by Wally Duff
“Maybe he wasn’t when you knew him, but stranger things have happened, especially with a guy who isn’t having sex with his wife,” I said.
Cas stopped defending Peter and stared out the window. None of us wanted to leave her alone, but Linda and Molly had to get home to their kids. They left. I stayed. I knew Linda would watch Kerry a little longer.
“It’ll be okay,” I said to Cas, after they left.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “You can’t begin to imagine what I’ve been feeling since Peter died.”
I waited as she blew her nose and wiped her eyes on a napkin. Then she began to shred it. “This doesn’t leave the table, okay?”
“Sure, fine.”
“We’ve been friends long enough that I’m going to share something with you, but you can’t tell Molly or Linda or Carter. No one.”
“You can trust me.”
“I would be dead if Joe finds this out.”
My stomach began to churn. Maybe I didn’t need this information. “Look, if it’s that bad, forget it.”
“If you’re going to work on this story, you need to know everything.”
“Okay.”
“When I was in nurse’s training at Northwestern, I became pregnant with Peter’s child. That’s how Diane knew who I was at the medical examiner’s office.”
42
Why didn’t I leave with Linda and Molly?
I didn’t want to know this about one of my best friends. Or did the reporter in me want to have all the facts? I reached for the last donut, a chocolate glazed, shoved half of it into my mouth, and began chewing. The reporter in me won out, as she usually does, and I continued listening.
“Peter was near the end of his residency,” Cas said. “He and Diane were going to have a big socialite wedding the following June.”
I swallowed and put the donut remnant down. “But you came along.”
She nodded. “We began secretly seeing each other.”
“Secretly?”
“His father met me once at Northwestern when he was having lunch with Peter. He saw the way Peter looked at me and knew something was going on. He had one of his people do a background check on me. It didn’t take them long to find out I didn’t come from the ethnic or social background that he and his wife wanted Peter to marry into.”
“How did you find this out?”
“From Diane.”
“She told you?”
“Oh, she was happy to, especially with what had happened.”
I shoved the remainder of the donut away and waited.
“I missed a couple of periods, but I assumed it was stress. When I discovered I was pregnant, I was devastated. I worked two jobs to put myself through nursing school. There was no way I could survive trying to work, go to school, and raise a child.”
“How did Peter feel about this?”
“He never knew. That was part of the agreement.”
“Agreement?”
“Somehow, Mr. Warren found out about my pregnancy. I think he kept tabs on me because he was worried I would try and trap Peter into a forced marriage.”
“Cas, I hate to ask this, but was the pregnancy a whoopsie?”
She stared at her hands a while before she replied. “I wanted to be with Peter and someday have his child, but it was a stupid mistake on my part.” She continued to shred the napkin. “One night after I found out, Diane showed up at my little apartment. She didn’t even take the time to sit down. Her offer was simple. Get an abortion and never see Peter again.”
“And what would you get out of it?”
“Enough money to pay off all my school loans and live comfortably for a long time.”
“And if you didn’t do it?”
“They had purchased my student loans. They were going to call in the notes and also make sure I was expelled from school for stealing narcotics from the pharmacy.”
“They would do something like that?”
“Would and could. She showed me the proof. They had fake pictures of me in the pharmacy and emails I supposedly sent to several students, proving I sold drugs to them.”
“Unbelievable.”
“She presented an agreement for me to sign. I didn’t want to, but I didn’t see any way out and signed it. She gave me a cashier’s check, and I had the procedure done.”
“Do you think Peter ever found out about the pregnancy and what followed with Diane?”
“I never told him anything. I didn’t see him again until I called him and we met at the nurse’s station when Linda was in the hospital after having her baby. We talked, and he never mentioned anything about our past.”
“Do you think Diane discovered that you and Peter had run into each other again?”
“I’m sure of it. Peter said he told her.”
43
When I came home from picking up Kerry at Linda’s home, Carter was already there.
“You’re home early,” I said.
“I wanted to hear more about the story,” he said.
“DADDY!” Kerry screamed when she saw him.
Carter picked her up, and they went into the family room to play. The story could wait. Kerry always comes first. “Pizza’s ordered,” he said over his shoulder. “Be here in twenty minutes.”
That was a relief. I walked in to join them. They were on the floor having a pretend tea party.
He glanced up at me. “How is Cas doing?”
