Karsch made it clear he would meet with anyone, any time, anywhere, and he’d go to whatever lengths necessary to keep things confidential. Only he knew if this’d done much for business. Thinnes didn’t know anyone who consulted him—or to be accurate, he didn’t know anyone who’d admit needing to. Karsch’s chief function, aside from keeping the coffee maker filled, seemed to be answering questions about the murky motives of criminal suspects.
“I need a refresher,” Thinnes said. Karsch waited, looking interested. “Besides drugs and depression, what would make a young man kill himself?”
Karsch’s dark eyes narrowed as he thought. “Psychotics do it.”
Thinnes shook his head. Karsch pointed to a chair, and Thinnes sat down.
“Accidents are probably the next biggest category.”
“Accidental suicide? You mean the sickos who get their kicks by half strangling themselves and don’t always stop in time?”
Karsch nodded. “And there’s a fairly amazing number—sometimes referred to as type Ts—who’re addicted to excitement and put themselves in dangerous situations for kicks. Sometimes they miscalculate.”
“Russian-roulette players?”
“Mm-hm.”
“What else?”
“Losses—loss of a loved one, loss of status or self-esteem, loss of health. Rape victims, especially victims of forcible or drug-related homosexual rape, often kill themselves, as do bankrupts.” He paused to reflect further. “And white-collar types caught in crimes likely to result in disgrace or prison. People diagnosed with incurable disease sometimes kill themselves, though not as often as you’d expect.”
“Compulsives?”
Karsch nodded. “Sometimes. You have something that would interest me?”
“Don’t know yet. I have to see the autopsy report.” He stood up. “It may turn out to be an ordinary homicide.”
Thinnes was back in the squad room, thinking about Allan Finley when Crowne came back.
“Do me a favor, will you, Ray?”
“What’s that?”
Thinnes handed Caleb’s card to Crowne. “Tail Dr. Caleb when he leaves his office this afternoon. See if you can get some idea of what sort of man he is.”
“You mean a stakeout, for cryin’ out loud? All night?”
“No, just till he goes home. I’ll pick him up in the morning.”
“Jesus! What if he doesn’t go home?”
“He has to go somewhere.”
“Yeah? Well what’s wrong with you tailin’ him? As far as I’m concerned, this whole homicide idea’s a crock.”
“My wife’s ready to walk out if I don’t show for dinner tonight. Anyway, you owe me for that hooker I ran down for you. I’m still catchin’ shit about the blond hair.”
“Yeah, okay. All right, I’ll do it—but then we’re square.”
“Thanks, Ray.”
Six
Even for a man skilled at unraveling peculiar events and motives, it had been a strange day. Stressful. Allan’s death brought back all the feelings Caleb thought he’d done with. Not the undiminished anguish, but the gray depression and the paralyzing outrage. The appalling waste. Dispassionately, Caleb noted his own symptoms of anxiety. He found—to his immense dismay—that he was unable to picture Allan clearly. After three years of weekly visits, his only vivid impression was of the bloody remains. And the irony. Such an innocuous man; such a brutal end.
Caleb willed his thoughts into other channels and noted with sardonic amusement how he used repression when it suited. After his last client left, he performed all the appeasing rituals, searching his memory and Finley’s file for clues to the tragedy. But Allan had been tediously innocent, and—even knowing the chaotic and libidinous drives motivating the man’s compulsivity—Caleb would have predicted he’d die of boredom. Not suicide. Certainly not murder.
Allan’s death was a police matter. In the few moments he’d observed the detective, Thinnes, Caleb had been intrigued and impressed. He’d noticed his flattened affect, his subtle twitchiness, the tired lines in his face. As he’d watched Thinnes deal with the medical examiner, he thought he’d detected the retarded responses, the general irritability and reluctance to expend energy that were characteristic of depression.
But there’d been a sharpness there, too, a cunning, a quickening of interest over the exchange like a cat awakening to the possibilities of a mousehole. If he could resist the ennui, Thinnes would give Allan’s killer an uneasy time.
Caleb decided to consult Margaret.
She lived in Evanston, west of the Northwestern campus, in a huge old house with a tree-shaded yard in front and a garden in the back. There were parking spaces on the street, and Caleb didn’t feel uncomfortable leaving the Jaguar in one of them. It didn’t seem conspicuous. As he went up the steps to the spacious porch, Margaret’s golden retriever greeted him with a wag of her entire body. Caleb took a moment to pat the dog, then told her, “Enough, Anna.”
The door was opened by Margaret’s teenage daughter, Lisa, who threw herself at him like an exuberant toddler. “Jack, it’s great to see you!” She gave him a huge hug and a grin that displayed voluminous hardware. “You’re staying for dinner, of course.” Almost as an afterthought, she added, “Mom’s in the study.”
The study, Margaret’s office away from the office, was warm and small and quiet, sort of a brightly lit womb, with comforting chairs and cheerful artwork. Margaret had decorated it herself, over years, so that everything about it expressed her personality and amplified her intense empathy. Only her most trusted clients and oldest friends were invited in.
