The Gift Horse's Mouth, page 7
part #7 of Jimmy Flannery Series
He struggles up and out of the leather sofa.
"Just bring anything you find to me first. Remember we're in this thing together." He stands there, tottering a little on his old legs. "Looks like young Daley's going to win this one."
"But will it ever be the same, Ray?" Delvin says.
"You mean will the machine start running the way it used to? No, it won't. These are different times. There's not much patronage to give out anymore. The courts took care of that. But there'll still be opportunities to be had. Being the warlord of a ward might mean a little something once again."
He toddles away, leaving me and my old Chinaman to chew that one over.
"He's not suggesting that Jarwolski knows there's a crime here and wants it covered up?" I say.
"Who knows what he thinks? Do the job he asks you to do. Go through the motions. Keep the old man happy."
"That don't seem to be a very good reason to play elaborate games," I say.
He raises his eyebrows like he's startled and astounded to hear me complain about playing games, which he probably thinks I'm playing all the time.
"Well, do it because your dog did it to his dog and you'd do well to have Carrigan owing you a big favor."
"How'd you know about Alfie and his dog?" I ask.
"Ah, Jesus, Jimmy, this old fox ain't deaf, dumb, and blind yet."
TWELVE
Finding a friend’s murderer is one thing. Helping out an influential person like Carrigan is another thing. But nosing around in a person's private life when they probably died by accident is going too far.
So here I am with the key to Goldie's flat in my hand and feeling bad about it.
I'm also excited and curious about what I might find inside the legendary Goldie Hanrahan's apartment.
The key slides in, then catches. For a minute there I got to jiggle it, work it in and out a hair until I can turn it. That could mean the lock's a little worn or it could be somebody's jimmied the door and damaged the pins. The door swings open and I step inside into a little hall. What they call a foyer. It's got striped cream-and-green wallpaper. There's a wide doorway into a living room and a short passage off to the right with a gilt mirror at the end of it. Also a doorway that probably leads to the back of the apartment, the kitchen and the service porch. Maybe a maid's room, which in these grand old apartments most people use for an extra bedroom or a place for storage.
The other way goes to a little powder room. I step inside and take a look. Just a toilet and a sink. Old fashioned wallpaper in a pattern of small roses. Guest towels hung over a brass bar. A big clamshell filled with little pieces of soap in different colors and shapes. Fussy and fancy.
The foyer's gloomy and the living room ain't much better because the windows are covered in heavy gray velvet drapes. I don't know if Goldie left them that way when she went out the morning she got killed or if somebody—the cleaning lady, somebody—has been in since and closed them; the sun shouldn't fade the carpet when it comes pouring in late in the afternoon.
I go over and look for the pull to open them up. There's a little motor does the job at the touch of a button. The drapes glide back and the morning light comes in through the windows but it don't do much good since winter's finally socked in and the cloud cover over Chicago's so thick you can't see even a wink of sun. I punch the button and the drapes glide shut.
The drapes is gray and the furniture is rose and green. All velvet, too. There's little tables like you see in English television historical programs all over the place, convenient to the sofas and easy chairs in case you got guests in for tea.
There's some prints, still lifes with lots of flowers and vegetables, and old-fashioned people in front of thatched cottages or by the seaside, in gold frames. Plus a portrait of Goldie which looks to me like it was done by one of them artists who paints your picture from a photograph. She's wearing a green satin evening gown off the shoulders and her hair's piled up on top of her head like she was going out for the evening.
At first I think it looks like her, then I realize it looks like her when she was laying in the coffin, only younger, but not like she did when she was alive.
I wander through the dining room into the kitchen. All nicely furnished, appliances the top of the line, ruffled curtains at the window over the sink. Yellow and blue.
There's not a crumb around the toaster, the oven's clean as a whistle, the glasses in the cabinets sparkling. There's a glass, a coffee mug, a small plate, a knife, and a spoon in the dish rack.
I open up the dishwasher. Nothing in it.
The bedroom's more of the same. Neat and clean. Clothes—nice dresses, some cocktail and evening gowns, even furs—lined up in long rows in the walk-in closet. Shoes and slippers lined up on shelves.
I open the drawers in the tallboy and the chest. Her sweaters and underwear are separated into neat piles. I don't go poking through her stuff. I lift the edges of each folded garment though and check to see if she's got a diary or something like that hidden away. There's nothing. Her dresser's practically covered with fancy cut-glass perfume bottles and pictures in small silver frames of Goldie with different people. Most of the men are in tuxedos and Goldie's always in a gown. I recognize four mayors, Daley, Bilandic, Byrne, and Washington. There's a couple of United States senators and even a picture of Goldie with ex-presidents Johnson, Reagan, and Carter. Also half the power brokers in the city, going back to Hizzoner's reign, are represented.
And Carmine DiBella, the Mafia don, Dunleavy, the head of Streets and Sanitation, Ed Keady, Jerry Killian, and Big Ed Lubelski, leaders of the Forty-seventh, First, and Thirty-second wards, Jack Reddy, now the supervisor of the water department, and plenty of others I know and some I don't.
