Drawers were open-ended, pictures pulled from the wall, pillows torn from a daybed in the corner and the bedding strewn about.
The wreckage was so confused and so violent that the worst abomination didn’t hit me for a few seconds. A body lay crumpled in the corner on the far side of the desk.
I walked gingerly past the mess of papers, trying not to disturb the chaos lest it contain any evidence. The man was dead. He held a gun in his hand, a Smith & Wesson.358, but he’d never used it. His neck had been broken, as nearly as I could tell without moving the body-I couldn’t see any wounds.
I lifted the head gently. The face stared at me impassively, the same expressionless face that had looked at me two nights ago in the lobby. It was the old black man who’d been on night duty. I lowered his head carefully and sprinted to Boom Boom’s lavish bathroom.
I drank a glass of water from the bathroom tap and the heaving subsided in my stomach. Using the phone next to the king-size bed to call the police, I noticed that the bedroom had come in for some minor disruption. The red and purple painting on the wall had been taken down and the magazines thrown to the floor. Drawers stood open in the polished walnut dresser and socks and underwear were on the floor.
I went through the rest of the apartment. Someone had clearly been looking for something. But what?
The night guard’s name had been Henry Kelvin. Mrs. Kelvin came with the police to identify the body, a dark, dignified woman whose grief was more impressive for the restraint with which she contained it.
The cops who showed up insisted on treating this as an ordinary break-in. Boom Boom’s death had been widely publicized. Some enterprising burglar no doubt took advantage of the situation; it was unfortunate that Kelvin had surprised him in the act. I kept pointing out that nothing of value had been taken but they insisted that Kelvin’s death had frightened off the intruders. In the end I gave up on it.
I called Margolis, the elevator foreman, to explain that I would be delayed, perhaps until the following day. At noon the police finished with me and took the body away on a stretcher. They were going to seal the apartment until they finished fingerprinting and analyzing everything.
I took a last look around. Either the intruders had found what they came for, or my cousin had hidden what they were looking for elsewhere, or there was nothing to find but they were running scared. My mind flicked to Paige Carrington. Love letters? How close had she been to Boom Boom, really? I needed to talk to her again. Maybe to some of my cousin’s friends as well.
Mrs. Kelvin was sitting stiffly on the edge of one of the nubby white sofas in the lobby. When I got off the elevator she came over to me.
“I need to talk to you.” Her voice was harsh, the voice of someone who wanted to cry and was becoming angry instead.
“All right. I have an office downtown. Will that do?”
She looked around the exposed lobby, at the residents staring at her on their way to and from the elevator, and agreed. She followed me silently outside and over to Delaware, where I’d found a place to squeeze my little Mercury. Someday I’d have enough money for something really wonderful, like an Audi Quarto. But in the meantime I buy American.
Mrs. Kelvin didn’t say anything on the way downtown. I parked the car in a garage across from the Pulteney Building. She didn’t spare a glance for the dirty mosaic floors and the pitted marble walls. Fortunately the tired elevator was functioning. It creaked down to the ground floor and saved me the embarrassment of asking her to climb the four flights to my office.
We walked to the east end of the hall where my office overlooks the Wabash Avenue el, the side where cheap rents are even lower because of the noise. A train was squeaking and rattling its way past as I unlocked the door and ushered her to the armchair I keep for visitors.
I took the seat behind my desk, a big wooden model I picked up at a police auction. My desk faces the wall so that open space lies between me and my clients. I’ve never liked using furniture for hiding or intimidating.
Mrs. Kelvin sat stiffly in the armchair, her black handbag upright in her lap. Her black hair was straightened and shaped away from her long face in severely regimented waves. She wore no makeup except for a dark orange lipstick.
“You talked to my husband Tuesday night, didn’t you?” she finally said.
“Yes, I did.” I kept my voice neutral. People talk more when you make yourself part of the scenery.
She nodded to herself. “He came home and told me about it. This job was pretty boring for him, so anything out of the way happened, he told me about it.” She nodded again. “You young Warshawski’s executor or something, that right?”
“I’m his cousin and his executor. My name is V. I. Warshawski.”
“My husband wasn’t a hockey fan, but he liked young Warshawski. Anyway, he came home Tuesday night- yesterday morning that would be-and told me some uppity white girl was telling him to look after the boy’s apartment. That was you.” She nodded again. I didn’t say anything.
“Now Henry did not need anybody telling him how to do his job.” She gave an angry half sob and controlled herself again. “But you told him special not to let anyone into your cousin’s apartment. So you must have known something was going on. Is that right?”
I looked at her steadily and shook my head. “The day man, Hinckley, had let someone into the apartment without my knowing about it ahead of time. There were things there that some crazy fan would find valuable-his hockey stick, stuff like that-and legal documents I didn’t want anyone else going through.”
“You didn’t know someone was going to break in like that?”
“No, Mrs. Kelvin. If I’d had any suspicion of such a thing I would have taken greater precautions.”
She compressed her lips. “You say you had no suspicion. Yet you took it upon yourself to tell my husband how to do his job.”
“I didn’t know your husband, Mrs. Kelvin. I’d never met him. So I couldn’t see whether he was the kind of person who took his work seriously. I wasn’t trying to tell him how to do his job, just trying to safeguard the interests my cousin left to my charge.”
“Well, he told me, he said, ‘I don’t know who that girl’-that’s you-‘thinks is going to try to get into that place. But I got my eye on it.’ So he plays the hero, and he gets killed. But you say you weren’t expecting anything special.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Sorry doesn’t bring the dead back to life.”
After she left I sat for a long time without doing anything. I did feel in a way as though I had sent the old man to his death. He got my goat Tuesday, acting like I was a talking elevator door or something. But he’d taken what I said seriously-more seriously than I had. He must have kept a close watch on the twenty-second floor from his TV console and seen someone go into my cousin’s place. Then he’d gone up after him. The rest was unpleasantly clear.
It was true I’d had no reason to think anyone would be going into Boom Boom’s apartment, let alone be so desperate to find something he’d kill for it. Yet it had happened, and I felt responsible. It seemed to me I had a murdered man’s death to investigate.
Paige Carrington’s answering service took my phone call. I didn’t leave a message but looked up the address for the Windy City Balletworks: 5400 N. Clark. I stopped on the way for a sandwich and a Coke.
The Balletworks occupied an old warehouse between a Korean restaurant and a package goods store. The warehouse was dingy on the outside but had been refinished within. An empty hallway with a clapboard box office was lined with pictures of the Windy City ballerinas in various roles. The company did some standard pieces, including a lot of Balanchine, but it also experimented with its own choreography. Paige was on the wall as a cowgirl in
The auditorium was to the left. A little sign outside it announced that a rehearsal was in progress. I slipped in quietly and joined a handful of people seated in the house. Onstage someone was clapping her hands and calling for quiet.
“We’ll take it from the scherzo entrance again. Karl, you’re coming in a second behind the beat. And, Paige, you want to stay downstage until the
The dancers wore a motley collection of garments, their legs covered with heavy warmers to prevent muscle cramps. Paige had on a bronze leotard with matching leg warmers. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face in a
