The Now-And-Then Detective Page 5

  I walked to Bill Stevens’s apartment building from the L station and took the elevator up to his eighth-floor apartment. I knew he’d be at work at the Chicago Tribune, but I had a key. The building was one of those known as Wrigleyville Rooftops, which were vintage mid-rise apartment buildings on Waveland and Sheffield Avenues near Wrigley Field whose flat roofs provided clear views of Cubs games. Because of that, they were valuable and didn’t turn over often. I put my bag in the guest room and went to the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee.

  I had an hour before I needed to catch the commuter train to Lake Forest. I’d brought the manuscript of Stoney’s Downfall and used the time to continue my editing. I knew Bill would ask about my progress when I saw him the next morning. He was in Milwaukee on a story and would be home late.

  My train car was packed with commuters, like sardines in a can, going home from jobs in the city to stops along the North Shore of Lake Michigan: Evanston, Wilmette, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Glencoe, Highland Park, Highwood, Fort Sheridan, Lake Forest, and Lake Bluff. If you stayed on the train, you’d get to North Chicago, Waukegan, Kenosha, Wisconsin, and other towns generally considered too distant for the commute to Chicago, and finally to Milwaukee. One good reason to go to Milwaukee was the bratwurst-and-sauerkraut sandwich at Miller Park, home of the Brewers. If there was another good reason to go to Milwaukee, I couldn’t come up with it. Then again, I was from Chicago.

  It was a one-hour train ride from downtown Chicago to Lake Forest, a city that, beginning with the arrival of the railroad in 1855, became a summer retreat for wealthy Chicago families. I recalled reading a story in the Chicago Tribune saying that Macy’s, the big New York department store company that acquired Marshall Field’s, a Chicago institution, much to the consternation of Chicagoans, was closing its little store in Lake Forest. It had been opened in 1928 by Marshall Field III, grandson of the founder, because he wanted his wife to have a place to shop when in residence at their summer home.

  My ex-wife, Claire, found that to be an “absolutely charming gift from a husband to his wife,” and she suggested that I should see if the Chicago PD would open a precinct station near our house in Lincoln Park in case she needed police assistance at a moment’s notice, and I wasn’t available. I told her I’d put that into the department’s suggestion box, which was a wastebasket.

  I disembarked, along with a group of Lake Forest residents, at the Downtown Lake Forest Station, there being another stop on the city’s west side.

  The office of Brandon Taylor Esq, attorney-at-law, was right across the street from the train station, in Market Square. I found a brass plaque with his name on it next to a doorway leading to the second floor of a white stucco building, with a Williams Sonoma store on the street level. Kitchen appliances were on display in the store window. I’d be hard pressed to know what any one of them did. I once bought an electric can opener for Joe’s food but couldn’t get the thing to let go of the can, so I tossed it.

  I walked up the stairs, entered an office through a pebbled-glass door with Brandon Taylor’s name on it, and stepped into a reception area with no receptionist. The door chimed when I opened it and Taylor came out through a door to greet me. He looked to be in his mid-thirties.

  “Mr. Starkey?” he said. “I’m Brandon Taylor. Let’s go to my office and chat.”

  There was only one office, indicating that he was a solo practitioner.

  “How long have you represented Henry Wilberforce?” I asked when we were seated in club chairs by the office window.

  “For the last six years,” he said. “Before that, my father handled his personal legal affairs, and before that, my grandfather represented Henry’s father.”

  “As I said on the phone, I’m here because the circumstances of your client’s death, at first thought by the police to be the result of a burglary gone wrong, now indicate he’d been targeted for murder,” I told him. “Do you have any idea about who might have done that?”

  “I’ll tell you what I told that other Naples detective when she called. I have no idea who might have murdered Henry, or why,” he answered. “Everyone who knew Henry liked him. His father and his grandfather, who built Wilberforce Foods into a multibillion-dollar business, were hard men who made enemies along the way. Henry worked for the company, eventually becoming chairman of the board and chief executive officer, but he wasn’t like that.”

  “Does he have any living family?” I asked. “I know that his wife and son are deceased.”

