Robert gave Chad a glance, and for an instant Kubiak wished he had chosen to speak to each alone, wondered why he should have felt the need to.
“I spent most of my time just telling him to calm down. You don’t understand, the calls were hardly Q and A sessions. They were interrogations. I resented his tone, and finally told him that if he wanted to know what was going on with Amber, he should talk to Amber.”
Chad added, “The last time he phoned me with his threats, I threatened him right back. I haven’t heard from him since.”
“Threats?”
“Yeah. When I started giving back to him the lip he was giving me, he told me he used to fight in the ring, and that he might come over here and teach me a thing or two. I told him I’ve done my share of kickboxing, myself, in high school, so he was welcome to come over any time, and that I’d be here waiting for him. He never showed.” Chad crossed to an ashtray on the table by Bridgot, gave Kubiak the once-over. “You don’t look like you’re here to do the job for him. What are you, a lawyer?”
“Something more like an arbitrator.” Kubiak addressed Bridgot. “What about you?”
She had been staring at the ash on Chad’s cigarette, turned to Kubiak, blinked. “Me?”
“Did Amber’s father threaten you?”
“No. What makes you think he even called me? I don’t even live here.”
“You look pretty comfortable. I’d guess you spend a lot of time here.”
“Yes, I do. You spend any time in student housing, you’ll know why. So what?”
“Joe Torasella gave me your name along with the others. Did he not phone you?”
She looked to Chad and Robert for help, got none, turned back to Kubiak. “No, I’m sure he did. But, he never threatened me.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Nothing.”
“Why not?”
Robert interceded. “You don’t understand, Mr. Kubiak. The way Mr. Torasella was carrying on, we were all afraid of getting involved. These days, your name gets wrapped up in the sort of thing he’s been suggesting, even if you have nothing to do with it, it could get you thrown out of school.”
“That’s twice, Mr. Fleming, that you’ve told me I don’t understand. I think it might be you who doesn’t get it. You don’t have a daughter.”
“You’re right, I don’t. But then, you don’t have a student loan it will take a decade of hard work to pay off, and a future that’s entirely tied to a diploma from the U of C.”
“Did you at least discuss any of this with Amber?”
“Amber knows that the lines of communication with us are always open.”
“That’s not an answer to my question.”
“Isn’t it? Then, I suppose you’ll have to go without one. And, I think it is time you do go.”
Kubiak eyed the three of them. “I hope you all understand that just being an associate of Harold Walsh makes you involved, and your silence—”
“What do you mean,” Chad interrupted, “associate of Walsh?”
“He’s your friend. I think that qualifies.”
“Friend? Downtown Downstate Harold Walsh? He’s no friend of ours. We haven’t seen Harold in . . .” He looked to Bridgot. “What?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “five, six months?” She addressed Kubiak. “Harold doesn’t even live up here. He goes to school in Champaign. Who told you he was our friend?”
“Jennifer Tucker, for one.”
She looked perplexed. Chad, cracking a grin, said, “You remember her, Bridgot. Amber’s neighbor, the waitress, set you straight about patriotism last Fourth of July weekend, just before she poured her beer in your lap.”
“Oh, that miserable thing.” She told Kubiak, “You might want to get your information from someone without an agenda.”
“What is her agenda?”
“Only that she wants to bring Amber back to the friendly confines of Cicero, and away from the big, bad wolves in the big, bad world where poor, little Jennifer just doesn’t fit in.”
“Considering the circumstances, don’t you think that might not be such a big, bad idea?”
Robert took a step forward, pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “Obviously she’s not the only one with an agenda. I’ve asked you once to leave, Mr. Kubiak, so I imagine in your capacity of something of an arbitrator you’re aware that at this point you’re trespassing. If you’re gone before I’m finished dialing 911, I promise not to press charges.”
It was after six by the time he got home.
“That must have been some conversation with the U of C police to run eight hours,” Denise said. “They didn’t find any outstanding warrants on you?”
“I stopped at Hawthorne for lunch.”
“Well, that explains it.”
“The rest of the afternoon I spent talking to Amber’s friends whose names were on that list Joe gave me.”
“I thought you said you couldn’t get directly involved for fear of a backlash.”
“I did. It’s why I only tiptoed around the perimeter, to avoid any confrontation.”
“How did that go?”
“Reasonably well, until they threatened to call the police and have me arrested.”
“That subtle Kubiak charm. Did you at least find out anything that might help Joe?”
“Nothing, except that I might have been wrong about Amber and Walsh being an item. Her friends claim they hardly know him, and that wouldn’t be the case if he were close to Amber. But, if he is just some psycho nut occasionally commuting up here to stalk her, they’d have no reason not to cooperate with Joe. I can understand Joe’s frustration. Something is all wrong here, and I can’t put my finger on what.”
“Are there any other perimeters you can tiptoe through to find out?”
“None that come to mind. I think the best we can hope for is Harold Walsh eventually going away quietly all on his own, and taking any answers with him.”
The next evening, on his way home from a short happy hour at Jimmy Dee’s, Kubiak detoured around the block to Park Tower’s front entrance to check up on Joe and get any fresh news on Amber, only to find Purcell still parked at the front desk two hours into Torasella’s shift.
