Loose Ends

Chapter One

Loose Ends



The old black phone on my desk rang in that jerky, old phone way and I looked at it for about two seconds wondering how many times in a lifetime the damn thing would ring, and how many times I would answer it, who it might be this time, was it worth answering and where and when it would end. I was thinking it ought to be almost over. Then I picked it up.
"Hendrick," I said.
A momentary pause.
"Mr. Hendrick?" the caller said weakly. He was trying to disguise his voice. "You don’t know me."
I said, "Why bother screwing up your voice then?"
A slight pause, then, “Just listen, damnit,” the voice suddenly took a dive; now it was a forced whisper between clenched teeth, desperate, maybe scared.
“Sure,” I said, leaning back in my chair. I plucked a sharpened number two pencil out of the top drawer of my desk and twirled it between my fingers.
I looked out the second-floor window next to my desk in the Tampa Tribune newsroom. The sky had turned a nasty bilious green. Big puffy clouds were meeting up, merging and pushing each other into a roiling mass. Gusty winds had kicked up discarded hot dog wrappers, newspaper pages, mustard stained napkins and other assorted papers and sent them tumbling along downtown sidewalks and dancing overhead like so many crinkled ghosts. A thunderstorm was about to strike and from the looks of those clouds, it was going to be a bitch.
“I’m all ears,” I said.
The voice said, “I’m on the grand jury, Mr. Hendrick. Your name has come up.”
A crack of thunder as loud as a bomb punctuated the caller’s statement and two kid reporters sitting near me damn near jumped out of their seats. It caught me off guard, too, and the muscles in my legs and arms flexed. I damn near broke the pencil. But it was the bastard on the phone who had my attention.
The grand jury is made up of eighteen citizens whose official job is to investigate crimes and file charges against those responsible. But state attorneys have found that the real utility of the grand jury is in official corruption cases, in which bribery, election law violations and other government-related crime is the main course.
News reporters love grand juries. If a reporter writes a story that results in a grand jury investigation, from then on it is referred to as his grand jury, and if somebody goes to jail the reporter is thought of as being responsible for taking down a bad guy. Even if the reporter doesn’t start the investigation, witnesses before the grand jury are sworn to tell the truth, so grand jury reports are chock-full of dirty little secrets and dirty laundry, the main ingredients of good newspaper stories.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t uncovered anything important enough or suspicious enough to get the attention of a grand jury in years. Had I? I damn sure hadn’t done anything wrong, unless you count thinking about murdering my wife. But they can't lock you up for what you're thinking, according to an old song that I hoped was still right.
I said, “The grand jury is supposed to be secret. You know that, right?”
“Of course,” he said. “It's the first thing they tell you. We know that."
“Who’s we?” I said.
“A few of us,” he said. “We decided to run the risk of calling you. We know it’s basically illegal.
I said, “Not basically illegal. Illegal with a capital I.”
“We know,” the caller said, suddenly bold. “Are you interested or not?”
It had started to rain, and in Tampa, Florida, the rain starts at full speed. There is no gradual build-up like you get up north. Sheets of wind-blown rain pounded my window, reducing visibility to a few feet. The slow-moving Hillsborough River that runs next to The Trib building was just a blur. I made out a skinny black kid running along the bank, a cane pole in one hand. He hopped up on some big rocks on which the University of Tampa students had painted Greek letters and ducked under the squat little Kennedy Boulevard Bridge for cover.
I took in a breath. Was I getting ready to break a law? Did I have to report this call to somebody or other? I wasn’t sure, but how could it be against the law to listen to a voice on the phone? He might be just some nut. There’s never a lawyer around when you need one.
I said, “I’m listening.”
The voice said, “No recorders.”
I said, “Don’t be silly. That would be a felony on top of a felony. Who said what about me?”
“Okay, here it is,” the voice said. “They brought in a young woman to testify a few days ago. She’s a deputy clerk of the court and she works downtown.”
“Yes,” I said.
