Windy City Blues Read online

  “What about the cops? Did they tell you anything?”

  “They got a couple of Laurel and Hardys pretending they give a damn. Every time I asked them a question, they’d look at each other and smile. Then one of the morons would give me the ‘it’s an ongoing investigation’ bull crap and laugh.”

  His defeatist tone intrigued me. “So you’re just going to roll over? Don’t you want to know why the Gelashvili investigation is being shut down?”

  Ross gave me a poisonous look. “You want truth? Is that it? I should be Zola and Gelashvili my Dreyfus? His head reduced to rubble and nobody cares. That’s the only truth that matters anymore. Fuck your truth!”

  I liked getting people fired up. “Why did you agree to meet me?”

  “Knight’s paying me a hundred bucks. He’s using me to rope you in so you have to give him the inside story. If you showed up, that means you signed his contract.”

  “Why didn’t Knight just ask you himself?” A kid on a skateboard flew past us, failed at executing a kick-flip, but still landed on his feet while the board went off the sidewalk.

  “Because I hate that little fuck. But I’ll take his money.”

  “You’re a true friend.”

  “He’s a punk with a rich daddy. Truth or no truth, he’ll never have to worry about making a living.”

  “Why does that piss you off?” I knew why, but I couldn’t resist.

  “Damn it! I just said why. Truth! You have any idea how I’ve had to compromise myself just to make a buck? You think I want to write meaningless articles about guys no one cares about getting beaten to death? But I gotta make money. I’ve wasted a lot of time. In fact, I’ve wasted my life.”

  His dejection was palpable and entirely uninteresting. I placed my business card on the bench and walked away.

  7

  As a kid, we always had the Sun-Times in the house. The Republic, I later learned, was the conservative paper while the Sun-Times leaned toward the progressive side. My great-granddad was part of Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson’s political machine during Prohibition. Both the Sun-Times and the Republic existed in one form or another back then. And both accused Great-Granddad of terrorism. He once shared a headline with Al Capone. I wondered which paper Great-Granddad read.

  Despite Republic Tower’s landmark status as a quintessential example of neo-Gothic architecture, I saw only a skeletal monolith of spikes, spires, pointed arches, and gargoyles. Medieval ignorance and suffering peasants with torches and pitchforks also came to mind. It was into this house of pain I walked, seeking answers from the eighth-largest newspaper in the United States. Famous quotations chiseled into the granite walls recalled the divine duty of a free press and created not just a lobby but a “Hall of Inscriptions.” An enormous relief map made of shredded money spoke many column inches about a newspaper baron’s true religion.

  “I’d like to speak with Mr. Konigson,” I said to the receptionist, whose only response was to stare at me as if waiting for the punch line.

  “You want to talk to Sam Konigson, the CEO of the Republic Media Group?”

  It was my turn to wait for the punch line—but I was the joke. “Okay, how about the city editor?”

  “I need to see an ID.” I complied, she wrote down some information, then gave me a guest pass to hang around my neck. “Go to the twentieth floor and try your luck. His name is Wilbert Palmer.”

  Peter Ross had told me Konigson called his editor directly. It seemed odd a CEO would personally call anyone below upper-level administration just to maim a story. Even I knew a collection of managers, associates, deputies, and assistants dwelled between a CEO and a section editor.

  Another receptionist awaited me as I stepped off the elevator. I had had a cult-like love for 1970s television like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Lou Grant and old movies from Citizen Kane to All the President’s Men, and the newsroom appeared exactly as I expected.

  The woman behind the counter looked like a college student. An open copy of Advanced Reporting confirmed my suspicion.

  “I’d like to talk to Mr. Palmer, please.”

  “Is he expecting you?”

  I smiled. “I doubt it.”

  She frowned and picked up the phone. “Someone here to see Wil,” she said and returned to Advanced Reporting.

  Seconds later a gloomy-looking man—just barely as old as the receptionist—rushed up to me. “Yes?”

