by Clark Howard
“Wally, if you were bothered having all the undressed women around, why’d you work there?” Dietrick asked quietly, his question not a challenge or criticism of any kind.
“I had to work where Mr. Getman told me to work,” Wally said. “I been working for him for a long time, five or six years. I clean his poolroom over on Pulaski Road, and his cigar store on Lake Street, an’ I take care of the furnace in an apartment building he owns. I’ve always done the 4-Star for him, even back when there wasn’t no dancers, when it was just a bar.”
“I understand. Why don’t you tell me about Ronnie Lynn now, Wally?” the Homicide detective suggested.
Wally shrugged. “What do you want to know?”
Kiley and Meadows exchanged quick glances, each wondering if the suspect was tightening up on Dietrick; if he was beginning to dummy up now that the scary “ghost” of his victim could no longer be seen.
“Well,” Dietrick said, shrugging also, “for instance, did you like her; did you like any of the women who danced there?” Kiley was relieved to find that Dietrick, despite his wrestler-like appearance and dickhead reputation, had a conversational, almost gentle interrogation technique. Kiley also became aware that a heavy body odor was becoming evident in the close little room.
“Sure,” Wally replied, “I liked all the girls. I would’ve taken any of them home with me, kept her, taken care of her, supported her. I liked the white girls best, naturally; then the black girls; the gook girls I didn’t like very much: I didn’t like to look at those funny eyes they had, an’ most of them didn’t have much in the tit department.”
“A tit man, huh?” Dietrick said with a conspiratorial leer and a quick, buddy-buddy wink.
“You got me there, Mr. Dietrick,” Wally replied with a wide smile that was eerily engaging considering the circumstances.
“George,” the detective told him. “Call me George.” Taking out a handkerchief, Dietrick brushed at his nose. The body odor was becoming very heavy.
“Sure, George,” Wally replied, pleased.
“You have a favorite among the girls?” Dietrick asked.
“You bet. Ronnie. She was my favorite.”
Dietrick tried not to seem surprised. “Oh, yeah?” he said calmly. “Why was she your favorite?”
“Well, George, first of all, I could tell right away she wasn’t no city girl,” Wally said analytically. “The city girls, you know, they’re all smartasses, think they know it all, an’ they always badmouth the customers. Ronnie wasn’t like that. She was from a small town and it showed. She never said nothing mean or nasty about no one, not even Laver, who nobody liked. An’ she didn’t talk down the customers neither. Some of the girls call the customers names: you know, ‘fucking animals’ and ‘pervert assholes’ and things like that; but not Ronnie. She always seemed to like the customers, an’ I guess they must have felt it ’cause Ronnie always knocked down twenty, thirty a shift in tips when the others was making ten or fifteen.”
“So Ronnie was your favorite because she was such a nice person,” said Dietrick.
“Yeah. That and her tits, George. She had the best tits of all the dancers.” Wally seemed to stare off in space. “Nice and big around, but not hard like the ones with that Jell-o or whatever it is in them. An’ she had nice big nipples that had a lot of neat little bumps on them an’ stuck out hard but wasn’t pointed like the gook girls’ nipples are.” Wally smiled. “I think she knew I liked her tits, because whenever I’d go and get snacks and stuff for the dancers, Ronnie would always let her robe hang open when she paid me, so’s I could see them real good. I’m pretty sure she knew.”
“Wally, tell us what happened to Ronnie in the alley,” Dietrick soothingly eased the story along.
“Well, this guy Tony called her on the phone, see. He was some sharpie hood, had kind of a mean look; I’d see him sometime when he come to pick her up. Mr. Getman and Laver, they fell all over themselves trying to be nice to him, so I figured he was either somebody important or he was dangerous, you know? He wore real slick clothes, drove one of them foreign cars—”
Kiley practically had to bite his tongue to keep from asking what color the car was. Next to him, Meadows also had a handkerchief out now; body odor pervaded the little room like smoke.
