We were eating at my apartment. Lotty had called earlier in the day, rattled by the young girl’s death and needing help putting the evening together. She was so clearly beside herself that I’d felt compelled to offer my own place. With cheese and fruit after dinner Lotty had begun discussing the case with the whole group, chiefly expressing her outrage with a legal system that let Mrs. Hampton off without so much as a warning.
For some reason Servino continued to argue the point despite Penelope’s warning frowns. Perhaps the fact that we were on our third bottle of Barolo explained the lapse from Paul’s usual sensitive courtesy.
“Mrs. Hampton did not point a gun at the girl’s head and force her to become pregnant,” he said. “The daughter was responsible, too, if you want to use that word. And the boy-the father, whoever that was.”
Lotty, normally abstemious, had drunk her share of the wine. Her black eyes glittered and her Viennese accent became pronounced.
“I know the argument, believe you me, Paul: it’s the old ‘who pulled the trigger?’—the person who fired the gun, the person who manufactured it, the person who created the situation, the parents who created the shooter. To me, that is Scholastic hairsplitting-you know, all that crap they used to teach us a thousand years ago in Europe. Who is the ultimate cause, the immediate cause, the sufficient cause and on and on.
“It’s dry theory, not life. It takes people off the hook for their own actions. You can quote Heinz Kohut and the rest of the self-psychologists to me all night, but you will never convince me that people are unable to make conscious choices for their actions or that parents are not responsible for how they treat their children. It’s the same thing as saying the Nazis were not responsible for how they treated Europe.”
Penelope gave a strained smile. She loved both Lotty and Servino and didn’t want either of them to make fools of themselves. Max, on the other hand, watched Lotty affectionately-he liked to sec her passionate. Chaim was staring into space, his lips moving. I assumed he was reading a score in his head.
“I would say that,” Servino snapped, his own Italian accent strong. “And don’t look at me as though I were Joseph Goebbeb. Chaim and I are ten years younger than you and Max, but we share your story in great extent. I do not condone or excuse the horrors our families suffered, or our own dispossession. But I can look at Himmler, or Mussolini, or even Hitler and say, they behaved in such and such a way because of weaknesses accentuated in them by history, by their parents, by their culture. You could as easily say the French were responsible, the French because their need for-for-rappresaglia-what am I trying to say, Victoria?”
“Reprisal,” I supplied.
“Now you see, Lotty, now I, too, am angry: I forget my English…. But if they and the English had not stretched Germany with reparations, the situation might have been different. So how can you claim responsibility-for one person, or one nation? You just have to do the best you can with what is going on around you.”
Lotty’s face was set. “Yes, Paul. I know what you are saying. Yes, the French created a situation. And the English wished to accommodate Hitler. And the Americans would not take in the Jews. All these things are true. But the Germans chose, nonetheless. They could have acted differently. I will not take them off the hook just because other people should have acted differently.”
I took her hand and squeezed it. “At the risk of being the Neville Chamberlain in the case, could I suggest some appeasement? Chaim brought his clarinet and Max his violin. Paul, if you’ll play the piano, Penelope and I will sing.”
Chaim smiled, relaxing the sadness in his thin face. He loved making music, whether with friends or professionals. “Gladly, Vic. But only a few songs. It’s late and we go to California for a two-week tour tomorrow.”
The atmosphere lightened. We went into the living room, where Chaim flipped through my music, pulling out Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuck In the end, he and Max stayed with Lotty, playing and talking until three in the morning, long after Servino and Penelope’s departure.
II
The detective business is not as much fun in January as at other times of the year. I spent the next two days forcing my little Chevy through unplowed side streets trying to find a missing witness who was the key to an eighteen-million-dollar fraud case. I finally succeeded Tuesday evening a little before five. By the time I’d convinced the terrified woman, who was hiding with a niece at Sixty-seventh and Honore, that no one would shoot her if she testified, gotten her to the state’s attorney, and seen her safely home again, it was close to ten o’clock.
I fumbled with the outer locks on the apartment building with my mind fixed on a hot bath, lots of whiskey, and a toasted cheese sandwich. When the ground-floor door opened and Mr. Contreras popped out to meet me, I ground my teeth. He’s a retired machinist with more energy than Navratilova. I didn’t have the stamina to deal with him tonight.
I mumbled a greeting and headed for the stairs.
“There you are, doll” The relief in his voice was marked. I stopped wearily. Some crisis with the dog. Something involving lugging a sixty-pound retriever to the vet through snow-packed streets.
“I thought I ought to let her in, you know. I told her there was no saying when you’d be home, sometimes you’re gone all night on a case”-a delicate reference to my love life-“but she was all set she had to wait and she’d’a been sitting on the stairs all this time. She won’t say what the problem is, but you’d probably better talk to her. You wanna come in here or should I send her up in a few minutes?”
Not the dog, then, “Uh, who is it?”
“Aren’t I trying to tell you? That beautiful girl You know, the doc’s niece.”
“Penelope?” I echoed foolishly.
She came out into the hall just then, ducking under the old man’s gesticulating arms. “Vic! Thank God you’re back. I’ve got to talk to you. Before the police do anything stupid.”
