Podmore, P.I. - Part 8
In Chicago, 1926, everybody's got something to hide. They all have secrets, buried in gardens and stowed in basements and sometimes sent to the morgue. Regulus Black stumbled into some of those secrets, and now he's sitting in the Cook County Jail. Given that Benjy Fenwick did the same and got a closed-casket funeral for his trouble, Black should probably count himself lucky.
One man who's learned that indeed you may count no man lucky until he is dead is detective for hire Sturgis Podmore. When we last saw the detective he was at the notorious South Side speakeasy known as the Hogshead, looking for information. Now, let us rejoin him on the case...
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The nights always went long at the Hogshead. Best thing about being illegal was old Abe could keep the place open all night if he felt like, and to hell with blue laws. In for a penny, in for a pound, as the saying went. The music stayed hot and loud as the place filled up with the drinkers and the dancers, the sad sacks and the good time gals, the lovers and the lost and the looking.
Sturgis Podmore spent the night looking, but not for love: for answers.
As a private detective, most of his work was on cases that in the great machine of the world didn't really matter. He investigated thefts too small for the police to care about and followed cheating wives around town. He found out what there was to know about guys trying to marry up with rich men's daughters. And that was when he could actually getting a case. Now he found himself with one that reminded him why he'd ever gone into police work in the first place.
He had wanted to punish the guilty and protect the innocent. He wanted to find out the truth and stand up to speak in court for the people who couldn't speak for themselves. Now, after two years of barely making rent or making a difference, Podmore had a chance to do it. Break this case the right way, take it to the right people, and it could put a real solid dent in all the corruption the city was rife with. He was too cynical to think he could bring the whole machine crashing down, but if he could even just knock one or two holes in it, that'd be something. If he got even a little justice for the banker and the jazz singer who nobody had anything bad to say about - and who the hell managed that on the South side of Chicago? - that was something, too.
The next morning saw Sully frantically taking notes as Podmore paced back and forth across the room, laying down all the information he'd picked up at the Hogshead. She'd never learned real shorthand, but out of necessity she'd learned to take quick notes and reinterpret them later. The secretary was justifiably proud of her efficiency, and she wasn't about to give her boss the satisfaction of asking him to slow down.
"...bass player doesn't think she was sleeping around - seemed pretty offended by the suggestion, actually," the detective went on. "I'd question it, but there was also the guy who was pissed off that she didn't sleep around, so I think we can cross "bein' somebody's moll" of the list of reasons she might've got bumped off. Frank says his wife liked 'er, and gave me that she for sure knew Fenwick - who wasn't a regular, by the way. Occasional visits only, which explains why I never met the guy. I'm gonna have to talk to his wife--"
"That's Greta?"
"Right," Podmore confirmed as she wrote. "Nobody knows where she's gone, and her family's all up in Wisconsin. She might've gone back there, but she's also got some friends a little closer by - the MacFustys, just across the border in Indiana. She may be scared, but I think she's gonna wanna stick close enough to the city that she can find out what goes down with the trial. I may need your help with that one. They're not gonna let a strange guy talk to 'er on the phone, not with who she's runnin' from."
The secretary paused in her frenetic scribbles to give him a skeptical look. "On the phone," he clarified. "They do have phones in Indiana, right?"
The secretary looked a little skeptical of that notion as well.
"I'm gonna have to drive south either way," Podmore said with a shrug. "I'd just like to lower my chances of having some crazy damn farmer point a shotgun at me when I get there. See if you can track down a number for them. Meantime, I'm gonna see what I can do about talkin' to Regulus Black."
That could be tricky. Oh, not the getting in part. He still knew enough people at the Cook County Jail that he could find someone to get him in. The hard part would be convincing the Black kid to talk. For some reason he hadn't yet, and if he was innocent, that didn't make any sense. There'd have to be something specific keeping him quiet, something that meant more to him than his own life - and Podmore intended to find out what it was.
The Cook County Jail was a block of bricks with polished concrete floors and solid iron bars on every window. It held violators of city and county law, minor criminals convicted of public drunkenness or disorderly conduct or sleeping on the street. It was also the temporary residence of many who awaited trial before being sent down the river to Joliet. Among those who was likely to join Leopold and Loeb was Regulus Black, now being held in solitary confinement.
For his own protection, the guy at the desk said. More likely so he didn't talk to anybody he wasn't supposed to, Podmore figured. Whatever the reason, he wouldn't have to worry as much about being overheard. That helped. The only other thing he had going for him was the fact that the kid hadn't seen a friendly face in a long time - and that he wasn't really any more than a kid. Eighteen, they said; no older than the stray newsboy his secretary was so partial to.
Podmore's shoes echoed in the hallway, each heel-strike a drop of water in a cave. The place gave him the creeps, even here outside the cell block. It was something in the quiet, and in the eyes of the officers who worked there. They had a dead look to them, like every spark of life had been drained from them after months and years of being nearly as incarcerated as the inmates. He wondered sometimes what these men were like at home, if their wives and children had to watch them grow colder by the day or if they somehow shut it off.
