Kindle County: Reversible Errors Part 3

She ended up making notes on the back of one of the green tablets of order tickets the waitstaff used. Harold needed warrants for the cars in the parking lot, and, as a double-check, the houses of Gus's staff. Before they parted, Muriel felt obliged to repeat John Leonidis's remarks about wanting to kill his father.

"h.e.l.l," said Harold and frowned. n.o.body liked having to beat up on the bereaved.

"It's just the shock," said Muriel. "You know how it is. Families?"

"Right," said Greer. He had a family, too. "Get me those warrants, huh? And give me your phone numbers in case I need something else."

She had no clue where she'd find a judge to sign a warrant at 4 p.m. Friday on a holiday weekend. When Harold left, she remained in the tiny office, feeling saddened by the proximity of Gus's personal things, while she phoned felony judges at home. Gillian Sullivan, Muriel's last choice, sounded, as usual, well sauced and sleepy, but she was available. Muriel headed for the office in the County Building, where she'd have to type up the warrants herself.

She was excited. In the P.A.'s Office, there was a standing rule: once you touched a case it was yours. The maxim kept deputies from dumping their dogs, and political heavyweights from clouting their way onto plum a.s.signments. Even so, she'd probably be stuck as third chair, because it would be a capital prosecution. Only if John and Athena were the kind to say no more killing would the P.A. hesitate to seek execution, and the Leonidis family clearly was not in that frame of mind. So it would be a trial"no one pled to capital murder"a big one. Muriel would see her name on the front page of the Tribune before this was over. The prospect sparked the nerves all over her body.

As a child, she'd had a prolonged fear of dying. She would lie in bed trembling, realizing that the whole long journey to grow up would only bring her closer to that point of terrifying blackness at the end. In time, though, she accepted her mother's counsel. There was only one way out"to make your mark, to leave some trace behind that would not be vaporized by eternity. A hundred years from now, she wanted somebody to look up and say, 'Muriel Wynn, she did good things, we're all better off now.' She never thought that would be easy. Hard work and risk were part of the picture. But obtaining justice for Gus, for all these people, was important, part of the never-ending task of setting her shoulder to the bulwark and holding back the grisly impulses that would otherwise engulf the world.

Leaving, she found Larry on the pavement in front of the restaurant, holding off Stanley Rosenberg, the rodent-faced investigative reporter from Channel 5. Stanley kept wheedling, no matter how many times Larry told him to talk to Greer, and finally Starczek, who generally had little use for journalists, simply turned away.

"f.u.c.king vulture," he said to Muriel, who walked beside him. Their cars were in the same direction. She could feel the grimness they'd left back there lingering with her on the gray streets, like an odor that stayed in your clothing.

"So Harold hired you?"

"You do good work," she said. They'd reached her Honda. She thanked Larry circ.u.mspectly and said "See ya," but he reached for her arm.

He said, "So who is it?"

When she finally caught the drift, she told him to forget it.

"Hey, you think I'm not gonna hear?"

They went a few more rounds before she gave in.

"Talmadge," she finally said.

"Talmadge Lorman?"

"Really, Larry. In your whole entire life, how many other people named Talmadge have you met?"

Talmadge, a former Congressman and now a renowned business lawyer and lobbyist, had been their Contracts professor when Larry and Muriel were in law school. Three years ago, Talmadge's wife had died at forty-one of breast cancer. Having shared a spouse's untimely death had drawn Muriel and him together. The relationship sparked, but it was off-and-on, which was how it always seemed to go with Muriel and men. Lately, though, they'd been gathering momentum. With both daughters in college now, Talmadge was tired of being alone. And she enjoyed the force field around him"epical events always seemed to be at hand when you were with Talmadge.

"You're really going to marry Talmadge Lorman?"

"We're not getting married. I told you I had a feeling this might, maybe, could, perhaps, probably-not lead to something. It's a million miles from that right now. I just wanted to give you the heads-up about why I won't come running when you whistle."

"Whistle?"

