Windy City Knights

by Michael A. Black

  “It’s a good thing you’re a better fighter than you are a bullshitter,” he said with a laugh. “Okay, I’ll do all this stuff for you on one condition.”

  “What?”

  “You work evening shift at the hotel for me to night,” he said.

  “For Christ’s sake, George, I’m training for a title shot.”

  “Yeah, yeah, but I’m in a super-bind,” he said. “The guy who was supposed to work had a death in the family. I can’t get nobody else on such short notice.”

  “Nobody but your old buddy Ron, huh?”

  “Yeah, my old buddy Ron, who expects me to do him favors all the time,” he shot back. “What the hell, you work for yourself. You make up your own schedule as you go along. You saying you can’t help out after all me and Doug done for you?”

  “All right, all right,” I said.

  Just then my beeper went off again. It was Paula’s apartment number. And there was a 911 after it. I told George I had to go, hung up, and rushed down the stairs.

  CHAPTER 13

  Just as I reached the fifth floor landing, the door swung open. I sidestepped and narrowly missed running into old Mr. Turner. He was holding a cellular phone. When he saw me he just about jumped out of his skin.

  “What the hell you doing in here?” he barked. He was wearing the same convex glasses that I’d seen before. They made his eyes look bigger.

  “Sorry,” I said and pushed past him. I ran down the hallway and knocked hard on the door to the apartment, telling Laurie it was me. I heard the locks click and the door opened. She looked ashen. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Before she could speak she raised up her arms and moved forward to embrace me, burying her face against my chest. After a couple of calming deep breaths, she told me. “I thought I heard the doorknob turning so I figured it was you coming back,” she said. “But it just made this clicking sound, you know, like somebody twisting it. Then I called your name, and the sound stopped. Nobody answered.” She looked at me and her eyes widened. “So I went to the peephole to see who it was, and I couldn’t see. Somebody’d put something over the hole.” I glanced at the peephole and saw an inch-long piece of masking tape over the opening. “Then the phone rang and when I picked it up it was another hang-up call. I was so scared, I dialed your beeper as fast as I could.” She smiled slightly. “I know it by heart now.”

  “How long ago did this happen?”

  “Not more than a couple minutes.”

  “Okay. Lock the door and don’t open it. I’ll be right back.”

  She nodded, swallowing hard. I sensed that it bothered her for me to leave, but if my hunch was right, time was of the essence. I carefully peeled the tape off the peephole and stuck the end of it on the inside of the door. Then I went to the elevator and punched the down button. I would have rather taken the stairs, but didn’t want to appear winded when I got to where I was going. I heard the sound of the elevator, and the doors popped open with a pinging sound. After stepping in, I pressed button two. When the doors opened for the second floor, I stepped out and strode over to Mr. Turner’s apartment and hammered my fist on the door till he answered.

  “You don’t have to keep pounding like that,” he said angrily. “I heard you.” He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and I thought I knew why.

  “I wanted to be sure you did,” I said. “You just wear your glasses for reading?” I stared at him closely for a few seconds. A hard-edged stare affects people differently, but with Turner it had the effect that I’d hoped for.

  His tongue darted over his upper lip. “What do you want?”

  “I wondered if I could use your phone.”

  “What for? You ain’t got a phone upstairs?”

  “Yeah, we do,” I said slowly. “But somebody keeps calling there and hanging up.” I continued to look at him.

  He drew his lips tightly together and tried to out-stare me. He lost.

  “Well, I don’t let anybody use my phone,” he said.

  I waited two more beats before continuing. “I don’t think I introduced myself properly before,” I said, taking out my private investigator’s license and holding it up in front of him. He blinked again, then reached inside his sweater and took out the reading glasses.

  “I’m a private investigator,” I said. “And I’m looking into Paula Kittermann’s death. I’m working with the Chicago Police on it.”

