The Black Cage

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘And about Stemec Henderson?’ Cornelius gestured toward one of the stacks of folders. ‘I’ve just reread all your pieces in the Examiner. Lots and lots of outrage, but well deserved.’

  ‘Always Stemec Henderson,’ Rigg said.

  ‘We’ve not forgotten.’

  ‘You weren’t involved.’

  ‘I’d only been here for a couple of months. So, the Graves girls?’

  Rigg nodded.

  ‘We defer to the sheriff. You should ask him.’

  ‘I can’t get through to him. I heard he made a major bust last week.’

  Feldott frowned. ‘There’s been no news of that.’

  ‘The suspect’s name is Richie Fernandez.’

  ‘Where did you hear it?’

  ‘Street talk, a name, a mention,’ Rigg said.

  ‘A source you can’t divulge?’

  Rigg shrugged.

  ‘Well, I don’t know anything about a Richie Fernandez,’ young Feldott said. ‘And nothing about anyone else, unfortunately. The sheriff’s investigation is still evolving, as they say.’

  It could have been a lid, it could have been truth.

  ‘So far, only Klaus Lanz,’ Rigg said.

  ‘Everybody knows about him. A quick arrest, a quick release.’

  ‘For show,’ Rigg said.

  ‘You must understand, the reporting last time …’ He let it slip away, that gentle accusation. ‘Maybe your Mr Fernandez was simply another catch-and-release, though you’re saying he was released without anyone knowing he’d been caught?’

  Rigg gave it up. ‘When will there be a more conclusive autopsy on the girls?’

  ‘You mean, more than the three wise men?’ Feldott said of the three doctors who’d found nothing except that the girls had been frozen. ‘Anything more is up to Mr McGarry.’

  ‘He’s not around, like Lehman.’

  ‘Off the record again?’

  ‘All of this is,’ Rigg said.

  ‘The girls haven’t fully thawed, but we don’t want that released.’

  ‘Too long frozen?’

  ‘We’re being more meticulous than last time. Surely you of all people can understand why.’

  ‘Any chance either of the girls was violated?’ Rigg asked, giving Feldott the opportunity to lie.

  ‘No chance I’d tell you something like that until we do complete examinations. Please do not speculate.’

  ‘I’m hearing McGarry wants out,’ Rigg said, to keep them talking.

  ‘We’d go on, regardless,’ Feldott said. It was interesting. He hadn’t denied the possibility of McGarry’s bailing out when his term was up.

  ‘You’re his assistant. You’d run?’

  ‘Gosh, no. Most, including me, think I’m too young, too new at the job.’

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘An outsider, I imagine.’

  ‘You’re an outsider, sent over by the Civilian Investigation folks.’

  Feldott smiled. ‘I meant a seasoned man from outside. What else do you know about this Richie Fernandez?’

  ‘Nothing beyond a name,’ Rigg said, standing up.

  ‘Maybe that’s more than anyone else knows,’ Feldott said, walking him to the door.

  ‘Except Lehman,’ Rigg said.

  NINE

  Rigg went looking for Glet’s house.

  He’d shown up there unannounced a couple of times, months before, late at night, in full fury at the lethargy of the Stemec Henderson investigation, demanding progress, and – he finally had to accept – in full fury at the random slaughter of the woman who’d been the core of his life.

  Glet lived on the northwest side of Chicago, in a block of identical brown brick bungalows. Rigg drove slowly until he came to one that had the wispy remains of some summer weeds poking above the snow in a cracked cement urn at the base of the front steps. Either a bachelor lived there, or someone who didn’t give a damn about neighborly grace. Glet was both.

  Walking up confirmed his guess. Dozens of cigar butts had been stubbed into the weed remains. The cracked urn reeked of Glet.

  ‘He ain’t home,’ a woman said. Tugging at a thin terry robe, the old woman had stepped out on to the tiny front porch next door. ‘Didn’t come home last night.’

  ‘Glet’s got a girl?’

  She barked a laugh at that and slipped back into the warmth of her house.

  Rigg went up the steps and banged on the front door anyway. There was no response. He walked back to his car.

  ‘Something stinks,’ Rigg said.

