Chicago Lightning

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright ©2011 Max Allan Collins

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Thomas & Mercer

P.O. Box 400818

Las Vegas, NV 89140

ISBN: 978-1-61218-091-5

For Bob Randisi—

who, in 1984,

asked me to write a

Nate Heller short story

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Kaddish for the Kid

The Blonde Tigress

Private Consultation

The Perfect Crime

House Call

Marble Mildred

The Strawberry Teardrop

Scrap

Natural Death, Inc.

Screwball

That Kind of Nag

Unreasonable Doubt

Shoot-Out on Sunset

About the Author

Although the historical incidents in these stories are portrayed more or less accurately (as much as the passage of time and contradictory source material will allow), fact, speculation and fiction are freely mixed here; historical personages exist side by side with composite characters and wholly fictional ones—all of whom act and speak at the author’s whim.

“Chicago lightning”–

1930s Underworld slang for gunfire.

Back in 1981, when I began work on my first Nathan Heller novel, True Detective, the historical mystery was no hot trend I was latching onto. I was just looking for a way to write my favorite kind of mystery—the private eye story—in a manner that didn’t seem anachronistic.

A lot of smart people—my then-agent, Knox Burger; my mentor, Donald E. Westlake—begged me to rewrite the novel in the third-person, and to make Nate Heller a cop or a reporter or anything but a private eye. That genre was dead, or at least an embarrassing niche, and I had hold of a great Chicago yarn that could be the breakthrough of my career…if I would just abandon my embarrassing insistence on writing it as a private eye story.

I remember Don saying, “Do you really think anybody wants to read a first-person private eye novel that’s as long as Moby Dick?”

It was sobering.

I eventually broke with Burger, who was willing to “show the book around” but was painfully unenthusiastic. Once editor of the legendary Gold Medal line of paperbacks, Knox had always made for me a downbeat advocate. When my Writers Workshop instructor, Richard Yates, first approached Burger about looking at my stuff, Burger did so, only to say: “I’m afraid young Collins is a blacksmith in an automotive world.” He wasn’t wrong, but finally he wasn’t right for me.

Don was another matter. He was a god. My first published novel, Bait Mone8220;Do y/span> (1973), was an homage to his work. Fortunately, I had also shown the book to another mentor (and god) of mine—Mickey Spillane—and Mickey had loved it.

“I think this is the best private novel I ever read!” Mickey said over the phone.

A good thing I was a tough guy writer, or my eyes might have welled up.

See, I got hooked on private eyes when I was still in grade school—a spate of P.I. series (Peter Gunn, 77 Sunset Strip, Perry Mason, The Thin Man, Mike Hammer, etc.) made up the latest TV craze, driving the adult westerns of Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel and Maverick if not into submission, then into second position among adolescents of all ages.

As part of the first television generation, I was always a kid who wanted to read the book a movie or TV show was based on—I was probably the only seven year-old who ever tried to read Thorne Smith’s sexy ghost story, Topper (inspired by the ancient sitcom that was partially written by a young Stephen Sondheim!). At age eight, Tarzan movies had led me to Tarzan comics and, of course, the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Sherlock Holmes flicks on TV meant I simply had to get to know Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

So it was no surprise that during the TV private-eye craze, I immersed myself in Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and Mickey Spillane. The key figure there is probably Spillane, because the paperback racks (and used bookstores) were swimming in Mike Hammer imitations. I read every private eye paperback I could lay my hands on, and my first sex education lessons came courtesy of Richard Prather’s leering Shell Scott novels.

Starting in the ninth grade, I began trying to write my own private eye novels, and while I never found a publisher for any of the half dozen or so (thank God), I learned a lot. By the time I got out of high school, I had professional skills few young writers possessed. And maybe some talent.

Along the way, however, a couple of things happened—for one, spies and their high-tech world had taken the place of private eyes in popular culture. In fact, my last high school novel was about a spy named (are you ready for this?) Erik Flayr. There’s a little noted irony here—Mickey Spillane was on his famous decade-long hiatus between Hammer novels—from Kiss Me, Deadly in 1952 to The Girl Hunters in ’62—and his paperback publisher, NAL, sought to fill the gap with a writer named Ian Fleming who had been branded the British Mickey Spillane. Signet even used the same cover artist.

Just when the Vietnam war was becoming a major campus issue, I was entering college, and antiheroes were taking over the screens (and paperback racks). After seeing the Lee Marvin/John Boorman film Point Blank, I got hooked on the source material, the hard-bitten series about one-named thief Parker (Don Westlake writing as Richard Stark). Jim Thompson, Lawrence Block and Dan Marlowe were also writing “crook books,” and I was already a fan of James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity) and W. R. Burnett (Asphalt Jungle, High Sierra). The notion of writing about a criminal protagonist seemed a simple step to one side from tough detectives.

Among my other enthusiasms groing up were police procedurals. The obsession of my childhood was the DICK TRACY comic strip (never dreaming I would take the strip over from Chester Gould himself one day), and I loved Jack Webb’s 1950s Dragnet TV series as well as a paperback series commissioned to take advantage of Webb’s tube success—Ed McBain’s great, dialogue-driven 87^th Precinct crime novels.

So in addition to training to write private eye novels, I felt ready to take on police procedurals as a form. But there was a problem. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, cops were guys with nightsticks clubbing my friends at Chicago’s 1968 Democratic Convention.

So crook books it was.

My early career consisted of novels about a Parker-like thief known as Nolan and a Vietnam-traumatized hitman called Quarry. Yet I still dreamed of finding a meaningful way to write about private eyes—my mystery-writing amateur sleuth Mallory was essentially an unlicensed private eye, and appeared in five novels during this same period. But the traditional private eye himself seemed to have no place in contemporary pop culture. Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe and Mike Hammer were fondly remembered, but frozen in the amber of their times.

Well, I was wrong.

Plenty of writers came along in the later ’70s and beyond to find interesting ways to tell private eye stories in modern dress (eventually so would I, in the graphic-novel series Ms. Tree). But back around 1974, I was longing to write the pure P.I., the tough/tender guy in the trenchcoat and fedora with a bottom-drawer bottle of wry. I didn’t want to update him, nor did I wish to plop him down in contemporary times like a drunk who tumbled off a time machine.

This classic character—as devised by Hammett, refined by Chandler, and redefined by Spillane—is a prototypical American hero, a child of the Old West by way of the Great Depression and a world war (or two), whose voice is as wonderfully, distinctively American as Huckleberry Finn’s. I remained enthralled by Chandler’s first-person poetry, and fascinated by Spillane’s war-traumatized knight in a surrealistic world.

But it was Hammett who showed the way. Back in ’74, I was re-reading for the umpteenth time the greatest of all detective novels, The Maltese Falcon, when I noticed the copyright, which stopped me long enough to muse, “1929…year of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre—Al Capone and Sam Spade were contemporaries.”

In the comics business (like Spillane and Hammett, I’m a veteran of that field), a light bulb would’ve popped on above me: the private eye had been around long enough to exist in an historical context!

In other words, rather than have Phillip Marlowe meet an Al Capone type, Al Capone could meet a Phillip Marlowe type.

My first attempt at this concept was a comic strip called “Heaven and Heller” about a Chicago private eye, one Nate Heller, whose opening case had to do with Houdini’s widow and a seance designed to bring back her dead husband. Drawn by the great sports cartoonist Ray Gotto (“Ozark Ike”), the strip sold to Field Syndicate (Chicago again); but before it really got into the pipeline, the editor who bought it was fired, and all his projects dropped. It was shown elsewhere but not bought—story strips were even deader than the private eye novel.

In the meantime, the film Chinatown, a one-season TV show called Banyon, and a few novels by a handful of top-notch mystery writers (Andrew Bergman, Joe Gores, Stu Kaminsky) were demonstrating that the “period” private eye story was becoming a niche within the genre. The late great Stephen Cannell created a short-lived TV series called City of Angels, with Wayne Rogers spot on as a Bogart-ish private eye, that convinced me I was on the right track.

But I didn’t just want to do a period piece: I wanted to do an historical novel. Next to mysteries, historical fiction had been my favorite genre growing up, and in particular I adored the (now unfortunately forgotten) Samuel Shellabarger, who wrote such vividly told tales as Captain from Castille and Prince of Foxes, in which swashbuckling fictional heroes mingled with historical figures. My idea was to create a private eye who could enter history in the same fashion, and “solve” famous unsolved cases.

As a Midwesterner (and old Untouchables fan), I figured Chicago made the ideal setting, and—gathering a team of Windy City research experts (led by literacy advocate George Hagenauer and comics editor Mike Gold)—I prepared the first novel as if I were writing the definitive nonfiction treatment of the assassination of Mayor Anton Cermak.

Then I wrote a mystery novel instead: True Detective (1983) was indeed the longest first-person private eye novel ever written, if not really rivaling Melville’s long Dick, and eventually being out-word-counted by my later Stolen Away (1993). Both novels won the “Shamus” Best Novel award from the Private Eye Writers of America in their respective years.

Nathan Heller was given an elaborate background—father, mother, grandparents, unusual trappings for a P.I. Like Mike Hammer, Heller is a battle-scarred veteran of World War Two; unlike Hammer, Nate takes us along with him to Guadalcanal (The Million Dollar Wound, 1986) to see how he got that way. He would marry, and would be a father—not typical private eye, well…fodder.

In the course of thirteen novels, Heller has solved the Lindbergh kidnapping, Huey Long’s assassination, Bugsy Siegel’s gangland hit, Sir Harry Oakes’ locked-room murder, the Roswell incident, the Black Dahlia case, and most recently (in Bye Bye, Baby) the murder of Marilyn Monroe. He has played Paul Drake to Clarence Darrow’s Perry Mason in Damned in Paradise (1996) and found Amelia Earhart in Flying Blind (1998). He does a lot more than just find Amelia, actually—let’s just say Heller has a unique way of learning whether or not said client’s wife is staying faithful. Unlike Chandler’s Marlowe, Chicagoan Heller does not always play by the private-eye rules. In True Detective, I made a point of him violating every tenant of Chandler’s famous “mean streets” code, including taking a bribe and despoiling a virgin.

Heller’s “bad boy” qualities seem to endear him to women readers, which to his creator is very gratifying (and a relief). In the post WWII war novels, Nate is frequently as psychotic as Mike Hammer and has often served up rough justice that goes beyond just about anything I can think of in private eye fiction. I find it interesting that readers accept Heller’s homicidal tendencies so casully. Sign of the times, perhaps, or maybe Nate is good enough company that we forgive him the occasional righteous slaying.

I do think that part of what separates Heller from the pack is the combination of influences. Many devotees of Hammett and Chandler dislike and/or dismiss Spillane. Heller, who has also been compared to Archie Goodwin (which I hope is apt, because Rex Stout is another favorite of mine), combines aspects of Spade, Marlowe and Hammer. I don’t think many mystery writers have shaken up that particular cocktail.

It’s been my hope that Nate could enjoy the conventions—even the cliches—of the classic private eye and yet be a fully dimensional character, growing and changing over the years. That the mysteries themselves are real—history mysteries—makes for challenging research, and a rewarding experience for a writer…for readers, too, I hope. The most unusual accolade Heller and I have received is the inclusion of the novels in the bibliographies of a number of non-fiction works. Not bad for a mystery writer and a fictional P.I.

Gathered in this collection is every Heller short story to date, spanning the length of Heller’s career as recorded thus far. Omitted only are three short novels that will be gathered in their own collection. I have arranged the stories not in their order as written, but chronologically by the years in which they are set.

One challenge of writing Heller’s memoirs is that they jump around in his life, which means I have to keep track of the arc of his characterization as well as the continuity of where he is and where he has been. And I hope you will note differences in Nate, as a man and as a detective, according to his age and the time period in which he’s operating.

When I was asked by AmazonEncore to gather all of the Heller short stories into one collection, I admit to being a little surprised by how many of them there are. Initially we included the three novellas as well, but the book would have been massive, even for a Heller. We would have given Moby Dick a run for it.

While I take pride in my ability to work as a storyteller in various forms, I admit I consider myself first and foremost a novelist. My wife Barb—with whom I write the “Trash ’n’ Treasures” mystery series (most recently Antiques Knock-Off)—considers herself primarily a short story writer, and enjoys working in miniature. She’s been much lauded for that. I am instinctively a novelist, and I suppose that most of these tales play as little novels.

Even at the University of Iowa, under Dick Yates, Gina Berriault, Walter Tevis and other gifted authors, I always worked on novels, submitting to the Writers Workshop not the expected short stories, but chapters. It wasn’t that I didn’t like short stories, but in the late ’60s and early ’70s, the market for them was already shrinking. Getting a story published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine seemed like the longest of long shots. The novel field, particularly paperback originals, appeared an easier place to break in. And it was.

I believe my first short story sale was “The Strawberry Teardrop,” also the first Heller short story (written after True Detective). I only wrote it because my writer pal Bob Randisi invited me to contribute to a Private Eye Writers of America anthology. Most of the stories here were written by invitation for various editors of anthologies.

