Authors: marshall thornton
There were a couple things about the case that could be getting to me. One was the money I found in Lenny’s bank account. The required an explanation. I know rich people kill themselves all the time, but a kid who’s normally broke and then comes into some money... well, it seemed like he’d at least spend the money first.
The other thing was that there was something wrong about Wayne saying Lenny was depressed and Freddie saying he was happy. One of them was lying. My gut, and the fact that he hadn’t called back, was telling me the liar was Campbell Wayne. Of course, I had to be careful not to discount the possibility that Freddie was lying his head off. I couldn’t let the fact that I’d recently fucked him cloud my vision.
Before I zeroed in on this Wayne guy, I’d need to do more checking. Or at least talk to him.
Unfortunately, the Borlock case wasn’t what was bugging me, and I knew it. I was bugged about my ex, Daniel. Whenever someone brought him up, the way Harker did, the idea of him floated around me like a dark cloud for a day or two. Harker had asked me how Daniel was. I had no idea, and, to be honest, I’d like to know. We’d ended abruptly and hadn’t talked since. He even
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moved his stuff out of our apartment while I was at work. After nearly two years, I still hadn’t filled in the empty spots he left in my living room.
When I met Daniel, I’d been with the Chicago Police Department about three years. After high school, I floated around doing odd jobs. I pulled high numbers in the draft lottery three years in a row, so that wasn’t a problem. Yes, there was flak about this in my family. They’re a pretty anti-commie bunch, but they calmed down when I signed up for the Training Academy.
I’d been dating women on and off, hoping that if I just got close enough something would click.
It didn’t. I met Daniel’s sister, Donna, at a bar on Rush and dated her half a dozen times over the course of two months. She probably thought I was an alcoholic, since I claimed to be too drunk twice to avoid sex. Even though it wasn’t going so well, at least in the sex department, she invited me to a family outing.
It was summer, and Donna’s family had turned out in force at some park up near Evanston. Her grandmother was turning eighty, and to most of their family that seemed a good reason to stand in the sun and drink beer while the kids ate too much cake and screamed their heads off.
Daniel showed up in a pair of roller skates, tube socks with bright blue stripes, a pair of frayed cut-offs, and a tank top that had an angel printed on it. He was small, tightly muscled, naturally blond, and had eyes that were sometimes gray and sometimes blue. That day I had to be careful not to spend too much time looking at him.
At twenty-four, Daniel was finishing up a graduate degree in library sciences. Out of the blue, he called me and said he needed to talk to me. I invited him to the studio apartment I had near Lincoln Park. When he showed up, he told me that Donna had begun to date someone else. And when I didn’t get too upset, he made a pass at me. With Daniel I didn’t have to make any excuses, and we moved into our apartment on Roscoe six weeks later.
I still live in the Roscoe apartment. The building is three stories, brick, and shaped like a sort of W, with two wings that come out to meet the street and a stunted wing that juts out from the center partway into the courtyard. I live in the garden apartment at the front of the eastern wing.
When I got home that night, I was soaked from taking a bus in the rain. I would have cabbed it, but the expense was getting to me. I stripped off my clothes and took a hot shower. I tried to jack off while I was in there, figuring that might be the itch that needed scratching, but it just wasn’t happening.
I put on a pair of sweats and an old rugby shirt. The phone was in the living room, so I went out there and sat in one of my director’s chairs that faced the spot where a sofa had once been. I’d had his phone number for more than a year. He was listed, so getting it wasn’t exactly detective work. Every once in a while I dialed six of the seven numbers, then hung up. For some reason, that night I dialed the seventh number.
I nearly hung up while it rang, but then he picked up. “Hello?” His voice seemed small and very far away.
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“It’s me.”
Static, then he said, “I thought you’d call. Eventually.”
“Yeah, well... how are you?”
“Groggy. I got out of the hospital a couple days ago. I’m still on pain medication.”
“Your eye?”
