by Holly Baxter
“I’m not so sure about that.” Mrs. Browne glanced toward the copy of The American Weekly which lay on the floor beside Alyce’s chair. “These are such dreadful times—it must leave a mark on children. I know my students are far more unruly than they used to be. Some of them are downright sassy to the younger teachers.”
“But surely not to you, Mumma,” said Elodie.
“I should think not. I am very firm with all my students.” They all laughed. Mrs. Browne had the softest heart in the city, and everybody, including her students, knew it. On the other hand, it was certainly possible her students never sassed her because they were so fond of her. She was an excellent teacher. It was respect as much as affection that kept her students in line.
“I know what you mean,” said Marie. “You can’t imagine how rude some people are in the shops and markets. Everybody is out for themselves these days.”
“Wow.” Alyce sat up as the closing theme came on. “That was terrific.”
“Time you were in bed, young lady.” Mrs. Browne glanced at the clock on the bookcase under the window. “School tomorrow.”
“I know.” Alyce sighed and turned off the radio. Very reluctantly, she went toward the door to the stairs. “Good night, everybody.”
They all said good night, and went on with the game. Hugh and Maybelle had won four rubbers and everybody was getting ready to quit, when the telephone rang.
Maybelle was closest, and got up to answer it. She then held it out to Hugh. “It’s for you, Hugh. Somebody at the paper.”
“Oh, thanks.” Hugh got up and went to the phone. “Don’t tell me, some speakeasy got raided and they found the Mayor there,” he said to whoever was on the other end of the line. His smile slowly faded as whoever was calling spoke. “Jesus, are they sure?”
Mrs. Browne frowned at his language, but said nothing as she gathered up the cards and began separating the two decks. Elodie and Maybelle listened unashamedly. Hugh wasn’t easily shocked, but his face was getting whiter and whiter. After a minute or two of listening, he spoke again. “I’ll go right down,” he said, and hung up the phone. Slowly he turned and looked at the women around the card table. His eyes went to Elodie, and his expression was bleak.
“Ellie…”
“What is it?” asked Elodie, her heart tightening in her chest.
“Your friend,” he said. “Your friend Bernice Barker.”
“Oh, no…”
Hugh nodded. “They just found her body in an alley behind Wentworth Avenue. I’m afraid she’s been murdered. I’m so sorry, Ellie.”
Elodie put her hands over her face, and began to cry. Hugh came over to stand beside her. “Now do you understand why I want you to stay out of it?” he said, softly.
“Out of what?” demanded Mrs. Browne.
“Wentworth is Chinatown, isn’t it?” asked Maybelle.
“Oh, no…oh, no…” wailed Elodie.
“Stay out of what?” repeated Mrs. Browne.
“Trouble,” said Hugh. “Big, big trouble.”
Chapter Fourteen
Deacon recognized her the minute he saw her, but it would have been easier if her head had still been attached to her body. Instead, it lay neatly next to her left shoulder. The sight was so unreal that it took him a minute or so to orient himself. It was the red curls that finally made him recognize Lee Chang’s secretary. Her name had come through at the station with the shout, gleaned by the first patrol on the scene from the handbag found alongside the body, but he hadn’t made the connection until now.
Around him moved the photographer, his flash bulbs lighting up the scene sporadically, revealing all the filthy details. An alley behind a Chinese laundry, garbage cans, empty cardboard boxes with Chinese writing on them, baskets of squashed vegetables from a grocery further along. Puffs of steam escaped through the laundry’s vents, occasionally obscuring the pathetic figure. She wore a brightly colored print dress and a dark coat. There were runs in her stockings where they had snagged on the rough surface of the alleyway in her final death spasms. There was a great pool of blood surrounding the head and shoulders in a halo of darkening scarlet. Her entire body must have been drained of blood, he thought. The waxy white face was lax and expressionless, blank blue eyes staring up at the starry night, their life and sparkle extinguished.
He had put her down as a good-time girl.
