The Black Cage

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘What the hell are you doing, calling me on a Saturday?’

  ‘Trying to figure out what the hell you’re doing at ATF. You haven’t been home.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Woman next door.’

  ‘Well, I’m home now, not that it’s an invitation for you to stop by. I been working late nights and leaving early in the morning. That old bat goes to bed right after nine, regular as clockwork, and doesn’t wake up until ten the next morning. She’s into the vodka, five minutes later.’

  ‘What are you doing at ATF, Jerome?’

  ‘It’s no secret. Officially, I’m assisting our federal friends in an illegal weapons distribution case.’

  ‘And unofficially?’

  ‘Something more.’

  ‘Something about the boys, as you implied last time we spoke?’

  ‘It’s always the boys, Milo. I told you I never forgot. Not for publication yet, but ATF picked up someone who might know something.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘That’s all for now.’

  Glet was playing cagey. Rigg would hold back, too, like he’d held back with Lehman and McGarry, and not say anything about the yellow card that linked the boys to the girls. ‘I’ve got something new on Richie Fernandez,’ Rigg said instead. ‘Remember I told you it was two cops that pinched him?’

  ‘One of them was Lehman, you said, and that the guy was never booked, that he never returned to his flop. Catch-and-release, I said it was probably, and Lehman scared him so bad the guy left town.’

  ‘The other guy along for the bust wasn’t a cop. It was McGarry.’

  For a moment, there was only silence, and then Glet said, ‘That doesn’t need to be no big deal, Milo. The M.E.’s a real interested party this time around. You hammered him for not helping on Stemec Henderson. Maybe he pushed Lehman to get him involved so he could look good. We all want to look better, this time.’

  ‘Lehman came to the Pink yesterday. He brought McGarry.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘They wanted to brace me about going to the Graves place about a tip I got.’

  ‘McGarry doesn’t brace anybody; he’s too soft. What tip?’

  ‘Just a tip, for now, Jerome, unless you want to tell me more about ATF.’

  ‘I can wait.’

  ‘What if Lehman’s got Fernandez somewhere?’ Rigg asked.

  ‘Stashed without being booked, like we talked last time?’

  ‘I called around. Nobody knows anything about Fernandez and, when I asked Lehman about him, he acted as confused as everybody else. But McGarry? He got real nervous. Cracked a sweat. Lehman had to hustle him away.’

  ‘You’re saying McGarry helped Lehman do a nasty on Fernandez?’

  ‘I don’t think Fernandez was a catch-and-release,’ Rigg said.

  ‘McGarry? McGarry’s not a doer; he’s a … he’s a keeper,’ Glet said, but he said it softly, as if he was trying out the idea on himself. And then he hung up before Rigg could ask what he meant.

  Rigg walked back to Aria’s office. ‘I just told Glet how nervous I made McGarry when I asked about Fernandez.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I think I might have agitated Glet a little, too.’

  She looked at her watch. ‘Do you have dinner plans?’

  ‘I never have dinner plans.’

  ‘Let’s go for grilled cheese,’ she said.

  SIXTEEN

  ‘It looked huge on the Internet, but, up close, it looks endless,’ Rigg said, looking through the pines on the other side of the road. Night was coming fast, but there was still enough light to see.

  Aria had pulled off on to the shoulder of the side road and cut the engine. It was a relief. She’d insisted on driving her MINI Cooper because she said Rigg’s Taurus was compromised from his too-obvious attempt to tail McGarry and Lehman. No doubt she was right, Rigg allowed, but there was nothing compromised about the way she drove. Her Cooper was red, fitted with a loud, high-performance exhaust system, and she drove it like she was fleeing the hounds of hell, thirty miles an hour over the posted limit, dodging recklessly in and out of traffic, all the way out to Winthrop County.

  ‘Twenty million dollars’ worth of endless, in fact, according to his wife’s divorce filing,’ Aria said. ‘Why a man with all that would want to be medical examiner in a crooked county is beyond me.’

  ‘Word was, he wanted stature of his own, instead of coasting on his father’s business success. There was talk he was going to run for president of the county board after the M.E.’s office.’

