“He was a remarkable man, at least when he was sober,” Anunciación said wistfully. “I miss him.”
“Did you know that the Chicago Fire Department determined that Heirloom Formula was the accelerant used to burn Therese to death?”
“That’s not possible!”
“That’s not to say I think you had anything to do with her death. You had no reason to kill her, at least that I’m aware of.”
“Of course I didn’t!”
“However, consider the following: Let’s say you needed money badly. Perhaps you recognized your husband’s product as the accelerant. You must be quite familiar with its odor and characteristics. Let’s assume you also figured out who the murderer was. It appears that Tom Daniels, who is a trust fund baby, is being blackmailed, so let’s assume he’s the murderer.”
“What are you trying to say?” she snapped, looking intently at him. Her eyes suggested a rising fury.
“That I think you’re blackmailing Tom. Let’s further assume that to distance yourself from the crime, you somehow coerced Mandrake to act as a go-between,” Cummings continued. “Let’s also suppose Otto found out about the blackmail and in his quirky way has been trying to find a way out of this predicament for both Mandrake and Tom. That would explain why he brought me into the situation.”
“You son of a bitch!” Anunciación shrieked in a hot Mediterranean rage. She rose from her chair, grabbed a small crystal bowl from a side table and hurled it at Cummings. It missed, shattering on the floor. “You think you’re so clever! Why don’t you know this?”
She threw open a drawer in a Chinese cabinet, pulled out a legal document and threw it at Cummings. It landed at his feet. He picked it up and perused it.
“This appears to be a contract,” he said.
“Yes, you idiot!” she confirmed. “You are correct that I needed money. Proctor and Gamble has been dogging me for decades to buy Heirloom Formula. Things being how they are, I accepted their offer a few months ago for more money than you will ever see in your life! I had no reason to blackmail anyone!”
Cummings considered this. He also consulted the figure stipulated in the contract, which included many zeros. “I suppose it’s possible I’ve miscalculated,” he conceded finally.
“How could I do such a thing? With my sweet disposition!”
She picked up another small object, a Sandwich Glass decanter, and threw it at Cummings. It grazed him before landing safely on a sofa cushion.
“I apologize,” Cummings said, rising hurriedly. “Perhaps you could stop throwing things at me now?”
“Out! Get out!”
Cummings made an athletic leap for the door, opened it and ran for the elevator.
By the time he came out of the lobby and was safely back on the street, his adrenalized condition was beginning to ebb. Worse, he was feeling regretful, not about falsely accusing Anunciación but about making a significant error.
He sat in his car and considered, then reconsidered, all the facts that had led to his erroneous conclusion. He then considered the same facts again but with a focus on what other conclusions they might lead to. Suddenly he saw his mistake. There was another even stronger possibility, one that seemed not merely plausible but now appeared to be obvious.
When the mail came, Cummings was pleased to discover a substantial check from Otto. He immediately went to the bank and deposited it. Still, working for Otto was hardly steady income. He spent the bulk of the day following up another batch of leads for jobs and consulting work, something that had become a frequent and frustrating routine.
The most promising, which wasn’t promising at all, was an inquiry from the Magen David Pet Cemetery. They wanted a consultant to assess why its requests for funding to the city’s many philanthropies were uniformly being rejected.
“Perhaps they don’t view it as a priority,” Cummings suggested during a call with the Director.
“But we have an online bereavement group!” the Director insisted.
Later Cummings managed to create an informal but filling dinner for himself and Odin, who seemed glum when he came home from work.
“Did something happen today?”
“I was asked to test the tensile strength of aluminum-reinforced pantyhose. I didn’t spend six years in school for this.”
“Persevere.”
“What’s the point?”
“Have you heard anything from your job interview?”
“No.”
“Things will improve. I have to go out for a few hours. Try and relax.”
Odin nodded. He turned on the television, took his dinner to the sofa and stared blankly at the screen.
Boys Town, an area in and around ten blocks of North Halsted Street in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, is the city’s historic gay and lesbian enclave. This designation, dating back to 1970, is acknowledged with place markers: eleven pairs of twenty-three-foot-high, slightly tapered phallic pillars with rings adorning them in the colors of the rainbow.
Boys Town has evolved in the last decades. The irony of social progress is that marginalization strengthens minority cultures while assimilation weakens them. In the post-gay world of the twenty-first century, Boys Town is no longer needed as a ghetto stronghold. A gay and lesbian presence remains, but Boys Town is a community now, not an enclave, and that community is diverse.
Boys Town was Cummings’s destination for the evening. He wanted specifically to visit several businesses including two gay bars, though not for the beer and flirting.
Cummings found a place to park his car and walked to his first destination. This was a tavern called The Wicked Age, Chicago’s oldest surviving gay bar, founded in 1927. It was named after a play written by and starring Mae West, an early gay rights supporter as well as an actress. The New York Times called the play “the low point of the theatrical season of 1927-1928,” and the show closed after nineteen performances. The bar has fared better.
