Max Collins - Chicago Lightning

My client was there, too.

She was slumped in front, sprawled across the steering wheel. She was still in the mink, the mauve-and-silver gown, and the diamond necklace she’d worn to the Troc Satury night. But her clothes were rumpled, in disarray, like an unmade bed; and there was blood on the front of the gown, coagulated rubies beneath the diamonds. There was blood on her face, on her white, white face.

She’d always had pale creamy skin, but now it was as white as a wedding dress. There was no pulse in her throat. She was cold. She’d been dead a while.

I stood and looked at her and maybe I cried. That’s my business, isn’t it? Then I went out and up the side steps to the loft above the garage and roused the elderly fellow named Jones who lived there; he was the bookkeeper for the Sidewalk Cafe. I asked him if he had a phone, and he did, and I used it.

I had told my story to the uniformed men four times before the men from Central Homicide showed. The detective in charge was Lieutenant Rondell, a thin, somber, detached man in his mid-forties with smooth creamy gray hair and icy eyes. His brown gabardine suit wasn’t expensive but it was well-pressed. His green pork-pie lightweight felt hat was in his hand, in deference to the deceased. Out of deference to me, he listened to my story as I told it for the fifth time. He didn’t seem to think much of it.

“You’re telling me this woman was murdered,” he said.

“I’m telling you the gambling syndicate boys were pressuring her, and she wasn’t caving in.”

“And you were her bodyguard,” Rondell said.

“Some bodyguard,” said the other man from homicide, Rondell’s brutish shadow, and cracked his knuckles and laughed. We were in the garage and the laughter made hollow echoes off the cement, like a basketball bouncing in an empty stadium.

“I was her bodyguard,” I told Rondell tightly. “But I didn’t work Sundays.”

“And she had to go to Chicago to hire a bodyguard?”

I explained my association with Fred Rubinski, and Rondell nodded several times, seemingly accepting it.

Then Rondell walked over and looked at the corpse in the convertible. A photographer from Homicide was snapping photos; pops and flashes of light accompanied the detective’s trip around the car as if he were a star at a Hollywood opening.

I went outside. The smell of death is bad enough when it’s impersonal; when somebody you know has died, it’s like having asthma in a steam room.

Rondell found me leaning against the side of the stucco garage.

“It looks like suicide,” he said.

“Sure. It’s supposed to.”

He lifted an eyebrow and a shoulder. “The ignition switch is turned on. Carbon monoxide.”

“Car wasn’t running when I got here.”

“Long since ran out of gas, most likely. If what you say is true, she’s been there since Saturday night…that is, early Sunday morning.”

I shrugged. “She’s wearing the same clothes, at least.”

“When we fix time of death, it’ll all come clear.”

“Oh, yeah? See what the coroner has to say about that.”

Rondell’s icy eyes froze further. “Why?”

“This cold snap we’ve had, last three days. It’s warmer this morning, but Sunday night, Jesus. That sea breeze was murder-if you’ll pardon the expression.”

Rondell nodded. “Perhaps cold enough to retard decomposition, you mean.”

“Perhaps.”

He pushed the pork pie back on his head. “We need to talk to this bird Eastman.”

“I’ll say. He’s probably at his studio. Paramount. When he’s on a picture, they pick him up by limo every morning before dawn.”

Rondell went to use the phone in old man Jones’ loft flat. Rondell’s brutish sidekick exited the garage and slid his arm around the shoulder of a young uniformed cop, who seemed uneasy about the attention.

“Ice cream blonde, huh?” the big flatfoot said. “I woulda liked a coupla of scoops of that myself.”

I tapped the brute on the shoulder and he turned to me and said, “Huh?”, stupidly, and I cold-cocked him. He went down like a building.

But not out, though. “You’re gonna pay for that, you bastard,” he said, sounding like the school-yard bully he was. He touched the blood in the corner of his mouth, hauled himself up off the cement. “In this, town, you go to goddamn jail when you hit a goddamn cop!”

“You’d need a witness, first,” I said.

“I got one,” he said, but when he turned to look, the young uniformed cop was gone.

I walked up to him and stood damn near belt buckle to belt buckle and smiled a smile that had nothing to do with smiling. “Want to go another round, see if a witness shows?”

He tasted blood and fluttered his eyes like a girl and said something unintelligible and disappeared back inside the garage.

Rondell came clopping down the wooden steps and stood before me and smiled firmly. “I just spoke with Eastman. We’ll interview him more formally, of course, but the preliminary interrogation indicates a possible explanation.” “Oh?”

He was nodding. “Yeah. Apparently Saturday night he bolted the stairwell door around midnight. It’s a door that leads to both apartments up top the Sidewalk Cafe. Said he thought Miss Todd had mentioned she was going to sleep over at her mother’s that night.”

“You mean, she couldn’t get in?”

“Right.”

“Well, hell, man, she would’ve knocked.”

“Eastman says if she did, he didn’t hear her. He says there was high wind and pounding surf all night; he figures that drowned out all other sounds.”

I smirked. “Does he, really? So what’s your scenario?”

“Well, when Miss Todd found she couldn’t get into her apartment, she must’ve decided to climb the steps to the street above, walked to the garage and spent the rest of the night in her car. She must’ve have gotten cold, and switched on the ignition to keep warm, and the fumes got her.”

I sighed. “A minute ago you were talking suicide.”

“That’s still a possibility.”

“What about the blood on her face and dress?”

He shrugged. “She may have fallen across the wheel and cut her mouth, when she fell unconscious.”

“Look, if she wanted to get warm, why would she sit in her open convertible? That Lincoln sedan next to her is unlocked and has the keys in it.”

“I can’t answer that-yet.”

I was shaking my head. Then I pointed at him. “Ask the elderly gent upstairs if he heard her opening the garage door, starting up the Packard’s cold engine sometime between two a.m. and dawn. Ask him!”

“I did. He didn’t. But it was a windy night, and…”

“Yeah, and the surf was crashing something fierce. Right. Let’s take a look at her shoes.”

“Huh?”

I pointed down to my scuffed-up Florsheims. “I just scaled those two-hundred-and-eighty steps. This shoeshine boy’s nightmare is the result. Let’s see if she walked up those steps.”

Rondell nodded and led me into the garage. The print boys hadn’t been over the vehicle yet, so the Lieutenant didn’t open the door on the rider’s side, he just leaned carefully in.

Then he stood and contemplated what he’d seen. For a moment he seemed to have forgotten me, then he said, “Have a look yourself.”

I had one last look at the beautiful woman who’d driven to nowhere in this immobile car.

She wore delicate silver dress heels; they were as pristine as Cinderella’s glass slippers.

The Coroner at the inquest agreed with me on one point: “The high winds and very low cold prevailing that week-end would have preserved the body beyond the usual time required for decomposition to set in.”

The inquest was, otherwise, a bundle of contradictions, and about as inconclusive as the virgin birth. A few new, sinister facts emerged. She had bruises inside her throat. Had someone shoved a bottle down her throat? Her alcohol level was high-.13 percent-much higher than the three or four drinks she was seen to have had at the Troc. And there was gas left in the car, it turned out-several gallons; yet the ignition switch was turned on….