Public Murders

by Bill Granger

  Mrs. Farrell was in the outer office before him. She usually was. Donovan glanced at the wall clock as he pushed into the retreat of his own office. Because the ceilings in the old Criminal Courts building at Twenty-sixth Street and California Avenue were very high, they made the rooms look small and dark. There was no rug on the floor of his office and, in fact, there was little to distinguish it from anyone else’s office in the rabbit warren of storerooms and conference rooms and offices. On one faded wall was a picture of Thomas P. Halligan, the state’s attorney. Someone had placed it on the wall automatically after his election. Jack Donovan did not mind it very much. On a second wall there was a large calendar from the county clerk’s office.

  And that was all.

  Donovan had walked from police headquarters to Grant Park and the murder scene in the hour before dawn. He had first gone to the wooden lavatory building where the body of Maj Kirsten had been found and then had traced the route to the place where Norman Frank was found in the bushes and arrested. He didn’t know what he was looking for.

  After a while he had taken the Madison Street bus west into the early morning black ghetto where the county morgue building was located, on Monroe Street. There he went into the basement to look at Maj Kirsten’s body.

  He stared at her face. It was now composed. Her eyes were closed.

  From the morgue he took another bus to Twenty-sixth and California and managed to drink a cup of coffee at the little restaurant across the street from the courts. He was very tired and felt depressed by the hour, by the silent city, and by the composed face he had seen in the basement of the morgue.

  He sat at his desk and pushed the intercom. “Mrs. Farrell—”

  “Mr. Halligan wants you to call him,” she interrupted.

  “I’m not here yet.”

  “He said to say he wanted to talk about the arrest in the papers this morning.”

  “Bring me some coffee, please. Then send in Mario.”

  “All right. As soon as I can,” she said. Her voice reminded him of sour milk.

  Mrs. Farrell would not be put off. “There was also a call already from Mr. Horowitz.” Leland Horowitz, the first assistant and chief political meddler in the office. Of course he would call.

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you want me to get Mr. Horowitz?” Mrs. Farrell persisted. She conducted intercom conversations like a guerrilla fighter.

  “No. Not now.” He looked at his watch. It was time for Matt Schmidt’s call. He glanced at the headline on the final edition of the Tribune on his desk. Delancey had protected his collar very thoroughly. Norman Frank was ready to be hanged.

  He rose, stretched and yawned, and walked to the dirty window that cast a long, gloomy light into the office. There was nothing to see. It was an air shaft, a penitentiary of light that formed a small square down through the building to let in air and light and a promise of sunshine.

  He put his fingers on the window.

  Beyond the building, on the other side of the courtyard in the back, was the rambling Cook County Jail building, one of the largest county jails in the nation, serving the largest single criminal courts division in the country. Waiting in the tiers of the jail were thousands of men and women: some were still to go to trial and were technically not guilty of any crime; others were serving sentences. All were treated the same.

  Mario DeVito entered the office without knocking and flopped down at one end of the leather couch.

  “Hello, Jack.”

  Donovan did not turn around. He tried to look up through the air shaft. The day was cloudy.

  “Close the door, Mario.”

  Mario groaned and, reaching with his foot, kicked the door closed.

  Donovan thought: the office was air-conditioned and the overhead light was sufficient. Really, there was no need for an old-fashioned air shaft anymore. It reminded him only of how closed in the office really was.

  Jack Donovan turned. Mario DeVito had placed his feet up on the chair next to the couch. Donovan leaned against the window ledge and gripped it with both hands.

  “As you can see, we have a suspect in the killing of that Swedish girl whether we want one or not,” he began quietly. “Personally, I don’t. He’s a wino, a hillbilly, and some goddamn motorcycle cop found him down in Grant Park this morning wearing a bloodstained shirt. They didn’t find a knife. That would be too much. So the arresting officer lets the newspapers know all about it. Technically, unless someone has screwed up, the guy is still a disorderly conduct until I hear from Matt Schmidt and from the crime lab.”

  “How bloody?”

  “Bloody enough.”

