Triple Pursuit (15 page)
Phil Keegan couldn't sleep late if he wanted to, not anymore. Once he could lie in bed for twenty-four hours, out like a light, but after his wife died and his kids moved away and there was only himself, he woke without fail at five-thirty. Thanks to his bladder, of course, but even without that biological alarm clock he was sure he would have been wide awake and eager to get going on another day. Staying busy was a necessity; that and visits to Roger Dowling when he could think about what his life might have been like if he hadn't flunked out of Quigley because he couldn't get the hang of Latin. He would have been annoyed if anyone suggested that police work was therapy for him, what kept him from going bonkers. But there was truth in this.
That morning the call from the department came first, and he listened to the radio on his way to where the body had been found, but all he could find were talk shows, dozens of voices violating the morning air with dogmatic comments on one thing after another. He turned it off.
Dr. Pippen was already at the scene when Keegan got there, looking as if she had yet to go to bed, but fresh as a daisy and more beautiful, the adornment of the coroner's office. The paramedics had called her as soon as they had checked out the body; the woman was clearly dead and beyond their jurisdiction. The crime scene was already
tainted by all the people who had been tramping around in the snow that had fallen during the night.
tainted by all the people who had been tramping around in the snow that had fallen during the night.
“What do you make of it?” Keegan asked her.
“Strangled with her own scarf.”
The medical examiner's wagon arrived and all hell was raised about the fresh footprints around the scene. The place was finally staked off, and the photographers went to work. Pippen huddled in her fur, her auburn hair hanging in a ponytail down her back, as if she were the animal whose skin she wore. Cy Horvath got there twenty minutes after Phil did and they had a conference.
“She live here?”
“The identification in her purse gives a Chicago address.”
“So what the hell was she doing here?”
That question would have to wait. How anyone could sleep through the commotion out there on the street was hard to understand. But as Phil looked around, all he could see were drawn drapes, no sign of light, as if this was just another morning.
Pippen checked out the body again after the medical examiner's crew had finished. She indicated that the body could go. Agatha Rossner was zipped into a rubber bag and taken away.
“Anyone bring coffee?” Pippen asked.
“Want to go get some?” Cy replied, and Phil frowned. Pippen was Cy's Achilles' heel. He was mesmerized by the beautiful young doctor, liked to hang around her, innocent as could be but not very damned smart. Pippen seemed to think of Cy as her big brother.
“Send someone,” Phil said.
“No reason for me to stick around,” Pippen said.
“How'd you find out about this?”
“My buzzer.”
“You wear it to bed?”
“I was still up.”
“At five?”
“My medical-school class had a reunion. It went on and on.”
“So you've got your car.”
“I've got my car. See you later. Much later.”
Cy watched her walk off, scrunching through the snow toward her car that she had left by the guard gate. He turned to Phil.
“I am going to check out the woman.”
“Which one?”
Cy held up a purse. “I kept this. I'll turn it in to evidence later. I want to check out her place. The keys are here.”
“Without a warrant?”
“She lives in Chicago.”
Phil nodded. Getting a warrant in Chicago would consume most of the day. Besides, the Chicago police would want to get in on this and they might never see the inside of the apartment.
“I'll come with you.”
She had lived in a remodeled house near Old Town, on the edge between the fashionable and the bohemian. Large windows looked out of her second-floor apartment onto a street where dogs were walked, couples strolled, and the curbs were lined with parked cars, bumper to bumper. The girl herself had rented car space some blocks away. A little plastic tag with the address was on her key ring: Kopcinski's Parking. Her car was not there, and Phil sent a message to have the Western Sun development searched to see if the car was out there. Otherwise it was a Chicago matter. The two Fox River detectives were careful not to leave signs of their passage as they went through the apartment. Not much furniture, not many books (and those were of the jumbo glitzy paperback typeâhundreds of thousands of words of improbabilities to soothe the civilized breast), a very elaborate sound system with speakers in all the rooms. Cy checked the CDs. She seemed to have liked everything.
“Lots of old stuff.”
“Classics.”
“No, âpopular music of yesterday.'” Cy was reading from the blurb.
“Jack Gallagher stuff.”
The remark was prelude to a number of surprising things. The number scrawled on the pad near the phone proved to be Jack Gallagher's. Not that they rang the number while they were in the apartment. In the bedroom, where a large mattress lay on the floor without benefit of bedstead, there was a framed photograph of Jack Gallagher, signed.
