The Blackmail Club Read online

  “Yes. I still wanted us to meet. Hopefully reach an understanding. I can handle whatever help you might be needing, whenever you bump up against a situation.”

  “That could happen, Max. We’re looking into something right now on which there could be something, but no guarantee. It’s loose, but the best I can do at the moment.”

  “I appreciate your candor. When you call, I’ll be here.”

  They shook hands, and Jack stayed near Max. “When you turn on the blarney, you have the lilt common to South Ireland, yet certain words suggest the lowlands of Scotland. Which is it?”

  Max raised his eyebrows. “You’ve a good ear, Jack. My pa and his family were from a small town in Scotland on the north shore of the Firth of Forth. Both my ma and my wife were born in County Cork, Ireland. So I’m a mutt, I ‘spose.” He chuckled. “My folks moved to Chicago when I was very young. Ma insisted we speak English, so I was always hearing Pa with a Scottish accent, and Ma with her Irish brogue. Truth being, I’m not often sure which I’m using when.”

  “Americans find the Irish and Scottish accents charming,” Jack said. “That’s probably why you selectively turn it on.”

  “Aye, you’ve found me out. Nora told me a leprechaun couldn’t sneak past ya at midnight.”

  Nora leaned in to put an end to Jack’s and Max’s spreading of the blarney. “Suggs is on the phone.” She pointed like Uncle Sam on a recruiting poster. “He wants you.”

  Jack walked back around his desk, gave Max a signal to wait, and picked up his phone. Nora loitered in the doorway. “Hello, Sergeant Suggs. What can I do for you?”

  “Forty minutes ago my partner and I pulled a call. City Sanitation found the ripe body of a man shot and left in a trash dumpster. Smells like at least two, maybe three-day leftovers. The dumpster’s behind your high-rise.”

  The detective bit off his next words. “Chief Mandrake asks that you come to the scene.”

  “This would seem a routine homicide, Sergeant. How did Police Chief Mandrake even know about it?”

  “He was with the chief of detectives when the call came in. Chief Mandrake said, ‘Hey, that’s the building Jack McCall’s in. Get him down there. Maybe he knows something.’ So are you coming McCall?”

  “How does this connect to me?”

  “I’m getting to that.” Jack heard Suggs take a hard breath before continuing. “The victim had no ID on him, but he had a cigarette pack rolled up in his t-shirt sleeve with a matchbook slid inside the pack’s cellophane wrapper. Your name and address were written inside. I ain’t got all day to chat, McCall, you coming or what? It makes me no never mind.”

  “Be right there.” Jack hung up and looked at Max. “You know Sergeant Paul Suggs?”

  “A long time. We teamed on homicides for a lot a years.”

  “How can I get the chip off his shoulder?”

  Max grinned. “Paul Suggs is Wyatt Earp caught in a time warp. He resents the movement to coddle-the-bad-guys, but he’s determined to get his thirty-year pension, shouldn’t have long to go.”

  “How do I get closer to him?”

  “Don’t take his shit. Don’t let him get you angry, but don’t be intimidated. Kid with him some, but not about the squeak in his shoe.”

  “Squeak?”

  “Yeah. He’s worn the same kinda black soft-soled shoes like, forever. The left one squeaks, always has. His walk must have something to do with it, ‘cause it don’t stop when he gets a new pair. He can’t hear the squeak. His ears just don’t pick it up. The guys have razzed him to the point where it’s like picking at a scab.”

  “I’m headed down there. Wanna tag along?”

  “Sure. I was hoping you’d ask. Be good to see Pauli again.”

  “Okay, Max. Let’s not keep the good Sergeant waiting. The man has a corpse with our name on it.”

  Chapter 3

  The late afternoon sky, smeared with illumination from the rotating lights atop the police cars, cast the alley in an eerie, reddish-grayish-yellowish hue.

  As Jack and Max approached the scene, some local youths, with their caps turned backwards, sat along the top of a block wall at the back of the alley like fans in a first row of bleacher seats. One of them hollered, “Where’s the CSI babes?” They all giggled.

  A uniformed officer stopped the two men. Max pointed, “There’s Pauli.”

