One Dead Drag Queen (29 page)

“How is melodramatic posturing going to help us now?” Scott asked.

“I admit it,” I said. “I am going over the top. I think it’s justified. I’m elated. I’m ecstatic. This is our chance to stop a whole lot of crap. I want to make as big a splash as possible. You can be calm and reasonable. I’m not feeling that way. I want to get even in huge front-page headlines from coast to coast, and I think it will get headlines, great, big, splashy headlines that will put a stop to what’s been happening to us.”

Scott shook his head. “We need to think and plan. If we hold a press conference, they just deny everything. We need proof.”

We both hate it when we disagree in front of others. I used to think of it as hypocrisy when my parents put on their party faces in front of company. Morty hardly rated as company since he was the resident traitor. Still I didn’t want to continue arguing in front of him. We walked a few paces off, keeping ourselves between him and the shore end of the pier.

Scott said, “This is our chance to have the moral high ground. A real conspiracy, by at least some of the asshole owners.” Scott loves to talk about seizing the moral high ground. I’m not sure being morally superior is all that it’s cracked up to be. Say you’ve got a monopoly on truth and beauty. And if you’re really well connected, you might have a hot line to whoever or whatever you consider to be God. The next guy can claim the same thing with as much authority. It’s like the Bible being divinely inspired. Who said so? Some guy who claimed a direct link to God. With that many direct links, maybe God hires out, and instead of connecting with God, one day somebody got a secretary and not the genuine entity. I don’t see the rise of righteousness in this
country as a sign that Christianity has grown or that anyone is more morally superior.

I said, “I don’t care about moral superiority. What difference does it make? I want the fear to stop.”

“Tom?” Scott put all he could of the annoyed thrum of his deepest voice into that one syllable. It was his call for me to be reasonable. Calm. I’d been getting ridiculous and out of control. I needed to be sensible and rational. Plotting and conniving cleverly wouldn’t be bad either.

I took a deep breath. “Do you have a plan?”

“The obvious way to get proof would be to have them on tape talking to Morty.”

“We send him back to Borini and Faslo?”

“What they’ve done has got to be criminal. He could try to get them to admit something incriminating.”

“Does that ever work outside the movies?”

“We can try. We can stage a dramatic, accusatory press conference if this doesn’t work. For now, we could contact Pulver.”

I said, “Okay. This is great. We’ll need less protection now that we know the source of the attacks.”

“Are you sure we need less protection?”

“Double conspiracies? Borini, Faslo, and McCutcheon? Even the most hardened nutcase would find that hard to swallow. I’m not ready to think they could plan that massively, that every protection we’ve tried has been tainted with our enemies.” I hesitated. I was sure of that, wasn’t I?

Scott said, “We’ve got to go with what we’ve got. Pulver must know people with access to taping equipment.”

It wasn’t hard getting hold of Pulver. He could help us, but there was a lot more red tape than I thought. On television, don’t they just pull the taping equipment out of a
drawer and go to work? Seems that way. We set up a meeting in the Twenty-third District police station at Halsted and Addison, just three blocks from Wrigley Field. Morty accompanied us. Every few minutes he apologized. He looked like a mortally wounded bear ready to bawl at the slightest provocation. He kept promising to make it up to us.

Pulver called in his superiors and a state’s attorney. Once officials began to assemble, help began to happen quickly. I knew with this many people involved there was no way we would keep it out of the media. That was fine with me. I’d come over to Scott’s side that we needed to get more proof, but I was ready to do some denouncing from as many podiums as I could mount. Scott says when I get like that, I need a good slap upside the head. I do tend to get overdramatic, and I love cheap sentiment.

It only took a couple hours to set it all up. Pulver told us we were lucky. They were eager to cooperate for several reasons: Scott’s fame, the possibility of lots of good publicity for the cops, and a possible career-making moment for the state’s attorney if all of this proved to be true. Plus, several of Pulver’s superiors were eager to take Borini and Faslo down. They’d been burned in court by that firm and would be happy to see huge headlines with pictures of them being hauled away in chains. I’m not the only one on earth who can be overly dramatic.

In a lull while we were waiting, I asked Pulver if he knew anything about Myrtle Mae’s interview with the police.

“Who?” he asked.

“A drag queen whose real name was Bryce Bennet.”

“Oh, I heard. They didn’t know he was a drag queen when he first came in. When the cops arrived to question him, he was wearing a very expensive suit. He didn’t seem to know anything.”

From long experience, Myrtle Mae wore his most conservative outfits when dealing with the police. He may have been an outrageous queen, but he wasn’t stupid. We’d asked Pulver to find out why the police were going to be questioning Myrtle Mae again.

Morty had demanded and gotten an appointment with Borini and Faslo for late that afternoon. We were permitted to sit in the back of a police car and stay out of the way. Only Jessica Fletcher gets to do the good stuff. In reality we were lucky to get that much.