Perhaps it was the conversation, which seemed weird on both ends, but she felt a fugue state grip her, as if she were hovering over the scene, outside the person of Muriel. Often in the last few years she'd had moments like this, where the real and true Muriel seemed to be there but undetectable, a tiny kernel of something that existed but had no visible form. She'd been the usual pain-in-the-rear teenager, who thought the entire world was a fraud, and in some ways she'd never gotten over that. She knew that everybody was in it for themselves. That's what had drawn her to the law"she relished the aspect of the advocate's role that required her to rip though everyone's poses. Yet the same convictions made it hard to cross the breach with anybody else.

That was what seemed to bring Larry back time and again on the merry-go-round"she knew him. He was smart"smarter than nice"and she enjoyed his jaundiced humor, and his equally sure sense of her. He was a big man, Polish and German in terms of his background, with innocent blue eyes, a big, round face, and blondish hair he was starting to lose. Masculine, you'd say, rather than handsome, but full of primal appeal. Playing around with him was the kind of screwball whim that marked her earlier years, when she thought it was a riot to be the wild child. But he was married"and a cop to the core. Now she told herself again what she'd told him"she had to move on.

She looked down the street to be certain they were un.o.bserved, and took hold of one b.u.t.ton on his shirt, a loose acetate number he wore under a poplin sport coat. She gave it a final familiar tug, a request, at close quarters, for mercy. Then she started her car. The engine turned over, and her heart picked up when she remembered the case.

Chapter 5.

October 3, 1991 Running Leads ON HIS WAY to DuSable Field to ask more questions about Luisa Remardi, Larry stopped off in the Point to see a house. About ten years ago, right after he'd worked the murder of a real estate broker, Larry got into rehabbing, turning over a property every eighteen months or so for a pretty good dollar. When he was younger, he'd regarded law enforcement as a way station. He loved the work, but until he dropped out of law school and accepted the Force as Kismet, he'd envisioned some higher destiny for himself among the power elite. These days, whatever visions of stature he retained rested on real estate.

On a mild fall afternoon, Larry pondered the house, which a broker had tipped him would be listed later this week. The Point, long a sanctuary for Kindle County's small African-American middle cla.s.s, had begun attracting singles and young families, of all races looking for better deals on houses close to Center City. This place, a big Victorian, was a Yuppie magnet if ever there was one. It had been split into apartments, but many of the original features remained intact, including the square widow's walks surrounding the belfries on each end, and the original spear-topped cast-iron fence in which yellow leaves were now trapped in soft heaps.

There was also a great sunny corner out front where he could bed zinnias, nasturtiums, dahlias, gladioli, marigolds, and mums, so there'd be blooms from May to October. Over time, he'd discovered that money invested in planting returned three-to-one in enhanced curb appeal. Oddly, the gardening had slowly become perhaps his favorite side of the endeavor. His father's father was a farmer in Poland. And now Larry was back there. What he loved was that it dialed him in on stuff that never mattered before. In the middle of the winter, he'd think about the frost in the soil, the microbes that were dying, and the nurturing snow. He kept track of the angle of the sun, and changed his mind each day about whether he wanted rain. The earth was beneath the street"that was how he always thought about it.

It was well past 4 p.m. when he approached the airport. The Task Force that Harold Greer had a.s.sembled at Paradise had stormed through the Tri-Cities for about five weeks, but as Larry had antic.i.p.ated, Greer had no luck running an investigation out of police headquarters in the great, stone edifice of McGrath Hall. That was nothing but a medieval palace, full of rumors about who was humping who and which undeserving jerk the Chief and the commanders were favoring. No serious police work went on there, except the persistent cop pastimes of politicking and grousing. In August, the FBI thought they had grabbed the right guy in Iowa. It didn't prove out, but by then most of the detectives had headed back to their old stuff. So far as Larry could tell, he was the only d.i.c.k on the Task Force still generating reports more often than every couple of weeks.

Luisa had proved enigmatic enough to maintain his interest. Even the autopsy had raised questions about the precise circ.u.mstances of her death. Around her a.n.u.s, Painless had identified a number of superficial linear tears marked by faint streaks of blood. Dead people didn't bleed. Larry's current theory was that she'd succ.u.mbed to a first s.e.xual violation, hoping to save her life. But what did Judson, the third victim who eventually dragged her body downstairs, do while Luisa was being a.s.saulted? Had an accomplice held a gun on him?

