DuBois Gordon sat upright in the office chair, frowning with concentration at the paper in front of him. The general’s voice and questions were efficient and articulate but cold, almost as if they were total strangers. Person to person, with body language and eye contact, Tarbert Weir had projected as more human, less formidable. Now the conversation seemed one-sided, almost authoritarian, with impatient waits for information, long questioning pauses on the general’s end of the line.
It was because he had so little concrete to report, the sergeant realized; the few roads of inquiry the police department had been able to follow had turned into detours or dead ends.
A department message form had been on the desk when Sergeant Gordon checked in. “Tarbert Weir called. Will call again at four o’clock sharp.”
When the phone rang Gordon had looked at his wristwatch. It read four minutes to four. Dammit, he thought irritably as he picked up the phone, the blasted thing is running slow on me, I’ll have to get my watch fixed...
He had made a checklist of points he wanted to discuss with the general and he looked at the paper as he spoke. “The guns, general,” he said into the phone, “both Ballistics and Stolen Property have been working on that. Lugers are hard to trace, about the worst. They could have come into the States from Europe or down from Canada any time in the last five years or earlier. Lab’s got the report on the bullets. They’ve got clear calibration marks and could match bullet to gun. We have men checking every pawnshop, gunsmith, collector and hot shop in Chicago and through the state. So far, nothing.”
“I see,” the general said.
“The murder site itself, that’s still being checked inch by inch. Fingerprints number into the hundreds for the six apartments on that floor and we’re running a check on all of them. Superintendent McDade ordered units to work Cabrini round the clock for any fact, rumor or hearsay that might bear on Mark’s case. We are getting maximum cooperation, we think, but so far only dead-end leads.
“Every officer in town is working on his private stoolies to come up with something. McDade talked to the press, he talked to the individual districts. We’ve got the word out on the street that the police department will do a lot of favors, a lot of forgiving to anyone who gives us information on Mark’s murder.”
The sergeant paused for a response, but there was none. In the silence he felt he could hear the general’s breathing over the miles of telephone wires that swayed and hummed through four states down to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.
“Are you with me, general?” he said.
“I’m listening,” Weir said.
“All right then. I had backup personnel to check me out,” Gordon said, “but I personally went through every scrap of paper in Mark’s wallet and on his person. I went through his desk, his files, every report he’d made out in the last year. I came across nothing irregular, nothing that needed any extra explanation.
“And his apartment, general. There’s not a drawer, a bookcase, an address book we haven’t turned inside out, examined and analyzed. We found nothing there that helped our case.” Again there was silence.
“I put some of the more personal things aside, sir, things you might want to go through later. As an officer, Mark was the model of efficiency, but he was kind of a packrat about his private life. He hoarded kid snapshots, old plane tickets, every letter you wrote when he was in school in the States...”
“Later, Gordon,” the general said abruptly. “That doesn’t seem relevant now. What else do you want to tell me?”
“A message from the superintendent. Clarence McDade wants to assure you that he is personally in charge of this investigation, that he gets a twice-daily report on all progress.”
“Progress?” Weir asked, a touch of irony shading his tone.
“The progress of elimination, if nothing else, elimination of probabilities, narrowing the field of suspects is necessary to any investigation,” Gordon said. “Take recent releases or paroles, for example. McDade was emphatic; he wanted those records examined for anyone who might have a blood vengeance or even a death feud against Lieutenant Weir, anyone he’d put in the pen who got out recently. Once again, nothing. Mark was a hard officer, but impersonal in his work, even criminals respected that. Besides, he was a little young to have stockpiled enemies.”
“We’ve got to assume he had at least one,” the general said coldly.
Gordon examined the checklist on his desk pad, then made a tick after Mrs. Lewis’ name and briefed the general quickly on the woman and her observation about gifts from her nephew, and her concern that no gifts had arrived.
“It’s only a hunch on my part,” Gordon went on, “but I’m working on the theory that our best clues will come from time and place. Cabrini Green, the place. We’re interviewing, we’re talking, we’re knocking on doors. And we’re examining leases and rental records for a name, a combination of names, a coincidence, maybe, anything that will tell us why Cabrini Green.”
“But it’s still a question. You still don’t know why,” Weir said flatly.
“Not yet, sir, not yet.”
“In short, sergeant,” Tarbert Weir said, “with all the best intentions in this investigation, the police are just about where they were an hour or so after my son was shot.”
“The kind of progress we’re making is hard to measure, sir, but we’re not standing still. Take Mark’s phone tape, the one with that last rendezvous call on it. We put linguistic experts on it at once, specifically an authority who specializes in acoustic phonetics. I don’t feel free to give you the details, general, but we have a pretty good profile of what kind of person that caller is — sex, age, education, nationality, background. And about time, we also know that person was not out duck hunting, he was not farming in Kansas, he was not playing pinochle in Toledo. Five hours before Lieutenant Weir was killed, that man was in a phone booth, maybe in a private home, somewhere in the state of Illinois, probably in the city of Chicago, talking to your son. We know that for sure.”
He paused. “I’ve spent hours listening to that tape and I’m adding my personal feelings to what the experts are telling us. I’m convinced that voice speaking is not the voice of a total stranger. It’s not necessarily someone I know, but someone I ought to know...”
“I appreciate everything you people are trying to do, sergeant,” General Weir said. The finality in his voice told Gordon this conversation was nearing its end. “And I thank you for it.”
“If there’s a breakthrough, where can I reach you?”
“John Grimes at my home phone number. You can trust him with anything, Gordon.”
The sergeant was reluctant to hang up the phone; he knew there was still something important and unspoken between them.
“General, Mark felt he was up against a stone wall in those murders we were working on, that’s why he turned to you when he did. Mark sensed he was out of his depth... hell, we both did. Chicago’s our beat and yet we couldn’t get a handle on what was happening. We had the effect here in Chicago, but the cause, that’s what we couldn’t get near. Mark had the impression that the cause might be outside our jurisdiction...”
“Sergeant Gordon,” the general said, “I’ve been making some inquiries of my own, as you may have inferred. But to use your own phrase, I don’t feel free to give you the details. Just let me assure you I understand what you’re saying, that I am aware the trouble could be coming from somewhere else. That was one of the last things my son said to me.”