by Bill Granger
“There he is,” said DeVito. “Hiya, Tommy.” Tom Ryerson was Norman Frank’s public defender. He and Mario had gone to school together, to St. Patrick’s on the old West Side.
“Hiya, Dago,” said Ryerson. “Hiya, Jack. I’m all screwed up today.”
“Like always,” said Mario with a smile. “What’s up?”
“They called for my man ten minutes ago in the lockup. And he isn’t there.”
DeVito grinned. Ryerson glanced down at his manila folder.
“They just sent over to the jail to see if they forgot him.”
“Jerks,” said Donovan.
“I got a theory,” said Mario. “When a guy flunks out of mailman school because he can’t read zip codes, they make him a jail guard.”
Ryerson nodded. “Well, as long as we got a minute, what are you guys gonna do on this one, anyway?”
“Swing for the fences, Tommy. A home-run blast.” DeVito was still smiling.
“Don’t gimme that shit, Dago.”
Donovan glanced at Ryerson. “What deal you wanna make, Tommy?”
“Drop the rape and let him plead to a lesser on the other thing.”
“You mean the murder?” asked Donovan. “The other thing is a homicide.”
Ryerson turned to his old neighborhood pal. “Come on, Mario. You guys don’t have enough for that.”
“Shit,” said Donovan. “Murder. Downtown. In a public park. And a white woman. No. More than that—a tourist. Are you kidding us?”
“Hey, people get killed all the time,” said Ryerson.
Mario said, “But they is mostly our black brethren.”
“That’s prejudice,” said Ryerson.
“That’s life,” said Donovan.
“What deal you really wanna make, Tommy?” asked Mario.
“Voluntary manslaughter,” said the P.D.
“You’re dreaming, Tommy,” said Mario.
“Hey, come on. He’s had a hard time already. Some of our black brethren over in your jail really reamed him.”
“Maybe he was flirting,” said DeVito. He was not smiling now. His voice was very harsh. Donovan noticed that the instinctive guttural, clipped sounds of the West Side accent had surfaced in the speech of both men.
“You know you just pinned it on him. You ain’t got shit.”
DeVito said, “Whatever you say, Tommy. Nice talking to you.”
“If that’s really all you’ve got.”
Donovan broke in. “Hey. We play by the rules. You got what we got. And we got a bloody shirt and a bum in the park and Maj Kirsten’s blood type.”
Ryerson looked disgusted. “You got diddle. Stop playing this game. I’m trying to do you a favor and my client a favor. Maybe even throw in a little justice just for laughs.”
“Whaddaya say, Jack?”
Donovan responded on cue: “We’ll drop the rape to assault and we’ve got to go for murder and he pleads to everything. At least twenty.”
Ryerson shrugged. “Everything sounds okay except for the twenty. He won’t go for that. How about a recommendation for a minimum.” The minimum for murder was fourteen years.
Hey, this guy is a convicted felon,” said Mario.
“Auto theft. Ten years ago. Come on, Dago, you’re talking to the Irish Terror.” He tried to smile.
Donovan shook his head. “This was a public murder, Tommy, all over the front page. How the hell are we going to go for a minimum on this? I’d be out selling shoelaces the next day. I’m sticking my neck out now. You know that. We ought to go to bat all the way.”
Ryerson shrugged. “I’ll talk to my client.”
“If you can find him, you Mick bastard,” said Mario DeVito with affection. “You couldn’t find your ass with a flashlight and a map.”
At that moment a deputy sheriff waved to Ryerson and edged over. All around them in the noisy courtroom cases were being called for trial dates, and the hubbub seemed perpetual.
“We can’t find him,” the deputy said.
“The fuck,” said Mario DeVito.
“He’s on the list. They said they moved him over this morning before court. We got his name but we ain’t got him,” said the deputy.
“Check the other lockups?”
“Sure.”
“Other courts on this floor?”
“I’m telling you, he ain’t around.”
“Who was guarding the lockup?”
“New guy named Jackson.”
