“Who signed the check?”
“Tench.”
“Did Bayer know about the deal with the city, or with Tench?”
“Silas couldn’t say yay or nay.”
“What sort of project would be so difficult the city couldn’t use its own employees?”
“Whatever the job, I’d guess it’s a backbreaker. Kadinger’s men are laborers, used to lifting and loading logs.”
“What about the city workers who dug the tunnel under Lake Michigan? They’re no weaklings.” Quinn’s curiosity redoubled. A thousand dollars a week for six months for work so secret Kadinger didn’t trust his long-time clerk with the reason and, apparently, neither did the workers who performed the work. Had they all been sworn to secrecy? “Maybe the money had nothing to do with Kadinger’s workers or his company. Maybe it had something to do with those water-loan bonds Kadinger had invested so heavily in.”
“If Kadinger was buying, the checks would’ve been going to the city and Silas would’ve seen the bonds or evidence of purchase.”
“You’re right, unless Kadinger purchased them off the company books with personal funds.” She didn’t know that Winthrop was involved, but if he’d been offered the opportunity to advance his prospects, he wouldn’t have refused. “I’m not sure where to go from here, Garnick, but I’d dearly love to burgle Winthrop’s office and ransack his mother’s pie safe.”
“That’s a job best left till midnight when there’s no coppers around to snap the cuffs on us. And after that?”
“After?”
“You’ll want someplace to sleep at the end of your ransacking.”
The implicit invitation started her pulse racing again. “I need to spend one more night at the Mansion if Lou will let me. I want to talk to Jemelle again and I’ve asked Megarian to bring Tench to the Mansion for a meeting in the morning.”
She expected Garnick to demur, to look a little disappointment at least. But he seemed happy to honor her request and put off kissing to another day. He tossed off the last of his beer and rose to leave. “You want to drop in on Gentle Annie this afternoon? She can tell us how Tench fleeces the brothels and maybe we can get a line on Stram’s hiding place from his ex-regular, Sue.”
Chapter 23
“What can I do for you, honey?” Romeo fluffed his green feathers and screeched with apparent glee. Half of a gnawed banana lay on the cage floor and a string dangled from his beak like a skinny white worm. “Romeo want some fun!” He mimicked a lascivious laugh that made Quinn’s skin crawl.
A dark-skinned woman in violet bombazine rested her elbows and overflowing breasts on the pedestal table. “What’s your pleasure?” she asked Garnick. “You want a threesome?”
Romeo cackled.
“We’re not shoppers,” said Garnick. “We’ve come for a word with Miss Annie.”
“She expecting you?”
The bouncer, shaggy-browed and surly as Quinn remembered, erupted into the parlor, shoving a wombly-legged drunkard ahead of him. “Annie ain’t receiving any detectives,” he growled as he walked by and catapulted the drunkard headfirst down the narrow stairwell. “Clear out, you two, or I’ll kick you out next.” The sound of the drunkard’s body bouncing off the walls punctuated the threat.
“I hope you’ll reconsider,” said Garnick. “Your boss lady won’t want to miss hearing what we’ve got to say about Alderman Henry Tench.”
“I’ll tell her,” said the woman in violet and swished off down the hall.
The bouncer glowered. “Stand over by the bird, out of the customers’ way.”
There were no customers just now, for which mercy Quinn felt greatly relieved. There was a prurient suggestion in Romeo’s evil little eyes and she worried that her thin dress and unbound hair conveyed an unintentional conviviality. The woman in violet swished back to the pedestal where she and the bouncer conferred in low voices. He gave the detectives a scathing look and left. The woman leaned her elbows and breasts on the pedestal again. “Annie says to hold your hosses.”
Garnick nodded. “Thank you, ma’am.”
Quinn fidgeted. The smells of banana and parrot droppings and the unwholesome musk of the place closed in on her, adding to her feeling of awkwardness. She wished they’d asked to meet the fat madam outdoors. The effluvium of the stockyards would have been more bearable.
