V
Chaim’s cleaning woman found him close to death the morning Penelope’s trial started. Lotty, Max, and I had spent the day in court with Lotty’s brother Hugo and his wife. We didn’t get any of Greta’s frantic messages until Lotty checked in at the clinic before dinner.
Chaim had gone to an Aeolus rehearsal the night before, his first appearance at the group in some weeks. He had bought a new clarinet, thinking perhaps the problem lay with the old one. Wind instruments aren’t like violins-they deteriorate over time, and an active clarinetist has to buy a new one every ten years or so. Despite the new instrument, a Buffet he had flown to Toronto to buy, the rehearsal had gone badly.
He left early, going home to turn on the gas in the kitchen stove. He left a note which simply said: “I have destroyed my music.” The cleaning woman knew enough about their life to call Greta at Rudolph’s apartment. Since Greta had been at the rehearsal-waiting for the oboist-she knew how badly Chaim had played.
“I’m not surprised,” she told Lotty over the phone. “His music was all he had after I left him. With both of us gone from his life he must have felt he had no reason to live. Thank God I learned so much from Paul about why we aren’t responsible for our actions, or I would feel terribly guilty now.”
Lotty called the attending physician at the University of Chicago Hospital and came away with the news that Chaim would live, but he’d ruined his lungs-he could hardly talk and would probably never be able to play again.
She reported her conversation with Greta with a blazing rage while we waited for dinner in her brother’s suite at the Drake. “The wrong person’s career is over,” she said furiously. “It’s the one thing I could never understand about Chaim-why he felt so much passion for that self-centered whore!”
Marcella Herschel gave a grimace of distaste-she didn’t deal well with Lotty at the best of times and could barely tolerate her when she was angry. Penelope, pale and drawn from the day’s ordeal, summoned a smile and patted Lotty’s shoulder soothingly while Max tried to persuade her to drink a little wine.
Freeman Carter stopped by after dinner to discuss strategy for the next day’s session. The evening broke up soon after, all of us too tired and depressed to want even a pretense of conversation.
The trial lasted four days. Freeman did a brilliant job with the state’s sketchy evidence; the jury was out for only two hours before returning a “not guilty” verdict. Penelope left for Montreal with Hugo and Marcella the next morning. Lotty, much shaken by the winter’s events, found a locum for her clinic and took off with Max for two weeks in Portugal.
I went to Michigan for a long weekend with the dog, but didn’t have time or money for more vacation than that. Monday night, when I got home, I found Hugo Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch still open on the piano from January’s dinner party with Chaim and Paul. Between Paul’s murder and preparing for Penelope’s trial I hadn’t sung since then. I tried picking out “In dem Schatten meiner Locken,” but Greta was right: the piano needed tuning badly.
I called Mr. Fortieri the next morning to see if he could come by to look at it. He was an old man who repaired instruments for groups like the Aeolus Quintet and their ilk; he also tuned pianos for them. He only helped me because he’d known my mother and admired her singing.
He arranged to come the next afternoon. I was surprised-usually you had to wait four to six weeks for time on his schedule-but quickly reshuffled my own Tuesday appointments to accommodate him. When he arrived, I realized that he had come so soon because Chaim’s suicide attempt had shaken him. I didn’t have much stomach for rehashing it, but I could see the old man was troubled and needed someone to talk to.
“What bothers me, Victoria, is what I should do with his clarinet. I’ve been able to repair it, but they tell me he’ll never play again-surely it would be too cruel to return it to him, even if I didn’t submit a bill.”
“His clarinet?” I asked blankly. “When did he give it to you?”
“After that disastrous West Coast tour. He said he had dropped it in some mud-I still don’t understand how that happened, why he was carrying it outside without the case. But he said it was clogged with mud and he’d tried cleaning it, only he’d bent the keys and it didn’t play properly. It was a wonderful instrument, only a few years old, and costing perhaps six thousand dollars, so I agreed to work on it. He’d had to use his old one in California and I always thought that was why the tour went so badly. That and Paul’s death weighing on him, of course.”
