Dante's Poison Read online

  I caught myself and shook my head. Self-pity wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I needed to come up with a plan. It was still a safe assumption that Gallagher’s death was related to the story he was working on, but following up on that angle would have to await whatever further information Welsh could dig up for me—if indeed any still existed. Discovering the identity of the client Jane had been arguing about with Gallagher that night was similarly impractical at this juncture. I could look up all the companies she represented, but even with Bjorn’s help I couldn’t very well go knocking on the doors of executive suites across the city, much less expect anyone to disclose what secrets they had imparted to their trusted trial counsel. I could only hope that continuing to investigate would eventually lead me to some answers. In the meantime, there was another gap in my knowledge that needed filling, and I thought I knew just the person who could do it.

  A short while later I was passing under the shadow of the Joan Miró sculpture on my way into the County Building. Originally called The Sun, the Moon and One Star, its title was later changed to Chicago. I didn’t understand either name, since the only thing the artwork brought to mind was a huge table fork. It stood directly across from the even larger Chicago Picasso, which journalist Mike Royko once famously said looked like a giant insect about to eat a much smaller, weaker one. Another wag had proposed replacing it with a statue of Ernie Banks. My own take was that Picasso had simply liked a good joke.

  As luck would have it, the man I had come to see was in, awaiting the jury’s return in the latest murder case involving a schoolchild mowed down by gang crossfire—Assistant State’s Attorney Tony Di Marco. A thirty-year veteran of the department, Di Marco was often called “a lawyer’s lawyer,” though in my opinion he was more aptly described as “a shark’s shark.” Di Marco had conducted my first, eminently forgettable cross-examination, and while his tactics cut more corners than an upholsterer, I respected his ability. In his hands a hostile witness’s smirking confidence was quickly reduced to pitiable insecurity and an urgent desire to flee the witness stand as quickly as their legs would carry them. I knew this because I’d been there. Beyond that, although we shared the same ethnicity, we got along together about as well as Frazier and Ali.

  “Dottore,” he exclaimed as I was being shown into his office. “So nice of you to drop by. To what do I owe the pleasure?” He came over and pumped my arm in a fake show of hospitality. “Oh, dear, look at you. Did you fall down? You really ought to think about getting a dog one of these days.”

  “I’d like to, but it might mistake you for a rodent. And stop pretending you didn’t hear.”

  “About the mugging, you mean?” he said, returning to his seat and leaving me standing. “Yeah, what a shame. I haven’t been able to get over to the hospital because of this trial, but I’m planning on it as soon as the jury comes back. How’s Hallie doing?”

  “She’s making progress,” I said, acutely aware of my own absence from her side.

  “There’s one thing that’s got us all puzzled, though,” Di Marco said.

  “Like who went after her?”

  “No, like why she hangs out with you in the first place. I mean, a beautiful girl like that. A lot of the guys here think it must be a mothering instinct. Me, I have a different theory.”

  “Go ahead. I know you won’t be able to keep it to yourself.”

  “She’s a sucker for men in black.” He laughed himself silly over that one while I groped around for a chair. I realized I hadn’t removed my sunglasses as I usually did when I came indoors, but decided to leave them on as a gesture of hostility.

  “So what can I do for you?” Di Marco asked. “Besides refer you to Human Services?”

  “Gee, Tony, I hate it when you get all mushy on me like that. I was hoping you might be willing to share some information.”

  “About what?”

  “About another former colleague.”

  “Depends on what you want to know.”

  I figured I had no choice but to level with him, explaining everything that had happened since Hallie and I were attacked. When I was through, Di Marco’s attitude had undergone what for him was a sea change.

  “OK,” he said. “I’ve heard enough. You’ve been square with me, so I’ll return the courtesy. Normally, my lips would be sealed tight. There’s an unwritten code here—what goes on in the office stays in the office. But I don’t like it that some cazzone went after an ex-prosecutor, or that the prick took advantage of your situation to pull it off. Jokes are one thing, but beating up a blind man is going too far.”