Like so many Chicago tavern interiors, it was dark and oaken. There was a long wooden bar, the walls were covered in wood paneling, and there were wood shutters on the windows. Curiously, the light fixtures were art deco layer cakes. The original owner, Louis Gager, commissioned these as a visual joke. Cake eater was slang for homosexual in the late 1920s.
Cummings walked in and looked around, surveying the surfaces, the clientele and their activities. Little was happening. There seemed to be few patrons, even for a week night, and they didn’t seem a very lively bunch at that.
Cummings left and went to the second destination. This was a much newer bar, Cement Pond, a sawdust and plank floor burger joint that served two hundred varieties of obscure beer and featured drag queen waitresses dressed like Elly May Clampett. Cummings was surprised to discover that the place was closed, not just for the evening but for good. A handwritten sign taped in the window announced the venue had ceased operations three weeks earlier.
So far, it was as Cummings had theorized, but he wasn’t certain his final stop would continue the trend.
He walked a few blocks to a small office building. It was locked up for the night. He assumed it would be, and that was fine. What he was looking for, if it was even there, wouldn’t be in plain sight.
Looking through the front window, his choices were these: take the risk of breaking in and hope he found useful information, or dig through the trash and hope that useful information had been foolishly discarded. Neither option seemed promising, but worst case, digging in the trash was likelier to result in wasted time than a jail sentence. So the trash it was.
He walked to the immediate back of the building, where there were two large commercial dumpsters. He threw open the heavy metal lid of one and climbed inside with a flashlight.
As Rockland might have observed, contradicting Dostoyevsky, the one subject so old that nothing new can be said of it is trash. The refuse in this dumpster did as garbage has always done: it rotted, it slimed, it stank. Cummings persevered, carefully digging through it l
ayer by layer for more than ninety minutes. He found a great deal he would have preferred not to have encountered, such as the remains of fifty servings of Tom Yam Goong from the adjacent Thai restaurant, but retrieved no trash of interest from the business.
Finally he climbed out of the first dumpster and climbed into the second. This turned out to be a more pleasant repository, as it contained only the leftovers of commercial transactions involving paper.
Cummings dug again. Though nothing was rotting, much was shredded. He stuck with his task, carefully looking through the streams of paper until he got near to the bottom. There he found several sheets of paper that had somehow missed the shredder in whole or in part. These were random parts of pages from three unrelated financial statements. He climbed out of the dumpster to take advantage of the brighter light of a street lamp.
Studying the fragments confirmed that they were evidence—not conclusive evidence, but at least encouragement. The numbers suggested that his assumptions were, or at least might be, correct.
He folded the sheets and put them in a pocket. He walked toward his car. He kept the windows open on the drive home, in a valiant but futile effort to dissipate the stench from his clothes.
Chapter Eighteen
The next morning, Cummings started the day searching the Internet for costume rental companies. He set his wristwatch timer and considered the relative merits of each. When the buzzer went off, he picked the one with the largest selection of costumes within five miles of his house.
“May I help you?” a young man, dressed as a comic book superhero, asked as Cummings walked in.
“Yes. I need a repairman’s costume.”
“What sort of repairman?”
“Any sort as long as one would commonly find such a person fixing something in a home, such as air conditioning or plumbing.”
“Contemporary or historical?”
“Contemporary.”
“Are you in a play?”
“No. I’m going to a costume party,” Cummings lied.
“Honestly, being a repairman is a little boring. We have thousands of costumes here. Wouldn’t you like something with more sparkle? Zorro? Sasquatch? Mary, Queen of Scots?”
“A repairman’s costume will do fine.”
“Okay, but you won’t be winning any prizes with that!”
The clerk led Cummings to a dusty rack of men’s service uniforms, dating from perhaps 1950 on. Cummings perused his options and chose a gray jumpsuit with a corporate logo, Lefkowitz Appliances, stitched across the back and on the front of a matching cap.
“Do you rent props, too?” Cummings asked. “I’ll need a tool kit.”
“I’ll look around.”
“Good. Is there somewhere I can change into this?”
“You want to wear it out?”
“Yes. Why not?”
Cummings drove to Tom Daniels’s neighborhood and parked. He picked up his toolkit from the passenger seat, straightened his cap and walked toward the house.
“I’m here to repair the washer,” Cummings explained to Glenda, Tom’s cleaning person, who answered the door.
“Mister Daniels isn’t here. He went to the market.”
“He said he wouldn’t be in, but you would.” Cummings knew this because Tom had remarked that he normally went out on Tuesdays to allow his cleaning person to do her job. “I’m from Lefkowitz Appliances. Mister Daniels called and asked us to come fix the washer.”
“I guess you should come in then.”
“Thank you. Can you show me where it is?”
Glenda brought him into the laundry room, which was located off the kitchen. On the way by the back door to the house, Cummings noticed two trash bags waiting to be taken out. They were tied with plastic closures.