“So you repaired it and got it thoroughly clean,” I said foolishly.
“Oh, yes. Of course, the sound will never be as good as it was originally, but it would still be a fine instrument for informal use. Only-I hate having to give him a clarinet he can no longer play.”
“Leave it with me,” I said gently. “I’ll take care of it.”
Mr. Fortieri seemed relieved to pass the responsibility on to me. He went to work on the piano and tuned it back to perfection without any of his usual criticisms on my failure to keep to my mother’s high musical standard.
As soon as he’d gone, I drove down to the University of Chicago Hospital. Chaim was being kept in the psychiatric wing for observation, but he was allowed visitors. I found him sitting in the lounge, staring into space while People’s Court blared meaninglessly on the screen overhead.
He gave his sad sweet smile when he saw me and croaked out my name in the hoarse parody of a voice.
“Can we go to your room, Chaim? I want to talk to you privately.”
He flicked a glance at the vacant faces around us but got up obediently and led me down the hall to a Spartan room with bars on the window.
“Mr. Fortieri was by this afternoon to tune my piano. He told me about your clarinet.”
Chaim said nothing, but he seemed to relax a little.
“How did you do it, Chaim? I mean, you left for California Monday morning. What did you do-come back on the red-eye?”
“Red-eye?” he croaked hoarsely.
Even in the small space I had to lean forward to hear him. “The night flight.”
“Oh. The red-eye. Yes. Yes, I got to O’Hare at six, came to Paul’s office on the el, and was back at the airport in time for the ten o’clock flight. No one even knew I’d left L.A. -we had a rehearsal at two and I was there easily.”
His voice was so strained it made my throat ache to listen to him.
“I thought I hated Paul. You know, all those remarks of his about responsibility. I thought he’d encouraged Greta to leave me.” He stopped to catch his breath. After a few gasping minutes he went on.
“I blamed him for her idea that she didn’t have to feel any obligation to our marriage. Then, after I got back, I saw Lotty had been right. Greta was just totally involved in herself. She should have been named Narcissus. She used Paul’s words without understanding them.”
“But Penelope,” I said. “Would you really have let Penelope go to jail for you?”
He gave a twisted smile. “I didn’t mean them to arrest Penelope. I just thought-I’ve always had trouble with cold weather, with Chicago winters. I’ve worn a long fur for years. Because I’m so small people often think I’m a woman when I’m wrapped up in it. I just thought, if anyone saw me they would think it was a woman. I never meant them to arrest Penelope.”
He sat panting for a few minutes. “What are you going to do now, Vic? Send for the police?”
I shook my head sadly. “You’ll never play again-you’d have been happier doing life in Joliet than you will now that you can’t play. I want you to write it all down, though, the name you used on your night flight and everything. I have the clarinet; even though Mr. Fortieri cleaned it, a good lab might still find blood traces. The clarinet and your statement will go to the papers after you die. Penelope deserves that much-to have the cloud of suspicion taken away from her. And I’ll have to tell her and Lotty.”
His eyes were shiny. “You don’t know how awful it’s
been, Vic. I was so mad with rage that it was like nothing to break Paul’s neck. But then, after that, I couldn’t play anymore. So you are wrong: even if I had gone to Joliet I would still never have played.”
I couldn’t bear the naked anguish in his face. I left without saying anything, but it was weeks before I slept without seeing his black eyes weeping onto me.
SKIN DEEP
I
THE WARNING BELL clangs angrily and the submarine dives sharply. Everyone to battle stations. The Nazis pursuing closely, the bell keeps up its insistent clamor, loud, urgent, filling my head. My hands are wet: I can’t remember what my job is in this cramped, tiny boat. If only someone would turn off the alarm bell. I fumble with some switches, pick up an intercom. The noise mercifully stops.
