by Shane Lusher
“Anyway,” she said. “This interview is over. I don’t talk to associates of my ex-husband.”
“Wait,” I said, and ventured to place a hand, gently, on her arm. “I’m not really an associate. And I think you and I are talking about two different rooms. The one I saw had a bar in it with pictures on the wall.”
She looked at me warily and sat back down. “Finish my drink,” she said. “That’s how long you’ve got.”
“Diane,” I said. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m investigating his daughter’s death, at the behest of the Tazewell County Sheriff. I was only there because he invited me over and I thought it would be good to see the house.”
“Lots of people were there, I assume,” she said after a while.
“Yes.”
“Who? People who adopted kids, right?”
I scanned my memory for any reference to that, and realized that was an angle I hadn’t looked into.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t think-”
“You know about the life insurance policies?” Diane asked.
“I found out about them,” I nodded. “But what’s the connection to—are you saying that Trueblood and his friends are all having sex with each other?”
She snorted and drained her drink. “Don’t be so goddamn naive, Dana,” she said. “You think I’d be drawing out this whole thing if it was just a matter of a bunch of adults swapping wives and husbands?”
“Well, then, what is it?” I asked. “Help me on this.”
She looked at me for half a minute, a musing look on her face, before she smiled sadly.
“I’ve already said too much,” she said. “You want to, you can talk to my lawyer. Vic Daniels. I’ll let him know he can tell you what he knows.”
“Vic Daniels? I thought he was disbarred.”
“That’s what he tells people,” she said.
“But what? It’s not true? I saw the records of the proceedings.”
She closed her eyes again, directing her face into the sun. “It’s one version of the truth. Besides,” she said. “That was a long time ago. Now I’ve got all of this.” She waved her hand, which by now had grown unsteady, at the panorama in front of us.
“A girl was killed,” I said.
“It happens,” she said and stood up.
I followed her into the bar to ask her what she meant by that, but she ignored my question until, finally, I placed my hand upon her shoulder.
She whirled around. “That’s assault,” she said, looking down at my hand.
I promptly removed it. “Diane, people have died. Not just Wayne Trueblood’s daughter, but two other kids. Not to mention my brother.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” she said, and turned to go again.
“Diane?” I called after her. “I don’t understand.”
She turned one last time. “Talk to Vic Daniels. It’s closer to him than it is to me now.”
“Diane,” I said.
“What?”
“Did he—did he ever get violent?”
She snorted and looked over at the bartender. “Wayne Trueblood? You could spit in his face and he’d probably apologize to you. That man is too much of a pussy to hit anyone. Not unless they’re tied up.”
Then she turned and left the bar.
“Four G & T’s,” the man behind the bar intoned. I looked at his name tag. Troy.
“What?” I asked, watching Diane as she wheezed her way out into the enclosed veranda and then turned toward the golf shop.
“Once she’s had four gin and tonics, she gets belligerent,” Troy said as he leaned on the bar. “Who knows how much she has before she shows up here.”
“She just accused me of assaulting her,” I said.
“I wouldn’t worry about it. She’s accused me of assaulting her five or six times, and I’ve never even touched her. She’s not all there.”
He looked at me and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I just met her.”
“Can I get you something?” Troy asked. He leaned back on his heels.
“I think I’ll take that cup of coffee,” I said. “And some information.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Let’s just try,” I said and sat down on a bar stool. “She ever have any visitors?”
Troy poured a cup from a pot of coffee and set it down in front of me. “Cream or sugar?” he asked. I shook my head.
“I’ve only been here for a year and a half or so,” he said. “In that time only one guy’s been here to visit her. He had a funny name, something like a British guy from a hundred years ago.”
“Percy?” I said.
“Yeah, you know him?”
“Sort of,” I said. “He’s her son. She one to sit at the bar and gab?”
Troy nodded. “Oh yeah. All the time. Until she gets to four G & Ts. Then she goes all crazy. Sometimes we have to get the manager to come escort her out.”
“What’s she do?”
“Usually the same as what just happened with you,” Troy shrugged. “Sometimes it’s worse.”
“It ever get physical?”
“Beyond any time anyone touches her she says she’s been assaulted?” Troy asked.
I nodded.
“Nah,” Troy said. “Mainly she talks about how much she hates men. I guess her husband was a real asshole. I mean-”
I sipped my coffee, burnt my lip, and set it down. “I know him. Don’t worry about it. He pretty much is a real asshole.”
Or seemed to be turning out to be one. “She mention any specifics about him?” I asked. “Anything about what kind of guy he was, what he did for a living, how he treated his kid?”
Troy thought for a minute, tugging at his lower lip. The old men in the corner signaled to him and he said, “Hold on a minute.”
He got a bottle of Maker’s Mark with a spout on the end from a shelf below the bar and walked over to their table, refilling carefully. They nodded their thanks and he returned.
“She did say something once,” Troy said.
“Yeah? What was that?” I asked.