  “Henry was an only child,” Taylor said. “There are two nieces and a nephew on his wife Miriam’s side of the family, the children of her brother and sisters. As far as I know, Henry hadn’t seen them in many years.”

  “Are they his heirs?”

  “No. They each inherited five-hundred thousand from their Aunt Miriam. They probably assumed they were in their Uncle Henry’s will, too, for some substantial amount. If they know he’s dead, they now also know they won’t inherit anything because I haven’t contacted them. Henry’s entire estate was left to his charitable foundation, other than his house here, and its contents, which he donated to the Lake Forest Historical Society. I think they intend to make it a museum.”

  “I’m wondering if Henry’s killer was someone who asked him for money and was turned down,” I said.

  “That’s possible,” Taylor answered. “But I have no way to identify such a person. In recent years, Henry’s gifts outside his foundation were random. He told me where to transfer money or to send a check or to have some item delivered, but not the identity of anyone he might have refused, if, in fact, he ever refused anyone.”

  “What about his butler and cook, Franz and Anna Mueller?”

  “Henry provided for them generously in his will. They helped me gather up his personal effects from the house, which I have in a storage locker, and then they returned to their native Austria,” he said.

  “Detective Duncan interviewed the Muellers in Naples,” I told him. “She said she had no reason to suspect them.”

  “I agree,” Taylor said. “They were like family to him.”

  “Did you examine his personal effects?”

  “Yes, of course. I found nothing that I thought related to his murder.”

  “I’d like to look at them too,” I said.

  “Not a problem,” Taylor told me.

  At my request, Taylor made appointments for me with the Lake Forest mayor, police chief, and several other people who knew Henry well over the years. He drove me to meet with them in his BMW 750iL, a sweet ride if you could pay the freight. All of those people told the same story as Taylor and everyone in Naples: Henry Wilberforce was a kind and generous man who had no enemies. Many of the people I interviewed asked me why I was doing such a thorough investigation for a home invasion that had inadvertently resulted in Henry’s death, as had been reported in the news media. I told them what I’d told Brandon Taylor, that it now appeared to be a murder, which shocked them. Just like everyone else who knew Henry, these people could not imagine why anyone would want to kill him. A man who owned a house next door to Henry’s said, unkindly I thought, “Murdering a man his age seems a bit, uh, redundant, doesn’t it, Detective?”

  Then we drove to Taylor’s storage locker where I spent nearly an hour going through boxes of Henry’s files and other personal items. I found nothing that might help my investigation. However, there were boxes of old mint-condition baseball cards. I opened one of the boxes and selected a card at random. It was a Honus Wagner. The Flying Dutchman. I knew that another Honus Wagner card sold at auction a few years ago for $2.1 million. “Henry started the collection as a boy,” Taylor told me. “I’ve got an appraiser coming. The value will be in the millions.”

  “Is Henry buried near here?” I asked Taylor when I was finished.

  “Yes,” he told me. “In Lake Forest Cemetery, with Miriam and Peter.”

  “I’d like to go there,” I said.

  My old feeling that the dead wanted t
o tell me what happened to them.

  The cemetery was at the end of Lake Street. We drove through large wrought iron gates and then along a winding asphalt road lined with oak trees. Taylor parked and we got out of the car. He pointed toward one of the trees and said, “Right over that way.”

  I followed him to the site of three graves with granite markers bearing the names and dates of birth and death of Henry Wilberforce, Miriam Wilberforce, and Peter Wilberforce.

  I looked down at Henry’s grave and silently asked him who his killer was. He told me, a whisper on the wind, that it was my job to find out, as they all did.

  “We can go now,” I told Taylor.

  He drove me to the station and I took the train back to Chicago. I’d arranged to have dinner with Claire and our daughter, Jenny, that night. Claire was now married to an orthopedic surgeon, several steps up from the alcoholic homicide detective she’d first been married to, and Jenny was married to an assistant US attorney.

