The Fifth Floor (24 page)

“Get the hell out of here,” he hissed.

“One thing I don’t understand. Why get me involved? Why not just confront Woods about the book? Kill him and take it for yourself?”

“You think murder’s that simple?”

“Allen Bryant might think so.”

“Mr. Bryant was a nobody. Mr. Woods had entanglements.”

“You mean the mayor’s office. Let me guess. You thought there was a chance they might actually investigate the death of one of their own?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Kelly. Now get out. And take the bitch outside with you.”

“I don’t think so, Randolph.” I placed a final piece of paper on the curator’s desk.

“This is your letter of resignation. When you walk out of this office, there will be a team of federal marshals waiting to take you into custody for questioning with respect to Allen Bryant’s murder. They’ll also take possession of your desktop computer and personal items pursuant to search warrants executed this morning in federal court.”

Blood drained south from Randolph’s face as I spoke.

“Want a suggestion, Lawrence?”

He nodded.

“Sign this letter. Hand the position over temporarily to your trusted assistant, Teen. Get a good lawyer and hope for the best.”

“Why should I do that?”

“’Cause you’re in the system now. I might be able to do you a favor down the road and, believe me, you’re going to need every one of them you can get.”

Randolph took a look around his soon-to-be-former domain. Soft yellow lights and even softer carpet. A wall of diplomas in golden frames. Pictures of Randolph with the mayor, governor, and any other smiling politician who would grasp his overreaching hand. Books, groaning with pretension and stacked from floor to ceiling. Presiding over it all, Randolph’s scheming ancestor, the man who pilfered Lincoln’s Proclamation in the first place, a common crook named Josiah. The curator pulled his eyes back to the rather unappetizing present, sniffed once or twice, and did what any sensible man would do.

“I want to cut a deal.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You can help.”

“Maybe. Tell me the rest.”

Randolph stood up, moved toward the desk, and picked up his oosik.

“That thing help you think?” I said.

Randolph put the oosik down. “Just a toy. I know, you find it strange. You realize my family had the Proclamation in our possession for over a century?”

“Didn’t know that.”

“Neither did they. Josiah died suddenly from a stroke.”

“Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

“Josiah was brilliant. Created a cover story about the Proclamation for his official diary. Never told anyone he had actually saved it.”

“And eventually hid it in his Sheehan’s.”

“In 1974, a pig of an uncle sold the book.”

Randolph waved his hands in the air. At the vagaries of time and fate. At the idiocy of others. At the temptations handed down by history. Temptations that were his undoing.

“I found the rest of the diary among Josiah’s papers four years ago. The whole story was there. When I realized what Josiah had done, what my family had unwittingly sold-”

“You got greedy.”

“The Proclamation belongs to my family. It’s my legacy.”

“A legacy you wanted to turn around and sell.”

“It’s mine, Mr. Kelly.”

“How did the Sheehan’s wind up in Woods’ hands?”

Randolph wandered over to his wall of books and picked randomly at the volumes there.

“I suspected the number four was in the Chicago area but was never really sure.”

“You needed someone to do your legwork. Someone relentless enough to get the job done, but someone you could control.”

“Something like that.”

“And that’s when you decided to bring in the mayor’s office and Johnny Woods?”

Randolph turned back my way. “I thought they might bite on the fire story.”

“Let them do all the heavy lifting,” I said. “Lead you right to the number four.”

“That was the idea.”

“Didn’t quite work out that way,” I said.

“Woods lied to me.”

“Not a big surprise there.”

“No, probably not. He said he’d located the book. Told me Bryant had it at his house on Hudson.”

“In actuality, Woods himself had already taken the number four from Bryant,” I said.

Randolph nodded. “When we arrived at the house-”

“We?”

“Lester insisted on coming with me that morning. As it turned out, that was probably a mistake.”

“Go ahead.”

“Bryant was hostile. Told us he had given the book to Woods the previous evening, and why were we so interested, anyway.”

I could see the old professor, staring at the skinhead in his living room, a lethal mix of fear and outrage bubbling inside.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You didn’t believe Bryant.”