  I wasn’t enamored of his reasoning but bit back a retort in the interest of learning what he could tell me.

  Di Marco went on. “I’m not saying I feel sorry for you—you’re too much like me to earn anyone’s sympathy—and I doubt we’re ever going to be friends, but I’m going to put aside our differences for the time being. Here’s the deal, though. You can’t say a word of this to anyone—and I do mean anyone. That woman is poison, and I can’t be taking the chance she’ll find out it was me who squawked. So if I tell you what you want to know, you have to make like Deep Throat and not repeat it to a soul. Capisci?

  “I understand,” I said. “The penalty for violating omertà is death.”

  Di Marco chuckled evilly. “You’ve got that right. OK, it all goes back to when we were starting out in ’95 . . .”

  He proceeded to tell me the story of how he, Jane, and another junior assistant, James O’Hara, were thrown together in a shared office and became comrades of a sort. “I’m not using the word ‘friends’—at least not where Jane was concerned. She was always stuck up, didn’t like to consort with the mere mortals among us, and was always critical of colleagues who didn’t meet her exalted standards. But when you’re spending all hours of the day and night in a twelve-by-twelve office space, you get to know people. Jimmy was a different story. A great guy, always willing to help out. Everyone in the place liked him.”

  The office pairing was fortuitous in another way. All three of the young lawyers proved well suited to their jobs and were promoted virtually in lockstep for the next several years, each of them eventually landing in the felony-crimes division. “From a raw-talent standpoint, Jane was undeniably the best, and I’m not saying that with any false modesty,” Di Marco said. “I probably came next, and Jimmy . . . well, he was one of those guys who could have outshined us both if he hadn’t been so nice. His trouble was not being able to turn anyone down. The supervisors love a guy like that, and he was always up to his eyeballs in files. When that happens, you can’t help getting a little sloppy. There were a couple of complaints, defense lawyers claiming that he didn’t turn over exculpatory material on time, but they always bitch about that and nobody could ever find proof that it was deliberate—just a busy guy falling behind on his paperwork.

  “Fast-forward ten years to ’05 when the then First Assistant was about to retire and the chief was looking for a replacement. All three of us put our names in, but I had to withdraw because my wife got sick. Jane should have been the front-runner based on her record, but you know how office politics are: nobody ever votes for the person they think is the best for the job, just who they think will go easiest on them. For the reasons I’ve mentioned, Jane was never very popular among the staff attorneys, especially the ones who punched the clock every day at five, and everyone figured there’d be hell to pay if she landed the job. Meanwhile, there was Jimmy, always a good sport and never a harsh word to say about anyone. When the tide started to turn in his favor, you could tell Jane was furious, though she kept a tight smile on her face the whole time. That’s when the shit hit the fan.”

  I had a bad feeling I knew where this was going. “What shit?”

  “That reporter pal of Jane’s—Gallagher. Got his hands on some old dirt about an informant whose priors—convictions, that is—weren’t disclosed to defense counsel in a capital case. A very big no-no under the discovery rules. If it hadn’
t been for the moratorium on the death penalty signed by the governor, the defendant would have bought the ranch on death row.”

  I remembered the story now from my Internet research. It was one of Gallagher’s last big breaks, leading to reversal of the conviction and calls for disciplinary action against the prosecutor responsible for not coming forth with the information.

  “You can guess who the ASA on the case was,” Di Marco said.

  “Your friend Jimmy.”

  “Uh-huh. Ruined his chances for the promotion and almost got him fired. That didn’t clear the way for Jane, though. Nobody would say it—and I’m not claiming it now, you understand—but everyone assumed they knew who Gallagher got his information from. Folks started thinking back and remembered a few other times when Gallagher seemed to have the inside track on departmental matters. After that, no one would have anything to do with Jane. My boss realized he had a problem and hired someone from the outside. Jane quit and we all said good riddance.”

