‘Don’t touch the doorknob.’
Really, if I knew exactly where Eliot Ness was standing, I would have tossed him a withering look. The way it was, I knew only that he was somewhere to my left, so I sent a glare in that direction and tugged my jacket sleeve over my right hand.
‘What, you think I don’t watch CSI?’ I asked him.
And I guess I wasn’t surprised when he asked, ‘What’s CSI?’
Unfortunately, I was not as lucky that Tuesday night as I had been the night before. The door that led into the kitchen of Dean McClure’s house was locked up tight, and I was left standing on the back porch with a cloud of ashes that used to be a famous lawman wondering what to do next.
‘You’re the big brain,’ I said. ‘So now what?’
‘Now we break in.’
‘Isn’t there just a way for you to …’ I wasn’t exactly sure how to explain what I had in mind, so I pointed toward the back door and made a face. Neither conveyed my meaning with success and I screeched. Quietly, of course, so the neighbors wouldn’t know anything was up. ‘How about if you just slide or fly or poof under the door. Then you could open it and …’
But of course, he couldn’t. He might have had the chops, but he didn’t have the body that would allow him to open the door.
I sighed my surrender. ‘Break in how?’
‘Now you’re talking!’ I actually might have felt better about this if Ness didn’t sound so darned pleased. He fluttered down the steps and over to the back of the house, and I followed.
‘Up there,’ he said, and since we were standing under a window, I guess that’s where he was looking. ‘If it’s locked, you can break the glass, stick your hand inside and—’
‘Get blood on a perfectly good black jacket? I don’t think so.’
‘There won’t be any blood. Not much, anyway. Not if you’re careful. And if you’re lucky …’ Apparently, he was studying the window because he was quiet for a while. ‘The house is old and the windows are, too. You might just be able to jimmy it. Go on. Get to work. The sooner we figure out what happened to my ashes, the better.’
All this talk of blood had done little for my mood, but I had to admit that he was right. The sooner we got this over with – and the sooner I got Eliot Ness out of my life – the sooner things could get back to normal. Or at least as normal as my life could be. With that in mind, I glanced around the yard and spotted one of those molded plastic chairs over near a tree. I dragged it over and tested it, one foot on the seat.
‘I’m going to fall and kill myself,’ I said, ‘and don’t tell me you’re going to help me if I do.’
‘I’m not going to help you if you do. I can’t.’
At least he was an honest ghost.
I climbed onto the seat of the chair, balancing myself as carefully as I could, and it’s a good thing I’m tall and the window wasn’t all that high up. The bottom of the window was at my waist level, and I was easily able to see inside and into a dark room. Sleeves still over hands, I tried to slide the window open and found it locked, but Ness was right. I wiggled that window and jiggled it, too, and before I knew it, it slid free of the lock enough so that I was able to slide the window up a couple inches, reach inside, and flip the lock.
Crawling inside the house was another story.
I got in, and not gracefully, and found myself in a back room that was obviously used as a sort of den. My flashlight app revealed a flat-screen TV in one corner, a couch across from it, and movie posters on the walls: Road to Perdition, Goodfellas, Donnie Brasco.
I pictured Dean in there watching hour after hour of endless gangster movies, feeding his obsession day and night.
And I wondered what Cindy was up to when he was doing that.
‘Cindy!’ The name escaped on a whisper that was half surprise, half terror. ‘What if Cindy’s home?’ I asked Ness.
‘She’s not. I had a quick look around while you were climbing in the window. Come on.’ I saw the cloud head toward the door and, from there, out into the kitchen. ‘Get moving!’
I did, but I didn’t follow Ness into the kitchen. Instead, I passed a tinier than tiny bathroom and checked out the room next to it. If the room I’d come in through was a den, this was an office of sorts. Desk, chair, computer. It didn’t take Ness’s big brain or any real experience as a detective to know there might be evidence around.
I closed the mini blinds, turned on the desk lamp, and got to work.
It should come as no surprise that the computer was password protected, and I knew there was no use wasting my time there. Techie stuff is not my forte. The desktop had the usual assortment of bills and grocery store flyers, the desk drawers—
I pulled open the top drawer and stopped cold.
There was a sheet of paper there, handwritten, as if whoever had composed it was just jotting down notes, getting the facts straight, and though they were written in the same blue ink as the rest of the note, I scanned the page and saw three words that stood out as if they were written in red.