F me, the real pleasure of writing a Heller short story is that I can get away from the signature “famous crime” approach of the novels and allow Nate to explore the dirtier, dingier, lesser known corners of Chicago crime (though we get to California, Ohio, and Florida, as well).

My chief research associate and prized collaborator on the Nathan Heller memoirs remains George Hagenauer, who literally wrote the book on true-crime pulps (True Crime Detective Magazines, 2008, with Dian Hanson and Eric Godtland). George and I both have poured through old magazines, newspapers, and true-crime anthologies, searching out gems of Chicago crime that might have the makings for a Heller short story. Like the novels, the stories are firmly rooted in fact. Very often Heller fills in the role a cop, insurance investigator or even private eye played in real life.

The idea of Heller was to set a private eye and his stories in the context of the era during which Hammett, Chandler and Spillane first spun their yarns. So I take great pleasure and a certain pride in turning these little-known crimes into the kind of story that might have been published in the great pulp, Black Mask, where Hammett and Chandler appeared, and where Mickey Spillane read the work of his childhood idol, Carroll John Daly, father of the fictional private eye.

And, as you might imagine, I find it gratifying that the Shamus-nominated “The Blonde Tigress” was one of the first stories purchased by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine to launch their new Black Mask category.

My thanks to the editors of the anthologies and magazines where these stories originally ran, and to editor Alan Turkus, for having the vision to bring all of the Heller memoirs back into print.

—Max Allan Collins

February 19, 2011

The first operative I ever took on, in the A-1 Detective Agency, was Stanley Gross. I hadn’t been in business for even a year—it was summer of ’33—and was in no shape to be adding help. But the thing was—Stanley had a car.

Stanley had a ’28 Ford coupe, to be exact, and a yen to be a detective. I had a paying assignment, requiring wheels, and a yen to make a living.

So it was that at three o’clock in the morning, on that unseasonably cool summer evening, I was sitting in the front seat of Stanley’s Ford, in front of Goldblatt’s department store on West Chicago Avenue, sipping coffee out of a paper cup, waiting to see if anybody came along with a brick or a gun.

I’d been hired two weeks before by the manager of the downtown Goldblatt’s on State, just two blocks from my office at Van Buren and Plymouth. Goldblatt’s was sort of a working-class Marshall Field’s, with six department stores scattered around the Chicago area in various white ethnic neighborhoods.

The stores were good-size—two floors taking up as much as half a block—and the display windows were impressive enough; but once you got inside, it was like the push carts of Maxwell Street had been emptied and organized.

I bought my socks and underwear at the downtown Goldblatt’s, but that wasn’t how Nathan Heller—me—got hired. I knew Katie Mulhaney, the manager’s secretary; I’d bumped into her, on one of my socks and underwear buying expeditions, and it blossomed into a friendship. A warm friendship.

Anyway, the manager—Herman Cohen—had summoned me to his office where he filled me in. His desk was cluttered, but he was neat—moon-faced, mustached, bow-(and fit-to-be-) tied.

“Maybe you’ve seen the stories in the papers,” he said, in a machine-gun burst of words, “about this reign of terror we’ve been suffering.”

“Sure,” I said.

Goldblatt’s wasn’t alone; every leading department store was getting hit—stench bombs set off, acid sprayed over merchandise, bricks tossed from cars to shatter plate glass windows.

He thumbed his mustache; frowned. “Have you heard of ‘Boss’ Rooney? John Rooney?”

“No.”

“Well, he’s secretary of the Circular Distributors Union. Over the past two years, Mr. Goldblatt has provided Rooney’s union with over three-thousand dollars of business—primarily to discourage trouble at our stores.”

“This union—these are guys that hand out ad fliers?”

“Yes. Yes, and now Rooney has demanded that Mr. Goldblatt order three hundred of our own sales and ad people to join his union—at a rate of twenty-five cents a day.”

My late father had been a diehard union guy, so I knew a little bit about this sort of thing. “Mr. Cohen, none of the unions in town collect daily dues.”

“This one does. They’ve even been outlawed by the AFL, Mr. Heller. Mr. Goldblatt feels Rooney is nothing short of a racketeer.”

“It’s an extortion scam, all right. What do you want me to do?”

“Our own security staff is stretched to the limit. We’re getting some support from State’s Attorney Courtney and his people. But they can only do so much. So we’ve taken on a small army of nightwatchman, and are fleshing out the team with private detectives. Miss Mulhaney recommended you.”

Katie knew a good dick when she saw one.

“Swell. When do I start?”

“Immediately. Of course, you do have a car?”

Of course, I lied and said I did. I also said I’d like to put one of my “top” operatives on the assignment with me, and that was fine with Cohen, who was in a more-the-merrier mood, where beefing up security was concerned. Stanley Gross was from Douglas Park, my old neighborhood. His parents were bakers two doors down from my father’s bookstore on South Homan. Stanley was a good eight years younger than me, so I remembered him mostly as a pestering kid.

But he’d grown into a tall, good-looking young man—a brown-haired, brown-eyed six-footer who’d been a star football and basketball player in high school. Like me, he went to Crane Junior College; unlike me, he finished.

I guess I’d always been sort of a hero to him. About six months before, he’d started dropping by my office to chew the fat. Business was so lousy, a little company—even from a fresh-faced college boy—was welcome.

We’d sit in the deli restaurant below my office and sip coffee and gnaw on bagels and he’d tell me this embarrassing shit about my being somebody he’d always looked up to.

“Gosh, Nate, when you made the police force, I thought that was just about the keenest thing.”

He really did talk that way—gosh, keen. I told you I was desperate for company.

He brushed a thick comma of brown hair away and grinned in a goofy boyish way; it was endearing, and nauseating. “When I was a kid, coming into your pop’s bookstore, you pointed me toward those Nick Carters, and Sherlock Holmes books. Gave me the bug. I had to be a detective!”

But the kid was too young to get on the force, and his family didn’t have the kind of money or connections it took to get a slot on the PD.

“When you quit,” he said, “I admired you so. Standing up to corruption—and in this town! Imagine.”

Imagine. My leaving the force had little to do with my “standing up to corruption”—after all, graft was high on my list of reasons for joining in the first place—but I said nothing, not wanting to shatter the child’s dreams.

“If you ever need an op, I’m your man!”

He said this thousands of times in those six months or so. And he actually did get some security work, through a couple of other, larger agencies. But his dream was to be my partner.

Owning that Ford made his dream come temporarily true.

For two weeks, we’d been living the exciting life of the private eye: sitting in the coupe in front of the Goldblatt’s store at Ashland and Chicago, waiting for window smashers to show. Or not.

The massive graystone department store was like the courthouse of commerce on this endless street of storefronts; the other businesses were smaller—re-sale shops, hardware stores, pawn shops, your occasional Polish deli. During the day things were popping here. Now, there was just us—me draped across the front seat, Stanley draped across the back—and the glow of neons and a few pools of light on the sidewalks from streetlamps. “You know,” Stanley said, “this isn’t as exciting as I pictured.”

“Just a week ago you were all excited about ‘packing a rod.’”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“That’s right.” I finished my coffee, crumpled the cup, tossed it on the floor.

“I guess a gun is nothing to feel good about.”

“Right again.”

I was stretched out with my shoulders against the rider’s door; in back, he was stretched out just the opposite. This enabled us to maintain eye contact. Not that I wanted to, particularly.

“Nate…if you hear me snoring, wake me up.”

“You tired, kid?”

“Yeah. Ate too much. Today…well, today was my birthday.”

“No kidding! Well, happy birthday, kid.”

“My pa made the keenest cake. Say, I…I’m sorry I didn’t you invite you or anything.”

“That’s okay.”

“It was a surprise party. Just my family—a few friends I went to high school and college with.”

“It’s okay.”

“But there’s cake left. You want to stop by pa’s store tomorrow and have a slice with me?”

“We’ll see, kid.”

“You remember my pa’s pastries. Can’t beat ’em.”

I grinned. “Best on the West Side. You talked me into it. Go ahead and catch a few winks. Nothing’s happening.”

And nothing was. The street was an empty ribbon of concrete. But about five minutes later, a car came barreling down that concrete ribbon, right down the middle; I sat up.

“What is it, Nate?”

“A drunk, I think. He’s weaving a little….”

It was a maroon Plymouth coupe; and it was headed right our way.

“Christ!” I said, and dug under my arm for the nine millimeter.

The driver was leaning out the window of the coupe, but whether man or woman I couldn’t tell—the headlights of the car, still a good thirty feet away, were blinding.

The night exploded and so did our windshield.

Glass rained on me, as I hit the floor; I could hear the roar of the Plymouth’s engine, and came back up, gun in hand, saw the maroon coupe bearing down on us, saw a silver swan on the radiator cap, and cream colored wheels, but people in the car going by were a blur, and as I tried to get a better look, orange fire burst from a gun and I ducked down, hitting the glass-littered floor, and another four shots riddled the car and the night, the side windows cracking, and behind us the plate glass of display windows was fragmenting, falling to the pavement like sheets of ice.

Then the Plymouth was gone.

So was Stanley.

The first bullet must have got him. He must have sat up to get a look at the oncoming car and took the slug head on; it threw him back, and now he still seemed to be lounging there, against the now-spiderwebbed window, precious “rod” tucked under his arm; his brown eyes were open, his mouth too, and his expression was almost—not quite—surprised.

I don’t think he had time to be truly surprised, before he died.

There’d been only time enough for him to take the bullet in the head, the dime-size entry wound parting the comma of brown hair, streaking the birthday boy’s boyish face with blood. Within an hour I was being questioned by Sgt. Charles Pribyl, who was attached to the State’s Attorney’s office.l was a decent enough guy, even if he did work under Captain Daniel “Tubbo” Gilbert, who was probably the crookedest cop in town. Which in this town was saying something.

Pribyl had a good reputation, however; and I’d encountered him, from time to time, back when I was working the pickpocket detail. He had soft, gentle features and dark alert eyes. Normally, he was an almost dapper dresser, but his tie seemed hastily knotted, his suit and hat looked as if he’d thrown them on—which he probably had; he was responding to a call at four in the morning, after all.

He was looking in at Stanley, who hadn’t been moved; we were waiting for a coroner’s physician to show. Several other plainclothes officers and half a dozen uniformed cops were milling around, footsteps crunching on the glass-strewn sidewalk.

“Just a kid,” Pribyl said, stepping away from the Ford. “Just a damn kid.” He shook his head. He nodded to me and I followed him over by a shattered display window.

He cocked his head. “How’d you happen to have such a young operative working with you?”

I explained about the car being Stanley’s.

He had an expression you only see on cops: sad and yet detached. His eyes tightened.

“How—and why—did stink bombs and window smashing escalate into bloody murder?”

“You expect me to answer that, Sergeant?”

“No. I expect you to tell me what happened. And, Heller—I don’t go into this with any preconceived notions about you. Some people on the force—even some good ones, like John Stege—hold it against you, the Lang and Miller business.”

They were two crooked cops I’d recently testified against.

“Not me,” he said firmly. “Apples don’t come rottener than those two bastards. I just want you to know what kind of footing we’re on.”

“I appreciate that.”

I filled him in, including a description of the murder vehicle, but couldn’t describe the people within at all. I wasn’t even sure how many of them there were.

“You get the license number?”

“No, damnit.”

“Why not? You saw the car well enough.”

“Them shooting at me interfered.”

He nodded. “Fair enough. Shit. Too bad you didn’t get a look at ’em.”

“Too bad. But you know who to go calling on.”

“How’s that?”

I thrust a finger toward the car. “That’s Boss Rooney’s work—maybe not personally, but he had it done. You know about the Circular Union and the hassles they been giving Goldblatt’s, right?”

Pribyl nodded, somewhat reluctantly; he liked me well enough, but I was a private detective. He didn’t like having me in the middle of police business.

“Heller, we’ve been keeping the union headquarters under surveillance for six weeks now. I saw Rooney there today, myself, from the apartment across the way we rented.”

“So did anyone leave the union hall tonight? Before the shooting, say around three?”

He shook his head glumly. “We’ve only been maintaining our watch during department-store business hours. The problem of night attacks is where hired hands like you come in.”

“Okay.” I sighed. “I won’t blame you if you don’t blame me.”

“Deal.”

“So what’s next?”

“You can go on home.” He glanced toward the Ford. “We’ll take care of this.”

“You want me to tell the family?”

“Were you close to them?”

“Not really. They’re from my old neighborhood, is all.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” He patted my shoulder. “Go home.”

I started to go, then turned back. “When are you going to pick up Rooney?”

“I’ll have to talk to the State’s Attorney, first. But my guess? Tomorrow. We’ll raid the union hall tomorrow.”

“Mind if I come along?”

“Wouldn’t be appropriate, Heller.”

“The kid worked for me. He got killed working for me.”

