Burners (5 page)

My gaze drifted back to Jack often. It was odd to see her in this sort of situation, glued to a chair, anxious to do something, but unable to move or take charge of her surroundings. Like a caged bird of prey.

Several of my colleagues were seated in the gallery, there to cover the case for their papers. Right then I would’ve swapped places with any of them.

The kid seated at the defense table could not have been more than twenty, if that. At times, for a moment here and there, I sensed that he grasped the severity of his circumstances. But that clarity would slip away an instant later, and he’d look like a boy who’d been summoned to the principal’s office on a charge of truancy.

He sure as hell didn’t look capable of intentionally setting the fire that killed one Dennis Braun, who was trapped inside his print shop, Laserquick, when it went up. In my work I’d crossed paths with murderers, thieves, rapists, and blackmailers. Interviewed more than a few of each. But I’d never met a burner, and would not have imagined they looked anything like Tony Beniquez.

The man I assumed to be his father sat directly behind Tony in the first row of the gallery, wearing his Sunday best. As though he, rather than his son, was the one heading for Judgment Day. He was a small man with a large mustache and neatly cropped dark hair streaked with silver along the sides. Studying his face, and the look of concern he was doing nothing to hide, I was sure the man would trade places with his son if he could.

Sitting in the front row along the other side of the courtroom was what I assumed to be the family of the deceased, including a woman I pegged to be his mother, and next to her an elderly man who I guessed had suffered the horror of burying his son. There were no children that I could identify, young or grown, but the widow wasn’t hard to spot. She wore a navy blue business suit, a simple silver necklace, and a face as impenetrable as hardened plaster.

When I wasn’t watching the accused, scanning the courtroom, or trying to get a fix on my fellow jurors from my seat in the front row at the far end, the furthest away from the witness stand, I listened to the attorneys present overviews of their cases.

Five minutes into the prosecution’s opening statement I learned the wife’s name was Alice Braun. She and the deceased had been married for five years, no children yet, but they’d hope to change that as soon as the economy picked up.

I stared at a diagram of the Laserquick floor plan while the prosecution laid out its scenario. The shop wasn’t very large. Just big enough to house a couples’ dreams of a future that was now lost, along with Dennis Braun’s life.

Led by Lipscomb, the prosecution was going to rely on eyewitness accounts from a fellow business owner whose store was located across the street from the print shop, and from a second witness, referred to as “a well-respected police officer from Chicago.”

So that’s why Jack Daniels was here. This was going to be good.

I imagined the headline for the story I’d write once all of this was over,
Chicago Police Lieutenant Daniels’ Testimony Convicts Killer
.

Judging from her body language, which involved a lot of fidgeting and smoothing out various parts of her designer wardrobe, Jack wasn’t planning to hang around for long. But any hope she had of making it to the stand on this day began to fade as what passed for a defense rambled through its opening statement.

The older of the two court-appointed attorneys representing Beniquez, a man who introduced himself as Scott Milledge, shook the discomfort out of his undersized sport coat just before he began his remarks. He touted the young man’s good character, despite a few “youthful indiscretions,” and emphasized his strong ties to his family and the community. His father Carlos had worked as a carpenter and handyman for more than twenty years, during which he’d done work for the city, and also the county.

“Much of the new woodwork in this courtroom was built by Carlos Beniquez,” Milledge said, pointing to the witness stand, jury box, and the railings that separated the business half of the courtroom from the gallery.

Tony’s mother had passed away several years earlier, but a couple of aunts and older cousins had stepped in to try and fill that void as best they could. According to Milledge, the Beniquez family went to church every Sunday, belonged to charitable organizations, and had done their best to assimilate into the community—no easy task in a town as white, protestant, and conservative as Birch Grove. And now Carlos’ only son was on trial for murder.

But Milledge did little to address the motive the prosecutor had pinned on Beniquez, that of a troubled juvenile whose shady past inevitably gravitated toward arson and murder. Instead, the defense attorney promised to prove that his client did not do what he was accused of, and suggested he would challenge the prosecution’s theory about the cause of death. That part I found interesting, but I didn’t have much faith in the defense at the moment.

As soon as Milledge was finished, Judge Malvo, who had spent the past few minutes squirming like someone had slipped a randy weasel under his robe, summoned the attorneys to the bench. After a brief and mostly one-sided conversation, he adjourned until the following morning.

When Malvo was done telling the jurors what we could and could not do, I turned my attention to where Jack had been sitting, but she was already gone. Twenty minutes later I was in my car, driving home to Oakton, and calling Zack, my assistant at the
Chicago Record
, on my cell.

