The Talk Show Murders (28 page)

There was no record of a license for his associate Ashton Killinek. The address on his driver’s license was no longer valid, though neighbors recalled Ashton and his wife, Anne. The couple’s public displays of affection had been either “disgusting” and “lewd” or “really sweet,” depending on the eye of the beholder.

Hospitals were being canvassed in hopes of discovering a doctor who’d set Heinz’s arm and packed his nose, assuming the broken bones had been attended.

On that note, I headed off to bed.

I didn’t hear Dal’s phone chirp. What woke me was the sound of his voice, sharpened by tension, as he said, “He can’t be! He said he was going home!”

I staggered from the bedroom into the lighted sitting room. Dal
was on his feet, dressed only in his shorts, holding the phone, looking dazed. “Yeah,” he told the caller. “I’m on my way.”

He clicked off the phone and began searching for his pants and shirt. “That was Trejean. The fucking gallery’s on fire. He thinks Mantata’s inside.”

By the time we arrived, there was an unnatural glow in the nightscape and smoke in the air, and the CFD and the CPD had the street traffic blocked.

Dal found a parking space on the periphery of the activity, and we worked our way along the sidewalk through the acrid night air, past a scattering of gawkers, some of them in robes and pajamas, a paparazzo or two, camera crews on the dog watch from local channels, yawning uniform cops and a weary firefighter trying unsuccessfully to keep a hastily dressed man at arm’s distance. The man was demanding to know the extent of the damage to his shop, which I gathered was next to the main fire.

A cop stopped us before we got too close to the gallery, but we were able to see its display window blow out, sending sharp glistening shards into the street over the fire engine and firefighters handling the hose.

I remembered seeing a building burn a couple of years ago, recalled how loud the noise was, not just the roar of the fire but the creaking and cracking of the structure as it gave in to the heat and flames. That fire was set to cover a murder and to get rid of evidence in a case that launched me as a reluctant amateur sleuth.

Suddenly, the flames grew brighter. The firefighters on the ladder started shouting at those on the ground. As the earthbound members of the crew rushed back and away, the roof of the building seemed to cave in on itself, sending up a spray of burning embers.

“What a fucking mess,” Dal said.

“Mos’def.” Trejean had moved behind us.

“You sure he was in there?” Dal asked.

Trejean nodded. His eyes were wet, maybe from the smoke. “He call me. Say to come and drive him home.”

“How long did it take you to get here?”

“One half the hour.” He scanned the area, regarding the police with some apprehension. “Too much law. No place to be. Mi step out, yah.”

“Let’s step out to my car,” Dal said. “I need to get a fix on all this.”

The once bright yellow gallery was now a scarred skeletal framework. The firemen gave up on it and concentrated on saving what they could of the neighboring buildings.

“Tell me exactly what Mantata said to you.” Dal made it more of a command than a request. He and I were occupying the Z-car’s front seats. The Jamaican was in the rear.

“De ole man say: ‘No trust cabs. I need you heah, to delivah mi to ma home.’ ”

“How did he sound?”

“What you mean? He soun’ lak Mantata.”

“Was he happy? Was he sad? Angry? Nervous?”

“Not happy. Mebbe sad. Oh, yeah. He say: ‘It time I be goin’ home.’ ”

Dal and I exchanged glances.

“There are less painful ways to go home,” I said.

Dal nodded. “What was going on when you got here, Trejean?”

“Street empty. I see fi-ah in the window. Smoke. I stop car, run to doe-ah. Key no work. I run to back doe-ah. Key no work theah.”

“We’d changed the locks.”

“I bang on doe-ah, shout for Mantata. Then I run back to car an’ phone him. All the while, the fi-ah grow biggah. Flames cover the wall. Mantata voice ansah, but not him, a record. I stop that, dial nine-one-one and tell them about the fi-ah. Then I drive away and park. I call you. I don’t know what else to do.”

“You didn’t tell ’em your name?”

“Hail, no! An’ mi speaky-spokey, like an American. But de ole man …”

“Not much else you could’ve done,” Dal said. “The poor bastard.”

Trejean made the sign of the cross.

We sat in silence for a minute.

“You finish wit me, Dal?” Trejean was staring at a policeman walking past the car.

