“Thanks a lot,” I said. “Aren’t you going to ask why I want to know?”
He shook his head no.
“If I don’t ask, I don’t know when someone else asks. Makes it easier.”
“You got a point,” I said and headed down Nineteenth.
There was an empty lot on the corner of Nineteenth and Komensky. Some kids wearing thin jackets were playing football in the snow. They called each other Al, Irwin, and Melvin and they screamed and laughed. One of the kids had one arm.
Forty thirty-eight was a three-story yellow building across from a wide, three-block long prairie. Cars were parked in the prairie near the street. The wind ran over a field of frozen weeds, hitting the cars and rocking them. The ground around the cars was covered with tire ruts made in the rain and now frozen solid and partly filled with shifting snow. A little kid sat in the recess of a narrow window on one side of the entrance to the building. The recess kept the worst of the wind away. The kid was about six, with a knit green cap over his head and ears. He wore corduroy knickers and a fuzzy jacket too light for the weather. The kid watched the cars and wind and played with a loose tooth in the front of his mouth.
“Hi,” I said pulling my collar around my neck. “My name’s Toby Peters. I’m a detective. What’s your name?”
“Stgsmmm,” he said, with a finger in his mouth.
“Stugum?”
“No,” he said with weary impatience removing his finger, “Stu-ard.”
“You live here?”
“Yuh.”
“Know a guy named Canetta? Wears an orange jacket?”
A sour look crossed Stu-ard’s face. His head went up and down once, showing he knew him.
“Second floor. Over us.”
“He there now?”
“Yuh, another guy too. Maybe two other guys.”
“You know the guys?”
“One’s Morris, comes here sometimes. I don’t know the other guy—a big guy I seen here yesterday.”
“Thanks,” I said, opening the door. “What are you doing out here in the cold?”
“Hit my baby sister and ran away,” he said, going back to his tooth. I gave him my scarf and wrapped it around his neck awkwardly, getting a suspicious look.
“Detectives get scarves free,” I explained.
“Detectives catch rats?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Dirty rats and killers.”
“I mean real rats,” the kid explained. I thought I saw a drop of blood on his gum from the squirming tooth. “We caught one in the phoney fireplace today. My dad’s home.”
I went inside and found Canetta’s name on the mailbox, scrawled in pencil right on the metal. The downstairs door in the hall was open. The hall was clean. I went up squeaky steps covered with clean but tired carpeting and stopped in front of the two doors on the second floor.
Behind the door on the left I could hear the bark of a small dog, and a woman shouting, “Quiet Peanuts.” Then she said something like, “Sheldon will find out about the noise when he gets home.”
I decided that wasn’t my door. The wind sang bass as I tried the handle on the second door and held my other hand on the .38, which lay cool and comfortable in my coat pocket.
The door was locked. I decided to knock and heard something scuttling inside—maybe one of the rats I was looking for. My nose was running again, but I didn’t have time or a free hand. I knocked again and thought I heard the scuttling sound move toward the door. It came slow and as it got closer, it sounded more like the dragging foot of the mummy from some Universal picture.
“Hello,” I said with a heavy Yiddish accent picked up from vague memories of my grandfather, “is here a Mister Canetta? I’m from landlord mitten da pipes.”
Someone fumbled at the lock inside and I stepped back, expecting to face the kid who had tried to steal my suitcase and whose nose I had broken. The door came open a crack and stayed that way.
“Somevone dere?” I asked. No answer.
I took a deep breath, wiped my nose on my sleeve, pulled out the gun and pushed the door open. I jumped inside and was about to go flat on the floor when I saw him. He was about three or four feet from me in a little reception area. His back was against a mirror on the outside of a closet. His knees were slightly buckled and his mouth was open. Blood trickled from his mouth and poured from his belly. He was a good thirty year older than Canetta—a little guy witha balding head gasping for air he couldn’t get. I moved to him, keeping low in the dark apartment. There was a living room behind me with some light coming in from the morning, but it wasn’t much of a morning.
