“Thank you for coming down, Miss Warshawski,” the widow said in her deep voice. “These are my children and my grandchildren.” She gave me their names and I told them how sorry I was.
The little room was crowded with friends and relations, heavy-bosomed women clutching handkerchiefs, dark- suited men, and preternaturally quiet children. They moved a little closer to the grieving family as I stood there- protection against the white woman who drove Kelvin to his death.
“I was a little hasty in how I spoke to you yesterday,” Mrs. Kelvin said. “I believed you must have known something was going to happen in that apartment.”
There was a little murmur of assent from the group behind me.
“I still think you must have known something was going on. But blaming people won’t bring my husband back to life.” She gave the ghost of a smile. “He was a very stubborn man. He could have called for help if he knew someone was going into that place-he should have called for help, called the police.” Again the murmur of assent from the people around her. “But once he knew someone was breaking in, he wanted to handle it by himself. And that’s not your fault.”
“Do the police have any leads?” I asked.
The young woman in the black suit gave a bitter smile. Daughter or daughter-in-law-I couldn’t remember. “They aren’t going to do anything. They have the pictures, the film from the TV consoles Daddy watched, but the killers had their faces and hands covered. So the police say if no one can recognize them there’s nothing they can do.”
Mrs. Kelvin spoke sadly. “We keep telling them there was something going on in that apartment-we keep telling them that you knew about it. But they aren’t going to do anything. They’re just treating it like another black killing and they aren’t going to do a thing.”
I looked around at the group. People were watching me steadily. Not exactly with hostility-more as though I was some unpredictable species, perhaps an ibex.
“You know my cousin died last week, Mrs. Kelvin. He fell from a wharf under the screw of a freighter. There were no witnesses. I’m trying to find out whether he fell or was pushed. Your husband’s death makes me think he was pushed. If I can find out for sure and find out who did it, they’ll probably be the same people who killed Mr. Kelvin. I know catching the murderer is a small consolation in the midst of great grief, but it’s the best I can offer- for myself as well as you.”
“Little white girl going to succeed where the police failed.” The person behind me spoke softly but audibly and a few people laughed.
“Amelia!” Mrs. Kelvin spoke sharply. “No need to be rude. She’s trying to be kind.”
I looked around coolly. “I’m a detective and I have a pretty good record.” I turned back to Mrs. Kelvin. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”
I shook her hand and left, heading back to the Dan Ryan and the Loop. It was after five and traffic scarcely moved. Fourteen lanes and all of it bumper-to-bumper within high concrete walls. Truck exhaust mingled with the damp still air. I shut the windows and wriggled out of my jacket. It was chilly on the lakefront but muggy in the expressway’s canyon.
I inched my way downtown and oozed off the expressway at Roosevelt Road. Main police headquarters are at State and Roosevelt, a good location, close to a lot of crime. I wanted to see if anyone there would give me any information about Kelvin.
My dad had been a sergeant, working mostly out of the Twenty-First District on the South Side. The brick building on 12th Street brought on a twinge of nostalgia-it had the same linoleum, the same cinder-block walls with yellow paint peeling away. A few harassed, overweight men behind the desk were processing everyone from drivers putting up bond for their licenses to women trying to see men brought in on assault charges. I waited my turn in line.
The desk officer I finally spoke to called inside on a microphone. “Sergeant McGonnigal, lady here to see you on the Kelvin case.”
McGonnigal came out a few minutes later, big, muscular, wearing a rumpled white shirt and brown slacks. We’d met a couple of years back when he was on the South Side and he remembered me immediately.
“Miss Warshawski. Nice to see you.” He ushered me back through the linoleum corridors to a tiny room he shared with three other men.
“Nice to see you, Sergeant. When were you transferred downtown?”
“Six, seven months ago. I got assigned to the Kelvin case last night.”
I explained that the murder had taken place in my cousin’s apartment and that I wanted to know when I could get back in and straighten out his papers. McGonnigal expressed the usual regrets at Boom Boom’s death-he’d been a fan, et cetera, and said they were almost finished with the apartment.
“Did you turn up anything? I understand the TV films showed two men going in. Any fingerprints?”
He grimaced. “They were too smart for that. We did find a footprint on the papers. One of them wears size twelve Arroyo hiking boots. But that doesn’t tell us much.”
“What killed Kelvin? He wasn’t shot, was he?”
He shook his head. “Someone gave him an almighty hard blow to the jaw and broke his neck. May only have meant to knock him out. Jesus! What a fist. Doesn’t tie in to any of our known B & E men.”
“You think this is a straight break and entry job?”
“What else would it be, Miss Warshawski?”
“Nothing of value was taken. Boom Boom had a stereo, some fancy cuff links and stuff, and it was all there.”
“Well, figure the guys are surprised by Kelvin. Then they see they’ve killed him rather than just stunning him like they intended. So they get nervous and leave. They don’t know whether someone else is going to come up looking for the guy if he doesn’t come back in so many minutes.”
I could see his point. Maybe I was making a mountain out of a molehill. Maybe I was upset by my cousin’s death and I wanted to blow it up into something bigger than an accident.
“You’re not trying to get involved in this, are you?”
“I am involved, Sergeant: it happened in my cousin’s apartment.”
“The lieutenant is not going to be happy if he hears you’re trying to stir up this case. You know that.”
I knew that. The lieutenant was Bobby Mallory and he did not like me to get involved in police work, especially murder cases.
I smiled. “If I stumble across anything looking through my cousin’s affairs, I don’t think that’ll upset him too much.”
“Just give us a chance to do our jobs, Miss Warshawski.”
“I spoke with the Kelvin family this afternoon. They’re not too sure you guys are really trying your hardest.”
He slammed his palm on his desk top. The three other men in the room tried to pretend they were still working. “Now why the hell did you go talk to them? One of the sons came around here and gave me a snootful. We’re doing out best. But, Christ, we haven’t got a damned thing to start from other than two pictures no one can identify and a size twelve boot!”
He pulled a file savagely from a stack on his desk and yanked a photograph from it to toss at me. I picked it up. It was a still made from the TV film of the men going into Boom Boom’s place. Two men, one in jeans and the other in chinos. They both wore corduroy sports jackets and had those Irish caps held up over their faces. McGonnigal handed me a couple of other stills. One showed them getting off the elevator-backward. Another showed them walking down the hall, crouched over to disguise their height. You could see their hands pretty clearly-they were wearing surgical gloves.
I gave the pictures back to McGonnigal. “Good luck, Sergeant. I’ll let you know if I come across anything… When can I get the keys to the place back?”
He said Friday morning and warned me to be very, very careful. The police are always telling me that.
10 Down the Hatches
