“What?” I said. “You cleaned before the police got there?” I asked, shaking my head incredulously. “But the evidence. The body!”
“Well, management put a sheet over the body so I wouldn’t have to actually see him. But he was just sitting there in a chair the whole time I cleaned. It did give me a weird sort of feeling, I can tell you that. The manager…in fact he was a manager on duty just like you, well, he didn’t want the police showing up to a mess like that. No, not in the famed Lanigan Hotel. He was afraid they’d step in all that blood and track it around the hotel, messing up the floors and such.”
“Wow,” I said, shaking me head. It was all I could say. I was hanging on her every word.
“Police thought the killer must have been a jilted lover…of the male persuasion if you get my drift. Never did find him. There was another door in that secret room that opened into a back hallway and led out to an alley…an escape route of sorts to protect guests’ privacy…and of course reputations at the time. It was way before the days of security cameras and all that. Killer must have snuck out that way and been off into the night.”
I rummaged in my pant’s pocket, producing my M.O.D. keys.
I dangled them in front of Linda.
“Show me?” I asked, grinning from ear to ear.
She shrugged, looking around her for a manager or co-worker.
“Don’t worry; I won’t let you get in trouble.”
She looked relieved, shoving her cleaning cart up against a wall to park it. “Well okay then, Mr. Haze, let’s go,” she smirked.
“Robert, please,” I smiled, leading the way.
I found the master key to unlock the entry door to the old club. Property operations had painted its glass-fronted doors black to help waylay curious passers-by from gazing inside its dusty confines.
I held the door open for Linda.
“Why thank you, sir,” she smiled sweetly.
I bowed slightly, “Certainly, ma’am.”
It was dark inside. Slivers of dim light filtered between cracks in the windows’ aged black paint.
I fumbled along the wall just inside the door, finally locating a light switch. I had little faith but flipped it anyway.
One dim bulb toward the center of the space flickered on. It was just enough to make out shapes and avoid tripping over the items property operations had placed inside the old club, making it one of their many converted storage areas. Just about any unused space in a hotel this size was eventually annexed by property operations. They’d store old furniture, new furniture, extra fixtures and equipment, carpets, paint, supplies, drapes, hand carts, plywood, shelving – the list went on and on.
They’d only utilized the front quarter of the club so far, packing it full of tables left over from the renovation of the Navigator Club several years ago.
I led us through a narrow pathway between the piles of tables stacked nearly to the ceiling until we emerged into an open space that I assumed was once the club’s main floor. Against the walls, the curved booth seats still sat intact, tables in front of them, as if awaiting the return of suit-clad men and evening dressed women. Although dusty, the dimpled backs of their red vinyl seat-cushions still managed to hold their luster in the faded light after all these years.
Nearly all of the Triton Club’s nautical décor had been removed, but a life-sized, wood-carved Gorton’s Fisherman look-alike stood in a far corner. He wore yellow rain gear and had a bushy beard with a pipe jutting from a tightly clenched jaw. His painted frame had dulled from years of nicotine gradually seeping into his wooden pores so that his hands and face worn a stale brown hue…or maybe it was just the lighting, I couldn’t be sure. From the way his face was scrunched up from clamping the pipe, it almost looked as if he was winking at me…either that or he was constipated.
I realized that Linda had stopped behind me. She was gazing around the room, lost in thought.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” she said absently, “just…remembering.”
I nodded, trying to go back with her, trying to envision what it must have been like back then.
“The waitresses wore the cutest little outfits. Mine was…”
She stopped short, and it was then that I realized why she was looking at the space with such reverie.
“Yours? You mean you worked here?” I said, half amazed.
She looked a little embarrassed, but nodded.
“I started off on the cleaning staff, that’s why I had to clean up after the incident. After a couple of months, the club manager…ahem, noticed me while I was cleaning his office one day.”
I wasn’t about to ask what she meant by “noticed,” but I had a pretty good idea.
“He promoted me to cocktail waitress. We had a little thing,” she gave a sly smile. “That’s another reason I know about that secret room.”
“Well, well, well. Devilish Ms. Linda,” I chuckled.
She gave a little laugh, “Hard to imagine me now struttin’ my stuff around here in a skimpy little cocktail outfit, huh?”
She continued to gaze about the room, turning slowly as she did.
“But that was me,” she went on. “My goodness…I haven’t been in here in years. Certainly brings back the memories.”
“I’ll bet,” I said admiringly. “Tell me about the place?”
“Well, first off, as I mentioned, it didn’t start off as the Triton Club. It originally opened as the Street Light Club. But that didn’t last long, only a couple years. Then it closed. There was something about a change in ownership or some business like that. Anyway, that’s when I started working here, back when it was the Street Light Club. But they kept me on when it became the Triton Club because I was the best damn waitress they had. Only black one they ever had in fact.
I was here until the place closed in ’73. Business had dropped off and a lot of the old clubs in this part of downtown just couldn’t make it anymore.” She pointed toward a far wall that was devoid of any furnishings. “The stage was there. See?” she said, pointing at the floor. “You can still see the outline on the floor. They walled up the stage entrance and removed the stage in oh, I think it was about ’69. That’s when they did away with most of the live entertainment too.”
