Brainy-BOOM!

by Wally Duff

  “These crooks were paying taxes on their illegal money.”

  “You got it, but it gets better. The Sturgeon Corporation’s board of directors took that laundered money, which was now legally in circulation, and invested it with Zhukov because of his fabulous returns. He paid them a thirty percent return each year, and since that money was legal, they paid taxes on that too.”

  “What did Zhukov get out of this?”

  “He charged one point five percent to manage the fund and received twenty percent of the generated profits from his fund.”

  “No wonder he was rich.”

  “Really rich,” she continued. “But it wasn’t enough. This is where Zhukov topped Madoff. Zhukov figured out how to hack into the funds in the Sturgeon Corporation’s bank account. When his scheme began to unravel, he embezzled their money to keep his returns up.” He paid that embezzled money back to the clients, including the Sturgeon Corporation, as a dividend.”

  “Wow. He returned a dividend to them with their own money. That took real guts.”

  “But he had to steal more and more cash as his investments continued to crash until the Sturgeon owners found out and wanted their money back. His only option was to escape with all the money. He emptied out what was left of his other clients’ money, wiping them out. He also took all the money he could from the Sturgeon Corporation.”

  “How much?”

  “Over one hundred million dollars from the Sturgeon Corporation alone. It might be as high as one hundred fifty million.”

  “They found out he was planning to escape with all their money and killed him — but only after he gave them the password to his files so they could find their money.”

  “And the money from the other investors. Do we even care where the money is now?”

  “Not if it means pissing off the Russians, but it sucks not to know for sure what happened to Zhukov. Rick and David’s builder story is looking better and safer.”

  Part 3

  37

  Friday morning, I dropped Kerry off at preschool and then left Macy with our across-the-street neighbor, Alicia Sanchez, who is our go-to babysitter.

  Turning left onto West Roscoe, I pulled up in front of Cas Johnson’s home. Like the rest of the houses in our neighborhood, it’s a brick, three-story, all-floors-above-the-ground style, but her husband, Joe, is frugal, and they have the bare basics for decorating inside and out — the polar opposite of Linda’s fabulous home, which could easily be featured in Architectural Digest.

  I honked and she came running out. I needed someone to cover my back in case we had an unanticipated problem where I intended to go: David and Rick’s home.

  Cas hopped into the passenger side of the van. “I thought we were working on that Russian guy’s murder.”

  “We are, but I’m backing off for now until I figure out if doing an article involving pissed off Russians is worth it.”

  “What’s this one about?”

  “David and Rick’s builder is working at a snail’s pace, and they’re about ready to kill him.”

  “What else is new? Our builder took forever to finish our home, and he charged us thousands more than the original quote. Joe and I wanted to strangle him.”

  From North Paulina to North Ravenswood there’s a tree-lined median on West Henderson, the cross street. The median divides the street into two one-way streets, one east-to-west and the other west-to-east. David and Rick’s home is halfway down the east-to-west side. It’s a three-story, reclaimed brick structure built over fifty years ago.

  I parked the van on the west-to-east side of West Henderson. We jogged over the median and crossed the street. David and Rick’s front stoop was gone, replaced by two long boards going from the dirt to the front door.

  There were a few loose boards and chunks of cement scattered randomly in the frozen dirt front yard. A wheelbarrow was turned upside down to the left of the front door.

  Cas studied the mess in front of us. “Now I totally get why David and Rick are upset.”

  I fished around in my backpack for my cell phone. Charlie Sullivan Homes was the name listed as the builder on the big sign prominently displayed in the front yard. I took a picture of the contact information.

  Cas pointed at the lock box on the front door. “How are we going to get in? Did they give you a key?”

  “I have something better.”

  Reaching into my backpack, I pulled out my lock pick gun and torque wrench.

  “I forgot you had that,” she said.

  “I never leave home without it,” I replied.

  38

  We walked up one of the wooden planks to the front door. Using my equipment, I had the lock box open in ten seconds. We stepped inside and closed the door.

  Cas looked around. “Jeez, it looks like a bomb went off in here.”

  The ceiling had been removed from the original entryway, which was now two stories tall. There was no staircase to the second floor. The stairs had been replaced by a ladder covered with various colored paint stains.

  It was difficult to tell whether the wall studs were being knocked down or hammered into place. Drywall had been removed in many places, but some of it remained. Wires hung from the ceiling and stuck out of what was left of the remaining walls.

  To my left was one intact wall with a door. I opened it and stared down into a black abyss.