“No. We’ll handle it. Go home! Get some sleep.”

“I’ll go home,” I said.

A chill breeze was whispering.

“But the sleep part,” I said, “that I can’t promise you.”

The next afternoon I was having a beer in a booth in the bar next to the deli below my office. Formerly a blind pig—a speakeasy that looked shuttered from the street (even now, you entered through the deli)—it was a business investment of fighter Barney Ross, as was reflected by the framed boxing photos decorating the dark, smoky little joint.

I grew up with Barney on the West Side. Since my family hadn’t practiced Judaism in several generations, I was shabbes goy for Barney’s very Orthodox folks, a kid doing chores and errands for them from Friday sundown through Saturday.

But we didn’t become really good friends, Barney and me, till we worked Maxwell Street as pullers—teenage street barkers who literally pulled customers into stores for bargains they had no interest in.

Barney, a roughneck made good, was a real Chicago success story. He owned this entire building, and my office—which, with its Murphy bed, was also my residence—was space he traded me for keeping an eye on the place.come alongas his nightwatchman, unless a paying job like Goldblatt’s came along to take precedence. The lightweight champion of the world was having a beer, too, in that back booth; he wore a cheerful blue and white sportshirt and a dour expression.

“I’m sorry about your young pal,” Barney said.

“He wasn’t a ‘pal,’ really. Just an acquaintance.”

“I don’t know that Douglas Park crowd myself. But to think of a kid, on his twenty-first birthday…” His mildly battered bulldog countenance looked woeful. “He have a girl?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s her name?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Poor little bastard. When’s the funeral?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re going, aren’t you?”

“No. I don’t really know the family that well. I’m sending flowers.”

He looked at me with as long a face as a round-faced guy could muster. “You oughta go. He was working for you when he got it.”

“I’d be intruding. I’d be out of place.”

“You should do kaddish for the kid, Nate.”

A mourner’s prayer.

“Jesus Christ, Barney, I’m no Jew. I haven’t been in a synagogue more than half a dozen times in my life, and then it was social occasions.”

“Maybe you don’t consider yourself a Jew, with that Irish mug of yours your ma bequeathed you…but you’re gonna have a rude awakening one of these days, boyo.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s plenty of people you’re just another ‘kike’ to, believe you me.”

I sipped the beer. “Nudge me when you get to the point.”

“You owe this kid kaddish, Nate.”

“Hell, doesn’t that go on for months? I don’t know the lingo. And if you think I’m putting on some fuckin’ beanie and…”

There was a tap on my shoulder. Buddy Gold, the bartender, an ex-pug, leaned in to say, “You got a call.”

I went behind the bar to use the phone. It was Sergeant Lou Sapperstein at Central HQ in the Loop; Lou had been my boss on the pickpocket detail. I’d called him this morning with a request.

“Tubbo’s coppers made their raid this morning, around nine,” Lou said. Sapperstein was a hardnosed, balding cop of about forty-five and one of the few friends I had left on the PD.

“And?”

“And the union hall was empty, ’cept for a bartender. Pribyl and his partner Bert Gray took a whole squad up there, but Rooney and his boys had flew the coop.”

“Fuck. Somebody tipped them.”

“Are you surprised?”

“Yeah. Surprised I expected the cops to play it straight for a change. You wouldn’t have the address of that union, by any chance?”

“No, but I can get it. Hold a second.”

A sweet union scam like the Circular Distributors had Outfit written all over it—and Captain Tubbo Gilbert, head of the State Prosecutor’s police, was known as the richest cop in Chicago. Tubbo was a bagman and police fixer so deep in Frank Nitti’s pocket he had Nitti’s lint up his nose.

Lou was back: “It’s at 7 North Racine. That’s Madison and Racine.”

“Well, hell—that’s spitting distance from Skid Row.”

“Yeah. So?”

“So that explains the scam—that ‘union’ takes hobos and makes day laborers out of them. No wonder they charge daily dues. It’s just bums handing out ad circulars….”

“I’d say that’s a good guess, Nate.”

I thanked Lou and went back to the booth where Barney was brooding about what a louse his friend Heller was.

“I got something to do,” I told him.

“What?”

“My kind of kaddish.”

Less than two miles from the prominent department stores of the Loop they’d been fleecing, the Circular Distributors Union had their headquarters on the doorstep of Skid Row and various Hoovervilles. This Madison Street area, just north of Greek Town, was a seedy mix of flophouses, marginal apartment buildings and storefront businesses, mostly bars. Union HQ was on the second floor of a two-story brick building whose bottom floor was a plumbing supply outlet.

I went up the squeaking stairs and into the union hall, a big high-ceilinged open room with a few glassed-in offices toward the front, to the left and right. Ceiling fans whirred lazily, stirring stale smoky air; folding chairs and cardtables were scattered everywhere on the scuffed wooden floor, and seated at some were unshaven, tattered “members” of the union. Across the far end stretched a bar, behind which a burly blond guy in rolled-up white-shirt sleeves was polishing a glass. More hobos leaned against the bar, having beers.

I ordered a mug from the bartender, who had a massive skull and tiny dark eyes and a sullen kiss of a mouth.

I salted the brew as I tossed him a nickel. “Hear you had a raid here this morning.”

He ignored the question. “This hall’s for union members only.”

“Jeez, it looks like a saloon.”

“Well, it’s a union hall. Drink up and move along.”

“There’s a fin in it for you, if you answer a few questions.”

He thought that over; leaned in. “Are you a cop#8221;

“No. Private.”

“Who hired you?”

“Goldblatt’s.”

He thought some more. The tiny eyes narrowed. “Let’s hear the questions.”

“What do you know about the Gross kid’s murder?”

“Not a damn thing.”

“Was Rooney here last night?”

“Far as I know, he was home in bed asleep.”

“Know where he lives?”

“No.”

“You don’t know where your boss lives.”

“No. All I know is he’s a swell guy. He don’t have nothin’ to do with these department store shakedowns the cops are tryin’ to pin on him. It’s union-busting, is what it is.”

“Union busting.” I had a look around at the bleary-eyed clientele in their patched clothes. “You have to be a union, first, ‘fore you can get busted up.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means this is a scam. Rooney pulls in winos, gets ’em day-labor jobs for $3.25 a day, then they come up here to pay their daily dues of a quarter, and blow the rest on beer or booze. In other words, first the bums pass out ad fliers, then they come here and just plain pass out.”

“I think you better scram. Otherwise I’m gonna have to throw you down the stairs.”

I finished the beer. “I’m leaving. But you know what? I’m not gonna give you that fin. I’m afraid you’d just drink it up.”

I could feel his eyes on my back as I left, but I’d have heard him if he came out from around the bar. I was starting down the stairs when the door below opened and Sgt. Pribyl, looking irritated, came up to meet me on the landing, half-way. He looked more his usual dapper self, but his eyes were black-bagged.

“What’s the idea, Heller?”

“I just wanted to come bask in the reflected glory of your triumphant raid this morning.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means when Tubbo’s boys are on the case, the Outfit gets advance notice.”

He winced. “That’s not the way it was. I don’t know why Rooney and Berry and the others blew. But nobody in our office warned ’em off.”

“Are you sure?”

He clearly wasn’t. “Look, I can’t have you messing in this. We’re on the damn case, okay? We’re maintaining surveillance from across the way…that’s how we spotted you.”

“Peachy. Twenty-four surveillance, now?”

“No.” He seemed embarrassed. “Just day shift.”

“You want some help?”

“What do you mean?”

“Loan me the key to your stakeout crib. I’ll keep nightwatch. Got a phone in there?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll call you if Rooney shows. You got pictures of him and the others you can give me?”

“Well….”

“What’s the harm? Or would Tubbo lower the boom on you, if you really did your job?”

He sighed. Scratched his head and came to a decision. “This is unofficial, okay? But there’s a possibility the door to that apartment’s gonna be left unlocked tonight.”

“Do tell.”

“Third-floor—301.” He raised a cautionary finger. “We’ll try this for one night…no showboating, okay? Call me if one of ’em shows.”

“Sure. You tried their homes?”

He nodded. “Nothing. Rooney lives on North Ridgeland in Oak Park. Four kids. Wife’s a pleasant, matronly type.”

“Fat, you mean.”

“She hasn’t seen Rooney for several weeks. She says he’s away from home a lot.”

“Keeping a guard posted there?”

“Yeah. And that is twenty-four hour.” He sighed, shook his head. “Heller, there’s a lot about this case that doesn’t make sense.”

“Such as?”

“That maroon Plymouth. We never saw a car like that in the entire six weeks we had the union hall under surveillance. Rooney drives a blue LaSalle coupe.”

“Any maroon Plymouths reported stolen?”

He shook his head. “And it hasn’t turned up abandoned, either. They must still have the car.”

“Is Rooney that stupid?”

“We can always hope,” Pribyl said.

I sat in an easy chair with sprung springs by the window in room 301 of the residential hotel across the way. It wasn’t a flophouse cage, but it wasn’t a suite at the Drake, either. Anyway, in the dark it looked fine. I had a flask of rum to keep me company, and the breeze fluttering the sheer, frayed curtains remained unseasonably cool.

Thanks to some photos Pribyl left me, I now knew what Rooney looked like: a good-looking, oval-faced smoothie, in his mid-forties, just starting to lose his dark, slicked-back hair; his eyes were hooded, his mouth soft, sensual, sullen. There were also photos of bespectacled, balding Berry and pockmarked, cold-eyed Herbert Arnold, V.P. of the union.

But none of them stopped by the union hall—only a steady stream of winos and bums went in and out.

Thenhe ound seven, I spotted somebody who didn’t fit the profile.

It was a guy I knew—a fellow private op, Eddie McGowan, a Pinkerton man, in uniform, meaning he was on nightwatchman duty. A number of the merchants along Madison must have pitched in for his services.

I left the stakeout and waited down on the street, in front of the plumbing supply store, for Eddie to come back out. It didn’t take long—maybe ten minutes.

“Heller!” he said. He was a skinny, tow-haired guy in his late twenties with a bad complexion and a good outlook. “What no good are you up to?”

“The Goldblatt’s shooting. That kid they killed was working with me.”

“Oh! I didn’t know! Heard about the shooting, of course, but didn’t read the papers or anything. So you were involved in that? No kidding.”

“No kidding. You on watchman duty?”

“Yeah. Up and down the street, here, all night.”

“Including the union hall?”

“Sure.” He grinned. “I usually stop up for a free drink, ’bout this time of night.”

“Can you knock off for a couple of minutes? For another free drink?”

“Sure!”

Soon we were in a smoky booth in back of a bar and Eddie was having a boilermaker on me.

“See anything unusual last night,” I asked, “around the union hall?”

“Well…I had a drink there, around two o’clock in the morning. That was a first.”

“A drink? Don’t they close earlier than that?”

“Yeah. Around eleven. That’s all the longer it takes for their ‘members’ to lap up their daily dough.”

“So what were you doing up there at two?”

He shrugged. “Well, I noticed the lights was on upstairs, so I unlocked the street level door and went up. Figured Alex…that’s the bartender, Alex Davidson…might have forgot to turn out the lights, ’fore he left. The door up there was locked, but then Mr. Rooney opened it up and told me to come on in.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He was feelin’ pretty good. Looked like he was workin’ on a bender. Anyway, he insists I have a drink with him. I says, sure. Turns out Davidson is still there.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding. So Alex serves me a beer. Henry Berry—he’s the union’s so-called business agent, mousy little guy with glasses—he was there, too. He was in his cups, also. So was Rooney’s wife—she was there, and also feeling giddy.”

I thought about Pribyl’s description of Mrs. Rooney as a matronly woman with four kids. “His wife was there?”

“Yeah, the luctiff.”

“Lucky?”

“You should see the dame! Good-lookin’ tomato with big dark eyes and a nice shape on her.”

“About how old?”

“Young. Twenties. It’d take the sting out of a ball and chain, I can tell you that.”

“Eddie…here’s a fin.”

“Heller, the beer’s enough!”

“The fin is for telling this same story to Sgt. Pribyl of the State’s Attorney’s coppers.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“But do it tomorrow.”

He smirked. “Okay. I got rounds to make, anyway.”

So did I.

At around eleven fifteen, bartender Alex Davidson was leaving the union hall; his back was turned, as he was locking the street-level door, and I put my nine-millimeter in it.

“Hi, Alex,” I said. “Don’t turn around, unless you prefer being gut-shot.”

“If it’s a stick-up, all I got’s a couple bucks. Take ’em and bug off!”

“No such luck. Leave that door unlocked. We’re gonna step back inside.”

He grunted and opened the door and we stepped inside.

“Now we’re going up the stairs,” I said, and we did, in the dark, the wooden steps whining under our weight. He was a big man; I’d have had my work cut out for me—if I hadn’t had the gun.

We stopped at the landing where earlier I had spoken to Sgt. Pribyl. “Here’s fine,” I said.

