Lady 52: A Jack Daniels/Nicholas Colt Novel

by Jude Hardin

  “Five. Did the whole round-the-clock thing, too. Constant surveillance. Peeing in a coffee can. But, to be honest, I pee in a coffee can at home, too. You know when you’re sleepy and your bed feels soooo good and you don’t want to get up?”

  “Did Shipman have any enemies?”

  “No. But I did notice something odd.”

  “What was that?”

  “A disproportionate amount of his patients had acne.”

  “He was a dermatologist, McGlade.”

  “Huh. That would explain it, then.”

  You never knew with Harry whether he was trying to be funny, or just really, really stupid.

  “So is that all of your questions, Jack? Will you sign the release now?”

  “I already signed it,” I said, turning on my heels.

  McGlade’s high-pitched laughter followed me down the hall.

  COLT

  SUNDAY, 12:33 P.M. CST

  I thanked Dr. Raymond Hitchcock for his time. He escorted me to the exit, assuring me that he would be in touch as soon as he heard anything about the missing necklace.

  I climbed into my rental car and sat there at the curb for a few minutes, the brisk Chicago wind whistling through the streets outside, little tornados stirring up the dirt on the sidewalks. I tried to call Doris Green, but she didn’t answer her phone. I left a message for her to call me as soon as possible.

  I decided to drive out to the site of the house fire. I didn’t imagine there would be anything of interest for me there, not after twenty-six years, but it was on my list of things to do. I figured it couldn’t hurt. Anyway, a nice long drive in the country usually helps clear your head after too many glasses of whiskey the night before.

  I used the GPS until I got to Northbrook, and when that quit working I stopped at a gas station to ask for directions. When I walked inside, it was like stepping back in time. There was an old-fashioned cash register with mechanical buttons and a bell that rang when the drawer opened. Metal signs on the walls advertised products like RC Cola, Red Man chewing tobacco, and Carter’s Liver Pills, while a couple of guys who’d probably retired around the time the Berlin Wall came down sat across from each other at a pickle barrel with a red and black checkerboard painted on its lid. In the opposite corner stood a candy machine and a Frigidaire refrigerator with rounded corners and chrome accents and a sign taped to the door that said COLD POP 50 CENTS.

  Unfortunately, the kid at the register couldn’t have found Canada with two tour guides and a compass. I was about to walk away when the elderly gentleman in line behind me said, “You talking about the old Ward place?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The old Ward place. You know where it is?”

  “Sure do. But you can’t get there from here.”

  “Huh?”

  He laughed. “That was a joke. But really, it’ll be easier for me to show you than to tell you. I’m in that red pickup truck out there. I’ll lead you to it.”

  “Thanks.”

  He paid for his milk and bread and we walked out of the store together.

  “Just follow me,” he said.

  I did, and it didn’t take long for me to understand why he’d been so hesitant to give me directions. We made about a thousand turns. This way, that way, over hill and dale, around some of the hairiest hairpin curves I’d ever navigated and some of the dirtiest dirt roads. Finally, he slowed and stuck his hand out the window and pointed to a clearing on the left. I waved in acknowledgement, and he honked his horn and sped on out of sight.

  I made a U-turn and pulled to the side of the road. I stuffed the loaded .38 into my coat pocket, climbed out of the car and hiked up a little hill to the lot where the house had burned. All that remained was a charred concrete block foundation, the crawl space filled with crunchy dead foliage from seasons past.

  It had been a small house, probably no more than five hundred square feet. There was nothing else around. The place seemed isolated and insulated from the rest of the world. No birds chirping, no squirrels scurrying. My ears hummed with the silence, the bad case of tinnitus an unpleasant remnant of my days on big stages with big amplifiers.

  If Doris Green was correct, this was the site where her mother had been murdered. It was a creepy place, and it gave me the willies. If someone wanted to kill you, this would be the perfect spot. Nobody would find you until you were a rotten pile of bones like Wanda Crumley.

