Dick had been my inside man at the Chicago PD for a number of years, until he quit to go into private practice himself. For a while he was in Mexico City, doing Christ knows what, but when he got back to Chicago, I used him for various A-1 work, mostly lie-detector testing, which he was damn good at. He had studied with my old friend Leonarde Keeler, who was only the guy who invented the lie box.
For the last year or so, Dick had been chief of the SIU for Sheriff Richard Ogilvie, a reformer who made a frankly odd fit with Dick. I had no illusions about the fact that Dick wasn’t the most honest copper in town—on the PD, he had played bagman, delivering mob graft to other coppers—but he was also a smart, tough detective who had an admirable arrest and conviction rate.
Right now, the SIU’s stated mission was to crack down on vice in Chicago and Cook County, and I had no doubt Dick was using that position to alternately line his pockets with payoffs and make splashy arrest headlines.
Understand that not every cop in Chicago was bent. But understand also that I had no real use for an honest cop in my life. A guy like Dick Cain, with some Outfit ties, on the inside of law enforcement, made a very handy resource for Nate Heller. And if I talk about myself in the third person again, you have my blessing to slap me.
Anyway, I accepted bent cops as a part of Mayor Daley’s fabled City That Works. The system may have been riddled with corruption, but things got done, and the voters kept putting the same aldermen—and for that matter mayor—in charge.
I drove the little Jag into the parking ramp next to the Pick-Congress Hotel, across from the Auditorium Theatre, and went in a side door and used one of the corner stairwells to go up to the third floor.
Moving down a narrow, nondescript corridor, I passed a black-and-tan team of homicide dicks, Mulrooney and Washington, about to knock on a hotel room door. They looked bored.
The Negro cop nodded at me and jerked a hitchhiker’s thumb, indicating I was wanted farther down the hall.
The white cop smirked and said, “Your brother’s waiting for you, Heller.”
That was police humor pertaining to the common department knowledge that Cain and I were tight, but also indicating that we bore each other a faint resemblance.
Despite their obvious preference for me to be somewhere else, I paused for conversation. “What are you ladies up to?”
“Canvassing the hotel guests on this floor,” redheaded Mulrooney said. If he’d been any more Irish-looking, he’d have worn a green top hat and been knocking with a shillelagh.
Washington shook his head and said, “Hopeless goddamn task, seeing who mighta seen what, last night. They’re either checked out or off doing business somewhere.”
“This is one of those dirty jobs you hear so much about,” I said pleasantly, “that somebody’s gotta do.”
Then I gave them a little wave and moved on, sensing their exchange of who-needs-that-asshole glances behind me.
Two uniformed officers were posted at the door to 318. I introduced myself, and the older of the pair said I was expected, the younger opening the door for me, and shutting it behind me.
The room was small and, with its pale-green wallpaper and mid-fifties Sears and Roebuck “modern” furnishings, damn near as nondescript as the corridor. The Pick-Congress had a fancy lobby but God help the guests.
Particularly this one.
Tom Ellison—goddamnit!—was on his back on the bed, sprawled diagonally, feet over the edge, a stiff so stiff it was like he was standing at attention lying down. The bed was made—he was on top of the spread, the pillows still tucked under.
He was in a white T-shirt and white boxers with blue polka dots and dark-brown socks, with an apparent puncture wound in his chest with the T-shirt bearing minimal rusty-brown dried dribbles of blood. His eyes stared upward, his expression saying, What the fuck?
I knew the feeling.
“Full rigor,” Dick Cain said from the bathroom doorway, where he was lighting up a Dunhill cigarette. “You missed the police photographer.”
Dick was in his early thirties, five eight or nine and about 160 pounds, a nearly handsome guy who might be taken for the 1940s Dana Andrews, from a distance. He wore black-rimmed glasses over green eyes, the left of which was milky, and his reddish-brown hair—the same color as mine—was worn just long enough to comb. His suit was charcoal, his tie silver gray, typical of his standard conservative look. You might have mistaken him for a Harvard Business School grad.
I asked, “Coroner?”
