by Thomas Laird
You could see the neat little seam on the left side of his nose that extended to his left nostril. The scar was the result of the magna punch that laid his honker flat on his face, back from his Golden Gloves era.
We were about to leave to interview some people at International who knew Jennifer Petersen. But our trip to O’Hare was interrupted when we got the call to a scene on the West Side.
*
The West Side was the barrio, the hood, of this city. This was gangbanger territory. Poverty territory. Homelessness. Street land and home of the yos and yoettes — young black males and females. They were the predators in this neighbourhood, especially the black males. Too many uneducated yos and yoettes. It was too easy to look for a living in the streets. The schools couldn’t compete with the corner crack barons. There were some Hispanics, the farther east and south you go from where we were headed. But it was one continuous barrio from the western periphery of Chicago almost to the Lake. It was a harsh landscape. Full of greys and browns and blacks. Dark colours, dark lives. The young males who were athletes might have had options about getting out of here, but the remainder of the hoodsters stayed put until the next drive-by slaying. We put kids on the meat wagon almost hourly, in these parts.
The apartment on the far West Side, here, was more like a flop in some sleazoid downtown hotel. One of those joints designed for the poor, the dudes with just enough coin to put a roof overhead. It was amazing they hadn’t condemned this apartment building. But the inspectors probably didn’t make their rounds around here too often.
The old man was propped up against the wall of his kitchen-dinette. It was a one-bedroom flop. Barely enough room to stretch your arms out sideways. Claustrophobic close.
The arterial spray was off to the left of his sliced-open throat. Black male. Probably in his late sixties or early seventies. The blood covered about eighteen inches of ancient wallpaper.
‘Jugular,’ Jack offered.
There was a pool of fresh blood on the once-white, now-grey tile beneath the old man. And in his arms was a tabby cat. The cat was gone also. Someone had sliced off all four of the feline’s paws. The kitty’s blood had soaked the old man’s pants, on his lap.
‘He figured he owed himself the cat too?’
Jack looked at me as if he were surprised.
Then a teenaged girl raced into the crime scene, past the uniforms who couldn’t stop her. She was maybe seventeen. Didn’t look like the typical yoette on these streets. Well groomed. No gang symbols on her anywhere. No tattoos. Cheaply but cleanly dressed. And a pretty girl, also. Reminded me of someone I used to be in love with, but Celia was much older than this teenager.
She didn’t scream as I rushed toward her with Jack at my side.
‘You shouldn’t —’
She snatched her right arm back from me, but her right fist went to her mouth. Not a sound came from her. I was afraid she might be going into shock when I saw the size of her eyes. The whites seemed enormous, the eyeballs almost popped out of her head.
‘You have to leave. This is a crime scene,’ I tried to explain to her.
‘Is he —’ Jack asked.
‘He’s my grandfather,’ the girl told Jack.
‘You have to leave ... What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Joellyn. Joellyn Ransom,’ she said.
‘This was your grandfather?’ Jack queried gently. He had both her hands now and had managed to turn her around, away from the sight of the old man and the cat.
‘Yes.’
Then the tears tumbled down Joellyn Ransom’s cheeks. Jack walked her outside to the uniforms.
The Crime Scene Investigators snapped their photos and did all the dusting for prints. Dr Gray had already come and gone. This was another bleeder, I thought. The slash to the jugular had stopped Arthur Ransom’s timepiece. And the cat’s. I thought the coppers on scene were more shocked at what happened to the feline than they were to what did in Arthur Ransom. Human corpses were typical around here. Dead domestic pets weren’t quite so everyday. It was rather ironic that animal life seemed more valuable than human life, but there it was.
The meat wagon came for Arthur. Jack and I made our last look over on this crime scene. He took notes for the two of us. I was not much for notebooks. It’d been my weakest link as an investigator. I relied too much on memory, and my memory would betray me eventually. I felt as old as Doc Gibron did when we watched them bag Jennifer Petersen.
