One Dead Drag Queen (30 page)

We also called our lawyer to discuss a possible lawsuit against the owners and Borini and Faslo.

“Possible?” he asked. “After we’re through with them, you’ll be able to buy a small country.”

Kearn was nearly as grateful as Morty was apologetic. Two hours later as the news conference was breaking up, I asked Kearn if he had any more news on the bombing or on Myrtle Mae. He didn’t.

“I’m going to go over the tapes again when I get home,” I
said. “There’s got to be a clue there. Myrtle Mae was no dummy. He saw something on those tapes. I’m sure of it. Someone who doesn’t belong or something that is out of whack.”

“You’re sure he said it was on the tapes?” Kearn asked.

“That’s what his message said.”

“I’ve got something else for you. I have it on good authority that the Tools of Satan terrorist group was in fact a real organization. That they did have an office in a building across the alley. It is possible that some of the workers in that organization were bringing in a bomb to use, and it blew up prematurely. Or someone could have been trying to bomb them.”

“Why take out the whole damn block?” I asked.

“Getting a huge impact is at least as important as setting the bomb in the first place. Or it could have been supplies that went off accidentally. Rumors are starting that they could have been planning to bomb that banquet of protesters, but they blew themselves up.”

“That sounds like a crock.”

Kearn shrugged. “You’d like it to be about your friends or your causes because then it makes more sense to you. But it doesn’t have to be about you or the clinic. Chaos happens and innocent people are caught in the middle of it.”

We decided to drive over to our penthouse for the tapes. I wouldn’t feel comfortable about staying there until we had debugging experts comb the place thoroughly. We could watch the tapes and be careful what we said. Better yet we could take them to my place out in the country. Morty had told us where the one bug he planted was, but we weren’t
going to take any chances. Kearn would follow us. Our lawyer was already working with the phone company and the police about the illegal tap on our line.

In the car Scott asked, “Are we going to give up the notion of finding out who the bombers were?”

“I guess I would, but I’m wondering who killed Myrtle Mae. Why would he be dead? Why would he give us a message about looking at those tapes? He didn’t see them.”

“I don’t think we’re ever going to discover who did either one,” Scott said. “We’ve got the weekend still to get away. I know it’s not a lead-lined bunker, but I could hire a jet and we could get away for a day or two. You’re not due back to work until Monday.”

“And I have my doctor’s note to prove my illness.” I still experienced a little dizziness at times, and I was often tired. I figured a few more days of rest and I would be ready to face the hordes of teenagers in my classroom. Going back after a sub has had your class for a week can be a hassle. Even the best substitutes usually manage to mess things up.

As we ascended in the elevator to the penthouse, I said, “Before we go to my place I think I’m going to look at those tapes one more time. If Myrtle Mae thought there was something odd about them, then there has to be.”

Scott said, “If we’re going to be at your place, I want to take a few tools and some lumber with me.”

The quiet in the penthouse was broken only by the hum of distant appliances. We found the bugging device Morty had mentioned. I wanted to take one of Scott’s hammers and smash it into smithereens, but it was evidence. A cop and a state’s attorney met us to do a preliminary search of the apartment. They took it away with them.

Kearn followed me to the electronics room. “I may not be able to let you keep these,” he said. “The station is getting
anxious to make sure everything connected with the case is accounted for.”

“What’s the big deal?” I asked. “We’ve only got copies.”

“I wonder what it was that Bryce Bennet saw? I want to look through these again myself.”

“He watched the overnight news. It was a joke among his friends.” A thought struck me. “Maybe he didn’t want the tapes of the event. Maybe he wanted the tapes of the coverage. What exactly did he say on his message?” I couldn’t remember.

“The coverage on the news?” Kearn asked.

“Or maybe he wanted to compare the two. He must have been onto something.”

“I’m inclined to Scott’s position that Bryce Bennet didn’t have a clue.”

Hearing Myrtle Mae referred to by his real name always startled me, doubly so with the repetition. “Who was your source in the department about what Myrtle Mae knew?”

“Your source in the department couldn’t tell you?”

“I’m not going to start playing games. I was kind of wondering who told you he was a drag queen.”

“Beg pardon?”

“You used the name Bryce Bennet when you met us outside his apartment, but when we saw the body, you made a crack about him being a drag queen. How did you know that?”

“I was told at the police station.”

“But Myrtle Mae wasn’t in drag. Pulver told us he’d shown up in a business suit. No one would have known.”

“It was general knowledge.”

“Which you didn’t have. I had to tell you.”

That’s when Kearn pulled out a gun.

“Myrtle Mae saw something on the tapes,” I said. “He knew you were guilty of something.”

“From my contacts with the police, I knew Bryce Bennet was onto something. It wasn’t the tapes, not then. The initial problem was I heard Bennet knew something that had to do with the Fattatuchis’ kid. Maybe Bennet had gotten to him. The Fattatuchi kid was a militia wanna-be. He was suspicious about the truth. He was Thornburg’s contact. He was helping to hide him. We managed to kill both of them. Turns out activists in Chicago were hiding Thornburg.”

“What did Myrtle Mae know specifically? Why did he have to die?”

“What did the drag queen know and when did he know it?” Kearn laughed. “Do you really care about one dead drag queen?”

Thoughts of physically harming the handsome menace flashed through my mind. The gun in his hand was argument enough to prevent the thought from becoming an action. I said, “He was a good friend.”

“He was a neurotic busybody sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong. Sort of like yourself.”

“Thornburg and Fattatuchi were dead. What was the problem?”

“We didn’t know who else the Fattatuchi kid might have told. Myrtle Mae’s knowledge probably wouldn’t have led to anything, but we couldn’t be sure.”