“We’re waiting. But the homicide team thinks he’s been dead since sometime last night, or very early morning hours.”
“Discovered how?”
“Housekeeping. There was no DO NOT DISTURB on the door. Maid knocked at around eight-fifteen, got no answer, figured the guest had either checked out or gone off to some business meeting … and found a mess she wasn’t qualified to clean up.”
“Could have been messier.”
“Yes it could.”
He came over, and we finally shook hands. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of months, so the ritual seemed called for.
“Client of yours, Nate?”
“I was a client of his. Former client, actually. He was a press agent out of Milwaukee.”
“Thomas Todd Ellison, yeah. His wallet was here, but no money in it. Found it by the bed, right in front of the nightstand. Homicide boys already put it in an envelope, but there’s still enough evidence around here to justify a nickel tour, if you like.”
“If you can make change for a dime,” I said glumly.
He moved nearer the bed, and I fell in alongside him. “Let’s start with how your friend got himself killed.”
“Did I say he was my friend?”
“Your business associate.” Dick exhaled smoke, gestured to the john behind him. “Found a Trojan wrapper on the floor—just missed the wastebasket in there.”
“Okay.”
“Over at the sheriff’s office, we consider that a strong indication sexual intercourse took place.”
“You guys are just that sharp.”
“Now take a look at the nightstand.”
I did so—two hotel water glasses with the Pick-Congress crest, both with amber liquid residue, one with lipstick smudges. Nearby a little ceramic ashtray sported three filter cigarette butts, also lipstick-marked.
Falling in next to me, Cain said, “A trained detective like me adds all this up to there being a woman in the room. My guess is not his wife.”
I gave him a sharp glance. “Has Jean been notified?”
“You do know this isn’t my case? That I work for the sheriff? I would imagine she hasn’t been notified yet. Chicago PD policy on an out-of-towner DOA is to contact the local police, so that somebody from the Milwaukee department can deliver the news personally. Not cold, over the phone. He was your friend, wasn’t he?”
I sighed, nodded. “Not a buddy. You can see I’m not shedding any tears. Not like the one I’d shed for you, Dick.”
This earned me a wicked half smile. “Single solitary tear? That’s what I’d rate?”
“I think a tear would cover it.” I nodded to the grotesque display that was all that remained of Tom Ellison. “But this was a nice guy, an honest guy, particularly compared to the two of us … and I don’t make him for the type who’d have a doxy up to his room.”
“‘There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio,’” Cain said, “‘than are dreamed of in your philosophy.’”
“That’s ‘dreamt,’ Dick, and fuck you.”
He laughed a little, not overdoing it. He spread an arm, like a ringmaster introducing a high-wire act, the hand with the Dunhill making smoke trails.
“Well, Nate, let’s look at the evidence. Over on the dresser, that’s an ice bucket and an empty bottle of champagne. In the john, there’s a rubber wrapper. On the nightstand, lipstick traces on a glass and ciggies. At the foot of the bed, trousers apparently taken off hastily, dumped. On the bed a guy in his s
horts who is dead and not of natural causes.”
“What story does that supposedly tell?”
“The lead homicide dick, Mulrooney, thinks your friend had a girl up to his room … not a very nice girl … and they shared champagne, and they played some night baseball, after which Mr. Ellison nodded off to sleep.”
“So a pickup, then, maybe in the hotel bar. Not a call girl?”
“Right. A hustler who plays lonely secretary or stranded stewardess or whatever the hell, and they go upstairs for nookie, have some, and cuddle up.”
“And while Tom dozes, in postcoital exhaustion, the not-nice girl is helping herself to his wallet, and then Tom wakes up…”
“… and is displeased, and gets physical, and his little guest grabs an ice pick, and punches his time clock.”
I thought about that. It stunk, but I didn’t say so.
He read me, though: “Hey, it’s not my theory. It’s just what the homicide boys came up with to close out the case in ten seconds.”
“Least they’re making an effort. Have they bagged the ice pick?”
“Wasn’t here.”
“Then what makes them so sure an ice pick was the murder weapon?”
