The Black Cage

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘My God!’ Judith had said.

  The man had held up a hand. ‘I never heard that anyone got killed, but the cars were sunk for forever. They’re sinking still, I expect.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’ Judith asked.

  ‘The lake’s got a bottom a million times softer than a baby’s,’ the man said, with a wink.

  ‘Softer?’ Judith asked, confused.

  The man laughed. ‘Soft, meaning layers and layers of silt,’ he said. ‘Tree limbs and leaves and all sorts of things fall on to the ice over the winter. Come spring, the ice melts and all that sinks into the water, to be welcomed as nourishment. That’s why the lake bottom never hardens. It just keeps decomposing, getting softer and softer as the old keeps sinking, making way for the new. Hell, those old racing cars ought to be coming out of the other side of the world any day.’ He looked up then, at the caboose they’d been painting. ‘Your little caboose there is just beyond our reach,’ he said, the expression on his face leaving no doubt that he would have loved to have scraped away their rail car along with everything else that was man-made.

  That snippet of conversation seemed decades old, words even from another lifetime, but they’d been spoken just little more than two years before.

  He rinsed his coffee cup, locked up and went down the railroad-tie steps to his car.

  Benten was right. Rigg needed a second witness to Fernandez’s arrest.

  In daylight, the Kellington Arms looked to be missing more mortar than it had the night before last. And, inside, the counter looked to be missing a clerk, though perhaps there was no need for one in the painfully bright hours before noon. There was no bell to summon anyone, so he improvised with his fist on the wood below the counter.

  ‘What the damned hell?’ a grizzled veteran grunted behind him, pulling himself upright to sitting from behind the two chairs in the lobby.

  ‘Richie Fernandez,’ Rigg said. ‘I heard he got arrested. I want to know who saw it.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ the man said, clinging to one of the chairbacks as if it were the deck rail on a ship tilting to sink.

  ‘He lives in room 202. I heard he got busted.’

  ‘A lady and a gentleman just rented that room,’ the morning clerk mumbled, teetering behind chairbacks. His ship had hit fifty-foot swells. ‘They just went up for the night.’

  Rigg headed for the stairs. Behind him, the grizzled veteran dropped with a soft thud.

  The doors upstairs were not thick. By their sounds, there was no doubt that the lady and the gentleman in room 202 had not yet arrived at their most urgent of destinations. Rigg stood a respectful few feet away, to wait for the sounds to diminish.

  ‘Peeper, are you?’ a man’s voice creaked.

  Rigg turned, surprised by yet another someone up and about in the halls that early. ‘I’m looking for Richie Fernandez.’

  ‘That ain’t Richie in there,’ the man said. He was in his fifties and had only one arm. ‘Richie was moved out.’

  ‘What do you mean, “moved out”?’

  ‘Meaning his stuff was tossed a few days ago.’

  ‘I heard he got arrested.’

  ‘Heard that, too, but can’t say for sure,’ the man said.

  ‘Who saw it?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Nobody sees anything here.’

  ‘He does factory work. Any idea where?’

  ‘Screw machine place, three blocks over.’ He pointed south with his one arm.

  Apex Screw Products was in a brown cinder-block building with impenetrable glass blocks for windows.

  ‘Can’t say for sure who’s here and who ain’t,’ the woman behind the desk said, not bothering to glance behind her. The building was one long room, twenty-five feet wide and maybe a hundred feet long. A dozen people, Mexican men and women, toiled at slender, tall machines, easily visible from the front.

  Rigg showed her his card. ‘Off the record, deep background, I heard Richie Fernandez got picked up and I’m trying to get his side of the story.’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘Witness to a drive-by,’ Rigg lied.

  ‘Gang-bangers?’ she asked, because gang-bang shootings happened every day in Chicago.

  ‘My editor wants me to check him out.’

  ‘Richie ain’t here. He ain’t often here. He’s one of our irregulars.’

  ‘Mean guy?’

  ‘Harmless,’ she said.

  ‘But a highly skilled machine operator?’ he asked.

  She laughed. ‘Part-time man, sweeps for grape.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘A week, maybe two, maybe more,’ she said. ‘Like I said, irregular.’