I allowed him to face me in the near-dark.

He sneered. “You’re that private dick.”

“I’m sure you mean that in the nicest way. Let me tell you a little more about me. See, we’re going to get to know each other, Alex.”

“Fuck you.”

I slapped him with the nine millimeter.

He wiped blood off his mouth and looked at me with hate, but also with fear. And he made no more smart-ass remarks.

“I’m the private dick whose twenty-one-year-old partner got shot in the head last night.”

Now the fear was edging out the hate; he knew he might die in this dark stairwell.

“I know you were here with Rooney and Berry and the broad, last night, serving up drinks as late as two in the morning,” I said. “Now you’re going to tell me the whole story—or you’re the one who’s getting tossed down the fucking stairs.”

He was trembling, now; a big hulk of a man trembling with fear. “I didn’t have anything to do with the murder. Not a damn thing!”

“Then why cover for Rooney and the rest?”

“You saw what they’re capable of!”

“Take it easy, Alex. Just tell the story.”

Rooney had come into the office about noon the day of the shooting; he had started drinking and never stopped. Berry and several other union “officers” arrived and angry discussions about being under surveillance by the State’s Attorney’s cops were accompanied by a lot more drinking.

“The other guys left around five, but Rooney and Berry, they just hung around drinking all evening. Around midnight, Rooney handed me a phone number he jotted on a matchbook, and gave it to me to call for him. It was a Berwyn number. A woman answered. I handed him the phone and he said to her, ‘Bring one.’”

“One what?” I asked.

“I’m gettin’ to that. She showed up around one o’clock—good-looking dame with black hair and eyes so dark they coulda been black, too.”

“Who was she?”

“I don’t know. Never saw her before. She took a gun out of her purse and gave it to Rooney.”

“That was what he asked her to bring.”

“I guess. It was a .38 revolver, a Colt I think. Anyway, Rooney and Berry were both pretty drunk; I don’t know what her excuse was. So Rooney takes the gun and says, ‘We got a job to pull at Goldblatt’s. We’re gonna throw some slugs at the windows and watchmen.’”

“How did the girl react?”

He swallowed. “She laughed. She said, ‘I’ll go along and watch the fun.’ Then they all went out.”

Jesus.

Finally I said, “What do you did do?”

“They told me to wait for ’em. Keep the bar open. They came back in, laughing like hyenas. Rooney says to me, ‘You want to see the way he keeled over?’ And I says, ‘Who?’ And he says, ‘The guard at Goldblatt’s.’ Berry laughs and says, ‘We really let him have it.’”

“That kid was twenty-one, Alex. It was his goddamn birthday.”

The bartender was looking down. “They laughed and joked about it till Berry passed out. About six in the morning, Rooney has me pile Berry in a cab. Rooney and the twist slept in his office for maybe an hour. Then they came out, looking sober and kind of…scared. He warned me not to tell anybody what I seen, unless I wanted to trade my job for a morgue slab.”

“Colorful. Tell me, Alex. You got that girl’s phone number in Berwyn?”

“I think it’s upstairs. You can put that gun away. I’ll help you.”

It was dark, but I could see his face well enough; the big man’s eyes looked damp. The fear was gone. Something else was in its place. Shame? Something.

We went upstairs, he unlocked the union hall and, under the bar, found the matchbook with the number written inside: Berwyn 2981.

“You want a drink before you go?” he asked.

“You know,” I said, “I think I’ll pass.”

I went back to my office to use the reverse-listing phone book that told me Berwyn 2981 was Rosalie Rizzo’s number; and that Rosalie Rizzo lived at 6348 West 13^th Street in Berwyn.

First thing the next morning, I borrowed Barney’s Hupmobile and drove out to Berwyn, the clean, tidy Hunky suburb populated in part by the late Mayor Cermak’s patronage people. But finding a Rosalie Rizzo in this largely Czech and Bohemian area came as no surprise: Capone’s Cicero was a stone’s throw away.

The woman’s address was a three-story brick apartment building, but none of the mailboxes in the vestibule bore her name. I found the janitor and gave him Rosalie Rizzo’s description. It sounded like Mrs. Riggs to him.

“She’s a doll,” the janitor said. He was heavy-set and needed a shave; he licked his thick lips as he thought about her. “Ain’t seen her since yesterday noon.”

That was about nine hours after Stanley was killed.

He continued: “Her and her husband was going to the country, she said. Didn’t expect to be back for a couple of weeks, she said.”

Her husband.

“What’ll a look around their apartment cost me?”

He licked his lips again. “Two bucks?”

Two bucks it was; the janitor used his passkey and left me to it. The well-appointed little apartment included a canary that sang in its gilded cage, a framed photo of slick Boss Rooney on an end table, and a closet containing two sawed-off shotguns and a repeating rifle.

I had barely started to poke around when I had company: a slender, gray-haired woman in a flowered print dress.

“Oh!” she said, coming in the door she’d unlocked.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“Who are you?” Her voice had the lilt of an Italian accent.

Under the circumstances, the truth seemed prudent. “A private detective.”

“My daughter is not here! She and her-a husband, they go to vacation. Up north some-a-where. I just-a come to feed the canary!”

“Please don’t be frightened. Do you know where she’s gone, exactly?”

“No. But…maybe my husband do. He is-a downstairs….”

She went to a window, threw it open and yelled something frantically down in Italian.

I eased her aside in time to see a heavy-set man jump into a maroon Plymouth with a silver swan on the radiator cap, and cream colored wheels, and squeal away.

And when I turned, the slight gray-haired woman was just as gone. Only she hadn’t squealed.

The difference, this timewas a license number for the maroon coupe; I’d seen it: 519-836. In a diner I made a call to Lou Sapperstein, who made a call to the motor vehicle bureau, and phoned back with the scoop: the Plymouth was licensed to Rosalie Rizzo, but the address was different—2848 South Cuyler Avenue, in Berwyn.

The bungalow was typical for Berwyn—a tidy little frame house on a small perfect lawn. My guess was this was her folks’ place. In back was a small matching, but unattached garage, on the alley. Peeking in the garage windows, I saw the maroon coupe and smiled.

“Is Rosalie in trouble again?”

The voice was female, sweet, young.

I turned and saw a slender, almost beautiful teenage girl with dark eyes and bouncy, dark shoulder-length hair. She wore a navy-blue sailor-ish playsuit. Her pretty white legs were bare.

“Are you Rosalie’s sister?”

“Yes. Is she in trouble?”

“What makes you say that?”

“I just know Rosalie, that’s all. That man isn’t really her husband, is he? That Mr. Riggs.”

“No.”

“Are you here about her accident?”

“No. Where is she?”

“Are you a police officer?”

“I’m a detective. Where did she go?”

“Papa’s inside. He’s afraid he’s going to be in trouble.”

“Why’s that?”

“Rosalie put her car in our garage yesterday. She said she was in an accident and it was damaged and not to use it. She’s going to have it repaired when she gets back from vacation.”

“What does that have to do with your papa being scared?”

“Rosalie’s going to be mad as H at him, that he used her car.” She shrugged. “He said he looked at it and it didn’t look damaged to him, and if mama was going to have to look after Rosalie’s g.d. canary, well he’d sure as H use her gas not his.”

“I can see his point. Where did your sister go on vacation?”

“She didn’t say. Up north someplace. Someplace she and Mr. Riggs like to go to, to…you know. To get away?”

I called Sgt. Pribyl from a gas station where I was getting Barney’s Hupmobile tank re-filled. I suggested he have another talk with bartender Alex Davidson, gave him the address of “Mr. and Mrs. Riggs,” and told him where he could find the maroon Plymouth.

He was grateful but a little miffed about all I had done on my own.

“So much for not showboating,” he said, almost huffily. “You’ve found everything but the damn suspects.”

“They’ve gone up north somewhere,” I said.

“Where up north?”

“They don’t seem to’ve told anybody. Look, I have a piece of evidence you may need.”

“What?”

“When you talk to Davidson, he’ll tell you about a matchbook Rooney wrote the girl’s number on. I got the matchbook.”

It was still in my pocket. I took it out, idly, and shut the girl’s number away, revealing the picture on the matchbook cover: a blue moon hovered surrealistically over a white lake on which two blue lovers paddled in a blue canoe—Eagle River Lodge, Wisconsin.

“I suppose we’ll need that,” Pribyl’s voice over the phone said, “when the time comes.”

“I suppose,” I said, and hung up.

Eagle River was a town of 1,386 (so said the sign) just inside the Vilas County line at the junction of US 45 and Wisconsin State Highway 70. The country was beyond beautiful—green pines towering higher than Chicago skyscrapers, glittering blue lakes nestling in woodland pockets.

The lodge I was looking for was on Silver Lake, a gas station attendant told me. A beautiful dusk was settling on the woods as I drew into the parking of the large resort sporting a red city-style neon saying, DINING AND DANCE. Log-cabin cottages were flung here and there around the periphery like Paul Bunyan’s tinker-toys. Each one was just secluded enough—ideal for couples, married or un-.

Even if Rooney and his dark-haired honey weren’t staying here, it was time to find a room: I’d been driving all day. When Barney loaned me his Hupmobile, he’d had no idea the kind of miles I’d put on it. Dead tired, I went to the desk and paid for a cabin.

The guy behind the counter had a plaid shirt on, but he was small and squinty and Hitler-mustached, smoking a stogie, and looked more like a bookie than a lumberjack.

I told him some friends of mine were supposed to be staying here.

“We don’t have anybody named Riggs registered.”

“How ’bout Mr. and Mrs. Rooney?”

“Them either. How many friends you got, anyway?”

“Why, did I already catch the limit?”

Before I headed to my cabin, I grabbed some supper in the rustic restaurant. I placed my order with a friendly brunette girl of about nineteen with plenty of personality, and make-up. A road-company Paul Whiteman outfit was playing “Sophisticated Lady” in the adjacent dance hall, and I went over and peeked in, to look for familiar faces. A number of couples were cutting a rug, but not Rooney and Rosalie. Or Henry Berry or Herbert Arnold, either. I went back and had my green salad and fried trout and well-buttered baked potato; I was full and sleepy when I stumbled toward my guest cottage under the light of a moon that bathed the woods ivory.

Walking along the path, I spotted something: snuggled next to one of the secluded cabins was a blue LaSalle coupe with Cook County plates.

Suddenly I wasn’t sleepy. I walked briskly back to the lodge check-in desk and batted the bell to summon the stogie-chewing clerk.

“Cabin seven,” I said. “I think that blue LaSalle is my friends’ car.”

His smirk turned his Hitler mustache Chaplinesque. “You want I should break out the champagne?”

“I just want to make sure it’s them. Dark-haired doll and an older guy, good-looking, kinda sleepy-eyed, just starting to go bald?”

“That’s them.” He checked his register. “That’s the Ridges.” He frowned. “Are they usin’ a phony name?”

“Does a bear shit in the woods?”

He squinted. “You sure they’re friends of yours?”

“Positive. Don’t call their room and tell ’em I’m here, though—I want to surprise them….”

I knocked with my left hand; my right was filled with the nine millimeter. Nothing. I knocked again.

“Who is it?” a male voice said gruffly. “What is it?”

“Complimentary fruit basket from the management.”

“Go away!”

I kicked the door open.

The lights were off in the little cabin, but enough moonlight came in with me through the doorway to reveal the pair in bed, naked. She was sitting up, her mouth and eyes open in a silent scream, gathering the sheets up protectively over white skin, her dark hair blending with the darkness of the room, making a cameo of her face. He was diving off the bed for the sawed-off shotgun, but I was there to kick it away, wishing I hadn’t, wishing I’d let him grab it so I could have had an excuse to put one in his forehead, right where he’d put one in Stanley’s.

Boss Rooney wasn’t boss of anything, now: he was just a naked, balding, forty-four year-old scam artist, sprawled on the floor. Kicking him would have been easy.

So I did; in the stomach.

He clutched himself and puked. Apparently he’d had the trout, too.

I went over and slammed the door shut, or as shut as it could be, half-off its hinges. Pointing the gun at her retching naked boy friend, I said to the girl, “Turn on the light and put on your clothes.”

She nodded dutifully and did as she was told. In the glow of a nightstand lamp, I caught glimpses of her white, well-formed body as she stepped into her step-ins; but you know what? She didn’t do a thing for me.

“Is Berry here?” I asked Rooney. “Or Arnold?”

“N…no,” he managed.

“If you’re lying,” I said, “I’ll kill you.”

The girl said shrilly, “They aren’t here!”

“You can put your clothes on, too,” I told Rooney. “If you have another gun hidden somewhere, do me a favor. Make a play for it.”

His hooded eyes flared. “Who the hell are you?”

“The private cop you didn’t kill the other night.”

He lowered his gaze. “Oh.”

The girl was sitting on the bed, weeping; body heaving.

“Take it easy on her, will you?” he said, zipping his fly. “She’s just a kid.”

I was opening a window to ease the stench of his vomit. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll say kaddish for her.”

