A Deadly Development

by James Green

  “Come on, Joe, you’re killing me with the suspense,” Thurber said. He wanted to declare victory. He wanted to let Burke know that on this day, he was the better detective.

  Dr. Joseph Dryer, M.D., took his glasses off and looked up.

  “I think you guys just found your murder weapon.”

  Thurber jumped up, screamed, “Fuck yeah!” and punched Burke in the arm.

  “Well, it’s not the murder weapon, but it is its twin.” Burke said, just to needle Thurber some. He pretended that the punch hadn’t hurt, even though his armed throbbed. He wasn’t going to give Jack any more satisfaction. He already was going to be insufferable.

  “Whatever, Tom, you know and I know this is a big fucking deal.”

  They talked about its significance all the way back to headquarters. It meant that murderer had been in the Mayor’s office before he killed Vithous. It also meant the murder hadn’t been premeditated. The killer had grabbed whatever was handy. It was less than ten feet from that bookcase to Vithous’ cube.

  “Twenty bucks the killer had been in the Mayor’s office before,” Burke wagered.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “It’s a straight shot from the entrance of the Mayor’s wing to his desk. You walk in those doors you would see the back of his head typing away. No reason to go in the Mayor’s office.”

  Thurber thought a moment. His big meat claws of hands on the wheel. He nodded.

  “That makes sense,” he conceded, “but lots of people have been in that office.”

  That was true. They had looked at the Mayor’s schedule that day. She had a total of six meetings alone in that office. They had started at 8:30, with the last one at 4:30.

  “Who was the last meeting with?” Burke asked. Thurber had been the one who had studied the schedule.

  “It was supposed to be with Councilman Cunningham, but they canceled it. Apparently they decided they could just talk to each other on the road over to Bartle Hall for the event with the realtors.” They were now pulling up to police headquarters. Like most cops, Thurber double-parked in front of the building. Who was going to give an unmarked police car a ticket?

  “What about before that?” Burke asked as they climbed the stairs, past the police memorial, to the entrance.

  “Don’t remember, I’ll have to look through my notes again.”

  Now it was Burke’s turn to tease. “Take some ginseng, you memory is going bad, Jack.”

  “Today I’ll let you have that one, Tom. ‘Cause I’m still the man, and you fucking know it!” Thurber strutted through the entrance.

  Oh God, Burke thought. Please let me solve this case soon. I can’t take much more of this.

  They went to Captain Michaels’ office. He was pleased about the possibility of a murder weapon. He was not pleased that Thurber had just grabbed the bookend without checking first with the Mayor.

  “Jesus Christ, Jack,” Michaels’ howled, “what if the old lady notices it was missing? Don’t you think she’ll know it’s you?” He leaned back in his chair, his face turning a brilliant scarlet color. Burke was enjoying this part. Now Jack could be the man.

  “I could slip in and return it, nobody will be the wiser,” Thurber offered.

  “And how are you going to do that exactly? Last time I checked, they’ve got security over there.”

  “Not as strong as you’d think,” Thurber stated. Michaels face turned from scarlet to a very deep red. Burke noticed that Jack regretted it the second he said it. But it was too late. The tidal wave was about to hit the shore.

  “Such a wiseass, eh, Jack? Always with the pithy comments. Well, smart guy you need to figure how to get that thing back into her office without anyone, and I mean anyone noticing!” Michaels hand had pounded on the desk to emphasis the last words.

  “Yes sir,” Thurber responded. “I’ll make sure it happens today.”

  “You’d better!”

  So, they had left as quickly as they entered. Thurber’s ecstasy had been replaced with nervousness. He lit a cigarette the second they exited the building.

  “No good deed goes unpunished,” Thurber complained.

  “You know Michaels is a total stickler for procedure,” Burke responded, “not surprised he reacted like that. Plus, we’ve been on his shit list for days.”

  “Maybe. But if you ask me the guy is just a prick.” Thurber took a long drag into his lungs. He slowly exhaled, the smoke floating above his head.