  ‘You got a human-resources person, someone who knows next of kin?’

  The woman stared at him, saying nothing, because hers was a shop run with undocumented workers. She didn’t keep records.

  ‘Which of your other workers knew him well?’ Rigg asked, anyway.

  She kept staring, saying nothing.

  He checked his phone out on the sidewalk. He’d gotten a text from the county medical examiner’s office. McGarry was holding a press briefing at two o’clock.

  There was no press room at the Dead House. A dozen folding chairs had been set in two rows in the lunchroom – inadequate for the twenty men and women attending. Four of them lugged video cameras for television. The room was hot from so many people cramming the small space.

  Three greeted Rigg with seeming pleasure, but most had a hint of feral in their eyes. Law enforcement had slapped back hard at all reporters after the lashing Rigg had handed out during the Stemec Henderson investigation. Like the cops, the reporters hadn’t forgotten Rigg.

  At precisely two o’clock, Medical Examiner Charles McGarry attempted to stride into the lunchroom, but he didn’t stride with the cool assurance of a man in charge. His normal ruddy complexion had lost its red, and he was sweating. Profusely.

  Three men in business suits followed him. Rigg guessed they were the doctors McGarry mentioned in his earlier, preliminary statement, when he announced that nothing of value had been learned from the initial examination of the Graves girls.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ McGarry began, jamming a shaking hand into his pants pocket. ‘Let me first introduce the three most notable physicians who assisted in our examination of Beatrice and Priscilla Graves.’ McGarry identified the doctors from St Francis, St Michael’s and Stroger.

  ‘It is their unanimous, and I mean unanimous, conclusion,’ he said, ‘that both girls died of hypothermia.’

  The room erupted. ‘They froze to death?’ a reporter shouted. ‘That’s it? They froze to death?’

  McGarry bit his lower lip, probably to keep it from trembling, but said nothing.

  ‘Like they’d just gone out to play, naked, in the cold?’ It was a wise-ass question from the wise-ass Primer, who wrote and blogged for the Curious Chicagoan, Chicago’s gamiest scandal rag. And ruined lives, like Rigg’s, by spinning words into untruths.

  ‘Or were they deliberately frozen to death?’ Rigg asked.

  ‘My God,’ another reporter murmured.

  ‘I know that, to some,’ McGarry said, ‘this finding might be unsatisfactory—’

  A dozen reporters shouted. ‘Come on, McGarry,’ one of the louder ones yelled, ‘you can’t brush this off as exposure to cold. They didn’t just wander into that ravine! They were tossed.’

  ‘What about those punctures?’ someone else screamed.

  ‘There were three, yes, on Beatrice,’ McGarry said, his voice quivering. ‘But, as we said in our previous announcement, they were shallow, less than a quarter-inch in depth, and could not have caused death.’ All three of the doctors nodded like bobble-heads, perhaps to encourage McGarry to keep taking the arrows that could have been shot at them.

  Their relief was short-lived. More questions were shouted, and McGarry turned, pleading, to the three doctors. Kemp, from St Francis, stepped forward. ‘We understand that hypothe
rmia is an unsatisfactory finding in cause of death,’ he said. ‘But we have very carefully examined the two young ladies, and I mean extremely carefully, and we simply cannot determine any cause of death except hypothermia.’

  ‘How long were the girls lying in the ravine?’

  Kemp didn’t retreat. ‘No telling, because of the extreme conditions that existed between December 28, when they went missing, and January 21, when they were found. The cold and the snowfall insulated the bodies from deterioration, making a conclusive analysis impossible.’

  ‘Your findings are no findings at all?’ a reporter from WGN shouted.

  ‘Essentially, yes,’ Dr Kemp said.

  Rigg then asked, ‘Is there any evidence of sexual assault?’

  Kemp hesitated just long enough for Rigg to believe Glet’s tip was accurate. Beatrice may have been penetrated. Finally, Kemp shook his head and looked away to take another question.

  Each of the three medical men took turns facing the same incredulity, answering the same questions over and over. Murder by freezing was not unheard of but there might never be a final accounting for the deaths of Beatrice and Priscilla Graves.

