An old desk was tucked into a corner in the hallway. Lynch went through it. Checking papers – bank statements, insurance policies, satisfaction of mortgage on the house. All of it pretty vanilla, nothing there. Lynch found a three-hundred-sheet spiral notebook in the center drawer, black cover. A sort of journal, Helen Marslovak’s account of her illness. The diagnosis back in October. Metastasized colon cancer. Deciding pretty much right off not to fight it – no chemo, no surgery – docs having told her there wasn’t much point. Writing about the pain with a kind of gratitude, thankful to know it was coming, to have a chance to put her soul in order. No self-pity that Lynch could sense.

Lynch went to put the notebook back, saw a piece of cardboard in the bottom of the drawer. He pulled it up. On the other side was an eight by ten photo, black and white, Eddie Sr and Hurley the First in the Hurley box at Wrigley, right behind the Cubs on deck circle. Eddie Sr and Hurley were up against the brick wall, leaning on it with their elbows. Ron Santo was standing on the field to the left of the mayor, Don Kessinger over to the right. Son of a bitch, Lynch thought, one of Hurley’s favor shots. Walk into any alderman’s office where the guy’d been around during the first Hurley reign, any mover and shaker in the city, you were gonna see his Wrigley shot. And the ballplayers in the shot, they told it all, in a kind of social ranking system as esoteric as any court ritual at Versailles but one that every politico in Chicago understood. Santo, he was Hurley’s favorite, even more so than Ernie Banks, because Santo was a white guy, and Hurley the First, he didn’t have much use for Schwartzers. Not racism of the white-supremacist type. Just he liked the balance of power the way it was, and the way it was when he took over left the blacks pretty much out of it. You’d see Ernie in a lot of the shots. Ernie had just enough step’n’fetchit in his act to keep Hurley happy. He was the only black guy you’d see, though. Never saw Billy Williams, never saw Fergie Jenkins. If you had Ernie and Santo, that was top drawer. Lynch’s old man had a Wrigley shot, Santo and Huntley, which was hot shit, too. But Lynch’s old man had hauled a lot of water for the Hurley family in his day. Now here’s Marslovak, Streets and San line grunt as far as Lynch could tell, and he’s got Santo and Kessinger? Lynch peeled the photo off the cardboard backing. Date from the developer on the back. July 1971. All these other shots out on the walls, what was this doing face down in the bottom of a desk drawer?

Lynch found an empty manila envelope in the center drawer and tucked the photo inside. Time to drive out to River Forest, to see Uncle Rusty.

CHAPTER 9 – CHICAGO

 

March, 1971

Detective Declan Lynch couldn’t decide. The watch commander told him Riley wanted him on the case, which meant the mayor wanted him on the case, and that was good. But the stiffs were the mayor’s kid and one of the mayor’s go-to guys, which, if Lynch didn’t solve this quick, would be bad.

Wasn’t hard to decide about the crime scene, though. The crime scene was a mess.

There was a lot of blood, and not much of it left in the bodies. Stefanski was spread-eagle on the floor, naked except for what was left of a Dago T. There was a shirt on the floor by his head, a pair of pants in the pool of blood next to him, more clothes strewn all over. The fire ax someone had used on him was still buried in his chest – looked like it was buried all the way into the floor. Stefanski’s chest was completely open, chunks of meat and rib sticking out. Lynch could even see his spine in a spot. He’d taken a good whack or two to the head as well. Just enough face left to know it was him. Must have thrashed around quite a bit – blood was smeared all around his body, smeared on his arms and legs, like he rolled over a time or two. Guess you would, Lynch thought, guy’s chopping you up with an ax. Lynch could see several spots where the ax had bit into the floor.

Junior Hurley was in his shorts, sprawled on the floor at the base of a big wing chair across the room. The top of his head was gone, a bloody wad of skull, hair, and brain lying between the rest of the body and the wall. Some blood on the chair, lots of blood on the floor, Hurley’s blood flowing over to mix with the smeared mess around Stefanski. Blood on the walls, too, where somebody’d used it to write BUTCHER THE PIGS. On the other wall, near Stefanski, RAPES THE PEOPLE. A bloody tie was wadded up on the floor near the graffiti. Must have been what was used for a paintbrush.

Footprints in the blood, too. At least three different shoes that Lynch could see. That diamond pattern on those Converse shoes a lot of kids were wearing. A bigger set, looked like boots of some kind. Something smooth-soled that was smeared around pretty good. Converse guy got around. Lynch could see his prints fading out toward the dining room. Looked like boot guy was the poet – good clear set of his prints by the wall next to Junior where the writing was.

A lot of shit smashed on the floor – a lamp in a mess of pieces, books thrown around, Hurley’s briefcase dumped out, the papers everywhere.

Lynch turned to the uniform watching the door. “Whole place trashed like this?”

“Yeah. We swept the joint when we got here, just making sure it was empty. Not much blood once you get by here, couple footprints in the dining room, but they ripped everything up pretty good.”

“Like they were looking for something?”

“Could be,” said the uniform. “More like they just wanted to. You get to the john, you’ll see somebody ripped off the toilet seat and hung it over the light fixture. What’s the point in that?”

“Anything else?”

“Smelled dope when we got here.”

Lynch took a sniff. “Yeah, a little. OK. ME guys are here, so you and your partner get on the canvas, see if the neighbors got anything.”

First thing the next morning, Lynch met with Dr Thomas Anthony, the ME. Sitting in the glassed-in office Anthony had off the autopsy room, metal furniture, chemical smell. Anthony was a big guy, bald, huge head, which, Lynch knew, was pretty much full of brains.

“Thanks for turning things around so quick. Long night for you guys, I know,” said Lynch.

“At least I’m done for now, detective. I don’t suspect you’ll be sleeping until you have an arrest.”

“I’m hoping you have something to help me out there, doc.”

“To start, you’ve got multiple assailants. Three sets of footprints, definitely contemporaneous because they walked on one another’s tracks a couple of times. At least one of your assailants is likely colored, because we’ve got a couple of Negroid hairs stuck to the ax handle. They were in Stefanski’s blood, so they were deposited while the ax was being used. One set of tracks is from a pair of Converse All-Stars, size twelve. One is from a pair of Red Wing work boots, ten and a half. I’m working on the other one. Smooth soles, heel, more like a dress shoe. Smaller, maybe a nine. We found the butts from two marijuana cigarettes in the room.”

“Wonderful,” said Lynch. “Coloreds and drugs – old man Hurley’s head is gonna explode. Cause of death looks pretty straightforward. Standard ax murder. Not that I ever had an ax murder before.”

“Almost impossible to tell, actually,” said Anthony. “Especially with Stefanski. The damage done with the ax is so severe that if there was any preexisting cause, it was obliterated. There was a mark on one rib, or should I say rib fragment, that didn’t seem to correspond with an ax. But the rib cage and surrounding anatomical context were so disassociated that any findings other than death due to trauma from the ax simply can’t be supported.”

“What are you telling me with this marks-on-the-ribs shit?”

“You saw Stefanski. I don’t have a piece of Stefanski’s ribs or sternum bigger than four inches, and the pieces I have are badly damaged. However, I have one piece of rib, still connected to the sternum, that has a fresh groove in it that doesn’t look like the ax wounds. Again, though, with so much trauma, I can’t do anything but report it as an anomaly.”