She was huddled in an ankle-length silver fur. Ordinarily elegant, with exquisite makeup and jewelry and the most modern of hairstyles, she didn’t much resemble her aunt. But shock had stripped the sophistication from her, making her dark eyes the focus of her face; she looked so much like Lotty that I went to her instinctively.
“Come on up with me and tell me what’s wrong.” I put an arm around her.
Mr. Contreras closed his door in disappointment as we disappeared up the stairs. Penelope waited until we were inside my place before saying anything else. I slung my jacket and down vest on the hooks in the hallway and went into the living room to undo my heavy walking shoes.
Penelope kept her fur wrapped around her. Her high-heeled kid boots were not meant for streetwear: they were rimmed with salt stains. She shivered slightly despite the coat.
“Have-have you heard anything?”
I shook my head, rubbing my right foot, stiff from driving all day.
“It’s Paul. He’s dead.”
“But-he’s not that old. And I thought he was very healthy.” Because of his sedentary job, Servino always ran the two miles from his Loop office to his apartment in the evening.
Penelope gave a little gulp of hysterical laughter. “Oh, he was very fit. But not healthy enough to overcome a blow to the head.”
“Could you tell the story from the beginning instead of letting it out in little dramatic bursts?”
As I’d hoped, my rudeness got her angry enough to overcome her incipient hysteria. After flashing me a Lotty-like look of royal disdain, she told me what she knew.
Paul’s office was in a building where a number of analysts had their practices. A sign posted on his door this morning baldly announced that he had canceled all his day’s appointments because of a personal emergency. When a janitor went in at three to change a light bulb, he’d found the doctor dead on the floor of his consulting room.
Colleagues agreed they’d seen Servino arrive around a quarter of eight, as he usually did. They’d seen the notice and assumed he’d left when every
one else was tied up with appointments. No one thought any more about it.
Penelope had learned of her lover’s death from the police, who picked her up as she was leaving a realtor’s office where she’d been discussing shop leases. Two of the doctors with offices near Servino’s had mentioned seeing a dark-haired woman in a long fur coat near his consulting room.
Penelope’s dark eyes were drenched with tears. “It’s not enough that Paul is dead, that I learn of it such an unspeakable way. They think I killed him-because I have dark hair and wear a fur coat. They don’t know what killed him-some dreary blunt instrument-it sounds stupid and banal, like an old Agatha Christie. They’ve pawed through my luggage looking for it.”
They’d questioned her for three hours while they searched and finally, reluctantly, let her go, with a warning not to leave Chicago. She’d called Lotty at the clinic and then come over to find me.
I went into the dining room for some whiskey. She shook her head at the bottle. I poured myself an extra slug to make up for missing my bath. “And?”
“And I want you to find who killed him. The police aren’t looking very hard because they think it’s me.”
“Do they have a reason for this?”
She blushed unexpectedly. “They think he was refusing to marry me.”
“Not much motive in these times, one would have thought And you with a successful career to boot. Was he refusing?”
“No. It was the other way around, actually. I felt-felt unsettled about what I wanted to do-come to Chicago to stay, you know. I have-friends in Montreal, too, you know. And I’ve always thought marriage meant monogamy.”
“I see.” My focus on the affair between Penelope and Paul shifted slightly. “You didn’t kill him, did you-perhaps for some other reason?”
She forced a smile. “Because he didn’t agree with Lotty about responsibility? No. And for no other reason. Are you going to ask Lotty if she killed him?”
“Lotty would have mangled him Sunday night with whatever was lying on the dining room table-she wouldn’t wait to sneak into his office with a club.” I eyed her thoughtfully. “Just out of vulgar curiosity, what were you doing around eight this morning?”
Her black eyes scorched me. “I came to you because I thought you would be sympathetic. Not to get the same damned questions I had all afternoon from the police!”
“And what were you doing at eight this morning?”
She swept across the room to the door, then thought better of it and affected to study a Nell Blaine poster on the nearby wall. With her back to me she said curtly, “I was having a second cup of coffee. And no, there are no witnesses. As you know, by that time of day Lotty is long gone. Perhaps someone saw me leave the building at eight thirty-I asked the detectives to question the neighbors, but they didn’t seem much interested in doing so.”
“Don’t sell them short. If you’re not under arrest, they’re still asking questions.”
“But you could ask questions to clear me. They’re just trying to implicate me.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to ease the dull ache behind my eyes. “You do realize the likeliest person to have killed him is an angry patient, don’t you? Despite your fears the police have probably been questioning them all day.”
Nothing I said could convince her that she wasn’t in imminent danger of a speedy trial before a kangaroo court, with execution probable by the next morning. She stayed until past midnight, alternating pleas to hide her with commands to join the police in hunting down Paul’s killer. She wouldn’t call Lotty to tell her she was with me because she was afraid Lotty’s home phone had been tapped.
“Look, Penelope,” I finally said, exasperated. “I can’t hide you. If the police really suspect you, you were tailed here. Even if I could figure out a way to smuggle you out and conceal you someplace, I wouldn’t do it-I’d lose my license on obstruction charges and I’d deserve to.”