“Cheekbone reconstruction. It’s the last one. I don’t really want to talk about it.” I didn’t want to talk about it, either, to be truthful. My boyfriend getting hit in the face with a baseball bat while I stood around watching wasn’t the kind of thing that made me chatty.
“I’m not a cop anymore.”
“I know. I heard. You’re like a private eye?”
It bothered me that he knew more about me than I knew about him. “Yeah, I’m a private investigator.”
We were silent long enough for it to become uncomfortable.
“Well...” he said.
“Are you seeing anyone?” I asked.
“I was. Didn’t work out. You?”
“No one that matters.” I replied. Rashly, I told him, “I miss you.”
“That isn’t what I want to hear.”
“What do you want to hear?”
“If I tell you, it won’t mean anything.”
* * *
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The mall was actually eight levels: a ground level, a mezzanine level, and then floors two through seven. As I rose in the elevator, I watched the stores go by. Lord & Taylor, Marshall Field, Florsheim, Waldenbooks, Chess King, some boutiques trying to get started, a Musicland.
At the seventh floor, I got out and looked around. It was quiet. There weren’t any other customers milling about yet. The elevator was on the south side of the octagon. I walked north until I got to the spot where Lenny had jumped.
The reason to pick the seventh floor over, say, the fifth or the fourth, is that while the octagonal openings get bigger and bigger for the other floors, the top two floors actually get smaller. If you tried jumping off the fifth floor, you’d end up on the fourth, and while you might have hurt yourself pretty bad, you probably wouldn’t be very dead. Jumping from the seventh was pretty much a guarantee.
Regardless of whether it was suicide or murder, some thought had been given to Lenny’s death ahead of time. Standing in the spot where Lenny jumped, I looked around. What was he thinking about? Did he think, “Wow, the last thing I’m going to see in my life is a Kroch's & Brentano's?”
Or was he in so much emotional pain he couldn’t think, could only focus on forcing himself to jump?
Not too long ago, I watched someone commit suicide by jumping. The part that was most disturbing was how prosaic it looked. One minute the guy was standing there, the next he was gone. That’s what it would have looked like with Lenny. He would have been walking around looking down the atrium, just like everyone does. Then he would have climbed over the railing, calmly, like he was climbing over the fence in someone’s backyard.
Even in my darkest moments, after Daniel and I broke up and I left my job with the Chicago Police Department, suicide hadn’t crossed my mind. I was in a lot of pain, and I suppose if the pain had been worse, or if I had a lower threshold for it, I might have considered suicide. Just as a way to make the pain go away, maybe. I wondered if that had happened with Lenny. Was he in that much pain? Had something gone that wrong with his life? If I could find the source of his pain, it would put Mrs. Borlock’s mind at ease. Or at least I hoped it would.
To be thorough, I spent a few minutes considering the possibility that he hadn’t killed himself. If he didn’t jump, then someone had to have pushed him. Except the octagon was circled in thick glass about four and a half feet high, with a large chrome tube running around the edge of the railing. No one could push you over. They’d have to lift you. If someone lifted Lenny and tilted him over the edge, he’d have to be bigger than Lenny. I realized I didn’t know how tall Lenny was. I pulled out my note pad and jotted myself a reminder to find out.
So, to get him over the edge, someone had to lift and push at the same time. Lenny would have been trying to break free, trying to prevent himself from going over, but there wouldn’t have been anything to grab onto to stop his fall. The chrome tube wouldn’t have been any help at all; he wouldn’t have been able to get any purchase. No, the only thing to grab on to was whoever was doing the lifting. I put myself in Lenny’s position and tried to think it through. If I was expecting it, I would have grabbed for the killer. And if I grabbed for the killer, I might have
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scratched him. I made note to ask Detective Harker if he noticed any scratches on anyone he talked to.
I wandered around the seventh floor for a few minutes. There was a high-end women’s boutique, a Rose Records, a shop that sold crystal and leaded glass, and a pair of escalators that took you down to the sixth floor. Tucked in a corner was a men’s room. I popped in.
