A taxi was waiting and the driver called out to her. I heard him just as I was going through the doors: “Did you call a cab, ma’am?”

She walked closer and bent down to talk to him through the open rider’s side window, and said, “No, I’m sorry, must be someone else,” and he shot her in the head.

Even before she fell, the cab squealed off. Some of what had been inside that pretty head splashed on my suit coat and drops spattered my face. When her legs went out from under her, she collapsed in a surprisingly graceful pirouette, the blue-gray eyes large if unseeing and yet staring right at me. The black hole in her forehead stared at me, too, and then she was on her face on the cement with the exit wound a cavernous thing, a carved-out red room of its own.

She’d finally got that payoff.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

As would be expected, I was first questioned at the scene by uniformed officers followed by plainclothes homicide detectives. Then I drove the loaner Cadillac—under police escort, as if I were a visiting dignitary, but thankfully without sirens—to police headquarters at the corner of Twelfth Street and Clark Avenue.

Somewhere in that massive six-story gray limestone cube of a building (where Carl Hall and Bonnie Heady had early on been held), I was further questioned, but not until after I’d been given my phone call. Someone on duty at the nearby FBI office, also on Twelfth Street, arranged to have a big football coach of a special agent named Don Hostetter come over to Police HQ.

Hostetter worked on Greenap with Wes Grapp, who was in Kansas City right now. Despite our never having met, the Special Agent vouched for me as an investigator for the Senate Rackets Committee. He informed one and all that the late Sandra O’Day was a potential witness I had been trying to groom for Senator McClellan and chief counsel Robert Kennedy.

That name-dropping, and an assurance I would make myself available as a material witness, got me shaken loose from the noble department that had brought the world the likes of Lieutenant Louis Shoulders and Patrolman Elmer Dolan. I was to let them know when I returned to Chicago, my contact information collected.

Walking me out into the warm, windy night, Hostetter—a no-nonsense six-three in his mid-forties—said, “You have blood on your face and gory dried shit on your suit coat.”

“I know.”

“It’s not a good look.”

“I don’t plan to go out.”

He walked me to the Caddy in the police parking lot and said, “Stop by the office tomorrow. I’ll see if I can get Wes in from K.C. Seems like you may have some things you’d like to share.”

“Thanks for springing me.”

“No problem. The Chief always likes it when we can add to your package, Mr. Heller. It’s about four inches thick now.”

I was back at the Coral Court in twenty minutes, snugging the Cadillac into its little private garage. When I stepped from there into the Red Room, I found the TV going and a guest watching it. On the red vinyl couch, in a yellow sport shirt and brown slacks and moccasin slippers with no socks, sat the motel’s proprietor—Jack Carr, smoking a cigarette, an ashtray on the coffee table before him, from a pack Sandy had left behind the other night. A book of Coral Court matches was nearby.