“You didn’t know any of the politicians?” Fenwick asked.
She folded the paper bags and placed them in a rack next to the refrigerator. She sat with them at the table. She said, “I recognized some of the names he had appointments with, and some of the people who came in looked familiar from pictures in the newspapers, but it wasn’t my business and wasn’t my job, so I didn’t pay much attention.”
“I looked in his appointment book,” Turner said. “He had only one meeting Monday and another Tuesday.”
“That sounds right. I kept his schedule for him. He could have had more political things to do, but if he did, someone from the campaign would call, but I don’t remember anything else. What was on the calendar should have been it.”
“How did he get along with other people in the University?” Turner asked.
She sighed. “How much do you know about University people?” she asked.
They shrugged. Turner said, “Not much.”
Harleth explained that her husband had been a professor at the university. She hadn’t had a degree and didn’t want to get one, but they were in love and had gotten married. The other professors’ wives, especially the ones with degrees, sneered and looked down on her. “It’s a catty competitive world among the professors and among their husbands or wives,” she said. But she and her husband had been secure in their love. He’d died ten years ago. She’d worked as a secretary for many years for a law firm in the Loop, but after her husband’s death, she had been devastated. She hadn’t worked for a year after. They’d invested wisely and saved so she didn’t have to work, but she wanted a few luxuries, and she wanted to keep busy. She’d seen an opening at the university, applied, and gotten it.
“University people tend to live in a closed society,” she said. “Lots of ambition and infighting. You listen closely to a lot of their conversations, it’s nothing but put-downs of each other. Sometimes somebody says something genuinely funny, but usually it’s hurtful stuff.”
“Like what?” Turner said.
“When my husband was alive, I’d go to parties with him. Most of the time I’d sit quietly and listen. It was incredible. They’d snipe at each other about who got reviewed and who didn’t and what the reviews said. They’d maneuver to get appointed to committees or fight about who was closer to the chairman of the department, who was or wasn’t going to get tenure. Men, women, they were all vicious about it. When I came to work it was the same thing.”
“How did Giles fit into that?” Fenwick asked.
She told them she’d known Giles slightly while her husband was alive. “He seemed pretty much like the rest, until this political business started.”
“What happened then?” Turner asked.
“It got much worse. A group of us faculty wives would get together once a week for lunch. We’d gossip about what was going on. Then when I became a secretary, a bunch of us ate lunch every day. We used to laugh about how pompous and absurd they were, but the professors took it all very seriously. When Giles started his political career, a lot of the other professors didn’t like it that he got all that publicity in the press. Some of them complained that it brought down the dignity of the institution to have someone connected to the University involved in the gutter politics of the city. I think some of them were simply jealous. Didn’t like it that he got on television.”
“Was it the people in the English department who felt that way?” Turner asked.
“I suspect most of them. The worst was the chairman Atherton Sorenson. I think if he could have stopped Giles from getting tenure, he would have.”
“Did they fight?” Fenwick asked.
“No one at the University of Chicago ‘fights,’” she said. “They declare war. You may never see a shot fired, but they’ll tear each other to pieces in a thousand ways.”
“If his chairman hated him, how’d he get tenure?” Fenwick asked.
“Giles was alderman after the issue of tenure came up. Giles had the research and publications and connections at the University. I never heard that his getting tenure was a major problem.” She smiled. “We secretaries know a lot but not everything.”
“Who was his best friend on the faculty?” Turner asked.
She thought for a minute. “I’m not sure you’d say he had friends on the faculty. Many of them went to the Quadrangle Club every day for lunch, and many of them vied to sit with the chairman, but Gideon never seemed to have one buddy. Certainly I never heard of him going out with one of the members of the department for a drink. I don’t know if they had a lot of dinner parties at his home.”
“Did he have any enemies besides Atherton?” Fenwick asked.
“No more or less than anybody else.”
“Grudges? Simmering feuds? Everyone else at the University described the department as a veritable Eden. You mentioned the head of the department, Sorenson, anybody at all? What about Darcy Worthington and Otto Kempe, the two professors in the English department?”
She thought carefully. “Two things stand out in my mind, but really I think they were nothing.”
Turner urged her to tell anyway.
“Well, as for Worthington, I’m sure it’s really nothing.”
“What was it?” Fenwick urged.
“Well, when Giles started, he and Darcy were real close.” She repeated much of the same story that Worthington had told Turner on Tuesday. At the end she added, “They kind of acted like it was all made up, but I’m not sure I ever saw them together once, all the time I worked there. I don’t know, sometimes I thought some bad feelings remained.” She could remember no concrete examples of this occurring.
“What about Kempe?” Turner asked.
“Really, it couldn’t have been anything,” she said.
“Tell us anyway,” Fenwick said.
“Well, Kempe used to tease Giles about being friendly rivals. Now that I think about all the articles I typed for Giles, it seems like they always happened to be writing about the same subject at the same time. I don’t know if that’s odd or not. Another thing, Kempe could tell a thousand different jokes. At parties he could always be counted on to entertain everybody with absolutely marvelous stories. He was probably the most-liked person in the department.”
