Windy City Blues (24 page)

The detective business is not as much fun in January as at other times of the year. I spent the next two days forcing my little Chevy through unplowed side streets trying to find a missing witness who was the key to an eighteen-million-dollar fraud case. I finally succeeded Tuesday evening a little before five. By the time I’d convinced the terrified woman, who was hiding with a niece at Sixty-seventh and Honore, that no one would shoot her if she testified, gotten her to the state’s attorney, and seen her safely home again, it was close to ten o’clock.

I fumbled with the outer locks on the apartment building with my mind fixed on a hot bath, lots of
whiskey, and a toasted cheese sandwich. When the ground-floor door opened and Mr. Contreras popped out to meet me, I ground my teeth. He’s a retired machinist with more energy than Navratilova. I didn’t have the stamina to deal with him tonight.

I mumbled a greeting and headed for the stairs.

“There you are, doll.” The relief in his voice was marked. I stopped wearily. Some crisis with the dog. Something involving lugging a sixty-pound retriever to the vet through snow-packed streets.

“I thought I ought to let her in, you know. I told her there was no saying when you’d be home, sometimes you’re gone all night on a case”—a delicate reference to my love life—“but she was all set she had to wait and she’d’a been sitting on the stairs all this time. She won’t say what the problem is, but you’d probably better talk to her. You wanna come in here or should I send her up in a few minutes?”

Not the dog, then. “Uh, who is it?”

“Aren’t I trying to tell you? That beautiful girl. You know, the doc’s niece.”

“Penelope?” I echoed foolishly.

She came out into the hall just then, ducking under the old man’s gesticulating arms. “Vic! Thank God you’re back. I’ve got to talk to you. Before the police do anything stupid.”

She was huddled in an ankle-length silver fur. Ordinarily elegant, with exquisite makeup and jewelry and the most modern of hairstyles, she didn’t much
resemble her aunt. But shock had stripped the sophistication from her, making her dark eyes the focus of her face; she looked so much like Lotty that I went to her instinctively.

“Come on up with me and tell me what’s wrong.” I put an arm around her.

Mr. Contreras closed his door in disappointment as we disappeared up the stairs. Penelope waited until we were inside my place before saying anything else. I slung my jacket and down vest on the hooks in the hallway and went into the living room to undo my heavy walking shoes.

Penelope kept her fur wrapped around her. Her high-heeled kid boots were not meant for street wear: they were rimmed with salt stains. She shivered slightly despite the coat.

“Have—have you heard anything?”

I shook my head, rubbing my right foot, stiff from driving all day.

“It’s Paul. He’s dead.”

“But—he’s not that old. And I thought he was very healthy.” Because of his sedentary job, Servino always ran the two miles from his Loop office to his apartment in the evening.

Penelope gave a little gulp of hysterical laughter. “Oh, he was very fit. But not healthy enough to overcome a blew to the head.”

“Could you tell the story from the beginning instead of letting it out in little dramatic bursts?”

As I’d hoped, my rudeness got her angry enough to overcome her incipient hysteria. After flashing me a Lotty-like look of royal disdain, she told me what she knew.

Paul’s office was in a building where a number of analysts had their practices. A sign posted on his door this morning baldly announced that he had canceled all his day’s appointments because of a personal emergency. When a janitor went in at three to change a lightbulb, he’d found the doctor dead on the floor of his consulting room.

Colleagues agreed they’d seen Servino arrive around a quarter of eight, as he usually did. They’d seen the notice and assumed he’d left when everyone else was tied up with appointments. No one thought any more about it.

Penelope had learned of her lover’s death from the police, who picked her up as she was leaving a realtor’s office where she’d been discussing shop leases. Two of the doctors with offices near Servino’s had mentioned seeing a dark-haired woman in a long fur coat near his consulting room.

Penelope’s dark eyes were drenched with tears. “It’s not enough that Paul is dead, that I learn of it in such an unspeakable way. They think I killed him—because I have dark hair and wear a fur coat. They don’t know what killed him—some dreary blunt instrument—it sounds stupid and banal, like an old Agatha
Christie. They’ve pawed through my luggage looking for it.”

They’d questioned her for three hours while they searched and finally, reluctantly, let her go, with a warning not to leave Chicago. She’d called Lotty at the clinic and then come over to find me.

