Dante's Poison (25 page)

“Two anonymous notes in one case,” Bjorn was saying on the ride back. “It's like a Halloween prank.”

“Or an Edgar Allan Poe story,” I said.

What Urquhart had pulled from the drawer had knocked the wind out of both our sails: another note, identical in appearance to the one left for me:

 

T
SK, TSK YOU'VE BEEN A BAD BOY
.
A
REN'T YOU CURIOUS ABOUT
WHAT REALLY KILLED YOUR UNCLE
?
D
O A LITTLE SPADE WORK AND FIND OUT
.
B
UT DON'T TELL THE POLICE OR
THERE COULD BE GRAVE CONSEQUENCES
.

According to Urquhart the note had arrived in his mailbox the day of Gallagher's funeral, sealed but without a stamp or a postmark. After contacting his lawyer, he and Polanski had determined not to show it to the police, since the opening line “You've been a bad boy” could easily be misinterpreted to suggest Urquhart had a hand in his uncle's death. Polanski had put on his thinking cap and come up with the way to keep Urquhart's name out of it by having Sparks sign an affidavit “on information and belief” that Gallagher was the victim of foul play, which Polanski then passed on to his ASA friend. In their haste to pin the murder on Jane, the police didn't look past Sparks's explanation that she “just had a feeling about Gallagher's death,” and Urquhart begged us not to tell them the true story now. “It will just look like we did it,” he moaned abjectly. I almost felt sorry for him.

“By the way, that was nice work you did back there,” Bjorn remarked from the driver's seat. “How did you know Urquhart and the Luvabull were hot and heavy?”

“I didn't. But I thought her outpouring of grief at the hearing was bogus, and I figured if she was going out of her way to help Urquhart with an affidavit, they had to be more than just casual acquaintances.”

“Do you think Urquhart was telling us the truth about Sparks being with him the morning Gallagher died?”

“No. I think he was scrambling to construct an alibi for both of them. I'd bet my last dollar she and Gallagher were together, just the way she testified. And I think Gallagher knew about her affair with his nephew.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Go back to her testimony at the hearing. His remark to her—‘Lucy, I think it's time you got everything you deserve'—sounds like he knew something was off. If so, I wonder what he was planning for her?”

“The trouble with this latest development is that it puts a major dent in my theory,” Bjorn said morosely. “I mean, if Urquhart didn't know about the poisoning ahead of time, he's probably innocent.”

It also punched a gaping hole in my surmise that Jane was the author of the note left for me. Both the tone—and, according to Bjorn, the appearance—of the two missives were identical, implying common authorship. But I couldn't fathom why Jane would have pushed to get Gallagher's body exhumed, especially if—as was looking increasingly likely—she had something to hide.

“Do you think we should go to the police with what we have?” Bjorn asked.

“Not yet. As you say, it's sounding less and less like Urquhart was the killer, and if we go to them now it will just look like we're spinning our wheels. It won't help us later if we ever do find out who murdered Gallagher. I'd rather stay mum until we have proof of something concrete to show them.”

Bjorn dropped me off at my home at 6:00 p.m. with promises to attack with renewed vigor the subject of Gallagher's whereabouts after leaving Gene & Georgetti's that night, and to see what further information he could coax out of Gallagher's cardiologist—or her staff—concerning who else may have known of the journalist's heart condition. I could have taken that job myself but figured Bjorn's methods were better suited to the task.

I arrived upstairs at my apartment feeling antsy and without any plans for the night except fretting over Hallie and Mike. Marta, my housekeeper, had been in that day and left a place setting out on the table as a signal that she'd cooked a meal, though I could have guessed it from the garlicky bouquet emanating from the oven. At least it meant I wouldn't go hungry. I kicked off my shoes and trotted over to the kitchen, stuck on a pair of cooking mitts—oversized ones that went up over my elbows—and was gingerly maneuvering the casserole out and onto the stovetop when my landline began ringing. It was my building superintendent, telling me he had accepted delivery of an envelope for me that afternoon and asking when I'd like to come down to get it.
Not another one
, I thought pessimistically.

