As Eliot Ness kept reminding me, I was a detective. Sure, all my clients were dead, but in the great scheme of things, what difference does that make? Thinking like a detective, I did a little research and a lot of thinking, and here’s what I came up with:
I had one murder victim, Dean McClure, and he was a collector of gangster and Prohibition memorabilia, including those ashes that were once the body of Eliot Ness, the ashes that were now missing.
At this point, I also knew that Dean McClure was the one who’d delivered an old bottle to me at the cemetery and that the old bottle had come from a brewery once owned by Al Capone.
Pardon the pun, but my next move was elementary.
Remembering that newsletter I’d scooped up at Dean McClure’s – The Hit List – I pulled it out and read it over, and I found out two very interesting things:
This was good news. I mean, other than for Bill and Vivian who I hoped were very happy. It meant that after work that Tuesday, I headed to the meeting of History’s Ill-Gotten Treasures Society.
Yes, it was a lame name for the group and as corny as hell, but I had no doubt someone had worked long and hard to come up with it just so they could call themselves the HITmen.
The HITmen met on the other side of town in an area called Westpark, one of those comfy neighborhoods where the sturdy older homes are neat and well-maintained and there’s a bar on every corner. It would have made perfect sense to me if the HITmen met in one of those bars, and I pictured it as dark and smoky, the sort of place where they’re still debating the pros and cons of Prohibition and where there are secret rooms in the basement, perfect spots for bootleggers to hide their wares. Alas, there was to be no bar in my Tuesday evening plans. I followed the directions on the back of the newsletter and found myself in the parking lot of a church that had been closed a few years earlier. The building now served as a community center, and I found the HITmen down in the basement in a room with bright overhead lighting, cheery floral pictures on the walls, and a table in the corner that had a coffee carafe on it and was stacked with homemade pastries.
A little background here: in the course of my very first ghostly investigation which involved Gus Scarpetti, a notorious mob boss who’d died back in the seventies, I’d actually once dealt with hit men. I mean, as opposed to HITmen. The guys I had to interview back then were made men. Wise guys. They might have been coffee drinkers, but as far I could remember, there were never homemade cookies involved.
‘Hey, we got a visitor!’ With the cookie in his hand – it looked like oatmeal – one of the men pointed to the doorway where I stood. He was eighty if he was a day and wearing old-man pants cinched around his scrawny waist with a belt along with a black T-shirt with the words Leave the Gun, Take the … well, I guess the last word was Cannoli but his pants were pulled up so high, I couldn’t see the rest. When he called out, the other people in the room, all of them men, looked my way.
I waved and smiled the smile that never failed to charm. But then, not a one of these guys could have been younger than fifty, and I suspect they hadn’t been smiled at any time in the recent past by a tall redhead in skinny black pants. ‘Is this the HITmen meeting?’
‘You got it, sweetheart.’ I couldn’t tell if the man who rose to greet me was playing a sort of tough-guy part or if he always talked that way. ‘Come on in! You want we should get you some coffee?’
I told him I’d get my own and, while I was at it, I got a couple cookies, too, since I hadn’t had dinner, and I took my time so I could look over the lay of the land.
That part was pretty easy because there wasn’t a whole bunch to see. A dozen men were seated on either side of a long table in the center of the room, and most of them had coffee and pastry in front of them. They were a motley crew: the old guy who’d first noticed me, a couple younger (relatively speaking) fellows in plaid flannel shirts who checked me out as I poured coffee, a few retirees who looked harmless enough. There were various objects in the center of the table, and I had no doubt they’d been brought in for a HITmen show and tell. I looked over the collection before I took a seat, calling up anything I could remember from what I’d seen at McClure’s the night before along with anything Ness had told me.
‘Ah, Al Capone!’ I set my plate of cookies down near a photograph of the man I’d seen in two pictures over at McClure’s, but before I could take a better look at it, the lights in the room flickered.
‘Darn old fuse box,’ one of the men grumbled, but as it turned out, the darned old fuse box kicked right back in, the lights came on and stayed on, and I had a chance to check out the picture of the most famous gangster of all time.
In this particular shot, Capone was wearing a dark suit and a straw hat, the old-fashioned barbershop quartet kind with a flat top and a round brim. ‘Nice picture,’ I said.
‘Autographed.’ The guy closest to me was one of the guys in the flannel shirts. His was red, and he inched back his shoulders. ‘Bought it for a song at a flea market. Guy didn’t know what a treasure he had.’
The old guy who pointed me out when I walked in leaned over and studied the picture. ‘And you don’t know what a sucker you are, Stan,’ he said. He flicked the picture with thumb and forefinger. ‘It’s a fake.’
