Death House Doll

by Keene, Day

  “It’s the truth.” I started to crack wise again and thought better of it. He was a cop. He was only doing his job. “You see, she had a kid by my brother. He got his two months ago and before Johnny died I promised him that as soon as I got States-side I’d make arrangements to take care of her and the kid.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “You mean it’s the story you told to get in to see Mona.”

  I hadn’t liked Corson when I’d first seen him. He wasn’t growing on me. I shrugged. “Okay. Have it your own way. It’s the story I told to get in to see her.”

  One of the detectives asked, “Mona had a kid?”

  Captain Corson nodded. “It isn’t generally known, but she did. It’s in a nursing home out on the south side.” He looked back at me. “But considering the number of men she played house with before she took up with LaFanti and killed Stein, I don’t see how she can pin the kid on any particular man.”

  I tasted the hot dog I’d bought to take away the taste of the beer. Mona hadn’t looked like that kind of a girl.

  The same detective asked, “How does the birth certificate read?”

  “As I recall, John Duval,” Corson told him. “As far as I can tell it’s the only decent thing Mona ever did. I mean have her lawyer make a deal with the state’s attorney’s office to keep the kid out of the trial.” He turned back to me. “All right. Come on. Let’s start waltzing. How does LaFanti hope to spring Mona, and where did she plant the rocks?”

  I told the truth. “I don’t even know LaFanti.”

  They all laughed at that.

  It made me sore. I said, “That’s the truth.”

  I saw Corson’t fist too late. The blow caught me full in the mouth, knocking me back over the table into one of the chairs. The chair smashed under my weight and spilled me on the floor. I got to my feet spitting blood. “You son-of-a-bitch. I’ll kill you for that.”

  “You and how many other punks?” Corson asked.

  Before I could get set he followed up his first punch and fought me back against the wall. “Talk, you phony bastard. Why did LaFanti send you to see Mona?”

  I fought back as best I could, giving as good as I was taking. “I told you I don’t know the guy.” I got in a left to Corson’s stomach that doubled him up. Before I could finish him off the two plainclothes men grabbed my arms.

  One of them said, “The captain asked you a question.”

  “Water on the captain,” I told him. “You know what kind of water.”

  While they held me Corson hit me in the face again. “Talk, you phony bastard. Why did LaFanti send you to see Mona?”

  He started to slug me again and one of the plainclothes men said, “Oh, oh. Olson just walked in.”

  He and his partner let go of my arms.

  I looked at the door of the squad room. A slightly built middle-aged blond man was standing in the doorway. “What’s going on in here?” he asked.

  No one answered him. The four detectives who had been playing pinochle dragged up unbroken chairs and went back to their card game. The guys who had been holding me looked like they didn’t know what to do with their hands.

  The blond man came over to where we were standing. “What’s going on?” he repeated.

  Without turning his head, Corson said, “Look. You run your office, Olson, I’ll run mine. LaFanti’s up to something. I spotted it this morning when this Abbott and Costello soldier showed up at Mona’s old address asking where she was and how he could get in touch with her. He laid it on too thick, see? As if everyone doesn’t know where she is. Hell. She’s been front page for the last six months.”

  “That right, soldier?” the blond man asked me.

  I asked him who he was.

  He said, “My name is Olson. I’m First Assistant State’s Attorney.”

  I spat out a mouthful of blood. “Then either call this mad man off or give me a chance to take him. I’m minding my own business, standing on Randolph Street, when Corson and these other two guys waltz me up here. They said to talk things over.”

  “But you did go to see Mona Ambler?”

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  I picked my cap from the floor and put it back on my head. “To make arrangements to take care of my brother’s baby.”

  “Then your name must be Duval.”

  “Technical Sergeant Duval,” I corrected him.

  Corson didn’t seem as certain of himself as he had.

  “Did you go through him, Captain?” Olson asked.

  “No,” Corson admitted. “I didn’t.”