“Not well. Not well at all.”
“Understandable, considering the velocity with which Warren impacted the bridge abutment. According to the reporter I assigned to the story, the doctor was incinerated.”
“Most of him, anyway.”
“The head business?”
I nodded. “We went down to the medical examiner’s office. It was tough.”
“Are you okay?”
“I am, but Cas isn’t.”
“She saw his body?”
“Only his head. The rest was fried by the fire.”
“I am sorry you had to go through that.”
“She’s my friend. You would do the same thing for any of your buddies. Who’s covering the story for you?”
“Jimmy Palagi.”
“I don’t remember him. Is he a new hire?”
“He is, but I’m not sure how long he’s going to last. He threw up several times after he saw the pictures of what was left of Warren. He was distraught, and I have no idea if he found out any relevant facts concerning the story.”
“Tough way to break in.”
“It is when you have to try to interview a person who does not want to be questioned.”
“Mrs. Warren?”
“Yes, and she was accompanied by Warren’s father and brother. They represented her.”
“Did they stonewall your reporter?”
“Worse. Two hours ago, we were informed by the Warrens that nothing about the doctor’s death is to be printed in the paper.”
“Do the Warrens have that kind of clout?"
“Mrs. Warren does.”
I could feel the heat rising in my face.
“Are you telling me that you won’t pursue a story because of her influence? What the heck kind of journalistic integrity is that? Have things changed that much since the FBI got me fired and I was forced to stop writing?”
“Sadly, they have,” he said. “And I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse.”
44
Thursday afternoon, Homicide Detective Sergeant Janet Corritore sat at our kitchen table. I had gotten to know her when we worked together on the shooting of her partner, Detective Tony Infantino, who’d met with me yesterday at the site of Warren’s car crash.
She is my age, thirty-six, and has short, curly, ash-brown hair that becomes unruly in Chicago’s humid weather. Her blue suit couldn’t hide an athletic figure that Cas would envy.
I invited her over to my home to see if she would be interested in helping us on the Warren story.
Early that morning, Cas texted me that Tony told her he didn’t think Warren’s death was a homicide. I hoped to convince Janet otherwise, because I needed access to Chicago PD files to work on the story.
“What do you think about how Warren died?” I asked.
“I don’t see it as a homicide,” she began.
Not a good start.
“You’re sure someone didn’t kill Warren?”
She flipped open a small spiral notebook. “On Tuesday, Warren has his usual morning office hours. He cancels out the afternoon and has a doctor’s appointment with an internist. That doctor won’t tell me what it was for, citing HIPAA and doctor/patient confidentiality.”
She flipped a page. I checked the Nanit app on my cell phone to make sure Kerry was still asleep.
“For the next four hours, he sits by himself drinking expensive single malt scotch in an upscale bar on Rush Street. He leaves and buys several gas cans at Lowe’s. He fills them up at a gas station across the street from Lowe’s. I have the credit card receipts to document this activity. He puts the full gas cans in the trunk, back, and passenger seat, according to security cameras covering the lot at the gas station.”
She turned another page.
“He returns to his office and is there until two a.m. This is also documented by the building’s security videos. He drives away in his Bentley, which is recorded by traffic cameras on the Kennedy. At some point, the car’s air bags are disabled, and he disconnects his seatbelt. He drives straight into the bridge abutment and never hits the brakes.” She closed the notebook. “The only logical conclusion is that he killed himself.”
“What about Warren having AIDS?”
“That test was a lab error.”
“He didn’t have AIDS?”
“At least that’s what is printed in the final autopsy report.”
“But you don’t believe it.”
“The chief medical examiner himself came in to oversee the autopsy, and when the report was finished, Warren had been mysteriously cured of the lethal AIDS virus he came in with.”
“Carter told me the Warrens didn’t want any publicity about his death.”
“And there won’t be, not even an obituary notice. They’ve made sure that all the medical report will say is he died in a car crash caused by faulty brakes.”
“Brakes do work better if you step on them before you drive into a bridge.”
“They do,” she paused, “and you and your friends might need to watch your backs.”
“Mrs. Warren?”
She nodded. “Your little group pissed her off when you ran into her at the medical examiner’s office. It took all of Tony’s considerable charm to cool her off.”
“Tony? With Diane Warren? That’s not exactly in his female demographic. He’s thirty-seven. Assuming she was around Peter’s age, she has to be at least ten years older than Tony is.”