  I had an hour before our reservation at Spiaggia, an Italian restaurant in the atrium of the One Mag Mile Building on Michigan Avenue, a favorite of mine and Claire’s back in the day. I caught a taxi from Union Station to Graceland Cemetery on North Clark Street, my second cemetery of the day, but this time I wasn’t working. I told the driver to turn in through the front gates. Graceland was the final resting place of many prominent Chicagoans, but I didn’t care about any of them, except to note that two of the inhabitants were Alan Pinkerton, founder of the famous detective agency, and Kate Warne, his employee and the first female detective in the United States.

  I had the driver follow the road to the gravesites of my father, mother, and brother, and asked him to wait. I got out of the cab, turned up the collar of my jacket against the wind, and walked over; there was a fourth plot, reserved for me. I lived in Fort Myers Beach, but Chicago would always be home.

  Then I did what I always did when visiting there. I updated my father on the Cubs prospects for next season, told my mother how much I missed her and her cooking, and told my brother about my current investigation. Whenever I visited, their presence was palpable, and comforting. A Starkey family reunion is how I thought of it.

  Then I got back into the taxi and gave the driver the address of Bill’s apartment building.

  Back at the apartment, I called Marisa.

  “Have you learned anything of value?” she asked me.

  “Just that I need to find a person who wanted something from Henry Wilberforce and didn’t get it.”

  “Needle in a haystack,” she said.

  “Needle in the Milky Way.”

  “The galaxy or the candy bar?”

  While I pondered that question, Marisa asked when I was coming home. It would have been beyond rude to tell her that I was home, so I said I had a flight the next morning.

  I got to Spiaggia early and was at the window table where Claire and I always sat. It had a panoramic view of Lake Michigan over the Oak Street Beach. After ten minutes, I spotted my girls being led to my table by a waiter in a tuxedo. They both looked terrific, turning heads in their wake. The last time I was in Chicago, five months earlier, to attend the funeral of a retired cop friend who’d died of cirrhosis of the liver, Claire was at a charity ball with Doctor Quack and Jenny was away on a business trip, so I hadn’t seen them in a while.

  The time before that was during the Christmas holiday. I was invited to Christmas dinner at Claire’s house, a Victorian in the city’s Gold Coast neighborhood. I got there early to exchange gifts with Claire and Jenny. The husbands weren’t part of that deal; they retreated to the family room, no doubt to discuss what an outstanding ex-husband and father I was, while the three of us sat in the living room by the Christmas tree, logs crackling and sparking in the fireplace.

  Claire thoughtfully gave me a leather-bound set of Arthur Conan Doyle’s four Sherlock Holmes novels; I’d only read one of them. Jenny gave me a garish tie featuring a palm tree and a woman in a hula skirt as a joke, and a wood-framed photo of my Chicago Police Academy class, which her husband, Brad Thornhill, an assistant US attorney in Chicago, somehow obtained, and which I loved.

  I’d asked Santa for a Dan Wesson 1911 .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol with a pearl grip, but he must have put it in someone else’s stocking by mistake. A pity, because those babies went for north of sixteen hundred bucks, if you got the 4.25-inch barrel.

  Marisa picked out a Hermes scarf featuring a jaguar for Claire, and, for Jenny, something called a cashmere pashmina. They kindly maintained the ruse that I’d done the shopping and, with a wink at one another, complimented my excellent taste in ladies’ fashion.

  I’d never before met Claire’s second husband, Dr. Evan McMaster, the orthopedic surgeon. I was disappointed to find that he was a thoroughly fine fellow. I discovered via Google that he was one of the best at his trade in the country, that he’d developed a new technique for hip replacements now widely used by the profession, that he’d been an All-America squash player at the University of Pennsylvania, and first in his class at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. If I’d been any one of those things, Evan would have heard about it before I asked him to pass the gravy. I did earn some medals in the marines, and as a cop, and considered wearing them on my sweater to the dinner, but I decided that would be too showy.

  When Claire and Jenny reached my table, I stood and kissed them both on the cheek.

  “You still clean up nicely, Jack,” Claire said, smiling, as they took their seats. For that occasion, I’d packed a grey suit.

