When the people near Adari realized the police were taking her with them, they crowded around her, protesting about Adari’s rights, and her innocence.
“She’s not under arrest, just coming with us to answer some questions, right, ma’am?” Oliver said.
The group pulled back, murmuring uncertainly. One advantage to picking up older white women at fundraisers instead of gang-bangers in drug houses, Liz thought—they and their friends weren’t usually combative. On the other hand, the room was lousy with lawyers, and three of them, a man and two women, were at Adari’s side when the cops walked from the room with her.
“Are you charging her?” one of the women lawyers asked.
Liz squinted to read her name badge: Leydon Ashford. Only the hyper-privileged walk around with two last names. Liz tried not to get her hackles up, but she really did not want some snot of a lawyer in the interrogation room with her.
“Not right now. We want to talk to her,” Oliver answered, his easy smile in place. He used his smile like a cook with a sugar sifter, knowing just how much he needed to sweeten the pastry.
The three lawyers rode down the escalator with Adari and the cops. They all offered to come to the station with her.
“She doesn’t need a lawyer,” Liz said. “We just want to ask her a few questions.”
“Everyone needs an attorney,” Leydon Ashford responded. “I’ll just ride over with you, Nina. See that they dot all their ‘i’s and so on”
The crowds began to gather outside the station long before the detectives arrived with their “person of interest.” Adults with rosaries and angry signs—Abort the Baby Murderers; Stop America’s Holocaust/Protect the Unborn and the ubiquitous blow-ups of bloody body parts—were kneeling on the walks right up to the edge of the driveway. They’d brought children with them, children who should be in school, Liz thought, not camped in front of a police station to hear their parents scream curses at a squad car.
“Drive around to the back,” Oliver said. “We don’t want them attacking the car.”
Liz drove past the front gates without slowing. “What are they thinking, involving their children in something like this? This isn’t a TV set.”
“Yes, it is,” Oliver Billings peered in the wing mirror as Liz whipped around the corner. “The camera crews are setting up.”
Liz called the desk sergeant on her radio to let him know they were coming in through the back. “You know there’s a crowd out front, don’t you, Tommy? Oliver says the networks are all there. He says the Christian Broadcast truck was behind us on Roosevelt Road.”
“Been watching them on the monitor,” the desk sergeant said. “If I’d wanted to work in a circus I’d a learned how to swing from a trapeze. I’ll let the looey know you’re here.”
When the detectives reached the back of the station, fog shrouded the heads of the small group of protestors kneeling by the rear gates, making them look like guillotined corpses.
The protestors didn’t try to block the car when the desk sergeant released the gates, but they pounded on the windows and spat as Liz drove past.
“If these are the Christians, the lions don’t stand a chance,” she muttered to Oliver.
“Their leader’s dead; they’re angry,” he said. “And they know we’ve got a suspect in the car.”
When they finally got through the back entrance and into Lieutenant Finchley’s office, the lawyer who’d ridden over with Adari asked Finchley how the abortion foes knew the cops were bringing the doctor in for questioning. “Did you tell them that Dr. Adari was coming to the station?”
“Nothing we do is very secret,” Finchley said. “People listen in to police scanners, they video our cops coming and going and put it on the Net. You know that as well as I do, ma’am. And you and Dr. Adari also know how high tempers are going to be riding over Mr. Culver’s death, so let’s try to keep the rhetoric at a manageable temperature, okay?”
Finchley had a uniformed officer escort Adari and the lawyer to an interview room before pulling Liz and Oliver into his office. “Okay, you two, everything you know. Now. Why did you bring the doctor in?”
“Pacheco—the uniform who found Culver’s body—he saw her assault Culver outside the boat where the fundraiser was taking place,” Oliver said.
“How’d he know who it was? He study this abortion rights group?” Finchley said.
“No, sir” Liz explained why Pacheco had ID’d Dr. Adari. “We looked up her history online—Culver’s been harassing her, she’s got a couple of lawsuits against him personally and against his organization.”
