My father liked alternating where we ate dinner in his rambling Bronzeville house, insisting that we never eat in the same location twice in a row. So tonight we sat at his formal dining room table, which could seat twelve comfortably and squeeze in fourteen if the need arose. He, of course, sat at the head of the table, and I to his right. Pearline had once again flaunted her gastronomic mastery, preparing the salmon with a sublime lemon butter sauce and sitting it perfectly on a bed of thin, vinaigrette-soaked cucumbers on top of creamy mashed potatoes. We now stared at two enormous pieces of warm sweet potato pie, which I had made at my father’s request. Our wineglasses were nearly empty for a second time.
My father suggested we retire to the media room in the basement, which he had refurbished last year with large, comfortable reclining chairs and a new 4K projector. He picked up a remote control the size of a computer keyboard, and after he tapped several buttons while mumbling a few expletives, the projector turned on, and we were immersed in the story of Black churches.
It had been a while since I had gone to church, but listening to the old spirituals that our ancestors sang to speak code to each other in the cotton fields and watching the firebrand preachers from small Pentecostal revival tents in the Deep South to the megachurches in big cities like Dallas and New York, made me feel like a little boy again, sitting between my parents on a hot North Carolina Sunday as my grandfather belted out another fiery sermon. I was enraptured by the images of little children dressed in their Sunday best, walking into cramped one-room churches at the end of a country road. There were big-city choirs, some over a hundred strong, raising their voices to the heavens in praise. First-name singers like Aretha, Whitney, and Patti had all started as young girls in the church, only to become superstars on mainstream radio stations and inside the DJ booths of sweaty discos. For almost two hours, we sat there, mesmerized by the story of our people, the struggles and triumphs, the injustices and the hope. Occasionally, I looked over at my father and caught him dabbing his eyes as the powerful sermons and thunderous voices awakened memories within him that were both joyous and painful. When the show ended, we sat there quietly for a couple of minutes in the still darkness.
“Nice piece of work,” he said. “We’ve come a mighty long way.”
“Sometimes we need to hear our stories to refocus our purpose and perspective,” I said.
“And context. A lot of our brothers and sisters have lost their way, as have the men of the cloth. Look at Bishop Keegan Thompson. What a shame.”
“What happened?”
“Dead at forty-five.”
Bishop Keegan Thompson was the pastor of the Bright Tabernacle Church, a megachurch based in Los Angeles that rivaled Joel Osteen’s in Houston and T. D. Jakes’s in Dallas. His father had started the church in the back room of a laundromat fifty years ago, and then Bishop Keegan Thompson took over, injecting the controversial prosperity theology, a more recent religious belief among some Christians that God has intentions of financial prosperity and physical well-being for all of those who believe. By honoring one’s faith, speaking positively, and generously donating to the church, God would return these good deeds by increasing the follower’s material wealth. Money and flamboyant materialism, traditionally believed to be symbols of hedonism and the devil at work, were now embraced, and proudly displayed as God’s blessings. A couple of years ago, Thompson was the target of criticism by politicians who decried the announcement that the church had purchased a private plane for Thompson on top of the Rolls-Royce and Beverly Hills mansion he already owned.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“No one knows,” my father replied. “I heard it on WVON on my way home from tennis. He was here in Chicago to preach for McCaskill at South Baptist, and they found his body late Saturday night, early Sunday morning.”
It made sense that one of Chicago’s most successful megachurches would invite Thompson, a religious superstar who had it all, including a beautiful wife who had been a model and young twin daughters.
“Was his family here with him?” I asked.
“The report said he was here alone.”
I took out my phone and googled Thompson. I would’ve expected several headlines announcing his death. Neither the Tribune nor the Sun-Times had anything on it. Only the Chicago Defender, one of the country’s oldest Black newspapers, had any coverage. The online article was a single, simple paragraph. They had a photograph of Thompson in a pin-striped suit, leaning against a white Rolls-Royce in front of his massive church. The article spoke mostly about his beginnings and success and the millions of people who followed him on social media and through his various media enterprises. There was no cause of death listed, but it was the last sentence that struck me as odd. Thompson’s body had been recovered from an apartment in the northern section of Bronzeville.