“Yeah.”

“Than mi step out, yah.” He waited until the cop was well past, then opened the door and exited, melting into the night.

“We should step out, too,” Dal said, and started up the Z.

Driving away, he repeated, “The poor bastard. Sitting up there on the third floor with all that flammable crap beneath him.”

“There must’ve been fire alarms in the gallery,” I said.

“And a sprinkler system. But from what I could see, the sprinklers weren’t operational.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I guess we know now why those guys broke in this morning.”

Dal was understandably silent on the drive to the hotel. When we were in my suite, I asked, “Isn’t there stuff you’ve got to do?”

“You mean like find another gig?” He was sitting on the bed made from the foldout couch, holding a water glass half filled with the Glenfiddich we’d picked up on the way.

“I mean about Mantata. Somebody will have to arrange for the funeral. There must be business things.…”

“He’s got family for that. A sister, I think. And there’s a lawyer. I was just one of his employees.”

“I got the feeling you and he were pretty close.”

“Close? All the guy did was rag on me and demand that I be at his beck and call and … Aw, hell. I loved the son of a bitch more than I did my old man. He believed in me more than my old man. Do me a favor, Billy, and leave me the fuck alone right now.”

I went into the bedroom and shut the door. But I could still hear him weeping in the other room.

“How much was Mantata paying you to watch my back?” I asked Dal during the short drive to Millennium Park the following morning. Neither of us had been able to shower away all of the smoke odor, and its lingering presence did nothing to lift the melancholy mood.

“Why?”

“Because I want you to keep doing it, and—”

“I’m paid up through the end of the month, Billy.”

“I’d still like to—”

“I’ve been paid,” he said, ending the discussion.

He stopped the car at the park’s entrance on Randolph. “I’d rather not sit around for the next three hours while you do your thing,” he said. “There’s stuff I should take care of. If that’s all right with you.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Don’t do anything dumb, like wandering off from the park on your own.”

“I’ll be good.”

I had one foot on the ground when he said, “Billy?”

I ducked down and looked at him.

“You think it’d be all right if I talked to his sister? I met her once, a while ago, but she may not even know who the hell I am.”

“I think it’d be fine.”

“I’d like to straighten her out on that crap that was in the paper.”

The morning’s
Chicago Trib
coverage of the fire had reported that “Its only victim is thought to be the gallery’s owner, an octogenarian reminder of this city’s wide-open and corrupt past. Born Byron Gaines on March 4, 1925, he became, at the age of twenty-three, one of the South Side’s most powerful gangland figures, operating houses of prostitution, gambling dens, the sale of narcotics, and other forms of vice, virtually untouched by the forces of law and order. It was not until the mid-1960s that he officially assumed the single name Mantata, an African word meaning dangerous. He was that and then some.…”

“My guess is his sister won’t be surprised by anything in the article,” I said.

“I just want her to know the stuff that wasn’t in the paper. He wasn’t an angel, but he was a hell of a lot better than some of the people that fucking rag praises for their civic duty. A hell of a lot better than the bastards who roasted him alive.”

“You know who set the fire?”

“What?” His face paled. “How could I? But I know somebody set it. According to the fucking paper, a fire lieutenant says it was arson.” He scowled. “You’re gonna be late. Call me when you need me.”

Before the show began, I asked Kiki to keep track of any news releases about the fire and its victim. Then I marched onto the set for seven minutes of bright cohost repartee, before the show switched to D.C., where our evening news anchor, Jim McBride, had risen early to interview a congresswoman who’d just introduced a bill that she felt would cut a fair amount of the nation’s budget by allowing indigents and the terminally ill to end their lives legally.

With tongue in cheek, Jim had suggested the possibility of saving even more money by selling their remains to pet food companies.

The congresswoman, who was quite beautiful, by the way, considered that and said, “Perhaps, if we can come up with a fatal drug that would not affect animals.”

I was considering the intelligence level of the voters who’d put the lovely congresswoman in office when Kiki cheerily reminded me to get ready for my segment with the sausage king of the Midwest.