  “No argument from me there.”

  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Burke stopped and savored the sunshine for a moment. He had been inside way too much lately. He had four weeks of vacation built up. He was going to use some of it the moment this case was wrapped up.

  “How are you getting that back in her office,” Burke pointed at the bookend, still sealed in the evidence bag.

  “Don’t imagine you’d take it over for me.” Thurber even seemed serious about it.

  “Not hardly, but I will walk over there with you.”

  “Never pictured you as a voyeur before, Burke,” Thurber replied, taking one last drag before throwing it on the ground and stomping it out with his foot. “Come on”

  They were back up on the 29th floor. Burke hadn’t been there since the murder on Friday, which now seemed like years ago. He tried to imagine what the killer had been thinking that night, walking into these doors into the Mayor’s personal office, grabbing the bookend, feeling the heaviness in his hands. Moving silently up to Vithous, striking downward on his skull as hard he could, over and over. Then leaving the office, moving to the elevator, pressing a button and waiting for it, hoping the building was completely empty. Did he clean himself up in the bathroom that was just a couple of steps away from Vithous’cubicle, or did he just leave? Still clutching the bookend, then moving into the elevator and taking the long ride down. What was that murderer thinking that long ride down? And what did he do with the bookend? If it had been Burke, he would have thrown it off the Paseo Bridge into the Missouri River – it would sink under the water, into the viscid mud. Never to be seen again. Burke doubted if the killer had thought it out that much.

  Thurber lucked out. The front desk security guard said the Mayor was gone for the day.

  “I left a notebook in her office, I was hoping to go in and get it,” he said while flashing his badge. The security guard buzzed them and they just walked in. Thurber slid the bookend out of his jacket pocket, and placed it right back where he found it.

  “That the side you found it?” Burke asked.

  “Yep, right here on the left side,” Thurber said pointing to it, “See how the side closer to the door has these books on their side?”

  Burke nodded.

  “Let’s not press our luck, let’s go.” They hurried outside and were back to their office within five minutes.

  The rest of the day had gone smoothly. Bobby had called to say he’d have Tom’s docket information first thing in the morning. Burke and Thurber had worked quietly for over an hour.

  “This is interesting,” Jack said, finally breaking the silence.

  “What was the name of the guy you said worked for the Mayor and was involved in the development downtown?”

  “Peter Knaak.”

  “He has a standing appointment every Friday at 3:30 with Mayor Hughes,” Thurber announced.

  “Last Friday, too?” Burke asked.

  “Yep,” Thurber said looking at the printout provided by the Mayor’s schedule, “looks like for over a year. He also has a standing appointment every Thursday at 4 p.m. with her.”

  “Interesting. He might have had a motive,” Burke speculated.

  “Peter Knaak has to be at least 60 years old,” Thurber replied.

  “So, old people don’t ever kill?” Burke chided Thurber. They had once investigated an eighty-five year old man who had killed his wife with a pillow because she apparently snored too loud. In the trial, he claimed his sleep deprivation made him temporarily insane
.

  “I’ve got someone I could ask about Knaak, the type of person he is,” Tom said, thinking about Bobby, and the list of law firms that had been on Bethany Edward’s printout. “I am supposed to meet him in the morning.”

  “We are supposed to get our elevator records in the morning too,” Thurber said, leaning back in his chair.

  Burke chuckled and shook his head.

  “What?” Thurber asked, “What is so funny?”

  “Not funny, just scary,” Burke said. “What if it is him? What if the Mayor’s personal attorney killed John Vithous. Can you imagine the shit storm that will bring? We’d better be sure, that’s all I am saying.”

  “We’ve already been wrong about two suspects,” Thurber said, grabbing a pack of smokes out of his pocket, and fingering his zippo lighter in his hand, “I wouldn’t get my hopes up just yet.”

  Burke nodded in agreement. He wasn’t getting his hopes up.

