Max Collins - Target Lancer

I forced a small smile. “You have a son and daughter, I know. I apologize for not remembering their names.…”

“Mike is in junior high, Susie’s in the sixth grade. My parents live in Milwaukee-that’s one of the reasons Tom and I moved there, Dad had some very good connections with the Miller people.… Anyway, I’m afraid I did something very cowardly.”

A woman alone who had driven the hour plus from Milwaukee to Chicago, within hours or maybe minutes of hearing of her husband’s death, did not strike me as cowardly. But I didn’t say that. I didn’t know what to say.

Nor did Lou, who had positioned himself in a chair just in back of and to the right of her.

She explained without prompting: “I left it to Mom and Dad to tell the kids. That’s terrible of me, I know. But I left it to them. They seem … more stable, more reliable, than me right now. I couldn’t think of how I could tell the kids. Just couldn’t. What would I say? Mike! Dad can’t make it to your football game Friday night. Susie! You won’t see Dad at the school musical.”

Another short, awful laugh.

I said, “How can we help?”

She leaned toward me, just a little. “Before we speak, I must ask you, uh-your friend, Mr. Sapperstein?” She glanced back at him and smiled politely. Then her dry-eyed gaze fixed itself on me: “Is he aware of why my husband contacted you on Friday?”

That gave me a chill. A goddamn chill.

She knew.

Her husband had confided in her about his worries, the situation he’d got himself into trying to get into that unmemorable Bears game.

I had not seen this one coming. I figured she might be here to ask me to look into Tom’s death, because I was their former client, their sort of friend who was a private investigator … maybe at most Tom might have mentioned to her he was going to see me Friday, but this ?

“Jean,” I said, sitting forward, “how much do you know?”

“I know about the football ticket and the envelope of money and the burlesque house and hiring you to go along, to protect him. I think I know all of it.”

The emphasis on protect had been the only sign that she perhaps blamed me a little. I’d been hired as Tom’s bodyguard Friday, and two nights later he was dead.

Trying not to sound at all defensive, I said, “I didn’t see Tom after the 606 Club. Everything appeared to go well-he passed along the envelope and left.”

I didn’t tell her the guy on the receiving end of the money drop was Jack Ruby, a little mobster I’d known for years. And I didn’t say I’d been invited to that Bears game, too, by Jimmy Hoffa himself.

“I blame myself,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Blame myself.” She settled back and sighed. The only sign of inner turmoil was the way she held onto that purse. Maybe she had a gun in it and was going to shoot me for letting Tom die. Maybe I wouldn’t blame her.

But she went on: “We don’t hide things, Tom and I. Even in business, he always runs things past me. We are close. We are still … sweethearts. Soppy as that sounds. He is a very loving husband, and a wonderful, attentive father. He does have to travel sometimes, but … he is the best husband a woman could ever dream of having, and the best father our kids could ever hope to have.”

Okay, so she was talking in the present tense. That was how she was handling it. Tom wasn’t dead yet. Even if she had just read me his obituary.

She was saying, “When he got the chance to take on those questionable clients, with the connections to this Hoffa gangster, I could have said no. But the money was good. The money was very good. We bought a new home. We put money away for Mike and Susie’s college. If I had just said, ‘No, Tom, not those people.’ If I had said that, I wouldn’t have had to go to that nasty-smelling place today and look at him on a tray with a tiny hole in his chest.”

I thought that might unleash the torrent, but it didn’t. The gloved hands strangled the purse.

“Do you think,” she said, “that this big shot Hoffa or the gangsters he runs with are responsible for Tom’s death?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible.”

“May I tell you what’s not possible? A Chicago police detective, and to his credit he tried to be as gentle as he could, indicated the official theory is that Tom had a woman in his room, and that she robbed and killed him.”

“Yeah. I don’t buy that.”

“I would understand if you did. Businessmen on out-of-town trips, they sometimes see women. Girls they meet in a hotel bar. Girls they pay for it. Sluts. Whores. But not Tom. You see, we’re still very … this is embarrassing to say … but there is … there’s nothing wrong with our sex life.”

I raised a hand to indicate she needn’t say more. “Jean, normally I might tell you that anything is possible, even in a good marriage. Good men slip, the best husband can make a mistake. But I don’t believe Tom was killed by a woman.”

“You seem very sure.”

“The evidence indicates a male assailant, no matter what the Chicago police may say. But it is possible that it was a robbery.”

“How so?”

I explained my bellboy theory.

“That seems a little … elaborate,” she said. “The planting of the glass with the lipstick, the Trojan wrapper and so on. Improbable, but not impossible.”

“No argument.”

“Still, Nathan…” Her eyes had a glint now. “It could have been something else … couldn’t it?”

She was smart. Tom had married a beautiful woman but she was much more than that.

“Yes,” I said. “A professional killer might well plan to leave behind a false trail … like the lipstick glass, the prophylactic wrapper. That’s not improbable at all.”

“A cold-blooded, premeditated murder, you mean.”

“I do. If the errand Tom ran on Friday night turned him into a loose end, then … that’s very possible.”

She nodded, as if I had just told her, Your car needs an oil change.

“What kind of loose end had Tom become?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t. Possibly that money being traceable back to Hoffa’s man may pose somebody a problem. That’s just a guess. And I may be a loose end now myself.”

Neither of us said anything for a while.

Lou filled the silence with a question I should have asked. “Mrs. Ellison, when did you last speak to your husband?”

“Sunday evening. He’d eaten at the hotel. Must have been around seven. We didn’t talk long. He just said he felt stupid, this mess with the Bears ticket, especially how dull the game had been. We talked about the kids, some events coming up.”

A football game. A school musical.

She was saying, “I talked to him Friday night, too. After that burlesque club fiasco. And we spoke Saturday night. He’d taken a client and his wife to a matinee at the Shubert. I forget what was playing.”

They’d spoken every night he was away. I believed they really were still sweethearts. And it didn’t seem soppy to me. Not at all.

She turned from Lou to me. Sitting straight, business-like, purse firm in two hands. “All right, Nathan-what can we do?”

“Jean, it’s not going to be easy. If he was killed by a professional, for the kind of people we’re talking about … it can be hard, even impossible, to prove.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Tom says you’re an interesting man. He says people tell stories about you.”

Lou gave me a look, and I said, “Really. What kind of stories?”

“Tom says that you are a very tough hombre. That’s what he said, isn’t it funny? Tough hombre . That you sit in a fancy office in Chicago, but you’re more like some kind of … Bogart kind of detective.”