A Hard-Boiled Homicide Detective Book Series
Turner Hahn And Frank Morales Crime Mysteries by B.R. Stateham
Series Excerpt
We could not find Gino Alberti. After asking a few questions we found the dorm the kid lived in.
Empty.
Gino had not been seen for at least two days. Frank and I talked to everyone on the floor Gino's dorm room was on. The last time anyone remembered seeing Gino was two days earlier, and what they remembered was that Gino had been extremely upset … mad at someone … and he made his anger known to anyone who asked. Several of his dorm mates told us that Gino really was upset with Dr. Holdridge. So upset, he was talking about doing the professor in. Several times he said he wanted to kill that dickhead professor, and, put away forever that lousy excuse for a teacher.
The last time Gino was seen was around eight in the evening. Someone on the floor answered the pay phone down at the end of the hall and the call had been for Gino. A couple of grunts and then a loud, “Fuck you!” and Gino hung up and stormed off the floor, fit to skewer the nearest faculty member he met.
He hadn't been seen since. Although, we did get a lead on someone who might know where he was. His girlfriend, Alicia Addams, knew just about everything that was going on around the campus. She and Gino were tight, really tight, we were told. If anyone knew where Gino was it would be Alicia.
“Isn't that Holdridge's student-assistant?” Frank asked as we climbed back into the old Ford.
“Yep.” I answered, sitting back in the seat and hitting the fan controls on the heater. “Sweet little thing too. I can see why Gino went for her. Smart, working on her master’s degree as well. In physics.”
“Two eggheads fall in love with each other. Gee, ain't love funny?” Frank said, dripping in syrup and grinning as he rolled the car out of the parking lot and onto the street. “Where to now?”
“A change in course, Captain. Let's find Abbott's place of work. I want to know how many women he was involved with romantically.”
“You mean how many he screwed?”
“Right, something like that.” I nodded, smiling.
We crossed town as snow began to fall from low hanging, gray and black clouds. Only, this time the snow was falling with no wind. They say Chicago has a lot of wind. But I'm here to tell you no place on earth has as much wind as this city does. The yearly average is fifteen miles per hour daily. It’s not uncommon to see the wind kicking along about twenty miles per hour all day long, especially in the summertime. If you are born in this state, then you better be prepared for wind. In fact, the wind needs to blow in my face every day. I need to have a fan blowing in my face at night when I go to bed. A day without wind is a day I'm nervous and jumpy. There was no wind kicking the snow around at the moment. But the snow was falling and making the city sort of relax and slow down. As we drove across town, I found myself mellowing out and unwinding. I even saw pedestrians wave and smile as we drove by. It was a good feeling.
We went back to Abbott's apartment and asked a few more questions. Eventually we found out that he worked at a health spa down on 137th street South and Woodlawn. Climbing back into the car we drove south until we found the spa. About twenty minutes of asking questions there we found out that he had two loves in his life. One was Rebecca Pickford and the other was a girl by the name of Eudora Felting.
“You think this Eudora Felting is the big-boobed mystery girl who kept extra underwear over at Abbott's apartment?”
“Won't know that until we find her, Sherlock,” I said, smiling at the face of Frank. He had this lecherous old man's grin on his face, and he was cracking me up. “Let's see if she's got a driver's license in this state.”
She did. We got her address and took our time driving over to where she lived. It was, we were curious to find out, in a quiet residential neighborhood on the east end of town. An old, well-established neighborhood, with big oak trees towering over the small, bungalow-styled homes, and deep, luxurious front yards.
As we climbed out of the car the snow by now was beginning to come down at a faster rate. So fast in fact I didn't see Eudora come out of her front door until she was off the porch and walking to the attached garage.
“Miss Eudora Felting?” I said, startling her as she jerked her head up and looked at me through the falling snow.
She was a tall woman. Much taller than Bruce Abbott and considerably huskier in build. She was big boned. Yet far from being fat. She had on a long, gray wool coat and around her head was a scarf to protect her shoulder length blonde hair. She was well endowed with a chest that would make a man stagger with anticipation.
“Yes? Who are you?
“Sergeant Turner Hahn, of Homicide. And this is my partner, Sergeant Frank Morales. Do you have time for us to ask you a few questions?”
“Concerning?
“You have not heard of the deaths of Bruce Abbott, or a girl by the name of Rebecca Pickford?” Frank asked, glancing at me, and stepping closer to the powerful looking woman.
“Wha … what? Bruce has been murdered!” she said, her eyes widening. Then she suddenly grew weak and bent at the knees.
We caught her just as she was about to do a dive into the large, snow-covered bush at the edge of her sidewalk. With each of us gripping an arm we carried her up onto her porch and out of the snow. By time we got to the porch, her eyes were running over with tears and messing up the thick coating of mascara she had only recently applied. Generously.