Well, her fun was over.
“This was in her hand, Archie.” The Medical Examiner handed Deacon a small piece of paper. It was a photograph of a chess piece, elaborately carved. A knight, he thought, from the shape. The crumpled photograph in black and white gave no indication of the color, although it was pale.
“Time of death?” Deacon asked.
The Medical Examiner, a small round man with the unlikely name of Blossom, looked at him in exasperation. “Some time before we got here.”
“Oh, come on.”
“From the rate of blood drying, I’d say no more than two hours ago,” came the reluctant information. “But you know I have to do an autopsy to be sure. It’s chilly out tonight, but there’s heat and steam from that laundry wall, which messes up temperature. It’s after midnight and they’re still working in there, believe it or not.”
“Oh, I believe it,” Archie said. “Nobody can work as hard as the Chinese when they want to. They have relatives waiting to come over. It’s kind of a very slow colonization,” he said, not without affection.
“If it’s any consolation, she was killed before her head was cut off.” He looked down at Bernice Barker’s body. “Hard to tell yet because of the decapitation cut across the throat, but maybe strangled.”
“How do you know?”
Blossom gestured widely. “Blood pattern. If she was still alive when her head was cut off, the heart would have been pumping and blood would have shot everywhere. Including over the killer. But as she was dead there was no pressure. She just—drained from the large vessels in the neck.” He leaned forward to inspect the base of the severed head and muttered half to himself. “Just like the others.”
“The others?” Archie just caught the words.
Blossom realized he’d been overheard, and turned away. Busied himself with putting his instruments back into his little black bag. “Forget I spoke.”
“Now, how can I forget that for crying out loud? What others?”
Blossom flushed. “It’s been kept quiet because they’re afraid of panic. That’s what we were told.”
“Go on.”
Blossom uttered a low curse, then shrugged. “Last three months or so we’ve had five homicides here in Chinatown. Three shot, one stabbed, one poisoned. But all of them had their heads cut off afterward.” He looked down at Bernice Barker’s body. “She’s not Chinese, though. They were all Chinese.”
“Jesus wept. Why haven’t I heard about this?” But, thinking back, he recalled whispers, rumors. Nothing more.
“We were told to cover up the decapitation part.” Blossom was deeply embarrassed. “Somebody paid somebody, I don’t know. Like since they were Chinese it was irrelevant what weird things they did to their dead folks. As if their rituals or whatever were no business of ours. You know how things are these days. People get spooked by what they don’t understand. Now, I don’t know what to do about this one, seeing she’s not Chinese.”
“I know who she is,” Archie said. “She works for a Chinese importer called Lee Chang.”
Blossom stared up at him in dismay. “Hell’s teeth—the one where that guy Webster was shot last week?”
“The very one.”
“So there’s a Chinese connection.” Blossom fancied himself a bit of a detective.
“Time will tell,” Archie said. “I can’t think of any other reason for her to be down here at night except on business for him.” He looked around. “Rotten way to die,” he muttered.
“Never came across a good one.” Blossom was philosophic. “Even in bed you g
ot lumps.” He snapped his bag shut. “Can I take her away now?”
Archie turned to the photographer. “You finished?”
“Yeah.”
“And you?” he asked the artist who was drawing the scene.
“Just two more minutes.” The artist’s tongue protruded from the corner of his mouth as his pencil raced across the page of his big notebook.
“Okay,” Blossom said. “I’ll tell them to bring the stretcher.”
Deacon watched the little medico leave. The police detectives would go over the alley with flashlights, looking for clues, but he doubted they would find anything except the occasional rat. Alleys are good places for murder—ideal from the killer’s point of view. Too many clues to too many lives other than that of the victim. What might be important was usually obscured by a surfeit of information. No, the only clue was this little photograph, which he would show to Lee Chang, even if he had to drag him out of bed to look at it. He would find out what was going on or get fired trying. The death of Bernice Barker re-opened the Webster case, officially or unofficially, as far as he was concerned. And it reopened the mental wound he’d been carrying since Webster’s murder. He hated things going on that made no sense. Crooks killing crooks, that made a kind of sense. But young girls full of life—no.