  Benten lit a Camel, as if to underscore the point. At probably four dollars a pack, they had to be setting him back close to a hundred a week – a big enough dent in any wage, let alone one that must have diminished when Benten, like Rigg, was banished to the Pink.

  ‘So …?’ Benten asked, after a lungful of smoke.

  ‘I’ve been incurring expenses. Cab rides, and another twelve to bribe a desk clerk.’

  Even nickels mattered to Rigg now. Working part-time at the Pink paid $400 a week, barely enough to cover the Westmont apartment’s rent. Everything else came out of Judith’s small life-insurance payout from the Field Museum, and that would go dry in about six months.

  Benten blew a lungful of smoke at the exhaust fan and laughed. ‘Twelve bucks for a bribe? Nobody bribes for twelve dollars.’

  ‘It was all I had left.’

  ‘And cab rides? Why cabs?’

  Glet had said he could tip his editor, if it meant that Rigg could work the story. ‘I met Glet last night. Very private, very clandestine.’

  The editor’s eyebrows arched with new interest. ‘Where?’

  ‘The site.’

  ‘Sweet shit. You can’t stay away from those woods?’

  ‘It was his suggestion. He parked away, came up through the snow on foot. He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s talking to me.’

  ‘He’s reeling you in. He wants Lehman’s job, and he wants you to glow about him.’

  ‘Lehman is old Chicago, a bully, too thick with the other crooks that run things. He’s not going anywhere.’

  Benten shook his head. ‘He will, if the Graves case greases his chute. City Hall will have to cut him loose if he screws up like last time.’

  ‘Glet gave me a nugget and a lead.’

  ‘What’s the nugget?’

  ‘Beatrice Graves might have been penetrated.’

  Benten swiveled around to look at a taped poster of a forest, where a window should have been. ‘Sweet shit,’ he said to the printed woods.

  ‘Glet swore me to secrecy, except to tell you if you needed convincing to keep me on this.’

  ‘And the lead?’ he asked, still with his back to Rigg.

  ‘He pointed me to a cabbie who phoned the sheriff’s department last week, saying he’d picked up the Graves girls with two men at a diner on Madison, January 6. The husband and wife who run the diner tipped the sheriff about that last week, too.’

  ‘Trolling for reward dollars?’

  ‘More likely jitters from sitting on information they should have reported earlier. The cabbie picked up the girls and two men from the diner and drove them to a flop nearby.’

  Benten swiveled back around and made like he was stifling a yawn. ‘Could have been any two girls.’

  ‘Two cops went to the diner last week and then to the flop. They busted one of the men.’

  ‘There’s been no news of that. Catch-and-release.’

  ‘The guy they arrested, Richie Fernandez, hasn’t been seen since. Never came back to the flop, not even for his stuff.’

  Benten leaned across his desk. He knew Rigg was tossing bait. ‘And …?’

  ‘The husband and wife that run the diner, and the night clerk at the flop, all got good looks at the two cops …’

  Benten bit. ‘Damn it.’

  ‘Lehman was one of them. He made the bust himself.’

  ‘And now this guy, Fernandez, has disappeared?’

  ‘No record of t
he arrest, no booking. Nobody knows anything about him.’

  ‘Glet didn’t know about Fernandez, just the cabbie?’ Benten asked.

  ‘So it appears.’

  ‘Why didn’t he chase the lead to the cabbie himself?’

  ‘He said he was afraid of getting caught poaching a lead meant for Lehman. And he implied he was working on something better.’

  ‘What’s better?’ Benten asked.

  ‘I don’t know that either.’

  ‘It’s you now, Milo.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Benten gestured at the latest Examiner lying on his desk. ‘You saw that ours was the only piece running on the Graves case this morning?’

  ‘I noticed.’

  ‘Wolfe got cost-controlled yesterday – fired, along with six copy editors and probably the cleaning lady that vacuums the Bastion at night. You get to continue to write under my byline. The Bastion gets the Graves case covered cheap.’

  ‘And the Richie Fernandez story – that’s part of it now.’

  Benten started to nod, but then apparently noticed something through the filmy glass wall. ‘Eleanor, what the hell is going on?’ he shouted through his open door.