  Twenty yards away, Sergeant Suggs stood pushing down one side of his shirt collar that poked out the way collars do when one side lacks a stay. He moved toward them, unfastened his collar button, the erect side relaxed. Then he yanked loose the knot in his gray knit tie, the kind with a square bottom that was popular a few decades back.

  “I’m pleased to see you again, Sergeant.”

  “What’s pleasing about it, McCall? I got your nose in my case.”

  “You called me, Sergeant.”

  “You trying to fuck with me, McCall? Cause that’d come in real handy. I need someone in my life to give a ration of shit on days that turn sour. Make that every damn day.”

  Suggs’s chin hinged along the deep lines that creased down from the corners of his mouth. He feigned a jab at Max’s mid-section. “Hey, Max man, you good-for-nothing mick, I thought you retired.”

  “I’m working some with this lad.” Max stepped closer. “Don’t bust his chops. Jack’s one of the good guys.” Then he stepped back. “So, whatdaya got?”

  The gruff cop shrugged. “A John Doe.” He jerked his head toward the dumpster and led them on a path that avoided the portions of the search grid the technicians had not yet completed. Two flashbulbs sparked on their right.

  “We bagged two shell casings from a thirty-eight, down there,” Suggs motioned, “near the wall of the building at the far end of the dumpster. I need you guys to ID the vic.”

  The two men leaned forward taking care not to touch the dumpster. Jack had never seen the blunt-nosed corpse, and he said so. Max shook his head, neither had he.

  “A good soldier,” Max said, “never knows just when the Lord will be giving him passage to Fiddlers’ Green.”

  Suggs, who stood about five-ten, raised his chunky body onto his toes and looked over the edge of the dumpster. “Come on, guys. This fellow was headin’ for your office. Take another look.”

  Max took out a packet of menthol-flavored lozenges. They each took one.

  “Sergeant, the body is on top of the trash,” Jack said. “Janitors come at night, so it’s a stretch to conclude this fella was coming to see us late on Friday after the janitors had finished. But if he was, he never got to us and wasn’t expected. We don’t know him.”

  The unfortunate stranger had a Popeye tattoo on his right bicep. His t-shirt was dark enough that in the smorgasbord lighting, even with a flashlight, Jack couldn’t decide between black, dark brown, or navy blue. He guessed the victim’s age as somewhere in his sixties.

  “The janitor service did come Friday night,” Suggs said. “We checked. That supports him being killed sometime between late Friday and now. My nose votes for Friday.” He gestured toward the victim’s legs. “That smaller torn bag is home garbage, some cheap bastard dumping where he works to save a nickel.”

  The putrefied food stuffs inside the dumpster had attracted a regiment of busy ants which ignored the crime scene tape to trail over the lip of the dumpster.

  “The body likely stayed the way it went down until the refuse workers threw back the lid and found him a little more than an hour ago,” Suggs reasoned.

  “Looks as if he climbed into the dumpster before being shot,” Jack said. “You agree?”

  “Yah, you betcha. The first shot got ‘im in the ticker,” Suggs said poking Jack in the chest, with a finger crowned with a chewed nail.

  “That was the kill shot, all right,” Jack said. “Then after he dropped below the top of the dumpster, the shooter added the head shot to clinch it.”

  A middle-aged woman walked purposely toward the dumpster. Jack recognized her from the news: Mildred
Rutledge, doctor of Forensic Pathology and DC’s medical examiner. She was not attractive enough to intimidate other women, yet shapely enough to draw a man’s eyes.

  Jack watched her small, deft hand gestures as she spoke. “I’m going in for a closer look. I don’t want the body moved until I’ve made a preliminary check for lividity and rigor.” She moved away from the ants, slipped on an impervious coverall, gloves and boots that fit over her shoes, then leaned on a co-worker while tugging her shoe covers tight. The co-worker also helped her into the dumpster.

  After climbing out, she talked with Suggs. He jerked his head toward Jack. She looked over, nodded, and brushed back her windblown brown hair. When she came over, she grasped Max’s forearms and they shared the look of old friends not expecting to see each other.

