Page 23 of Fade Out
“I remember Gunner Lindquist. We all knew who he was. He was always around. Back in the old days, he was one of those peepers who used to try and get pictures of cheating spouses, things like that.”
I waited. There had to be more than that. Frank took a long drag off his cigarette. I was tempted to ask for one—I mean, why not, right? But he started talking again.
“There were always rumors about blackmail. First it was about his switching sides in a divorce case. The wife hires him, then the husband offers to double his fee if he’ll switch sides. That sort of thing. Then, later, there were rumors about his daughter—she must have been twelve, thirteen at the time. He’d have her meet men in a motel room. He’d get some photos and then blackmail the men.”
“That can’t be true.”
“I said it was a rumor, so I don’t know. Not for a fact.”
I pushed away the thought of what that might have been like for a teenage girl and asked, “What happened to Gunner?”
“Dead. Two, three years now.”
I nodded and said, “Lung cancer.”
Frank made a face. “Um, no. Who told you that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t remember.”
“He showed up in the Chicago River with a bullet in the back of his head. That’s not exactly lung cancer.”
“It was a hit?”
“There’s a building near the river.”
Before he could continue I inserted, “618 North Wells.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Lindquist was involved in that somehow.”
“You don’t know how?”
Frank shook his head. “Financial Crimes has had an open investigation on that building for years. As near as I could tell they were conning people at every stage of development. They sold shares, too many shares, then they paid fake construction companies. The real companies, they cheated the employees and welched on their workman’s comp contributions. They were even running a scam with stamps. They’d buy a hundred thousand dollars in postage stamps and then sell most of them to a dealer at a discount. Postage is not a suspicious line item. The amounts they were spending on the other hand…”
“I’m not seeing how Lindquist is involved.”
“We were pretty sure he knew about at least some of the scams and was blackmailing someone over them.”
“You don’t know who though?”
“Could be any one of the people involved. It could be all of them.”
“What about Carney, Greenbaum and Turner?”
“They were the attorneys for the finance guysandthe construction companies. But given privilege we could never prove what they knew and when they knew it.”
There are a couple of dicey rules lawyers have to navigate when dealing with the guilty. First, if they know of ongoing or upcoming crimes they should report them, and second, they can’t help their clients lie about the crimes they’ve already committed. Many lawyers ignore those rules completely.
“Rita worked for them,” I explained. “Did her father have that job before her?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“So she might have something on them, whatever her father had?”
“And you think that’s what got her killed?”
“I don’t think she’s dead. The body is missing its head and hands.”
Letting that sink in, he crushed out his cigarette butt in a plastic ashtray. “You know, Bert and I worked a case. Seventy-eight, seventy-nine. This guy, we found him in the trunk of an abandoned car near Erie Park. He didn’t have hands or a head. No I.D. They didn’t want him identified, see. But the guy did have a tattoo. A mermaid. We went to fifteen, twenty tattoo places. This was when they still had a lot of tattoo parlors down on State Street, so maybe it was before seventy-eight. Might have been seventy-two. I don’t remember.”
