The Cop

by R.J. Ellory

  “Yep.”

  “What happened?”

  I was going to sugarcoat it, but there had to be a time you’d take the blinkers off and let your kids see the world they were growing up in. See some of it, at least.

  “A bad man killed a woman, and today I have to find him and take him to jail.”

  “Why’d he kill her?”

  “I don’t know, Dougie, I just don’t know. When we find him that’ll be the first question we ask him.”

  “Is Uncle Pete helping you?”

  “Sure is.”

  “I like Uncle Pete. He makes me laugh.”

  “He makes me laugh too.”

  “Hey, you know that game we saw on TV . . .”

  And so it went. Asked his questions, got his answers, and then we were talking about whether or not the Sox had a prayer. Thursday had seen them lose to the Yankees at Comiskey Park. Harshman faced three batters in the 4th, did his best, but those guys came out seven on top. Broke my heart. You saw players like Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra out on that field, and you just wanted the world to shift on its axis. 10-3. Two and three quarter hours of heartache, and we came out 10-3. Son of a bitch.

  I dropped Dougie off, waved to him as he ran up to school, pulled away and headed to meet Pete at the precinct house.

  “We got a lead,” he said as I walked in the door. He was waiting in the lobby.

  “Tell me.”

  “Crime Scene found a restaurant check in the girl’s purse. Just called the place. They remember her and a dark-haired guy last night. Said they split the bill on dinner. Said that they had words at the table as he really wanted to pay the check and she wouldn’t let him.”

  “How’d we know it’s the same girl?”

  “Described her, described him, and it was a quiet night. Only four tables the whole evening.”

  “Let’s go,” I said, and we were out of there.

  The restaurant—Hannigan’s—was low-slung and discreet. Kind of place rich fellers took cheap dates, or maybe cheap fellers took expensive dates hoping that it might just make the grade. I didn’t know what we were dealing with, the former or the latter. They had a blue plate special and a meat and three, but the menu looked mostly Italian, a lot of pasta and tomato arrangements going on.

  The owner and the waitress that had served our folks were already there. Pete had done good. Pete Quinn didn’t only make my kid laugh, he was also a damned fine detective.

  We asked the standard questions, needed to know if either of them had heard the girl use the guy’s name. They couldn’t help us with that. They figured him for late-twenties, early thirties, same as Mrs. Gerrity in the Shangri La had guessed. Slim, maybe five ten or eleven, dark hair, good-looking.

  I asked what had happened with the check, and the waitress concurred with what Pete had already learned.

  “He really wanted to pay the whole check,” she said. Her name was Brenda, she was maybe thirty-five or so. She’d had her hair dyed a touch too dark and it didn’t suit her complexion.

  “Anyway, he really wanted to pay, and she said no, and it was kind of a bit awkward, you know? I was standing there listening to them, and I didn’t know where to look.”

  “So what happened?”

  “They agreed to split it, but then he left me a buck tip as well.”

  “Anything about him at all? Anything that could help us identify him?”

  Brenda shook her head. “I waited on them, that was all. I didn’t really speak to them, and I certainly didn’t overhear any of their conversation, apart from something he said about how she made him feel like the King of Egypt. They seemed to be having fun. They were quite drunk, and he said something about—”

  Brenda hesitated.

  “What?” I said. I saw the flash in her eyes.

  “The Blue Parrot. I heard him say Blue Parrot.”

  I waited for her to explain, and even as she started I got it.

  “That fancy cocktail place on—”

  “I know the one,” I said. “That’s where they’d come from, or that’s where they were headed?”

  “That’s where they were going,” Brenda said. “He said so as he helped her with her coat. He said, ‘Let’s go to The Blue Parrot,’ and she said okay, that she’d been there before and it was a nice place.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’s really good, Brenda. Okay, anything else at all, however small it might seem, however irrelevant.”

  Brenda was thoughtful. She knew she was helping. She wanted to help, as most folks did, especially when they thought it might get a crazy off the streets. However, there was nothing else she had for us.

  We thanked her and left. The manager held the door open for us, handed me a discount flier.

  “Come back sometime,” he said. “We do a good lunch.”

  It was too early for The Blue Parrot crowd. Pete called the precinct, got them to look up the business owner. We called him in, told him to find whoever was on the bar the night before. We needed all of them at work now.

  “What’s it all about?” he said, thinking maybe we were going to bust him for his overdue liquor license or some such, but we told him it was an investigation into the murder of a client.

  Pete and I smoked cigarettes and waited in the car. Leads like this had to be chased down relentlessly. You found people and you asked them for anything they could remember as fast as possible. Things were forgotten so quickly. Faces disappeared. One day blurred seamlessly into the next. Was that last night or the night before? Jeez, sorry, I just don’t recall so clearly. Sorry I can’t help you.

  By ten we had the gathering assembled. The owner, a skinny guy with a pencil moustache called Marvin Letts, was all fingers and thumbs, nervous as hell. Could’ve put money on the fact that he had stolen booze in the cellar, stolen cigarettes in the vending machines, the works. I wasn’t interested. I just wanted to know if anyone remembered Carole Shaw and her date. I showed them her picture. The barkeep and one of the waitresses got her immediately.