  She moved her pink tongue over her red upper lip. “Mr. McCall, you understand my comments will be preliminary.” She leaned on Max to pull off the boots covering her shoes. “There are procedures we will not be able to perform until the body is out of that box.”

  Her manner didn’t acknowledge the pungent fumes that continued to attack Jack’s nose and eyes, but she did take one of Max’s lozenges. Jack took a second one. The three of them moved to the upwind end of the dumpster.

  “The belly is already distended,” she began. “This bloated condition normally follows both the earlier rigor mortis and the later flaccidity. There are blisters on the skin and the lips are puffed. Fluid is leaking from his ears, and there are fly larvae in his mouth.” Dr. Rutledge pushed down on the top of her small flashlight and pointed the beam. “You can see that maggots have been eating the skin, and look, look at his neck. Spiders have already arrived to feast on the maggots. All this suggests the victim has been dead more than two days. Naturally, all this can be altered by stuff like the weather and the bacteria and bugs indigenous to a dumpster in an alley.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. Any release of information will come from your office or the police department, not McCall Investigations.”

  She reached inside her blouse to reposition a bra strap that had slipped toward the crown of her shoulder. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”

  Jack walked up to Paul Suggs. “May I see the matchbook?”

  Suggs led Jack to the closed trunk of one of the squad cars and handed him a clear evidence bag. The opened matchbook was trapped inside with Jack’s name and address hand-printed in block letters. He turned over the evidence bag. The back of the bright red matchbook cover was embossed with gold foil in the outline of a woman’s legs sitting crossed over the name Donny’s Gentlemen’s Club.

  Jack wondered if this reference to Donny Andujar meant anything more than the victim frequented his club, but he said nothing. Then Jack glanced at Suggs. “Anything else?”

  “He had a ballpoint pen clipped in the neck of his t-shirt. The ink appears to match the writing of your name. We’ll confirm that later. Did you have a Friday afternoon appointment, a no show?”

  Jack shook his head. “No appointments, Sergeant. I told you. We do not know this guy.”

  Suggs shrugged. “If this was a heist, the robber could’ve made him get in the dumpster to intimidate him. But robbers rarely shoot unless the person resists, which wasn’t likely once the vic got into the dumpster.”

  “Could the victim have been shot and then put in the dumpster?” Jack asked.

  “Could, but if you’re the shooter, why shoot and lift?”

  “Maybe he was shot somewhere else and dumped here?”

  They both looked up when the evidence team turned on their Klieg lights to brighten the crime scene as twilight matured toward darkness.

  “Maybe,” Suggs allowed, “but that don’t explain the shell casings next to the dumpster. Of course, if the casings don’t match up with the slugs or we don’t find the slugs in the vic or the dumpster, then your ‘maybe’ gets stronger.”

  Max, who had lingered near the dumpster, came over to join them. “My two cents,” he said, “this here’s a killing. Not a robbery.”

  Suggs’s pudgy face wobbled slightly while he nodded, listening to Max.

  “It’s time for us to get out of your hair, Sergeant,” Jack said. “Please give my appreciation to Chief Mandrake, and I’d like to be kept informed, including the victim’s identity.”

  “I’ll pass on your request to the chief. But don’t forget,” Suggs said, flipping his wrist back and forth between them, “communication is a two-way street. If you find out who this guy is or why he was heading your way, let me know. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “Listen, McCall, Max says you’re okay, but I don’t like nobody using politics to nose into my cases.”

  “Which part of Minnesota do you come from, Sergeant?”

  “Little town, north of the Twin Cities, you never heard of it. Been here most of my life. You could still tell, huh?”

  “Yah, you betcha.”

  Suggs’s face took on an unpracticed smile. “The Norwegian farm still slips out.”

  “Listen, Sergeant, I don’t blame you for getting pissed when people play politics in police matters. I imagine it happens a lot in this town. I didn’t know anything about this until you called me, so you know there were no politics played from my end.”

  “Let’s leave it at that.” Suggs said, before following Jack under the yellow tape and outside the crime scene. Then the detective touched Max on his arm. “When we were doing this together, you were pretty good at reading the scene. What did you see?”