  “Mr. Palmer?”

  “I’m Dylan, his assistant.”

  “Assistant to what?”

  “To the city editor.”

  “I’d like to talk to the city editor.”

  “Unless he’s expecting you, send him an email.”

  In the back, I saw a glass room with a long conference table. At the head of the table a balding man sat alone, staring out the window.

  “I want to talk to him about a murder. I’m a private investigator.” I showed him my identification.

  “He’s too busy to see everyone who stops by. Send an email.”

  “Busy, my ass. That’s him staring out the window in the conference room, right?”

  The man glanced behind and then back to me. “Mr. Palmer communicates only by email unless you have an appointment!”

  His non-denial told me I had guessed correctly. I reached for my wallet.

  “Here’s twenty bucks,” I said and stuffed the bill into his shirt pocket. “And here’s twenty for you.” I dropped another bill onto Advanced Reporting and blew past the assistant to the city editor.

  They caught up to me as I opened the glass door of the conference room. The three of us entered together.

  “I just want to talk about Gelashvili—” I said but was immediately drowned out by the youngsters begging forgiveness.

  Then a woman about my age came in. “What the hell’s going on?” she asked.

  “And you are?” I asked.

  “I’m Mr. Palmer’s assignment editor.” If Palmer gave a damn, he didn’t show it. I think he barely glanced our way. “Brenda, get back to your desk. Dylan, what’s going on?”

  “He just barged in—”

  “Now, just wait a goddamn second. Dylan here took twenty bucks to let me come in.” I plucked the bill out of his shirt pocket and dropped it on the floor.

  “He’s lying!”

  While Dylan voiced his outrage, I sat next to Palmer and introduced myself.

  “Why was the Gelashvili execution given about as much space as a standard obit?”

  Palmer turned and looked at me. His hairline receded uniformly past the top of his head. From above, I supposed he resembled a half moon. His face had a plump, healthy glow despite his sixty or more years. His eyebrows looked professionally groomed. Gold cuff links matched gold tie clip. Gucci, I guessed. Our eyes momentarily met before he turned back to the window. A large hand fell upon my shoulder. I looked up into the face of a security guard who suggested it was time for me to leave. I was able to fling a business card onto the table before the officer escorted me out the door while demonstrating the arm lock restraining position. A real control freak.

  8

  At two o’clock, it had already been a long day. Back home, I dropped the stomach and intestines of an unidentified animal into Punim’s bowl. The gloppy thud brought her running into the kitchen, where she attacked the entrails like the sweet little kitty-cat she was. I needed some couch time. To assist her digestion, Punim would soon curl up on my lap, and the two of us would drift off together while the facts of the case swirled around my subconscious and Punim chased and devoured the small animals of her dreams.

  The cell phone ended my nap. Punim voiced her irritation and ran off. On the phone a soft male voice. “Uh, yes. You want to know about Mr. Gelashvili?”

  I recognized the voice. “Mr. Palmer?”

  “May I ask why you should care about Mr. Gelashvili?”

  “He was murdered. I’m being paid to find out why.”

  “Don’t you believe the police can figu
re it out?”

  “When my investigation is finished, I’ll tell you what I believe.”

  “And what makes you think I can help your investigation?”

  “Why would the CEO of a giant media corporation take the time to personally call a city editor just to kill a story about a guy who writes parking tickets?”

  Deep sigh, then, “Where shall we meet?”

  —

  Palmer insisted we meet in “your neck of the woods,” and I gave him directions to Mocha Mouse. I got the idea Palmer had not ventured much north of downtown. He kept asking how to spell major streets like Halsted and Armitage. When I told him just to tell the cab driver the address, he informed me he was going to travel by “elevated train.”

  From my table, I watched a tall, plump, white dress shirt with gray slacks walk into the wood-centric, bebop-jazz-themed coffee shop of graying ponytails, pierced noses, and enough tattoos to be measured in square yards.