  ‘Lehman’s on TV!’ she yelled, pointing at the television. ‘We just got the email five minutes ago. Only WGN is covering it!’ WGN was a local, unaffiliated television station.

  Benten followed Rigg out to the general office. Lehman was at a podium surrounded by nobody at all.

  ‘I’m announcing that we’ve taken into custody the man we allege perpetuated the horrible crimes against Beatrice and Priscilla Graves.’

  ‘Here comes your Richie Fernandez,’ Benten said.

  ‘Klaus Lanz is known to most of you. He was …’

  Rigg lost the words coming through the tinny speaker. He looked over at Benten. Benten stared back at him.

  ‘We had insufficient grounds initially to hold Mr Lanz,’ Lehman went on. ‘We had to release him. But now, thanks to us never letting go, we believe we’ve developed enough compelling evidence to request that Mr Lanz be held without bond.’

  Rigg stared at the screen as he listened to the lunacy that was being spouted. Lanz was a drifter, a two-bit nobody. He’d been vetted by cops and by reporters, including the Examiner’s just-ejected Wolfe, and was found wanting of everything except psychic signals. Nothing solidly incriminating pointed to Lanz.

  It was over in the next instant. Lehman, usually a showboat who went on and on, announced that further details would be forthcoming, and strode out of camera range.

  Benten turned to Rigg. ‘Richie Fernandez, my ass,’ he said.

  ‘Klaus Lanz, Lehman’s herring,’ Rigg said.

  ‘Write without speculation,’ Benten said.

  And so Rigg did.

  REDO?

  Harold Benten, Chicago Examiner

  Klaus Lanz, an unemployed pipe fitter, was arrested again by Cook County sheriff’s officers for the murders of Beatrice and Priscilla Graves, Sheriff Joseph Lehman announced today. Lanz had confessed previously to placing an anonymous call to police, explaining that he was descended from generations of psychics, and that it came to him in a dream that the girls were being held in Santa Fe Park, south and west of the location on German Church Road where they were subsequently found last Monday. Lanz was arrested mid-January, before the girls were found, in conjunction with the girls’ disappearance, and subjected to a lie-detector test. According to the sheriff’s department at the time, the results were inconclusive, and he was released. Today, Lehman announced he’d uncovered sufficient new evidence for Lanz’s re-arrest. Lehman took no questions at the press conference, promising that further details would be forthcoming.

  Rigg sent Benten the copy and followed it to the threshold of the cigarette fog.

  Benten read it, typed a small change and sent the story across the room to Eleanor at the front desk. ‘Ah, investigative journalism, gotten straight from television,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘He didn’t hold a press conference because he didn’t want questions,’ Rigg said. ‘Lanz is a red herring. Lehman’s got a different suspect that he doesn’t want anyone to know about.’

  ‘You’ve got no corroboration on Fernandez,’ Benten said.

  ‘I’ve got the desk clerk.’

  Benten laughed. ‘A wino at a flop who can be bribed for twelve bucks?’

  ‘What did you change on my piece?’

  ‘The byline. It’s time to announce you’re back.’

  Rigg crossed the pink-tile floor to his desk and began calling to find Lehman, Glet, or any of the sheriff’s other minions who might open up more about Lehman’s news. But nobody was in and nobody knew when anybody was expected back. And so, for the rest of the afternoon, there was only one suspect in the Graves case, and that was Klaus Lanz.

  ‘What the heck, Milo?’ Blanchie’s voice boomed across the diner when he walked in. The Rail-Vu in Lisle was as deserted as it had been the night after the Graves girls were discovered.

  ‘“What the heck” what?’

  ‘You only come in once a week, remember?’ She gave him an elaborate curtsy, adding, ‘Not that I’m not flattered.’

  ‘I’m adding days to my weeks.’ He slid into a booth and opened his laptop. ‘A burger,’ he said, logging on to the Internet.

  ‘Mushrooms,’ Blanchie said.

  The piece he’d written, under his own byline for the first time in months, had been up on the Examiner’s site for two hours. The other queens had been just as prompt.