With shaking hands and a face as pale white as the falling snow, Eudora found her house key and fumbled around enough to open the door. We three walked into a small, but warm front room of the home. Shrugging off her coat, which fell off her and straight to the floor, she made her way over to a recliner chair and sagged into its deep cushion, burying her face into her hands to cry for a few moments. But only for a short time. She finally sobbed, blew her nose with a Kleenex she reached for from a box of Kleenexes on the coffee table between us, then wiped the tears from her eyes.
“Jesus! Bruce is dead? How? Who?” she sobbed, her eyes red and her face still streaked with black runs from the mascara.
“That's what we were hoping you would be able to tell us, Miss Felting,” I said. I looked at her and then pointed to a couple of suitcases which had been quickly deposited in the hallway, visible from the living room and in front of a door that might have led into a bedroom. “Just returned from a trip?”
“Yes … yes. I've been in St. Louis since last Thursday,” she nodded, blowing her nose in another Kleenex, and then reaching for a third. “I'm a nurse. The head nurse at a retirement home. I've been in St. Louis at a convention for nursing home staff. I was a speaker at two meetings, plus I attended several others. But tell me, who killed Bruce?”
“We don't know,” Frank said, looking Eudora Felting over carefully. “But someone entered his home while he was in his bathtub and smacked him upside the head.”
“My God! The poor little man,” she whimpered, eyes filling with tears again as she lifted a hand up to cover her trembling lip, “I … I was just about to get into my car and rush over to his apartment! I … I've missed him so much and I was eager to see him!”
She broke into a low moan of sobbing again and we sat back and waited for her to regain control. She was a woman in her mid-thirties and decent enough at which to look. Her face had too much make up on for my tastes, and she liked to wear her hair in some fashion straight out of the nineteen fifties, but she was narrow in the hips and with a flat stomach … plus very well supplied with breasts. Her bosom was large, healthy, and obviously something she was proud of. She had on a tight, form fitting dress that accentuated her best anatomical features. It was a yellow dress with big, white plastic buttons running down the front. I could imagine her and Abbott rolling around on the bed with Abbott unbuttoning each big button, one button at a time, as she struggled to rip his pants off.
Eudora Felting was a woman who had a taste for men. She was earthy. Willing. Appreciative of a male being around. She radiated a kind of invitation which naturally drew men to her. She was big framed, but not fat. She looked strong, possibly stronger than Abbott would have been. Certainly, strong enough to hit such a small man with a blunt instrument on the side of his head and crush it in.
Her crying was too convincing … too genuine. And there was the other problem. She said she had been out of town since Thursday of last week. That could be checked, it would be checked, but I was fairly sure she was telling the truth.
“How long did you know Abbott, Miss Felting?” Frank asked, his voice growing soft as we listened to her genuine anguish at the loss of a loved one.
“Maybe three, four months. He works … worked … down at a spa I have a membership in. I joined it soon after my husband and I got a divorce. He gave the best massages I've ever had.”
“Did you know a girl by the name of Rebecca Pickford?” I asked, watching her wipe her eyes free of tears again with shaking hands.
“Well … not personally. But I think she was a member of the spa. Why?”
“She was murdered, too. And she and Abbott knew each other as well,” I said, tactfully not mentioning that Abbott and Pickford had been lovers.
“Oh. My God, what's happening here?” she whispered, her eyes growing big with fear. “Do you know who the killer is? Or killers?”
“Not yet. We’ll find them soon,” I said, smiling and trying to sound confident. “But I have to ask you this, Miss Felting. Sorry about being so blunt. Did you and Abbott know each other intimately?”
She looked at me and at Frank with big blue eyes, eyes lined red from crying, then she smiled that lost, forlorn smile of someone who has forever lost something cherished deep in their heart as she brought a trembling hand up to her cheek.
“Do you mean were we lovers, Sergeant? Yes. I loved Bruce, and I'm sure he loved me.”
“You said you were in St. Louis,” Frank broke in, glancing at me, frowning, then back at the big woman. “Can you give me the name of the hotel in which you stayed?”
“Sure. It was the Holiday Inn Downtown. The convention was at the Memorial Hospital.”
“And were you there Monday, this last Monday?”
“Yes. Monday was my day to speak. I had two sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I gave a talk on how to minimize nurse staffing in private care institutions.”
“At what times did you speak?” I asked, knowing that whatever she was going to say, it would be an air-tight alibi … and the truth as well.
“The morning session began promptly at nine. I had maybe three, four hundred people at that one to hear me. The second one was at three in the afternoon. There was only fifty or so there.”
