by Bill Granger
“So she was a tourist, right?”
“It looks that way. There were some letters in her purse, also in some foreign language that looks like the stuff in the passport. Little dots above some of the letters—you know. I guess it must be Swedish. I saw ‘Sverige’ on the passport, that’s Swedish, I think. She lived in—wait. M-A-L-M-O.”
“Malmö,” Schmidt repeated. “It’s across this bay from Copenhagen. I was there once. Three years ago when Gert and I went to Europe.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, let’s look at her.”
Matthew Schmidt had been in homicide for nineteen years, and he hated dead bodies. The sight of them always startled him. He avoided wakes as well. And he did not like the smell of flowers.
He pulled back the rubber cloth covering her head. Her eyes were open. There was dried blood on her face, and her neck and her blouse was still wet with soaked blood. Her face was white.
“It looks like he raped her too,” said Terry Flynn slowly. “Her panties were torn off. He must have been huge. There are bruises around her pussy.”
Matthew Schmidt pulled the rubber open, revealing the lower part of the body. The moment of panic at the sight of her—it was always the same for him and he was ashamed of it—was past. He looked carefully at her torn and bloody sexual organ.
After a little time during which they said nothing, Matthew Schmidt pulled the cloth carefully back over the face of Maj Kirsten and stood up. His knees crackled.
“Flynn. Call First District and ask for Dalby himself. Tell him I would appreciate it if he could send a couple more uniformed men over here. I want to find that knife or whatever it was. The blood on her blouse is still wet. I want to search the park, thoroughly, now. He might still be around. I want one sweep starting at the Field Museum on the south end and working north on both sides of the Outer Drive. Get a second sweep working south from the parking lot. Include the west side of the park, on the other side of the IC tracks, all the way to Michigan Avenue. Flush all the bushes—winos, lovers, muggers, everyone. Take the obvious ones over to First District, but get the names of the others. Tell Captain Dalby this is priority, Flynn. If Dalby doesn’t respond to your usual pleasant approach, tell him he will talk to the superintendent this afternoon. This is not a cheap murder, and his help is not open to negotiation.”
Flynn was writing it all down; Schmidt spoke in a purposely flat voice that seemed to carry a shrieking edge. Four years before he had been operated on for lung cancer. One more year and he could say his body had been free of cancer for five years. The doctor assured him that his chances for survival were very good. But it frightened him all the time to think of the death that had been in his body and might still be there, waiting to fool him. Almost as a reaction to it, to the fragility of life, he had become quiet, slow to speak, introspective. Or perhaps he had always been that way and was now aware of it and exaggerated those traits. Of course, he did not smoke anymore. Once in a while, when the shrieking edge threatened to overwhelm the calm, he sat at home alone and consumed a bottle of bourbon. Those were the times when he was very frightened.
Flynn folded his notebook and shoved it into his sweat-stained shirt pocket. “I’ll tell him, Matt. He’ll know what you mean.” Flynn turned and walked to his car parked on the grass behind the wooden public lavatory. The sun was almost directly overhead, and because he did not want to sit on the hot vinyl seat, Flynn reached through the open car window and took his radio microphone in hand.
Terry Flynn was glad to be working with Schmidt again. He liked the older man. They had met when Flynn was just a uniformed tactical cop working out of Area Two on the South Side. Normally a lieutenant did not direct a murder investigation—let alone a sergeant; but a murder in Grant Park—any murder so public, so fraught with ramifications beyond mere life and death—called for investigators with clout inside the department. Flynn called First District on the radio.
Matthew Schmidt strolled over to the coroner; like everything else, the coroner’s office had changed its designation in recent years to the more technical sounding “medical examiner’s office.” But the same red-faced coroner’s man who had examined the body on Schmidt’s first murder case was waiting with the two policemen who would remove the body in the squadrol to the county morgue on West Monroe Street.
“You got everything, Mattie?” asked the coroner, whose name was Watson.
