Windy City Blues (26 page)

“But Penelope,” I said. “Would you really have let Penelope go to jail for you?”

He gave a twisted smile. “I didn’t mean them to arrest Penelope. I just thought—I’ve always had trouble with cold weather, with Chicago winters. I’ve worn a long fur for years. Because I’m so small people often think I’m a woman when I’m wrapped up in it. I just thought, if anyone saw me they would think it was a woman. I never meant them to arrest Penelope.”

He sat panting for a few minutes. “What are you going to do now, Vic? Send for the police?”

I shook my head sadly. “You’ll never play again—you’d have been happier doing life in Joliet than you will now that you can’t play. I want you to write it all down, though, the name you used on your night flight and everything. I have the clarinet; even though Mr. Fortieri cleaned it, a good lab might still find blood traces. The clarinet and your statement will go to the papers after you die. Penelope deserves that much—to have the cloud of suspicion taken away from her. And I’ll have to tell her and Lotty.”

His eyes were shiny. “You don’t know how awful it’s been, Vic. I was so mad with rage that it was like nothing to break Paul’s neck. But then, after that, I couldn’t play anymore. So you are wrong: even if I had gone to Joliet I would still never have played.”

I couldn’t bear the naked anguish in his face. I left without saying anything, but it was weeks before I slept without seeing his black eyes weeping onto me.

THE WARNING BELL
clangs angrily and the submarine dives sharply. Everyone to battle stations. The Nazis pursuing closely, the bell keeps up its insistent clamor, loud, urgent, filling my head. My hands are wet: I can’t remember what my job is in this cramped, tiny boat. If only someone would turn off the alarm bell. I fumble with some switches, pick up an intercom. The noise mercifully stops.

“Vic! Vic, is that you?”

“What?”

“I know it’s late. I’m sorry to call so late, but I just got home from work. It’s Sal, Sal Barthele.”

“Oh, Sal. Sure.” I looked at the orange clock
readout. It was four-thirty. Sal owns the Golden Glow, a bar in the south Loop I patronize.

“It’s my sister, Vic. They’ve arrested her. She didn’t do it. I know she didn’t do it.”

“Of course not, Sal—Didn’t do what?”

“They’re trying to frame her. Maybe the manager … I don’t know.”

I swung my legs over the side of the bed. “Where are you?”

She was at her mother’s house, 95th and Vincennes. Her sister had been arrested three hours earlier. They needed a lawyer, a good lawyer. And they needed a detective, a good detective. Whatever my fee was, she wanted me to know they could pay my fee.

“I’m sure you can pay the fee, but I don’t know what you want me to do,” I said as patiently as I could.

“She—they think she murdered that man. She didn’t even know him. She was just giving him a facial. And he dies on her.”

“Sal, give me your mother’s address. I’ll be there in forty minutes.”

The little house on Vincennes was filled with neighbors and relatives murmuring encouragement to Mrs. Barthele. Sal is very black, and statuesque. Close to six feet tall, with a majestic carriage, she can break up a crowd in her bar with a look and a gesture. Mrs.
Barthele was slight, frail, and light-skinned. It was hard to picture her as Sal’s mother.

Sal dispersed the gathering with characteristic firmness, telling the group that I was here to save Evangeline and that I needed to see her mother alone.

Mrs. Barthele sniffed over every sentence. “Why did they do that to my baby?” she demanded of me. “You know the police, you know their ways. Why did they come and take my baby, who never did a wrong thing in her life?”

As a white woman, I could be expected to understand the machinations of the white man’s law. And to share responsibility for it. After more of this meandering, Sal took the narrative firmly in hand.

Evangeline worked at La Cygnette, a high-prestige beauty salon on North Michigan. In addition to providing facials and their own brand-name cosmetics at an exorbitant cost, they massaged the bodies and feet of their wealthy clients, stuffed them into steam cabinets, ran them through a Bataan-inspired exercise routine, and fed them herbal teas. Signor Giuseppe would style their hair for an additional charge.

Evangeline gave facials. The previous day she had one client booked after lunch, a Mr. Darnell.

“Men go there a lot?” I interrupted.

Sal made a face. “That’s what I asked Evangeline. I guess it’s part of being a yuppie—go spend a lot of money getting cream rubbed into your face.”

