4 The Marathon Murders Read Free

tiled corridor infused with a pervasive antiseptic odor. We
passed a huddled woman in a wheelchair, a few wisps of gray hair clinging to
her bowed head. She talked to herself in low, unintelligible tones. It left me
with a hollow feeling inside, a feeling I should do something to help her but
without the vaguest idea of what I could do. It was similar to what I felt when
encountering a homeless guy on the street. I usually gave them a buck and hoped
it would be spent in some useful manner, if not a wise one.
    We found Arthur Liggett’s name
beside the door to a room not a lot more spacious than a broom closet. It
housed a bed, a lounge chair, and a three-drawer wooden chest. A few aluminum
stack chairs had been squeezed in for our benefit.
    A large man with thinning white hair,
Liggett had a full face and a silvery mustache in need of trimming. I suspected
his granddaughter would get around to that shortly. Hooded eyes gave him a
lethargic look. Small oxygen tubes fed into his nose, a circumstance that
struck me as demeaning, though necessary. Neither age nor physical impairment
had lessened his desire to maintain the formality of years in management,
however. He wore a white shirt with red tie beneath the blue sweater donned to
combat the robust air-conditioning system. My approach to retirement had taken
the opposite tack. After a lifetime of being forced to dress up in coats and
ties, I took pains to avoid them except when an absolute necessity, and never
during a mid-August heat wave.
    After introductions, I shook Mr.
Liggett’s large, gnarled hand and took a chair beside the battleship gray wall.
“What in the world are you doing here, Mr. Liggett?” I asked. “You look like
you’re ready to run a marathon.”
    He leaned his head against the
lounge chair and gazed out through thick oval lenses, the bare hint of a smile
tilting a corner of his mouth. “You can’t see the gruesome part . . . under
this blanket covering my legs. I never did run too fast, though. Maybe it won’t
matter.”
    He spoke in a low, breathy voice,
the words coming slowly.
    “As long as I’ve known him, he’s
never been a complainer,” Kelli said.
    I wondered about that “as long as
I’ve known him” but let it pass.
    “You were a hospital
administrator?” I asked.
    “Yes. You’d think I’d seen enough
of this sort of environment, that I’d figure out how to avoid it in any way
possible.”
    “How long were you in the hospital
business?”
    He took a deep breath, looked up at
the ceiling, then back at me. “Practically all my life. I served in the Army Medical Corps during the war. Went to
work in a hospital after my discharge. I only needed a year to finish
college. They were generous enough to let me do that while I was working.”
    Kelli leaned forward. “He was
manager of one of the city’s largest hospitals when he retired at
seventy-plus.”
    “You’ve spent a long time in the
trenches,” Jill said. “Time for you to get a rest.”
    “ Hmph . Only rest I’m likely to get’s in the grave.
Kelli says you’re detectives. I hope you can find out what’s going on.”
    “Tell us how this came about,” I
said.
    “A few days ago I got a call.” He
glanced at the phone on the bedside table. “Fellow said—what was his name?”
    “Pierce Bradley,” Kelli prompted.
    “Yes, Pierce Bradley called. Said
he was a foreman with a contractor rehabbing the old Marathon Motors buildings
on Clinton Street. It’s just beyond downtown, near the Inner Loop. I knew the
place, of course. That’s where my grandfather worked years ago. Werthan Bag Company used the buildings in its operations
for a while, but they’d been vacant a long time.”
    “Somebody new had bought them?” I
asked.
    “Yes. A fellow
making office space for photographers and artists and musicians. Don’t
remember his name. Anyway, this—Bradley, was it?—said one of his workers had
found a sheaf of papers behind some wood paneling. It was addressed