Read You Bet Your Life: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Three) for Free Online

calling the Medical Examiner or Coroner or whatever they called it in Cook County.
    “Chopper did that,” said Kleinhans. “Relatively clean. Short burst. I’d say someone who knows how to handle it. No needless extra shots. The walls are clean.”
    “Maybe he was shot someplace else and brought here,” I suggested, popping another Bromo tablet and blowing my nose into a wad of toilet paper.
    Kleinhans sat down in the only chair in the room. I sat on the bed. The cop on the phone kept talking.
    “Nope,” said Kleinhans, pursing his lips and scratching his bulbous nose. “And you don’t think so either. According to the stuff we got on you last night from L.A., you were a cop. Maybe not much of a cop, but a cop. How would anyone get a bloody corpse like that up to the sixth floor of a downtown Chicago hotel?”
    “A better question is why,” I said.
    Kleinhans took his hat off, scratched his scalp like a nervous chimp and examined his fingernails to see what they had found. The cop hung up the phone and said, “They’re on the way.” Kleinhans rubbed his ear and nodded toward the door. The second cop left. I blew my nose.
    “Better take care of that,” he said.
    “I’m trying,” I said.
    Kleinhans looked at the body for a few more seconds before speaking.
    “Ever see our friend before?”
    “Two days ago in Miami. He was keeping an eye on Capone for someone. Nitti, Guzik, or his brother Ralph. He didn’t say.”
    “Must have come up by plane,” he said. “You working some kind of deal with him?”
    “Am I going to need a lawyer?”
    “I don’t think so,” said Kleinhans, getting up. There was a knock at the door. He opened it and let the fat cop in. They talked without me for a few seconds.
    “We’ve got to get out of here for awhile,” Kleinhans said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “State Street district is a few minutes away. Let’s ride down there and talk.”
    He was pretty good. He made it all sound like a friendly request. Doctor and patient. Dad and son. In Los Angeles I might have tested him, pulled back to see how mean he could get, but it wasn’t in me. The cold in my head and outside the hotel were getting to me as much as Leonardo was.
    “Right,” I said. “Know why he had that circle of white hair on his head?”
    “Beats me,” said Kleinhans.
    We were at the State Street Station in about five minutes and in an office Kleinhans borrowed from a lieutenant who was home with the flu. My brother’s a cop with an office. My brother’s office was small and almost as old as California. There was no room in it to run if Phil lost his temper, which was about eighty percent of the time. The Chicago lieutenant’s office was a big cold barn with bare wooden floors and an echo. It looked as if someone years earlier had moved all the furniture into the middle of the room to get ready to paint the walls and then forgot about it.
    “Tell your story,” said Kleinhans, getting comfortable behind the desk with a cup of coffee. He gave me one, too. We both kept our coats on. I started my tale in Miami, worked my way forward to include my battle with the orange-shirted kid in the train, and made it up to Leonardo in the closet.
    Kleinhans was looking out of the window at a passing streetcar when I finished.
    “What do you think?” he said.
    “I don’t know. Someone went to a lot of trouble to dump the body on me. Maybe it’s a warning. It might be a threat or a screwy accident. Maybe Leonardo decided I got something from Capone or I was on my way to something. Maybe he called Chicago for orders. Maybe he called the kid in Jacksonville and told him to grab my stuff so they could check me out. Maybe Leonardo decided to come here and stop me, but someone stopped him instead.”
    “And maybe elephants piss nickels,” sighed Kleinhans, wrinkling his brow for a massive belch that never came.
    “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re lying,” he said, finishing his coffee.