I handcuffed the lovebirds to the bed and called the local law; they in turn called the State Prosecutor’s office in Chicago, and Sergeants Pribyl and Gray made the long drive up the next day to pick up the pair.

It seemed the two cops had already caught Henry Berry—a tipster gave them the West Chicago Avenue address of a second-floor room he was holed up in.

I admitted to Pribyl that I’d been wrong about Tubbo tipping off Rooney and the rest about the raid.

“I figure Rooney lammed out of sheer panic,” I said, “the morning after the murder.”

Pribyl saw it the same way.

The following March, Pribyl arrested Herbert Arnold running a northside handbill distributing agency.

Rooney, Berry and Rosalie Rizzo were all convicted of murder; the two men got life, and the girl twenty years. Arnold hadn’t been part of the kill-happy joyride that took Stanley Gross’ young life, and got only one to five for conspiracy and extortion.

None of it brought Stanley Gross back, nor did my putting on a beanie and sitting with the Gross family, suffering through a couple of stints at a storefront synagogue on Roosevelt Road.

But it did get Barney off my ass.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

While Nathan Heller is a fictional character, this story is based on a real case—names have not been changed, and the events are fundamentally true; source material included an article by John J. McPhaul and information provided by my research associate, George Hagenauer, who I thank for his insights and suggestions on this story and all the others in this collection.

August 1933 in Chicago was surprisingly cool, unless you were a crook, in which case it was hotter than usual. We were suffering through one of those periodic anti-crime drives the city subjected itself to now and then, and since the Capone/Nitti Outfit got a free pass on its fun and games, small fry like the Blonde Tigress and her “mob” (two male accomplices) got the brunt.

Did the Blonde Tigress have a damn thing to do with the policeman who got himself shot in a Cook County courtroom? No. She and her gang of two merely got caught up in the over-reaction when the Honorable John Prystalski, the county’s chief judge, ored all the other judges back from summer vacation to work through the jammed-up docket. Two-hundred-thirty-five defendants got the book thrown at them that August, including three death sentences.

And that was before the Blonde Tigress had appeared in the dock….

In my big under-furnished one-room office on Van Buren, I sat at my desk, working on a pile of retail-credit checks, with the window open behind me to let in a cool morning breeze and the occasional rumble of the El.

I tried to let the phone ring five times before answering, but was short enough on clients to settle for three. “A-1 Detective Agency,” I said. “Nathan Heller speaking.”

“Nate, Sam Backus.”

My hopes sank. Backus—small, nervous, with ferret features—was with the Public Defender’s Office, which made him the kind of criminal attorney who couldn’t afford my help.

“Hiya, Sam. Any of your clients get a ticket for the hot squat today?”

“No, but the day’s young. Listen, I got the Tigress.”

I sat up. “What?”

“You heard me. Eleanor Jarman is my client.”

All summer, the Blonde Tigress case had been plastered across the front pages, and the radio was all over it, too. The so-called Blonde Tigress—a good-looking lady bandit with “tawny hair” and a “voluptuous figure”—had led her two-man mob on a series of stickups all around the West and Northwest sides. The Tigress was said to carry a big revolver in her purse and a blackjack, too, one of her male accomplices using the gun, the Tigress adept with the jack. The usual target was the small merchant, grocery stores and other shops, the robbery victims often roughed up for intimidation or maybe just the hell of it.

After the August 4 hold-up of a clothing shop near Oak Park—and the murder of its seventy-year-old proprietor—sometime waitress Eleanor Jarman, her live-in guy George Dale, and Dale’s ex-fighter buddy Leo Minneci had been identified as the perpetrators and brought in by two top Detective Bureau dicks.

“Well, she’s guilty as sin, isn’t she?” I asked him cheerfully. “Maybe you can arrange for her to sit on her boyfriend’s lap when they fry him, and save the state on its electricity bill.”

“Nate, I think she’s being railroaded. These characters Dale and Minneci are stick-up guys, sure, and there’s no doubt Dale pulled the trigger on the old boy. But Eleanor’s just the girl friend. Wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Are they being tried separately?”

“No, but each has separate representation from the Public Defender’s office.”

I was shaking my head. “If she’s innocent in this, why was she charged? Didn’t Tuohy and Glass make the arrest? They’re as close to real detectives as the police department gets.”

“Nate, you know about this clean-up and crackdown campaign that’s going on. When did you ever hear of somebody getting arrested for murder in this town and then have the trial go on the same damn month?”

“Okay, you stumped me. But I—”

“Think it through, Nate. This is about the papers looking for a hot story, and what’s better than a sexy baby leading her ‘gang’ on a bunch of robberies?”

I shifted in my chair. “Listen, I don’t care if she’s guilty or not guilty. I’d be glad to work for you, Sam, if you were a real criminal lawyer with some scratch to spend.”

“That’s the good part about all this press nonsense, Nate. Think about the publicity! There’s no bigger story right now.”

“Then I’m right—there isn’t any money in this.”

“Actually, pal, there is.”

That got my attention, but I said, “Don’t call me ‘pal.’ Makes me nervous. When do I ever see you, Sam, when we aren’t in a courtroom?”

“Nate, if you take this case, you can peddle your story to one of the papers afterwards, with my blessing. And I’ve got a true detective magazine that’ll pay even better. That’ll beat any of your five-dollar-a-day action, any time.”

“That’s ten and expenses, and what do you have in mind?”

“Just meet with my client. See if she doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.”

“So then you have no case?”

“…I have no case. I need you to go get me one.”

If I was the private eye who cleared the Blonde Tigress, I’d be in demand with every criminal lawyer in town.

“I can meet with her,” I said, “any time today.”

Now a guy can get some pretty funny thoughts sometimes. And by funny, I mean stupid. But while I’d been around, I was only twenty-eight, and I couldn’t keep from wondering if some exotic, erotic encounter might not occur between the Blonde Tigress and me, behind the closed door of that First District Station interrogation room. The matron standing guard would hear the muffled sounds and wonder what might be happening in there, between the curvaceous blonde gun moll and that handsome six-footer with the reddish brown hair, and dare she interrupt?

I was expecting the combination Jean Harlow and Mata Hari that the papers had been pumping, and in my defense I must say that they’d taken some fairly fetching photos of Eleanor Jarman. And the woman seated at the scarred table in a brick-walled enclosure whose windows were barred and throwing appropriately moody shadows—was certainly attractive, albeit in a quiet, modest, even mousy way.

Her hair was not tawny, at least not by my standards—more a dishwater blonde, curling-ironed locks framing her heart-shaped face. I’d call her pretty, or anyway pretty enough, with big gray eyes that dominated her face and a nice mouth, full lips lightly rouged. Prisoners awaiting trial were allowed street clothes—in this case, a simple white dress with angular blue stripes and a white collar with a bow, the stripes giving the faintest unintentional prison-uniform touch. She had a nice hea but “voluptuous” was torturing a point.

She gave me a big smile and stood and held her hand out for me to shake. The smile was disarming—I might have been a brother she hadn’t seen for some time.

“Thank you for this, Mr. Heller,” she said warmly, as I took a chair at the table, her at the end, me alongside.

“I haven’t agreed to take the job, Mrs. Jarman,” I said, and took my hat off and tossed it on the table. “I said I’d have a talk with you and see.”

Her smile remained but she put the teeth away and nodded. “It’s because Mr. Backus can’t afford to hire you. But what if I could?”

“Could what?”

“Afford to hire to you.”

I squinted at her. “How could you afford to hire a private detective if you can’t afford your own lawyer?”

She shrugged and half a smile lingered. “That was strategy, Mr. Heller. I could’ve hired a lawyer, not an expensive one, but I do have some money salted away. It’s just, well…”

And I got it.

“If you could hire a criminal attorney,” I said, “it would make you look more like a criminal. Somebody pulling off heists all summer could afford counsel. Smart.”

“I’m not rich. But I could offer you one hundred dollars.”

“I charge ten a day and expenses. That’ll take you a fair way.”

“Fine. I’ll have it sent over to your office.”

“You’re not what I expected.”

She grinned. “Not a Tigress?”

“Not the femme fatale the papers paint, and not the victim Sam Backus would make you, either.”

“What, then?”

“A smart, resourceful cookie.”

“Thanks. Could I call you something besides ‘Mr. Heller’?”

“Sure. Nate’ll do. And I’ll call you Eleanor.”

They had provided a pitcher of ice water and I served us up some. The breezy afternoon was making its way through windows that were open onto their bars.

“Do you need to hear my story, Nate, before you say yes?”

“I want to hear your story, but I already said yes to your hundred dollars.”

She had a whole repertoire of smiles, and she gave me another one, a chin-crinkler. But the gray eyes had a sadness that fit neither her happy kisser nor her business-like brain.

She started with the story of her life, which didn’t take long, because it wasn’t much of one. She was from Sioux City, Iowa, daughter of immigrant German parents who died in a flu epidemic when she was fourteen, just the right age to start working as a waitress in a joint near the stockyards. She married Leroy Jarmanwho told her she deserved better, and gave her two sons and put her to work as a laundress. Earlier this year, after Jarman took a powder, she moved to Chicago, where she continued to do laundry in her little apartment while taking care of her two boys. A neighbor introduced her to George Dale, and her life changed.

“George never said what he did for a living,” she told me. “I always figured it was something a little shady, but hell, I ran a beer flat in Sioux City, so who was I to talk? Anyway, he always had plenty of dough and we lived in nice apartments.”

Then she got to the meat of the matter: the crime.

She and her boy friend George and George’s friend Leo were on their way to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. They were running early and decided to stop and do a little shopping; George had spotted the clothing store sign and pulled in, saying he needed some shirts. They had all three gone inside.

“George was talking to Mr. Hoeh up in front,” she said. Her eyes were not on me; they seemed to be staring into her memory. “The old man was getting shirts from behind the counter and laying boxes out for George to see. Leo wasn’t interested, and just hanging by the door. I was in the back of the store, looking at ties and other boys clothing—my sons are nine and eleven—and was caught up in making some selections.” Now she looked at me, gray eyes wide and earnest. “Then I heard the sound of a scuffle.”

“Was the old boy still behind the counter?”

“No, he was coming around after George, who was heading out.”

“Leaving you in back of the store?”

“No, that’s the other thing that alerted me that something was wrong—George was calling, ‘Eleanor! Hurry!’”

“What did you think was happening?”

“Honestly, I had no idea. I guess I thought the old man had gone off his rocker or something. Leo was there at the door, holding it open, but Mr. Hoeh was attacking George. Then all of sudden George had this gun….”

“You didn’t know George had a gun?”

She shook her head. “And the old man wrestled with George, had a hold of his wrist and twisted the thing around, and it went off!”

“And the old boy got hit?”

“No! Leo did—in his hand, his left hand I think. Leo yelled something like, ‘Jesus, George, you shot me!’ Then George shoved Mr. Hoeh away, and I was coming up from the back of the shop now, and I followed them out onto the sidewalk—I was the last one out, kind of trailing the old man, who was all over George. Why did he do that? He knew George had a gun!”

I shrugged. “It was his store. A guy his age, builds a business, he might do anything to defend it. Go on.”

“I know Mr. Hoeh was old, but he was big and tough, slugging and swinging, and I almost jumped on his back, trying to pull him off George, trying to stop this.”

“You must’ve have known it was a hold-up by now.”

Sheshook her head firmly. “No. I wasn’t thinking, not rationally, anyway. It was all so fast. I just knew George was in trouble and this crazy old man was attacking him.”

“All right. What happened then?”

She swallowed; no smiles now. “The old man shoved me away. That’s when George shot him. Twice.”

I drew in a breath; I let it out. “And Mr. Hoeh died before he made it to the hospital.”

“I know.” She was shaking her head, eyes glued to the scarred table top. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea George was some kind of…stick-up man. But I can’t believe he did that, with me along.”

“You’d never been along before?”

“No. Never.”

“They say something like sixty witnesses have identified you and George and Leo in a whole slough of other robberies. Thirty-some?”

“I don’t care what they say. These witnesses are only saying what the police tell them to. Do you think they had us stand in the show-up line? No. Hell, no. They’d haul their witnesses into the women’s cell block and point at me and say, ‘That’s her, isn’t it? The Tigress?’ And I’ll bet they’ve done the same kind of thing with George and Leo.”

“That’s not a point I’d care to argue. You’re not saying that this was a spur of the moment thing for George, that he suddenly decided to become a stick-up artist on his way to a Cubs game? He didn’t grow that gun.”

She got out another smile: a bitter one. “No. I understand that now. I believe George and Leo have been at this a long time. George had been throwing a lot of money around and that’s where it came from, obviously. They saw an opportunity with that old man alone in that shop, and they took it—putting me in this fix.”

“You’re not saying there’s another ‘Tigress’ working with George and Leo?”

“Why not? And, anyway, I’m no ‘Tigress,’ and if there is a real female accomplice, she probably isn’t, either.”