I go back to where the maid's room was when even middle class people had maids. I try the knob but the door's locked. I got this kid, lives next door to Mary and me, taught me how to pick locks. What kids know nowadays can make you wonder. It takes me maybe a minute, maybe a minute and a half, to jimmy the door and step inside.
She's been using it for a bedroom just like I figured except there's an air about this room which gives me the feeling it's the only one that's really been lived in.
It's a plain room with a single bed that looks like it was slept in, a small overstuffed chair with a chintz slipcover and a shawl tossed over the back of it, a dresser with a mirror, and a little pine wardrobe since there's no closet.
The wardrobe's got two or three cotton house dresses in it, a ratty pair of slippers, and a chenille bathrobe with most of the pom-poms worn off the sleeves and back. It could be the maid's things, but somehow I know they ain't the maid's things.
There's a rollaway table with a nineteen-inch television on it.
There's some framed pictures on the walls. What I guess is her mother and father on their wedding day. And some of them stiff-posed pictures which an old time photographer retouched and colored until the people—which I figure is her grandparents—look dead.
There's more photos in frames on the dresser, but the frames are imitation tortoiseshell or plain wood.
Goldie's in these pictures, too, except she's always with just one other person, a different man in each one, and the clock's turned back forty years.
There's not a woman in any of them, not even in the background.
I recognize Ray Carrigan from back then. He looks like Spencer Tracy. There's Smith Jarwolski when he was a patrolman in uniform, and my old Chinaman, Delvin, when he was a much younger man. I think I recognize Vito Velletri, the warlord of the Twenty-fifth. There's one more picture. A picture of Goldie with my old man. It must be 1951, '52, because he's in uniform. The Korean War was on, he was about twenty-six years old, and he was just about ready to marry my mother. They're at some kind of amusement park. There's a sign in the background. I get my nose up close and I can just barely make out the word City and the letters tic in front of it. Atlantic City?
All of the pictures seem to be from back around then. Say the early fifties into the sixties.
Goldie looks like she's in her late teens or early twenties. A very beautiful girl who smiles these tight little smiles—she had bad teeth even back then—but even in such small pictures you can see she's got something special on the ball.
I wonder about all the places the snapshots could've been taken. I wonder who took them. It could be they was all taken by different photographers like the ones that hang around amusement piers. I wonder if these are photos of Goldie on her day off having a date with a different boyfriend.
Except for the one with my father taken in Atlantic City. They'd have had to travel to get there on the East Coast.
There's one more snapshot of Goldie. She's holding a baby in her arms. There's no man in the picture. I wonder which one of the men in the other pictures took the snap.
I take the photos of my old man, Ray Carrigan, and Chips Delvin and put them in my pocket, knowing that somewhere down the road I could be charged with breaking and entering, interfering with a police investigation, suppressing evidence, burglary, and petty theft.
There's a telephone on the floor by the bed and a little book alongside it.
I sit down on the bed and pick up the book. It's an appointment calendar. I look at the last day when Goldie was alive. There's four entries. I hear a key in the front door. I go out through the kitchen and the back door to the service landing, closing it with a lot of care.
Then I stand there wondering what I should do. Finally I bend down on one knee and look through the old-fashioned keyhole.
I see a Latino woman about fifty come into the kitchen. She stands in the middle of the floor, like she's listening. She shakes her head, a sad look on her face. Then she takes off her coat. She's wearing a blue smock. It's the maid.
I take the service elevator down to the basement and walk over to the park where I can sit on a bench and read.
THIRTEEN
I look through the appointment book. It's nothing special. It looks like every appointment book I ever seen except maybe it's a little neater than most, since Goldie was a secretary and Carrigan's executive assistant all those years.
The page on the day of her death has five notations.
The first note says, "Shedd, B.B.?" The next one says,"Sissy—Breakfast." The next one is "John M.—Lunch." "R.C." is the next, and the last one says "D.D.S.—3:00."
I sit there working out what I can from not very much.
When you shorthand somebody's name with initials it probably means you know them pretty good or their names is fresh in your memory.
So it figures, until I find out otherwise, that R.C. stands for Ray Carrigan.
Because she uses the whole first name you got to figure she's got lots of last names in her address book start with M but only one John M.
She uses the whole last name, Shedd, which tells me it's somebody she's just met so that she's afraid she could forget it and initials won't be enough to remind her who it is.
Sissy I don't know if it's a good friend, not a good friend, or she just wrote it down like that for no particular reason. We don't always do the same things the same way.
D.D.S. stymies me for a minute. Why would she use three initials? Then I flash on her nickname and her missing bridgework and I'm willing to bet D.D.S. stands for doctor of dental science.
That's as far as I can get sitting on the bench, so I go back to her apartment house and take the elevator back up to her floor and walk along the corridor until I come to her door and knock on it.
After about a minute I knock again.
A voice from the other side says, "Wha' do you wan'?"
There's a lot of city employees besides cops and firemen what carry badges. I got a little badge pinned inside my wallet because sometimes you got trouble with a backed-up sewer line into a house and you got to get in there to have a look so you got to show something official so people will let you in.