  While Suggs wedged an unlit half-smoked cigar into the corner of his mouth, Max glanced at Jack who nodded his approval.

  “The victim was left-handed,” Max answered. “My guess is he was a night janitor, maybe with this building’s janitorial service. Then again, if he was heading for McCall’s office he likely worked for a different service.”

  “I picked up on the left-handed part,” Suggs said. “His skin appeared lighter on top of his right wrist, which also had less hair. Most people wear their watch on their weaker arm. And the cigarette pack was rolled up in his right t-shirt sleeve. But how did you get ‘works nights as a janitor’?”

  “His head hair is all matted and gnarled from wearing the stocking cap that’s half-stuffed in his back pocket. Despite the death pale of his skin, it looked to me like he had a tan when he died. That suggests he’s outside a lot during the day, so he either had a day job outside or worked nights. A day job outside is likely inconsistent with the stocking cap. A day job inside isn’t a great fit with his tan.”

  Jack grinned.

  “The soles of his shoes,” Max continued with a twinkle in his eye, “went to the soul of the matter. They support the idea he did janitor work and confirm he was left-handed, and that all jibes with his cap and tan.”

  “Oh!” Suggs said as his eyes reshaped into saucers.

  “When you go back, look at his left shoe. The sole is worn thin at and just above the toe. That won’t happen from walking. The top of his shoe above the worn area is heavily discolored. The top of the right shoe has a similar discoloration, but much less than his left. Your lab experts will likely find the discoloration is floor-cleaning solution. When janitors run their big machines on a hard-surface floor, they often keep a scouring pad with them. They use it under their toe to scrub off the stubborn black marks caused by the heels on some shoes.” Max demonstrated. “The old-timers call it Fred-Astaireing the floor. Most janitors do it with their stronger and better coordinated leg. In this case the victim’s left.”

  Sergeant Suggs continued chewing his cold cigar while listening.

  Jack could see that Max was enjoying demonstrating he still had the eye for the details of a crime scene and a feel for how it all fit together. He was clearly showing off, probably mostly for him, but Suggs had asked.

  Max shrugged. “Take care, Pauli.”

  Suggs nodded while pointing his cold soggy cigar toward Max. “You can still kick ass, Maxman.”

  The wind slapped at Ja
ck and Max when they turned the corner of the building. Ugly clouds were crowding the sky and the air smelled damp. Max flipped up the collar on his jacket.

  “I thought this was spring,” Jack said, watching a little whirlwind lift leaves and odd pieces of paper from the sidewalk.

  “The season’s in the seam. The weather’s a coin flip every day.”

  Jack leaned against the wall in the elevator. “Now tell me what else you saw.”

  The elevator stopped at the floor below MI. Two people got in. Instead of answering Jack’s question, Max told him the story behind the word blarney: “It began when the Irish Lord of Blarney Castle would dazzle the Queen of England with colorful double-talk rather than obey her royal edicts. The queen came to refer to the lord’s reports as blarney.”

  Back in Jack’s office Max took the last swig from the water bottle he’d left on the desk before answering. “The vic wore silk socks and had gold-capped teeth. Not what you’d expect for a janitor, unless he owned the business and it was successful. Then again, maybe he had another source of income, maybe criminal, could be that’s what brought him to an early end.”

  Jack pinched his nose and blew out trying to dispel the memory of the stench he’d brought back from the crime scene. “The victim had been under heavy stress for some weeks prior to his death.”

  “Cause?” Max asked.

  “The creases in his belt showed he had it cinched two notches tighter than normal, so he had recently changed his eating habits.”

  “You got a wee touch of the observer in ya too.”

  “You saw more than I did. Great work, Max.”

  “Thanks, Jack. It’s parta convincin’ ya to take me on.”

  “When we get something requiring more manpower, I just hope you’re still available.”

  Jack walked Max to the door, and then told Nora about the corpse in the dumpster. They decided that whoever the dead guy was it looked like he planned to contact MI, but the killer got to him before he could. They would remember the matchbook, but, at least for now, had no reason to connect Donny Andujar to this killing.