I frowned at her. “You think George has another girl friend who goes out on robberies with him?”

“No. But Leo might.”

“Is Leo married?”

“Yeah. Does that mean he can’t have a girl friend?”

“If it did,” I said, and grinned at her, “I’d be out of business.”

“It’s also possible,” she said, “that George and Leo pulled some robberies, but on their own. Without a female accomplice, and we’re taking the blame for some other bunch.”

“You each have your own lawyers.”

“Yeah. Our stories don’t exactly jibe. Leo says he had no idea George was going to pull a robbery at that haberdashery. George says there wasn’t any robbery.”

“Then why did George have the gun?”

She held her hands up in surrender. “I think it was the old man’s. Look, they don’t exactly let me talk to George and Leo. You’ll have to ask them, if you can…. Well, Nate? Do you think you can help?”

“I’ll give it a hundred bucks worth of college try,” I said.

“Do you believe my version of what happened?”

“I don’t exactly believe you. But I don’t exactly disbelieve you, either. I’ll keep an open mind. How’s that?”

“That’s the best I could hope for,” she said, and offered me her hand to shake.

The handshake lingered and her gray eyes sent me the tiniest signal that her gratitude might be shown in ways beyond that hundred bucks.

Which is as close as my Tigress daydream came to playing out.

In the hallway of the First District Station, a new modern facility, I encountered an old-fashioned cop—Captain John Stege, who greeted me much as I’d expect: “What the hell are you doing here, Heller?”

Stege was a fiftyish fireplug with a round white face and round black-rimmed glasses. He was in shirtsleeves and a blue bow tie, which was about as casual as he ever got, a revolver on his hip.

“Fine, Captain,” I said. “How are you?”

The owlish cop frowned at me. “Get your ass in my office.”

I was an irritant to Stege because I confused him: when I’d been on the Detective Bureau, not so long ago, I’d ratted out some corrupt coppers, which he considered disloyal of me, and yet he was one of the most honest flatfeet on the force.

I sat across his desk from him. The office was as small and clean and compact as he was. He just looked at me, asking no question but clearly expecting an answer.

“I’m doing a job for Sam Backus,” I said.

“Since when does the Public Defender’s office have money to hire investigators?”

“Since never.” I shrugged. “Maybe I’m doing it out of a sense of public duty.”

His tiny eyes tightened behind the lenses. “Hell—not the Tigress? That’s it, isn’t it? You figure you can peddle your story to the papers!”

“I don’t care what anybody says. You’re a detective.”

The door to the office was open. I was sitting there with my hat on. He told me to close the door and take off my hat. I did so. What was this about?

“I’m glad you’re on it,” Stege said.

“What?”

“Something smells about that case.”

“Oh, you mean like taking witnesses down to the cell block and pointing to the suspect, in lieu of a line-up?”

He tasted his mouth and it obviously wasn’t a pleasant flavor. “Something like that. This clean-up campaign, I never saw so many corners cut. If I can help you, let me know. I mean, keep it on the q.t.—but let me know.”

“This is so sudden, Captain.”

“Don’t get cute. It’s just that lately I feel like we’re working for these yellow damn journalists—trying to make ourselves look good instead trying to do our jobs.”

I sat forward. “They’re taking this to trial right away. I could use some help.”

“All right.” Stege squinted at me meaningfully. “But don’t ask to see the files—I won’t go sneaking around on honest cops. Anyway, the papers told the story accurately enough, if you take out the ‘Tigress’ hooey.”

“Do you think Dale and Minneci were part of this stick-up gang hitting small merchants on the West and Northwest Sides?”

“They could be. And so could that woman, for that matter. There’s definitely been a rash of robberies where two men and a woman go in to a store, once they’ve established no other customers are around. They’d make a lot of noise, one of the men and the woman, too, yelling and threatening and even shoving, waving a gun and a blackjack around.”

“That’s not a stupid approach.”

“You don’t think sticking up innocent merchants is stupid, Heller?”

“Sure. My old man ran a bookshop on the West Side, remember? Anybody kills a shop owner for what’s in his till, I’d like to take their tonsils out with a penknife. But by making a big commotion, intimidating their victim? It can make turn the whole thing into a big blur. Hard to get a good identification out of somebody who’s been put through that. What was the woman’s role?”

Stege shrugged. “Like I said, she was part of the show. Apparently she’d come in with a big handbag and the man would dip into it and that’s where the gun came from. She was the one waving the blackjack around, and some victims claimed they’d been struck by it.”

“They’d clean out the cash drawer?”

“Yeah, and sometimes help themselves to some merchandise. This woman, in clothing shops with female apparel, she’d pick herself out some pretty things and take ’em along.”

“Women do love to shop.”

Stege grimaced; helping me was hard on him. “I don’t want you bothering the dicks on this case. They’re good boys. I’m afraid all this pressure for arrests and publicity may have got the better of ’em, is all.”

“I won’t even talk to them,” I said. “Who I want to talk to are the Tigress’s little cubs—George Dale and Leo Minneci.”

The little round-faced copper nodded and reached out his pudgy little fingers for the phone.

Within an hour I was sitting in another interrogation room, smaller but also wit brick walls, barred windows and a scarred table. I might have still been at the First District Station, but I wasn’t: this was the Cook County Jail on Dearborn, and a cell block guard was ushering in the first name on my dance card: George Dale.

Dale was tall, maybe six two, a good-looking guy with an athletic build; he had a certain Lothario look undercut by thinning brown hair. Dale was in a white shirt, open at the collar, and brown suit pants with dark shoes and white socks.

The guard deposited him across the table from me. Dale wasn’t in handcuffs or leg irons or anything—just a big guy with a friendly face, unless you knew how to read the coldness of his dark eyes. And I did. I was glad I wasn’t packing my nine millimeter, because this character could have made a reasonable go of taking it off me.

“What’s the idea?” Dale asked. “Where’s my lawyer? If I’m talking to another copper, I want my lawyer.”

“My name’s Heller, private operative. Working for your sweetheart’s attorney.”

He sat forward, some life coming into the hard eyes. “How is Eleanor? Is she doing all right?”

“She’s sweating the hot seat like you are. I think I can help get her out of this, if you can confirm she wasn’t an accomplice.”

“She’s innocent as a newborn baby!”

“Well, let’s not get carried away, George….”

“Look, Heller, I’m no stick-up man. I’m a gambler. I make my money on dice and poker, you ask around. This is all just a terrible misunderstanding. An accident.”

“An accident.”

“Yeah. That old man was crazy! I wanted to buy some shirts, and I wanted ’em in quantity—said I’d buy half a dozen if he’d give me a decent discount. He said his price was firm and I tried to haggle and he just shook his head and gave me a nasty look. I had this box of shirts in my hands, and he yanked it away, and I yanked back, and he shoved me, and I shoved him back.”

“Across the counter, this is?”

“Yeah!”

“He was seventy, wasn’t he?”

“So they say, but he was a wild man! After I shoved him, he pulled the gun out from under the counter and came around and chased me, waving the thing. It was, you know, close quarters, and I tried to grab it away from him, and it went off and shot Leo through the hand. Then we ran out on the street—Eleanor was in back of the store and came running up behind us. The old fellow and me, we were struggling over the gun, and Eleanor was pounding him on the back, and he kind of tossed her off, like you’d toss off a kid that jumped you. Then the gun just…went off.”

“Just went off. Twice.”

“Well…yeah. I was scared. He was vicious.”

“Okay, George. Maybe we should start over.”

He shook his head. “Look, I didn’t pull any stick-up. They found fourteen bucks in the cash drawer, you know.” height="0%">

“Right. But you had a roll of bills in your pocket adding up to three hundred bucks.”

“That was my money! I don’t deny I shot the old man. But it was an accidental type thing.”

“George. Don’t kid a kidder—you’re a seasoned stick-up artist, and you stopped at that clothing store for a smash and grab.”

He just sat there, the eyes going hard again. “I don’t say I’m a saint. But Eleanor was never in on anything illegal I ever done, and these witnesses that say we were some kind of gang, the three of us, it’s a goddamn lie. The cops are just looking to clear a bunch of robberies off their books, in one fell swoop.”

“The three of us, you said. Where does Minneci figure in?”

“He was just along for the ride. I’m sorry he got his hand shot up.”

“Going to the Cubs game.”

“Right.”

I didn’t press. The story held water like a paper sack, but it was close enough to Eleanor’s to make them both look credible. Of course, they’d known for several days that the cops were after them and had had time to get their stories straight before getting hauled in.

Leo Minneci was a dark, handsome guy, or anyway handsome if you didn’t mind the cauliflower ears and the flattened nose. I never met him before, but I remembered him from his pug days—he’d been a pretty fair heavyweight, going up against Tuffy Griffiths and other headliners.

He wore a blue workshirt, sleeves rolled up, and blue jeans with his left hand bandaged. He had a confused expression, like a stranger had called to him from across the street.

Seated opposite me, he asked, “What’s this about? You another cop?”

“I’m a private dick working for Eleanor Jarman’s attorney. I’d like to get your version of what happened at that clothing shop.”

He shrugged. “Listen, I’m one of them victims of circumstance you hear about.”

“Really. I always wanted to meet one of those.”

“This has nothing to do with me. It’s Dale and that dame of his. I was just riding with them to a ball game. We was running a little early, and I said I could use a shirt and we stopped at that place. We were only in there a coupla minutes before Dale pulled a gun and stuck up the old guy. I tried to keep George from shooting the geezer and I, you know, wrestled with him, and the thing went off and…” He raised his bandaged mitt. “…got a bullet through the hand.”

“Did Eleanor know anything about the stick-up?”

He shook his head. “I think it was, what you call it, spur of the moment on George’s part. Look, I got a wife and two kids. I do all right with day labor, and I wouldn’t risk putting them in a bad spot.”

“What’s your wife’s name?”

“Why?”

“I’m just gathering information, Leo. Don’t get jumpy.”

“It’s Tina. You want the address?”

I wrote that down.

I left the jail feeling better about my client. George Dale might or might not be a stick-up artist, and Leo Minneci might or might not be his accomplice; but their stories both put Eleanor Jarman on the sidelines.

I talked to half a dozen of the merchants on the witness list. Advertising that I was working for the Tigress would have turned them into clams, so I would just tell them I was a detective, and flash my little private investigator’s badge, and that’d do the trick.

Mrs. Swan G. Swanson (no joke) was typical. She was the proprietor of a little gift shop across from the clothing store on West Division Street. This was a busy shopping area, the treetops of fashionable, sleepy Oak Park visible above the bustle of commerce and traffic on this late afternoon.

She was about sixty-five, five foot five in heels and maybe one-hundred-and-sixty pounds that still had some shape to them, well-served by a cotton dress with white polka dots on dark blue; with that pretty face highlighted by nice light blue eyes behind round wire-framed glasses, she was who you hoped your wife would turn out to be at that age.

“Detective Heller,” she said, in a whispery soprano, “it was one of the most vicious things I ever saw.”

“I know you’ve been over this several times, but I’m new on the case. Don’t spare the details.”

She nodded. “Two men came running out of the store. The first man was dark and he was holding onto his hand, which was bleeding, dripping all over the sidewalk. The other man was struggling with Mr. Hoeh, who ran after them. Mr. Hoeh was very brave, fighting hand to hand with a man holding a gun.”

Very brave or very dumb.

“Then this wildcat of a woman, a blonde, came out and was swinging this blackjack around and was hitting Mr. Hoeh with it. Mr. Hoeh sort of stumbled and stopped fighting and the woman stepped to one side and the man with the gun shot Mr. Hoeh—twice! And then when Mr. Hoeh was on the sidewalk, bleeding, dying, that vixen kicked him! Kicked him right in the face!”

“That is vicious. Tell me, when did you notice the blackjack?”

“Oh, uh…well, right away, I guess. When she started swinging it.”

“I was just wondering if the detectives you spoke to earlier had mentioned that the Tigress sometimes used a blackjack. Did you notice the blackjack at the time? Or when they mentioned this to you, did you remember you’d seen it?”

She frowned. “Actually…I guess I just thought she was pounding on him. But on reflection, I was sure, pretty sure, she had a blackjack.”

“What does a blackjack look like, anyway?”

The light blue eyes froze behind the lenses. “Uh…well, it’s black, obviously. It’s a sort of wrench, isn’t it?”

When I grew tired of talking to thesewitnesses who’d been played like a kazoo by the Detective Bureau, I had a Coke and a grilled cheese at the drug store on the corner of Austin Boulevard and Division. Then I called the First District Station to see if that dedicated little public servant Captain Stege was still in his office.

He was, and I asked, “Was there anything in the reports about Hoeh having any facial injuries?”

“Just minor stuff, from the scuffle with Dale, I understand.”

“Then nobody kicked him in the face?”

He grunted a laugh. “I saw that in the papers, some of the witnesses saying that. But, no, Heller, nobody kicked the old man. The two bullets were enough.”

