“Then what makes them so sure an ice pick was the murder weapon?”
Dick smirked at me, the milky eye taking the edge off his otherwise handsome face. “It’s what we call in the trade an educated guess, Nate, based on a couple of things.… Don’t tell the coroner’s guys I did this.”
He leaned in and over and lifted Tom’s T-shirt, having to tug it up some to get past-and expose-the fatal wound. It was a small puncture in the midst of blondish chest hair with very little blood-a stab right through the sternum. Dick let me study the wound a while, then pulled the T-shirt down back into place.
“Add to this,” he said, “the fact that every ice bucket in this hotel is delivered with an ice pick. Only here we have an ice bucket, but no pick.”
“And they figure she took the ice pick with her, when she skedaddled, to dispose of.”
“Isn’t that what sewer drains are for?”
From the door, a mellow, world-weary voice intoned, “Excuse me, gentlemen-would you mind clearing the crime scene while I have a look?”
The slender, somber, narrow-faced, retirement-age guy in glasses-tortoiseshell frames-apparently knew Dick Cain, and assumed I was just another cop. After all, plenty of cops in Chicago could afford a Louis Goldsmith suit.
“Not at all, doc,” Cain said. “I’m just a kibitzer from the sheriff’s department. Heller here has confirmed identification of the body.”
The doctor nodded at us and came in. He had a black medical bag handy. Like it would do Tom any good.
I said, “Doctor, uh…?”
“Owens,” he said. “Clarence Owens.”
We skipped the handshake ritual. He was standing just inside the door with the Gladstone bag fig-leafed before him, held in both fists.
“Dr. Owens,” I said, “when you run the postmortem I’d like to know what the angle is on that wound. Chief Cain here thinks it’s an ice-pick wound.”
Owlish eyes blinked behind the glasses. “I don’t recognize you, detective.”
“I’m Nate Heller.”
“Oh. Nathan Heller. The private detective.”
“Forgive the dumb question, doctor, but can you tell whether the deceased had sex recently before he died?”
He went over near the bed and the corpse. “Well, there seems to be dried semen residue on the front of his shorts.”
“So he did have sex shortly before he died.”
His tone and expression were dry as day-old toast. “A lot of men in hotel rooms alone ejaculate, Mr. Heller.”
Cain offered, “There’s a Playboy on the dresser.”
“Some of us read it for the articles,” I said.
“But,” the doctor put in, “we can check the deceased’s pubic region for female pubic hairs and secretions.”
Cain said, “We believe a condom was used. Wrapper found on the john floor.”
“Even so, there might be evidence of intercourse. Still, it’s an inexact science.”
“Sounds pretty exact to me,” I said.
The doctor shook his head. “We don’t know that the deceased didn’t bathe or wash himself off, after having sex.”
“The homicide detectives think a prostitute did this, and he would probably have waited till she left to wash up.”
The owlish eyes were unimpressed. “We can’t know that. But I can see that you have an interest in this case, Mr. Heller. When I have anything, I’ll give you a call at your office.”
“If I’m not in, ask for Lou Sapperstein.”
That got something resembling a smile out of him. “I remember Lou from the old days. Is he still working?”
“When he feels like it.”
“Sure, Mr. Heller. Glad to. Friend of yours, the victim?”
“Business acquaintance. A very nice guy.”
“In my job, whether they were nice or not is, sadly, seldom relevant. You’ll be hearing from me, Mr. Heller.”
I thanked him, and then I suggested to Dick that we get out of the way of the investigators whose job this actually was. He agreed.
Soon we were sitting in the Coffee House, the blandly modern Pick-Congress eatery off the fancy lobby. A no-nonsense waitress with a lady-wrestler demeanor immediately tried to force coffee on us, but we were spoilsports-being strictly an after-dinner coffee drinker, I had iced tea; and Dick, who I’d never seen touch java, had a bottle of Coke with a glass of ice. She was not happy with us-the lunch crowd would be here soon, and we were taking up a booth.
“So,” I said, “my business card was in his wallet.”
“That’s right. Had you seen Tom Ellison lately?”
“I had, but it was strictly social,” I lied. “We had a beer at the Berghoff Friday afternoon, and just caught up with each other. I think maybe he was fishing for some business.”
“But in a sociable way.”
“That’s right. I hadn’t used him for publicity for a couple years-why go to Milwaukee, when there are so many good people here at home?” I squeezed a lemon slice into the iced tea. “Will I be hearing from those homicide dicks? Will they want a statement?”
“Not unless I advise them to.” He shrugged. “That guy Mulrooney, he knows you and me are Siamese twins. He saw that business card and gave me a call, and I came right over. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t jammed up in this thing, somehow.”
“I appreciate that.”
He nodded, no big deal. “Are you going to look into it?”
“I don’t think so, Dick. But I would like to know a few things.…”
“Like the angle of penetration. I’m talking about the ice pick, of course.”
“Of course.” My tone was casual, matter-of-fact. “And I’d like to know what the latent print guys have to say.”
He laughed once, a harsh blurt. “You really think some hustler left her fingerprints? Surely she rubbed everything down.”
“You’d think so, since damn near every hooker and B-girl in town has an arrest record with prints on file. But in that case, wouldn’t she clean the lipstick off that glass, and flush the lipstick butts, too?”
He waved that off. “In too big a hurry to get the hell out, probably.”
“Which means, if she exists, she would leave fingerprints. Too panicky to be bothered with niceties.”
Cain thought about that. Filled the rest of his glass of ice with Coke-it was one of those new ten-ounce bottles.
“And,” I said, “how about that DO NOT DISTURB hanger?”
“What DO NOT DISTURB hanger?”
“Exactly.”
It came to him. “You mean, if Ellison had been entertaining, he’d have hung one on his door.”
“You would think. And this supposed doxy turned killer, if she were taking time to tidy up, wouldn’t she have left the DO NOT DISTURB on the knob, exiting? To keep the deceased undiscovered for as long as possible?”
The sheriff’s man had a thoughtful expression now. When he did that, the milky eye went half lidded. “So Chicago Homicide’s theory is horseshit. Do we care? He was your friend. How do you read this thing, anyway?”
“Do you know how hard it is to punch an ice pick through somebody’s sternum?”
He nodded. “Pretty fucking hard. On the other hand, adrenaline can inspire many a superhuman feat. Like a mom lifting the front of a Buick off her child.”
“Yeah, that’s an event I keep hearing about, but for some reason you never see any pictures. Look, if I were you, and wanted a feather in my cap, I might go a different way.”
Dick grinned. He was a guy whose grins always had a frowny cast, his mouth a half moon with the corners down. “You know me, Nate. I never shy away from a good headline, and I don’t mind the PD boys owing me.”
“What you may have here is a guy robbing hotel guests.”
His eyebrows rose over the dark frames. “Well, there’s no shortage of that on the books. Unsolved or otherwise. But I don’t know of any recent surge of that particular pastime.”
I leaned in. “What if some sleazeball has snagged himself a bellboy’s outfit? That and a bucket of champagne and an ice pick … he can fill the bucket with ice from a machine on any floor, right? He knocks on the door, and if there’s no answer, maybe he goes on in.”