  Or maybe they would never find you.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out my cell phone, thinking I would check on Laurie and Jack. No signal. I closed the phone and put it back in my pocket, decided to hike around a little bit and try to locate the site where the skeleton had been found. Hitchcock had shown me the area on Google Earth, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to find the exact spot. Mostly I was just walking around and thinking. It’s a big part of my job. Thinking. A casual observer who sees me sitting in a bar nursing a glass of bourbon might assume I’m goofing off, but nothing could be further from the truth. I’m actually working very hard. Busting my ass. Really.

  “Howdy.”

  An electric wave traveled from the base of my spine to the top of my skull. After assuring myself that I hadn’t soiled my britches, I turned and saw a man standing about twenty feet to my left. He wore a long black coat and some sort of beat-up hat that reminded me of Jed Clampett.

  And he was carrying a shotgun.

  Twelve-gauge pump, barrel like an exhaust pipe on a diesel rig.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to sound as cool as possible with my heart rate jacked to three hundred or so. “Out doing some hunting this afternoon?”

  “Now that wouldn’t be legal, would it? Seeing as how this is a forest preserve.”

  “None of my business. I was just—”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Nicholas Colt. I’m a private investigator. A woman’s skeleton was found around here somewhere, and my client thinks she might have died in the fire at the old Ward place.”

  “Ain’t been no fire around here in a long time.”

  “Right,” I said. “It was twenty-six years ago.”

  He pulled a cigar out of his pocket, struck a match and lit it. As if trying to make some sort of point. Come messin round where you don’t belong, you might get burned too, boy.

  Then, to my astonishment, a smile spread across his face.

  “I can show you the spot if you want me to,” he said. “I was the one who found her.”

  Unbelievable.

  “Sure,” I said, relieved that he probably wasn’t going to cut me in half with that cannon he was holding. “That would be great.”

  “Come on.”

  He led me through some thick brush to a small clearing. It couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards from where we started, so I’d gotten pretty close to the site by myself.

  “You found one of the leg bones first?” I said.

  “Yeah. It was her left thigh bone. I knew it was human. Ain’t no animals around here with a bone that long and fat. My wife called the police, and they sent some people out here, started looking around. Digging, scratching. They ended up finding the whole skeleton, right over here.”

  He pointed toward a depressed area on the hillside.

  “She was buried?” I said.

  “Not really. Maybe she had been at one time. If so, the soil must have washed away. She was just covered with some dead leaves and stuff. Twenty-some years’ worth. Pretty gruesome when they pulled the skull out of there. They had the area taped off, but I was sitting up on the hill with a pair of binoculars. I saw it all. They put a little tag on every single bone, then wrapped each one in plastic and loaded it into a body bag. Once they had all the bones gathered, they zipped the bag up and toted it on down the hill. Never heard anything more about it after that. Nobody ever called or stopped by to thank me or nothing.”

  “When you were watching the police officers catalog the skeleton, did you happen to notice them finding a gold chain and locke
t?”

  “No, I didn’t see nothing like that. But, you know, I wasn’t watching every single second. So I might have missed it.”

  “Thanks for showing me the site,” I said.

  “You hungry, Mr. Colt? My wife should be fixing some lunch about now. You’re welcome to join us if you want. Ham, taters, corn on the cob. Nothing fancy, but it’s hot and it’s good. The house ain’t far.”

  “Thanks, but I better be running along.”

  “Suit yourself. Have a good one.”

  “I don’t think I caught your name.”

  “Rusty,” he said.

  I waited for a last name until it was obvious he wasn’t going to give me one. I guessed it didn’t matter. Jack could look him up in the police file if I needed to speak with him again, which wasn’t likely.

  “Did you live here when the Ward place burned down?”

  Rusty nodded. “Wasn’t no lightning, neither. Newspapers said it was. It was raining, but there was no lightning.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “It was the talk of the town for a few weeks after. Speculating who done it.”

