A Rose From The Executioner

by Edward Izzi

  Upon further investigation, I had discovered that the car, which was only used for one day, was paid for in cash, and used for a little over 24 hours. I acquired the mobile telephone number which was used on the rental contract, but when I called the number, was disconnected. I had looked at the contract and noticed that a driver’s license was used as the required identification. I ran the driver’s license through the Secretary of State and verified the name. I also checked with Avis to see if the car had been re-rented again or was still on the rental lot at the O’Hare garage. She called me back and verified that the car was still in the parking garage and hadn’t been rented. Since it had just been returned the night before and had not been cleaned out yet, I called Tommy and asked him to run over there and impound the car. I wanted CSI to run some prints and get whatever other evidence was inside of the vehicle. I then asked Tommy to meet me over at 5208 North Narragansett.

  As I approached the front entrance of the yellow brick bungalow, Tommy went in the back yard to keep an eye on the back door. When I rang the front door bell, I heard some loud cluttering noises. I then heard Tommy yell out “Chicago Police” and I ran towards the back yard with my gun drawn.

  Tommy had already began chasing the suspect down the back alley and, even though he was now a heavy smoker, was able to easily catch and apprehend the suspect about a half block down the back way. He must have had something to hide, as he was not interested in answering the door or our questions. We handcuffed the suspect and brought him down to the Sixteenth District.

  Bartell, was a taller man in his late fifty’s, with gray, receding hair and was wearing dark horn-rimmed glasses. He was very silent in the squad car and, at first, said very little when we sat him down in the interrogation room. As I was studying the suspect, I imagined him on the security tapes, and noticed he had the same body type and build as Monsignor Kilbane. While I was sitting with the suspect, I noticed an unusual ring that he was wearing on his right hand. It looked very familiar, and I couldn’t remember where I had seen it before.

  “That looks pretty expensive,” I said, drawing the suspect’s attention to his right hand. “Where did you get that ring?” It was shiny and gold, with a red cross design clad in very small rubies. He didn’t say much, other than he had ‘received it as a gift’.

  “Why did you run when I knocked on the front door?” I asked him. Bartell sat there silent for several moments, as if to think long and hard about his answer.

  “I’ve been very behind on my child support payments, and I thought you guys had come over to take me into custody. I can’t afford to miss any more days of work,” Bartell replied.

  “This has nothing to do with child support. We wanted to ask you a few questions regarding your rental car from Avis. We noticed that it was used for only a day and was returned late last evening. Why did you need a rental car?” I asked.

  “My car was in the shop, and I needed it to go to work,” he replied.

  “We talked to the Avis employee who rented you the car, and she said you were very specific as to the type and kind of car you were interested in renting that day. Why a blue Chevy Impala?” I inquired.

  “I wasn’t specific. That happened to be the only car that was available,” he quickly denied.

  “Well, it just so happens that the same make and model of that car is the same car that was driven and used by a murder suspect in a hospital homicide yesterday. That same car was displaying a stolen license plate. Do you know anything about it?”

  Bartell protested, “I don’t know anything about any murder. I needed a rental car to go to work yesterday. That’s all,” he said loudly.

  “What happened to your vehicle?”

  “It was in the body shop, and the driver’s side door was getting fixed from an accident I was in last week. He needed to keep the car in the shop until today.”

  “He didn’t have a loaner car to give you?” I asked him.

  “No, the rental car is covered under my insurance.”

  “Do you have the name of the body shop?” I politely asked.

  Bartell stumbled for several long seconds, until he pulled out his wallet.

  “I thought I had his card in my wallet,” as he kept fumbling.

  “What’s the name of the shop and where is it?”

  “Arcadia Body Shop, on West Irving Park,” he replied.

  “I need the name of your employer and his number. We need to verify your whereabouts yesterday afternoon too,” I said.

  Bartell then gave me his employer’s information. He said he worked at M & A Machining Shop on Belmont and Laramie as a die and machine operator. He reluctantly answered a few more specific questions about his job description and work hours. I then decided to hold him in lockup for a little while until I could verify his employer and body shop information. I needed to check out his story. I figured that, if his alibi was true, and the body shop could confirm the accident and his car repair, that Bartell was going to be a dead end and I would release him later that evening.

  I called his employer and left him a message to call me back, as he was out of the office and was “not available”. It was after 5:00pm, and when I called the body shop, it had already closed. I then left a message on the company’s voice mail. As I was sitting at my desk making these phone calls, I couldn’t get that guy’s ring out of my head. I had seen it before, but where?

  As I was at my computer trying to do some other cross checking and trying to verify his employment, my desk phone rang. It was Commander Callahan.

  “Dorian, get downstairs to lock up. NOW!” he yelled as he abruptly hung up the phone. I was confused. I ran downstairs with some other officers and detectives to check on the jail cell where we were keeping Bartell.

  The prisoner was laying on the prison cot of the jail cell and was totally unresponsive. It looked as though he had been convulsing and had vomit all over himself and on the prison floor. It first looked as though he had been choking. One of the patrolman was trying to administer CPR while another was calling EMS, telling them to get over to the district station right away. His eyes were wide open as if to have that “death stare”, as he was lying on his back without a heartbeat or any other vital signs.

