Public Murders

by Bill Granger

  “We’ll ask the questions,” said Donovan.

  “You look married, that’s why I ask. So maybe you have a daughter? Is she going to be a whore someday. You don’t worry about her? Don’t tell me you don’t worry. Is she in puberty? Have you seen how they revert to their nature? They are animals made for sex and procreation and nothing more.”

  Donovan looked down at his own hands. He was afraid they were trembling. “And Christina Kalinski was a whore because she lived with a Jew?” he asked.

  “Make your own definition of a whore,” said Bremenhoffer. “Not because she lived with a Jew. Weiss is a Jew but he is also a pervert. I have no quarrel with Jews. I was not a Nazi. I ran away from Germany before the war and my brother was killed in the underground during the war. I am not an anti-Semite.”

  “Weiss is a bad man,” said Flynn. “But not as bad as the man who killed Christina Kalinski.”

  “Why? How do you figure that?” Bremenhoffer looked at him. “A man kills a whore but what does a whore do? She disgraces herself, her body, her God, and her parents. Can you compare the man who kills such a creature to scum like Weiss.”

  “All whores should be killed?”

  “Perhaps,” said Bremenhoffer. “But that is impossible. That is like saying all wars should stop. All rats should be exterminated. All poverty ended. Perhaps all whores should be eliminated or taken away. Perhaps women should not have so much freedom to become whores, what do you think? Have you read the Koran? It is very specific in placing women in society. Woman are chattel in Arabic society. They belong to their masters.”

  “I think the man who killed Christina Kalinski and Bonni Brighton and Maj Kirsten was a sex fiend. An animal lower than a whore. A maniac and a leper to society.” This was Donovan and he stared at Frank Bremenhoffer.

  The gray man shook his massive head slowly from side to side. “What are we talking about anyway? What the hell are we talking about? Are we suppose to be talking about Bonni Brighton or what? I think you don’t know what you’re talking about anymore. I am talking about ideas and you are talking about mere reality.”

  “We’re talking about murders. Three murders,” said Flynn.

  “Look, I’m not a goddamned immigrant, you know. I’m a citizen. You stop me in the street when I’m going home, you take me to that hideous place where you have the body of this woman who used to be my daughter. I try to help you as much as I can. Now you are talking about murders I know nothing about. I’m a citizen, Mr. Donovan, and you can’t treat me like I just got off the goddamned boat.”

  “We appreciate your help,” said Jack Donovan mildly.

  “Why did you go to the Ajax Theater?” asked Flynn.

  “I told you. I got an invitation.”

  “Do you have it? The invitation?”

  “I don’t think so. I turned it in at the theater. Or maybe I lost it.”

  “You didn’t have an invitation.”

  “I told you my former daughter was a strange girl.”

  “How was she strange?”

  “This is what was her sense of humor, if you can call it that.”

  “The same man killed Bonni Brighton and Maj Kirsten and Christina Kalinski,” said Jack Donovan. He was trying to get the interview moving again; it was running around the same deep track.

  “Is that right? I hope you catch him.”

  “We’re puzzled by the clothes, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know. What happened to the clothes?”

  “Whose clothes?”

  “You know.”

  “What clothes?”

  “Her clothes.”

  “Bonni Brighton’s clothes?”

  “Christina Kalinski’s. They’re missing. He killed Maj Kirsten and left her dead, fully clothed. He killed Bonni Brighton and had to leave her fully clothed. But he took Christina Kalinski’s clothing.”

  “So maybe it wasn’t the same man.”

  Jack Donovan looked at Frank Bremenhoffer thoughtfully. “No. It was the same man. I hope you don’t mind if we search your apartment.”

  Bremenhoffer finally reacted. He jumped up out of the chair, and Flynn grabbed his arm. “Siddown, siddown.”

  “You have no right to search my home,” he shouted.

  “Yes, we do, Mr. Bremenhoffer,” said Jack Donovan. “Now sit down.”

  “You can’t do that. Ulla is there. She will be terrified.

  “It can’t be helped.”