  Olson held out his hand. “Could I see your travel orders, Sergeant Duval?”

  I gave him my envelope. As with the prissy lad in Warden Kane’s office, Olsen knew what he was looking at.

  “Hmm. A medal of Honor man, eh?” he said. “A career soldier with twelve years in and just signed up for another hitch.”

  One of the two plainclothes men who had held me took off his hat and ran his handkerchief around the sweat band. The slap of the playing cards was plainly audible in the silence that followed Olson’s statement. Corson looked like he’d eaten something that hadn’t agreed with him. Like my hot dog, maybe.

  Olson handed back my papers. “I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am this happened, Sergeant Duval.” He looked at Corson. “And as far as you are concerned, Captain Corson, if the sergeant is inclined to prefer charges, I wouldn’t be surprised if this means your shield. You and your office have been warned time and again against unnecessary brutality. And it just so happens that Sergeant Duval’s campaign ribbons and medal bars aren’t phony, that he isn’t an Abbott and Costello.”

  Corson’s face was as gray as his hair. I knew he was thinking of his pension. “How was I to know the guy just got back from Korea? I never saw a G.I. with so many ribbons before, outside of General MacArthur.”

  “You have now,” Olson said.

  I could tell by the way Corson was looking at me that he wanted to say he was sorry, but was too stiffnecked to apologize. “You going to prefer charges?” he asked.

  I let him sweat a little. “I haven’t made up my mind.”

  Chapter Three

  OLSON’S OFFICE was on the floor below. He let me use his private lavatory to wash up and brush my uniform. Outside of a cut on the inside of my mouth and a few loose teeth, I hadn’t come out too badly. When I looked halfway G.I. again I walked out into his office and sat in the big leather chair in front of his desk.

  He’d come up with a bottle of rye, some ice and two glasses. As I sat down he started to pour. “Say when, Sergeant.”

  I let him half fill the highball glass before I said, “That will do fine.” My stomach was still queasy. I hoped the whiskey would settle it.

  Olson lifted his glass. “To the infantry.”

  “You were in it?” I asked him.

  “Thank God, no,” he smiled. He put on the same record he’d played up in the squad room. “I can’t begin to tell you, Sergeant, how sorry I am that —”

  I said, “Skip it. Corson thought he was doing his job.”

  “You’re charitable,” Olson said. “And realistic.”

  I sipped my drink. “What you can do is brief me on the case. If the girl has been tried and convicted and the date of her execution set why has Corson still got ants in his pants and where does this LaFanti come in?”

  Olson offered me a cigar. I shook my head at him. He slit the end of the cigar with a small gold pen knife and put the cigar in his own mouth. “It’s quite a story. We’ve had Mona listed as one of LaFanti’s girls for some time now. But outside of paying her lawyer, so far as we can tell, he hasn’t lifted a finger to get her a new trial or try for a commutation of sentence.” He laughed. “That’s what bothers Corson.”

  I didn’t get it. “Why should that bother Corson?”

  “Because LaFanti is one of our minor local big shots. And Corson t
hinks this silence and inactivity on his part is to lull us into a feeling of false security, that he, LaFanti that is, still hopes to come up with a fast one. You see it’s his open boast that his political connections are so strong that the State doesn’t dare execute anyone connected with him.”

  “He can make that stick?”

  “He has on several occasions in the past.”

  “How much longer has Mona?”

  Olson consulted the calendar on his desk. “Five days. We’re expecting, momentarily, some last move by LaFanti. Because of that and the fact that the diamonds for which Mona killed Stein are still missing and various insurance companies are eating off our tails, Captain Corson and his boys are back-trailing themselves. They’re trying to smell out anything they might have missed in the original investigation. I imagine that’s how he happened to pick you up outside her old address this morning.”

  I washed the cut on the inside of my mouth with rye. “How come the State is so anxious to burn the girl?”

