“The most recent thing cooked up in here,” I said, “was Estelle’s murder. Look at this.”
I pointed to the floor where a blood-stained bread knife, a blood-spattered rolling pin, a blood-tipped ice pick and a ten-inch blackjack lay, here and there, as if casually dropped when done. Nearby was a kitchen chair pulled away from a small table, on which was a flat iron, used to batter her, I figured, and a glass ashtray with a number of crushed butts therein; spatterings of blood were on the table, chair and floor underneath.
“This is where it started,” Drury said, hands on hips, appraising the chair. Still in his camel-hair coat. He really was too well-dressed to be a cop. Honest cop.
“Not quite,” I said. “Take a look.”
I stood and pointed to two cups on the kitchen counter. One of them was half-filled with hot cocoa; cold cocoa, now. In the bottom of the other cup was the dry cocoa powder, ready for hot milk to be poured in. The milk was still simmering on the stove, opposite.
“This is where it started,” I said.
“How do you figure?”
“She was fixing a cup of cocoa for one of her guests, her back turned as she faced the counter. She was already drinking a cup herself. They grabbed her, tossed her in that chair, started beating her.”
Drury pushed his hat back on his head; the dark eyes, set so close on either side of the formidable nose, narrowed. “That makes sense, I guess. But why do you assume more than one ‘guest’?”
“It’s two people. Probably a man and a woman.”
“How do you figure that?”
“The broken whiskey bottle out in the other room, a glass of which was poured in here and then hurled against that wall.” You could see the dried splash it had made.
“So?”
“So Estelle didn’t drink. I also don’t think it was her practice to keep a liquor cabinet for guests, though I could be wrong.”
“You aren’t wrong,” Drury granted. He said his detectives had already determined that.
“My guess,” I said, “is that bottle of whiskey was brought in, by one of her killers, in that paper bag there.”
A wadded-up paper bag was tossed in the corner.
Drury went to it, bent and picked it up, uncrumpled it, looked inside. “There’s a receipt in here. This is a neighborhood liquor store.”
“In the detective business we call that a clue, Captain.”
He only smiled at that; we’d been friends a long time. “Well, I’d tend to agree with you that the whiskey was probably brought in by a man. But just because Estelle was fixing a second cup of cocoa doesn’t mean the other party was necessarily a woman. Men have been known to drink cocoa, you know.”
“It’s a man and a woman. The man used the heavy male weapon-the blackjack-and the woman used makeshift female weapons, flat iron, kitchen utensils like a rolling pin, ice pick, bread knife.”
He thought about that, nodded slowly.
“Also,” I went on, pointing toward the ashtray, “Estelle didn’t smoke, either. Yet some of these butts-and there’s some heeled-out ones on the dining room floor, too-show lipstick. And some don’t. Man and a woman.”
Drury smiled in defeat, shrugged. “Man and a woman.”
I moved toward the archway, kneeling. “After while they dragged her into the dining room-by the hair, I’d say. There’s some strands right here. Red. Hers.”
He knelt down next to me. “You haven’t forgotten how to be a detective, have you?”
I didn’t tell him that the only way I could handle this charnel house was to revert into being a cop; that I was forcing myself, like a man trying to put toothpaste back into the tube, into once again looking at the world from a detached, strictly business perspective. To keep from thinking about scorched flesh, the smell of which was in my nostrils. To keep from remembering the soft pink flesh of a girl I’d loved once.
“They were friends of hers,” I said, standing.
Drury stood, too. “Friends? Not hardly!”
“Well-not in the long run, no. But the firemen had to kick down the front door, right? It was night-latched, correct?”
“Yes,” he said. “So we can presume she kept it latched, and only let in people she knew.”
“And felt secure enough, having let this lovely couple in, to latch it behind her.”
“So she knew them. I’ll give you that. Not necessarily friends, though.”
“Friends. They knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t have liquor in the place and brought their own. She invited them into her kitchen. She was making one of them cocoa. Friends.”
He smiled a little and shrugged. “Friends,” he agreed.
“This back door is locked, too,” I noted.
“Yeah. We got ourselves a regular locked-room mystery here.”
“No mystery,” I said, unlocking it, looking it over. “This is a spring lock. The killers went out the back way, the door locking behind them.”
Drury gave me a wry one-sided grin. “There’s nothing here I wouldn’t have figured out for myself, you know.”
“Sure,” I said, managing to grin back at him. “But I don’t mind taking a couple of minutes and saving you two or three hours of brain work.”
“You should be on the radio. Cantor could use the help. Want a look at the bedroom? Maybe you can save me from thinking in there, too.”
Like the rest of the apartment, the bedroom had been tossed; the mattress had been gutted with a knife, even its pink fluffy spread slit open. The white French provincial furnishings were scattered, occasionally broken.
“What were they looking for?” I said. “They obviously were torturing her, trying to make her talk. What was she hiding? What did she know?”
He shrugged. “I’m not so sure they were trying to make her talk at all. I think she was being made an example of.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Isn’t it obvious? It’s this grand jury thing, Nate. Nicky Dean was the last to squeal. Bioff went first, Browne cracked next but only recently has Dean loosened up. Only recently has he cooperated at all with Uncle Sam-now that a reduced sentence has been dangled in front of him.”
“And killing his girl is a warning from the Outfit for Nicky to clam back up?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Then why not just kill her? Why torture her like this?”
“This’ll have more impact, Nate. This’ll smack Nicky between his bushy eyebrows.”
“Yeah, right, only Nitti doesn’t work this way.”
“The old Nitti didn’t. But he’s been under a lot of pressure.”
“Since when?”
“Like the song says, since you went away. There was a big scandal about Nitti-owned linen services having contracts with the public schools. When the press got hold of that, he lost the contracts, which were lucrative, and then Mayor Kelly, to save face, let us crack down on Nitti’s bookie joints and nightclubs. Even the Colony Club got shuttered.”
“Where was Estelle working, then?”
He gestured to the sheared bed. “Right out of here, I’d say.”
“What do you base that on?”
“Sergeant Donahoe’s already given this room a cursory once-over, and he reports her affects indicate a call-girl operation.”
He walked me over to a dresser, on its side; one drawer had been taken out, its contents scattered, bundles of letters, mostly. I wondered if it had been done by the killers or the police. Drury poked around, found a little black address book, which he plucked from the rubble. He began thumbing through it. Smiling as he read.
“Well, well, well,” he said, running his finger down a page, then going on to the next page and running his finger down that one. “Some very familiar names. Of some very wealthy men-doctors, lawyers, here’s Wyman, the iron construction man. He was involved in a messy divorce not so long ago…”
“So she was a call girl, then.”
“Looks like.” He kept thumbing through it. “And get this-some of these other names…friends of hers from her twenty-six girl days. High-class hookers.”