The Million-Dollar Wound (23 page)

“And then the next crowd’ll step in, and will they be any better? What are we talking—Accardo? Giancana? That’ll be swell. Nitti, at least, has kept the bloodshed to a minimum.”

Drury shook his head. “How in God’s name can you find anything good to say about that evil son of a bitch?”

“Nitti’s no worse than the next guy in his slot, and possibly a damn sight better. I remember the Capone days, and so do you, Bill.”

“Nate, I’m disappointed in you.”

“I told you I’d testify. I’ll sing like Nelson Eddy sitting on hot coals. But I want to see Louie B. Mayer and Jack Warner and Joe Schenck sitting in cells next to Nitti and Campagna and Ricca.”

“Schenck did time.”

“On income tax, and not much.”

Eliot looked at me, glumly. “They can subpoena you anyway, Nate. You know that.”

“Haven’t you heard? I’m battle-fatigued. I’m shell-shocked. I got amnesia, remember? Just ask the medics.”

Eliot shook his head, looked at the floor.

Bill sat there, dumbfounded. “I don’t get you, Heller.”

“Bill, those Hollywood schmucks Bioff and Browne and Dean plucked were just trying to get off cheap where paying the help was concerned. And the rank and file knew they had gangsters in their union but figured all that muscle was getting ’em some extra bucks, and looked the other way accordingly. So I say screw ’em. Screw ’em all.”

Drury started to say something, but the phone rang. It was Gladys, next door; for Drury.

“I left my number,” he said, taking the phone. “Hope you don’t mind.”

I waved that off.

Drury was mostly listening, so I said to Eliot, quietly, “No hard feelings?”

He smiled wearily again. “None. I’m just glad you’re back from that hellhole in one piece. Why don’t I buy you dinner tonight?”

“Why don’t you?”

Drury barked, “Jesus Christ,” into the phone, and we looked at him. Then he said, “Right away,” and handed me the receiver, and stood.

“Why don’t you come with me, Heller,” he said, his face ashen. “There’s something you might be interested in.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. A good example of your theory how Nitti and company soft-peddle the bloodshed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Grab your coat and we’ll go over to Addison Street, in Lakeview. You might be interested in seeing what’s become of Estelle Carey.”

She was naked under her red silk housecoat, but she wasn’t much to look at. Not in the way she had been, 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
kunai
grass, charred grinning corpses by a wrecked tank along the Matanikau and then I was out in the hall, leaning against the wall, doubled over, trying not to puke, trying to keep that corned beef platter from Binyon’s down where it belonged.

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.

“
This
is where it started,” I said.

“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
that?”

“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?”

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.”