Incendiary Designs

by Michael Allen Dymmoch

  “Nope. According to Mrs. Renzi, she used to say it was God’s punishment for marrying Limardi. Mrs. Renzi’s also pretty sure Limardi kicked her in the stomach shortly after young Eddie was born—hurt her so bad she couldn’t have any more kids.”

  “And I s’pose he knocked Ed junior around while he was at it.”

  “Mrs. Renzi didn’t say.”

  “You get confirmation on any of this yet?”

  “No, but I got a few calls out.”

  “Well, keep on it. And while you’re at it, see if you can find out who owns the house Mrs. Ori lives in.”

  “What’re you gonna be doing?”

  “I think I’ll invite Fast Eddie to come by and talk about his family tree.”

  Thinnes asked Swann to bring Limardi in because he didn’t want to pull Oster off what he was doing and Ferris would’ve let the cat out of the bag. Nobody else was free.

  Swann put him in the interview room. When Thinnes went in, Limardi said, “I don’t know any more about Helen Morgan’s death than I did the last time I was here!

  “Okay.”

  “I could’ve told you that over the phone.” He wasn’t mad enough to be an injured innocent, though it was amazing how many who were innocent put up with the inconvenience of coming down to the Area just because some cop implied they’d be thought guilty if they didn’t. Almost as many as those who, like Limardi, thought they were smarter than the entire detective division. In spite of old Columbo episodes rerunning everywhere. They wanted to know what the police had on them and thought they could outcop the cops to find out. Wasn’t there a fancy word for that kind of arrogance?

  “Actually, we were looking into another matter,” Thinnes said.

  “Well?”

  “Tell me about Dino Ori.”

  “He’s a deadbeat.”

  “Your cousin?”

  “My mother married his uncle. That doesn’t make him my cousin.”

  “So you hated the guy?”

  “It’s more like I don’t like him, and we’ve got nothing in common. He’s a deadbeat.”

  “Was. He’s dead.”

  Limardi shrugged.

  “I’m surprised your mother didn’t tell you.”

  “I don’t see her much.”

  “When was the last time?”

  “Easter.”

  “When was the last time you saw your cousin?”

  “I told you, he’s not my cousin. And if somebody shot the bastard, it’s not my fault. I don’t know anything about it or about him.”

  “Why would you think someone shot him?”

  “To know him was to want to shoot him.”

  “Do you know a Brian Fahey?”

  “Should I?” Thinnes waited. “No. Is he dead, too, or did he kill Dino?”

  “Did I say Dino was killed?”

  “Aren’t you a homicide detective?”

  “Violent crimes.” Limardi shrugged. “Do you know Terry Koslowski?”

  “No.”

  Thinnes thought he’d detected a slight hesitation. He said, “Linda Koslowski?”

  “No.”

  This time there was a flicker of wariness, but was it because he was lying or because he was being asked about a woman? “Where were you the night of July seventeenth?”

  “God, I thought nobody outside of B movies asked questions like that.”

  “Well?”

  “I have no idea. Why?”

  “Linda Koslowski was murdered July seventeenth.”

  “Not by me.” Limardi seemed sure of himself. Either he didn’t do it or he’d rehearsed his denial. “I’d like to go now. Or you can get me a lawyer.”

  Oster was still on the phone when Thinnes came out of the interview room. Swann was reading the Sun-Times, and the headline got Thinnes’s attention: “Blood Placed on Simpson Sock: Expert.” He walked over to check it out. Swann was his age or better, and when he put on reading glasses to study the paper, Thinnes was reminded—not for the first time—that they were both getting older.

  Ferris came in and read the caption over Swann’s shoulder. “How the hell could they tell that?” he demanded.

  Swann dropped the paper on the table and pushed it toward Ferris. “I don’t know. Read it yourself.”

  “Nah, it’s bullshit.” Ferris put his hands in his pockets and walked over to stand behind Oster. “You know what’s the slogan of O.J.’s new limo service, Carl?”

  “You’re goin’ straight to hell?”

  “Close. We’ll get you to the airport with time to kill.”

