“Vic! Vic, is that you?”
“What?”
“I know it’s late. I’m sorry to call so late, but I just got home from work. It’s Sal, Sal Barthele.”
“Oh, Sal. Sure.” I looked at the orange clock readout. It was four-thirty. Sal owns the Golden Glow, a bar in the south Loop I patronize.
“It’s my sister, Vic. They’ve arrested her. She didn’t do it. I know she didn’t do it.”
“Of course not, Sal— Didn’t do what?”
“They’re trying to frame her. Maybe the manager... I don’t know.”
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. “Where are you?”
She was at her mother’s house, 95th and Vincennes. Her sister had been arrested three hours earlier. They needed a lawyer, a good lawyer. And they needed a detective, a good detective. Whatever my fee was, she wanted me to know they could pay my fee.
“I’m sure you can pay the fee, but I don’t know what you want me to do,” I said as patiently as I could.
“She... they think she murdered that man. She didn’t even know him. She was just giving him a facial. And he dies on her.”
“Sal, give me your mother’s address. I’ll be there in forty minutes.”
The little house on Vincennes was filled with neighbors and relatives murmuring encouragement to Mrs. Barthele. Sal is very black, and statuesque. Close to six feet tall, with a majestic carriage, she can break up a crowd in her bar with a look and a gesture. Mrs. Barthele was slight, frail, and light-skinned. It was hard to picture her as Sal’s mother.
Sal dispersed the gathering with characteristic firmness, telling the group that I was here to save Evangeline and that I needed to see her mother alone.
Mrs. Barthele sniffed over every sentence. “Why did they do that to my baby?” she demanded of me. “You know the police, you know their ways. Why did they come and take my baby, who never did a wrong thing in her life?”
As a white woman, I could be expected to understand the machinations of the white man’s law. And to share responsibility for it. After more of this meandering, Sal took the narrative firmly in hand.
Evangeline worked at La Cygnette, a high-prestige beauty salon on North Michigan. In addition to providing facials and their own brand-name cosmetics at an exorbitant cost, they massaged the bodies and feet of their wealthy clients, stuffed them into steam cabinets, ran them through a Bataan-inspired exercise routine, and fed them herbal teas. Signor Giuseppe would style their hair for an additional charge.
Evangeline gave facials. The previous day she had one client booked after lunch, a Mr. Darnell.
“Men go there a lot?” I interrupted.
Sal made a face. “That’s what I asked Evangeline. I guess it’s part of being a Yuppie — go spend a lot of money getting cream rubbed into your face.”
Anyway, Darnell was to have had his hair styled before his facial, but the hairdresser fell behind schedule and asked Evangeline to do the guy’s face first.
Sal struggled to describe how a La Cygnette facial worked — neither of us had ever checked out her sister’s job. You sit in something like a dentist’s chair, lean back, relax — you’re naked from the waist up, lying under a big down comforter. The facial expert — cosmetician was Evangeline’s official title — puts cream on your hands and sticks them into little electrically-heated mitts, so your hands are out of commission if you need to protect yourself. Then she puts stuff on your face, covers your eyes with heavy pads, and goes away for twenty minutes while the face goo sinks into your hidden pores.
Apparently while this Darnell lay back deeply relaxed, someone had rubbed some kind of poison into his skin. “When Evangeline came back in to clean his face, he was sick — heaving, throwing up, it was awful. She screamed for help and started trying to clean his face — it was terrible, he kept vomiting on her. They took him to the hospital, but he died around ten tonight.
“They came to get Baby at midnight — you’ve got to help her, V. I. — even if the guy tried something on her, she never did a thing like that — she’d haul off and slug him, maybe, but rubbing poison into his face? You go help her.”
2
Evangeline Barthele was a younger, darker edition of her mother. At most times, she probably had Sal’s energy — sparks of it flared now and then during our talk — but a night in the holding cells had worn her down.
I brought a clean suit and makeup for her: justice may be blind but her administrators aren’t. We talked while she changed.
“This Darnell — you sure of the name? — had he ever been to the salon before?”
She shook her head. “I never saw him. And I don’t think the other girls knew him either. You know, if a client’s a good tipper or a bad one they’ll comment on it, be glad or whatever that he’s come in. Nobody said anything about this man.”
“Where did he live?”
She shook her head. “I never talked to the guy, V. I.”
“What about the PestFree?” I’d read the arrest report and talked briefly to an old friend in the M.E.’s office. To keep roaches and other vermin out of their posh Michigan Avenue offices, La Cygnette used a potent product containing a wonder chemical called chorpyrifos. My informant had been awe-struck — “Only an operation that didn’t know shit about chemicals would leave chorpyrifos lying around. It’s got a toxicity rating of five — it gets you through the skin — you only need a couple of tablespoons to kill a big man if you know where to put it.”
Whoever killed Darnell had either known a lot of chemistry or been lucky — into his nostrils and mouth, with some rubbed into the face for good measure, the pesticide had made him convulsive so quickly that even if he knew who killed him he’d have been unable to talk, or even reason.
Evangeline said she knew where the poison was kept — everyone who worked there knew, knew it was lethal and not to touch it, but it was easy to get at. Just in a little supply room that wasn’t kept locked.
“So why you? They have to have more of a reason than just that you were there.”
She shrugged bitterly. “I’m the only black professional at La Cygnette — the other blacks working there sweep rooms and haul trash. I’m trying hard not to be paranoid, but I gotta wonder.”
She insisted Darnell hadn’t made a pass at her, or done anything to provoke an attack — she hadn’t hurt the guy. As for anyone else who might have had opportunity, salon employees were always passing through the halls, going in and out of the little cubicles where they treated clients — she’d seen any number of people, all with legitimate business in the halls, but she hadn’t seen anyone emerging from the room where Darnell was sitting.
When we finally got to bond court later that morning, I tried to argue circumstantial evidence — any of La Cygnette’s fifty or so employees could have committed the crime, since all had access and no one had motive. The prosecutor hit me with a very unpleasant surprise: the police had uncovered evidence linking my client to the dead man. He was a furniture buyer from Kansas City who came to Chicago six times a year, and the doorman and the maids at his hotel had identified Evangeline without any trouble as the woman who accompanied him on his visits.
Bail was denied. I had a furious talk with Evangeline in one of the interrogation rooms before she went back to the holding cells.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me? I walked into the courtroom and got blindsided.”
“They’re lying,” she insisted.