Public Murders

by Bill Granger

  “She’s gone again.”

  He steadied one hand on the sink and looked at the half-empty bottle of Scotch whiskey standing nearby.

  “Grandpa’s gone to look for her.”

  He glanced at the kitchen clock.

  “When did she leave?” he said at last.

  “Maybe this morning. I was in summer school and Brian was out early because he was working at the drugstore.”

  “Where was Grandpa?”

  “He went out early like he does. Down to the tavern. He says she was home.”

  Arthur O’Connor had his shot in the morning before anything else. And rarely drank the rest of the day.

  “He doesn’t know where she went,” Kathleen said.

  “Don’t cry, baby.”

  “Now they both went out. They didn’t want to call you. But I’m here alone, Dad,” she said. “I’m not a baby.” She knew she didn’t have to add that, he thought, but she did. Did he treat her like a baby? Of course.

  “Did anyone call the cops?” he asked.

  “No. I don’t know. They treated me like a baby. They said I should stay here, that everything would be all right, that they would be back soon. But she’s gone, Dad. I know she went away again.”

  “Don’t cry, Kathleen,” he said.

  “I’m not.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  She waited. He could hear her not crying.

  “Maybe she’s down at the tavern.”

  “No,” she said. “They never saw her. She’s left like she did before. Dad, I’m afraid.”

  He didn’t know what to say. Rather, he knew what he should say. He waited.

  “Daddy,” she said. She broke his heart.

  Lily was in the hallway now, watching him. He cupped the receiver. “Rita.”

  “Her? At this hour?”

  “No. It’s Kathleen. Rita ran away again.”

  She saw how white his face was.

  “What are you going to do?” she said.

  “Hello? Dad?”

  He put the receiver to his ear. “I’m here. I’m coming down, Kathleen. I’ll get you.”

  “Will you?” she asked.

  “I’ll be there right away. I want you to do something.”

  “What?”

  “Until I get there. I want you to turn on all the lights. And wait for me. And turn on the TV. I’ll hold on while you do it.” He knew Arthur O’Connor’s house; he knew it was dark because the old man preached economy in all things. And he could see Kathleen, being very grown-up and thirteen, sitting in the half darkness, talking to him on the telephone.

  “Okay,” she said, and put down the phone.

  While he waited, he thought: yes. He’d get her and Brian. That was what he had to do. All the rest was just bullshit, all the self-pity. This was his daughter. Kathleen.

  “I turned all the lights on,” she said.

  “Wait for me, baby,” he said.

  “You don’t have a car.”

  “Wait for me.” He looked at Lily again, standing naked in the hall, watching him. “You’re coming home with me. For now. Pack some things, we’re going to wait until your Mom comes back. Okay?”

  “Am I?” she asked. She sounded much better, he thought.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be ready, Dad,” she said. “What if Grandpa comes home?”

  “You tell him what I said. But don’t fight with him. Just tell him what I said.”

  “Yes,” she answered. And he broke the connection.

  Lily was watching him.

  “Rita’s gone and Kathleen’s been left home alone while that old fool went out looking for her. He didn’t call the cops, and he wouldn’t call me. So Kathleen called me now. This is bullshit.” He went back into the bedroom.

  “You’re going to bring your kid back here?” Lily asked.

  “Yes,” he said. He pulled on his shorts and went to the closet and found a pair of pants.

  “Where’s your boy now?”

  “Brian’s out with the old man. I don’t know where they’re looking for Rita. I can’t imagine.”

  “Poor kid,” she said.

  “Who? Kathleen? Or Rita?”

  “Or Jack,” she said.

  “I want to borrow your car. I’ll bring it back tonight.”

  “Do you want some coffee? To sober up?” she asked.

  “God, no.” He found a shirt and pulled it on.

  The streets were brilliantly orange under the lamps. One environmental group had said they killed the trees by fooling them into thinking it was perpetual daylight; trees needed to rest. When he had heard about that, Jack Donovan thought: only people don’t need to rest.

