Target Lancer (11 page)

“So,” I said, “my business card was in his wallet.”

“That’s right. Had you seen Tom Ellison lately?”

“I had, but it was strictly social,” I lied. “We had a beer at the Berghoff Friday afternoon, and just caught up with each other. I think maybe he was fishing for some business.”

“But in a sociable way.”

“That’s right. I hadn’t used him for publicity for a couple years—why go to Milwaukee, when there are so many good people here at home?” I squeezed a lemon slice into the iced tea. “Will I be hearing from those homicide dicks? Will they want a statement?”

“Not unless I advise them to.” He shrugged. “That guy Mulrooney, he knows you and me are Siamese twins. He saw that business card and gave me a call, and I came right over. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t jammed up in this thing, somehow.”

“I appreciate that.”

He nodded,
no big deal
. “Are you going to look into it?”

“I don’t think so, Dick. But I would like to know a few things.…”

“Like the angle of penetration. I’m talking about the ice pick, of course.”

“Of course.” My tone was casual, matter-of-fact. “And I’d like to know what the latent print guys have to say.”

He laughed once, a harsh blurt. “You really think some hustler left her fingerprints? Surely she rubbed everything down.”

“You’d think so, since damn near every hooker and B-girl in town has an arrest record with prints on file. But in that case, wouldn’t she clean the lipstick off that glass, and flush the lipstick butts, too?”

He waved that off. “In too big a hurry to get the hell out, probably.”

“Which means, if she exists, she
would
leave fingerprints. Too panicky to be bothered with niceties.”

Cain thought about that. Filled the rest of his glass of ice with Coke—it was one of those new ten-ounce bottles.

“And,” I said, “how about that
DO NOT DISTURB
hanger?”

“
What
DO NOT DISTURB
hanger?”

“Exactly.”

It came to him. “You mean, if Ellison had been entertaining, he’d have hung one on his door.”

“You would think. And this supposed doxy turned killer, if she were taking time to tidy up, wouldn’t she have left the
DO NOT DISTURB
on the knob, exiting? To keep the deceased undiscovered for as long as possible?”

The sheriff’s man had a thoughtful expression now. When he did that, the milky eye went half lidded. “So Chicago Homicide’s theory is horseshit. Do we care? He was your friend. How do you read this thing, anyway?”

“Do you know how hard it is to punch an ice pick through somebody’s sternum?”

He nodded. “Pretty fucking hard. On the other hand, adrenaline can inspire many a superhuman feat. Like a mom lifting the front of a Buick off her child.”

“Yeah, that’s an event I keep hearing about, but for some reason you never see any pictures. Look, if I were you, and wanted a feather in my cap, I might go a different way.”

Dick grinned. He was a guy whose grins always had a frowny cast, his mouth a half moon with the corners down. “You know me, Nate. I never shy away from a good headline, and I don’t mind the PD boys owing me.”

“What you may have here is a guy robbing hotel guests.”

His eyebrows rose over the dark frames. “Well, there’s no shortage of that on the books. Unsolved or otherwise. But I don’t know of any recent surge of that particular pastime.”

I leaned in. “What if some sleazeball has snagged himself a bellboy’s outfit? That and a bucket of champagne and an ice pick … he can fill the bucket with ice from a machine on any floor, right? He knocks on the door, and if there’s no answer, maybe he goes on in.”

“Using a jimmy or a passkey he’s finagled,” Dick said, going along.

“If somebody does answer, the ‘bellboy’ says he’s delivering a complimentary bottle of champagne from the management, and is of course allowed in to set the bucket down.”

“What if there’s more than one person in the room?”

“Well, he probably fades. But if it’s a room with just one person in it, a guy like Tom Ellison, say … maybe our bogus bellboy sticks up the guest.”

His expression had turned half appalled, half amused. “With an
ice
pick?”

I raised my hands chest-high, like a robbery victim. “Maybe our bellboy has a gun. But for some reason, this particular mark—Tom Ellison—puts up a fight, and rather than fire off a noisy gun, the bellboy grabs that ice pick and … hammers Tom in the chest with it.”

Dick’s expression had settled back down; he was playing along again. “A
man
ice-pick stabbing somebody in the chest, deep enough to kill, does seem more likely than some little prostitute doing it.”