  Olson looked down his nose at me. I couldn’t make up my mind whether I liked the guy or not. He was smooth, like all lawyers. To the average guy words are just something you say. He could make them bend around corners. “The State,” he corrected me, “is never anxious to see anyone executed. It is as much a part of the State’s Attorney’s office to protect the innocent as it is to prosecute the guilty. All we do is present the facts as gathered by the investigating officers and present them to the jury. It is the jury that determines the amount of guilt and the penalty, and the judge who set the date of execution.”

  “You handled the case personally?”

  “I did.”

  “And Mona killed this guy Stein?”

  “Beyond a shadow of a doubt.” Olson stood up back of his desk. “Excuse me a moment, Sergeant. I realize that because Mona bore, or claimed to have borne, your brother a child, you’d feel much better about this whole affair if all the details were clear in your mind.”

  “That’s for sure,” I admitted. “I only saw her for two minutes this afternoon, but she didn’t impress me as the kind of a girl who’d be in the mess she’s in.”

  Olson’s smile was thin. “I don’t wonder you feel that way about her. Her looks confused the jury. Despite the fact she confessed she killed Stein and her holograph confession was admitted as evidence, the jury stayed out for forty-six hours. And at one time, I believe, they stood six to six for acquittal.”

  He left the office. I sat wondering what holograph meant. There was a big dictionary on a metal stand in one corner of the office. I thumbed through it until I came to the word. According to Mr. Webster, the word holograph meant: A document, as a will, wholly in the handwriting of the purported author.

  Having confessed to killing the guy in her own handwriting seemed to remove any doubt as to her guilt. Still, the hard-faced matron had said:

  “I don’t care how many confessions she signed. Mona never killed anyone.”

  The hot dog still bothered me. I stood looking out over the city. At night Chicago looked like a big babe in a black velvet dress, hung with a billion dollars’ worth of jewels, and all hot and panting to go somewhere.

  Olson came back with a fat manila envelope and laid it on his desk. “I’ve the case history here. At least most of it.”

  It was the first time I’d ever seen a police file. The investigation read like a story. First there was the report of the radio car officers who had been sent to the hotel to investigate a shooting. Their report was dated 7:15 A.M., 1-25-’53

  I fingered on through the file. In the coroner’s report the approximate time of death was listed as 4:30 A.M. of the same date.

  “How come the lapse in time?” I asked Olson.

  He laughed. “You’re shrewd to catch that, Sergeant.”

  I said it didn’t take a mental giant to figure there was a gap of almost three hours between 0430 and 0715.

  He explained. “According to the story Mona told on the stand she sat terrified for three hours after she’d shot Stein, before she got up nerve enough to call the East Chicago Avenue Station.”

  There was nothing in the file concerning the three hours but a report by a Lieutenant Masters who said he had questioned the switchboard girl. She had admitted that Miss Ambler had made two early morning calls, but being a new girl on the desk she hadn’t known she was supposed to write down the numbers.

  The official pictures were the worst. There was a picture of the dead man lying nude on the bed, the sheet sodden with blood and various articles of intimate feminine attire scattered around the room. I stuck at a pair of size 4 high heel shoes with their toes pointed under the bed. There was no doubt what the bed had been used for before the guy on it had been shot.

  There was also a picture of Mona, her eyes swollen from crying, her lips smeared and her hair disheveled. She’d put on her dress but she was still bare footed and even in the picture you could tell she wasn’t wearing anything under the dress. She looked just like she had in the death house, like a frightened little girl. The only two mature things about her were her breasts and the heavy loop gold earrings.

  “Not very pretty, is it, Sergeant?” Olson asked.

  “No. It isn’t,” I admitted.

  The file was six inches thick. It would have taken me as many hours to read all the various police and laboratory reports. I looked at Olson. “Suppose you tell me the story.”

  He poured us another drink. “Well, as I presented it to the jury, from Mona’s own admission, verified by Captain Corson and the other investigating officers, Mona met Stein in a North Clark Street deadfall called The Furnace.”

  “It’s that kind of a joint?”

