Marian turned to Washington and Esposito. “I guess I won’t be needing you anymore. Thanks for your help.” The two men mumbled something and left, eager to get away from the place.
The ward where Derek Brown was to spend his last hours was depressing and a little scary, with its run-down look and its battered metal carts of Dr. Frankenstein medical equipment and its rows of curtained-off beds—dying places, Marian thought. A nurse directed her to Derek Brown’s bed; Marian opened the curtain and slipped inside.
In spite of thinking she was prepared, she was shocked by his appearance. He looked ten pounds lighter and twenty years older than yesterday; she wondered how he managed to keep breathing. After a moment he opened his eyes and saw her standing there. He twisted his thin lips into a wry smile. “I thought I’d be seeing you again,” he rasped.
There was no chair and no bedside table. Marian gritted her teeth and took out the tape recorder; she identified herself, Derek Brown, the time, the place. Then she put the machine on his pillow and asked if he understood he was being recorded. He said he did.
She hated what she had to do. “You know why I’m here, don’t you?” she said slowly. “You left your calling card for us to find. We know who killed Mr. Nakamoto, and we know why. We don’t have the gun yet, but we do have your prints at the scene. And we know why you let yourself get sucked into such a scheme. But it was all for nothing. It’s over, Derek.”
A long silence followed. Then a raspy sigh floated up from the bed. “Yes, it’s all over.” He breathed noisily for a moment or two. “I’m not sure I ever believed it would work.”
“It was part of the deal you made,” Marian went on, “that you leave something behind to incriminate yourself. You knew you weren’t going to live long enough to be prosecuted—you’d never go to prison. So you agreed to take the blame in exchange for…security for your family? How was that supposed to work, Derek?”
There were tears in his eyes. “A trust fund. For my mother and my sister.”
“And you trust a murderer to keep her word?”
“It was already set up. All she had to do was sign one paper, as soon as Mr. Nakamoto was dead and the money was hers.” A look of pain crossed his face. “That man never did anything to me. I’m sorry he’s dead.” He was quiet a moment. “It was the only chance I had of getting my family out of the projects. Do you know Alison carries a knife? A ten-year-old girl carrying a knife. And Sergeant, I couldn’t tell her not to.” A long spasm of coughing overtook him.
“Take your time,” Marian said.
When he’d recovered a little strength, he actually mustered up a smile. “You know what they say you’re supposed to do when life hands you a lemon…well, I tried. I did the best I could.”
He probably had, at that. “Where’s the gun?”
“Pushed down between the sofa back and the seat…you know, that sofa where I sleep. You’ll find only my fingerprints on it.” He coughed again. “I got that gun for her—not hard to do, where I live.”
“Were you there when she shot him?”
“In the kitchen.” He had to wait until he had the breath to go on. “I heard the three shots, and then she brought the gun to me. I dropped the little calendar with my fingerprints on it and stumbled down the back stairs making as much noise as I could.”
“How did she get out of the building without being seen?”
“Out the front way, while the guy downstairs was busy gawking at me.” Another pause. “Sergeant, what’s going to happen to my mom and my sister?”
“They won’t be abandoned,” Marian promised. “I’ll call Social Services today. They’ll work out something—don’t worry about your family. They’ll be taken care of.”
He closed his eyes. “It was Social Services that put them in the project house.”
There was nothing she could say to that. The Social Services Department would do the best it could—but it was never enough. Never.
His breathing seemed shallower. “Sergeant,” he whispered, “I did the best I could.”
“I know,” she said.
A few minutes of silence passed and Marian began to fear he was dead. But then she saw his chest rising slightly and falling again; only sleeping. Grateful that she wouldn’t have to watch him die and ashamed for being grateful, she turned off the tape recorder and made her way out of the depressing ward.
She barely saw where she was going. The mother in a wheelchair, the son with AIDS, and the ten-year-old daughter carrying a knife to protect herself. You know what they say you’re supposed to do when life hands you a lemon. And a small Japanese woman had provided him with the means for doing it.
* * *
—
Marian took a cab back to where she’d left her car parked near the Nakamoto apartment on Second Avenue. She should phone for Washington and Esposito, but she wanted to handle this alone. She’d worry about Captain DiFalco later.
Mrs. Nakamoto answered the door with the same expressionless face she’d shown Marian earlier. “Sergeant Larch. This is the second time you have been here today.”
“It will be the last. May I come in?”
The Japanese woman stepped back and allowed her to enter—an important legal nicety, since Marian didn’t have a warrant. Standing just inside the door and without offering a word of explanation, she took out the tape recorder and started it playing.
As Mrs. Nakamoto came to understand what she was listening to, her shoulders began to slump and her head bowed. Already small, she seemed to shrink to child-size as Marian watched. The small-boned hands clasped each other so tightly the knuckles were white. When at last she lifted her head, it was to show Marian the face of despair. “It was my chance,” she whispered. “It was my only chance.”
Marian turned off the tape recorder. “No, it wasn’t,” she said, more harshly than she intended. “You didn’t have to kill him. There were other ways.”
The small woman flared, the first sign of passion she’d shown. “You know nothing of my life! You know nothing of our ways!”