A pot-bellied man with lank brown hair and a pitted face passed through and jogged down the stairs, whistling. A satisfied customer, no doubt. A few minutes later, a scrawny girl in a baby-blue dress minced into the room and assumed a pose on one of the red velvet settees. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Quinn wondered if she was the one the whistling man had his fun with.
“Didn’t I tell you to keep away from here?” Annie swanned into the room fanning her big arms and adding the bouquet of otto of roses to the smothering atmosphere. Today she wore a crimson gown almost the color of her hair. She looked as wide and spectacular as a closed theater curtain.
Romeo dipped his head and cowered against the bars of his cage.
Quinn stepped forward. “I have additional questions for you.”
“What makes you think I’ll answer ’em?”
“The right answers could save you and your husband a lot of money, Mrs. Hyman.”
“Still mealy-mouthed.” Her angry eyes shifted to Garnick. “Not much heft to your bodyguard here.”
“But I’m nimble,” said Garnick, “and I fight dirty.”
She snorted. “You want to talk, follow me.” She pulled a key out of her cleavage and opened a panel covered with red-and-gold wallpaper. Inside it appeared to be an ordinary office with a mahogany kneehole desk. Instead of a chair, there was a high-backed settee of sufficient dimensions to accommodate Annie’s girth. She shut the panel, moved behind the desk, and enthroned herself.
There were no other chairs. All who entered here were clearly supplicants. Quinn leaned her back against the wall. Garnick stood off to the side of the desk and sawed his finger across his chin, as if mentally mapping detours around the blockades Annie might throw up.
“What’s this horse manure about Tench?” she demanded.
“We know why the councilmen are quaking in their boots since the Kadinger fire,” said Quinn.
“Why’s that?”
“Actually,” said Garnick, “it’s their money collector, Tench, who’s quaking. The rest are probably just trying to keep clear of any shot that ricochets off him.”
“What’d he do?”
“He was Delphine Kadinger’s paramour before she married Burk Bayer,” said Quinn.
“Sounds like a girl with a big heart.” Annie threw back her head and detonated that cannonball laugh of hers. “Who’s your favorite poet?”
“What?”
“Your favorite poet. Mine’s Lord Byron. Now there’s a man who understood love.”
Garnick laughed along with her. “Seems like I’ve heard something about his lordship’s way with the ladies. But back to Tench. His love, if that’s what it was, makes him a suspect in Delphine’s murder.”
“Yeah, and Elfie Jackson’s love, if that’s what it was, makes her the one waiting trial in the calaboose,” countered Annie.
“Thanks to Jemelle’s false witness,” said Quinn.
“I read in the paper she’s changed her tune. You must’ve buttered her up good.”
“We pointed out the risks of not telling the truth,” said Quinn.
“Jemelle’s a stupid heifer, but she knows how many beans make five.”
Garnick edged closer to the queen bee’s throne. “Did a big, ugly cuss named Ned Handish ever come around here asking for Jemelle?”
“Didn’t your partner here tell you? I don’t keep tabs on my girls, nor every Ned, Dick and Harry who walks in the door.”
“You sell yourself short, Annie. You don’t get to be the richest brothel keeper in the Patch without being the savviest. I reckon you’ve got eyes in the back of your head.”
“Don’t try to soft-soap me, Garnick.”
“Likewise, Annie, don’t pretend you don’t keep a sharp lookout.”
“All right, for what it’s worth to you, Handish was here. I wouldn’t have heard of him, but my bouncer caught Jemelle squirreling a roll of bills under a loose board in her room and figured she’d been holding out on me. He took it away from her and the three of us had a consultation. Jemelle claimed somebody named Handish gave her the money but wouldn’t say who he was or what it was for.”
“Was Handish a courier for Tench or the council?” asked Garnick.
“Cap’s never mentioned the name.”
Quinn hadn’t known about Handish’s connection to the case when she first visited Annie. She still wasn’t clear how he fit into the picture. “Was this consultation with Jemelle before or after Stram beat her up?”
