Brainy-BOOM!

  brainy-BOOM!

  By

  Wally Duff

  A Hamlin Park Irregulars Novel: Book 4

  www.HamlinParkIrregulars.com

  www.wallyduff.com

  All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise — without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

  For permission requests, write to the publisher at:

  Attention: Wallace Duff

  c/o K, M & N Publishers, Inc.

  Hamlin Park Irregulars, A Nebraska Limited Liability Co.

  Suite 100, 12829 West Dodge Road

  Omaha, NE 68154

  © 2019 -- Wallace Duff. All rights reserved.

  Visit the author’s website: www.HamlinParkIrregulars.com,

  www.wallyduff.com

  First Edition

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7324652-2-0

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  To Alan and Marcia: you were great friends to David and Rick and Mindy and me and many, many others. We all miss you.

  Sundown is often the worst time of day for people with dementia. They can become restless and difficult.

  ~ Laurie Graham

  Builders: their promises are as worthless as that meaningless witticism “date of completion.”

  ~ Author Unknown

  Part 1

  The Loop

  Chicago, Illinois

  7:00 p.m.

  Monday, March 4

  1

  “Спасибо за то, что встречаться со мной,” I said, practicing the Russian sentence I’d memorized that morning.

  I stood in front of the closed double doors of a top-floor corner office located in a high-rise building in the middle of the Chicago Loop business district. The Russian immigrant and ultra-wealthy money manager, Alexis Zhukov, whom I was scheduled to interview, had a reputation for hating the press. My strategy was to soften him up by thanking him in his native language for seeing me.

  It was seven p.m., exactly when my appointment with him was to begin. The instructions from his PR representative were to be prompt and not to expect anyone other than Zhukov to be there.

  I knocked on the double doors.

  No answer.

  I knocked again.

  Still nothing.

  Huh?

  I turned the doorknob. It wasn’t locked. I left the door open and walked into the reception area. It was bigger than a triple-car garage. No one was behind the modern L-shaped desk to my right. The computer sitting on the surface was turned off, but the desk lamp was on, providing enough light that I could check out the rest of the room.

  Two black leather chairs and a black leather couch were on the opposite wall from the desk. The painting on the wall above the couch appeared to be an original Sarah Morris. The only noise came from the hum of the desk lamp. I sniffed and thought I detected the faint aroma of donuts.

  I walked forward to another set of double doors and knocked. “Mr. Zhukov?” I asked, to the door.

  There was no response. I did have an appointment, so I tried the doorknob. It wasn’t locked.

  What should a reporter chasing a story do?

  Go in.

  I gave the door on the right a gentle push. It swung open, and I stepped inside.

  2

  “Hello,” I said.

  No response.

  I stood in the doorway and scanned the room. Zhukov’s office was three times larger than his reception area. The illumination in the room came from Chicago’s nighttime city lights filtering through the floor-to-ceiling windows on the wall in front of me and to my right.

  There was an unlit stone fireplace in the middle of the wall to my left. It was a foot taller than my five eight and was at least that wide. Facing it was a long black leather couch flanked by end tables. There was a closed door to the left of the fireplace and one to the right, also closed. Once again, I thought I smelled donuts.

  In front of the windows along the far wall was a conference table with several chairs. Occupying the right side of the room was a large, modern, glass and metal desk. There was a lamp on the desk but it wasn’t on. A sleek chrome credenza was positioned at right angles to it. Three large computer screens sat on the credenza.

  The only noise in the room came from the hum of the computer hard drives. There were two black leather chairs in front of the desk and a taller one behind it. That chair was turned toward the windows.

  I squinted at it and thought I saw the top of a man’s head.

  Zhukov?

  I cleared my throat. “Спасибо за то, что встречаться со мной,” I said, with greater gusto.

  The man didn’t turn around.

  Dang it.

  Maybe I wasn’t saying the phrase with the proper accent. Maybe I wasn’t even saying, “Thank you for meeting with me.” That was the trouble with using our Russian dry cleaner as my translator. I wasn’t all that sure that he even understood what I needed when I asked him for his help this morning to teach me one sentence of his native language.

  Or maybe the man wasn’t Zhukov.

  “Спасибо за то, что встречаться со мной,” I said, one more time.

  The man remained facing the windows. Maybe he’d been in the United States too long and no longer understood Russian.

  My husband had confirmed that Zhukov had a frosty relationship with the American press, and now I appeared to be a victim of it.

