“What the hell are you doing?”
I was still fumbling to get the phone to my ear, but I knew right away it was Commander Rory Burke. His cantankerous growl was unmistakable even when I was coming out of a deep sleep.
“I’m doing what any sane person north of thirty would be doing at two in the morning,” I said. “Trying to finish a damn good dream.”
“Get your ass outta bed,” Burke grumbled. “You have a case.”
“Since when?”
“Since Elliott Kantor was found dead, tied up to a four-poster bed with women’s panties on and a leather dog collar around his neck.”
That sat me up. Elliott Kantor was one of the richest men in Chicago, next to the real estate titan Randolph Gerrigan. The two had made a sport of alternating the top spot on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Chicagoans. Kantor had built his fortune in textiles. Last I had checked, he was beating Gerrigan by a mere hundred million, give or take.
“Are you shittin’ me right now?” I said.
“Stupid question,” Burke said. “It’s two o’clock in the morning. You think I have time for games at this ungodly hour? I’m at the Manor apartment building in Lincoln Park. How long before you get here?”
“Thirty minutes.”
“Make it twenty. I need to get his body out of here ASAP.”
The affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood was a straight shot north of where I lived in downtown Streeterville. There was barely anyone on Lake Shore Drive that early in the morning, so I reached the Fullerton Parkway exit in five minutes, and after a few more minutes traveling west from the lake, I could see the enormous rectangular landmark building that I had passed hundreds of times but had never entered. My realtor friend had once told me its story as I hunted for an apartment to purchase once I separated from the Chicago Police Department. The building had been erected in the early 1920s to house the Fullerton State Bank, but then the Great Depression hit, and it closed. The Perfection Burial Garments, a company that made inexpensive clothing to drape over corpses before they were buried, took over the building. That’s why there was still the word PERFECTION carved into the stone underneath the F logo that had been preserved from the building’s former life as a bank. Now it had been gloriously and expensively renovated into eight huge, extremely private apartments.
I noticed several unmarked cars, a wagon, and only one patrol cruiser sitting outside the southern entrance of the building. All of their lights were off, and they were parked orderly, not haphazardly at different angles like they normally parked at a crime scene. When I worked as a detective for CPD, this was how we arrived when we didn’t want to arouse unnecessary attention, quietly present but not intrusive.
Burke stood inside the massive lobby, looking impatiently at his watch as I entered. His eyes were red and irritated, the bags underneath badly swollen.
“We need to move quickly,” he said. “Not a lot of time.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Follow me.”
We walked through another set of glass doors, then down a small hallway to the right and around a sharp corner. An impressive amount of marble and limestone had been meticulously laid on the floor and along the walls. The enormous windows several feet above our heads allowed ambient light to rush in and boost the dim glow from the gold sconces perched high on the otherwise barren walls. A plainclothes officer stood guard outside of a wide black door with a shiny brass 1W centered above an ornate design. He opened the door for us to pass. We stepped inside, and immediately I was struck by the sheer immensity of the apartment. Voices from the other end of the dark hallway softly echoed in our direction.
“A call came into the district that an older man was unresponsive in his bed and likely needed assistance,” Burke said. “They gave the address and apartment number, then hung up. A patrol car was dispatched. It took the officer several minutes to gain access to the building, but another resident eventually buzzed him in. He arrived at this ground-floor apartment and found the door slightly open. He knocked and called out, but no one answered. He entered and walked around and finally located the primary suite, where he found the deceased. He’d been dead for some time. No chance of reviving him. He found the man’s pants on the floor, retrieved his wallet, and called in the name. The patrolman who found him was young. Didn’t recognize Kantor’s name, but someone on the desk did. Everything went into hyperdrive. I got the call from HQ to get over here, take care of things, and keep a lid on it. Kantor was one of Bailey’s biggest donors.”
I wasn’t surprised. Mayor Bailey’s political allies were as varied and rich as his list of enemies. This was how he conducted business: intervening at will, never afraid to ignore protocol or ethical guidelines, circumventing the law when it served his purposes. In his mind, the police force worked for him first, then the good of the city afterward.
“All makes sense,” I said. “So why am I here?”