“I did. Lester wasn’t so sure.”

“So you killed him.”

“Lester wanted to waterboard the professor. Said the CIA did it all the time to get people talking. Are you familiar with the technique?”

“Sure. Stretch him out on a piece of wood and pour water over the guy’s face. Victim thinks he’s drowning.”

“Unless he actually is drowning, which, in the case of Mr. Bryant, was exactly what happened. Terrible accident. For the record, all Lester’s doing.”

“Spoken like a true rat. They’re gonna love you inside, Randolph.”

Randolph blinked behind his glasses. “What about our deal?”

“I told you, I’ll do what I can. Tell me about the murder. Why all the fuss?”

“Excuse me?”

“The sand in Bryant’s mouth. If he was already dead, what was the point?”

The curator puffed himself up as only an academic, even a wannabe homicidal academic, can do. “I thought we needed to add a bit of complexity to the crime scene.”

“Keep the focus on the fire as a possible motive. And maybe turn up the heat a little on Johnny Woods?”

Randolph smiled and walked back to his wall of books. “You’ve sampled a little history on the Great Fire. You might appreciate this.”

The volume was large, dusty, and old. Randolph laid it flat on the desk, open to an onionskin map of 1871 Chicago.

“The fire devoured Chicago in chunks,” the curator said. “Block by block. Thousands of people streamed into the streets-streets made of wood and often already aflame. Anyway, where were they to go?”

I turned a page and looked at the illustrations. A dark and boiling river of people, drawn in faded ink, terror on their faces as they ran through a rain of fire and ash. Swarming toward the water. The apparent safety of Lake Michigan.

“According to most accounts,” Randolph said, “thousands flocked to the lakefront. Some ran into the water, but found it to be alive with pieces of flaming timber and burning pitch. The air itself, however, was no better. So hot, it peeled the skin off people’s bones. To draw a breath was to risk cooking, literally, from the inside out.”

Randolph reached over and turned the page for me. To a fresh set of drawings.

“Others coming to the lakefront buried themselves up to their necks in sand. It should have been a prudent move. The earth underneath was wet and cool. There was only one problem.”

“The wind.”

“Excellent, Mr. Kelly. Columns of superheated air and flames had risen into the sky and tore along the lakefront. Those who survived called them fire devils. They turned the beaches into sandstorms-and then into graves. Some, it seems, were buried alive.”

I closed the book on faces from long ago. Eyes looking up at a sky filled with death. Mouths half covered in sand. Faces drowning in earth.

“So you fashioned the same fate for Allen Bryant.”

“As I said, it was Lester who insisted upon killing the man. I simply provided the proper historical context. May I?”

I stood up. Randolph moved back behind his desk and booted up his computer.

“Now, Mr. Kelly. There is only one more thing I want to show you.”

I walked across the room and replaced the volume of history Randolph had given me. Then I sat on a couch along the wall and waited. Rodriguez was already outside with the feds and their warrants. I could give the curator a final minute.

“Your computer play, Mr. Kelly. Clever. As I said, I assume you won’t use any of that material officially. Of course, investigators will know exactly where to look in my desktop computer and find it, anyway. Isn’t that the notion?”

“That’s how it works, Randolph.”

The curator finished typing and pushed away from the screen. “Okay, I’m ready to go.”

“What did you want to show me?”

“Actually, nothing. Or rather, soon-to-be nothing.”

Randolph flipped his screen around so I could get a look. File names were appearing and reappearing in a manic game of hide-and-seek.

“I have a few computer tricks of my own. One is known as a bomb.”

I jumped at the computer and hit some buttons. File names kept slipping across the screen.

“What did you do?”

“It can’t be stopped, Mr. Kelly.”

There was a beep and the file names disappeared altogether. Replaced by a blinking cursor.

“In fact, it’s done.” Randolph smiled. “All my files and e-mails are erased, on my computer and any computer that received them. Incapable of being reconstructed even with the most sophisticated of programs. A very effective and very lethal bomb.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t have to. Doesn’t make it any less real.”

