Devil by the Tail

by Jeanne Matthews

  “We’ve been handing them out since April,” said Quinn. “They’re advertising.”

  “I know what it is.” The mouse under Chesterton’s jaw wriggled. “Maybe you’ll recall if the gent on a slab down the hall is one you pitched your services to. Let’s go, detectives.”

  “There’s no cause to be snide,” she said with an edge of defiance. “Are you going to renege on your promise to let us see Miss Jackson?”

  Garnick was quick with a softener. “I’ve known the Captain long enough to know he’s a man of his word. Sounds like there’s been a turn-up that wants our two bits worth. Let’s have a look at this deceased gent, Chez. He ain’t so unsightly he’ll unnerve the lady, is he?”

  “Not if she’s got a strong stomach.”

  They walked a few doors farther down the corridor and Chesterton showed them into a brightly lit room with an even stronger smell of disinfectant. This was the police morgue. Three bodies had been laid out on sawhorse tables and covered with sheets.

  Chesterton yanked the sheet off the one in the middle. “Look familiar?”

  “Holy Mother,” murmured Quinn.

  “He was a client of ours,” said Garnick. “Name’s Handish. He’s wanted in Cairo for killing his wife. He claims he didn’t do it and hired us to find the man who did.”

  “Does that man have a name?” asked Chesterton.

  “Stram. Jack Stram,” said Garnick, turning over Handish’s shirt collar.

  “What’re you gawking at?”

  “Some kind of a wax smirch. Dried sweat, dandruff, hair, could be a spot of Macassar oil and maybe a tetch of red-eye gravy down the front.”

  “Trying to show off your fancy detective know-how, Garnick?”

  “Just to give you a flavor, in case you ever need our professional guidance.”

  Chesterton harrumphed and threw the sheet back over Handish. “Did you get a lead on Stram?”

  “No. We never did.”

  “Some detectives you are. Well, you can forget about him. Looks like he found Handish first. I hope your client paid in advance.”

  “Where,” asked Quinn, “did you find Mr. Handish?”

  “In an alley back of Lou’s Mansion. No point asking questions around there. If any of Lou’s girls saw anything, they’ll play deaf and dumb. Anybody gets himself murdered in that neighborhood, it’s his own fault and nothing for the police to waste time on. But I appreciate the lowdown about Handish’s trouble in Cairo. I’ll wire the sheriff down there. Maybe there’s a reward.”

  Chapter 9

  Elfie sat hunched against her cell wall, arms hugged tight around her knees. Still but alert. Coiled, thought Quinn as she sat down on the foot of the cot and faced her. She wasn’t pretty, but something in the singularity of her features, the lustrous hazel eyes and heart-shaped face, made it hard to look away. Her black hair straggled around her face and she had dark crescents under her eyes. They smoldered with what Quinn imagined was a pent-up store of anger and fear.

  Introductions having been made with no response from the prisoner, Quinn said, “We’re here to help you, Elfie. May I call you Elfie?”

  “Call me what you like. The rest of the lot in this place do.”

  “All right, Elfie. And you call me Quinn. I believe you’re innocent and so does Mr. Winthrop. He’s optimistic he can win an acquittal for you, but we need to know where you were and who you were with on the night of the fire. That was July fifth. Tell us everything you can remember.”

  “Have you talked to Burk?”

  Quinn wasn’t surprised at how quickly Burk’s name cropped up. He seemed to have enchanted every woman he met. “We have talked to him. He says he wants to help us find evidence to prove you didn’t set the fire.”

  No reply.

  Garnick slouched against the iron gate. “Are you hungry, ma’am?” He pulled an apple out of his pocket. “I’ve been locked up, myself. The grub, if the turnkeys remembered to bring it, was so bad I near-about starved.” He held out the apple and she grabbed it.

  There was no “thank-you.” She hid the apple behind her back and hugged her knees again.

  Quinn tried a different approach. “Annie told me about a friend of yours, Jemelle Clary. Were you with Jemelle for all or part of that night?”

  No reply.

