An Echo of Death Read online

  I heard the clunk of metal on cement and then the roll of the flashlight.

  “Did you throw it away?” I asked.

  “It’s broken,” Scott said. “We can’t fix it.”

  I was torn between yelling at him for flinging it away and feelings of guilt for causing him to drop it in the first place.

  “Let’s try to find the rungs,” Scott said.

  We stepped close to each other and then began moving to the sides, touching every inch of wall.

  I didn’t say anything about if this way was blocked above, that we should have kept the flashlight and maybe tried to fix it. How would we anyway, in total darkness?

  I groped along the wall for a few minutes. Suddenly my hand touched metal. I called to Scott. When I felt him next to me, I reached for his hand and brought it to the metal.

  “I’ll climb first,” I said. “Probably be good if you stick right behind me.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  I had seen a narrow railing on each side before he dropped the light. Now I clutched each of these and began my ascent.

  Several times the stairs turned through narrow openings, but up I climbed, listening to Scott moving below me.

  After maybe thirty steps I saw it. “Light ahead!” I shouted. It didn’t seem like daylight and it was faint, but in that darkness it might as well have been the blaze of the sun. Maybe twenty more steps, and I could see that the light came from various pinprick-sized holes in a round object. Dim as it was, at least I could see.

  “It’s like some kind of manhole cover,” I announced to Scott when I arrived near the top. The steps continued to the covering. I grabbed hold of one railing with my left hand and banged the other against the manhole. It didn’t budge.

  I could see that the opening we were in was big enough for three people to stand next to each other in, if there had been a floor.

  “What’s wrong?” Scott asked.

  “It won’t move,” I said. I examined the blockage carefully. Two hinges held the left side of the cover, but I couldn’t find any other protuberances. The lock would be on the side away from us. I pulled the gun out of my belt.

  “You’re not going to shoot!” Scott said.

  I turned the gun around and held it by the barrel. “No,” I said as I began banging away at the pins holding a hinge. I knew the sound of the gun being fired in this narrow place would deafen us, perhaps leaving permanent damage.

  I tapped at it vigorously, but it wouldn’t budge. I gripped the railing carefully with one hand, planted one foot on the rung, and found a hold for the other on the opposite wall. I swung hard. Nothing. I summoned a reserve of strength and whammed it. A quarter-inch movement, but enough for a huge surge of hope. A few minutes’ work, and it was gone. The second proved even more recalcitrant, but with a last swing, the gun butt cracked, and the pin flew into the darkness below.

  I shoved at the lid. It scraped open. I clambered up and onto a floor, turned around, knelt down, and gave Scott a hand up.

  We were inside a small room. The light came from an opaque fixture which glowed yellow above a sign that said “Danger. Wear Your Hard Hat.”

  By the light, I could see mounds of thick cables connected to banks of switches on all the walls. I took a step toward the door. It flew open. Framed against the blackness of night was a well-fed man who said, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Turned out we were in the middle of an electrical substation a few feet north of and under the Merchandise Mart. We explained everything twice to him, then to several electric-company officials, and finally to the police. Most of them instantly recognized Scott Carpenter, the baseball player. You win more than a few World Series games and make millions a year, people in Chicago will take notice. They barely took notice of me as Tom Mason, non-famous person. At this moment, their recognition of him and the goodwill it brought were very good things.

  Somebody asked whether we wanted food. We said no. It was a little after five in the morning.

  Our news about a murder at Scott’s place kept any fawning and good fellowship on the part of the police to a minimum.

  We rode to the penthouse in the back of an unmarked cop car. Numerous other police joined us in the lobby of Scott’s building.

  Howard wasn’t on duty. The morning guard told us that she hadn’t seen anything strange, and that when she took over, Howard had acted normal.

  The cops, led by a slender detective, maybe in his mid-forties, with a hatchet face and a long nose, whose name was Joe Quinn, insisted that we give them the key and that they go up ahead of us. Two plainclothes cops and two uniforms took the journey to the penthouse.

  Fifteen minutes later, the two detectives came down with strange looks on their faces. “Are you guys shitting us?” Quinn asked.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  He crooked his finger at us to follow him. We gathered on the elevator. As we rode up, I asked, “What’s going on?”

  “You’re going to tell us.”

  “We didn’t kill him,” Scott said.

  Quinn said nothing.

  At the door the uniformed officer gave us an odd look.

  We hurried inside.

  The body was gone.

  We rushed over to the windows. Only a small rust-colored stain remained to mark the spot of Glen Proctor’s demise.

  Scott and I gaped at each other, then turned to face the police.

  “He was here,” Scott said. “I swear to God.”

  Something truly outre had happened, and I was angry, but a granite mass of fear rested at the pit of my stomach.

  I knelt down and felt the rug. It was slightly damp. “This could be his blood,” I said.

  “Or not,” Quinn said.

  “Why would we make this up?” Scott asked.

  “I don’t know,” Quinn said. “Maybe you could tell us. We don’t need this kind of shit. We’ve got plenty of real cases to deal with, not this crap.”

