Chicagoland by Gail Martin (important books to read TXT) 📕

“I’ll take the authors,” Sarah volunteered, sounding excited. “A friend of mine from boarding school, Juliana, runs a long-standing book club here in the city. The topics of those occult books might not appeal to her crowd, but I bet she knows the authors—and probably all the gossip about them.”

West let me clean up in the bathroom first since he wanted to poke around with his photo developing stuff before he turned in, and I wasn’t going to fight about the chance to get some shut-eye.

I had the feeling that we’d learned something important tonight. I just wasn’t sure what it was. With luck, tomorrow would help to narrow that down because I couldn’t shake the impression we were on borrowed time.

3

Finding Pat Quinlan’s errand boy, Eddie Durant, wasn’t as hard as it sounded. He held court on a park bench a block from Holmes’s “murder castle” and offered to take passers-by on a tour if they’d just buy him a drink.

Eddie was probably in his early forties, but he looked like he’d taken the long road to get there. Jaundiced skin and bleary, bloodshot eyes gave the short version of his story, along with the way clothing hunt off his gaunt frame.

I peeled a few bills out of my wallet and held them out. Eddie reached for them with a shaking hand, and I pulled back, just enough to get his attention. “I want a tour. A real tour,” I said. “Not just walking around the block. Take me in the basement.”

A shudder ran through Eddie, and I saw his lip twitch. West and Lassiter Davis had dismissed him as a drunk and a con man, and I didn’t doubt that both were true. But Eddie had the look of a man who saw horrors he could never outrun, and I suspected he’d been trying to drown those images in alcohol for a long time.

“I can’t—”

“I think you can,” I replied. “You took Mr. Capone there.” It was a gamble, but I knew from the way Eddie flinched that I was right.

“Nobody tells Mr. Capone no,” Eddie replied, and his gaze flickered between the money and my face.

“I can be very persuasive.” I knew that the money I held out was far more than Eddie’s normal fee, enough to feed him a few good meals, buy a bottle or two of rotgut, and a cheap room to sleep it off in.

“You sure? A man can’t un-see what’s in that place,” Eddie asked with a shiver.

“I’m a history buff,” I replied. “And I’ve got a strong stomach.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Eddie muttered, leveraging off the bench. He led the way to the infamous building and stopped on the opposite side of the crosswalk. A black and white stray dog eyed us from its spot near the park fence.

“Place used to have two more floors,” he said, gesturing toward what was now a one-story brick building of storefronts at street level. “Always had the shops on the bottom, but the third floor was for the hotel and the second floor was for bad things.” His expression darkened. “And the basement was for real bad things.”

We crossed at the corner, and I tried to picture the building as it had been before a fire—most believed it to be arson—gutted the top two floors. Given the building’s horrific story, I was surprised there’d been an effort to save it at all. Would have thought the city fathers might have been glad to be rid of such a notorious reminder.

Here and there, I could still see scorch marks on the bricks, as I had back in Death Alley from the theater fire. I wondered if the place was haunted and figured it had to be. Holmes had confessed to twenty-seven murders, but most people thought there had been many more. I suspected they were probably right.

“I was ten years old when Mr. Quinlan hired me to fetch things for him,” Eddie said without looking back to see if I had followed him. “Thought I’d hit the jackpot, what with this being such a fancy place and all. I just wanted enough money to buy me a ticket to the Worlds’ Fair and get something to eat when I got there,” he added.

“Did you ever go upstairs?”

Eddie shook his head. “Not back then. Mr. Quinlan used to meet me at the back door to tell me what he needed and take what I brought back for him. Later though, after it got shut down, but before the big fire, us kids used to go in and explore.” He licked his lips nervously. “Creepy damn place.”

I knew the basics from the accounts in the newspaper, although I couldn’t say so without revealing my real age. The third floor had appeared to be normal, with the hotel office and guest rooms. Even so, hidden passageways, trap doors, secret chutes, and elevators made it possible for Holmes to dispose of bodies without being seen.

The second floor held many of Holmes’s most fiendish additions. Airtight rooms piped with gas to asphyxiate those trapped inside, dark rooms with no light fixtures, a maze, secret doors, and other oddities designed to trap and kill his guests. In the basement, he could clean up the corpses and dissect them to sell to medical schools. A crematory furnace and an acid bath helped eliminate the evidence. Reports said he even owned a medieval rack.

“Did you meet Holmes?” I asked, trying to gauge how crazy Eddie was. I had the feeling that he’d seen more than he could handle, even if that compelled him to keep returning to the scene of the crime. Although he’d only been a kid at the time, I wondered whether some errands seemed less innocent in hindsight and if the alcohol he clearly overused helped to blur both memories and guilt.

Eddie’s gaze slid away. “Only once. Near the end. Mr. Quinlan always seemed nervous if Mr. Holmes was