One Monday We Killed Them All (21 page)

“But you hope you can—make a deal.”

“In a whipped town, honey, even vice is an essential industry. It meets its payroll and keeps the money moving and pays property taxes. Feed me, huh?”

The emergency call came just as Meg was pouring my second cup of coffee, and I had to leave it right there. I met Larry at the hospital. The coroner was already there. We went down to the morgue, and walked through to the autopsy room where Dr. Thomas Egree was standing beside Kermer’s body, chatting with one of the interns. Egree is a heart specialist and one of the most well-known and important doctors in Brook City, a blond-gray man with stern gray eyes, a large lumpy nose, a face pitted with the acne scars of long ago.

He spoke to each of us in turn, “Sam, Chief Brint, Lieutenant.”

Jeff Kermer was naked under the merciless glaring white of the big overhead operating light. He was blue-white, grotesquely dwindled, puddled as if the light was melting him down. The ruff of hair on his chest was white. His eyes and mouth were half-open. The left side of his chest looked mangled.

“Gentlemen, I was in the hospital when it became known they were bringing in what was presumed to be a massive coronary infarction, so I went down to emergency and made the necessary preparations. Dr. Walsh here was on duty. The patient was apparently D.O.A., with no respiration, no perceptible pulse. Dr. Walsh injected a stimulant directly into the heart muscle while I opened the rib cage to gain access so as to manually massage the heart itself. As soon as I touched the area I knew I was faced with a different problem. The pericardial sac was full of blood. I opened the sac, removed the blood and tried to find a wound in the heart wall. When the heart is not beating, this is most difficult when the perforation is small. I had ordered an immediate transfusion. I turned the heart slowly, squeezing it gently, and finally found the perforation on the underside of the left ventricle. By then there was no need to suture it because the patient was unquestionably dead. With the heart back in its normal position, I found a matching perforation in the rear of the pericardial sac.”

He motioned Walsh around to the right side of the body, lifted the left arm of the corpse across the chest and said, “Dave, please pull a little, roll him just a little way over. Gentlemen, here is the primary entrance wound.”

It was a very tiny, bloody mark about four inches below the bottom of the shoulder blade, and well toward the left side.

“What do you think, Sam?” Dr. Egree asked.

Our county coroner, Dr. Sam Hessian, bent and examined it at close range for what seemed a long time. When he straightened up, the intern let the body settle back into it’s previous position, and put the left arm neatly back at the side.

“Clean puncture,” Sam Hessian said. “Like a goddam knitting needle. Point of entry matches what you found?”

“An upward angle, assuming he was sitting or standing
erect at the time it happened. Call it about a thirty-degree angle from the horizontal.”

“Lung?”

“Of course. But you’ve got a spongy tissue, and an extremely sharp object, so you’d almost get a self-sealing effect, much the same as you would in the pericardium. Not perfect, of course, but not enough hemorrhage or leakage to have much effect on him in the short time between when it happened and when he died. It skimmed past the aorta. It had to be sharp to slip through the gristle between the ribs. Flexible, to a certain extent. Eight to ten inches long. The same diameter for the whole length of it. I’d say the absolute maximum would be an eighth of an inch. Sam, I don’t know what the autopsy ritual should be, in any legal sense. I have a perfectly straightforward cause of death here which I will certify, and I wouldn’t have come across it except for the emergency measure I took.”

“Nobody would have come across it,” Sam Hessian said sourly. “But I better get a regular autopsy request and go through the routine.”

There was a silence in the small room. I noticed that Jeff Kermer’s body still wore dark silk socks and a gold wedding band. The disinfectant smell was acid-sharp in the still air. I looked at Larry Brint. He met my glance and looked away. But there had been an affirmation in that moment. This was what we were for. This was the ultimate felony.

“Just a couple questions,” Larry said. His voice sounded almost bored. “Wouldn’t he know he was stabbed? Wouldn’t it hurt like hell? Wouldn’t he yell?”

“We can assume he was drinking,” Dr. Egree said. “A certain anaesthetic effect there, of course. He would appear to have been in his late fifties, overweight, with bad muscle tone. A man like that would be accustomed to pains and twinges, discomfort in the upper torso, gastric pains—some of them quite sharp. The most sensitive area would be the epidermis, but with a very sharp instrument used quickly, that would be so minor as to be barely noticeable. A good nurse can give an almost painless injection. We can assume further penetration, quickly done, would cause almost no pain at all until the heart wall itself was pierced. Then there would be growing pain and discomfort, and a feeling of breathlessness.”

