The station’s old Grand Concourse with its vaulted ceiling had deteriorated nearly to the point of ruin. Then the train station had been renovated into a mall in the sixties. That retail dream had gone broke in the eighties. None of the store fronts remained as businesses. Tonight, however, music that sounded to Turner like heavy metal rock mixed with a disco beat thundered continuously as they strode down the old main concourse of the building. A crowd of mostly men, but a few women, crammed the interior. All wore leather garments running the gamut from skimpy thongs to heat-defying leather pants and jackets.
“What is this?” Fenwick asked.
“The annual Black and Blue Party,” Slade said.
Turner could have explained to Fenwick about leather fairs and how they worked, but it was better to have Slade go over it.
Dressed in sports coats and ties, the detectives drew stares. Slade quickly led them to a side door to avoid having them walk through any more of the party. Turner caught enough of a glimpse of the outfits and activities to recognize the resemblance of this area of the Black and Blue Party to the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco and the dealer’s room at the International Mr. Leather weekend in Chicago. Lots of butch-looking men and their hangers-on swarmed booths of vendors hawking an immense variety of leather wares and porn.
They entered a dimly-lit corridor with water-stained cement block for walls. Slade spoke. “I’m sure the party had nothing to do with this. I’m sure no one at the party would engage in this behavior. I’m sure there’s some kind of mix-up.”
The small elevator they entered needed to be operated with an old-fashioned hand crank. Slade had to close the wooden slatted doors from the top and bottom. He worked the old-fashioned lever and sent the elevator down.
Fenwick asked, “What’s the Black and Blue Party?”
Slade said, “A leather party. A gay leather party. Are you going to be assholes about that?”
Fenwick asked, “What exactly happens at a Black and Blue Party, and why does it need this much space?”
“Gay people and leather go back decades,” Slade explained. “This is just a chance for those who like it to be together, see each other, attend seminars, hook up, buy some specialty items. We’ve been doing this in Chicago now for four years. This is more refined and less commercial than other leather events around the country. It’s more... intimate.” All the while he talked, Slade twisted his hands together, or rubbed them on his leather pants, or ran them through his ill-arranged comb over.
The elevator rocked slowly down. “How far below the surface is this?” Turner asked.
Slade said, “Several floors at least. We’re going down to some of the earliest parts of the station.” The elevator clanked, rumbled, and jerked as it moved. “This elevator is an antique.”
“Is this the only entrance?” Turner asked.
“This place is a maze,” Slade said. “The original was built before the Great Chicago Fire in 1871. It burned. A lot of the Loop has been raised over the years over the original swamp. You can still find houses with stairs leading up to front doors built above sidewalk level. They didn’t dig this place that far underground, it’s just that the city kept being built up and up and over it. The original building sometimes gets lost in all the additions and renovations. When this was part of the levee district, supposedly there was prostitution going on down here. And then during Prohibition, it’s rumored Al Capone had a speakeasy or one of his headquarters down here.”
“Is any of that true?” Fenwick asked.
“That’s what I read.” Slade shrugged. “I have no idea if it’s true.”
The elevator bumped to a rocky stop. Once they were outside of it, the three of them entered a long hallway. The light came from sconces high on the walls. An immense mural covered one wall. It was done in black and white and featured rough-looking, masculine men. Turner vaguely recognized it.
They passed portals through which they caught glimpses of wavering light and writhing bodies and the continuous thump of more heavy metal music.
“You own this place?” Fenwick asked.
“We rent it for the party every year.”
“Who owns it?”
“I can give you the name and address of the man we deal with. It’ll be with my things in the temporary office we have.”
“How much of the party is down here?” Turner asked.
“We have some specialty rooms on this level, but nothing as far below as the... problem.”
They continued down a long corridor, came upon three switchbacks, followed them. As they moved, the noise from the party above and behind them slowly abated. After the switchbacks, they descended several sets of stairs.
“What’s a specialty room?” Fenwick asked.
Slade faced them from the bottom of a set of steps. He put his hands on his hips. He wore leather pants and a leather vest. The logo of a dragon chomping on a snake caught in its massive jaws adorned his left shoulder. “Look,” Slade said. His hands finally stopped moving. “Let’s get this straight. I’ll tell you anything you want about leather and this party, but I’m sure it has nothing to do with what’s happened.”
Fenwick and Turner exchanged looks. Turned nodded at his partner. Suspects’ fears wouldn’t hinder the investigation in the slightest.
Slade saw the exchange of looks and said, “I’ve put in a call to my lawyer. And there are several attorneys I know, who, I believe, are upstairs now. If I need to, I’ll get them.”
Turner said, “We’re not out to ruin the party or to cause you undue trouble, but we’ve got a corpse to deal with. We’ll cooperate with you, but we’ll need even more cooperation from you.”
“What does that mean?” Slade asked.
Fenwick said, “We may need all the names of all the people attending the party.”
“You’re not going to get the name of everyone who’s at the party. That’s over three thousand people. We can’t have their names in the paper. We can’t have them bothered by the police. This is private property. We were doing nothing wrong. You can’t arrest me.”
“Sure I can,” Fenwick said. “Our dead body trumps any problems you might have.”
Slade turned pale.
Turner soothed, “Mr. Slade, we’ll do what we can to minimize any inconvenience to you.” He also knew that there were very likely to be people in attendance who wouldn’t want it to be known they were at a gay leather fair. This he understood very well.
Slade led them down three more corridors and shallow flights of stairs each less well-lit than the last. The air smelled dank, mixing with an odor of rot. At the end of the last flight of stairs they descended a steep ramp. At the bottom of this the ground flattened out. Slade said, “This is one of the original platforms trains stopped at when the station was built.”
The lighting here was much dimmer than above. They could see perhaps as far as ten feet in front of them. Turner flicked on his flashlight. Hefting his own flashlight, Slade led them farther along. “Nobody from the party is supposed to come down here,” he said. “Hell, I don’t think anybody knows about this area except me and a few of my security people. Plus, I read up on the place. I’m kind of a train buff.”
They strode along the platform. The humidity down there was as stifling as it had been on the street.
“There must be outside openings,” Fenwick said.
The smell became more noxious and with each step grew exponentially. It soon became nearly as oppressive as the humidity. Turner and Fenwick knew what it was: unwashed human mixed with rotting garbage and dead animals. Turner suspected homeless people would know about these areas. He presumed garbage and dead critters of all kinds must have been accumulating for decades. And it wouldn’t take long in the heat and humidity for a corpse to deteriorate.
They turned a corner. A beat cop, Perry Deveneaux, shone his flashlight on their faces.
Deveneaux said, “The dead body is down there.”
Fenwick added the glow of his flashlight to Turner’s. They stepped gingerly forward. Down a short flight of stairs, they could see the corpse. They stopped. They’d wait for the Crime Scene Investigation team to arrive before proceeding.
“Who found the body?” Turner asked.
Slade said, “I did.” His hands began their wandering again rubbing over various bits of his costume and flesh.