Ring of Silence Read online

  “Sort of what Wilson and Roosevelt said.”

  “We had a rush of action. Now we’ve got a rush of investigation. I don’t think it’s going to be in our next union contract that we get random moments for possible reflection.”

  They were stopped at an intersection. Turner said, “You want to stop and talk about it?”

  Fenwick shook his head. “Talking won’t change the rush of adrenalin, the dangers of the world, or the random chance of the universe. We’ve got work to do. I can immerse myself in reflection later. Or write a poem about it. I didn’t really want to talk about it with Wilson and Roosevelt. You I don’t mind.” Fenwick paused. “You’re not upset by all this?”

  Turner said, “I’ll deal with my emotions when I have time. In bed tonight with Ben, we’ll talk, and any residual fear will bubble to the surface. I can let myself be frightened then, and he’ll soothe me. Right now, we’ve got a job. Molton trusted us to handle this. He knows we’re going through shit. We always handle tough cases. It’s what we do.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Turner knew that for all his bombast, Fenwick had a gentle and philosophical soul. He’d cut out his tongue before he let others outside of his inner circle know that. That he was a poet who did occasional readings around the city was also a deep dark secret. Turner was loyal. He went to all the readings. Sometimes Ben joined him. Turner liked those times because then he and Ben could sit in the back and help keep each other awake.

  “You sure you’re okay?” Turner asked Fenwick.

  “Yeah.” Fenwick looked at him. “You were there. Carruthers was fucking up, and either one of us could have died.”

  “But we didn’t.”

  “It’ll take me a while to get used to what happened. Probably the same for you.”

  Turner nodded. He knew it was best not to push his partner. He turned left on Harrison. In the early evening with rush hour traffic still dwindling, Harrison was one of the secret, best ways to go from the south Loop to the near West side.

  Turner said, “The crime scene is two and a half blocks from where Carruthers didn’t manage to kill somebody. Coincidence?”

  “You mean Carruthers could have done the murders as well?”

  “We couldn’t be so lucky, but neither one of us likes coincidences.”

  Fenwick muttered, “I guess we’ll find out.”

  “What’s the most recent news on Preston Shaitan?”

  “You know him?”

  “I know of him.”

  While Fenwick Googled, Turner said, “He’s this supposedly gay guy who does right wing shtick.”

  “A right wing gay person?”

  “So he says. He’s been written about in the gay press. He also publishes essays in some supposedly high-brow right wing journal, Thought.”

  “Never heard of that either.”

  “Lucky you. I read one of the essays. He tried to prove that we didn’t need any anti-discrimination laws of any kind for any group.”

  “He’s delusional?”

  “He also said that states have the right to have any kind of laws they want about any kind of discrimination they want.”

  “So we can have state-wide discrimination just not nationwide non-discrimination? Discrimination depends on the size of the jurisdiction? That the people of a state have the right to vote for or against discrimination? Is he insane? We’d still have slavery in the South.”

  “You asked me what the man said, not if what he said was sane.”

  “Why do you say ‘supposedly gay?’”

  “Some articles quote him as saying this is all in fun and he only says things to be provocative and that the linear sexual structures of the patriarchy are passé.”

  “Linear sexual structures of the patriarchy? What does that mean?”

  “He’ll fuck anything that will let him.”

  “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

  “Yes.”

  “You memorize shit he says?”

  “I’m not quoting exactly.”

  Fenwick looked back at his phone and tapped. He said, “I’m Googling ‘linear sexual structures’.” He gazed at the front for a minute then said, “By damn, you’re right.”

  “Happens once in a while.”

  Fenwick checked his phone some more then reported. “What I’ve got is a few articles about a tour he was making around the country. He called it “The Back Room is not Your Friend” tour. What does that mean?”

  “That he’s not as good at marketing as he thinks he is.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s not a very catchy title.”

  Fenwick gave what was on his screen a quick perusal. “This says he’s gay, but only has sex with Latino drag queens. Is that important?”

  “Not something I’d feel the need to kill anybody over.”

  “In eight cities, people stormed the stage, and the promoters and/or the authorities, or both were forced to stop the show.”

  “Shaitan’s people didn’t hire security?”

  Fenwick read then reported. “Doesn’t say why they didn’t have enough, or why they didn’t increase it after the first time, or the first few times.”

  “The people were stupid? Or he wanted to be interrupted to increase the publicity factor? Or he was trying to generate headlines with the help of anti-him protesters? Maybe he was trying to generate publicity to sell books. I hear authors can be pretty desperate.”

  Fenwick shrugged and said, “Feed my ego. Feed my sheep.” He read some more. In a minute, he said, “There was one audience, here in Chicago years ago. He doesn’t actually draw all that many people these days either. I mean, college Republicans, how many can there really be? Used to be, they usually didn’t need much more than a classroom to hold the crowd.” He read some more then said, “So Shaitan and his people were expecting the usual small crowd, maybe twenty-five, but people kept streaming in. It wasn’t like today when often crowds are screened. And he wasn’t a presidential candidate or famous, so nobody checked much. So they had to move to a bigger venue. Turns out the vast majority of the crowd was there to protest.”