The women outside were murmuring, craning their necks and looking in our direction. I could tell this made Troy uncomfortable, so I stood up and put a twenty dollar bill down on the bar.
“She said something about his liking them young,” Troy said. “When she said her husband had left her for a woman twenty years younger than she was, I remember somebody here saying—it was mainly women I remember being in the bar then—someone here said that it was always that way. That’s it,” he said. “She hit her four, and then she got pissy, and she left.”
I nodded.
“Look” Troy said. “I got to go.”
Someone yelled his name from outside. An elderly woman pushing ninety had stood up and was shaking her raised fist over her head.
“You’d better go,” I said. “The natives are getting restless. Thanks.”
“No problem.”
Forty-Two
It wasn’t even ten’o clock when I left the country club via the long and winding road that had brought me in. As I exited the building, Amber waved. When I waved back I thought, not for the first time in my life, how many people I’d seen that I’d never see again.
I headed west to I-55, because I knew the way into Chicago better from there, and then hit the next exit to the first McDonald’s I saw. I’d only had the toast that morning, and the two cups of coffee and the gin and tonic I’d had afterwards had removed any traces of it in my stomach.
I watched the cars and chewed on my sandwich. A series of silver and navy blue SUVs went by through the drive-thru, along with a smattering of sedans of the same color. There was one red Corvette, something French and green, and a tarnished gold Jaguar.
As I ate and watched, I tried to put together the most important aspects of my cases.
I put Sweeney and Roe to the side for t
he time being. Percy was working on that, even if he had taken the weekend off.
Tad. I had a possible conspiracy, his killer so scared she dared only speak with her fingers. A man with a suit.
Colby. Kelly had said that beatings savage enough to kill someone usually came from someone you knew. I remembered hearing that somewhere, most likely on television. A beating was personal, an act of passion. It was easier to kill someone with a gun, but if you used your fists—or a knife—you had to get close enough to actually touch the person.
Murder was an intimate deal when you got in close, and apparently followed the same complex rules of human interaction as family or sex. If you didn’t know someone well enough, you were more apt to shoot them, or get at them some other way from a distance.
But if you knew them, you could beat or stab them to death.
Kelly had said the night before that there had been something sexual about the beating. I’d just found out that Wayne Trueblood liked them young, and he liked S & M. His ex-wife had just mentioned the rumpus room.
I set down my sandwich and took a drink of my orange juice.
I thought I knew now who had killed Colby. I also knew that I needed to get back into Trueblood’s house, and it was unlikely that I would be invited back any time soon. I had to find a reason to do that.
Trouble was, Trueblood had an alibi. He’d been in Chicago the very weekend she had been killed.
The Colby Trueblood murder book on the table in front of me indicated that hotel records showed both Hannah and Wayne checking into a Holiday Inn near Loyola University at 5:33 P.M. that Friday and checking out at 9:52 A.M. the next Sunday. According to a credit card statement, they’d paid for lunch in the loop at 1:03 P.M. on Sunday, and had dinner in Joliet at 5:00 P.M. That kind of stuff couldn’t be faked, not easily.
Then why had he told me the night before that he hadn’t been up to Chicago in awhile? Had it just slipped his mind?
Colby’s car, and her body, had been discovered Sunday afternoon. Trueblood’s alibi was solid, if it had been him and Hannah who’d actually used the credit card at those locations.
It was a stretch. I would have to come up with more than that. Especially because my line of thinking opened up a number of other suspects that had already been weeded out.
Directly outside my window, a white sedan had just pulled into a handicapped parking spot. The passenger door opened, and a heavyset woman in her late fifties began trying to extract herself from the vehicle.
The driver’s side door opened immediately and a tall, thin man in his twenties with a wispy mustache and the look of the walking dead popped out and hurried around the front, his arms and legs looking like pipe cleaners as they worked beneath his clothes, which seemed about three sizes too big.
When he got to the woman and began trying to help her out, she thumped back down on her backside and punched him in the arm. The man paused for a moment in his efforts, the resigned look on his face implying that he’d done this many times, and that each time took a few days off of his life.
The large woman was gesturing, her mouth working in a way that caused spit to fly out of her mouth and onto the window. The man shrugged, went around to the trunk, and emerged in a minute with a wheelchair.
When he placed his hand on the woman’s arm again, she smacked him with a cane and he stepped back once more.
The scene was not lost on me. I needed some help. Big time. I slid my phone out of hibernation and dialed Alden Corcoran.
After I’d explained to him what I needed, and he’d agreed to meet me that afternoon in the Loop, I hung up and called Darcy Stamm.
“I talked to her,” she said without preamble. “She says it was an older guy. She thinks.”
“She thinks?”
“She doesn’t know,” Darcy admitted. “She just had a feeling that the guy was older.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Sorry I couldn’t help more,” she said.
“You’ve helped me a lot, Darcy,” I said. “Thank you.”
Forty-Three
Alden Corcoran was lead detective in Chicago’s 18th district, which covered Near North in and around Cabrini Green. The notorious housing projects in the area had been demolished and much of their inhabitants scattered to the winds—which meant the near suburbs—but the murder rate had really only dipped slightly.