It was large and empty. Everything was marble like the rest of the mall. There were five stalls. I walked to the farthest one from the door and opened it. I studied the walls. The outer two walls were marble, the inner ones beige-painted metal. It was clean. They really paid attention here.
Graffiti wouldn’t last long.
However, next to the toilet paper dispenser, scratched into the paint, was the quaint little invitation “BJ 3:00 Thurs.” Obviously, Lenny hadn’t responded to that invitation, but I wondered if there might have been another, one written in pen that had later been cleaned off? Or, more likely, did Lenny just think the restroom was cruisy and come over to check it out during his coffee break? Did he make a pass at the wrong guy? The kind of guy who wouldn’t worry too much about tossing a fag off the seventh floor? It was a possibility I couldn’t discount.
I walked out of the men’s room and circled the floor again. It was time to check out the witness, Jeanine Anderson. The Gold Mine was a theme restaurant where they served expensive, half-pound burgers with clever names like The Prospector and The Motherlode. You had to enter the dark restaurant through a long mineshaft. The hostess station was three quarters of the way down the twisting shaft.
As I walked by, I noticed a pretty young woman setting up the station. Figuring it must be Jeanine, I walked over. “Hi, are you Jeanine?” I asked. I didn’t really know what I was going to say next, but it probably wouldn’t be the truth.
“No, Jeanine doesn’t work on Fridays.” She said this as though Jeanine wasn’t quite good enough to work Fridays. She flicked her long hair over her shoulder.
“When is she here?”
“Are you a friend of hers?” She narrowed her eyes at me. This girl was pretty enough to have had trouble with guys; obviously she figured that’s what this was.
“You know what, I’ll just call her at home.” I hoped that this girl would figure I was a good friend and not even bother to mention it to Jeanine.
When I turned around, I knew something was wrong. Looking down the mineshaft, all I could see was the entrance to the glass elevator and part of the crystal store. Jeanine’s statement had to be wrong. She specifically said she’d seen Lenny hanging around the spot where he jumped.
From the hostess station, the only place she could have seen him hanging around was the elevator.
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I turned around and asked today’s hostess one more question. “Is this where the hostess stand always is? Or do you move it further up?”
She gave me a quizzical look. “What kind of question is that? Are you some kind of inspector?
Do I need to get the manager?”
I told her to have a nice day and left.
On the first floor, I found a payphone. I called Campbell Wayne’s office and asked for him. He still couldn’t come to the phone. “Actually, I’d like to make an appointment with him. Can you take care of that?” I asked.
The temp put me back on hold. He was gone a long time. I was beginning to think I should have brought a book when he came back on the line. “Mr. Wayne’s schedule is very full, and he feels that since he’s already spoken to the police there wouldn’t be much point.”
Somehow I wasn’t surprised.
“All right. I’ll give you a call tomorrow and see if his schedule has loosened up,” I said, because I knew he’d repeat it to Mr. Wayne.
After I hung up, I stood there stewing. I could try ambushing the executive, but I figured as soon as I identified myself he’d clam up. I had an idea; it was a little crazy, but it seemed like the only way I’d get to talk to Campbell Wayne. I picked up the payphone again and called Bobby Martin. I told him my idea, and he giggled, but agreed to help. He had a phone call or two to make, but said he’d meet me at the bagel place on Oak Street around lunchtime.
* * *
The rain had probably stopped before he left his apartment, but he was likely too thrilled by the opportunity to wear his raincoat to notice. I took a good look at him as he waited at the counter.
His hair was a sandy color, trimmed in the back and over his ears, but allowed to grow long in the front. You couldn’t tell it, but beneath his raincoat he had a tight little body and a nice fat ass.
After he got coffee and a sesame bagel, he caught me up on all the doings in his life. He told me all about his acting class, several auditions he’d been on for plays he wasn’t cast in, hinted that he’d been having lots of really great sex, and complained about what a little bitch Freddie could be. Then he said, “Well, that’s all that’s new with me. How about you?”