  When the Chicago Fire EMS truck arrived, they tried in vain to revive him. The attending paramedic had estimated that he had already been dead for several minutes or more before the attending officer had noticed on the monitor that he was not moving.

  ‘What happened to him?” I demanded to know from the paramedic.

  “Not sure, but it looks like he’s been poisoned,” he replied. “He’s dead. We can’t revive him.”

  What the hell just happened? He couldn’t have been in his jail cell for more than a few hours. He requested the attending officer for a glass of water earlier, but other than that, nothing unusual. Several other paramedics arrived at the Sixteenth District, and Commander Callahan was speaking with the one of the Chicago Fire Department Deputy Chiefs.

  “Did you remove all of the suspects possessions and inventory them before locking him up?” the Deputy Chief asked me.

  “Well…yeah. I had one of the patrol officers remove his belongings, his belt and shoe laces,” I replied, still dazed and confused about what had actually happened.

  “We’re going over the surveillance tapes now, but nothing unusual happened, other than his receiving a glass of water,” another officer stated.

  The CSI investigators arrived and were taking pictures of the crime scene, as I walked over the cell monitoring station and tried to get some answers. Several of the officers and investigators were going over the surveillance tapes, and it was verified that no one else had entered the suspect’s prison cell. They were looking at the specific tape frames, watching and inventorying all the suspect’s actions and physical movements over the last few hours.

  After receiving a glass of water, Bartell turned his back away from the camera, and reached into his pocket. It looked as though he had put someth
ing in his mouth before drinking from the styrofoam cup. He then walked over to his cot and laid down, and after several long minutes, started convulsing.

  “He obviously had something in his pocket,” observed one of the investigators.

  “Didn’t you guys empty the prisoner’s pockets? Didn’t you guys inventory them with all of his other possessions before lockup?” the Commander loudly interrogated the attending female policeman.

  “We did. We made him empty his pockets. He had some loosely wrapped cough drops which he could keep because he said he had a ‘sore throat’.

  “Sore throat my ass!” I angrily replied. “Those throat lozenges were probably arsenic pills.”

  For whatever reason, Bartell felt it imperative to take a poison pill and ‘check out’ rather than face any consequences of whatever crime he had committed or was guilty of. But I just didn’t understand it. We didn’t lean very hard on him, and if his alibis and his employer had corroborated, we probably would have immediately released him. Why would he panic and kill himself?

  As Bartell’s dead body was removed by the coroner in a black body bag, several other detectives began working on his story. It turned out later that, Bartell’s late model Cadillac SUV was never in a car accident and had been parked on the street on North Narragansett for several days, even receiving a couple of parking tickets.

  He had been terminated by his employer over a month ago, and the dead suspect had recently been unemployed. The only thing that did check out was that he hadn’t paid child support in over a year to his ex-wife and two young children, with whom he had a very estranged relationship with. I kept turning over the facts of this recent suicide over in my head, and I began believing more and more, that Kilbane had nothing to do with any of these murders. There was something or someone much, much bigger out there, and it was something that I just couldn’t understand.

  I walked downstairs over to the evidence room where there was an attending officer and asked to see the dead prisoner’s belongings. It was still sealed in a manila envelope. I unsealed it and opened the contents on a nearby desk. There was Bartell’s wallet, which had $67.00 dollars in small bills inside, and .87 cents in some loose change. There was also a weathered silver Burberry watch with a blue dial and some scratches on the crystal, several keys with a “Nashville” keychain, and the gold ring with the ruby encrusted red cross. I picked up the ring and studied it for several minutes. I knew I had seen this ring somewhere before, and it looked familiar.

  I then did something that I had never done before. While the attending evidence officer wasn’t looking, I took the ring from the evidence bag and put it in my pocket. I acquired a new manila envelope and then ‘sealed’ it, returning the contents back to the attending clerk. My ‘sixth sense’ was screaming inside of me again, as I abruptly exited the evidence room. I was desperate, and I had a suspicious feeling.

  My gut was telling me that this expensive gold ring had a connection to these “Pedophile Priest Murders”.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Arezzo Jewelry

  The rush-hour traffic on Harlem and Belmont Avenues was horrendous that morning, as I was on my way to pay a good friend a visit. The sun was blatantly in my eyes as I was fumbling with my sunglasses and trying to maneuver my squad car. That was a monumental task, between the double-parked cars and the ‘stop and go’ buses which continued to slow down the north bound stream of traffic.

  Arezzo Jewelry was an established jewelry store on North Harlem Avenue, and my old high school friend, Michael Arezzo had owned and managed the store for many years. I had called him and asked him to make time for me earlier that morning, as I needed his jewelry expertise.

  We had both gone to Holy Cross High School in River Grove, and we remained good friends after we graduated and periodically talked whenever I was in the neighborhood. Although we had lost touch lately after my messy divorce, Michael was always there to rescue me in the past when I was in dire straits. He always assisted me when I needed a fast, last minute ‘Christmas gift’ on Christmas Eve or a discounted Lladro statute (which my ex-wife collected) whenever I was in the ‘doghouse’, which I often visited during our twenty-five years of marital bliss.

