A Taste of Old Revenge

Chapter 3-1

CHAPTER THREE

We didn’t make it to the rabbi’s house.

By the time we left the lawyer’s palatial estate it was almost 4:30 in the morning. Frank and I had been on the job close to sixteen straight hours. This may come as a surprise to everyone. But sleep is a good thing. Even detectives need to sleep no matter how many active cases they’re working on.

Before we went home, I asked a couple of detectives, Mike Bean and Marissa Hamm, to find the rabbi and do the routine for us. Mike and Marissa were one of the three teams that worked the graveyard shift. They were only working on two cases at the moment, one a homicide case and the other an auto theft ring, so I thought they might have time to swing over to the rabbi’s place. You have to understand. In this city having a detective’s badge doesn’t mean you are exclusively a homicide detective. We’re not a New York or Chicago. Out here we only have about a million point five living in and around the metropolitan area, so the department is not as specialized as those in the bigger cities. Drive forty-five minutes in any direction and you’ll find yourself standing in the middle of a wheat field. We’re a blue-collar city. We build cars and steel. We’re a little like Chicago in that millions of tons of wheat are shipped down river from huge granaries which dot the riverbanks of the Brown and Little Brown. We also ship out beef. At any given time, the beef packing plants’ holding pens have about two hundred thousand head of beef waiting to be slaughtered. Both rivers, coming together to form a big Y almost in the center of town, have tugboat and barge traffic on them day or night, summer or winter.

Parts of this city never sleep. It is going twenty-four hours a day, every day, except Christmas. But it’s a young city. We haven’t developed the true ghettos yet, although some would say anything east of Troust Boulevard could be classified as ghetto. Most of the city is still in the building stage. The suburbs sweep out in all directions with lots of bedroom communities. People here still nod their heads and say ‘good morning’ to you as you pass them on the streets. It’s still safe, in most areas, to let your kids stay out after dark and play.

In the summer, and especially in August and September, it is as hot as the blast furnaces in Hell. It’s nothing to survive through one or two months in the summer when the temperature on the bank hits the century mark or higher every day and stays there till about eight or nine o’clock that night. In the winter, especially in the downtown area, which sits on a high bluff overlooking both rivers, the wind chill gets low enough to make the Arctic tundra of Siberia a cake walk. I’ve seen the ice freeze so hard down on the river you needed a crowbar to break the stuff off your car doors. If you are going to live in this town, you are going to be relatively young and naturally tough. Just the kind of city I like.

But if you are going to carry a detective’s badge in this town, you are going to be a detective of all trades and not a specialist. Even the uniformed cop riding a beat sometimes acts more like a detective than a regular beat officer. That’s just the way it is here. The city is big, raw boned, and young. But it isn’t one with a large budget and the budget for the city’s police department is amazingly frugal. Overtime is a word which is an anathema to the department’s higher ups. Working too many sixteen hour shifts in a month can get your butt in a sling, if you know what I mean. Hard not to do if you’re a cop. Even harder if you are a detective.

Mike and Marissa worked the graveyard shift. Although there was talk of moving the two up to second shift with us. Mike is a little bowling ball going permanently bald. He’s shaped somewhat like a bowling ball. Meaning no matter how expensive the suit he wears he looks like he just pulled it out of the dirty clothes basket. And he has a chip on his shoulder. There’s always something ruffling his feathers. The weather, the sun, the cold, the heat, the people he works with. He has a special displeasure for Frank. That’s a story that goes back a long way. But, and in spite of the rumors of his checkered past, Mike is one shrewd cop who can do the job very well once he puts his mind to it.

Mike’s partner, Marissa Hamm is his doppelganger at the opposite sense of the spectrum. Marissa is relatively tall for a woman. And as flat as a board. She has short cut, dark red hair and there is a no-nonsense, get the job done persona about her. She does have a sense of humor. I have actually seen her at least smile. But you have to know her a long, long time before that side of her personality comes out. Very intelligent and very capable, partnering her up with Mike became an object lesson in symbiosis. They were okay cops when they worked separately. But the lieutenant’s brilliant idea of transferring them into South Side and forcing the two to work together as a team seemed like a touch of divine inspiration.

Together the two make a great team, and despite Mike’s grumblings about lending a hand, especially to Frank and me, we help each other out anytime we’re asked. Before we left the station that night, I laid a note down on Marissa’s desk asking them to check the rabbi out for us. The next day when I came in, I found Frank standing by our desks with a note in his hand.

“They couldn’t find the rabbi, Turn. Went to his house twice and knocked on the door. Knocked loud enough to wake up the neighbors. But no rabbi.”

“Gone?”

“Not what they think,” he said, glancing again at the note and then back up at me. “The car is still in the garage. A light is on in the kitchen. There were no papers lying on the sidewalk in front of the door and no mail in the mailbox. However, they did find something interesting. They used their flashlights to look through the living room windows. In the middle of the floor were three big suitcases just sitting there waiting to be picked up. Lying over the top of the suitcases was a lightweight wind breaker. Mike said they called the cab companies to see if someone called a cab and left the place. No one left. But get this – someone came over a little after midnight last night.”