I went into the dining room for some whiskey. She shook her head at the bottle. I poured myself an extra slug to make up for missing my bath. “And?”

“And I want you to find who killed him. The police aren’t looking very hard because they think it’s me.”

“Do they have a reason for this?”

She blushed unexpectedly. “They think he was refusing to marry me.”

“Not much motive in these times, one would have thought. And you with a successful career to boot. Was he refusing?”

“No. It was the other way around, actually. I felt—felt unsettled about what I wanted to do—come to Chicago to stay, you know. I have—friends in Montreal, too, you know. And I’ve always thought marriage meant monogamy.”

“I see.” My focus on the affair between Penelope and Paul shifted slightly. “You didn’t kill him, did you—perhaps for some other reason?”

She forced a smile. “Because he didn’t agree with Lotty about responsibility? No. And for no other reason. Are you going to ask Lotty if she killed him?”

“Lotty would have mangled him Sunday night with whatever was lying on the dining room table—she wouldn’t wait to sneak into his office with a club.” I eyed her thoughtfully. “Just out of vulgar curiosity, what were you doing around eight this morning?”

Her black eyes scorched me. “I came to you because I thought you would be sympathetic. Not to get the same damned questions I had all afternoon from the police!”

“And what were you doing at eight this morning?”

She swept across the room to the door, then thought better of it and affected to study a Nell Blaine poster on the nearby wall. With her back to me she said curtly, “I was having a second cup of coffee. And no, there are no witnesses. As you know, by that time of day Lotty is long gone. Perhaps someone saw me leave the building at eight-thirty—I asked the detectives to question the neighbors, but they didn’t seem much interested in doing so.”

“Don’t sell them short. If you’re not under arrest, they’re still asking questions.”

“But you could ask questions to clear me. They’re just trying to implicate me.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to ease the dull ache behind my eyes. “You do realize the likeliest person to have killed him is an angry patient, don’t you? Despite your fears the police have probably been questioning them all day.”

Nothing I said could convince her that she wasn’t in imminent danger of a speedy trial before a kangaroo court, with execution probable by the next morning. She stayed until past midnight, alternating pleas to hide her with commands to join the police in hunting down Paul’s killer. She wouldn’t call Lotty to tell her she was with me because she was afraid Lotty’s home phone had been tapped.

“Look, Penelope,” I finally said, exasperated. “I can’t hide you. If the police really suspect you, you were tailed here. Even if I could figure out a way to smuggle you out and conceal you someplace, I wouldn’t do it—I’d lose my license on obstruction charges and I’d deserve to.”

I tried explaining how hard it was to get a court order for a wiretap and finally gave up. I was about ready to start screaming with frustration when Lotty herself called, devastated by Servino’s death and worried about Penelope. The police had been by with a search warrant and had taken away an array of household objects, including her umbrella. Such an intrusion would normally have made her spitting mad, but she was too upset to give it her full emotional attention. I turned the phone over to Penelope. Whatever Lotty said to her stained her cheeks red, but did make her agree to let me drive her home.

When I got back to my place, exhausted enough to sleep round the clock, I found John McGonnigal waiting for me in a blue-and-white outside my building.
He came up the walk behind me and opened the door with a flourish.

I looked at him sourly. “Thanks, Sergeant. It’s been a long day—I’m glad to have a doorman at the end of it.”

“It’s kind of cold down here for talking, Vic. How about inviting me up for coffee?”

“Because I want to go to bed. If you’ve got something you want to say, or even ask, spit it out down here.”

I was just ventilating and I knew it—if a police sergeant wanted to talk to me at one in the morning, we’d talk. Mr. Contreras’s coming out in a magenta bathrobe to see what the trouble was merely speeded my decision to cooperate.

While I assembled cheese sandwiches, McGonnigal asked me what I’d learned from Penelope.

“She didn’t throw her arms around me and howl, ‘Vic, I killed him, you’ve got to help me.’” I put the sandwiches in a skillet with a little olive oil. “What’ve you guys got on her?”

The receptionist and two of the other analysts who’d been in the hall had seen a small, dark-haired woman hovering in the alcove near Servino’s office around twenty of eight. Neither of them had paid too much attention to her; when they saw Penelope they agreed it might have been she, but they couldn’t be certain. If they’d made a positive I.D., she’d already
have been arrested, even though they couldn’t find the weapon.

