The Shoulders of Giants (8 page)

I drew a circle around the group, and sent the target back down the range. I fired the remaining seven rounds in the Glock at the target’s head, and then took out my Sundance A25. It felt small in my hand, compared to the Glock, and again I wondered if a small revolver would have been a better choice for a back-up gun. I switched targets one more time, and went for the bullseye with all seven shots, waiting to breathe until after the gun was empty. I knew my groupings with the Sundance would be nothing compared to the Glock. The gun wasn’t made for distance work. If you expect to stop anyone with a .25 caliber pistol, you’ll have to be close to them, or extremely accurate.

Finally, I took out my Smith and Wesson Model 500. It weighed more than four times as much as the Sundance and it only carried five rounds, but it was big. Big enough that the first thing anyone said when they saw it was ‘Wow. That’s a big gun’. I figured if there was ever a situation where I was in my office, in trouble, and didn’t have access to my usual two guns, I might as well have something impressive to threaten someone with. If I could lift it. Although it lacks the theatricality of jacking the slide back on an auto, there is something altogether imposing about a large caliber revolver.

No matter how many times I fired the 500, it still surprised me on the first shot. Smith and Wesson went to a great deal of trouble to reduce the recoil. It’s got rubber grips and a ported compensator on the muzzle and it’s balanced slightly forward of center. Even with all these measures, the recoil shook through my arm and rocked me back on my feet. And the noise. Even through ear defenders, it was quite amazing. I prepared myself for the second shot, and managed to keep it under a bit more control. I thumbed the hammer back and fired one last shot, inspected my wrists to make sure they still worked, and retrieved the target from the end of the range. The thing I noticed first was the difference in the sizes of the holes made by the different weapons. The .25 caliber holes, in a grouping of about three inches on the chest, looked tiny in comparison to the three holes made by the .50 caliber S&W, which were just about confined to the head of the silhouette.

I dropped the 500 back at the office and, promising myself I would clean my guns later, I walked a couple of blocks to Jackson Boulevard, and had a turkey sandwich and a Coke at Caffè Baci. I’d arranged the major players in my head now. The guys who attacked me worked for Michael Coughlin, Irish Mob boss, who fed information to Deputy Chief Hennessy, who maybe should have been the one on trial for racketeering and conspiracy instead of Gregory Patterson. With Hennessy dead, and therefore considerably less intimidating, maybe Patterson would start looking into the case again. Maybe the link between Hennessy and Coughlin would come out. And maybe Coughlin’s mobster colleagues would be disappointed to find out he was a rat. I guess Mob guys don’t take disappointment well. It all kind of fit, but there was plenty that didn’t quite make sense. First, how did they know I’d been hired? Did they know it was to find Susan, or did they think it was to clear Patterson? Did Susan’s death have anything to do with it? If it did, why hide her body in the trunk of a car - if you’re going to send a message, you want to make it loud and clear. Well, at least I had no shortage of questions.

Back at the office after lunch, I looked at my ad in the Yellow Pages once again. There, a couple of inches below it, was
Joey Cicero, P.I.
, a number and an address in Riverdale. I dialed the number and he picked up straight away.

“Joey Cicero.”

“Mr Cicero? My name’s Jake Abraham, I’m a P.I. in the city. I wonder if I could come see you and pick your brains about a case I’m working?”

“You want advice? I’m flattered Mr Abraham, but I’m a busy man.”

“I’ll pay you for your time,” I said.

“Well why didn’t you say so? How soon can you be here?”

Cicero’s office was on the fourth floor of a building that looked condemned. There was a tattoo parlor on the first floor, and most of the other units seemed abandoned. One had yellow crime scene tape across the door. The man himself looked only slightly out of place, largely because he was wearing what could only just be called a suit. His office was small and it didn’t look like he’d cleaned up for me. He pointed to his sole client chair and I moved a pile of papers so I could sit down.

“Just to get it out of the way, I get uh… $100 for a half hour consultation.”

“No problem,” I said. I’d brought $200, but I tried not to let the rest show as I got out his hundred and placed it in his sweaty hand. He grabbed it like it was the only money he’d seen in weeks.

“So, what happened to your face?” he asked.