In all upper case letters.
And on fire.
Detective Quinn Harrison.
I sucked in a breath and – fingerprints be damned – I grabbed the paper for a better look.
‘It’s a …’ I glanced over the words quickly and tipped the page so Ness could see it, but honestly, my hands were suddenly shaking so I’m pretty sure he couldn’t read it, anyway. ‘It looks like Dean was writing a sort of report. Look, he even signed his name, and it’s about …’
Because I couldn’t believe my eyes, I looked over the note again.
‘It happened a couple weeks ago,’ I told Ness. ‘McClure says he was in a bar downtown and he had a confrontation with Quinn and things got physical. He says Quinn threw a punch.’ This did not jibe with the cool-as-an-iceberg, calm-as-a glassy lake, collected-as-a Tibetan monk Quinn I knew, but really, that wasn’t the point. ‘McClure says it wasn’t the first time he had a run-in with Quinn. He says there was an incident a couple years ago and—’
I swallowed hard and remembered that back when I first met Quinn, he was on administrative leave. He never told me what he’d done to end up in the boys in blue doghouse, and I’d never asked. Now I wondered if McClure was the reason.
Just like I wondered why when he arrived at the scene and saw who the victim was, he’d never mentioned that the two of them had a history that included punching.
‘This is crazy.’ I was talking more to myself than to Ness, but leave it to a lawman not to keep quiet.
‘He was the detective who was here last night?’ Ness asked and I nodded. ‘Interesting. He knew the victim.’
‘And the victim …’ I pointed to a line at the end of the page. ‘Dean McClure has Margaret Roadhouse’s phone number written down. Margaret, she’s Quinn’s lieutenant.’
‘McClure was going to report the incident at the bar, and then—’
‘And then?’ It was a legitimate question that only a cop could answer. The paper clutched in my clammy fingers, I looked over to where the little cloud hovered in the air in front of a closet. ‘What would happen to Quinn if this got back to his boss?’
‘I can’t say for sure,’ Ness admitted. ‘It would depend on if there have been other complaints. According to that note—’
‘McClure claimed it had happened before.’
‘Then that detective might be suspended. Or fired. Maybe even brought up on charges depending on the severity of the attack. But now that the complainant is dead—’
I sucked in a breath that barely made it past the painful knot in my throat. ‘Now that he’s dead …?’
‘If a complaint was ever filed, the department could follow up and keep investigating,’ Ness told me. ‘You’d think this Detective Harrison wouldn’t want to take any chances. I’m surprised he didn’t take the note with him. Unless he never saw it. Maybe he didn’t search in here well enough. Maybe he’s just not thorough.’
I knew Ness was wrong. When it came to his work (and other things, too, but that was a thought for another time), Quinn was plenty thorough. He wouldn’t have missed the note from McClure, and he would have known exactly what it meant if Roadhouse got hold of the information.
‘There’s obviously nothing to it,’ I decided right then and there. ‘If there was, if Quinn was somehow involved in covering up the incident by’ – I couldn’t make myself say it – ‘by doing something to McClure to make sure he never filed the complaint, if he was trying to cover up the incident, he wouldn’t have left the letter right here where anybody could find it. That proves it.’ I thrust the note back in the desk and slammed the drawer shut. ‘Quinn wasn’t worried. That means he knew he had nothing to worry about.’
‘You know,’ Ness said, ‘I originally came to Cleveland back in 1935 and I was given the job of Safety Director because, at the time, the police department here was one of the most corrupt in the country. I’ve seen plenty of cover-ups in my day.’
‘This isn’t a cover-up!’ Could I be any clearer? ‘If Quinn was trying to hide something, he wouldn’t have left the note here. Are you listening to me?’ Since I couldn’t see Ness, it was hard to tell, so just to be sure, I raised my voice. ‘Quinn is an honest cop. He’s not trying to hide anything.’
‘Maybe not,’ Ness conceded. ‘But we can’t turn a blind eye. There may be more going on here than you want to admit.’
‘Really?’ Fists on hips, I glared at the lawman, or at least at what was left of him. ‘You want to explain?’
‘We’d be foolish not to consider the fact that McClure was murdered and that Detective Harrison had a very good reason to want to see him dead.’