  The press finally gave it up. Rigg turned to file out with them and spotted Greg Theodore leaning against the back wall, smiling at him. The Trib’s media reporter had always been a scrupulous associate, and his short, factual sidebar about Rigg’s return was more evidence of that, but Rigg didn’t want to get buttonholed for a comment that might make him newsworthy for a second day in a row. He hurried to his car and sped away.

  He spotted a McDonald’s a mile later and realized he’d not eaten since before he’d ignored the hamburger at the Rail-Vu the previous evening. He pulled in and took his laptop inside. It was three-thirty, mid-afternoon, and the McDonald’s was deserted enough to work. He got two Quarter Pounders and a coffee, and took them to the table farthest from the counter.

  He wrote the McGarry presser straight, reporting every smart question and every wooden non-reply exactly as it had played out. He made no mention of McGarry’s trembling hands, waxen face, or the obvious discomfort of the three forensic physicians. There was plenty wrong with the stilted, tentative question-and-answer performance he’d just witnessed, but that was for analysis, not factual reporting. He hesitated a bit, then inserted his byline and sent the piece off to Benten.

  He’d just finished the first Quarter Pounder when his computer dinged with an incoming email: Got it, thanks. Aria.

  The response came from Aria Gamble, someone he’d never met, but whose name he recognized as the features reporter who’d written the Examiner’s laudatory pieces about Corky Feldott. Every day seemed to be a shuffle at the Bastion, an ever-fragmenting puzzle of shifting jobs and lay-offs, and now it seemed the scramble had come to the Pink. Aria Gamble had come to replace someone, likely Eleanor, the supplement’s copy editor.

  He finished his coffee, tossed the second burger in the trash, and had just gotten outside when his cell phone rang.

  It was Glet.

  ELEVEN

  ‘You heard?’ Glet asked.

  ‘Hypothermia.’

  ‘The only things frozen are the brains of McGarry and the three wise men he paraded out to take the heat,’ Glet said. ‘McGarry’s a nervous fool. He should have insisted they keep examining, instead of trotting out those doctors to say they couldn’t find shit other than murder by freezing.’

  ‘And Lehman’s Klaus Lanz pinch?’

  ‘Everybody knows Lehman’s just buying time, using Lanz to show he’s hot on the case.’

  ‘What are you hot on, these days?’

  ‘Chasing a lead.’

  ‘Working the girls though, right?’ Rigg asked.

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘You don’t know if you’re working the biggest heater case in town?’

  ‘It’s a fragile thread I’m pulling.’

  ‘Cut the poetic, Jerome. Why the subterfuge?’

  ‘I heard you came by the house,’ Glet said, dodging.

  ‘Something came from that cabbie you tipped me to.’

  ‘What?’ Glet asked.

  ‘He had a story. Does the name “Richie Fernandez” mean anything to you?’

  ‘Who?’ Glet’s confusion sounded genuine.

  It was Glet’s tip, so Rigg gave it all to him.

  ‘No shit?’ Glet said when Rigg was done. ‘Lehman actually arrested the guy?’

  ‘But never charged him with anything, and now the guy’s disappeared. He didn’t even go back to his flop for his things.’

  ‘It was a catch-and-release, then,’ Glet said. ‘Guy was probably so scared, he ran all the way out of town.’

  ‘Or Lehman’s still got him.’

  ‘Unbooked for a whole week?’ Glet paused to think, and then spoke slowly. ‘It’s possible. He could have stashed him in some motel where Lehman scares the owner, but that’s risky, even for Lehman. He can’t just book a suspect after holding him for a week. Unless … No, Jeez, it’s got to be another catch-and-release.’

  ‘Why didn’t you chase the cabbie yourself, Jerome?’

  Glet named Lehman’s secretary. ‘I told you: I was near her desk when the tip came in. “You’re sure it was the girls?” she’s saying to the caller, writing, Rocco Enrice, cabbie, on a pink message pad. I called downtown, got the licensing bureau, found out he drove a Checker south of Midway. I gave it to you as a gesture of goodwill.’

  ‘You copped a lead meant for Lehman—’

  ‘Which, as it turned out, was a damned good lead,’ Glet interrupted.

  ‘What’s got you more interested than the girls?’

  ‘Like I said, I don’t know yet.’

