Public Murders

by Bill Granger

  “Is there anything else I should know?”

  “No. There was no apparent connection between Maj Kirsten and Christina Kalinski. We thought both might have been taken to the park by a mutual boyfriend, but now that we know Christina lived with Weiss, that appears unlikely. Not impossible but unlikely. Christina came from the Northwest Side and Maj came from Sweden. One was stabbed to death and raped and the other was stabbed, stripped, and raped. Why did the killer take her clothes?”

  “It was Sunday, wasn’t it?” asked Karen Kovac.

  “Yes,” said Schmidt.

  “Perhaps he had the opportunity.”

  Schmidt stared at her.

  “I mean,” she continued. “Perhaps because there was no one around, he could take her clothes. And couldn’t before.”

  “Of course,” said Matt Schmidt. “That would be logical.”

  Karen Kovac waited.

  “That’s very good,” Matt said at last.

  She appreciated it but did not smile. “It’s not like Kojak,” she said, “It’s mostly just detail and boredom.”

  Matt Schmidt smiled.

  By the time the six of them could arrange to meet, it was after three P.M. and the throbbing morning life of the Criminal Court had eased into the daily afternoon coma.

  Mrs. Farrell asked them if they wanted coffee. She was almost human, Jack Donovan thought, and then decided it was because of the presence of the policewoman. Except that she couldn’t know Karen Kovac was a policewoman since Karen had changed back into civilian clothes.

  But no one wanted coffee. It was too late in the day for that.

  Karen Kovac sat on the old leather couch next to Matt Schmidt, who had wanted the meeting.

  Terry Flynn sat on the chair next to Donovan’s desk. Donovan had taken his usual position sitting on the sill of the grimy window that faced the air shaft. When it became apparent there was no other place to sit, Sid Margolies had finally decided to take Donovan’s desk chair. He looked uncomfortable behind the large desk.

  Mario DeVito, standing next to the filing cabinet, was staring at Karen Kovac’s legs. He decided they were too thick.

  Strictly speaking, there was no reason for the conference at all. Mario DeVito had better things to do, as he had told Jack Donovan. And yet the meeting was inevitable. For one thing, a new member had joined the group. For another, they were all feeling the official heat generated by the two public murders in Grant Park. The three regular Criminal Courts reporters—from City News, the Tribune, and the Daily News—had pestered Mario and Jack all day about Seymour Weiss and when he would be charged in connection with the park murders.

  And there had been two telephone calls from Lee Horowitz essentially asking the same thing.

  Leonard Ranallo had told someone that Matt Schmidt ought to be retired. He was too old and there was the problem with his cancer. The word had gotten back to Matt and he resented it.

  Even Terry Flynn had been ragged at by his old boss at Area One. He had said nothing because the last time he had told a lieutenant to go fuck himself, he had very nearly been suspended for two days. But he had carried the resentment all day.

  So now there were six of them, including the woman.

  Flynn started: “I got the profile from the guy at the University of Chicago just before we came over. The guy says the killer is a black who is taking out his hatred of the white world on blond women. He says that’s why he rapes them; not because he really wants to screw them, but because it’s a symbol of renewal in his own mind of his black manhood and a way of asserting black claims on white America.”

  “What a lot of crap,” said Mario DeVito. He flicked his toothpick into the wastebasket. “Two points,” he added.

  “There’s more,” said Flynn. “He says the killer is of above-average intelligence.”

  “How can he tell that?” Donovan asked from the windowsill.

  “We haven’t caught him,” said Flynn. They all smiled.

  “Miss Kovac,” Jack Donovan said.

  “Yes.”

  “Did Matt tell you about all this? That it might not work at all?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that if it works, you will be in great risk of your life, however briefly?” Donovan did not like the sound of his own voice; it was too pompous. Even supercilious.

  “I’m going to carry a pistol.”

  “Not your service revolver?”

  “No,” she said. “Something smaller.”

  “Something you can put in your purse,” said Matt Schmidt.

  “It’s a twenty-five-caliber automatic.” She took it out of her purse. The automatic was small and the barrel gleamed dully in the dim office light.

  They all seemed relieved to see the pistol. She returned it to her purse.

  “Maybe you won’t be able to use a pistol,” said Margolies. They looked at him.

  “I learned hand-to-hand combat at the academy. And I took a course in martial arts at the YMCA before I even joined the department,” she said. “I get practice.” They gaped at her. “Riding the El to work,” she said.

  Flynn laughed out loud.

  Schmidt said, “Terry Flynn and Sid Margolies are going to alternate your surveillance on this operation.”

  Flynn said, I’ll be in the car. We’ll set up a regular route, from where Maj Kirsten was found over to Monroe Street Harbor and then back. Obviously I won’t have you in sight at all times. But we ought to be able to arrange for a portable radio for you.”

  “I don’t know,” said Margolies. “I already asked around and everyone is either using theirs or they’re in the shop.”

  “What crap,” said Flynn.

  “It’ll be all right,” Karen Kovac said. She found the discussion embarrassing. She did not want this.