“Around the time the old man was killed?”

Frank’s rectangular-shaped head nodded as he grinned and reached for a paper on his desk.

“Marissa said they found one cabbie who said he picked up a guy who looked like he had been on a month-long drinking binge around midnight-forty-five. The cabbie said he took the ride over close to the rabbi’s house. But not exactly to the rabbi’s house. Said the guy insisted he let him off about six houses down from the rabbi’s.”

“Someone dropped in at the rabbi’s house around midnight. Where did they pick up this person?”

“Corner of Montrose and Eighth. That’s about six blocks from the old man’s garage.”

“It’s down by the river front,” I mumbled, thinking it over. “There’s nothing down there but warehouses and wharves.”

My short but very wide partner nodded. Outside the precinct house we could hear the heavy traffic of commuters heading home. But inside the precinct, and in the second-floor detective’s squad room, it was as silent as a tomb. Three other detective teams worked the four to midnight shift. They were swamped with their workloads, as were we all, and hardly stayed long enough in the squad room to drink a cup of coffee, so I wasn’t surprised we were the only ones here.

“So, what are we going to stick our noses into first? The John Doe? Or the convenience store killing? Or the old man’s?”

I glanced at Frank and thought it over. At the moment we were working on three separate cases. None of them were going our way, making it all the more frustrating for both of us. Case number two had us investigating a John Doe … a nude John Doe found in the middle of an empty lot half buried in a bank of snow. A week earlier an elderly lady was walking her rat terrier through a lot filled with fresh snow. The rat terrier went berserk and literally drug the old lady over to the body – whereupon she immediately fainted and fell across the semi-bloated corpse. When she came to and realized where she was, she began screaming hysterically. This attracted attention and half the residents on the block came out to see what was going on. By the time we got there we were in store for a full-fledged, genuine mystery.

The coroner’s report said the man died from falling a great distance. The chest cavity was crushed, there were massive wounds to the skull, and both legs were broken. Interestingly, Joey pointed out to us all the fingers on the man’s right hand had been systematically busted in a precise pattern. As if someone had tortured the poor guy before killing him. The problem about this murder was this; how did he die? The body was found in the middle of an empty lot, in a snowbank roughly four foot deep, in a neighborhood that has brownstones lined up like ducks in a penny arcade shooting gallery not more than three stories high. Joey said the John Doe had to have fallen at least a hundred feet to his death. Adding to the conundrum was the fact he was a true John Doe. We had no idea as to his identity. We could not find his clothes. There was no wallet lying about. His fingerprints came up without any matches and no mug shots matched his face. There were no reports of a missing person fitting his description. There were no vehicles parked close by that might have sat for days unattended. There was absolutely nothing in this case which gave us even a tiny glimmer to work from.

Of course, Frank being Frank, and seeing this was going to be one of those cases which required one to actually activate the cerebral cortex and do some thinking, gave me that quirky grin only he can do and told me this case was mine.

Case number three began three days ago. On the surface it seemed more like an ordinary homicide. Two men in their twenties walk into a convenience store. Just as they enter through the glass doors, they slip on identical Halloween masks. Circus clowns’ masks. As luck would have it, they put the masks on before the security camera in the store can get a clear shot of their faces. Pulling out a big gun they rob the store, disregarding the two bystanders completely. Since it is a convenience store, they may have taken one hundred or one hundred fifty bucks from the till. Places like this don’t keep a lot of money lying around. Both men turn and walk to the front door of the store. The tallest walks out and calmly strolls across the drive and rolls his big frame into a ‘66 Chevy Nova SS. The second guy, somewhat smaller and wearing a baseball cap, starts to step through the door but hesitates and then turns to look at the store clerk.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

The second guy looked at the clerk for a moment or two and then raised his big automatic up and calmly shot the clerk in the chest with two rounds. The bystanders screamed and dove to the floor. One bystander was a teenage girl who’d dropped in after her high school basketball practice to get something cold to drink. The second bystander was an accountant who’s in his forties and had just finished filling his minivan with gas. Both saw the cold-blooded murder, and both saw the killer turn and look at them just before the two dove for the floor. Both believed they were going to die. The killer just looked at them for a second or two and then turned and walked out to the Chevy Nova and got in. The two drove away and blended into the traffic sedately, as if they were just doing something totally normal.

The teenager was a babbling i***t when we first interviewed her. We had to wait a day for her to finally calm down and give us a statement. The accountant was the one who recognized the car. He was positive it was a ‘66 Nova SS because his older brother had one exactly like it. His brother’s was a bright red one. The one used by the killers was navy blue. Both gave us fairly decent descriptions. The tall one was dark-haired, maybe about six feet three or taller, and wore blue jeans. For a coat he wore a high school letter jacket. A red one with white leather sleeves. On the right-hand pocket of the jacket was a big “E.” Down the right leather sleeve were all kinds of small gold emblems representing the sports the killer played in while in school.