  ‘And from there, governor?’ She turned to give him a smile. ‘Your reporting on Stemec Henderson trashed that.’

  ‘This is Illinois, remember? Our last two governors had enough millions to buy the office. McGarry has enough, too, starting with television commercials to make voters forget his incompetence.’ He leaned forward. ‘Definitely someone’s home.’ Several lights were on inside McGarry’s mansion.

  ‘Could be just the staff. Housekeeping, the chef and a maintenance manager, I imagine.’

  ‘The wife is gone?’

  ‘She’s at their penthouse condo on Longboat Key, probably communicating hourly with her divorce attorney and perusing chalets for sale in Switzerland. And McGarry spends most of his time at their mansion on Astor Street. He doesn’t come here much.’

  ‘Except for yesterday, with Lehman, in a hurry,’ Rigg said.

  She turned to look at him. ‘You really think they’re keeping Fernandez, a suspected murderer, among the staff in the main house?’

  ‘None of the other buildings look heated,’ Rigg said, of the several unlit outbuildings.

  ‘My God,’ she said. ‘You’re not thinking …?’ She let the thought trail off. The idea that Fernandez was being kept freezing, or frozen, in an unheated, unlit outbuilding was too heinous for words.

  She twisted the ignition key. ‘It’s getting too dark to see,’ she said.

  She swung the car around, spinning her tires on the snow-slicked road until they bit into the asphalt. Three miles later, she pulled into the parking lot of the bar where McGarry and Lehman had stopped the day before. Three pickup trucks and one dirt-encrusted sedan were parked on the gravel.

  ‘Do you ever drive rationally?’ Rigg asked.

  She laughed. ‘I took a performance driving course, out in California. It’s added controlled risk to life.’ She reached for the door handle. ‘Shall we dispel all doubt that they stopped here to eat?’

  The place was the dump she’d described – paneled in knotty pine, faintly crunchy underfoot from grit dragged in from the parking lot, and lit by ancient neon freebie signs for Old Style and Bud Lite, and a strand of multi-colored Christmas lights draped across two stuffed deer heads on a side wall.

  ‘My treat,’ she said.

  The three bearded men in flannel shirts and worn jeans perched on stools there grinned as she walked up to the bar. Stunning in tailored slacks, a short black wool jacket and the hint of pearls beneath, she was obviously a quantum leap in visuals from the deer heads, even ones so festively draped with Christmas lights. She ordered two grilled cheese sandwiches, but it was when she added two regular Budweisers – no Lites – to chase the cheese that their grins stretched into worshipful smiles. No doubt, this was a creature of discernment rarely, if ever, encountered in their pine-paneled midst.

  The bartender, a bearded man of flannel as well, but also of efficiency, put both bagged sandwiches into the microwave behind the bar. They ballooned in an instant, presumably rendering them bacteria free. Aria laid a twenty on the bar and they took their cans, their bloated sandwich bags and the admiring eyes of all four males to the scuffed plastic laminate table in the farthest corner.

  ‘Not your usual dining experience?’ she asked, as they sat down. The light from the neon beer signs danced colors in her eyes.

  ‘I’m comfortable in places like this,’ he said.

  ‘Even now that you’re alone?�
��

  He shrugged at her directness. He didn’t want to talk about Judith.

  ‘There are so many stories about you,’ she said, taking a sip of beer. ‘Joined the Examiner fresh out of city college, quickly rose to be a crusader reporter with his own column, loner, except devoted to his wife, became a traumatized widower, and finally, and most unkindly, exposed lover.’

  ‘I was never anything to Carlotta Henderson except an ear.’

  ‘As you wish,’ she said.

  ‘There are so very few stories about you,’ he said.

  ‘You scrubbed me?’ she asked, using the newspapermen’s term for deep background checking.

  ‘I Googled, was all,’ he said. ‘Northwestern grad, reporter for a local suburban rag, society writer at the Examiner, and now advertising peddler at the Pink. No mention of a marriage.’

