The Shattered Bull (Drexel Pierce Book 1)

by Patrick Kanouse

  The priest said, “And Mayor Wozniak has a few words.”

  Drexel rubbed his eyes and looked forward.

  Wozniak held the side of the pulpit and kept her head down for a moment. She looked up and out across the crowd. “I first heard of Hal when he was banging on doors to get some Hollywood studio license to film on our streets. He was told, ‘You can get the forms from the Chicago Film Office.’ He said, ‘Well,’ I won’t say the next word here, ‘if I’d known that I wouldn’t have knocked so loud.’” Wozniak smiled. Soft laughter, nervous at first, and more free seconds after, rose from the audience. “He was ambitious. Driven. And wouldn’t take no for an answer. More importantly, he learned from life. Learned from his mistakes. And he did not brush the more serious ones aside. He said, ‘I’m a different person than then.’ But, and this here I think is key, he did not dwell on them. The past did not consume him. He lived in the present. He thought about the future. A way of viewing life we can all learn from. That this city can learn from.

  “As an alderman, Hal did what every good representative of the people should do. He kept them first. He went every day to the council and fought for them, fought for this city. Hal, taken from us, believed in transformation. How a city could be transformed from reality to the silver screen. How a felon could become a leading, honorable citizen. How even the worst off can become the most successful. A shining light of Chicago is gone, taken from us. But the light he cast will last.” Wozniak wiped a tear away and went back to her seat.

  Drexel knew as well that the honorable citizen can become the felon, that the hero can become the villain. His phone vibrated. He slipped it out of his pocket and looked at it. Ryan was waiting for him, so he slid out of the pew and exited the cathedral, closing the door behind him.

  Chapter 17

  Ryan was sitting at a booth, a cup of pop and wrappers on a red tray in front of him. He stood up when Drexel stopped at the table and extended his arms out. Drexel gave him a hug, which Ryan added to by patting him hard on the back.

  “Sorry I’m late,” said Drexel.

  Ryan made a show of looking at his watch. “Just barely.” He adjusted his Chicago Cubs hat so the brim was higher on his head. The brim was worn smooth at the edges and the colors had lost their vibrancy over the years. His lucky Cubs hat, he would say, though it had never seemed to help the team. Ryan was the eternal optimist regarding the Cubs, while Drexel presumed every April began a losing season. His brother’s light brown hair burst forth beneath the hat and he wore a blue flannel, long-sleeved shirt. His face still bore the chicken pox scars that gave his cheeks a craggy texture.

  Drexel sat down, and Ryan pushed him a container of fries. “Here. Eat.”

  “Not hungry.” Drexel pushed them away.

  “I bought them for you.”

  Drexel sighed and pulled the fries back to him, grabbed three, and ate them. He pulled five twenties out of his wallet, folded them, and handed them between his fingers to Ryan, who shoved them into his pocket.

  “Thanks. Lily will thank you.”

  Drexel nodded his head and ate two more fries. “What are you getting her?”

  “She’s always talking about them creams and stuff. Figured I’d get her a basket of those.”

  “She’ll like that. How’s work?”

  Ryan rubbed his thick, brown beard that he let grow without trimming except once a month. “The same. Pipes break. Toilets leak. You wouldn’t believe the shit people shove down pipes.”

  Drexel smiled and let out a small laugh.

  “You? How’s work going?”

  He shrugged with his hands, grabbed three fries, and ate them. “Busy. Maybe some day this city stops killing each other. Until then…” He shrugged with his hands again. “Look, Ryan, I’m sorry about—”

  “Don’t even say it. I’m sorry. I’ve caused you more headaches than I know, I’m sure. And you’re just trying to be a good big brother.” Ryan winked. “And you’re like a cop or something.”

  “That’s detective motherfucker.”

  They laughed.

  “Thanks for the fries.”

  Ryan reached over and grabbed two. “Least I could do. I need to get going. Got to get back to Naperville. Some beautiful suburbanite needs her toilet snaked.”

  Drexel crumbled the napkin as he stood up and raised his hands. “I don’t want to know what that means.”

  His brother carried the tray of wrappers and cups of pop over to the trash. He grabbed the pop and dumped the rest in the garbage. They separated outside the doors. Ryan walked to his Plumber Savior van, begrimed with a winter’s layer of dirt. Drexel’s phone rang with the default ringtone, the thunderous war march from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. “Hello?” he answered.

  “Detective Pierce?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Ms. Nevitz.”

  “Yes, what can I do for you?”

  “Mr. Pritchard would like to meet with you.”

  “Okay. When is he available?”

  “Actually, now. The funeral is over, and he is returning home.”

  Drexel sighed. “Okay. What’s his address?”

  * * *

  Pritchard, scion of an old Chicago family, lived on Lakeshore Drive in the Gold Coast. The house looked faintly like images he had seen of Venice, a city Zora and he had wanted to visit but never did and thus remained as an ideal place in Drexel’s imagination. Boats scooting along the canals. Sidewalks and back ways so winding that even natives got lost. And he imagined the quiet of such a city at night. But now, he stood on the sidewalk, the traffic buzzing behind him. A wrought-iron gate led by a few steps to a single black door. The second story’s three windows were recessed into the wall, bordered by Ionic columns and topped by an arched window, protected by wrought-iron bars. The three windows spanned the width of the house and led to a balcony with six carved bending stars. The third story featured two windows, each with their own small balcony. The house’s neighbors were also mansions, though in Romanesque and Victorian Gothic styles.

