tommy asked.
“Yes. It was worth several million. Much more than her insurance. And I’m her sole heir. There are no children.”
“So you inherit it all,” I said.
“Lieutenant, I’m worth seventeen million dollars. Let’s cut to the center, here. Greta was worth perhaps six million, all told. I’m beginning to find all this very embarrassing. I don’t really have to tell you anything without my attorney’s presence.”
The combative, competitive athlete was emerging now. He wasn’t really angry. He was aroused by the sport of the challenge we’d thrown him.
“If we were to subpoena a list of all your assets, that seventeen million would be liquid assets?” I asked.
“Yes, Lieutenant, liquid assets.”
“Who do you think blew up the Anderson Building?” I asked Hansen.
He looked momentarily taken back.
“I’m sure it’s the same people who blew up the World Trade—“
“You think it’s Bin Laden and Al Qaida,” Tommy said.
“Yes,” the tall athlete answered.
The cool wind wafted over us on this open deck. When the sun went down it would be too chilly to sit here very long.
“Why would they pick the Anderson Building?” I asked.
“That’s your field of expertise, I’m afraid,” Walker S. Hansen replied.
“Your money is in construction, is it not?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“Then you’d be familiar with fertilizers and chemicals such as those found at ground zero here in Chicago. You’d have a working knowledge of explosives, being in the field you’re in,” Tommy explained.
“I wouldn’t. I hire people who know all about explosives used in construction, sir, not about building bombs to blow up edifices and humanity. Now if you have no further questions—“
“You have any outstanding debts that might punch a leak in your seventeen million?” I asked him.
“This conversation is finished. You can contact my attorney from here on out. Please don’t bother me again. I just lost my wife and you’re here asking me…Please leave now.”
I set my Diet Coke on his glass table, but next to the coaster. I saw him watch me put it there on purpose. He was imaging the ring it would make on that immaculate, glass surface, and his face began to darken as Tommy and I left the premises.
“He’s got too much money. No reason to blow her up, and all the rest with her.”
“We can check out his holdings. See if he’s as liquid as he says he is, Tommy.”
“We can do that.”
We were driving on the Outer Drive. It was a crisp November afternoon, and the slop of winter was still just a threat. But we had gone past thirty-one days now, and I knew the Captain was about to pull our plug.
“You have nothing, then?” the Captain barked. He was ex-Special Forces in the Vietnam War, and the guys he ran with then were stone killers, stone assassins. But his exploits in the War hadn’t left him out of control, like some of his Special Forces cohorts. Those out of control button men couldn’t adjust back here in the World. The Captain was nothing if not in control of his emotions. He could ejaculate anger at times. I’d seen it in the past, and it was not pleasant to behold.
“All I’ve got is my gut, Captain. It tells me the common wisdom shared by the Federals is sniffing out the wrong fox.”
“You think it’s one of our residents here in the city.”
“I have a suspect. And all he is is a suspect at this time.”
I explain my feelings on the subject of Walker S. Hansen. I explain that he says he’s worth seventeen mil, and therefore has no motive to whack his wife Greta and to take a thousand other souls along with her. But I like the guy, I tell the Captain. I haven’t got a goddam thing on him yet, but I really like him.
“You sure you just don’t dislike the son of a bitch and you want him to fit this profile you’ve been creating. Am I right?”
“Yes, Captain. You’re right. I don’t like him. He’s an arrogant son of a bitch. Someone who’d be careless enough to kill a thousand innocent people just to get away with the death of one…Right now it is all intuition.”
“Intuition don’t mean dick to a jury.”
“Yes sir. I’m well aware of that.”
“I know you are, Jimmy.”
He looks over at Tommy Spencer as if he’s looking for help.
“How you feeling, Jimmy?” the Captain asks. His tone has softened considerably.
“You mean am I burned out and frustrated and semi-paranoid and ready to retire? The answer is yes…Just about, but not yet. I believe I’m headed in the right direction, and if it isn’t Walker S. Hansen, then it’s his dark twin or someone just like him. It isn’t Bin Laden. The Arab wouldn’t have done the Anderson Building because it’s small potatoes. I might be off with Hansen, but I know in my head and in my gut, this thing is about cash and nothing else. Somebody needed a quick fix for money, and they got lucky. They had that fifty gallon drum of fertilizer set up the day of the blasts in New York. They already saw the Towers go down, but they capped the Anderson Building because it would have to seem connected to what happened in the Apple.”
“Do you see all this in some kind of vision, Jimmy?”
“Captain—“
“I mean did you hear some voice that told you all this?”
“I’m not—“
“I know you’re not nuts. But you’re two years past retirement. I gave you a month to turn over this little one-man conspiracy theory, and it just ain’t working out, Jimmy. You are tired out, worn to the nub. And Doc’s death has to be doing things to you too. And the word is you’re going to be a daddy at sixty.”
I look over at Tommy.
“Not from me he didn’t,” Tommy tells me, his eyes directly upon mine. So I believe Spencer wasn’t the leak about Natalie.
“You need to retire now, Jimmy. Get out before this shit overwhelms you. I can’t let you chase this goblin all over the city anymore. You’re hurting your own rep, and I can’t stand to watch it any longer. I’m shutting you down. Immediately.”
“Captain, please…”
“No. My decision is final. I can’t force you to retire and I won’t. But I can control what cases you work on while you’re active in Homicide…Jimmy, you’re the best. The best I ever saw. You were even better than Doc because you had that special kind of second sight that the great ones all have. But you also have the bulldog in you, and now it’s become common stubbornness. And I can’t have it. You got your mind made up that everybody’s wrong and you’re right, and this time you got it wrong, not them. I don’t know why they picked the Anderson Building, but I have a suspicion it was one of several sites. I think the Anderson site blew because security was shitty and lazy. I think it was human error that it got blown. The FBI found three other bombs the afternoon of the eleventh. They just shared that information with me this morning. There were devices in the Tribune Building, The Sun Times Building and the Sears Tower. They found the bombs just minutes before they were set to go off. The FBI shared all that with our people just two hours ago.”
“Were any of the devices barrels of fertilizer, like the Oklahoma bombing?”
“No. I think they were rigged C-4 setups. Plastic. The bomb squads took all three of them out. It’s one hell of a story. You can read about it tomorrow in the papers. They’ve been holding back because they didn’t want a bigger wave of hysteria to take over this city…Jimmy, that’s it. You’re back on your regular load with Tommy. You will no longer investigate anything remotely attached to the Anderson thing. Do you hear me, sir?”