  He took off his glasses and stuck them back in an open case clipped to his shirt. I saw the gray plastic of the cellular phone sticking out of the outside sweater pocket. My hand shot forward and grabbed it. “Hey!” he grunted. “Gimme that back.”

  I moved forward, putting my left leg inside on his side of the jamb, so he couldn’t close the door unless he wanted to try and push me back out into the hall. And he knew better than that.

  “Gimme my phone,” he repeated. “I’ll call the cops on you.”

  “Call ’em,” I said as I pressed the recall button. The phone number for Paula’s apartment flashed across the screen. I looked back at Turner. He sort of recoiled like he was afraid that I was going to hit him.

  “I ain’t gonna hurt you, buddy,” I said, letting a hint of menace creep into my voice just the same. Stripping off the battery, I checked the faceplate of the cellular. The serial number had been scratched off. “This your phone?”

  “Yeah,” he said, trying to recover some of his false bravado. “What of it?”

  “Well, for one thing, the last number in the memory is to Paula’s apartment upstairs.”

  “So what? I’m the super here. I got a right to call to check up on things.”

  “Checking up is one thing,” I said. “Calling and hanging up is another. Ever hear of a criminal statute called telephone harassment?”

  His lower lip puckered up defiantly, and he blinked several times.

  “Not to mention the piece of masking tape you stuck over the eyelet,” I continued.

  “You can’t prove that.”

  “Oh no? There’s a pretty good fingerprint on the adhesive side,” I said. It’s always dangerous to bluff, but when you have the upper hand, sometimes you just got to go for it. Besides, he looked ham-handed enough to have probably left the print anyway. “Should I have one of my police friends send it to the lab to see if it matches any of your prints?”

  His eyes shot to the floor and I knew I had him. “It all adds up to some pretty suspicious behavior. You’d better come up with the truth, or you’ll be explaining it all down at the station.” I let my gaze settle on Turner. His tongue darted over his lips again, and he swallowed hard.

  “All—all right,” he said stammering slightly. “I made the call. Just wanted to see who was in there.”

  “Look, don’t even try to bullshit me,” I said. “I ain’t in the mood. You made the call last night too, didn’t you?”

  He looked momentarily surprised, then nodded.

  “Okay,” I said. “Now, tell me why. And where did this phone come from?”

  The question about the phone seemed to stun him. “Some guy came by here,” Turner said, his gaze turning downward. “It was a few days after the cops had been here and told me she was dead. He told me he worked for a lawyer. That Paula’d been involved in some kind of a civil lawsuit. He needed to serve some papers. Asked if I’d mind letting him post a subpoena inside her apartment for her next of kin. Said he wouldn’t take nothing, and I could stand right there. Paid me fifty dollars.” He reached up and wiped at his nose. “Well, I let him in, and he just posted the paper like he said he was gonna do, then left. I locked the door after him.”

  “You watched him the whole time?”

  Turner nodded. “Well, he did look around a little bit. Went to the washroom.”

  “Is it possible he could have unlocked the door when you weren’t looking?”

  “Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “I checked the door when we left. Locked it myself.”

  “What about the back door? The one that leads
to the fire escape. You check it too?”

  His jaw just sagged open.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” I said. “Now why did you keep making those hang-up calls?”

  He exhaled dejectedly before he spoke. “He came back a day or two later. Told me that it was important to get a hold of him if anybody, family or anything, came by the apartment. Said that there were papers he’d have to serve in person. Paid me a hundred dollars for just keeping an eye out and calling him back if there was somebody in her apartment. He give me that phone, too.” He nodded toward the cellular. “Told me I could keep it just for helping him out.”

  “Yeah, well don’t get used to it. It’s probably cloned. You have this guy’s number?”

  “What do you mean, ‘cloned’?”

  “I mean that it’s stolen,” I said, holding up the back so he could see the scratched-off serial number. “They steal somebody’s phone and reprogram it with someone else’s number. As soon as that person gets his next bill the phone company will cancel this one out.” I snapped the battery back in place. “Now, what did this dude look like?”