“Perhaps not,” Marian said, “but I do know the laws of this country. You didn’t have to kill him, and you didn’t have to bribe that poor sick boy to take the fall for you. You have the right to remain silent—”
“It was the best I could do!”
Marian continued reading her her rights, and then told her to get a coat. “You can call your lawyer from the station,” she said, “as soon as we book you.”
Mrs. Nakamoto asked permission to bring a purse; Marian told her all right, but it would be taken away from her once she was booked. The Japanese woman moved slowly, so slowly, trying to postpone the inevitable. At last she was ready, and Marian waited while she locked the front door. The cop handed the prisoner a set of handcuffs and told her to put them on.
In the car, the silence stretched out painfully. Then Mrs. Nakamoto said, in a voice even higher than usual, “I wish to honor my commitment to Mrs. Brown and the girl.”
Marian took her eyes off the traffic for a moment to stare at her; could she truly be that naive? “The law says you can’t profit from a felony. You’re not going to get one cent of your husband’s money.”
“I understand that.” Her hands were clasping and unclasping again. “But all that is required to make the trust fund legal at this point is my signature. I have not been, ah, booked yet, and the money is mine right now. Right now, at this moment, it is mine. I can sign it away to Mrs. Brown if I wish.”
“That’s crazy. Once you’re booked, the trust will be invalidated.”
“Perhaps…but perhaps not. How is the law to know of the arrangement? The bank officer will not wish to lose the administration of the trust. Neither Mrs. Brown nor I will speak of it. Only you, Sergeant Larch, stand in the way. But if you take me to the bank before you book me, then Derek’s mother and sister will be ta
ken care of.”
“Crazier and crazier. Even if your bank officer were willing to turn a blind eye—and I think you’re assuming a hell of a lot there—too many other people at the bank will know about the trust. You think they’re all going to break the law just to help you ease your conscience?”
Mrs. Nakamoto’s breathing was becoming shallower. “People…do not wish to trouble themselves, on the whole. I understand there are many ways the trust may fail. But if there is even one small chance it will succeed…then I must try, do you not see?”
Oh, Jesus! “Mieko, do you have any idea what you’re asking me to do?” Marian said miserably.
“I understand. And I ask.”
They rode in silence, for one city block, then another. At last Marian said tightly, “Which bank?”
The Japanese woman named an address.
Marian turned the car uptown. One man was dead, another was dying, and a woman was going to prison. But maybe Alison Brown wouldn’t have to carry a knife anymore. “This isn’t going to work,” she muttered.
“Perhaps not.” Mrs. Nakamoto stared straight ahead. “But I am doing the best I can.”
“Yes,” Marian said, and pressed down on the accelerator.
DETECTIVE: MS. TREE
LOUISE
Max Allan Collins
MAX ALLAN COLLINS (1948– ) has created several diverse series characters, including Quarry, a hit man; Nolan, a professional thief; Mallory, a midwestern mystery writer who solves crimes; Eliot Ness, the real-life FBI agent of the Prohibition era; Dick Tracy, the famous character created by Chester Gould (when Gould retired, Collins wrote the comic strips, a novelization of the Dick Tracy movie, and two additional novels); and his most successful character, Nate Heller, a Chicago private eye whose cases were mainly set in the 1930s and 1940s. Many of the novels involve famous people of the era, including Al Capone, Frank Nitta, and Eliot Ness in the first book, True Detective (1983), as well as featuring such notorious cases as the kidnapping of Charles and Ann Lindbergh’s baby in Stolen Away (1991), the disappearance of Amelia Earhart in Flying Blind (1998), and the Black Dahlia murder in Angel in Black (2001).
Collins is also the author of the graphic novel Road to Perdition (1998), the basis for the 2002 Tom Hanks film, and several sequels, and has written numerous stand-alone novels and coauthored many books and stories with Mickey Spillane, completing works that were left unfinished when Spillane died.
Ms. Tree is the heroine of a popular comic book series featuring Michael Tree, a private detective who takes charge of the agency when her husband is murdered. She is tough and fearless, inspired, according to the author, by Velda, Mike Hammer’s secretary and girlfriend.
“Louise” was originally published in the anthology Deadly Allies, edited by Robert J. Randisi and Marilyn Wallace (New York, Doubleday, 1992).
Louise
MAX ALLAN COLLINS
HER FACE WAS PRETTY AND HARD; her eyes were pretty and soft.
She was a waif in a yellow-and-white peasant dress, a Keane painting child grown up, oval freckled face framed by sweeping blond arcs. She wore quite a bit of make-up, but the effect was that of a school-girl who’d gotten into mommy’s things. She stood with her purse held shyly before her, a guilty Eve with a brown patent-leather fig leaf.
“Miss Tree?” she asked tentatively, only half-stepping inside my private office, despite the fact my assistant had already bid her enter.
I stood, paying her back the respect she was showing, and tried to put her at ease with a smile. “I prefer ‘Ms.,’ ” I told her, sitting back down, and gestured toward the chair opposite me.
