Fenwick pulled off Lake Shore Drive at Wacker and took it west. Lower Wacker Drive, one of the fastest ways around downtown Chicago, made a half circle a level below surface streets from southwest to northeast around the Loop. Open on one side to the Chicago River, the other side contained a warren of underground nooks, crannies, and deadfalls to crawl into, fall down, or die in—the basements, garbage bins, and secret recesses of the steel and concrete behemoths that soared above the streets.
They found the corner Roman Ayres had told them Carl Schurz or his dope dealer might inhabit. They saw several abandoned refrigerator cartons, wind-whipped bits of cardboard, plastic paper wrapping, and torn fast-food containers around the darkened area. The lights on lower Wacker Drive seemed more to infringe on the darkness than to provide illumination. They found the opening Ayres had indicated.
The passage was dim and sloped slightly downward. The wind died at the entrance to the narrow walkway. They stepped over the leavings of the homeless: rolled-up newspapers, grime-encrusted towels, rusting outdoor grills, yellow-and-brown-stained mattresses, empty tin cans, cold embers of fires never warm enough in the first place to keep the Chicago winter at bay.
About twenty feet farther on they came to an opening. If people
were doing drugs, it wasn’t here. This space may have been out of the direct wind, but it was still bitterly cold. Near the rear of this collective hovel, an air shaft led up to street level far above. It let in the only light, street dimness from high overhead. Garbage covered the entire floor of the thirty-by-twenty living area. As far as Turner could tell, this could be the Ritz for the homeless. Fenwick and Turner began poking their way through the debris. Turner didn’t expect to find anything, at the same time he feared what they might. Near the back they found a baby carriage a child might use for its dolls. Inside were tattered doll-size clothes neatly folded.
“My butt is almost frozen,” Fenwick said.
“Let’s at least hunt through the larger mounds of stuff. Hate to think the kid crawled in here tonight.”
“I don’t like it that no one else is around,” Fenwick said. “Makes me shiver, and not from the cold.”
Fenwick began prodding the largest mound of debris in the corner under the best light while Turner unearthed mounds of garbage near the baby carriage.
Fenwick said, “Carl Schurz is going to make a very poor witness.”
“He was probably lying,” Turner said. “Won’t be surprised if he denies everything.”
“Lying witnesses I don’t like,” Fenwick said, “but dead ones depress me. You better come here.” Fenwick pulled away several layers of cardboard.
The body looked like it was sleeping peacefully. Turner took off his gloves, leaned down, and touched the face. Carl Schurz was dead.
Fenwick returned to the car to call for backup. Turner remained standing over the body. “You poor kid,” he muttered at the body and the cement walls. “Nobody ever loved you enough, or maybe there was never enough love to give you, or maybe you weren’t very lovable. And there was nothing any of us could have done about it.” The cold seeped into his consciousness
and prevented further emotional speculation. Almost automatically, Turner began the investigation.
Turner and Fenwick and the technicians inspected the area carefully. They found several needles and less than an ounce of marijuana. They could find no wounds on Schurz’s body. The ME said he’d get to the autopsy as quickly as possible.
“I thought Lower Wacker cleared out when it got this cold,” Turner said to one of the uniformed cops.
“Usually does. We know a lot of drugs go down around here. We try to clean it out. They always find some place. They seem to be able to sense if something has gone wrong.”
“Did he die from the cold or someone kill him?” Turner asked the ME.
“Not sure. Probably cold, just like a lot of the other homeless.”
“Maybe he just got tired of living,” Turner said. “Crawled into a hole and let himself die.”
“We’re all freezing our butts off,” one of the Crime Lab people said. “Let’s blow this dump. He was just a homeless dead kid.”
“He’s not just a homeless dead kid,” Turner said. “His life was important. It made a difference that he was alive.” Turner felt awkward defending Carl Schurz. He also wished that what he’d said was true.
Turner went through the pockets. He pulled out a wallet. He would inspect it back at Headquarters.
In the car on the way back to Area Ten, Turner said, “I’m really pissed. He shouldn’t be dead. There was no reason for him to be on the streets. There are places he could have gone for help.”
“You’re taking this hard,” Fenwick said.
