Winter of frozen dreams (10 page)

"Girls come and go. How can I keep track? Besides, what's she done that's attracted your interest?"

"You don't remember Barbara Hoffman? Bullshit!"

"And what do you assholes do for me except bust my rocks at every opportunity?" countered Curtis. "I support a goddamn law firm to stay clean. You guys try to nail me with everything illegal that goes on in this town, from dogfights to drug deals, and it sucks."

"You haven't ever seen a pit bull?" Lulling smiled. "You'd mistake cocaine for powdered sugar?"

"Chuck, if I knew anything about Barbara Hoffman, I'd cut a deal. What's she done that's so hot?"

"You don't know her, so it doesn't matter, does it?" Lulling walked to the door. "If your memory returns, Curtis, call me."

Ken Curtis closed the door. He scrambled back to bed, where he snatched the phone from the nightstand and dialed his lawyer, Charles Geisen.

Curtis recounted Lullings visit. He told the attorney that the detective was desperate for information and, from what Curtis had heard, the cops didn't have enough evidence to move against Hoffman for the Berge killing. He suggested Geisen contact the DA and offer a deal: information connecting Hoffman to the Berge homicide in exchange for a little help for a friend.

23

On the fringe of Madison's south side was a triangular parcel of city consisting of rickety wooden houses and narrow alleys, backyard gardens and chicken coops, cobbler's shops, bakeries, a junkyard. The area was known as Greenbush. Its denizens were working people— Italian mostly, with a smattering of Irish, Polish, Chinese—men who labored in the construction trade or shoveled coal for Castle-Doyle, women who tended goats, hens, children. St. James Roman Catholic Church and Parochial School offered solace to sinners and an education to kids.

After World War II Madison grew and its boundaries pushed farther south. Cornfields were developed into housing tracts and shopping plazas. Some families left Greenbush for plusher, more prestigious quarters, but many families stayed in the cramped confines, for the Bush was home, a community, a soil where people established roots.

In the late fifties and early sixties, when urban renewal captivated the whimsy of city planners, bulldozers and

wrecking balls attacked the Bush under the guise of neighborhood improvement. Tons of concrete were poured. A hospital was constructed. Maple trees and sod were planted in green profusion around boxes of apartment buildings. What emerged was a miniature wasteland, the ghost of a community. Former residents had dispersed throughout the city, embittered that their home turf had been destroyed. Madison's single cluster of ethnicity had been razed.

Ken Curtis and Jim Doyle, Jr., were reared in Green-bush. They were acquaintances as youths, mindful of each other, unaware of present differences that the future would magnify.

Doyle mumbled the Latin as an altar boy. Sports consumed him. He prayed to the apostles for athletic success, and he peeked at the girlie magazines while he sipped a cherry phosphate at Mickey's Dairy Bar.

Curtis squandered nickels on the pinball machines. He stayed away from any activity involving adults. He brawled, drank beer, sloshed in the bogs that bordered Lake Wingra, spearfishing carp for amusement.

At Madison West High School Doyle and Curtis were in the same homeroom but traveled different paths. Doyle concentrated on studies and sports, excelling at both. Curtis drifted. He cut classes and clashed with teachers. Doyle was accepted at Stanford. Curtis faked it as a student, went on to a local technical school, and waited for something to happen. It did. He grew four inches and twenty-eight pounds after graduating from Madison West. Then a buddy introduced him to the inside of a weight room.

While Doyle labored with the books, Curtis cranked iron and packed huge muscle onto his new frame. The bulk added to his belligerence. Curtis went from being obnoxious to being a bully.

Weightlifting and hustling drugs became the twin poles of his life. He entered powerlifting competitions and collected numerous trophies. His ego swelled as large as his pectorals. Occasionally he resorted to thievery, for adventure and profit. Once he hawked hot Sony Trinitrons

from the tailgate of a pickup truck for $100 a pop. His boldness and his nastiness earned him a reputation.

Sam Cerro had also been raised in Greenbush. Cerro was a short man, as plump as a Roma tomato, with gray hair very meticulously combed and with stubby fingers ringed by circles of silver that were studded with gaudy stones. He wore baggy trousers, always wrinkled, and Ban-Ion shirts. Paternalism and conviviality emanated from Cerros soul. In a typical gesture he would thrust an arm around a friends shoulder and whisper a salacious joke or dispense an old Italian adage as if he were sharing a great secret.

Cerro operated a private poker game and a floating craps table. Drugs and stolen merchandise were fields of endeavor. He loaned cash to those people who wished to avoid the traditional banking channels. When sports betting became popular, he ran the local action. Sports gambling developed into Cerros most lucrative trade.