Stan’s cheeks turned an ugly maroon color. ‘What do you mean fake, Louis? I checked it out when I was at the flea market. I looked online and—’
‘And look at the signature.’ Louis dragged the picture closer to where he was sitting, and oatmeal cookie crumbs landed on Capone’s nose. ‘This C is nice and round and even, see. Capone’s real signature … well, tell him, Bill …’ Louis looked down the table at another older man. ‘You’ve got a couple authentic Capone autographs. Tell him, Bill, the way Capone signed his name, the bottom loop of the C always curled around and went under the a in his name.’
‘You got that right,’ Bill said and when Stan’s picture got passed to him, he shook his head. ‘Hope you didn’t pay too much for this one, Stan.’
Stan crossed his arms over his chest and plunked back in his chair.
I figured it was my job to change the subject and, while I was at it, to get the conversation headed in the direction I wanted it to go.
‘So …’ The picture of wide-eyed innocence, I looked up and down the table. ‘Will Dean McClure be here tonight?’
Ol’ Bill nearly choked on his coffee, Louis dropped his cookie, and everyone else started talking. All at once. At least until I wrapped my knuckles against the table.
‘It was a simple question,’ I said, loud enough to drown out the couple voices that still droned on. ‘Anyone want to tell me why your knickers are in a twist?’
Bill had a shock of thick white hair and Coke bottle glasses. He peered through them down to where I sat. ‘How do you know Dean?’ he asked.
Don’t worry, I was prepared for the question. ‘We’ve been talking,’ I said. ‘Well, not exactly talking. We’ve been emailing each other. I’m just getting into collecting, see, and I’m interested in buying one of the items in his collection.’
Louis waved a hand in my direction, and cookie crumbs spilled from his fingers and rained down on the white plastic tablecloth. ‘That doesn’t sound possible. Dean never sells anything. He’s the ultimate pack rat. He has a lot, but he wants more.’
‘He wants it all,’ one of the other men said.
‘That’s for sure,’ Stan grumbled. ‘Like that arrest record. The one from Capone—’
The fuse box took that particular moment to act up again, but just as quickly as the lights went off, they were back on, and Stan continued. ‘That arrest record that included his fingerprints. Nathan, he had that arrest record and—’
And once again, the place erupted. Voices overlapped, and I didn’t have a clue what anyone was arguing about, I only knew that Stan’s mouth was flapping, Louis’s eyes were wide, and when he tried to raise his voice and call for order, there was spit in the corner of Bill’s mouth.
He finally pounded the table with his fist and that worked.
‘All right then.’ Bill was breathing hard. But then, he was no spring chicken and there was no telling what he and Vivian had gotten up to at their fiftieth anniversary celebration the night before. He looked like he needed a strong drink and a long nap. He scraped a hand through his hair. ‘You know the rules, Stan, that’s the one thing we said we weren’t going to talk about. Not ever again.’
‘We said we weren’t going to talk about it when Dean was around,’ Stan pointed out. ‘And you know as well as I do, Bill, Dean ain’t around.’
‘You mean he’s not going to be here tonight?’ Big points for me, I wasn’t a blonde, but I could play dumb with the best of them. I tilted my head and stuck out my lower lip. ‘He promised he’d be here. Last time we emailed, he said he’d be here and he was bringing the leather wallet that once belonged to Eliot Ness.’
Bill scratched a hand behind his ear. ‘Well, if that isn’t the darnedest thing. Dean just bought that wallet from a collector in Fresno. You sure he said he was gonna sell it to you?’
‘That’s what he told me.’ Just to make sure they all knew I was miffed, I tossed my head. ‘If he says he’s going to do something and he doesn’t do it … well, then this Dean guy isn’t very ethical, is he? It’s a good thing he didn’t show up tonight. I guess I don’t want to do business with him, anyway.’
As loud as the HITmen had been before, they were suddenly quiet. Louis chewed his cookie. Stan and his clad-in-flannel buddy looked at the ceiling. A man down toward the end of the table grabbed that Capone picture and studied it like he’d never seen the face before, or for that matter, a photograph.
Bill cleared his throat. ‘Well, it’s like this, Miss …’
‘Martin.’ I supplied the last name, but not the first. Who knew how far my detective reputation had gotten me! I didn’t want to take a chance that some of these wise guy wannabes might have gotten wind of what I did.
‘Well, Miss Martin, if you saw the news this morning—’
‘No time for that.’ I waved away the thought.
‘Then if you read the newspaper—’
‘Who wastes time on that rag!’ I added a little laugh. ‘When I’m not working, I spend most of my time reading. You know, about Eliot Ness and Prohibition and Al Capone and—’
For the third time in as many minutes, the lights flickered.
Bill waited to be sure they’d stay on and, when they did, he said, ‘Well, then I hate to be the one to tell you …’ I could tell he had a good heart. Uneasy and probably worried about me fainting dead away once he broke the news, he ran a finger around the inside of his collar. ‘Dean McClure … well, Dean is dead.’
