by Al Roker
“I don’t understand what you and Billy are talking about, Daddy,” Jonny said.
“That’s okay,” Baker said. “It was a long time ago, son,” he said. “Things were different.”
“Right. Now you kill a better class of people,” I said. “With your children as your accomplices.”
“Eat or get eaten,” he said. “It’s the new American business motto.”
“Only in your part of the zoo,” I said.
“Enough!” He turned to Dal. “Take care of this.”
I hoped I still had one card left to play.
“Did it feel like old times, Baker, seeing those flames again, feeling the warmth of the fire, getting that whiff of smoke and burning flesh?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The fire you set at Ubora Gallery. The one that killed the man who was helping me. Mantata.” I forced myself not to look at Dal.
“I didn’t—”
“No. I guess maybe you let the boys do it.”
“Not me,” Jonny said. “I don’t like fire. I only watched while Dickie—”
“Shut up!” his brother shouted.
He barely got the words out before Dal shot him in the head.
Chapter
FORTY-NINE
Baker watched, stunned, as his younger son crumpled to the floor. Then he wheeled on Dal in full fury.
“Why?” he cried.
Dal didn’t answer. He stood rigid. Eyes glassy.
I remembered what Mantata and Trejean and even Dal had said about the way anger transformed him.
Baker clawed at something in his robe pocket.
I turned and ran past Jonny, who was raising his weapon. I grabbed Kiki and pulled her to the floor, covering her body with mine as the gunfire began.
It was over almost immediately.
Still, I stayed in place, Kiki wiggling under me. At first I was afraid that I had been shot and would feel the pain at any second. Then I was worried that someone was standing near us, waiting for me to move before firing.
“Billy …”
It was Dal.
I rolled away from Kiki and stood.
I was, literally, the last man standing.
Jonny was on his back about two yards away, hand still clutching his gun, open dead eyes staring at the ceiling. His father lay on his side, blood seeping through his silk robe. Dal was braced against the wall near the door. Still breathing, but not easily. Staring at me.
I pulled Kiki to her feet and deposited her back on the couch before going to Dal.
As I approached, he coughed blood. He’d been shot twice that I could see, a probably fatal chest wound and a gash along his right cheek. “Just … wanted … to find out … who …”
“I got that.”
“They … all dead?”
I nodded.
“Get … outta here.”
I took out my phone and dialed 911.
“No,” he said. “Go … I’m … dead.”
And he was.
The Winnetka Police Department has a chief, a deputy chief, and an administration staff of two commanders, four sergeants, and eighteen officers, nearly all of whom visited the Baker compound within the next twelve hours. Along with investigators from the North Regional Major Crimes Task Force (NORTAF), a forensics team, paramedics for Kiki, and Detectives Hank Bollinger and Ike Ruello, whom I’d notified.
The Winnetka officers were not overjoyed by the presence of the Chicago team, but my feeling was that since they were investigating the murders of Patton and Larry Kelsto, they deserved to be on the scene. And I wanted to be on their good side, in case I needed them later.
Kiki and I told the same story many times that night and on into Saturday morning. At Baker’s request, his sons had murdered Patton and Kelsto, who’d been attempting to blackmail him with the knowledge that, under his birth name, Giovanni Polvere, he’d been a member of the Chicago Outfit in the late eighties. They’d burned down Mantata’s gallery and killed him because they’d mistakenly thought he’d been in on the blackmail scheme. That’s also why they kidnapped and killed Nat Parkins. As for Kiki, they decided to use her to lure me to their party to find out what I knew about their father’s history. Which was nothing.
What made them think you did, Mr. Blessing?
From what Baker said, Patton told them I was involved. I have no idea why. I met him only last Friday on Midday with Gemma. We met once or twice after that and didn’t exactly hit it off. But I can think of no reason why he’d want to get me in trouble with killers like these. Maybe he was just a man who liked to cause people trouble.
The investigators from the CPD, the WPD, and NORTAF seemed to accept that vague speculation. I guess Patton’s reputation succeeded him.