His livelihood associated the bookmaker with every stratum of Madison society and garnered him a modicum of notoriety. He played poker with judges, took lawyers 7 bets on college football, drank his beers at the Italian Workmen's Club. Sam Cerro was friendly like a favorite uncle, but he was not consistently smart. Collisions with law enforcement people were troublesome, and his career had been interrupted with arrests for bookmaking, possession of gambling materials, possession of stolen goods, property, and drugs.

When the first massage parlor opened in Madison, it drew Cerros attention. Though the place eventually folded, he decided the concept was solid if police harassment could be kept at a minimum. What he needed was a competent person to hire the women and kick ass when things got sloppy. He sought someone tough and audacious. Ken Curtis fit the qualifications. Cerro offered the weightlifter a partnership, and Curtis showed no more hesitation than when bench pressing 400 pounds. He gritted his teeth and pushed straight ahead.

Two months later Jans Health Spa premiered in the

basement of a small shopping center on Madison's west side. A few naive citizens dropped in expecting a gym and exited quickly when greeted by a woman in high heels and lace negligee and a promise of pleasure.

Things went better and worse than each partner anticipated. On about the eighth night of business Curtis pummeled a customer who got obstreperous when he wasn't permitted to sodomize the girl of his choice. It took an emergency room intern an hour and a spool of thread to stitch the horny gents face back together. Curtis was detained by police but released when the man refused to press charges. A couple nights later one of the masseuses was arrested by an undercover cop for soliciting prostitution, and the massage parlor was closed by official order. A court restraining order had it opened within a week, minus the naughty vixen. The publicity over the arrest provided front-page advertising. Trade was brisk.

The partnership immediately expanded its enterprise. The Rising Sun massage parlor debuted in the shadow of the state capitol to service the uptown activity. The Geisha House opened for the convenience of the east-side clientele. Business in the downtown area was so good that another parlor, on the opposite side of the capitol from the Rising Sun, was opened.

Curtis stocked the parlors with a variety of women— sultry, sweet, sensual, sassy—and procured them drugs to encourage their enthusiasm. Many of the women were recruited from the university campus, answering ads in the student newspaper. On a Friday night giving hand jobs could bring a coed $100 to $150, and if the woman was apt to give other amenities—such as sucking or fucking— she could double or triple that amount.

Curtis augmented his own income with the dissemination of illegal substances. With cash and the proper recommendation a pharmacy of narcotics was available— speed, grass, Quaaludes, angel dust, hashish, cocaine.

The cocaine commerce flourished in particular. Jan's became a hub of local trade, a swirl of back-room barters, where shipments arrived in the middle of the night from

Louisiana, or were driven into town after being flown into a small country airport in Iowa, to be sampled, weighed, cut, and distributed. Wholesale and retail action was conducted in a cool frenzy by Curtis, the calculating weight-lifter who never used any of the stuff himself.

For Curtis the parlors were a zany circus in which he played multiple parts: ringmaster, lion tamer, strongman. Most often he was the man on the flying trapeze. Every day brought thrills. His interview technique when hiring a new masseuse was to drop his pants and ask the lady to demonstrate her skills.

If you can't blow the boss, he would tell a prospective masseuse, how does the boss know you can jerk off the jerkoffs?

The ladies, the scams, the profits seemed endless.

Success did not spoil him. He stayed temerarious and mean. One night Curtis heaved a surly customer down a flight of stairs, punched him into the street, kicked him as he tried to crawl away, then mashed his face into the grille of an Oldsmobile until the man gurgled blood and bits of busted teeth. Curtis didn't care about the pain, inflicted or incurred. Pain and pleasure were strategies, methods to achieve what was desired.

Curtis's ability to give and take punishment was legendary among his friends. In the late sixties he was drafted for military induction. One of the favorite ploys of Madison's youth was to swallow a tab of LSD on the day of the physical and thus escape military service because of psychological problems and disorientation. Curtis would never tamper with his head so capriciously, but with his body he would take any extreme. He went to the weight room of the Central Y and ordered a friend to climb the squat rack and drop a hundred-pound dumbbell on his right foot, which mashed the bones in his toes and secured him an exemption from military service.

A couple years later, when Curtis discovered a female massage employee was taking her tricks outside the parlor, he had to set an example of what happened when his rules were defied. He didn't quiz the woman on her

scheme. He told her what he had heard, then punched her in the face. Her jaw was broken and had to be wired together.