“How long between the time he was stabbed and when he’d pass out?” Larry asked.

Egree shrugged. “He’d start to feel extreme discomfort almost immediately. The pressure inside the heart would be pumping blood through the puncture wound in the heart wall. The pericardial sac would fill quite quickly, causing an external pressure that would severely tax the heart muscle, causing it to labor and slow down and founder. He’d feel faint, breathless, dizzy, much as if he had a small aortal rupture.”

“And it would look like a heart attack, eh?” Larry said. “Doctor, would it take a lot of skill to do that?”

Egree shrugged. He clenched his fists and held them together. “Your heart is as big as this, Chief. It hangs in the middle of your chest, very slightly off center to the left. The hardest part would be sliding the weapon through the gristle between the ribs. An upward stroke through the diaphragm would be much simpler. You could hardly miss the heart once in fifty times. Usually under such circumstances the victim would remain ambulatory for from ten seconds to a full minute. He’d become comatose in a period of from thirty seconds to two and a half or three minutes. He’d be dead in from five minutes to forty minutes.”

“Oh, this is so interesting,” Larry said with with weary disgust. “Not more than five hundred people would like to kill him off. I think I am going to learn to miss this tiresome bastard. A heart attack would have been enough trouble. Thanks for being so thorough, Dr. Egree. Thanks a lot!”

“Happy to be of service,” Egree said ironically. “Sam, when you go in there, palpitate that coronary artery. Pronounced arteriosclerosis, heavy deposits, constricted flow. He wouldn’t have been with us much longer even without the—unfriendly gesture.”

“He’s the type,” Sam said.

“So far,” Larry Brint said, “are we the only ones who know it’s murder?”

“Plus the emergency room nurse,” Egree said. “I told her to keep it to herself. She will.”

“If Division Street thinks it’s a heart attack, we can get some information,” Larry said. “If there’s any rumor about it being a killing, we’ll never find out who was with him.”

And it worked as he predicted. I put Rossman and Raglin on it, and we began tapping all other sources. Kermer’s manager had closed the doors of the Holiday Lounge, but the death was the big topic of conversation in all the other saloons and casinos. We soon learned a lot of people who hadn’t been there were claiming they had. But we brought in a bartender who straightened it out, and it was the bartender who remembered that Kid Gilbert had been nearest to Jeff Kermer, and it had looked as if Kermer was trying to say something to the Kid.

I had him picked up and brought in, and thought it might work better if we used my office instead of an interrogation room. He walked in with Johnny Hooper, and I had Johnny close the door to the squad room.

The Kid’s battered old face looked wary and curious. “What the hell, boys? What the hell?” he said in his worn whispery voice. “Sometimes I come to visit. I don’t like this being brought in, you know?”

“You can’t complain to Jeff about it. Not any more.”

His eyes were quick and bright. “I can’t think of anybody who can take over I wouldn’t know pretty good.”

“A heart attack is a terrible thing, isn’t it?” I said.

He moistened his lips. “I never see one so close. I don’t want to see no more of them, never.”

“How close were you?”

“Too damn close. Like this. He was in the big bar, circulating the way he always does. You know, he gets a little bagged having a drink with this one and that one, and then he goes home. It’s like his social hour. And that’s when deals get made. Everybody knows it’s a good time to hit him up for something. So he goes around the corner usually, into the next room there, when it’s something private, a little kind of room where there’s just a pay phone. He was coming from there when it hit him. I just happened to be crossing from the bar to one of the booths to talk to an old buddy when he comes walking toward me. His face was wet and shiny and sort of gray colored. He had both hands pulled tight against his chest. He was looking right at me and his jaw was going up and down like he was trying to say something, but it’s noisy in there that time of night. His eyebrows were way up, making him look surprised, you know? I got to him as he started to go down, and I got just enough hold on him so I eased
him down. I yelled and the place got quiet, and then some broads started screaming, and somebody was yelling to phone an ambulance. He was out cold a half a minute after I eased him down.”

“Who was he talking to?” I asked. “Who did he have the private business with?”