“Even so” Finchley said, “she’s not very big, and she must be twenty years older than Culver on top of it. It’s hard to believe she could have attacked him, let alone killed him.”
“Element of surprise in the fog, Looey,” Oliver suggested. “And whoever killed him was furious—dude had been hit on the head so many times the eye-sockets were destroyed.”
Finchley grunted. “Any priors on the Adari woman?”
Oliver hunched a shoulder. “Not since her student days. She dates back to the Vietnam War, got arrested three times in the seventies, once for pouring blood over an Army recruiter.”
“Marchek, anything more recent than thirty years ago?”
Liz saw the pulse throbbing in Finchley’s left temple. “Uh, well, sir, she seemed to be investigating Culver, trying to dig up some kind of dirt on him, maybe, to stop him targeting her clinic.”
“She find anything?”
“We’ll ask her that when we talk to her, sir.”
“You two need to tread very carefully here. The cardinal has already been on the phone to me, as has the mayor, and the head of the local ACLU, and I can guarantee that Fox and CNN are going to keep this on a twenty-four-hour loop. Any suspects you talk to, especially here at the station, you follow regs down to the smallest sub-paragraph. Capisce?”
“Yes, sir,” Liz said.
“And if either of you talk to the press, even to a ten-year-old blogger, you will be walking night patrol in South Chicago for the rest of your short lives.”
“Yes, sir,” Liz repeated.
“Yazzuh, boss.” Oliver sketched a salute.
The lieutenant frowned, which sent Oliver grumbling into the interview room. Every time Finchley refused to laugh and joke with Oliver Billings, the detective magnified the size of his grievance against the new commander. The fact that Finchley was black and Billings was white only made the relationship more volatile.
Liz pretended sympathy with her partner’s complaints about Finchley, because Oliver had proved more than once that he’d blind-side her in the field if he thought she wasn’t supporting him. Privately, she was glad the old commander had left. She’d only served under him for two months, but he used jokes as a thin cover over his efforts to put women officers off-balance. When he’d assigned her to Oliver, he’d eyed her with a leer and told Oliver to “shape her up, not that there’s anything wrong with the shape she’s already in.” The late-night, post-shift drinking sessions with his special cronies not only created divisions in the station, but brought his buddies, including Oliver Billings, to work with chronic hangovers.
She and Oliver stopped outside the interview room for a word with the officer who’d been listening to the hidden mikes. Leydon Ashford apparently suspected the police could eavesdrop—the officer said the Dr. Adari and her lawyer had murmured so softly into each other’s ears that he hadn’t picked up anything.
Oliver pulled a chair away from the table and leaned back in it, legs crossed: the suspect was supposed to be lulled into thinking it was a casual chat. He announced his and Liz’s names for the recording equipment, but before he could launch into his first question, the doctor narrowed her eyes at Liz.
“Have we met, detective?”
“I don’t think so, ma’am, unless I was on patrol for an event like today’s.” Liz’s tone was wooden.
Oliver cleared his throat, demanding attenti
on. “I understand you and Arnie Culver had a history, doctor.”
“Every abortion provider in this country has a history with Mr. Culver. Recently, most doctors who prescribe contraceptives have started having a history with him.” Dr. Adari had her hands folded in her lap.
“Is that why you attacked Culver outside the fundraiser this morning?” Oliver asked.
“I can’t add to what I told you earlier,” the doctor said. “He used one of his children to hand me a flier. I tossed it at him. Is that an attack? Is it similar to the time he lit gasoline-soaked rags and threw them at me?”
“That’s what we want to know, doctor” Oliver said. “Did you follow him down the lake path? Have a confrontation that got out of hand?”
“No. I told him not to abuse the children he brought into the world by forcing them into his private anti-abortion army, and then I went into the fundraiser, where any number of people can tell you I spent the entire lunch hour. Is there anything else you want to ask me? I have patients waiting.”
“To abort their babies?” Oliver asked.
