Max Collins - Target Lancer

“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.”

“Yes it does.”

“We’re ruling out an underhand stab?”

“For a sternum blow? The assailant would have to be seven feet tall. No, this is strictly a Psycho stab, and a man.”

Dick tilted his head. “Some of these broads are good size, Nate. And a lot of ’em work with guys who rob a would-be john after the doll makes entry, but before the john does, if you get my drift. And anyway, how do you explain the lipstick?”

“Well, maybe our thief in the bellboy outfit has thought ahead to the possibility of something going wrong. And he’s brought along some lipstick and a Trojan wrapper, just in case. To lead the cops astray.”

He was smirking again. “Oh, Christ, Heller, you’re watching way too much television. Ever since you got that color TV. Listen to yourself.”

“Yeah, I know,” I admitted. “It’s thin.”

But it wasn’t so thin, if you considered that Tom’s slaying might have been a hit, not a robbery.

My far-fetched scenario got goddamn probable, if all some killer had to do-in or out of a bellboy uniform-was gain access to that hotel room, kill Tom, and stage it to look like a hooker robbery gone wrong.

Had somebody tied off Tom Ellison as a loose end? Because of that money drop he’d made? And if so, what the hell did that make me, but another loose end?

Plus, there was always the possibility that somebody had seen Tom with that envelope of cash, not knowing he’d passed it to Jack Ruby at the 606, and my bellboy theory-right down to preparing for the hooker ploy-seemed suddenly less preposterous.

I did not, however, share any of that with Dick Cain. He was a friend, as far as it went, but there was no way I would ever let him know about the job I’d done for Tom, not unless he confronted me with an eyewitness. His presence today could have less to do with him covering for me, out of friendship, and more to do with somebody- Hoffa? Giancana? — checking up on me, to see if I’d spill what I knew about Tom and Ruby to a copper.

From the Outfit’s point of view, my pal Dick would be the perfect cop to send my way.…

Still, Dick’s dealings with the Outfit always seemed to be at arm’s length-he was doing business with them because he had to, to make it in Chicago. Which was an attitude I well understood, because it was my own. You have to swim in the waters you find yourself in.

And the sheriff’s top investigator had expressed his disgust with the Outfit to me many times-though everybody seemed to think of Dick as Irish, his father had been Italian … and had been murdered by the Black Hand.

“Do you want me to keep an eye on this thing?” Dick asked. Considering that he only had one good eye, that was damn near a joke. He was lighting up another Dunhill.

“Let’s see what the coroner comes up with,” I said casually. “The trajectory of the pick will help pin down whether it’s a man or a woman who swung it.”

He shook his head, sighing smoke. “Not sure I see that.”

“Well, it’s obvious Tom was standing up when he was killed.”

“Is it?”

“The angle of his body on the bed. His feet hanging over. He started out standing near the bed, got stabbed, fell backward … and that’s why there’s so little blood.”

“There’s never a lot of blood with an ice pick.”

“But more blood than that! After he fell backward, gravity took care of the rest-making for damn little bleeding. Anyway, the angle of the ice-pick wound will give us the height of the killer.”

“All right. I’ll buy that.”

“And that bed, Dick-didn’t you notice? It was tidy, except for Tom’s body, on top of the spread. Didn’t look to me like anybody’d been riding bareback on it lately. He was in his T-shirt, boxers, and socks-a guy relaxing in his hotel room, not a guy who just got laid. If somebody came to the door, Tom probably pulled his trousers on and answered, and let his murderer in. Post-kill, the guy yanked Tom’s trousers off and dumped them on the floor.”