  “And so Bud Halligan already knows.”

  “You’re better than Jeane Dixon.”

  “And Horowitz called you already.”

  “Keep it up. We’ll get you an astrology column.”

  Mario smiled his wide broad-toothed grin. “Little bit of heat, eh, Jackie?” Donovan tried to smile in return. “So when is Matt Schmidt going to call you to tie this guy up?”

  “Before court. Any time now.”

  Mario DeVito did not say anything; there was no need. Jack and Mario had been friends for a long time. They had gone to DePaul Law School at nights together, and Mario had helped him when Rita had gone insane. A long time before.

  Mario said. “I never heard of a wino raping no one. They can’t get it up. It’s a scientific fact.”

  “I know. Goldberg called me at three thirty this morning from Area One Homicide. Goldberg did the right thing. He’s a bright boy. Maybe we ought to bring him out here.”

  “I know him.” Mario made a face. “Leave him where he is. He’ll be out soon enough. He’ll have my job in a year and yours in two.”

  “As long as he can take Halligan and Horowitz.”

  “The Gold Dust Twins,” said Mario. “If Goldberg wasn’t a Jew, they could elect him state’s attorney.”

  But Donovan was following another thread of conversation. “Think about Goldberg. I like him. Anyway, I went down to Area One and Matt came in. He looked like hell.”

  “You look like hell yourself at four in the morning,” said Mario. “But I know what you mean. I saw him testify last week in the Washington-Lee trial.”

  “Yeah. Well, I don’t think Matt cared for the bust either, so I told him to talk to this guy Norman Frank and call us—”

  Mrs. Farrell buzzed his office. It was Matt Schmidt on line one. Donovan picked up the telephone and punched the appropriate button.

  “Yes, Matt?”

  “He’s ours for now.”

  Donovan felt sick.

  “Why, Matt?”

  “Type A on the shirt. She was Type A. He’s O. He’s still a little shaky about last night. I interviewed him with Goldberg and Margolies. He said he got drunk with a friend of his and ran out of money. So he mooched a bit down in the Loop and then decided to flop in Grant Park. He said he got enough for a bottle of muscatel and then went over to the park. He said he usually lived over at the Red Lion Hotel.”

  “That’s on Clark near Oak Street?”

  “Yeah. Flop heaven. I’ll send a man over there to look it over. So I asked him to tell me about Maj Kirsten. He said he never heard of her.”

  There was a pause. Jack Donovan looked across the desk at Mario and shook his head.

  “We talked about his problems. He’s got problems. He came up here from Lynchburg, Tennessee, six years ago and said his wife died and his children went back to Tennessee to live with relatives. He said he lost his job a year ago. He used to be a truck driver. I listened to him, and then I brought up Maj Kirsten again. Then Margolies started on him hard and I cooled him, but he wouldn’t say anything. Then he said he really wasn’t sure.”

  “What?”

  “He said he wasn’t sure.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. He says he sometimes blacks out. I asked him where he kept his knife, but he said he didn’t know.”

/>   Matt Schmidt’s voice was low and flat, as though he were reading from a notebook. Which he probably was.

  Mrs. Farrell came into the office. She carried two paper cups of coffee and put them on the edge of the desk and quickly turned away so that she did not have to acknowledge Mario DeVito’s little wave of thanks.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Norman said he kept an old army bayonet knife for protection, but he didn’t know where it was now. He said he was robbed once when he flopped in a crib in one of those chicken-wire rooms they got at the New Era Hotel on Skid Row. So he said he had a knife but he didn’t know where it was. He didn’t even know where his gear was. Norman is a careless boy.”

  “What about the bloody shirt?”

  “Norman seemed amazed. He said he must have bled when Delancey roughed him up.”

  “Is he roughed up?”

  “A little. I don’t think Delancey really did very much. He must have got his nose bloody and there’s a little bit of swelling above the left eye. He could have got that falling down.”

  “Delancey has the mentality to keep him on three-wheelers for the rest of his life.”

  Schmidt did not respond.

