by Jim Cliff
Chapter 1
After I accused her of having an affair with one of her students, I must admit I never expected to see her again. But there she was, sitting in one of my client chairs, struggling to find the words to ask for my help.
“What can I do for you, Dr. Parker?” I prompted, smiling.
She was tall and slender, with sharp features, probably in her mid-to-late thirties. She wasn’t attractive, so much as compelling. Over the past year, she’d grown her short blonde hair out into a neat bob that brushed her shoulders while she looked silently around my office.
“I don’t really know where to start, Mr. Abraham,” she said, her tone apologetic.
“Jake, please,” I said. She didn’t suggest I call her Jane. “It’s normal to be a little nervous the first time you hire a private investigator.”
“Oh, I’m not nervous.” She smiled for the first time since she’d sat down. “It’s just that I’ve been waiting for this moment for almost twenty-five years. It’s somewhat overwhelming to be sitting here, finally.”
She reached into her bag and handed me a folded, yellowed, page of newsprint. I looked at the header. It was a copy of the Chicago Tribune from November 5, twenty-three years ago.
“The story on the right,” said Dr. Parker. The smile had faded.
It was a couple of inches about a woman’s body being found in Thatcher Woods, out in River Forest. Her name wasn’t given, but it said the police were treating it as a suicide. I looked up, hoping for some kind of clue about what I was supposed to do next.
“I need you to find out what happened to her. I need to know who killed her.”
“The paper says suicide,” I helpfully pointed out. Case closed. That was easy.
“They’re wrong.”
“You seem pretty sure about that.”
“I was there when she died.”
Chapter 2
“I was twenty,” she continued. “I was at grad school at Concordia, and I was having an affair with a married man.”
I wanted to let her get on with the story but my brain was struggling to cope with parts of that last sentence. Isn’t twenty pretty young for a grad student? Also, that made her forty-three now – good job, Botox! And the last I heard, she was gay. I decided to focus on the only question that seemed relevant to the investigation and save the rest for later.
“Can you tell me his name?” I asked.
“Grady. Grady Caldwell. He’s a senior executive at McGinley Mutual Bank. He’s happy to speak to you about this,” she said, anticipating my next question. “Back then Grady worked in a branch in Forest Park. He would tell his wife he was staying in the city because he had to work late, then he would pick me up from the campus and we’d go to a motel.”
“Why not your place?”
“I was still living with my parents. I couldn’t afford my own place.”
I nodded, made a note on my pad, and she went back to her story.
“So this one time, he said he didn’t want to go to a motel. He said he wanted to park the car someplace. He said it would be exciting.”
“Thatcher Woods?”
She nodded. “There’s a small parking area and a sort of trail which goes into the woods. We parked near the trail. As far away as we could get from the road.”
“What time was this?”
She went into her bag again and out came a well-worn spiral-bound notebook. She flipped through a few pages before she answered. “Around eight. Grady got out to check whether there was anyone else around. Then we got into the back seat. We kissed, started taking our clothes off, but it was cramped and somewhat awkward. We’d just started having sex when it happened. It was 8:19.”
“What happened?”
“Outside the car I heard a shout. Then a woman screamed. Then there was a gunshot.”
“Did you see anything?” I asked. She shook her head.
“We just froze. The windows were all steamed up. After a couple minutes, I wiped away the steam, but it was completely black out there, and raining hard. I couldn’t see a thing.”
“Tell me about the shout.”
“It was a man’s voice. He said ‘Shut up, shut up’.”
“Twice, like that?”
“Yes.”
“Did you recognize the voice? Did he have an accent?”
“I didn’t recognize it.” She thought for a moment. “I don’t remember an accent.”
“What did you do next?”
“We just stayed still and quiet, and listened for a while, but we couldn’t hear anything. Then Grady said he was going to go and see if there was anything he could do. I argued with him. I said the man could still be out there, but he was adamant. When he came back he said she was dead.”
“How long was he gone?”
“Three minutes. He left at 8:31 and came back at 8:34.” She glanced down at her notebook to double check and nodded to herself.
“You’re very clear on the times,” I said. It came out sounding like a challenge.
“Like I said, it was pitch black. The only thing I could see was the green digital clock in the dash. It was a point of focus.”
“And you remember the times, even now?”
“Oh, no,” she said, clearly realizing I had misunderstood, and indicated her notepad. “The notes I have here? I wrote them back then. That night. See?”
She showed me the page in her pad. It was signed at the bottom, with a time and date: 9:43 p.m., November 2. Barely an hour after she’d witnessed a murder. Kind of.
“That’s...” I wasn’t sure quite how to put it. “An unusual approach.”
“We couldn’t go to the police without admitting we were there, which would have destroyed Grady’s marriage. But I knew at some point it might come out and I would have to testify, so I wanted to be accurate.”