  ‘Three months to a boy during college. Annulled. Kept his last name because it sounded better than my maiden name, which is “Fall”.’ She took another sip of her beer.

  ‘Feldott’s a Northwestern grad, too. Did you know him?’

  ‘When he got named assistant M.E. I recognized his picture in the paper as someone from school, but we never spoke or anything.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to open your sandwich?’

  ‘I like things to harden,’ she said, arching her eyebrows just a little.

  Rigg looked down to concentrate on unwrapping his sandwich rather than chase thoughts he hadn’t had since before Judith was killed. Besides, the woman – the very attractive woman – was his boss.

  The escaping steam smelled old, like something from a rusted pipe. ‘I think you’re right about Lehman and McGarry not coming here to eat,’ he said.

  She laughed. ‘So, rich bitch is right, not just getting by on her looks?’

  He smiled. She was so very direct. ‘About the grilled cheese, certainly. Then again, you are North Shore.’

  ‘My immediate family is not incredibly rich like Luther Donovan.’

  ‘Just a modest number of millions?’

  ‘Not even close,’ she said.

  ‘One more question about you?’

  ‘Shoot,’ she said.

  ‘Are those pearls real?’

  She laughed her good laugh again. ‘You asked that when we first met.’

  ‘You didn’t answer.’

  ‘I’ll say this,’ she said. ‘If they’re real, their size would make them worth a lot of money, and that would be risky, wearing a fortune around my neck.’

  ‘You said you like risk. Your driving proves that.’

  ‘Most people assume they’re fake.’ She raised her beer in a toast. ‘I like that you’re tenacious, Milo. I like that you’re loyal to Carlotta Henderson.’

  ‘She’s the one left to shoulder it all, after everyone else has forgotten.’

  ‘Except you.’

  ‘She calls in the middle of the night when she gets something, and she keeps getting things. Lots of wackos, lots of nut jobs are out there. But she treats every one as if it was the real thing, the final clue, and now comes a yellow card that might tie the girls’ killer to Stemec Henderson.’

  ‘Can it be he’s started up again, after a fifteen-month lull?’ she asked.

  ‘We might know soon enough. Glet implied he’s working a new angle to Stemec Henderson, someone ATF picked up who might know something about the boys. It might lead to the girls.’

  ‘So, who has the card now?’ she asked.

  He said nothing, which said it all.

  She reached across the table to touch the back of his hand. Her fingers were light and warm. ‘This could blow back past you and on to the Examiner, like those pictures did. It’s a delicate time, financially, for Donovan.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  She took her hand away, peeled open the plastic bag containing the sandwich and took a bite. ‘Just as I remembered.’ She reached quickly for her beer.

  He tasted his sandwich. It was like paste.

  They finished their beers, dropped their uneaten sandwiches in the trash barrel by the door and left.

  Neither of them spoke as she raced them through a night spotted only here and there by houselights, but when she downshifted to speed up the ramp to the east–west tollway, she said, ‘I heard you gave away all your furniture.’

  ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘From somebody who heard it from somebody who doesn’t know anything about it at all.’

  ‘I needed to declutter the apartment.’

  ‘You didn’t want reminders,’ she said.

  ‘I kept our place in the dunes intact,’ he said.

  ‘So, does your apartment have furniture, or not?’ she asked.

  ‘A love seat.’

  ‘You kept a love seat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that metaphorical?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘I heard you also have a wall of boxes filled with Stemec Henderson files.’

  ‘Answers might be in them.’

  ‘Don’t file that index card away,’ she said, swerving around a tank truck. ‘You have to turn that over to Lehman, if only for your own safety.’

  He turned to look at her. Her beauty and her pearls glittered in the glow of the instrument panel. She was right.

  ‘You know, too,’ she went on, ‘that the Henderson woman was only a messenger, right? You were the intended recipient.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  The loud exhaust from her Cooper masked the sounds of the cars they passed, and again they didn’t talk. After another ten miles, they exited the tollway. Five minutes later, she swung into the parking lot behind the Pink. She switched off the engine, but still they did not speak. The night was not late.

