once.
She lay on the plush carpet partially under a straight-back chair in the dining room of her third-floor five-room apartment at 512 West Addison in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of wall-to-wall apartment buildings near the lake on the North Side. She’d been living well. Dying had been something else again.
Her hair-she’d dyed it red since I saw her last-was a fright wig, clumps of it torn away from or possibly cut off at the scalp, scattered on the floor nearby, like a barbershop. The face was recognizably hers, despite the cuts and bruises and welts that added touches of purple and red and black to her white face, and despite too the jagged slash through her left eye and the ice-pick punctures on her cheeks and her bloodied broken nose and her smashed pulpy lips. Her throat had been cut, ear to ear, but superficially, a mark of torture, not murder. She had lived through most of this.
The red silk housecoat was scorched from the waist down, and so was she, till her legs were virtually charred. So were her hands and arms. Someone had set the housecoat afire-had splashed whiskey on it and set a match to it, it would seem-and she had put the fire out with her hands, or tried to. She’d been somewhat successful, because only the lower part of her was burned, and even the red silk housecoat could still be seen to be a red silk housecoat. But the fire had spread to the carpet, where it met the broken and apparently not empty whiskey bottle and got ambitious. The two nearby walls were black from floor to ceiling, dripping wet from the firemen’s hose, the lingering smoke smell still strong, acrid in the room. Not enough to wipe out the smell of death, however, the smell of scorched human flesh. Not enough to smother the memory of a certain foul wind, of dead, rotting flesh, Japs bloating in the sun in the
Drury was right there beside me, a hand on my shoulder, looking ashamed of himself. I’d been in there standing looking at Estelle Carey, frozen by the burned sight of her, for I don’t know how long, while he got filled in by the detectives already on the scene. Now he was embarrassed, saying, “Damnit, Heller. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”
I was breathing too hard to speak.
He said, “I was trying to make a point. This came up, and bringing you along seemed like the perfect way to make a point.”
I said, “Don’t say ‘this came up’ to a guy who’s trying not to lose his lunch, okay, Bill?”
“Nate. I’m sorry. Shit. I feel like a heel.”
I let go of the wall; I seemed able to stand, without any help. “Well, you are a heel, Bill. But…who isn’t, from time to time?”
“Why don’t you go, Nate. Go on home. If you’re interested in how this sad affair plays out, I’ll keep you posted.”
I swallowed. Shook my head no. “I’ll stay.”
“I was a bastard to use that dead girl like this. I hope my apology’s enough. After what you been through overseas, I shoulda had sense enough not to…”
“Will you shut the fuck up? Let’s go back inside.”
Drury, having been one of my partners back on the pickpocket detail, knew very well that Estelle and I had been an item, once. So it was cruel of him to expose me to this. But then he hadn’t seen the condition of the corpse yet, when he made the decision; if he had, I doubt he’d have called me in.
He had an excuse though; I was the one who, officially, identified the body.
My lunch was staying down, but I was shaking. We moved through the vestibule into the living room and back into the dining room; it was cold, the windows open to air out the smoky place, letting in the winter chill. Eliot hadn’t joined us-he had business at the Banker’s Building; Drury had driven me over in an unmarked car. The firemen-who had been the first to the scene, the neighbor across the hall calling in to report smoke seeping out under the front door-had been and gone. The fire had been contained to the one room, only two walls of which were scorched. Present now were two patrol officers, Drury and two detectives; this was Drury’s bailiwick, as he was currently working out of nearby Town Hall Station. More police and related personnel would descend soon. Photographers, medical examiner, dicks from downtown. This was a good chance to get a look around before the professionals stumbled over themselves ruining evidence.
I walked into the next room, through a doorless archway, stepping around a shattered glass, which had apparently been hurled against one wall of the compact white modern kitchen. To my left was a small maple table with two maple chairs, one of them pulled away from the table, at an unnatural angle. Against the wall were cabinets and a sink and more cabinets; the cabinets to the far left were blood-smeared; there was blood spattered in the sink, too.
“The most recent thing cooked up in here,” I said, “was Estelle’s murder. Look at this.”
I pointed to the floor where a blood-stained bread knife, a blood-spattered rolling pin, a blood-tipped ice pick and a ten-inch blackjack lay, here and there, as if casually dropped when done. Nearby was a kitchen chair pulled away from a small table, on which was a flat iron, used to batter her, I figured, and a glass ashtray with a number of crushed butts therein; spatterings of blood were on the table, chair and floor underneath.
“This is where it started,” Drury said, hands on hips, appraising the chair. Still in his camel-hair coat. He really was too well-dressed to be a cop. Honest cop.
“Not quite,” I said. “Take a look.”
I stood and pointed to two cups on the kitchen counter. One of them was half-filled with hot cocoa; cold cocoa, now. In the bottom of the other cup was the dry cocoa powder, ready for hot milk to be poured in. The milk was still simmering on the stove, opposite.
“
“How do you figure?”
“She was fixing a cup of cocoa for one of her guests, her back turned as she faced the counter. She was already drinking a cup herself. They grabbed her, tossed her in that chair, started beating her.”
Drury pushed his hat back on his head; the dark eyes, set so close on either side of the formidable nose, narrowed. “That makes sense, I guess. But why do you assume more than one ‘guest’?”
“It’s two people. Probably a man and a woman.”
“How do you figure
“The broken whiskey bottle out in the other room, a glass of which was poured in here and then hurled against that wall.” You could see the dried splash it had made.
“So?”
“So Estelle didn’t drink. I also don’t think it was her practice to keep a liquor cabinet for guests, though I could be wrong.”
“You aren’t wrong,” Drury granted. He said his detectives had already determined that.
“My guess,” I said, “is that bottle of whiskey was brought in, by one of her killers, in that paper bag there.”
A wadded-up paper bag was tossed in the corner.
Drury went to it, bent and picked it up, uncrumpled it, looked inside. “There’s a receipt in here. This is a neighborhood liquor store.”
“In the detective business we call that a clue, Captain.”
He only smiled at that; we’d been friends a long time. “Well, I’d tend to agree with you that the whiskey was probably brought in by a man. But just because Estelle was fixing a second cup of cocoa doesn’t mean the other party was necessarily a woman. Men have been known to drink cocoa, you know.”
“It’s a man and a woman. The man used the heavy male weapon-the blackjack-and the woman used makeshift female weapons, flat iron, kitchen utensils like a rolling pin, ice pick, bread knife.”
He thought about that, nodded slowly.
“Also,” I went on, pointing toward the ashtray, “Estelle didn’t smoke, either. Yet some of these butts-and there’s some heeled-out ones on the dining room floor, too-show lipstick. And some don’t. Man and a woman.”
Drury smiled in defeat, shrugged. “Man and a woman.”
I moved toward the archway, kneeling. “After while they dragged her into the dining room-by the hair, I’d say. There’s some strands right here. Red. Hers.”
He knelt down next to me. “You haven’t forgotten how to be a detective, have you?”