Anyway, Darnell was to have had his hair styled
before his facial, but the hairdresser fell behind schedule and asked Evangeline to do the guy’s face first.

Sal struggled to describe how a La Cygnette facial worked—neither of us had ever checked out her sister’s job. You sit in something like a dentist’s chair, lean back, relax—you’re naked from the waist up, lying under a big down comforter. The facial expert—cosmetician was Evangeline’s official tide—puts cream on your hands and sticks them into little electrically heated mitts, so your hands are out of commission if you need to protect yourself. Then she puts stuff on your face, covers your eyes with heavy pads, and goes away for twenty minutes while the face goo sinks into your hidden pores.

Apparently while this Darnell lay back deeply relaxed, someone had rubbed some kind of poison into his skin. “When Evangeline came back in to clean his face, he was sick—heaving, throwing up, it was awful. She screamed for help and started trying to clean his face—it was terrible, he kept vomiting on her. They took him to the hospital, but he died around ten tonight.

“They came to get Baby at midnight—you’ve got to help her, V. I.—even if the guy tried something on her, she never did a thing like that—she’d haul off and slug him, maybe, but rubbing poison into his face? You go help her.”

Evangeline Barthele was a younger, darker edition of her mother. At most times, she probably had Sal’s energy—sparks of it flared now and then during our talk—but a night in the holding cells had worn her down.

I brought a clean suit and makeup for her: justice may be blind but her administrators aren’t. We talked while she changed.

“This Darnell—you sure of the name?—had he ever been to the salon before?”

She shook her head. “I never saw him. And I don’t think the other girls knew him either. You know, if a client’s a good tipper or a bad one they’ll comment on it, be glad or whatever that he’s come in. Nobody said anything about this man.”

“Where did he live?”

She shook her head. “I never talked to the guy, V. I.”

“What about the PestFree?” I’d read the arrest report and talked briefly to an old friend in the M.E.’s office. To keep roaches and other vermin out of their posh Michigan Avenue offices, La Cygnette used a potent product containing a wonder chemical called chorpyrifos. My informant had been awestruck—“Only an operation that didn’t know shit about chemicals would leave chorpyrifos lying around. It’s got a toxicity rating of five—it gets you through the
skin—you only need a couple of tablespoons to kill a big man if you know where to put it.”

Whoever killed Darnell had either known a lot of chemistry or been lucky—into his nostrils and mouth, with some rubbed into the face for good measure, the pesticide had made him convulsive so quickly that even if he knew who killed him he’d have been unable to talk, or even reason.

Evangeline said she knew where the poison was kept—everyone who worked there knew, knew it was lethal and not to touch it, but it was easy to get at. Just in a little supply room that wasn’t kept locked.

“So why you? They have to have more of a reason than just that you were there.”

She shrugged bitterly. “I’m the only black professional at La Cygnette—the other blacks working there sweep rooms and haul trash. I’m trying hard not to be paranoid, but I gotta wonder.”

She insisted Darnell hadn’t made a pass at her, or done anything to provoke an attack—she hadn’t hurt the guy. As for anyone else who might have had opportunity, salon employees were always passing through the halls, going in and out of the little cubicles where they treated clients—she’d seen any number of people, all with legitimate business in the halls, but she hadn’t seen anyone emerging from the room where Darnell was sitting.

When we finally got to bond court later that morning, I tried to argue circumstantial evidence—
any of La Cygnette’s fifty or so employees could have committed the crime, since all had access and no one had motive. The prosecutor hit me with a very unpleasant surprise: the police had uncovered evidence linking my client to the dead man. He was a furniture buyer from Kansas City who came to Chicago six times a year, and the doorman and the maids at his hotel had identified Evangeline without any trouble as the woman who accompanied him on his visits.

Bail was denied. I had a furious talk with Evangeline in one of the interrogation rooms before she went back to the holding cells.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me? I walked into the courtroom and got blindsided.”

“They’re lying,” she insisted.

“Three people identified you. If you don’t start with the truth right now, you’re going to have to find a new lawyer and a new detective. Your mother may not understand, but for sure Sal will.”

“You can’t tell my mother. You can’t tell Sal!”

