Fenwick growled, “No enemies?”
“None,” Sorenson said quickly. Turner thought his majesty might be a little intimidated by Fenwick, and he enjoyed watching it, but they still had to get any information out of him they could.
“Do you know if Giles had any habits about what he drank or ate here at the University?” Turner asked.
“I haven’t the faintest notion,” Sorenson said.
“Did you see anybody or anything unusual at any time today? Any strangers walking through the building?” Turner asked.
Sorenson thought a moment, then shook his head no.
“Notice any change in Giles lately? Unusually nervous or tense?”
Another elegant shake of the head.
“Did he have a habit of drinking one particular thing in his office every day?” Turner asked.
“You can ask his secretary Gwendolen when she returns from vacation. Now that I think about it, I vaguely recall he tried to eat healthy things. Perhaps drank carrot juice and such nonsense.”
They let him go.
Fenwick said, “Stupid, overintellectual. Bet he doesn’t know shit about the real world.”
Turner heard shouting coming from the hallway outside.
“I’ll check it out,” Fenwick said.
Moments later the bulky cop flew backwards through the doorway, landing with his back against a poster that ripped and fell off the wall.
Turner jumped up. A tall black woman stood in the doorway. She sneered at Fenwick, then stepped aside. A pale woman staggered into the room. She wore a velvet dress, gold-flecked tulle scarf, and clutched Alain Mikli sunglasses in one hand.
“Where is he?” she gasped.
Sanchez appeared at the door. “Sorry, Paul. They busted past us. Want me to get rid of them?”
“I’ll do it.” Fenwick marched toward her.
Turner held up a hand. “Who are … ?”
The starkly pale woman said, “I’m Laura Gideon Giles.” She pointed to the black woman. “Lilac called me at work. She said something terrible had happened. She told me my husband is, is …”
Laura Giles took a deep breath and drew herself up very straight. Her violet eyes searched theirs for several moments. She said, “I think I would like to sit down.”
Turner hated dealing with the families of the victims, especially if he was the one who had to break the news. He’d been spared that difficulty this time.
They helped Laura Giles to a chair. Dry-eyed and dazed, she whispered, “What happened?”
Turner told her as much as they knew.
After he finished she muttered, “I don’t believe it. This morning we talked about remodeling our cottage in Michigan. It was one of his favorite places, and we’d just decided to fix it up. I can’t believe we’ll never … I don’t know what to do.”
“We know this is a difficult time, Mrs. Giles, but if you could answer a few questions, it might help us find your husband’s killer.”
“Murdered,” she said.
She rummaged in her purse and pulled out a pack of Virginia Slims and some matches. Fenwick gave her a styrofoam cup with a layer of coffee in the bottom to use as an ashtray.
“Can we get you something?” Turner asked.
She blew smoke out through her nostrils. “A cup of tea, please.” Lilac left, returning a few minutes later with a steaming cup. She remained standing in the doorway.
Laura Giles took a large gulp of the hot liquid, shut her eyes, and breathed the vapors. She put the cup down, took another long drag on her cigarette, missed the ashtray with a flick of ash, and turned to stare up at Turner.
“A few questions please, Mrs. Giles,” Turner said.
Her body shook for several moments. She stabbed the cigarette into the cup. Turner heard it sizzle. She crossed her arms tightly over her chest, looked up, and said, “I’ll help any way I can to find his murderer.”
Turner asked for background on Giles’s life, who might have grudges from years ago, who might not like him now.
Mrs. Giles explained that she and her husband had met in graduate school at Stanford University. She majored in business law and he in English and political science. They’d dated for three years during graduate school, then moved together to Southern California. While Gideon worked on his Ph.D. in English, she attended USC for her M.B.A.
“We were so broke those years. We had a million fights about money. We threatened to call it quits nearly every week. He just had no head for money. Give him a credit card and he went nuts. I had to take them all away.”
“But you got married eventually,” Turner said.
“We went into therapy for a year together and resolved our differences. We always loved each other. We just had a lot of growing up to do.”
After receiving their degrees, they’d worked together for several years on projects to help the homeless in Southern California.
“Those were the happiest times of our lives. We felt committed. We knew our work was paying off. We could see results. Shelters built. Men and women placed in homes.”
She’d gotten a business offer from an old college friend. They’d moved to Chicago. Gideon continued his work with the homeless. Laura Giles prospered in business. Gideon eventually landed the job at the University of Chicago.
As far as she knew, he had no enemies from before the time she met him. “After he got the job at the University, we moved to Hyde Park. He got involved in the community, moved up the ranks in the department. People in higher education have all kinds of petty quarrels. Who doesn’t at work? And some of them became jealous when the community began pushing him for alderman.”
“Who was jealous?” Turner asked.
“Sorenson, the head of the department, for one. I don’t really remember the names now.” She said that Giles had made enemies as his notoriety grew and his ability to grab the attention of reporters expanded. “People didn’t like it, that this articulate, good man could promote programs and causes so well.”
Fenwick said, “I thought not one of his bills ever got passed in the city council.”