  I wanted to say, “I think you’re a pompous asshole,” in Russian, but I didn’t know how.

  Remain positive.

  I wasn’t going to leave without talking to him.

  As I walked into the room, my brand new, black Rolando Hidden-Platform Christian Louboutin four-inch pumps sank into the plush white wool carpet, making it difficult to move gracefully without falling on my face. Slowly stepping forward, I detected a second odor in the room. It was familiar, but I was too fixated on this interview to search the olfactory part of my brain to figure out what it was.

  I stopped at the front of his desk and waited for him to turn around.

  He didn’t.

  “Mr. Zhukov, I’m Tina Thomas. I’m with the Chicago Tribune, and I’m here for our scheduled interview.”

  I didn’t exactly yell “scheduled interview,” but I did increase the volume of my voice as I said it.

  He didn’t respond.

  Before I was fired by my Washington Post bosses a few years ago, I was a world-class investigative reporter and didn’t achieve that position by letting dickheads like this stiff me on a story. I was determined to write it, and he was going to talk to me.

  I moved around the edge of his desk. “I have an appointment with you, and I am not leaving without an interview.”

  Placing my hand firmly on the top edge of his chair, I pulled. The chair slowly rotated toward me. I was face-to-face with Alexis Zhukov. He stared at me.

  There was a bullet hole between his open eyes.

  3

  Ohmygod! Ohmygod! Ohmygod!

  If the killer was still in here, I was in deep doo-doo.

  Run!

  My all-out sprint for the door lasted three steps before I tripped and did a face plant on the thick carpet. My four-inch high heels weren’t made for running.

  Leaping up, I kicked off my shoes and fled into the reception area. Going full speed, I fl
ew out the open front door of the office into the hallway and made a hard right turn toward the exit stairs.

  Or I tried to.

  Whoopsie!

  I wore black panty hose, making it difficult to get traction on the highly polished marble floor. To compensate, I moved my legs faster, causing me to slip and flop on my back.

  My forward momentum became rotational. I whirled around three times like I was an upside down turtle before I crashed into the opposite wall and ricocheted back across the floor into the first wall.

  The impact knocked the wind out of me.

  Go, go, go!

  I rolled onto my stomach and used my hands to help me stand up and slip and slide my way to the exit door at the far end of the hallway.

  It was my friend Molly Miller’s fault that I was in this mess. Earlier that afternoon, while we shopped at Neiman Marcus, she convinced me that I needed to wear the black panty hose, something I rarely do. She felt they went well with my new, classic, black Ralph Lauren power suit, which she helped me pick out. Ditto the shoes.

  And worse, thanks to Molly, I didn’t have my Glock 19 handgun. The tiny black Prada purse she’d loaned me was high fashion but was too small to carry anything more than my lipstick, van keys, and cell phone.

  I ran down six flights of exit stairs before I stopped to catch my breath. Leaning over, I put my hands on my knees and breathed air in through my nose and out through my mouth.

  The stairwell smelled dank and musty, which triggered my olfactory memory. The other odor in Zhukov’s office came from the acrid stench of gunpowder. It was intense, indicating a gun had recently been fired close to his desk.

  Yikes!

  The shooter might be after me!

  Run!

  I sprinted down another flight. The cement stairs shredded the bottoms of my panty hose. I continued going down; running in bare feet gave me better traction to sprint down five more flights and outside to my van.

  The gun was in my backpack, which sat on the passenger seat of my mommy van, a blue Honda Odyssey.

  Get it!

  My hands shook as I hit the key fob and opened the door. I slammed it shut and locked the doors. I dug out my Glock and chambered a round. I took in a deep breath. For the first time since I found Zhukov’s body, I felt safe enough to reassess the situation.

  How in the hell did I get into this?

  Two nights before

  Our Family Room

  West Lakeview, Chicago, Illinois

  8:00 p.m.

  Saturday, March 2

  4

  “Are you ready to work on a story?” my husband, Carter Thomas, asked me. He is the deputy managing editor for local news at the Chicago Tribune.

  Am I ever!

  I didn’t want to appear to be too excited, but I needed to write an article again, even if it was a short one. For the past sixteen months, other than daily journaling, I haven’t written a simple declarative sentence that might be considered intellectually stimulating to a reader of any newspaper, even a free local publication. And I really missed the challenge of investigating stories.