It was a stove-top interview with a guy as round as he was tall and who spoke with an accent thicker than Schwarzenegger’s. Fourteen minutes later, weary from straining to understand what the guy was saying and feeling totally stuffed from scarfing down three or four very tasty sausages, the best of which was the one stuffed with Gouda cheese and apple, I left the set only to be approached by Trina.

“What do you know about rap?” she asked.

“What do you know about the Planet Zorg?” I replied.

“Well, fortunately, I’m not going to be interviewing a Zorgean by satellite in seven minutes.”

“There’s no rapper on my schedule.”

“There is now. Li’l Beatcakes. He’s got the number one record in the country, but our favorite entertainment hostess refuses to talk to him.”

“Isn’t that what she’s paid to do?”

“She claims his name is demeaning to women.”

“Beatcakes? What does it mean in rap lingo?”

“Fucking doggie-style,” Trina said.

“Didn’t I just see that on a greeting card?” I asked.

“You’re doing the fucking interview,” she said, and walked away. Arf! Arf!

Kiki had no new information on the fire, she informed me, when I returned to the office. But she did have notes on Li’l Beatcakes, who had only recently returned from a two-year prison stretch for carrying a concealed weapon. Among the other things that happened to
him while in the slams, he had found God. Hence his new hit on Dig Out Records, “Pick the Redeemer over the Reamer.”

It was not my finest interview. I’m never at my best talking to a TV screen. In this case, I was talking to a TV screen that was essentially nonverbal. Li’l Beatcakes didn’t so much talk as make growling noises, especially when one referenced his time in the slams. No matter. The interview was really just a warm-up to get him to sing his song, which was, to my ear, growling noises punctuated by uhns.

But what do I know?

Still nothing new on the fire and no definite identification of the victim. And the media’s interest was waning.

Gus Genovisi, the fresh-vegetable king of Chicago, was a subject more to my liking than Li’l Beatcakes. Charismatic, knowledgeable, and helpful. Ditto Danny DeBek, the creator of
Plum Tukker
, a comic strip about the dating life that was a sort of mash-up of
Doonesbury
and
Cathy
. I was about as au courant on that as I was on rap, but DeBek was not only verbal, he was funny.

Kiki was waiting for me after that interview. She held up my phone.

“Some bloke just called. Said he’d call back. Sounded frantic.”

“Good,” I said. “Frantic is exactly what I need this morning.” But the events of the night made me think the call might be important. I took the phone. Its log listed the caller as “Private Number.”

I handed the instrument back to her. “If he calls again, try to work your magic and get a name and a not-so-private number.”

When I wrapped my “people online” segment, she was waiting. “He called again. Hung up as soon as I told him you were busy.”

“Okay.” I took the phone and walked to the tent where coffee and fruit and pastries awaited. I had black coffee and a bear claw, and I didn’t feel in the least guilty about ignoring the apples and bananas. Well, maybe a little. Halfway through the second bear claw.

The phone rang, but it was Cassandra calling from Manhattan.

She was angry and puzzled. Her fiancé’s operatives had followed the rat- and roach-releasing busboy to the offices of Restaurants International, the conglomerate that was trying to purchase stock in the Bistro.

“Fuck that smarmy Frenchman Charles Limon and his cologne!” she exclaimed. “But I don’t get it. Why would they want to ruin a business they want to buy?”

“They don’t want to ruin it,” I said. “They just want to make it more difficult for me to keep it going without their ‘help.’ It’s a combination of the old protection racket and the new business morality.”

“So we report them to the police, right?”

“Wrong. Ask your fiancé, A.W., if we’ve got enough evidence to make a case against Restaurants International. If not, we’ll just give ’em more rope until we do. Then we turn the whole thing over to Wally Wing and whichever firm of legal sharks he wants to bring in to bite them in their bankroll.”

“Wow, Billy. Speaking of the new business morality …”

“It’s the world we live in,” I said.

At a little after ten, just as I was getting ready to call Dal, Lily Conover arrived at our temporary HQ. My cable coproducer was dressed down in a little white frock, draped with a zebra-stripe-patterned cape.

She’d flown in from Manhattan to oversee the taping early next week of two
Blessing’s in the Kitchen
shows focusing on the varying styles of Chicago’s famous pizza, from the original deep dish to the more recent stuffed version, including thin-crust and pan-cooked pies.