“Joe didn’t have a bank deposit box.”
“Oh, no? Joe didn’t have a gun, either.”
“Joe had nothing to keep in a bank deposit box. He spent twice his earnings—fancy clothes, fancy cars—”
“Fancy broads.”
“I paid my own way, Tut.”
“What was Orlando’s address?”
“I’m not sure, but I’ve been there.”
“I’ll bet you have!”
“I don’t remember the number, but he lived on Thirty-fourth Court in Elmwood Park just north of Grand Avenue—a garden apartment. He’s in the telephone book. Why?”
“I’ll have to get in there tonight. If I can’t pick the lock, I’ll jimmy a window. They’ll be sealing the place tomorrow morning, sure as hell!”
“No problem getting you in—I have a key that Joe gave me when we were swinging.”
“The days of wine and rose tattooes?”
“Say, where did you get today’s mood? I’ve never known you to be like this!”
“All right, Glad, you come by Millie and Jake’s Watering Hole and give me the key. I’ll go to Orlando’s, you go to Sister Rosetta’s flat, and we’ll see what we can turn up.”
“One question.”
“Okay.”
“Where’s the hookup, Tut—how would Aunt Rosie know about Joe Orlando?”
“She hired another detective, remember?”
“Yes, I’d forgotten about that detective! When we’re through, I’ll meet you at Raponi’s and we’ll compare notes.”
“Uhh-h-h, not at Raponi’s, Glad—Raponi has Mafia connections—it’s a hangout for hoods.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“No place to take a lady.”
“Then where?”
“Make it the Apollo Lounge—east side of Austin, north of Irving—Kennessy’s Light Lager sign.”
“All right. I’ll be at Millie and Jake’s within an hour—watch for me.”
Willow hung up, sweating. If Florence Gambrello ever saw him in the company of a dish like Gladys Hornsby, there’d be no telling what might happen.
29
Sunday
The silver beam of Willow’s five-dollar flashlight licked the night walls of Joe Orlando’s Elmwood Park basement apartment. Joe Orlando had driven high-class automobiles and he’d dressed like the Crown prince of South Floogelstan, but he’d lived like a Wessex saddleback boar. It would have taken a regiment of polish cleaning ladies a fortnight to make the place presentable. The sink was stacked with dirty dishes, the garbage container was filled to overflowing, and its stench would have flipped the stomach of a starving hyena. The ashtrays were heaped high and the floors were cluttered ankle-deep with Chicago Tribunes, one announcing that the Cubs would open their 1984 season in San Diego. The bedroom was awash in dirty underwear and stiffened socks, the bed would have been a disgrace in an Algerian whorehouse, and—ah, Gladys Hornsby, you utterly shameless, breathtakingly lovely little critter, you! Willow saw them at the head of Joe Orlando’s bed—twelve glossy eight-by-tens, thumbtacked to the walls. His flashlight flickered over the naughty dozen, steadying on the picture featuring the cucumber. He stared at it briefly, shaking his head and wondering who’d eaten that particular cucumber. He jerked the photographs down, shielding his eyes from flying thumbtacks, stacking the photographs neatly and tucking them under his arm, glossy sides toward his body. That would have to do it for the evening—he’d ransacked the place, and if the remaining pictures and negatives were on the property, Orlando had hidden them well. It was no jackpot but it was a step in the right direction.
He went out, quickly and quietly, easing Joe Orlando’s apartment door shut with a barely audible click. He left the vestibule to inhale blessed fresh air, sauntering down the walk as nonchalantly as he knew how. He turned south toward the corner where he’d parked a half-hour earlier. A few steps short of his Buick he felt a heavy hand clamp down on his shoulder and his heart did a double backflip. Breaking and entering—how long? Thirty days? Sixty? Florence Gambrello said, “So, how was she?”
Willow’s sign of relief would have blown out a forest fire in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He said, “Flo, where did you come from, and how was who?”
“The bitch in that apartment.”
“What bitch? I’m working a case, and why aren’t you at Raponi’s?”
“Some case—no lights! Nick give me a few hours off so I could run a check on my interests.”
“Well, for God’s sake, don’t sneak up on me like that! You could give a man a double coronary. Are you following me?”