“I’m going to have to give them some reason for dropping your case, and knowing Sal it’s going to have to be the truth.”

For the first time she looked really upset. “You’re my lawyer. You should believe my story before you believe a bunch of strangers you never saw before.”

“I’m telling you, Evangeline, I’m going to drop your case. I can’t represent you when I know you’re lying. If you killed Darnell we can work out a defense.
Or if you didn’t kill him and knew him we can work something out, and I can try to find the real killer. But when I know you’ve been seen with the guy any number of times, I can’t go into court telling people you never met him before.”

Tears appeared on the ends of her lashes. “The whole reason I didn’t say anything was so Mama wouldn’t know. If I tell you the truth, you’ve got to promise me you aren’t running back to Vincennes Avenue talking to her.”

I agreed. Whatever the story was, I couldn’t believe Mrs. Barthele hadn’t heard hundreds like it before. But we each make our own separate peace with our mothers.

Evangeline met Darnell at a party two years earlier. She liked him, he liked her—not the romance of the century, but they enjoyed spending time together. She’d gone on a two-week trip to Europe with him last year, telling her mother she was going with a girlfriend.

“First of all, she has very strict morals. No sex outside marriage. I’m thirty, mind you, but that doesn’t count with her. Second, he’s white, and she’d murder me. She really would. I think that’s why I never fell in love with him—if we wanted to get married I’d never be able to explain it to Mama.”

This latest trip to Chicago, Darnell thought it would be fun to see what Evangeline did for a living, so he booked an appointment at La Cygnette. She
hadn’t told anyone there she knew him. And when she found him sick and dying she’d panicked and lied.

“And if you tell my mother of this, V. I.—I’ll put a curse on you. My father was from Haiti and he knew a lot of good ones.”

“I won’t tell your mother. But unless they nuked Lebanon this morning or murdered the mayor, you’re going to get a lot of lines in the paper. It’s bound to be in print.”

She wept at that, wringing her hands. So after watching her go off with the sheriff’s deputies, I called Murray Ryerson at the
Herald-Star
to plead with him not to put Evangeline’s liaison in the paper. “If you do she’ll wither your testicles. Honest.”

“I don’t know, Vic. You know the
Sun-Times
is bound to have some kind of screamer headline like DEAD MAN FOUND IN FACE-LICKING SEX ORGY. I can’t sit on a story like this when all the other papers are running it.”

I knew he was right, so I didn’t push my case very hard.

He surprised me by saying, “Tell you what: you find the real killer before my deadline for tomorrow’s morning edition and I’ll keep your client’s personal life out of it. The sex scoop came in too late for today’s paper. The
Trib
prints on our schedule and they don’t have it, and the
Sun-Times
runs older, slower presses, so they have to print earlier.”

I reckoned I had about eighteen hours. Sherlock Holmes had solved tougher problems in less time.

Roland Darnell had been the chief buyer of living-room furnishings for Alexander Dumas, a high-class Kansas City department store. He used to own his own furniture store in the nearby town of Lawrence, but lost both it and his wife when he was arrested for drug smuggling ten years earlier. Because of some confusion about his guilt—he claimed his partner, who disappeared the night he was arrested, was really responsible—he’d only served two years. When he got out, he moved to Kansas City to start a new life.

I learned this much from my friends at the Chicago police. At least, my acquaintances. I wondered how much of the story Evangeline had known. Or her mother. If her mother didn’t want her child having a white lover, how about a white ex-con, ex- (presumably) drug-smuggling lover?

I sat biting my knuckles for a minute. It was eleven now. Say they started printing the morning edition at two the next morning, I’d have to have my story by one at the latest. I could follow one line, and one line only—I couldn’t afford to speculate about Mrs. Barthele—and anyway, doing so would only get me killed. By Sal. So I looked up the area code for Lawrence, Kansas, and found their daily newspaper.

The
Lawrence Daily Journal-World
had set up a special number for handling press inquiries. A friendly woman with a strong drawl told me Darnell’s age (forty-four); place of birth (Eudora, Kansas); ex-wife’s name (Ronna Perkins); and ex-partner’s name (John Crenshaw). Ronna Perkins was living elsewhere in the country and the
Journal-World
was protecting her privacy. John Crenshaw had disappeared when the police arrested Darnell.