“I’m impressed by the logic. I would think most twenty-one-year-olds would be too upset or freaked out to think that clearly.”
“I was devastated. But I knew how important it was to get all the details down on paper quickly.”
A confused look from me took the place of another question.
“I mentioned I was in grad school? My master’s thesis was on the malleability of memory and the unreliability of witnesses. People think the brain is like a video recorder - that recalling a memory is like playing a tape and over time it stays the same but loses some of the detail. That’s not how it is at all. It’s more like putting on a play. Every time you remember an event in your past, your brain is reconstructing it from parts of the original memory, parts of associated memories, similar events, your expectations of how people behave in those kinds of circumstances. It’s like you’re putting the play on each time with actors who change lines and improvise on the theme and, over time, the play changes. But you know what stays the same?”
“What?”
“Your confidence that everything happened exactly as you remember it. We’ve done experiments where we’ve convinced people they went in a hot air balloon as a child or got lost in a mall, and after a few weeks they remember it in great detail and swear it really happened to them.”
“How did you convince them, like under hypnosis?”
“No, just stories, doctored pictures. It’s quite easy actually. There’s another phenomenon where people take events that happened to other people, say a sibling, and adopt it as their own memory. They’re absolutely convinced it happened to them.”
She was more animated than I’d seen her before. She clearly loved her subject.
“So you wrote everything down.”
She nodded.
“OK,” I said, “so Grady came back at 8:34. What
did he say?”
“He just said she was dead, and there was nothing we could do to help her, so we should get out of there.”
“That’s when you argued?”
“Not at first, no. I was in shock. He drove me home and before I got out of the car I said we should call the police. He said it would ruin his marriage and his career, and we didn’t even know anything that could help.”
“His career?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said it would ruin his marriage and his career. I get the marriage part, obviously, but why would it affect his career?”
“Oh. The bank president was his father-in-law. He was right - he would definitely have gotten fired.”
“So you agreed to stay quiet?”
“Well, no. I kept on arguing. I mean a woman died. We had a duty to do something. Eventually, Grady said we should watch the papers for information about it. If it looked like someone was going to be put away who didn’t do it, say if the police got the time of the murder wrong or something, then we would come forward. He said he would sacrifice everything to prevent a miscarriage of justice.”
“So you went home, wrote everything down, and watched the papers. Did anything else show up?”
“Just this,” she said, taking another folded, yellowed page from her purse.
It was from three days after the first piece, and about the same length. It named the woman - Elizabeth Weber, said she was a real estate agent from River North, that the medical examiner had confirmed suicide as the cause of death and her family had been informed.
“What did Grady say when the suicide verdict came out?” I asked.
“I called him, but he said there was nothing we could do. We didn’t know anything. I said we knew it wasn’t suicide, and her family had a right to know she didn’t kill herself.”
“He didn’t agree?”
She shook her head. “He said maybe we were wrong. Maybe she did kill herself. But I knew that wasn’t true. We both heard the man’s voice, and we heard her scream. Why would someone scream before they shot themselves?”
“I don’t know. Is it possible the police got it right?”
“No. I know what I heard. Grady knew it too.”
Chapter 3
I called Grady Caldwell’s office while I waited on a wooden bench in the lobby of the Chicago PD Homicide Division on Harrison and Kedzie. After putting me on hold to check with her boss, his assistant told me he could fit me in at 4:30 that afternoon. Seemed like he was ready to be cooperative. I was putting my phone away when Detective Scott Bales appeared around the corner.
“Hey buddy, how’s it going?” he said, smiling. He was obviously having a good tour.
“Good, thanks. You have five minutes to talk?”
“Sure. Just put away a piece of shit we’ve been after for months. There’s a crapload of paperwork to do, so I’m ready for a distraction right about now.”
“I’ve been asked to look into a suicide out in Thatcher Woods from twenty-three years ago. I was wondering if I could get a look at the police report?”
“Thatcher Woods? Not our area. You’ll need to speak to Cook County Sheriff’s Office records division.”
“Right. I know. The thing is, if I ask for it, it’ll have to be a Freedom of Information request, but if my oldest friend asks for it, they’ll probably send it right over.”
“Why? Does your oldest friend have some kind of influence over there?”
“It’s you, dumbass.”
“I’m really your oldest friend?”
“Yeah. What? We’ve known each other ten years!”
He shook his head, sadly. “You don’t have any friends from high school?”
“They were assholes to me in high school. Trust me, you are my oldest and best friend.”
“Your life makes me sad.”
“Are you going to help me or would you rather do paperwork?”
“Helping you is paperwork! Look, suicide was twenty-three years ago, right? What’s a few weeks waiting for the FOI request gonna hurt?”