“Who performed here? Do you remember?”
“Well, most of the well-known acts were upstairs in the Lake Ballroom. They were too big for this type of venue. We got more of the local musicians down here. A lot of jazz acts. And maaaan…” she drawled, “…they may not have been famous, but boy could they blow! You want to talk about some parties. This…” she pointed at the floor, “…this was the place to be!”
“What else?” I said expectantly.
She moved farther into the room to another empty space, a smaller space just to the rear of where the stage had sat.
“This here is where the bar was,” she gestured. “They had a horseshoe-shaped bar that came out to about here,” she pointed around the area, providing dimensions as she walked. “Right here is where we waitresses would pick up the drinks.”
She walked up two steps that led to where more booths sat, just past the life-sized wooden fisherman.
“There were of course cocktail tables and chairs all through here,” she waved a hand across the empty space. “I was so damn good, I could walk my way through them blindfolded. Shit, I had to…” she covered her embarrassed. “Sorry,”
I couldn’t have cared less about her language; I was just so damn intrigued.
“It’s fine,” I urged. “Please, go on.”
“I was just going to say that I had to pretty much make my rounds blind half the time anyway with the poor lighting and all the smoke down here. Couldn’t see where the heck I was going.”
She turned to look at me, “You just kinda had to feel it, you know?”
“Linda, I only wish I did know,” I said. “I wish I could go back and see what it was like…feel what it was like.”
She shoo
k her head. “I’ll tell ya, it was somethin’, that’s for sure.”
Then she pointed over at the wooden fisherman. “I see they left old Bushy down here.”
“Bushy?” I said. “They called him that because of his beard I take it?”
She chuckled softly, “Well, kind of…not really. Sure, he has a bushy beard, but the waitresses knew him as ‘Bushy’ for another reason. You see, since it was a cocktail lounge in the 60s, well before all this sexual harassment business started, and you had us scantily clad ladies all running around half naked in the dark, some of the male patrons would get a little…frisky…you know, trying to cop a little feel here and there as we passed by, running hands up thighs and that sort of thing. Well, it got to be kind of a running joke with some of the regulars. Every time one of us got a good goosing or groped up the thigh and let out a little shriek, the men would all point over here at the wooden sailor.”
“Ol’ Bushy done it,” they’d laugh. “Tryin’ to live up to his name again! They’d giggle like schoolboys.”
“You know, back then things were a bit looser than they are now when it came to that sort of stuff. It wasn’t something you did anything about. You just took it and tried to laugh it off along with them, just hoping the tip they left would be a little bit bigger. Nowadays, they’d get tossed out of the place for something like that and there’d probably be a lawsuit from the offended waitress in the process…although I guess now they’re called servers or customer service representatives or whatever fancy title they come up with. Back then, we were just waitresses.”
She led me deeper into the old club, past where the seating ended to another open space where a forlorn looking disco ball now dangled, lost and lonely.
“In the early 70s, they tried to switch the old club into a discotheque, but it never took. I knew things were coming to an end, and at that point, I didn’t really have anywhere to go. My manager friend was long gone, I was a single mom, and my looks were starting to fade along with the club. I didn’t have an education, I didn’t have a husband, and I didn’t have a sugar daddy. So I took the only thing open to me.” She held her arms out wide, “And here I am today.”
I just shook my head, amazed. “Wow,” I breathed. “Who woulda guessed?”
Linda laughed aloud, “Boy, you said a mouthful there! Who woulda guessed?” She shook her head and said softly and somewhat sadly, “Certainly not me.”
Toward the back of the space, the room took a slight J-shaped curve to the left.
“There used to be swinging double doors here that separated this section of the club from the rest. There was a bank of pay-phones against that wall,” she pointed, “but on this side there was nothing but a big painting of an old sailing ship. See here?” she pointed. “You can still kind of see the outline of where it hung.”
The poor lighting of the area barely reached this section of the old club, but as I peeked through the dim yellow light, I could indeed see where the painting had etched itself a place, shielding that particular portion of wall from decades of smoke, dust, and other club grime.
Toward the lower right-hand corner of this cleaner section of wall was a small hole, just about the size of a fore and middle finger held together.
Linda went on, “You’d just slid your hand behind the painting a bit until you felt the hole,” she re-enacted while she was speaking, “like this. Then you’d just give a little pull, and…”
The wall cracked a little bit and then gave way to reveal a full-sized door, still covered in ancient green and yellow wall-paper. Linda swung the wall open toward us then pushed open the old door.
“Holy cow,” I breathed, amazed. “I never would have seen this had you not pointed it out. It’s so well concealed.”
I peered inside. The space was completely dark. Our poor lighting was unable to stretch itself far enough to see.
“Damn!” I hissed. “I wish I’d brought a flashlight.”
“I’ve got one,” Linda said, happily, producing a tiny – maybe four inch long – flashlight and clicking it on.
“Why?” I asked.
She shined the light up so that it illuminated her face in an eerie glow.
“Because,” she said in a voice reminiscent of Bela Lugosi as Dracula, “ven you get to be my age, you never know ven you might vake up in a casket.”