  Drexel opened the gate, closed it behind him, and walked up to the door and rang the bell. He turned and faced the street and the lake, his arms behind his back.

  The door opened. “Detective, please come in.”

  Pritchard was dressed in comfortable khakis and a v-neck, three-banded blue, white, and gray sweater, with a dark blue shirt collar poking above. Drexel walked in and stopped in the hallway. Pritchard pointed to three hooks on the wall. “You can hang your coat there.”

  More a command than a request, no matter how nicely said, Drexel put his cap on the hook and then hung his coat over it. He looked through the window of the door and saw cars passing, but he heard barely any sound. “I would have expected this place to be much louder with Lakeshore Drive just outside.”

  Pritchard smiled. “This way.” He pointed past the short hallway and to the right, where they walked up a short flight of stairs and into the great room—the three windows looking out onto the lake. “Have a seat.”

  Drexel sat in an overstuffed, dark leather chair facing out the windows.

  Pritchard walked to a small bar. The room was decorated in a comfortable, almost hunting lodge fashion, though without animal heads hanging on the wall. The furniture was all the same dark leather with stained wood embellishments. The coffee table and end tables were dark wood as well, but either handmade or made to look so, not the Target and IKEA shelves or end tables of Drexel’s apartment. Cream curtains hung from the ceiling and draped down each window’s sides, tied back with a heavy rope. On the wall hiding the stairwell on the right, a painting about as wide and tall as Drexel’s outstretched arms hung. Leaning toward monotone, the painting still managed to strike him as vibrant in color. The sky was gray-bluish with some high white wispy clouds and what looked like a star behind one of them. An ocean occupied the bottom
third of the image, and its color mirrored the sky, though it was more gray and shinier. Two sailing ships—almost black in color and lacking detail—sat on the ocean close to each other. An orange glow sat between the ships and dark smoke seemed to rise from it and waft over, upward, and to the left of the ships. To the right of the ships, the edge of a smaller boat clutched the sea. Near the bottom of the image a bird flew across the water. He wondered what Zora would make of this. She would have some incisive comment no doubt, some narrative to explain the two ships and the bird and the sky. To him, though, it was simply the image, a captured moment in time. Wood burned and cracked in a fireplace to Drexel’s left, which punctuated their conversation. “A drink?” asked Pritchard.

  Drexel looked at him, but before he could say no, his host said, “You’re a bourbon or scotch man. Let’s have a scotch.” He pulled out the cork from a bottle Drexel did not recognize and poured two generous servings. He handed a glass to Drexel and sat on the sofa across from him, his back to the windows. “That painting,” Pritchard pointed with his finger while holding the glass, “is a version of ‘Burial at Sea’ by Turner. It’s not the final version, the one that hangs at the Tate in London. More of a detailed study. It depicts his friend’s burial. David Wilkie was the fellow’s name.”

  Drexel nodded. “It’s impressive.”

  “Critics savaged it when he first showed it.” Pritchard gestured vaguely to the room. “Holabird and Roche built this house in 1895. Same folks who built Soldier Field and Sears on State and a bunch of other iconic buildings. A different time then. Lakeshore Drive,” he thumbed behind him toward the street, “wasn’t a freeway and lots of houses could be had along its borders from Streeterville and up the Gold Coast.”

  Drexel took a drink. A peated scotch, almost like drinking smoke, yet comforting on a cold day. “Times change.”

  “Yes. I had to get special permission about the windows. They conform, outwardly to the original style, but they are triple-paned glass, and effective at blocking the noise. Do you like the scotch?”

  “Very good.”

  “Good. It’s from Islay. Cragabus. Tiny distillery. Have you ever been to Scotland?”

  Drexel shook his head.

  “Lovely country.” Pritchard seemed to mentally go there, take a drink, and then smiled. “My family is an old family here. My great, great grandfather—two greats—came to Chicago in 1845. Joining the boom of growth and opportunity. We’ve been here ever since. My family made its fortune in construction. It was a good time to be in construction with this city blooming up all around. During the Civil War, my family started making bullets. Those Minie balls. After the Great Fire, the family made even more money. It was a family joke that it wasn’t O’Leary’s cow that started the fire but cousin Fred to stoke the construction business.” Pritchard chuckled and took a drink. “Anyways, family has money. I couldn’t afford this house on an executive’s salary from TG Enterprises. No matter what anyone thinks, TG Enterprises is not that big. That painting,” Pritchard pointed to the Turner, “is a family heirloom. I understand your wife was an artist.” Pritchard paused and bent his head to the right a little.

  Drexel nodded.

  “Turner could paint landscapes wonderfully, but he had such a hard time capturing people in a landscape. Portraiture was fine, but humans, in the midst of the world, always look a bit cartoonish. Like he couldn’t get them. Very interesting.”

