“Ebe, you and Nate follow this up,” Martineau said.
But Ebe was right behind me, as we trailed the agent out and to his desk, to get that address, grab our raincoats, and go.
The rooming house, oddly enough, was just four blocks south and a couple of blocks east of my town house. The compact nature of the geography of this case was starting to feel weird.
The light-yellow Victorian wood-frame, peak-roofed structure dated to the teens. The landlady lived in the basement apartment of the old three-story, whose outer walls almost touched the newer brick buildings on either side-a twenties-era terra-cotta-trimmed number with offices over a Walgreens drugstore and a nondescript fifties-vintage four-story with apartments over a “New and Used” record shop. Three decades represented by three side-by-side buildings-not unusual in this part of the city.
She met us up the handful of steps on the small porch, a squat woman in her fifties wearing a floral tent and nurse’s shoes, another DP but of Greek extraction. Her features were coarse in a squashed circle face, her hair gray and netted, her eyebrows thick and black with a facial mole perfect for today-Halloween.
I introduced myself, showing her my Justice Department credentials, and, wide-eyed, she pointed past me to Eben Boldt, like somebody about to yell, Fire!
“Is he with you?” she demanded.
“We’re together,” I admitted. “He’s a Secret Service agent.”
She folded her arms like Chief Sitting Bull. “Well, the boy waits outside. No colored allowed.”
Eben’s face turned hard as a carved African mask-a frightening one, at that-also fit for All Hallows’ Eve. He seemed about to verbally explode, so I stepped in.
“Ma’am, he needs to come along. I may require him to take notes for me, or maybe run errands.”
Eben’s eyebrows went up, but so did the heavy black ones on our witchy hostess’s mug.
“Okay, then.” She heaved a wary sigh, then shook a schoolmarmish finger at me. “But you deal with him. I don’t truck with the colored.”
“He’ll be my responsibility,” I assured her, and followed her in. I grinned back at Eben, who sneered at me. He really didn’t have much of a sense of humor.
Again, there was no question of a search warrant. The landlady-whose name was Knockomus, she said, and who was the owner of the building-led us up a flight of stairs.
“They paid for a week in advance,” she said. “Starting Monday.”
At the landing, we followed her to the left, a short trip. You could see a bathroom at the end of the hall, door ajar.
Wondering if I should be getting the nine-millimeter out, I asked, “Is there any chance they’re here now, ma’am?”
“No. I saw them go an hour ago. They never come back till late afternoon.”
We were in front of a door marked 2A.
As she was unlocking it, Mrs. Knockomus said, “I don’t relish this at all. I have to put up with the girls on the first floor-I got two apartments down there, they are whores, those girls-and now it comes to renting to spics.”
Her description of her first-floor tenants as whores was likely less a slur than a job description-we were at Clark and Division, near Rush Street and the older Rialto area, where prostitutes plied their trade.
Mrs. Knockomus opened the door and gestured for me to go in. I did, and she moved in front of Eben, I guess to make sure he was admitted last.
This was a flat that took up the entire second floor. The rooms-there were three-were much nicer and larger than Vallee’s one room. The floors here were hardwood with worn yet still handsome Oriental carpets, and the solid-looking furnishings were probably antiques, the upholstery still decent, the iron bed blessed with a “Home sweet home” comforter that looked hand sewn. Maybe our hostess had hidden depths.
“I should have sold back in the fifties,” she said, scowling at nobody in particular, not even Ebe, “but I missed my chance. This urban renewal thing coming up? I’m gonna snap at that line like a mackerel. Enough of this nonsense with scum-of-the-earth tenants.”
We’d been through all three rooms. No guns, not rifles, not handguns, not in the dresser, not in any of three closets.
“I mean, I don’t mind the girls, really,” she was saying. “The whores keep to themselves and don’t bring nobody home. And I don’t even mind some Outfit guy on the lam, now and then, neither. They dress nice, those type fellas, and they are … what’s the right word? Much more discreet about their weapons. These spics, they just leave their guns lying around! What if one went off and was pointed at the floor and killed somebody, like me for example?”
“I don’t see any weapons,” I said.
She pointed at the windows onto the street. No screens, I noted; no air conditioner. Summer would be rough in this space.
“They was leaned up against there,” she said, indicating the wallpapered area between the windows. “Four rifles. Had those fancy telescopes attached. Like the hunters use.… It’s Kennedy, isn’t it?”
Eben and I exchanged glances. “What makes you think that?”
“Right there,” she said, and pointed to an end table by the couch, “they had a map with street names on it.”
I asked, “The kind of map you get from a service station?”
“No! Hand-drawn. With street names and highways and places.”
“Such as?”
“Such as Northwest Expressway and Jackson and Soldier Field.”
Jesus.
She was smiling at her own cleverness. “The motorcade route, am I right?”
Eben walked over to the table. “No map here now.”
Forgetting herself, she said to him: “And the newspaper is gone, too.”
“What newspaper?” I asked.
“It was on that dresser, in the bedroom.” Now she was pointing in that direction. “With the article about Kennedy coming, circled.”
Not a wall collage, but telling enough.
I said to Eben, “Show her the photos.”
He took the four suspect shots from his inside suit-coat pocket and handed them to her. She paused before accepting something from him-he might have been a Zulu handing her a shrunken head-but finally she took them.
Without hesitation, she said, “That’s the two tenants. Their names on here are correct, the spics-Gonzales and Rodriguez. These other boys, the whites? They aren’t staying here, but they come around in the evening.”
“Often?”
“Twice, at least.”
She had placed all four suspects in this flat.
I asked, “Could the two white guys be crashing here at night?”
“Crashing?”
“Staying all night. Maybe slipping out before you’re up, or when you aren’t looking.”
She frowned, offended. “I’m up at six, mister G-man, and I don’t miss nothing.”
Eben asked, “They haven’t checked out, have they, ma’am, your two tenants?”
“No,” she said, but she was looking at me. “They’re still staying here. I don’t know where they go during the day. What do spics do with their time, anyway?”
“It’s a mystery to me,” I said. “Look, Mrs. Knockomus, you mustn’t say anything to them about our being here. About you having a look in their room. Nothing at all.”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” she said. “The only thing I ever said to them was, ‘Seventy-five dollars in advance.’”
I asked her several more questions-did her tenants have a car? Yes, green Pontiac, no idea what model or year. Where did they park it? On the street, best they can. Was there a rear exit? Not one available to the upstairs tenants, as it was off one of the downstairs apartments.
Soon we were on the sidewalk, under a sky that remained overcast on a day cooler than the previous several.
I used the phone booth in the Walgreens next door to report in to Martineau.
After filling him in, I said, “I’m going to recommend a twenty-four-hour stakeout.”