“Vic! Vic, is that you?”
“What?”
“I know it’s late. I’m sorry to call so late, but I just got home from work. It’s Sal, Sal Barthele.”
“Oh, Sal. Sure.” I looked at the orange clock readout. It was four-thirty. Sal owns the Golden Glow, a bar in the south Loop I patronize.
“It’s my sister, Vic. They’ve arrested her. She didn’t do it. I know she didn’t do it.”
“Of course not, Sal-Didn’t do what?”
“They’re trying to frame her. Maybe the manager… I don’t know.”
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. “Where are you?”
She was at her mother’s house, 95th and Vincennes. Her sister had been arrested three hours earlier. They needed a lawyer, a good lawyer. And they needed a detective, a good detective. Whatever my fee was, she wanted me to know they could pay my fee.
“I’m sure you can pay the fee, but I don’t know what you want me to do,” I said as patiently as I could.
“She-they think she murdered that man. She didn’t even know him. She was just giving him a facial. And he dies on her.”
“Sal, give me your mother’s address. I’ll be there in forty minutes.”
The little house on Vincennes was filled with neighbors and relatives murmuring encouragement to Mrs. Barthele. Sal is very black, and statuesque. Close to six feet tall, with a majestic carriage, she can break up a crowd in her bar with a look and a gesture. Mrs. Barthele was slight, frail, and light-skinned. It was hard to picture her as Sal’s mother.
Sal dispersed the gathering with characteristic firmness, telling the group that I was here to save Evangeline and that I needed to see her mother alone.
Mrs. Barthele sniffed over every sentence. “Why did they do that to my baby?” she demanded of me. “You know the police, you know their ways. Why did they come and take my baby, who never did a wrong thing in her life?”
As a white woman, I could be expected to understand the machinations of the white man’s law. And to share responsibility for it. After more of this meandering, Sal took the narrative firmly in hand.
Evangeline worked at La Cygnette, a high-prestige beauty salon on North Michigan. In addition to providing facials and their own brand-name cosmetics at an exorbitant cost, they massaged the bodies and feet of their wealthy clients, stuffed them into steam cabinets, ran them through a Bataan-inspired exercise routine, and fed them herbal teas. Signor Giuseppe would style their hair for an additional charge.
Evangeline gave facials. The previous day she had one client booked after lunch, a Mr. Darnell.
“Men go there a lot?” I interrupted.
Sal made a face. “That’s what I asked Evangeline. I guess it’s part of being a yuppie-go spend a lot of money getting cream rubbed into your face.”
Anyway, Darnell was to have had his hair styled before his facial, but the hairdresser fell behind schedule and asked Evangeline to do the guy’s face first.
Sal struggled to describe how a La Cygnette facial worked-neither of us had ever checked out her sister’s job. You sit in something like a dentist’s chair, lean back, relax-you’re naked from the waist up, lying under a big down comforter. The facial expert-cosmetician was Evangeline’s official tide-puts cream on your hands and sticks them into little electrically heated mitts, so your hands are out of commission if you need to protect yourself. Then she puts stuff on your face, covers your eyes with heavy pads, and goes away for twenty minutes while the face goo sinks into your hidden pores.
Apparently while this Darnell lay back deeply relaxed, someone had rubbed some kind of poison into his skin. “When Evangeline came back in to clean his face, he was sick-heaving, throwing up, it was awful. She screamed for help and started trying to clean his face-it was terrible, he kept vomiting on her. They took him to the hospital, but he died around ten tonight.
“They came to get Baby at midnight-you’ve got to help her, V. I.-even if the guy tried something on her, she never did a thing like that-she’d haul off and slug him, maybe, but rubbing poison into his face? You go help her.”
II
Evangeline Barthele was a younger, darker edition of her mother. At most times, she probably had Sal’s energy-sparks of it flared now and then during our talk-but a night in the holding cells had worn her down.
I brought a clean suit and makeup for her: justice may be blind but her administrators aren’t. We talked while she changed.