Bollinger and Ruello drove us back to the hotel.
Kiki was uncharacteristically silent through most of the trip. But just before we arrived, she said to me, “There are two things we have to straighten out if I am going to continue working with you.”
I saw the detectives suddenly snap to attention.
“Okayyy,” I said, warily.
“You have to believe I didn’t know—”
“Of course I do.”
She kissed my cheek. Then she said, “And the next time we’re in a greenroom and I tell you I’m getting bad vibes and you should pass on the show, you bloody well pass on the show.”
I smiled at her. “Done,” I said.
Chapter
FIFTY
The aftermath of what some press wag labeled the Winnetka Wipeout was bigger and more intense than either of my previous brushes with homicide had been. Both Kiki’s life and mine were changed, if not forever, at least for the immediate future. Everyone wanted to use us for fun and/or profit. That included the police; district attorneys; my agent, Wally Wing, who seemed to think he was now representing Kiki, too; the network, who insisted I become a semipermanent part of Hotline Tonight while signing Kiki to a new contract that would kick in as soon as the show returned to New York.
During our final week in Chicago, we both needed security guards to get us through the media throngs at the hotel, our temporary site in Millennium Park, police headquarters, and—long story short—any place we tried to show our faces in the city. This made it difficult for me to run a couple of crucial errands. Difficult but not impossible.
On the last Tuesday, just after noon, the first time since the Winnetka Wipeout when I’d had more than a moment to myself, I donned a Cubbies cap, a chambray work shirt, rumpled khaki pants, and, the perfect touch, a battered backpack, and made an incognito escape from my hotel room, down the elevator, to a basic gray two-door Ford Fiesta in the hotel’s subbasement.
From there I had no problem driving to North Sedgwick Street in Old Town, parking only a few feet away from the alley leading to the house that had been shared by the late Larry Kelsto and Nat Parkins. I entered the yard through the rear fence gate.
The house was still wrapped in yellow CPD tape. That was fine with me. What I wanted wasn’t in the house.
I approached the chrome naked man and chair. As I’d realized, the man was seated in pretty much the same position as the Shakespeare park statue that Nat had sketched in such detail.
When I’d first seen the chrome man, I’d been a bit distracted by its protruding penis. Now I ignored that in favor of the gap in the chrome where Nat had been planning on placing the missing right leg. It was an ostrich egg–shaped cavity, approximately seven inches across. Its edges should have been jagged, but they weren’t. I hoped they’d been purposely smoothed by one of the tools Nat had been in too much of a hurry to put away.
Gingerly, I poked my hand into the gap. Nothing. I moved it higher. I was into the sculpture up to my shoulder when my fingers touched something that felt like a rolled magazine. Eager now, I pushed one more inch of my shoulder into the gap, got the edge of the object between fingers and thumb, and yanked.
It was the first red file, folded in t
wo. Three others, dislodged, came tumbling after.
Like a miser—hell, like Scrooge McDuck finding a pot of leprechaun gold—I carried my treasure back to the car. There I immediately examined my find. The folders’ tags carried three-digit numbers, their significance lost on me. Two-eighty-four contained a DVD disk and xeroxed pictures of a naked Carrie Sands. In some, she energetically worked the pole in a strip club. Others were considerably less wholesome.
File 137 featured pages from an accountant’s ledger and copies of two sets of matching fingerprints. Damned if my guess at Baker’s hadn’t been on the money. One set was marked “Polvere—back cover financial records, Windy City Industrials, September 3, 1987.” The other: “Baker—pencil from office, construction site North Franklin and West Monroe, May 4, 2011.”
So he had tied Baker to Polvere over a year ago. Why did he wait to confront him? Had it been something I said, as he told Baker? I doubted I’d ever know. Not that it mattered anymore.
My file was numbered 112. Its contents were the original pages and the Xeroxed copies that Patton had shown me that morning at the hotel.