“Oh, just some out-of-town broad. She’s been around off and on the last couple weeks. Big blonde. Calls herself Nan something.”

I looked at Johnny Hooper. We had the same idea at the same moment. He nodded and walked out. The Kid caught the exchange. “What’s going on?”

“What kind of a deal do you think the woman was trying to make?”

“I don’t get in on that end of the business.”

“Would you make a guess?”

Kid Gilbert shrugged. “It would probably be some kind of woman thing. That’s how she looked. Like she’d have five or six girls and got squoze out somewhere, maybe from the law or too big a cut working against her, and trying to make a deal to open up here, and she’d know she’d have to fix it with Jeffie because here you do it that way instead of greasing the law, and so it would be up to Jeffie to make the best deal he could, if he figured it wouldn’t cut the take on the business he already has going for him.”

Johnny Hooper came in with one of the pictures from Youngstown. “That’s her?” he asked the Kid.

“Sure,” he said. “The hair is different, and she’s older than in the picture.” He gave us his broken grin. “I answered fast, huh? So maybe I’m fingering her, and maybe I should have said I never seen her before, but Jeffie Kermer was nothing but nice to me ever since I know him, and now I got the idea it wasn’t what it looked like.”

“They caught it by accident at the hospital, Kid. She stuck a piece of steel into him, something thin and long, into his left side, toward the back, right up into the heart, something so small there was a good chance the wound would never be noticed.”

He made his smashed hands into potato fists and looked a long way through my office wall. “I heard of it done in Boston with a piece of wire, once. Who’d she do it for?”

“Who do you think?”

“Everything else is quiet, so it would be McAran.” He sighed. “And this would be just about the first chance she had, you know? The boys Jeffie brought in, they’ve been staying close. She had to see him three or four times before they’d pay no attention to her. She had that big straw pocketbook, big enough to hide it in. So maybe she could give him some figures to look at, showing what the take and percentages would be, and she moves a little behind him, sort of, and slips it in there fast. She came out a little behind him, smiling and talking, as if she hadn’t noticed anything wrong with him. After everybody was around him, I didn’t see her again. The way it is that time of night, if he yelled when she did it, nobody would have heard. You know, Lieutenant, that kind of a broad, she could do that to Jeffie, and it wouldn’t be the first.”

“Kid, we want her to think she got away with it. We want McAran to think she got away with it. The papers will cover it as a heart attack because they won’t be told differently. If there is any leak, we’ll know it came from you. And I think that with Jeff Kermer out of the way, we could make you very unhappy.”

He spoke with a dignity which surprised me. “You don’t have to say that to the Kid. You aren’t going to make me any more unhappy than I am for Jeffie being dead. So I keep my mouth shut because you ask me to. I don’t have to make myself big around this town by proving I know things other people don’t. But I tell you one thing. I see that broad anywhere, and I am going to walk up to her smiling and hook her in the belly and cross the right, and you can have her from then on.”

“All right, Kid. Do you know what kind of a car she was driving?”

“I never seen her outside the Holiday.”

“How was she dressed?”

“Always pants and a sweater, high heels, fur cape, white gloves and a big purse, loud perfume, lots of paint, and a cigarette all the time in the corner of her mouth. No hat. What she drank—I heard her order—was vodka stingers, easy on the mint, with one rock. Deep voice for a woman. Built big but not fat, you know. As far as I could tell, she always come around alone, anxious to talk private to Jeffie. You want to kill a man like Jeffie, that’s a good
way. That’s a real good way, goddam her.” He stood up. “You don’t need me any more? So I want to go by by myself. I’m going to miss him.”

After he left, Johnny Hooper and I talked it over, thinking out loud.

We finally reached the conclusions which satisfied us to a certain extent. McAran had made the murder of Kermer part of the deal. Miller and the Frankel woman had joined McAran in the hills well before the jail break. And she, with the brass of the best grade of assassin, had kept coming into town until she had him set up just right, with, perhaps, a little parting message from McAran. Morgan Miller would be inclined to humor McAran in this matter because it would create internal confusions which would put a lot more strain on our resources of manpower and vehicles, and thus give their main project a better chance of succeeding. There would be a minimum of two cars, four men and one woman up in McAran’s hide-out, but we could not overlook the possibility that Miller might have brought in some additional talent.