High Chicago (15 page)

T
he Chicago Tribune building is inlaid at eye level with stones liberated from some of the world’s most recognizable buildings and structures by intrepid
Tribune
correspondents of days gone by. A tile from the Taj Mahal. Stones from the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China and the Alamo. Souvenirs of Notre Dame and Westminster Abbey and Lincoln’s Tomb. A twisted bit of metal from the World Trade Center next to a stone from the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent. Even chunks of the Pyramids and the Parthenon—the ruined temple, not the nightclub.

The
Tribune
newsroom is on the fourth floor. Somehow I’d expected a scene out of
The Front Page:
a clamorous, smoky room filled with hard-bitten Chicago newsmen pounding out copy on clacking typewriters, phones jangling like alarm bells, flasks of whisky at the ready. Instead, the place was strangely quiet. Soft tapping on computer keyboards. Phones burring discreetly. No cigarettes, no cigars, no pipes, no booze. No copy boys running the gauntlet from writers to editors, no pneumatic tubes whooshing stories over to rewrite. It could have been an insurance office or a call centre, except for one glassed-in area where police scanners squawked.

Jericho Hale was a tall, lean black man about my age,
which is mid-thirties. His head was cleanly shaved, which somehow makes black men look cool and white men unemployable. His eyes were focused on the screen in front of him as his fingers thrummed quickly over the keyboard, lips pursed as if he were about to plant a kiss on someone. The man was in a zone. I stood there watching him for several minutes until he stopped typing and without looking up said, “You had some information about Simon Birk.”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “Wait.”

He resumed typing, his eyes moving from the screen to a document on the desk next to him and back, until he was satisfied with whatever he had written. He saved his copy, then pushed back from his computer and took me in.

He said, “Birk.”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “Sit.”

Hale had been writing about Simon Birk for years. He slid open a file drawer and showed me files jammed into hanging holders. “And that’s just one drawer,” Hale said. “The man has been something of a boon to me. I’m like one of those birds that ride around on the back of a rhinoceros.”

“Better above him than below,” I said.

“True enough. So what brings an investigator here from Toronto?”

“I’m looking for information on Birk.”

“And you came to me?”

“You’ve written more about him than anyone else.”

Hale smiled. “That’s because people give
me
information. Not because I give it to them.”

“Maybe we can help each other.”

“I know I can help you. What I’m not seeing is how you can help me.”

I said, “Birk’s putting up a building in Toronto.”

“He puts up buildings everywhere.”

“This one is called the Harbourview.”

“I know. I watched the groundbreaking ceremony on TV.”

“It’s dirty,” I said.

“How dirty?”

“Dirty enough to put Birk in jail for the rest of his life.”

Hale picked up a spiral notebook and a pen. Said, “You have my full attention.”

“But this is quid pro quo, right? We trade information?”

“You give me the quid,” he said, “then we’ll see about the quo.”

I told him about the deadly Aroclor 1242 that had been found on the site. He took notes without looking down at the pad. I told him how Birk had made Rob Cantor cover it up.

“Because he couldn’t afford to have it cleaned?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s according to Cantor?”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

I told him Birk had ordered the deaths of three people to keep the project going.

He stopped taking notes and leaned his long body closer toward me. “Are you shitting me? What three people?”

“Before I get into specifics—”

“Uh-oh. Here it comes.”

“Here comes what?”

“The part where you tell me you have no proof of this.”

“Not directly, no.”

“Nothing? No other sources who’d back you up? Police, say?”

“Not officially. Not yet.”

He said, “Are you fucking with me?”

“No.”

“’Cause this is a newsroom, and we get a lot of nutbars come in here with crazy stories. They’re emissaries from another planet. The mayor’s bugging their houses. The CIA wants them dead. The country is being run by reptiles from space.”

“I’m pretty sure that one’s true,” I said.

“Look, I got deadlines. I got real stories I’m working on, the kind that come with sources, witnesses, documents. The kind of stuff I can write without getting my ass sued.”

“You don’t think Birk is capable of this?”

“What I think isn’t worth a damn,” he said. “I’m not an editorial writer. I am a reporter, and the company pays me to write factual stories that I can back up, line by line, under the scrutiny of the legal department if necessary and I hate when those people review my copy. If they’re not space reptiles, they’re first cousins. Now if the police in Toronto consider Birk a murder suspect, and someone there is willing to go on the record, I can report that. If Rob Cantor makes some kind of public statement about the Aroclor, I can report that. Until then, you are a guy who came in off the street with a mouthful of cotton candy.”

“It’s not bullshit,” I said.