The final red file, 283, was devoted to Derek Webber. There was another Xerox, this one of a check made out to Onion City for one hundred fifty thousand dollars and no cents. It was signed by Jonathan Baker. A notation on the page said that it was for two points in the feature film The Thief Who Stole Trump Tower. “Onion City’s connection to Outfit,” Patton had written. This was something Webber should see, I thought. Considering the number of people in the city who did business with Baker, Patton’s smoking gun wasn’t even a cap pistol.
But then I noticed another of Patton’s notes in the folder. There was a paper-clip indentation at the top. My guess was that at one time, it had been attached to the film script Nat shoved under my door.
Chapter
FIFTY-ONE
“Yo, Billy,” Derek Webber called out. “You’re looking pretty good for a survivor of the Winnetka Wipeout.” Walking to meet me, he gestured toward the briefcase in my hand. “Homework?”
“You could call it that.”
We were on Navy Pier. During its normal hours of operation it served as a “family-friendly” collection of restaurants, a children’s museum, an IMAX theater, and, near where we were standing, a giant Ferris wheel. The wheel, like the pier, had closed for the night a while ago but was quite active all the same, with the movie crew getting it ready for a golden time, all-night shoot.
I’d called Derek around noon, asking if we could get together. He’d suggested ten that night, but I’d had a Hotline spot at ten-forty-five, so we’d settled on eleven-thirty.
“It looks pretty busy around here,” I said. “I hope I’m not keeping you from anything important.”
“Me? There’s nothing for me to do here. I’m just one of the guys who own the studio. But I love watching them make movies. Austin—you’ve met our director, Austin Deware, of course you have—he’s filming a key sequence where our beautiful thief meets our beautiful but sinister villainess on the wheel. Austin says it’s his homage to Carol Reed’s scene in The Third Man, where Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten have a chat on the Great Wheel in Vienna.”
“Is there someplace we can talk?”
“What about on the wheel? It’s just sitting there. Lars is playing with his crane. The sound guy’s not ready. Let’s take a ride.”
“I’d rather not. There’s something I want to show you.”
“Okay.” Webber seemed surprised but agreeable. “There’s a Winnebago we’re using for an office.”
We walked to where several motor homes were parked near the pier entrance. The one we entered was occupied by Derek’s partner, Alan, and Madeleine Parnelle. They were sitting before a computer monitor, going through a file with lots of numbers.
“B-B-Billy,” Alan said. “B-b-been reading about you. Glad to see you in one … piece.”
Madeleine merely granted me a quick artificial smile.
“C’mon in the back, Billy,” Derek suggested.
“Actually, as long as Alan and Madeleine are here, this is something they should know about.”
Alan cocked his head and looked bemused. Madeleine seemed annoyed but attentive.
I opened the briefcase and withdrew the number 283 red file.
“Seen this before, Derek?” I asked.
The puzzled look on his face told me that he hadn’t. Alan, on the other hand, was frowning. I began to wonder if I’d missed a beat somewhere.
“This belonged to the late Pat Patton,” I said to Derek. “Here’s an item you and Alan should find interesting.”
I presented him with the Xerox of Jon Baker’s check with Patton’s comments. He gave it more than a glance and handed it to his partner.
He watched as Alan read it carefully, passing it to Madeleine. “This is bullshit,” Derek said. “Nearly everybody in Chicago has done business with Baker.”
“That’s B-B-Billy’s point,” Alan said. “Right?”
“Right,” I agreed. “This should clear up any doubt anyone may have about your company due to Patton’s claim.”
“Patton,” Derek said, as if the word left a bitter taste in his mouth. “What a son of a bitch.”
“But he did have that gift some cops and reporters seem to be born with,” I said. “He could look at a bunch of seemingly unrelated things and find a pattern. It’s how he found out about Baker’s past.”
I removed the other page of the old detective’s notes from the folder. “And this is something else he was working on when he was killed.”
I handed it to Derek.
He read through Patton’s neat penmanship and looked up at me. “Does this mean what I think it does?” he asked.