The clerk’s office flashed in my mind. Row after row of file folders stacked on shelves five or six high, color coded, numbered, dog eared, the thickest ones boxed up and placed on top of the others, so high you’d need a ladder to reach them. Doleful, solemn faced men and women, haggard, bored, no patience, serving one angry, ignorant bastard after another. It's the courthouse version of the post office, where the relentless grind turns normal human beings into zombies, where nothing is important and nothing is unimportant, where every customer represents just another request from another unwashed, smelly son of a bitch.
Aside from the human misery, the clerk's office is the vast locker of the courts, where the files of all cases, criminal and civil are collected, organized, digitized, monitored and made ready for trials, and for history. Without the clerk, the court system would be a chaotic and random mess.
When it comes to helping reporters, employees of the clerk’s office can help a lot or not at all, at their discretion. I try to be friendly, but if you’re doing your job right in the newspaper business, you’re pissing off a lot of people.
“She said you’d been asking questions about her relationship with Judge Walter Frommer.”
I stopped twirling the pencil and felt the muscles in my hands tighten like guitar strings.
This went back a few months. I'd heard talk. Early one morning I dressed up like a common thief, arrived at Frommer’s courtroom at 8:30 a.m. and settled back on a hard oak bench between a pretty pregnant woman and a guy with a plaster cast on his arm who smelled like stale whiskey. Both looked like regular customers in criminal court, him because he kept getting sent up, her because her baby’s father kept getting sent up. Neither one ever learned a lesson.
On this particular morning, the door in the back of the courtroom swung open with a metallic twang and Judge Frommer, stern, fat-bellied, never yielding, confident that he had never made a mistake in his life, came in with a flourish. His black robe billowed behind him as he skipped up the three steps that led to his high bench, and he fell back into his thick-cushioned red chair with a whoosh.
On his face was the look of a man dissatisfied with his life, especially about having to waste yet another morning reading scripted legalese to men who understood not a word of it despite the vigorous nodding of their heads and whispered 'yes, sirs.' He looked like an arrogant, pompous son of a bitch who wanted to put as many of them in handcuffs and sent to prison as he possibly could so that tomorrow's workload might be that much lessened.
The clerk, one Julia Jenson, had a much less majestic seat to the judge’s right, below his but close enough so that she could pass him file folders. Ms. Jenson was looking lovely, her fine light brown hair reaching to her waist, her flashing green eyes bright and full of promise. She had tiny little hands, white and fine and perfect long fingernails I could almost feel on my back.
Julia had a reputation. It was rumored that she found a way of breaking the incessant boredom of her job by sleeping around. She'd slept with two or three of her coworkers in the clerk’s office, two different mediators on the third floor, a bailiff or two and some of her husband's cop friends. Ms. Jenson’s associates who professed to know about these affairs did not use the word slut when talking about her, but they got the idea across.
The frequent moving around had caused her cop husband to lose control on one occasion when she did not come home until the sun was rising. He’d pushed her around, knocked her down, pulled her pretty brunette hair and committed other such indignities after which she called the cops. Had her husband been ordinary Citizen Joe, he would have been run into jail that very night.
But Mr. Jenson was a cop and things are different with cops. This is so because cops believe they are in a life and death struggle against evil, and they are in it together. This requires them to be members of a union. It is a union forged of blood, and is governed by laws that go beyond the laws that govern the rest of us. As a result, nothing about Julia getting batted around leaked out, and Jimmy Jenson was allowed to quit the force with no black mark on his record.
On this particular morning, Judge Frommer did not look at Julia, to the point that it was obvious that he was not looking at her. No man could have avoided looking at that stunning girl unless he was trying not to look.
Julia leaned toward the judge an inch, maybe two; the white flowers on her yellow dress barely moved at all. But in this tiny movement was a gesture, a sign of familiarity between this 30-something year-old nymph and a circuit judge twice her age.
Julia whispered, “You okay?” The words came out so softly that nobody could possibly have heard her, what with all the feet shuffling and the crowd buzzing and the bailiff shouting to have cell phones turned off and there would be no talking. I wouldn't have heard her myself except I was reading her lips. At the same time she smiled. She smiled with her eyes, her lips, her shoulders, her whole body if that's possible. It gave me a hint about why she had moved around so much, it came natural to her. Julia was a woman who would always move around on whoever she was seeing.