Donovan broke in impatiently and leaned into the deputy’s face. “You know who we’re talking about, don’t you? We’re not talking about a disorderly conduct charge.”
“Take it easy,” said Mario.
“What’s this shit, ‘He ain’t around’? You think I’m asking where the fucking men’s room is?” Donovan’s face glared red.
“I don’t have to take this shit,” said the deputy.
“Sure you do,” said Jack Donovan. He looked as though he would strike the deputy.
“Who the hell is this guy?” the deputy asked Mario.
“God,” said Mario. “You know Norman Frank killed a Swedish woman in Grant Park a month ago.”
“Yeah, I know who you mean,” said the deputy. “But I still don’t have to take this shit.”
Ryerson said, “Well, if you boys find him, let me know. I was going to the P.D.’s office anyway. Give me a call.”
Ryerson seemed unnaturally cheerful. Mario was as angry as Donovan, but he pulled Jack aside. “Leave Hopalong Cassidy alone. It isn’t going to solve anything.”
“You know what happened, don’t you?” asked Jack Donovan.
Mario nodded. They both understood.
“It gives us a little breathing room, though,” Mario said. Norman Frank has made a deal with one of the other prisoners in the lockup, and they had switched cells. “Maybe we can figure out what the hell is going on.”
“The bastard is on the streets now, Mario.”
“Unless he detoured to the lunchroom and died there of ptomaine poisoning.”
Donovan let it go. Without another word he turned and shoved his way out of the courtroom and went down the two long flights of stairs to the state’s attorney’s office.
When he reached his own office, he closed the door, sat down at the desk, and dialed the sheriff.
“This is Jack Donovan,” he said and waited to be put through. Finally he heard Jacobs’s deep voice boom on the line.
“Jack, whaddaya say?”
“I say your prisoner Norman Frank is missing.”
“Who?”
“Norman Frank who’s supposed to go to bat for killing Maj Kirsten.”
“Who?”
“The woman in the goddamn park last month.”
“Oh. What happened?”
“He was due in court this morning and he’s missing.”
“Shit.” Pause. “He break out?”
“No, it looks like the same old shit. He made a deal with someone and switched cells.”
Jacobs was silent and Donovan could not stand it. “Goddamn it. It’s happened four times in the past year, but this is the first white guy. You got so many prisoners in the lockup behind the courtrooms that the goddamn bailiff doesn’t know who’s who.”
“I know how it happens,” said the sheriff.
“Terrific,” said Jack Donovan. “You run a jail like a nympho runs a whorehouse. You don’t know who’s fucking who and if there’s any money in the till.”
“That’s unkind, Donovan,” the sheriff said mildly.
“How come your prosecutor didn’t spot him?” asked Jacobs finally.
“He was just getting his date changed. That assistant was juggling thirty cases down there. How the hell is he supposed to know who’s who?”
“And the P.D.?”
“They got stand-ins, same as we do. Nobody knows the players except the players.”
“Well, it wasn’t our fault.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Well�
��”
“Fuck this. Norman Frank is up on murder, rape, armed assault, everything but intent to commit mopery, and he walks out of court today because he’s not important enough to your gorillas in the jail to make sure he shows up in court.”
Jacobs said, “You aren’t going to say that, are you?”
“What do you think I’m going to say?”
“Come on, Jack. We’ll hang the guard at the lockup for you, if you want.”
“For starters. I’m certainly not letting the officer take your beef when the newspapers come around,” said Donovan.
“Bud is a friend of mine,” said Jacobs.
“Good. If you think Bud Halligan is going to put his balls in a chopper for you, then he must be a pretty good friend.”
“Listen, Jack,” said Jacobs. The tone had changed. But Donovan felt sick and angry and he couldn’t talk to the sheriff anymore. He hung up. He stalked to the window and tried to look up the air shaft at the sky. He hit the window ledge with the side of his hand.
A half hour later Mario DeVito entered the office. Mario threw his thick dark body onto the old leather couch and put up his feet on the chair next to it.