“How did he get along with Giles?” Turner said.
“I always thought Gideon strained a bit to smile at the jokes and stories. Giles was the brunt of a few of the stories, but Kempe picked on everybody at some time or another. It wasn’t really noticeable. I can’t see it as being a big thing.”
Turner asked her about Giles’s and the health-food drinks. “Is that what the poison was in?” she asked.
Turner nodded.
She gulped. “He always was bringing in these concoctions, each one more vile than the last. He constantly tried to get me to drink some. I know they were mostly vegetables and were good for me, but I could barely stand the smell of them. He usually drank something healthful after lunch.”
“Who knew he did that?” Turner asked.
“I don’t know. I never gave it much thought myself.”
They spoke for a short while longer, but that was all she knew.
“Let’s go talk to Darcy Worthington,” Fenwick said.
Turner looked him up on his master list. Worthington lived in a high rise on South Shore Drive a block in from Lake Shore Drive. The security guard told them Worthington wasn’t home.
They decided to try the Quadrangle Club to see if any of the people from the English department might be hanging around that popular establishment.
“What bugs me,” Fenwick said, “is how the killer did it. That had to be an incredible chance, to walk in there and poison him.”
“We’ve asked everybody about his eating habits. Everybody knew some version of the fact that he ate health foods. A few people thought he might have eaten things at regular intervals, but nobody knew for sure. Killer could have brought it in and walked off.”
“Hell of a nerve,�
� Fenwick said. “So it could have been anybody at any time during the day after he bought his ingredients. You’d think somebody would have seen a stranger.”
“Don’t forget, no one even saw Giles return from lunch, and nicotine can take a while to work, especially if Giles took it on a full stomach. He ate lunch some time in that hour before he died.”
“Killer walks in, pours poison in his juice, and leaves. Could have been somebody from politics,” Fenwick said, “but my bet is on somebody from the university. It would have been so much easier.”
“Maybe the killer is counting on us to think that,” Turner said.
At the Quadrangle Club they spotted Darcy Worthington taking advantage of the pleasantly cool spring day out on the tennis courts. Turner and Fenwick walked onto the playing surface. When Worthington noticed them at the edge of the court, he threw them a sneer and tried to ignore them. His opponent looked to be the age of a graduate student. Both wore warm-up suits. Worthington had a sweater tied around his waist. Fenwick stalked to the middle of the net and the game stopped. Worthington snarled, walked over to his gym bag, and grabbed a towel out of the top.
“What are you doing here?” Worthington asked.
“We need to ask you a few questions,” Fenwick said.
The student walked over. Worthington thanked him for the game and told him he’d see him next week.
“You lied Tuesday,” Turner said.
Worthington glared at him. He untied a sweater from around his waste and pulled it over his head. “I resent that remark,” Worthington said.
“Tough shit,” Fenwick said.
Worthington glanced around the tennis court. No one else was out in the early spring coolness.
“You can’t talk to me that way,” Worthington said.
Fenwick laughed. “Sure I can. I just did.” He moved closer to Worthington and lowered his voice. “I can do just about anything I want.”
“I won’t put up with police brutality. You won’t do anything here, in such a public place.” You could see the tennis courts from numerous windows.
“Don’t have to do it here,” Fenwick said. “We could take a trip down to the station and bust up some of that arrogance.”
“I knew the Chicago police were just thugs,” Worthington said. He began to move away from them.
Fenwick placed his bulk in front of him. “This is a murder investigation, you stupid shit. We don’t put up with lies from anybody. We want some truth, and we’ll take it here or down at the station. You make the choice.”
Worthington looked at Turner. “You can’t do this,” the professor said.
Turner said, “What really happened between you and Gideon Giles when you had your falling out?”
Worthington looked from one cop to the other. “You can’t,” he began. “I won’t.” Beads of sweat shone on his upper lip and forehead.
Fenwick put his nose an inch from Worthington’s. The cop said, “You need to never tell me what I can or can’t do. Right now I’m a cop who wants answers, and I better hear some real soon, and I better like what I hear.”
Turner said, “Come on, Darcy. Just tell us what happened.”
Worthington mopped at the sweat on his face. “Okay,” he mumbled, “but not here.”
They trekked to his office on the third floor of Swift Hall. The building was open and he didn’t need to use his key to enter. The halls on this Saturday were deserted and quiet. In Worthington’s office, Turner noted the hundreds of books crammed into shelves that filled three of the walls. Worthington tossed his gym bag in a corner and sat behind a paper-strewn desk.
“I didn’t kill him,” he said.
“What happened, Darcy?” Turner asked. “Why’d you guys fight?”
Worthington used the edge of a paperback book to clean under his nails. He fiddled with the collar of his warm-up suit. Finally he gazed at Turner for several minutes before telling his story.
