The Black Cage

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘And that is? Rigg asked, because it was expected.

  ‘Why didn’t they come after you like they did Glet?’

  ‘Perhaps it was too late. They had to get away fast. Her car’s noticeable. Maybe it will turn up.’

  Theodore leaned back, struggling to find conclusions. ‘They’re running together, or he killed her, as you suggested. Either way, someone’s getting by just fine on what came from hocking those pearls?’

  ‘Big bucks – seventy-five grand, she said.’ Rigg turned to look out the window, down to the little lake. The surface had completely thawed; the thick ice that had run out to the hole in the center had long since melted away.

  ‘We’re left with only speculation?’ Theodore asked, standing up.

  ‘Only speculation,’ Rigg said, relaxing his grip on the little plastic flower pot and standing up too.

  FORTY-SIX

  The Chicago Tribune ran Theodore’s speculation on the following Sunday’s front page. That was rare. Their front page was for hard news, not for something so clearly labeled as conjecture. But interest in the disappearance of the rising star of Chicago law enforcement had remained fevered; many saw young Cornelius Feldott as the only hope to rise from the muck to cleanse Cook County. Theodore’s Sunday piece shattered all that.

  He’d opened with the few facts:

  When Cornelius Feldott, an always punctual young man, failed to show up for work or answer his phone, his staff became worried. Police were called, a wellness check was conducted. Nothing appeared to be missing from his apartment, and his county car, a black Chevrolet Impala, was parked in the complex’s garage. It was as if he’d just gone out for a walk. But Cornelius Feldott was nowhere to be found.

  Enter the mysterious complication of the beautiful Aria Gamble, an editor of the Chicago Examiner. Unnoticed in the recent collapse of that paper, when all of its employees were let go and there was no co-worker to report her missing, Miss Gamble had disappeared, too. Like Feldott, her apartment was undisturbed, appearing as though she’d stepped out for a short time. Unlike Feldott, her car, a tiny red MINI Cooper, was missing from her apartment’s assigned parking space.

  Intriguingly, while the two seemed to have had no visible association in their recent lives, professors at Northwestern University confirmed that they were very close as undergraduates. And Gamble’s recent praise in support of Feldott is indisputable. She’d written several laudatory profiles of the rising young medical examiner, as if to help his career.

  For now, these few facts are all that is known. But Milo Rigg, formerly the premier investigative reporter and crime columnist for the Chicago Examiner, suspects much more. He postulates a theory about the disappearances of Cornelius Feldott and Aria Gamble, theorizing that the closeness they developed as Northwestern undergraduates led Gamble to suspect Feldott of plotting murders that would propel him into prominence in Cook County government. Rigg wonders – this is his pure speculation – if Feldott killed Beatrice and Priscilla Graves, Jennifer Ann Day and Tana Damm to set himself up to appear to solve the murders by falsely accusing Cook County Deputy Sheriff Jerome Glet of the killings after Glet was found dead, purportedly of a self-inflicted gunshot, in his Chicago home. Perhaps furthering this, alleged evidence of his involvement in the girls’ murders was purportedly discovered by Feldott at Glet’s home – evidence that Feldott himself may have planted, according to Rigg. Rigg believes Feldott may have had another motive for killing Glet besides needing a fall guy, namely fearing that the deputy had uncovered his scheme. Rigg believes it’s possible that Gamble discovered all this and that Feldott killed Gamble when she confronted him with her suspicions.

  Rigg also wonders if his relentless investigation into the disappearance of a suspect in the Graves murders, Richie Fernandez – who was later found dead in the Rock River, several miles north of Charles McGarry’s Winthrop County estate – figures into the still-unsolved Stemec Henderson murders and the more recent killings of the girls. His reporting alleged that former Cook County sheriff, Joseph Lehman, had arrested Fernandez shortly before his disappearance, but no evidence has been found linking the sheriff to Fernandez’s death. He also alleged that former Cook County medical examiner, Charles McGarry, later found buried on his country estate, accompanied Lehman during the Fernandez arrest.

  Milo Rigg admits he is conflicted about the futures of the cases involving the recent murders of the girls and Charles McGarry, the ambiguous circumstances surrounding the deaths of Jerome Glet and Richie Fernandez, and the disappearance of his former boss, Aria Gamble. He stresses that his theories are speculative and not based upon known facts. Moreover, even if guilty of any crimes, he’s not confident that Cornelius Feldott will ever face justice. ‘He’s cunning, clever and perhaps on the run. He’ll know how to cover his tracks. He might have hidden Gamble’s car after killing her and changed his appearance. Certainly, the pearl necklace she wore every day was the real thing, likely to fetch Feldott enough money to fund a long, long run from the law.’

  Rigg closed his laptop. It was a relief. Theodore’s nose was good, but it had not been good enough.

  He looked out the window, down to the small lake at the base of the dune, recalling again that snippet of conversation from years earlier. ‘Pure silt, slushy compost if you will,’ the field ecologist had told him and Judith. ‘Young bucks back in the day used to race in circles on the ice – race, that is, until they hit a soft spot … cars still sinking … ought to be coming out of the other side of the world any day.’

  He didn’t want to remember, but he thought he might have been screaming that as a mantra that panicked night in February, as he crept the little car in low gear across the thick ice, until he was close enough to put it in neutral, jump out and, with a last tug on the transmission lever from outside, send it toward the hole in the ice in the center of the lake.