The Judge did not say anything in response to this intimate inquiry, but he nodded and blinked, wrinkled his forehead, shifted his right hand slightly up and then down, a silent acknowledgement.
It may not have seemed like much, but it was proof enough for me that something was up beyond coffee and doughnuts. But it was not enough to get in the paper. What the editors wanted to know was, first, how do you prove it? I thought my observations were interesting, even conclusive, but they were not even close to the proof required to put an allegation of sexual goings on in the newspaper. And secondly, so what if he’s in bed with the pretty young clerk? Unless he’s got a gun to her head, where’s the story?
I hate questions like that because I have no good answer. It's my job to come up with this stuff. I want somebody else to decide whether to publish it. Still, it seemed newsy that an old married bastard who acts like he’s God all day, everyday is screwing his young clerk. And anyway, stuff like this always leads to something else, such as divorce. But the lily livered bastards said no so I basically forgot about trying to get anything in the paper about it. Now I was thinking I should have stayed with it. Maybe Ms. Jenson would have come across with something that would have gotten it into the paper. I kicked myself. And now I had to go back and find out.
I said to the caller, “Tell me what happened.”
The caller said, “The prosecutor, Lee Thompson, asked this clerk some questions about a guy who brought a gun into the clerk’s office and had to be handcuffed and removed from the building. She talked about seeing it happen, identified the guy's picture, and we thought that was it. Then he asked her if she knew about anything else and that’s when she started in on you, how you had been over to the courthouse watching her, asking questions about her and Judge Frommer and were they seeing each other.”
The caller paused.
I said, “Go ahead.”
The caller said, “When this happened, the prosecutor, Mr. Thompson, went out of his tree. He jumps up, starts yelling. ‘Stop this. This is not why you were called. You were a witness to a crime. That is all. You are to confine your testimony to that.’ Just like that, he was really pissed.”
“This bothered you?” I said.
“Well, yes, it did. Then she, this clerk, she said it was his last chance, and he wasn’t going to let anybody destroy it.”
I gripped the pencil again, felt it strain under my fingers. The rain had not slowed at all. If anything, it was coming with greater force. The wind was having a hell of a time with the palm trees and scrub oaks outside my window and the small part of our parking lot that I could see was completely under water. So far as I could tell, the skinny black kid was still safely under the bridge.
I said, "Last chance for what?”
The caller said, "Thompson never let her finish.”
I worked on the pencil some more. The yellow paint would crack if I dug my nails into it, but I didn’t have any nails.
“Then what?”
“One of the other jurors wanted to ask her questions. Right after we were sworn in, Thompson told us we could ask questions.”
I said, “And?”
“Thompson told the bailiff to take the woman out of there and he started saying how some newspaper reporter on a fishing expedition had nothing to do with us, and we were not to ask questions about it.”
I gripped the pencil hard and made a thick, straight vertical line in my green desk blotter.
“Anything else?”
“What we want to know, Mr. Hendrick, is why would he stop us from asking questions? What's going on with this woman and the judge that they don't want us asking questions?"
I put one hand on my forehead, closed my eyes and took a breath. An old editor told me once that the hardest thing to find was not answers but questions. If you can figure out the right questions, you're more than half way to getting your story.
The voice said, “Are you there, Mr. Hendrick?
I said, “Yeah, I’m here.”
He said, "What do you think?"
I hesitated a long moment. Finally, I said, "I'm not sure what to think, sir. Have you talked to Mr. Thompson about it?"
"Yes. He will not discuss it. It's not a matter properly before the jury. That's it."
I closed my eyes again.
"Okay," I said. "The other thing is you're way out on a limb, sir. If you’re for real, and I’m thinking you are, you have definitely violated your oath, which in your case means you’ve committed a felony. So far, I’m okay with it because I don’t know if you’re for real or just another nut and in any case I don’t know your name. But I'll look into what's happening with Julia Jenson. I’ll go talk to her. Maybe she’ll tell me something I can put in the newspaper.”
“Okay,” the caller said. “I’ll be looking for something.”
“Right,” I said. “Good.”
“Great,” the caller said. "And listen, can I depend on you to be discreet about this call?"
Discreet. What a nice way to put it.
I said, "Discretion has always been my specialty. I promise discretion, if nothing else."