  Sixty

  “Josh and Linny are spending the weekend with their grandmother,” Martin said.

  They were sitting in a quiet corner of the Palmer House bar. Morgan looked marginally better than he had the day of the funeral, but there were still worry lines, and dark circles beneath his eyes. There were also symptoms of attraction—dilated pupils, accelerated respiration, lingering eye contact. They’d been talking shop and weather, neither verbally acknowledging the electricity between them.

  But there was something bothering Martin. Caleb was reluctant to ask what. Within his certainty that Martin couldn’t have been behind his wife’s murder there was a germ of doubt—given sufficient provocation anyone is capable. “Something’s troubling you,” he said. “What?”

  Martin looked up from his drink and blushed. “Am I that easy to read?”

  Moot question. Caleb waited.

  “Linny said you told her Detective Thinnes is relentless.”

  “What brought that to mind?”

  “The police hauled me in for questioning.”

  “Hauled?”

  “Well, the very strong implication was that I’d fail to cooperate only if I were guilty. They asked me all sorts of personal questions: had I ever been unfaithful? why had I only recently filed for divorce? didn’t I have Helen heavily insured? They asked questions I’d answered the last time I spoke with them. They acted as if it were just a matter of time until I get summoned before a grand jury.”

  “It’s probably not personal. Until they figure it out, everyone’s suspect.”

  “I’m sure they can sense guilt the way dogs pick up on fear. And I’ve been paralyzed by guilt lately. I wanted to be rid—I wanted to be free of Helen. Now, I feel as if I caused her death.”

  “Have a care for what you ask the gods…”

  “Precisely. But I didn’t want her dead. And I didn’t kill her. I know you’ve got no reason to believe me. My whole life to date has been a lie. No, not a lie! A mistake. But you must know people sometimes change, given sufficient motivation. God knows I have that!”

  Of course he was right, Caleb thought. People change. Particularly when they reach a point when the pain is greater than the fear.

  “I guess I’m asking you to trust me,” Martin said.

  Caleb wasn’t one to trust a man he scarcely knew. In God we trust, he thought, all others pay cash. He really didn’t know Martin.

  Another maxim came to mind. Something he’d once seen on the notice board outside a church: Faith is not belief without proof but trust without reservation. He wished he could smother his reservations. He knew they were personal as well as interpersonal; faith in Martin was really faith in his own ability to judge character. He didn’t believe Martin capable of premeditated murder but—he admitted—he’d been fooled in the past. And it was doubly hard to be objective when your soul cried out, this is the one. Self delusion? And was it his soul or his gonads?

  Sixty-One

  There was a shrine in the darkened living room of Mrs. Ori’s house. Oster hadn’t mentioned it after his first visit, but he knew more about little old Catholic Italian ladies than Thinnes did, so maybe it was standard equipment. It was set up on a table in the corner of the room. A candle burned in a short red glass in front of a two-foot-tall statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Sharing the stage was the black-and-white picture of a grammar-school-age girl.

  “My Bianca,” Mrs. Ori said
, when she noticed Thinnes looking. “An angel in heaven. With God.” In case there was any doubt. “She died in that terrible school fire.”

  “Our Lady of Angels?” Oster asked.

  Mrs. Ori nodded. She reminded Thinnes of his grandmother, though she was about the age his mother would be if she were still alive. She had on a dress that came well below her knees. Her gray hair was piled and pinned up on her head. Her glasses were probably all the rage in the early seventies. “The same,” she said. “God has His reasons, I’m sure. But it’s hard.”

  Thinnes nodded, and waited. She invited them to sit; she took a chair facing the shrine. They sat on the sofa, and Thinnes got to the point. “We were wondering if you could tell us about your brother Aldo?”

  “Aldo? I haven’t seen him since I left Italy. I don’t even know if he’s still alive. When I married Eduardo—my first husband—I was cut off from my family.”

  Thinnes glanced at Oster and got an I-told-you-so look.

  “Eduardo—never mind. I won’t speak against the dead. But Aldo. You’ve met him? You know him?”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ori. He passed away.”