I had given Hale my investigator’s licence when I arrived. He picked it up off his desk and looked at it closely. He said, “You seem halfway normal to me. But even if I believe you—even if my gut tells me that you are telling the truth—”

“Does it?”

“Doesn’t matter. I still can’t expose my paper to a libel suit, which happens to be one of Simon Birk’s hobbies, and which would get me fired or bumped back to rewriting wire copy.”

“I’m not asking you to write anything. Yet. Just hear me out.”

“Which I’ve been doing, despite certain time constraints piling up on my ass.”

“And help me understand Birk a little better.”

“The quo to your quid? All right,” he said. “Let’s get to the murders. Who is he supposed to have killed?”

“The engineer who was responsible for cleaning the site. He was beaten to death two—no, three days ago. The environmental studies major who found the Aroclor was shot the next day.”

“And the third?”

“Rob Cantor’s daughter.”

“Jesus. What happened to her?”

I told him about Maya’s apparent suicide and the evidence we had found that it had been staged.

When I was done, he gave me a long look, tapping his pencil against his pad, his lips pursed again—his thinking face.

“You’re not throwing me out,” I said.

“No.”

“You’re thinking it could be true.”

“Yes.”

“Because you know Birk.”

“Because I know—or at least I think I know—things about him I’ve never been able to print.”

“What things?”

He handed me back my ID and said, “Let’s get some air.”

Two years ago, Hale told me, two men forced their way into Birk’s house, beat Birk and his wife unconscious, and made off with a fortune in cash, jewellery and art.

“Joyce was the collector,” he told me. “Birk’s idea of great art would probably be a portrait of himself. But she put together one of the best private collections in the city. Everything from the Impressionists onward. The cash the thieves got away with was negligible, maybe ten thousand from a safe. The jewellery not so negligible. Joyce had expensive taste and there were at least two or three pieces worth a hundred thousand or more. Each. But the artwork—man, I think the estimate was fifteen to twenty million.”

“None of it ever recovered?”

“Not a sketch.”

We were standing on the bridge that crossed the river at Michigan Street, looking out at a boat taking tourists on an architectural tour. We could hear the voice of the guide calling out the names of landmark buildings, the Tribune Tower among them.

“So what was it that you couldn’t print?” I asked.

“Put it this way,” Hale said. “That robbery couldn’t have happened at a better time.”

Now it was my turn to say, “You have my full attention.”

“Birk was going through hell. They had just started excavating the Skyline site when some old bones were found. There was plenty of excitement because they were thought to be from the first white settlers.”

“I read your piece on that.”

“Then you know everything came to a screeching halt. And stayed there. At the same time, there was a strike by pipefitters that stopped construction on his building in New York. A casino he built in Macau was basically washed away in a typhoon. The tower crane right here snapped. Kind of a perfect shitstorm for Simon Birk. There were rumours that he was financially constrained before the robbery, but not so much after. The insurance payout was huge. And he sold the house, which netted him a little over ten million. The market was pretty hot at the time. And that all came to him, not his company.”

“Are you saying the robbery was his idea?”

“Now we’re getting into your territory,” he said, grinning at me, “where I might think something but I can’t prove it. All I know is what my gut tells me, which is it was too damn convenient. Simon cashed in big time, enough to float his boat until he could start building again.”

“But he got the shit beaten out of him. And his wife …”

“There’s something else that bothered me,” he said. “His injuries were bad, but not one of them was even close to life-threatening. Broken hand. Collarbone. Nose. Six weeks later, he
was all the way back. Every blow Joyce took was to the head. They beat her fucking senseless with a crowbar or something. Her heart stopped three times before the medics stabilized her.”

“You think he wanted her dead?”

“I started out as a crime reporter. And one of the first things cops ask at the scene of a crime is, Who benefits? Whether the home invasion was Birk’s idea or not, it left him free and clear of a whole bunch of things. He rose like a phoenix out of those ashes—maybe not as pretty as he’d been, but with shitloads of new cash. He moved himself into his own building, which doesn’t cost him a dime, and his only expense is keeping Joyce in a nursing home. Ten, fifteen grand a month max. She used to spend ten times that much without buying a single piece of art.”

“Did you float this idea past the cops?”

“I asked whether the evidence pointed to anything but a crime perpetrated by persons unknown.”

“And?”

“The lead cop on the case looked at me like I was some kind of ghoul for even asking.”

“And that’s where it ended?” I asked.

“Let me clue you in on a fact or three about the state of news gathering these days. Circulation is declining every year. Ownership is not happy about said decline. And good investigative journalism is the most expensive kind there is. Sometimes you invest days, weeks, months on something that might not pan out.”

“Fortunately,” I said, “I have no such constraints.”

“Knock yourself out, m’man.”

“You remember the cop’s name?”