“Yeah, Doc.” Schmidt looked back at the rubber-covered body. “Must have been a butcher knife.”
“Or a bayonet. But something big,” agreed Watson.
“About noon?”
“Oh, Christ, I don’t know. Noon. Eleven. Even ten o’clock. The colored kid told Margolies he found the body at twelve fifteen. Precise little bastard. I’d say eleven or thereabouts off the top of my head.”
Schmidt bit his lower lip. Everything had been taken care of, but he was reluctant to close up a “scene,” as the homicide detectives called it. They had an almost magical faith in the scene of the crime and its power to extract an emotional confession from the killer then and there. But there was no one to question except one young boy, and it was indecent to leave the remains of this young woman in the sun, covered by a rubber bag.
“You got all your photographs?” said Schmidt.
One of the young policemen volunteered that the police photographer was already back at Area One Homicide with his roll of film.
He nodded. “All right. You can have her.”
“Thanks, Mattie,” said the old coroner. “I’ll see you down at the morgue later.”
But Schmidt had turned away, back to the small crowd of spectators standing a few feet from the body, held in check by a surly traffic patrolman. Schmidt looked at the faces of the curious. Did any of you kill her? The faces told him nothing. Then he spotted the young reporter from the Chicago Daily News.
“What do you want here?”
“Can you tell me who was she? What happened? We got on the radio that she was shot down—”
Schmidt glanced at the name he had copied from the passport.
“Her name was Maj Kirsten,” he said. He spelled it. “Twenty-seven. She was stabbed at least once in the neck, several times in the breast.”
He waited while the reporter copied down his words. Unlike some of his colleagues, Schmidt talked to reporters. Along with his mystical faith in the power of “the scene” was a belief in the ancient practice of raising the hue and cry: a murderer is at large among us.
“She was from Sweden. Correction. She carried a Swedish passport and we assume now she was a visitor in the city. It appears there was a possibility of rape. Her clothes were in disarray, but they had not been removed from her body.”
“Were her panties torn off?”
Schmidt looked at the reporter. He guessed he was about twenty-two. “Yes.” He made a face. “They had been torn off.”
“Got the murder weapon?”
“No.”
“Any motive?”
“Of course. But we don’t know what it was. Some money may have been taken from her purse, but there’s a ring on her finger. Also her wristwatch was left.”
“Can you give me a description?”
“Not very well beyond her age. She was blond.” He felt sick to his stomach, and the old wound across his chest flared. “She had blue eyes.” They had stared at him.
“Any suspects?”
“We’re following several leads.”
“Did—”
“No more now.” Schmidt spoke quietly. “Except you can put out that this was a very bloody crime. Whoever killed her had blood on his clothes. A lot of blood. Someone had to see the blood. You can put that out.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant. I got your last name right?” He showed him his painful scrawl. The name was wrong. Schmidt did not bother to correct it.
“Hiya, Matt. I got Dalby.”
Schmidt turned and saw Sergeant Flynn cross the grass toward him. Schmidt waved him away from the reporter.
“It’s set. Couple of uniforms’ll be here in a few minutes. He wasn’t very happy about it, but couldn’t resist my honeyed words.”
Schmidt smiled. He felt terrible. He wanted a cigarette. “The hell with Dalby.”
“What now?”
“Oh, the usual thing. You run the sweeps, Flynn, and then hit some of the joints where our old colleagues congregate. Get the word out. This guy is a real creep, but it might be one of our old, familiar creeps moving up to the big leagues. Take a look at the people you find in the park—don’t leave it to the uniforms. Or get Margolies to go over them at the district. If we get any good-looking suspects, let’s call up Donovan and see how the state’s attorney wants to handle this thing. I don’t like public murders like this, there’s too much heat. You haven’t had one like this before, have you, Flynn?”
“Don’t you remember? I was in uniform on tac when I was with you down at Area Two. When that broad started trash-compacting her kids.”