“What did you do between those times?” Frank asked, writing notes in the notepad before looking up at her.
“I had lunch with several old friends from the St. Louis area around noon, and then at one there was a lecture I wanted to attend … Oh my God! You think I killed Bruce, don't you, and it happened on Monday!”
More tears. More sobbing. I thought she was going to cry herself right off the chair and onto the floor. Frank and I kept our mouths shut and when she finally got control of herself, we assured her we were not accusing her of the crime. All we were doing was asking the required questions.
We both knew there was no way the woman could have killed Bruce Abbott on Monday. She had the build, the strength and possibly a motive for killing both Abbott and Pickford. She knew Pickford was a member of the same spa she was a member of, and that Abbott worked in, something we weren't quite sure about earlier. If she was the jealous type, knowing that Abbott was sleeping with Pickford as well as with her, that might have been motive enough for a double murder.
But St. Louis is seven hundred miles away as a Boeing 737 flies. No way to fly back here, kill the two, and then get back to St. Louis for her meetings on Monday if her alibi checked out. I was sure it was going to check out as gospel.
So, Eudora Felting was not our murderess, and somehow, I didn't think she was the type to kill a man. She loved men too much. She might bash them around like a trash bag being tossed into the dump. Or she might be bashed around by a man. But not kill. It didn’t fit her personality.
We still had a murderer to find.
“So, where does that leave us now, sport?” Frank asked, as we backed the old Ford out of Eudora's driveway and onto the snow-covered street.
We asked Eudora a few more questions and then we quietly left her crying in the recliner. Leaving people crying their hearts out over the loss of a loved one is part of the job I do not handle very well. And I've been in homicide a long time.
“Well,” I sighed, running a hand down my face, and collecting my thoughts as we listened to the tires crunching through fresh snow, “We know that Pickford, Abbott, and Felting all are connected by the link with the spa. Maybe if we go back down there and nose around some more, we might find a link that connects Pickford and Abbott with someone else.”
“Maybe, and maybe we might win the lotto. But hell, we've got to do something.”
I nodded in agreement, and we drove back to the spa. Two hours of asking a lot of questions gave us a list of names of people who may or may not have known both Rebecca Pickford and Bruce Abbott.
It was on the way back to the station that Charlie Ten gave us a squawk over the radio and told us of a phone number to call. A Charlie in this town is a black-and-white patrol car. Beat officers are who do the day-to-day work of rolling along the streets and answering all the first calls which come in on 911.
Charlie Ten was a beat car with two big, gregarious Irish cops in it by the name of Ian McNutty and Carl Flannery. They were second generation cops. In fact, their fathers had served as partners back in the early fifties together. Nut and Flack were their nicknames, and their beat was a section on North Broadway and Hanover streets.
In the same beat where our third murder investigation was going on.
Our third homicide case was fairly cut and dried. We knew who the killer was, and this time, witnesses easily identified Ricky Martinez as being the trigger man who killed Leon Graham. We had five witnesses who watched the murder happen in a small beer joint down on Grover and Simpson. Every witness was willing to testify. There was no doubt about it. To a man everyone agreed that Ricky Martinez was the killer.
Now all we had to do was find Ricky Martinez … which was not going to be easy since Ricky was part of a gang, and soon after he put the 9 mm to the back of Leon Graham's head and pulled the trigger, an act of murder being the requirement to enter the gang, Ricky disappeared. The gang whisked him away and not a trace of Ricky could be found. We had been keeping contacts within the community around Grover and Simpson streets, the gang's main turf, waiting for some sign of Ricky's return.
Nut and Flack were beat officers that had the gang as their prime source of their nightly activity to contend with. Driving fast across town, Frank and I knew getting a call from them could only mean Ricky Martinez must have made an appearance somewhere.
Over the phone they told us to meet them behind a small neighborhood grocery store just a block away from Grover Street. We found them sitting in their car in an empty lot behind the store waiting for us. Rolling up beside them on my side, I rolled the window down and Ian McNutty rolled down his window and then lifted a thermos mug.
“Coffee? It's colder than a frozen Eskimo's pecker out here today.”
“No thanks. We just had some something,” I said, shaking my head. “What's up?”
“Had a friendly little kid tell us he saw Ricky last night at a party just up the street from here,” Carl Flannery said, leaning forward on the far side of his black-and-white to answer while McNutty poured himself a cup of coffee. “It was supposed to have been a big party that went all night and all day this morning. The way our source told us, they should be all down and out for the count by now.”
I glanced at Frank, and then turned my attention back to the two beat cops.
“You can trust this source?”
“The kid's a brother to someone who was badly cut up by Ricky and a couple of gang members. He wants Ricky roasted over an open pit. Sure, we think his information is legit.”
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