  “How are you, Dad?” Jenny asked.

  “As good as can be expected, given what I have to work with,” I answered, and we both laughed. It was our running joke, dating back to her girlhood.

  She put her hand on my arm. “Seriously.”

  “I’m good, honey. Keeping busy with the bar, and the occasional homicide investigation. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Tell us about it,” Claire said.

  When we were married, I never discussed my cases with Claire. The idea was to leave my work at the office. I talked to a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Black instead.

  The waiter arrived and took drink orders, chardonnay for Claire, pinot grigio for Jenny, and club soda with lime for me. Then I told them about my case.

  “I know who Henry Wilberforce was, of course, and I read about his death in the Tribune,” Claire said. “In fact, I wondered if you’d be on that investigation, because he died in Naples, and you helped the police there once before.”

  “Be careful, Dad,” Jenny said. “Given what happened during your last two Florida cases.”

  “I’m wearing my Kevlar vest right now,” I said. When they didn’t smile, I added, “Kidding.”

  The waiter took our dinner orders and we chatted amiably while we ate. At one point, Claire asked, “Are you still seeing that …”

  “Realtor,” I answered. “Yes.”

  Maybe she meant to say “floozie.” But Claire wasn’t like that. I wanted to ask her if she was still married to that second-rate sawbones. I was like that, but I didn’t.

  “Is it serious?” Jenny asked.

  She knew I still loved her mother. She wanted me to move on and be happy. As did Claire.

  “Serious is as serious does,” I answered enigmatically, and Jenny let it go.

  I will never forgive myself for blowing it with my family. I once asked Brother Timothy if I ever could, and he said, no, probably not, only God could. “The forgiveness business is hard, but fair,” he said. He also said, “I learned a lesson as a boxer, Jack. It doesn’t matter how many times you get knocked down, it only matters how many times you get up, and the two numbers need to be the same.”

  Amen to that.

  The next morning, before flying home, Bill and I walked to Lou Mitchell’s, a restaurant on West Jackson Boulevard near Union Station that had been serving great breakfasts and lunches since 1923. Lou’s was one of those places luminaries frequented: politicians, mo
vie stars, rock stars, business leaders, famous authors, and important clerics. It was said that a Pope once stopped in for pancakes.

  We sat at the counter, as we always did. I ordered a belgian malted pecan waffle. Bill got a Greek sausage omelet.

  “So how’s the book editing going?” Bill asked while we waited for our food.

  “I’m on it,” I said. “But sometimes, real murders get in the way.”

  “Light a fire under it,” he said. “The deadline’s almost here.”

  Bill waved at a man at a nearby table, who I knew to be his city editor, then said, “You told me you’re here on a case.”

  “You know about what happened to Henry Wilberforce,” I said.

  “Sure. It was in all the papers, including mine.”

  “Off the record?”

  “Always,” he assured me.

  “It wasn’t a home invasion gone bad, it was a targeted murder,” I told him.

  He gave a low whistle and said, “At some future time, that’d make a great plot for a Jack Stoney book. He’ll solve the case, of course. With you, we’ll see.”

  7.

  No Stone Unturned

  Sometimes, when stumped by a difficult case, it helped me to let the facts churn around in my subconscious brain. I did that, for a week, busying myself with business at the bar, helping Marisa plant some kind of flowers in her backyard, a task I ranked the same as attending an art lecture, and disciplining myself to exercise by running and doing sit-ups and push-ups, a regimen I’d let slide.

  One morning, I was running along the beach, taking note of the passing scene, including people who looked good in skimpy bathing suits and people who did not. Among the latter group were old, fat men who wore tiny, tight bikini bottoms showing off their packages, which identified them as other than American, in my experience. Marisa said she thought that those bulges were rolled-up socks.

  When I finished my run and was walking to cool down, like a racehorse after exercise, an idea did find its way from my subconscious to conscious mind: Brandon Taylor, Henry’s lawyer, mentioned that Henry had a nephew and two nieces. Even though they hadn’t been in touch with their uncle in years, and weren’t in his will, I decided it would be worthwhile to speak with them.