“No more than necessary. I was coming down Austin Boulevard when I seen you pull out of Millie and Jake’s parking lot. What was all the excitement about this afternoon? I heard somebody got killed.”
“Yeah, remember the guy in Raponi’s parking lot—the one you worked over twice?”
“That candy-ass with the glass jaw—name of Joe Orlando?”
“That’s the man, and he’s dead. Somebody shot him in the back, and I’m trying to find out who did it.”
“And you got to go in apartments with no lights on.”
“Sure. That’s where Orlando lived, and I was in there looking for clues.”
“Uh-huh, and I see you got a whole armful! Let Florence take a look at them clues.” She snatched the Wow-Wee photographs from under Willow’s arm to study them one at a time under the pinkish glow of the streetlight.
Willow shuffled around nervously. He said, “Evidence, Flo.” Rather lamely, he thought.
Florence peered at him. “You like this kinda stuff?”
Willow shrugged. “I can take it or leave it.”
Florence winked at him. “Hey, c’mon, we go up your place, and Florence really gonna float your boat!”
“Flo, those photographs are important to this case.”
“Aw, looky, lover, Florence understands—Florence wasn’t born last week—she knows about men! All jerk and no lay makes—”
“Flo, listen to me, will you? Those pictures are—”
She squeezed his arm. “Baby, no secrets! You can level with Florence. Everybody got their own little fantasies. Why, just about every night Florence pretends she’s getting raped by Benito Mussolini!”
“Benito Mussolini’s dead and so is Joe Orlando! I’m just—”
Florence pressed a finger to his lips. “No matter, sweetie—a little shakeup in the lineup never hurt nobody! You like look on this stuff, Friday night Florence gives you real eyeful!” She glanced down at the Wow-Wee pictures. “This cookie got no class—carrots, cucumbers, corn—high-school crap!”
“Well, Flo, you see, that’s not exactly what—”
Florence returned the pictures with a superior sneer. She said, “Hey, Tutto, you got a baseball bat?”
“Yeah, I got an old Louisville Slugger—what about it?”
Florence thumped him on the chest with a meaningful forefinger. She said, “To the trademark, honey—to the trademark!”
30
Sunday
Willow drove west on Grand Avenue and into Franklin Park, studying his rear-view mirror the way a mystic studies a crystal ball. He pulled into the parking lot of the Grand Bowl, entered by the east door, exited by the south door, walked west and around the building to cut through the alley, stopping there to check the parking lot for Florence Gambrello’s bronze Mercury. No bronze Mercury. He found a pay telephone in the Grand Bowl vestibule and he called Raponi’s Old Naples Spaghetti House. When Florence Gambrello answered, he hung up, took a deep breath, and drove to North Austin Boulevard to park on a side street, feeling like Secret Agent ZZ-13 on the lam from the fucking KGB.
The Apollo Lounge was perking right along. The jukebox was whanging out “Mothers, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys,” and a few young people were in the dance area, standing in one place, wiggling their asses. They called it dancing, but the Tango was in no serious difficulty and neither was the Charleston. The bar was t
hree-quarters filled and Gladys Hornsby sat in a booth, demurely nipping at a screwdriver. Willow picked up a Kennessy’s Light Lager at the bar and sat across from her, placing the Wow-Wee photos facedown on the table at her elbow. He said, “Here’s twelve of ’em—best I could do. They were tacked to his bedroom wall. You get lucky?”
Gladys shook her head. “Not very.” She reached for the pictures and began reducing them to confetti. “That apartment was like a tomb and I couldn’t determine when she was there last—possibly on the afternoon I had to put her to bed.”
“No gun—no pictures?”
“No gun, but I found one very interesting picture.” She interrupted her shredding process to take a folded scrap of newspaper from her purse, handing it to Willow. “This was in a bureau drawer, and it disturbs me.”
Willow unfolded it, glanced at it, and said, “Who is this?”
“Look closely.”
Willow spent a minute peering at the picture—a smiling, burly, gray-haired man standing in front of a low building. “Casey Bucknell?”
“None other. Casey avoids cameras but the Globe caught him in a rare cooperative moment. He was at Seely Studios that afternoon, and he’d just announced Seely’s expansion into West Germany.”
“Who clipped it?”
“Aunt Rosie, obviously.”
“Any idea why?”
“No, and that’s what bothers me.”