  “Decidedly so. We’ve been trying to close it for two years but it’s one of a string of such places owned by Joe LaFanti and, so far at least, he’s been able to pull enough political wires to keep us from taking any action.”

  I sipped at the drink he’d poured. “Go on.”

  “You’ve seen Mona. She’s pretty. Stein, a wholesale jewelry salesman from New York, was on the town and amorous. He wanted to buy what she had for sale, and that was fine with Mona. They took a cab from The Furnace to the apartment hotel in which she lived and their business transaction was consummated.” He glanced at one of the reports in the file. “It says here, for a fee of twenty dollars.

  “As I presented the case, it would have ended there but Stein, liking the merchandise he’d sampled, wanted more of the same and arranged to stay the night for an additional fifty dollars.” Olson’s smile turned smug. “I imagine he intended to put it on his expense account as ‘entertainment.’”

  My mouth felt hot and dry. I finished the rye in the glass. “Some entertainment.”

  Olson looked at the picture of Mona. “I have no doubt he got his money’s worth. Unfortunately, Mona had a bottle in her apartment and they continued drinking. Then, sometime during the early hours, drunk, wanting to show off in front of Mona, Stein showed her the fortune in un-set diamonds he was carrying in his specially made money belt.”

  “How big a fortune in diamonds?”

  “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars retail, their wholesale value insured at one hundred and twenty-five thousand.”

  I whistled.

  Olson continued. “Almost as drunk as Stein was, the diamonds intrigued Mona. She’s been one of LaFanti’s girls long enough to know that un-set diamonds are almost untraceable. Immediately her greedy little mind began to scheme. She fed Stein more of what he wanted and more whiskey. Between the two, he passed out. When she was certain he was out she crept out of bed, taking the belt with the diamonds in it with her.

  “Unfortunately Stein came to and realized what was happening. He threatened to call the police. They struggled on the bed and around the room. Then, according to the story Mona told the court, and which the jury decided to disbelieve, afraid for her life, she snatched from a drawer a .38 calibered revolver that one of her admirers had given her and shot S
tein in self-defense. She only shot him once. But as you can see by the pictures the bullet caught him in the left temple. And there she was with a dead man on her hands, or should I say in her bed?”

  “Then what happened?”

  Olson sucked at his cigar. “According to her story: still plenty high, she sat terrified for three hours wondering what to do. At 7:15, slightly sobered, she decided the best thing she could do was call the police.”

  “And the diamonds?”

  “They were never recovered. She refused to even talk about them.”

  “And the two phone calls?”

  “We were never able to trace them. Our theory is that one of the calls, possibly both, were to Joe LaFanti and he either sent one of his boys or came to the apartment personally, taking the diamonds with him when he left, allegedly to finance her defense. She didn’t say anything to you about the diamonds, did she?”

  I shook my head. “No.” There was something screwball about the story, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Olson asked if I wanted another drink. I said I’d had plenty and stood up. “Well, thanks.”

  “It was a pleasure, Sergeant Duval,” he assured me. “I’m only sorry that Captain Corson —”

  I stopped him. “I told you to forget it. Nice to have met you, Mr. Olson. See you around some time.”

  Out in the hall I wondered if I should have called him Mr. Attorney, or something. It was the first time I’d ever met a First Assistant State’s Attorney.

  The hot dog continued to bother me. I wished I hadn’t eaten the goddamn thing. Then, riding down in the elevator, I realized it wasn’t the hot dog that was bothering me. It was the little doll in the death house: a girl I’d only seen for two minutes, my dead brother’s widow, a twenty-dollar tart who’d scragged a wholesale jeweler for a quarter of a million dollars worth of diamonds.

  The big foyer was filled with uniformed cops and plainclothes men, coming and going, chewing the fat, talking about their wives and broads, bitching about their pay and tours of duty, like so many G.I.’s in a day room. Most of them had probably been G.I.’s, glad when they got that paper, when the big brass had said “duration.”