I sat on the front steps waiting for the purr of Julia’s 300 SL watching six-year-old Elmore push his three-wheeler up and down the walk, each time asking me a question that had no answer. The ones I gave him seemed to satisfy him: The sky was blue because it wasn’t red. The rain isn’t snow because it’s not white enough. Bears don’t live in Chicago because they won’t let them on the El but they put them in uniform and let them play football. They call it Soldier’s Field because George Washington built the place with a bunch of GI’s and everyone knows Bear fans never tell a lie, just like George, who’s real name was Clarence.
Gail’s phone rang at least twenty times before I could pull myself to my feet and stagger in the house. Even if it wasn’t Julia, it’d be useful to know who wanted Gail that badly. A wee female voice dipped in puddles of fright said my name like a life-or-death question from the bottom of a deep well. I didn’t recognize her until she told me who she was, Dee Mathews. She’d dispensed with formalities, and her fog voice needed oiling.
Please, please could I rush up to the Gateswood estate? On her way out to meet me, Julia had seen the door to the guesthouse standing open and found Gail’s body inside. Little sobs joined her words; it was a mess she said, a horrible tragic mess: Julia was inconsolable, Mr. Gateswood was in Washington, Julia didn’t want the police called until I got there, she didn’t know what to do. She’d tried to reach me at home and at the office, when Julia finally told her to try Gail’s. Julia knew I was at Gail’s but she wasn’t thinking too clearly, wasn’t talking at all, had locked herself in her bedroom and Dee was terrified what she might do. I told her I’d be there in twenty minutes or less and too keep her wits about her, all two of them. I was about to hang up when she asked:
“Do you have a partner?”
“Rick? Yes, he’s out of town, why?”
“No, he’s on his way up. I talked to him at your office, a Mister Anthony, is that him?”
“News to me. I thought he’d be away longer. Don’t touch anything in the guesthouse before either of us get there.”
She hung up.
The Gateswood estate was once a rolling twenty-acre palace in Park Ridge for a now obscure industrialist who had fourteen children. The acreage was sold off after his death and smaller versions of the two-story portico-ed mansion were built on the resulting lots, still pretty large by any standard. Henry Gateswood had once taught a few classes at nearby DePaul University, and upon election to Congress, was able to restore the home to its former opulence. The guesthouse had originally been a playhouse for the magnate’s mob of brats.
I swung the Buick through the brick and iron-arched entrance and followed the immaculate driveway as it curved up through towering oaks to the house, where Rick’s puke-green Carmen Ghia squatted in the driveway loop. Dee Mathews met me at the door with hollow eyes and a frowsy appearance like she’d floor wrestled a truck driver for a week without sleep. Her face was sickish white, bearing no resemblance to the young woman who’d come to my bungalow a couple of days ago. After dampening my lapel some, she snuffled into a gauzy handkerchief that might have made a good q-tip and led me through the house to the side entrance.
“Julia will want to know you’re here,” she said. “I’ll go tell her. I apologize for being emotional. Mister Anthony’s in the guesthouse, doing what I don’t know. He said for you to walk over when you arrive.” She looked up into my face like the dogcatcher had just nabbed her beagle pup and gassed the mutt before she could save him. Miss Mathews hadn’t stopped gripping my arm since I’d met her at the door. The look in her eyes was one I’d seen a few times before. Nothing I could say that would make any difference. I said it anyway.
“Things will sort themselves out. Relax. How long’s Rick been here?”
“He came just after I called you,” she said. “Should I call the police now?”
“Do that. It should give us enough time to check out the guesthouse. And tell Mrs. Gateswood it’s very important I speak to her before the cops arrive. You might want to put on some blush and lipstick before they get here. You look ratty.”
Her dark eyes widened and darted back the way we’d come. “I will. Julia’s a pretty big mess, too,” she whispered. “Please go easy. You’re very blunt, did you know that?”
I nodded that I knew and made my way down a wide brick walk past a row of garages and a pond with a gurgling waterfall to a white bungalow with green trim. Gurgling water calls my bladder. I told it not to answer and went on. The headline wouldn’t read: “ANGEL PISSES ON MURDER CASE” today.