“At that time you were already living with Bucknell?”
“Yes, for more than a month, as I recall.”
“And she didn’t know where you were?”
“Not until last Thursday, apparently.”
“And she’d never heard of Casey Bucknell?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
Willow shook his head. “Well, at least we’ve established one thing. Orlando had a dozen Wow-Wee shots and he’s the cat who killed Brumshaw.”
Gladys started to reply, glanced over Willow’s shoulder, bit off her words, and hurriedly swept the tom photographs into her purse. A big man was sliding into their booth on Willow’s side. He nodded to Gladys. “Miss Hornsby, is it?”
Gladys gave him a withering stare. “Is it?”
“Oh, sure, it is! I’d know you anywhere, Miss Hornsby! You’re talking to a man who saw Becky Johnson Comes Home!”
“Am I?”
“Great movie!”
“Was it?”
“Terrific!”
“How did your wife like it?”
Willow said, “Gladys, this is Lieutenant Buck Curtin of Chicago Homicide—I may have mentioned Lieutenant Curtin.”
Gladys yawned. “You may have and then again you may not have.”
Curtin said, “Say, Miss Hornsby, I sure enjoyed that part where you were taking that high-school quarterback to the cleaners!” He chortled and slapped his leg. “Man, that poor kid’s eyes were skidding around like pinballs!”
Gladys got up. “You’ll excuse me, Tut?”
Willow said, “Sure.”
She went out and Curtin’s eyes followed her until the door swung shut. He said, “Wow, what a hunk of woman!”
Willow said nothing.
Curtin said, “Willow, you must have a tongue like a paintbrush—that bimbo is two hundred years younger than you!”
“It comes with practice, Curtin—practice and dedication.”
Curtin said, “I don’t remember that rose tattoo from Becky Johnson Comes Home, but I sure remember the rest of her!” He jerked a cigarette from Willow’s pack on the table and lit up. “Oh, by the way, you were up at Millie and Jake’s Watering Hole this afternoon, weren’t you?”
“You know I was.”
“A guy got killed up there.”
“Deader than hell.”
“Man named Orlando.”
“Right, Joe Orlando.”
“You knew Joe Orlando.”
“Sort of.”
“Miss Hornsby knew Joe Orlando.”
“Orlando was a makeup expert and Miss Hornsby’s a fashion model—interlocking fields of endeavor. They figured to know each other.”
“Joe Orlando’s the guy who told us that you and Gladys Hornsby had been to Brumshaw’s office.”
“I believe you’ve mentioned that.”
“Orlando lives way the hell down in Elmwood Park.”
“Is that a fact?”
“And you live in River Grove.”
“True.”
“But Orlando gets scragged in an automobile that has your car blocked in a gin-mill parking lot clear up on North Austin Boulevard. That puzzles me.”
“Me too, by God.”
“What were you doing at Millie and Jake’s?”
“Watching a football game.”
“Go there often?”
“Not really, but I’ve been drinking on North Austin Boulevard since the Spanish Inquisition.”
“What was Orlando doing in that parking lot?”
“Getting himself murdered, apparently.”
“Did you hear a shot?”
“No.”
Curtin nodded. “Neither did anybody else. That makes it a silencer, wouldn’t you think?”
“Could be.”
“Orlando had a rose tattoo on his hand—just like Gladys Hornsby.”
“Oh?”
“And that ain’t all.”
“It ain’t?”
“Orlando had a tattoo of an orchid on his ass—Gladys Hornsby got an orchid on her ass?”
“I haven’t noticed.”
“One of these days I’ll find out.”
“I doubt it. She’ll kick your balls up around your ears.”
“Orlando had a blackjack.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Could it be he was laying for you?”
“I can’t imagine why.”
“Oh, maybe on account of a woman, some young thing you got no business messing around with.”
Willow didn’t say anything. Curtin looked like a bulldog but he was a fox.
Curtin’s smile was slow, and Willow wasn’t certain that it was one-hundred-percent smile. He said, “Well, it’ll all come out in the wash, won’t it, Willow?”
“Reckon so.”
Curtin said, “You see Becky Johnson Comes Home yet?”
“No, I thought it was out of circulation.”
“It’s still around, but you gotta look for it. The Parisixxx is gonna run it for three nights next week. Parisixxx—that’s with three xs—get it?”