  I hadn’t had much need for jewelry since my grueling divorce, and I hadn’t seen or talked to Michael since our thirtieth high school reunion a few years ago. After parking my squad car on the east side of the street, I made my way to the front entrance of his elaborate jewelry store. I was buzzed in, and I waited several minutes before Michael came out of the back room.

  “Philip!” he exclaimed my name, as if he was excited to see me. His eyes and line of sight went immediately towards my forty-four-inch waist line.

  “Hello Michael.” We shook hands and immediately hugged one another, as my large, oversized stomach got to closely rub up next to his.

  “We’re on ‘Dunkin’ Donut’ diets, I see,” as he smiled. He seemed to be as embarrassed as I was about our over-sized waistlines. Michael was a tall, good looking Italian who only seemed to look better with age. Except for his visible over-indulgence for pasta, and with a few distinguished greys, he looked almost the same as he did in high school.

  “How’s Jeanne?” I asked, noticing that his wife and full-time salesperson was not behind the counter.

  “She’s great,” he replied. “You’re here to buy an engagement ring for your new girlfriend?” he presumptuously asked, knowing full well that I was there for anything but that.

  “I wish, Mikie, but no…no girlfriend yet.”

  “I see. You’ll have to work on that before the next reunion,” he kiddingly commented, fumbling with his reading glasses tied around his neck and the jeweler’s eye-piece that he regularly kept in his shirt pocket.

  “Not in any rush,” I disclaimed, hoping to dispel any immediate rumors.

  Michael then brought me into the back room, and immediately offered me an espresso coffee, which I eagerly accepted. We both sat down at his desk and exchanged pleasantries as we were enjoying our jolts of caffeine. We were making small talk and catching up on ‘Holy Cross’ gossip, talking about all our old classmates of the all-boys school that we attended together. There were so many guys that we ran into over the years but had lost track of since our high school graduation.

  Arezzo was grooming his son, Vincent, to take over the business. He was complaining that he didn’t have the time anymore to enjoy a decent vacation or any time off, since he was open seven days a week. Michael mentioned that his business was booming and was getting new customers every day.

  After finishing our espressos, I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the plastic sandwich bag that contained the gold and ruby clad ring with the bejeweled red cross.

  “Michael, have you ever seen one of these before?”

  He grasped the ring from my hand and immediately put on his jewelers eyepiece. He gazed at it for a long period of time, as he fumbled with the jewelry piece, concentrating on the stamp markings on the back of the ring that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye.

  “Where did you get this ring?” he asked, with a concerned, shock look on his face.

  I stared at him for a few seconds, and just coldly replied, “Police business.”

  He continued to stare at the ring with his eyepiece, as the look of amazement never left his face.

  “I haven’t seen one of these rings in many, many years,” he slowly said, still trying to make out the internal stampings.

  “I had a customer once, many years ago, who wanted to duplicate one of these rings, and couldn’t get it done because there was someone who had a design patent on it,” he said.

  “Design patent?”

  “Well yeah, it’s kind of like someone trying to duplicate a Rolex watch. They have a design patent on it, and you must go to the original designer if you want to order that watch. The same applies to this ring,” he explained.

  After a few more minutes of studying the gold object, Michael exclaimed loud
ly,

  “Here it is. There is a very small stamp on the inside of the ring. You can only see it with the eyepiece. It’s stamped with a design of a rose and the letters ‘SRC’.”

  “SRC? What is that? Someone’s initials?” I asked.

  Michael immediately put the ring down on his desk and went into another room where he had some reference materials. He started fumbling through several books on gold jewelry patents and was focused on researching those stamped initials and design. After a twenty minutes of fumbling and researching, he came back to his desk with an open book in his hand and started to make a phone call.

  “What’s up, Mikie?”

  “Hold on, Phil. I need to make this call.”

  He was calling a downtown jewelry store at 376 South Wabash in Chicago and was on hold for several minutes until the owner and manager, David Feinstein of George Feinstein & Sons Fine Jewelry came on the line. Michael Arezzo was making small talk with him for a few moments, then asked him about the ‘gold, 18 carat bejeweled ruby red cross ring.’

  “What do you know about this ring, David? It has the initials ‘SRC’ and the design of a rose stamped on the inside. From what I recall and what I’ve found, you guys are the only ones in Chicago who are authorized to stamp out and fabricate this ring,” he said.

  There was a very long silence on the phone.

  “David? Are you there?” More silent moments.

  “David?”

  “Excuse me, Michael…I have a customer here. Let me call you back.”

  CLICK!

  I could hear the party on the other line loudly terminate the phone call. Michael just stared at me with a shocked look on his face.

  “That was weird,” he said. He continued to fumble with the ring, periodically trying to make out the ‘SRC’ stamped letters inside along with the rose design.

  “Why do you think he cut you off?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen or talked to David Feinstein in a few years. They have an established jewelry store on South Wabash, and it’s been around over one hundred years or more. David is, like, the fourth generation to run and take over the business,” he explained.