“Yes it does.”

“We’re ruling out an underhand stab?”

“For a sternum blow? The assailant would have to be seven feet tall. No, this is strictly a
Psycho
stab, and a man.”

Dick tilted his head. “Some of these broads are good size, Nate. And a lot of ’em work with guys who rob a would-be john
after
the doll makes entry, but before the
john
does, if you get my drift. And anyway, how do you explain the lipstick?”

“Well, maybe our thief in the bellboy outfit has thought ahead to the possibility of something going wrong. And he’s brought along some lipstick and a Trojan wrapper, just in case. To lead the cops astray.”

He was smirking again. “Oh, Christ, Heller, you’re watching way too much television. Ever since you got that color TV.
Listen
to yourself.”

“Yeah, I know,” I admitted. “It’s thin.”

But it wasn’t so thin, if you considered that Tom’s slaying might have been a hit, not a robbery.

My far-fetched scenario got goddamn probable, if all some killer had to do—in or out of a bellboy uniform—was gain access to that hotel room, kill Tom, and stage it to look like a hooker robbery gone wrong.

Had somebody tied off Tom Ellison as a loose end? Because of that money drop he’d made? And if so, what the hell did that make me, but another loose end?

Plus, there was always the possibility that somebody had seen Tom with that envelope of cash, not knowing he’d passed it to Jack Ruby at the 606, and my bellboy theory—right down to preparing for the hooker ploy—seemed suddenly less preposterous.

I did not, however, share any of that with Dick Cain. He was a friend, as far as it went, but there was no way I would ever let him know about the job I’d done for Tom, not unless he confronted me with an eyewitness. His presence today could have less to do with him covering for me, out of friendship, and more to do with somebody—
Hoffa? Giancana?—
checking up on me, to see if I’d spill what I knew about Tom and Ruby to a copper.

From the Outfit’s point of view, my pal Dick would be the perfect cop to send my way.…

Still, Dick’s dealings with the Outfit always seemed to be at arm’s length—he was doing business with them because he had to, to make it in Chicago. Which was an attitude I well understood, because it was my own. You have to swim in the waters you find yourself in.

And the sheriff’s top investigator had expressed his disgust with the Outfit to me many times—though everybody seemed to think of Dick as Irish, his father had been Italian … and had been murdered by the Black Hand.

“Do you want me to keep an eye on this thing?” Dick asked. Considering that he only had one good eye, that was damn near a joke. He was lighting up another Dunhill.

“Let’s see what the coroner comes up with,” I said casually. “The trajectory of the pick will help pin down whether it’s a man or a woman who swung it.”

He shook his head, sighing smoke. “Not sure I see that.”

“Well, it’s obvious Tom was standing up when he was killed.”

“Is it?”

“The angle of his body on the bed. His feet hanging over. He started out standing near the bed, got stabbed, fell backward … and that’s why there’s so little blood.”

“There’s never a lot of blood with an ice pick.”

“But more blood than
that!
After he fell backward, gravity took care of the rest—making for damn little bleeding. Anyway, the angle of the ice-pick wound will give us the height of the killer.”

“All right. I’ll buy that.”

“And that bed, Dick—didn’t you notice? It was tidy, except for Tom’s body, on
top
of the spread. Didn’t look to me like anybody’d been riding bareback on it lately. He was in his T-shirt, boxers, and socks—a guy relaxing in his hotel room, not a guy who just got laid. If somebody came to the door, Tom probably pulled his trousers on and answered, and let his murderer in. Post-kill, the guy yanked Tom’s trousers off and dumped them on the floor.”

Now Dick was nodding, clearly with me. “Okay, Nate. Maybe you got something. We’ll see what latent prints comes up with.”

“Good. That’s all I ask.”

“Is it?” The milky eye made his gaze unsettling. “You’ve been known to even scores, Nate. Business, schmizness—this was a friend of yours. Are you really content to let law enforcement handle it?”

“I’m old and respectable now, Dick. I don’t play Wild West anymore. That’s for you young go-getters.”

He’d shot a few bad guys in his time—sometimes coming under criticism for the same. Probably had led to his resignation from the PD.