  It dawned on Quinn that if she were going to pry anything out of Elfie, she would have to use Burk as the lever. She left the cot and idled about the cell, hands behind her back. As if thinking out loud, she said, “Maybe it was Burk who set the fire. Maybe he did it in order to take possession of his father-in-law’s money and business. Money has tempted a lot of men to murder, hasn’t it, Garnick?”

  “They say it’s the root of evil.”

  Quinn waited for a response from Elfie. None came and she went on. “In addition to the value of Mr. Kadinger’s business, there’s sure to be an insurance settlement for the loss of the house. Burk made a great show of saying how anxious he is that you be absolved of guilt, but I don’t believe him. If he hadn’t told the police you were intent on punishing him for desertion, he’d be the first person they suspected. It wouldn’t balk them for a minute that he was in Rock Island at the time. Isn’t that right, Mr. Garnick?”

  “Like I said before, he could’ve hired it done. Come to think of it, he could’ve hired a lawyer for you out of his own pocket if he’d wanted to.”

  Elfie sat rigid and dumb as a wooden doll. Quinn had expected her to contribute something to her defense, to rail against Burk or curse the woman he deserted her for. But her feelings, whether hate or thwarted love, remained banked behind those smoldering eyes.

  “Did you punish him for leaving you, Elfie? Did you set that fire?”

  Nothing.

  Quinn wanted to shake her. “If you don’t bestir yourself and deny it, you may as well confess, save the Christian ladies who paid for your lawyer the money, save Mr. Winthrop the time and bother of preparing for trial, save Garnick and me the bother of hunting up people who’ll testify to your good character. But if you believe Burk has set you up to take the blame, for pity’s sake stand up and fight.”

  Elfie pounced off the cot with such suddenness Quinn fell back against the wall. Garnick stepped forward, a hand raised to stop her, but whatever the feeling that animated her died aborning. Her shoulders sagged. “What is there to fight for? I’m damned. Even if I’m acquitted and turned out into the world, I’m a ruined woman, a supposed slut for men like that fat guard to make sport of. Burk took everything – my money, my maidenhood, my self-respect. But I could never hate him. If he asked me to come back to him, for no other reason but to scrub his floor, I’d do it.”

  Quinn racked her brain for something cogent or compelling or comforting to say, but her thoughts snagged on a discrepant fact. “I thought you were penniless.”

  “I am now. My mother had money. I stole four thousand dollars from her so Burk could buy a parcel of land. When she discovered what I’d done, she disowned me.” Elfie sank back onto the cot. “I didn’t care. It made Burk happy. He sold the timber to Weyerhaeuser for a profit. Mr. Weyerhaeuser was impressed by Burk’s bargaining skills. Last spring he made him his chief purchasing agent and sent him here to Chicago. If I hadn’t robbed my mother to please him, he’d have stayed in Rock Island and none of this would have happened.” A sob tore from her throat with such a rasp of despair that Quinn drew back in alarm.

  “If you’ll let us,” said Garnick, “we can help you, Elfie. Just tell us whether or not you set the fire. Won’t neither of us judge you if’n you did. I’d wager you never meant anybody to die.”

  “Dying is all that’ll help me. If I can’t have Burk I want to die.”

  “Stop it,” said Quinn. “Suicide is a mortal sin, worse than murder, and that’s what you’ll be doing if you don’t quit this sniveling and show some grit. You’ve let Burk turn you into a doormat to wipe his boots on. If you refuse to help yourself and get yourself hanged, don’t think he’ll lay flowers
on your grave. He has a brand new sweetie.”

  Her head snapped up. “Who?”

  “Delphine’s bridesmaid. She, too, comes from a well-to-do family. Her father’s a banker.”

  “Whatever Burk’s scheming at, I know he loves me.”

  Garnick said, “Maybe he had second thoughts about abandoning you and hatched a plan to get rid of his new wife so he could marry you.”

  “We’re already married. In the eyes of God.”

  “Did you ever go to Delphine and tell her that?” asked Quinn.

  “She wouldn’t listen. She called me a liar and a parasite. She was a fool. Her father told her as much. He said she was blinkered when it came to Burk and he wasn’t going to give his approval until he got an explanation from Burk.”

  “You talked to Rolf Kadinger?” Quinn was taken aback. Winthrop said Kadinger should have done more to protect his daughter and apparently he tried. Either Bayer’s explanation satisfied him, or the marriage went forward without his blessing. “When did you have this conversation?”