  “She was real pretty,” the barkeep said. “She sat at the bar with her guy. They had whiskey sours, both of them. She said she wanted a Ward 8, but I didn’t have no Grenadine. They talked for a while, and then they moved to the number three booth back there.”

  “And you served them there?” I asked the waitress.

  “Yes, I did. They had two or three more drinks, and then they left.”

  “Time?”

  She glanced at the barkeep, shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know, maybe eight or so, I’m not sure. Perhaps a little earlier . . .”

  Yet again, that tied in with the statement from Mrs. Gerrity at the apartment building. It was a short bus ride from here to there, unless—of course—they took a cab.

  “Do you know if they left in a cab, or did they walk?”

  The waitress couldn’t help, nor the barkeep.

  “It was just starting to get busy,” she said. “It was quiet when they arrived, and then it got real busy about eight.”

  “And what did he look like?” I asked.

  “He looked okay,” she said. “Kind of skinny. No, not skinny. Slim maybe. He had real dark hair, clean-shaven.”

  “He look like Montgomery Clift?” I asked.

  She smiled suddenly. “Hell, now you come to mention it, yes he did. Maybe just a little. Not as handsome, but maybe a little like that.”

  “So they have three or four drinks, one at the bar, a couple in the booth, and then they leave around eight. Anyone see which way they went, left or right?”

  “Left,” the barkeep said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I was watch—” he stopped suddenly, a little embarrassed.

  “She was a pretty girl, right?”

  He nodded. “I watched her leave. I saw her through the front window. They went left.”

  I looked at Pete. Pete nodded.

  “Good,” I said. “Anything else at all. Anything.”

  There wasn
’t. Pete gave the manager a card, told him to call us if anyone remembered anything else.

  We left the bar, went up and down the street both ways. Nearest cabstand was half a block to the right, bus stop that took a route to the Shangri La was on the left.

  “Call the bus company. Get the bus schedule. Find out who was on this route between seven and nine last night, tell them we’re coming over to speak with the drivers right now.”

  I went back into the bar to use their restroom, and just to make sure no one’d had a sudden return of memory.

  The manager was just too polite and accommodating to be honest, but I didn’t have time to wind him up.

  Pete had the bus company thing under control, and we went over there. By the time we were organized and had everyone’s attention it was close to noon. Carole Shaw had been dead about fifteen hours. Her killer could have made it to Canada.

  We found the driver without any trouble.

  “I remember them,” he told us. “I remember her and the guy she was with because they had a five-buck bill for the fare and they had to get change from some of the passengers. She was laughing a lot, and I think he was a little embarrassed by her.”

  “Where did you drop them off?”

  “Corner of Lombard and 19th Street as far as I recall. She told me to have a nice day, and he was telling her to keep it down, you know?”

  “And this was when?”

  The driver shrugged. “On that route at that time of night, I’d be on Lombard by 7:50, 7:55 maybe.”

  Lombard and 19th was right near the Shangri La building where Carole Shaw lived. Mrs. Gerrity had the girl and her killer coming in about eight or eight-fifteen. It was all slotting together like a jigsaw puzzle. We had their route, we had the schedule, we had the victim, but we weren’t any the wiser as to who the guy was. But that was how it worked out in so many cases. This one just seemed to be running faster than usual. People did remember them, they did see them together, they did know where they had gone. So now we had everything leading up to the entrance to her apartment, and nothing beyond that but her dead body on the kitchen floor.

  Pete did the thing with the cards—“Anything else you remember, you call us . . .”—and then we were on our way back to the precinct.

  We worked back through what we had, and we had nothing. We knew where they had been in the evening, but we didn’t know where they’d originally met that day, or even whether they were a longstanding item or a new thing. Carole Shaw had split from the Kramer guy six weeks ago. She could have found someone else in that time no problem. The someone else could have been a regular thing long before she split from Kramer and he could have been the reason for the split. What I didn’t have was the early part of the day. That was important, and it wasn’t until breakfast the following morning that I got something.

  It came from Dougie, believe it or not. God bless him. There I was wolfing down a plate of eggs, inhaling some coffee, and he said something about a school trip to see the tooting cartoon.

  “Sorry, son?”

  “The tooting cartoon. That’s what Mrs. Danvers says we’re going to see next week.”

  “Evie?”

  Evie appeared in the doorway.

  “What’s this Dougie’s talking about? Some cartoon he’s going to see with the school?”

  She frowned.

  “The tooting cartoon,” Dougie pipes up.

  Evie smiles. “He means Tutankhamun. There’s an exhibition of artifacts at the Field Museum. There’s a consent form somewhere. He’ll need a packed lunch and a buck for a drink and souvenirs.”

  I saw the waitress’s face then, Brenda with the too-dark hair, the one from Hannigan’s.

  something he said about how she made him feel like the King of Egypt . . .

  An odd thing to say. One hell of an odd thing to say. Unless . . .

  I called Pete.

  “We’re going to the Field Museum,” I said. “I think that’s where they were yesterday.”

  “What—”

  “Meet you there in half an hour. I’ll explain when I see you.”