Sure, the thought had crossed my mind for a nanosecond, but I never would have had the guts to actually say the words and, for a moment, I was too shocked to speak. But then, it’s hard to get words past outrage that was so overpowering, it nearly knocked me off my feet. When I was finally able to sputter, my voice would have been as cold as Ness’s grave. If he had one. ‘What you’re thinking, it’s crazy and it’s wrong. Dead wrong.’
‘Maybe that’s how you see it, but—’
‘But nothing.’ I stomped toward the door, but just as I was about to go out into the hallway, I spun around and went back to the desk. I yanked open the drawer, grabbed that paper, and folded it in half.
‘You can’t tamper with a crime scene,’ Ness warned me.
‘And you can’t stop me, you’re a ghost.’ I put the paper into my pocket. ‘Quinn is as honest as the day is long, and he’s a good man. I mean, a really good man. If he was trying to cover up something that happened with McClure, he wouldn’t have left that note there. Which means he’s not trying to cover it up. Which means that nothing happened. Which means this piece of paper doesn’t mean anything. Nobody needs to see it. Ever. End of story.’
I didn’t even check to see if Ness came along with me; I turned off the desk lamp, switched on my flashlight app, and followed its light through the kitchen and into the living room. Ness or no Ness, I didn’t much care. All I wanted to do was to get this over with.
I tried to keep the thought in mind. No easy thing considering that my blood boiled and my pulse pounded like a jackhammer. Through it all, I managed to check out the display case I’d seen briefly the night before, the one with Eliot Ness’s name on the front of it.
‘Nothing,’ I grumbled, settling my weight back against one foot at the same time I looked over the display case again, just to be one hundred percent sure. ‘It doesn’t look like there was a lock on the case, which means whoever took that little wooden box where the ashes were stored just lifted the lid on the case and made off with the ashes. And he also,’ I reminded myself, ‘killed Dean McClure.’
Where this left me was at the end of my rope, investigation-wise, and I was in no mood to hear it from Ness. I’d just decided to leave and leave the what-next thinking for another day, when a couple things happened all at once:
Car headlights skimmed the wall, and I watched that car turn into the driveway.
I heard a car door slam and, the next second, I heard something even more disturbing, the sound of a key turning in the front door lock.
Before I could tell myself to move and move fast, the front door opened.
‘Oh!’
Both the woman at the front door and I let out our startled cries at the same time.
‘Who are you?’ I blurted out at the same time she said the same thing and added, ‘What are you doing in my house?’
I didn’t need an old and dead Prohibition agent to tell me I was in big trouble if I didn’t think fast, and think fast I did. My phone was still in my hands and I tucked it away in my pocket and turned on the nearest light.
‘Mrs McClure, I’m so glad you’re finally home.’
Whatever she had expected this stranger standing in her living room to say, it was apparently not this. Cindy was a short, heavyset woman with dark eyebrows and a double chin. Her eyes squinched, she curled her top lip until it met her nose, and kept a death grip on the front door handle.
‘Who … are you … what are you …?’
I had a feeling we’d stand there all night asking useless questions if I didn’t make a move.
I stepped forward and extended my hand. ‘I tried to call you earlier to let you know I was going to stop by.’ Sure it was a lie, but it helped put her at ease; some of the stiffness went out of her shoulders. ‘I was here last night. With the police.’ This, of course, was not a lie, and though it was not the full truth, either, it worked wonders.
Cindy pressed a hand to her heart. ‘Oh, thank goodness! I was so afraid someone else had broken in. What on earth are you doing here in the dark?’
Of course she was bound to ask. ‘I was just checking to see … you know, what the scene might have looked like last night when your husband was …’ Even thinking I might have to say the word made me wince, but Cindy didn’t hold this against me. ‘There were no lights on when your husband’s body was found,’ I said without bothering to point out that I was the one who had found it. ‘I just wondered what the killer was and wasn’t able to see in the dark.’
‘That’s really smart.’ Cindy ventured farther into the room and tossed her purse down on the brown-and-orange-plaid couch that faced the display cases where Ness’s ashes had once been displayed, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many hours Dean had sat on that couch admiring his collection.
‘There’s something missing,’ I told Cindy.
‘Is there?’ She came to stand at my side – she smelled like peppermint – so she could look at the empty case on the shelf. ‘What was it?’ she asked.
‘You don’t know? It was your husband’s collection.’