Donovan had finished his schedule, letting the anger and frustration be drained by playing with the problem of numbers on a legal pad. He looked at Mario.
Mario held his nose with his thumb and index finger and began an imitation of a police radio dispatcher. “Be on the lookout for a white, male, Caucasian, nonblack, un-Negro escaped killer named Norman Frank, who walked out of the Criminal Courts today like he owned the joint. That is all.”
“Did you get anything?”
He traded with a fellow shitkicker named Micky Joe Strong. Ole boy Micky Joe was up for grand theft and wanted a bond hearing. Ole boy Micky Joe’s lady comes in with the bond and grabs hold of old Norman and says, “This here’s my beloved Micky Joe.”
“Norman Frank is certainly a caution,” Donovan said.
“He probably went down on Micky Joe twenty times for a favor like that. Ole Micky Joe say he don’t know what happened, didn’t hear his name called, says it weren’t his fault.”
“They were just good friends,” said Donovan, who had regained his calm. It was all absurd, he realized. All of it.
“So we got two murders and one fugitive who may or may not be guilty of one of them,” said Mario. Jack Donovan realized Mario was getting angry now.
He waited.
“This is really bullshit, you know that, Jack? You ever get the feeling that nothing works?”
“All the time.”
They each waited for the other to say something.
“I couldn’t remember what Maj Kirsten looked like,” Donovan said. “When I was talking to Ryerson. All morning. Even when I was talking to you and Flynn.”
Mario reached into the manila case folder and pulled out a small Polaroid picture. It was a photograph of Maj Kirsten, taken at the scene. Her eyes were staring and bulgy and her face was covered with blood.
“Yes,” said Jack Donovan. “I forgot.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Mario.
Donovan got up and went to the couch and sat down next to Mario. He returned the photograph and Mario looked at it. “Sure it does,” Donovan said quietly.
Mario stared for a long time at the picture.
Donovan said, “I suppose we ought to talk to Matt at the hospital this afternoon. About this whole thing. After we get a call from Terry Flynn. I suppose we just didn’t go at it the right way.”
Mario didn’t say anything. They sat together on the couch, looking at the photograph for a long time.
6
It had only been the flu.
Matthew Schmidt, homicide lieutenant in police Area One, entered his small office in police headquarters building at 1121 South State Street shortly after eight A.M. Tuesday.
He hung his straw hat on the hook he had driven into the office wall twelve years before when he had first been assigned this office. With satisfaction he looked down at his desk: the top was covered with bulletins, notices, copies of arrest sheets, and messages from other homicide units and shifts, and all the other debris accumulated during his four days in the hospital.
Influenza. They gave him pills for it.
He touched his chest and coughed again experimentally. He wiped his hand across his dry lips and found saliva. He examined it. It was clear.
Gert had wanted him to stay home for a few more days. To rest. She really couldn’t understand that after those four days in the hospital and the days of fear that preceded them, going back downtown to work was a kind of miracle, like a child’s Christmas morning.
He took off his blue suit coat and arranged it on the back of his chair, then sat down and began to go through nine days worth of accumulated papers. Though he seemed to proceed slowly, in a few minutes his wastebasket was full. He mashed down its contents with his foot and continued to feed it. There were always so many papers to read and fill out, to sort or throw away, to file. He looked down the coroner’s list from the past week, and his finger stopped at one line:
“Unknown. WM, approx 35. Stabbed. Chicago River at Michigan.”
He circled the entry and put it on the side of his desk. If it was in the river, it might have been Area One’s responsibility.
He had been at home the week before he went into the hospital. It was as though the week was a piece of memory surgically removed from his mind.
He went through the arrest sheets like a priest listening to confessions. All these terrible sins were the same; he had heard them all before.
Gert read Agatha Christie at home as a kind of sleep-inducing drug; he read arrest sheets. But they did not induce sleep, only a sense of life, as though he touched the circle of reality from anarchy to order. This man had killed his wife. He had taken out his butcher knife from the drawer in the kitchen and driven it into her heart and her belly. He had said he was sorry, explained to police that he was drunk at the time.