The living room was furnished with dark, heavy furniture. I kept my back to it, and my eyes down the dark hall going the other way. With my free arm I helped the man sag to the floor. I had never seen him before, but I had the feeling he might be the Chico double I was looking for. The age and size were right. The face and features were probably close, but it was hard to tell. The face in front of me was twisted in pain and surprise. No one would mistake him for a Marx Brother if he were in the same room with the Brothers, but a good bluff might carry it off.
He tried to say something, and his eyes moved in the direction of the hall. I nodded to him that I understood, but I didn’t understand a goddam thing. Something gurgled inside of him and moved up his chest to his throat. It rattled his body and killed him. I lowered him gently and looked at myself in the bloody mirror. My hands were shaking. I held my breath for the count of ten and stepped as quietly as I could over the body and toward the apartment’s hall. The floor was uncarpeted and made of boards that squeaked above the outside wind like a carpenter driving nails.
I moved along the wall, my back against it and my gun pointing forward. A blast of machine gun fire would cut through me like the man in the alcove before I could get off a shot. I hoped the guy with the chopper was gone, but I couldn’t be far behind him. My feet slipped slightly in something wet and sticky, probably the trail of blood from the dead guy who had let me in.
I hit an open door and put as little of myself into it as I could. It was a bedroom with a single window, a single chest of drawers, a painting of a peacock on the wall, and a closet with holes in it. The holes made a curving line, as if someone had done a graph of the weather or stock market in bullets. The man in the hall had probably been shot in the closet, I thought, but something changed my mind—a sound from the closet. I inched along the wall and kicked the door open. There was nothing at eye level and only a few shirts on the hangers inside. Sitting on the floor with a pair of pants and a wire hanger in his clenched fingers was the kid who had tried for my suitcase in Indianapolis. I couldn’t see much of him in the dark, but I saw enough. His nose was bandaged where I had hit him, but it would take more than bandages to take care of what had happened to him now.
One of the bullets that went through the closet had hit him in the neck. Another two had caught him high on the chest. He wasn’t as messy as the guy in the other room, but it looked just as fatal. He saw me and tried to say something.
I got low and moved into the closet, keeping my eyes jumping from him to the bedroom door.
“Get cop,” he sputtered, and started to cough.
“I’ll call the cops,” I said. “They’ll be here in a few minutes. Who shot you?”
He looked at me as if I were crazy. His eyes opened wide and his head moved back and forth. He wet his lips to say something, opened his mouth wide, let out a guttural sound and froze, looking at me. It was a still photograph, a frozen frame of film and time. He would look at me forever unless I moved, because he was dead.
But I didn’t move. The closet door did. It slammed with a crack. I froze.
The question was: was there something about me that made people want to use me for a bullet pin cushion? Did I ask for it by looking like a victim or a person who was worth a quarter of a pound of lead, but not a quarter of an hour of conversation? Those are the kinds of things you think of when you expect to have
someone fill you full of holes. At least that’s what I thought. The experience is free for those who have a chance to test it and survive.
Maybe, I thought, I like having people shoot at me. That made me think of my brother’s bullet hole, the only one he had. He didn’t get his on the street chasing some stupid kid who robbed a candy store. He didn’t get his from a former movie star who thought he was coming too close to a secret. He didn’t get his from a mob triggerman in a closet. Phil Pevsner got his in the great war.
Phil had enlisted in 1917 when he was twenty-two. He was big and tough and angry at the Germans. Then he caught a long, thin pointed German rifle bullet in his stomach in some Belgian woods, during some battle that didn’t make the newspapers and was a cinch to miss the history books. Phil had a medal to show for it. The medal had been worth two bucks and a job as a cop. I was sure Phil now imagined suspects as German soldiers—the German soldiers he never got his hands on.