The state’s attorney practiced with Morty before he went up. He told Morty which things he had to try to get them to say. “Insist that you have to meet with the owners,” the state’s attorney said. Morty agreed to everything. He practiced his lines numerous times, like a high school jock who was in the school play for the first time. Typecast once again.

25

Being in the back of a police car was odd. There really were no handles for the doors or windows. We weren’t going to get out unless somebody let us out. I don’t think we were particularly recognizable, but people craned their necks in that I’m-not-really-looking-I-just-happen-to-walk-in-this-nearly-hunched-over-way-staring-into-the-backseat-of-parked-cop-cars look. The surveillance van with the bugging equipment was almost out of sight around a corner.

We were sitting on Wells Street under the el tracks a couple blocks from Sears Tower. While we sat, the uniformed cop who drove us walked over to a deli across the street and ate a sub sandwich at the counter. I hoped he didn’t decide to go far. I didn’t want to be stuck in the backseat with no possible exit and no person around to let us out.

In the back of the cop car, for the first time in hours I had time to reflect. Giddy relief at the end of our fear mixed with the residue of our argument.

“I shouldn’t have walked out,” Scott said. “How is that supposed to help?”

“I push too hard. I don’t listen.” I joined the orgy of apology. “I feel rotten. I’d have been really upset if you’d been hurt.”

“I made an adult decision. It was my choice. Not a very good one. I just had to get away for a few minutes. I was coming back.”

“I always want you to come back. I always want to be there when you do.” We held hands in the backseat of the car for a while.

Half an hour later, we got the cop to let us out so we could get ourselves some coffee and sandwiches at the deli. Finally, after two hours, the state’s attorney walked up to where we were leaning our butts against the car.

“Did you get what you needed?” I asked.

“Yes. A surprisingly nasty amount. Your buddy did a great job. That, and Mr. Faslo has a tendency to brag.”

“What did Morty do?” I asked.

“Played his script perfectly. He asked for a meeting with some of the owners. Demanded a guaranteed contract with a specific minor league team with a clause to move him up to the majors in five years. For such a high-powered firm, they were pathetically vulnerable to someone like Morty turning on them. They tried threatening him and weaseling around, but he’s got a stolid doggedness that worked better than any threats or bluster. He was pretty persuasive. We owe him some.”

I said, “He owed us a great deal to begin with.”

“I guess you’re right,” the state’s attorney said.

Clayton Pulver drove up in a white 1965 Rambler. The car seemed totally out of place for Pulver. With him was Morty.

The first words Morty said to us were “I’m sorry.” They
were also the last and most of the words in the middle. I appreciated the sentiment, but I wasn’t ready to forgive yet. I remembered all too clearly the hurt and the fear we’d been through.

“What happened?” Scott asked him.

“They kept reassuring me,” Morty said. “I talked about how scared I was after the bombing. I said you’d nearly caught me today. I just pushed until they called one of the owners and got him on the phone. It was great.”

“Did you get the phone conversation taped?” I asked.

“It wasn’t necessary,” the state’s attorney said. “We have plenty without it.”

“Now what?” I asked.

The state’s attorney said, “We hold a press conference. They don’t know what we’ve got. We want to use the element of surprise on them.”

“Isn’t that kind of quick?” Scott asked.

“You want the threats to stop?” Pulver asked.

I said immediately, “Definitely.”

We arranged for Brandon Kearn to get an interview before the press conference. He and his station got an exclusive for half an hour. I don’t understand why getting the scoop is so important these days. It seems as if every media outlet spends hours beating to death every single detail of even the most insignificant story. After the overkill and often useless live reports, they trot out the talking heads. That whole shtick never makes sense to me. But then I think talk radio is a lot of moronic blather led by and fed by people who desperately need to get a life. But people are paying attention to them. It’s hard for me to imagine anything dumber than setting policy because of comments made on talk radio.

When I called, Kearn explained that he’d been interviewing the survivors who lived in the same building as Thornburg.
He’d been unable to interview Omega Collins as he was hot on the scent, often finding people before the police did. It was still not definite that Thornburg had set off the explosion.

On the way to the interview, Scott and I agreed we could drop McCutcheon and his services or at least go back to using him and his company only for public appearances. At least until we were able to hire a new one. I had the pleasure of giving McCutcheon the news.

McCutcheon and I spoke in the corridor outside the room where the press conference was being held. Besides telling him about the cutbacks, I asked, “How come you never noticed these guys following Scott around?”

He shrugged. “It was a teammate. Someone he trusted implicitly. Scott confided in him about his schedule or casually mentioned where he might be going. Hiding something, or in this case someone, out in the open is always preferable when you can do it. Remember, my firm is mostly designed for public events. No one thought you needed round-the-clock protection until this whole latest mess began. I’m glad you found who did it. I wish I had found them first. I’m going to be sorry not to be working for you guys.”

I felt like kind of a heel since he wasn’t the guilty party.