Page 72 of Fade Out
“I told my wife I didn’t want to be on the board. I told her,” Elber said, nearly whimpering.
“Why don’t we start by knocking on the door?” I suggested.
Elber looked back at the door like he wanted to run from it. I leaned over him and knocked. We waited. Nothing happened.
“See, there’s no one here,” Elber said. “I guess you all came out for nothing.”
“Could you unlock the door?” I said.
“You know, I’m thinking I should call the building’s law—”
“Just unlock the fucking door,” White growled.
Reluctantly, Elber unlocked the door and opened it a crack. “Hello?”
Elber took a deep breath and stepped into the apartment.
“Check the refrigerator,” I told him.
“What?”
“If someone’s staying here there will be fresh food in the fridge,” I explained. The week before, when Rita had been staying at Andrew Rapp’s, there had been a homemade cake in the fridge. If she was here there would likely be food.
Hamish Gardner elbowed by me and went in after Elber. The door was open enough that I could see down a hallway into the living room. A thick metal door led to the half-circle balcony.
Suddenly, Elber turned and pushed past Gardner. He was back in the hallway in a flash. “Someone’s been in there. You can tell. It’s messy. Mr. Porter would never have left it like that.”
“Do we have your permission to enter the apartment?” White asked.
Elber nodded. The rest of us, except Elber, hurried in. On my right, I caught a glimpse of a bathroom and a hallway that led to the bedroom. On my left was the kitchen. It was pink. Entirely pink. The stove was pink, the refrigerator was pink, the cabinets were pink. It made me wonder if Barbie had designed the place.
I went over to the refrigerator and opened it. As I’d expected there was food inside. Recent food. Chinese takeout, half a pizza, a carton of milk and luncheon meat from a deli. At Rapp’s, Rita had felt comfortable enough to bake. Here, she didn’t want to boil an egg.
I didn’t think the kitchen would provide much more information, so I followed the others into the main room. It was set up as half living room, half dining room. Winslow Porter’s tastes ran to nineteenth century bordello. There was a red sofa with tufts and carved legs, a large gilt mirror on the wall, and a dining room table that might have belonged to some minor French courtier. All of it ran counter to the ultra-mod style of the building.
“Oh shit,” White said from the other room. It wasn’t until then that I realized he wasn’t with us. “We need to get the Crime Lab out here. There might be blood in the shower.”
Gardner and I went through the bedroom into the bathroom. Tony and Owen hung back. The two detectives and I crammed into the small space. The baby-blue bathtub was surrounded by one-inch tiles in various hues of blue. White was pointing out some brownish stains on the grout between the tiles.
“If this is a murder scene then it wasn’t cleaned up very well. There are brown stains everywhere,” White said.
“Maybe it’s not blood. Maybe it’s something else. Tea maybe,” Gardner said. White gave him a questioning quizzical look.
I was now about four feet away and I couldn’t see what they were talking about. It was okay though. I’d take White’s word for it. It was entirely possible we were looking at the place where Hillary’s hands and head had been cut off. And I didn’t need to know that.
The thought of it was more than I could take at that particular moment and I backed out of the room. It’s not like I’d never been at a murder scene before. I’d even been at some really gross murder scenes. It was that this murder was so cold, so calculated. Of course, I didn’t really know what had happened, what had been planned and what hadn’t been. But it didn’t matter, a young woman had been killed. And then her body had been mutilated to get revenge on her parents or on me or both. That it was Hillary Buckman was incidental. She wasn’t as important as the people Rita could hurt with her plot.
Feeling a bit sick, I went and stood by the floor to ceiling window in the bedroom. I was counting on the skyline views to make things better. I loved Chicago’s architecture. It always made things better. The window looked out at the balcony—a quarter pie. There was a thick door that opened onto it, just like in the living room. The bedroom had a peek-a-boo view of the Sears Tower through a couple of buildings. Somewhere down below was the river; I couldn’t see it over the edge of the balcony. To the east was the lake, south of us the Loop, and to the west—
I craned my neck to take in the westerly view and found myself looking right into Mike ‘Possum’ Mazur’s face. He’d pressed himself on the other side of the metal door. I have to be honest, he did look like a possum. Beady-eyed and feral.
“Guys—you need to—”
Before I could finish, Possum had opened the door and was running across the bedroom. I ran after him. I got a hand on his shoulder, trying to stop him, or at least slow him down. And it worked—sort of. He came to a stop and slammed me up against a wall. When I hit, it compressed my shoulder over the injury I’d been struggling with since Christmas and I let out a thick oof as pain shot through me like a lightning storm. I fell to the floor.
Gardner came out of the bathroom in time to be shoved aside by Possum and without asking any questions immediately ran after him, yelling, “Stop, Police,” as though anyone ever paid attention to that. I could have gotten up and run after them, but the pain in my shoulder was making me dizzy.
Maybe it was time for someone else to break their neck.