So I take out my wallet and hold the badge up to the spy hole for a couple seconds and then close it up and put it back in my pocket hoping she'll think I'm a cop without me having to lie out loud.
There's another little delay while she thinks it over and then she opens the door but leaves it on the chain.
"Wha' you wan'?" she says again.
She's got a nice coffee-colored face, sweet and calm, except her eyes are rimmed with red because she's been crying.
"I come about Ms. Hanrahan."
"She had an accident. She's dead," she says, and her face twists up in a little spasm like she's going to let go again but she gets hold of herself.
"I know. That's what I come about."
"Yes?" she says, but she don't open the door.
"You happen to know the name of her dentist?"
A little frown puckers up the skin between her eyes like she's wondering what I want to know that for.
"I don't like to upset you with such things, ma'am," I say, "but Ms. Hanrahan's teeth was damaged and the undertaker'd like to see her X rays so he can. . .reconstruct the face."
She winces again. "She's already laid out. I wen' to see her," she says.
"So you could tell she don't look natural."
She takes the door off the chain and opens up.
"Please, come in," she says. "I go fin' Ms. Hanrahan's book."
"I take it you're Ms. Hanrahan's housekeeper?" I say.
"I'm jus' the cleaning lady. I come in half a day, t'ree times a week."
"Well, that's being a housekeeper," I say, smiling at her.
"I suppose so. You wan' to wait in the living room? I t'ink it'll be all righ'."
I follow her into the room I was just in fifteen minutes before.
"What can I call you, miss?" I ask.
"Connie. Ms. Hanrahan always called me Connie," she says, and hurries out of the room, her hand getting a handkerchief out of the pocket of her smock.
She's opened the gray velvet drapes. The overcast is breaking up and there's a slice of sun on the carpet. Even so I get the feeling again that the flat was hardly lived in, like Goldie had earned the fancy coveted flat in the expensive building but never really felt comfortable in it.
I stand up when Connie comes back with the address book. The courtesy flusters her a little so she don't hesitate handing it over.
"It's cold out today, ain' it?" she says.
"It surely is," I say.
"Maybe you'd like a cup of coffee?"
"Only if you'll have one with me."
She blushes and says, "You t'ink tha' would be all righ'?"
"I don't think Ms. Hanrahan would mind we had a cup of coffee together."
"No, she wouldn'. Plenty times she ask me to sit down have a cup of coffee wit' her. Talked to me about when she was a young woman jus' makin' her way out of the tenemen's."
"I'd like to hear some of that," I say, like now I'm an old friend of Goldie's and not just the cop I'm sort of pretending to be.
"I make the coffee," she says, and leaves the room.
I sit down and go through the book. First I look up Shedd, but I can't find any Shedd in it.
Then I check out John M's and come up with three. John Markowitz, John MacNamara, and John Milholland. I write down their addresses and phone numbers on one of the three-by-five cards I carry around with me when I'm looking into something.
I find the dentist listed. Dr. Harry Slaughter. I can imagine the jokes the poor guy must get about that. I take down the vitals.
Just to be on the safe side I go through the C's and find out that Ray Carrigan ain't the only R.C. in it. There's also a Robert Campo, so I write that down, too.
Connie comes in with the coffee in two mugs on a plastic tray with some pink packets of sweetener and a small container of low-fat milk and sets it down on the table.
"Ms. Hanrahan don' keep no sugar or cream in the house."
"That's all right. I take mine black half the time anyway."
She sits down and waits for me to pick up my mug before she picks up hers. Neither of us puts anything in it and we both take sips at the same time to test how hot it is. Just then a wind comes blasting in off the lake and rattles the windows. We both look over there like we think somebody's trying to get in, then we look at each other and grin and take another swallow of the hot coffee.
"You fin' the dentist's name?" she asks.
"I think so. This the only address book she keeps?"
"I don' know," she says, frowning like my question puzzles her.
"I mean like she could have a personal address book and a business address book."
"Maybe she got one over to her office."
"She's got an office? I didn't know she had an office. What would she want an office for? She's retired over five years."
Connie shrugs her shoulders as though she don't know and she don't care.
"Maybe she's got business. Importan' people like Ms. Hanrahan always got business."
And important people like Goldie Hanrahan what retire from government service got plenty of inside dope, clout, and savvy to sell. So they set up as consultants and make five times as much for introducing this person to that person than when they was one of the persons other persons wanted to be introduced to.
I wondered if Goldie'd set herself up in the influence and favor business and thought it smarter not to work out of her home.
"You know where this office is?"
"No, but she give me the number in case I ever had to get her and she wasn' here at home."
"You happen to know it off hand?" I ask with my pen ready to write it down on one of my cards.
She rattles it off no trouble like it was a number she was used to.
"You call her at the office a lot?" I ask.
"Wha' you mean?"
"I mean either you called her a lot or you got a good memory for numbers. I got a very bad memory for numbers. Sometimes I have a hard time remembering my own."
"Oh, me, too. I mean, how often you call yourself?"
"So you called Ms. Hanrahan at the office a lot?"