The cell block was no less unsettling, for all that it was louder. The noise there was restless, the shouts and chatter of inmates who had nothing better to do than make sounds for the hell of it. Here a guy would be reading in his cell, there one would be writing a letter, one bounced a rubber ball off the wall, and too many shouted just to be heard.
The cell that was Podmore's destination, however, was dead quiet. One of the blank-eyed guards let him in, and he was greeted by the sight of a young man who looked more completely defeated than anyone he'd ever seen. The signs were all there in his posture, in the way he didn't even bother to fidget, in his dark, sad eyes that didn't turn to look even when the cell door clanged shut again. He didn't flinch. He sat, his silence anvil-heavy.
"Name's Podmore," the detective said into the silence before him. "Friend of yours hired me to look into things. I've done some looking, but now I need what you can tell me."
Then the kid moved, looking sharply up at him with eyes full of terror. "You tell Chloe to stay out of this!" he said quickly, voice just as panicked as his face. Whoever Chloe was, she meant something to him. Interesting, then, that she wasn't the one who'd come to him.
"Easy, kid." Podmore held his hand up. "I don't know any Chloe. You worried about 'er?"
Silence again, which was as good as a yes. Water dripped from a pipe running overhead, and Podmore changed tactics. His gaze hardened, and he leaned down close to his target and lowered his voice.
"Look, you wanna know the truth?" he asked. "I don't give a damn about you, rich boy. But you're my case, and there are people in this who do matter to me. Dorcas Meadowes and Benjamin Fenwick deserve justice."
Slowly, Regulus Black looked up with a dark fire in his eyes. He appeared equal parts haunted and hating, but it was with total confidence that he looked at the detective.
"You want justice for Benjy Fenwick?" His voice was soft, shaking even as he pushed through with the thoughts he'd spent too much time with. "Let 'em try their new electric chair out on me."
It was then that Podmore knew for certain that whatever Regulus Black might have done as an agent of his family, he didn't kill Fenwick. Not with that look. The kid felt responsible, that much was clear...but he didn't do that murder.
"You were there," Podmore said quietly, trying a push for the truth. He just needed a little more, some kind of direction. "You didn't do it."
"I'm responsible," Regulus replied, but that didn't contradict either of the statements made.
"You wanna be responsible for the one who did that still runnin' loose?" the detective pointedly asked. "Choppin' people up for fun? You wanna go down for this while he goes free?"
"You have no idea what you're talking about," Regulus snarled, showing some fire again. "The kind of power you're dealing with? Everyone I've ever loved would be gone by sunrise if he even knew I spoke so much as a word to you."
And with that thought, the younger man's eyes glanced worriedly to the long hallway. Was anyone listening? Maybe Crouch was arrogant enough to not even bother having him watched, but maybe he wasn't, and...dammit. Damn, damn--
He cut off his own thoughts with an earnestly whispered demand. "You can't tell anyone you were here. Not anyone. And please...if you've got any heart in you at all...don't go looking for Chloe. He'll kill her just like that banker, and I can't take any more blood on my hands. I can't. Not hers."
The more he heard about Barty Crouch Jr., the less Podmore liked him. He was starting to sound like a genuine sadist, putting Leopold and Loeb's "crime of the century" in the shade. He should've thought about the information he already had on the guy before he'd come straight down to see Black himself - now this really could be dangerous, and not just for whoever Chloe was.
"Yeah, a'right," he said quietly, straightening up. "Well, my client's not gonna like the sound of that," he said more loudly, trying to provide at least some cover. "But that's women for ya. Thanks."
A clang on the bars summoned the guard to let him back out. Back down the hall, into the long line of bars that rippled in his peripheral vision, through the clanging and the calling...and finally once more into the silence. Podmore let his own footfalls chase him through to the front office, still thinking about where to go next...until he saw the absolute last person he wanted to run into.
Sergeant Dylan Selwyn.
The cop who had made his career on the case that killed Podmore's. What in the hell was he doing at the county jail? The lazy bastard never followed that far up on a case.
They didn't speak, because they never spoke. They'd barely spoken when they'd been on the same side, when there wasn't any official bad blood. Back then, their dislike of one another was based on no more than Podmore not liking the way the man treated his own wife and Selwyn not liking the way Podmore called him on it. Now they didn't speak because Selwyn thought he'd already won...and because Podmore now hoped nothing more than that the sergeant was in some way involved in this case and he could bring him down even harder than he'd fallen himself.
As usual, Podmore would've liked to reach out and deck him. Selwyn was a lousy excuse for a police officer and a human being, knee deep in dirt and loving every second of it. But now, watching Selwyn enter the cellblock as he exited, Podmore had a goal to add to the others that went with this case: find enough dirt to bury him.