“The son wants to talk to you.”
“I didn’t even know he had a son.”
“He wants to hire you.”
“To do what?”
“I’ll let him talk for himself. He’s downstairs waiting for you in the wine cellar. But I want you to see the body first. They’re almost done processing the scene, then we’re getting him out of here.”
“Where you taking him?”
“To his estate up in Kenilworth. For the purposes of the media and everyone else who’s not here, that’s where he died.”
I followed Burke through the large rooms that had been sparsely but expensively decorated. They were dark and cold, as if an interior designer had gone about their work for the sole purpose of being featured in a design magazine, without any regard for the practicality of someone having to live there. The primary suite sat in the back of the apartment. An officer gave us booties and gloves to put on just before we entered. We walked through a carpeted sitting room with a couple of matching chairs, a large chaise lounge, and a television monitor the size of a billboard. We passed through a set of wide double doors and into a barrage of camera flashes that popped every few seconds. Three officers stood along the perimeter of the room. A massive bed stood in the middle of it all, underneath a domed ceiling with a colorful fresco painted underneath it. We approached the foot of the bed. Kantor was stretched out in the center of the bed, his hands and feet individually spread, each tied to a post. Besides the ruby-colored women’s panties, he was completely naked. A forest of unruly curly gray hair worked its way across his sagging chest and downward until it stopped just above his protuberant abdomen. His legs were those of a prepubescent boy: completely shaved, very white, and skinny. His face had fallen to his left side, his eyes partially open. A yellowish fluid had dried around his lips and pooled on the white satin sheets. His horseshoe smattering of hair had been neatly trimmed, and his bald dome had a couple of small older scars where it looked like he had been nicked while shaving.
Kantor bore no resemblance to the powerful and vibrant man who, despite reaching his upper seventies, remained a social bon vivant, donating generously to almost any charity that asked, and a fixture at sporting events around the city. The newspapers loved him because he always had a good quote at the ready, and he was a fierce defender of Chicago, constantly calling it the greatest city in the country, even lauding it above his native New York. How in the hell did he end up here? How in God’s name did he end up like this?
I took out my cell phone and walked the perimeter taking snaps of the scene. One of the techs stepped in to stop me, but Burke waved him off. Beyond the panties and Kantor’s being tied up, it didn’t feel right. I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it, but something was amiss. I zoomed in and snapped his feet then his neck. The studded leather collar was loose enough against his neck for me to slide at least two fingers between the leather and his skin. I photographed the rest of the room, but there wasn’t much. A pack of opened condoms and a small plastic bag with a couple of blue pills sat on the nightstand. A tall dresser stood against the wall opposite the foot of the bed. I opened the drawers in succession and found that only three had anything in them. One drawer had a stack of underwear and T-shirts. Another drawer had a few socks with tags still on them. A third drawer had several Chicago Bears shirts and two Chicago Bulls jerseys—Michael Jordan and Derrick Rose, who had made it to the NBA after growing up playing street ball just ninety blocks south.
Two officers entered the room with a stretcher and body bag. Burke approached me.
“They’re taking him out the back, through the garage,” he said. “Let’s go talk to the son.”
I took one last look at Elliott Kantor. I had been to many gruesome crime scenes with all the gore of amputated limbs and exposed organs, but not even they had moved me like the sadness of this indignity.
Burke led me through several more hallways.
“This place is a damn maze,” I said.
“Rich-people shit,” Burke said.
“The son?”
“Name is Simon Kantor. He’s downstairs in what used to be the vault when this place was a bank. I wanted you to talk to him down there so you could have privacy.”
We descended a wide set of steps, took a couple of turns, walked through a personal gym, then found ourselves standing at a gigantic, polished steel door.
“You can see your way out when you’re done,” Burke said. “I’ve gotta get back and wrap this up. And just so you know, all reports are coming to me first before going into the CHRIS system. I have to keep a lid on this as best as possible.”
CHRIS was the computer system cops used to enter the general case report and any additional reports that were filed as an investigation progressed. Anyone could access the reports as long as they knew the case RD number. This was why it had long been standard practice on special heater cases like this to have the reports run through a commander or another higher-up first before being entered into the system. Once reports were in CHRIS, thousands would have access, which in a high-profile case like this almost guaranteed leaks. So everything would run through the commander first, and it wasn’t uncommon for the reports to be strategically edited before being uploaded into the computer.