*
We interviewed the people who knew Jennifer Petersen at International at O’Hare. I have always despised coming here to this circus of an airport. Too many frenetic people. Crowds. Everything jammed up. People running around in a frenzy. Pickpockets did a booming business here. There was a victim with a dangling wallet or purse everywhere. The security was a joke. You were on your own in this jungle. Cops hated working this place, and the security clowns were making minimum wage. They could give a shit if you got boosted.
We seldom had homicides on this scene, but we interviewed people here, from time to time. I almost got to interview O.J. Simpson, but I was diverted onto another case.
Someone at the Tribune got wind of the facts regarding Jennifer Petersen’s demise, and now some writer was talking about vampires and bloodsuckers doing Ms Petersen.
All we needed were werewolves and goblins to complicate a murder case. Got people crazy. Bela Lugosi returned from the grave. Nosferatu and all that Transylvanian jive. It was hard enough unravelling a standard vic’s demise without the papers making it go Hollywood. Next would come the tabloids and the TV media and their takes on the Petersen murder. The circus would have many rings.
We interviewed four employees of International. Three were sister flight attendants. They knew Jennifer only barely, they said. She kept to herself. Her home base was O’Hare, so she had a lease on an apartment a few miles away from the airport. That, of course, was where we found her.
The queries came to nothing, so Jack and I took lunch at the O’Hare Chili’s. We both ordered Old Timer Burgers. Both of us were on diets, but Jack showed far better results than I did. I had fifteen pounds to unload.
*
‘So he kept her quiet by strapping her mouth shut with the grey duct tape we found in her kitchen,’ Jack repeated. ‘He kept her immobile by also strapping her to her bed with the same grey duct tape. Apparently he didn’t let her get up, since we found the faecal and urine stains on the sheets of her bed.’
I looked down at my newly arrived Old Timer Burger, and my stomach pangs had vanished. ‘Thanks,’ I told my younger partner.
‘Sorry, Jimmy. But we do need to sort —’
‘I know, I know. It’s okay.’
I tried to bury the burger in condiments. It didn’t help.
‘So he had her there for two or three or four days,’ Jack continued. ‘The stains seem to support that theory.’
I took a bite out of my Old Timer Burger. My hunger and my empty stomach overcame the usual revulsion at case details. You gotta eat, no?
‘They’ve already named this guy with Jennifer Petersen. Downtown they call him “The Count”.’
‘They got a name for the perpetrator of the poor old yo on the West Side?’ I asked.
‘He’s not high profile enough to get a moniker. Just another yo, to some people.’
‘Not to me. How about you, Jack?’
He smiled and shook his handsome noggin.
‘I knew there was something I really liked about you.’
CHAPTER TWO
My wife Natalie kept me going even with the weight of all that goo in my ears and the usual burden of being a homicide investigator. I looked at my young beauty of a mate and I consistently wondered how a middle-aged guinea like me ever became as fortunate as I was. I’d write her poetry if I had the muse. But I was poetically tone deaf, as Doc Gibron of the PhD in Literature would say. I tried to tell her I loved her at least once every day, but repeatedly forgot, and my shortcomings in that department h
aunted me. Time seemed very short with Natalie. We were always headed in different directions. She was in Homicide now, too, but we tended to work different shifts, so I rarely saw her on the job. We made as much time for ourselves as we could, but with two almost grown children — the oldest being away at a university — and two small fry, our baby girls, we still had commitments to the young people in our home.
My mother, Eleanor, helped us out a great deal of the time, handling the two young girls and keeping an eye on Michael, my only son, but Natalie and I liked to be for-real parents as often as work would allow us. And the parent thing did not allow us to be alone very frequently.
‘A good thing it is too,’ Natalie cracked. It was a Wednesday morning that found us in bed with a day off and the girls at my mother’s house and Michael and the big girl at school.
We slept in. It was 9:07 a.m. and we both felt very much guilty about how good this all seemed.
‘Why is it a good thing, Red?’ I asked.
‘You’d just knock me up again if we spent too much time together.’
‘Flattering yourself, are we?’ I smiled.