“Funny story…” I said, and I took out the composites of Tommy Byrne and his friend and put them on the desk, side by side.

Cicero went white and his obnoxious smile disappeared. “What is this?” he asked.

“You know these two?” I said.

“Never seen them before.”

“You’re a terrible liar, Joey. Can I call you Joey?”

“I think you’d better leave,” he said

“I paid for a half hour. I’d like you to answer my questions.”

“I can’t help you.” He said. Emphatic this time.

“Look, Joey, I’m not trying to get you into trouble. I know Gregory Patterson hired you last year to look into his innocence. I know you took the case and then disappeared. Now I know why. These guys paid you a visit. Did they hurt you?”

“I ain’t saying nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You got the wrong guy.”

“Come on, Joey. How about a little professional courtesy? All I need to know is what you were looking into that might have got their attention. I swear, if you tell me, it’ll go no further than these four walls. If you don’t, well, I might have to start telling people that you’re helping me clear Patterson’s name. I know a guy at the
Tribune
…”

“You call that professional fucking courtesy? You could get me killed!” He was scared. I had him.

“So tell me what I want to know. Then I’m gone. Who did you talk to first?”

“There’s nothing to tell. I swear. I took Patterson’s check and cashed it, but I didn’t do anything. Within twenty four hours they… somebody jumped me coming out of my apartment. I ain’t saying it was them,” he said quickly, motioning to the composites on his desk. “All I know is, if they thought I was onto a lead they were way off. The only thing I could figure is they must have been following Patterson and they saw him hire me.”

“Did he come here?”

“No, he had me meet him in a bar out by Oz Park.”

“Place called Flanagan’s?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“Okay, Joey. That wasn’t too painful, was it?”

“Fuck you,” he said. Nice guy.

Assuming Patterson wasn’t in the business of setting up multiple private investigators for a beating, it had to be someone at the bar feeding back information to the Mob. I briefly considered interrogating the bartender, but I decided there were easier ways to get myself killed and chose instead to head back to the office. I hadn’t even reached the car when my cell phone rang. It was Scott. He sounded cheerful.

“Call off the dogs,” he said.

“What?”

“We’ve got him.”

Chapter 12

For a moment, I couldn’t take in the enormity of what Scott was trying to tell me.

“Got who?” I asked, and by the time the words were out, my brain had caught up and I knew the answer.

“The killer. You remember, the bad guy.”

“Is he a Mob hitman?”

“No, he works in a zipper factory – Milton Zippers. Guy’s name is Calvin Walsh. Ballistics matched the Smith & Wesson .38 special we found at the last crime scene with the bullet from Melissa Adams, and the piece was registered to this Walsh guy, so we did a bit of checking. Turns out he owns a blue VW, just like the one Susan Patterson was found in.”

“So what, he’s just a psycho? Does he fit the profile?” I asked.

“Don’t have it yet,” snapped Scott. He had a story he wanted to tell, so I let him continue. “The Feds get hundreds of requests a month from all over the world. They’ve got a bit of a backlog. If you must know, he’s white, single, mid 30s. Anyway, I haven’t finished. We went to the guy’s apartment, all jacketed up, just in case, but he wasn’t in. When we did the search, we found a few more interesting items. Looks like our Mr Walsh is a diabetic. And there are prints everywhere that match the ones on the Ray-Bans we found in West’s car”.

“Wow,” I said, when Scott paused for me to praise his investigative powers. “Did you find any cyanide?”

“Nah. But that doesn’t mean nothing. His shotgun’s gone too.”

“He has a shotgun?”

“Unless he’s got rid of it. Wherever he is, he’s probably got it with him now.”

I took a moment to let Scott’s last sentence sink in.

“What do you mean ‘wherever he is’?” I asked, “I thought you’d got him.”

“Well, when we find him, we’ve got him. What I mean is, we know who he is. We’ve got people staking out his apartment, checking out haunts, talking to people. Everyone’s on it. Just a matter of time now.”

“Meantime, he’s out there with a shotgun. Forgive me for not breaking out the medals just yet.”

“Hey, do you want me to let you know what’s going on or not?” Scott had somehow sensed I was less impressed with his news than he was. I probably should have been more expressive of my admiration, but I had had a long week, and I was being unfair. Perhaps I was also a little jealous that he had solved it before me.