  He stared up at me in disbelief. “Young guy. Real clean-cut looking.” His voice sounded tired and old.

  “Was he white, black? Big, small?”

  “About your size, I guess. Maybe a little bit shorter, but stockier. Sort of like a football player or something. White guy. Red hair.”

  I grinned. Red, my buddy from the hotel. “You got his name and number?”

  “Yeah,” Turner said. He reached in his sweater pocket and took out a card. It said Regis Phillips, with a phone number and a box address below it. I put the card in my pocket along with the phone. Turner’s jaw jutted out and he said, “Hey. What you doing with those?”

  “Saving you the cost of a lawyer,” I said. “This is some real nasty business, and I don’t think you want to get mixed up in the possession of stolen property. Do you?” He pursed his lips again, then shook his head. “Good,” I said. “Now, just so we continue on this new course of cooperation, after you made the hang-up call last night, did you call this Phillips guy and let him know we were in the apartment?”

  “Yeah,” Turner said slowly. “He thanked me. Then he called back later and said that he’d missed you. Told me there’d be more money in it for me to continue keeping my eyes open.”

  “Why the tape?”

  “He told me to put it over the peep hole in case he had to come back to serve them papers,” he said. “That way you wouldn’t know it was him.”

  Yeah, I thought. So we wouldn’t see the gun in his hand either. I silently thanked God that Laurie hadn’t stayed there alone last night.

  “So did you call him today after you saw us?”

  Turner shook his head. “I was gonna, but I was kind of afraid to.” He glanced up at me obliquely. “After you caught me with the phone in the stairwell, I didn’t want to make it seem too obvious.”

  “Ever seen this guy before he approached you? He ever come over to see Paula socially or anything?”

  Turner shook his head.

  “She had quite a few boyfriends,” he said, “but not him. I’d never seen him before.”

  “Do you know any of her friends?” I asked. “Her recent ones?”

  “Well, like I said, she had a passel of men always going up there. Most of ’em seemed like bar pick ups. Sometimes they’d spend the night, sometimes not. Seemed to be with this one fella past few months though.”

  “What did he look like?”

  His lips meshed together loosely as he pondered the question. “Lots older than her,” he said. “I guess about fifty, or so. Gray hair. Kind of heavyset. Sort of puffy looking. Like a drinker.”

  “What else you remember about him?”

  He shrugged.

  “Okay,” I said, taking out my notebook and pen. “Start with the basics. Male, about fifty. Gray hair, heavyset. White?” Turner nodded.

  “Mustache? Glasses? Facial scars?”

  “He did have a mustache,” he said. “No glasses, that I ever saw, but I didn’t get a real close look at him. He just sort of stands out from the others ’cause he came by regular.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks. And if this guy calls you back, just tell him that the phone quit working and that you’re still keeping your eyes open. Then call me. I’ll make it worth your while.” I handed him one of my cards. I wasn’t entirely sure that I could trust him, and certainly wasn’t about to give him a C-note for watching. But I figured that it was worth a shot. I went back up to the apartment.

  “I was getting a bit worried,” Laurie said, letting me in. “That was a lot longer than ten minutes.”

  “Yeah, but it was productive. I found out who was making those hang-up calls.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Turner, the super.”

  Her eyes widened, then she said, “Why that old creep.”

  I explained to her what Turner had told me.

  “So who is this guy with the red hair?”

  “I’m not sure right now,” I said. “Turner told me that he hadn’t called Red today, but I’m not entirely sure we can trust him.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We pack up as much stuff as we can. Then I go down and do a recon to check for Injuns before we leave.”

  “Injuns?”

  “That’s what George and my brother Tom used to say when they were in ’Nam,” I said. “It’s a euphemism for hostiles.”

  “Not very politically correct,” Laurie said, with a tone of mock rebuke.