  He found the car at the end of the block, opened it, and got in. It smelled of Lily or Lily’s perfume.

  Within five minutes he was on the Kennedy Expressway heading for the South Side. There was still much traffic. As he sped south, the skyline of the Loop loomed up in the darkness and then fell away as he cut into the South Side. He was on the wide Dan Ryan Expressway and the other cars were behaving erratically; some straddled lanes or burst ahead inexplicably. He supposed at that hour most of the drivers were drunk.

  Forty minutes later he turned off the Ninety-fifth Street ramp and headed west to Oak Lawn, the suburb where Arthur O’Connor lived. Where Rita lived. He looked at the darkened houses along the way. Where are you, Rita? Are you cold? Or happy? Or have you forgotten us for the night?

  The first time Rita ran away, she was gone more than a year and they thought she was dead.

  No crisis had precipitated her disappearance. One day she had merely gone. He had been working the night shift at South Chicago district tactical and the desk sergeant had received a call from a neighbor. When he called the neighbor back, she told him that Rita had left the kids with her for an hour to go shopping and that had been at four o’clock and the kids were crying and Rita hadn’t returned and there must have been an accident and—

  She came back fourteen months later and said she didn’t know where she had been or what she had done. She agreed to go into the hospital. It was very hard for her, and it was hard for him and the kids.

  She suffered. Sometimes, the doctors told him, she woke up screaming and when they asked her what she had dreamed, she saw her children dead. Not only Brian and Kathleen but the others. She had names for the fetuses she could not carry to term. The first was Michael and the second was Ann and the third was Sean. Sean, she would tell them, called her. Over and over, in her sleep.

  He turned down the block where the O’Connor home sat.

  There was no car in the driveway. He turned the engine off and went to the door and rang the bell. Kathleen opened the door and her face seemed pale.

  “How are you, baby?”

  “Dad.” She let him in. “I made coffee for you.”

  “All right.” He let her lead him to the kitchen. He sat down while she poured him a cup of coffee. It didn’t taste very good.

  “They didn’t come back yet.”

  Jack Donovan nodded.

  “I’m ready to go with you. But what about Brian?”

  “It’ll be all right. I’ll leave a note if they aren’t back yet.”

  “But what about summer school?”

  “It’s all right. We can call them up.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m calling the cops first,” he said.

  She nodded. “Do you think this is like last time?” she said. “Or is Mom in trouble, in an accident?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Ten minutes later the two policemen entered the home and sat down on the plastic-covered couch. In that precise house, they seemed large and heavy and threatening in their uniforms, full of pistols, bullets, mace cans, and truncheons and handcuffs.

  He told them everything, all the facts. He left out the anguish. They understood the anguish was there, but they didn’t need to hear about it. He gave them a picture of Rita.


  “When she came out of the hospital, she seemed all right for a while and then she ran away again, this time for only a week. They found her in Evanston, working as a waitress. I don’t know if she’d do that again.”

  “Is she under treatment now?”

  “Medication. Maybe she stopped it.”

  “She’s not dangerous?”

  “Only to herself.” What a mess life turned out to be, he thought. Little Rita O’Connor in the first grade, standing in the playground in her snowsuit, her breath smelling of milk. “I’m gonna have babies,” she told him then. She didn’t even know where they came from.

  “So what about you, Mr. Donovan?” One of the officers looked up from his notepad.

  “I’m taking Kathleen home with me tonight. I’m leaving Arthur O’Connor a note. And my boy. I don’t want Kathleen left here alone.”

  They looked at each other. It was family business and the two policemen didn’t want a part in it. They got up and one of them shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “That’s okay with us.”

  Kathleen fell asleep on the way back to the North Side, but she awoke when he turned off the expressway and went down the bumpy side streets back to his apartment. He wondered if Lily would be there. He didn’t think so and she had not said.