Glenda returned to her work as Cummings pretended to inspect the washing machine. He waited fifteen minutes. When he heard the muffled sound of a vacuum cleaner start up in some distant part of the house, he called out:
“All fixed. I’ll let myself out.”
He went to the back door, picked up the trash bags and took them through the landscaped yard. Alleys run behind almost all Chicago residential streets. Cummings was safe in assuming that beyond the cedar fence marking the end of the property, he’d find one — as indeed he did.
He opened the back gate. Tom had a small detached garage, also a common feature in Chicago residential neighborhoods. Cummings crouched to one side of it, out of view of the house.
He opened the bags and began carefully digging through the contents. He found what he was looking for quickly, a welcome contrast to his earlier trash explorations. He put the items of interest into a pocket and resealed the bag.
As he did so, he heard the sound of a car entering the alley. He stood up and walked away casually from the garage.
It quickly became clear there were two cars, not one. In the first Cummings recognized Tom Daniels. A police car was behind him.
Cummings casually walked another hundred yards or so, then moved to the side and stood behind a tree. The cars passed him. Cummings was now slightly obscured and far enough away not to attract undue attention, yet he was still within visual and aural range.
He watched as Tom’s garage door opened automatically and Tom drove in. The cruiser stopped, and two policemen got out. They ordered Tom out of his car.
“What is this about?” Tom asked, walking back into the alley.
“We’re placing you under arrest for the murder of Therese Hickok,” the first policeman said, brandishing a pair of handcuffs.
“You can’t be serious,” Tom protested.
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law ...” the policeman continued, pushing Tom against the side of his garage and cuffing him.
Cummings wasn’t surprised. Indeed, he nodded his head in assent, wondering why the police hadn’t made the arrest sooner. He continued his walk down the alley away from Tom’s garage.
“Good afternoon, Rockland,” Cummings said. He was speaking on his cell phone in his car, still parked down the street from Tom’s home. “Is this a bad time to probe your remarkable mind?”
“I am not sure what would characterize a time as bad,” Rockland responded. “If you are seeking to learn whether I’m in a coma or otherwise intellectually indisposed, the answer is no.”
“I was just at Tom Daniels’s house. He’s been arrested for the murder of Therese Hickok.”
“Is that a surprise?”
“I don’t think so. He’s been our prime suspect for some time. I became even more certain about him during the last few days. Anyway, I was digging through Tom’s trash just before the police arrived. I found some printouts from the drug store — you know, the drug information they give you when you fill a prescription. Would you tell me what these drugs are used to treat?”
Cummings’s next stop was Otto’s house. Traffic was tangled, as it often is in Chicago, and it took him more than an hour to get there.
Mandrake did not open the door. Instead Cummings found himself greeted by an apparently distraught Otto. He was wearing sunglasses, and it was obvious that tears had been running down his face.
“What are you doing here?” Otto asked, not pleased to see Cummings.
“I want to speak to Mandrake.”
“He’s not here. He’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“It’s been a horrific day, and we’ve just heard dreadful news! Tom’s been arrested for Therese’s murder. He just called and asked me to get him a lawyer. Mandrake took off the moment he heard. He literally ran out of the house! How could you do this, you son of a bitch?” Otto exclaimed.
“How could I do what?” Cumming asked.
“Throw Tom to the wolves! What do you think I mean?”
“I didn’t have anything to do with his arrest. May I come in?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Let him in,” a voice behind Otto said. It w
as Sebastian. Otto didn’t move.
“Let him in!” Sebastian insisted.
Otto moved away from the door, and Cummings walked into the entryway. Sebastian stood a few feet away, proportionately as unemotional as Otto was overwrought.
“We didn’t have anything to do with this,” Sebastian said.
“Anything to do with what?” Cummings asked.
“With any of this,” Sebastian answered cautiously.
Cummings saw a shape in the corner of his eye. He glanced down the hallway. Barbara Cartland was lying on her side on the floor. She wasn’t moving.
“Is something wrong with the dog?”
“She’s dead,” Sebastian said. “We don’t know what happened. She just fell over. Possibly she had a heart condition.”
At this Otto began to wail with the emotional fervor of a Norse berserker about to attack a medieval monastery. He fell to his knees, crawled to Barbara’s lifeless body and keened over her remains.
“I imagine this is a difficult time for you,” Cummings said, understating the obvious. “I came by just now to tell you Tom had been arrested, but you seem to know that already. I also wanted to give you some additional information. Perhaps it will be of some comfort.”
“What information is that?” Sebastian asked.
“Tom is very ill. He has multidrug-resistant tuberculosis that doesn’t appear to be responding to treatment. He’s scared. He’s not thinking clearly. I think he wanted the brooch because of its reputed health properties. I believe he tried to buy it from Therese, but she wouldn’t sell it to him. So he decided to steal it by creating a diversion while she was speaking at the Mathers meeting. Of course, we know what happened — the diversion went out of control.
Husbands And Lap Dogs Breathe Their Last Page 18