Trigger City

by Sean Chercover

  For use when vodka isn’t enough to dull the loneliness.

  In one corner of the living room, a computer on a small desk. There was a television, a stereo…and music. Like lonely people everywhere, Joan Richmond owned a lot of music. A woman after my own heart.

  The Stones, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, and James Taylor…Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, and Sheryl Crow…Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner…a large collection of Bowie…Pink Floyd, early Genesis…The Clash, The Psychedelic Furs, The Replacements…Blondie, The Cars, and Cheap Trick.

  A few disco and Europop albums, which seemed out of place for a woman who listened to prog-rock and punk and new wave. But we all have a few albums we keep for an occasional nostalgia trip, even though we know better. Disco had arrived when Joan Richmond was a teenager and those are prime years for midlife nostalgia trips.

  I decided to select something that I’d never heard before. Something of her life, but not of mine. When I opened the stereo’s CD tray, there was already a disc loaded. The Cure. The first time around, I’d dismissed them as a makeup and hair band. Then in college, my friend Terry Green had insisted that I give them a fair listen and I’d had to admit they were good. But their latest album was virgin territory for me. And this was probably the last music Joan Richmond had listened to before her death. I pressed Play.

  I filled a glass with ice, poured cold vodka over the ice. I was listening to the woman’s music…I might as well drink her booze.

  I called Vince Cosimo at home. I knew he was on surveillance and I could’ve called his cell but it’s easier to apologize to an answering machine.

  I waited for the beep and said, “Vince…Ray. I, um, I know you’re not having fun on this gig but I appreciate you doing it for me and I want you to stay focused. You’re learning important skills…and I’ll have some better work for you pretty soon. Okay? Thanks. See you tomorrow.”

  Some apology.

  Vince was probably right—I should forget about Jill and move on with my life. But I’d never let anyone get as close, never told anyone as much as I’d told Jill. I’d even allowed myself to envision spending the rest of our lives together, and I liked the view.

  But she ended it. As much as I’d told her, it was far less than what normal people share of themselves and she said she needed me to trust her. But that wasn’t the only problem. Jill couldn’t get comfortable with what I do for a living.

  We met in the hospital, just after I’d taken a beating. I convinced her that the job was not usually like that and she agreed to go out with me. It was intense. It was love. But she was uncomfortable with the gun, so I started going around without one. I got into the habit of leaving my gun locked in the office and only wearing it when I thought I might need it.

  But the thing is, you never know where and when you’ll need your gun. If you did know, you’d simply arrange to be somewhere else at the appointed time. And then you wouldn’t need a gun at all.

  In my effort to ease Jill’s concerns, I ignored that logic. And it cost me another beating.

  Having learned that lesson the hard way, I now carried all the time. I didn’t know how or if Jill would ever be comfortable with it, but I wanted the opportunity to try to get past her fears. I’d returned to Chicago in May but it took a month to work up the courage to call her. Whereupon she informed me that she was involved with someone.

  No use rehashing it. I picked up the phone and called Terry Green at the Chicago Chronicle. I figured to get his voice mail but he was working late so I got him on the line. I asked him to search the archives for anything on Joan Richmond and Steven Zhang.

  “There a story in it?” he said.

  “Nope. But next time we go drinking it’s on me and I’ll throw in a couple good cigars.”

  “I’ll do it,” he said, “if you come for dinner on Thursday. Angela hasn’t seen you in ages and you’re becoming a hermit.”

  “I’m not a hermit,” I said, “I just haven’t been socializing.”

  “Which is the definition of a hermit,” said Terry. “Thursday, our place, dinner, seven o’clock.”

  I poured another vodka and turned up the volume. Robert Smith seemed furious with the state of the world and his place in it, and the music matched. Great album, on first listen. I wondered what it had meant to Joan Richmond. It was in her current rotation, so I assumed it spoke to her. But I may have been looking for too much meaning in it, as I sometimes do. Maybe it was just the latest album from a band she really liked. Maybe there was no deep meaning here.