Dick smirked at me, the milky eye taking the edge off his otherwise handsome face. “It’s what we call in the trade an educated guess, Nate, based on a couple of things.… Don’t tell the coroner’s guys I did this.”
He leaned in and over and lifted Tom’s T-shirt, having to tug it up some to get past—and expose—the fatal wound. It was a small puncture in the midst of blondish chest hair with very little blood—a stab right through the sternum. Dick let me study the wound a while, then pulled the T-shirt down back into place.
“Add to this,” he said, “the fact that every ice bucket in this hotel is delivered with an ice pick. Only here we have an ice bucket, but no pick.”
“And they figure she took the ice pick with her, when she skedaddled, to dispose of.”
“Isn’t that what sewer drains are for?”
From the door, a mellow, world-weary voice intoned, “Excuse me, gentlemen—would you mind clearing the crime scene while I have a look?”
The slender, somber, narrow-faced, retirement-age guy in glasses—tortoiseshell frames—apparently knew Dick Cain, and assumed I was just another cop. After all, plenty of cops in Chicago could afford a Louis Goldsmith suit.
“Not at all, doc,” Cain said. “I’m just a kibitzer from the sheriff’s department. Heller here has confirmed identification of the body.”
The doctor nodded at us and came in. He had a black medical bag handy. Like it would do Tom any good.
I said, “Doctor, uh…?”
“Owens,” he said. “Clarence Owens.”
We skipped the handshake ritual. He was standing just inside the door with the Gladstone bag fig-leafed before him, held in both fists.
“Dr. Owens,” I said, “when you run the postmortem I’d like to know what the angle is on that wound. Chief Cain here thinks it’s an ice-pick wound.”
Owlish eyes blinked behind the glasses. “I don’t recognize you, detective.”
“I’m Nate Heller.”
“Oh. Nathan Heller. The private detective.”
“Forgive the dumb question, doctor, but can you tell whether the deceased had sex recently before he died?”
He went over near the bed and the corpse. “Well, there seems to be dried semen residue on the front of his shorts.”
“So he did have sex shortly before he died.”
His tone and expression were dry as day-old toast. “A lot of men in hotel rooms alone ejaculate, Mr. Heller.”
Cain offered, “There’s a Playboy on the dresser.”
“Some of us read it for the articles,” I said.
“But,” the doctor put in, “we can check the deceased’s pubic region for female pubic hairs and secretions.”
Cain said, “We believe a condom was used. Wrapper found on the john floor.”
“Even so, there might be evidence of intercourse. Still, it’s an inexact science.”
“Sounds pretty exact to me,” I said.
The doctor shook his head. “We don’t know that the deceased didn’t bathe or wash himself off, after having sex.”
“The homicide detectives think a prostitute did this, and he would probably have waited till she left to wash up.”
The owlish eyes were unimpressed. “We can’t know that. But I can see that you have an interest in this case, Mr. Heller. When I have anything, I’ll give you a call at your office.”
“If I’m not in, ask for Lou Sapperstein.”
That got something resembling a smile out of him. “I remember Lou from the old days. Is he still working?”
“When he feels like it.”
“Sure, Mr. Heller. Glad to. Friend of yours, the victim?”
“Business acquaintance. A very nice guy.”
“In my job, whether they were nice or not is, sadly, seldom relevant. You’ll be hearing from me, Mr. Heller.”
I thanked him, and then I suggested to Dick that we get out of the way of the investigators whose job this actually was. He agreed.
Soon we were sitting in the Coffee House, the blandly modern Pick-Congress eatery off the fancy lobby. A no-nonsense waitress with a lady-wrestler demeanor immediately tried to force coffee on us, but we were spoilsports—being strictly an after-dinner coffee drinker, I had iced tea; and Dick, who I’d never seen touch java, had a bottle of Coke with a glass of ice. She was not happy with us—the lunch crowd would be here soon, and we were taking up a booth.
“So,” I said, “my business card was in his wallet.”
“That’s right. Had you seen Tom Ellison lately?”