The door to the guesthouse stood open.
I went through a sparsely furnished sitting room to short hallway and a bedroom in the rear. Rick was kneeling at the foot of the bed examining bloodstains that led to an adjoining bathroom. The naked body sprawled diagonally across the upper part of a king bed, twisted at the waist, legs bent and together, feet arched with toes pointed down like she was in a half-tuck dive, breasts bloody with crossing thin red lines and welts that were recent. Her arms reached straight down toward her knees and her hands were cupped together like they’d been posed.
The bedspread was a pattern of scarlet hearts and blood red squares. Funny how little things like that are noticed when a body’s staring up at you. Except this body wasn’t staring. It was headless.
I approached and bent over the corpse. A faint red and blue tattoo, the letters “CF” with two small hearts was visible high up on one buttock. My scar twitched.
The head had been severed, but it hadn’t been a clean job. It looked like someone had hacked away with a dull machete a dozen or more times. Lifting up one hand revealed a broken nail, and some greenish material under it that looked like vegetation. She wore no rings or other jewelry and there weren’t any ring depressions on either hand. Her wrists were bruised with red streaks chewed through the top layers of skin with dried blood down one arm, like she’d been bound and bled there from the struggle. She might have put up a fight but with the condition of the body it was hard to tell.
“Any sign of what was used to bind her? You find the head?”
“It’s in there,” Rick said, pointing with his chin to the bathroom as he continued examining the floor around the bed. “I’d say thin wire was used, piano type or smaller. None around though. See how it cut into the sides of her wrists almost to the bone? Rope or power cord wouldn’t make those marks. She struggled hard to get loose. Maybe tortured.”
I stepped into the bathroom. The milky brown eyes were open, fused to some horror on the ceiling. The mouth was thin and grim. Blood smeared on the cheeks like someone had drawn circles with a finger. Across the forehead, written in bright orange-red lipstick block letters was the word “ANTIGONE.” The reference escaped me right then.
The sink was full of water, a ghoulish tomato soup. Blood drippings trailed in a curve out the door and across to the bed, like the body had been carried from the bathroom neck down to the bed, twelve feet away.
Rick called, “If you lift the head you’ll see neck bruises consistent with thick rope. Looks like a few hemp fibers. She could have been hung before decapitation. Hard to say which killed her. This sort of thing involves a lot of hatred.”
I turned away from the macabre scene and walked out through the bedroom, stopping at the door, my head a sick bubble with the gorilla pounding to get out again. “I’ll take your word for it. I didn’t know you were flying back so soon.”
“I didn’t know it myself until I’d sat around looking at umpteen cousins with no more to say. I was able to get a quick standby at Newark. It was like watching a bunch of people at the railroad station and suffering the same stale coffee and donuts for a week. But Mom had a good send off, and ninety is not altogether unhappy.”
I thumbed back toward the bathroom head repository. “So, what’s it mean? Antigone?”
Rick motioned me out and we stood on the brick walk watching the waterfall gurgle and looking up at the main house. “Sophocles,” he said, which meant zero to me. Then he stuck a hand in his coat like he was playing Napoleon, pasted on a fake face and said, “…and the folly that is mine alone, to suffer this dread thing; for I shall not suffer aught so dreadful as an ignoble death.”
“Ignoble’s appropriate. Shakespeare?”
“I can see you’re no student of classic literature, my boy. Sophocles, a Greek scribbler, playwright, predated the Bard some two thousand years. While you were in short pants I was taking all those classes and bedding all those lasses at NYU, expanding the old gray matter and socially finding substitutes for family and friends.”
“So give me the Reader’s Digest version of this tale, professor Sherlock.”
“Antigone was one of his three character tragedies. She was a reckless and defiant girl, sister to the proper Athenian woman Ismene, both daughters to King Creon.”
“Gail was reckless and defiant alright, from what I’ve found out, but I’m not quite sure just how proper Julia is. There’s plenty of lava beneath her icecap. I suppose this Greek babe was beheaded too?”