  It bobbed after it hit the water, bouncing in the splash of the waves it had set off. Rigg stared, transfixed, at the cavorting coffin-thing, horrified that the corpses of the shooter and the woman who, at the last minute, had tried to stop him, would clamber out and thrash their way to the safety of the edge of the ice. But, at last, the tiny MINI Cooper settled as the water calmed, and then it sank.

  Still, he remained immobile on the shore, weighted too heavily by too many realizations to move. Perhaps his gut had known even if his mind had rejected: Aria had been in it from the beginning, conspiring with Corky to fuel his rise. She’d been too laudatory about him and too relentlessly inquisitive about Glet’s fireworks. She’d played Luther Donovan to get assigned to the Pink, to get too close to the Examiner’s only reporter covering the girls’ killings. She’d played Rigg for sure, with her beauty and her wiles, to know what he knew and what he supposed he knew, to keep tabs, to report back to Corky. And then, when he’d tipped her offhandedly about Glet’s bringing DNA on a soda pop can and a paper coffee cup to the Richmond lab – her DNA, Corky’s DNA – they’d had to act. They’d already gone for Glet, and when Rigg began talking about having discovered traces Glet had left behind that pointed to the identity of the murderer of the girls, his fireworks, she’d come with Corky to the dune to kill again.

  But in her last instant, she’d lunged to save Rigg. She’d caught Feldott’s first bullets, giving Rigg time to fire back, to squeeze the trigger again and again until his clip was empty and Feldott lay dead like Aria on the ground.

  He wondered then, there on that shore, if the enigma that was Aria Gamble would come for him in the nights, beckoning from behind flat bars, from a new black cage. He wondered if he’d ever understand, but there was no knowing that, not then, and so he’d gone back up the dune and torn the cameras from the trees. Then he stayed up all night, watching the lake down below shimmer in the moonlight until the dawn came, searching for any glimmer of red beneath the surface of the water in the middle of the ice. But there was none. Finally he drove back to his apartment outside Chicago.

  Now, five weeks later
, on a Sunday in mid-March, he dared to hope that Gregory’s piece in the Trib might end it. The girls’, Glet’s, Fernandez’s and McGarry’s murders would never be officially solved. Lehman would bask in Florida, Aria would always be disappeared and Corky Feldott would forever be on the run. But a sort of justice for the girls and Glet had been rendered on the top of his dune – a justice rendered in a panic and only reflexively, to be sure, but it had been a justice, nonetheless.

  There would be justice of a sort for the Stemec Henderson boys too, he hoped. Glet was dead and had left no usable evidence against Kevin Wilcox behind. But there would be punishment. The federal gun case against Wilcox looked solid, and would almost certainly result in a conviction and a long prison sentence.

  Now there remained only the last pearl.

  He reached for the little plastic flower pot he’d clutched before Theodore could touch it. Rigg had cursed himself at that moment, for, if Theodore had picked it up, however innocently, he would have wondered about the rattle in the bottom of the plastic pot. If he’d poked a finger beneath the little plastic flower to see what caused it, Rigg could have been indicted for murder.

  The glint of the pearls torn from her as she fell, lying scattered down the dune, had stopped his breath when he finally returned to his caboose, late in the morning of the last day of February. Frantic, he’d scrambled down to scoop them up and jam them in his pocket. And then he drove, as he’d planned for days, to a sporting-goods store in Michigan City to buy the bamboo fishing pole for pretense, a line to weight and mark off in five-foot increments, and the rubber dinghy, for, by then, weeks had passed and the small lake had thawed. Rigg rowed his new dinghy to the center of the lake that afternoon.

  ‘What goes to the bottom keeps descending?’ Judith had asked.

  ‘All is welcomed,’ the field ecologist had said.

  Rigg dropped the plastic bag of pearls and sand overboard and eased the weighted end of the marked line in after it. Anyone watching would notice the bamboo pole and think he was merely fishing. He located the metal roof – a hard spot, five feet higher than the surrounding silt. He’d paid out forty-nine feet.

  He rowed out every day, after that. As the small lake warmed, the silt grew more welcoming. The hard spot at the bottom of the lake settled more. By the second Wednesday in March, when Greg Theodore came out, the top of the car was down to a depth of fifty-four feet.

  Now, on Sunday, there was one thing left to do. He put the lone pearl he’d been saving, for reasons he did not quite understand, into the small jar he’d filled with sand.

  ‘Paste, but good paste,’ the jeweler in Grand Rapids had called it. Rigg had driven all the way up there to be sure no one near the dunes would know.

  ‘The string is broken,’ Rigg said, as it surely was when she lunged to stop the bullet meant for him.

  ‘The value of a whole necklace would be a thousand dollars, no more,’ the jeweler said.

  Rigg thanked the jeweler, put the last pearl in his pocket and walked out into the sunshine. He’d had the thought to toss it into one of the city’s garbage receptacles on the street, but it didn’t seem fitting. And so he’d brought it back to the caboose, kept it safe at the bottom of the little plastic flower pot, hoping it might nudge him into understanding. The woman had schemed horribly, perhaps even helped to kill. But, in her last instant, she’d saved his life.

  He supposed he’d have to add that question to the other torments he’d struggle with for the rest of his life, but that was not for now. He rowed to the center of the lake, found the hard spot. It was fifty-six feet down, that Sunday.

  He eased the little jar into the water and let it go. It would drop to the car and the other pearls, and keep settling for forever beside the enigma of the woman he’d once thought he might learn to love.