Turner and Fenwick walked across the alley. They slowed their pace as they entered the yard. Each observed the path to the door and the surrounding area carefully. No sign of blood or of a body having been dragged or carried.
“You know what I hate most about winter?” Fenwick asked as they knocked on the back door of a Queen Anne-style house.
“Snow and cold?”
“That too.” Fenwick pulled at the crotch of his pants, “No, my long winter underwear gives me jock itch.”
“Thanks for sharing.”
A now recognizable Dave McWilliams opened the back door of the house.
“He’s in the kitchen,” McWilliams told them.
Turner stopped for a minute and let the warmth of the home ease into his psyche. Jumping in and out of the cold had been miserable. He accepted a cup of coffee gratefully and let his hands surround the ceramic mug. He left his jacket on for the moment.
He glanced around the kitchen. The floors gleamed. The walls were done in very pale beige and the cabinets in a very muted, very light brown. A cuisinart in one corner. A microwave oven in another. Electric stove. Large refrigerator. Butcher-block table.
The beat cop donned his winter gear and left.
Calvin Hancock, whose home they were in, sat opposite Turner and Fenwick at the table. They thanked him for making the call and being helpful.
“Tell us how you happened to find the body,” Fenwick said.
“I told the others already.”
Hancock was around five-foot-two with spindly arms and a narrow pinched face. Turner didn’t picture him toting around a two-hundred-pound corpse.
Neither loudly nor angrily, Fenwick said, “I don’t like working on holidays when everybody else has off. I was going to miss three football games already today. Now, I’m going to miss at least seven because of this murder. I am not a very friendly person in general, so why don’t you just tell us what happened without the crap, and we can all go home sooner?”
Hancock’s eyes widened at Fenwick whose massive bulk took up a great deal of space in the reasonably large kitchen.
“I am home,” Hancock said.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” Fenwick suggested.
“Surely.”
“Don’t call me Shirley,” Fenwick said.
Hancock looked as if he didn’t know whether he should laugh at Fenwick’s feeble humor or not.
Turner ignored Fenwick’s crack. “Go ahead, Mr. Hancock.”
The man gave a nineteenth-century upper-class British sniff. “Well, around seven this morning I took out the garbage from my party last night. Three of my friends and I have been getting together for dinner at one another’s homes on New Year’s Eve for twenty years. We don’t like to be out on the streets or in crowded bars or at loud, uncivilized parties. One of us always cooks for the others. In the library, over coffee and dessert, we listened to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. We always play that on New Year’s. It’s a memory of when we all went to college. We were so poor—it was the only album in the apartment, the first time we did this. I cleaned last night, but waited until I was going out for the papers today to take out the garbage.
This way I could combine the two trips. I didn’t want to have to don all my winter accoutrements twice if I didn’t have to.”
“What happened in the alley?” Turner asked.
“My dumpster is across the way from the one with the body. I put my debris in my own and began to walk away. I noticed the red spots on the ground. At first I thought they were some kind of champagne or a sauce of some kind. The trail led to the dumpster opposite. The lid was open. I don’t like that in our alley. Those businesses across the way don’t watch for that as much as they should. Even in this weather leaving them open like that will attract vermin. I went over to close it. I reached for the lid and barely glanced in. As you know, the body was right there. I immediately returned here and phoned the police. I hope they still have some newspapers left when I’m finally allowed to go to the store.”
“We’re almost done, Mr. Hancock,” Turner said.
“You know the dead guy?” Fenwick asked.
“Not from what I saw. I didn’t look at the face that much. Who was it?”
“Albert Meade?”
“The judge?”
“You do know him?”
“I know of him. Every gay person who keeps up with the news should know who he is.”
“Who is he?” Fenwick asked.
“Albert Meade is one of the three judges who ruled, the day before Christmas, that the antigay law in Du Page County was legal.”
The name still meant nothing to Turner, but the upheld law did. Du Page County was immediately west of Chicago, known for its rock-ribbed Republicans, and legislators who were well in the running for first prize for being some of the most stupid, ignorant, and narrow-minded elected officials in the country. A year and a half ago the Du Page County Board had passed an ordinance forbidding any business or government body from treating gay people equally.
After the law was passed, outrage and protests had been followed by legal suits. As Hancock had said, the local federal circuit court had ruled last week on the side of the county. More furious protests had followed. Ian had let loose a tirade at their annual Christmas get-together about gays being second-class citizens ending with the declaration that he wasn’t going to go quietly when they came to get him for the concentration camps.