By now, Larry had parked in front of the huge Administrative Center TN Air had recently completed. With the advent of shorter-stopping jets, Trans-National had reinitiated service at DuSable, serving a distinctive target market, namely businessmen and gamblers. The airline offered no-frills fares to other Midwestern cities, and to Las Vegas and Atlantic City, where planes flew twenty-four hours a day. The program had been an astonishing success. Three other national carriers had bought gates, and the county airport authority had authorized a huge expansion, hoping to relieve the round-the-clock mess at the ma.s.sive Tri-Cities Airport. The major hotel and restaurant chains were breaking ground nearby and TN, to much fanfare, had recently opened this new Administrative Center, where, five years ago, a deserted housing project had stood. The concrete structure had a gla.s.s atrium attached to the front in the shape of a rolling pin. It was typical new construction"thin walls and bright lights. Larry didn't go much for modern.

He had asked TN Security to arrange another interview of Genevieve Carriere, a ticket agent whom everyone referred to as Luisa's best friend. Nancy Diaz, a former Kindle County copper, like most of the Security staff, had Genevieve in her office when Larry arrived, and Nancy left Larry alone with her while Nancy headed off to cover something else.

"Erno wants to talk to you when you're done," Nancy told him from the door. Erno Erdai was the Deputy Head of Security at the airline, and ran the show out here. Larry had known Erno for years"they had started in the Academy together"but Erno hadn't bothered to greet him the first couple of times Larry had come snooping around. Erno always wanted Larry to know how big he'd gotten.

Nancy's interior office had a desk with wood-grained laminate and intense fluorescent glow to make up for the lack of windows. In her persimmon uniform, Genevieve sat with her legs crossed at the ankles, demure as a schoolteacher, which she had formerly been. She was putting her husband through med school, and had found it easier, and better paying, to work the graveyard shift out here, so she could be home during the day with their one-year-old. A trifle plump, with a small silver cross at her throat, Genevieve had a round-cheeked look, accentuated by a bit of an overbite. She'd been raised to lift her chin and look folks in the eye when she spoke to them, and Larry thought he'd detected the quiver of something unspoken when he'd interviewed her two and a half months ago.

They talked about her baby for a second. Larry had questioned her last time at her station, where a leather threefold with photos had been propped on the counter. Today, Larry told her he wanted to ask about money.

"Money?" replied Genevieve. "We don't know much about money. I wish we knew a little bit more."

"No," said Larry, "Luisa's money."

Genevieve found that even more confusing. She said that Carmine, Luisa's ex, shorted her most months and Luisa was always stretched. Luisa had lived with her elderly mother and her two daughters. About five years ago, she'd transferred out to DuSable from the big airport and worked alternating flex shifts with Genevieve, 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. one day, 6 p.m. to midnight the next, the only agent on duty when the planes to and from Las Vegas turned around. The schedule enabled Luisa to get her girls off to school in the morning and see them when they returned, even to be home on odd nights for dinner. She slept during the day.

As described in Larry's interviews, Luisa came across as a s.p.u.n.ky city girl, caught in a familiar pinch. She'd had Carmine's babies and then been ditched"maybe she'd put on a few pounds, maybe she reminded Carmine in the wrong way of his mother, or hers. Once he was gone, Luisa was left with a big-time mortgage on their four-bedroom dream house on the West Bank, but she was determined not to make her daughters suffer for their father's stupidity. The result was debt. Lots. Larry counted a $30,000 dent in her credit cards as of a year ago. Then she began sending her entire paycheck to the bank. So how was she paying for things like groceries and school supplies? Cash, it turned out. Luisa had cash in hand wherever she went.

If there was another Homicide detective who knew how to tear up somebody's finances, Larry hadn't met him yet, and he felt a certain amount of pride as he laid the doc.u.ments he'd retrieved from the banks over a number of months on the desk in front of Genevieve. Luisa figured for Genevieve's wild friend"more bad words in Luisa's mouth, more nights in the clubs, more guys in her bed than Genevieve had ever dared. He suspected Genevieve had done a lot of listening, but now she shook her head in wonder.