  He got out.

  ‘You have to turn over that card,’ she said, but she said it to the windshield, not facing him.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘And I want to see your wall of boxes,’ she said, still looking straight ahead.

  He knew that, too. He closed her door, she sped away and he walked to his car.

  SEVENTEEN

  Glet called at 8:30 that Sunday morning. Rigg was sitting on his love seat with an open file box on his lap. In the four hours since he’d been rousted by the cage, he’d rearranged his wall of boxes so that the bottom ones were now on top, and he’d begun looking through notes he hadn’t gone over in some time. But the search for clues he’d missed would still be scattershot, because there was nothing else left for it to be.

  ‘Lehman is issuing a statement, no press conference, in thirty minutes,’ Glet said. ‘Two boys, both age ten, found a sealed, five-gallon drum along the beach two days ago. It was heavy, wrapped with waterproof duct tape. Thinking it was valuable, they snuck the drum into one of the kids’ garages and opened it last night after hockey practice. They freaked. The garage boy’s old man called the Chicago cops. They called us.’

  ‘Parts?’

  ‘All that were missing. McGarry brought in his three fancy doctors to sort of reassemble her. Five foot six, 150 pounds, mid-teens. Lehman thinks her face matches a photo of a missing girl.’

  ‘You’re working this?’

  ‘We got people on it.’

  ‘But not you?’

  ‘I’m working other angles, like I told you.’

  ‘Remember when I told you it was McGarry who was along for the Fernandez bust?’

  ‘So?’ Glet asked.

  ‘You said McGarry was a keeper, or the keeper. What did you mean?’

  ‘Nothing I can remember,’ Glet said, and hung up.

  The beige receptionist at the Dead House shook her head. ‘No press right now.’

  ‘Call Corky.’

  ‘Cornelius,’ she corrected, not moving a finger toward her phone, ‘but Mr Feldott is busy.’

  ‘Call him anyway.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll wait for Corky,’ he said, motioning to the row of plastic chairs against
one wall.

  ‘This isn’t a bus station,’ she said.

  He sat on one of the chairs and smiled back at her glare.

  Forty minutes later, two men emerged from the hall that led back to the morgue. One man was trembling, supported under one elbow by the second man. Corky Feldott followed close behind. He wasn’t sporting his perpetual grin that morning; the look on his face was stricken. Even his narrow necktie that day was black, funereal. With the barest of frowns at Rigg, he put his hand on the trembling man’s shoulder and then the two visitors walked out on to the sidewalk.

  Feldott nodded to Rigg and motioned him over. ‘Poor people,’ Feldott said. ‘They’ve been sitting on a ransom card that never got followed by a money demand for a month, hoping their girl was alive.’

  ‘Card?’ Rigg asked, trying to sound casual.

  ‘Not for publication, but it wasn’t even a letter, just a little yellow thing,’ Feldott said.

  ‘Where’s McGarry?’ Rigg asked.

  ‘I’m handling this part of it,’ Feldott said.

  Rigg asked about freckles and a faint, slight scar. Feldott nodded, remembering when Rigg had asked about them earlier, but said nothing further now. Feldott gave him details about the Montrose Harbor girl, asked him to wait until noon to file, so that the men who’d just left could notify their other family members, and sent Rigg on his way.

  Noon was still two hours away and Rigg’s story on Fernandez was still single-sourced and flimsy. He had time to drive back to the Kellington Arms and try again. Not surprisingly, a different man was behind the counter.

  ‘Richie Fernandez,’ Rigg said.

  ‘Don’t know him.’

  ‘Busted here.’

  ‘Don’t know him.’

  ‘The night clerk saw it.’

  ‘Talk to him, then.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘No telling which night clerk you’re talking about. A lot of us take turns at the desk. Get free nights that way.’

  Rigg took out a ten. ‘Who else might have seen the bust?’

  The man’s face came alive at the sight of the green. ‘I heard Wally was down the hall when the cops came.’

  ‘Is he here now?’

  The clerk nodded, his eyes on the ten. Rigg handed it over.