  I sat at her desk and booted up her computer. It all looked pretty straightforward. No password-protected partitions or files, no cryptic file names.

  The Excel files of Joan Richmond’s personal finances told of a successful single woman in her forties. As the head of payroll for HM Nichols, Joan made $96,000 a year. She’d bought the condo five years ago for $328,000, minus a 25 percent down payment. Mortgage companies were offering huge loans with little or no down, but Joan was an accountant and didn’t fall for that con. She took on a mortgage she could afford, had premium quality health insurance, drove a Toyota Corolla, and put money away for retirement. The picture of fiscal responsibility.

  I launched Thunderbird and went into her e-mails, found nothing unusual. The computer was new and the e-mails only went back six months, so not a lot to search through. She’d kept in occasional contact with a handful of girlfriends from college, sending congratulations on new husbands, new babies. The e-mails she received were a little more restrained. There was no new husband, no new baby, and there didn’t seem to be a lot of congratulations. She did her job, lived her life alone, and put on a brave face for the rest of the world.

  I searched for Steven Zhang’s name. She’d contacted him six weeks before he came to work at HM Nichols, saying she might have a gig for him. The e-mails were informal and she did not ask for credentials or references, and I got the impression that she’d used his services before. And she asked him to give her best regards to Amy, so she at least knew of his wife. Zhang’s replies were sane enough—he seemed eager to take the gig and appreciative of her offer.

  I went into her Firefox history file and browsed the cookies on her system. No unusual surfing habits, no fetish porn or online gambling sites. She was a regular visitor at the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal.

  Nothing in Joan Richmond’s computer suggested a double life, or any reason for Steven Zhang to kill her.

  The music ended. I looked for something to change my perspective. Something I knew and loved, something equally righteous but less angry. She had a little reggae. A very little. Black Uhuru, Jimmy Cliff, and of course some Bob Marley. I put Exodus on the stereo.

  I refreshed my vodka, wrapped the bag of frozen peas in a dish-towel. My shoulder had started barking around noon and I’d ignored it since. The vodka helped some, but not enough. I popped a couple of Percocet.

  I sat in the living room, holding a bag of frozen peas to my shoulder, drinking cold vodka and waiting for the Percs to kick in. Thinking about the dead woman whose life I’d invaded.

  The computer told me little, the music a little more. But what had I really learned about her? The apartment itself didn’t say much. And maybe that said a lot. Generic decor, no evidence of guests, lonely bedroom.

  No personal photos on display. Which reminded me of my own apartment, but was definitely not normal. I searched for a photo album, found none.

  The bookshelves held some literary fiction and thrillers, but mostly biographies and current events. Almost a dozen books on 9/11 and the war in Iraq. Not wing-nut conspiracy stuff, all mainstream, but all critical of the administration. The top two shelves held books she’d kept from her college days.

  I pulled Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus off the shelf and took it back to the couch. The book had meant a lot to me, years ago. It had helped me make sense of things at a time when nothing made any sense, helped me navigate the bumpy t
ransition from adolescence to adulthood. Most of all, it had enabled me to intellectualize the worst experience of my life, giving me the emotional distance I desperately needed.

  Maybe Camus could help me again. I opened the book and read:

  There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

  Maybe not. I closed the book, dropped it on the coffee table, and listened to Bob Marley sing about the movement of Jah people. The Percs had gone to work inside my brain and the pain was now dull and distant. When the music ended, I tossed the peas back in the freezer and brushed my teeth. I didn’t think Joan would mind me using her toothbrush, given our increasing intimacy.

  I stripped off my clothes, climbed into bed on the side opposite where Joan had slept. I lay on my back and stared at the motionless ceiling fan. And was immediately gripped by a sense of dread. Thinking Just look under the bed. What’s so hard about that? Just look.

  I looked under the bed. And there it was. I pulled it out and opened the leather cover, recognized Joan Richmond’s handwriting on the lined pages.

  Anger coursed through my veins and my face burned. I tossed the book aside, thinking What is it with diaries kept under the bed, a fucking rite of womanhood? Goddamnit.