“Looks like he was found close to us,” I said. “He was in an apartment right here in Bronzeville. Doesn’t feel right.”
“Stranger things have happened,” my father said. “After all, this is Chicago.”
I found another photograph of the smiling Bishop Keegan Thompson, his hair trimmed razor-sharp, his two-thousand-dollar custom suit, his Beverly Hills stone-and-brick mansion rising up behind him. All of that gone in an instant, his wife now a widow, his young children fatherless, his thirty-thousand-strong congregation now without their spiritual leader. He would become yet another footnote in the long, fabled history of the Black church.
The next morning, I focused my efforts on Kantor’s apartment building. Burke had given me transcripts of the interviews that had been done with the three other residents. I read carefully through what the detectives had gathered. The other unit on the first floor, 1E, was owned by the Mann family. The husband was a retired DePaul history professor and his wife a music teacher. He was the man from the video who had been wearing a Cubs hat. The interview was extensive. They had seen their neighbor infrequently, usually getting out of his SUV or occasionally being picked up. They hadn’t even known his name. He was extremely quiet. They never saw him with anyone, nor did they see anyone going in the direction of his apartment. They had the usual curiosities: Did he have a family? What did he do for a living? Why was he seen so infrequently? The wife had gone to his door several times a couple of years ago to give him slices of cake she had baked for holidays. He never answered the door. They claimed there was a period where they hadn’t seen him for at least five months. They thought he might’ve moved or died, but then they saw him again, getting into the SUV with the man who always drove him. They assumed he had been on vacation. Their final thoughts were that the occupant of unit 1W was a mysterious man who liked to keep to himself and not be bothered with the business of anyone else in the building.
The second interview had been conducted with the owner of unit 2W, Hugo Melzer. Melzer was a stockbroker who worked for one of those giant international financial firms on South Wacker. He was the last of the residents to purchase his unit. He was single, an avid hockey player, and spent a lot of time at work or entertaining the firm’s clients. He had never seen the owner of unit 1W, nor had it ever crossed his mind to wonder who lived there. He was too busy with his own life to have any interest in discovering who else shared his address. The second-floor apartments had private elevators, so the only time the building occupants would run into each other would be in the lobby or the garage. Melzer had grown up in New York City, where he had lived most of his life, until he moved to Chicago after college to get his MBA from Kellogg. He didn’t own a car, because he never learned to drive, so there was no reason for him to go to the garage. When the detectives showed Melzer a photograph of Elliott Kantor, he was visibly shocked. He recognized Kantor right away and couldn’t believe he owned an apartment in the same building as one of Chicago’s richest businessmen. He was so surprised that he asked the detectives if they were certain Kantor was the owner of unit 1W. They assured him that Kantor was, and he assured them that he had never seen Kantor anywhere near the building and would’ve recognized him right away if he had. The detectives were careful not to disclose to any of the other residents that Kantor had died in the building. They looked at Melzer’s calendar and other supporting documents and were satisfied that Melzer had been in Dallas visiting clients for a three-night stretch, one of which was the night Kantor had died.
The last interview had been conducted with the Spiewak family, who lived in unit 2E. Craig and Pam Spiewak were a young couple with a four-year-old boy. They were one of the first occupants of the building. Craig worked for a national engineering consulting firm, and Pam had been a paralegal until their son was born. Now she was a stay-at-home mom who planned on returning to work next year when her son was in school full-time. Craig had only seen Kantor a few times, either walking through the lobby or being dropped off by his driver in the black Escalade that Craig noted was always shiny, even in the middle of winter. Craig never had much of a conversation with Kantor, as he spent a lot of time traveling for business. Pam, however, had spoken to him more than anyone else in the building, but never for more than a few minutes. Pam knew him as Mr. Henry. She didn’t think he had a family, because one afternoon, she was running bathwater for her son, got distracted, and forgot to turn it off. The bathroom flooded, and she was worried it might get into Mr. Henry’s apartment beneath her. She went down and knocked on the door. It took a while, but he finally answered. She told him of her concerns, so he let her come into the front foyer while he went to check the various ceilings. Several minutes later, he came back and told her that everything looked fine. She gave him her number and told him to call her if he or his family had any issues, and she would pay for the repairs. He told her he didn’t have a family, thanked her for her concern, and closed the door.