  Basement?

  The stairway was missing. There wasn’t even a ladder to gain access to the lower level space. Cement and musty dirt fumes drifted up and began to irritate my nose.

  I took out the flashlight from my backpack and scanned the dark void below me. Part of the floor was gone, and all I could see were chunks of concrete and piles of dirt. The drywall had been ripped out, and only the cement block walls remained.

  Cas followed me as I stepped over loose boards and nails and walked to the back of the house. We entered into what appeared to be a vaulted-ceiling great room. There were two sawhorses supporting a piece of old plywood, which functioned as the builder’s desk, but there were no plans on it.

  There were a couple of empty soda cans and a wadded up sack from Taco Bell on the floor. I sniffed but didn’t smell freshly sawed wood, glue, or paint.

  Not much happening here.

  To my right was a room that could have been the kitchen, but it was hard to tell. To my left was a tangled mess of walls and electrical wires. I had no clue what was going on in there.

  Outside, excavation for a room addition had begun, but it had a long way to go since only the dirt had been turned. To the left of this, a worker had dug down about three feet for frost footings.

  A veranda?

  We walked back down the plank leading from the front door to the frozen ground and returned to the van. Did all people want to kill their builder? Who could blame David and Rick? This place was not even close to being ready to be lived in.

  “What do you think?” Cas asked.

  “There might be a story here,” I said. “Most people would relate to it.”

  “I agree.”

  “But I won’t consider working on it without discussing it with all of you guys first.”

  39

  I dropped off Cas, picked up Macy from Alicia’s, and went home. While I breast-fed my daughter, I texted the rest of the Irregulars, including our newest members, David and Rick, about needing to meet to discuss the Zhukov and home builder stories. David called me when he received it.

  “Sweetie, let’s do it at our condo,” he said.

  “Great, if it’s not too much trouble,” I said.

  “For you ladies, it never is. And there have been some recent developments, so we have a lot to discuss. I’ll text the rest of the girls. See you around seven.”

  Carter had stories to edit, so he was happy to stay home with our daughters. At six thirty, I picked up Molly, Linda, and Cas and drove to David and Rick’s condo in Northalsted.

  Their unit is on the top floor of a three-story, moder
nistic, white brick building in the middle of the block. There are no retail stores in their building.

  On the first floor of the three-story building on the left is an Oriental restaurant, a dry cleaners, and a pizza joint. The upper two floors contain condos. The entire first floor of the building to the right houses their salon, and the upper two floors have more condos.

  Across the street is a four-story open garage sandwiched between two four-story office buildings.

  Their condo is a little cluttered, but somehow it all flows together. There is no central decorating scheme or color. It’s almost too much to absorb. Each time I come in I see something that I haven’t seen before.

  We sat in their family room. I stood up to tell the group what had happened with Zhukov, but David waved me back into my chair. He wore his deerstalker hat. He loves playing Sherlock Holmes to Rick’s Dr. Watson.

  “We have to go first,” David said.

  “Definitely,” Rick said.

  “It happened this morning,” David said. “It could be tragic.”

  “Terrible,” Rick added.

  David smiled. “As you know, our clients tell us everything.”

  “Most of which we don’t need to know,” Rick said.

  “But you absolutely must hear this,” David said.

  Rick pointed at me. “Especially you, Tina.”

  David frowned. “It’s that awful Diane Warren.”

  “She is such a bitch,” Rick agreed.

  “You won’t get any argument from me,” Cas said.

  As a nursing student, Cas had an intense affair with Diane Warren’s then-future husband, Dr. Peter Warren. Diane and Cas hated each other because of this. It didn’t stop when he killed himself over a year ago by driving into a cement bridge abutment. Diane wasn’t exactly the reason he did this, but she was a major donor, or at least that was Cas’s assessment.

  “I think we all agree that Diane isn’t the sweetest person in the universe, but what else is new?” I asked.

  “This morning, Leslie Van Horn at The Factory called us,” David continued. “Since Diane fired us for not allowing her to bring Bear, her monster dog, into our salon, Leslie’s the one stuck with attempting to make her awful hair appear presentable.”

  “She told him that MidAmerica Hospital is in severe financial trouble since Dr. Fertig died,” Rick said. “And as you know, she owns the hospital.”

  “And Leslie says she blames the Hamlin Park Irregulars for this,” David added.

  What?!

  “Have you ever heard of any hospital in this area losing money?” I asked.

  David pondered that. “Now that you mention it, no.”