“Thanks,” he said. He sounded much more comfortable, and hung up.



*****


I sat there looking into the torrential rain. Water was washing over the seawall and filling up the Hillsborough River which would fill up Tampa Bay which would fill up the Gulf of Mexico. All that water. It had to go somewhere.
Was Julia Jenson's affair and subsequent trip to the grand jury a loose end of something bigger? And why the hell wouldn't the prosecutor have let the grand jurors dig into it unless he had something to hide?
I was wondering about that when Ed Deitz, a dripping wet, black and white umbrella in one hand and a soaked spiral notebook in the other, came half running into the newsroom. He headed for the city desk in the middle of the room. Deitz was a good kid who looked like he was stuck in the 60s, hair way too long and scraggly beard that would not grow in right. He left a trail of water on the dark waxy floor.
John Golson, as thin and frail a man as I have ever known, was on the city desk. He was reading something and looking bored, as always, when Deitz hurried up to him, out of breath. I stood up and walked toward him and listened as Deitz began to give John the story.
"You are not going to believe this,” Deitz said, taking big gulps of air as he looked through his notebook. “Some fucking maniac threw a guy out a window on the 35th floor of the Sun Trust building,” Deitz said, wiping his palm through his hair and shaking the water off onto the floor.
Golson's brow furrowed and his eyes narrowed.
Golson mumbled so badly you could almost never understand him, but I had no trouble understanding his response.
"Jesus," he said quietly, glancing up at Deitz, then me. “Out a window?”
Deitz said. “Broke the window with a chair. The cops said you couldn’t break that window, that it was made with hurricanes in mind, but this bastard did it.”
“Jesus,” Golson said again. "This just happen?” Golson said, and he glanced out the window as if to check on the weather.
"Maybe an hour ago. I tried to call it in but my cell phone was soaked and I think the lightning screwed it up. The poor bastard landed on Kennedy Boulevard in that goddamn rain and a city bus ran over him, or what was left of him," Deitz said. "It's a bloody mess. I had Serne with me so we've got pictures."
Golson had been a newspaper editor for more than 30 years, but a lifetime of horror stories had not prepared him for this. Me neither. We were silent for a few seconds.
Without looking up, Golson shook his head and said, “This happened in front of people?”
Deitz let out something like a laugh, but not because something was funny.
“This happened in Lindy's, a new restaurant on the 35th floor of that building. The place was packed, around a hundred people. Every one of them scared shitless, except one waiter who got in the guy’s way and almost got his neck broken.”
"Christ,” Golson said again, looking away. Then he said, “Any idea who?"
Deitz flipped a page in the notebook and went on.
“The dead guy is a former Buc. A football player. He wasn’t a big star, but he played defensive back a few years ago. I’ll have to check to get the details.”
“Damn,” Golson said, shaking his head. “What else?”
"The guy who did it was pissed because the football player laughed at him in the elevator, according to the dead guy's wife. Road rage, elevator rage, something like that. Can you believe it? He’s pissed off. So he chokes the guy until he passes out, then he carries him into Lindy's, dumps him on a table loaded with trays of food and drinks, busts the window with the chair and tosses the guy out. Then he walks out of the place as cool as ice."
The three of us stood there, all with the same questions, and no answers.
“Jesus.” Golson said.
“I told you it was crazy," Deitz said.
Golson looked at me. We were thinking the same thing. Road rage on an elevator. New ways for people to be crazy and mean and murderous are discovered all the time. It was possible. Or maybe it was bullshit.
Golson said to Deitz, "Write what you’ve got. Don’t worry about how long it gets.”
Deitz nodded and turned toward his desk. It was horrific, tragic, crazy, but writing the thing would be no problem. This kind of story wrote itself.
I had the overall picture, but I wanted a close-up.
"Listen, John, Deitz has all he needs for tonight. Let me go over and see what I can find for a follow-up."
Golson nodded.
"Good luck."
I picked up my coat and hurried toward the front door. Elevator rage leads to murder. It looked like just another crazy man committing just another crazy act. Could there be something bigger? That would make two loose ends in one day. Not a record, but something to remember.
I was still mulling this when the wet aftermath of the storm hit me in the face.