There was another occasion, when Pam was struggling to carry several bags of groceries while pushing her son’s stroller and trying to open the door. Mr. Henry’s driver was waiting for him outside, but Mr. Henry noticed she wasn’t having an easy time, so he helped her get up to her apartment. Mr. Henry asked her why he never saw her with the boy’s father, and she explained that her husband traveled a lot for work, and when he got home, he was often exhausted. His response stuck with her. “Sometimes the time spent chasing money isn’t worth the time lost with family.” She said he seemed very sorrowful when he said that, almost as if he were speaking from experience. She asked him if he wanted to come in and have tea or something, but he declined, saying he had a dinner to attend. Pam said she had never seen anyone go to his apartment, nor had she ever seen Mr. Henry with anyone other than his driver. She thought he was a lonely old man and felt bad for him. While she had not seen him often, each time she did, he was extremely courteous and conversational. He always smiled and said nice things to her son. She was very sad he had died, and she regretted never inviting him up for dinner with her family. He looked like he could’ve used the company.
I turned on my computer and looked at the video from the night he died. I tried putting together in my mind a story for each of the residents, what they were doing that night, what they had seen or heard that might’ve been helpful. I watched the Amazon deliveryman with the trunk, and something bothered me. I looked at the time: 9:53 p.m. Wasn’t that late for a delivery?
I dialed Carolina’s number.
“How often do you get deliveries from Amazon?” I said when she answered.
“No ‘good morning, how is your day going, how are you feeling’?” she said.
“I’m sorry. Yes to all of the above.”
“I get at least a couple of deliveries every week or so,” she said. “Why?”
“What time do they make the deliveries?”
“Depends. There’s no set time.”
“You’ve gotten them at night?”
“Sure. You want to tell me what this is about?”
“How late?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never really looked at the time. But sometimes they’ll ring the bell after dinner.”
“An Amazon driver made a delivery at 9:53 to Kantor’s building the night he died. Isn’t that late?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve seen their drivers on the road that late. I think it depends on how many packages they have to deliver that day and how fast or slow they go.”
“Thanks, I’ll call you back.”
I called down to my doorman.
“Harold, what’s the latest you’ve seen Amazon deliveries?” I asked once he answered.
“I don’t work the night shift often, but I’ve seen them come as late as ten o’clock,” he said.
“You sure?”
“Positive. I remember talking to one of the drivers, and he was exhausted. He was finishing a twelve-hour shift, and ten o’clock was quitting time.”
I thanked Harold, then called Burke.
“The Amazon delivery to Kantor’s building that night,” I said. “Did your guys ask the other residents about that delivery?”
“Give me a second,” he said. “I need to open the file.”
I heard him riffling through papers and mumbling to himself. When he came back on, he said, “I don’t see where they asked. What’s the problem?”
“The driver showed up at 9:53,” I said. “That’s late, but still within their normal delivery time. They shut down at ten. Something about that delivery is bothering me, but I can’t call it just yet. Maybe your men can ask around and see if anyone had a delivery that night. Might not amount to anything, but it’s worth getting it checked off the list. Speaking of which, any update on the missing Bentley?”
“Negative. We’ve pulled a lot of video and can’t pick it up anywhere.”
“I’m still trying to make sense of it. Who had access to the car? Who even knew he had a car? He was always with his driver, so why or when did he have a need for a car anyway?”
“We have almost every city services agency looking out for that car,” Burke said. “We’ve checked all the chop shops for any of its parts. Nothing.”
“What about all the tolls?”
“Nothing.”
“Maybe there was a tracking device,” I said.
“Negative. We found the dealership he bought it from up in the northern suburbs. Locators aren’t installed by the manufacturer. Customers have to make a request, then they install an aftermarket device. Kantor never made that request, so his car didn’t have one.”
“Of course not. That would be too convenient.”
Someone must’ve seen whoever had taken the Bentley. They might not have known it was Kantor’s car, but at some point, whether they passed the person in the building or getting into the car, someone saw the driver. How did the cameras not catch them? Then I had a thought. Maybe I was looking at this wrong. What if the driver never entered the building, but instead gained entry to the garage from outside?