  “You have a boy at home,” said Mario DeVito. “Do you want to think about this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jack Donovan said, “Go home and think about this.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  Matt Schmidt looked at Donovan. Donovan felt foolish but tried to console himself that he was only being chivalrous. That he was only thinking about the child. It wasn’t true, of course.

  “Look,” she said in that flat, husky voice. “I’m a sworn officer and I know I don’t have to do this. But I want to do it. I want to get into homicide.”

  “What?” It was Matt Schmidt.

  “I don’t want to be on patrol all my life,” she said.

  “I can see that,” said Schmidt but it was plain he could not. She laughed then. It was the first time she had laughed that day. They were all so foolish.

  Flynn grinned. “Sure, Matt. Why not? Give a little class to the operation. Besides, there’s no heavy lifting.”

  She smiled at him.

  “Well,” said Schmidt in a lieutenant’s voice. “That’s later. We intend to start tomorrow morning at eight A.M. We’ll work the park until noon.”

  “Tomorrow,” said Margolies. “Day off for me.”

  “Then I’ll take it,” said Flynn. “I’m working through the weekend.”

  “Tomorrow’s Friday,” said Mario DeVito.

  “So what?” said Flynn.

  “Nothing. I just didn’t think this week was going to end.”

  They all understood that.

  11

  Lily provided a comfortable arrangement for Jack Donovan and it sometimes occurred to him that he was just as comfortable as her. She did not want to get married again, that was clear. She had been married three times in her thirty-nine years, and each marriage had turned out worse than the last. Lily had an ability to select the wrong man at the wrong time. When Jack Donovan told her this once, when both of them were very drunk in O’Rourke’s Pub on a Friday night, she said that must include him as well and she wouldn’t go home with him.

  Now Lily reached again for him across the unmade bed. He felt her hand reach for his penis and slowly awaken it.

  Comfortable for both
of them. She had her place and he had his. She had two cats and he had none. She owned her own small travel agency, which catered to independent women like herself who, nonetheless, were reluctant to travel alone. And he—what did he have exactly?”

  “Jack, I want you,” she said.

  Lily could be disconcertingly direct. He met her a year before at a political fund-raising dinner in a downtown hotel. She was sipping a Manhattan at the cocktail hour, and she was not drinking, merely standing near the bar and watching the scene. She asked him where his campaign button was, and he said he did not have one and did not want one. Why attend the dinner? she asked. He had had to purchase a one hundred-dollar ticket from the party and so he wanted to see what one hundred-dollars worth of food looked like.

  Don’t bother, Lily had responded. Was he a politician?

  No, just a lawyer, he had explained. She seemed interested and he had warmed up enough to have a drink with her, and then two, and when the announcement came that they were all to shuffle into the grand ballroom, she suggested they skip dinner and go to another place. It turned out to be her own, a townhouse on Grant Park on the North Side. They ate bread and cheese and apples there and drank wine. And they made love. After it was all over, Jack Donovan thought it might have been a dream.

  But he met her again, a few weeks later, at Sterch’s Tavern, and this time they talked to each other like old friends who had missed each other’s company.

  You’re really a fucked-up guy, she had said that time. Later. After love again. He agreed and said she seemed to screw up her own life just as well. Yes, Lily had replied. That made it easier on both of them. No one could ever get hurt, she said, because it was too much of a comedy.

  Now he slipped into her, feeling again the pleasant wetness of her; she kissed him on the neck and her thighs squeezed his narrow buttocks. She grabbed his behind. “I love your ass,” she said. “You’ve got an ass that a broad would be proud of.”

  “Stop it,” he said and kissed her. “You’re making me feel inferior. You’ve got a very nice ass too.”

  “Too,” she said. “You bastard.”

  He wanted to laugh, and yet he wanted to make love to her more. He raised his chest a little and she gasped then. “Yes,” she said.

  Afterward, he rolled over to her side and she held him.

  “Jack, that was nice,” Lily said.

  “Yes.” He felt very tired. The bare bedroom—it was his bedroom this time—was dark but there was a light in the hall that slanted through the open door and made them barely visible to each other on the bed. He thought her black eyes glowed in the darkness like those of the cats she kept at home.

  It really had not been a satisfactory evening, though it had ended in bed. He was late for dinner and she had not been very interested in his explanation. The state’s attorney’s office bored her

  “Where are you?” she said now.

  “Here. In me own bed with me own woman beside me.”

  “Celtic humor. Very funny. You’re still worried about that case.”

  “Yes. I was wondering if you’d need any help in the travel agency. I could lead tours of single women.”

  “To where? Monasteries in Ireland? You’d be hopeless on a tour. Are you going to lose your job?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “Yes. And that’s what bothers me. I really didn’t want it in the first place. And now I can lose it and I don’t want to lose it. They always get you, don’t they?”

  “That’s why I work for myself. Why don’t you get out and up your roof or whatever it is that lawyers do.”

  “Put out a shingle,” he said. He smiled and kissed her.

  “Well, why not?” She got up from the bed and found her dress and shrugged it on.

  “You’re going?”

  If I was going, I’d put on my bra, dummy. It’s cold in this place. I never understand people who have the air conditioner on full blast. Turn it down.”