  “The lab checked the trousers,” he finally continued. “He wasn’t wearing any underwear. The trousers have traces of everything from catsup to dried wine, but there’s no semen.”

  “Did he use his prick for a spoon?”

  “He’s thirty-eight years old, and when we checked with the feds, they said he served two years for auto theft in Tennessee in 1963.”

  “Truck driver,” said Donovan sarcastically.

  “He killed someone.”

  Donovan closed his eyes for a moment and tried to see Matt Schmidt, to catch the tone of voice and connect it with a phantom face. “Are you sure?”

  “He killed someone or he knew someone who killed someone. He’s trying to get something out to us but he won’t let himself.”

  “Did he kill Maj Kirsten?” Donovan asked quietly.

  “I don’t know.”

  Another pause.

  “Hold him. Talk to him some more, Matt. I’ll call you back.”

  “All right.”

  They broke the connection. Donovan picked up his coffee and sipped it. It scalded his tongue.

  “You got a customer?” Mario inquired mildly.

  “It seems he may be forced down our throats.”

  “What’s it all about?”

  Donovan began to explain, quietly, slowly, the facts of the matter and his own reservations about Norman Frank. He realized he was not presenting substantial objections, but he valued Mario’s opinion and he knew that Mario could grasp the nuances of all that Donovan could not even say aloud.

  As he spoke the clocks in the old building passed ten A.M.

  Now the vast, bumbling juggernaut of bureaucracy stumbled again into motion in the sprawling, incoherent system of courts and jail of Cook County. It had started again: the crimes of passion committed during the long, hot, windless night were now exposed and picked over like bleaching bones laid out in the cloudy daylight of justice. Judges entered their imposing oak-paneled courtrooms from their chambers in the rear; bailiffs stood around with beefy arms folded; clerks called the courts to attention; lawyers in three-piece suits crowded forward with briefs and pleas and writs while clerks dickered with lawyers for appearance times set in the future, and judges attempted to fill in the court calendar in the long, losing race against merely staying even with the swelling sea of cases. All the while prisoners taunted one another in the dirty lockups behind the courtrooms while more bailiffs watched outside the cages, regarding the prisoners as though they were strange animals captured for a zoo.

  And in the long corridors outside the stifling courtrooms they waited and smoked and talked to each other in low voices and ate sandwiches and drank coffee and laughed—the deputies, bailiffs, state police troops in Boy Scout hats, Chicago policemen and suburban cops and men from homicide, general assignment, robbery, vice, tactical, narcotics, and gambling; undercover policemen from the Illinois Bureau of Investigation and the Chicago police red squad; gang members and their relatives, petty thieves out on bail; rapists, murderers, Mafia killers, armed robbers, political activists, and assistant prosecutors. All of them were actors on the dozen of stages of the bureaucracy of crime and justice. Their performances spilled from courtrooms in the old Criminal Courts building on the West Side to the new family court house; to the Civic Center courts in the Loop across from City Hall; out to the suburban branch courts of the Cook County circuit court system that encircled the city like a stolen necklace; to police courts in the six police areas of the city; to courts in police headquarters like the gun court and women’s court full of strutting pimps and tired whores; to courts in the old warehouse building on South Michigan Avenue, including violence court, as though violence were a thing apart from crime; to courtrooms secreted in the massive red-brick traffic court building on the banks of the Chicago River north of the Loop.

  Every day it came alive, enmeshing thousands of lives, a monster of a thousand heads reborn with the morning court call.

  Quietly Jack Donovan finished his explanation of the case involving the rape and murder of a Swedish tourist named Maj Kirsten. Mario DeVito finished his cup of coffee and contemplated the dregs. He looked up at Jack Donovan, who was still leaning on the windowsill. He liked Jack very much and sometimes he felt sorry for him.

  “Well,” Mario said. “Hang it on him.”

  “I can’t explain it, Mario. I just can’t believe he did it. It doesn’t work. Not that it’s so neat—I can understand that. But it still doesn’t make sense. The guy is a stewbum.”

  “Well, you can’t let him go.”

