Sara Paretsky - Windy City Blues

Apparently while this Darnell lay back deeply relaxed, someone had rubbed some kind of poison into his skin. “When Evangeline came back in to clean his face, he was sick-heaving, throwing up, it was awful. She screamed for help and started trying to clean his face-it was terrible, he kept vomiting on her. They took him to the hospital, but he died around ten tonight.

“They came to get Baby at midnight-you’ve got to help her, V. I.-even if the guy tried something on her, she never did a thing like that-she’d haul off and slug him, maybe, but rubbing poison into his face? You go help her.”

Evangeline Barthele was a younger, darker edition of her mother. At most times, she probably had Sal’s energy-sparks of it flared now and then during our talk-but a night in the holding cells had worn her down.

I brought a clean suit and makeup for her: justice may be blind but her administrators aren’t. We talked while she changed.

“This Darnell-you sure of the name?-had he ever been to the salon before?”

She shook her head. “I never saw him. And I don’t think the other girls knew him either. You know, if a client’s a good tipper or a bad one they’ll comment on it, be glad or whatever that he’s come in. Nobody said anything about this man.”

“Where did he live?”

She shook her head. “I never talked to the guy, V. I.”

“What about the PestFree?” I’d read the arrest report and talked briefly to an old friend in the M.E.’s office. To keep roaches and other vermin out of their posh Michigan Avenue offices, La Cygnette used a potent product containing a wonder chemical called chorpyrifos. My informant had been awestruck-“Only an operation that didn’t know shit about chemicals would leave chorpyrifos lying around. It’s got a toxicity rating of five-it gets you through the skin-you only need a couple of tablespoons to kill a big man if you know where to put it.”

Whoever killed Darnell had either known a lot of chemistry or been lucky-into his nostrils and mouth, with some rubbed into the face for good measure, the pesticide had made him convulsive so quickly that even if he knew who killed him he’d have been unable to talk, or even reason.

Evangeline said she knew where the poison was kept-everyone who worked there knew, knew it was lethal and not to touch it, but it was easy to get at. Just in a little supply room that wasn’t kept locked.

“So why you? They have to have more of a reason than just that you were there.”

She shrugged bitterly. “I’m the only black professional at La Cygnette -the other blacks working there sweep rooms and haul trash. I’m trying hard not to be paranoid, but I gotta wonder.”

She insisted Darnell hadn’t made a pass at her, or done anything to provoke an attack-she hadn’t hurt the guy. As for anyone else who might have had opportunity, salon employees were always passing through the halls, going in and out of the little cubicles where they treated clients-she’d seen any number of people, all with legitimate business in the halls, but she hadn’t seen anyone emerging from the room where Darnell was sitting.

When we finally got to bond court later that morning, I tried to argue circumstantial evidence-any of La Cygnette ’s fifty or so employees could have committed the crime, since all had access and no one had motive. The prosecutor hit me with a very unpleasant surprise: the police had uncovered evidence linking my client to the dead man. He was a furniture buyer from Kansas City who came to Chicago six times a year, and the doorman and the maids at his hotel had identified Evangeline without any trouble as the woman who accompanied him on his visits.

Bail was denied. I had a furious talk with Evangeline in one of the interrogation rooms before she went back to the holding cells.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me? I walked into the courtroom and got blindsided.”

“They’re lying,” she insisted.

“Three people identified you. If you don’t start with the truth right now, you’re going to have to find a new lawyer and a new detective. Your mother may not understand, but for sure Sal will.”

“You can’t tell my mother. You can’t tell Sal!”

“I’m going to have to give them some reason for dropping your case, and knowing Sal it’s going to have to be the truth.”

For the first time she looked really upset. “You’re my lawyer. You should believe my story before you believe a bunch of strangers you never saw before.”

“I’m telling you, Evangeline, I’m going to drop your case. I can’t represent you when I know you’re lying. If you killed Darnell we can work out a defense. Or if you didn’t kill him and knew him we can work something out, and I can try to find the real killer. But when I know you’ve been seen with the guy any number of times, I can’t go into court telling people you never met him before.”

Tears appeared on the ends of her lashes. “The whole reason I didn’t say anything was so Mama wouldn’t know. If I tell you the truth, you’ve got to promise me you aren’t running back to Vincennes Avenue talking to her.”

I agreed. Whatever the story was, I couldn’t believe Mrs. Barthele hadn’t heard hundreds like it before. But we each make our own separate peace with our mothers.

Evangeline met Darnell at a party two years earlier. She liked him, he liked her-not the romance of the century, but they enjoyed spending time together. She’d gone on a two-week trip to Europe with him last year, telling her mother she was going with a girlfriend.

“First of all, she has very strict morals. No sex outside marriage. I’m thirty, mind you, but that doesn’t count with her. Second, he’s white, and she’d murder me. She really would. I think that’s why I never fell in love with him-if we wanted to get married I’d never be able to explain it to Mama.”

This latest trip to Chicago, Darnell thought it would be fun to see what Evangeline did for a living, so he booked an appointment at La Cygnette. She hadn’t told anyone there she knew him. And when she found him sick and dying she’d panicked and lied.

“And if you tell my mother of this, V. I.-I’ll put a curse on you. My father was from Haiti and he knew a lot of good ones.”

“I won’t tell your mother. But unless they nuked Lebanon this morning or murdered the mayor, you’re going to get a lot of lines in the paper. It’s bound to be in print.”

She wept at that, wringing her hands. So after watching her go off with the sheriff’s deputies, I called Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star to plead with him not to put Evangeline’s liaison in the paper. “If you do she’ll wither your testicles. Honest.”

“I don’t know, Vic. You know the Sun-Times is bound to have some kind of screamer headline like DEAD MAN FOUND IN FACE-LICKING SEX ORGY. I can’t sit on a story like this when all the other papers are running it.”

I knew he was right, so I didn’t push my case very hard.

He surprised me by saying, “Tell you what: you find the real killer before my deadline for tomorrow’s morning edition and I’ll keep your client’s personal life out of it. The sex scoop came in too late for today’s paper. The Trib prints on our schedule and they don’t have it, and the Sun-Times runs older, slower presses, so they have to print earlier.”

I reckoned I had about eighteen hours. Sherlock Holmes had solved tougher problems in less time.

Roland Darnell had been the chief buyer of living-room furnishings for Alexander Dumas, a high-class Kansas City department store. He used to own his own furniture store in the nearby town of Lawrence, but lost both it and his wife when he was arrested for drug smuggling ten years earlier. Because of some confusion about his guilt-he claimed his partner, who disappeared the night he was arrested, was really responsible-he’d only served two years. When he got out, he moved to Kansas City to start a new life.