“So anyways,” Wally continued, “he called on the phone, I answered, he says go get Ronnie, tell her Tony’s on the phone. No fucking please or nothing, you know? So I knock and holler for Ronnie to come to the phone. While she’s out on the phone, there’s no other girl in the dressing room; one was on stage and one was in the john. The door’s open, so I went in to collect the trash an’ I had my broom to maybe sweep up real quick. While I’m in there, this gook dancer, Amy, comes back in from the john, then Ronnie comes back from the phone and says to Amy, ‘That was Tony on the phone. He’s going to meet me out back in half an hour to get his ring and give me those pictures he took. I will be so glad,’ she says, ‘to be out of that relationship.’ Then Amy says something like, ‘Never suck a guy off for pictures unless you get paid, honey.’ That’s the way the gook girls are, you know: anything for money. Except with me. I offered a gook hooker money one time on the street an’ the cunt walked away from me without a word. Can you believe a hoor like that, George?”
Dietrick shook his head in resignation. “Just goes to show you, Wally, you never can tell about people. This boyfriend—what was his name? Tony?—did he actually come over and meet Ronnie back in the alley?”
“Yeah, sure. I went downstairs in the basement. The furnace an’ all my cleaning supplies an’ stuff is down there. An’ there’s a door to the alley, at the bottom of some steps. So I left the light off and the door open a few inches.” Wally grinned. “I’ll be honest with you, George: I was hoping they’d do something out there an’ I could watch.”
“Did they do anything?”
“Nothing,” Wally said, “not a damn thing.” The disappointment seemed still to annoy him. “All he did was pull into the alley in that sports car of his, an’ Ronnie was standing there waiting for him. He says, ‘You got the ring?’ and she says, ‘You got the pictures?’ Then he says, ‘What, you don’t trust me?’ But he hands her an envelope and she glances inside it, then she takes a ring out of her robe pocket and hands it to him. He smiles and says, ‘I got another finger waiting for this already.’ ‘I know you’re a fast worker, Tony,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to remind me.’ He laughs, gets back in his little faggot car, and drives off.”
Wally stopped talking and did not immediately resume. Dietrick waited, nodding as if he understood the silence, as if he knew that it was only a temporary pause. But Wally looked up at the ceiling, as if he were through talking for the day. Dietrick gave him a full ninety seconds, then asked, “Is that coffee okay, Wally? I notice you’re not drinking it?”
“It’s fine, George,” the little janitor said. “I’m just not very thirsty.”
“Wally, what made you come up out of the basement after Tony drove away? You weren’t mad at Ronnie or anything, were you?”
Wally shook his head. His expression turned sad and he blinked several times as if to check tears. “I—I didn’t come out to hurt her, George, I swear to God I didn’t—”
“I know that, Wally,” the detective said. “She was your favorite.”
“Right. An’ I didn’t plan to hurt her, I want you to believe me—”
“I do believe you, Wally. But why did you come out of where you were hiding?”
“I wanted to help her, to comfort her. She started crying—”
“Crying about what?”
“The pictures Tony had given her. She went over by the back door of the club, where there was a light, and she took the pictures out of the envelope and looked at them. Then she started crying.”
“Why do you think she was crying? Was she ashamed of being in pictures like those?”
“No, that wasn’t it, George,” the suspect said with more than a hint of impatience. “
They were the wrong pictures.”
“The wrong pictures?”
“Yeah! See, I came out of the basement and went over to her and said, ‘Ronnie, what’s the matter, why are you crying?’ And she handed me the pictures and the envelope and said, ‘These are the wrong pictures! They aren’t pictures of me! The son of a bitch, he did it on purpose, I know he did!’ I looked at the pictures, and sure enough it wasn’t her in them. It was some naked broad had hair like hers, sucking this guy’s cock and taking it in the ass doggie-style, but it wasn’t Ronnie.”
“What happened then, Wally?”
“She started crying harder,” he said, again blinking back tears himself. “She was, like, sobbing, like, wailing, like she was in pain, really hurting. I felt so—so sorry for her; I wanted to take that guy Tony and kick him in the fucking balls. I started saying, ‘Don’t cry, Ronnie, everything will be all right, it’s not so bad, don’t cry, Ronnie’—you know, like you’d talk to a kid that was hurt. Well,” Wally’s expression changed now to indignation, “you know what she did? You know what the cunt did, George?”
“What did she do, Wally?”