“He was a troubled gay kid. He didn’t have to die. He was bright, nice looking. Not that long ago, he was an innocent little kid, playing with toys, asking somebody to read him a book, trying to get a little attention in the best way he could, just like
the rest of us. I’m going to see Ian. Maybe he knows something about what happened.”
“Why not call him and talk first?” Fenwick asked. “He’d have phoned us if he’d seen the kid.”
“I guess I’ll call.”
“Paul, why aren’t we considering Ian a suspect?”
Paul stared out the window in silence.
“Paul?”
“I’ve thought of it. He isn’t the killer.”
“You mean he didn’t do it, or you hope he didn’t do it?”
“Both.”
“He’s known a lot of information from mysterious sources. I don’t like mysterious sources.”
“I know,” Paul said. “My years of friendship with him and all that I know about him says he wouldn’t kill.”
“Anybody’s capable of it.”
“Yeah.”
Fenwick let the subject drop. Back in the squad room, someone had had pizza delivered. Turner tried a piece and almost choked on it. Even Fenwick found his prodigious appetite blunted.
Turner went through the wallet. There were two driver’s licenses, both made out to Carl Schurz. One said he was sixteen, the other that he was twenty-one. One address was for Lubbock, Texas, the other for Rapid City, South Dakota. He found an identification card for the Kennedy Federal Building. Schurz had two dollars in change. No social security card, no credit cards, no voter registration, no medical card, no pictures, no hidden compartments with keys or addresses.
He called both cities. Lubbock had one listing for a Jack Schurz. Turner realized it was near midnight, but he phoned anyway. The person who answered said he didn’t know any Carl Schurz. He sounded like he’d been asleep. He gave brief, terse answers to Turner’s questions. The Rapid City operator had no listing for any Schurz. Turner wondered—had the parents moved away, had a smart kid gotten two fake IDs? He suspected
that the one that identified him as sixteen and dated the year before was the accurate one.
Turner tried to do paperwork, but his mind wouldn’t focus. He was used to death, but Carl Schurz was different. He’d touched him, held him, felt the kid’s needs. He didn’t think he could have ever met them.
Turner gave up writing reports. He picked up and began reading one of the dissents the judge had written in an abortion case. After two paragraphs he put it down. He wasn’t sure if it made sense or not. Right now, he didn’t care.
Molton entered the room. He said, “I heard you got bad news.”
“We’ve had a fucked-up day,” Fenwick said.
“It’s tough to lose a witness in a murder case,” Molton said.
“We’re not sure what he knew,” Fenwick said.
They discussed the case with him for several minutes. After he left, Turner tried calling Ian at home. There was no answer, so he tried his private number at the paper. Ian picked up on the third ring.
“It’s Paul. Carl Schurz is dead.”
Ian was silent.
“You there?” Turner asked.
“Yeah.” Ian’s voice was subdued. “What happened?”
Turner explained.
Ian said, “There was no reason that kid had to die.”
“I know.”
“What can I do?”
“I don’t know. I wanted to tell you.”
“Thanks. I doubt if anybody knows any family. If I can’t find anyone, I’ll try and work it out so that he gets some kind of decent burial. Maybe his parents put out a missing kid’s notice?”
“I put in a search on him. Nothing turned up. If they threw him out, they wouldn’t turn in a report.”
“This is such shit,” Ian said. “Goddamn kids don’t need to die.”
“I’m tired and depressed,” Turner said.
They were silent for several moments. Finally Ian said, “How badly does this hurt your investigation?”
“I’m not sure. Geary says the judge was at Au Naturel. Schurz confirms and adds information about the Federal Building. Now he’s gone. The son gave us more details. Maybe we wouldn’t need Schurz after all. Hurting the case is a pain in the ass, but that boy should not have died.”
Ian agreed, but there was nothing either one could do at the moment.
“Why are you still at the paper?” Turner asked.
“Working on the Meade case. I’ve been at it eighteen hours a day. If you need to talk, let’s meet.”
“In an hour or so. I’m going to stop at the autopsy.”
Turner thanked him and hung up. He stared at the papers strewn on the top of his desk, the remnants of pizza next to the space heater by his feet, then back at Fenwick. His friend met his gaze.
“Time to go home,” Fenwick said. “We’re not going to get any more done tonight.”
“I guess.”
Fenwick had never heard his friend sound so defeated. “You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, sure.”