  “You’re cold-blooded.”

  “I’m going to get a drink.”

  “Get me one.”

  She brought two glasses back and sat down on the bed cross-legged. He had propped his head on the pillow. He felt pleasantly dissipated. He took the drink.

  “Why not?”

  “What?”

  “Open your own place.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do.”

  “What?”

  “You’re afraid you won’t make it.”

  “No. It’s not that. I’ll make it. I’ve got too many years in the office not to make it. Too many connections.”

  “Then do it.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I’m thirty-eight years old and I’m not even sure I want to be an attorney.”

  “Well,” she said. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  He smiled. “A cop. I want to catch the bad guys.”

  “You’ve done that. You were a cop.”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to be a cop?” she repeated. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “Oh,” he said. “I don’t want the bullshit that goes with it. I couldn’t go back in the department. Even if I did want to go back, I don’t think it would be very easy. And then what would I do? Back on patrol? Or at tactical? Writing parking tickets? Doing Friday night shootouts with the West Side cowboys? No. But being a cop—I mean, Lily, I liked being a cop without liking most of it.”

  “You’re just another pig. You like to push people around.”

  “But that was it,” he said softly. “That was the part that made it mean something. I was a good cop. I didn’t take. I played it on the square. I didn’t push John Q around, even if he was black. Shit, Lil, you should have known me. I was a good cop.”

  “I couldn’t have stood you. You were a little Catholic boy from the South Side playing cops and robbers, going home every night to your little Roman Catholic wife and the little family shrine she had set up there…”

  He didn’t answer. She was sorry about that but sometimes he seemed to drive her to it. She wondered if that were true. Lily touched him on the chest. “Jack,” she said. “You make yourself lost, you know.”

  He nodded.

  “No, you don’t know but I do. I like you, Jack, I really do but thousands wouldn’t. You’re morose and you really are a drunk, you know. Really. And you’re going bald.”

  “I am not going bald,” he said.

  “And you think you drove your wife crazy a long time ago and while you take the guilt, you won’t take the responsibility.”

  “That’s just crap, Lily,” he said.

  “Okay. Maybe it is. I’ve been drinking too much tonight, being with you.”

  “Thanks.”

  They sipped their drinks for a long while.

  “What are you really thinking about?” she said.

  “About him.”

  “Oh,” she said. She waited. She didn’t like to hear this.

  “Is it one guy? Or was it Seymour Weiss and someone else? Or won’t it happen again?”

  “Jack, that just depresses me.”

  “We got a woman. From patrol division. Her name is Karen Kovac, she’s divorced, got a kid, I think you’d like her.”

  “I don’t like kids and women with kids.”

  “She’s very… something. Very sure of herself. Or she seems to be sure of herself.”

  “Polish?”

  “Kovac isn’t Polish but that was probably her husband’s name. Yes. I’d think so.”

  “And I don’t like Polacks either.”

  “You’re the most prejudiced bitch I know.”

  “I am. I don’t like niggers either or fags. In fact, I hardly like anyone but redheaded Irishmen. And the odd Dago.”

  “How many odd Dagos have you had?”

  Again they were silent.

  “Why would I like h
er?”

  “I just think you would. She’s going on a decoy operation tomorrow. In Grant Park.”

  “Is she crazy?”

  “No. I think she wants to move up.”

  “An ambitious bitch. That’s why you think I’d like her. You’re wrong. There’s only room for one ambitious woman in my life and that’s me. I like them dumb and passive. It makes me stand out more.”

  “You’d stand out anyway. Especially with those tits.”

  “Do you want to screw again?”

  “You’re insatiable. I’m afraid men don’t have the staying power women have.”

  “Yes. That’s too bad.” She added, “Do you think this creep, this guy is going to go for her?”

  “We hope so.”

  “Oh.”

  “You see how it is?”

  “Yes. That’s why I don’t like to talk about what you do. It really is all like that, isn’t it? Nothing clear, nothing clean, just this kind of temporizing, patching up your plans day by day. I really don’t like to think that’s the way it is. I like to think it’s a lot clearer.”

  “Yes.” He got up and pulled on a robe. “I like to hope it would be all a lot more clear. That’s what’s wrong. That’s why I really don’t like it either.”

  “Jack, you are home,” she laughed.

  “I know. I’m going to the bathroom.”

  “I’m tired,” she said.

  “Will you stay tonight?” he asked.

  She said she would.

  The telephone began ringing at midnight, but he did not hear it until Lily poked him in the ribs. He grunted and awoke. He pulled the alarm clock near his face and looked at the time and then got up. The telephone kept ringing and it sounded shockingly loud in the silence of the flat.

  Lily was right. It was too cold. He stood naked at the telephone and picked it up.

  “Dad?”

  The voice was small, afraid, almost a whisper.

  He could not speak at first.

  “What?”

  “Dad? It’s me. Kathleen.”

  “Kathleen. What’s wrong, baby?”

  “Mom,” she said. She sounded so afraid. His hands were shaking.

  “What’s wrong,” he repeated.