  “Look,” I said. “We didn’t make it up. There was a dead guy here. Glen Proctor, the baseball player. He just got in from Mexico. You could call down there to the team or check the airlines. He came here. Call his parents’ house. They live in the area. Check with Howard, the night security man. He might have seen the guys who were after us.”

  Quinn growled. Jess Bolewski, his partner, a guy with thinning hair that he combed straight back in lonely strands, said, “We could make a couple of calls. You better hope some part of this checks out.”

  “His luggage is in the bedroom,” I said. “I’ll show you.” Bolewski followed me down the hall to the room Proctor had been staying in. All of his things were gone. The room looked as if a cleaning service had been through it. I checked the bathroom he’d been using. Totally spotless.

  “Why are you guys doing this?” the cop asked.

  “We aren’t doing anything,” I said. “It really happened. I saw it. I touched him.”

  Back in the living room, Quinn was on the phone. I listened to his half of the conversation. “We got no dead body … I don’t know yet … Don’t strike me as the hysterical type … We’ll get to the bottom of it.” He hung up.

  “No luggage,” Bolewski told his partner.

  I was angry, confused, and frightened. “The ability to move that quickly and cover their tracks means it’s a big-time outfit,” I said.

  Bolewski said, “You’re saying that some nasty people killed him, left, then said, ‘Oh, gosh, let’s not leave our mess to clean up,’ and hurried back here to neaten the place?”

  “No!” I snapped.

  A few moments’ silence passed before Quinn asked, “Anybody else see Proctor here?”

  We shook our heads. He’d gotten in late Friday. Scott said he hadn’t gone out or called anyone.

  “At least make the calls I suggested,” I said. “We have no reason to lie to you.”

  Quinn agreed to try calling. We sat on the white leather couches in the living room.

  “What a
irline?” Quinn asked.

  “He told us he flew Air Mexico,” Scott said.

  The detective called the airline, identified himself, and told the person on the other end what he needed. From what he said, I gathered he was being put through to a supervisor. Quinn turned to his buddy and said, “Tough finding somebody to give me information this early in the morning.”

  Eventually he was connected. The significant part came when he said, “No record. You’re sure?” He listened a minute more, thanked the person, and then turned to us.

  “You sure he was on Air Mexico?” Quinn asked.

  “That’s what he told us,” Scott said.

  “They have no record of him being on any plane, and to take an international flight you have to show your passport. Are you saying he had a fake passport?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We’re just telling you what he told us. Can’t you check the other airlines?”

  “Yeah, but it’ll take a while. Why would this guy lie to you?” Quinn asked.

  “He told us he was in trouble,” I said.

  “What kind of trouble?” the cop asked.

  “He didn’t say.”

  “You let him stay here without knowing what was going on?”

  “He was a friend,” Scott said. “He told me he’d explain, but that he just needed a place to stay and could we put him up? He’s a good friend. I trusted him.”

  “Isn’t he the baseball player that’s been suspended for drugs?” Bolewski asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Quinn made another call. “I need the number for Proctor either in 708 or 312 area code,” he said into the receiver. “The real estate guy—try the North Shore first.”

  He jotted a few numbers on paper in his regulation blue notebook. He punched in the number. He had to wait some time for an answer. He stood up and trailing the forty-foot cord, paced the length of the room in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  When someone answered, he stopped walking. Quinn identified himself and asked for Mr. Proctor. After a lengthy pause, he again identified himself, then asked if Glen Proctor was there or if they knew where he was.

  Several minutes of conversation followed. When he was finished, Quinn came back and sat across from us. “They haven’t heard from him,” he said. “As far as they know, he’s in Mexico getting ready for or making contacts for winter baseball. He is supposed to be doing some traveling down there at the moment. He could be anywhere in the country. We could call the team tomorrow and see if they’ve seen him or have any guess as to where he might be. Confirming his whereabouts won’t be easy.”

  Interviewing Howard the security man necessitated rousting building management and more lengthy explanations. But after a final phone call, Quinn said, “He didn’t see a thing out of the ordinary.”

  “One too many naps, or they got to him,” Scott said.

  “Glen Proctor was here,” I said. “He had two bullet holes in him. One was—”

  Quinn cut me off. “What do you want us to do? Say we buy your story. What could we do? We don’t have a corpse. Tough to prove a murder without a body. Okay, you saw it, but where is it? You don’t just tootle around the city with a dead body draped over your shoulder.”

  “The guys who work in the parking garage,” I said. “They must have seen something.”

  Quinn directed one of the uniformed cops to go downstairs and check it out.

  “Can’t you guys get the crime lab up here?” Scott said. “You could take fibers from the carpet. That stain has to prove something.”

  “The crime lab, when there isn’t a crime?” Bolewski made it sound as if we were really dumb and that he was getting truly fed up.

  “The crime lab comes,” Quinn said. “They take samples. Say they find blood. Who’s to say it isn’t yours or somebody else’s? Do you know Proctor’s blood type? If they found fibers from a jacket or piece of clothing, we have only your word that’s what Proctor was wearing. If they could track the DNA of what they found, what do you have from Proctor that would show it was his?”

  “And if we do find evidence,” Bolewski said, “what’s to keep us from thinking either one or both of you killed him?”

