by Mark Zubro
THREE
The station’s old Grand Concourse with its vaulted ceiling had deteriorated nearly to the point of ruin. Then the train station had been renovated into a mall in the sixties. That retail dream had gone broke in the eighties. None of the store fronts remained as businesses. Tonight, however, music that sounded to Turner like heavy metal rock mixed with a disco beat thundered continuously as they strode down the old main concourse of the building. A crowd of mostly men, but a few women, crammed the interior. All wore leather garments running the gamut from skimpy thongs to heat-defying leather pants and jackets.
“What is this?” Fenwick asked.
“The annual Black and Blue Party,” Slade said.
Turner could have explained to Fenwick about leather fairs and how they worked, but it was better to have Slade go over it.
Dressed in sports coats and ties, the detectives drew stares. Slade quickly led them to a side door to avoid having them walk through any more of the party. Turner caught enough of a glimpse of the outfits and activities to recognize the resemblance of this area of the Black and Blue Party to the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco and the dealer’s room at the International Mr. Leather weekend in Chicago. Lots of butch-looking men and their hangers-on swarmed booths of vendors hawking an immense variety of leather wares and porn.
They entered a dimly-lit corridor with water-stained cement block for walls. Slade spoke. “I’m sure the party had nothing to do with this. I’m sure no one at the party would engage in this behavior. I’m sure there’s some kind of mix-up.”
The small elevator they entered needed to be operated with an old-fashioned hand crank. Slade had to close the wooden slatted doors from the top and bottom. He worked the old-fashioned lever and sent the elevator down.
Fenwick asked, “What’s the Black and Blue Party?”
Slade said, “A leather party. A gay leather party. Are you going to be assholes about that?”
Fenwick asked, “What exactly happens at a Black and Blue Party, and why does it need this much space?”
“Gay people and leather go back decades,” Slade explained. “This is just a chance for those who like it to be together, see each other, attend seminars, hook up, buy some specialty items. We’ve been doing this in Chicago now for four years. This is more refined and less commercial than other leather events around the country. It’s more... intimate.” All the while he talked, Slade twisted his hands together, or rubbed them on his leather pants, or ran them through his ill-arranged comb over.
The elevator rocked slowly down. “How far below the surface is this?” Turner asked.
Slade said, “Several floors at least. We’re going down to some of the earliest parts of the station.” The elevator clanked, rumbled, and jerked as it moved. “This elevator is an antique.”
“Is this the only entrance?” Turner asked.
“This place is a maze,” Slade said. “The original was built before the Great Chicago Fire in 1871. It burned. A lot of the Loop has been raised over the years over the original swamp. You can still find houses with stairs leading up to front doors built above sidewalk level. They didn’t dig this place that far underground, it’s just that the city kept being built up and up and over it. The original building sometimes gets lost in all the additions and renovations. When this was part of the levee district, supposedly there was prostitution going on down here. And then during Prohibition, it’s rumored Al Capone had a speakeasy or one of his headquarters down here.”
“Is any of that true?” Fenwick asked.
“That’s what I read.” Slade shrugged. “I have no idea if it’s true.”
The elevator bumped to a rocky stop. Once they were outside of it, the three of them entered a long hallway. The light came from sconces high on the walls. An immense mural covered one wall. It was done in black and white and featured rough-looking, masculine men. Turner vaguely recognized it.
They passed portals through which they caught glimpses of wavering light and writhing bodies and the continuous thump of more heavy metal music.
“You own this place?” Fenwick asked.
“We rent it for the party every year.”
“Who owns it?”
“I can give you the name and address of the man we deal with. It’ll be with my things in the temporary office we have.”
“How much of the party is down here?” Turner asked.
“We have some specialty rooms on this level, but nothing as far below as the... problem.”
They continued down a long corridor, came upon three switchbacks, followed them. As they moved, the noise from the party above and behind them slowly abated. After the switchbacks, they descended several sets of stairs.
“What’s a specialty room?” Fenwick asked.
Slade faced them from the bottom of a set of steps. He put his hands on his hips. He wore leather pants and a leather vest. The logo of a dragon chomping on a snake caught in its massive jaws adorned his left shoulder. “Look,” Slade said. His hands finally stopped moving. “Let’s get this straight. I’ll tell you anything you want about leather and this party, but I’m sure it has nothing to do with what’s happened.”
Fenwick and Turner exchanged looks. Turned nodded at his partner. Suspects’ fears wouldn’t hinder the investigation in the slightest.
Slade saw the exchange of looks and said, “I’ve put in a call to my lawyer. And there are several attorneys I know, who, I believe, are upstairs now. If I need to, I’ll get them.”
Turner said, “We’re not out to ruin the party or to cause you undue trouble, but we’ve got a corpse to deal with. We’ll cooperate with you, but we’ll need even more cooperation from you.”
“What does that mean?” Slade asked.
Fenwick said, “We may need all the names of all the people attending the party.”
“You’re not going to get the name of everyone who’s at the party. That’s over three thousand people. We can’t have their names in the paper. We can’t have them bothered by the police. This is private property. We were doing nothing wrong. You can’t arrest me.”