“You tell me,” I said.
“This is nuts.” He turned to Madeleine. “How tall is Gerard?” he asked.
“How tall? I’m not sure, exactly. Taller than I, I am confident.”
“Take a guess,” Derek said.
Madeleine and Alan exchanged glances.
“W-W-What’s this all about? Let’s see that p-p-paper.”
“I’d say a little under six feet, right?” Derek said, keeping the paper. “How about moles? Did he have a little one just under his right nipple?”
“No,” Madeleine said.
“If I ask Carrie, she’ll agree?”
“Qu’est-ce que tu fais?” Madeleine said. She looked flushed, splotches of red on her cheeks.
“When exactly did your husband fly home to Paris?” I asked.
She blinked her eyes. “I am not sure of the exact date. But it was several weeks ago. I can look it up.”
“I remember exactly,” Derek said. “He was supposed to have flown out on a Wednesday, four weeks ago tomorrow.”
“I am sure you are right,” she said. “So?”
“Stop b-b-beating around the b-b-bush, Rek. What’s this all about?”
Derek looked at me.
I said, “The day Patton, Carrie, and I were on the talk show, the main topic of conversation was the truncated body that washed up on Oak Street Beach. That’s why Patton was booked on the show. He claimed to have some secret knowledge about the corpse’s identity that he wasn’t quite ready to share. I think that was a bluff. But by the end of the show, he did have the glimmer of an idea worth pursuing. That’s because Carrie surprised our hostess with the news that Gerard Parnelle had flown back to Paris several weeks before.”
“I repeat, ‘So?’ ” Madeleine said.
“Your husband’s success made him a celebrity,” I said. “And the fact that Gemma Bright didn’t know he’d flown home struck Patton as significant. It meant he’d done it under the media radar. No shaky TMZ shots at the airport. No comings and goings in showbiz journals. No photos in the tabloids.
“And there was the timing. One of the things Patton did know about the dead man was the approximate time he was dumped in the lake. It’s all in his notes.”
Derek handed her t
he page. I watched her eyes jump jerkily from sentence to sentence. Alan moved closer to her to read over her shoulder. I wondered if Derek was sharing my thought, that they looked like a couple. In this case, brought together by desperation rather than love or sex.
They were looking at the plans Patton had for an investigation he’d been unable to pursue. He had found a Chicago Tribune photo of Parnelle on the movie set earlier in the month. He’d written: “Get NV”—possibly a CPD friend, I thought—“to check airline passenger lists for a three-week period following date of photograph. Have MC make soft inquiry into the whereabouts of Parnelle in Paris. Check with doctor.”
He’d included notations, apparently from the postmortem examination of the truncated corpse. The approximate height was sixty-eight to seventy-one inches. Weight, 165 to 174 lbs. Age, thirty-seven to forty-five. Hair, brown. The “mole under right nipple” was noted. As for the occurrence of death, an approximate date was noted. There was not even the speculation of a time of death.
Patton had underlined the cause, “AMI, acute myocardial infarction,” and followed that with: “Check w. P’s medical record, heart?, hypertension?, enlarged?, asthma?, etc.”
Madeleine Parnelle suddenly crumpled the paper in her hand, squeezing it into a ball. “This means nothing.”
“True,” I agreed. “But you and I know Patton’s hunch would have paid off. Your husband died of a heart attack at an inopportune time. There were the movie and future movies, television series, book contracts to fulfill. The temptation to keep everything moving forward must have been overwhelming.”
“Jesus Christ!” Derek exclaimed. “You cut him up? Your husband? The guy you lived with for five years?”
The red spots had left her cheeks, leaving her face pallid, appropriate for the coldness in her voice as she turned to Alan. “Trop sentimental.”
He didn’t seem that pleased to be on her team. He took a step away. Looking at Derek, he said, “It’s not like you think. She … we d-d-didn’t d-d-do that to him. The whole thing was B-B-Baker’s idea. His … kid did the c-c-cutting.”