His volatile temper and bellicose attitude did have consequences: arrests for disorderly conduct, a suspended sentence and probation for battery charges. He packed a pistol under the front seat of his Lincoln, for emergency use only.

By 1976 Curtis was getting fat financially. He was purchasing property and setting up dummy corporations to launder his funds. Where Curtis was careful to distance and protect himself, his partner, Sam Cerro, was reckless. On a muggy August evening in 1976 Cerro tried to purchase $72,000 worth of cocaine from a pair of undercover cops. He was busted. The charges carried a large fine and a maximum twenty years' imprisonment. At age fifty-one jail was a frightening prospect for Cerro, and because of his previous record a conviction might carry the maximum term.

The portly Cerro squirmed. He needed help from wherever he could dig it up.

When Chuck Lulling asked for help on the Hoffman case, Curtis schemed to do his partner a favor.

24

On January 6, 1978, the snow piled next to the green Dumpster behind 638 State Street was rechecked for evidence of blood. A spot on the bedsheet that had blanketed Harry Berge's body indicated that postmortem bleeding had occurred.

Perhaps on Christmas Day it was too cold for the cops to be thorough. Lulling assigned an officer assisting with the investigation to try again, to sift carefully through the snow no matter how high and tight it had been packed.

His instructions were followed. It was cold, eight degrees above zero, with winds that gusted across the

lakes and shivered the city. The snow, which had a couple of additional inches of fresh accumulation, was examined. No blood was found.

25

It was Jerry Davies who solved the Linda Millar riddle.

Standing in a hallway of the courthouse, his back slouched against a wall, Davies waited to see Jim Doyle. The shipping clerk had used sick time and taken the afternoon off. He needed to talk.

The DA was conducting a John Doe hearing, which was a secret proceeding used as an investigative tool to obtain sworn testimony. Doyle employed the John Doe to get evidence on record regarding the Berge homicide.

He spotted Davies as he exited a courtroom, and they rode the elevator to Doyle's office. Davies spewed his worries in jumbled sentences. He knew Barbara was innocent. It seemed the police kept coming back to her, seeking ways to involve her when she could never have participated in such an act. He hadn't lied to them about the body; thus he wasn't lying about Barbaras innocence.

Doyle didn't challenge the curious logic. In order to change the topic Doyle asked if the name Linda Millar meant anything to him. The sad Davies nodded without thinking.

Doyle repeated the question, and Davies elucidated. Linda Millar, he said, was an alias Barbara had chosen after she'd quit working the massage parlors. She wanted to bury those years and start her life anew. Because she was afraid the old and painful associations would haunt her, she decided that a different name would help cut her ties to the old life. To begin the future, she had explained to Davies, she had to rid herself of the past.

Had she ever actually used her alias? asked Doyle.

Occasionally, Davies replied. Once she'd had him send her an envelope with no letter that was addressed to Linda

Millar, at Barbaras State Street residence, to check whether the post office would deliver mail to the bogus name.

As soon as Davies left, Doyle phoned Lulling with what he had learned. Barbara Hoffman was Linda Millar, who had a savings account, a social security number, a post office box. Harry Berge had died with no will or testament. But two months before he had perished, he had made Linda Millar a joint tenant on his home for "one dollar and due considerations/ 7 and he had made her beneficiary of his life insurance policies, which totaled $34,500.

It seemed that Barbara Hoffman had planned Berge's death. Her motive was money.

26

Barbara Hoffman and Harry Berge were introduced on a lazy winter afternoon in 1975. Barbara was snuggled into a chair at Jans Health Spa, reading a paperback novel, when one of the girls bolted out of a session with a customer. She cried for the manager to give the man a refund.

"The guys a fucking weirdo," she said, flustered. "HI do the usual, but I ain't doing freaky things."

Barbara watched the scene unfold. Three weeks and the girl was already burned out. Probably the angel dust she was smoking had been cut with something weird. That was partly why Barbara herself preferred Quaaludes. The pills were obtained with a prescription, from a pharmacist. She knew what she was getting.

Barbara walked over to the girl and said she'd handle the gentleman.

Down the hallway heat ducts crawled the ceiling like huge silver worms. Wire splicings surfaced and disappeared. Hot air gushed from an open vent. Barbara tapped on a door, stepped into a room with black walls. A blue bulb cast a strange, moonish glow.

A naked man sat in a chair in the center of the room. His skin looked as soft as blue cheese, and the pockmarks on his shoulders resembled mold. His hair was short and as bright as aluminum in the blue light. Black hairs dotted his shoulders and back. Thin dime-store handcuffs were at his feet.

