Max Collins - Target Lancer

“No reason. Maybe I’m just in the mood for a romantic liaison with your ancient ass. Also, there’s a murdered guy with your business card in his wallet.”

“Oh.” Now I was wide awake. “Be right there.”

I roused Helen just enough to let her know I had to leave for a while. We planned to move her out of the Lorraine Hotel this morning, into the client’s apartment downstairs; but now that might have to wait. Business.

She just nodded and nestled into her pillow and didn’t stir at all as I quickly shaved and showered and got into a two-piece gray worsted by Louis Goldsmith. Wanted to look my best for Dick Cain, and whoever this dead body was.

I had a sick feeling I knew the answer to the latter already, or maybe that was just the slightly stale doughnut I washed down with orange juice. Anyway, I didn’t remember giving Tom Ellison my business card, so it couldn’t be him. Shouldn’t be him.

But beyond that possibility, I had no idea who this stiff might be.

And I hadn’t bothered to ask Dick Cain what a sheriff’s man was doing on a city homicide-I figured I’d find out soon enough. My hunch was Dick was looking after my best interests, which was something he habitually did.

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.”