  I knew it was totally irrational, but I was livid with Joan Richmond for keeping a diary under her bed. For making me feel like the thirteen-year-old boy who found his mother’s cold body naked on top of the sheets, an empty pill bottle beside her, a half-empty bottle of Sambuca on the nightstand. For making me feel like the thirteen-year-old boy who crawled under his mother’s bed, squeezed his eyes tight and stayed there an hour, pleading with a nonexistent God: I’ll do anything…Please, just make her wake up…I’ll never do anything bad again…I’ll do anything you want…Please…Kill me instead.

  The thirteen-year-old boy who found his dead mother’s diary under the bed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It took a couple of days to get a meeting with HM Nichols’s CFO, Douglas Hill, but at least he’d been straight about it, saying matter-of-factly that he needed to check up on me first. I’d given him the numbers for Isaac Richmond and Mike Angelo and I guess they said the right things and now I sat across from Hill at this uncluttered desk in the HM Nichols head office in a Skokie industrial park.

  Tall and slim, Hill wore a brown three-piece suit, rimless glasses, and a wedding band. His fingernails were chewed beyond short. His slicked-down comb-over wasn’t fooling anybody and, like all comb-overs, actually drew more attention to his impending baldness. He wasted the first five minutes of our meeting telling me about what a busy man he was and how he couldn’t spare a lot of time. As he wrapped up his opening monologue, I reached into my briefcase and, bypassing Joan Richmond’s diary, pulled out my notebook.

  “I won’t take a lot of your time.”

  “I mean, there really isn’t much to say, Mr. Dungeon.”

  “Dudgeon,” I said. “But call me Ray if that’s easier.”

  “Yes, well, not much to say. Joan was our payroll manager. She hired Mr. Zhang on a three-month contract. Two months into the contract, he went crazy and killed her.”

  “Were there other bidders on the contract? How did she come to choose Zhang?”

  Hill made a steepling gesture at me. If there’s a gesture that better conveys superiority, I haven’t seen it. “Mr. Dudgeon, I do not micromanage my managers. Joan had my trust and confidence, she didn’t have to clear a short-term freelance contract through my office.”

  “Do you think she might have used his services before she came to HM Nichols?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “There must have been something on paper—an application, a résumé—something I could look at.”

  “All of our records on Joan Richmond and Steven Zhang now reside with the Chicago Police Department. Perhaps they will let you look at them.”

  “You gave the originals to the police? Usually they just take photocopies.”

  Hill’s smile was designed to look apologetic but it failed to look sincere. “You must understand,” he said, “we were all very upset around here after…well, after what happened. Joan was well liked and I suppose we were in shock. Of course we should’ve made copies for the police, but we gave them our originals.”

  “So HM Nichols kept absolutely no paper whatsoever on Joan Richmond or Steven Zhang,” I said.

  “That’s correct. It’s all with the police.” Hill’s words sounded like a door closing. He took a long look at his watch.

  “How long did Joan work here?” I asked.

  “Just over eight months.”

  “Previous employer?”

  “I can’t recall.” Hill’s thumb started rubbing back and forth against the nail of his index finger and he pressed his lips together. I stared at him and let the silence become uncomfortable until he said, “I’m sorry, I just…I really can’t recall.” Another smile of false apology. “I’m an accountant, I have a head for figures.”

  “But not for company names.”

  “I guess not. But you can check with the police, that information will be in her file.” He glanced at his watch again. “I really must get back to work.”

  “Sure, thanks for your time, Mr. Hill. One more question—did you observe any of Steven Zhang’s erratic behavior?”

  Hill’s head jerked side to side like he was trying to shake the question from his ears. “I really didn’t know the man. Our paths rarely crossed. The payroll department is on the third floor and, as I said, I’m not a micromanager. But I’ve arranged for you to see Joan’s former assistant, Kate Weinstein. She knew Mr. Zhang.” Hill looked again at his watch, as if the time might’ve changed radically in the past thirty seconds. His eyes moved to the computer screen on his desktop without meeting mine along the way. “I’ll ask you to please take as little of her time as possible.”