Yeah, I had anticipated this little scenario, too. I leaned forward, my mouth open in a tiny ‘O’ of surprise.
‘Does that mean I won’t be able to buy Eliot Ness’s wallet?’ I asked.
That was it. Just as I anticipated, that was all it took. My priorities clearly in line with their obsession, I was instantly a member of the club.
Just call me a HITman.
‘You didn’t hear?’ Louis had piled cookies on his plate and he reached for another one, chocolate chip this time. ‘From what I read …’ He looked up and down the table. ‘Nothing was taken from the house. That’s a blessing, huh? Nothing taken. Dean’s collection is intact.’
Not completely, but then no one who wasn’t actually looking for Eliot Ness’s ashes would have known they were missing.
‘So this Dean guy …’ I nibbled on a sugar cookie. ‘What happened to him? He didn’t say anything to me about being sick when he emailed me on Saturday.’
Bill shook his head. ‘Murdered.’
I pretended to be surprised, and I did it pretty well, too. It took me a full minute before I could stutter out, ‘That’s terrible! Did the police arrest anyone? Do they know who did it?’
‘I read somewhere that it was some druggie from the neighborhood,’ a man down toward the end of the table said. ‘Hey, I warned Dean. We all did. We warned him not to move into that neighborhood.’
‘The neighborhood is fine!’ Bill waved away this bit of information. ‘The whole thing’s a crying shame. Dean, he was so excited when I talked to him last week. Said he was going to Chicago for the weekend.’
‘He mentioned something about Chicago in his last email,’ I said. ‘Does he have family there?’
Louis shook his head. ‘No, Dean didn’t have no family. No one but Cindy.’
Bill snorted and since no one explained why, I kept digging. ‘So why Chicago?’ I asked.
Stan’s top lip curled. ‘Bet he was buying something. That’s the only time Dean got really excited about anything, when he had a seller on the hook and was all set to pounce on some new find. He called me last week, too, told me he was headed to Chicago. You know what Dean was like. It would have killed him to pick up the phone and just call and ask how the hell anybody was. He never called. Not unless he knew he was going out buying and he was going to come back with something that was sure to make us all jealous.’
There were mumbles of assent up and down the table.
‘So he went to Chicago to buy something, and it must have been something special.’ For all the HITmen knew, I was simply trying to get the facts straight rather than working out this bit of the mystery in my head. ‘Do you think it might have been a bottle from Sieben’s Brewery?’
‘Capone’s place?’ When the lights flickered, Bill grumbled, but they came right back on again, just as they had the first three times. ‘We’re going to have to talk to the people from the city. They got to do something about the wiring in this place.’ He shook his head and looked my way. ‘What’s that you say? Could he have been going to Chicago to get a Sieben’s bottle?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Louis sounded pretty sure of himself. ‘A Sieben’s bottle, yeah, that’s fine. But Dean, he even called me to tell me he was going to Chicago. Stan’s right. Dean, he would only call everybody when he was excited, really excited, about something he was going to buy.’
‘And the beer bottle wasn’t worth getting all that excited about.’ This was an interesting bit of info, and I tucked it away in my brain for further review and asked no one in particular, ‘So what could Dean have been going to Chicago to buy?’
‘I haven’t seen anything go up for sale on any of the chat boards,’ one man commented.
‘Last thing I saw on eBay wasn’t worth the powder to blow it up,’ another man said.
‘But Dean was excited, really excited,’ I reminded them.
‘Yup.’ Like he couldn’t understand it, Bill shook his head. ‘Dean, he must have had the inside track on something. Something none of the rest of us heard about.’
‘Dean, he was a son-of-a-bitch like that,’ Stan grumbled and, all around the table, there were mumbles of consent.
I took a bite of cookie and decided to get into it with them. Hey, they were HITmen, but not hit men, and I’d gone toe-to-toe with real hit men and come out on top. ‘So what you’re telling me …’ I looked up and down the table. ‘Is that none of you liked Dean and any of you could have killed him.’
I expected outrage. Or at least a little bit of sugar-induced anger.
I got laughter instead.
‘Of course none of us liked him.’ Bill chuckled and bit into a donut covered with powdered sugar. ‘I’m pretty sure no one who ever met Dean liked him. But that doesn’t mean any of us killed him.’
‘If this was a TV show, the cops would want to know if you have alibis.’ Oh yes, I sounded as innocent as a lamb when I said this. ‘You know, so they could eliminate all of you as suspects.’
Louis scrubbed a finger under his nose. ‘Not one of us liked Dean. He was greedy.’
‘And he bragged a lot,’ another man offered. ‘And he liked to rub it in our faces when he bought something fabulous for his collection.’
‘Or when he outbid us at an auction,’ a third man said.
