She became a regular in the Lucky Aces tavern on Irving Park Road on the northwest side of the city.
She stopped in four times the first week and, at Donovan’s suggestion, took four days off.
They called her Karen. She said she had moved into the neighborhood a few months before and that she hardly knew anyone. She played the bowling machine with the construction worker she had met on her first visit. He had four children and showed her their pictures in his wallet.
The two fat women who had been in the bar the first day also developed personalities. They were called Alice and Lou, and they came to the bar to drink. Lou was a widow and Alice was her friend. They usually got their load on by six P.M. and staggered out of the tavern into the fading autumn twilight, holding each other’s arms.
The bartender on days was Jerry. The owner was Homer, and he worked nights. He said he preferred to work nights. He would come in after five P.M., to handle whatever rush-hour after-work business there was.
Karen usually arrived at four P.M. and usually left by seven P.M. She tried to arrive before Bremenhoffer and to leave after he left.
The owner, Homer, lived in Arlington Heights and commuted in a new Buick Electra 225. One night he offered to visit Karen at home, but she declined.
It was not very long before Karen Kovac went to the Lucky Aces tavern six nights a week, and if she missed a night, they asked her the next night what had happened. Or they said they had missed her.
At first Frank Bremenhoffer came only two or three times a week. And then something seemed to impel him to come every night. When he arrived at the tavern, he drank two or three beers (as Karen related in her report) and sometimes had a single shot of brandy. Afterward he went directly home (according to Sid Margolies who followed him), and he never missed a night of work.
It was a routine assignment, deadly dull.
All these things happened every day, week after week; which is to say, nothing happened at all.
But they accumulated details. More and more.
Frank Bremenhoffer went to his doctor three times in the period of their observation. A fellow worker at Halsted Graphics said he suffered from angina pectoris or chest pains caused by heart problems. But the doctor apparently could not discover a physical cause for the pains. When the police interviewed him, he refused to tell them what was wrong with Frank Bremenhoffer.
They learned that Bremenhoffer sometimes visited Post Office News, an old magazine store on Monroe Street downtown, and bought the Abendpost, a German-language paper published in the city. He also picked up his copies of Stern there.
The details seemed to mean nothing and the days went on. All the details were recorded on sheets of report paper and filed in a gray metal cabinet in Matt Schmidt’s office. Details and details and nothing happened.
Gradually the investigation team set up by the politicians become nonexistent. On October 14, Jack Donovan closed up his temporary office downtown and returned to the Criminal Courts building on the West Side.
Gratefully Mario DeVito slipped back into trial work. The people who worked in the various departments of Criminal Courts rarely mentioned the Grant Park murders or the murder of Bonni Brighton in a movie house in the Loop. Too many other crimes, current crimes, intruded on their consciousness.
Terry Flynn was assigned to a particularly grisly homicide on the South Side involving the deaths of three young black children found butchered in an apartment.
Flynn cleared the case in a week. They had been killed by the boyfriend of the mother. It wasn’t very difficult.
Leonard Ranallo asked Matt Schmidt what he was doing besides the Grant Park case. Matt Schmidt showed him a file drawer full of new cases that had come into Area One Homicide in the past six weeks. He said he was very busy on the murder of a dentist on the twenty-third floor of a downtown medical building.
Ranallo was satisfied.
In fact, Matt Schmidt did not have the slightest idea of how to proceed in the case of the dentist. No one had seen the murder, and robbery had not been the motive.
Maurice Goldberg was transferred to Criminal Courts in September at the insistence of Jack Donovan. He began to work for Mario DeVito and wished he wasn’t.
And nothing happened.
One afternoon Leonard Ranallo asked whatever had happened to Sid Margolies, and Matt Schmidt said that Sid Margolies was working on a couple of cases that kept him out of the office. One involved the murder of the dentist. And the other involved the murder of a white female.
“Not that goddamn Bonni Brighton case?” asked Ranallo.
“Yes,” said Matt Schmidt.
“Okay. It’s your funeral.” Whatever that meant.
Each afternoon Sid Margolies parked outside the Lucky Aces tavern on Irving Park Road and watched Karen Kovac walk inside a few minutes later. And then watched—on most days—Frank Bremenhoffer come down his side street and walk across the street at the traffic light near the expressway and continue to the same tavern.
Jack Donovan continued to check each morning with two calls to his friends at police headquarters.
The first was to Matt Schmidt, because the murders were still on his mind and, technically, he was still in charge of the investigation. The order from the mayor’s office had never been rescinded.
The second call was for word of his wife.
There was no information to be gathered from either daily call. Rita O’Connor Donovan had completely disappeared. As a courtesy to Donovan her picture had been reprinted on the daily bulletin distributed to the thirteen thousand men of the department each morning. Still they had not spotted her. There were so many runaways. So many people who had to escape.
Each day that passed, the tension seemed to go out of the park murders case. It was like rubber that had been stretched too far and too long; each time it was returned to its original shape, it was a little more slack. The case was slack and they all knew it.
And still, doggedly, Karen Kovac returned in the afternoons to the Lucky Ace tavern. She became a champ on the bowling machine and some of the men liked her.
When the construction worker stopped coming (he had completed his job on the Northwest Side), she became even more popular.
One afternoon Lou came into the tavern alone. Alice had fallen at home and broken her arm.
In October Terry Flynn took Karen Kovac and Timmy to a resort called the Red Lantern in Indiana, on the shore of Lake Michigan. For the sake of propriety, or to avoid making Tim uncomfortable, he took a separate bedroom. The three of them walked the cold, pounding beaches, and felt the spray from the chill lake waters. There wasn’t much to do, but they seemed to have a good time. When Tim asked Terry Flynn if he was in love with his mother, Terry Flynn didn’t know what to say. So he said nothing.
On October 29, two days before Halloween, it snowed for the first time in the season.
The snow began early in the morning, falling majestically in large, wet flakes that quickly covered the pavement and then the rooftops.
Traffic was treacherous. Residents in the upper apartments of the one hundred-story John Hancock Building complained that clouds obscured the street below. On the other hand, the sun was shining into their apartments. Generally people cheated of their autumn felt the snow was unfair.
Karen Kovac caught cold again, from her son, who had brought the virus home from school. She missed two days at the tavern. Timothy was supposed to have been the Great Pumpkin at the school Halloween tableau and felt keenly disappointed by his illness.
Karen watched television with him at home.
When his father came to see them on Saturday, Timothy told him about Terry Flynn.
Karen’s ex-husband asked her later if she intended to get serious with this man. She said, quietly, that it was none of his business, and he left angrily two hours early.
On October 31, police in Johnson City, Tennessee, near the North Carolina border, arrested a suspect in an armed robbery of a gasoline station. A routine check revealed he was Norman Frank, wanted in Chicago, Illinois, for the murder of Albert C. (Shorty) Rogers.
Norman Frank did not fight the extradition proceedings. In fact, the Johnson City detective who turned him over to Sergeant Terrence Flynn of the Chicago police department said, “This here boy seems like he just gave up and quit on himself.” Flynn noted that in his report.
They flew back to Chicago, and Norman Frank asked him if they had caught the killer of Maj Kirsten.
“We know who it is,” said Terry Flynn. “We’re going to get him.” As it turned out, neither Flynn nor Norman Frank really believed that.