“Usually are. I read something about a cache of weapons being collected at the apartment where the dicks caught up with Dale and Eleanor. Was there a blackjack among the stuff?”

“No. Pretty good arsenal, though—four revolvers and a shotgun.”

Dale had said he was no saint.

I went back to the office, not because I was as dedicated as Captain Stege, but owing to the fact that I lived there, with the Murphy bed to prove it. There was a Depression going on, as you may have heard, and I had an arrangement with the building’s owner to keep an eye on things at night in exchange for rent.

That evening I needed to get over to the Century of Progress, where I was doing some security work—without the World’s Fair, my summer would have been a bust—and I was just getting ready to go when a knock rattled the pebbled glass of my door.

“Come in,” I said, wondering what I’d done to deserve two clients in one day, but it wasn’t that at all.

For a moment I thought Leo Minneci had escaped and come around, because this was a dark young man who resembled Minneci strongly. On a closer inspection, he was smaller and younger than Leo, without the flattened nose, and better dressed—white short-sleeved shirt, red tie, white summer slacks and white bluchers—also a boater-style straw hat, which was in his right hand.

“I’m Tony Minneci,” he said. “Leo’s brother. I have something for you, Mr. Heller.”

I gestured to the client’s chair and he came over and filled it.

“This may seem a little strange,” he said. “I’m not here because of my brother.”

“Oh?”

“I’m kind of mad at Leo. He got me in trouble.”

Then I remembered—the car used in the robbery, whose license number had been reported by three or four witnesses, turned out to belong to Tony here, a University of Illinois student working as a grocery clerk for a summer job.

“Leo asked to borrow my car that day,” his young doppelganger said, “but I said no. Then he took it, anyway.”

“Did you know Leo was doing stick-ups? Is that why you didn’t want him using your wheels?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t know anything about that. It’s just my car, is all. Let him get his own car.” He got into his pocket and fished out some bills—twenties. He put five of them on my desk. That was a lot of cabbage for a college-kid grocery clerk to haul around. A well-dressed college-kid grocery clerk.

He smiled shyly. “That’s to cover what you’re doing for Eleanor.”

“You’re Leo’s brother, but you’re running an errand for Eleanor? Why?”

“She’s a nice girl. She’s innocent in all this. We were friendly.”

“You and Eleanor?”

“No, all of us, Eleanor and George and Leo.”

“This is the same Leo? Let-him-get-his-own-car Leo?”

He shrugged. “I get along fine with my brother. We don’t agree on everything under the sun, but—”

“What don’t you agree with? Him sticking up stores?”

“Look, Mr. Heller, my brother may not be perfect, but he does his best to keep that wife of his happy. If he did do something he shouldn’t have, you can blame her for it.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s a nag, that’s why. You should go talk to her. See for yourself. If you ask me…nothing.”

“Make your point, Tony.”

“They got two kids now, Mr. Heller, but she was a wild one, Tina. She got my brother in all kinds of scrapes, and then she trapped him, far as I’m concerned.”

“How?”

“Back when he was boxing and making good money, she got pregnant on purpose to bag him. If I was on this case? I’d see what her alibi was, the day of that robbery, and all those other robberies.”

“Does your sister-in-law know you feel this way?”

“No.” He shrugged again. “I’m nice to her. Leo asked me to keep an eye on her, and the two kiddies, make sure they’re okay. I’m on my way there now, as it happens.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, she’s broke. I’m gonna give her some grocery money.”

“You are a nice guy, Tony. Why don’t we go over there together?”

He frowned. “Why would you want to do that?”

“She’s on my list to talk to. Maybe you could pave the way for me, a little.”

“Well…okay. I don’t see why not. You’ll see, I don’t let it show, how I feel—my only interest is in those two little kids. My nephews.”

“Sure. You have a car?”

“Yeah.” He got to his feet and put the straw hat on. “You want a ride, Mr. Heller?”

“No, I have the address. I’ll meet you over there.”

The Minneci apartment was four handsomely furnished rooms over a florist shop on the corner of Madison and Homan. These were fairly nice digs, suggesting hubby Leo had been doing all right for his little family before the cops took him away.

Tony Minneci introduced me as a private detective trying to help clear Leo. Tina Minneci—tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, slender—immediately warmed to me, and seemed genuinely bewildered that anyone could ever think her gentle, loving husband could have robbed or hurt anybody. (It would have been impolite to point out that gentle, loving Leo used to bash other guys’ brains out for a living.) She wore about a buck’s worth of cotton house dress, blue plaid with a ruffled collar, nicely feminine, and her narrow face would have been pretty with a little make-up and a good night’s sleep.

She sat us down at a round wooden table in the kitchen; a highchair was shoved to one side. She had a pot of coffee going as well as a bottle of milk in a saucepan on the stove.

We all had coffee while we sat and talked—quietly, because she had just put baby Jimmy down for the night.

“He’s a good boy,” she said, almost whispering, “unless something wakes him—then look out!”

I said, “You have another child, don’t you?”

“Yes—Leo, Jr. He’s six. He’s been with his grandparents since…since Leo, Sr., went away. They have a nice flat on the West Side—Daddy has a little restaurant over there, and does pretty well.”

“I see.”

“Little Jimmy and I may be joining Leo, Jr. I may have to move back in with my folks—my rent here is due in a week and I’m flat broke.”

I nodded toward the living room. “You have a pretty nice place here. This isn’t exactly a Hooverville.”

“I know, but we didn’t have any money stashed away in the bank or under a pillow, either. Leo’s always been a good provider. He made a really decent living as a fighter, and when that dwindled, he always brought enough in to keep us comfortable.”

“Where did he work?”

“No one place, but he always had something going. He did day labor, sometimes he helped out at the gym where he used to train.”

I kept my tone easy. “You don’t think that money could’ve come from…somewhere else?”

Her eyes flared. “Mr. Heller, my husband is an honest man. He got in with a bad crowd, is all. I always thought George Dale was a slickster.”

“What about Eleanor Jarman?”

Mrs. Minneci gave up a benefit-of-the-doubt shrug. “She always seemed all right. She has two little ones of her own to look after, you know.”

Tony sat forward; his straw boater was on the table next to his coffee cup like an upturned soup bowl. “Listen, I got some grocery money for you, Tina. Five bucks I squeezed out of my clerk job. If I go over there with you, I can get the employee discount.”

Mrs. Minneci turned her dark eyes on me and explained: “The little grocery store where Tony works part-time is just a block from here…. You’re a sweetheart, Tony, but I can’t leave Jimmy here alone, and I’m not about to wake him.”

“I can babysit,” I said, “if you’re not gone too long.”

She beamed at me, then frowned with parental concern. “What would a nice young man like you know about taking care of a baby?”

“This nice young man used to go out with a nice divorcee with three kids, two in diapers. I know all about changing ’em, and I wield a mean milk bottle, too.”

Mrs. Minneci glanced at her brother-in-law, who shrugged and said, “Mr. Heller’s reliable. No worries. We can be over there and back in fifteen, twenty minutes.”

A small discussion (“Do you mind? Are you sure?”) followed, but finally dutiful Tony took the sister-in-law he claimed to despise—although I’d seen no sign of that—out the door and into the hall and down the stairs.

The tricky part was that slumbering kid. Jimmy was in a crib in the bedroom where I needed to poke around. So I did my quietest, most careful work, and I’d like to say I was able to pull off the find because I was a real professional, but a blind man could have pawed around and come up with the stuff.

Under the bed, in a trio of clothing boxes, were lovely fashions, long-sleeved wool and rabbit’s hair numbers, stylish with Ascot ties and metal buttons and all the most fashionable current touches. Stege had said the Blonde Tigress had helped herself to pretty things on the robberies, and these brand-new, never worn dresses certainly qualified.

Most damning were two items dropped on top of the final box I opened, nestled on a long-sleeved rayon satin two-color frock with a bow at the neck: a blonde wig and a blackjack.

Some things never go out of style.

I thought about laying all this stuff out on the kitchen table, like a meal; but instead I just put the caboodle away and went out and helped myself to another cup of coffee. Something about the set-up made me think maybe I should have taken that bottle of warm milk out of that pan instead.

They returned in just over twenty minutes, with their arms full of grocery sacks and Tina Minneci all smiles. She was saying, “I think I’ll have the folks send Leo, Jr., home for a few days. We can eat like a proper family again. How can I thank you, Tony?”

Tony was all smiles, too, but his eyes kept flicking toward me expectantly. I pitched in with my hostess and her brother-in-law and helped unload the groceries sacks and turned the cupboard shelves from empty to full.

Leaning back against the kitchen counter, looking happy and with a hint of how lovely she really could be, Tina Minneci said, “Any trouble with Jimmy?”

“No,” I said. “Slept like a baby.”

That made her laugh. “Shall we sit down, and I’ll try to answer the rest of your questions?”

“I don’t have any more questions, thanks. You’ve been very gracious, Mrs. Minneci. Tony, isn’t it time we were going?”

Tony nodded and we made our goodbyes and we started down the steps and I waited until we were two-thirds of the way before I tripped him and sent him rattling down those stairs in a pile of arms and legs until he knocked up against the closed door.

I stood over him in the little entryway and he gazed up at me, astounded. “What the hell did you do that for?”

“That’s the clumsiest frame I ever saw.”

He got to his feet, brushing off his white pants. He picked up his boater, which had cracked. “You busted my hat!”

“I should bust more.”

His chin stuck out at me. “Listen, my brother is a boxer. He’s taught me a thing or two. I can take a punch.”

“Can you take a slap?” I asked, and slapped him four times, twice per cheek, ringing like gunshots in the stairwell.

Then I grabbed him by the shirt front and slammed him into some little wall-mounted mailboxes, which probably hurt. He was crying.

“I’ve seen low,” I said. “But framing your own sister-in-law…. Did Eleanor put you up to it?”

“I’m not talking to you!”

“Question is, am I talking to the cops?”

“You work for us!”

“Shut-up.” I shook my head. “Get the hell out of here. You make me sick.”

He and his busted boater scooted out. Under normal circumstances, he might have been able to give me worse than I’d just dished out to him. But I had righteous indignation on my side, which I admit was something new.

The next morning, Eleanor Jarman and I sat in the same interrogation room as before. Her arms were folded, her eyes cold, her mouth a wide tight line, straight as a ruler’s edge.

My arms were folded, too, but I was smiling. “Here’s the deal. I keep the hundred. I intend to send thirty bucks of it to Minneci’s wife, to help out on her rent. But I keep the rest—you’re getting off cheap, because if I sold what I know to the papers, you’d really be sunk.”

I had just filled her in on a bunch of stuff, including that I knew Leo’s brother was part of their little gang, possibly fencing boodle, certainly providing the car.

She gave me a gray-eyed glare. “I ask my lawyer for the shiftiest private eye around, and you’re what he comes up with? A goody two-shoes?”

“This isn’t about right or wrong. This is about me not being stupid. Scratch that—it’s about me not liking being taken for stupid. You and George and Leo have been knocking over little shops since, when? April, May?”

She just shrugged.

“The clothes I found under Mrs. Minneci’s bed were strictly fall and winter items.”

Her eyebrows went up. “If I wanted to frame her, and had thnch of stolen summer frocks of my own, why didn’t I just have that dope Tony stick some of those under that bitch’s bed?”

“Because you girls don’t wear the same size. She’s tall and skinny, you’re short and curvy. You had to frame her with clothing that would fit her—and that dope Tony, as you accurately put it, went out and bought new things…fall and winter items that just hit the stores.”

“You said you found a blonde wig and a blackjack.”

“Yeah. The wig was new, but the blackjack wasn’t. You really did go around terrorizing small merchants with that thing, didn’t you?”

She sighed and her face softened. She unfolded her arms and put her hands on the scarred table and leaned forward. “Listen, Heller—dumbbell Tina wouldn’t’ve served any time. That was just to muddy the waters and help get me off—when the cops looked into it, she’d probably have alibis for some of those robberies, maybe including the Hoeh thing.”

“Probably. Maybe.”

“And as for waving around that blackjack? That was just theater. I never slugged anybody, I never kicked anybody. These are hard times, as you may have noticed, and these hands…” She held them up; they were cracked and almost arthritic-looking, fifty-year-old hands on a woman not thirty. “…these hands had done all the laundry they could take.”

“But the cops wanted to make themselves look good, and the papers went along, turning you into a Tigress.”

She smiled. “Hey, fella, I was a tigress, but that was part of the show. Scare ’em, rattle ’em, and get them to give up their money. And we lived pretty darn good these last few months.”

“Until Gustav Hoeh didn’t cooperate.”

Her smile faded. “I hate that. You can believe me or not believe me, I don’t give a damn. But the truth is, I never wanted anybody hurt. This was just about some fast, easy cash.”

“That gun you hauled around in your bag for George—you never thought he’d use it?”

“No. He’s a coward at heart.”

“Hell, Eleanor. Don’t you know? That’s who uses guns.”