  “If what Diane told Leslie is factual, MidAmerica is the only one in Chicago that is,” Rick said.

  “How is that possible?” Linda asked.

  “In one word, Dr. Randall Fertig,” David said.

  “Honey, that’s three words, but who’s counting?” Rick asked.

  40

  Dr. J. Randall Fertig was a breast cancer surgeon who claimed his surgery cured one hundred percent of the patients he operated on. From the beginning, I was skeptical of that claim.

  Fertig was the head of surgery at MidAmerica Hospital and produced over seventy-eight percent of their total revenue. I thought the story was great and worked hard on it until he ended his career by flying his plane into the ground from twenty thousand feet.

  “Diane told Leslie that if you hadn’t pursued the story on Fertig, he wouldn’t have killed himself,” David said.

  Cas jumped up. “That is total bullshit, and we all know it! Fertig had incurable AIDS. He killed himself to keep the world from finding out about it.”

  “That is not her version of the events,” Rick said. “Leslie said she is positive you did this to get back at her due to your relationship with her late husband.”

  “Guys, Diane has more family money than she can count,” Molly reminded us. “Why doesn’t she close the hospital and go on a world cruise or something?”

  “Her gigantic ego is the reason,” David said.

  “Apparently Diane has pushed all her chips into the pot to save her hospital,” Rick said. “She wants to prove Fertig wasn’t the reason for the hospital’s financial success — it was her management skills that were.”

  Might need to look into that.

  “If it goes under, she’ll be down to her last few million dollars, poor dear,” David said.

  “She is bellowing to the world that the Irregulars harassing ways were the cause of her husband Peter’s death,” Rick added.

  “Because of all of this, Leslie said she is out to get you,” David warned.

  “Then we should have Tina shoot her before she does something to us,” Molly said. “That’s what the farmers taught me.”

  “Not funny, Molly,” I said, “but that reminds me of something that happened the night the guy who worked for Diane attacked us in the garage at MidAmerica Hospital and I shot off his fingers. Linda, do you remember how he knew where we were?”

  “He said he put a GPS transponder under your fender,” she said. “I found it.”

  “I wonder if Diane had one of her employees do it again,” I said.

  “Gosh, if she did, this would be the perfect time to do something to us,” Molly said. “We’re all together, and we don’t have our kids with us.”

  My hands began to sweat. “Cas, do you have your Taser and Raid Wasp and Hornet spray with you?” I asked.

  “Always,” she answered.

  “If there is more than one of them and they start shooting at us, those won’t do much good,” Linda said. “Do you have your gun, Tina?”

  “It’s in my backpack.”

  “Then there you have it,” Molly said.

  “Have what?” Linda asked.

  “If they start shooting at us, Tina can take care of them. Simple.”

  “I would prefer not to be involved with any more gun play,” Linda said. “I don’t want to see any more fingers shot off.”

  “We should call the police,” Cas said.

  “And what would they do?” David asked. “As a former lawyer, I can assure you that until a crime is committed the police will not assist us.” He turned to Linda. “Don’t you agree?”

  “I do, but maybe we’re worrying for nothing and no one is outside.”

  “Are you willing to bet on that?” I asked.

  No one spoke.

  “There’s only one solution,” I said. “I’ll call Frankie.”

  41

  Whatever it is that Janet Corritore’s husband, Frankie, does, he always has at least two bodyguards with him. He is the perfect friend to have in a situation like this.

  I called him. “We might need your help,” I said.

  “Already on it,” Frankie said.

  “On what?” I asked.

  “Me and the boys are outside.”

  “Outside... here? I don’t understand.”

  “It’s the way we roll when the boss gives us an assignment.”

  “Janet?”

  “Yeah. After you found the Russian stiff, she called me. She was worried about you. One of us has been on you ever since.” He paused. “Russians are tough dudes. They aren’t the kind of guys you want to fool around with.”

  “You sound like you’re afraid of them.”

  “Just being realistic. They’re good at what they do.”

  “Which is?”

  “Killing people they don’t like.”

  My heart began to thump against my sternum. I left the family room and walked into the dining room, which faced the street where we had parked our cars. I walked over to the window and peeked out. “I don’t see you.”

  “Enzo is on your left at the end of your side of the block. He’s in a Ford Taurus. Luca is on your right in a Chevy truck at the other end of the block.”

  Checking both ways, I saw the two vehicles. The windows of the vehicles were tinted, making it difficult to see if anyone
was inside.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Watching.”

  “Watching what?”