  She nodded as if she’d been expecting it and waited for him to continue.

  “He left you all his property in his will.”

  “I don’t understand. What about his family?”

  “I guess you’re all the family he had.”

  She started crying softly. Thinnes looked at Oster, who shrugged. They waited. After a few moments, she said, “What about the arrangements?”

  Oster said, “He’s already been buried, Mrs. Ori. I’m sorry.” He took a card from his pocket and handed it to her. “This is the name of your brother’s lawyer. He can tell you about the arrangements and the terms of the will.”

  She took the card and held it in her lap. Tears made lines down her cheeks. “So many wasted years,” she said. “Lonely, wasted years.”

  Thinnes looked around for a tissue box, located one, and offered it to her. She took a tissue; he put the box on an end table within reach.

  “Is there someone we can call for you?”

  “Father Raymond. Over at the church.”

  “I know him,” Oster said. “I’ll do it.”

  She pointed to a doorway on the far side of the room. “The phone’s in the kitchen.”

  Oster left. Thinnes waited in silence with her. When Oster returned, he was carrying two glasses, both of which he offered to the woman. She took one and sniffed it. “My cooking wine?”

  “Medicinal,” Oster said. “Water,” he added and put the other glass next to the tissues. “Father Raymond will be here in twenty minutes.” He sat down. “Mrs. Renzi’s coming, too.”

  “That gossip?” She softened. “Well, she’s in on all the marryings and buryings.” She took a sip of wine and sighed.

  Thinnes said, “I know this probably isn’t a good time, Mrs. Ori, but we’re still working on your nephew’s death. Would you mind looking at some pictures for us? See if you recognize anyone?”

  She nodded. Thinnes took a pack of Polaroids from his pocket and showed them to her one by one. The first three were District Nineteen tactical officers. She shook her head. The fourth was Limardi.

  “That’s my Eddie, my son!” She glared. “What’s his picture doing with these criminals?”

  “Those others were police officers.” She seemed placated. “When was the last time you saw Eddie?”

  “Eastertime.” She must’ve realized how callous that made Eddie seem because she added, “He has his own life.”

  Thinnes nodded and showed her the next picture.

  “Why, that’s Brian Fahey.”

  “Where do you know him from, Mrs. Ori?”

  “He went to school with Eddie. Long time ago.”

  “When was the last time you saw him, ma’am?” Oster asked.

  “Three or four weeks ago.” Thinnes and Oster looked at each other. “He was down on his luck. He said he lost his job and got evicted. I let him stay in Eddie’s room. Eddie hasn’t used it for years. He must’ve been in some very bad trouble, because he didn’t say good-bye when he moved out.”

  They waited until they were sure she had nothing to add, then Thinnes showed her the sixth picture.

  “Why that’s another friend of Eddie’s—Terry. He calls me Mom. He’s renting Eddie’s room from me—I would have let him stay for free, but he insisted.”

  “You seen him lately?” Oster asked.

  “Now that you mention it, not for over a week. That’s very strange. He used to come up all the time and ask was I okay in the heat? And did I want anything from the store?”

  Thinnes looked at Oster; he shook his head. One bad news flash at a time. Thinnes showed her the rest of the pictures. She didn’t recognize the two female patrol officers who’d stood in the lineup with Maria Cecci, but she recognized Cecci.

  “That’s a girl Eddie used to go with, years ago.”

  “Not recently?”

  “Oh, no. She died. She went away to college, Eddie told me, and she died.”

  In a matter of speaking, Thinnes decided. Died for Limardi’s purposes. He turned over the last picture, Helen Morgan, and was surprised when Mrs. Ori said, “I know her, too. I can’t remember her name, but she used to have a crush on Eddie. She was always hanging around, mooning over him. He never cared much for her. I don’t know why. She was nice enough but she wasn’t so pretty when she was younger.”

  When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Oh, a long time ago. Around the time Eddie graduated.”