“This Darnell-you sure of the name?-had he ever been to the salon before?”
She shook her head. “I never saw him. And I don’t think the other girls knew him either. You know, if a client’s a good tipper or a bad one they’ll comment on it, be glad or whatever that he’s come in. Nobody said anything about this man.”
“Where did he live?”
She shook her head. “I never talked to the guy, V. I.”
“What about the PestFree?” I’d read the arrest report and talked briefly to an old friend in the M.E.’s office. To keep roaches and other vermin out of their posh Michigan Avenue offices, La Cygnette used a potent product containing a wonder chemical called chorpyrifos. My informant had been awestruck-“Only an operation that didn’t know shit about chemicals would leave chorpyrifos lying around. It’s got a toxicity rating of five-it gets you through the skin-you only need a couple of tablespoons to kill a big man if you know where to put it.”
Whoever killed Darnell had either known a lot of chemistry or been lucky-into his nostrils and mouth, with some rubbed into the face for good measure, the pesticide had made him convulsive so quickly that even if he knew who killed him he’d have been unable to talk, or even reason.
Evangeline said she knew where the poison was kept-everyone who worked there knew, knew it was lethal and not to touch it, but it was easy to get at. Just in a little supply room that wasn’t kept locked.
“So why you? They have to have more of a reason than just that you were there.”
She shrugged bitterly. “I’m the only black professional at La Cygnette -the other blacks working there sweep rooms and haul trash. I’m trying hard not to be paranoid, but I gotta wonder.”
She insisted Darnell hadn’t made a pass at her, or done anything to provoke an attack-she hadn’t hurt the guy. As for anyone else who might have had opportunity, salon employees were always passing through the halls, going in and out of the little cubicles where they treated clients-she’d seen any number of people, all with legitimate business in the halls, but she hadn’t seen anyone emerging from the room where Darnell was sitting.
When we finally got to bond court later that morning, I tried to argue circumstantial evidence-any of La Cygnette ’s fifty or so employees could have committed the crime, since all had access and no one had motive. The prosecutor hit me with a very unpleasant surprise: the police had uncovered evidence linking my client to the dead man. He was a furniture buyer from Kansas City who came to Chicago six times a year, and the doorman and the maids at his hotel had identified Evangeline without any trouble as the woman who accompanied him on his visits.
Bail was denied. I had a furious talk with Evangeline in one of the interrogation rooms before she went back to the holding cells.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me? I walked into the courtroom and got blindsided.”
“They’re lying,” she insisted.
“Three people identified you. If you don’t start with the truth right now, you’re going to have to find a new lawyer and a new detective. Your mother may not understand, but for sure Sal will.”
“You can’t tell my mother. You can’t tell Sal!”
“I’m going to have to give them some reason for dropping your case, and knowing Sal it’s going to have to be the truth.”
For the first time she looked really upset. “You’re my lawyer. You should believe my story before you believe a bunch of strangers you never saw before.”
“I’m telling you, Evangeline, I’m going to drop your case. I can’t represent you when I know you’re lying. If you killed Darnell we can work out a defense. Or if you didn’t kill him and knew him we can work something out, and I can try to find the real killer. But when I know you’ve been seen with the guy any number of times, I can’t go into court telling people you never met him before.”
Tears appeared on the ends of her lashes. “The whole reason I didn’t say anything was so Mama wouldn’t know. If I tell you the truth, you’ve got to promise me you aren’t running back to Vincennes Avenue talking to her.”
I agreed. Whatever the story was, I couldn’t believe Mrs. Barthele hadn’t heard hundreds like it before. But we each make our own separate peace with our mothers.
Evangeline met Darnell at a party two years earlier. She liked him, he liked her-not the romance of the century, but they enjoyed spending time together. She’d gone on a two-week trip to Europe with him last year, telling her mother she was going with a girlfriend.
Windy City Blues Page 20