“No, she hanged herself over a slight disagreement with Creon about burying a traitor. I think her big sister was too much to handle, too good looking, too socially perfect. Athenian perfection was like Fifth Avenue and Central Park West, with a dollop of Emily Post thrown in. Sound familiar? Lots of social pressures, nuances in the play. An actor’s group put on the play in one of my seminars. Antigone was stunningly endowed as I recall. Of course, that was literary license.”
“You would remember that part — or those parts. Your license should be revoked. I always thought your ex spoon-fed you that classical junk.”
“Hardly. She ran off with an insurance man. You were about 12.”
“There’s more here than a cheap triangle, but Antigone was a big point to the killer. Maybe he was just name-calling and didn’t want the cops to understand Shakespeare.”
“Sophocles. But you’re right about the killer being a man. A female could hardly have hanged her, cut her head off, then moved her into the guesthouse by herself. The killing might have taken place somewhere on the grounds. I won’t be able to look it over good before we have visitors.”
“I’ll have to keep Greek parallels in mind. You got this play I can borrow?”
“I can dig it up for you, but you won’t care for it. There’s no hot sex, no headstrong PI’s, and most of all no wizened retired NYPD lieutenants playing Sherlock Holmes.”
“Thanks. I’ve missed your pithy comments slightly less than insomnia. Wrap your logical mind around this murder scene while I hear what Julia has to say. Bird Legs said Julia found the body this morning and she’s pretty broken up over it. When you’re used to hating your sister for a few decades, her death tilts all the angles.”
“I caught a brief glimpse of the lovely Mrs. Gateswood when I arrived. She hurried upstairs to change. Not bad. You really know how to pick clients, I’ll give you that, Mikey.”
Rick was the only guy who could call me that without winning a fat lip. He’d been my dad’s partner for years, seen me grow up, and when I did a short stint on the force at the 23rd precinct, hauled my ass out of a few insubordination scrapes. Since Dad’s death, Rick’d been a big brother and father to me. When he approached me about a partnership, I wasn’t sure, but a case fell in our laps and it was de facto tag-team before I knew it. I bulldozed, he analyzed. All in all it worked, though I don’t know why.
“Lipstick on the forehead’s a strange way to leave a murder message, reminds me of those Bronx psycho cases you and Dad worked on together. I have a pretty good file on Gail the sister that Miss Bird Legs compiled. Julia’s the oldest, wife to the good Congressman Gateswood, and former beauty queen. She hired me to locate her missing sister a couple of days ago, a wild number who ran with hoodlums for thrills. She was the one in that grand jury finger pointing last year about the prostitution ring that led into corruption of Mayor Daley’s special thug force. Looks like she lost her head over it. No King Creon though, unless you give that role to Henry. The real father deserted the family and was later killed at Iwo Jima. Mother abandoned her when she was two.”
“Still, Antigone’s a pretty apt reference, especially if you say Gail was wild. Too obvious. DePaul’s right down the road, any connection? Was she a student there?”
“She didn’t seem the type. I’ll ask Julia before the cops swarm us.”
“So, the mousy small-eyed paleface who called me — that who you call Bird Legs?”
“The same. Miss Efficient — virgin I suspect — although that’s only an impression, not the result of close detection. I’ve just started on this case, what should have been a simple missing persons ticket. We’re going to need your special diplomatic talents with homicide detectives and some research efforts.”
“They don’t ever seem to stay simple for you, do they? I mean, for us. Sometimes it slips my mind we’re partners.”
I rubbed my fingers lightly over the back of my head, where the swelling had tightened the skin and blood had matted the hair. It wasn’t ready for touching. Dad warned me but I had to just rush in. “You’ll get used to it, if I don’t dump you first. Anyway, it beats police work. And speaking of flatfeet, I need to ask Julia a few things before the ulcer boys start browbeating her. With her charms they might monopolize her the rest of the day.” I winced when my fingers rounded the lump’s apex. A searing needle of pain shot through my molars and down my scar.