Fenwick gazed at him carefully. “That sounds more like you mean you’re not okay, but you don’t want to talk about it.”
Turner really liked Fenwick, but at the moment he wanted to talk to a gay person about what had happened to Carl Schurz. Fenwick was a good friend, probably his best nongay friend, but sometimes you needed to talk to one of your own, someone who had shared the strains of being a gay person in America at the tail end of the twentieth century.
Turner gave Fenwick a brief smile. “I’m going to be fine. You’re right. Let’s call it a day. I’m going to stop at the morgue, see if they started the autopsy.”
“Want me to go with?”
“If they find anything important, I’ll call you.”
Outside the wind was dead calm. Turner could feel the cold against his face. The weather bureau predicted the temperature would hit twenty below zero by midnight but then begin to climb before morning. The prediction was for near freezing by the end of the weekend.
After he started the motor, Turner shivered in his car for a few minutes. He watched Fenwick pull away. He needed to get home. He hadn’t seen Jeff or Ben all day. Ben would have long since picked up Jeff and brought him back to the house. He wanted to feel the warmth of his home, his family, and the arms of his lover, but he couldn’t get Carl Schurz out of his mind.
Turner drove over to Cook County Morgue. He walked past the half-tile, half-glass entry room. A body lay there on a gurney waiting for transportation to the back. He walked down the corridor toward the autopsy room. As always, the room was pristine clean except where they were doing the current autopsy. Every surface was gleaming stainless steel.
The ME working on the body looked up. It was Hamilton Trout, who was short, stout, black-haired, and enormously competent. At the moment Hamilton was holding a liver in his left hand. Turner looked at the face on the table. It was Schurz. The body cavity gaped open. The naked corpse looked waxen, cold, dead. The ME weighed the liver and placed it carefully on a table.
“This one yours?” Hamilton asked.
“Yeah.” Turner wasn’t exceptionally squeamish after all these years of viewing autopsies. He was not ready, however, to jump into a vat of corpses either. He approached the body. He noted the smell. Same as all the others, chemicals and body odors.
“You know how he died?” Turner asked.
“Think so. Freezing was the immediate cause of death, but not the first cause.”
“Come again?”
“Kid was on his way to being very dead. He’d taken enough
pills to put himself away. If somebody would have found him before he froze, they probably could have saved him. A little stomach pump and he’s fine. He took more than enough to ease whatever pain he was in, crawled into the cold, fell asleep, and died.”
“Killed himself.”
“Tried to. Cold finished it for him.”
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty much. I’ve got more tests to run, but that’s my best guess now. I doubt if it’s going to change. Does the way he died make a difference to what you’re working on?” As he spoke, the ME began examining and weighing more organs. Sometimes he paused to cut off bits of tissue to be labeled, stored, and examined more thoroughly later.
“No, no difference. It bothers me that there’s another dead gay kid.”
“He was gay?” Hamilton pointed at the body. “Can’t tell it from the corpse.”
“No difference when we’re dead. He a drug addict?”
“No needle tracks anywhere. I’ll have to check for other drugs. You know this kid?”
“Only briefly as a witness.”
“Some bother you more than others.”
“Yeah. Something else comes up, let me know.”
“Sure.”
Paul met Ian at the Melrose Restaurant on Broadway. They sat in the corner front booth. Watching the parade of hot men stroll past was one of the great joys of a summer evening spent in this booth. Now, at midnight on a bitterly cold Saturday in January, the streets were mostly deserted. Traffic was sparse and pedestrians nonexistent.
Ian was already there. Paul tossed his hat, coat, gloves, and scarf onto the seat. He ordered soup and salad.
After the waitress left, he turned to Ian and said, “Schurz committed suicide.”
Ian shook his head, stirred his coffee, sipped it. Put it down, dumped a packet of sugar in it, and stirred again. He said, “Too many gay kids die.” For years, Ian had been working on a series of articles on gay kids and suicide. Some studies indicated that from thirty to forty percent of teens who tried to kill themselves were gay. Ian hadn’t been able to prove or disprove that statistic, but he’d researched the deaths of a lot of gay kids over the years.
“You knew this one personally,” Turner said.
“That makes it all the harder. It’s depressing and makes me angry. I thought about it since you called. You know, this is the first one in all these years that I actually knew.”