‘But none of us …’ Bill was so sure of this, his chin rose. It would have been an impressive show of force if there wasn’t powdered sugar on the end of this nose. ‘None of us would kill the guy. Heck, Dean McClure, he wasn’t worth going to prison for.’
‘Nathan might not agree,’ Stan said.
He was seated over on my right on the same side of the table where I was sitting, and I needed to spin in my seat so I could look Stan’s way. ‘That’s the second time you mentioned this Nathan guy. Anyone want to tell me what it’s all about?’
As it turned out, they all did. All at once.
I waited for most of the hubbub to settle down and tried my best to make some sense of the bits and pieces of the words that flew around me. ‘So this Nathan guy had an arrest record from Al Capone.’ The lights flickered and, this time, I didn’t even react. I knew they’d come back on again. ‘And you say that Dean, he went to see that arrest record and—’
‘Not just Dean. We were all there that night,’ Bill said. ‘It was the HITmen Christmas party, and Nathan volunteered to host.’
‘And when we got there,’ Louis informed me, ‘that arrest record was right where it was supposed to be. In a display case in Nathan’s den. He just bought it a couple months before and he was anxious to show it off.’
‘And the next day,’ Stan said, ‘Nathan calls each and every one of us and tells us it’s gone.’
‘Did this Nathan make a police report?’ I asked.
‘I know he made an insurance claim,’ Bill said. ‘And he said that Dean was the last person in the den.’
‘And what did Dean say about that?’ I wanted to know.
‘Well, if you listened to Dean, Nathan was scamming the system,’ Louis told me. ‘But then, Nathan and Dean, they never did get along. Dean said that Nathan got the insurance payout for that arrest record, but that he made up the whole thing about how it was stolen. Some of us …’ He looked around and I did, too, and saw that a few of the men nodded. ‘Some of us agree. We think that arrest record is right in Nathan’s house where it’s always been.’
‘That don’t explain how much Nathan hated Dean,’ Stan insisted. ‘Hated him with a fiery passion.’
‘Enough to kill him?’ I asked.
Stan nodded. Louis wasn’t so sure. Bill shuffled some papers on the table in front of him.
‘You want to find somebody who hated Dean,’ Louis said, ‘maybe you should talk to Cindy.’
‘And that’s Dean’s—’
‘His wife,’ Bill told me. ‘But I don’t know. A woman like Cindy—’
‘That Cindy’s as mean as a snake,’ Stan put in. ‘Don’t you remember, Bill? Last meeting, Dean, he told us how Cindy was giving him a hard time about every little thing he bought. She even wanted him to sell some of his stuff.’
‘Which is maybe why Dean contacted you,’ Bill told me, and since it fit in with the cock-and-bull story I’d given them, I pretended it was true.
‘So now we better get down to business,’ Bill added, clearly uncomfortable speculating about the murder. He rapped the table with a wooden gavel. ‘I hereby call to order this meeting of History’s Ill-Gotten Treasures. Louis, you start us out with the secretary’s report.’
Louis did, though truth be told, I didn’t pay a whole bunch of attention. Secretary’s report, treasurer’s report, ways and means (these guys actually held car washes to raise money for the group). I zoned out through it all and only paid a little more attention when the guys who’d brought things in to show explained what they were and how they’d gotten him: A cigarette lighter that had once belonged to a cousin of a friend of Bugsy Siegel. An old FBI badge. A license plate from the thirties. None of it was especially interesting, and aside from that picture of Capone, none of it had anything to do with the things I wanted to find out more about: Dean McClure’s murder and Eliot Ness’s ashes.
By the time the HITmen wrapped up and told me they hoped they’d see me at the next meeting, I might have been in a gangster-induced coma, but I hadn’t completely fallen down on the job. I paid my ten dollars to join the group for a year and, in exchange, I got the club roster. Yes, it included Nathan’s full name, his address, and his phone number.
I am not a detective for nothing.
‘You did well.’ The flurry that was Eliot Ness met me just as I got out to my car.
‘Yeah, you want to reimburse me the ten bucks I just spent?’
He actually laughed. ‘That’s a small price to pay for information.’
‘Maybe.’ I slid into the car and started the engine. ‘But being bored all night is going above and beyond.’
‘Well, then it’s a good thing the rest of the night isn’t going to be boring.’
I had already pulled out of the parking lot, and I slanted Ness a look.
‘The rest of my night is going to consist of going home and falling into bed.’
‘Yes. Later. After.’
Good thing I was stopped at a red light when I closed my eyes and groaned. ‘After …?’
‘After we stop back at Dean McClure’s, of course,’ he told me. ‘My ashes are still missing, and whoever stole them might have left a clue as to where they went.’
‘Should I even ask?’
I guess Ness was a pretty good detective himself; he knew exactly what I was talking about. ‘Well, you never had a chance last night,’ he said. ‘So tonight you’ll make up for it. Tonight, you’ll finally have your chance to break into Dean McClure’s house.’