  But I had a reason, and I had just finished breastfeeding her when he posed the question. Seven months ago, Macy Jo Thomas was born at the MidAmerica Hospital here in Chicago. She was kind of planned, like most babies, but once I found out I was pregnant, I put a hold on all my writing activities.

  When I begin chasing a story, I go all out, and sometimes that’s risky, even dangerous. I’ve always been a sucker for a compelling tale, but I’m also an adrenaline junky.

  I didn’t fully acknowledge the extent of this character flaw until, after over seven years of a forced reporting layoff after being fired, I began going after stories again.

  I figured it out while working on my most recent feature when, to save our lives, I shot off a couple fingers of a man who was going to shoot me and my friend Linda Misle. After the gunfire stopped, I realized how much I enjoyed the intoxicating rush of pulling the trigger and hitting my target — as long as I hadn’t killed him.

  Now that I think about it, I shot him in both hands, so there may be more finger parts involved; but the point is, when the gun smoke cleared, my heart wasn’t even beating fast. That episode was part of the last article I had worked on with Linda and my two other close friends Cassandra (Cas) Johnson and Molly Miller. Gunfire was a prominent part of that adventure as it has been in other stories we’ve worked on together.

  It was Molly who suggested I cut back on working on feature stories until Macy was born, and I did. She has four boys, each one year apart, so she considers herself an expert on all things having to do with birth, even though Cas was a labor and delivery nurse and clearly knows the science of pregnancy.

  Even if I had wanted to pursue a story, I wouldn’t have had the time or energy because I was way too busy birthing and raising Macy. Added to that, I struggled to enroll our now almost four-year-old daughter, Kerry, in preschool.

  Who knew? Face-to-face interviews, an essay, and background checks for the mother and father. For God’s sake, it’s only preschool, but here in Chicago, that’s the way it is.

  And cost? Don’t even bring it up. I didn’t want to admit it to Carter, but any income I made from doing a feature for the Chicago Tribune, his employer, would go for Kerry’s tuition.

  For preschool.

  Unbelievable.

  “Honey, I would love to work on a piece again,” I said. “Tell me about it.”

  5

  Carter and I sat in the family room of our home, which is located in an upscale neighborhood in the West Lakeview area of Chicago. A satisfied Macy snoozed in my arms. Though she’s still breastfeeding, we’re introducing baby food, which will allow me a tiny bit of freedom to do a story for Carter and get a little much-needed sleep.

  “I would like you to interview Alexis Zhukov,” Carter said.

  Whoa.

  “The multimillionaire money manager?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve read he hates talking to the press.”

  “When did that ever stop you?”

  “Never, but why do a feature about him if he doesn’t want to be interviewed?”

  “All we know to date is that he is a Russian immigrant who made his money primarily by investing funds from other Russian immigrants to the U.S. However, a strong rumor has surfaced that his clients aren’t happy with his recent returns for them.”

  “Thus the need for an interview so Zhukov can show his best side to me, figuring I’ll write a positive article.”

  “Indeed. He hired a public relations firm here in Chicago to present a favorable image to the business world.”

  “And to his unhappy clients.”

  “Correct. The PR firm wants us to send a reporter for an interview, with the hope that he can begin rehabilitating his image before any negative press comes out.”

  “Which it will, when his bad investment returns become public.”

  “Again, correct. With the interview coming at their request, he will be fully accessible, and I want to take advantage of the rare opportunity for you to question the man himself.”

  I used to call pieces like this “executive blowjobs” and said I would never write one, but I was desperate to work on any story. However, Carter knew I would dig deeper to uncover the true facts, regardless, even if the PR firm didn’t like them.

  “Why me? You have reporters who would kill to do this.”

  “Back when we both worked for the Post, you wrote that three-part feature on the Russian Mafia’s inroads into legitimate businesses in the United States. With that background, you are the most qualified reporter I have to do a piece on him.”

  Yes! I love being an investigative journalist. It’s who I am.

  “What’s my timeline?” I asked.

  “You have an appointment to interview him at his office on Monday at seven p.m. It will be one-on-one, with no pictures or recordings. He will talk to you for exactly thirty-two minute
s.”

  “Guess I can live with that.”

  “You have no choice.” He paused. “And, since it’s a short interview, it will not be dangerous.”

  His comment was in reference to several features I’ve worked on, starting with me being fired over seven years ago as an investigative journalist for the Post. Then, I was blown up and almost killed chasing a story I was ordered by the FBI not to pursue. Understandably, my hubby doesn’t want me to work on any risky stories. But if he’s good with this, so am I.