  “I don’t know. Right after Burk left me, sometime last April.” Her arms fell limp onto her lap and her body seemed to uncoil. “Mr. Winthrop showed me the newspaper. I know what they’re saying about me, that I’m like that witch in the play, Medea. I’m not. It’s Burk who’s like Jason.”

  “How’s that?” asked Quinn.

  “Wanting it all, not understanding the heartache he caused. But if Medea truly loved Jason, she was a fool. He offered to keep her as his mistress after he married the other woman, but it wasn’t enough for her. If Burk kept me as his mistress, I’d be happy.”

  “But Burk didn’t offer you that consolation,” said Quinn. “Did it make you unhappy enough to kill his wife?”

  “No. I swear I didn’t set that fire. I could never do anything that…that horrible.”

  Garnick sawed a finger across his chin and looked thoughtful. “Fighting in the war, Mr. Bayer must’ve got used to horror. Then too, he had a financial motive for murder.”

  “Don’t you go thinking that. Burk can’t help loving money, but he wouldn’t kill for it. He just waits and it comes to him. And he wouldn’t want me to be blamed for what happened. You’re wrong about him. All he did was answer the police’s questions. It was the police put me here, not Burk.”

  “Why do you defend him?” demanded Quinn. “After the way he’s treated you?”

  She shrugged and hung her head.

  “Were you at Annie’s the night of the fire?” asked Garnick.

  She nodded.

  “Can Jemelle vouch for you?”

  “The day the police came for me, she told them I’d confessed to her. She pulled a shawl out of my trunk. It was singed and smelled smoky. She said I’d worn it that night and if they looked, they could probably find scraps of it where the fire started.” Elfie locked her arms around her knees and curled into a tight ball. “Somebody must’ve paid her to trump up that story. One of her customers maybe. It wasn’t even my shawl.”

  “Do you have a specific customer in mind?” asked Quinn.

  “There was one. He came five or six times, always during the day. I know they didn’t go to bed. He never stayed long enough to get out of his clothes. Jemelle made me leave, but I didn’t go far. I waited out of sight down the hall. I heard him say, ‘It’s worth fifty bucks to you if you give out a line of dirt on her.”

  “Did you hear Jemelle’s answer? Or anything else from either of them?”

  “No. I didn’t hear my name, but the way he looked at me gave me the all-overs.”

  “What did this palm greaser look like?” asked Garnick.

  “Tall, rangy, light-haired. He had a bushy horseshoe mustache.”

  Quinn’s eyes met Garnick’s. “Isn’t that how Handish described Florrie’s killer?”

  “Sounds mighty like.”

  Chapter 10

  The storm had passed, leaving the city chilled and strewn with garbage and downed tree branches. Streams rushed through the ditches on either side of the street and washed over the wood paving blocks in low spots. An eerie quiet had descended. The only sound was the clop and splash of Leonidas’ hooves and the clacking of the carriage wheels. It was two o’clock in the morning, moonless and black. Quinn had never felt so wide-awake. More than the shock of Handish’s murder, more than her astonishment at Jemelle’s venality and Stram’s vileness, she puzzled over Burk Bayer’s unshakeable hold on Elfie.

  Garnick let her off in front of her boarding house and walked her to the door. “Why,” she asked, “does Elfie continue to defend him? Is she in a trance?”

  “I’ve got no answer, Quinn. Like the Good Book says, love beareth all things.”

  “All things? That’s not love. That’s slavery. Why should all the misery be hers alone to bear?”

  Garnick had no answer to that one either. “I’ll meet you at the office in the morning and we can go see that photographer fellow. After that, if you’re still squeamish to go by yourself to Madam Lou’s, I’ll drive you. I don’t hold out much hope for Jemelle doing Elfie or our case a good turn.”

  They said goodnight and Quinn tiptoed into the house and up the stairs to her room. She sloughed off her dress, pulled on her nightgown, and brushed her teeth, but she had no inclination to sleep. Frustration and the prospect of defeat pecked at her and she couldn’t erase the picture of Elfie cooped up in a dark cell waiting to die while Jemelle gloated over her thirty pieces of silver and Burk enjoyed his dead wife’s fortune. He’d evidently convinced Rolf Kadinger that his relationship with Elfie was chaste, but he wouldn’t want to go through the same awkward explanations with Josabeth’s father. That gave him a dandy reason to incriminate Elfie.