‘My husband’s collection.’ There was acid in her voice and in the look she shot around the room at that old telephone, the cigarette lighter, the pictures and the autographs. ‘My husband’s collection was nothing but a whole crapload of junk.’
I remembered what I’d heard from the HITmen. ‘You aren’t into gangster collecting, not like your husband was.’
‘You think?’ Cindy’s laugh said it all. ‘I’m telling you, I should have seen it from the start. But what’s that old saying? Love is blind? In my case, love was deaf, dumb, and blind. Even back when I first met him, Dean was obsessed with all this gangster crapolah. It was his great-uncle’s fault, you know. You know about his great-uncle?’
I admitted that I did not.
‘Back in the day,’ Cindy explained, ‘Dean’s Uncle Lindy lived in Chicago. He was a chauffeur. He used to drive for that What’s-His-Name once in a while, that Al Capone. He used to drive for Capone, and back when Dean was a little kid, Uncle Lindy gave him a button and said he’d found it in the back seat of the car right after he gave Capone a ride. Told Dean that button came off Capone’s coat and after that …’ When Cindy sighed, her broad chest rose and fell. ‘What’s that they say about stupid people? That they don’t need much encouragement? Dean sure didn’t. From that day on, he ate and slept and breathed this stuff. It was all he thought about. What he could buy, what he could trade, how he could get more.’
‘And I hear he was very good at it,’ I ventured.
‘Those other crazies thought he was. You know, the other collectors. I can’t tell you how many times they showed up over here, sometimes just one of them alone to see Dean, sometimes the whole lot of them all at once. And they always expected me to feed them!’ The way she harrumphed at the end of the sentence told me what she thought of that. ‘They’d sit here for hours and look at all Dean’s gangster shit, and they’d talk and they’d talk and they’d talk.’ She pressed a hand to her forehead. ‘It was enough to give me migraines.’
‘And I bet Dean loved it all,’ I said. ‘Not the migraines,’ I added quickly. ‘His collection.’
‘Yeah, well truth be told, I don’t think he minded the migraines, either. If I had a headache, I’d be upstairs in bed and him and his HITmen buddies, they could stay down here until the wee hours watching gangster movies and talking about gangster stuff.’
Cindy rolled her eyes. ‘Dean, he loved all this garbage, loved the idea of gangsters and what he called the excitement of the Prohibition years. Excitement! I never understood. Why, those stupid gangsters he loved so much are even the reason we live in this lousy little house. We used to have a nice split-level. In the suburbs. Then this house came up for sale, and Dean, he found out that some guy named Johnny Vitale grew up here.’
‘Johnny?’ Just like you never forget your first kiss, you never forget your first ghost, and Gus Scarpetti was mine. In the course of investigating his murder, I’d met Johnny at a home for retired mobsters. ‘He was a known associate of Gus Scarpetti.’
‘You into this gangster stuff, too?’ Cindy asked and, even if I was, I would have denied it because it was obvious what Cindy thought of Dean’s obsession and I couldn’t afford to alienate her.
Cindy threw her hands in the air. ‘He had to have the house. Dean had to live here. He said he wanted to soak up the atmosphere.’
‘And you said …’ I asked her.
‘What do you think? I told him he was crazy. I said he was a jerk. I said he shouldn’t spend all his money on this gangster garbage, but Dean, he never listened. This piece of junk?’ She strode forward and slapped a hand against the display case that held what I think is called a candlestick telephone. It had a base where there was a dial for the numbers, a tall, thin stem with a round thingie the caller could talk into at the top, and a sort of arm where the thing the caller listened on was hung.
‘Used to belong to Al Capone,’ Cindy said with a sneer. ‘Big, hairy deal! Dean paid as much for that stupid phone as some people pay for a car. It was our money. Our money!’ Something told me that if she knew she wasn’t the one who’d have to clean it up, she would have spit on the display case. ‘He shouldn’t have bought all this stupid stuff with our money!’
‘I heard he was going to buy something else for his collection. That’s why Dean went to Chicago last weekend, wasn’t it?’
‘You know what …’ She pursed her lips and puffed out a breath of annoyance. ‘I stopped asking because I didn’t want to know. I got home from work on Friday and there he was packing the car.’
‘The car out in the garage? That old car?’
‘Yeah, that car. The car of his heart, Dean called it. Like anybody could actually care about some old pile of rust and bolts.’