  “You believed it was arson?”

  Rusty snorted. “Of course it was arson. Fires don’t start all by themselves.”

  “Thanks for your help, Rusty. I appreciate it.”

  I started walking back toward the old Ward place, and he headed off in the other direction.

  I milled around the crumbling foundation of the house some more, did some more thinking. If there had ever been any evidence that a crime had occurred, it was long gone by now. I found an old coke bottle and a rusty length of pipe and some beer cans that someone had set up and shot with a BB gun, but that was about it. If someone had intentionally killed Wanda Crumley twenty-six years ago, I couldn’t think of a single way to prove it now.

  I pulled out my notebook. Kevin Ward. He’d owned the house at the time it burned. People still called it the old Ward place, although the house must have been vacant when Wanda Crumley found it. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been squatting there, and she wouldn’t have died there.

  I decided to write down a few questions for future reference: Why had the house been abandoned? How had Wanda Crumley ended up there, so far outside the city? Why had the place suddenly burned to the ground one night?

  The obvious answer was that Kevin Ward had torched the place for the insurance money. But Ward had been in Kentucky at the time. That’s what the little two-inch article in the Chicago Tribune section had said. The property’s owner. The Trib hadn’t printed his name, for some reason.

  So Ward had a solid alibi. I planned on talking to him, and to Dylan Wexler, former Cook County Fire Marshal—if they were still alive, of course—but I didn’t expect any big revelations to come from either conversation.

  I really didn’t have any leads. Nothing substantial to go on. For the first time in my career as a private investigator, I felt hopelessly lost.

  Or maybe I just needed something to eat. And a beer. A beer or two before lunch always seems to lift my mental capacity exponentially, not to mention my mood.

  I closed my notebook and stuck it back in my pocket and walked on down to the nice little Nissan Altima, which wasn’t there.

  Damn.

  Someone had stolen my rental car.

  DEL CHIVO

  SUNDAY, 2:10 P.M. CST

  The United States truly was a nation of diablos.

  Sergio had spent the day going from adult bookstore to adult bookstore, trying to find what he needed. He had originally gone to costume shops, but the thing he’d desired had been rented out. They’d suggested he try these smut peddlers.

  It was an unwelcome education in perversion.

  These shops catered to every type of deviant imaginable. Abhorrent DVDs, with topics so disgusting they turned Sergio’s stomach. Grotesque toys, so large that they would make a mare flee in terror. Strange salves and oils, some packaged with a repulsive game called Twister.

  Any self-respecting Latin woman would have died of shame walking in a store like this. Sergio himself felt the need to take a bath, and then spend a week on his knees in church, to rid himself of some of the things he’d seen. Especially those stripping whores that he’d spent more than fifty American dollars watching in a tiny peep show booth.

  But his dedicated quest had paid off. In a fetish section of a particularly repellant store, he found exactly what he was looking for.

  “Do you also need handcuffs?” the pervert who took his money asked.

  “Please,” Sergio answered. “Muchas gracias.”

  COLT

  SUNDAY, 2:37 P.M. CST

  At least I hadn’t left Jack’s revolver in the glove compartment. The holster and the extra cartridges were gone, but those could be replaced. As could the suitcases full of clothes I hadn’t carried up to the apartment, knowing that Laurie and I would be checking into the Valiant Inn tomorrow. I felt like an idiot for leaving the car unlocked, but there was nothing I could do about it now. All I could do was start walking.

  So I did.

  This way, that way, over hill and dale. Hairy hairpin curves, dirty dirt roads. I’d probably covered about three miles when my cell phone finally started picking up a signal. There was a message from Doris Green. I listened to it, and then called Laurie.

  Got voice mail.

  I tried Jack, and finally got a live human being on the line.

  “Daniels,” she said.

  “Jack, you’re not going to believe this, but somebody stole my car.”

  “Did you get the extra insurance?”