In his instructions to the jury, which the judge had delivered as though he was reading a script, he warned us against discussing the trial, told us to avoid any news coverage, and to resist doing any research on our own. I, of course, understood why this was part of the process, and that jurors were expected to render a verdict based solely on what was presented to them during the trial.

Despite the judge’s orders, I had no desire to serve as little more than a referee in a contest between two teams of lawyers. Especially when one of those teams appeared to be so ill-equipped to meet the challenge.

No, if I was going to be part of the jury judging Tony Beniquez I was going to get it right. Whichever decision I made regarding the young man’s guilt or innocence would be something I’d carry around with me long after the lawyers had moved on to other defendants.

I wanted to learn all that I could about Tony Beniquez and the crime he was supposed to have committed, and I needed to get started right away.

  

W
hen it became apparent they weren’t going to be calling me that day, I got out of there. I’d had my curiosity piqued and I wanted to see if I could find some answers.

To be a good cop meant possessing various traits that were needed on the job. Being able to command authority was a necessity. I could do that, along with shoot a gun, hold my own in a scuffle, and read people well enough to separate truth from bullshit. But one of the most important characteristics a good cop possessed was a burning need to figure things out.

I was a good cop. And even though this wasn’t my case, I wanted to know more about the string of fires. The prosecutor didn’t bring them up, perhaps in case the murder rap didn’t stick so he could later charge Beniquez with arson. The defense didn’t bring them up, which meant the attorney was either incompetent, or his client didn’t have solid alibis for the earlier fires. If Beniquez could prove that he didn’t commit any of the other arsons, that would introduce a big dose of reasonable doubt. So something was up.

Normally, the way I did research was on the Internet, but I hadn’t brought my laptop with me. So I decided to go old school and visit the local library, which I located, ironically, using the Internet on my cell phone.

True to the original intent of having a Main Street, the library was situated on the east end of it, bookending the half mile stretch like the courthouse did on the west. My Nova was parked in the lot, and I opted to leave it there and make the journey on foot. I passed all the usual small town businesses: three antique shops, an ice cream parlor, a bookstore, three bars, two cafes, various restaurants, a music store, a shoe store, a locksmith, several clothing stores, a five and dime, a newsstand. Of those, one of the cafes, and the music store, had the same plywood windows and scorch marks as the print shop. That got me thinking, and I retraced my steps a block back and popped into Jay’s Locksmithe Shoppe.

Jay’s had seen better days. The tile floor was in bad need of a wax, the front counter had an ugly, dirty split in the Formica, and the glass showcase had a crack in it and only showcased a few dusty boxes of burglar alarm systems. There were three key trees boasting hundreds of metal blanks, and stacked along the wall were half a dozen large pieces of plywood.

There was a grinding sound coming from the rear of the shop, and I stood near the register and waited until the guy cutting keys noticed me. He was Caucasian, bearded, and even from the distance of five meters I could see the ink on his arms, dark blue against a deep tan.

When he noticed me, he put on a friendly smile and strolled over, letting his safety goggles fall across his chest on their elastic band.

“Can I help you, ma’am?”

I’d been meaning to get an extra front door key made, so I fished it out and pried it off the key ring as I spoke.

“I need two more copies of this. Can you do it while I wait?”

“There’s an extra charge for rush service. Twenty-five percent.”

“No problem.”

He smiled again, then took my key and walked over to the racks of blanks. It took a few seconds of searching and jingling before he found the appropriate match. When he passed me up I pointed and said, “Those boards. Are they used to board up broken windows?”

“Yup. I’m the guy in town to call if a window gets broke. Come out anytime, even the middle of the night, but there’s an extra charge for that.”

“You the one who boarded up all the shops that were set on fire?”

The smile left his face and I got the look. The thousand-yard-stare, perfected by anyone who did time.

“What about those fires?” he asked.

“How many have there been?”

“You’re not from around here. Haven’t seen you before. You a cop?”

“Maybe I’m just curious. Or maybe I’m a reporter,” I said, thinking of Chapa.

“I ain’t done nothing wrong, and I don’t got to talk to you.”

“Are you Jay?”

“Ain’t no Jay. Got the sign cheap from some store went out of business in Wisconsin.”

“So who are you?”

“Who’s asking?”

I thought about pulling out my badge, but I had no jurisdiction here. Besides, this man wouldn’t talk to cops, just based on principal. The designs on his arms were obvious jailhouse tattoos, and we were the enemy. On one hand, it seemed odd that an ex-con got work in this quaint little town as a locksmith. But on the other hand, who is better suited to working with locks than someone who knows how to pick them?

 ”What are you being paranoid about?” I asked, trying to make my tone non-confrontational. “They caught the guy. There won’t be any more fires.”

“I do what I’m supposed to, and don’t bother nobody. I ain’t doin’ nothing wrong.”