‘So he left on Friday and he came home …?’
‘Sunday night. And he was so darned excited, I’ll tell you what, Dean couldn’t stand still.’
‘Did he bring a beer bottle with him?’
‘What, it isn’t enough that Dean got murdered? Now you’re thinking that he drove back from Chicago while he was drinking?’
‘No, no. Not at all. I just wondered if he might have gone to Chicago to buy an old Sieben’s beer bottle.’
‘Sieben’s?’ Cindy crooked a finger and beckoned me to follow her through the kitchen and down the basement steps. In the small room at the bottom of the steps, she turned on a light to reveal packing box after packing box. Something told me each and every one of them contained more memorabilia.
‘Sieben’s Beer.’ She pointed to the neat writing on the side of one of the boxes. ‘This whole box is filled with Sieben’s bottles.’
‘So Dean wouldn’t have been all that excited about buying another one.’
‘You got that right.’ Cindy led the way back upstairs.
‘But he was excited, wasn’t he?’ I asked her once we were in the kitchen.
‘He couldn’t even sleep that night. Bounced around here like a kid on Christmas Eve waiting for Santa to visit.’
‘And he didn’t tell you why.’
‘I didn’t ask.’ She jerked open a drawer, found a pack of cigarettes, and lit up. ‘I didn’t want to hear it. Because I didn’t care. More junk is just more junk and Dean, he was like a junkie. He had to have another fix, no matter what it cost.’
‘So now what are you going to do with it all?’ I asked her.
Like maybe she’d never thought of this until that very moment, Cindy froze and held in a lungful of poisonous smoke. ‘I guess I get to sell it, huh?’ A slow smile spread across her doughy features and smoke streamed out of her nose. ‘Yeah, I could sell it all and finally get the money that should have been mine all these years. Every last penny of it!’ She practically skipped into the dining room where she turned on the lights and went from display to display. ‘All of it gone. And me gone, too. Back to the suburbs where I belong.’
‘I’m sorry I have to ask.’ I wasn’t, but hey, had I really been working with the police, I think that’s what I would have said. ‘I need to know where you were last night, Mrs McClure.’
‘You and that good looking cop who already asked me.’
Of course Quinn had. Like I said, thorough.
She stuck the cigarette in her front teeth so she could open one of the drawers on a buffet against the wall. There was an envelope there from a bank, and she pulled out a short stack of tens and counted them. ‘Six hundred,’ Cindy said, more to herself than me. ‘I’m surprised. I thought this was the money Dean took with him to spend in Chicago.’
‘Does that mean he didn’t buy anything when he was there?’
She went into the living room. ‘He sure acted like he did, he was that excited. But what the hell …’ She put the money in her purse. ‘At least he left me something, something other than bad memories and a boatload of anger.’
‘Which is why I asked …’ I tried to get her back to what I needed to know. ‘About last night?’
‘Last night. Yeah. I was out. With friends. We went to dinner. And I never got home until …’ Cindy glanced over her shoulder at the area rug that had been thrown over the dark red stain on the wall-to-wall. ‘That good looking cop, he was still here. You must have been gone already by the time I got home.’
‘I was.’ That much was true. ‘I’m sure Detective H—’ I coughed away the rest of the name; I wasn’t taking the chance that Cindy might have seen that damning letter to Margaret Roadhouse. ‘I’m sure the detective asked where you’d had dinner.’
‘Sure. Absolutely. That new place, that Max’s over on Madison. I had pasta.’
I made a mental note of this. Not the pasta part.
‘And the people you were with?’ I asked.
Like I should have known all along, Cindy shrugged. ‘Peggy and Mary Jean and Carole. Like always. We go to dinner every month. We went last night. Like always.’
I remembered the car still running in the driveway. ‘And now?’ I asked.
‘Now?’ Cindy breezed past me and up the stairs. ‘I’m just here to get a few things. You don’t think I’m going to spend another night in this house, do you?’
I couldn’t say I blamed her.
Upstairs, I heard her rummaging through drawers and dragging something – I guessed it was a suitcase with wheels – out of a closet.
But then I heard something else, too, and it was so loud, I practically jumped out of my skin.
‘I know you’re in there!’ a woman’s voice screamed from the front porch right before that same woman pounded on the front door. ‘Open up, McClure, you son of a bitch. Let me in!’