“Sure I can,” Fenwick said. “Our dead body trumps any problems you might have.”
Slade turned pale.
Turner soothed, “Mr. Slade, we’ll do what we can to minimize any inconvenience to you.” He also knew that there were very likely to be people in attendance who wouldn’t want it to be known they were at a gay leather fair. This he understood very well.
Slade led them down three more corridors and shallow flights of stairs each less well-lit than the last. The air smelled dank, mixing with an odor of rot. At the end of the last flight of stairs they descended a steep ramp. At the bottom of this the ground flattened out. Slade said, “This is one of the original platforms trains stopped at when the station was built.”
The lighting here was much dimmer than above. They could see perhaps as far as ten feet in front of them. Turner flicked on his flashlight. Hefting his own flashlight, Slade led them farther along. “Nobody from the party is supposed to come down here,” he said. “Hell, I don’t think anybody knows about this area except me and a few of my security people. Plus, I read up on the place. I’m kind of a train buff.”
They strode along the platform. The humidity down there was as stifling as it had been on the street.
“There must be outside openings,” Fenwick said.
The smell became more noxious and with each step grew exponentially. It soon became nearly as oppressive as the humidity. Turner and Fenwick knew what it was: unwashed human mixed with rotting garbage and dead animals. Turner suspected homeless people would know about these areas. He presumed garbage and dead critters of all kinds must have been accumulating for decades. And it wouldn’t take long in the heat and humidity for a corpse to deteriorate.
They turned a corner. A beat cop, Perry Deveneaux, shone his flashlight on their faces.
Deveneaux said, “The dead body is down there.”
Fenwick
added the glow of his flashlight to Turner’s. They stepped gingerly forward. Down a short flight of stairs, they could see the corpse. They stopped. They’d wait for the Crime Scene Investigation team to arrive before proceeding.
“Who found the body?” Turner asked.
Slade said, “I did.” His hands began their wandering again rubbing over various bits of his costume and flesh.
FOUR
The detectives shone their lights on the floor, walls, and ceilings. Slade kept himself on the far side of the detectives, away from the body. They did a cursory examination. The search for details would come later. They turned to Slade.
“How’d you happen to find the body?” Turner asked.
“We patrol down here. There are about a million entrances and exits to this place. The ones above are all secured, but down here, who knows? I and several of my security people come down here periodically. We get people trying to sneak in. It’s a hassle. Maybe an hour ago now, maybe a little less, I was down in that direction.”
He waved his flashlight toward the darkness on the far side of the corpse. “I heard somebody. Nobody is supposed to be down here. I commanded him to stop. He ran. I ran after him. He stumbled. I thought I’d catch up to him, but I’m not as young as I used to be. But then I came to here, and I saw...”
He gulped and turned paler. He whispered. “I was in such a rush, I almost fell on the body. It was awful. I got out my cell phone, but it won’t work down here. I used my walkie-talkie and got one of my security guards. I had them get help. I had to direct them. This place is a warren built by a succession of mad men. The time I had to be alone with the corpse wasn’t long. The two beat cops came, and they recognized the body. Seemed kind of odd to me.”
“Did you get a look at who you were chasing?”
“A little. Thin. Blond. White. That’s all I could really say. Wearing leather short pants. That’s all I know. Really. Can I go now? I hate standing near...that.”
Turner saw the crime scene investigators toting their heavy gear down the last ramp toward them. He said to Slade, “Thanks for your help. We’ll need to talk more later so don’t leave.”
“I can tend to my work?”
“Just don’t leave the premises.”
FIVE
Turner and Fenwick took the time to make sketches of what they could see from this vantage point.
Turner said, “No signs of a struggle up here or on the way we came down.”
Fenwick said, “No sign of a body being dragged. Although there are a lot of footprints. For a section that was supposedly unused, they might have been herding buffalo down here.”
Turner shone his light on the edges of the platform. “We better get the forensic guys to go over the floors of all the halls and platforms, but especially along the edges on the way down here. There might be a lot of traffic in the middle, but maybe checking the edges will give us something.” Turner knew it wasn’t likely. Then again, a lot of the cop stuff they did was unlikely to lead directly to the killer. But they always did all the basics because you never knew which one of those bits of information might lead to a criminal and a conviction.
They sent Deveneaux to round up several other beat cops so they could begin examining all the possible exits and entrances to this area of the old station. Turner knew the plethora of beat cops available to them would be nearly limitless. This was the death of a Chicago cop, and people would want answers fast and results faster. Or hushed up. Depended on how powerful the person was whose ox was being gored and which side he or she was on.
While they waited for the techs to finish, Fenwick asked, “How much do you know about this leather shit?”
“Enough to have a good time. Probably not enough to solve the murder.”
“Cryptic and enigmatic,” Fenwick said.
Turner said, “Don’t you have to pay a fee to use polysyllabic words?”
“I get grammar points for them.”
Half an hour later, after getting the okay from the techs and donning plastic booties, Turner and Fenwick approached the corpse. Arc lights now lit the scene. Turner said, “No drag marks or signs of a struggle down here either.” They checked a ten-foot radius around the body.