  “That’s me, your politically Incorrect Private Eye.”

  We packed up most of Paula’s clothes in the boxes we’d brought. Her other possessions seemed fairly scarce, except for drawers full of make up, hair dyers, and other female trinkets. We found some personal records, checkbook, credit card receipts, and bankbook. No passport, which Laurie thought was strange. Paula had recently sent a postcard from Bangkok while she was there on a modeling assignment. It was almost like it was a stage set of a girl’s apartment or something. Under the dresser I did find a leather-bound portfolio. Inside were several professionally done photographs of Paula in both color and black-and-white.

  “Like I mentioned, she told me that she was doing some modeling assignments,” Laurie said.

  “Is that how she was supporting herself?” I asked. I paged through the book. Several of the pages had been torn out of the back.

  “As far as I know,” Laurie said. “She just said the money was real good.”

  I checked an empty plastic slot on the inside front cover that looked like it had once held a business card. Taking out my pocketknife, I inserted the blade into the plastic sleeve and gently cut it loose.

  “What are you doing?” Laurie asked as I moved toward the window.

  “An old Charlie Chan trick.” I held the clear piece of plastic up toward the light. The imprint was faintly visible: SAMUEL R. PEEPS PHOTOGRAPHY. I was able to make out a north Dearborn address and phone number. I went to the phone and dialed the number.

  “Samuel Peeps Photography,” a male voice said. “May I help you?” The voice sounded very British…It had a familiar ring to it.

  “Do you do portfolios for male models?” I asked, raising my voice a few octaves.

  “Sure, just pop on by,” the voice said.

  I verified the address and asked him what time he closed. “I’ll be here till late,” he said. “If you want to stop in.”

  I said I would and told him my name was Lewis Van Tillworth the Third. When I hung up, Laurie tilted her head and smiled.

  “That was quite a per for mance,” she said. “I had no idea you were so talented.”

  “And you ain’t even seen me in action yet, babe,” I said. I was beginning to like the look of her smile, and grinned back.

  I was looking forward to meeting Mr. Peeps.

  CHAPTER 14

  It took me several trips to get the boxes loaded into the back of the tr
uck. I didn’t even want to think about unloading them when we got back to my place. I’d told Laurie that we could just store everything in my basement until she made arrangements to have it all shipped up to Ludington. We covered the bed with a tarp and secured it with a couple of bungee cords that George always left in the glovebox. The only trouble was that with the boxes all piled so high in the bed, I couldn’t see out the rearview mirror. Not that I was totally inept at driving downtown just using the side mirrors, but I quickly realized that if old Mr. Turner had, in fact, called Red, I probably wouldn’t be able to notice a tail very easily. I figured that he’d been straight with me, but I still had one of my customary uneasy feelings.

  After starting up the truck and flipping on the heater to high, I snatched the parking ticket from the windshield wiper and quickly got back inside. Laurie sat shivering beside me as I took out my cell phone and made two quick calls: One to Bob Matulik to see what the prognosis was on The Beater, and the other to the vet to check on Rags. Both had good news.

  “Should be ready in about an hour or so, Ron,” Bob told me. “Just finishing up with the fuel pump now.”

  “Great,” I said, not wanting to know how much the bill was going to be. “You’ll be open till seven, right?”

  He assured me he would, and I said that I’d be by. The vet told me that Rags had endured the second worming with exceptional aplomb. I told her I’d be by for him before six. I glanced at my watch. Three thirty.

  “Sounds like you’re going to be a very busy man,” Laurie said.

  “After we check on this photographer, I still have to touch base with George on something and call Chappie.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, George sort of suckered me into working at the hotel security job to night.”

  “Really? At my hotel?”

  “No such luck. Same chain, different location.”

  “Too bad. I was hoping maybe we could have dinner or something. On me.”

  “I’ll take a raincheck,” I said, smiling.