“After. Wasn’t much doubt she was lying through her teeth, but being as how she’d never rooked me before, I only took twenty. Between Cap and Lord Byron, love’s turned me soft-hearted.”
It was increasingly apparent to Quinn that Stram told the truth when he said he didn’t know Handish. Was it possible both he and Handish worked for Tench and didn’t know each other? “All we want, Annie, Mrs. Hyman, is to prove Elfie innocent of the murders and find out who set that fire. Jack Stram was at the Kadinger house that night. He knows who else was there and he’s scared. He wouldn’t be hiding out in fear for his life from Elfie. But if Tench did the murders–”
“Bull!” Annie rose like a breaching whale. “You sleuth-hounds have been beating your gums ninety to the dozen, but I ain’t heard one thing I give a damn about, nothing that saves me a Dixie dollar.”
“If Tench can be taken down a peg, the council might slack off on their extortion game,” said Garnick. “That would save you some legal green.”
“Pshaw! The good citizens of Chicago don’t care that the council takes a bite out of my profits, or Cap’s or Roger Plant’s.”
“They’d care if Tench killed one of their own kind and his young daughter and burned their house to cover his tracks,” argued Garnick.
She appeared to turn the idea over in her mind. “The bastard’s got a face like a mule. Why would he kill the daughter of a codfish aristocrat or any other woman willing to do the hogmagundy?”
“Keep it clean and mannerly, Annie. You’ll make us blush.”
“Then you’re in the wrong place. Get to the nub. What do you have on Tench?”
“I think Delphine Kadinger was doing to Tench what he’s been doing to you,” said Quinn.
“Bleeding him for money? Pah! She’d be telling on herself if she went to his wife.”
“Maybe she had something else to tell,” said Quinn. “Something more serious than a charge of marital infidelity. In fact, maybe it was her father who was bleeding him. Kadinger’s employees were doing some kind of heavy work for the city on the sly. Have you or your husband picked up any hearsay about what that might be?”
“The two-mile tunnel and the water works are finished. That’s all aboveboard and a boon to the public, if you believe all the hurrahs the city pols have been giving each other. Nothing else going on except for ’em digging up coffins in the cemetery and they sure as shooting can’t keep the stink off that mound of rotting Confederate meat a secret.”
“Are you trying to raise my hackles, Annie?”
“I should’ve guessed you were a grayback, Garnick.”
Quinn said, “We’re going to interview a few of Kadinger’s employees in the next day or two. We’ll find out if Tench or his fellow aldermen were fleecing the city and paying blackmail to Kadinger, or if Kadinger was doing something illegal for the benefit of the council. But we really need to find Stram. If we can persuade him to spill the beans about the council’s schemes, you may get a reprieve from their extortion.”
“When the sun rises in the west.”
“Another of your girls used to mingle limbs with him,” said Quinn. “Sue. He visited her here after his fight with Jemelle and you. She may know where he’s hiding.”
“Not likely. That ninny don’t know a whore-pipe from a bell pull.”
Heat seared Quinn’s face. The old bawd was taunting her with obscenities. “I daresay you derive your eloquence from a source other than Lord Byron. But whether you help us or not, here or someplace else, we’re going to talk to Sue.”
“Here, then, damn it. This reprieve sounds like a lot of tomfoolery to me, but whatever you dig up against Tench, keep my name out of it. Ten years ago another moralizing mayor and his holier-than-thou vigilantes brought in a team of dray horses and leveled my lakefront brothel and every other doggery and squatter’s shanty in the neighborhood. Cost me plenty to re-settle. I don’t need another posse of Sunday school jayhawkers.”
Annie pranced out past the bird’s cage, hips rolling. “Farley! Round up Sue if she ain’t in flagrante and bring her here. These detectives want to ask her some questions. And take Romeo out and clean his cage. How many times do I have to tell you? Birdshit ain’t an aphrodisiac.”
The bouncer pouted but complied without comment. Romeo rocked from side to side and ruffled his feathers, but he seemed diminished and kept mute. Annie locked her office door and sailed off into the bowels of the place, leaving Quinn and Garnick to wait.