Fenwick said, “Lot of unclear marks. Nothing obvious. We’ll have to wait and see what they find with the ultra-violet light.”
The body lay on its side. His leather pants were down around his ankles. Belger still wore black boxer briefs which bulged several inches at the back. Tit clamps encased his protruding nipples. Flecks of blood dotted his torso.
Fenwick pointed to the bulge in the back of the briefs.
“What’s that?” he asked.
The ME, a gray skinned functionary, said, “The bottom end of a large dildo.”
“He’s gay?” Fenwick asked.
Turner said, “Enjoying having your butt played with is not limited to gay guys. Not as far as I know.”
“It’s not the butt play, per se,” Fenwick said.
The ME groaned. He, and anyone else who had the slightest acquaintance with Fenwick, was used to the detective’s attempts at puns and word play.
Fenwick continued, “It’s the size of the dildo.”
Turner said, “My comment remains the same. Although I could add, I sure get suspicious when a guy is at a gay leather event, and he’s found dead with a dildo up his butt. Not saying it proves anything. Gay or straight, he’s pretty damn dead, and I’m not sure yet whether the gay or straight part had anything to do with it.” Turner pointed to the corpse’s left hand. “He’s wearing a wedding ring.”
“Kind of odd,” Fenwick said.
“Wearing a wedding ring is odd?” Turner asked.
Fenwick said, “Being at a gay party dressed in serious leather, with evidence of S+M, plus the wedding ring, and being dead. That’s odd.”
“Depends,” Turner said. “This day and age, wearing a wedding ring doesn’t definitively mean he’s straight. He and his partner, male or female, could both be into S+M. It might be a turn-on for a gay guy who knew he was whipping a straight guy, or for a straight guy to get whipped by a gay guy. Or a straight guy to whip a gay guy. Which part of that, if any, means he was gay, I have no idea. Nor does it tell us who killed him. We’ve got to try to find out what he was into.”
“I like weird,” Fenwick said. “It adds zest to an investigation.”
“That’s my goal in life,” Turner said, “to make sure you have zesty investigations.”
The ME gave Turner and Fenwick his observations and conclusions. “He’s been dead for at least a couple hours. I’ll work on trying to be exact. I don’t know how accurate I’m going to be able to be with this humidity. Guy was an asshole.”
“You knew him?” Fenwick asked.
“I never saw his fifteen minutes of fame. Not interested. I don’t watch the news. I did meet him on a few cases. He was an asshole. So was his partner.”
“You kill him?” Fenwick asked.
“I wish I’d had the chance. He could fuck up an investigation like few others and his partner Callaghan was just as bad. Even I knew about their reputation. They’d bully witnesses and scare suspects. We had more people ask for attorneys when they were around than any other half a dozen cops. They were incompetent boobs.”
Fenwick said, “Tell us how you really feel.”
The ME snorted.
Turner leaned over to get a closer look at the body.
The ME pointed with the tip of his pen. “We’ve got fresh whip marks here and here. They happened within the last six hours certainly.”
“Did the whipping kill him?” Turner asked.
“I doubt it.”
Fenwick said, “But the killer whipped him?”
The ME said, “I have no idea. Whether or not he knew his murderer and something just went wrong with an S+M scene this time around is something for you guys to figure out. He may have been whipped before he died, while he was dying, or even after he died. Whether or not it was
the killer tearing up his body, I have no idea.”
Fenwick said, “I like definitive. The killer may or may not have whipped him.”
The ME said, “You’re welcome.”
Turner said, “I wonder if the whip marks may or may not have happened at the leather thing upstairs. There aren’t any old scars.” This didn’t surprise Turner. He knew that people into the whipping scene were often very careful, and the action was often mostly show, without actual blood being shed, and usually involving a minimum of real pain.
“Would these cuts have left scars?” Turner asked.
The ME peered at the wounds closely. “Yes. Some of these are pretty deep. Somebody beat the hell out of him. I very much doubt if he did them himself.”
“Why not?” Fenwick asked.
“Angle and direction. If he was doing it himself, I’d expect deeper impressions here and here with the angle either from the side or from the top. These look to me like they came from someone standing directly behind him.”
Fenwick said, “The question is by whom?”
The ME said, “I love when you use the correct interrogative pronoun.”
Fenwick said, “Corpses inspire me, and I need to build up grammar points.”
Turner said, “That’s the second time you mentioned points. We having some kind of contest tonight or you just in another rut?”
Fenwick said, “Ruts to the left of me, ruts to the right of me.”
Turner knew it was best to ignore Fenwick when he started mixing misquoted poetry with an investigation. Turner said, “Another question is, was it voluntary?”
The ME said, “You’d think his wife would have noticed when he got home. She’d have to notice, and if he wasn’t telling her the truth, I can’t imagine an explanation that would make sense.” He paused then added, “We didn’t find a whip.”
Fenwick said, “The killer is undoubtedly at Area Ten headquarters even as we speak, and he is calmly placing the whip into evidence.”