All the best
,
Jack
. Cy frowned at the picture.
All the best
,
Jack
. Cy frowned at the picture.
“That's an old frame.”
“So?”
“I mean it's a picture that's been in that frame for a long time.”
“Why would this woman even know of Jack Gallagher?”
“She likes old music?”
“But this is an old photograph.”
When they left it was with thoughts of Jack Gallagher on their minds, and they just looked at one another when they got Jack's address from downtown. The body of the girl had been found twenty-five yards from Gallagher's condo.
When Phil rattled the knocker on Jack Gallagher's door, the door of the next apartment opened, and a lady in a kimono leaned out with her finger to her lips. “Shhh. He never gets up until noon.”
“A lot of commotion here this morning.”
“What do you mean?” The glassy look suggested contacts. Cy showed her his identification. Her mouth rounded and she stepped back. “It's that car that's been parked out there for days, isn't it?”
“What car is that, Mrs ⦠.”
“Ritchie. Isabel Ritchie. That's with one
l
.”
l
.”
“One's enough,” Cy said. “What car has been parked out there for days?”
“I don't know one car from another. But there were two men, sometimes only one, and they just sat there, for hours, day and night.”
“Did you complain about it?”
“I mentioned it to the gate guard and he said he'd look into it.”
“But the car remained?”
Wrapping her kimono more tightly around her, she stepped outside in her big floppy slippers. “It may be out there still.” She stopped. “What are all those people doing?”
“That's why we're here, ma'am.”
The theory was that retired people took out their hearing aids when they went to bed and could have slept through a bombing of the city. Whatever the explanation, the body had been taken away, patrol cars and meat wagon were gone, nothing was left to commemorate the finding of the dead girl's body but a yellow plastic ribbon marking off an irregular rectangle at the side of the road, a rectangle in which the freshly fallen snow had been trampled thoroughly by dozens of feet.
“Who reported the body?”
Phil looked at Cy. “Good question.”
They decided to postpone visiting Jack Gallagher for a while. They had the 911 tape relayed to them several times. Cy looked at Phil. “If I had to guess, I would say that is Tuttle trying to disguise his voice.”
Then they headed back to Jack Gallagher's door.
Jack Gallagher was in a mood when he opened his door at the crack of dawn, going on eleven o'clock, to find Cy Horvath and Phil Keegan on his step. Cy opened his wallet and Jack squinted, pretending he could read it.
“What can I do for you?”
“This may take time, Mr. Gallagher.”
“âMr. Gallagher'! Come on in, there's fresh coffee.”
The apartment was a little steamy and the fragrance of showering
drifted from the inner reaches. Taking in the place, comparing it to his own modest digs, and to the place in Chicago from which they had recently come, Phil decided it was basically a motel suite, one room made to look like manyâliving area, another area divided between the kitchen on one side and the dining table on the other, and beyond the inner sanctum, bedroom and bath. The living room was cluttered with photographs, most of them including Jack, if not exclusively of him.
drifted from the inner reaches. Taking in the place, comparing it to his own modest digs, and to the place in Chicago from which they had recently come, Phil decided it was basically a motel suite, one room made to look like manyâliving area, another area divided between the kitchen on one side and the dining table on the other, and beyond the inner sanctum, bedroom and bath. The living room was cluttered with photographs, most of them including Jack, if not exclusively of him.
“We found the body of a young lady in a snowbank beside the street outside.”
Jack had gone into the little kitchen area to fetch the coffee. There were mugs set out on the little ledge that separated it from the living room. He had no reaction at all.
“Did you hear me, Mr. Gallagher?”
“Not unless you call me Jack.”
“A dead girl was found in the snow just outside your apartment. All hell broke loose around here in the early hours.”
“You're kidding.”
“You heard nothing?”
He shook his head slowly back and forth. “One of the selling points of these places is the acoustics. They're built with a common wall but the claim is that all the walls, not only the common one, assure absolute quiet and privacy. It's true.”
“The girl's name was Agatha Rossner. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Of course. She worked with my daughter Colleen at Mallard and Bill in the Loop. That's a legal firm.”
“Why would her body have been found here?”
“I suppose people can die anywhere.”
“She was strangled, Jack.”
He stared across the room as if contemplating the fragility and folly of life. He shook his head. “She was younger than Colleen.”