She settled gradually into the chair and straightened her skirt primly, though her manner was at odds with the scoop neck that showed more bosom than modesty would allow. “I never been to a office on Michigan Avenue before,” she said, her big blue eyes taking in the stark lines of my spacious but austere inner chamber. “You sure have a nice one.”
“Thank you, Miss Evans.”
Pretty as she was, she had the sort of countenance that wore more suffering than even heavy make-up could hide; so it was kind of a shock when her face brightened with a smile.
“Louise,” she said, and she extended her tiny hand across the desk, with a deliberation that revealed the courage she’d had to summon to behave so boldly, “call me Louise. Please.”
“My assistant tells me you were quite insistent about seeing me personally.”
She nodded and lowered her head. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, Miss Evans.”
“It’s Mrs. Evans. Excepting, I’d like you to call me Louise. I need us to be friends.”
“All right,” I said. This wasn’t going to be easy, was it? “You said this is about your daughter. That your daughter is in trouble.”
I was too busy for this, with Gold Coast divorce cases, legal work, and corporate accounts, but it hadn’t been the kind of plea you could turn down.
“Terrible trouble,” she said, and her lower lip trembled; the blue eyes were filling up. “My husband…I’m afraid of what he might…”
Then she began to weep.
I got up, came around and knelt beside her as she dug embarrassedly for Kleenex in her purse. She was so much smaller than me, I felt like an adult comforting a child as I slipped an arm around her.
“You can tell me,” I said. “It’ll be all right.”
“She’s gone,” she said. “He took her.”
“Your husband took your daughter?”
“Months ago. Months ago. God knows what he done her, by this time.”
“Tell me about it. Start at the beginning. Start anywhere.”
But she didn’t start. She grabbed my arm and her tiny fist gripped me hard. As hard as the life that had made the sweet features of her young face so old.
“I wish I was like you,” she said. Her voice had an edge.
“Louise…”
“I’ve read about you, Ms. Tree. You’re a strong woman. Nobody messes with you. Nobody pushes you around.”
“Please…”
“You’re big. You killed bad men before.”
That was me—a cross between King Kong and the Lone Ranger, in a dress. Frankly, this petite if buxom woman did make me feel “big”; at five ten, one-hundred-forty pounds, I sure wasn’t small. My tombstone would likely read: “Here Lies Michael Tree—She Never Did Lose That Ten Pounds.”
And so I was to be Louise’s savior; her avenger. I sighed, smiled and said, “You really should tell me about your daughter, Louise—and your husband.”
“That’s why I come here. I need somebody like you to go get Maggie back. He took her, and the law can’t do nothing.” I got a chair and sat next to her, where I could pat her reassuringly when necessary, and, finally, she told me her story.
Her husband Joe was “a good man, in lots of ways,” a worker in a steel mill in Hammond. They met when she was working in a McDonald’s in South Chicago, and they’d been married six years. That was how old Maggie, their only child, was.
“Joey’s a good provider,” she said, “but he…gets rough sometimes.”
“He beat you?”
She looked away, nodded. Battered women feel ashamed, even guilty, oftentimes; it makes no logical sense, but then neither does a man beating on a woman.
“Has he beaten your daughter, too?”
She nodded. And she started to weep again.
She was out of Kleenex; I got up and got her some.
“But that…that’s not the worst part,” she said, sniffling. “Maggie is a pretty little girl. She got blond hair, just like mine. And Joey was looking at her…you know. That way. The way my daddy done me.”
“Do you think your husband ever…?”
“Not while I was around. But since he runned off with her, t
hat’s what I’m afraid of most.”
I was a little confused; I had been assuming that this was a child custody situation. That the divorced husband had taken advantage of his visitation rights to disappear with his daughter.
“You haven’t said anything about divorce,” I said. “You and your husband are divorced?”
“No. We was talking about it. I think that’s why he done it the way he done.”
“What do you mean, Louise?”
“He knew that that if we was divorced, the courts’d give Maggie to me. And he didn’t want me to have her. Ms. Tree, when I was Maggie’s age, my daddy beat on me. And he done other things to me. You know what kind of things.”
I nodded.
“Ms. Tree, will you take my case? All I got is two hundred dollars I saved. Is that going to be enough?”
“It’s going to be like McDonald’s, Louise,” I said.
“Huh?”
“You’re going to get back some change.”
* * *
—
Louise had reported her husband’s disappearance to the police, but in the five months since Joey Evans and his daughter vanished, there had been little done. My contact at the police department confirmed this.
“The Missing Persons Bureau did what they could,” Rafe Valer said, sitting on the edge of his desk in his small cluttered office at Homicide.
“Which is what, exactly?”
Rafe shrugged. Darkly handsome describes him, but considering he’s black, saying so may be in poor taste. Thirty, quietly ambitious and as dependable as a pizza at Gino’s, Lt. Valer had been my late husband Mike’s partner, before Mike went private.
“Which is,” he said, “they asked around Hammond, and South Chicago, talking to his relatives and friends. They found that one day, five months ago, Joe Evans quit his job, sold his car for cash, packed his things and left.”
“With his six-year-old daughter.”
“With his six-year-old daughter. The assumption is, Evans has skipped the state.”
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 156