Dark Blonde (10 page)

I was up at first light. When I’m on a case my mind keeps turning it over and I’m never very far from wakefulness. I got up and made a pot of strong coffee, then sat down and opened the briefcase. Sophie my calico raised her head and stretched from her silk pillow on the table, one I’d brought back from Korea. She stood, stretched, turned around, then lay back down, stuck her paws out toward me and closed her eyes. Sophie didn’t seem to have the same trouble sleeping when I was on a case.

I studied the files from Gail’s briefcase, downed a cup of black plasma, and then studied each page again. When thick mud stunk in the pot I still couldn’t see anything that might incriminate Whipple, his campaign or anyone else. There were expense ledgers for Whipple’s campaign: so much for advertising, so much for bumper stickers, so much for writers, artists, boiler room vagrants, renting of halls, cars, catering, booze, and even one for paper clips. The biggest expense stuck out like an obese madam in a choir of anorexic virgins — an itemized listing for legal fees to Kermit Brockway in the amount of ten thousand dollars. Pretty high for a few weeks of paper shuffling. I was in the wrong line of work.

After eyestrain from squinting at numbers, I felt like I’d been grilled by a neurotic IRS auditor with constipation. Maybe Rick could spot something else in those statements, but I couldn’t. I reached for the briefcase and tipped my coffee over. Steaming liquid splashed against the side of the briefcase. Like a photographic negative revealing its image in a chemical bath, the leather showed dark square lines behind the surface forming a square corner just under the briefcase skin.

I grabbed a towel from the kitchenette and mopped off the files, table and side of the briefcase. Then I examined the inside of the case where the lined impression showed. The inside panel of the case was rougher, a different grain of leather than the other inside panels. Working my fingers up inside the top edge of the briefcase I felt a row of thick smooth stitches. I turned the briefcase inside out and held the edge under the light. Fine test fish line had been sewn in, but didn’t pierce the outer leather.

I took a ripper from Molly’s cross-stitch work, a hobby of mine that relieves boredom, where a pattern of a nude Jayne Mansfield reclined half finished. I carefully cut the knots in the end of the fish line until I could peel down the inserted panel. Out came four 8x10 glossy photographs, none of which were suitable for printing in a family newspaper and any one of which would have insured that the lone adult in the picture would earn hard time. Mister Jacob Whipple wouldn’t be running for any office except maybe some muscular inmate’s wife.

More than ten million people live in a 150-mile radius of Chicago, which by odds includes a few sickos, freaks and perverts. When I first came to town, I shared a lunch with Molly and Irv Kupcinet, who everybody called Kup. I learned more about the city from him than I would have in twenty years of wandering around. As we savored a great cup of coffee at the Pump Room, Kup leaned back and gave me the grad course I needed. He’d been sizing me up during lunch and something in his good face said he approved of Molly’s choice. Chicago ran in his veins and he knew everything worth knowing about it. He was wise and articulate:

“Chicago isn’t just a big city, our second largest, but it did in sixty-five years what it took Paris six hundred to do — grow to over a million. Now it’s ten times that size, taking it all in. It’s the town of Jane Addams, Carl Sandburg, Montgomery Ward, P.K. Wrigley, Mike Todd, Sally Rand and Al Capone. Why just 130 years ago it was a frontier swamp. Our financial district on LaSalle is second only to Wall Street, Randolph and Rush Streets second in entertainment only to Broadway, shopping on State second to none. Sure, the stockyards and steel mills are no secret, but there’s big industry in a dozen other areas — mail order, candy, cosmetics, and printing. We’re the world’s leading inland port, leading rail terminal with over a quarter million passengers a day.” He took another cup of coffee and kept going:

“The Morrison’s the world’s tallest hotel at 42 stories, the Conrad Hilton the largest with 3,000 rooms. We’ve also got the biggest commercial building, convention hall, trading pit, produce market and air terminal, and I could give you the numbers for all of these, but here are the human numbers — a birth every five and a half minutes, a marriage every twelve.” At the mention of marriage, Molly’s eyes twinkled at me and warmed to Kup. “A daily average of 12,000 visitors attend the ten or so conventions and trade shows going on at any time.

“It’s fabulous, ordinary, beautiful, ugly, progressive, backward, cultured, rough-edged, and a great place to live. Mike and Molly — you’re a great addition to Chicago as a couple. Let me know if I can help you in your investigative business.”

And help he did after I set up shop. Rick and Kup were contemporaries and hit it off right away when Rick retired as a lead detective from the New York Police Department and joined me in my investigation work.

Chicago wasn’t heaven. Like Kup told me that day, you can’t have coffee without dregs. This would be true in any city, but in the second largest in the country it seems the dregs keep washing up against my doorstep. When you pack so many souls into a metropolitan area, the filth seems to self-generate: the cheap, the tawdry, the unrepentant and depraved — all mix and hide among average Joes and Jills making families and trying to lift themselves toward better things. But when the civic leaders are in fact the worst of the dregs, the filthiest of the filth, everyone feels stained when they’re found out, as they always are, thanks to men of integrity like Irv Kupcinet.

