He walked back into the bar area, silenced the volume on the overhead television that no one was watching and said, ‘Grand crimes in Grand Point, Illinois.’
Farris Hobbs groaned. ‘Here we go again: Betty Jo Dean and the Polish guy. He grilled me about that, night before last,’ he said to the others. ‘Bought me an extra drink, on the house, he did.’
The prospect of free booze should have set all their glasses to tapping on the glossy counter. It didn’t. To a man, they stared up at the muted television screen, not speaking.
‘All right, all right,’ Mac said, as though he’d been met with a clamor. ‘I’ll buy the next round.’ He lined up fresh glasses and poured each man another of what he’d been drinking.
No one reached for the new booze.
‘The mere mention of a crime from 1982 stops you cold?’ he asked.
‘Not much to tell, is all,’ said the man who used to run the movie theater. He was eyeing the new, full glass in front of him apprehensively, as though touching it would obligate him to say more.
‘The case got stalled years ago,’ said the town’s tow truck driver.
‘But there were so many leads,’ Mac said.
‘So many dead ends.’ Farris Hobbs pointedly pushed his new drink a couple inches away, a master of self-control.
The tow truck driver stood up, his drink untouched. ‘Rumor was most of them tips were made up by our own deputies to keep the Rockford coppers the hell out of the way.’ He headed for the door.
‘Ever hear that the killer might have been local, someone influential enough to stop the investigation?’ Mac asked.
That did it for the man who used to run the movie theater. ‘Sweet shit, don’t talk like that.’ He, too, headed for the door.
Farris Hobbs pulled his drink back to within clutching distance. ‘It was so long ago,’ he said.
The tightness on his face showed that nothing more was going to come out of his mouth. Mac turned up the television.
THIRTY
The highway heading east out of Grand Point was deserted at seven-thirty on Saturday morning.
Mac had barely gotten four hours sleep. His bedside Scotch had begged another, and that begged still another, to dull the churnings in his mind about a waitress who disappeared and men sitting at a bar, too afraid of thirty-year-old killings to sip a free drink.
A car charged up behind him. Mac recognized the shape of the grill. It was a Cadillac Sedan DeVille, so shiny it looked like it had just been polished.
He knew someone who owned a car like that. That bastard, Ryerson Wainwright, drove a DeVille. His was bright red, to attract the most attention. Wainwright kept it highly polished. He lived by sparkle.
The car swung out into the oncoming lane, pulled abreast and blew past his laboring truck. In an instant it was only a dark speck in the distance.
He’d not gotten a glimpse of the driver, but he recognized the red.
What he couldn’t figure was why Wainwright had been in Grand Point at such an early hour.
The Harold Washington Library was an enormous mausoleum of bricks and granite in Chicago’s downtown Loop. The newspaper microfilms were kept in long rows of putty-colored cabinets on the second floor.
The Chicago Tribune’s coverage, on the inside pages, was terse and dense with facts: many leads were being chased down; low-flying planes had aided ground search teams; Pauly Pribilski had been found in a field, shot multiple times; Betty Jo was discovered under a tree with one bullet embedded in her skull.
The Tribune had run four photos in five days. He’d already seen the first, of Pribilski in his Marine uniform. The second, of Betty Jo wearing a plaid top and smiling into the camera, was taken in seventh grade. The third picture showed the Devil’s Backbone the morning she was found, crowded with cops. The final photograph was of her father, dressed in a light-colored suit, helping his wife into a car to ride to the funeral.
The Tribune’s last report ended with a bit of poignancy. Betty Jo was buried in the dress she was to have worn to her brother’s upcoming wedding.
The Daily Reporter’s first piece was more lurid. A front-page headline trumpeted, ‘Murder at Moonlight Tryst,’ reporting that Pribilski had been shot once in the heart, then four times, fast, in the lower abdomen. They’d run two photos – Pribilski’s Marine picture, and the swimsuit shot of Betty Jo that Wiggins had run in the Peering County Democrat.
A day later, the Daily Reporter had reported that a psychic, Abigail Beech, had contacted the Dean family to tell them their daughter was alive, and in the company of a dark-haired man.
Mac leaned back from the microfilm reader. He knew Abigail Beech. He’d hired her to do a dinnertime psychic act a couple of times the previous winter. She’d been a hit, moving from table to table, asking a little, telling a little, making the customers laugh. His customers enjoyed her, and he planned to have her back. She came in, now and again, for dinner. Maggie often joined her for a moment, in a booth.
The Daily Reporter’s third report offered titillating details: Betty Jo Dean had been discovered almost nude, dressed only in a girdle, and was known in the community as a girl of many loves. According to one of her friends, Betty Jo thought of all her boyfriends as good Joes, and used to say, ‘I love ’em and I leave ’em,’ also quoting an anonymous local bartender who said, ‘Betty Jo didn’t care whether a man was married or not.’ Clamp Reems was also quoted, saying only that ‘the murders may be hard to unravel because beautiful Betty Jo Dean led such a complicated life.’
His head ached from squinting at the microfilm reader. He put the rolls away. Jen Jessup had recapped everything of value. He’d learned nothing new other than an act he’d hired for the restaurant had once passed herself off as a legitimate psychic.
He went out into the bright sunlight of mid-afternoon. Though it was a Saturday, traffic headed toward the outbound expressway was choked to a standstill. He walked down to a striped-awning restaurant that sold small things on rolls at prices the Bird’s Nest couldn’t get for a whole meal. Thinking to wait until traffic died down, he ordered coffee and a smoked ham sandwich, and rationalized while he ate: people got murdered every day. Some of them were young, seventeen years young, and some of those cases would never be solved. That was the horror of the world he’d known since he was nineteen.
An hour later, traffic was still not moving. He went back to the library to kill another hour, and took out a microfilm spool labeled, ‘Chicago Sun-Times, May-July, 1982.’ He forwarded it to the last ten days of June.
Unlike its competitors, the Sun-Times had reported nothing in the first days following the murder. He kept his finger on the advance button, only half interested in watching bygone times scroll by, until he got to Tuesday, June 29, 1982, a full week after the discovery of Pauly Pribilski’s body.
He jerked his hand away like he’d been jolted by electricity.
A huge headline ran across all of pages two and three: ‘WHAT’S WRONG IN GRAND POINT?’ Underneath were thousands of angry-looking words.
It wasn’t the text, though, that dried his mouth like it had been chalked. It was the name of one of the reporters, up at the top in the byline.
Jessup. Laurel Jessup.
THIRTY-ONE
An editor named Leon Eddings had prefaced the piece: ‘The Chicago Sun-Times is proud of the wide-ranging, hard-hitting, fact-based coverage it extends to its readers throughout all of Northern Illinois. Our reporter, Jonah Ridl, submitted the following immediately prior to embarking on a national assignment. Because Mr Ridl’s report raises disturbing questions and infers actions and motivations that are still being examined, we are offering what follows as editorial content, and not as our usual, doubly-verified presentation of facts.’