Margaret was a slim woman, fifty-three, clear-eyed—figuratively and literally—and ladylike in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Though she wasn’t shocked by profanity, Caleb had never, even under the most trying circumstances, heard her use it, and he’d never seen, in fact couldn’t imagine, Margaret wearing pants. Her dress today was silk, flattering without being flashy, and she’d recently cut her salt-and-pepper hair.
“Margaret, how are you?”
“Fine, thanks. Coffee?”
“No, thank you. You changed your hair. Very becoming.”
“You would notice. Sit down and tell me what’s on your mind.”
He took one of the comforting chairs and she sat down across from him. “It’s been a hell of a day. I woke up this morning dreaming I was being attacked by cougars.”
“Some aspect of your life getting the better of you?”
“Nothing so Freudian. The cats were slugging it out for possession of the bed. They fight all the time.”
She laughed. “Why don’t you just get rid of one?”
“I will if I find someone I can trust to take care of him.”
She smiled and waited.
“Celibacy is the pits.”
“I know. Have you considered starting with just friendship?”
“Not recently.”
“When was the last time you had a relationship?”
He gave her a rueful smile and a self-deprecating shrug.
“Good Lord, Jack, five years ago?”
“I know. I still haven’t worked it all out.”
“I’ve heard that before. What’s special about today?”
“One of my clients was found dead.”
“Oh Jack, I’m so sorry. A special friend?”
“Just ‘a bit of the continent.’”
“Then? You’ve had clients die before.”
“Not by murder. He didn’t show up for his appointment this morning—the first time. So I went round to his apartment on my lunch hour. The police were there…I almost lost it, Margaret.”
“What, Jack?”
“That subtle complex of behaviors we call control.”
“What would happen if you lost control?
“The last time it happened, I killed a man.”
She was unperturbed. She’d heard the story before. “Do you want to talk about that?”
“No. I
t’s old business.”
“Tell me about your client.”
“He was a nice, a decent man, a man of integrity. And he’s dead. I gather the police think he killed himself, though he wasn’t suicidal. They found him in his apartment with his head blown half away.”
Seven
It was finally raining. Traffic was snarled and crawly. The radio announced fifty-five minutes—Kennedy to the Junction, equal delays on the Eisenhower, the Dan Ryan, and the Drive. Thinnes took side roads. In among the visual garbage that littered the commercial streets he spotted a billboard: SAY IT WITH FLOWERS. Not a bad idea. He signaled a turn and headed south. He’d stopped for a red light half a block from the florist’s when the old street-copper autopilot kicked in.
There were several cars parked in the lot of a liquor-convenience store across the intersection. One particularly caught his eye, the one in front of the plate glass door, with its engine running and the driver’s door open.
He fidgeted with impatience. As he waited for the green, he looked around for a blue-and-white. He stared daggers at the retarded traffic signal. Still red. His eyes kept moving, from light to car, to traffic, to street. Through the plate glass he could see the pantomime of what might be a robbery in progress. He reached for his .38 and slipped it half out of its holster, let it settle back in place.
Suddenly a gunman exited the store and stepped to the car. Thinnes started forward, then hit the brakes to avoid tail-ending the car in front. The light hadn’t changed. He leaned on the horn. The gunman heard and stopped. The light changed. The car in front of Thinnes took off. He floored it, heading for the gunman. He leaned on his horn and hit the brights.
Instead of running, the gunman took careful aim and fired, just missing Thinnes, but crazing his windshield. Thinnes slammed on the brakes and cut right to avoid killing him. The brake pedal went to the floor. The car spun sideways. The gunman fired again, then was struck by the side of the car as the Chevy skidded out of control on the wet pavement. The gunman sailed into the center of the lot. Hit the blacktop. Bounced. Thinnes pumped the brake, but the car spun around until Thinnes’s door slammed the rear of the gunman’s vehicle.
As he drew his .38, Thinnes let out the breath he’d been holding. He couldn’t see through the spiderweb of cracked glass on the windshield or open his crumpled door. He scrambled across the seat and out the passenger side door and ran to cover the gunman.
At that moment, squad cars with Mars lights flashing blue squealed into the parking lot from every direction, and uniformed officers swarmed out with guns drawn.
Thinnes felt an overwhelming panic as the coppers closed in. He quickly raised his hands and shifted his hold on the gun so he was holding it by the cylinder, not the grip. He was breathing and sweating as if he’d just run the Chicago Marathon. “I’m a police officer.” He tried to reduce his adrenaline level by taking deep breaths. Two of the cops covered him while a third approached from the rear and took his revolver. The cop who’d arrived first reached down and relieved the unconscious gunman of the weapon he was still clutching.
A man hurried cautiously from the store. “He’s not the one!” he told the cops.
Thinnes told the cop behind him, “Left inside pocket.”
The copper extracted Thinnes’s star, glanced at it, and showed it to the others. He relaxed. “Sorry, Detective.”
Thinnes let his breath out slowly as he put his arms down. “It’s all right.”
