by P. N. Elrod
Escott gave me the address from Pierce’s notes. I got the car in gear and we took off.
Kitty’s home was in a nice block of modern apartments in a nice part of town. We parked on the curb out front next to a has-been of a car. I’d hardly stopped when Escott was out and pulling off one of his gloves. He put one hand on the old car’s hood to see if it had been running recently, and his lips thinned with satisfaction.
“Stan’s?” I asked.
He opened the door and checked the registration, then nodded. While I nervously watched the street for beat cops, he did something under the hood to make sure it wouldn’t start.
The apartment entrance required either a key or that visitors buzz. I saved us some trouble and slipped through to open the door for Escott. Kitty lived on the second floor at the end of a carpeted hallway. After trying her door and finding it locked, I did the same thing again, but slowly. Still invisible, I checked the room beyond to ascertain that no one was there. It was very small, probably no more than an entry with a coat closet. I reformed and spent a moment listening, but picked up nothing. I clicked the lock back as softly as possible and let Escott inside.
He already knew to be quiet and his manner was calm enough, but I could hear his heart thumping like a drum. He enjoyed this sort of work.
The living room was new looking, the furniture comfortably plump, but not fussy. A low table displayed drawing pencils, a battered sketch pad, and a stack of fashion magazines. Escott flipped a few pages of the sketchbook. It was full of stylized drawings of heads, all tilted to show off the crazy hats they wore.
The first bedroom was a work area. A couple of card tables in the middle were covered with a colorful scatter of ribbons, feathers, netting, Lice, velvet, and similar junk. In the corner stood a small black sewing machine, and stacked next to it were different kinds of hat blocks. A wall hill of shelves held samples of the finished product. Most of them looked awfully strange to me, but were probably just the thing for Bobbi to go crazy over.
Escott went down the short hall to the other bedroom and I followed. It was done up in pale blues with an eye for comfort, especially the central furnishing.
“That’s a pretty big bed for such a small lady,” I said. It looked nearly double the regular size, filling most of the room. I’d seen something like it once in a movie and had thought things like that only existed in Hollywood.
“Agreed.” He went over to one of the nightstands and opened the top drawer, immediately pulling out several packets of prophylactics. “Well, well.”
I shifted uncomfortably. The girl was entitled to some privacy and I didn’t feel right about invading it on such an intimate level. Escott dropped them back and shut the drawer with hardly a raised eyebrow. I’o him it was simply information. He collected it in the same absent way other people collect string. He checked the closet and bath and came back right away, shaking his head to indicate they were empty. That left only the kitchen at the other end of the flat.
The dining room was clean and uninteresting. The door from it to the kitchen was shut. I listened and this time heard the faint sound of someone breathing within. Just as I touched the doorknob I jerked my hand back as though from an electric shock.
“What is it?” asked Escott.
It was unmistakable, but I drew another cautious breath just to be sure.
“Jack?”
I swallowed with difficulty, because my mouth and throat had gone bone dry. “Bloodsmell,” I whispered.
He started to say something but caught the look on my face. He nodded, understanding, and slipped his glove back on to open the door.
A lot of different images crowded my eyes: gray-speckled linoleum, shining steel cabinets, white curtains with red trim. The trim almost seemed to accent the red pool at our feet.
Kitty Donovan had pressed herself into a corner formed by the steel cabinets. Her hands gripped their edges on either side with white fingers. Her mouth hung slack and her eyes were too big to be real, as though they’d been painted on her face. She was staring at Stan McAlister, who was sprawled on the floor in front of her.
He was on his back. His coat and shirt had been unbuttoned, their pockets turned out, and the contents scattered. There was a nasty bruise on his temple; bad enough, but whoever had hit him had wanted to be sure of things. The blood had oozed from at least a dozen wounds in his chest and one in the neck, where the carving knife was still embedded.
Kitty looked up at us, shivering violently from head to toe. Her lips moved, but only a soft hiccuping came out of them. Her eyes fastened once more onto McAlister’s body, then abruptly rolled up in their sockets. With an audible sigh, she dropped gracelessly forward in a faint.
3
I moved toward her but Escott stopped me. His face was drawn and his lips had thinned to the point of disappearance.
“Mind where you step,” he said in a low, carefully level voice.
He wasn’t trying to be funny; he looked as sick as I felt. I nodded and took my time getting to Kitty. She’d just missed hitting the mess from McAlister’s throat. I scooped her up and Escott followed as I took her out and put her on the oversized bed in the back.
“Still wearing her coat,” he murmured. “She must have walked straight in and found him.”
“I’m glad you don’t think she did it.”
“Of course, she could have knocked him out first and then killed him as he lay helpless. The physical evidence is against that theory, though. Except for this”—he removed one of her shoes and examined the smear of blood on its sole—”she is quite clean. The killer would most certainly have at least a spot or two on his hands.”
He sounded pretty clinical until I realized that the cold detachment was his way of being able to handle the whole horrible business. He was still pasty white and his fingers twitched with more than his usual nervous energy.