  “And Jimmy, what happened to him?”

  “That’s the worst part of the story. The stress of the investigation and all the haranguing in the press were too much for him.”

  “Was he forced to quit, too?”

  “I wish. Poor bastard had a congenital heart condition. Nothing too serious so long as he remembered to take his medication.”

  I had another ugly premonition about where this was headed.

  “He missed a couple of his pills and had a massive coronary right at his desk.”

  I had barely begun to digest this new piece of information when my phone starting ringing.

  “Excuse me,” I told Di Marco.

  The caller was a clearly worked-up Bjorn. “You won’t believe what I’ve got to tell you. I think I’ve cracked the case,” he said over what sounded like a car phone, the posh accent for once abandoned or forgotten. “Where are you?”

  “At the County Building, talking to my new amico,” I said, lowering my sunglasses and winking over at Di Marco.

  “Good. Pick you up in five at the southeast corner of Washington and Clark,” he barked, ringing off before I could say another word.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said to Di Marco. “But one last question. Was your friend Jimmy’s body autopsied?”

  “Of course. That’s how they knew he’d stopped taking his heart pills. ME could tell from the relative absence of the stuff in his bloodstream. And the standard tox screen didn’t turn up anything else.”

  That didn’t rule out all poisonous substances. A “standard” tox screen mainly looks for evidence of opiates. But given the findings, the ME’s conclusion seemed solid enough. I thanked Di Marco and told him I owed him one.

  “Damn straight you do. And don’t forget—stai zitto.”

  We said our ciaos, and a few minutes later I was standing on the street downstairs, guarding my perimeter and daring anyone to lay a hand on me with a stony glare. Bjorn pulled up and tooted the horn—shave and a haircut, two bits (or maybe I should say, two bob)—and pushed open the passenger door, sending out a whiff of his exuberant aftershave. I climbed what seemed like a small cliff into the Land Rover, which idled like a restlessly slumbering elephant. Waylon Jennings pumped from the speaker system.

  We swung south and then west in the direction of the Kennedy Expressway.

  “Is now an opportune time to tell me where we’re going?” I asked.

  “I thought we might do a little electronics shopping,” Bjorn said.

  He turned down the music and proceeded to tell me what he had found out in the last twenty-four hours. The miles sped by quickly as he filled me in.

  “You wanted to find out who was behind that motion for exhumation of the body. I was thinking about where to start when I remembered that big dispute at O’Hare last year. You hear tell of it?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Well, the city’s been trying to expand the airport for some time and figured they had a way to do it. Only problem was the plans for a new runway ran right through a hundred-year-old cemetery, which didn’t go over well with the families of the folks buried there. They said no to disinterring their loved ones, so the city politely condemned the land. The families fought back with a lawsuit that went all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court.”

  I was glad I’d missed that cheery item. “Who won?”

  “I’m surprised you have to ask. They just finished shipping off the last of the remains last week. Anyway, it got me thinking about Gallagher—wouldn’t they have had to notify his next of kin or something before digging him up? So I went back to the probate-court records and looked up the name of Gallagher’s executor, an attorney named Gene Polanski. The name rang a bell, so I did some further checking and guess what? Polanski is the same guy Gallagher’s nephew used when he was trying to shut down that Best Buy.”

  “Go on,” I said impatiently.

  “I figured it couldn’t hurt to have a chat with him, so I popped by his office on Wells—seedy little space right by the ‘L’ tracks—and tried to get an audience. He was there—I could hear him yammering on the phone inside—but his secretary pretended he’d just left for lunch. I thought that was odd, and she was a nice-looking bird, so I invited her out to drinks after work. I give her points for not spilling the beans until we got back to my place that night.”

  “You can spare me the details of the conquest,” I said, not wanting to imagine similar romantic adventures with Hallie. “What’d she have to say?”