  “Smoke break,” Thurber announced and headed out the door.

  By the time Burke was finished for the day, Thurber had been gone for over an hour. Tom had been so engrossed in thought, looking at documentation, playing around with the county’s economic development website Bethany had showed him, he hadn’t noticed that most everyone had left for the day.

  Burke headed south out of downtown, deep in thought. But at the moment, he wasn’t thinking about John Vithous, Dick Houlihan, Pete Knaak or Jane Hughes, he was thinking about an old home in Brookside, the one he had called home for over a decade, and now had an offer pending.

  The route he was heading was one he had taken thousands of times over the years. Heading south on Oak Street, over I-670, past the newspaper printing facility, to Crown Center. Rolling past hospital hill on his left – aptly named because of the location of Truman Medical Center and Children’s Mercy Hospital. Crown Center to his right, then Union Hill appeared ahead, on a crescent that contained the Union Hill cemetery, with gravestones so old that some predated Kansas City altogether. Through an intersection that contained ‘martini corner’ a hipster hangout of high priced drinks and hors d’oeuvres. When he was in his twenties, the area had been pretty much abandoned, now it was making a comeback.

  He drove past 31st Street, and to his left was the El Torreon ballroom. Or what was left of it. Now it was mostly dilapidated and housed as an antiques shop. The rest of the building was empty, but you could still see some of its former glory by the architecture of the building. Burke’s grandparents had danced here on many a hot Saturday night, where men like Count Basie refined the ‘Kansas City’ sound.

  He was now in Hyde Park, Kansas City’s first ‘suburban’ neighborhood. Huge mansions that were built around 1900 doted the road, interspersed with ugly, dilapidated 1960s and 70s apartment buildings. A hundred years earlier, Hyde Park was the neighborhood for Kansas City’s elite, and remained so, until Ward Parkway had come along. Then it was almost mortally wounded with the race riots and the implosion of the Kansas City school district. The families with real money fled to Johnson County Kansas or Lee’s Summit or somewhere north of the river, where the houses were new and the school districts were lily-white. In the past twenty years, it too was seeing a bit of a renaissance, but the movement was slow, and crime remained an issue.

  Burke’s car rolled past the Nelson Atkins Museum, a neo-classical behemoth of an art gallery that stood where William Rockhill Nelson, the immensely powerful publisher of The Kansas City Star had lived. The museum had recently added an addition that housed modern art pieces. During the day, it looked like a bunch of storage facilities, lined up together. But at night, which is when Burke was driving by it, the buildings glowed with a transparent, milky brilliance.

  The addition had been highly controversial. Kansas City had these type of controversies about every ten years or so. The Nelson’s earlier controversy had involved placing forty foot tall shuttlecocks on either side of the lawn of the building, making the building look like a net of a badminton game. Burke had liked the shuttlecocks, but there had been a lot of howling at the time.

  Next his car cut through the University of Missouri, Kansas City campus, where Burke reluctantly had gone to school, unable to afford any of the out of state schools he had wanted to attend. Then through Crestwood, the neighborhood John Vithous called home. Tom had thought about driving by the home, but figured there was no point, so he kept heading south.

  Finally, he was in the neighborhood he had called home, both as a child and as a first time homeowner.

  When he had bought, it had been an investment. He and a high school buddy were in the business of flipping houses. They were young, with a limitless amount of energy, enthusiasm and optimism. They flipped a total of five houses, each time spending months gutting, painting and updating the home. Tom’s college buddy, Steve Taylor, was the talent of the operation. His father was a contractor, so Steve knew how to upgrade electrical, plumbing and HVAC systems. Tom had been mostly the muscle; he was good at throwing a sledge hammer around and breaking down moldy ceilings, broken plaster, and leaky roofs.

  They hadn’t much money, so they would live in the houses they were flipping. This led to many nights of dealing with no lights, or running water. But, they had done it. Both he and Steve took tremendous pride in the finished product, and they made a little cash to boot.