"I never heard anything about this. I swear."

When you saw too much folding money, it figured to be something unholy and Larry had pounded the names of everybody in Luisa's address book into NCIC, the FBI's national criminal database, with no hits. But he tried out a less scandalous explanation on Genevieve. Was there, perhaps, an older gentleman in Luisa's life?

"If there was," Genevieve answered, "I didn't hear about it. She didn't have much use for men. Not after Carmine. Not for relationships anyway. You know, she'd party on Sat.u.r.day night, but she never mentioned any sugar daddy."

"Any other activities or a.s.sociates that might explain the cash?"

"Like?"

"Drugs?" Larry awaited any tell, but Genevieve seemed sincerely taken aback. "There's this item in her personnel jacket," Larry explained. In the name of aircraft safety, all TN employees were required to pee in a cup every quarter. Two months before her death, Luisa had come up dirty. Then, while TN Security was investigating, they'd received an anonymous tip that she'd been selling on the premises. The union steward was called in and Security demanded a pat-down search to which Luisa had succ.u.mbed only over furious objection. The search came up dry and, on second submission, her dirty result proved to be a false-positive. Yet once Larry saw her cash, he'd begun thinking there might have been something to it after all. An airport employee was in a unique position to help import drugs.

Genevieve had a different theory.

"It was a setup," she said. "I heard all about it. Lu was outraged. She didn't have a bad drop in ten years with the airline. Then they search her? How fishy is that?"

"Well, who set her up, then?"

"Luisa had a mouth. You know how that goes. She probably irritated somebody."

"Any guess who?"

Genevieve looked to Larry as if she might have had a name or two in mind, but she wasn't about to make Luisa's mistake of speaking out of turn. He tried several ways to get her to spill, but she maintained that pleasant little smile and kept rolling her eyes. It was getting late. He didn't want to miss Erno, so he let Genevieve go, saying he might contact her again. She did not appear especially excited by the prospect. It was an unfortunate aspect of his job that he often antagonized people like Genevieve who he actually thought were all right. Did Genevieve know where Luisa's cash came from? Seventy-three percent of Americans in our poll said, Yes. But she was clearly convinced it had nothing to do with Luisa's murder. One way or the other, Genevieve was probably guarding her friend's memory, and Larry actually respected her for that. Maybe a mobbed-up uncle was helping out. Maybe Luisa's mom, an Old World type, was running numbers in her former neighborhood in Kewahnee, or, more likely, bailing out her daughter with cash Momma had long kept in her mattress.

He spent a few minutes circling a potted plant outside Erno's door before the secretary showed him in. TN's Head of Security was stationed out at the big airport, making Erno the honcho here, and he had one of those offices too big for the furniture they gave him. The light from the large windows glazed his desk on which nothing rested, not even dust.

"Can I ask?" Erno said, when they were settled. "The suits in Center City always like to hear it first, if they're gonna read about anybody around here being naughty."

Erno had been smuggled out of Hungary in 1956, after the Russkies hanged his father from the lamppost in front of the family house, and a trace accent still played through his speech like incongruous background music, elongating certain vowels and sticking other sounds far back in his throat. It was essential to Erno's character to act as if n.o.body would notice. He was one of those guys who always wanted to sound like he was on the inside, and given that, it figured he'd be scratching around to find out what Larry had come up with. But his curiosity gave Larry leverage. Instead of answering, Larry flipped open a small spiral-topped notepad and said he wasn't getting the skinny on the narcotics search referenced in Luisa's personnel file. Considering the price of admission, Erno wiggled his mouth around and finally scooted forward so he could place both elbows on his desktop.

"I wouldn't want you to write this down," he said, "but I think my boys got a little rambunctious. This young lady, Luisa, from what I hear, she was Excedrin headache number 265. You've seen her evaluations in the file. You know, 'Insubordinate.' It's misspelled several times. I think she got pretty ornery when she come up dirty, enough to make a suspicious guy more suspicious."

Erno offered the last with a wry look. He was suggesting his guys had made up the 'tip' as an excuse for the search. It happened on the street all the time. Genevieve had this one right: Luisa had talked her way into trouble.

"So that's a zero?"