She nodded.
“And how about her sparkling and nurturing personality?” I continued. “I can’t see him being able to even talk to her.”
“According to him, not only did he talk to her, they even went out for drinks.”
“No way,” I said. “The Bears will win another Super Bowl before he hooks up with a woman older than he is.”
45
Janet put her spiral notebook into her jacket pocket. She was getting ready to leave. I had to delay it.
“As long as you’ve driven out this far, may I at least offer you some coffee?” I asked.
“Ever meet a cop that turned it down?” Janet responded.
“How about a donut from Dinkel’s?”
“I hoped you would ask. Being a world-class investigator, I detected that there were several of them in that box on the counter.”
I put the box on the table and poured a cup of coffee for her. She selected a glazed donut, finished it in four bites, and swallowed the coffee without saying a word. She looked up when she was done.
“A bad habit, eating too fast,” she said. “It drives my husband crazy when we go out to eat at a nice restaurant.”
“What do you know about Dr. Fertig?” I asked.
She adjusted her handgun on her right hip and then took out her notebook again. She opened it and flipped through several pages.
“He’s a breast cancer surgeon. He does an operation that cures each patient. When Tony and I talked to your friend Cas this morning, we found out she thinks he killed Warren.” She crossed her arms across her chest. “She’s a little intense.”
“Especially about this.”
“Like I said, I don’t see it. Warren got AIDS and killed himself. End of story.”
“Peter was chairing a committee to investigate Fertig’s results. What if he found out evidence that could expose Fertig as a fraud? Wouldn’t that be a motive to kill Peter?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Warren drove the car. It’s hard to figure how Fertig caused the accident.”
I put down my cup of green tea. “I would like to meet Fertig and then schedule an interview.”
“If I was working this case, that’s the way I would do it. Why not make an appointment at his office for starters?”
“Except for sagging from my pregnancy with Kerry, my breasts are fine. I don’t need a cancer specialist.”
“I suggest you find a lady with a breast lump or cyst that might be cancer, so there’s a valid reason to make an appointment with him.”
“I don’t know a female with a breast problem.”
“I do.”
“Can you call her for me?”
“I don’t have to. It’s me, and I also have a burr under my saddle about this case.”
“That’s a long way from your breasts. What’s bugging you?”
“At noon today, our captain called Tony and me in and told us to cease and desist on the Warren investigation. He made us hand in our case files forthwith.”
“You think Diane Warren did this?”
“He didn’t say who did, and I’ll stop working on this case when I decide to, not because a rich society bitch tells me to.” She stood up. “I’ll make an appointment with Fertig. You can go with me.”
“I’m so there. Let me know when.”
“Done.”
46
Friday morning, the Hamlin Park Irregulars, minus Cas, were in the locker room at XSport Fitness. The club is on North Ashland two blocks away from our front door. The facility is another center for our activities and has the added benefit of free babysitting while we work out.
We recovered in the locker room, enveloped by the aromas of shampoo, soap, hair spray, a variety of perfumes, and the stench of sweat. I hadn’t seen or talked to Cas since we were at Dinkel’s Bakery on Wednesday. I hoped she would be teaching the class, but Mindy Wales, one of the other instructors, taught it instead.
“Have you guys talked to Cas?” I asked.
“All I get is her voice mail,” Molly said. “And she doesn’t answer my texts.”
Linda rubbed a cold water bottle on her forehead. It was her first postpartum workout. “She doesn’t seem to be coping with this.”
“I can understand why,” I said.
Linda put the bottle down and eyed me. “Is there something you need to tell us?”
“After you guys left Dinkel’s, Cas and I had a long talk,” I said. “Let’s just say that she and Peter had an intense relationship when he was in his eye residency and leave it at that.”
“Finding out that he wanted to hook up again might be the reason,” Molly said.
“Except for one item,” Linda said. “She’s still married to Joe.”
We sat in silence pondering Cas’s possible marriage woes.
“She needs our help,” Linda said.
“That’s what friends are for,” Molly said.
“There is one new element to the story,” I said. “Cas told me Warren texted her early Tuesday morning that he’d figured out how Fertig was doing it.”
“Doing what?” Linda
asked.
“She never found out. Before he met with her, he had his doctor’s appointment, and we all know what happened after that,” I said.