The doctor said, “My patients’ privacy is sacrosanct, detective. I can’t tell you why they consult me. I can only tell you that it’s unprofessional of me to make them wait.”
The lawyer said, “Right. If you have any further questions for Dr. Adari, you can call me.” Ashford put one of her business cards on the interview table. She nodded at Adari and the two women stood.
“What about the private eye you hired to investigate Culver?” Liz asked.
“What about it, indeed?” the lawyer said.
“How did Culver react to the investigation?” Liz persisted.
“I expect someone in his organization could tell you,” Adari said.
“He was suing you for invasion of privacy,” Oliver said, “so we can assume he wasn’t happy about it.”
“He knew a lot about invasion of privacy,” Adari said.
The lawyer took her firmly by the arm and steered her from the room.
“Good of you to join in the interrogation there at the end,” Oliver said to Liz when the women had left. “I thought you’d turned into a deaf-mute on me.”
Liz smiled. “I’m the rookie, remember? I’m learning from you.”
“You’re the big-mouth licking Finchley’s ass. Why don’t you use your tongue on Culver’s kids. It’ll give you practice for when you have some of the little darlings yourself.”
“And what will you be doing while I’m honing my daycare skills?” Liz demanded.
“Dr. Adari hired someone to investigate Culver. That’s worth investigating.”
Liz rented the third floor of a converted workman’s cottage on the city’s northwest side, but when she finished interviewing the Culver children, she headed to her grandfather’s apartment in Rogers Park, near the lake.
After her mother was killed in a botched police raid when Liz was nine, her grandparents had raised Liz and her brother Elliot. Grandma Judith had been dead for some years now and Grandpapa lived alone in their old apartment. Even though he’d retired from Temple Etz Chaim, he was still the wisest man Liz knew.
She hadn’t always felt that way. As a teenager, she’d battled with him furiously over her mother. She had fought with Elliot, who said their mother was asking for trouble by being part of an anarchist cell, and with Grandpapa, who, she said, sided with the police against the poor. She announced she was an anarchist who didn’t believe in Gd, hoping to spark rage in Grandpapa, but he only reacted by calling her “My little anarchist,” when he gave her his blessing.
When she told him she wanted to join the police, he’d been troubled, and asked her pointed questions about her motives. “Do you imagine yourself as some kind of resistance hero, infiltrating the police so you can read their covert files?”
It was their last serious argument, because she didn’t want to admit how close he was to the truth. Grandpapa hadn’t believed she could be a happy cop, but she’d actually taken to the work. Seven years on patrol and then she’d passed the exam to become a detective.
“Detective Anarchist!” Grandfather greeted her when she arrived this evening. “Still keeping order in an unorderable world?”
He didn’t follow the news; he hadn’t heard about Culver’s death and she didn’t tell him, just asked about his arthritis, about Mrs. Gelinsky and Mrs. Mannheim, who were competing for his attention, and about the cat, Bathsheba, who ruled the house in the absence of a human female.
“You hear from your brother?”
“Every day, Grandpapa. If you would learn to text, you’d hear from him, too.” Her brother Elliot was in Denmark, testing and repairing computer security at his firm’s Copenhagen headquarters.
She went into the kitchen to make supper, knowing her grandfather wouldn’t have bothered to cook a meal just for himself.
“And what’s troubling you, little anarchist,” he asked when she’d put an omelet in front of him.
“Nothing. Why can’t I stop by to make you supper just because I love you?”
He smiled. “I’m grateful, even if you’re telling only a portion of the truth.”
“Omitting the truth, Grandpapa. How big a sin is that?”
He nodded: she had revealed the real reason for her visit. “The rabbis put a great deal of thought into that, and the answer is, it all depends. If you’re protecting someone from harm, versus trying not to embarrass yourself, versus trying not to show off, versus not violating your own privacy—I would need much more information before I could give you an answer. Did you omit the truth in talking to someone? Or did you commit g’neivat data, theft of the mind, encourage someone to believe a falsehood?”