  “You are worse than the storm troopers.”

  “Sit down,” said Jack Donovan. “We have a search warrant, and our men are searching your house right now.”

  Bremenhoffer sat down suddenly and tried on another smile. “All right. Go ahead. I will talk to my lawyer. Do you think you’re dealing with some goddamn Polack?”

  “Judge Cummings signed a warrant. Probably twenty-five minutes ago. Our men are talking to your wife now about the clothes. About your daughter’s death.”

  He continued to smile. “You can’t talk to her. Ulla could never speak English well. She’s a stupid woman, and she won’t make any sense. And she’s afraid of the police too. She was in a concentration camp.”

  Donovan did not return the smile. “We’ll see what she has to say.”

  “This is harassment, Mr. Donovan,” said Bremenhoffer. “I am the father of a murder victim, and you are harassing me for what reason I don’t know. It’s after noon already and I am still not asleep. I have to go to work tonight.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Donovan.

  “This is harassment.”

  “You were in the theater when Bonni Brighton was killed. Why don’t you tell us what happened?”

  “Someone yelled. I thought there was a fire.”

  “Didn’t you see your daughter in the theater?”

  “No. It was dark. I was watching the film. It was not like Fritz Lang. My daughter was licking another woman. Between her legs.”

  “Did that make you angry? Did you want to do something then?”

  “I wanted to throw up.”

  “Where were you sitting?”

  “I’m not saying another word. You people are really clowns.”

  “Shuddup,” said Flynn.

  “Oh, the bully cop. Irish, aren’t you? The Irish are very good at playing bullies. I saw the Irish in England during the war. They are good barroom bullies until the Englishman has had enough and then they are slapped down.”

  “That’s too fucking bad you don’t like the Irish because you’re going to spend a lot of time with us,” said Flynn. He grabbed Bremenhoffer by the shirt and pushed him against the wall. Donovan realized that Flynn was really angry.

  “You don’t frighten me, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Turkey Irishman,” said Bremenhoffer. “Turkey” was a Chicago idiom for “Irish.”

  “Sit down, Terry,” said Jack Donovan.

  “Oh,” said Bremenhoffer. “And you’re the good cop, right? And this one is the bully. You’re the one I’m supposed to be friendly with? Maybe confess to?”

  “What do you want to confess?” Jack Donovan said.

  “Nothing. If I felt that I wanted to confess, I would go to church and tell a priest. They would keep it a secret, all my sins. Would you keep it a secret, Mr. Donovan?”

  Donovan waited.

  “No, I don’t think you would—if I had any sins to confess.”

  “What did you do with the clothing?”

  “What clothing?”

  “Christina’s clothing. She wore a short-sleeved green dress when she left her apartment.”

  “Is that this man Weiss’s apartment?”

  “She wore panties. And pantyhose.”

  “Ach. I don’t want to hear this stuff.”

  “She wore a brassiere. She had very large breasts, and she always wore a brassiere, which unbuckled in the back.”

  “Why are you telling me this? I don’t want to hear it.”

  “She wore black shoes.”

&
nbsp; “I don’t want to hear this,” said Bremenhoffer in a flat, deliberate voice.

  “What did the killer do with those clothes?”

  Bremenhoffer was silent. His fingers, Donovan noted, were bunched into a fist on the table.

  “Do you think he took them home with him?” asked Donovan. “Did he hide them from his wife, or did she know he had them? That he had killed someone? Did he take them out from time to time? Did he like to feel them? Maybe he took them out and felt the material at night, when he thought he was alone. They were very soft and delicate—”

  “You’re a sick man, Mr. Donovan. Really sick. You are enjoying this. You must want to do these things yourself.”

  Donovan got up finally and went into the squad room next door.

  “Well?” asked Matt Schmidt.

  “Like you said. He isn’t hard. If he was hard, then he would crack finally. But he plays with us when he talks.”

  “Yeah. That’s the feeling I got.”

  “What now?”

  “Well, we’ve finally got the showup set. We got a couple of guys from the traffic division who look sort of like him, and we got them some gray work clothes from Bailey’s over on Van Buren. It’ll be a good showup.”