“I’m between cases right now. I have the time to look into this. Plus, Abby’s away at some conference thing. I have nothing else to do. Please? I’ll bring you some donuts. Cops love donuts, from what I hear.”
“Tell you what I’ll do. Give me the details, and I’ll talk to a guy I know in the sheriff’s office.”
“Awesome! Thanks, Scott.”
“I’m not finished. I’ll talk to him, but if they don’t want to play ball I’m not going to push it, and you go through the proper channels. Agreed?”
“Was it the donuts? Because I kind of felt like you were wavering before I mentioned the donuts.”
“Don’t try and get out of bringing me donuts. We had a deal.”
Chapter 4
My appointment with Grady Caldwell was still two hours away, so I took a drive out to Thatcher Woods and parked in the dirt parking lot, by the trail into the woods.
I wasn’t really sure what I expected to see after all this time, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to get an idea of where it happened.
I took a few steps down the trail. It was a sunny day, but not much was making it through the trees. The forest floor was lit with a dappled sunlight effect that instantly put me in mind of a Robert Frost poem. Not the one about the two roads - the other one. The canopy above me was thick and I wondered how much the trees had grown in the past two decades. Did it look the same back then?
I walked back to my car and looked at my watch. Grady went into the woods to see what had happened and was back in three minutes. Actually, the clock changed from 8:31 to 8:34 while he was gone which gave him anywhere from just over two minutes to just under four, but three seemed like a reasonable working hypothesis.
I waited for the second hand on my watch to get to the twelve and headed off down the path. Grady was doing this in the dark, scared, with a killer somewhere close by, so I tried to think myself into his place and moved carefully, like a drunk man trying not to wake his wife at three in the morning.
After ninety seconds I’d made it maybe forty yards along the path into the trees. Assuming Elizabeth Weber’s body was on or right next to the path, this was roughly where he found it. Maybe he could have gotten further if he had a flashlight, was braver than I gave him credit for or if he had nearly four minutes rather than three. There was nothing special about this part of the woods. Of course, things can change in twenty-three years. Maybe this was going to be harder than I thought.
Chapter 5
Grady Caldwell’s office was bigger than mine and much more expensively furnished. I expect an interior designer had been involved at some point. Grady wore a blue shirt and a tie that almost matched but not quite. His suit jacket was hanging over the back of his chair. What little hair he had left formed a kind of semi-circle from over one ear, around the back of his head, to the other. It, along with his neat mustache, was totally white, offset nicely by the dark black frames of his spectacles. The top of his head reflected the afternoon sun shining through his office window behind him.
As we shook hands, Grady caught me looking at the three framed Hitchcock posters which hung along one wall of his office. Judging by the style and the faded colors, they were originals.
“Are you a fan?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“What’s your favorite?”
“I always liked North By Northwest,” I said. “You?”
“It has to be Psycho. It’s a masterpiece. Here, take a look at this.”
Grady pointed to the Psycho poster, and I noticed some writing and a line drawing of a familiar silhouette.
“Is that…?”
“Signed by the great man himself. That was not cheap, I can tell you.”
I tried to look sufficiently impressed by his investment. He suggested we sit on the huge black leather couch that took up most of the wall beneath the posters, and insisted I call him Grady.
“Thank you for
agreeing to talk with me so soon,” I started.
“Not a problem, Mr. Abraham, I’m happy to cooperate. I don’t know how much Jane told you, but my wife divorced me earlier in the year. She was the reason I didn’t come forward before. That and the shame I felt, regarding my behavior.”
I wasn’t sure whether he meant the affair or failing to tell the police what happened, but I let it go.
He continued, “Jane said you treated a situation she was involved in last year very discreetly. While I no longer have a marriage to protect, I do have a reputation, and I would appreciate similar discretion in this matter.”
“Discretion is my middle name,” I said. “It’s a shame it doesn’t fit on my business cards. Why don’t we go through what happened that night, in your own words?”
“Very well. Jane and I had been seeing each other for a few months. Due to our respective situations we generally spent our time together in a motel, but on that evening we couldn’t find one with a vacancy, so we found ourselves out by Thatcher Woods. We hadn’t been there long when we heard a shout and a scream, then a shot.”
“A man’s shout and a woman’s scream?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you hear what the man said?”
“I’m afraid not. It was raining hard, and with the sound of the raindrops on the roof of the car and the shock of it all… well, it was hard to make out any words.”
“OK, so what did you do then?”
“We stayed where we were for a few minutes in case anything else happened, but then I pulled up my pants and went to see if there was anything I could do.”
“Weren’t you afraid you might get shot too?”
“I guess I didn’t really think about it. I just knew that if she was injured maybe I could help. You know, stop the bleeding or get her to the hospital or something.”
“Jane says you were back in the car in three minutes. She must have been pretty close to the parking lot?”
“I suppose so. I don’t recall.”
“What did you do when you found her?”