  When they came back with Fuego and the warrant, the downstairs apartment, “Eddie’s room,” looked like the crazy uncles’ place in Unstrung Heroes—wall-to-wall junk. Boxes had been piled up against the walls in the hallway to the point where you had to turn sideways to squeeze between them.

  Thinnes walked to the “center” of the room and said, “Where the hell do you start?”

  Fuego, who’d followed him, made a slow one-eighty degree turn, then pointed to a shelf of old notebooks. “Start with those. He must’ve had a reason to save them.”

  “Check this out.” Oster held out a grimy photo album with age-yellow newspaper clippings glued to its pages. The glue made darker spots on the corners of the clippings. “We got any clue about this?”

  Most of the articles were newspaper accounts of the Our Lady of Angels fire that had taken ninety-five lives in 1958, but there were a few pictures and accounts of other fires. There were also other albums filled with clippings about fires. The notebooks contained pages filled with neat lines of handwritten text, so small it could hardly be read without a magnifying glass. Thinnes tried to make out what it said; it reminded him of Ulysses, a book he’d had to read in school. One line—“I’d like to set the God-cursed city on fire”—seemed enough to justify seizing the notebooks as evidence, and the scrapbooks were a no-brainer.

  “This is promising,” Fuego said. “Let’s get the lab to go over these for prints.”

  “Why?” Oster said. “Even if Limardi’s prints are all over ’em, it’s his room in his mother’s house. He’ll just say Fahey or Koslowski left it.”

  “Yeah, but he might have trouble explaining if only his prints are on things.”

  “And how do you know which is his stuff and what belongs to Fahey and Koslowski?”

  “We’ll sort it out. We got time. No statute of limitations on murder.”

  Sixty-Two

  The Area Three squad room. Kate Ryan dropped her purse on the floor next to her chair; put down the rest of what she’d been carrying—large McDonald’s soft drink, several files, a Tribune—and collapsed. Except for her red cheeks, she was a bright pink and beaded with sweat. She let out an exaggerated sigh.

  Thinnes accepted the invitation. “Rough day?”

  She laughed. “Day? Do you realize the average high for the month is ninety degrees?” She picked up her cup and rolled its sweaty surface over her cheeks and for
ehead, then took a long swallow.

  The phone rang. Thinnes answered and told her, “For you.”

  “How’d they know I was here?”

  “Good detective work.”

  She picked up and talked, then listened. When she hung up, she said, “That was the tac office. They’ve got my shooter in the Mackie case. He wants to deal.”

  Thinnes stood outside the interview room with officers Noir and Azul, the odd-couple tac team that had made the bust. Thinnes was admiring Ryan’s technique, the other two critiquing her physique. The alleged offender was beginning to crumble.

  “Jerry,” she said. “We have an eyewitness. We have bullets recovered from the gun you were carrying. We have other witnesses who can put you in the neighborhood. What we need is why you did it. Maybe you had a good reason, a reason a jury would give you the benefit of the doubt over.”

  Jerry sat back and stretched his long legs out, and rested his scarred, gang-tattooed hands on his thighs. “I got the best reason there is.” Ryan waited. “The man paid me to cap ’im.”

  “The man have a name?”

  “Nope. He send me fifty shiny new twenties in a envelope with a note says I get the other half when this dude’s history. Gave me the dude’s car, an’ plate, an’ where to find ’im.”

  “Did you get the second installment?”

  “Damn straight.”

  “From who?”

  “Didn’t give me no name. An’ he was real careful that I didn’t see his face. But he slipped up and I seen the car he was driving’.” Ryan waited. “A big old white Mercedes.”

  Sixty-Three

  Thinnes had discovered that the usual interview techniques didn’t work on Dr. Caleb. The best way to get information out of him was to ask straight out. You didn’t always get it, but you didn’t get a load of shit either. Monday morning he left a message requesting that the doctor come in and talk.

  By 2:00 P.M. the temperature was ninety-five degrees, and the Sun-Times headline pretty much described the situation: “City Goes on Heat Attack Cooling Sites, Hotlines Help Some Find Relief.” Caleb came in looking like he’d just come from one of the cooling sites.