  “I wish I had the weapon.”

  “Yeah. And I wish I had a name for every gun in the Chicago River.”

  Jack Donovan was silent, but Mario was agitated now. He got up and began to pace.

  “Look at it, Jack. Matt Schmidt isn’t a rookie. He’s got his feelings about it too. And he thinks Norman did it. You ain’t even talked to this creep.”

  “You’re right.”

  “So why stick your neck out on this? You got the papers, you got Halligan, you got the cops. What’s the percentage for you to hold the process of justice up?”

  Mario spread his hands; Donovan smiled. “I’ve got to tell Matt something. I wish I had a little more time.”

  “So does Maj Kirsten,” said Mario.

  “Cheap shot,” said Donovan. “We’re not in court now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Donovan considered. Was this instinct of his only further evidence of his inability to act and to make a decision? Or was it a valid feeling? Why the hell wait anyway?

  He pushed himself up from the sill and went to the intercom on the desk.

  “Get me Maurice Goldberg. He’s at Area One felony review.”

  A moment later Mrs. Farrell said, “He’s on line two.”

  “Hello, Goldberg. Tired?”

  “Hello. No, not really. I sat in on the questioning, but I figured you wanted to hear it from Lieutenant Schmidt.” Donovan smiled at Goldberg’s clever self-deprecation.

  “What do you think, Goldberg?”

  “I think we’ve got enough for a charge.”

  “What, for instance?”

  Goldberg sounded confused. “Murder? Rape?”

  “You want to do it?”

  There was hesitation. “Uh. Mr. Donovan. This is a major charge. I don’t mind going ahead, but is that the way you want it handled?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, Mr. Halligan was calling over here. He talked to Margolies, who didn’t really seem to tell him anything. And the newspaper guys are all over the place. We got the first edition of the Daily News here, and it says the cops got the killer of Maj Kirsten and that he’s been charged with murder.”

  Donovan smiled at Mario.

  “Okay, Goldberg. We’ll go al
ong with the Daily News. Get him booked through on murder and rape and stay out of the rest of it—Matt Schmidt can handle it. Ranallo at homicide will probably want his piece of the credit, and I’ll talk to Halligan later. Tell Matt we really have to have a weapon to go to the grand jury with.”

  “I’ll tell him. What about the newspapers?”

  “Fuck the papers. Let Lee Horowitz handle that shit. I don’t want to see quotes in the papers, okay, Goldberg?” His voice was not friendly anymore; his tongue had been scalded by coffee and his stomach hurt. “That’s not your concern, Goldberg. Go home.” He hung up.

  Mario was smiling. “Didja scare Sammy Glick?”

  “I don’t know. He wears on me a little. But he’s young. I still think you ought to bring him out, Mario, and see what he can do.”

  “You’re the boss,” said Mario. “Feel better?”

  “No. Now I have to call Uncle Bud Halligan.”

  “Suffering is good for the soul, Jack. It makes you a better man.” Mario grinned. Then, he said:

  “Well, I’ve got to go upstairs and see Judge Frankenheimer this morning, so I better go. Did I tell you he’s thrown out three gang cases this week, including one murder? Remember that grocery murder? Son of a bitch. All insufficient evidence. Little prick. I wish one of our little black brothers would carve him some night. Maybe his heart would stop bleeding then.”

  “What does he want with you?”

  “Conference. He wants to talk about the declining quality of prosecution.”

  Mario DeVito was in charge of trial work.

  Jack Donovan sighed and sat down behind his desk. There were little pieces of paper scattered on it, all messages. “It is, isn’t it?”

  “Declining? Sure. We want to keep up with the times. We should only prosecute when we’ve got fourteen witnesses and the arrest is made by Jack Webb.”

  “Delancey,” Donovan said suddenly.

  “Who?”

  “That goddamn motorcycle cop.”

  Mario was annoyed; Donovan was not listening. Frankenheimer let off fucking Geoffrey Tucker last week, de big hit man of de Black Gaylords.”

  “You told me,” said Donovan. “Do you want me to go up with you?”