“There are other ways to exercise influence,” she said. “Just being an alderman in this city gives you some clout. We’d been in enough causes over the years to know that you don’t always succeed by just getting votes.”
“Any political enemies?” Turner asked.
“Not really. He fought with people, but he was always professional about it. They understood each other. The only one who held a grudge of any kind was the man he replaced as ward committeeman.”
“Who was that?” Turner asked.
“That awful Mike McGee.”
Turner didn’t recognize the name. “Tell me about him.”
“McGee had this more-committed-than-thou attitude. He’d supported lots of causes but never seemed to get anything accomplished for any of them. His reform candidates always seemed to lose. My husband found out he’d been robbing the organizations that trusted him. Siphoning off funds.”
“What happened?” Turner asked.
“Gideon talked to him privately. Offered him a deal that if he quit, he wouldn’t report him. McGee refused, so my husband defeated him in the election.”
They’d have to interview McGee.
“How about neighbors?” Turner asked. “Any problems there?”
“No. We had little contact with them. Our lives were too busy.”
Still they’d have to visit the neighbors.
“Did he eat or drink anything specific every day. A habit people might have been aware of?” Turner asked.
“We usually had coffee together at home in the morning. I know he was into health foods. He brought his own vegetables and juices for his own concoctions. He never made them at home. Why is that important?”
“We think something he drank was poisoned,” Turner said.
“Oh.” She lit another cigarette and smoked in silence, staring at the walls. A few tears escaped from the corners of her eyes. She fished a
lace handkerchief out of her purse and dabbed her eyes, but the tears became a flow. She buried her face in the hanky. The African-American woman put her arms around her. Laura Giles crumbled into the embrace and cried softly.
A few minutes later the two women left, leaning heavily on each other. Turner’s memory of the night his wife died was dim. He remembered being numb. Knew he cried in his best friend’s arms.
“Who was the African-American woman?” Turner asked Sanchez.
“One of the members of the department, Lilac Ostergard,” Sanchez said. “Folks out here say she’s Mrs. Giles’s best friend.”
They spent the next hour interviewing seven other people, those who’d rushed in to help, others in the department. Mostly they confirmed what they’d learned already. All of them showed varying degrees of being upset at the loss of a co-worker. None of them had seen any strangers or anyone suspicious lurking in the halls.
Turner felt a cop’s twinge of suspicion about two of the faculty members. Sure they weren’t telling the truth, and his instinct told him to check them out. Most of the time believing an instinct wasn’t going to get him far in court, but he trusted it enough to follow it up.
The first was Darcy Worthington, a blond-haired man in his late forties, about the same age as Giles, he spoke with a New England accent.
In response to their questioning, he’d told them that years ago he and Giles had been best friends. “We started the same year,” Worthington said. “We got together with our wives often, but I want to make sure I tell you before the gossips around here do. We had a falling out over his political activities.”
“You disagree with him philosophically?” Turner asked.
“Not too much, no. We fought because I discovered he was the most ruthlessly ambitious person I’d ever met. I didn’t see that side of him until he decided to run for office. Winning consumed him.” He shook his head. “I regretted the loss of the friendship. We never really quarreled openly. I just let the friendship drift and stopped responding to him.”
When he left, Turner said, “I want to check him out more.”
Fenwick said, “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could pound his butt into the pavement.”
The other suspicious person was Otto Kempe. Otto was a roly-poly man, Turner guessed to be in his mid forties. He mopped his forehead with an enormous starched white handkerchief after every other sentence.
“I heard the cries for help,” he said. “I rushed over. My office is across the hall. It was a mad whirl of people. I was frightened, but I took CPR many years ago, before it became fashionable. I tried to revive him. People were shouting and screaming. Every time someone yelled, he spasmed.” Kempe puffed breaths out for several minutes. After a thorough face wipe, he continued, “He died in my arms. It was awful. It was ghastly. I never want to go through something like that again.”
They let him compose himself for several minutes.
They asked him a few more questions. Like everyone else, he hadn’t seen any strangers, nor had he seen Giles.
“How’d he get along with people in the department?” Turner asked.
“We’re academics, dedicated to research. We try to care about ideas, not personalities. I like to think I did that most of the time. People might tell you that Giles and I took opposite sides on esoteric academic issues. Our Chaucer essays were wonders to behold. I thought of it as a friendly rivalry of a good sort.”
Kempe left a few minutes later.
“Him I don’t like,” Fenwick said. “Stupid hanky.”
They walked back to the inner office to begin checking through all the papers. Turner tried to avoid getting the remnants of fingerprint powder all over his clothes.
“Killer must have had a hell of nerve,” Fenwick said. “Might have been recognized coming in here. Could have been surprised by Burke coming back early.”
“Or the person could have come in days before,” Turner said, “placed the poison in the juice and waited for him to drink it, but you’re right. He or she had to risk being recognized.”
They spent the next two hours going through every piece of paper in Gideon Giles’s office. They confirmed Burke’s story about messages. They found countless letters from causes asking for support. They switched on the computer and ran through seven of the twenty-eight computer discs. Near five o’clock, Sanchez stuck his head in.
The beat cop said, “I got two people out here. One says he’s from the University press office and the other claims she’s a representative of the University administration.”