When the man saw Barbara, his expression of dejection did not change. A simple favor, he implored. He deserved to be punished. He tossed an electrical cord across the floor.

Barbara picked up the cord. She locked the mans wrists to the slats of the chair with the cheap handcuffs. Barbara hit him once with the cord. Then she hit him harder. The blue light seemed to crackle as the cord cut his skin.

She cracked him across the shoulders, across the meat of his spine. The tip of the cord whipped around and bit his chest, and he yelped like a puppy. His flesh flushed with creases of scarlet.

After a dozen lashes the man begged her to stop. Defiantly she added two extra.

The mans back was ragged with welts. In two or three spots the skin had broken and a rivulet of blood trailed the curve of his spine. Barbara dabbed the wounds with a towel soaked in cold water. A sigh leaped from the man's lips, and though tears dripped down his cheeks he looked neither sad nor hurt. He looked lonely.

He asked if he could request her next time. Barbara looked at his sagging belly and limp penis and nodded. He told her his name was Harry Berge.

He slid a couple of twenties from his wallet and dropped them on the massage table. He rolled up his electrical cord and tucked it into a back pocket. Then he disappeared.

27

January 10, 1978, was another hectic day in a series of hectic days for Jim Doyle. The morning was crammed

with meetings. At 2:00 p.m. he would deliver a guest lecture at a U.W. Law School seminar on legal ethics. A Democratic party function would ruin the evening. In the intervening hours were decisions bureaucratic, legal, political.

The old Plymouth that carted him to Monona Avenue backfired at a red light, skipped gears, lunged forward, then proceeded along as though nothing unusual had happened. The Plymouth had turned 142,000 miles, and he wondered if it deserved a new transmission or retirement to the scrapyard. A clump of rust dropped from the front fender.

In the basement coffee shop of the courthouse building the DA ordered a large orange juice. He had a vague notion the juice might calm his stomach. An editorial in last nights Capital Times had added to his aggravations. The newspaper had lambasted Doyle s frequent use of the John Doe process, citing two occasions he'd resorted to it regarding the Berge slaying. Doyle was sensitive to criticism, especially when it was directed by a liberal press that had endorsed him for DA and whose support he might need should he run for other elected positions.

The orange juice didn't relieve the ache in his gut. During his five-minute stay in the coffee shop four people asked him about the Berge case. Were charges forthcoming? Was Hoffman the prime suspect? Doyle served the same shrug to each. People were fascinated by the case. Rumor and speculation abounded. The newspapers fueled this morbid appetite for details of the murder. Berge's neighbors in Stoughton and Hoffman's neighbors on State Street had been interviewed for opinion and gossip.

In fact, after two weeks detectives had gathered only tatters of circumstantial evidence. Chuck Lulling prodded and probed, yet the gaps in what the authorities knew loomed large, and even Lulling admitted they didn't have enough evidence to consider an arrest.

Doyle shuffled these bleak thoughts to the back of his head.

Soon he caught a break. Mid-morning, he got a call from Pat O'Donohue of O'Donohue and Associates, an

independent insurance agency. O'Donohue told Doyle that he'd been following the Berge murder case in the newspapers and that he had documents that related to Barbara Hoffman.

His offering of information was voluntary, O'Don-ohue asserted. He wanted his name kept out of the newspapers. Not that he had done anything wrong, he added quickly. The situation was unusual. He had been in the insurance business for over twenty-five years, and the situation was unique, he assured the DA.

Pat O'Donohue had reason to be careful. His conduct regarding Hoffman would be subject to review, and to some his actions might appear to be less than professional. He had to tell the authorities about his contact with Hoffman, but he had to minimize his hunger to find her an insurance policy. It was his own greed, and maybe his questionable ethics, that he did not care to discuss.

Doyle sensed O'Donohue's equivocation that morning. He had called to volunteer information, but he had details to hide.

Over the next week Doyle and Lulling pressured the insurance agent, threatening him with subpoena and scrutiny by the states insurance review board, until O'Don-ohue finally loosened and divulged all of what he knew.

In November 1976 the Norman Anderson Agency of Madison had received a typewritten and unsigned request from Gerald Davies for a three-million-dollar life insurance policy. Anderson did not sell life insurance, and the lead was shuttled to O'Donohue and Associates, whose offices were down the hall. O'Donohue contacted the interested party. One week later Davies and his fiancee, Barbara Hoffman, appeared for an interview.

