This story is reconstructed based on FBI records.
A historical novel.
The hallway smelled like burnt coffee and gun oil when I came up the back stairs, and I knew before I touched my own door that something inside had gone wrong. The lock was fine. The hinges were fine. It was the silence on the other side that told me, the particular silence of men trying not to make noise.
I pushed in anyway. Two of Eddie's men had a stranger tied to my kitchen chair, a thin fellow with a split lip and rope burn already showing white on his wrists. My coat was still on the hook where I'd left it that morning, and now there was a man bleeding quietly onto my floor underneath it.
Ruth was on the landing behind me, come up from her rooms to see what the noise was, and I put my arm out and walked her back toward her own door before she could get a good look. 'Go on inside, Mrs. Bell,' I said. 'This isn't your business.' She looked at me like she didn't believe that for one second, but she went.
Back in my kitchen, the bigger of Eddie's men, a slab-faced boy named Curtis, told me this wasn't anything to concern myself with either. 'Eddie needed a quiet room for an hour,' he said. 'Yours was open.'
'It's not open. I pay rent on it.' I said it plain, the way you'd correct a man about change at a counter, though my hands weren't steady doing it.
Curtis didn't like being corrected. He held his hand out, palm up, and asked for my key, said they'd need the place again later and it'd go easier if I just handed it over and found somewhere else to sleep for the night. He had a second man with him I didn't know, leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed like he was waiting for me to make it interesting.
I put the key in my pocket instead of his hand. Curtis looked at the pocket, then past me toward the landing. His second man shifted into the opening. I pulled my kitchen chair away from the wall before he could shut the door, catching one leg against the threshold. The scrape sounded through the house. Ruth's door opened again. I heard her ask whether she could get downstairs, and Curtis told her to wait.
I stood the chair upright and made the second man step back so she could pass. He caught my sleeve. For a moment I thought he would pull me into the kitchen and close us all inside, leaving her to wonder what came next. I held the door with my foot until he released me. Ruth went down without thanking me. She kept one hand on the rail, looking at each tread rather than at either man.
Curtis said Eddie needed a car as well as a room. Mine was out back; I could bring it around and make myself useful. That meant leaving Pike here with them. I said the car stayed where it was. Then I carried the chair between the stove and the captive, close enough that Curtis would have to move me before he could move Pike. I sat down. My knees wanted to shake, so I planted both heels. Somebody was going to tell me why a stranger was bleeding on my floor.
The man in the chair lifted his head enough to look at me. His voice came out cracked. 'Name's Pike,' he said. 'I work lookout for Frank Sutter. You want to get me loose before Sutter finds out where his man's being held, you'd be doing yourself a favor. He knows this building. He knows which door to come through.'
Curtis told him to shut his mouth, but the words were already out, sitting in the room with us, and I understood that whatever quiet arrangement Eddie thought he'd made in my kitchen, it wasn't quiet anymore, and it wasn't just his trouble now. It was mine, hung on my own doorknob, with my name still on the lease and nobody else's on the mailbox below.