  “What happened?”

  “Here, they didn’t rush the stage. The protesters all just sat there in complete silence. Nobody held up an anti-idiot banner. Nobody much moved at all. The rest of the audience kind of got intimidated, according to this, and got kind of quiet themselves.”

  Turner said, “The Gandhi approach. I approve. What did Preston Shaitan do?”

  “Halfway through his speech, he stormed off the stage and left the building. Says nobody laughed at his usual laugh lines or applauded at his usual applause lines. People outside texted and sent pictures to the protesters inside showing Shaitan getting into a limo and leaving. Then the protesters all stood up in silence and walked out. After that, they held a candlelight vigil in a park a few blocks away where they sang songs of peace.”

  “Hell of a thing,” Turner said. “What do you do, if you’re expecting wild and crazy and all you get is silent? Must have driven him nuts. Let’s be sure to talk to whomever organized that.”

  “You think they had something to do with the murder?”

  “I want to pin a medal on them.”

  Thursday 7:37 P.M.

  Uniformed police officers diverted the traffic approaching from all directions for blocks before the intersection of Racine and Harrison. Turner and Fenwick were halted a half a block east of Racine Street. The Racine Street bridge over the Eisenhower Expressway began over fifty feet to the north of the intersection itself.

  Traffic from all directions was at a standstill. Honking and cursing filled the air.

  Turner gave up trying to get closer and parked in a bus stop on Harrison Street about thirty-five feet east of the intersection. The crime scene van was also on Harrison but another one hundred feet west of the intersection in front of the building where the bodies were on the roof.

  The wind was now at a howl out of the south. The trees that lined th
e streets swayed and creaked in the wind. To the west rays of sunset escaped through rents in the still-building clouds.

  The detectives noted clumps of people gathered at various spots. The largest clot was about fifty people near the south end of the bridge. Five cops stood in a line keeping the crowd from proceeding south. Several in the crowd were shouting at the cops. Some people had phones and cameras out.

  Fenwick said, “I wish those people were in our way to get to the crime scene.”

  “Why?”

  “Then I could bull through them like a cliché Chicago cop.”

  “I know being a cliché Chicago cop has been a goal of yours for some time.”

  Fenwick sighed. “A dream come true, lost again.”

  Turner said, “I can picture the meeting with Molton after you did that.”

  “Oh?”

  They stood at the intersection amidst the cacophony of the wind.

  “Yeah,” Turner said. “I can hear him in that soft voice he uses with the first year officers. And he says, Buck, and he would be using your first name the way he does when he’s annoyed.”

  “Yeah.”

  “’Buck, why did you go out of your way to go north on Racine Street to the bridge and through all those people who were not in the way of you getting to your crime scene.’ And you’d say in your gruff voice, something nonsensical about claiming that we had to show those people who was boss.”

  “He would not be happy.”

  Turner went on. “And then Molton’s voice would get even softer.” Turner and Fenwick had seen their boss engaging in this kind of discipline with those just out of the Police Academy. They’d never been victims of it themselves. They knew what good police work was. “And he’d go on, ‘And rushing to the crime scene instead of helping on the bridge was important because one or both of the corpses had a hot date that night? That your delay at the bridge would show that you were a rotten cop that didn’t know how to do your job?’”

  Fenwick gave a gargantuan Fenwickian sigh. “But they aren’t between us and the crime scene.”

  “They never were.”

  “And Molton did tell us to help out.”

  “We could go back get the car, and go all the way around to the north, and park up on Racine Street north of the bridge. Then the crowd of about fifty people standing around aimlessly would be between us and the crime scene. Then you could bull through them like a cliché Chicago cop.”

  “And get bawled out by Molton for being an asshole? Not on my to-do list for the day, now or ever.”

  To their right on the bridge about fifty-five feet away, they saw a cop and a protestor go at it for several seconds, arms flailing. The cop started to fall, but was righted by another protestor. The violent one the cop scuffled with disappeared into the back of the crowd. Voices began to be raised.

  Turner and Fenwick hustled over. In his head, Turner could almost hear Molton’s voice, “You madly rushed to the crime scene while avoiding helping out with the confrontation on the bridge? What were you thinking? And the riot that followed that grew to three nights of chaos in the city and cost billions in property damage? And six people dead? But no, you had to get to your crime scene when you could have lent a hand. Why? Did you think the dead bodies would miss you? Get up and leave? Weep because you were late?” Molton could be as sarcastic as Fenwick.

  Approaching the bridge on their way north away from the intersection, among the police, Turner saw only the blue uniforms of beat cops. He didn’t see any stiffly-ironed and heavily-starched white shirts with gold braiding that indicated someone from the command structure. The detectives clipped their badges on their shirts as they hurried forward.

  A beat cop saw them and said, “We need more help.”

  “Where’s your local District Commander?” Turner asked.

  The young cop shrugged.

  Fenwick snapped at the officer. “Call him.” Then Fenwick walked another ten feet north, onto the bridge, and inserted his bulk between the straggly line of cops and the crowd. Turner stood next to him. For a few seconds, silence reigned.