"Dry hole," said Erno authoritatively. He reached into a desk drawer and placed a toothpick in the side of his mouth. Erno was nervous and slender. He had a narrow face, a long thin nose, and eyebrows so pale you could barely see them. To Larry, he'd always been a hard man to like. There was an edge to Erno and a frequent sour frown, like he'd smelled some stink, which might well have been you. He probably would have made an all-right cop, smart enough and serious about the job, but he never got that far. While he was still in the Academy, he got into a domestic situation where he shot and killed his mother-in-law. The coroner's inquest had included testimony from Erdai's wife, who confirmed that the old lady had come after Erno with a knife, but the bra.s.s on the Force would not bring on a guy who'd killed with his service revolver even before he had a star.

In the strange way things go, this had been an okay break for Erno. Some coppers from the Academy hooked him up with the security department at TN. He kept peace at the airport, helped Customs nab smuggled drugs, and tried to make sure n.o.body stole a free ride on an airplane. He went to work in a suit and tie. These days, he had a nice house in the suburbs and a pension plan and airline stock, and a large staff of ex-coppers under him. He'd done fine. But for years he'd remained a wanna-be, hanging around at Ike's, the Tri-Cities' best-known cop bar. He craved the weapon and the star and the stamp of a certified tough guy. He'd nibble at a beer, taking in the coppers' stories with the same look of middle-aged woe about things he'd missed out on that a lot of people showed at this stage, maybe, even, including Larry.

"What's your angle with the dope, anyway?" Erno asked. "I thought Greer was figuring she's popped by Stranger Danger. Wrong time, wrong place."

"Probably. But your girl Luisa, she had some big money coming in."

That seemed to pep up Erno. Erno, in Larry's experience, was one of those hunkies with a strong interest in money, especially his own. He didn't really boast; when he talked about his stock options, he was more like a guy telling you about his low cholesterol. Ain't I lucky? He reminded Larry of some of his elderly Polish relatives, who could give you the case history on every dollar they'd ever made or spent. It was an Old World thing, money equaling security. Being a Homicide d.i.c.k taught you two things about that. First, people died for money; the only thing they died for more often was love. And second, there was never money enough when the bogeyman rang your doorbell.

"From where's she getting money?" Erno said.

"That's what I wanted to ask you guys. She stealing something?"

Erno turned sideways to consider the question. Across the street, on the north-south runway, a 737 was settling down like a duck onto a pond. The plane, a screaming marvel of rivets and aluminum, sank toward the tarmac a few degrees off center, but alighted uneventfully. Larry figured Erno's windows for triple-pane, because there was barely a sound.

"She wasn't ripping tickets, if that's what you're thinking," Erdai answered.

"I was wondering more whether she had her hand in the till."

"No chance. Accounting's way too tight when we get cash."

"And why not tickets?"

"Tickets? That's the best thing around here to steal. One piece of paper can be worth a thousand on the street. But people always get caught." Erno outlined procedures. Agents issued tickets, usually by computer or sometimes by hand. The ticket wasn't valid unless the issuing agent was identified, either by way of a personal computer code or, for the hand tickets, through the agent's own die, a metal plate which fit in a machine like a credit card imprinter that was used to validate blank ticket stock. "Anytime somebody travels, accounting matches up the flight coupon with the payment. No payment, my phone rings. And the issuing agent, that's the first door you knock on."

"So? Your phone ringing?"

"One, two tickets now and then. But you know, nothing that's gonna make thousands for somebody, if that's what we're talking. No missing die. That'd be a biggie. The airline's a bear on this stuff. Lock you up and sue you, they don't care if it's a buck ninety-five. Zero tolerance. It works, too. They got everybody scared s.h.i.tless. How'd your talk go with Genevieve? She got any clue where Luisa was hiding her money tree?"

Larry grunted. "Three monkeys."

"Really?" Erno made a face.

"Really. Any chance she was into the same s.h.i.t as Luisa?"

"Never say never"but I'll say it anyway. Too goody-goody. Follows every rule. Why not lay a grand jury subpoena on her? Somebody like that won't stiff you, once you make her swear an oath to G.o.d. I bet if you squeeze her, you'll find out what Luisa was up to."