  “Okay. You got the victims?”

  “Got everyone,” said Matt Schmidt. “We got three park victims and we got the copper who normally works traffic in front of the movie house and we got the creeps from the Ajax Theater. And speaking of creeps, we’ve got Fredericks, the movie critic.”

  “Any word from Sid?”

  “No. I figure it’ll take him a couple of hours at least to toss that apartment.”

  The two men opened the door of the interview room. “Get up, Frank,” said Matt Schmidt wearily.

  “Why?”

  “You’re going onstage,” he said.

  “I don’t like this,” said Bremenhoffer.

  “We don’t really give a flying fuck what you like,” said Jack Donovan. The words were sudden and vicious and unexpected. They all stared at him.

  It was the usual setup. The room was well lighted, and there were lines on the wall indicating height. Four policemen stood on the spots marked. They all wore gray shirts and gray trousers. They bore a rough resemblance to Bremenhoffer. He stood in the middle of them on a spot designated.

  On the other side of a door, in a second room, waited the observers, including Angela Falicci, who had been attacked in the park on the day after Maj Kirsten’s murder, and Tiny Preston and Gloria Miska, who operated the Ajax Theater. Motorcycle Officer Clarence Delancey was there as well, on his day off, and so was Traffic Officer James McGarrity who worked in front of the theater on Washington Street.

  One by one each was led to the one-way window in the door and asked to study the men standing in the showup.

  Each was given a reasonable amount of time to study the men. Each was asked if they could identify any of them.

  Gloria Miska said she had never seen any of them before. Including Patrolman Ralph Curtiss who had been stationed in the lobby of the theater for four hours during the homicide investigation the day before.

  Tiny Preston said he had positively seen one of the men regularly in the theater. He identified Desk Sergeant Michael O’Herlihy who had nine children and was president of the St. Agnes Holy Name Society. And who had never been in the theater in his life.

  Angela Falicci said she was not certain.

  That’s all right, honey,” said Flynn. “Take a good look.”

  “I don’t want to pick the wrong man,” she said.

  “It doesn’t all depend on this, on you,” said Flynn. “Just take your time.”

  She picked a radio dispatcher.

  Clarence Delancey picked a man he had spotted in the park twice in the past month.

  Flynn was disgusted. That’s Jerry Mikolajczak from robbery, you goddamn idiot.”

  “I saw him in the park.”

  “So what? You’re hopeless, Delancey. You oughta be selling apples. Go on welfare. Resign the department.”

  “I don’t have to take this abuse—” Delancey began. He knew his rights.

  In fact, the showup proved to be totally worthless; identifications were confused, and most of the potential witnesses were reluctant to make any identification at all.

  When the farce was over, Bremenhoffer was led back to the interview room.

  “Is that all?”

  “We have some questions,” Flynn said.

  “You always have questions. But I am too tired to answer them now. Either let me go home or let me call my lawyer.”

  “You’ve got a lawyer lined up?” said Flynn.

  “I know a lawyer.”

  He looked at Matt Schmidt then and at Donovan. The two men went into the squad room.

  “What does Sid Margolies say?”

  “There’s nothing in the apartment. He’s in the basement now. That’ll take a couple of hours. The woman won’t say boo. She’s scared and Sid says he feels like a goon.”

  “We’re going to have to let him go.”

  Matt Schmidt nodded. “I’m not surprised. I’d hoped Angela Falicci might have done better. But we’ve got the film. And Frank is definitely a little crazy on the subject of sex.”

  “But that’s nothing. He was in the theater, which puts him at the scene. That’s good. But what else do we have?”

  “He hated his daughter.”

  “It’s a shaky case, Matt.”

  Schmidt nodded. “But we know, don’t we?”

  “That he did it?” Donovan glanced back at the squad room. “Yes. There’s no doubt about it.”