“You yourself were acquainted with her?”
“Oh, yes. We had become pals. Several times she came by here and I took her over to the clubhouse for drinks.”
“She just stop by or what?”
“By invitation. I had met her when I was given a grand tour of Mallard and Bill some time ago. She ended up being my tour guide. We had a drink and it was pleasant but a little hectic so I asked her out here to see our clubhouse.”
“When did you last see her?”
“Last night.” He had hesitated. “Last night was one of the times she came by for a drink.”
“At the clubhouse?”
“We came back here afterward.”
“When did she leave?”
“I don't know.” Jack looked from Cy to Phil and the macho look faded from his face. “I was asleep.”
“Was that the first time she stayed?”
He shook his head.
“So it was an affair?”
“Of sorts. Driven by curiosity on both sides. Of course, we liked one another.”
“Never quarreled or anything?”
“When there is a great disparity of age there is little to quarrel about, or to agree about, frankly.” His shoulders slumped. “It was a damned foolish thing to get involved in.”
Cy took him through every stage of his relationship with Agatha Rossner, the tour of the firm, the drink downstairs afterward, the mutual kidding that had proved to be a prelude to her coming by the condo, the visit to the clubhouse where he had displayed her as a kind of trophy, but Jack claimed to have been surprised when it went beyond drinks and talk. “I have always been the aggressor in such matters. Being seduced was a novelty. Before I realized she was serious, we were in bed.” He looked agonizingly at Cy. “I hope to God none of this has to be made public.”
The telephone rang and it was Jack's son Tim. After Jack hung up, he smiled ruefully. “He advised me to say nothing. That comes a little late. Since I have been forthcoming I hope you will do what you can to keep me out of this.”
“Keep him out of it,” Phil said as they walked to the car.
Cy got behind the wheel and paused before starting the engine. “He never once asked about the girl.”
When Marie Murkin heard the news that a young woman's body had been found beside the road in a West End retirement development, she had no reason to think of it as anything different from the dozens of dreadful happenings with which the radio listener becomes acquainted over his toast and coffee. Murder, mayhem, rape, and bombings, are digested along with the morning meal and scarcely rise to the level of consciousness. Marie's antennae were sensitive enough but even she had become dulled over the years by the din of disaster with which her day began. But her head snapped up from her Wheaties when she heard “Western Sun Community.” She sat with cocked head, chewing methodically, then shrugged it off. Later she would claim that she knew from the beginning that Jack Gallagher lived there and that all this had to do with him.
“Imagine his gall, suing Austin Rooney,” she said later, when Phil Keegan stopped by.
Father Dowling and Phil turned to Marie when she made this remark. Phil Keegan had begun telling his old friend about the investigation that now occupied his detective division.
“That is a non sequitur, Marie.”
“You bet it is. Almost Divine retribution.”
The story Phil had come to tell was not exactly a logical sequence in itself. Things seemed to stick together and not stick together at the
same time. The young woman, a Chicago attorney, had been found on the street not far from Jack Gallagher's condo. She had worked with a Loop firm in which Jack's daughter Colleen was a paralegal. Perhaps she was a friend of the daughter's?
same time. The young woman, a Chicago attorney, had been found on the street not far from Jack Gallagher's condo. She had worked with a Loop firm in which Jack's daughter Colleen was a paralegal. Perhaps she was a friend of the daughter's?
“Pretty much the opposite.”
“Have you talked with Colleen Gallagher?”
Phil made a face. “Not yet. She didn't come to work today.”
Only when Marie was out of earshot did Phil let Father Dowling know the direction in which suspicion was tending to gather.
“Jack Gallagher!”
“Roger, the guy is a cool fish, no doubt about it. He owned up to things which turn out to be incriminating as can be. He was carrying on with that young woman. Cy hears that she was a woman who went after whatever she wanted, and she decided that Jack Gallagher was it. He paraded her around like the cock of the walk, and there is no doubt that it had been going on at least a week, hot and heavy. She stayed over at least twice, including last night. He claims he doesn't know when she left. But as far as we can tell, he was the last one to see her alive.”
“But why would he do her physical harm?”
“Is there an alternative?”
The alternative seemed to be someone lurking around, waiting for her to appear. But why would anyone think that would be before full daylight?
“Somehow Jack Gallagher seems a feeble adversary for Austin Rooney. If he is embroiled in this, his suit against Austin will seem weaker than it did.”
