just to spare Mr. Contreras the struggle of keeping Mitch from bullying him, but if I found a trail to Coop, I wanted to offload his dog as soon as possible.
When we’d settled in, one with a cortado, the other under a desk with a bully stick, I called SLICK’s Mona Borsa. I didn’t recognize her voice when she answered, it was so changed by the shock of her coworker’s death.
She and Simon Lensky had known each other for thirty years, she said, in her tremulous new voice. They’d met over shared community issues, gone to the same church, and then had run SLICK, along with Curtis Murchison, for the last eleven years.
I listened to her memories and her grief for some time. When she seemed ready to talk about Lensky’s death, I asked if she knew why he’d gone to Coop’s apartment.
“The police don’t know,” I explained.
“I can’t understand it.” She wept. “Coop—we all were tired of Coop. He was always disrupting our meetings. We have regular cleanup days in the parks, as you saw. We plant trees, we try to keep glass and used diapers off the beaches, but whatever we did, Coop knew it was wrong.
“He attacked one of our volunteers for using Roundup on the running paths. I mean attacked with his fists. He said we were trying to kill dogs and chipmunks, probably even rats, who chew on the plants. If it had been Coop found dead in that bathtub, it would have made sense, he upset so many people.
“But Simon? He wasn’t that kind of person, not the kind of person to go around picking fights. After he lost his wife, that was eight—no, it’s been nine years now—he buried himself in Chicago history. He cared about his collection of old history books, he cared about the lakefront. He was writing a history of the lake, from La Salle to Lightfoot. What possible reason could that maniac Coop have to kill him, except that he is a maniac?”
“Do you know if Coop invited Simon over to the apartment?”
“Yes.” Mona sniffled. “He got a text message from Coop, saying he had something to show Simon about the beach plan.”
That didn’t make sense: Coop wanted to be off the grid. He didn’t use devices that made him easy to trace; if he used a phone, it wasn’t a smartphone. He might carry a burner, but an old-fashioned flip phone seemed more his style.
“Are you sure the message came from Coop?” I asked.
“It was signed with his name. Simon forwarded it to me; I saw it myself.”
I persuaded her to send it to me, but she sent only the words, not the identifying phone number: You’re being used as a fall guy over the beach plan. Meet me at my place at seven tonight and I’ll show you the real plans. Coop.
The message ended with the address for Lydia’s apartment on Ingleside.
“Why did he go alone, when he knew Coop could jump the rails at a moment’s notice?” I asked.
“I know. I told him not to, but he thought, he said, that time of evening, it’s still light, there’d be plenty of people around.” Her voice trailed away into a fresh bout of tears.
“Tell me more about the lakefront development plan,” I said when she’d regained some composure. “Leo Prinz was working on that, too. Leo went through the maps and documents Mr. Lensky was preparing. Was there some controversy over the plan?”
“There’s always controversy over any change. Some people hate change—Coop was one of them, and that Nashita Lyndes who’s always picking apart our proposals is another. That place where they’re planning a new beach, you can’t use it unless you don’t mind climbing over rocks and gravel. This would be such a gift to the South Side. We never get the city to pay any attention to what we need down here and those two were trying to shut the project down before it got off the ground.”
“That last SLICK meeting where Leo Prinz was speaking, he and Mr. Lensky had a disagreement about one of the maps or diagrams,” I said.
“That was nothing,” she said. “I asked Simon after the meeting, because Leo was making a song and dance about it. Simon said it was an old map from the thirties that he was using for his book, only he’d got it mixed into the beach proposal. It happened all the time with him, he was such a—not a pack rat—but papers, he hoarded