  The Chicago Sun-Times reporter had written the story as Rigg had, letting the brevity of Lehman’s announcement raise its own questions about why the sheriff had offered no specifics about re-arresting Lanz. Likely enough, Rigg figured, the Sun-Times reporter suspected Lehman was using the hapless Lanz to show progress when there’d been none – unlike Rigg, who saw Lanz as a herring to disguise sweating a better suspect elsewhere.

  Rigg clicked on the Tribune’s site. Their crime reporter played it the same way, too. But the Trib had a short sidebar, written by their media man, Greg Theodore, who’d picked up on Rigg’s byline:

  Milo Rigg has come out of suburban solitude to take over the reins of reporting on crime for the Examiner, following the latest round of lay-offs at Chicago’s number-three newspaper. First up is covering the explosive case of the murders of the Graves sisters, whose bodies were discovered just three days ago in a ravine in suburban Cook County. Covering the perhaps similar murders of the Stemec and Henderson boys fifteen months ago proved problematic for the Examiner’s venerable crime reporter, and resulted, some said, in his banishment from the Examiner’s downtown Chicago headquarters.

  Blanchie brought him his mushroom burger. Rigg took two bites and a forkful of coleslaw, and held up his credit card.

  ‘Lost your appetite?’ Blanchie asked, coming over.

  Rigg nodded. Theodore’s small sidebar and his own byline had said it all.

  He was back.

  TEN

  Sunlight hitting his face woke him, and it felt later than usual, and warmer. Eyes still shut, half asleep, he felt for his phone on the floor to check the time. He had to reach too far. He opened his eyes. He wasn’t in his Westmont apartment. He was in the dunes.

  He’d left the Rail-Vu unnerved by a certainty that the resurrection of his byline was going to resurrect the tawdriness of his past. He hadn’t wanted to go back to his hollowed-out apartment, where his every move echoed with the absence of what he’d lost. He’d wanted to drive. And so he’d driven, despite the late hour, to the refuge of the dunes.

  He swung out to put his feet on the floor. He slept on the bottom bunk, now. Judith’s bunk. His had been on top, up the short, narrow metal ladder. She’d laughed every time he climbed up, for there was no graceful way to ascend. He’d gotten somewhat good at it, but still she laughed. He’d laughed, too. They’d laughed a lot in that caboose.

  She’d seen it advertised for sale in a local shoppi
ng rag – a quirky, odd thing that an eccentric retiree had tugged to the top of a small dune and that his heirs wanted gone. ‘A place in the dunes,’ she’d said.

  ‘An old railroad car, stinking of creosote and oil,’ he said. But they’d gone to look, and they bought it because it was cheap and because she wanted it so very badly.

  They’d labored on that relic, scrubbing and sanding the old wood of the sides, painting it the original vibrant red, its interior clapboards a glossy white. They installed the bunk beds and had custom cabinetry fitted to make tiny closets and a kitchen. It was cramped and narrow and exactly what they wanted to enjoy for fifty years. And then she was dead.

  He’d intended to gut the caboose of their things and put it up for sale. But, when he finally summoned the courage to drive back to the dune for the first time after she was killed, he was surprised to find calm inside the tiny rail car. He didn’t know whether that was from the dunes’ almost preternatural quiet, now that field ecologists had scraped away almost all of the surrounding old cottages to restore the area to its natural state; whether dreams of the black cage never found him there; or whether he felt Judith’s presence much stronger there than in the apartment. Whatever it was, the caboose became his refuge, and he quickly abandoned any thought of eliminating it from his life.

  Even months later, when his life descended even further into chaos following the Stemec Henderson murders, the botched investigations and the trashing of his reputation, calm always welcomed him in Indiana. It was how he had survived.

  He walked the five steps to the galley kitchen, made coffee and sat at the two-person banquette to look down from the dune. The hard-crusted ice on the small lake below sparkled like a million diamonds in the sun. It was completely frozen over, like always by late January.

  Out for a walk their first summer there, he and Judith had stopped to talk to one of the field ecologists supervising the removal of one of the old cottages on the other side of that small lake. ‘This thing freezes three, four inches thick every winter,’ the bearded man had said. ‘So thick, young bucks back in the day used to race in circles on the ice – race, that is, until they hit a soft spot and went in.’