“Three people identified you. If you don’t start with the truth right now, you’re going to have to find a new lawyer and a new detective. Your mother may not understand, but for sure Sal will.”
“You can’t tell my mother. You can’t tell Sal!”
“I’m going to have to give them some reason for dropping your case, and knowing Sal it’s going to have to be the truth.”
For the first time she looked really upset. “You’re my lawyer. You should believe my story before you believe a bunch of strangers you never saw before.”
“I’m telling you, Evangeline, I’m going to drop your case. I can’t represent you when I know you’re lying. If you killed Darnell we can work out a defense. Or if you didn’t kill him and knew him we can work something out, and I can try to find the real killer. But when I know you’ve been seen with the guy any number of times, I can’t go into court telling people you never met him before.”
Tears appeared on the ends of her lashes. “The whole reason I didn’t say anything was so Mama wouldn’t know. If I tell you the truth, you’ve got to promise me you aren’t running back to Vincennes Avenue talking to her.”
I agreed. Whatever the story was, I couldn’t believe Mrs. Barthele hadn’t heard hundreds like it before. But we each make our own separate peace with our mothers.
Evangeline met Darnell at a party two years earlier. She liked him, he liked her — not the romance of the century, but they enjoyed spending time together. She’d gone on a two-week trip to Europe with him last year, telling her mother she was going with a girlfriend.
“First of all, she has very strict morals. No sex outside marriage. I’m thirty, mind you, but that doesn’t count with her. Second, he’s white, and she’d murder me. She really would. I think that’s why I never fell in love with him — if we wanted to get married I’d never be able to explain it to Mama.”
This latest trip to Chicago, Darnell thought it would be fun to see what Evangeline did for a living, so he booked an appointment at La Cygnette. She hadn’t told anyone there she knew him. And when she found him sick and dying she’d panicked and lied.
“And if you tell my mother of this, V. I. — I’ll put a curse on you. My father was from Haiti and he knew a lot of good ones.”
“I won’t tell your mother. But unless they nuked Lebanon this morning or murdered the mayor, you’re going to get a lot of lines in the paper. It’s bound to be in print.”
She wept at that, wringing her hands. So after watching her go off with the sheriff’s deputies, I called Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star to plead with him not to put Evangeline’s liaison in the paper. “If you do she’ll wither your testicles. Honest.”
“I don’t know, Vic. You know the Sun-Times is bound to have some kind of screamer headline like DEAD MAN FOUND IN FACE-LICKING SEX ORGY. I can’t sit on a story like this when all the other papers are running it.”
I knew he was right, so I didn’t push my case very hard.
He surprised me by saying, “Tell you what: you find the real killer before my deadline for tomorrow’s morning edition and I’ll keep your client’s personal life out of it. The sex scoop came in too late for today’s paper. The Trib prints on our schedule and they don’t have it, and the Sun-Times runs older, slower presses, so they have to print earlier.”
I reckoned I had about eighteen hours. Sherlock Holmes had solved tougher problems in less time.
3
Roland Darnell had been the chief buyer of living-room furnishings for Alexander Dumas, a high-class Kansas City department store. He used to own his own furniture store in the nearby town of Lawrence, but lost both it and his wife when he was arrested for drug smuggling ten years earlier. Because of some confusion about his guilt — he claimed his partner, who disappeared the night he was arrested, was really responsible — he’d only served two years. When he got out, he moved to Kansas City to start a new life.
I learned this much from my friends at the Chicago police. At least, my acquaintances. I wondered how much of the story Evangeline had known. Or her mother. If her mother didn’t want her child having a white lover, how about a white ex-con, ex- (presumably) drug-smuggling lover?
I sat biting my knuckles for a minute. It was eleven now. Say they started printing the morning edition at two the next morning, I’d have to have my story by one at the latest. I could follow one line, and one line only — I couldn’t afford to speculate about Mrs. Barthele — and anyway, doing so would only get me killed. By Sal. So I looked up the area code for Lawrence, Kansas, and found their daily newspaper.
The Lawrence Daily Journal-World had set up a special number for handling press inquiries. A friendly woman with a strong drawl told me Darnell’s age (forty-four); place of birth (Eudora, Kansas); ex-wife’s name (Ronna Perkins); and ex-partner’s name (John Crenshaw). Ronna Perkins was living elsewhere in the country and the Journal-World was protecting her privacy. John Crenshaw had disappeared when the police arrested Darnell.
Crenshaw had done an army stint in Southeast Asia in the late sixties. Since much of the bamboo furniture the store specialized in came from the Far East, some people speculated that Crenshaw had set up the smuggling route when he was out there in the service. Especially since Kansas City immigration officials discovered heroin in the hollow tubes making up chair backs. If Darnell knew anything about the smuggling, he had never revealed it.
“That’s all we know here, honey. Of course, you could come on down and try to talk to some people. And we can wire you photos if you want.”
I thanked her politely — my paper didn’t run too many photographs. Or even have wire equipment to accept them. A pity — I could have used a look at Crenshaw and Ronna Perkins.
La Cygnette was on an upper floor of one of the new marble skyscrapers at the top end of the Magnificent Mile. Tall, white doors opened onto a hushed waiting room reminiscent of a high-class funeral parlor. The undertaker, a middle-aged highly made-up woman seated at a table that was supposed to be French provincial, smiled at me condescendingly.
“What can we do for you?”
“I’d like to see Angela Carlson. I’m a detective.”
She looked nervously at two clients seated in a far corner. I lowered my voice. “I’ve come about the murder.”
“But... but they made an arrest.”
I smiled enigmatically. At least I hoped it looked enigmatic. “The police never close the door on all options until after the trial.” If she knew anything about the police she’d know that was a lie — once they’ve made an arrest you have to get a presidential order to get them to look at new evidence.
The undertaker nodded nervously and called Angela Carlson in a whisper on the house phone. Evangeline had given me the names of the key players at La Cygnette; Carlson was the manager.
She met me in the doorway leading from the reception area into the main body of the salon. We walked on thick, silver pile through a white maze with little doors opening onto it. Every now and then we’d pass a white-coated attendant who gave the manager a subdued hello. When we went by a door with a police order slapped to it, Carlson winced nervously.
“When can we take that off? Everybody’s on edge and that sealed door doesn’t help. Our bookings are down as it is.”
“I’m not on the evidence team, Ms. Carlson. You’ll have to ask the lieutenant in charge when they’ve got what they need.”
I poked into a neighboring cubicle. It contained a large white dentist’s chair and a tray covered with crimson pots and bottles, all with the cutaway swans which were the salon’s trademark. While the manager fidgeted angrily I looked into a tiny closet where clients changed — it held a tiny sink and a few coat hangers.