“Where’s the Parisixxx?”
“Janesville, Wisconsin. I got a brother-in-law in Janesville—pain in the ass—never made an honest dollar in his life. You’d probably like him—birds of a feather.”
“Well, give him my best.”
Curtin said, “Sure thing.” He stood. “See you around, kid.” He left, taking Willow’s cigarettes with him, making no mention of a drunken nun, or of how he’d known that Willow was at the Apollo Lounge.
31
Monday
The next morning the Chicago Globe had it splattered all over its front page—a drawing of a nun with a skull where her face should have been. She brandished a blood-dripping scythe and there was a headline: DOES KILLER NUN STALK CHICAGOLAND?—all of this blossoming from an unsubstantiated report that a nun had been seen in the vicinity of a murder scene. Willow was undismayed—that was a Chicago Globe tradition of many years standing—ask an alarming or damned fool question, but never answer the sonofabitch. He remembered Chicago Globe headlines from earlier years—WILL MARTIANS ATTACK EARTH NEXT WEEK?—IS THE POPE A TRANSVESTITE?—WAS JOHN DILLINGER JFK’S FATHER?—IS BILLY GRAHAM A CIA AGENT? Like so many successful American newspapers, the Chicago Globe was owned by four-flushers and operated by character assassins, and its ability to turn puddles into oceans was far from unique in the publishing field. The killer-nun headline would sell two hundred thousand extra copies of the Monday edition and that was the point. Still, Willow thought, it might prove useful—it might
serve to flush Sister Rosetta into the open, if it had indeed been Sister Rosetta who’d been seen leaving Millie and Jake’s parking lot, and, what the hell, just how many drunken nuns go staggering through Chicago’s Northwest Side alleys on rainy Sunday afternoons? Willow found the headline’s supporting story on page 84, back among the used-car advertisements, sandwiched between an ’83 Thunderbird at $9500 and a ’72 Lincoln Mark IV at $6000—four or five lines stating that a nun may have been seen near where a UBS makeup man had been shot to death. There was no reference to a nun being at the Walton Building on the morning of Sam Brumshaw’s death.
Willow had smoked his wake-up cigarette at eleven-thirty, he’d taken his lukewarm shower and downed his morning can of Kennessy’s Light Lager. Then Florence Gambrello had called to announce that she’d be unable to control her raging passions until Friday night and that she’d be dropping in this evening, possibly as early as ten o ’clock, if she could work it out with Nick, and she was confident that she could. Willow, also being confident that she could, had dressed with unsteady hands. At Oscar’s Diner on River Road, he’d shoved his Chicago Globe down the counter to an elderly fellow who’d just come in, and he’d turned to his cheeseburger and his eggless vanilla milkshake. He was weary of fighting it—when you’re over the hill, you’re over the hill, and a few eggs ain’t gonna make that much difference. He ate quickly and went to the telephone to call the usual North Austin Boulevard drinking establishments and received the usual negative responses—Sister Rosetta?—not yet, not today. Once more he considered picking her lock and turning her apartment inside-out, and again he procrastinated, remembering all too vividly the Christ-awful scare Florence Gambrello had thrown into him on the previous evening. He returned to the counter for a cup of black coffee, thinking about Gladys Hornsby. Her situation was becoming touch and go. Once Sister Rosetta was identified, Chicago’s piranha press would tear the old woman gizzard from appetite, it’d link her to Gladys, then it’d tie Gladys to Casey Bucknell, and Bucknell would run for his life. Bucknell shunned the limelight, keeping his perversions under cover—he was a wary character—any bastard who’d put a Great Dane to his mistress and give her the old heave-ho because she’d posed for a dozen off-color pictures would be a lead-pipe cinch to hit the panic button under publicity pressure. There was, of course, one possible antidote for the whole scuzzy ball of wax, and Willow considered it at length, if not seriously. As things stood, Sister Rosetta was an odds-on favorite in the Orlando affair, but favorites win less than thirty-five percent of their starts, and what if the old dragon was innocent? If she was clean, she’d have to be extricated from the web of a Chicago Homicide investigation that’d be clicking into high gear before nightfall, and how does one go about exonerating a woman who can’t be found?
Death Wore Gloves Page 13