“I have to make some phone calls. If she comes round, keep her back here and don’t touch anything that will hold a print.” He carefully placed the shoe on the nightstand. Almost as an afterthought, he swiped his gloved fingers over the drawer handle, and left.
Her skin was clammy and blue at the edges. I pulled the bedspread up and tucked it around her slight body. There seemed no point in reviving her; she’d be awake all too soon and have lots of talking to do for the cops. She was still out when Escott returned a few minutes later.
“Our employer is not at home and no one knows where he is. I should have liked to have given him some warning about this, but it can’t be helped now, the police are on their way. I rousted the manager of this place. She’s downstairs waiting to let them in.”
“You call Lieutenant Blair?”
“Yes. He’ll be thorough, which means you might not wish to be here. If this ends up in court …”
“I’ll stick around. Tell him that I was waiting out in the car while you followed the girl inside. They won’t call me into court if I wasn’t here to see anything.”
“And your presence now?”
“I got tired of waiting and followed you in—after you found the body. The only problem is Kitty, she saw us both.”
He hardly glanced at her. “I doubt that she will be in a condition to remember, but if so, then it is something you can remedy easily enough. Now, before Blair shows up I want to check things again.”
McAlister’s looks hadn’t improved while we were gone. Escott picked his way around the kitchen as though the pool of blood were part of a mine field. He’d once mentioned that he suffered from squeamish-ness; apparently it was under control tonight. I couldn’t bring myself to go in, and hung back in the dining room, out of the way.
“Seepage rather than splashing,” he said to himself in a voice that sounded borrowed. “He must have already been dead for this one.” He indicated the blade in McAlister’s throat.
“What about his stuff?” My own voice was thin.
He surveyed the scattered debris from the turned-out pockets. “His wallet�
�if he carried one—is missing. Perhaps we are meant to think the motive was robbery.”
“Maybe it was, but for the bracelet.”
“Which is not here, unless it’s under him, and I’ve no wish to move him and see. Only we and Mr. Pierce know of it as being a possible motive for this terrible thing, yet these multiple wounds indicate …” He squatted on his heels, staring hard at them.
“What?”
He shook his head. He would talk when he was ready. He stood, casting around for something else to study, fastening his gaze on the stove and a heavy iron frying pan there. Instead of sitting square on a burner, it was tilted half-on and -off. Escott peered at it closely, keeping his hands well clear.
“Is that what smashed his head?” I asked.
“I believe so. It more than qualifies as a blunt instrument and is the only likely object in the room.”
“What about his blackjack?”
“Yes, there’s that, but I really don’t see him as cheerfully handing it over for his killer to use. Also this was done very quickly. We weren’t more than ten minutes behind Miss Donovan, and McAlister was less than five minutes ahead of her.”
“So the killer must have been waiting here for him.”
“Unless Miss Donovan is the killer.”
“But you said—”
“I know. It is most unlikely, given her actions to aid him at the Boswell House, but it is just possible.”
“You don’t really think…”
He shrugged. “All permutations must be equally considered, especially the unsavory ones. Perhaps you can settle things one way or another when she comes round.”
“You can make book on it.”
“Yes, that’s another factor to consider,” he mused.
“What?”
“Leadfoot Sam, the bookie.”
He quit the kitchen and I led the way back to her bedroom. The bed was empty, its spread tossed aside. The shoe on the nightstand was gone. A corner window with access to the fire escape was wide open and the thin curtains over it seemed to shiver from the icy air drifting inside. We both darted over, but she was nowhere in sight.
Escott allowed himself a brief and entirely American-sounding obscenity. “She’ll make for her car.”
“I’ll go find out.”
He didn’t argue. To save time, I vanished on the spot and hurled out the window, using the uncompromising metal gridwork of the stairs as a guide to the ground. Re-forming, I heard a motor kick over and rushed around the building in time to see her taillights flare and dim as she took a sharp corner out of the apartment parking lot.
My car was on the other side of the place, of course. I was halfway there when the first of the cops rolled up and stopped. I waved at him in a friendly, hurried way, but he wasn’t buying any. He’d been called to the scene of a homicide and spotted a man running away; it was more than enough to inspire his hunter’s instinct. He was out and shouting for me to stop.
I didn’t know if he had his gun in hand or not and had no inclination to find out. Quickly swerving under the deep shadow of a couple of trees, I vanished again, and kept going. He was still beating the bush when I bumped against my car and slipped inside. I was feeling pretty smug as I started up the engine. The feeling lasted until a prowl car roared in from nowhere and screeched to a halt right in my path. The first cop ran up, half crouching so he could see inside the driver’s window. He did indeed have his gun in hand and it was pointed right at my chest. I decided not to move.
He bellowed at me to get out and I obliged. While he and his friends went through the farce of slapping me down and putting on the cuffs, Kitty Donovan sped merrily away into the night. I might have eventually been able to hypnotize my way out of it, but there were too many strikes against that gambit. The three of them were distracted and hostile, it was too dark for them to see me very well, but most of all I was just too dust spitting mad to talk coherently.