  I thought escaping from the tunnels would be our biggest problem.

  The cop returned from downstairs. “The guy who was working the parking garage went home after his shift. I called him from downstairs. He says the only thing that happened was after three this morning, when a couple guys in gray suits came in, said they were waiting for one of the tenants. The attendant said he had to park a few cars. When he came back they were gone, and he didn’t see them again. Says he didn’t see or hear anything suspicious, and no, he wouldn’t recognize them again.”

  Bolewski glared at us.

  Quinn said, “Why don’t you guys really tell us what this is all about?”

  Both Scott and I used every argument we could think of to try and convince them.

  At one point Quinn said, “It would be a lot easier if you could give us anything tangible to prove your point.”

  Both of us spoke passionately in a desperate attempt to be believed. We even followed the cops down in the elevator as they left trying to get in a few more words that would tip the scale to get them to believe us.

  Bolewski didn’t even want to listen, and he made it evident with elaborate sounds of disgust every time one of us would try to make a telling point.

  Outside, Bolewski immediately hopped into the car. Quinn said, “I promise to do a little checking. This is too screwy. I want to believe you guys.”

  Quinn got in the car, and they drove off. One of the uniformed cops edged up to Scott and held out a little notepad. He asked Scott for an autograph for his kid. Almost reflexively Scott reached out his hand for the pen.

  I gave a disgusted sigh.

  3

  Sweeping down the street from the north through the mist was Lester Smitherton walking his two German shepherds. The dogs heeled one to each side while Lester held the leashes in limp wrists. He wore a shocking-pink jacket almost brighter than the sun rising about us. He wore fluffy blue warm-up pants appliquéd with pink lightning bolts. He wore bright white tennis shoes with tiny pink dots on them. He loved to wear this or even more outrageous outfits when he walked the dogs. He often expressed the desire for gay-bashers to try and mug him while he was in the company of Oscar and Wilde. He’d had them specially trained to defend him.

  I’d met Lester ten years ago in a used-record shop up in Rogers Park. We’d been hunting through the folk-music bin. I’d been there first and picked up a long-out-of-print Bob Gibson album.

  His first words to me were “I’ll give you fifty dollars for that album.”

  We’d wound up having a long discussion about collecting folk music. I was really just an amateur, trying to find artists I liked. Lester was an eclectic connoisseur, concentrating not only on folk music but on a wide variety of esoterica. One of his most prized finds was a ten-inch album by Blossom Dearie from the 1950s made by WVBR in Ithaca, New York. He also collected popular music of the forties and fifties, especially Jo Stafford, whom I also liked. His absolute favorites, which he insisted on showing everyone who entered his home, were something I thought made him wonderfully unique. He had a collection of original albums with teen tragedy songs on them from the late fifties and early sixties. He loved nothing better than a group wailing a pathetically schmaltzy simple melody of hopeless love.

  He never played any of the records but once, that to record them on tape—and then he made a tape of the tape to store in a safe-deposit box.

  We’d gone out for coffee that first day. Afterward, we’d kept up contact. Lester had invited us to a few parties and, over the years, the three of us had become good friends. Occasionally he gave investment tips to Scott, who passed them on to his accountant. Several had paid big dividends.

  He lived in one of the few mansions still standing on Lake Shore Drive north of Oak Street just a block and a
half from our place. His investments had been shrewd and immensely profitable. He was an investment banker in one of the big La Salle Street firms and had been for twenty years. He’d also inherited a substantial pile when a favorite uncle died.

  As he approached us, the dogs began to wag their tails. Lester smiled and waved. When Lester stopped three feet from us, the dogs immediately sat down.

  “What’s wrong?” Lester asked us.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  “You both look exhausted. I’m about to make breakfast. You must come to my place and let me fix you something.” Lester was also a master chef.

  Although I hadn’t slept, I found that my nerves were still strung far too taut for me to fall asleep. I agreed.

  “That sounds good,” Scott said.

  We walked the short distance to Lester’s. First he served us exquisite coffee in the living room. One dog sat on either side of Lester’s chair. The living room was what one of his ex-lovers had called the trash room. Lester had the money to indulge his whimsical tastes. All those little knickknacks you almost impulsively bought, but came to your senses in time—Lester had them in this room. In addition he attended conventions where thrift shops could purchase mounds of useless merchandise. This room was a trash nightmare. Among other things scattered along the shelves were a Dutch civil-defense urinal, a music box that played a funeral march, round plugs of Astroturf left over from the manufacture of putting greens, and a collection of parachute rings. This was not to mention the more mainstream debris of a 3-D View Master from the 1950s, a hubcap from a 1947 Studebaker, a Don King troll doll, and a glass case filled with his belt-buckle collection.

  Lester was in his fifties with short grizzled hair, a deep cleft in his chin, and a slender although unmuscular body. He settled himself in his favorite canary-yellow overstuffed chair, drew his knees up to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, and said, “Tell me all.”

  I explained everything to him. When I finished, I summed up. “Somebody killed Glen Proctor. We got chased, but not shot at as aggressively as we could have been. Someone broke in and took the body away from the penthouse. These people got by security twice.”