It had also been the hunting grounds of John Markley Wallace, A.K.A. The Chicago Shopper, whom I’d helped Corcoran nab.
Corcoran was a friend of a friend’s girlfriend, and had just happened to be drinking at a dive bar in the Ukrainian Village the same time I’d been there. We’d gotten to talking, I mentioned the studies that had been done on determining a person’s lifestyle choices based on their shopping habits, and that had sealed the deal.
He’d also gotten me out of the assault charge, or rather, prevented it from happening, by setting me up with a good lawyer and having a word with the doctor I’d punched.
Which meant that I wasn’t sure if I could ask him for any more favors.
Still, it had gotten him the position of lead detective, and maybe if I nudged him with a few beers and a steak, he’d do what I needed him to do.
He was seated at the bar when I walked into Dapper’s. Dapper’s was your typical modern old-style Chicago pub. The ceiling was made of hammered tin, and black, the floor was sanded pine, and the bar was oak and polished. There were twelve taps with various animal and demon heads behind it, only one or two of them representing mainstream beers.
He was already tossing back the dregs of his first pint. When I’d spoken to him on the telephone out in Joliet, he’d mentioned that his wife and his sister-in-law were shopping all afternoon, and that meeting me wouldn’t be a problem.
“Dana, my man,” he said when I came in. He glanced over at the woman behind the bar, gestured toward his glass and held up two fingers. “What brings you back? I thought you were all bent on staying down below the Mason-Dixon Line.”
I smiled at him as I sat down. “Yeah, well, I still have visitation rights, don’t I?”
I’d already filled him in on what I was doing in Tazewell County, and though he’d seemed a bit puzzled, he wasn’t all that surprised. I guess when you’re a cop, you understand that you can’t just switch certain things off.
He also knew about my brother, and wanting to make sure the right person went down for a crime was something all cops understood.
“I’m up here with my, um, girlfriend.”
The beers arrived and we both took a hefty drink.
“Your Um Girlfriend?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Yeah, well, I guess she’s my girlfriend.”
“So, you’re railing someone you hold dear,” he said and laughed.
“Yup,” I said and took another drink. “That pretty much sums it up.”
Corcoran nodded and looked away. I studied his face, remembering the hours we’d spent together; that and the frustration, with me at the computer, with him pacing around the room, always wanting everything to go faster.
Corcoran was old and new school Chicago. He’d grown up in Beverly, which was the last true Chicago neighborhood, at least according to Corcoran.
“Not any of that garbage those kids from the suburbs put up with street festivals and shit,” he’d said once. “Daly tried to bring that feel back to the city, and that’s all good, but where I grew up, you knew everything about everybody else. You knew whose dad was a drunk, whose mom turned tricks and which ones had something going on the side.
“Warm, homey, middle America,” he’d said. “And we all stuck together.”
His father was Chicago Irish, his mother a transplant from Mexico, and it wrote its way all across Corcoran’s face: curly black hair, a dark complexion, and green eyes.
Now he was looking at me again. “We going to talk about what you need from me first, or are we going to eat first?”
“Whatever you want to do, Alden,” I said.
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He sucked on his teeth and gestured toward the bar woman again. “Can we get two more of these over there?” he asked, gesturing over his shoulder with a thumb toward a booth in the corner.
“No problem,” she said. “You want menus?”
We went over and sat in the booth and looked over through the foggy glass at the street.
“I never come down here anymore,” he said. “Funny how this place turns into a ghost town on the weekends.”
I murmured my assent and hesitated a moment.
Corcoran cleared his throat.
“Wayne Trueblood,” he said. “Clear all the way back to 1968.”
“What happened then?”
“Statutory rape,” he said. He watched me over the top of his glass as he took a drink. “He was nineteen. The girl was eleven.”
“Eleven?” I asked.
Corcoran nodded.
“Jesus. Did he do any time for that?” I asked.
Corcoran shook his head. “Statutory rape was different back then. Now, it’s an automatic charge, regardless of what the parents or the girl say, but back then, you could wiggle your way out of it.”
“Still-” I said.
“Yeah,” Corcoran nodded. “We’re not talking he was eighteen and she was sixteen, hell, I could even see eighteen and fourteen, kids go to the same high school, for Christ's sake-”
“But eighteen and eleven?” I interrupted. “That’s not an age difference. That’s child molestation.”
“That’s what I would have said, too,” Corcoran said. “But back in the sixties, a guy got picked up on that, he could get out of it, if he had the right lawyer, or if he had some money.”
“I don’t know much about his background prior to the 1980s,” I said. “I know he went to college.”
“So he must have had a little bit of money,” Corcoran said. “Or knew somebody.”
“Where was it?” I asked.
“Champaign County,” he said. “But forget calling down there. They won’t have anything more than what I got on the NCIC. Anybody around back then, he’d be retired already. Or dead.”