“Oh yeah.” The trouble was, Matthew Schmidt could always remember the bodies. “That was public, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Flynn. “But not like this.” He watched Schmidt like a bright student who studies a teacher’s face to learn the tricks and find the truth revealed in little gestures.
“The papers’ll go crazy this afternoon and the TV tonight. I’ll take the heat on it, Flynn, as much as I can so you and Margolies can get the damned thing cleared. If we can clear it, I’ll talk to the superintendent this afternoon and the same with Ranallo.”
Flynn nodded. Leonard Ranallo was chief of homicide.
“Did you or Margolies find a hotel key in her purse?”
“No.”
Schmidt sighed heavily. “There’s still the kid to talk to. He didn’t come all the way across the field to take a piss. He saw something.”
“That’s what Margolies thought.” Flynn was defending Sid Margolies to Schmidt in case Schmidt thought Margolies had fallen down on the interview.
“Then he should have asked him about it.” Schmidt stared at Flynn for a moment. He was glad the sergeant had defended Margolies; Flynn, he thought, came on like an aggressive and unthinking loudmouth, but there might be more there.
“We don’t have another man. See if you can get one of the smarter-looking uniforms to do the hotel check. She might have been in the Hilton, down at this end of the Loop.”
Flynn wrote it down. There wasn’t anything more to say. The doors of the blue-and-white squadrol, which was nothing more than a small truck, slammed shut. Inside, on a bench that usually carried prisoners to the county jail complex and drunks to the district lockup, lay the body of Maj Kirsten. It was one fifty-three P.M., and the temperature was now ninety-six degrees.
Because he did not own a car, Jack Donovan usually hitched a ride to the Loop, from Dominic Lestrada, an assistant state’s attorney in the criminal division who lived rather ostentatiously in one of the Marina City towers. The arrangement suited them both. Because Lestrada was ambitious and aggressive, he saw the ride to the Loop from the West Side Criminal Courts building as a chance to propound his legal theories to the boss. Donovan, as chief of the criminal division, did not appreciate Lestrada’s rather banal ideas but did appreciate the ride from the courts. So, on most nights, he endured twenty minutes of Lestrada on the Law to save himself forty-five minutes on public transportation.
Tonight, as usual, Lestrada pulled to the curb at the corner of Wacker and State, and Donovan got out and waved goodnight. He walked a block south down State Street, under the brilliant marquee of the Chicago Theater to the subway-el entrance. It was a little past seven o’clock P.M. and the city was still bathed in smoky, humid light.
As usual he bought the first editions of the morning newspapers at the corner and went down the steps to the subway. He brushed past a sinister figure insistently selling an underground weekly paper in a doom-laden voice. The salesman cursed him as he passed. Donovan continued down in the manner of those around him—as though in a trance. He pushed through the turnstiles, went down the escalator, and waited on the platform for the roaring whoosh of the northbound A train. When it screamed into the station, he pushed with the others through the doors, found a place to stand and brace himself, and opened the papers. He began to read about the murder of Maj Kirsten.
Both of the morning newspapers—the Sun-Times and the Tribune—had played the story on page one. This, in itself, might seem unusual in a city that counted nearly nine hundred murders in one year. But this was a public murder and not mundane. A man had not killed his wife. A black teen gang had not murdered a grocer on the South Side. This murder involved a white woman, butchered (as they put it) in daylight in Grant Park, between the hulking Loop skyline and picturesque Monroe Street Harbor. Further, as the papers pointed out sternly, she was a tourist, a guest of the city. She had also been “brutally raped,” and the newspapers understood that such a thrilling murder was of more interest to their readers than bloodshed in Southeast Asia or even the new wage-and-price guidelines. Jack Donovan had understood this as well when Matt Schmidt phoned him that afternoon.
Two years before, Jack Donovan had been appointed chief of the criminal division for the state’s attorney’s office of Cook County. He did not understand then why the new state’s attorney, Thomas P. Halligan, had given him the job. Though he did not especially desire the job, he did not reject it. Some people saw his passive acceptance of events in recent years as strength; Donovan knew that was wrong.