“I have no idea where he is,” Purcell said. “He just never showed, and nobody’s answering the phone at his house. I know Joe’s got you working on some trouble his daughter is in. Anything you care to share, so I can maybe keep him from getting written up and suspended?”
Kubiak said he was sorry, but had nothing to offer. Purcell didn’t bother to hide his disappointment, added curtly, “By the way, you’ve got company. That Lieutenant Crawford, and some other fella with him I don’t know.” He checked his log. “Been up there about an hour now.”
During the elevator ride up to Floor 7, Kubiak tried to figure the chance of Crawford just happening to show up on the same night Joe just happened not to, knew that wasn’t the case when he entered his apartment and discovered that the “other fella” accompanying him was Danny Guie. Both men were on their feet, and the look on Denise’s face told of a strained visit.
“Hell, Danny,” Kubiak said, hanging up his coat, “if I had known that what you expected in trade for that phone call to the U of C yesterday would be an evening with my wife, I might have asked for more on my side of the bargain.”
Guie wasn’t amused. “You’ve already asked for too much.”
“Then I suppose there’s no point in my asking what you two are doing here.”
Crawford spoke up, all business. “When was the last time you talked to Joe Torasella?”
“Two days ago. Why?”
“What about his daughter Amber?”
“I’ve never met her.” Kubiak addressed Guie. “I think I already told you that. Is she all right?”
“No,” Guie told him. “But, she’s in better shape than Harold Walsh.”
Crawford glared, judging Kubiak’s reactions. Kubiak showed his palms.
“Go ahead, it’s all news
to me.”
Crawford offered it. “Walsh is dead.”
“Dead how? When?”
“Three this morning,” Crawford said. “A knife wound to the chest. Butcher knife. They found him in his parents’ kitchen.”
“Who did, the parents?”
“No, they were out of town visiting relatives. Walsh was house-sitting while up here on spring break. But, you knew that.”
“The spring break part, yeah. Who did discover the body, then?”
“Officers responding to the 911 call.”
“So, Walsh had time to pick up the phone. What did he tell the dispatcher?”
“Nothing. He never made a peep. It was Joe Torasella made the call. He announced that he had killed Walsh, and was glad he did, and that he would wait there quietly for the police. Sure enough, when they got there, he was sitting at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette and helping himself to the family’s gin.”
Kubiak glanced at Denise, remembered Joe sitting uncomfortable and anxious in their chair, warning them of what he might do to Walsh if he had occasion to confront him.
“You said something about Amber not being all right. What happened?”
Guie came up close beside Kubiak, a little too close. “I’ll tell you what happened,” he said, the words coming sharp, along with a light spray of spittle landing on Kubiak’s cheek. “Just what you knew was going to happen. Harold Walsh beat the living hell out of Amber Torasella, but not before you managed to toss this mess in my lap.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the schedule you set up. The university had an officer stationed outside of Amber’s classroom building at five thirty yesterday afternoon, as per your request. She came out of it about ten minutes later. She was with a young man. They walked together, seemed to be getting along with one another. Turns out, from the description, that it was Walsh, though the officer didn’t know it at the time. He didn’t make his presence known, again as per your request, but kept them under observation, followed them up to Fifty-third where they stopped in a pizza joint and settled into a booth by the window. Like I said, they appeared to be getting along, so our guy took off. About an hour later, on a lark, he thought to check on Amber’s car. It was still in the visitor’s lot, so he went back to the pizza joint, but they were gone.
“Nine o’clock, the phone calls started coming in to the university P.D. from Connie Torasella saying that Amber wasn’t home yet, and she thought they had a deal where the cops were supposed to get her home safe at night.”
Crawford interrupted, asked Kubiak, “Is that what you told her?”
“I never even spoke to her.”
Guie continued, “Our guy went back to the visitors’ lot and found Amber’s car gone. The calls kept coming, now with Joe Torasella on the extension once he got home from work and found out what was going on. Then the calls stopped, right about one thirty in the morning. It turns out that’s when Amber finally got home looking like hell. She tried going straight upstairs to her room, but didn’t before her father got a look at her face, and that was when he decided he didn’t need the cops any more. Now we’ve not only got a nineteen-year-old U of C student beaten, but another student dead, both under the watch of a few good university cops who are bound to get hung out to dry. I told you from the start I didn’t want to get these guys involved in anything that could come back at them.”
“Guie, I asked you to arrange an umbrella service, plain and simple. That’s all they got involved in. The fact it didn’t work—”
“No, not so plain and simple, because Amber Torasella wasn’t involved in arranging it, and because she knew nothing of its existence, which removes any culpability she might have for walking out of that building arm-in-arm with Walsh and lays it all right at the feet of the U of C. And me. And you. You can’t tell me that it’s a coincidence Walsh beat the crap out of that girl within twelve hours of our setting up that service. Either you had a better idea than you let on to me that the beating was imminent, or something set off Walsh, most likely the service itself, which only makes things worse.”
Kubiak thought of his visits that afternoon to the university campus and Cicero, shook the idea away. “Maybe your guy was spotted.”