“They had a shouting match at the Filigree last night. The maître d’ was quite upset. Servino was a regular and he didn’t want to offend him, but a number of diners complained. The Herschel girl”—McGonnigal eyed me warily—“woman, I mean, stormed off on her own and spent the night with her aunt. One of the neighbors saw her leave around seven the next morning, not at eight-thirty as she says.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. I asked him about the cause of death.

“Someone gave him a good crack across the side of the neck, close enough to the back to fracture a cervical vertebra and sever one of the main arteries. It would have killed him pretty fast. And as you know, Servino wasn’t very tall—the Herschel woman could easily have done it.”

“With what?” I demanded.

That was the stumbling block. It could have been anything from a baseball bat to a steel pipe. The forensic pathologist who’d looked at the body favored the latter, since the skin had been broken in places. They’d taken away anything in Lotty’s apartment and Penelope’s luggage that might have done the job and were having them examined for traces of blood and skin.

I snorted. “If you searched Lotty’s place, you must have come away with quite an earful.”

McGonnigal grimaced. “She spoke her mind, yes…. Any ideas? On what the weapon might have been?”

I shook my head, too nauseated by the thought of Paul’s death to muster intellectual curiosity over the choice of weapon. When McGonnigal left around two-thirty, I lay in bed staring at the dark, unable to sleep despite my fatigue. I didn’t know Penelope all that well. Just because she was Lotty’s niece didn’t mean she was incapable of murder. To be honest, I hadn’t been totally convinced by her histrionics tonight. Who but a lover could get close enough to you to snap your neck? I thrashed around for hours, finally dropping into an uneasy sleep around six.

Lotty woke me at eight to implore me to look for Servino’s killer; the police had been back at seven-thirty to ask Penelope why she’d forgotten to mention she’d been at Paul’s apartment early yesterday morning.

“Why was she there?” I asked reasonably.

“She says she wanted to patch things up after their quarrel, but he’d already left for the office. When the police started questioning her, she was too frightened to tell the truth. Vic, I’m terrified they’re going to arrest her.”

I mumbled something. It looked to me like they had a pretty good case, but I valued my life too much
to say that to Lotty. Even so the conversation deteriorated rapidly.

“I come out in any wind or weather to patch you up. With never a word of complaint.” That wasn’t exactly true, but I let it pass. “Now, when I beg you for help you turn a deaf ear to me. I shall remember this, Victoria.”

Giant black spots formed and re-formed in front of my tired eyes. “Great, Lotty.”

Her receiver banged in my ear.

I spent the day doggedly going about my own business, turning on WBBM whenever I was in the car to see if any news had come in about Penelope’s arrest. Despite all the damaging eyewitness reports, the state’s attorney apparently didn’t want to move without a weapon.

I trudged up the stairs to my apartment a little after six, my mind fixed on a bath and a rare steak followed immediately by bed. When I got to the top landing, I ground my teeth in futile rage: a fur-coated woman was sitting in front of the door.

When she got to her feet I realized it wasn’t Penelope but Greta Schipauer, Chaim Lemke’s wife. The dark hallway had swallowed the gold of her hair.

“Vic! Thank God you’ve come back. I’ve been here since four and I have a concert in two hours.”

I fumbled with the three stiff locks. “I have an office downtown just so that people won’t have to sit on the floor outside my home,” I said pointedly.

“You do? Oh—it never occurred to me you didn’t just work out of your living room.”

She followed me in and headed over to the piano, where she picked out a series of fifths. “You really should get this tuned, Vic.”

“Is that why you’ve been here for two hours? To tell me to tune my piano?” I slung my coat onto a hook in the entryway and sat on the couch to pull off my boots.

“No, no.” She sat down hastily. “It’s because of Paul, of course. I spoke to Lotty today and she says you’re refusing to stir yourself to look for his murderer. Why, Vic? We all need you very badly. You can’t let us down now. The police were questioning me for two hours yesterday. It utterly destroyed my concentration. I couldn’t practice at all; I know the recital tonight will be a disaster. Even Chaim has been affected, and he’s out on the West Coast.”