The Talk Show Murders (33 page)

During our final week in Chicago, we both needed security guards to get us through the media throngs at the hotel, our temporary site in Millennium Park, police headquarters, and—long story short—any place we tried to show our faces in the city. This made it difficult for me to run a couple of crucial errands. Difficult but not impossible.

On the last Tuesday, just after noon, the first time since the Winnetka Wipeout when I’d had more than a moment to myself, I donned a Cubbies cap, a chambray work shirt, rumpled khaki pants, and, the
perfect touch, a battered backpack, and made an incognito escape from my hotel room, down the elevator, to a basic gray two-door Ford Fiesta in the hotel’s subbasement.

From there I had no problem driving to North Sedgwick Street in Old Town, parking only a few feet away from the alley leading to the house that had been shared by the late Larry Kelsto and Nat Parkins. I entered the yard through the rear fence gate.

The house was still wrapped in yellow CPD tape. That was fine with me. What I wanted wasn’t in the house.

I approached the chrome naked man and chair. As I’d realized, the man was seated in pretty much the same position as the Shakespeare park statue that Nat had sketched in such detail.

When I’d first seen the chrome man, I’d been a bit distracted by its protruding penis. Now I ignored that in favor of the gap in the chrome where Nat had been planning on placing the missing right leg. It was an ostrich egg–shaped cavity, approximately seven inches across. Its edges should have been jagged, but they weren’t. I hoped they’d been purposely smoothed by one of the tools Nat had been in too much of a hurry to put away.

Gingerly, I poked my hand into the gap. Nothing. I moved it higher. I was into the sculpture up to my shoulder when my fingers touched something that felt like a rolled magazine. Eager now, I pushed one more inch of my shoulder into the gap, got the edge of the object between fingers and thumb, and yanked.

It was the first red file, folded in two. Three others, dislodged, came tumbling after.

Like a miser—hell, like Scrooge McDuck finding a pot of leprechaun gold—I carried my treasure back to the car. There I immediately examined my find. The folders’ tags carried three-digit numbers, their significance lost on me. Two-eighty-four contained a DVD disk and xeroxed pictures of a naked Carrie Sands. In some, she energetically worked the pole in a strip club. Others were considerably less wholesome.

File 137 featured pages from an accountant’s ledger and copies of two sets of matching fingerprints. Damned if my guess at Baker’s
hadn’t been on the money. One set was marked “Polvere—back cover financial records, Windy City Industrials, September 3, 1987.” The other: “Baker—pencil from office, construction site North Franklin and West Monroe, May 4, 2011.”

So he had tied Baker to Polvere over a year ago. Why did he wait to confront him? Had it been something I said, as he told Baker? I doubted I’d ever know. Not that it mattered anymore.

My file was numbered 112. Its contents were the original pages and the Xeroxed copies that Patton had shown me that morning at the hotel.

The final red file, 283, was devoted to Derek Webber. There was another Xerox, this one of a check made out to Onion City for one hundred fifty thousand dollars and no cents. It was signed by Jonathan Baker. A notation on the page said that it was for two points in the feature film
The Thief Who Stole Trump Tower
. “Onion City’s connection to Outfit,” Patton had written. This was something Webber should see, I thought. Considering the number of people in the city who did business with Baker, Patton’s smoking gun wasn’t even a cap pistol.

But then I noticed another of Patton’s notes in the folder. There was a paper-clip indentation at the top. My guess was that at one time, it had been attached to the film script Nat shoved under my door.

“Yo, Billy,” Derek Webber called out. “You’re looking pretty good for a survivor of the Winnetka Wipeout.” Walking to meet me, he gestured toward the briefcase in my hand. “Homework?”

“You could call it that.”

We were on Navy Pier. During its normal hours of operation it served as a “family-friendly” collection of restaurants, a children’s museum, an IMAX theater, and, near where we were standing, a giant Ferris wheel. The wheel, like the pier, had closed for the night a while ago but was quite active all the same, with the movie crew getting it ready for a golden time, all-night shoot.

I’d called Derek around noon, asking if we could get together. He’d suggested ten that night, but I’d had a
Hotline
spot at ten-forty-five, so we’d settled on eleven-thirty.

“It looks pretty busy around here,” I said. “I hope I’m not keeping you from anything important.”