  “Hi,” said Kathleen. She snuggled next to him.

  “Hi,” he said. It was nearly three A.M.

  They were silent for a little while. Then she said, “When do you think Mommy will come home this time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why does she do it?”

  He couldn’t think of an answer. “Sometimes, I think, she gets unhappy. Inside. And she has to go away until she can work it out for herself.”

  “She’s crazy, isn’t she?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “Sometimes she is.” They had stopped at Halsted Street and Fullerton Avenue and Donovan glanced at the bright exterior of the Seminary Restaurant and Lounge. They waited for the light to change.

  “Am I going to be crazy?” she asked.

  “No.”

  What a pitiful answer, he thought. The car was pleasantly cool and the city was silent outside the windows, as though it were a film without sound.

  “I worry about it,” she said. She touched his arm.

  “Don’t worry, baby,” he said. He always said that and it didn’t mean anything.

  “Okay.”

  “It’ll work out.” Everything he said sounded hollow and unconvincing to him. Did it to her as well? Why did he say these things? Why was he so worried? Was it for Kathleen? Or Rita?

  “She’ll be all right,” Kathleen said. She was soothing him and he realized how frightened she was.

  “Yes. She’s a tough Irishwoman, Kate. She’ll survive.”

  He realized he felt sorry for himself. He extinguished the feeling the way he might clear his throat. Gone.

  “Why did she run away the first time?” Kathleen asked.

  Because of the dead children.

  “Dad?”

  He waited.

  “Is that when you’re crazy? When you have to run away?”

  But he didn’t answer.

  12

  They had started the decoy operation as planned. Karen Kovac and Terrence Flynn met as they had arranged Friday at seven A.M. on the corner of Jackson and Michigan, across the park from the Art Institute. It was at the edge of the street and within a mile of the places where Maj Kirsten and Christina Kalinski had been murdered.

  Terry Flynn had borrowed a portable radio transmitter from Area One Burglary, and they tested it for a moment before Karen Kovac put it in her purse. The radio, which emitted a constant stream of official chatter, was too noisy to leave on. It would be worthless at the moment of attack, but it might be useful at other times. They were both vague on what the other times might be.

  Karen Kovac was to begin her stroll from the Art Institute, across the railroad bridge, to the comfort station where Maj Kirsten had been killed seven weeks before. From there she was to cross the Outer Drive at the Monroe Street traffic lights and continue down the sidewalk to the harbor.

  All this time Sergeant Flynn would be in the unmarked police car trying to follow her visually or at least according to the planned schedule. Once she had walked to the end of the Monroe Street Harbor, she would turn and repeat the route.

  They would rendezvous again at the Art Institute once an hour. They agreed they had thought of everything.

  If there was an element of risk—as Donovan and Schmidt harped—then it was probably a small one, and Karen Kovac was determined to ignore it.

  At seven forty-five A.M. she marched off briskly from the Institute building, went across the railroad bridge and into the park. As she went deeper into the park, she could hear the thunder of rush-hour traffic from Michigan Avenue merging with the sound of traffic on the Outer Drive.

  Unfortunately, in planning the decoy operation, everyone had forgotten about the rush-hour traffic.

  Within five minutes Terry Flynn’s car was hopelessly entangled in a traffic jam caused by the collision of a CTA bus and a private car that had attempted to turn into the same lane at the same time. Within a few minutes hundreds and then thousands of autos miles from the scene of the slight accident on Lake Shore Drive were mysteriously halted by the jam, like disturbed waters rippling away from the epicenter. Flynn’s car was trapped in a curb lane.

  He could not see Karen Kovac. And because her radio was not on, he could not call her.

  Lieutenant Schmidt, while valuing Terrence Flynn’s insights and occasional acts of courage, still was under the impression that his subordinate often had mental lapses in which he acted instinctively, without regard for the consequences of his actions. In this Schmidt was correct; even Flynn would agree. But Flynn never saw this part of his character as a defect. He trusted his instincts. Given a choice between what he felt and what he thought, he would choose his feelings. And those instincts rarely failed him.