His omelet grew cold as he talked. By the end of the evening, Liz thought if she believed in Gd she’d be in even worse trouble than she was already, but she didn’t say it out loud. Not that she had to—Grandpapa realized that when he put his hands on her forehead to bless her, before she left him to drive to her own place.
Whether Gd was angry with her, Liz couldn’t say, but Lieutenant Finchley definitely was. When she arrived at Area Six the next morning, there was a note taped to the desk she shared with two other detectives: Marchek, see me ASAP. Cops usually texted each other; a written note sounded ominous.
The lieutenant sent the desk sergeant away and shut his door. “Why didn’t you tell me as soon as you brought Adari into the station yesterday, Marchek?”
Liz stood with her hands clasped behind her, feet apart, as if she were at inspection. The pulse above the lieutenant’s left eye was throbbing, a danger sign.
“I’m taking you off this case.”
“But, sir—”
“There is no ‘but, sir,’ in this conversation. The victim photographed you going into the suspect’s clinic. How did you expect to keep that a secret?”
“I didn’t think my medical history was anyone’s public business, sir. Not the victim’s, and not my co-workers.”
“Your medical history is your business, Marchek, which is why I’m not posting this on the World Wide Web, but when any officer in my command has had prior contact with a suspect or a victim in an investigation, I hear about it first from that officer, not from someone in the Evidence Unit sifting through the victim’s papers, unless you think you are V.I. Warshawski, able to operate outside standard systems with impunity. If we don’t come up with a better lead in the next forty-eight hours, you and every patient Culver ever photographed will be a person of interest in this crime. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir.” Liz dug her fingernails into her palms to keep her voice from shaking.
“You will assist Sergeant Wrexall at the front desk and catch up on your paperwork backlog until I decide you’re ready for the street again. Send Detective Billings in to see me when he arrives. You’re dismissed.”
Liz wanted to know what the lieutenant was going to say to Oliver, but his manner was too forbidding for her to ask. She kept her head up, her shoulders back
, as she walked to the front desk. G’neivat daat, theft of the mind, wasn’t in the Illinois Criminal Code, but Lieutenant Finchley knew the punishment for it, anyway.
Fortunately, Sergeant Wrexall acted as though it was an ordinary event, detectives to be put on desk duty.
At nine-thirty, when her partner arrived, Wrexall said, “Billings, the looey wants to see you. Whatever you do, don’t complain about hemorrhoids—he decided mine were hurting my job performance so he took your partner to help me out here.”
After five minutes with Finchley, Billings stalked to the front desk, his lips thin. “What did you tell Finchley about our investigation?”
“Nothing. He called me in this morning and told me I was riding a desk for now—what did you tell him about me?”
“That you’re a useless rookie. He’s putting Clevenger and Cormack in charge of Culver and asking me to assist—to be a third wheel! Oliver held out his thumb and forefinger a quarter inch apart, “I was this close to handing in my badge.”
Liz and Wrexall nodded sympathetically. Oliver’s father, two uncles and grandfather had all been Chicago cops. He would never resign. Liz felt a flood of gratitude to the lieutenant wash through her. He’d protected her privacy; he hadn’t outed her to Oliver Billings.
“Who is V.I. Warshawski, anyway?” she asked Wrexall when they were alone again. “The looey asked if I thought I was like her.”
“She’s a PI. Gets on a lot of cops nerves because she takes risks and cuts corners we can’t—and also because she has an annoying habit of popping up in high-profile cases and solving them.”
“Maybe she’ll pop up and solve Culver’s death,” Liz suggested.
Thirty-six hours passed with no viable leads, and no sign that V.I. Warshawski was going to pop up. In twelve hours, Lieutenant Finchley would turn the photographs from the Evidence Unit over to the investigating detectives. Liz would become a person of interest—one among however many thousand Culver had photographed at abortion clinics, but the one whose private history would become part of her partner’s arsenal when he wanted to tear her down. Maybe even end her police career just as it was getting going.
Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! Page 6