“I had, but it was strictly social,” I lied. “We had a beer at the Berghoff Friday afternoon, and just caught up with each other. I think maybe he was fishing for some business.”
“But in a sociable way.”
“That’s right. I hadn’t used him for publicity for a couple years—why go to Milwaukee, when there are so many good people here at home?” I squeezed a lemon slice into the iced tea. “Will I be hearing from those homicide dicks? Will they want a statement?”
“Not unless I advise them to.” He shrugged. “That guy Mulrooney, he knows you and me are Siamese twins. He saw that business card and gave me a call, and I came right over. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t jammed up in this thing, somehow.”
“I appreciate that.”
He nodded, no big deal. “Are you going to look into it?”
“I don’t think so, Dick. But I would like to know a few things.…”
“Like the angle of penetration. I’m talking about the ice pick, of course.”
“Of course.” My tone was casual, matter-of-fact. “And I’d like to know what the latent print guys have to say.”
He laughed once, a harsh blurt. “You really think some hustler left her fingerprints? Surely she rubbed everything down.”
“You’d think so, since damn near every hooker and B-girl in town has an arrest record with prints on file. But in that case, wouldn’t she clean the lipstick off that glass, and flush the lipstick butts, too?”
He waved that off. “In too big a hurry to get the hell out, probably.”
“Which means, if she exists, she would leave fingerprints. Too panicky to be bothered with niceties.”
Cain thought about that. Filled the rest of his glass of ice with Coke—it was one of those new ten-ounce bottles.
“And,” I said, “how about that DO NOT DISTURB hanger?”
“What DO NOT DISTURB hanger?”
“Exactly.”
It came to him. “You mean, if Ellison had been entertaining, he’d have hung one on his door.”
“You would think. And this supposed doxy turned killer, if she were taking time to tidy up, wouldn’t she have left the DO NOT DISTURB on the knob, exiting? To keep the deceased undiscovered for as long as possible?”
>
The sheriff’s man had a thoughtful expression now. When he did that, the milky eye went half lidded. “So Chicago Homicide’s theory is horseshit. Do we care? He was your friend. How do you read this thing, anyway?”
“Do you know how hard it is to punch an ice pick through somebody’s sternum?”
He nodded. “Pretty fucking hard. On the other hand, adrenaline can inspire many a superhuman feat. Like a mom lifting the front of a Buick off her child.”
“Yeah, that’s an event I keep hearing about, but for some reason you never see any pictures. Look, if I were you, and wanted a feather in my cap, I might go a different way.”
Dick grinned. He was a guy whose grins always had a frowny cast, his mouth a half moon with the corners down. “You know me, Nate. I never shy away from a good headline, and I don’t mind the PD boys owing me.”
“What you may have here is a guy robbing hotel guests.”
His eyebrows rose over the dark frames. “Well, there’s no shortage of that on the books. Unsolved or otherwise. But I don’t know of any recent surge of that particular pastime.”
I leaned in. “What if some sleazeball has snagged himself a bellboy’s outfit? That and a bucket of champagne and an ice pick … he can fill the bucket with ice from a machine on any floor, right? He knocks on the door, and if there’s no answer, maybe he goes on in.”
“Using a jimmy or a passkey he’s finagled,” Dick said, going along.
“If somebody does answer, the ‘bellboy’ says he’s delivering a complimentary bottle of champagne from the management, and is of course allowed in to set the bucket down.”
“What if there’s more than one person in the room?”
“Well, he probably fades. But if it’s a room with just one person in it, a guy like Tom Ellison, say … maybe our bogus bellboy sticks up the guest.”
His expression had turned half appalled, half amused. “With an ice pick?”
I raised my hands chest-high, like a robbery victim. “Maybe our bellboy has a gun. But for some reason, this particular mark—Tom Ellison—puts up a fight, and rather than fire off a noisy gun, the bellboy grabs that ice pick and … hammers Tom in the chest with it.”
Dick’s expression had settled back down; he was playing along again. “A man ice-pick stabbing somebody in the chest, deep enough to kill, does seem more likely than some little prostitute doing it.”
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