  “Coffee, tea, various fruit-based drinks?” I said.

  “Nothing, thank you,” Palmer said, sitting down before wiping his head and forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief. He leaned forward on his elbows and looked me straight in the eye. He wore no rings although his fingernails were clean, even, and polished. “I’ve become so accustomed to communicating by email,” he said in an East Coast aristocratic accent I recognized from old movies. “Now, please, what did you want to know?”

  I had the feeling he was anxious to talk.

  “The stringer who wrote the original article about Jack Gelashvili’s murder, Peter Ross, told me you relayed a message from Konigson saying the article should be hacked down to an insignificant nub. Is it true?”

  “Mr. Ross was very upset about this. While I had no obligation to explain anything to him, I did tell him Mr. Konigson had personally called me. I had no more information to share with him.”

  “Got anything to share with me?”

  Palmer dabbed his forehead again. “I’m not sure. That is, you are correct to think it unusual for someone in Mr. Konigson’s position to personally call an editor. I must say, it piqued my curiosity as well. I had never expected to speak to the man, yet there he was on the phone, wanting to talk to me.”

  Palmer reminded me of a painfully shy, über-intelligent child desperately trying to break out of his shell.

  “What exactly did Konigson say to you?”

  Palmer laughed or coughed, I wasn’t sure which. “Well, he told me to make sure there’s not a human interest story surrounding Mr. Gelashvili. When I told him a good article had been written by Mr. Ross, he spoke quite harshly and used crude language. He threatened me, actually.”

  Palmer turned his attention to an area of thrift-shop couches arranged in a circle where tie-dyed kids held hands with closed eyes, creating a kind of peace-circle ambience. He looked like he wanted to ask me about it. “Don’t ask,” I said. “Now, why didn’t the all-powerful Oz just tell you to kill the story?”

  He laughed or coughed again. “In retrospect, I think fear. He was afraid other media sources might pick up the story and try to investigate. An obit of a poor immigrant would help discourage investigation by sending a signal that the case had been looked into, so why bother?”

  “Sounds like you’ve really thought about this,” I said. Palmer didn’t respond. “Konigson was afraid of something related to Gelashvili’s murder. But when he demanded the story be nothing more than a glorified obit, he didn’t even bother making up a reason?”

  “I’m afraid that’s pretty much what happened. That arrogant—” Palmer suppressed a thought.

  “What is it?”

  Palmer looked at the meditating kids. “The arrogance of money. One with money need not fear consequences.”

  Had the corrupting influence of money been lost on Palmer only to have been found with Gelashvili’s murder? “You could’ve told me all of this on the phone.”

  Palmer took a deep breath. “Yes, it’s perfectly normal that you should wonder why I came all the way up here to meet you. And to be absolutely honest, I’m still processing my motivation as well. Perhaps it was just the timing. Mr. Konigson’s phone call stirred up emotions inside me. I was never one to question the way things were, and suddenly I’m conflicted. You were the first person to directly ask me about the Gelashvili article. Now that someone else is demonstrating a keen interest, I feel compelled to discuss my internal struggle.” Palmer leaned back in his chair and briefly closed his eyes.

  “So what are you doing here?” I said.

  Palmer straightened up and gave me a quizzical look. “How do you mean? We agreed—”

  “No, I mean here in Chicago. I would never have pegged your personality surviving a big-city newspaper.”

  Palmer smiled and nodded. “I know now that you are correct. The Republic chose me, and not the other way around. In fact, my entire life has been chosen for me.”

  “Before you tell me the story of your life, can you make it remotely relevant to the squelching of the Gelashvili article?”

  Palmer thought for a second. “Yes, I think what I have to say will be relevant, if only parenthetically.” He looked squint-eyed and then rubbed his forehead. “Actually, it may be more relevant than either of us realizes. I have a feeling that insights previously unrecognized may surface—if you don’t mind listening to me.”