Randolph picked up the flash drive I had given him off his desk. “Kind of renders this irrelevant.”

He dropped the drive into a wastebasket by his feet and stood up. “Don’t feel bad, Mr. Kelly. You’re Irish and I’m not. As Charles Hume knew so well, breeding will always tell.”

Then Randolph walked out of his office and into the arms of the police. Two hours after that, he walked out of the society with his lawyer. No charges filed and apologies all around. Lawrence Randolph was a killer. And a free man.

I sat in the bowels of the Billy Goat. In the VIP section. Also known as two wooden tables and a collection of chairs. The staff had separated us from the great unwashed by what looked like a green shower curtain. Fred Jacobs sat across from me. It was a little after eleven in the morning and Fred was working on his second Horny Goat. I popped four aspirin and sipped at a cup of coffee that tasted like it had been drained from the Chicago River. I had been up most of the night. First with the feds. Then Rodriguez. Finally, an audience with the judge who had signed the warrants on Lawrence Randolph. Also known as Rachel Swenson.

The FBI and Rodriguez sympathized. Rachel offered various flavors of scorn. Without the information on Randolph’s computer, there was virtually nothing to tie him into Allen Bryant’s murder. Of course, I still had his entire hard drive at my disposal. Unfortunately, it was poached from Randolph’s laptop as he sat inside a Starbucks. Highly effective and just as illegal.

“What about the skinhead Lester?” Jacobs said. The reporter wasn’t concerned so much with the niceties of the legal system. He was thinking about his story, heading south fast.

“Rodriguez pulled him in last night.”

“Let me guess. Lester never heard of Lawrence Randolph.”

“That’s about it.”

“So they kicked him free?”

I shook my head and ran a hand across three days’ worth of stubble. “Feds had a warrant on Lester’s apartment. Scored two thousand hits of crank and a dismantled cooker. Rodriguez says he’s looking at twenty-five to life. You got the exclusive.”

“Not exactly a Pulitzer, Kelly.”

I took a look at my watch. “Let’s see what the Fifth Floor has to say.”

On cue, the green curtain parted and Patrick Wilson walked in. Cook County’s chief prosecutor, Gerald O’Leary, was right behind him. The two men took a quick look around. Probably wondering where we hid the microphones and cameras. Then the mayor’s cousin spoke.

“Fred, nice to see you again. Mr. Kelly. You both know Gerald O’Leary.”

The man who ruined my career offered his hand and I took it. Gerald O’Leary held up well on television. News directors looking to cultivate a source knew better. So they shoveled on the makeup and shot him from high angles, making O’Leary’s jowls much less so and taking off ten years in the process. In person, however, the prosecutor didn’t fare so well. His face was flushed, his cheeks scored with tiny blue veins. Too much steak, too much butter, too much booze. I wasn’t rooting for a massive stroke, but I wouldn’t be surprised either.

“How are you, Michael?” O’Leary loved to call me Michael. Like we were old friends. I let him because I didn’t have the energy anymore not to.

“Fine, Gerald. Just fine.”

We all sat down. Patrick Wilson slipped a hand across the table and touched my arm. “Mr. Kelly, I realize we have some history here.”

I looked over at O’Leary. A picture of Mike Royko glared at him from the wall. “I have no problem with Gerald,” I said. “Glad to see he’s here.”

O’Leary swung his large made-for-TV head my way and grinned. “I told you, Patrick. Water under the bridge. Let’s move on.”

A Billy Goat bartender stuck his nose through the curtain.

“Pepsi?” Wilson said.

The nose wrinkled, then spoke. “No Pepsi. Coke.”

Patrick Wilson nodded. “Coke it is, then.”

The nose disappeared. A minute later, a hand poked through the curtain. At the end of it was a plastic bottle of Coke. Wilson took it and the hand disappeared.

“Okay.” The mayor’s cousin spoke as he poured his drink into a glass. “Fred has given me some of the details behind your request to meet.”

“And the rest you picked up from the Chicago police this morning,” I said.