But my remark only made him smile.

“You know, Nate, I think I’m gonna choose to believe you,” he said. “Here comes that waitress again. Maybe we better order lunch before she puts coffee down us with a funnel. You’ll be getting the check, by the way.”

CHAPTER
7

After lunch, I decided to leave the Jag in the Pick-Congress parking ramp and shrugged on my Cortefiel raincoat, snugged on the Dobbs narrow-brim hat, and took a brisk, overcast walk over to the Monadnock Building.

Once upon a time it had been the largest office building in the world; today the Monadnock was a sixteen-story curiosity among its taller, often less-distinguished offspring. Even now the soot-gray brick structure with its flaring base and dramatic bay windows struck a moody yet modern pose that made it a good fit for a detective agency.

I went in the main entrance on West Jackson, walked down a corridor consisting of the ass-end display windows of stores facing Dearborn and Federal, ignored the distinctive open winding stairwells, and took the elevator to seven.

Though we’d taken over much of the office space on this floor, our main area remained the corner suite where the frosted glass-and-wood exterior had stayed the same for decades. The door had been revised slightly:

A-1 Detective Agency

Criminal and Civil Investigations

Nathan S. Heller

President

with in smaller lettering,

Louis K. Sapperstein

Vice President

Like Fred Rubinski out in Hollywood, Lou was a full partner now. Just not full enough to have his name in letters the size of mine.

There were no customers in the reception area, which made me sorry we’d expanded it. The walls bore the framed vintage Century of Progress posters that had been part of the agency since 1934, the furnishings blond Heywood-Wakefield numbers. The reading matter on the end tables included the usual suspects—
Time, Newsweek, Redbook, Sports Illustrated
—with a few battered ringers mixed in. Like a certain
Life
issue and a few decade-old true detective–type mags, covering cases of mine. I still got written up in such periodicals, but the covers had grown so sleazy of late, they no longer sent the right waiting-room message.

Our receptionist was a dark-haired looker in her late twenties called Mildred, a name that had always struck me as a bad parental joke. Mildred had a nice smile, was not stupid, but wanted to be Jackie Kennedy so bad I just couldn’t take her seriously. Today she wore a pale-pink dress with a cowl collar. She’d have worn a pillbox hat if I let her get away with it.

“Mr. Heller,” she said, giving me a bright-eyed welcome.

“Mildred,” I said, nodding.

A fairly typical conversation between Mildred and me.

The bullpen was mostly full, only a few agents out in the field—we always had a Monday staff meeting, and unless a case dictated otherwise, everybody was here. My fourteen agents were a wide range of ages and sexes, and we had a Negro and a Chinese guy, too.

Every A-1 detective had a police or military police background. Those not working a case were in business clothes, with those taking a break from fieldwork in street clothes. Their modern metal desks were widely spaced, because I didn’t care for cubicles. Most of the agents did not need privacy with clients because either Lou or I took the first meetings. A wall of windows provided a view onto Jackson Street showcasing the Federal Building, and another wall was strictly metal four-drawer files.

The office was run by Gladys Sapperstein, Lou’s wife. Gladys had been a gorgeous young woman when I hired her in the early ‘40s, who had interviewed warm but proved a cold fish, dashing any Hollywood fantasies I might have harbored about a private eye and his sexy secretary. I’d been made to suffer for my error by way of decades of Gladys’s business acumen and efficiency.

Several years into my employ, Gladys had married one of our operatives, a kid named Fortunato, and when he died in the war, she thawed out some. Not that she and I were ever an item, not by a long shot; and I thought she would never remarry, but then about ten years ago, she and my partner Lou announced that they’d gotten married by a judge over the lunch hour.

I suspected a longtime office affair, but said nothing, since I didn’t give a damn, other than my ego being bruised by the beautiful Gladys never having been tempted by my masculine charms. Lou was a strapping guy, sure, but a dozen years older than me—he’d been my boss on the Pickpocket Detail in the early thirties—and he was bald and bulbous-nosed and bespectacled, and what the hell was wrong with me? Well, I knew. Gladys saw me for the randy, unreliable fucker I was, and Lou for the right guy that he was.