She paused, turning the light toward the darkened space and stepping inside, “Now,” she continued the deep Romanian accent, “please come vith me.”
Inside, the room was bigger than I thought it’d be. I was expecting something more along the lines of a mop closet, but this was almost as big as a good-sized bedroom.
Linda swung her tiny light around the space, illuminating an old steel desk with a chair still sitting behind it in one corner. A coat rack stood like a frozen soldier beside it, along with a large metal waste basket. The top of the desk was cleared, but there were some cardboard boxes, the top box of which was uncovered and filled with old papers and packed manila envelopes. I wanted to dig into those envelopes and find out what was inside, but now was not the time.
The floor was covered in thick shag carpet, although in the darkness, I couldn’t make out the color. Across from the desk was an old couch. A large lamp was set atop a small wooden end-table beside it.
“Looks different from when I saw it last,” Linda said.
She pointed at where the desk sat.
“Used to be set up more like a mini-lounge in here. Someone must have made it into an office later on. Where the desk was, there were several cocktail tables and chairs. Sometimes men would use this as a private gambling space. Where the sofa is now, there used to be four slot machines. They were illegal of course, but that didn’t stop them from having them in here. Against that wall over there,” she shined her light against the empty wall between where the desk and the sofa sat, “there used to be a little bar area, complete with stools.”
“Then,” she said, guiding me over to the wall opposite where the non-existent bar would once have sat, “over here, they had a big five-foot tall painting of a woman in a sheer negligee. And if I remember correctly…” she paused, feeling along the wall with her hand at about eye-level, “…yep, here they are,” she took hold of my arm in the darkness and guided me over beside her, shining her light against the wall. “This is the lookout spot.”
“The lookout spot?” I said.
“Take a peek,” she touched the back of my head lightly with a hand and guided it over to two tiny holes.
“Wow, I can see out into the club space,” I breathed.
“They had it so patrons or management or whoever else was back here could watch what was going on out in the club without being seen.”
“That’s awesome!” I said. “Just like in the movies.”
“Pretty much,” Linda laughed.
I couldn’t resist, “So where was the man killed?”
“Ugh,” she said, the memory obviously striking her hard. We turned and she shined her light back over to where the desk now sat.
“When I got here to clean up,” she said, “he was slumped in one of the club chairs just beside where the desk sits now. There was blood on the table, blood all over the chairs, blood on the walls. Heck, I spent a good thirty minutes scrubbing the floor. Didn’t do any damn good though. There was so much blood; they ended up having to replace the carpet.”
I walked over to the space as Linda held the light on it.
“Wow,” I said in awe, “it’s so weird to think that someone died right here…and that they never caught the killer.”
“Yep,” Linda said. She seemed much less impressed. “Happened a lot more in those days of course, the killer getting away that is. The police didn’t have the equipment and methods they have nowadays for solving crimes. It was often just a mixture of luck, brains, and a lot of hard work – pounding the pavement kind of stuff and talking to everyone they could get their hands on.”
“Did they talk to you?” I asked.
>
“Nah. I was black. To them, I probably didn’t know nothin’, didn’t want to know nothin’, and even if I did know somethin’, they didn’t want to hear it from me.”
I shook my head. “That’s crazy!” Then I paused, “Did you know anything?”
I could see her shadowed outline give a slight shrug in the darkness.
“I’m not really sure,” she said. “I know I saw a couple of guys come in here, and neither one of them ever came out.” Then she caught herself, “Well, one came out, but he wasn’t breathing.”
She moved the flashlight’s beam from the desk area to the corner behind it. “Used to be a tiny door over there, the one that led to a hallway and out to the alley. That’s how the killer must have left.”
“Did you get a description of him?”
“I did.”
“But you didn’t tell the police?”
“Like I said, they didn’t ask. And back then, for a black person in Chicago, volunteering information could get you in a whole lot more trouble than just keeping it to yourself, if you get my drift.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right.
“Wouldn’t have made much difference anyway.”
“Why’s that,” I asked.
“My description would have been terrible. Just looked like another white guy to me…and you know, all you white guys look the same.”
I laughed, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“Anyway,” she went on, “one good thing did come of it. The man that was killed was staying here at the hotel. Since I had to clean up the mess down here, management let me choose something from his room to keep before the police took it all away. They said that the man didn’t have any relatives and all the stuff was probably going to an evidence locker for the next 30 years, that or in the trash, so I went through the man’s laundry and took one of his suits, a real nice Italian made one, and gave it to my brother since he was about the man’s size.”
I didn’t respond. I was transfixed on the spot of the stranger’s demise, and something was tugging at my subconscious, screaming for recognition, but I couldn’t think of what it was. The thoughts of the present were getting all muddled with my reverie for the past. I was having the strangest feeling, like I was forgetting something, overlooking something, but I just couldn’t see it. It was right there, on the tip of my brain – something about Linda’s mention of the man’s suit that she gave to her brother, but I couldn’t be sure why it was there or what it meant.
The Case of the Guest Who Stayed Over (The M.O.D. Files Book 1) Page 17