  “Polanski engineered the whole thing. He called on an old pal of his, a guy in the State’s Attorney’s office, and got him to initiate the exhumation request just so Polanski could show up and acquiesce in it.”

  “That seems like a rather roundabout way of going at it.”

  “Exactly. You see what it means?”

  I admit that at this point I was utterly baffled. “No, but I’m looking forward to your penetrating analysis.”

  “Let’s say Urquhart wants to knock off his uncle for the insurance money. Being Gallagher’s only heir, he’d have to know how quickly suspicion would fall on him. So he decides to make it look like a heart attack. But it can’t stay a heart attack forever if Urquhart is to collect under the double-indemnity clause. Eventually it has to be discovered to be a homicide.”

  “OK,” I said, still at sea.

  “He doesn’t demand an autopsy right away because that would look too obvious. Instead, he waits until after the funeral, and then engineers it so that the exhumation request looks like it’s coming from a state official. The beauty of it is that by the time the ME gets around to autopsying the corpse, the stomach contents have decomposed enough that no one can say exactly when Gallagher was poisoned. And, to be sure no one pins the murder on him, Urquhart uses a substance that will quickly lead the police to his uncle’s lover.”

  I thought it sounded too convoluted but went along with his reasoning. “So you’re saying Urquhart framed Jane for the murder?”

  “Bingo!” Bjorn said in triumph.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Wouldn’t the plan depend on his knowing about Lucitrol and its health hazards for someone like his uncle?”

  “That’s easy. Jane’s victory in the Atria lawsuit was all over the news, and anyone who watches ten minutes of television would have seen the drug advertised multiple times with all of its warnings. They’re very direct about saying someone with heart disease—not to mention a dozen or so other conditions—should not take Lucitrol.”

  He had a point. In fact, I thought wryly, given the amount of dire information about designer drugs circulating on the airwaves, it was surprising more people didn’t think of bumping off their loved ones in a like fashion. “All right, but if it was a frame job, how did Urquhart know that Jane and Gallagher would be together that night?”

  “That’s easy,” Bjorn said. “I saved the best bit of information for last.”

  I gave him an inquisitive look.

  “You can’t just show up a
nd ask the Circuit Court to exhume a body—there has to be a reason. In this case, the ASA had an affidavit, conveniently signed by a close associate of Gallagher’s.”

  “OK, you’re killing me,” I said.

  “It was Sparks—Lucy Sparks—Gallagher’s fiancée.”

  We passed the rest of the forty-five-minute drive in near silence, while Bjorn zipped in and out of truck traffic to the beat of Rockin’ Country Rebels and I fidgeted in my seat. What he’d told me made sense in an Occam’s Razor sort of way—wasn’t the simplest answer usually the right one?—but Urquhart as his uncle’s killer didn’t begin to explain all the other strange doings in the case, beginning with Jane and Gallagher’s quarrel on the night he died. I was sure their argument had something to do with his death, along with whatever information Jane had wiped from Gallagher’s computer. And then, of course, there was the attack on Hallie and me and the anonymous note. If Bjorn’s theory was correct, Urquhart would have had to be behind both, but to what end? Once the police had fingered Jane for the poisoning, his best course was to lie low and wait, not attract possible attention to himself by stalking and then setting upon two strangers. Even if Urquhart and the Luvabull were somehow in cahoots, there were too many loose ends involved in Bjorn’s theory.

  Urquhart’s main store was situated in Orland Park, a community emblematic of the haphazard planning of many Chicago suburbs. Once covered with working farmland, it now consisted of miles of strip malls and housing developments, with nothing so petroleum-unfriendly as a sidewalk connecting them. According to Bjorn, the current cash crop was foreclosures; nearly every gated community we passed had a sign up. E-Z Electronics stood a mile from what passed as the town center at the back of an empty parking lot. Bjorn told me that Urquhart spent most of his days there, hunched over his sales reports and brooding over the Mom and Pop store Armageddon that was online retailing.