It turned out to be from Klutsky, as I found out when I got back upstairs and put the first of five sheets on the scanner in the spare bedroom I used as an office. “Nothing on the server front yet,” he informed me in a thoughtfully typed note. “But I thought you might find these of interest.” I fed the rest of the sheets into the machine and went back to the kitchen to suss out what Marta had left for me, lifting a corner of aluminum foil from the casserole dish and sniffing. It was one of her specialties, a Venezuelan
pasticho
bubbling with tomatoes and cheese. I cracked open a bottle of beer and wolfed down half the pasta straight from the pan while the scanner did its
wheeze-click
,
wheeze-click
in the next room. When I was done with the meal, I decided it was high time I gave Marta another raise. I downed another of my pills, scraped the leftover food into a refrigerator dish, and put the pan in the sink to soak. Then I went to listen to the scanned report of what Klutsky had sent me.

It wasn't much, but it was something: Gallagher's cell-phone records for the last month of his life. I guessed that Gallagher's phone had been paid for by the
Sun-Times
and congratulated Klutsky on having thought of that angle while I considered what to do with the information. Bjorn could probably engineer a reverse lookup of the numbers, but that would have to wait until morning and would in all likelihood yield nothing but a list of names. In the meantime, I could get a head start on things. The list of outgoing calls was as long as my arm, but it was better than moping or trying to find something to distract me on TV. I took a swipe at my watch face. It was a little after 7:00 p.m. With most Midwesterners turning off their lights around eleven, I had a window of about four hours.

The first thing I needed was an accessible list. I sent the scanned records to my Braille printer while I changed into a sweatshirt and jeans. I returned to the kitchen for another beer (for courage) and checked my phone to make sure its caller-ID function was disabled. When I returned to my printer it had obligingly produced a half-inch stack of pages with Gallagher's outgoing calls arranged in a single column from top to bottom in order of recency. I cleared the surface of my desk of clutter and got out a Braille eraser—a wooden device shaped like a golf tee but slightly larger and sturdier—and a 3-D marker, another handy tool with ink that dried to leave tactile markings on paper.

If you've ever wondered how it works, the Braille alphabet is based upon a “cell” consisting of six dots arranged in two side-by-side columns. The uppermost dot in the left column is numbered 1, the next one down 2, and the one farthest down, 3. The same pattern is repeated in descending order—4, 5, and 6—in the column on the right:

 

1 4

2 5

3 6

Not all the dots within a cell are raised. The ones that are identify a letter. For example, a raised dot at 1 is an
a
, raised dots at 1 and 2 are a
b
, and at 1 and 4 a
c
. And so on. The first ten letters of the Latin alphabet,
a
to
j
, use only the top four positions. The next ten are identical except for the addition of a raised dot at 3, and the letters after that pick up another raised dot at 6. The numerals one through ten are also identical to
a
through
j
except that they are preceded by a symbol shaped like a left-facing capital L, indicated by raised dots at 3, 4, 5, and 6.

As you might imagine, the dots have to be very small to allow as many words as possible to fit on a page. Space considerations also dictate that the area between lines be kept to a minimum, making one of the principal challenges not getting lost in a field of text. I usually solved this problem by reading two-handed, deciphering letters with my right hand while using my left as a guide to the next line. But with such a long list of numbers, I couldn't count on keeping track of my place. Hence, the eraser and marker.

I started on the most recent calls first. I got no answer to the first two numbers I called, so I erased the backward L in front of them by flattening the dots as a signal to return to them later. The third number put me through to the answering machine of Gallagher's dentist, so I drew a line through it using the marker. My fourth and fifth calls likewise produced no answers, so I checked them off with the eraser, too. On the sixth call, I got a human being.

“Yeah?” said a curt male voice coming on the line.

I launched into the speech I'd prepared.

“Hi, my name is Mark Halliday. I'm a paid canvasser for the Industrial Wellness Association. We're doing a survey of workplace satisfaction, and I was wondering if I could take a few short minutes of your time . . .”