In honor of Phil’s failure to get to the Germans during the war, I had renamed our old dog Murphy, Kaiser Wilhelm, knowing Phil’s fondness for throwing a kick at the animal if I wasn’t around. Phil never really appreciated my consideration. Someplace I had a photograph of Phil just before he shipped out for the week he would spend in Europe. He had his uniform pants tucked into shiny boots, his neat jacket, and his doughboy cap right on the top of his head with the chin strap tight under his chin.
Nostalgia was getting me nowhere. With a corpse in my lap, and my back against a cold wall, I started to feel a chill. I could do without irony. I had found the flu in Chicago, but had avoided the backache I had almost learned to live with. If my back hit now, the triggerman wouldn’t even have to shoot. He could just leave me sitting against the cold wall in a cramped position for an hour or two, and I’d never be able to stand up straight again.
Maybe, I thought, I could yell through the door and persuade the killer that I was the harmless remnant of a man, a soon to be elbow-shaped creature worthy of curiosity, not hatred or fear. Those were my semidelirious thoughts at the top level of consciousness. I shared them with the still warm corpse of a kid named Bitter Canetta, who had plenty to be bitter about.
Someplace a lot deeper down, I knew I was going to get on my knees and hope my back had enough spring left in it for me to get out of the closet fast and possibly hit the killer before he could hit me. I listened for footsteps, but I couldn’t tell. The wind and creaking of the building didn’t help at all, and the rats scurrying in the walls weren’t cooperating.
There was a thin space between the bottom of the closet door and the floor. The morbid winter grey light spread through the bullet holes and under the door, but not very far. Clouds and daydreams of killers darkened the beams.
My back tightened low on the left but let me get up on my knees. I had to lift Canetta off of me and into the corner, but there wasn’t much room for moving and lifting in the closet. I remembered seeing something with Lillian Gish years before in which Donald Crisp had locked her in a dark closet. She went crackers, thrashing all over, screaming. I wondered if Al Capone had felt like Lillian Gish when he was on Alcatraz. I wondered if he had felt the way I did in that closet.
My foot slipped on a shoe and some old newspaper. My agility and silence made the USC marching band sound like silent prayer. I was sure I heard something outside the door, in the bedroom. I was sure I saw a shadow through the holes in the door. My knees ached, but my back felt all right. I thought of putting my eye next to one of the bullet holes in the door, but the thought of getting shot in the face made me sick to my stomach. I’d seen a few with slugs in the face. I backed as far as I could against the wall with my gun in my hand, reached out for the handle, and shot my 160 pounds out of the door. The door banged open behind me, closed and opened again.
My spring sent me forward toward where I figured the gunman was, but he wasn’t. I hit the bed and flew over it against the window. The window quivered and held. As I slid to the floor, losing my gun, I got a glimpse of the concrete courtyard two flights down. I could have been splattered on it if I had gone through the glass.
If anyone had been in the room I would have been dead, if he weren’t convulsed with laughter. It would take a pretty wild joker to find the whole thing funny, but my pal with the chopper didn’t seem to be too upset by the corpses he was leaving. I scrambled for my gun, making more noise, and having the flash of an idea that the killer might want to be found and was leaving corpses as Hansel and Gretel left pieces of bread or ginger ale or whatever. If I survived, and he killed enough people, I might be able to follow the trail to him. I also remembered that for some reason Hansel and Gretel’s trick didn’t work and that I hadn’t believed in fairy tales for thirty-five years.
I finally got both hands on my .38 and got up with it. The dead Canetta just looked at me dumbfounded. It was winter in a freezing apartment, and I was sweating.
I wanted to inch my way back to the front door as fast as I could and get the hell out of there. I wanted to tell myself that I had arrived too late and the killer was long gone. But I knew it couldn’t be so. With the bullet holes in them, Canetta and the other guy hadn’t been a long time dying, and besides, the kid downstairs had said three men were up here. I sat listening, trying to hold my breath. I thought I heard a squeak of floor somewhere in the back of the apartment, further into the darkness of that hall. It didn’t have to be a person. It didn’t have to be someone waiting me out, but it probably was.
I got off the squeaking bed, knowing that if someone was back there he sure as hell knew that I was there and had found his bodies. I could have opened the window and yelled “help” into the wind, but I went back to the hall.