He stared at the wall, looking glum.
“What’s eating you, Garnick?”
“I can’t stop thinking about those unearthed corpses in the cemetery. Must be more than a dozen I knew from the prison camp, one or two I liked.”
She touched his arm. “It’s a desecration, but you mustn’t dwell on it. I’m sure there’ll be more reverence for the dead when they’re laid to rest at Oak Woods.”
“I’m not worried about how reverently or irreverently their bones are treated, but think about it, Quinn. There’s six thousand or more bodies buried in cheap, termite-eaten pine boxes, some just wrapped in winding sheets. Moving ’em is a whopping big operation. What if some genius dreamed up a shortcut?”
“What kind of shortcut?”
“Less digging, less hauling, less cost. I don’t know. I’m still cogitating.”
“But if all Kadinger did was provide the city with more diggers and haulers, and the city paid him, how is that illegal? Why would he not let his clerk know about the deal?”
Before the question could be addressed, a spindly girl with a wan complexion and frightened eyes scuffed into the room and gripped the edge of the pedestal table as if it were the only fixed and solid thing on a tossing ship. “I’m Sue,” she said, “and I don’t know nothing about nobody.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sue. This lady is Miz Paschal and I’m Garnick. We’re trying to get a girl out of some bad trouble and we think you can help.” He spoke as if gentling a fractious colt. “Would you let us buy you a bowl of iced cream? It’s a hot day and I know an eatery a mile or so from here that serves chocolate and coffee flavored cream, fizzy water, too, if you’re thirsty.”
“I told you I don’t know nothing.”
“You know whether you like iced cream, don’t you?”
“You think you can buy me off, but you can’t ‘cause I don’t know where Jack’s gone to and if I did I wouldn’t blow on him.” She kept a white-knuckled grip on the table.
“Is that because you love him or because you’re afraid of him?” asked Quinn.
“If you’re afraid,” said Garnick, “we can see to it he won’t bother you again. And if Annie didn’t come straight out and say so, she wants you to own up and tell us what you know. You wouldn’t want to disappoint her, now would you?”
“Lawd, would I rather be beaten or whipped?” She looked too frightened for sarcasm.
Quinn said, “Annie won’t whip you, Sue. And if you think Stram will come back and beat you, we can move you someplace safe.” She might have added, if I can think of one, but her objective was persuasion. “The sooner we find him, the safer we’ll all be.”
&
nbsp; Annie crashed into the room like a landslide. “Sue!”
The girl spun around with a tremulous cry.
“Quit your whining and tell these nags what they want to know so I can get ’em out of here.”
“But I don’t know where Jack is.”
“What’s your best guess?” asked Garnick.
“All’s I know, he once said he had an old laker boat docked near the McCormick Reaper Works and if anybody was ever to come after him for his IOUs, he could hole up on the river till they gave up.”
Chapter 24
The McCormick Reaper Works was a busy, sprawling factory situated on the north bank of the Chicago River. An adjacent rail spur and wharf made loading the heavy reaper machines less arduous. At least twenty barges and steamers were berthed along the wharf. A forest of masts rose in front of the McCormick smokestack and a hundred men or more moiled about in a welter of noise and hurly-burly.
Garnick handed Quinn the field glasses. “Notice the last three boats at the far end. Looks like they’re out of commission. Leastways no cargo being loaded. Probably waiting to be shellacked or something. I’d guess Stram’s holed up in one of them.”
“Here we go then.”
“You best wait here. I’ll reconnoiter. If I find him, I’ll prod him back this way.”
“No, we’ll go together.”
“That wharf ain’t a resort promenade, Quinn. You’ll hear saltier language down there than what you heard from Annie.”
“I won’t faint. Anyway, those men aren’t ruffians or yahoos. They’re just laborers going about their work.”
“Men without much practice in the social graces,” said Garnick. “The sight of a woman traipsing along the dock will for sure gin up interest.”
“I’ll shut my ears and keep my eyes on my shoe tops.”
Devil by the Tail Page 17