The officer gave Thinnes back his gun and star, and Thinnes put them away. He bent and felt the gunman’s throat and was relieved to feel blood pulsing beneath the skin. Behind him somewhere he could hear one of the cops calling for an ambulance. He thought of the paperwork that would occupy the next few hours of the arresting officer’s time. He turned to the first cop on the scene and said, “The suspect fired on an off-duty police officer on the scene, causing him to skid and lose control of his car and strike the suspect, throwing same to the ground. At that point, the first patrol officer on the scene, Officer…” He looked at the copper’s name tag. “…Officer Selkirk, disarmed the suspect and placed him under arrest. Nice bust, Selkirk.”
Selkirk started to protest, then shrugged. It wasn’t anywhere near shift change, Thinnes could see him thinking, and the arrest wouldn’t look bad on his record.
Selkirk’s partner laughed. “The dumb fuck. Six thousand off-duty cops in this city, and he has to pull a gun on Dirty Harry.”
Thinnes stepped into the speaker’s personal space and pointed at the suspect. “This son of a bitch is gonna live!” As he turned away, he added, “And Selkirk made the bust.”
Later when the truck had his car in tow and was about to pull away with it, Thinnes felt the letdown, the depression that sets in when the adrenaline rush has passed. Time to go home.
He approached the coppers still talking to the store manager. “You guys going by HQ?”
“We’ll give you a lift.”
“Thanks. May as well get my share of the paperwork over with.”
Thinnes lived near the Northeastern campus. Sauganash was a quiet North Side neighborhood of single-family homes, with a suburban feel. It was close to midnight when the blue-and-white pulled up the drive and dropped him in front of the two-story brick and frame house. The porch light was on. Rhonda’s car wasn’t in the drive.
He got out and thanked the coppers, and the squad pulled away as he trudged up the walk. He checked his watch and shook his head. When he went inside, he left the porch light on.
Eight
Thinnes stood in the doorway and inventoried the room. Middle-class kitchen with standard equipment: appliances, oak cabinets and wainscoting, white Formica counters, bright curtains and cheery wallpaper. It was morning; the table was set for three, with place mats and a single rose in the bud vase. Rhonda’s touch was evident, too, in the potted herbs and hanging plants.
Rhonda.
She was cooking, slamming pots and dishes, slapping the faucet. She was a tall woman, almost blond, thirty-seven and fit. The sunlight slanting through the window over the sink accented every line and furrow of her face, making it look tired or cruel. Or unhappy. She didn’t look at Thinnes when he slid into one of the chairs at the table. They had said their curt good mornings in the bedroom. Each was reluctant to say more for fear of starting something ugly.
He understood. They’d been friends in high school, before the revolution of the sixties, and long before that kind of friendship between men and women was “in.” They hadn’t been political in those days. She hadn’t protested when he was drafted, when he’d chosen to go—or rather, had chosen not to protest or run. But corresponding with him, she’d become political, awakened, as she put it. She joined the protest, though she’d never blamed him. After the war they were lovers, and when he become a rookie among Chicago’s finest and signed up to study law enforcement nights, she’d studied and become a teacher. They’d married. Thinnes’s indifference to politics became an active distaste as he worked his way up to detective. Rhonda taught third grade and commiserated with other coppers’ wives as her husband developed his workaholic tendencies. She hadn’t complained early or often enough. She endured the moody silences and occasional drunks as Thinnes spared her the terrors of his job, the disgusting events, the atrocities. She hadn’t wanted to undermine his morale, she told him later. Too late. His silence had, by then, become a habit that came between them like bulletproof glass, and all her efforts to shatter it reinforced the wall. Thinnes couldn’t help. Sometimes it seemed only habit held them together. Habit and Rob, the one thing in their lives about which they had no disagreement. But Rob was nearly fifteen…
Thinnes studied his son as he slipped into his place with the Sun-Times and a nervous smile for each of them. The boy had Rhonda’s hair and clear blue eyes, Thinnes’s lank frame, and a promise of height one day soon.
Rhonda put a plate down, carefully, in front of Thinnes without looking at him or speaking. Rob, also, didn’t l
ook at him. After the first uncertain grin, he studied the paper as if it contained all the secrets of the universe.
Thinnes ventured, “What time did you get in last night, hon?”
She didn’t bother to look at him. “You really give a damn?”
“No, I just asked to make conversation.”
“If you’d been here when I left, you’d have heard me say when I’d be back.” She glared at him. “Damn it, if you’d been here, I wouldn’t have gone out. Where were you?”
Thinnes looked at her but she faced away. “Working late.”
Rhonda glared at him. “Working late! Working on a blonde, I’ll bet! When I called at seven, your office said you left at five.”
“So they screwed up. They got seventy people to keep track of, and I don’t always say where I’m going.”
“You son-of-a-bitch,” she said, advancing on him.
Thinnes stared at his eggs. He wouldn’t argue. There was no point. There was no winning, even if she agreed.
The Man Who Understood Cats Page 4