Turner doubted if six people in the country could name more than a few of the Supreme Court justices much less those from lower courts in the circuits.
Calvin Hancock slowly stood up. “Judge Meade is dead! I found the body.” He paused briefly and then an enormous smile crossed his face. “Thank god. I can’t think of a dead person I’d rather speak evil of.” The man almost capered around the room. “Wait until I tell everyone. I’ll be a celebrity. I hope I’m on every talk show. Oprah, I’m ready for my close-up.” Calvin hummed several bars of “Ding-dong the Witch Is Dead.”
Turner understood the feeling. He wondered about the implications of him being gay and investigating the murder. Maybe he should dismiss himself from the case. He could never hope to be objective.
Fenwick said, “Mr. Hancock, I’ve never seen anyone happier to see someone dead.”
Calvin smiled at them. “You think my being happy makes me a suspect?”
“The thought crossed my mind.”
“Forget it. I’m a lawyer. I know precisely what I’m saying. If you’re going to arrest everyone in the city, or even the country for that matter, who is happy about this piece of shit being dead, you’ll have to haul in every faggot in three thousand miles and some in foreign countries, too.”
“But you knew who he was after we said his name.”
“I’m a lawyer and a gay activist. I follow all these cases carefully. I didn’t file the brief in this instance, but I’m head of the local Gay Lawyers Guild. If my being happy he’s dead is going
to get brutality from the cops, I’m ready. I dare you to try anything with me. When they come to take me away in the middle of the night, I will not go quietly.”
“Nobody’s taking anybody to concentration camps,” Fenwick said. “We’re just trying to get some answers.”
“And you got some. All you’re going to get. I told you what happened. You want to know how I feel about him being dead? Like the Jews in the concentration camps must have felt when told that Hitler was dead. Every gay person you talk to will feel the same way.”
When they got in the car and got the heater going as best they could, Fenwick asked, “Is that how you feel?”
“What?”
“Happy that he’s dead.”
“I don’t have a history of knowing about him like Hancock did, but I’d be lying if I didn’t think this was one less homophobic asshole on the planet. Hard for me not to be pleased about that.”
“You gonna ask to be taken off the case?”
“Ethically, I don’t think I have a choice.”
“You take yourself off, you’re going to have to do a lot of explaining. By now half the Area Ten personnel know that a prominent judge bought it in the city and that we got the case. People will want to know why you want off. If you don’t say anything, they’ll speculate. If you do tell, you risk repercussions. Commander Poindexter is probably okay and most of the detectives, but I don’t know about this temporary commander we’ve got. Look what happened when Ben called. Whoever wouldn’t help him yesterday is still working in the station. He almost certainly has friends who feel the same way.”
“Being in or out of the closet, now or ever, is not going to make a difference in my being on a case or not.”
Fenwick was quiet a minute then said, “Sorry.”
“Forget it. I understand what you said, and it’s all too possible. The main questions is how can I work on a murder case
of someone I’m not sorry is dead? The killer probably deserves a medal.”
“You can’t quit the case. What if they assign me Carruthers as a partner?”
“Just shoot him and leave him in a dumpster. If someone bothers to report it, any cops would take one look and walk away.”
Carruthers was the curse of the Area Ten day shift. He’d spent the week before Christmas with his wife and two kids in Hawaii. To the surprise of no one, he’d returned to work on Christmas Eve in a Day-Glo, flower-print shirt. Everyone had studiously ignored him.
“I wish the commander wasn’t on vacation,” Fenwick said. “He’d be all right with it. You can’t just up and quit a case.”
They located the local beat cop in charge of coordinating the neighborhood canvass. Turner and Fenwick asked about the status of the questioning.
They had gotten to about half of the neighbors, but to only a few of the businesses. Most of the latter were closed. Many of the bars would open in a few hours, especially ones with televisions tuned to the many football games of the day. No one interviewed so far had seen anything in the alley.
Turner and Fenwick walked quickly down the alley for two blocks south and then north for a block and a half where the large bulk of Children’s Hospital prevented the alley from going through any farther in that direction. They also walked around the entire immediate block.
As they made their neighborhood survey, the day seemed to be getting colder not warmer. By the time they were done, even the feeble warmth of the car felt good.