“She slapped the pictures out of my hands and she says, ‘What the hell do you know about it?’ So I right away got down on one knee and started picking up the pictures, and I says, ‘I just want to help you, Ronnie.’ She’s shaking her head and wailing, ‘You can’t help me! Nobody can help me!”’ Wally leaned forward, arms on the table, as if to begin speaking confidentially to Dietrick. “Now, I’m down in a crouch in front of her, right? She’s got on a robe but the belt has come loose some and it’s open a little below the waist. I mean, George, I’m looking right at her pussy, man. She’s wearing that bikini thing that she dances in, but it don’t cover squat, you know. So I start thinking, hey, maybe ol’ Wally’s about to get lucky here. I get all the pictures stuffed back in the envelope and stand up, and I say, ‘Come on, Ronnie, it’ll be all right.’ I say, ‘Come on down in the basement, I got a little corner fixed up with a table and chairs, got a little bottle down there.’ I did have, too: good stuff, ’cause I don’t have to drink cheap booze, I got a cough medicine bottle I fill up behind the bar when nobody else is here. Shit, I drink Chivis, Glenlivet, Cutty—only the best.”
“What did Ronnie say when you invited her into the basement?” Dietrick asked.
“She said, ‘Oh, just leave me alone, Wally.’ And I says, ‘Come on, Ronnie, a drink’ll do you good.’ And I, like, put my hand on her shoulder, you know, to comfort her and walk her over to the basement steps. And you know what the cunt does then?”
“What, Wally?”
“She slaps my hand away. Says, ‘Don’t you touch me! Who do you think you are touching me? Get away from me,’ she says. ‘You stink!’ she says. So I look at her and I say, ‘I stink?’ ‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘you stink, Wally. Hasn’t anybody ever told you that before? You stink. You smell bad!’ I couldn’t believe it, George. Couldn’t believe she would talk to me like that.”
“Did it hurt your feelings, Wally?”
“Yeah,” he swallowed dryly, “it did.”
“Make you mad?”
“Goddamned right it did,” he declared, nodding assertively.
“What did you do about it, Wally?”
“Slapped her across the fucking face, is what I did.” He smiled slightly. “That made her mad. She tried to hit me back, but I just held up my arms and she hurt her hands on them. I’ve got arms like logs, George. Hell,” he looked up at Kiley and Meadows for the first time, “I’m probably stronger than anybody in this room.”
“I’ll bet you are, Wally. What happened next?”
Wally shrugged. “She called me some names.”
“What did she call you?” There was almost a sympathetic note in Dietrick’s voice, Kiley thought.
“Well, you know,” Wally shifted his eyes away from all contact, “she called me a stinking garbage man, an’ an alley crawler, an’ a pervert, stuff like that. And she kept on saying, ‘You stink, Wally, you stink and smell bad.’ Stuff like that.”
“What did you do about it, Wally?” Dietrick asked, repeating exactly his earlier question.
“Slapped her across the fucking face again, the little cunt.”
“Wally, when you say ‘slapped,’ do you mean hitting her with your hand open? With your palm?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you start hitting her with your fist, after? Or with both your fists?”
“Yeah.”
“When did you start hitting her with your fist, or both your fists?”
Wally shrugged. “I don’t know. Couple of minutes, I guess. I slapped her a few times first. Then she got real sorry, you know, for all the names she called me. She started saying, ‘Look, I’m sorry, okay?’ Started kind of begging me, like, to quit pounding on her. ‘I’m sorry, okay?’ she kept saying. Well,” he stared off at space again, remembering, “it wasn’t okay. It was too late to take back what she said, because she meant it.” He looked at Dietrick again. “I was really pissed by then, George. I was ready to really give it to her. I put on my lifting gloves; they’re made of roughout boar skin, an’ the knuckles is padded for protection. I wear ’em when I’m lifting those fifty-five-gallon drums of garbage; keep my hands from getting skinned up—”
“Where are your gloves right now, Wally?” asked Dietrick.
“My locker in the basement of the 4-Star. The pictures are there too.”
“Okay. What happened after you put your gloves on?”