  “Time is money,” I said.

  “That is a fact,” he said without looking up.

  Meeting over.

  I didn’t mind. Further questioning would’ve only yielded further lies.

  Kate Weinstein told me everything I’d already read from her police interview transcript, but also this: Joan never talked about the job she had before coming to HM Nichols. Never. Any time the subject of work history came up, Joan checked out of the conversation. The topic seemed to make her nervous. Steven Zhang came to HM Nichols at Joan’s invitation. There were no other applicants for the contract and Joan had not advertised the position; she simply brought Zhang in. Kate overheard conversation between Joan and Zhang that gave her the impression they’d worked together before. When Kate asked, Joan denied it, said that Zhang came on the recommendation of a friend’s husband. Kate thought Joan was lying.

  “Why didn’t you mention any of this to the police?” I asked.

  “Oh, I did. I told them all about it.”

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely. The detective even wrote it down in his little notebook.”

  I believed her, which meant the cops deliberately left it out of the interview notes for the case file. I said, “How long before the murder did you notice a change in behavior by Mr. Zhang?”

  Kate Weinstein twirled her wavy hair with an index finger while she thought about it. “It was three weeks, almost. See, it was a Monday when he first started acting all crazy. I remember because at first I just thought he was being grumpy and I tried to make a joke of it and said, ‘You must’ve had a big weekend, maybe you should’ve called in hungover,’ and he just looked at me really strange and said, ‘They can make people disappear. They control everything,’ and then he just kept staring at me. I thought he was kidding and I started to ask who they were, but he put his hands over his ears and made a strange moaning sound and turned away and left the room. It was weird.”

  “That would definitely qualify as weird,” I said.

  Kate laughed and said, “Tell me about it. And he just kept getting weirder and then three weeks later, he k
illed Joan.” She reached a hand out and touched my arm. “And the sad thing is, she was really worried about him. I mean we all were, but mostly we were just creeped out. Joan was talking about putting him on sick leave or something and making him see a doctor. She was the only one of us who really wanted to help him…and she was the one he killed. Don’t you think that’s sad?”

  I agreed that it was sad, handed her a card and asked that she call me, should anything else come to mind.

  “Like what?” she said.

  “If it comes to mind, you’ll recognize it.”

  Daddy doesn’t love me. He wants to, but he doesn’t know how. I think he’s waiting for me to open up and reveal myself. We both must know, on some level, that it can’t happen that way. I wish…

  I wish we could go back in time. Does he even know how much it hurts? Does he know? Sometimes I think he does, but then he says something that makes me realize we’re on different planets and it makes my stomach hurt. He can’t know. But sometimes when I look at him, I go back in time, to the day I lost him.

  “Be a good soldier,” he said. He wiped a tear off my cheek with a rough finger, turned and walked away from me and went back to work. I didn’t see him again for six months.

  Be a good soldier?! Daddy—I’m just a little girl. Mom is gone. I’m all alone. Don’t leave me. I’m seven years old, Daddy! If you loved me, you’d stay. It’s just not fair. If you loved me, you’d stay.

  From that day on, I ripped up your letters without reading them. If you only knew.

  I sat in my office, reading Joan Richmond’s diary and not liking it much. I put the diary aside and refilled my coffee mug from the half-empty pot. Or half full, if you’re an optimist. I took my coffee back to the desk and, for the third time, turned my attention to Vince’s surveillance reports on Dr. Feelgood.

  Dr. Feelgood had a real name—Dr. Andrew Glassman. The night before last, Glassman left Rush Medical Center and drove his Mercedes east on Harrison to the Printer’s Row neighborhood. He had dinner at Custom House with a colleague from work—Dr. Sam Martell—during which they talked shop. He then headed up Lake Shore Drive, exited at Fullerton. He spent two hours visiting his mother at a fancy nursing home, like a good son should. Then he retired for the evening to his Gold Coast condo, arriving just before eleven o’clock. Probably drank himself to sleep with a warm glass of milk.