  Drexel nodded. “Mr. Pritchard—”

  “Lloyd.”

  “Lloyd. Why did you want to see me? Did you send the message about the illegal fights?”

  Pritchard took a sip, held it in his mouth, and squinted at Drexel before swallowing loudly. Looking at the glass, he said, “Exquisite scotch. This house we’re in, I bought a few years ago. My father and one of my brothers live a few blocks away, but on a quieter street, on a street lined with houses and not some last surviving remnant of old Chicago. However, my father prizes old Chicago wealth. And so does my brother, the heir apparent of the family business. Don’t let the fact of our being in the twenty-first century fool you into thinking the rule of primogeniture is a thing of the past. So I struck out on my own.” He set the empty glass on the coaster on the end table, leaving his fingers on the edge longer than necessary, before clasping his hands together in front of his chest. “I wanted to do something completely different than the rest of my family. Something not tied to real estate, manufacturing, construction, or finance. Something I wanted to do. Something I found enjoyable.”

  “So TG Enterprises?”

  “Why so surprised? I’d heard of Hal’s efforts in bringing more filming work to Chicago and his parlay into agenting. I suggested he become an agent to athletes, film stars, big celebrities. I realized agenting was depression proof like booze. Athletes, actors, they’ll always need agents, and sports and acting will always be needed.” He raised his hands emphasizing the obviousness of the statement. “The point is that I wanted to build a company outside the immediate expertise of my family. And Hal and I did that. It went well. Very well. The thing is, I began to notice last year, that some of the financing seemed a tad off. I’m sure you’ve seen that already.”

  Drexel had not, but he nodded anyway.

  “Nothing big—rounding errors possibly. But I’m an exact person, and I don’t like rounding. Began years ago when my father would give me tables of figures to reconcile and would have me redo anywhere every penny wasn’t accounted for.”

  “What do you mean by a tad off?”

  “It was buried in T&E—uh, travel and expense—and it was paying out extra for trips. You don’t have to have a receipt for anything under one hundred, and I noticed a lot of sub one hundred inputs. And it happened several times in bursts.”

  Drexel had taken out his notebook and was writing in it. “What did you do?”

  “I asked Hal about it. He said he’d lost his corporate card so he had taken cash out of his bank and was using that.”

  “You didn’t buy it?”

  “Once or twice, maybe. But not dozens.”

  “So then what?”

  “Then he died.”

  Drexel angled his head a bit.

  Pritchard raised a hand. “No. No. His death forestalled my taking my information to the FBI.”

  “You don’t think they’d be interested.”

  “Yes, but no one is left to punish but the company itself. I can now correct any errors in his judgment, even if I put in my own money.”

  “With the Bull’s death, you seem right in line to become CEO.”

  “I’ve earned it.”

  “What did you think of the Bull’s political aspirations and work?”

  Pritchard poured himself another drink. “Of two minds. Well, maybe three. I didn’t like that it took him away from the business, and my family has never been interested in direct political power. However, it was nice to have someone at the Hall. He could smooth things, even though he was pretty careful not to give too much preferment to TG Enterprises. His politics. Well. Let’s say we come from different places.”

  Drexel leaned back in the chair. “Did you agree with the direction of the business?”

  Pritchard let a thin, half-smile appear on the right side. “We had our differences, but no more than most business people I don’t think. Fact is, he owned fifty-three percent of the company, so what he said, had more votes.”

  “What about that fifty-three percent now?”

  “You mean now that the owner of them is dead without having designated their distribution upon his death?”

  “Yeah. That. I assumed he had a will. His girlfriend said he left everything to charity.”

  Pritchard smiled and he shook his head. “She is misinformed. He should have had a will. He should have left a lot to charity. I told him to do that, but he never got around to it. It all means they go into probate. The cou
rts try to hunt down any heirs they can and give it to them. Can’t find anyone? They’ll go into the market again. So fifty-three percent of the company is still outside my control.”

  “But anything you wanted to do until someone actually owns them, you can pretty much do, right?”

  Pritchard plucked a piece of lint off his slacks. “Theoretically, yes. But I will ask you, did you know Hal’s girlfriend has been asking to have those stocks released to her? Passed over to her ownership?”

  “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “That’s millions of dollars.”

  Drexel sat up. “And control of TG Enterprises. So what did you know of Kara?”

  “Nothing really. Hal and I were business partners, not friends. Frankly—”

  “Go on.”

  “Frankly, I thought she was after his money. Young. Beautiful. Hal’s rich. But he looks like he came from the streets if you know what I mean.” Pritchard chuckled. “Hal irritated the old money around here even if they respected that he had pulled himself up. My father and brother were both annoyed beyond belief.” He looked at his watch. “Oh, I do have something I need to get to. Are we done?”

  “So who do you think did this to Hal?”

  Pritchard stood. “I’m a businessman. I say, follow the money.” He gestured toward the stairs. “I wanted you to know about the irregularity. And I know gold-digging when I see it.”

  Drexel cocked his head. “So this expansion request. What was it for?”

  “Nothing good. He wanted to invest in boxing in a big way. I knew what was going on, and I don’t think the financing would’ve been approved.”