Wally began to mimic a pleading female’s voice. “She started saying, ‘Please, stop. No more, please, no more.’ Know what I told her? I said, ‘You fucking little slut, I haven’t even started on you yet.’ Then I proceeded to beat the holy shit out of her. I beat her fucking face in, an’ then I ripped her bra off and beat her fucking tits until they felt like mush.” Wally grunted softly. “Teach her to tell me I stink.”
Joe Kiley quietly let himself out of the malodorous little room.
Two hours later, in a cocktail lounge across Randolph Street from the Greyhound Bus Terminal, Alma Lynn took a long, cold swallow of dry martini and said, “Well, I guess that’s that, then.”
“Looks like,” Kiley said, lifting his own glass. They were in a back booth, away from the still bright day showing through the front window.
“You don’t suppose Ronnie could have made a mistake about the pictures, do you? I mean, it was dark out, and—”
“I doubt it,” Kiley said. “Wally saw them too, and he sounded pretty convinced that they were pictures of another woman.” After a pause, he added, “I wouldn’t worry about them.”
Alma rolled her eyes. “You would if they were your identical twin. And if you taught high school in a little Indiana town.”
“All right, I’ll try to get a look at them,” Kiley placated, “just to make sure. I’ll call and let you know.”
“Thanks. I really would appreciate it.” Now it was she who paused, then said, “What does this do to your theory that the same person who killed Ronnie also killed your partner?”
“Blows the theory all to hell,” Kiley told her, “but doesn’t change the fact that I still believe your sister’s ex-boyfriend killed Nick, or had him killed.”
“You mean Tony whatever?”
“Yeah, Tony whatever.”
“Are you still not going to tell me his last name?”
“I’ll tell you his last name,” Kiley said. “Why not? Everybody else knows it, and now we all know that he didn’t kill your sister. His name is Tony Touhy. Anthony Francis Touhy. He’s a two-bit punk with heavy connections.”
“You said a moment ago you believed he either killed your partner or had him killed. Could he do that?” Alma asked almost in revulsion. “Have someone killed?”
Kiley nodded. “His older brother, Phil, is a big man in the mob; one of five or six men who control organized crime in the city and suburbs. I’m not sure Tony could order a hit without his brother
’s approval, but if my partner had caught Tony in some kind of criminal act, something serious, that night, and tried to arrest him, Phil might have said do it. Or if it was a situation where my partner had to be hit right then or else Tony would have gone down for something heavy, then Tony probably could have done it on his own.” Kiley lifted his glass again, drained it, and sighed heavily. “It’s all very vague right now, very mixed up in my mind. Tony didn’t beat your sister to death, and he wouldn’t have had bruised knuckles—so I have no idea what my partner would have braced him about. He had to have caught Tony at something; I just have to find out what.”
Kiley held his glass up as a signal for the bartender to bring another round.
“I can’t imagine,” Alma said, shaking her head, “how Ronnie got mixed up with someone like this Tony Touhy. A hoodlum—”
“Yeah, but a real glitzy hoodlum,” Kiley qualified. “Expensive sports car, fancy high-rise apartment with a view of the lake, tailor-made clothes, a tab everywhere in the city because of who his brother is. That kind of flash can turn a small-town girl’s head, believe me. I’ve seen it happen before.”
“Was she—was Ronnie on drugs, do you know?”
“I don’t know,” Kiley said. “I haven’t seen her autopsy report. By the time it was sent over to Homicide, my partner was already dead and I was downtown being grilled about that.” Kiley stared at nothing for a moment, lost in the unthinkable, improbable, totally unpredictable chain of events. “It’s all happened so goddamned fast—”
Fresh drinks arrived but Alma kept her first one, not even half finished. When the bartender left, she said, “I wish you hadn’t ordered another for me—”
“It won’t go to waste,” Kiley assured her. Taking a swallow of his new drink, he rested his head back and let his thoughts range. “Another thing that bothers me now is the time element involved,” he said. “In the time it took me to drive home that night, my partner had already followed Tony to the Shamrock Club and called my apartment. I wasted about ten minutes before I finally listened to my answering machine. Couldn’t have taken me more than twenty minutes to get to the club; added to the ten I lost in the apartment, that totals half an hour. What I can’t figure is how something major could have gone down, my partner killed, and the place locked up tight and deserted—all in that short time. Somebody had to have made the decision to waste my partner awfully quick.”