  “By all means, sir. Tell me your story.”

  “My family comes directly from the New York of the Gilded Age…”

  Palmer began his story of childhood WASP ostentation complete with exclusive private schooling for children of the super-rich who also possessed remarkable intellectual gifts. That the written word became the source of Palmer’s fascination delighted his mother, although his father would have preferred that his son’s encyclopedic mind took advantage of the less subjective world of finance. As he spoke, the phrase “proper breeding” repeatedly flashed through my brain.

  Palmer had spent his life in a bubble, focusing only on the journalistic and literary tasks put in front of him and excelling at each level. Family contacts ensured that opportunities to work at the most distinguished publications were available to him. As a gesture to his father, he also obtained advanced degrees in finance and law, earning one of the top ten scores in the country on his CPA exam. Palmer’s cultivation amidst the elite publishing families of Manhattan guaranteed a symbiotic relationship with the media’s gradual corporatization and culminated with his appointment to oversee all of the Dow Jones consumer-oriented publications.

  “Over the course of many years in New York financial publishing, I realized I was an oddity,” Palmer said and, without any detectable change in his aristocratic inflection, began deriding himself for a life of shallow nearsightedness. Purely out of curiosity, I asked him to elaborate. “Wall Street,” Palmer said. “Specifically, the blatant way investment banks controlled the country.”

  I didn’t know if I had ever been so underwhelmed. “Are you kidding? That came as a surprise to you?”

  Palmer stared at me for a solid five seconds. “Have you ever seen Mr. Konigson?”

  “Only newspaper headshots of his shaggy face.”

  “I’ve never seen him without three former navy SEAL bodyguards surrounding him. I used to see nothing peculiar about living this way. Gradually, my eyes opened. My revulsion for the controlling gentry stems from having lived among them so long. Someone as far removed as you from the elect of finance has the ability to see much more clearly than someone like me, who has known no other reality.”

  Palmer’s deadpanned sincerity filled me with shame.

  “Excellent observation. But did you think Chicago would be a bastion of provincial virtue?”

  Palmer smiled. “Chicago was not New York. That was enough for me. I had been groomed to one day own or run a media company. Many argued I shouldn’t settle for being an editor. I, however, welcomed the reduced role in the journalistic scheme.”

  When Palmer spat out the bitter taste
of “scheme,” he said more than all his preceding words combined. Perhaps I should investigate how far a disillusioned journalist would go to get the truth.

  “So what I know for sure is that we have a media billionaire personally ordering one of his hundreds of mid-level deputies to kill a story of no consequence about a person of even less consequence. I certainly appreciate you coming to meet me, Mr. Palmer, and I sympathize with your career disappointment, but as I said earlier, you could’ve told me this on the phone.”

  Palmer stared at the tabletop while drumming his fingers. “So what am I doing here?” he said, still looking into the table. After a minute he said, “I’d like to offer my expertise, to see if I can find a financial angle to the murder. My understanding is that money almost always plays a role in such crimes. This information could be my contribution to not allowing a man’s death to be callously consigned to the status of a footnote. Nobody should have that much power. Who’s to say it won’t happen to me or you?”

  9

  The following morning I pondered the lowering angle of mid-October’s sun, along with the gradual decline of relative humidity—in particular, how this overture heralded the best time to be in the Midwest. Chicago’s well-deserved reputation for crappy weather sometimes eclipsed our memories of the delightful days that visited each autumn. This morning began as one of those days. Outside my window, the ash trees had just begun their metamorphosis, and something about the way the breeze spoke through their leaves inexplicably evoked nameless but pleasant feelings of peace. Then the phone rang.

  “To some, a neighborhood is as significant as an entire world. There is no difference.”

  It took a few moments, but I recognized the unmistakable inflection as belonging to Izzy. “What do you mean?”

  “Something local may be globally momentous. I’m ready for an update on your progress.”