  By the time they arrived at the 1925 Tudor home, with beautiful oak crown molding, and gorgeous hardwood floors, Tom had saved up enough for a down payment.

  This house had been a wedding present from a young groom to his bride. The couple had been there when Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, the stock market crashed and for FDR’s four elections. Within those walls, the couple watched their children grow up there, saw the world come to war, and eventually receded into old age during the latter part of the 20th century.

  The husband died in 1983, but his widow had refused to move. One snowy night, she broke her hip slipping on the back porch, and her children wouldn’t let her come back to the home when she got out of the hospital. Tom knew all this because the man he bought the house from was her youngest son. While looking at the house together, the son would point to a corner and talk about a specific childhood memory often becoming emotional. Tom wondered why the son hadn’t bought the house, but he hadn’t asked. Selfishly, he had wanted the home for himself.

  It had great bones but was a mess. Leaky plumbing had led to large amounts of plaster crashing to the floors below. The kitchen hadn’t been updated since the 1950s; the basement still housed the original boiler, which at some point had been converted from being heated by coal to being warmed by natural gas. The old coal shoot still stood in the corner of the basement. The son indicated he was too young to remember when it was used, but did say his dad talked often about how much of a pain it was to keep the boiler stoked on cold Kansas City nights.

  Steve and Tom had moved in on a March Saturday, and got to work. Over the next six weeks they filled up three industrial bins full of trash. They tore the building down to its studs, leaving only the beautiful molding, wood floors, black and white bathroom tiles and the clawed foot bathtub upstairs.

  Burke would come home from a long patrol shift, Taylor from his Dad’s contracting business and they would start in. They usually wouldn’t stop until at least 10:30 at night, sometimes later. It had been exhausting and frustrating, but in the end, all worth it.

  Burke had moved in as bachelor that fall, and would be there for the next decade.

  He had dated a lot in the early days, never finding the ‘one’ that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with, until when he was 35 years old and he met a young nurse named Julie in a spinning class at his gym.

  She wasn’t from Kansas City, and had just moved into town. Tom had found himself enchanted immediately; she had a smile that she gave away so easily. She laughed at his jokes, and enjoyed many of the same things he did; history, travel, going to the gym to workout.

  He had his misgivings; she was 13 years
younger. But she assured him it didn’t matter.

  “Love knows no age, Tom,” she purred into his ear one night on his couch in the house that he loved.

  After that, it had been a whirlwind. She moved in, they got engaged and on a trip to California, they eloped. Their mothers had been furious, and that was one of the reasons they did it.

  All these memories were swimming in his head as he pulled up to the very house where Julie had won his heart, and then – only a few years later – broke it into a thousand pieces.

  Tom walked up the three steps that he had countless times before, but instead of entering, he tapped firmly at the door. He still had his key, but felt he shouldn’t barge in, and to be honest, was afraid of what he might find.

  Julie came to the door looking very much like that girl at the spinning class all those years ago. Her turquoise eyes stared up at him, flashing a combination of guilt and contempt.

  “I thought you were going to call first,” she said, while motioning him inside. It was still all the same furniture, the blue sofa, the brown overstuffed chair with the huge ottoman that Tom bought specifically to watch football on weekend afternoons. Everything was in the exact same place. Everything, except him.

  “I have been really busy,” Burke said, not caring if she believed him or not. That trust was broken, and he’d be damned if he ever tried to put it back together.

  “Tom, I know you are intent on selling this house, but I’m not ready. Where would I go?”

  “Not my problem, Julie,” Tom said with a shrug while sitting down on the edge of the ottoman, “you agreed to this as part of the divorce settlement. It’s time.”

  Julie sat across from him, as far as the couch would allow her to be from him. She curled her legs up alongside her, like she always did. Her bare feet jutting out from her Levi’s, a red V-neck sweater that hugged her body close. She still looked amazing, but the feeling of love he had for her was long gone.