“He swears he wasn’t. My guess would be that either the mother or the father let word of the service slip to Amber, who told Walsh about it in that pizza joint, and he didn’t like hearing it, and took it out on her face.”
Kubiak, nursing a knot forming in his gut, stepped away from Guie, moved across the room to the short bar by the picture window overlooking Lake Shore Drive. He had made a point of having Joe make Amber take the family car to and from campus. If she had pressed her mother hard enough on why her father thought it necessary . . .
He poured himself a bourbon, neat, turned back to Guie. “All right,” he said. “So, what do you expect me to do at this point?” He sipped the warm liquor, tilted the glass toward Crawford. “And why the escort?”
Guie only glared. Crawford stated flatly, “The only reason I’m here is because when you dragged Guie into this, you dragged the Chicago P.D. into it. But his point is real. This kind of situation, this kind of news story, blame gets kicked around until everybody involved gets smeared by it. Fortunately, though, or unfortunately, depending on how you feel about it, there’s a wrinkle or two in this particular situation you might be able to help us straighten out, put an end to the thing before it gets out of control.”
“What kinds of wrinkles?”
“Little discrepancies. The biggest is the time line. Amber got home at one thirty in the morning. Joe Torasella was out the door immediately, but didn’t make the 911 call from Walsh’s kitchen until three. That’s an hour and a half for an angry man to drive ten minutes and shove a kitchen knife into a kid’s chest. You figure he and Walsh might have argued first, but from what I understand Torasella knows how to use his fists, and there was no sign of a struggle. Walsh was unscathed from head to toe except for that one, clean stab wound to the heart.”
“How does Joe explain it?”
“He says it took him time to get up the nerve to make the call. But, it also gave him time to wander all over the kitchen, extract the knife from the body and put it on the table, tromp through the blood, basically make a mess of the crime scene. And, it makes the time of death that more difficult to pinpoint.”
Kubiak finished his bourbon. “But he’s already confessed. The only reason he’d feel the need to muddy the time of death . . .”
“Exactly. If he wasn’t the one who killed Walsh. Figure Torasella walks into the kitchen, finds Walsh dead where his daughter left him. It took Amber ten minutes to get home, took him ten minutes to get there. Walsh has already been dead a minimum of twenty-five minutes before Torasella can even think of picking up the phone and taking the rap for his daughter. Granted, there was no guarantee the first responders would catch the fact that the body was a half hour dead already, but with him waiting an extra ninety minutes, they never had that chance.”
“You think he’s that smart?”
“I think he’s that determined, and the fact he’s exhibiting more quiet determination than self-righteous satisfaction only convinces me more that he didn’t kill Walsh, but Amber did. But I can’t be sure, and the Oak Park P.D. is even less certain.”
“What’s Amber saying?”
“Nothing. Not one word to anyone.”
“That’s odd.”
“And with her having taken that kind of beating, we can only push her so hard for answers.”
“Sure. But I go back to my same question. What do you want from me?”
Crawford approached the minibar. Kubiak offered a glass. Crawford refused.
“Right now,” he said, “the only person we know of who Joe and Connie Torasella trusted to deal with their daughter’s situation was you. Either of them might listen to you.”
“You want me to talk Joe into giving up his daughter on the homici
de?” “We want you to get him to tell the truth.”
Guie spoke up. “It’s pretty clear things went down the way Crawford is saying, and if that’s so, and you can get Torasella to admit it, it’ll just happen to work out in everyone’s best interest. Sure, we all might still get kicked around some, but the simpler the case is, the quicker it will die, and there’s a lot more gray in a father avenging his daughter’s beating than in a girl using a knife in self-defense. The way I see it, all you have to do is convince the mother that her daughter has a better chance of walking on this than her husband does, which is a pretty safe bet.”
Kubiak considered.
“You realize,” Crawford said, “that as soon as lawyers get involved they’ll be the ones telling the family what to say, and then we won’t know what to believe. We don’t have much of a window here.”
Still, Kubiak said nothing. Crawford pulled a manila envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket, laid it on the bar. “You want to see what Walsh did to her face?”
Kubiak stared at the envelope, opened his mouth to say no, hesitated. He had seen his share of police photos. He thought of the no-nonsense harsh lighting accentuating the bruises and lacerations, the cold expression bound to be on Amber’s face. Then again, what if his imagination were worse than the reality of the damage Walsh had inflicted? Either way, he would never again picture her as that little girl in the photo in her father’s wallet.
“No, thanks,” he said.
“I didn’t think so.” Crawford picked up the envelope, pocketed it. “These will make for a good defense.”
Guie stepped forward to make another point, but Crawford met him halfway and quieted him by laying a palm on his shoulder, used the palm to turn him around toward the door, nodded to Denise. “I gave you the number to my cell phone. You two want to talk it over, go ahead, but get back to me either way over the next couple of hours. I can send a car.”
Kubiak didn’t acknowledge the men’s exit, continued to say nothing for a full minute after they were gone. It was Denise who finally broke the silence.
“You did say,” she told him, “that the best we could hope for was that Walsh would just go away and take any answers with him.”
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 03/01/11 Page 4