“He'll probably drop it.”
Amos Cadbury stopped by at ten, on his way to his office. He was a good friend of Nathaniel Bill of Mallard and Bill, and learned that the young woman, Agatha, had been notorious in the firm. Not that Bill
had heard this until after his young associate was dead. Amos tried hard for a delicate way to put it.
had heard this until after his young associate was dead. Amos tried hard for a delicate way to put it.
“She boasted of her conquests, Father. A staple of talk in the ladies' room was Agatha's daily bulletin of her activities. Apparently she was making a run of the Gallagher family.”
“How so?”
“First it was the son, Timothy.” Amos shook his head. “However flamboyant the father, Timothy Gallagher is the picture of rectitude. It would be dreadful if her claims to have had an affair with him should be publicized.”
“But is it true?”
“Truth and publicity are strangers, Father. It wouldn't matter whether it was true if it became the subject of idle chatter.”
“The only Gallagher I know is the daughter, Colleen.”
“She is a paralegal at Mallard and Bill.”
“And she plans to marry a man who was just recently made a partner in an unprecedentedly brief period.”
Amos traced the line of his jaw with a manicured hand. “What is the young man's name?”
“Mario. Mario Liberati.”
“Oh my.”
“What?”
“One of Nathaniel's confidences was that they are letting Liberati go. Apparently he concealed from the firm his connections with underworld figures in Milwaukee. That is his native city. They will give the young man what Nathaniel referred to as a golden parachute, but he has been let go.”
“What kind of connections with the underworld?”
“His sister is married to a man who has just been indicted on a drug count. By all reports, he is the head of the Milwaukee drug racket.”
“Poor Colleen.”
The two old friends sat in silence. Father Dowling longed for a
return of the almost innocent shenanigans in which Jack Gallagher and Austin Rooney had been engaged. Folly is one thing, but murder quite another. The last time he and Amos had spoken, Father Dowling had told the attorney of the senior dance and all the events of that adventurous evening. Then, he had been anxious about bad publicity coming to the parish; now those events had sunk to the level of a playground quarrel.
return of the almost innocent shenanigans in which Jack Gallagher and Austin Rooney had been engaged. Folly is one thing, but murder quite another. The last time he and Amos had spoken, Father Dowling had told the attorney of the senior dance and all the events of that adventurous evening. Then, he had been anxious about bad publicity coming to the parish; now those events had sunk to the level of a playground quarrel.
“Do you think Gallagher will drop his suit against Rooney?”
“Why should he?”
“Phil Keegan is proceeding on the assumption that Jack Gallagher strangled that girl.”
Amos thought about it. “Even so, he might find it difficult simply to walk away from that capricious undertaking.”
“Surely you won't hinder him.”
“I was thinking of Judge Bertha Farner. Whatever sympathies she might have felt for Jack Gallagher as the object of Rooney's assault, will be reversed when she learns the kind of Lothario he is.”
“But surely that is irrelevant.”
“Trial-procedure relevance is one thing, Father. But what a judge finds relevant in the privacy of her own mind is quite another thing. She is likely to want him to pay a price for bringing the suit before her when his own hands were tainted. Whether or not he is accused of the death of that young woman, I suspect Judge Farner will insist that the civil suit go forward.”
“To what end?”
“If he loses, he will have to pay court costs.”
“That's fairly vindictive, isn't it?”
“To Judge Farner, it might seem to be simple justice.”
“Did you find Maud Gorman helpful when you deposed her?”
Amos immediately brightened. “That woman could be a female Dorian Gray. Somewhere there must be an image of her that is showing the ravages of time, but in person I found her the same delightful woman I knew at the country club years ago.”
“Men find her attractive.”
“Men.” Amos shook her head. “It is demeaning that such a woman should be dragged into this ludicrous dispute.”
“There are those who think she encourages attention.”
“Nonsense. There are those who fail to understand the manners of such a lady. It is her femininity that is misunderstood. I doubt that any woman has been more willing to accept the gender God gave her than Maud.” He paused. “She told me that âSmoke Gets in Your Eyes' was sung that night. I am surprised it hasn't been embargoed in the current puritanical climate vis-Ã -vis tobacco.”
It occurred to Father Dowling that, styles apartâas well, of course, as the object in viewâthere was some similarity between Maud Gorman and the predatory young woman Amos had described who now lay in the morgue.
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