She was right, of course. I’d eventually get her into ‘trouble’ if nature took its course, and we had agreed that we’d produce no more offspring. I was getting too old — fifty-five this summer — and Natalie wanted to pursue her Homicide career without any more infants to nurse. We had our two girls together, as well as the two older ones who adored their new mother. Erin gave life to Kelly and Michael. They remembered their mother and loved her very much, but they took to the Redhead as if she’d always been a part of the Parisi mob. I missed Erin, but I didn’t feel guilty about loving Natalie anymore. I hadn’t removed my first wife from my life. I think I simply added on to it with the Redhead.
Retirement was not an issue. I had no hobbies. I liked to read but I didn’t get much chance, other than to peruse the jackets of the vics I investigated. I didn’t follow the Sox the way I used to, ever since the strike. The NBA was in shambles, even with an aged Michael Jordan on a team he shouldn’t have joined. And football was dominated by 400-pound giants that have turned the NFL into a near freak show. All Natalie and I did for recreation was go to the movies, and we had damn little time to do that.
But was I happy? As much as a man who earned his bread dealing with the dead and those who made them that way can be happy. Family was all I had, of course. But I didn’t find it to be chains on my soul. I had not had the urge to take off in the midst of some midlife crisis. You know, buy a Harley, run down to Mexico and live in a shack by the Gulf of Mexico with some mestizo Mexicana and start a new life collecting seashells.
Life had sent me a number of wounds to the vulnerable tissue. But the women in my life have kept my head above the surface of the roiling seas, as Doc might phrase it.
*
The Count had already made it to the headlines of two of the bigger newspapers in the city. The tabloids had joined in the fun as well, and even though this guy was not a serial operator — yet — Jack and I had the sick feeling we’d be hearing from him soon. The problem was that since there was no series of murders, it became a bit difficult to talk about this cheesedick’s tendencies. He had no track record yet. Fortunate for all the possible vics he could be acquiring, but unfortunate for homicide investigators who looked for patterns to predict behaviour.
No one saw Jennifer Petersen latch onto a male partner after she landed at O’Hare seven days ago. She took a cab to her apartment, two miles from the terminal, and then she was swallowed into obscurity at her residence. No one ever heard from her again. Except, of course, for The Count, himself.
We tossed her efficiency apartment thoroughly. He left no sign. No fibres that couldn’t be attributed to Jennifer herself. No fingerprints but the vic’s. He cleaned up after himself as well as any organised killer can.
The only calling card that Jack and I could make was the awkward punctures he left on her arm. The black and blue remainders of the needle he used to take her blood.
‘What’s he doing with the blood?’ Jack Wendkos mused on the way toward O’Hare.
We were again canvassing the various stores and shops and restaurants at the airport to see if anyone had seen Jennifer on her way out of the terminal.
‘Drinking it. Naturally. That’s what vampires do, you Polski,’ I smiled.
‘No one can drink the real thing, can they?’
‘Some African tribes drink the blood of the animals they kill. Think I heard that in some history lecture in college,’ I offered.
‘That be bullshit, Lieutenant. I don’t even want to think about it.’
‘How about all that lovely au juice you swill down with the prime rib you so greatly love?’
‘That isn’t the same, Jimmy.’
‘Well, I guess so. But it’s from the blood of the steer, no?’
‘Are you trying to make me heave, Lieutenant?’
We pulled into the grand terminal that is O’Hare Airport. We pulled up to the official no parking zone right near the United entrance, and we showed our badges to the uniform who was hustling toward us to get us out of the no parking zone. The badge did have a few perks. The black uniform cop smiled and waved and went back to his surveillance perch.
We started with the restaurants. Jennifer completed a flight from Seattle the day she vanished inside her own apartment. The Chili’s manager directed us to his day manager who was on shift the day Ms Petersen was directed toward the ages. Middle aged, but very attractive, this day manager was. Forty, forty-five. But very ripe. The type of mature who still turned heads of males a decade younger than she was. Her name was Kori Whalen. No ring. I wondered if she was divorced. She was too fine to have been passed over.