“I’m sorry man, it’s been kind of a weird day and, to be honest, this wasn’t the way I thought it was going. It’s great that you’ve got the guy, and I hope you catch him.”

Back in my office, I decided to start typing up my report and bill, so that I could give it to my client as soon as the word came through that Calvin Walsh had been charged with four counts of homicide. The rough draft of my bill did not make me feel better. With the $1250 retainer I’d got, even after taking away three days’ pay, gas, and the money I’d given to Lucy, Dutch and Cicero for information, I ended up owing Patterson almost $200.

I started work on the case report. It was the first time I had prepared a report for a client, and I wondered how much detail I should put into it. I began by making a list of people I had interviewed, and what I had learned. It occurred to me that I had meant to talk to Susan’s ex-girlfriend, Abby Dexter, her Psych tutor, Dr Aronson, and her friend Anjali Sharma. After I got beat up and then she showed up dead, it had seemed less urgent to speak to the people who knew her, but I still might have learned something useful. I wondered if any of them had heard of Calvin Walsh.

I wasn’t sure how much of the stuff about Deputy Chief Hennessy and the Irish Mob to put in, since most of it had come from Patterson anyway and, after trying several different formulations, I got distracted by an email and went online instead. I decided to learn a bit about the Tylenol murders from 1982. The archives on the
Tribune’s
website didn’t go back that far, so I typed the words ‘Tylenol’ and ‘cyanide’ into Google.

I found a large number of articles, news reports and studies, some of them actually relevant to the subject. One study by a group called the Foundation for American Communications claimed that there have only been a few fatalities due to true product tampering, and all of them involved cyanide. The first was the Tylenol in 1982, then separate cases involving Excedrin, Tylenol, and Lipton Cup-a-soup in ‘86, Sudafed in ‘91, and Goody’s Headache powder in ‘92. The study said that faked or staged tamperings were far more common, where someone contaminates a product to make it look as if they have been a victim of random tampering. That appeared to fit with what happened to Julie Campbell.

Next was an article in the
Augusta Chronicle
from May ’97 about tamper-proof seals, which went into a bit more detail about the crimes which followed the Chicago cases:
‘others tried to use the senselessness of the Tylenol murders to cover up specifically targeted crimes of their own. In one particularly notorious case, a Seattle, Washington insurance salesman put cyanide in Excedrin in an attempt to kill his wife. She survived, but two other people died to make it look like a random act.’

There was a site which laid out most of the details of the original case that Freedman had mentioned, along with information about the victims, the stores where the Tylenol had been placed, and a suggested profile of the killer. This had been put together by an individual who believed the killer could still be caught, and wanted to help out.

Finally, I found some information about cyanide, what it does and where you get it. I read the clinical words on the screen with a morbid sense of fascination, and the image of Julie Campbell lying by the side of the road came back to me. Apparently, cyanide stops red blood cells from absorbing oxygen, so major organs like the heart and the brain don’t get any, and stop working. It’s like being suffocated from the inside. Then there was a list of industries that use it: chemical processing, gold mining, electroplating, film processing, refineries, steel and iron industries, pesticides, and more. It’s even found in apricot kernels. I wondered where Calvin Walsh had got his. It was still weird to me that the Mob angle, which had seemed so plausible earlier that day, now looked like a total bust. I mean, it looked like there was something to Patterson’s claims of innocence, but, as he said, I wasn’t getting paid to look into that, and doing so would likely put me in danger. But it looked like Susan’s death was nothing to do with it. Now I thought about it, I’d never heard of a Mob hitman using such odd ways of killing people, but then I guess I’d never heard that much about Mob hitmen.

If Walsh was just some psycho then the link with the Tylenol murders made my bathtub theory make some warped kind of sense. If he emulated one famous historical killer, why not another? I found all I needed to know about the ‘brides in the bath’ murders on Wikipedia. George Joseph Smith, a serial bigamist, murdered three of his wives in London in the second decade of the last century, mostly so he could collect on life insurance policies they’d just taken out. He grabbed his brides by the ankles and pulled sharply upwards. The coroner figured out later that the water rushed up their nose and into their throats, causing shock and unconsciousness, and then they drowned.