“Me? There’s nothing for me to do here. I’m just one of the guys who own the studio. But I love watching them make movies. Austin—you’ve
met our director, Austin Deware, of course you have—he’s filming a key sequence where our beautiful thief meets our beautiful but sinister villainess on the wheel. Austin says it’s his homage to Carol Reed’s scene in
The Third Man
, where Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten have a chat on the Great Wheel in Vienna.”

“Is there someplace we can talk?”

“What about on the wheel? It’s just sitting there. Lars is playing with his crane. The sound guy’s not ready. Let’s take a ride.”

“I’d rather not. There’s something I want to show you.”

“Okay.” Webber seemed surprised but agreeable. “There’s a Winnebago we’re using for an office.”

We walked to where several motor homes were parked near the pier entrance. The one we entered was occupied by Derek’s partner, Alan, and Madeleine Parnelle. They were sitting before a computer monitor, going through a file with lots of numbers.

“B-B-Billy,” Alan said. “B-b-been reading about you. Glad to see you in one … piece.”

Madeleine merely granted me a quick artificial smile.

“C’mon in the back, Billy,” Derek suggested.

“Actually, as long as Alan and Madeleine are here, this is something they should know about.”

Alan cocked his head and looked bemused. Madeleine seemed annoyed but attentive.

I opened the briefcase and withdrew the number 283 red file.

“Seen this before, Derek?” I asked.

The puzzled look on his face told me that he hadn’t. Alan, on the other hand, was frowning. I began to wonder if I’d missed a beat somewhere.

“This belonged to the late Pat Patton,” I said to Derek. “Here’s an item you and Alan should find interesting.”

I presented him with the Xerox of Jon Baker’s check with Patton’s comments. He gave it more than a glance and handed it to his partner.

He watched as Alan read it carefully, passing it to Madeleine. “This is bullshit,” Derek said. “Nearly everybody in Chicago has done business with Baker.”

“That’s B-B-Billy’s point,” Alan said. “Right?”

“Right,” I agreed. “This should clear up any doubt anyone may have about your company due to Patton’s claim.”

“Patton,” Derek said, as if the word left a bitter taste in his mouth. “What a son of a bitch.”

“But he did have that gift some cops and reporters seem to be born with,” I said. “He could look at a bunch of seemingly unrelated things and find a pattern. It’s how he found out about Baker’s past.”

I removed the other page of the old detective’s notes from the folder. “And this is something else he was working on when he was killed.”

I handed it to Derek.

He read through Patton’s neat penmanship and looked up at me. “Does this mean what I think it does?” he asked.

“You tell me,” I said.

“This is nuts.” He turned to Madeleine. “How tall is Gerard?” he asked.

“How tall? I’m not sure, exactly. Taller than I, I am confident.”

“Take a guess,” Derek said.

Madeleine and Alan exchanged glances.

“W-W-What’s this all about? Let’s see that p-p-paper.”

“I’d say a little under six feet, right?” Derek said, keeping the paper. “How about moles? Did he have a little one just under his right nipple?”

“No,” Madeleine said.

“If I ask Carrie, she’ll agree?”

“
Qu’est-ce que tu fais
?” Madeleine said. She looked flushed, splotches of red on her cheeks.

“When exactly did your husband fly home to Paris?” I asked.

She blinked her eyes. “I am not sure of the exact date. But it was several weeks ago. I can look it up.”

“I remember exactly,” Derek said. “He was supposed to have flown out on a Wednesday, four weeks ago tomorrow.”

“I am sure you are right,” she said. “So?”

“Stop b-b-beating around the b-b-bush, Rek. What’s this all about?”

Derek looked at me.

I said, “The day Patton, Carrie, and I were on the talk show, the main topic of conversation was the truncated body that washed up on Oak Street Beach. That’s why Patton was booked on the show. He claimed to have some secret knowledge about the corpse’s identity that he wasn’t quite ready to share. I think that was a bluff. But by the end of the show, he did have the glimmer of an idea worth pursuing. That’s because Carrie surprised our hostess with the news that Gerard Parnelle had flown back to Paris several weeks before.”

“I repeat, ‘So?’ ” Madeleine said.

“Your husband’s success made him a celebrity,” I said. “And the fact that Gemma Bright didn’t know he’d flown home struck Patton as significant. It meant he’d done it under the media radar. No shaky TMZ shots at the airport. No comings and goings in showbiz journals. No photos in the tabloids.

