Windy City Blues

Evangeline said she knew where the poison was kept-everyone who worked there knew, knew it was lethal and not to touch it, but it was easy to get at. Just in a little supply room that wasn’t kept locked.

“So why you? They have to have more of a reason than just that you were there.”

She shrugged bitterly. “I’m the only black professional at La Cygnette -the other blacks working there sweep rooms and haul trash. I’m trying hard not to be paranoid, but I gotta wonder.”

She insisted Darnell hadn’t made a pass at her, or done anything to provoke an attack-she hadn’t hurt the guy. As for anyone else who might have had opportunity, salon employees were always passing through the halls, going in and out of the little cubicles where they treated clients-she’d seen any number of people, all with legitimate business in the halls, but she hadn’t seen anyone emerging from the room where Darnell was sitting.

When we finally got to bond court later that morning, I tried to argue circumstantial evidence-any of La Cygnette ’s fifty or so employees could have committed the crime, since all had access and no one had motive. The prosecutor hit me with a very unpleasant surprise: the police had uncovered evidence linking my client to the dead man. He was a furniture buyer from Kansas City who came to Chicago six times a year, and the doorman and the maids at his hotel had identified Evangeline without any trouble as the woman who accompanied him on his visits.

Bail was denied. I had a furious talk with Evangeline in one of the interrogation rooms before she went back to the holding cells.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me? I walked into the courtroom and got blindsided.”

“They’re lying,” she insisted.

“Three people identified you. If you don’t start with the truth right now, you’re going to have to find a new lawyer and a new detective. Your mother may not understand, but for sure Sal will.”

“You can’t tell my mother. You can’t tell Sal!”

“I’m going to have to give them some reason for dropping your case, and knowing Sal it’s going to have to be the truth.”

For the first time she looked really upset. “You’re my lawyer. You should believe my story before you believe a bunch of strangers you never saw before.”

“I’m telling you, Evangeline, I’m going to drop your case. I can’t represent you when I know you’re lying. If you killed Darnell we can work out a defense. Or if you didn’t kill him and knew him we can work something out, and I can try to find the real killer. But when I know you’ve been seen with the guy any number of times, I can’t go into court telling people you never met him before.”

Tears appeared on the ends of her lashes. “The whole reason I didn’t say anything was so Mama wouldn’t know. If I tell you the truth, you’ve got to promise me you aren’t ru

I agreed. Whatever the story was, I couldn’t believe Mrs. Barthele hadn’t heard hundreds like it before. But we each make our own separate peace with our mothers.

Evangeline met Darnell at a party two years earlier. She liked him, he liked her-not the romance of the century, but they enjoyed spending time together. She’d gone on a two-week trip to Europe with him last year, telling her mother she was going with a girlfriend.

“First of all, she has very strict morals. No sex outside marriage. I’m thirty, mind you, but that doesn’t count with her. Second, he’s white, and she’d murder me. She really would. I think that’s why I never fell in love with him-if we wanted to get married I’d never be able to explain it to Mama.”

This latest trip to Chicago, Darnell thought it would be fun to see what Evangeline did for a living, so he booked an appointment at La Cygnette. She hadn’t told anyone there she knew him. And when she found him sick and dying she’d panicked and lied.

“And if you tell my mother of this, V. I.-I’ll put a curse on you. My father was from Haiti and he knew a lot of good ones.”

“I won’t tell your mother. But unless they nuked Lebanon this morning or murdered the mayor, you’re going to get a lot of lines in the paper. It’s bound to be in print.”

She wept at that, wringing her hands. So after watching her go off with the sheriff’s deputies, I called Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star to plead with him not to put Evangeline’s liaison in the paper. “If you do she’ll wither your testicles. Honest.”

“I don’t know, Vic. You know the Sun-Times is bound to have some kind of screamer headline like DEAD MAN FOUND IN FACE-LICKING SEX ORGY. I can’t sit on a story like this when all the other papers are ru

I knew he was right, so I didn’t push my case very hard.

He surprised me by saying, “Tell you what: you find the real killer before my deadline for tomorrow’s morning edition and I’ll keep your client’s personal life out of it. The sex scoop came in too late for today’s paper. The Trib prints on our schedule and they don’t have it, and the Sun-Times runs older, slower presses, so they have to print earlier.”

I reckoned I had about eighteen hours. Sherlock Holmes had solved tougher problems in less time.

III

Roland Darnell had been the chief buyer of living-room furnishings for Alexander Dumas, a high-class Kansas City department store. He used to own his own furniture store in the nearby town of Lawrence, but lost both it and his wife when he was arrested for drug smuggling ten years earlier. Because of some confusion about his guilt-he claimed his partner, who disappeared the night he was arrested, was really responsible-he’d only served two years. When he got out, he moved to Kansas City to start a new life.

I learned this much from my friends at the Chicago police. At least, my acquaintances. I wondered how much of the story Evangeline had known. Or her mother. If her mother didn’t want her child having a white lover, how about a white ex-con, ex- (presumably) drug-smuggling lover?

I sat biting my knuckles for a minute. It was eleven now. Say they started printing the morning edition at two the next morning, I’d have to have my story by one at the latest. I could follow one line, and one line only-I couldn’t afford to speculate about Mrs. Barthele-and anyway, doing so would only get me killed. By Sal. So I looked up the area code for Lawrence, Kansas, and found their daily newspaper.

The Lawrence Daily Journal-World had set up a special number for handling press inquiries. A friendly woman with a strong drawl told me Darnell’s age (forty-four); place of birth (Eudora, Kansas); ex-wife’s name (Ro

Crenshaw had done an army stint in Southeast Asia in the late sixties. Since much of the bamboo furniture the store specialized in came from the Far East, some people speculated that Crenshaw had set up the smuggling route when he was out there in the service. Especially since Kansas City immigration officials discovered heroin in the hollow tubes making up chair backs. If Darnell knew anything about the smuggling, he had never revealed it.

“That’s all we know here, honey. Of course, you could come on down and try to talk to some people. And we can wire you photos if you want.”

I thanked her politely-my paper didn’t run too many photographs. Or even have wire equipment to accept them. A pity-I could have used a look at Crenshaw and Ro

La Cygnette was on an upper floor of one of the new marble skyscrapers at the top end of the Magnificent Mile. Tall, white doors opened onto a hushed waiting room reminiscent of a high-class funeral parlor. The undertaker, a middle-aged highly made-up woman seated at a table that was supposed to be French provincial, smiled at me condescendingly.