There’s high and low culture in a big place like Chicago. There are arts and flesh dumps, universities and sweatshops. Whatever you want, you can find it, buy and sell it in Chicago, legal or not. But there’s one thing that isn’t acceptable to 99.9% of the people from convicts to cardinals.

I’ve never understood the urge for sex with children. It’s all pretty disgusting and depraved, not subject to rational analysis. And yet I’d heard some sickos trying to sell the idea that it’s natural. Ruined lives are never natural. I don’t buy the idea of a gene for perversion. Nowadays it’s fashionable for perverts to claim they were born that way; that its nature’s fault; that there should be no morality on what happens behind closed doors. But this sort of filth doesn’t involve consenting adults, and kiddies don’t have the perspective to consent, not boys the age of those in the pictures I pulled from that briefcase skin. If the boys were listed in the address book, the case would be tied up with a nice red bow for Gerard, the publicity-loving munchkin of a DA.

As much as it turned my stomach I studied the details on each picture. If they were fakes they were awfully good fakes. The pale gangly boys were frightened sheep. In the corner of one picture, on a table under a lamp was a boy’s baseball cap, turned with the bill to the right. I dug out a magnifying glass and held it over the cap. Boy Scouts of America. Across the back of a couch that held the reclining corpulence of Whipple, a shirt and pants were folded, gray in the black and white photo, but most likely tan.

I dialed Rick. Busy signal. I dialed every few minutes and finally it rang. He picked up.

“Been on the line?”

“Checking out a few names. I found a common thread for at least some of these.”

“I found something too.”

“The files were incriminating in some way?”

 
“Only maybe to Brockway, who might have been overcharging for his legal fees, or maybe laundering large amounts of cash. Maybe Whipple knew, maybe not. Politicians don’t always ask if cash gifts are clean. They don’t always care. But what was sewn inside a panel in the briefcase you might call the smoking cannon. Be here as quick as you can. We can decide our next move.”

I hung up and showered, trying to wash off the stain of those pictures. If something is dangerous enough, the mind can block it out, forget. The mind can be defensive if the horror is great enough. But for the worst sins the mind seems to cling to the images. They’re forever pressed upon the passages of thought, to randomly fly out like a Halloween mask. Such images can rob a man’s peace, stain his soul, even. Images like that can scab over, but from time to time the scab is ripped away. Enough images with enough scabs and enough bleeding becomes a bottomless gutter pit. It’s the reason good cops burn out and private detectives retire to chicken ranches.

I put on my best blue suit, a dark blue shirt, a navy tie, a pair of black silk socks, my polished Florsheims, and checked the magazine and chamber on my .45. If I had to see Kermit Brockway, Whipple’s infamous attorney, and interview Congressman Gateswood, the still-likely next senator from Illinois, I’d want them to see the epitome of a successful private investigator. Illusion isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes I even fool myself. On some days I even believe I am the best, even though I hate many things about the business.

“You think they’re fakes?”

“I’d like to see the negatives. No negatives?”

“None. I checked the briefcase closely. No other hidden pockets. The way I add it up, whoever took these is as dirty as Whipple, probably one of Gail’s scummy boyfriends.”

“Quite the contrary, I’d say a victim took them.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Look at the angle they’re shot from. Eye level just above the back of the davenport, less than five feet high. I’d say one of the boys was directed to take these. A higher angle would have lacked the prurient perversion in these shots, even by a man of average height.”

I studied the evidence with new eyes. Rick’s 29 years on the force, the last 10 that as a lead detective, endowed him with an eye for details I was still developing. The downside was that sometimes he’d come up with too many details, too many clues, analyzing a situation to tears, while I would have been off chasing the first good detail that kicked me in the shin.

“I see. A man wouldn’t’ve knelt to shoot these,” I said, holding two of the photos up side by side. “You’re right as usual, Sherlock. If a boy took these, then there was no accomplice, safer for Whipple, and the pictures would have been in his hands alone. So how did Gail get them?”

“No telling. Stolen, perhaps. Or she got next to Whipple. There were several books on photography in that torn up house. Whipple probably had his own little darkroom. It’s quite likely he still has. He may still be into this sport. They say it’s an incurable perversion, pornography with children. I doubt a politician’s going to be passing this sort of snapshot around. He’d no doubt keep them under tight lock and key. Or destroy them after a few months and make new ones.”

“You said you had a common thread in some of the names in that address book?”

“So far, I’ve identified four men who are Boy Scout council bigshots for the Chicago area.”

I leaned back against Rick’s refrigerator and flopped the pictures back onto the table. “I saw the Scout logo on that cap, there, the one with Whipple and two of the boys, but I don’t get it. Why would he want photos like these to exist? I mean, if the guy’s into kiddy porn he can get that slime on a junket overseas, or even behind the right door in Chinatown, but he doesn’t have to be a headliner.”

“If you review the expression on his face in these, I believe you’ll have your answer. Being in the photos provided him with a unique sort of sick enjoyment. Obviously, having a photographic collection of his little escapades would suffice his twisted libido when no young boys were available.”