The absurdity of the tragedies moved Matt Schmidt, as did the stilted police prose: “Perpetrator” and “he proceeded” and “he commenced an assault with a deadly weapon upon.” The cops who wrote the reports on battered old typewriters groped with English as though it were a foreign language, but in their inarticulateness, Matt Schmidt found a kind of truth he could not really grasp anywhere else.
Gradually he made order out of the chaotic pile of papers.
He read that morning’s daily police bulletin. There was a mug shot of Norman Frank on it, and Matt Schmidt read of his escape slowly, while humming an old dance tune.
It surprised him to think of the sad little man called Norman Frank finding a way out of the machinery of justice he was enmeshed in. After finishing the bulletin, he put it down and turned to the copy of the FBI wire. It had been received on Friday. He wondered if Terry Flynn had read it.
The FBI wire identified the man in the river, and something in the identification nagged at Matt Schmidt.
Finally he picked up a copy of Sid Margolies’s report on the body found in Grant Park on Monday, the day before. The newspapers this morning had treated the matter sensationally but had been sketchy about details.
Matt Schmidt was disappointed to find that even Sid Margolies’s painstaking report had little more to offer. A dead woman, about twenty, stabbed and raped. Time of death fixed at sometime Sunday morning.
He put the report down just as Margolies himself entered the little office.
Sid Margolies never talked in the morning unless he was forced to. He nodded at Matt, went to the window, and looked out at the bright hot street. Sid took off his felt hat—he wore it summer and winter—and threw it on the desk. He had a little potbelly, and he drank Amaretto as a cocktail. He knew everything about Chinese cooking and was quite expert himself. He had taken the sergeant’s exam only once, and never again; he had sad eyes and sallow skin and he always carried his notebook in the pocket of his shirt.
“I wa
nt to ask you about the body in the park.” Schmidt was as reluctant as Margolies to break in on his morning’s silence, but it had to be done.
“You want cream?”
Schmidt nodded and Margolies went down the hall to the communications room where they ran a coffee concession. He brought back two cups and a sweet roll. He tore the sweet roll apart, took half, and began to munch.
Matt Schmidt did not find it unusual that Sid Margolies did not mention his stay in the hospital. Sid did not make small talk before noon and seldom thereafter.
“Is it the same man?” Matt asked quietly.
“Some things are the same,” said Sid Margolies. He took out his notebook. “She was stabbed with a big weapon, like a butcher knife or a bayonet. Something very big. She was apparently first stabbed in the right side of the neck, like Maj Kirsten. She was raped and he really tore into her, just like Maj Kirsten. In the park, that’s the same. But he took her clothes this time, why’s that? And he killed her on a Sunday—why would he figure he’d find a woman in the park on Sunday morning?”
Margolies was finished. He sipped his coffee.
“I didn’t see a picture in the morning papers.”
“We had to clean her up a little. The morgue released a picture last night, but no one was around to pick it up. It’ll probably be in the afternoon papers. We ran her fingerprints but got nothing.”
Something nagged at Matt Schmidt’s consciousness, but he realized it was not the woman found in the park. He didn’t press it; it would come.
“Are they going crazy over at the state’s attorney’s office?”
Margolies shrugged. That was small talk.
Sergeant Terry Flynn entered the room. He picked up the half of the sweet roll that Matt Schmidt had not touched and started to eat it.
“Hot as vinegar piss,” Flynn said.
Margolies walked to his desk and sat down, savoring the bad coffee.
Matt Schmidt stared at the calendar on the wall from the Federation of Police.
“So what’d they say, Matt?” Flynn asked, finishing the roll.
“Flu.”
“Flu. Son of a bitch.”
“What do you think of our latest park murder?”
“Nothing.” Flynn took off his sport coat and threw it on the desk. He had large muscular arms that peeked out of the short-sleeved shirt. His tie was already askew. Though he had brown hair, a fuzz of reddish hair covered his arms. His .357-magnum revolver was on his belt, attached by a small clip on the side of the gun.