Click.

A few more clicks made me think I ought to sweeten the pot, so the next time someone answered—a tired-sounding woman with a child screaming in the background—I modified my approach.

“Hi, my name is Mark Halliday. I'm a paid canvasser for the Industrial Wellness Association, and we're offering a chance to win an all-expenses-paid cruise to the Bahamas to anyone willing to answer a few brief questions. The entire survey will only take five minutes of your time—”

“What line?” the woman asked.

“Excuse me?” I said in confusion.

“I'm asking what cruise line. If this isn't some kind of scam, you oughta be able to tell me.”

I improvised. “Royal Starfish.”

“Never heard of them,” she said, hanging up.

Before the next call, I went on the Internet and selected the name of a popular cruise-ship company to use in my spiel if questioned. This time it worked, and I got to ask my questions:

“On a scale from one to ten, with one being completely unsatisfied and ten being extremely satisfied, how would you rate your experience with your current employer?”

“I dunno,” said the male voice on the other end of the line. His speech was slurred like he'd knocked back a few. “A four, maybe?”

I continued in this way, asking after his satisfaction level with his workplace conditions, supervisor, employee benefits, and salary, before getting to the information I was really after.

“And just to complete the survey, would you mind telling me your name and the name of your employer? I'll need that information to enroll you in the cruise ship drawing. You can be sure that the answers you gave me earlier will be held in the strictest confidence.”

I held my breath while I waited to see if it would work.

“Sure,” the man answered after a short pause. He gave me his first and last names. “I'm a baggage handler at O'Hare. When will I find out about the cruise?”

Thirty or so phone numbers later I was thoroughly impressed by the behavioral effect of free offers.

And getting nowhere.

I could well understand why Gallagher's reporting had fallen off. The majority of his calls were to businesses that served his personal needs—Sam's Liquors, a dry cleaner, the Men's Shop at Mark Shale, a barbershop, his local Jewel/Osco—and none of the others sounded like a serious lead. I got through to two city employees, a marine biologist at the Shedd Aquarium, a building supplier, an IDOT worker, a teaching assistant at Loyola, an insurance adjuster, and half a dozen personal assistants (all apparently as unhappy with their jobs as Yelena) before concluding I was wasting my time. If there was a connection to be found among these contacts, I couldn't see it. Trading places with Sisyphus would be as least as productive.

I got up and paced around my apartment, thought about having another beer and decided against it, paced some more until I had covered the same ground a dozen or so times, and finally tossed myself in frustration on my living-room couch. A Scrabble game I'd been playing against myself sat unused on the coffee table next to it. I picked up the tiles I'd last been working with—which were oversized and (obviously) embossed with Braille—and began idly moving them around, searching for a word with the highest numerical value and playing with various patterns.

And that's when it hit me. A pattern.

I'd been looking in the wrong place for one.

At one time, my photographic memory would have easily alerted me to what I now wanted to know, but except for things I'd seen before I lost my sight, it had regrettably been deactivated. Fortunately, there were ways to get around that. I went back to my office and dumped the scanned contents of Gallagher's phone records into a spreadsheet program on my computer. I then sorted the numbers in four ways: date, time, area code, and number. Once again, I turned to my Braille printer to create tactile lists with the results. I was most interested in the numbers, so I turned to those first.

I moved slowly down the list with my fingers, taking my time and looking for groupings with the same prefix. I found several of them: three numbers with a 744 prefix, six with a 507 prefix, and five with an 832 prefix. I selected one at random from the last grouping and called. It was now nearing midnight, so I was surprised when a live voice answered.

“Murphy here.”

This time, I decided not to beat about the bush.

“Hello, Mr. Murphy? My name is Mark Halliday. I'm an associate of Rory Gallagher at the
Sun-Times
. You may have heard that Mr. Gallagher passed away recently. We've been trying to get a lead on the story he was working on when he died, and his phone records indicate that he spoke to you on . . .” I checked the date. “On August 22.”