Worthington and Giles had hit it off from the first day they joined the faculty. As the only two new people in the department that year, they found themselves thrown together, sharing experiences. “We’d go out together, drinking buddies. We’d meet with students, talk for hours, work out, go running along the lakefront. We’d get together with our wives and spend hours talking and laughing. We even took a few vacations with them. Those were the best days of my life.” He pushed his chair back and put his feet on the desk. “In those days I wanted to make a difference in the world. I wanted to excite young minds. And kids here are bright. They don’t need to be taught how to think. I thought I could change the world. I always figured Gideon Giles shared those dreams. All those talks we had, I don’t know how I didn’t notice.” He paused.
“Notice what?” Turner said.
“That Gideon Giles was the most self-centered, ambitious creep I’d ever known. We got interested in local politics. Even worked in a few campaigns together, but you could almost see it, like a horrible disease, it took him over completely. He does have a certain presence in front of crowds. People listened to him. As his ambitions grew, the less he had to do with me. I enjoyed liberal politics, especially when it got the goat of some of the staid old-timers around here, but it became a religion to Giles, all-consuming. He had no time for those of us who’d known him.”
He took his feet off the desk. Placed his elbows on his knees, and clasped his hands. He looked up at the cops. “So, I confronted him. Told him our friendship was more important to me than all this political power. He laughed at me.” Worthington shook his head. “That laugh told me more than anything he could have said. It wasn’t cruel, more total indifference. He didn’t care if I existed or not.”
He sighed deeply. “That wasn’t the end of it. I couldn’t let it go. He’d been my friend, the guy I’d been closest to in my whole life. I demanded he talk to me. I told him what I saw, tried to remind him of all the dreams we’d shared together. He turned vicious. No one witnessed this scene, so you see I’m being honest with you. We lost our tempers. We threatened each other. I made wild claims about how he’d be sorry. It was stupid, childish, but I was hurt.”
“So you didn’t just drift apart like you told us the other day,” Fenwick said.
Worthington shook his head.
“When did all this happen?” Turner asked.
“Just after he was elected alderman the first time.”
“What happened after the confrontation?” Turner asked.
“Nothing. It was in his office. I walked out. It was a Saturday, I remember, like this, with no one around, so no one heard us. Afterwards we were correct and polite with each other. We never did another thing together again.”
He sat up in the chair. “And that was years ago. I had no reason to kill him. He was no threat to me. I had a secure job here.”
“Did he ever have any other violent confrontations?” Turner asked.
“Not with anybody at the University. I’ve thought about this a lot since Tuesday. Trying to think who could have done it and what motive they would have had.”
Your amateur sleuths in mysteries could get wound up in figuring out the motivation of the killer, but in actual fact, most of the time detectives ignored motive. What was far more important was physical evidence, witnesses, and confessions. A detective was far more likely to solve a case by figuring out how the killer did it than why. Sometimes there wasn’t a why.
Worthington continued, “The only thing I could come up with was the night Giles won the election for committeeman. We weren’t friends anymore, but some of us from the University wanted to go, see what it was like. On Giles’s way up to the podium, this young woman stopped him. Remember now, the room was jammed, people shouting, laughing, band playing, but I saw the two of them clearly. She grabbed onto his arm and wouldn’t let go. At first I thought it was simply someone trying to get a favor. I couldn’t hear them, but it was obvious she wasn’t saying congratulations. She waved her fist at him. He tried to pull away from her. Finally a coup
le of his campaign workers noticed and dragged the two of them apart. They escorted her to the door.”
“Who was it?” Turner asked.
“I asked around. Somebody finally told me it the old committeeman’s granddaughter, Molly McGee.”
They talked for a few more minutes. Fenwick and Turner decided to take one more look at the crime scene in case they might have missed something, so they hung back as Worthington started down the corridor. At the top of the stairs he looked back. He was about twenty feet from them, his face in shadow. “You know,” he called back, “the person you should really talk to is Laura Giles. She really loved him. I can’t believe the way he changed didn’t affect her.”
They listened to his receding steps. Giles’s office still had the “police scene” tape across it. The door was locked. They spent fifteen minutes hunting for a security guard to open it for them. The woman who let them in seemed inclined to linger, but Fenwick asked her to leave. They’d find her when they were done so she could lock up. She left.
Turner sat on the desk in Giles’s office. He watched Fenwick prowl around the room. His partner inspected the refrigerator, now emptied of its contents, all safely tucked away at the evidence lab. Fenwick gazed out the window at the quadrangle, inspected the desk, opened all the drawers, got down on his hands and knees and inspected the rug.
“Not much here,” he said.
“Not much more the day of the murder,” Turner said.
“Guard’s coming back,” Fenwick said.
Turner heard the soft footfalls. They both turned toward the door. A shadow appeared in the entryway to the outer office and stopped.
“What the fuck?” Fenwick said.
The barrel of a gun swung around the doorway. Turner dove for the floor. Shots rang out. Turner scrapped the knuckles on his right hand scrambling behind the desk. More shots thundered above him. Wood and plaster flew around the room.
Political Poison Page 16
