The Million-Dollar Wound

I didn’t tell him that the only way I could handle this charnel house was to revert into being a cop; that I was forcing myself, like a man trying to put toothpaste back into the tube, into once again looking at the world from a detached, strictly business perspective. To keep from thinking about scorched flesh, the smell of which was in my nostrils. To keep from remembering the soft pink flesh of a girl I’d loved once.

“They were friends of hers,” I said, standing.

Drury stood, too. “Friends? Not hardly!”

“Well-not in the long run, no. But the firemen had to kick down the front door, right? It was night-latched, correct?”

“Yes,” he said. “So we can presume she kept it latched, and only let in people she knew.”

“And felt secure enough, having let this lovely couple in, to latch it behind her.”

“So she knew them. I’ll give you that. Not necessarily friends, though.”

“Friends. They knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t have liquor in the place and brought their own. She invited them into her kitchen. She was making one of them cocoa. Friends.”

He smiled a little and shrugged. “Friends,” he agreed.

“This back door is locked, too,” I noted.

“Yeah. We got ourselves a regular locked-room mystery here.”

“No mystery,” I said, unlocking it, looking it over. “This is a spring lock. The killers went out the back way, the door locking behind them.”

Drury gave me a wry one-sided grin. “There’s nothing here I wouldn’t have figured out for myself, you know.”

“Sure,” I said, managing to grin back at him. “But I don’t mind taking a couple of minutes and saving you two or three hours of brain work.”

“You should be on the radio. Cantor could use the help. Want a look at the bedroom? Maybe you can save me from thinking in there, too.”

Like the rest of the apartment, the bedroom had been tossed; the mattress had been gutted with a knife, even its pink fluffy spread slit open. The white French provincial furnishings were scattered, occasionally broken.

“What were they looking for?” I said. “They obviously were torturing her, trying to make her talk. What was she hiding? What did she know?”

He shrugged. “I’m not so sure they were trying to make her talk at all. I think she was being made an example of.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Isn’t it obvious? It’s this grand jury thing, Nate. Nicky Dean was the last to squeal. Bioff went first, Browne cracked next but only recently has Dean loosened up. Only recently has he cooperated at all with Uncle Sam-now that a reduced sentence has been dangled in front of him.”

“And killing his girl is a warning from the Outfit for Nicky to clam back up?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Then why not just kill her? Why torture her like this?”

“This’ll have more impact, Nate. This’ll smack Nicky between his bushy eyebrows.”

“Yeah, right, only Nitti doesn’t work this way.”

“The old Nitti didn’t. But he’s been under a lot of pressure.”

“Since when?”

“Like the song says, since you went away. There was a big scandal about Nitti-owned linen services having contracts with the public schools. When the press got hold of that, he lost the contracts, which were lucrative, and then Mayor Kelly, to save face, let us crack down on Nitti’s bookie joints and nightclubs. Even the Colony Club got shuttered.”

“Where was Estelle working, then?”

He gestured to the sheared bed. “Right out of here, I’d say.”

“What do you base that on?”

“Sergeant Donahoe’s already given this room a cursory once-over, and he reports her affects indicate a call- girl operation.”

He walked me over to a dresser, on its side; one drawer had been taken out, its contents scattered, bundles of letters, mostly. I wondered if it had been done by the killers or the police. Drury poked around, found a little black address book, which he plucked from the rubble. He began thumbing through it. Smiling as he read.

“Well, well, well,” he said, running his finger down a page, then going on to the next page and running his finger down that one. “Some very familiar names. Of some very wealthy men-doctors, lawyers, here’s Wyman, the iron construction man. He was involved in a messy divorce not so long ago…”

“So she was a call girl, then.”

“Looks like.” He kept thumbing through it. “And get this-some of these other names…friends of hers from her twenty-six girl days. High-class hookers.”

“What, you figure she was their madam?”

He shrugged. “Of sorts, maybe. Maybe she was a referral service, if you will. But any way you look at it, she was making her living on her back.”

I couldn’t argue with him.

“Well, then,” I said, “you’re going to have a merry time sticking this on the Outfit.”

His expression darkened. “Why’s that?”

“If she wasn’t being tortured to make her talk, what does that leave? She was being made an example of, like you say. Or-she was tortured by somebody who wanted to see her suffer, for the sheer sweet pleasure of it. For revenge.”

“Yeah. So?”

“So what you got here is the torture slaying of a dead call girl who’s been seeing a lot of high-hats, and one of her tormenters, one of her slayers, seems to be a woman. Now, off the top of your head, what does that all add up to?”

He grunted. “Jealous wife.”

“You got it. See if the papers don’t land on that with both feet.”

“Maybe,” he said, giving me his best official look. “And we’ll pursue that avenue. I don’t rule anything out. You heard, when we came in, the downstairs neighbor say she saw a guy in the alley.” Around two-thirty, running, with fur coats in his arms, she’d said. “Well, there’s been a series of apartment fur thefts going on in Lakeview for the past three months. So I don’t rule that out either, though in my opinion the killer just grabbed the coats on the way out to make this look more like a robbery, not a mob hit. Nonetheless, I smell the Outfit all over this.”

I could only smell scorched flesh. My lunch was acting up again. Be a cop, a voice said.

“Somebody was looking for something,” I said, making myself get back into this on that level. “What?”

Shrug. “Jewels, maybe. Estelle was known to have ’em. That doesn’t rule out this being a hit; why shouldn’t an assassin pick up a little extra something in the bargain? At the same time confusing the police as to the motive.”

That made sense, but then, on cue, Sergeant Donahoe, a heavyset middle-aged detective with a basset- hound mug, came in from the other room with his hands full of obviously expensive jewelry, including a diamond ring and a glittering diamond bracelet.

“We found this in a baseboard hiding place,” Donahoe said, “in the living room.” His hound-dog expression made the news sound unintentionally woeful.

“So much for jewels,” I said.

“That just means the killers didn’t find the goddamn things,” Drury said, shrugging it off.

“Also,” Donahoe said, piling the jewels in one hand, reaching in his pocket with the other, “this was tucked away in there.” A little silver.25 automatic with a pearl handle.

Drury took the gun. “Didn’t do her much good hid away, did it?” Dropped it in his pocket.

“And there’s a sable coat in the front closet,” Donahoe said glumly, and went out.

“So much for fur robbery as a motive,” I said. “If they weren’t looking for furs or jewels, what’s left?”

“Money,” Drury said.