  18

  Sid Margolies called Area One Homicide at four ten P.M. Saturday to report he had found nothing in the basement of the apartment building on Kedvale Avenue that would link Frank Bremenhoffer to any of the murders. Sid also said he was tired and wanted to go home. He was relieved at the building by another detective who had instructions to keep a tail on Bremenhoffer at all times.

  The slow, painstaking police routine began.

  Saturday slipped into Sunday and then Monday. It rained on the weekend and was bright and hot again on Monday. A week passed. They had managed to borrow, at one time or another, forty investigators who wearily questioned all the employees of the Halsted Graphics and Printing Company.

  Karen Kovac theorized that Frank Bremenhoffer had killed Maj Kirsten because he thought she looked like a whore. He might have killed Christina because a co-worker informed him of her lifestyle.

  None of them knew Christina Kalinski though.

  In fact, none of them professed to know Frank Bremenhoffer very well. He kept to himself and was considered surly by some of them. When most of the printers played cards on their lunch hour in the back shop, Bremenhoffer read books. Alone.

  The twenty-four-hour tail on Bremenhoffer began to give them a full picture of his life.

  In the mornings, after work, he usually visited the Courtesy Tap, a little bar on Wells Street under the el tracks, which opened at seven A.M. for the functioning alcoholics who came in with their briefcases and three-piece suits and drank their breakfasts. Frank Bremenhoffer drank beer and sometimes ordered a shot of cheap brandy to go with the beer chaser.

  On other mornings he went to the Art Institute and waited until it opened for the morning.

  Other times, after visiting the tavern, he went to the movies.

  To pornographic movie houses.

  And he went home at noon. He apparently lunched with his wife and slept in the afternoon.

  He took the El to work at night and did not own a car. On the El train he either read a book or stared out the window at the night city. Sometimes the book was a sensational paperback novel. The only periodical he ever was seen with was Stern, the German newsmagazine.

  On Monday, while he was gone, they got a search warrant and permission from the printing company to search his locker at work. It was bare, except for a shop apron and a can of hand cleaner. The
apron smelled of gasoline, which a printer explained was used to clean off the type after pulling proof sheets.

  Bremenhoffer was merely a lonely man like many others who led a solitary life. He had his favorite tavern, he had his little peculiarities. He was a lover of art apparently; and he saw pornographic movies.

  On Sundays Ulla Bremenhoffer went to early mass. Her husband did not accompany her.

  Other aspects of the case continued while the investigators probed Bremenhoffer’s life.

  The body of Bonni Brighton was shipped to her brother, Bruno, in Van Nuys, California, twelve days after her murder.

  Seymour Weiss, fifty-two, was indicted on charges of attempted rape, deviate sexual assault, kidnapping, resisting arrest, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. At the same time Luther Jones, forty-three, was indicted on charges of pandering, kidnapping, deviate sexual assault, resisting arrest.

  Seymour Weiss became convinced of the mob’s disfavor and pleaded guilty to a reduced count of imprisonment and felonious assault. He was sentenced to four years in prison, which would make him eligible for parole with a third of the time served. He was sent to the state correctional facility at Colinsville, a minimum-security prison.

  Luther Jones pleaded not guilty and eventually stood trial and was convicted on all charges. He was sentenced to twenty-five to forty years in prison at the state maximum-security prison called Stateville, located near the city of Joliet.

  The runaway girl found in Weiss’s club was named Ramona Jefferson from Rochester, New York. After the child’s maternal grandmother and guardian refused to assume custody of her, she was institutionalized by order of the family court judge. The court psychiatrist said tests indicated that Ramona Jefferson was probably an imbecile.

  There was one further development. A traffic policeman named James McGarrity came to Lieutenant Schmidt one afternoon with a newspaper clipping showing the face of Maj Kirsten. McGarrity said he was certain he had seen Maj Kirsten around the time she was murdered. He had not remembered it before.

  Schmidt questioned him, but McGarrity could give him no further information. He could not identify Bremenhoffer.

  Jack Donovan kept a loose hold on the investigation but largely left Matt Schmidt alone. At the same time he fielded the weekly reports he had to make to both the state’s attorney and the police superintendent.