We showed her the photos of Jennifer.
‘Yes. She was in here. Late in the afternoon.’
Kori was a platinum blonde with a very fine root job. Not a hint. Jack had also noticed the qualities of this day manager goddess.
It wasn’t supposed to happen. You were not supposed to strike gold on the first dig. The usual was to spend six or seven hours canvassing a site for someone who might be able to help a case. But here it seemed to be.
‘Was anyone with her?’ Jack asked the manager.
Kori had the full bosom, the lean waist, the tight rear end, and the muscular calves. She demanded one’s full male attention. She must have been a real drawing card for this airport restaurant. I thought I was beginning to flush.
‘No. She was alone. But she had lots of male patrons aware of her.’
I was thinking that it’d be tough competition if Kori were in the same room with Jennifer Petersen. Petersen was attractive. Kori, however, was the kind of woman who commanded your breathing patterns.
I reminded myself that I was married. Happily. I felt like reminding Jack Wendkos how blissful he was too, but we were both somewhere near a primal slobber.
‘No one approached her?’ Jack finally was able to ask.
This was becoming a very difficult interview. And none of it was the day manager’s fault. It was just that God spent far too much time on some of his creatures.
‘No. I didn’t see anyone come up to her.’
‘Anybody in that crowd appear strange?’ I asked her.
‘There are two or three million strange people in this terminal at any given moment,’ she replied.
I was melting. I should have sent the Redhead to do this query. But I was a senior investigator, I told myself. I would regain my composure. Jesus, I felt like a rookie fresh out of the Academy. I squeezed my fists and struggled, and I was back under control.
‘No one appeared more odd than usual?’ I asked again.
She was ready to confirm what she already said, but then something stopped her.
‘There was a guy ... He stood out, I guess. He was in here when that poor woman was eating ... I remember ... I remember that he looked extremely pale. As if he had the flu. I almost asked him if he needed help. But
he left just before the stewardess did. I recall it clearly. Yes. He left before she did. Never made a move toward her, that I saw.’
‘What kind of pale?’ Jack asked.
‘Like I said. A sickly white. A fish-belly white. You know, kind of anaemic.’
‘Can you give us a fuller description?’ I asked.
‘He was about six feet tall. Thin. What you’d call gaunt, I suppose. You know, like almost caved in. Terrible posture. And he was dressed weird too. All in black. Black ... Like those goofy kids — the Goths? Is that what they call them?’
‘Yeah. Something like that,’ Jack affirmed.
‘He had very black hair. With a blue sheen. That’s how you know it’s really black. I watch people every day. To see if they try to run out and stiff us. To make sure they don’t rip off our servers by stealing tips ... He never did anything off key that I remember —’
‘How’d he pay for his bill?’ I asked.
‘Ask the cashier. She’s working now.’
We had to fairly rip ourselves away from this stunning piece of handiwork — Christ, I was using Doc’s language again. I must have missed him more than I thought.
Sheryl was the cashier. We approached her and displayed our credentials and then Jack told her about Jennifer Petersen, showed her the photo of the stewardess, and Sheryl remembered the guy with the black hair and the pale puss.
‘He paid with one of those direct cheque cards. I can remember it because he startled me when I looked up at him. Jesus, what a spook! I mean we get crazies in this terminal all the time, but ... He was exceptional. Yeah, I remember him.’
‘Can you get the receipts from the day he was in here?’ I asked.
‘Sure. But you’ll have to ask Kori. That’s her department, old receipts.’
Jack couldn’t believe our good luck. A credit card trail and another round with the blonde beauty who had us both under her spell.
It was a Visa number. During the hour he and Jennifer Petersen were in the restaurant, only five people used a credit card. Two were males. One of the males was seventy-two years old, which we found out when we put our technicians in Computer Systems to work. The other male was Anthony Mann, aged twenty-six, of 1231 River Canal Street. It was an Old Town Address. Jack was familiar with the hood there, having lived there during his first marriage.