  Flynn gunned the accelerator on his car and swung the front wheels sharply onto the curbing and into the grassy park. The big Dodge lumbered across the grass and crashed finally into a row of bushes. Flynn considered himself parked and jumped from the front seat. He began running across the grass to the comfort station where Maj Kirsten had been murdered.

  Karen was not there.

  The ground was dusty around the comfort station, and the air was heavy and sweet smelling. Flynn was sweating already. He stood in his shirt sleeves and rumpled tie and looked down at the ground where he had first seen the body of Maj Kirsten. He wiped his head with a handkerchief, then stuffed it back into the pocket of his trousers. His lungs ached from his sprint across the park. He lit a cigarette and then threw it down on the ground and began to sprint along the grass path he had taken from Lake Shore Drive. Cars were stalled in a mile-long jam on the drive, and he did not have to wait for the lights but ducked across the middle lanes. What a mess, he thought.

  He smelled the lake.

  Flynn found the sidewalk leading down alongside Monroe Street Harbor. Hundreds of little pleasure boats bobbed on the water as far as the concrete breakwater.

  He ran past the bushes where they had found the body of Christina Kalinski and then he stopped. It was all right.

  He saw her.

  She was standing at the far end of the sidewalk, talking to a uniformed policeman. A three-wheeler sat nearby, its police radio squawking out morning commands.

  He walked up to them and he was not puffing as badly when he arrived. Karen Kovac began to speak, but he waved her words away and looked at the policeman.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “Who the hell are you?” asked the cop.

  “Who does it look like I am?”

  Recognition came to Officer Clarence Delancey’s face. “Oh. Sarge. You. I didn’t recognize you because your face was all red like that.”

  Karen Kovac said, “He was going to arrest me.”

  “Wha
t?”

  “This is no place for a woman at this time of day, I was telling her,” Delancey said. He seemed quite firm about it, as though the obvious had escaped both of them. “There were women killed here, don’t you know that?” He was addressing Karen. “I told her she had to go on back, or I’d have to run her in. But I wasn’t really going to arrest her.”

  “You goddamn idiot,” said Flynn.

  “I’m a police officer,” said Karen Kovac. “I didn’t get a chance to tell him. He came out of the bushes and told me to halt and then he started talking.”

  “Idiot,” was all that Flynn could think of to say in front of the woman.

  “I didn’t know she was an officer,” said Delancey. He sensed for the first time that something might be wrong.

  “Even if she wasn’t, what the hell right do you have to go around telling people they can’t walk in the park?” asked Flynn finally.

  “Orders,” said Delancey.

  “What?”

  “Well, the watch commander said I should try to discourage people from being out in the park until they catch this guy that’s killing the women. I just followed orders is all.”

  “That’s terrific,” said Flynn. “A guy kills someone in the park, so what do we do? We keep everyone out of the park instead of catching the guy. Brilliant police thinking.”

  “Well,” said Delancey. But Flynn had grabbed Karen Kovac by the arm and was starting away up the sidewalk. Delancey shrugged and got back on his motorcycle and slowly putt-putted up to Lake Shore Drive.

  “He’s an idiot,” said Flynn. “I wish to Christ they’d transfer him down the South Side and get him out of my way. He’s the one who found Christina Kalinski. And he found Norman Frank, the cause of all our troubles.”

  She smiled. She liked Flynn. “A regular sleuth.”

  “An idiot, you mean,” he repeated.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “More brilliant police thinking. We forgot about the rush-hour, it just happens every morning. I got caught in a traffic jam on the Outer Drive and lost you and I got a little panicked. So I pulled up on the curb and came after you. This won’t work the way it is. We’re going to have to have a different operation. I hate to say it, but I think I’m going to have to walk. Maybe I can disguise myself as one of those goddamn joggers.”