  ‘You’re sounding odd, Jerome.’

  ‘Maybe I’m looking back further.’

  ‘The boys?’

  ‘Not now, Milo.’

  ‘Lehman knows what you’re chasing?’

  ‘He thinks I’m assisting on a weapons distribution thing, which ain’t all untrue.’

  ‘Tip me, Jerome.’

  ‘Later,’ Glet said, and hung up.

  From the doorway, the Pink was the same, and it wasn’t.

  Eleanor and one of the bridge hens were there. The pink-tile floor was just as scuffed, the pink walls just as faded. The five metal desks were arranged as always: Eleanor’s gray one in front, the two gold ones used by the part-time hens right behind it, and, farther back still, the black one that had once been used by the cuttery’s owner and was now reserved for the relentlessly plaid advertising salesman. Rigg’s red desk, too, was where it should be – jammed against the back wall, as if to isolate a recalcitrant child.

  It was the sound of the place that had changed. The Pink never had been energized by the clatter of a real working newsroom. It was a former beauty salon, a place that still smelled of dyes and shampoos intermixed with Benten’s cigarette smoke, peopled now by folks who chuckled softly to entice eighth-of-a-page advertisers. But, overarching it all, there’d always been the irregular thrum of Benten’s exhaust fan vibrating the glass of his office wall and the metal of the desks, and even the plaster of the old walls.

  That thrum was gone; the fan had been silenced. Now, the Pink squeaked.

  Eleanor gave him a half-smile as he walked past her desk.

  A woman stood making great brownish swirls on the inside of Benten’s glass wall. She was quite beautiful, quite tall, quite dark-haired, quite slim, and she wore a quite black sheath of a dress and pearls – pearls, for damned sake. She was spraying Windex on to the glass with her right hand, wiping away great gobs of dark brown nicotine goo with the bunched paper towels in her left. Benten was being cleansed away.

  Rigg went to his red desk, sat down and turned to watch the woman behind the smeared glass. She seemed to give him no notice and continued scrubbing, though the glass seemed to give her scrubbing no notice as well. Benten had been exhaling tar and nicotine on to it for several years and, despite the efforts of the rickety fa
n, much of it had stuck like glue, apparently. All she was accomplishing was to smear the brown film into wide swirls before tossing each bunch of toweling into one of three open black garbage bags and reaching for more. After a couple of moments, Rigg got up and walked to her doorway.

  ‘It’s going to be really nice when you get it done,’ he said. ‘You’ll have a clear view of all of us, or at least those who are left.’

  ‘You’re Rigg,’ she said, dropping another bunch of soiled paper towels into a bag.

  ‘You’re Aria, the person who intercepted my copy.’

  ‘Not intercepted. Accepted.’

  ‘You’re Features at the Bastion.’

  ‘I’m no longer necessary at the Bastion,’ she said, reaching for more towels and misting more Windex on to the glass. ‘I’m here to help boost ad revenue.’

  ‘Where’s Benten?’

  ‘At home, I presume.’

  ‘Whacked?’

  ‘Leave of absence, I heard. I don’t know.’

  ‘Why are you wearing pearls?’ The woman’s vagueness was irritating.

  ‘Don’t you like pearls?’ she asked, swirling.

  ‘I do, so long as they’re not sported by someone who got a good editor like Harold Benten bounced from his job.’

  ‘I told you: I don’t know what precipitated the change. Call Donovan,’ she said, naming the real-estate developer bastard who’d bought the Examiner two years earlier and was hastening its descent into oblivion.

  ‘Are they real, or are they plastic?’

  With the briefest glance down toward her chest, she smiled. ‘You’re referring to the pearls?’

  He felt his face flush, which hadn’t happened in years. ‘Yes … yes, of—’

  ‘Why don’t you call Donovan – or Benten at home?’ she said, grinning even more broadly now, from making him stammer.

  ‘He knows pearls?’

  ‘I’m here to help bring in advertising, like I said.’

  ‘But Benten’s not coming back?’

  ‘Call him at home,’ she said again.

  ‘And the rest?’ he asked, pointing out to the almost empty newsroom.

  ‘They scattered when I came in this morning.’ She dropped more soiled towels, grabbed more clean ones.