  “What?”

  “The rental place always asks if you want extra insurance.”

  “I’m pretty sure they didn’t ask me.”

  “Where are you?”

  I explained to her where I’d been and why I’d gone there.

  “I’m not far from the Edens Expressway, about forty minutes from downtown,” I said. “If you guys wouldn’t mind, I could really use a lift.”

  “Laurie’s getting her hair done. She’s right in the middle of—well, she wants it to be a surprise. I don’t want to leave her stranded here at the salon, so let me see if Herb will ride out there and pick you up.”

  “Herb? Your partner?”

  “He won’t mind.”

  “Sorry to be so much trouble,” I said.

  “No problem. It’s not your fault the car got stolen. It’s not like you walked off and left the doors unlocked or anything stupid like that.”

  “Of course not,” I lied. “And I wasn’t offered the extra insurance.”

  “Let me give Herb a call, and then I’ll call you back.”

  “Okay.”

  I clicked off, kept walking. The filling station where I’d stopped to ask directions appeared around the next bend, and I decided to walk inside to shake the chill off. It was probably fifty degrees outside, but it still felt cold to me. My Florida blood wasn’t used to it. I gave the clerk a nod, walked to the back of the store and grabbed a grape soda from the cooler.

  One of the old guys who’d been playing checkers had disappeared, and the other was just sitting there staring at the board. Planning future strategies, I supposed. He looked up at me and said, “Play a game?”

  “Maybe in a minute. I need to make a phone call.”

  He nodded, went back to staring at the board.

  I punched in Doris Green’s number again, and she answered on the third ring. She seemed happy to hear from me.

  “So how’s it going?” she said.

  “Not so great. I spent some time at the Cook County Morgue this morning, and they can’t seem to find the necklace your mother was wearing.”

  “They lost the necklace?”

  “Apparently. I’m sure it’ll turn up, but it might be a while. I was just wondering if you wanted me to continue the investigation.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” she said.

  “Well, with no necklace, there’s basically no Wanda Cr
umley. The necklace was circumstantial anyway, but it was something. Now we have no means whatsoever of identifying your mother’s remains.”

  “I already identified them.”

  “You identified them based on the gold chain and the locket,” I said. “I’m just trying to think ahead, about how all this might play out in a courtroom. Even if—somehow—we establish that foul play was involved, and even if—somehow—we come up with a suspect, a conviction will be nearly impossible without positive identification on the victim. You see what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, but I know that’s my mother in that drawer up there. I have plans to bury her next to my father in Quincy once this is all over.”

  “You know it’s your mother, and I know it’s your mother, but the judge isn’t going to know it without some sort of proof. As it stands now, that skeleton could have belonged to anybody. Did your mom have any dental records that you know of? Or maybe there’s a lock of hair or something somewhere, something that could be used in a comparative DNA analysis.”

  “There’s no lock of hair. And I threw out Mom’s clothes and toothbrush and everything a long time ago. It’s been twenty-six years, you know? As for dental records, anything like that would be in Quincy. I have no idea what dentists she went to, or even if they would still be around.”

  “Do you have any relatives who might know?”

  “How many people know the name of the dentist you go to, Mr. Colt? If you died, and someone was trying to find that information twenty-six years later, would they be able to? I wouldn’t even know where to start. Anyway, you’re the private investigator.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

  “It means that I’m paying you a lot of money, and if some dental records need to be found, then you’re the person who needs to find them.”

  She was starting to get huffy, and I wasn’t in the mood to play.

  “If my performance isn’t up to your standards, then we can forget about the whole thing right now. Just give me the word, and I’ll be on the next flight back to Florida. I called you to give you an update on what’s going on, and to let you know that we might be spinning our wheels if that necklace never turns up. If you want to send me to Quincy to look for a dentist, then to Quincy I will go. Just don’t give me a hard time, okay? I’m doing the best I can with what little information I have to go on.”