A couple of unmarked cars rolled up and a medium-tall man in a belted leather overcoat emerged from one of them. We hadn’t seen each other in several months, but I knew him right away. A young forty and dandy handsome, Lieutenant Blair was one of the best-dressed cops in Chicago, if not the rest of the state. He walked up slowly, studying things, and especially me. A broad smile of recognition appeared under his carefully groomed mustache.
“What have you got here?” he asked, addressing the cop who had a proprietary hand on my shoulder.
“Caught him running away, Lieutenant.” The cop briefly described my capture.
“Uh-huh. Why were you running away, Mr. Fleming?”
“I was chasing someone.”
“And who were you chasing?”
I didn’t know how far Escott wanted to go in protecting his client’s privacy. “Better ask Charles about that, I only came along for the ride.”
Last fall, in order to avert a problem, I’d hypnotized Blair, planting the idea in his mind that we were friends. It had worked very well, but by now time and circumstances had eroded my suggestion down to almost nothing. Blair wasn’t a bit amused with me.
“If you’d like to go for another ride, I’m sure we can arrange it.”
The cop took a firmer grip on me as though to follow through with the threat, and that’s when Escott made what I can only describe as a timely entrance. There were some smudges of grime on his clothes, indicating he’d also used the fire escape to exit the building. He was only slightly breathless, enough to give the impression that he was in a hurry.
“Lieutenant Blair, thank you for coming so quickly.” He shook hands with Blair and at the same time got him walking back toward the apartments. He immediately launched into a succinct outline of his version of the evening, keeping me safely in the background until the last. Somehow he managed to avoid mentioning Pierce’s name or how we broke into Kitty’s flat.
“… when we saw that she’d escaped out the window, Jack naturally went after her,” he concluded.
“Naturally,” he agreed, his tone bordering on sarcasm. “And just why did the young lady go out the window?”
“She was probably frightened out of her wits.”
“Where would she go?”
Escott shrugged minimally, using one hand and an eyebrow.
As our parade reached the entry doors and the lights on either side of them, Blair noticed the souvenir Escott sported from McAlister’s blackjack. “You been in a war or something?”
“Only a small skirmish, hardly worth the resulting headache.”
Escott’s offhand and deprecatory manner amused Blair long enough for him to have the cop release me. He had more important things to do than to push around the hired help. By the time we turned to go into the building his mood had gone sour again. It spread to the rest of the group, with the exception of the middle-aged woman in a bathrobe who let us in. For her, it was a toss-up between terror and curiosity. Murder can do that to people.
The next couple of hours were spent sitting on Kitty Donovan’s overstuffed sofa watching a parade of cops turn the place over. Her neat little life was twisted inside out as they took photographs, dusted for prints, and collected anything that could be remotely connected with Stan McAlister’s death.
Things wound their way down and the number of investigators thinned and left. Without ceremony or stir, McAlister was carried out in a stained and creaking wicker basket. Escott watched, his face carefully blank. One of his hands rested on the power switch of a table lamp next to his chair and he idly flicked it on and off until one of the cops told him to cut it out. He stiffened a little, not from the cop’s annoyed order, but from some internal start. His pale gray eyes fixed on me, but he had no chance to say anything. Blair came over and started asking questions again, the kind Escott couldn’t answer. I’d once been on the receiving end of one of Blair’s interrogations and knew Escott’s reticence would not be welcome.
A description of Kitty Donovan and her vehicle had been issued so the prowl-car boys could get in on
the hunt. Blair hadn’t made it any too clear whether he wanted her as a witness or a suspect. He’d listened to everything we could tell him, but had reserved judgment on our conclusions.
With the passage of time and the scarcity of facts, Blair’s patience lessened in direct proportion to his growing temper. His olive skin got a few shades paler and his dark eyes were bright from all the internal heat. Push him too far and he’d explode. Escott didn’t look very worried about it.
Blair abruptly stopped the questions when a muscle in his jaw started working all on its own. I thought the volcano would go off then and there, but he still had it well in check. His voice was smooth, almost purring. “Very well, Charles, I can admire your business ethics, but it’s getting late and I’ve other work to do. I may need to call you in for more questions at any time, though, so I want you to hang around the station just in case anything new occurs to either of us.”
“Are you charging me with anything?”
“Don’t tempt me.”
Escott had been carefully neutral since Blair’s arrival and continued to hold on to it. He nodded, ruefully accepting Blair’s terms, and 1 wondered what he was up to since he was fully capable of talking his way out of the situation. “Would you like to have my assistant accompany us?” he inquired politely.
“No, I would not. Your assistant can just get the hell out of here.”
One corner of Escott’s mouth twitched. Blair missed it or he might have reconsidered his snap decision. “Very well,” he said, with only a hint of exasperation. “Jack, I was wondering if you’d look after my car before going home. I wouldn’t want any pranksters bashing in the lights.” He handed me the keys.
“Yeah, sure!”
One of the plainclothesmen hustled him out.
“What’s this about his car?” asked Blair.
“Nothing, Lieutenant,” I said. “We had to leave it in a rough neighborhood, is all.”
“Near the Boswell House, by any chance?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“Just stay away from the place. My men are going over it now and you could get swept up and taken in along with anything else they find over there.”
