Sid Margolies called Area One Homicide at four ten P.M. Saturday to report he had found nothing in the basement of the apartment building on Kedvale Avenue that would link Frank Bremenhoffer to any of the murders. Sid also said he was tired and wanted to go home. He was relieved at the building by another detective who had instructions to keep a tail on Bremenhoffer at all times.
The slow, painstaking police routine began.
Saturday slipped into Sunday and then Monday. It rained on the weekend and was bright and hot again on Monday. A week passed. They had managed to borrow, at one time or another, forty investigators who wearily questioned all the employees of the Halsted Graphics and Printing Company.
Karen Kovac theorized that Frank Bremenhoffer had killed Maj Kirsten because he thought she looked like a whore. He might have killed Christina because a co-worker informed him of her lifestyle.
None of them knew Christina Kalinski though.
In fact, none of them professed to know Frank Bremenhoffer very well. He kept to himself and was considered surly by some of them. When most of the printers played cards on their lunch hour in the back shop, Bremenhoffer read books. Alone.
The twenty-four-hour tail on Bremenhoffer began to give them a full picture of his life.
In the mornings, after work, he usually visited the Courtesy Tap, a little bar on Wells Street under the el tracks, which opened at seven A.M. for the functioning alcoholics who came in with their briefcases and three-piece suits and drank their breakfasts. Frank Bremenhoffer drank beer and sometimes ordered a shot of cheap brandy to go with the beer chaser.
On other mornings he went to the Art Institute and waited until it opened for the morning.
Other times, after visiting the tavern, he went to the movies.
To pornographic movie houses.
And he went home at noon. He apparently lunched with his wife and slept in the afternoon.
He took the El to work at night and did not own a car. On the El train he either read a book or stared out the window at the night city. Sometimes the book was a sensational paperback novel. The only periodical he ever was seen with was Stern, the German newsmagazine.
On Monday, while he was gone, they got a search warrant and permission from the printing company to search his locker at work. It was bare, except for a shop apron and a can of hand cleaner. The apron smelled of gasoline, which a printer explained was used to clean off the type after pulling proof sheets.
Bremenhoffer was merely a lonely man like many others who led a solitary life. He had his favorite tavern, he had his little peculiarities. He was a lover of art apparently; and he saw pornographic movies.
On Sundays Ulla Bremenhoffer went to early mass. Her husband did not accompany her.
Other aspects of the case continued while the investigators probed Bremenhoffer’s life.
The body of Bonni Brighton was shipped to her brother, Bruno, in Van Nuys, California, twelve days after her murder.
Seymour Weiss, fifty-two, was indicted on charges of attempted rape, deviate sexual assault, kidnapping, resisting arrest, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. At the same time Luther Jones, forty-three, was indicted on charges of pandering, kidnapping, deviate sexual assault, resisting arrest.
Seymour Weiss became convinced of the mob’s disfavor and pleaded guilty to a reduced count of imprisonment and felonious assault. He was sentenced to four years in prison, which would make him eligible for parole with a third of the time served. He was sent to the state correctional facility at Colinsville, a minimum-security prison.
Luther Jones pleaded not guilty and eventually stood trial and was convicted on all charges. He was sentenced to twenty-five to forty years in prison at the state maximum-security prison called Stateville, located near the city of Joliet.
The runaway girl found in Weiss’s club was named Ramona Jefferson from Rochester, New York. After the child’s maternal grandmother and guardian refused to assume custody of her, she was institutionalized by order of the family court judge. The court psychiatrist said tests indicated that Ramona Jefferson was probably an imbecile.
There was one further development. A traffic policeman named James McGarrity came to Lieutenant Schmidt one afternoon with a newspaper clipping showing the face of Maj Kirsten. McGarrity said he was certain he had seen Maj Kirsten around the time she was murdered. He had not remembered it before.
Schmidt questioned him, but McGarrity could give him no further information. He could not identify Bremenhoffer.
Jack Donovan kept a loose hold on the investigation but largely left Matt Schmidt alone. At the same time he fielded the weekly reports he had to make to both the state’s attorney and the police superintendent.
The newspapers hounded them all about Bonni Brighton with a ferocity that exceeded that following the murders of Maj Kirsten and Christina Kalinski. Chicago Today, an afternoon paper, began to print a serialization of Bonni Brighton’s unfinished autobiography.
Frank Bremenhoffer broke the camera of one photographer who came to interview him, and after that the reporters mostly left him alone. Besides, he was considered too dull to make good copy.
The police superintendent and the state’s attorney questioned Donovan closely every time they held a session, but there was nothing to say and nothing left undone.
The case was dragging and they all knew it. And each day that passed made it more difficult to solve. After a while even the newspapers seemed to grow tired of it. Which was fine with Jack Donovan and the rest of them.
Karen Kovac resumed her decoy role but nothing came of it, and she was eventually transferred back to the patrol division. They gave her a party on her last night on homicide and Terry Flynn kissed her. He explained the next day that he had been drunk and hadn’t intended anything by the kiss, but Sid Margolies and Matt Schmidt razzed him about it all the same.
Karen Kovac applied for duty on homicide.
Leonard Ranallo was against the request and told the chief of detectives his opinion of women in homicide.
Matt Schmidt quietly told the chief of detectives that Karen Kovac was a damned good investigator and that if they could get a woman in his squad, he’d be very happy. Besides murders, the homicide division handled rapes, and he thought Karen Kovac would be invaluable in this area.
When Leonard Ranallo went on vacation in August, Karen Kovac was transferred back to homicide, to Matt Schmidt’s squad.