Chapter Thirty-three
ON A DAY IN LATE APRIL 1991, I finally confessed to myself that the FBI was not likely to determine what had happened to Jon. I will always think of that day as a numbing day.
Sandra called me at work to say that Attorney Tina Gutierrez had gone to the federal courthouse in Baltimore. Tina was upset because she had sensed that something was amiss, and she wanted to learn what she could. That afternoon when I got home from work, I called her.
“The FBI’s doing a tank job,” Tina told me.
“A what?”
“You know. This case is going in the tank. The Justice Department has sent a hatchet man from Washington to shut the case down.”
“Why?”
“They don’t want it investigated.”
“What can you do?”
“I can let them know there’ll be the devil to pay if they tank this investigation. That should at least drag things out. Maybe something will come up.”
I didn’t necessarily doubt Agent Bellinger’s sincerity, but he worked for the Department of Justice, and if they wanted they could shut down the investigation for whatever reasons they might have. As I hung up the phone, I felt a twinge in the little finger of my right hand, and two fingers and the right side of my hand were immediately numb. The numbness gradually subsided over several months, but even after all these years the finger still has an odd feel about it.
* * *
Tina Gutierrez succeeded in getting the federal investigation extended. The federal grand jury that was hearing evidence in the case, she said, probably would end, but the case was still open. I had been subpoenaed but had not been called to testify before the grand jury. I called FBI Agent Bellinger and said I wanted to talk, and we arranged an appointment.
There was a sense of finality to our meeting as I sat facing Bellinger across his desk. I assumed he knew what Tina had told me about the Justice Department trying to halt the investigation, and I didn’t see any point in wasting time talking about what had taken place behind the scenes.
We sat in silence a few moments and Bellinger asked, “Do you think Riemer killed Jon Bowie?”
“I don’t know how to answer that,” I said. “This is the United States of America, not Nazi Germany. You don’t make a charge like that unless you can lay your cards on the table. What I think is not relevant.”
“I think Jon died a peaceful death,” Bellinger said. “I think he was inebriated and he got into a situation that he couldn’t get out of, and he just relaxed and let it happen. Rust on the bottoms of his shoes indicated that he climbed the backstop himself.”
I sensed that he was telling me something he wanted me to tell Sandra, regardless of whether he believed it himself. Jon could just as easily have gotten rust on the bottoms of his shoes trying to get off the backstop. I assumed this was also obvious to him, and I let it pass.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What if someone held a gun on him and told him to climb it? There were those bullets found in the grass.”
I couldn’t be certain if Bellinger had just forgotten or if he wanted to hear me repeat it in case he might learn something new. Regardless, I had to go over the bullets again and tell how they were found. It seemed he wasn’t really listening so I retold it quickly. When I had finished, he said more to himself than to me, “If we could just get a break. Usually, it takes a break to solve a case like this.”
This remark suggested to me that he didn’t really think Jon’s death was a suicide, that he was just accustomed to holding his cards close to his vest and he was frustrated. I wondered if maybe I had misjudged the FBI investigation, and he had simply done what he could in the time allowed.
“What did you learn about Courtney?” I asked.
“Who?”
“You know, the woman from Chicago who supposedly saw people at the backstop?”
“Our experience is that such things seldom check out,” he said. “We can’t follow up on every rumor.”
I was becoming more adept at continuing a conversation after having been figuratively smacked in the forehead with a shovel, and I kept talking.
“So, if I, say, bumped into her on the street, you wouldn’t see it as interfering with the FBI if I stopped and had a chat with her?”
He studied me across the desk and didn’t answer.
* * *
Sandra took the window seat and I sat in the middle. Two college-age female interns who worked for Reverend Rogers sat together farther back in the plane. Rogers had planned to attend the national conference on police accountability, but a last-minute scheduling conflict prevented him from coming. After arriving in Chicago, we picked up a rental car and drove to the conference, which was held in an old gray stone building that took up most of a city block and looked like a once-elegant bank.
After checking in, we joined a large group discussion. Sandra provided details on Jon’s death, and several people from Chicago talked about experiences with the Chicago police that involved boxes with electric wires, plastic bags pulled over people’s heads, and leaning people over steam radiators until they confessed to things.
When the discussion was over, a woman named Mary introduced herself to Sandra and me. At Rogers’s suggestion, I had called her before leaving Maryland to ask for her help in locating Courtney. Mary said she had found Courtney with one phone call.
“She said it was odd that I called her at that particular time because she had just gotten off the phone with an FBI agent from Baltimore.”
Sandra and I exchanged glances and didn’t interrupt.
“I don’t know if you should go see her,” Mary said. “She said that the FBI wants to fly her to Baltimore to testify before a grand jury. The agent told her to call him immediately if anyone connected with the Bowie case contacts her.”
“Damn,” I said. “The FBI knew about Courtney six months ago. Now they call her a few hours before Sandra and I get off the plane? I really don’t understand what’s going on here. Will she call the FBI and say she talked with you?”
“I asked her that,” Mary said. “She says she won’t since I’m not really connected to the case. Besides, she says she doesn’t know anything. She says it’s all some sort of confusion. When she went past the backstop, the body had already been discovered. The only people she saw were the people taking the body down, and the bystanders.”
Surprised and disappointed, I said, “It still aggravates me. All the FBI had to do was call their Chicago office six months ago and find out that she didn’t have anything to say. Why fly her to Baltimore now? It’s grandstanding. They really do want to kill this investigation.”
Mary handed me a slip of paper with Courtney’s full name, address, and phone number. “It might not be smart to call her until after she talks with the FBI,” she said. “They could say you tried to influence her.”
The next morning, Sandra and I ate fast food breakfast sandwiches as I drove and she leaned over a map of Chicago. Courtney lived only a few miles from the conference center in an attractive brick, tree-shaded town house. We drove past a few times and then parked by the curb. I said, “I can’t believe we’ve come all the way to Chicago to talk to this woman, and now we’re right in front of her house and can’t do it.”
“We can’t,” Sandra said. “It would be used against us somehow.”
We returned to the conference center and spent the day with groups from Dallas, Los Angeles, Boston, Minneapolis, New York, you name it. An ex–police officer talked about being drummed out of police work for speaking out against police brutality. Another officer said things had to change—it wasn’t enough just to complain. A young Latino woman from Los Angeles talked about the Rodney King case, which still was an evolving story at the time. She didn’t think the Justice Department wanted to deal with the King case. People in Los Angeles were trying to apply pressure so the case didn’t simply disappear.
Sandra and the interns and I had a fairly early flight, so we left Sunday morning before the conference ended. We didn’t talk much on the way home.