I got off the IC at a little after four at 115th Street, which I crossed-the obnoxious paint odor of the nearby Sherwin Williams plant mingling incongruously with wondrous spicy smells from various hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurants-to Kensington Avenue, the wide, airy street the little neighborhood was named for. This quaint four-block neighborhood was an Italian oasis in the midst of a Swedish and Polish area; it even had its own church. And Kensington was one Italian neighborhood in Chicago with little or no mob taint.
The bottom floor of the narrow three-story brick building was a grocery store; at the top of the second floor stairs was a landing and a single door, with no number. I knocked.
“Just a second!” a voice from within called. Female voice.
When the door opened, a slender, darkly attractive girl of about twenty stood there; she was in rather form-fitting coveralls with her hair covered by a bandanna, knotted in front, Aunt Jemima style.
“Can I help you?” she said, looking at me rather crossly, her thin frame blocking the doorway. What little of her hair was showing under the bandanna was matted from sweat and her face was smudged here and there.
“My name’s Heller. I’m a friend of Private D’Angelo’s.”
She brightened. Stepped back and gestured for me to come in, saying, “Nathan Heller, sure. You’re Tony’s friend. He told us all about you. Read about ya in the papers, too.”
I stepped inside. It was a small living room with nice but not lavish furnishings, overstuffed sofa, some chairs, radio console, Catholic icons.
She gestured to herself, to her coveralls, her bandanna, smiling widely. Her teeth were very white and her eyes were very brown. “Excuse. I just got off my shift at Pullman.”
I smiled at her. “Rosie the Riveter, huh?”
“Marie the arc welder. Would you like to see my brother?” She seemed hopeful and sad all at once.
“Sure. He’s here, then?”
“Yeah. Sure.” She seemed surprised I’d think otherwise. “It’s close to Roseland Community.” That was a hospital, about a mile from here. She went on: “I think some company might help Tony a little.”
She stepped closer; she smelled sweaty, the sweat of good hard honest work. I liked the way she smelled. She was, in fact, a cute kid, and if I wasn’t here to see if maybe her brother was a murderer I might have asked for her phone number. I never dated an arc welder before. Or the sister of a murderer, that I remembered.
“Is D’Angelo a little down?” I said. I couldn’t seem to bring myself to call him Tony; don’t know why.
She stood very close to me. “He’s been blue as hell. He was okay when he got home. We were all surprised how good his spirits were, considering. But when he saw the paper this morning…”
“The Estelle Carey killing?”
She nodded gravely. “He cried and cried. Don’t tell him I told you.”
“Look, uh, Marie. Let me give you a tip. Some of your brother’s letters and things were found in her apartment.”
The skin around her eyes tightened. “Really?”
“They haven’t connected them to… Tony, yet. But they will. And cops and reporters will be swarming around.”
“Oh dear. What should we do?”
I shrugged. “You may want to have him stay someplace else, till it all blows over. I don’t mean to suggest you keep him away from the police, but you may want to keep the reporters off him.”
She nodded. “Certainly. I appreciate this.”
“That’s okay. I figure you should be warned. And your aunt and uncle downstairs, with their business and all.”
She smiled again. Lovely smile. “It’s nice of you.”
I wasn’t so nice. I was here to confront my old war buddy about a murder. Two murders.
But I owed him this much, this warning. And I liked his sister’s smile.
“I’ll take you back to him,” she said.
“No. You can just point the way.”
“Okay. I need to get a bath, anyway.”
I didn’t want to think about her bathing. I had other things to do.
She pointed me down a hallway, off of which were various bedrooms, and at the end was a small kitchen, with a hoosier cabinet and a table and sink all crowded together. To the left was a bedroom, D’Angelo’s, she said.
But I found him sitting out on the enclosed porch, also off the kitchen. It was a little cold, out there. No insulation. But D’Angelo didn’t seem to notice. He was at a card table, but turned facing a window looking out on the alley, a half-played hand of solitaire spread out before him like a meal he wasn’t hungry enough to eat.
“Hello, D’Angelo.”
He turned slowly and looked at me. His face was hollow-eyed, haunted, like the Marines of the 1st Division we’d come to the Island to spell, those wasted scarecrows who’d met us as we waded ashore off the Higgins boats. Only D’Angelo looked even worse. He’d always been razor-thin, and he still was, only now that razor was dull. His eyes were dead.
But something in them came marginally alive when he recognized me.
“Heller,” he said. It was cold enough for his breath to show. He smiled, just a little.
I went over to the card table and sat next to him. Just looking at him I knew he hadn’t killed Estelle. Monawk was another matter.
“I’m sorry about your girl,” I said.
“Hell of a thing,” he said. His eyes were full of water. “Hell of a thing.” He reached for a deck of Luckies on the card table; shook a smoke out and lit it nervously off a battered silver Zippo lighter from his plaid flannel shirt. “You can’t know what it’s like to come home and your girl’s dead, your goddamn girl’s dead. Murdered! Tortured…”
I said nothing.
“Want a smoke?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. He lit it off his-hospital habit-and handed it to me. I sucked the smoke into my lungs and felt strangely alive.
“What the fuck kind of world is it?” he said. “Come home from what we went through, and somebody murdered your goddamn girl! Your goddamn girl.” He didn’t want to weep in front of me, I knew, but it was killing him holding all that water in his eyes.
“Go ahead and bawl,” I told him. “We all do it.”
He covered his face with his hand and tears dripped through his fingers. I looked away. Smoked.
“Who am I kidding?” he said. He rubbed the tears off his face, as best he could; some smears of moisture remained. “She had a lot of guys. Some of my friends wrote me and said she was out with this swell, and that one. She loved money more than she loved any man.”
That was true.
He looked at me curiously, all of a sudden. “What were you doing there?”
“What?”
“I saw your name in the papers. You were there, at her apartment, with the cops.”
“I know the detective whose case it is, is all. Coincidence.”
He gripped my arm. “If you find something out, you gotta let me know. If you hear something. If I can get my hands on the bastards that did that to her, I swear I’ll wring their fucking necks. How could anybody do that to a beautiful girl like her?” He shook his head. “Aw, shit, Estelle. Why’d you have to love money so goddamn much?”
“I remember back at San Diego,” I said, “you mentioned you worked for Nicky Dean at the Colony Club. Is that where you met her?”
He nodded. “I was a waiter there. Head waiter. I ran errands for Nicky, sometimes.”