It was an idea, and Larry wrote it down in his notebook, but Muriel and Tommy Molto wouldn't sign off. The grand jury meant defense lawyers who'd start howling about busting on nice white people for no better reason than a hunch.

Erno asked what else Larry was thinking.

"Well, there isn't that much left, right?" Larry said. "I don't see Luisa keeping a book"especially with half the people coming through here on their way to Las Vegas."

Erno acknowledged the logic of that.

"So what kind of problems do you have?" Larry asked him.

"Right now, this is still a small town. Our biggest issue is the b.u.ms in the winter. You know, these pooches who're on the street in the North End want a warm place to hide out. We got these guys everywhere"in the johns, hiding in back on the baggage claim carousels. They steal, they scare people, they puke on the floor."

"Any hookers?"

There were a lot of lonely travelers looking for company. A young lady like Luisa, in her airline attire, might pa.s.s for somebody's fantasy of a flight attendant"lunchtime, coffee break, after work, the dead of night when nothing was doing anyway. But as Erno pointed out, there was barely any hotel s.p.a.ce around here for a young lady in that line of work to ply her trade.

"I wouldn't say you've been a f.u.c.k of a lot of help," said Larry.

Erno pushed his tongue into the side of his mouth, which in his case was what pa.s.sed for a smile.

"Actually," he said, gesturing with the toothpick, "I may have one thing for you. I don't even know if I oughta be mentioning it. There's a kid"well, he's no kid"there's a guy I know. Well, not a guy, not just a guy. To be straight with you, Larry, he's my f.u.c.king nephew. You wouldn't necessarily know that when you see him."

"Not as good-looking?"

"No, he's good-looking. His dad was a big good-looking stud, and he's a big good-looking stud, too. But he's a different tint than you and me."

"Ah," said Larry.

"My sister, you know"when I was a kid in the South End, all the old guys were ever on about was running the Nubians outta town. You know, we had 'em on three sides, and it's like we don't want them brown b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, with their drugs and whoring. Fekete. Dark. That's the word in Hungarian. All the time, 'Fekete!' like it's cussing. So naturally, there are chicks, they get to the age when it's, f.u.c.k you, Momma, Daddy, and all this Roman Catholic bulls.h.i.t. Their idea of living dangerous is to give it up as fast as they can for the first black guy to say howdy-do. My kid sister, Ilona, she's one of these hunky broads, just couldn't stuff enough black meat into her cannoli.

"So this is how my nephew stumbles into the world. My parents, you know, they can't figure who to kill first, my sister or themselves, so right from the jump, it's the big brother, Yours Truly, who's giving them a helping hand. And that's a soap opera with about six hundred installments. You got time for the skinny version? It'll help make sense of the rest of it."

"I'll put in for overtime," said Larry.

"Well, the kid, you know, he's a brown-skinned fatherless b.a.s.t.a.r.d, just to put it in a nutsh.e.l.l. The old neighborhood don't have much use for him and he got even less use for the neighborhood. My sister, she means to do right and only makes things worse. She sends him to public school, instead of Saint Jerome's, so he's not the only black kid, and soon enough, that's what he is, a black kid, talking just like them and running with the gangs and the dope. And I'm all the time like a guy with his hand in a fire, trying to pull him out. First conviction is T's and Blues""a prescription painkiller and cough syrup, the cheap high in the '80s before crack""I go to the Favor Bank and get him the Honor Farm.

"But you know, I think it's in the genes with those people, I really do. He keeps going back down. With the drugs, of course. He's tried them all. And potential? Bright. But you know the race thing"it bugs him. He hates his ma, he despises me. We can't tell him what to do because we don't know what it's like, being a black man in white America. Oh, he can give you every a.s.shole speech you ever heard. I had him working out here when we opened back up, but he needs to be a flipping executive, not some house darkie standing by the metal detectors, besides he wants to travel. Join the army, right? He's dishonorable out of the service in eight months"drugs, natch"so we send him to the old country. That ain't his roots, he says, and bugs out for Africa. But guess what? n.o.body plays basketball, not old home week there either. So he comes back, and says he's ready to be a grown-up. Decided he wants to work in the industry after all."