Murder at Union Station by Margaret Truman Read Free Book Online Page A

pants that seemed always to be slipping below his belly and pushed through the crowd.
    “Who was he?” a woman who’d been there from the beginning asked. “A political big shot? Nobody else worth shooting in Union Station.”
    “Go get a cup of coffee,” Mullin told her. “It’s over.”
    “Are you a detective?” a teenager asked as Mullin gestured for him to get out of the way.
    Mullin muttered something profane at the boy and continued walking through the train concourse until he reached Exclusive Shoe Shine, where Joe Jenks had just finished a customer’s shoes. Mullin was no stranger to the bootblack station and its employees, especially Jenks. Although never accused of being a fashion plate—sloppy was a more precise description—Mullin liked clean shoes and often stopped in Union Station to have Jenks practice his own special brand of spit-shine magic, minus the spit. At the same time, Jenks was one of dozens of people Mullin had cultivated in the area to lend their eyes and ears to any crime. Joe was at his post in Union Station every day, and on more than one occasion had called in a tip about someone he considered an unsavory character, or a potentially troublesome situation.
    “Hey, Mullin, my man,” Jenks said. “Caught yourself a big one, huh?”
    Mullin climbed up into Jenks’s chair.
    “What happened, man?” Jenks asked as he pulled cloths and polish from a drawer beneath the chair. “Somebody says an old guy with a cane got it. I think I seen him.”
    “Is that so, Joe?”
    “Yeah. He limps on by and I ask him if he wants a shine. He looks at me like I just called his mother a dirty name, says somethin’ in Italian or Greek or somethin’, and goes on his way.”
    “Italian or Greek?”
    “He talked foreign, that’s all I’m saying. You nab the perp?”
    Mullin gave forth what could be considered a laugh. He always found it amusing when people tried to speak cop talk.
    “No, we didn’t nab the perp, Joe. Maybe you saw him.”
    A shrug from Jenks as he brushed off Mullin’s shoes in preparation for shining. “Maybe I did. You know what he looks like?”
    “We had a couple of descriptions. A black guy, skinny, expensive suit, maybe carrying a raincoat. Light, mulatto style they say.”
    Jenks leaned back and his eyes opened wide. “Oh, I know the dude you’re talking about, man,” he said. “Four dollars.”
    “You do?”
    “Shined him up. Very cool, like aloof, you know. No field hand or house slave. Uppity is what I thought.”
    “You gave him a shine?”
    “Yup. I didn’t much care how he acted ’cause he tipped big.”
    Mullin pulled a narrow steno pad and a pen from the pocket of his suit jacket. “I’m listening, Joe. Tell me all about this cool one who tips big.”
    Shoes polished to a mirror finish, and notes made of Joe Jenks’s description of his customer—brand of shoes, kind of socks, knife-edge creases, label in the raincoat,
New York Times
—Mullin continued his walk through the station, stopping to ask those in a position to observe whether they’d seen the man now described as Louis Russo’s killer.
    “I noticed him,” a shopkeeper in the travel accessory store near gate A-8 told him. She was in her deep thirties. “He was standing near the gate reading a newspaper.”
    “How come you noticed him?” Mullin asked. “Was he doing something that caught your eye?”
    “He was—” She smiled sheepishly. “I thought he was really good-looking,” she said.
    “Anything else?” Mullin asked.
    There wasn’t. But the details checked.
    Mullin concluded his walk-through by entering the East Hall, where the rolling kiosks were located. Two detectives were already there asking questions of the kiosk owners.
    “This lady says she saw the guy we’re looking for,” Mullin was told by one of the cops. A conversation with her revealed that the tall, thin man had passed her kiosk and gone into the bar behind B. Smith’s restaurant. Mullin and one of