“Tom Barnett.”

“Where’s he work out of?”

“Bureau of Investigative Services. Detective Division. You planning on talking to him?” he smiled.

“Why not?”

The smile got bigger. “Be interesting to see if he likes private investigators any better than he likes reporters.”

O
nce I was checked into my room, I called Jenn and gave her the rundown on my day.

“You think Birk’s ears are burning yet?” she asked.

“I’d bet on it. If the site manager didn’t call him, Peter Stemko probably did.”

“I’m sorry I missed your act,” Jenn said. “You being careful?”

“I’m watching my back while hoping he tries something,” I said. “Because so far we’ve got nothing to hang him with. But there is something you could check.”

“What?”

“You have good contacts in the art world?”

“I’m gay, Jonah. I can’t go to a party without bumping into four gallery owners.”

“Good. Simon Birk’s house was looted two years ago.”

“I remember. It was in the package I put together for you.”

I told her what Jericho Hale had said about the convenient timing of the robbery, and his suspicion that Birk might have engineered it himself.

“Jesus. Is there nothing he won’t stoop to?”

“For a change,” I said, “there’s no proof.”

“So what can I do?”

“I’m emailing you an article that lists the main items
taken. Find out what they would have been worth on the black market. Ask if any have surfaced. I’ll speak to the insurance company and see if they had any doubts.”

“I’m on it,” she said. “So … your friend Avi help you at all?”

“He said he’d make some calls,” I said. “I’m going there for dinner tonight, so maybe he’ll have something for me.”

“It’s good you have a friend there.”

“Yes.”

“What’s he like?”

“Very different than he was in Israel—much more corporate—but I guess I’m different too.”

“But some things never change,” she said. “I’m sure you have more in common than you think.”

“We’ll see.”

“Anything else?”

“That’s it for now. Except …”

“Except what?”

“Maybe you ought to work from home while I’m away.”

“Why? You think more goons might come around?”

“It’s possible.”

“And you think I can’t take care of myself?”

“Don’t take it the wrong way.”

“I’m not supposed to worry about you but you can worry about me? Of all the sexist crap.”

“It has nothing to do with sex, Jenn.”

“Then what?”

I was struggling to find the right way to express what I was feeling—how much she meant to me as a friend and partner—when I heard a loud snort and a peal of laughter and realized I’d been had. “Gotcha,” she giggled.

“You witch,” I said.

“Guilty,” she said.

“A guy tries to show concern …”

“I’m touched, Jonah.”

“In the head, you’re touched.”

“I’m also at home.”

“What?”

“I felt creeped out at the office after what happened. So I forwarded the phones to home and I’ve been working here all day. In my jammies.”

“And still you give me shit.”

“I was a little bored here.”

“You’re toast when I get back,” I said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“So get back in one piece,” she said. “Then you can give me all the shit you want.”

I hailed a cab in front of the hotel, the interior ripe with the smell of curry, and told the Sikh driver I wanted to go to West Montana Street—via the Gold Coast.

I could see his face light up in his mirror at the thought of the higher fare a roundabout trip would bring. “Of course,” he said.

I gave him the address of Birk’s old house on North Astor Street. He took Lake Shore north along Lake Michigan until Division, where he turned left and drove past North Astor to State. “Astor’s a one-way south so I must go around this way,” the driver explained. The houses grew grander in size and more grandiose in design, hundred-year-old mansions in all the styles popular at the turn of the century: Queen Anne, Georgian, Romanesque. The people who built these houses once ran the city: the publisher of the
Tribune
, the Wrigleys, the mayor, the guys who made money in steel, lumber, real estate and beer. Not many were family homes anymore. Like the mansions that lined the streets of the Annex back home, they were apartments or condos now, or museums or clubs. The biggest of all was the red sandstone home of the Archdiocese of Chicago; the second biggest, the old Playboy mansion.

When we got to the former Birk residence, I asked the driver to wait.

“Take all the time you need, sir,” he said.

The house was spectacular. A four-storey Georgian master-piece built of grey stone, with arched windows on the ground floor and Juliet balconies along the top. Footlights bathed the stone in a soft pink light. There were security cameras at either end of the front gate, one aimed at the front door, one at the street. They weren’t new—their black casings showed frills of rust along their edges—and had surely been there in Birk’s time. The north side of the house was built up against its neighbour, barely a foot between them, and that gap was well covered by old-growth ivy that was dying against a trellis, dry brown twigs and leaves curling into themselves. On the south side, a driveway went halfway to the back of the house, ending at a side door covered by a small white portico. A camera there too. I assumed there were cameras at the back of the house as well.

I got back into the cab wondering how the thieves had pulled off their robbery without being caught on tape.