It had turned out all right.
“Bud’ Halligan was a buffoon in many ways but a shrewd buffoon. He had largely left the handling of the sprawling criminal division to Donovan—except for the interference from time to time of Leland Horowitz.
Horowitz had been Halligan’s campaign manager in his successful bid for office. So Halligan had made Horowitz his first assistant.
At first Horowitz had tried to pack the clerical staff with party patronage workers, and Jack Donovan had resisted. There had been a showdown in Halligan’s office. Though Halligan had compromised on some of the people Donovan wanted to keep, he had sided mainly with Horowitz. Jack Donovan had nearly quit then, but his entrenched passivity led him to do nothing. A few months later Horowitz again made personnel selections, this time in the ranks of the lawyers—the assistants who prepared and tried cases. Again Donovan went to Halligan, and this time Halligan had sided with Donovan against Horowitz. Donovan now thought he knew where Halligan stood; he also decided he could live with it.
The El suddenly bolted out of the subway tunnel and climbed effortlessly to the tracks thirty-five feet above the street as it rumbled into the North Side. Sunlight flashed across the thousand rooftops of the old three-story flat buildings. Donovan sighed and folded his newspapers. Two teenagers pushed to the doorway of the train next to him. Both were smoking beneath the defaced NO SPITTING, NO SMOKING sign. Donovan turned from them and stared out the window.
The train slowed into rickety, wooden Fullerton Avenue Station, and Donovan pushed out through the doors onto the wooden platform, down the steps, through the grimy turnstile, and onto the sidewalk. The trance was broken. He paused, rubbed his hands across his mouth, and decided he wanted a drink; it had become a usual decision in the past year. Quickly he walked two blocks east to Halsted Street.
He pushed the door into the Seminary Restaurant and walked through to the cocktail lounge in the back. It looked like a lot of other bars, but he had gotten used to it; some ex-cops drank there and so did a few priests and students from nearby DePaul University. He sat down and rested his hands on the plastic cushion that edged the bar top. His shirt was wet from the heat; he had long since loosened his tie. The bar was very cold, and he thought he heard the air-conditioning system thump and hum from somewhere behind him. He looked around and didn’t find anyone he knew. He realized he was disappointed.
“Vodka and tonic. No lime,” he said and pushed a five-dollar bill across the bar top.
; He drank the first very quickly. The second only a little more slowly.
The third felt better. Someone was saying the Cubs were going to win the pennant this year. It was the same talk every June. Jack Donovan was raised on the South Side, and when he had been interested in baseball, was a White Sox fan. He didn’t think they would win the pennant either.
The man next to him started to talk to him about the murder of Maj Kirsten, and Jack Donovan realized he would get drunk if he stayed. He did not want to talk about the murder. He took his change from the last drink, shoved it in his pocket, and got up.
The heat outside hit him like the opening of a furnace. He sucked in his breath and turned down the block. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment carved out in an old four-story building on Cleveland Street. He had lived in the neighborhood for six years, ever since he had given up the kids to Rita. He had seen the old families of the neighborhood move out and watched the realestate speculators move in and renovate the old, post-Fire of 1871 houses into apartments for the young and affluent. The neighborhood made him feel like a stranger now.
In the vestibule of the building he opened his mailbox and found the usual bills, then unlocked the hall door and went up the stairs to his apartment on the third floor.
There were two locks on his door.
He pushed it open at last and felt the welcome rush of cold air from the air-conditioning units in the living room and bedroom. He shut the door behind him and dropped the bills and newspapers and keys on a little table in the vestibule.
The telephone rang.
He shuddered. No one called him, and he preferred it that way. This call might be more about the murder or about some trial gone to jury. Or—or it might be Rita.
He let the phone ring three times and then went to the kitchen and picked it up.
“Hello? Jack?”
He listened to her voice. He felt cold. Maybe the air-conditioning was on too high.
“Jack?”
“Hello.”
“I wanted to catch you when you came in from work.”
“You caught me.”