“Did the Fattatuchi kid confide in Myrtle Mae?”

“I tried to find out. Bennet wouldn’t tell. The possibility that he knew something was a threat to me—he had to die. I knew he was a drag queen because when I showed up to find out what he knew, he conducted the interview as he dressed. He may have been going to wear a business suit to see the cops, but I had to watch him in his dressing room primping more assiduously than an expensive whore.”

Myrtle Mae loved to chat as he “pulled himself together.” He transacted a lot of gay rights negotiations over his vats of makeup.

“The guy bragged incessantly that ‘no one is going to pull the chiffon over the eyes of this drag queen.’ ”

That was one of Myrtle Mae’s favorite twists on a cliché. “You had to get rid of him because he could identify you as the bomber?”

The gun didn’t waver and nothing loud or dramatic happened. “Pretty much. The son of a bitch was suspicious.”

“Why do the bombing in the first place?”

“Two reasons. Braxton Thornburg was ready to turn us in. He was going to try and work a deal with the authorities. He would give evidence of our group if the government would go easy on him.”

“How do you know he hadn’t already told? If he was negotiating, how come he wasn’t arrested?”

“His lawyer was negotiating. I have sources. I knew I hadn’t been named yet. I was worried about what he might tell his lawyer. The clinic was conveniently across the alley as a cover for the real crime.”

“But why kill all those people?”

“Who would think of a terrorist bombing being used as a cover for a murder of someone who was in the way?”

“But what did he know about you? What had you done that was illegal?”

“Other terrorist bombings and shootings. The last two smaller-scale bombs that had been left killed a few people here and there. We did those. The underground network knew that. There is a secret, violent underground network. When rumors surfaced that Thornburg was going to testify, he had to be stopped. We decided we could kill him and make
a statement. Nobody would dare betray us again.”

“There’s an international conspiracy to blow up abortion clinics?”

“Not so much of a conspiracy as a loosely knit group of people who cooperate with each other. My main camera guy and I were in it together.”

“How’d you know how to put a bomb together?”

“Really, who has to know that nowadays? You just connect to the Internet and bippiddy, boppiddy, boo, you’ve got a bomb.”

“Why did you do so much investigating? Why did you keep getting us involved?”

“Because I intended to keep being a reporter. My job is a fabulous cover. I had to milk this story for all it was worth. You guys as an interview would have been great. Keeping an eye on what you knew was even better. I doubted if you’d find out anything, but I couldn’t be sure. What was even more perfect, the more I uncovered, the better I could scatter suspicion in every direction.”

“What was the deal with the tapes?”

“What Bennet told me, before I killed him, was that he was watching late-night local-television news and saw our report on that protest in the north suburbs. He knew the priest who got hurt. He saw our interview with him. Bennet didn’t think we had time to get back for the bombing. He thought we arrived too soon. That we couldn’t have gotten from the far North Side to the scene in the time it said. The timing display on the tape was supposedly a giveaway. He was wrong. Scott was right. Bennet had screwed it up. Unfortunately, he could alert half the planet to a possible anomaly.”

“If there was no problem with the tapes, why come back here to get them?”

“The tough part was, we did have a real problem. Somebody
needed extra tapes at the scene. They simply came to our truck and took them. My cameraman left used tapes in what he thought was a secure place, but reporters were desperate that night. Nobody’d ever used that much tape. There were more than a zillion cameras. They took every tape that wasn’t nailed down. Only later did we realize we had made a mistake. See, we’d taped ourselves setting the bomb.”

“Home movies of the crazed and conscienceless.”

“When he realized the mistake, it was too late. Our truck had been caught in the secondary explosion. We were a little careless then. We didn’t think the second bomb would be that powerful. We couldn’t find the tape of ourselves. When we couldn’t find it, we believed it had gone up with the van. We figured we were safe. The station made all those copies for you. There are an incredible number of hours of tape of what happened. We discovered a few brief snippets of ourselves on one of the tapes. Most of it had been taped over, but not everything. We destroyed the original. We got the copy from the cops. That’s where I was when I didn’t answer my pager this morning. We still had to get yours. You have that bit. None of them had noticed the oddity. It’s only for a few seconds at the beginning. Shown frame by frame it is off-kilter. It isn’t much, but it could be fatal. Until you offered to come back here, we thought we’d have to kill you both. I thought that would be kind of a shame, because I kind of like you both. Unfortunately, you caught my slip about Bennet.”

“When we met you outside his building, you’d just killed him.”

“Yes. I was forced to use one of the oldest tricks in the book. I spotted you trying to find a parking place. Instead of running, I turned around and made it look as if I was just arriving as well.”

“If Myrtle Mae thought you were the killer, why’d he let you in?”

“He was suspicious, but he wasn’t sure. He thought he’d get me to slip up. He wasn’t as clever as he thought he was.”

“Maybe you aren’t either. People know the three of us came here together.”

“I appreciate your concern about my getting away with this, but you needn’t worry. You’ll be dead.”

I worried about where Scott was and how I could warn him to stay away, get out, call the police, and rescue us.

“Why did you set the bomb off that night?”

“Thornburg might be going to cooperate. He also could skip town. We had to act quickly. With that banquet of protesters in town, it was perfect. I figured I could put suspicion on a lot of people. I had a contact at the convention in Wisconsin. When I found out that Clancey was coming to town, I figured this would be a great day to strike.

“My main problem during the investigation was holding back on the knowledge I had. I couldn’t be seen to know too much too soon. I
had
to look like I was investigating. You guys actually helped there. It would have been a perfect murder if it hadn’t been for that goddamn drag queen.”

“Why did you blow up my truck?”