“And there was the timing. One of the things Patton did know about the dead man was the approximate time he was dumped in the lake. It’s all in his notes.”

Derek handed her the page. I watched her eyes jump jerkily from sentence to sentence. Alan moved closer to her to read over her shoulder. I wondered if Derek was sharing my thought, that they looked like a couple. In this case, brought together by desperation rather than love or sex.

They were looking at the plans Patton had for an investigation he’d been unable to pursue. He had found a
Chicago Tribune
photo of Parnelle on the movie set earlier in the month. He’d written: “Get NV”—possibly a CPD friend, I thought—“to check airline passenger lists for a three-week period following date of photograph. Have MC make soft inquiry into the whereabouts of Parnelle in Paris. Check with doctor.”

He’d included notations, apparently from the postmortem examination of the truncated corpse. The approximate height was sixty-eight to seventy-one inches. Weight, 165 to 174 lbs. Age, thirty-seven to
forty-five. Hair, brown. The “mole under right nipple” was noted. As for the occurrence of death, an approximate date was noted. There was not even the speculation of a time of death.

Patton had underlined the cause, “AMI, acute myocardial infarction,” and followed that with: “Check w. P’s medical record, heart?, hypertension?, enlarged?, asthma?, etc.”

Madeleine Parnelle suddenly crumpled the paper in her hand, squeezing it into a ball. “This means nothing.”

“True,” I agreed. “But you and I know Patton’s hunch would have paid off. Your husband died of a heart attack at an inopportune time. There were the movie and future movies, television series, book contracts to fulfill. The temptation to keep everything moving forward must have been overwhelming.”

“Jesus Christ!” Derek exclaimed. “You cut him up? Your husband? The guy you lived with for five years?”

The red spots had left her cheeks, leaving her face pallid, appropriate for the coldness in her voice as she turned to Alan. “
Trop sentimental
.”

He didn’t seem that pleased to be on her team. He took a step away. Looking at Derek, he said, “It’s not like you think. She … we d-d-didn’t d-d-do that to him. The whole thing was B-B-Baker’s idea. His … kid did the c-c-cutting.”

“You owe Derek no apology,” she said.

“The hell he doesn’t. You both do.”

Alan sighed and started to say something, but Madeleine interrupted him. She apparently was in no mood to hear him struggle through an explanation. “It was the night you attended the filming at Soldier Field,” she said to Derek. “Jon invited us for dinner on his yacht. Alan, Gerard, and myself. Jon and his son, the handsome one, not the
parfait imbécile
. We were in the midst of dining, and it happened like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Gerard stopped eating. He complained of pain in his chest. And he fell forward.
Mort
.”

“We were shocked. B-B-But Jon was incredibly c-c … cool.”

“He arose, approached Gerard, touched him here”—she pointed to a spot on her throat—“and shook his head.”

“I g-g-got out my phone to c-c-call nine-one-one.…”

“But Jon stopped him, suggested that we consider the—how do you?—the implication of Gerard’s death.”

“We all had a g-g-great deal riding on Gerard.”

“What are you talking about?” Derek asked. “You two maybe, but Jon only had two points in the movie. That was chump change to him.”

Alan looked even more uncomfortable. “I g-g-guess it’s g-g-gonna … come out now, anyway. He was t-t-taking over the … company. With my help.”

“Christ, Alan,” Derek said. “You know what Onion City means to me.”

His partner couldn’t look him in the eye.

“It wasn’t just Onion City,” he said. “I agreed to sell him my shares in Instap-p-picks.”

Derek looked as if a magic finger had poked a hole in him, allowing all the air to escape. He backed to a chair and sat down. “We grew up together,” he said, in a whisper.

“So much money,” Alan said. “For you, t-t-too.”

This was all interesting, in a big-business soap-opera way. But we’d wandered afield from the reason I was there. I was about to attempt to get back on track when Madeleine, brutally pragmatic Madeleine, did it for me.

“In any case, Derek, Gerard’s death would have ruined everything.”

“Just out of curiosity,” I said, “what was the ultimate plan? You couldn’t keep the man’s death a secret forever.”

“Not forever,” she said. “There would be a prolonged illness, during which Gerard would undergo treatment in seclusion. I would assist him on his writing for perhaps two years. At which time he would, alas, succumb, leaving behind several completed works and many others in various stages that I, being his collaborator, would complete.”