A shot lit up the darkness like a flared match and whistled past my head down the hall. It wasn’t a machine gun. I jumped back into the bedroom and heard fast footsteps and the opening of a door.
I went back into the hall, took a shot down the hall to lead the way, and went carefully but fast in the direction of the door sound. I found a toilet and a small dining room that led into a smaller kitchen with a worn yellowish linoleum floor. The back door was open, and the storm door banged in the wind.
I stepped out onto the grey painted wooden porch and listened. I could hear clotheslines creaking and footsteps hurrying below me. I leaned over the railing into the whirling snow and looked down at an empty concrete courtyard. A figure wearing a dark coat and carrying a black case ran across the open space toward the corner of the building. I leveled my pistol and took a shot. Chips of brick sprayed near his head. He didn’t look back.
I ran down the steps, slipping a couple of times on the patches of ice. Somewhere I could hear the wail of police sirens over the weather and the thubbing of my heart. Someone, maybe the old lady who was waiting for Sheldon, had called the cops about machine-gun shots. Even with the wind, someone must have heard what looked like at least forty rounds of explosion.
Running across the snowy sidewalk of the courtyard, I turned the corner and ran through a passageway to a street. Half a block ahead I could see the figure with the suitcase. I figured I had been lucky. I had arrived when he had put the machine gun away. Whoever he was, even if he had a car waiting, couldn’t carry a machine gun through the streets. That was why he had taken the shot at me with a hand gun. The few seconds I had stopped to talk to the kid downstairs had probably kept him from decorating the apartment with me along with Canetta and the little man.
I couldn’t get a good look at the guy, who was moving pretty well on the empty streets in the snow considering the fact that he was carrying a fifteen pound machine gun in a suitcase.
Running was hard. No one shoveled the walks in this neighborhood. It was tough to cut the distance between us. Everytime I tried to hurry, I slipped, but I kept the distance between us the same. There were definitely police cars somewhere behind, but I didn’t stop to worry about them. If the guy with the chopper had someone in a car waiting, it was far from where he had used his gun. If
he had a car parked, I had stayed close enough to him to keep him from jumping into it without risking a clean shot from me as he took time to start it and drive away, especially on a snowy street.
We kept chugging through snow, my pant legs dripping wet, steam coming from my mouth. I didn’t know what kind of shape he was in for a cross-country race.
He turned a corner and headed east toward Pulaski. I kept up. In two short blocks he crossed Pulaski. I had cut the distance by about fifteen feet and was sure I’d have him. He was slowing down. Then he got lucky. Streetcars didn’t run often on Sunday in Chicago, but one pulled up at the corner as he crossed the street. It was heading north and he got on. I was too far away to catch it and bothered by the blowing wind and low visibility to make out his face even if he had turned it toward me, which he carefully did not.
The red streetcar headed north and I stood panting. I still had some run left in me, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to take on a streetcar. I decided to give it a try anyway. Maybe a cab would come by and I could catch it and the streetcar. There weren’t many people on the street, which looked like it was normally commercial. Sunday and bad weather kept the number down to a handful as I trotted into unknown territory after the slow-moving streetcar.
It stopped to pick up a passenger on Sixteenth Street but pulled away before I could cut the distance very much. The sidewalks of Pulaski were shoveled reasonably clean, and I would have caught up with the streetcar on a day when it made normal stops to let off and pick up people. As it was, even with traffic lights, I kept it in sight. The streets moved up in numbers. By Twelfth Street, I had managed to keep from losing ground and I was sure the man with suitcase had not gotten off. But it was man against machine. The man was sucking in chilled air fast and feeling the pain of unfamiliar cold.
I leaned against a delicatessen on the corner of Twelfth and Pulaski and was stared at by a small, bearded man dressed entirely in black. He picked up a discarded cigarette butt that had melted a hole in a bank of shoveled snow and turned his back on me.
You Bet Your Life: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Three) Page 9