As a shipping clerk at the U.W. who'd earned $9,150 in 1975, Davies seemed an unlikely candidate for a three-million-dollar policy. But extenuating circumstances existed. Davies claimed a silent ownership of four Madison massage parlors. A small investment had reaped large dividends, and currently the return from the parlors ex-

ceeded his regular income by almost double. His monthly profit was listed as $1,500, a sum expected to increase over the next few years. Davies wanted a large policy in order to defer his tax burden and to build an immediate equity in his estate.

To O'Donohue it was an extraordinary request from what seemed a strange couple. More than once Davies consulted his fiancee when completing the application, and it was Barbara who determined that term, rather than whole, would be the appropriate type of life insurance for their needs. Davies assented and scratched answers onto the questionnaire.

An insurance policy for $3 million might be difficult to procure, he told the couple, because of Daviess unusual investment and the low figure on the tax statement. Nonetheless, he would shop around and do his best.

The fiancee smiled and replied that if he didn't they'd find someone else who would deliver.

The application was filed and the information forwarded to Equifacts, a firm that conducts research for the insurance industry. Equifacts compiled a brief biography of Gerald Davies. His family background was examined. Medical and employment records were checked. Bank transactions and credit ratings were investigated. The single element not researched and verified was his silent ownership of four massage parlors.

A copy of the Equifacts reports and Daviess application for $3 million of term life insurance was submitted to Guardsman's Life of Des Moines, Iowa. It refused the policy. Two other companies also rejected the request. O'Donohue had to convince someone that Daviess financial situation was unorthodox but credible. Not every company would be scared by the massage parlor income. O'Donohue calculated the commission on a three-million-dollar policy and must have decided it warranted his sin-cerest effort. He spent hours explaining to company vice presidents the massage parlor scene in Madison, explaining that these were legitimate business ventures that his client wished to be discreet about and that Daviess income

tax statements were not an accurate reflection of his net worth or of his monthly cash flow. The request was shaved to $1 million and shipped to Guarantee Life of Hammond, Indiana. He reapplied to Guardsman's Life with this reduced figure. Both firms respectfully declined.

Crown Insurance of Buffalo, New York, was next offered the opportunity to underwrite. On February 8, 1977, O'Donohue mailed the application plus a check for $580, which represented the first months premium. Crown returned the check uncashed. When O'Donohue moaned that all his work was for naught, a part-time agent in the office asked if he might intercede.

Jorge de Zamacona had moved to Madison from Mexico City years ago to pursue graduate studies at the U.W. Madison's liberal atmosphere fit de Zamacona's free spirit, and a variety of interests delayed his academic agenda. There were parties and impassioned discussions about politics and poetry. He saw no reason to rush toward a degree and a return to his homeland. De Zamacona lingered. He worked at a variety of jobs—research assistant, bartender, insurance salesman. He was resourceful, enterprising, with a great many connections. When he asked for a chance with the Davies application, O'Donohue consented.

A flurry of phone calls and inquiries went out from the office de Zamacona shared at O'Donohue and Associates. He contacted a company in Fort Worth, Texas. Transport Life was sent a request for a one-million-dollar policy, which it denied. When he reapplied for $750,000, Transport Life accepted.

Jerry Davies was informed that a policy had been obtained. The annual premium was $13,236.60.

On February 26, 1977, Davies and Barbara Hoffman met de Zamacona at his office and handed him a cashiers check for $6,618.30, one-half the annual payment, and took possession of the policy, which was back-dated to January 26, 1977, to save on a rate increase. The second premium installment was due on July 26, 1977, with a thirty-day grace period. The term life policy insured Da-

vies for $750,000. His estate was named as beneficiary.

The impossible had been performed. De Zamacona had secured an insurance policy for a shipping clerk whose verifiable yearly income, $9,150, was less than the policy's yearly premium. As Davies had no other real assets, except a car and a modest savings account, it seemed absurd. Yet the policy was quite real. O'Donohue was astounded, and he would soon be chagrined. Within weeks of linking Davies and Transport, de Zamacona left town. He had tired of Madison and returned to his native Mexico City to be reunited with his family. O'Donohue doubted the timing was coincidental.

Transport Life paid the field agent the first years premium as commission on its life insurance policies. The check for $6,618.30 was deposited by Transport Life, which then issued a payment in that exact amount to Jorge de Zamacona. He would receive the balance when the second payment was made. Legally de Zamacona was bound to divide the commission with Norman Anderson, who had received the original request from Davies, and with O'Donohue, whose agency employed him. Instead he had cashed the commission check and fled.