I walked into the wine cellar, which was bigger than any I had seen, even at some of the city’s nicest restaurants. A man with dark hair that had been cut into a bob and pulled behind his ears sat at a long, elevated table. He wore a bright blue polo shirt and knee-length shorts. His leather driving loafers with bright blue stitching matched his shirt, and an enormous gold Rolex with an emerald green face occupied most of his narrow wrist. He looked like he had been crying.
“I’m sorry about your loss,” I said, extending my hand.
“Thank you,” he replied, accepting my shake. His hands were soft, almost feminine.
I sat in a chair facing him.
“My father was a good man,” he said. “No way he deserved to go out like this. I want you to help me find who did this to him.”
“You have more than thirteen thousand men and women in blue who can find out what happened,” I said. “You don’t need me.”
“I do. We do. Me, along with my younger sister and brother. I was told you work quietly. Effectively. Most of the time you figure out what happened.”
“I have my own style,” I said. “Not exactly orthodox, but I get results. And not most of the time. All the time.”
“We’ll pay you whatever you want.”
“I’m not going to take your money.”
“We don’t want you to work for free.”
“I’m sorry this happened to your father, Simon, but I’m not going to take this case.”
“Why?”
“No disrespect, but I don’t know if there really is a case or if your father was having a bit of fun and just got unlucky in the privacy of his own bedroom. But more importantly, I’m taking the entire summer off.”
He didn’t disguise his confusion.
“I thought you did private investigative work?” he said.
“I do. But I’m also a degenerate golfer, and the last two years I’ve been promising myself that I am going to spend an entire summer working on my game and nothing else. This happens to be that summer.”
“Dad was a golfer,” he said. “Not a good one, but he liked to go out and swing the clubs with his friends or clients who flew into town.”
“Where did he play?”
“Chicago Golf Club.”
I wasn’t surprised. It was the most exclusive club in all of Chicago and believed to be the first golf course in the entire country. I had played it once with my billionaire friend, Penny Packer. Her family had been charter members when it opened in the 1800s.
“What do you think happened upstairs?” I asked.
“Someone killed him.”
“Was he into kinky sex?”
“He’s my father. We didn’t talk about things like that. But based on how he was found, I can’t just outright deny the possibility.”
“When was the last time you talked to him?”
“Yesterday afternoon. We talked several times a day. He was leaving the office and heading to the family house.”
“This isn’t the family house?”
“No, he lived up in Kenilworth. This was just a little place he bought when he wanted to stay in the city.”
“Does your mother ever stay here?”
“My mother died two years ago from breast cancer. Dad bought this place several years before she died. She never knew he owned it.”
“I’m sure you know I was a detective with CPD before I became a private investigator,” I said.
He nodded.
“I’ve handled lots of cases in my career. Some of them garden-variety robberies or homicides. But there have been many that were complicated, some gruesome, and some downright strange. I guess I’m telling you this to say that I’ve seen a lot in my career, and what I just saw upstairs, I’ve never seen before.”
“Is that why you don’t want to take the case?”
“No. I don’t want to take the case because often people think they want to know the truth, when really they’re better off just leaving things alone.”
“That’s my father,” he said with a tinge of indignation. “Of course I want to know the truth.”
“Many people say that, but when secrets are laid bare, they fold.”
“I’m not many people. I’m a Kantor.”
I looked directly into his eyes, then said, “The city’s richest man is upstairs hog-tied to a five-thousand-dollar bed with a leather dog collar around his neck and wearing red panties. Who did that and why they did it could lead anywhere and reveal anything. What you need to think about is whether digging up those answers is really worth it to you and your family and the memory of your father.”
I turned and walked out of the vault and up the wide stairs that had brought me down just minutes ago. As I navigated the dark maze of hallways, I saw them slowly rolling a now-bagged Elliott Kantor underneath his multimillion-dollar paintings out the back of the mansion apartment and into the cold, dark garage.