  Was Bayer deliberately hazy about where the Kadinger’s maid had disappeared to? It seemed fishy from the beginning that the girl would flee the fire never to be seen again by anyone except Bayer. A macabre idea insinuated itself into Quinn’s thoughts. The woman who died in the fire had been burned beyond recognition. What if that woman was the housemaid and the coughing escapee was Delphine? What if she faked her death to help Bayer inherit her father’s estate?

  Elfie’s plight continued to prey on Quinn. And that wormy Tribune reporter would continue to make hay selling drivel about the pathetic fate of the “vengeful witch.”

  The Medea book sat unopened on the bedside table. She picked it up and leafed through, too distracted to delve into “the supernatural elements.” There was a long colloquy with a nurse and Medea and a “chorus.” It wasn’t a smooth read, what with all the bitter cries of lamentation and woe. Quinn skimmed the long speeches. It seemed that Jason, Medea’s husband, abandoned her to marry a princess and advance his station in life. His defection devastated Medea. Until then she had done everything he asked of her, even killed her own brother to save him. She prayed to the gods that she might die. The chorus commiserated. They cursed men who unlocked the secrets of female desire and disclaimed responsibility for the pain they caused. “Whither wilt thou turn?” they chanted. “What protection wilt thou find? In what a hopeless sea of misery heaven hath plunged thee.”

  Medea rebuked Jason for his treachery, for having lost all shame and allowing the king to exile her, but then she appeared to come around and even sympathize. She sent conciliatory gifts to his bride-to-be – an exquisite dress and a coronet of beaten gold. But Medea had laced her gifts with poison and when the princess put them on, they burst into flames that devoured her flesh. Her anguished father knelt to embrace her body and he, too, was burned alive. “O’ Medea,” chanted the chorus, “How dread a scourge is love!”

  Quinn closed the book. As she struggled to fall asleep, that was the line that echoed in her memory.

  ***

  Vulture-like, Fen Megarian hunkered atop an open roll-top desk and lectured to a flock of avid looking young men. “Those bodies that washed up against the water intake crib in the lake had to have been weighted. Two miles out and six fathoms under? Of course they
were weighted! Some bloodthirsty sailor butchered them and threw them overboard. And the tenders charged with protecting the purity of Chicagoans’ drinking water were too liquored up to notice. Now there’s a story to be chased down, boys. Whoever catches it can make a reputation for himself in the trade.”

  “Gosh, thanks, Mr. Megarian. I’ll sure try.”

  “Me, too. I’ll start by talking to the crew that recovered the bodies!”

  “Keep your stories bubbling, boys. Full of storm and strife. The racier the better. Readers will lap it up, especially the ladies. Underneath those decorous bonnets and fine manners, they’ve a taste for blood and mayhem.”

  Quinn and Garnick stood at the back of the group, listening. Her eyes felt sandy from lack of sleep and under her bonnet, impatience and aggravation sizzled. When Megarian’s audience dispersed, Garnick stepped forward and handed him the agency’s card. “My name’s Garnick and this is Mrs. Paschal. We’d like a minute of your time if you please, sir.”

  “Detectives?” The little man hopped off the desk and eyed them with interest. “You’re the gal whose image I caught in front of Gentle Annie’s hookshop.”

  “I trust that card corrects any misunderstanding of my purpose for being there,” said Quinn. His contemptuous tone made her want to defend Annie. “I called on Mrs. Hyman regarding an investigation Mr. Garnick and I are conducting. Whatever reason you had for taking that photograph, it’s libelous, a violation of my rights and I demand that you give it to me.”

  “A photograph’s not libelous. It’s true of itself.”

  “Not if it invites misunderstanding,” she said.

  He leaned forward and cupped his ear. “I didn’t hear a reason to give you a mustard seed, much less an expensive photograph.”

  “If it’s money you’re after, I’ll pay for it. How much?”

  “That depends. Just who or what are you investigating?”