I tried explaining how hard it was to get a court order for a wiretap and finally gave up. I was about ready to start screaming with frustration when Lotty herself called, devastated by Servino’s death and worried about Penelope. The police had been by with a search warrant and had taken away an array of household objects, including her umbrella. Such an intrusion would normally have made her spitting mad, but she was too upset to give it her full emotional attention. I turned the phone over to Penelope. Whatever Lotty said to her stained her cheeks red, but did make her agree to let me drive her home.
When I got back to my place, exhausted enough to sleep round the clock, I found John McGonnigal waiting for me in a blue-and-white outside my building. He came up the walk behind me and opened the door with a flourish.
I looked at him sourly. “Thanks, Sergeant. It’s been a long day-I’m glad to have a doorman at the end of it.”
“It’s kind of cold down here for talking, Vic. How about inviting me up for coffee?”
“Because I want to go to bed. If you’ve got something you want to say, or even ask, spit it out down here.”
I was just ventilating and I knew it-if a police sergeant wanted to talk to me at one in the morning, we’d talk. Mr. Contreras’s coming out in a magenta bathrobe to see what the trouble was merely speeded my decision to cooperate.
While I assembled cheese sandwiches, McGonnigal asked me what I’d learned from Penelope.
“She didn’t throw her arms around me and howl, ‘Vie, I killed him, you’ve got to help me.’” I put the sandwiches in a skillet with a little olive oil. “What’ve you guys got on her?”
The receptionist and two of the other analysts who’d been in the hall had seen a small, dark-haired woman hovering in the alcove near Servino’s office around twenty of eight. Neither of them had paid too much attention to her; when they saw Penelope they agreed it might have been she, but they couldn’t be certain. If they’d made a positive ID, she’d already have been arrested, even though they couldn’t find the weapon.
“They had a shouting match at the Filigree last night. The maître d’ was quite upset. Servino was a regular and he didn’t want to offend him, but a number of diners complained. The Herschel girl”-McGonnigal eyed me warily-“woman, I mean, stormed off on her own and spent the night with her aunt. One of the neighbors saw her leave around seven the next morning, not at eight thirty as she says.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. I asked him about the cause of death.
“Someone gave him a good crack across the side of the neck, close enough to the back to fracture a cervical vertebra and sever one of the main arteries. It would have killed him pretty fast. And as you know, Servino wasn’t very tall-the Herschel woman could easily have done it.”
“With what?” I demanded.
That was the stumbling block. It could have been anything from a baseball bat to a steel pipe. The forensic pathologist who’d looked at the body favored the latter, since the skin had been broken in places. They’d taken away anything in Lotty’s apartment and Penelope’s luggage that might have done the job and were having them examined for traces of blood and skin.
I snorted. “If you searched Lotty’s place, you must have come away with quite an earful.”
McGonnigal grimaced. “She spoke her mind, yes…. Any ideas? On what the weapon might have been?”
I shook my head, too nauseated by the thought of Paul’s death to muster intellectual curiosity over the choice of weapon. When McGonnigal left around two thirty, I lay in bed staring at the dark, unable to sleep despite my fatigue. I didn’t know Penelope all that well. Just because she was Lotty’s niece didn’t mean she was incapable of murder. To be honest, I hadn’t been totally convinced by her histrionics tonight. Who but a lover could get close enough to you to snap your neck? I thrashed around for hours, finally dropping into an uneasy sleep around six.
Lotty woke me at eight to implore me to look for Servino’s killer; the police had been back at seven thirty to ask Penelope why she’d forgotten to mention she’d been at P
aul’s apartment early yesterday morning.
“Why was she there?” I asked reasonably.
“She says she wanted to patch things up after their quarrel, but he’d already left for the office. When the police started questioning her, she was too frightened to tell the truth. Vic, I’m terrified they’re going to arrest her.”
I mumbled something. It looked to me like they had a pretty good case, but I valued my life too much to say that to Lotty. Even so the conversation deteriorated rapidly.
“I come out in any wind or weather to patch you up. With never a word of complaint.” That wasn’t exactly true, but I let it pass. “Now, when I beg you for help you turn a deaf ear to me. I shall remember this, Victoria.”
Giant black spots formed and re-formed in front of my tired eyes. “Great, Lotty.”
Her receiver banged in my ear.
III
I spent the day doggedly going about my own business, turning on WBBM whenever I was in the car to see if any news had come in about Penelope’s arrest. Despite all the damaging eyewitness reports, the state’s attorney apparently didn’t want to move without a weapon.
I trudged up the stairs to my apartment a little after six, my mind fixed on a bath and a rare steak followed immediately by bed. When I got to the top landing, I ground my teeth in futile rage: a fur-coated woman was sitting in front of the door.
When she got to her feet I realized it wasn’t Penelope but Greta Schipauer, Chaim Lemke’s wife. The dark hallway had swallowed the gold of her hair.
“Vic! Thank God you’ve come back. I’ve been here since four and I have a concert in two hours.”
I fumbled with the three stiff locks. “I have an office downtown just so that people won’t have to sit cm the floor outside my home,” I said pointedly.
A Woman’s Eye Page 40