  Then one of people in the crowd pointed and said, “He’s the one who saved the kid over four hours ago.”

  Another guy said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s on the Internet.” By now, half the people had their phones out replaying the video of Turner and Fenwick saving DeShawn. Turner could see on the face of several of the phones the same YouTube video he’d seen on Wilson’s phone back at the station over a half hour ago.

  More people pointed.

  “The other guy Tased the shooter.”

  Sporadic applause broke out. Phones and cameras emerged. The crowd surged toward them.

  Fenwick smiled, held up his hands, and said, “No autographs, please. Is there something we can do to help?”

  Many in the milling group looked confused.

  Turner knew exactly what Fenwick was doing. In all the most modern police training, the goal was to defuse tension, not create it. That hundreds of police forces hadn’t gotten the memo or the training didn’t lessen its effectiveness as a sane thing to do. Salt Lake City was the most recent place he’d read about with the new training. The article had appeared in the Chicago Tribune in May. Molton had drummed it into the heads of all the people who worked at Area Ten, that the most important thing was to calm and/or neutralize a situation if they could. The Commander had repeated it at roll call after roll call and had made special training sessions mandatory.

  Molton was definitely in the camp that was against police departments buying tanks, and bazookas, or tactical nuclear weapons to control crowds in cities. To go bulling into a situation like cliché Chicago cops from the ‘68 convention was stupid. Making illogical demands of people and insisting they obey was pointless, such as making demands that people ‘move along’ for no apparent logical reason.

  All making such demands ever did was show that it was important for you, the official person, to make people obey you. It might come to that, but this situation wasn’t near that point. The key to crowd control isn’t showing that you can bully them into submission by making them obey random demands. The key, in all modern training, was to see if you could find a way to calm the situation. Asking if they could help was a far better ploy for crowd control than demanding that they comply with some pointless directive.

  The Racine St. Bridge over the Eisenhower wasn’t some main, vital artery, but just another two lane bridge, one of many, on the long march the Expressway took to the western suburbs. Clearing it would be good but wasn’t vital to the commerce of the city or of ambulances getting to any nearby hospitals. A few people might be home late for dinner. This was nowhere near a crisis situation. Yet. They needed to help prevent that if they could.

  The woman nearest to them wore a clerical collar and a black tunic. She stepped forward and held out her hand, “I’m Marjorie Zelvin.” She pointed behind her. “Several members of my congregation are here. We keep hearing rumors. That attendees of the conference are dead, perhaps even Mr. Bettencourt, one of the organizers. We need to be heard. Attention needs to be paid.”

  Fenwick asked, “How did you know there might be a murder here and who it might be?”

  Again people held up phones which now showed the same anchor on the local television news that Molton had shown them back at the station. Turner sighed to himself. Half the city was probably rife with impossible rumors. He realized it would be absolutely moronic to start in on any of these people much less accuse them of something or treat them as suspects. Anyone with a phone with access to the Internet could have heard any number or rumors. If they were going to treat everyone who heard the rumors as a suspect, they’d have to go back and start their interrogations with Molton, Wilson, and Roosevelt.

  Fenwick said, “Perhaps you could help us out.”

  Marjorie Zelvin looked like a modern spokesperson, trying hard to look young, with long blonde hair that was probably dyed, more makeup than a fashion model in high season. She had
a shrill voice.

  Turner knew you didn’t start situations with the public with people you chose. You dealt with those you had. He said, “Let’s talk over here.”

  Turner, Fenwick, and the cleric shuffled a few feet away from the crowd.

  Fenwick lowered his voice. “It will help us if you and these officers can work something out. We need to get to a crime scene. After that, maybe we can do more talking.”

  Zelvin said, “We won’t be silenced. We need to know what’s going on. It isn’t only the police who want peace.”

  Fenwick gritted his teeth. “Have you talked with the Commander of the local District?”

  “He’s been less than helpful.”

  Fenwick said, “Let see if we can’t get a few people from the local District over here. They’re in charge of local crowd control. They’d be able to help you most.”

  “We can’t just deal with you?”

  “We have jobs to do,” Fenwick said.

  “So there has been murder done! Ha! You can’t conceal it.”

  “We know that,” Turner said. “Right now, we want to do what’s best for your people. Find out what will help the most and see how we can accommodate you.”

  Fenwick brought two of the local beat cops forward and introduced them to Zelvin and the others nearby. They began to talk. Fenwick turned his bulk and began to trundle away. Turner saw more cell phones out for video and pictures. He followed his partner.

  Turner no longer marveled at his gruff partner’s ability to calm tough situations. He’d seen it numerous times. Maybe it was his bulk, or air of command. Certainly here, it was his, or both their, status of newly-minted hero-dom that calmed everything.

  A man in a tie and sport coat rushed up to them. Even though he was on this side of the police line, the detectives were wary. The guy said, “I’m Adam Edberg from the mayor’s office. We can’t have violence.” He pointed to the crowd. “Any such gathering would be a disaster, a disaster waiting to happen, rife with possibilities of violence and civil disorder.”

  Fenwick let out his deepest rumble. “What’s your official role here?”