He turned, realizing how angry he really was, and bumped into someone standing behind him.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.
Hugh Murphy looked past him to where Bernice Barker still lay. Still forever.
“I got a call,” Hugh said. He couldn’t take his eyes off the dead girl. She looked like a shop dummy, but she was real. And her head…. It was ghastly, like nothing he’d ever seen before. Finally he looked at Deacon. “I was at Elodie Browne’s house when it came through.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Exactly.” Hugh fumbled in his jacket for a cigarette, offered it to Deacon, who declined, and lit it up himself. “Elodie is pretty broken up. Bernice was her closest friend and she thinks it’s her fault, somehow. She told me how you pressed her for information. She wishes she’d kept her mouth shut, poor kid.”
“She was the only one there with any brains,” Archie said, defensively. “I wasn’t about to get anything out of people like Miss Hutton or Lee Chang himself. They think they are above the police, somehow. I had no choice but to ask Miss Browne.”
“And to take her to dinner?”
Archie felt himself flush. “You can’t blame a man for trying,” he said.
Hugh smiled. “I know. She’s cute and smart and funny. Unfortunately she’s my cousin. That means I care about her and what happens to her. Including who is interested in her.”
“Understood.” Archie regarded the reporter. One thing about Murphy, he thought, he talks straight and expects straight answers. Makes life a lot easier. Unless there’s something you don’t want to tell him. Then it makes life very difficult. Relationships between the police and the press had never been easy, nor would they ever be. Murphy was about the best of a bad bunch.
“You know she has all kinds of ideas about all this business with Webster and so on,” Hugh continued. “She has too much imagination, too much determination, and no common sense at all. Can you stop her?”
“It’s got nothing to do with me.” Even as Archie spoke he knew it wasn’t true. He sighed. “Anyway, she doesn’t like me, won’t listen to anything I say.”
“Or me,” Hugh agreed. “Maybe you could arrest her for something and keep her in jail.”
“Very funny.” They both stepped back as the stretcher-bearers came past to collect the body. “This might stop her,” Archie said, gesturing toward the pathetic small body and detached head of the late Bernice Barker.
“Is it going to stop you?”
Archie looked at the reporter, recognized a friend with common interests. “It makes everything worse, as you damn well know.”
Hugh nodded. “Well, that’s exactly the effect it had on Elodie. First she broke down, then she got angry. Her mother and sisters practically had to tie her down to stop her coming down here with me. They finally put her to bed with some kind of pills her mother had for her arthritis. I told them to lock the door just to make sure.” They both turned to follow the oddly laden stretcher out of the alley and around the corner to the mortuary van. “You know about this mingdow business?”
“She told me. I can’t find anyone who knows anything about it.”
Hugh nodded. “Well, she did.” They came to a stop under the corner streetlight.
Archie looked at him in amazement. “She did?”
Hugh gave a very small chuckle. “Very resourceful is our Elodie. She went to her university library and got it translated by some specialist or other. It could mean several things but ‘shining sword’ seems the most likely, apparently. Ring any bells?”
Archie frowned. “No, but it sounds bad.”
“I thought so, too,” Hugh agreed.
“Especially since…” He stopped.
“Since what?”
“Since heads are getting chopped off. Maybe by a shining sword?”
Hugh finished his cigarette and tossed the butt into the gutter. “Heads? Plural?”
“Apparently, according to Blossom. But it’s been kept quiet. Very quiet.”
“But you won’t let me use that, will you?” Hugh didn’t really need to ask.