People have moods. They aren’t usually planned and the dark ones aren’t usually welcome. If you own a good variety of moods you get labeled moody, and few want to trust their valuable social time with you. This whole nasty mess made me clamp my teeth and wear the mood of a bear who’d been lied to about spring arriving, then kicked in the ass when he stuck his head out of the cave. My mood was ruining my day. Between daydreaming about the dark blonde, a naked girl in my bed I wanted but didn’t dare take, missing Molly, and this child victim stuff, I was in a foul mood.

“The sick bastard’s into reliving the moments, moments of hell those poor boys might never get over. It wasn’t enough that he threw his sick lust on young boys; he made trophies of his depravity. Those boys as men might find they can’t be with a woman, live with shame and pain and feelings of worthlessness, live with them until they hang themselves with an extension cord or shred their liver at the bottom of a bottle in a few years. If it wasn’t for nailing Gail’s killer, I’d haul these over to Kup at the
Times
right now. Whipple stole their childhood and he might have stolen their future. What sort of evil makes slime like this tick?”

“I feel the same. Pedophilia is indeed evil, so very destructive. Many young men have committed suicide after episodes like this. Eventually we’ll have to turn these pictures in, but we can say it took us a couple of days to find the hidden pocket. It’s a crime to possess this material. I suggest you take one of these on a visit to candidate Whipple, convince him to drop from the race. It might be tricky, with his bodyguards around. They didn’t look like florists. First I’d recommend we give his illustrious legal brain a visit. See what we can learn there.”

“That’s what I had in mind. Don’t say anything about the brief case papers to the Gateswoods. After I see Brockway, depending on how it goes, I’ll drop by up there even if you’re gone. Julia seems pretty fragile; I’m not sure how she’ll take her sister being in possession of these. You can pin down some of those Scout leaders.”

Rick picked up a yellow pad. “I’ve got a few other things here. The groundskeeper: Asuri Nakamura. Thirty years of great references in that section of town. No record. Also, I called the Sands on the Strip in Vegas. Got hold of the head security man there, Bernard Casey. He says no record of Gail Gorovoy ever working for the casino. He called back later and said none of the other majors have a record of her employment either. The doctor on those prescription bottles lost his license a year back and retired to Florida.”

“Sounds like she fed one to Julia about the Vegas job. Given her choice of friends she might have been on some crime gig and needed cover. Her work for the governor might also be bogus. Guess we can check that later.”

“One more thing. That Pontiac that tailed us from Gorovoy’s place? Registered to Jacob Whipple.”

We locked up Rick’s apartment and walked to the elevator. The doors slid open and we stepped in. A wide-shouldered older redhead with a leopard fur collar and matching Cossack hat leaned against the back wall. Her deep-set brown eyes could’ve put a colicky baby to sleep, and she had that sort of healthy freckled complexion that doesn’t tan but just reddens, then lightens up again. Coiffured hair, pasted on eyebrows. Figure was what you’d call voluptuous to excess: squeezed into a couple of dress sizes too small and trying to escape.

A Pekinese slightly larger than an overfed rat stared at us with the same deep-set brown eyes as his mistress. The woman pointed a ridiculously long cigarette holder at the corner of the elevator ceiling and practiced sucking through the thing. Vestiges of beauty still clung to her face but it was obvious that it had been a losing battle since FDR was in office. Her worn face held stories of excess and possibly abuse; hard lines gripped her eyes and mouth. Her eyes sported enough paint to start an art colony. But her figure trumpeted female, intact and brassy — and in the dark might have been mistaken for a twenty-year-old’s. She dressed like old money but in a way designed to show off her best assets. I guessed she was the kind of woman who was sexier in clothes than out.

“Good morning, Richard,” she purred, blowing a tight blue smoke ring toward him. “I intended to see if you were in. I’m having a few friends in tonight for a poetry reading and séance. I thought you might like to join us. I enjoyed your take on Frost at our last soiree.”

I raised my eyelids at Rick and rubbed out a smirk, the kind that always gets me in trouble with a female, especially those who use long cigarette holders. Rick stammered an introduction to Gloria LeVeaux, his upstairs neighbor. She reached to shake my hand and gave me three cold fingers inside an elbow length silver glove, together with a sly look down her thin nose. The rat dog made a grating noise like a wind up toy, a growl approaching what a sick parakeet might make.

When the elevator leveled off with a bounce at the ground floor, we parted to let Madame Smoke Ring and Fifi exit. Her legs were a felony and her ass a misdemeanor, but they held up her balcony well enough to have justice served. She obviously enjoyed a stage and audience. In a few years the old girl would work behind the curtains. Watching her walk away left me with the end of an era nostalgia.

When we were in the car, I said: “Poetry reading? Séance? Nice apartment salon you’ve got into here. I’d take the stairs from now on, if I were you. You can spin me your take on Frost in the car.”

“She makes a mean gimlet. Plus, older women can be very grateful.”

“If Rin Tin Tin doesn’t take part of your pinkie finger off.”

I stopped at the first red light and a scrawny ruffian in wrinkled short pants and a White Sox cap turned sideways hollered at us about a murder scandal. He held up a Chicago
Tribune
and made like Chicken Little. The headline read: “GATESWOOD DUCKS DEBATE.”