“Really?”
“All the others were statistics. I listened to disembodied voices of relatives over phone lines trying to cope with tragedy. Sometimes I got overworked cops in distant cities or reporters trying to make their own headlines and deadlines. A few people I contacted, straight and gay, were sensitive to the needs of frightened, suicidal gay teens. These kids are drowning in misery before they’re twenty. They’re mostly invisible, and they die with nothing to show for their lives.”
“Mike Meade’s fondest wish was that he not be gay,” Turner said.
“He told you that?”
“Yep.”
“Hell of a world we live in. Too many gay kids learn self-hatred.”
Their food arrived. “I didn’t find much among Carl Schurz’s things,” Turner said. He explained what little he had found in the wallet. “I tried calling both addresses. Whether they were fake or real, nobody at the other end knew a Carl Schurz. Maybe the one in Lubbock wasn’t fake. It was kind of late to be calling. Guy thought it was strange when I asked him his age. He asked me if I was really a cop. Finally told me he was twenty-two.”
“Not going to be the daddy.”
“No. I wonder where Carl was really from? Where are his parents? Will they ever know he’s dead?”
“I never knew where he came from. He kept a lot of secrets. When you’re a gay kid, you learn from an early age how to hide important feelings, important information. You know that as well as I do. A gay or lesbian kid may not be a consummate liar, but, unless they are very lucky, they better be very good at disguise.”
They each ate for a few minutes. The soup, as always, was delicious. The warmth revived Turner slightly.
Ian said, “I didn’t find out anything new today. I couldn’t find Carl. Maybe if I would have …” His voice trailed off. He was silent for a moment then said, “It’s easy to get lost in Chicago. I wonder if he was telling the truth about what he saw on New Year’s Eve.”
“I’d like to find out.”
“My sources are dried up. I’ve called half of my Rolodex and some of those two or three times. I’ve snooped every place I know of in the gay community. Nothing. No Carl today. No information from anybody.”
“That’s about the same as we got today.”
“Maybe if I hadn’t convinced Carl to talk to you, he wouldn’t be dead.”
“Maybe’s can kill you,” Paul said. “You’ve told me that hundreds of times.”
“Just because it’s my excellent advice, doesn’t mean I have to take it.”
“Gay kids are going to keep dying.”
“Yes, and so are gay adults. A teacher friend called the other day. He’d found a note that fell out of a book a kid had left behind in his classroom. The note said that all the kids knew that the teacher was gay, and the boy’s dad said all gay people should have a bullet hole put in their heads. This from a sophomore in high school.”
“Did the teacher report it?”
“He didn’t dare. He’s not openly gay at school.”
“The kids know, but he’s not out?”
“It’s one thing to be gay, it’s another to talk about it. If you tell your administrator, you might force him or her to act.”
Paul nodded. “You know I’m not the kind to feel sorry for myself, but at the moment I sure feel put upon by the world. I’m depressed, and I feel like shit.”
“I know what you mean, but do remember a hefty dose of self-pity can be good for the soul. If you’re not going to feel sorry for yourself, who is, and frankly who is better at feeling sorry for yourself, than you?”
Paul smiled briefly. He finished his food in silence. He took great comfort in the simple closeness of his friend. They paid and left.
At home Paul found Ben asleep on the couch. Quietly, he hung his winter outer garments in the entryway closet. Paul checked on Jeff. He sat on the side of his son’s bed. He stroked Jeff’s hair gently, pulled the covers up carefully, and leaned over and placed a kiss on his son’s forehead.
In the kitchen, he found several messages. One was from Rose Talucci. Another said that Brian had called and sent his love. Paul wished his older son was home. He heard footsteps in the hallway. Moments later Ben walked into the kitchen.
“You’re home?” Ben sounded groggy from sleep.
Paul walked up to his lover. He enfolded him in his arms. Ben returned the embrace. The feel of his lover’s arms on his back, his torso against his own, soothed Paul. This was what he needed—the few moments of human contact. He kept his arm around Ben’s waist as they ascended the stairs to bed. They undressed slowly and slid between the covers. Paul put his head on his lover’s chest. “Just hold me,” he whispered. Ben’s hands rested on his side and back. Paul drew a deep breath. He fell asleep moments later.