“No.” Archie indicated the shops that lined the street where they stood. “Look at them, all Chinese-owned, all good businesses, well-run and profitable. Owned by family men. All above board. And yet, underneath, there is a whole world we know nothing about and have no entry into. Knowing how that word translates doesn’t tell us anything about what it actually means. And nobody can close you out like a Chinese who doesn’t want to talk. Or tell you more lies and make you believe them if it’s to protect what he wants to protect. I’ve been trying all week to get some response to that word. No luck at all. I like them enormously, admire them, really, but I’ll never get inside their world in a thousand years.”
“Elodie might,” Hugh said.
Archie turned to him in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“She’s got an appointment with a Catholic priest at DePaul University on Tuesday. He used to be a missionary in China. If anyone knows about the world of the Chinese people, it’s him.”
Archie was dumbfounded. “She did that?”
“I told you she’s resourceful. And a danger to herself and everyone around her.”
“Are you going with her?”
“What do you think?” Hugh said.
“You’ll let me know what she finds out?”
Hugh shrugged. “Knowing Elodie as I do, she’ll want to tell you herself. She did an end-run around you on this one, didn’t she? Well, she’ll want to rub it in. She doesn’t dislike you, by the way. I wish she did.” They stood watching the mortuary van drive away. “Meanwhile, what can you give me on this?”
Hugh had produced his notebook and pencil. He was all reporter again. Archie looked at him in resignation. “You know the rules. If we have anything it will come out at a press conference.”
“They won’t be able to shut this one down the way they did the Webster killing,” Hugh agreed.
“You know where the pressure came from on that?” Archie asked, with interest.
“Not specifically. High up. And from the east coast. Personally I think it was La Hutton’s father weighing in with his money. Wouldn’t have wanted the fact that his darling daughter was anywhere near anything as nasty as murder. And he has friends in this town, you know. Including the Mayor. A word here, another there—that’s all it takes up on the social mountaintops.”
“It kind of makes you fond of Capone,” Archie said. “At least you know his motives.”
Hugh shrugged. “Not so different—money, privacy, power, freedom to do what they damn well please. That’s all any of them want.�
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“I used to love this town,” Archie said, sadly.
“Me, too,” Hugh agreed. “Damn shame we both make our living from what’s wrong with it.” Their eyes met in mutual understanding and sadness.
“Including nice young girls getting their heads chopped off.”
“Yes,” Hugh agreed. “Including that.”
***
“My God, what’s happened to you?” Sal demanded as Elodie came through the door and stood staring at the coat rack for a moment as if it could tell her the meaning of life.
With a start, Elodie came to herself and shook off her coat, hung it up, and then took off her hat, which she realized wasn’t hers at all but one of Maybelle’s, grabbed off the hook at home as she rushed out. She held it in her hand, staring at it.
“It’s a hat,” Wilson said from his usual position on the couch. “You had it on your head when you came in, remember?”
“Cut it out, Drew,” Sal snapped as she got up and came over to where Elodie stood. She took the hat from Elodie’s grasp, put it on the rack, and then led Elodie over to their couch and pushed her down. “Coffee,” she said, and brought her a cup, standing over her until Elodie had drunk it, then going back to refill it for her. She sat down next to Elodie, and waited.
“My friend,” Elodie finally said. Her voice wavered.
“The one you’ve been worried about?” asked Sal, gently.
Elodie nodded. “She was murdered last night.” Her voice broke and the tears threatened again. She ducked her head and drank the hot coffee fast.
“Dear God in Heaven,” Sal gasped.
“Son of a bitch,” was Drew’s contribution.
The cup began to shake in the saucer and Sal took it from her, putting it on the worktable that stood between the two couches. “You should have stayed in bed,” Sal said. “You could have sent a message….”
Elodie shook her head violently. “No!” She took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “I was awake in bed all night, I couldn’t stay there a minute longer. And don’t be nice to me, everybody is being so nice to me, and I can’t stand it. It’s probably my fault she’s dead.” Again, her voice almost betrayed her. She still couldn’t believe that vibrant, funny, pretty Bernice was dead and still. Bernice had never been still in her whole life. How could someone that alive be dead? “It’s my fault,” she whispered.