  Traffic was tight, took me all of twenty-five minutes to get out there, add on the ten minutes it took me to escape the house and I was running late. Pete Quinn had already arrived. He was standing at the bottom of the steps smoking a cigarette.

  I told him about Dougie and the cartoon, the comment from the waitress.

  We went up and found that the desk attendant from the previous day wasn’t in for another half an hour. The floor manager—late fifties, name of Howard Schumann—seemed to be the go-to guy, and we tracked him down in the Tutankhamun exhibit.

  “He was quiet, she was noisy,” Schumann told us.

  “You remember them?”

  “Sure I do. It’s real slow here in the day, relatively speaking. The exhibition is closing at the end of next week, and most folks who want to see it have seen it already.”

  “Is there anything at all that you recall about them, anything about their names, things they said, the way they acted together, important or unimportant, it doesn’t matter . . . anything that stands out in your mind?”

  “He was in the army.”

  “The army? You spoke to him?”

  “Some, yes. Not a great deal.”

  “How come he mentioned that?”

  “Because of my leg.”

  I frowned.

  Schumann took a little walk around in a circle. His left leg dragged a good deal. “He asked if I was okay, had I hurt myself? I told him it was a war wound. He said he did two years in the military, never saw the war, but he did his basic and served a couple of years.”

  “Did he say where?”

  “He didn’t, no, but I could tell he had.”

  “How so?”

  “Same way you could tell if a man had been in the police department. You just know.”

  “What else?”

  “There isn’t a great deal else. They wandered around a bit. She was laughing a lot. I had to ask her not to touch anything, and he was telling her not to cause trouble. They just seemed like a nice young couple. Definitely hadn’t known each other a long time.”

  “Why d’you say that?”

  “You can tell that too, right? They weren’t very physical, but you could tell they wanted to be. He held her hand a couple of times, and then he let go. They weren’t very comfortable, if you know what I mean.”

  I was surprised that Schumann was so attentive, so perceptive.

  “Hell, I ain’t got nothing to do all day but watch folks walk around this place,” he added as way of explanation. “I might be completely wrong, but they looked like a new thing to me.”

  “That’s really good,” I said. “Anything else?”

  Schumann was pensive for a moment, and then he shook his head. “No,” he replied. “That’s all I got for you.”

  “And what time were they here?”

  “10:30 maybe, something like that. We don’t open until 10:15 on the weekdays, so they were here pretty much as soon as we opened. They were the first ones in. They were here maybe an hour, an hour and a half, then they left. Maybe two other visitors the entire time they were here.”

  “And you don’t know who these other visitors were, by any chance? Did you speak to any of them?”

  “No, didn’t speak to anyone else. Sorry.”

  “And you don’t record names of visitors at the desk, right?”

  “Right.”

  We thanked Schumann, gave him a card, went back down to find the desk attendant. He vaguely remembered the girl from the picture I showed him, but there was nothing else.

  As we left the museum I outlined my thoughts for Pete.

  “It’s a school day,” I said. “She’s going to the exhibition. That means it was more than likely planned. I want to go back to the apartment and see if she had a diary or a journal, anything where she might have written her schedule down. I want to see if she’s got his name down to go to the exhibition wit
h her. And we’ll call the school. I want to know if she had a leave booked, or if she took a sick day.”

  Back at the girl’s place there was nothing. We were there for a while, an hour perhaps. There was no diary, no journal that we could find. We also got hold of the school and learned that she had a day booked every month. The third Monday.

  I stood in the kitchen. Pete was seated.

  “So she takes a day off every third Monday, but this Monday she decides to go to the museum. She’s there as soon as it opens.”

  “Diners, restaurants in the vicinity,” Pete suggested. “Maybe she had breakfast, a cup of coffee while she waited for the museum to open.”

  “Let’s go,” I said, and we left Carole Shaw’s apartment to drive back across town.

  Canvassing was a raw deal. Always had been, always would be. There was no easy way to do it, and when you were working on something as tight as this, well, you figured you needed to do the legwork yourself. Perhaps unfair, but if it was your case then you believed that you’d pay more attention than a uniform, you’d ask one more question, get whoever to look at the picture of the vic just one more time in the hope that it would jog some half-forgotten memory.

  We did diners, restaurants, coffee houses, even newsstands, and we were running ragged.

  We took one more block west, finding places where the guy on-shift yesterday was not the guy on-shift today, where such-and-such a waitress was sick and wouldn’t be in until tomorrow, and then we hit pay dirt.

  “Yep, remember them clear as daylight,” the short order cook told us.

  It was a diner on 9th, a small place, neat and clean. The counter faced the kitchen, and you could watch the cook make up your breakfast as you drank your coffee. The cook’s name was Stanley Hayes.

  “They were sat next to one another. She spilled her coffee. He helped her clean it up. They got to talking, and then they left together.”

  “So they didn’t come in together?”

  “Nope. He was here first, minding his own business. She comes in and sits right beside him.”

  “The place was busy.”

  “So-so. Nothin’ special. It was about nine or so. Early for the late breakfasts, late for the earlies, if you know what I mean.”

  “So she could have sat several other places?”