Turner and Fenwick put up with a mild dose of administrative ‘Let’s involve the university in as little scandal as possible.’ Turner let them indulge in their bureaucratic skittishness and then ushered them out the door.
“We’re not going to finish this anytime soon,” Fenwick said after he returned from hustling them out of the office. “Let’s leave a guard and get something to eat.”
They walked over to Hutchinson Commons and grabbed a couple of sandwiches and some coffee and sat in the dark wood-panelled dining hall. Fenwick gazed at the portraits staring down at them and asked, “Who are all the old farts?”
Turner shrugged. He knew Fenwick rarely expected answers to impossible questions.
At the far end of the dining hall, Turner noticed Clark Burke sitting with a handsome young man who had a large green book bag on the table next to him. He watched curiously as the two engaged in intent conversation. Turner nudged Fenwick and pointed. The two cops watched the students for a few minutes.
“I think the kid’s gay,” Fenwick said.
“I agree,” Turner replied, “but I don’t think that little snippet of information is going to get us any closer to who killed Gideon Giles.”
Turner wanted to talk to some of the people in Giles’s Fifth Ward organization. He suggested they leave the papers in Giles’s office until later; they’d gone over most of the important ones.
“I want to try and see some of these campaign people today,” Turner said. He’d taken a blank piece of the campaign stationery with the office address on it.
They drove to Fifty-seventh and Dorchester. A lone figure stared out the window when they walked into the headquarters. The office was one of several in a one-story building on the north side of the street.
The decorations on the walls repeated the scheme in Giles’s office. Poster after poster of causes lined every surface. Turner saw one of Che Guevara tucked in a corner of a rear wall.
The man staring out the window appeared to be in his mid thirties. He didn’t acknowledge their presence until they stood directly in front of him. He wore gold-rimmed glasses, had short-cropped hair, and wore a white t-shirt with the words YOU GOTTA BELIEVE in faded blue letters across the chest.
He let his eyes rove to the two of them and said, “Everybody’s gone. The alderman’s dead.”
They showed their stars and identified themselves. The man blinked and sighed. He told them his name was Frank Ricken.
“Where’d everybody go?” Fenwick asked.
“Press conference.” Ricken leaned back in the chair. “That’s what this office specialized in. Press conferences. We lived to get him on TV. I’ve got the numbers of all the important television and radio contacts memorized. We knew media and manipulated them. First-name basis with all the local reporters in the city. And all we got is murder. That’s how it’s always been. If you get an effective liberal, kill him.”
Fenwick asked, “You think a conservative killed him?”
“The right wing in this country has destroyed every liberal cause, with vicious lies, distortions, every dirty trick in the book. They’d easily resort to murder. There’s lots of right-wing crazies out there.”
“What were you in the organization?” Fenwick asked.
“Campaign chairperson, specializing in press relations. Not the spokesperson. We had somebody in a gray suit and tie to make the announcements to the press. People like to see “espectable” spoke
spersons. I controlled contacts.”
“How come you’re here if there’s a press conference somewhere else?”
“What’s the point? The cause is lost. It always is.”
Turner asked, “Did he get any specific threats lately, anybody he annoyed more than anyone else?”
“The mayor of the city of Chicago and the other forty-nine alderman. They all hated him.”
“Somebody specific. Did he mention any new problems? Something that might have come up recently.”
“Not to me. And he’d have told me. We were close.”
They asked how the alderman’s organization functioned. Ricken said, “Giles very much believed in lack of structure. If somebody came in and they had a cause, they worked on it. We had two people who did nothing but work on the problems in Central America.”
“Isn’t that a kind of unusual project for a Chicago alderman?” Fenwick asked.
“All causes were welcome here. Gideon Giles truly believed in giving his all to the helpless, the hopeless, and the homeless.”
Fenwick said, “We need to seal the office off, examine the files.”
Ricken said, “I can authorize that. I have access to everything in the office.”
Turner said, “Could you show us around, explain what we’re looking at? I’m sure you want to help us find who killed him. You never know what might be significant.”
Ricken led them into an inner office. It was a shabby duplicate of the professor’s office, more posters for more causes filling the walls. Pamphlets stacked on tables crammed against each wall. A desk strewn with paraphernalia sat in the middle of the room.
Ricken explained the system, then excused himself, and the cops got to work. Half an hour later, Fenwick walked out to see about some coffee. He stuck his head back in the office. “That Ricken guy’s gone.”
Turner joined him in the outer office. “I don’t like that,” Turner said.
“He got spooked and ran,” Fenwick said.
Turner shrugged. “We can find him later. Why not get a couple beat cops over here and seal the place off? We should have done that earlier.”
They spent another hour going through the office, but found nothing that might have indicated a murderer. They ducked under the DO NOT CROSS police ribbon and were saying good night to the beat cop on duty when a woman in her fifties approached them. She wore a gray skirt and blue sweater, her gray-flecked hair hung to her shoulders. She saw them, the police barrier, and said, “I’m Mable Ashcroft, the alderman’s chief assistant, and you are?”
Political Poison Page 4