Some of the details I never got. I was only on the case for two days, so I never found out exactly what hold Eleanor Jarman had over Tony Minneci, and I have no idea what became of Tina and her two boys after I sent the thirty-bucks rent money.

On the witness stand, Eleanor wore a pretty blue frock (where had she picked that up, I wondered?) and told her sad tale of being an orphan and waiting tables and doing laundry. She denied knowing that Hoeh’s store was going to be robbed, while Dale had changed his story to put the blame on Minneci, who told a similar story with Dale cast as the heavy. Assistant State’s Attorney Crowley went after the death sentence for all three, but only George Dale got the chair; his last act, in April of 1934, was to write Eleanor a love letter.

As for Eleanor, she Leo each got 199 years, a sentence designed to beat any reasonable chance of parole—and the longest stretch ever assigned a woman in Illinois.

That should be the end of the story, but the Blonde Tigress had other ideas. For seven years Eleanor served her time at Joliet as (to quote the warden) “an industrious, obedient, and model prisoner in every respect.” Then, on the morning of August 8, 1940, she wore a guard’s dress stolen from a locker and used a rope fashioned from sheets to go over the ten-foot wall.

Supposedly she had heard her youngest son had threatened to run away from home. The story goes that Eleanor Jarman returned to Sioux City, spent some time with her two boys, and then disappeared, not turning up till she met with family members briefly in 1975 before vanishing again.

No one, except perhaps her blood relatives, knows how Eleanor spent the rest of her life or where. My take on it was that she was neither the Tigress of the press nor the victim she pretended to be. And maybe seven years was enough time for her to serve, though numerous attempts by her family to get her pardoned went nowhere.

Anyway, the part I liked best was how she got out of prison.

By stealing a dress.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction based on an actual murder, and many real names are used. “Tony Minneci” is a composite of Leo Minneci’s real brother and several other peripheral figures in the case, none of whom were shown to have anything to do with the robberies or murder. My longtime research associate George Hagenauer wrote about the Blonde Tigress in The Big Book of Little Criminals (1996). Newspaper accounts, including retrospective ones, were consulted as well as several articles in vintage “true detective” magazines, notably “Smashing the Terror Reign of Chicago’s Blonde Gun Girl” by Robert Faherty in Detective Tabloid, February 1935. Mark Gribben’s internet article, “Eleanor Jarman Please Phone Home,” was also useful.

I grabbed the Lake Street El and got off at Garfield Park; it was a short walk from there to the “Death Clinic” at 3406 West Monroe Street. That’s what the papers, some of them anyway, were calling the Wynekoop mansion. To me it was just another big old stone building on the West Side, one of many, though of a burnt-reddish stone rather than typical Chicago gray. And, I’ll grant you, the three-story structure was planted on a wealthier residential stretch than the one I’d grown up on, twelve blocks south.

Still, this was the West Side, and more or less my old stamping grounds, and that was no doubt part of why I’d been asked to drop by the Wynekoop place this sunny Saturday afternoon. The family had most likely asked around, heard about the ex-cop from nearby Douglas Park who now had a little private agency in the Loop.

And my reputation on the West Side—and in the Loop—was of being just honest enough, and just crooked enough, to get most jobs done.

But part of why I’d been called, I would guess, was Earle Wynekoop himself. I knew Earle a little, from a distance. We’d both worked at the World’s Fair down on the lakefront last summer and fall. I was working pickpocket duty, and Earle was in the front office, doing whatever front-office people do. We were both about the same age—I was twenty-seven—but he seemed like a kid to me.

Earle mostly chased skirts, except at the Streets of Paris exhibition, where the girls didn’t wear skirts. Tall, handsome, wavy-haired Earle, with his white teeth and pencil-line mustache, had pursued the fan dancers with the eagerness of a plucked bird trying to get its feathers back. Funny thing was, nobody—including me—knew Earle was a married man, till November, when the papers were full of his wife. His wife’s murder, that is.

Now it was a sunny, almost-warm afternoon in December, and I had been in business just under a year. And like most small businessmen, I’d had less than a prosperous 1933. A retainer from a family with the Wynekoop’s dough would be a nice way to ring out the old and ring in the new.

Right now, I was ringing the doorbell. I was up at the top of the first-floor landing; Dr. Alice Wynekoop’s office was in an English basement below. I was expecting a maid or butler to answer, considering the size of this place. But Earle is what I got.

His white smile flickered nervously. He adjusted his bowtie with one hand and offered the other for me to shake, which I did. His grip was weak and moist, like his dark eyes.

“Mr. Heller,” he said. “Thank you for stopping by.”

“My pleasure,” I said, stepping into the vestibule, hat in hand.

Earle, snappily dressed in a pinstripe worsted, took my topcoat and hung it on a hall tree.

“Perhaps you don’t remember me,” he said. “I worked in the front office at the fair this summer.”

“Sure I remember you, Mr. Wynekoop.”

“Why don’t you call me ‘Earle.’”

“Fine, Earle,” I said. “And my friends call me ‘Nate.’”

He grinned nervously and said, “Step into the library, Nate, if you would.”

“Is your mother here?”

“No. She’s in jail.”

“Why haven’t you sprung her?” Surely these folks could afford to make bail. On the phone, Earle had quickly agreed to my rate of fifteen bucks a day and one-hundred-dollar non-refundable retainer. And that was the top of my sliding scale.

An eyebrow arched in disgust on a high, unwrinkled brow. “Mother is ill, thanks to these barbarians. We’ve decided to let the state pay for her illness, considering they’ve provoked it.”

He tried to sound indignant through all that, but petulance was the result.

The interior of the house was on the gloomy side: a lot of dark, expensive, well-wrought woodwork, and heavy, plush furnishings that dated back to the turn of the century, when the house was built. There were hints that the Wynekoops might not be as well fixed as the rest of us thought: ornate antiquated light fixtures, worn Oriental carpets and a layer of dust indicated yesterday’s wealth, not today’s.

I sat on a dark horsehair couch; two of the walls were bookcases, filled with leather-bound volumes, and the others were hung with somber landscapes. The first thing Earle did was give me an envelope with one hundred dollars in tens in it. Now Earle was getting himself some sherry off a liquor cart.

“Can I get you something?” Earle asked. His hands were shaking as he poured himself the sherry.

“This will do nicely,” I said, counting the money.

“Don’t be a wet blanket, Nate.”

I put the money-clipped bills away. “Rum, then. No ice.”

He gave me a glass and sat beside me. I’d have rather he sat across from me; it was awkward, looking sideways at him. But he seemed to crave the intimacy.

“Mother’s not guilty, you know.”

“Really.”

“I confessed, but they didn’t believe me. I confessed five times.”

“Cops figured you were trying to clear your mama.”

“Yes. I’m afraid so. I rather botched it, as a liar.”

It was good rum. “Then you didn’t kill your wife?”

“Kill Rheta! Don’t be silly. I loved her, once. Just because our marriage had gone…well, anyway, I didn’t do it, and Mother didn’t do it, either.”

“Who did, then?”

He smirked humorlessly. “I think some moron did it. Some fool looking for narcotics and money. That’s why I called you, Nate. The police aren’t looking for the killer. They think they have their man in Mother.”

“What does your mother’s attorney think?”

“He thinks hiring an investigator is a splendid idea.”

“Doesn’t he have his own man?”

“Yes, but I wanted you. I remembered you from the fair…and, I asked around.”

What did I tell you? Am I detective?

“I can’t promise I can clear her,” I said. “She confessed, after all—and the cops took her one confession more seriously than your five.”

“They gave her the third-degree. A sixty-three-year-old woman! Respected in the community! Can you imagine?”

“Who was the cop in charge?”

Earle pursed his lips in disgust. “Captain Stege himself, the bastard.”

“Is this his case? Damn.”

“Yes, it’s Stege’s case. Didn’t you read about all this in the papers?”

“Sure I did. But I didn’t read it like I thought I was going to be involved. I probably did read Stege was in charge, but when you led this morning, I didn’t recall…”

“Why, Nate? Is this a problem?”

“No,” I lied.

I let it go at that, as I needed the work, but the truth was, Stege hated my guts. I’d testified against a couple of cops, which Stege—even though he was honest and those two cops were bent even by Chicago standards—took as a betrayal of the police brotherhood.

Earle was up pouring himself another sherry. Already. “Mother is a sensitive, frail woman, with a heart condition, and she was ruthlessly, mercilessly questioned for a period of over twenty-four hours.”

“I see.”

“I’m afraid…” And Earle sipped his sherry greedily. Swallowed. Continued: “I’m afraid I may have made the situation even worse.”

“How?”

He sat again, sighed, shrugged. “As you probably know, I was out of town when Rheta was…slain.”

That was an odd choice of words; “slain” was something nobody said, a word in the newspapers, not real life.

“I went straight to the Fillmore police station, when I returned from Kansas City. I had a moment with Mother. I said…” He slumped, shook his head.

“Go on, Earle.”

“I said…God help me, I said, ‘For God’s sake mother, if you did this on account of me, go ahead and confess.’” He touched his fingertips to his eyes.

“What did she say to you?”

“She…she said, ‘Earle, I did not kill Rheta.’ But then she went in for another round with Captain Stege, and…”

“And made that cockamamie confession she later retracted.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you think your mother might have killed your wife for you, Earle?”

“Because…because Mother loves me very much.”

Dr. Alice Lindsay Wynekoop had been one of Chicago’s most esteemed female physicians for almost four decades. She had met her late husband Frank in medical college, and with him continued the Wynekoop tradition of care for the ill and disabled. Her charity work in hospitals and clinics was well-known; a prominent clubwoman, humanitarian, a leader in the woman’s suffrage movement, Dr. Wynekoop was an unlikely candidate for a murder charge.

But she had indeed been charged: with the murder of her daughter-in-law, in the basement consultation office in this very house.

Earle led me there, down a narrow stairway off the dining room. In the central basement hallway were two facing doors: Dr. Wynekoop’s office, at left; and at right, an examination room. The door was open. Earle motioned for me to go in, which I did, but he stayed in the doorway.

The room was narrow and wide and cold; the steam heat was off. The dominant fixture was an old-fashioned, brown-leather-covered examination table. A chair under a large stained-glass window, whose ledge was lined with medical books, sat next to a weigh-and-measure scale. In one corner was a medicine and instrument cabinet.

“The police wouldn’t let us clean up properly,” Earle said.

The leather exam table was blood-stained.

“They said they might take the whole damn table in,” Earle said. “And use it in court, for evidence.”

I nodded. “What about your mother’s office? She claimed burglary.”

“Well, yes…some drugs were taken from the cabinet, in here. And six dollars from a drawer…”

He led me across the hall to an orderly office area with a big rolltop desk, which he pointed to.

“And,” Earle said, pulling open a middle drawer, “there was the gun, of course. Taken from here.”

“The cops found it across the hall, though. By the body.”

“Yes,” Earle said, quietly.

“Tell me about her, Earle.”

“Mother?”

“Rheta.”

“She…she was a lovely girl. A beautiful redhead. Gifted musician…violinist. But she was…sick.”

“Sick how?”

He tapped his head. “She was a hypochondriac. Imagining she had this disease, and that one. Her mother died of tuberculosis…in an insane asylum, no less. Rheta came to imagine she had t.b., like her mother. What they did have in common, I’m afraid, was being mentally deranged.”

“You said you loved her, Earle.”

“I did. Once. The marriage was a failure. I…I had to seek affection elsewhere.” A wicked smile flickered under the pencil mustache. “I’ve never had trouble finding women, Nate. I have a little black book with fifty girl friends in it.”

It occurred to me that a real man could get by on a considerably shorter list; but I keep opinions like that to myself, when given a hundred-buck retainer.

“What did the little woman think about all these girl friends? A crowd like that is hard to hide.”

He shrugged. “We never talked about it.”

“No talk of a divorce?”

He licked his lips, avoided my eyes. “I wanted one, Nate. She wouldn’t give it to me. A good Catholic girl.” Four of the most frightening words in the English language, to any healthy male anyway.

“The two of you lived here, with your mother?”

“Yes…I can’t really afford to live elsewhere. Times are hard, you know.”

“So I hear. Who else lives here? Isn’t there a roomer?”

“Yes. Miss Shaunesey. She’s a high school teacher.”

“Is she here now1;

“Yes. I asked if she’d talk to you, and she is more than willing. Anything to help Mother.”

Back in the library, I sat and spoke with Miss Enid Shaunesey, a prim, slim woman of about fifty. Earle lurked in the background, helping himself to more sherry.

“What happened that day, Miss Shaunesey?”

November 21, 1933.

“I probably arose at about a quarter to seven,” she said, with a little shrug, adjusting her wire-frame glasses. “I had breakfast in the house with Dr. Alice. I don’t remember whether Rheta had breakfast with us or not…I don’t really remember speaking to Rheta at all that morning.”

“Then you went on to school?”

“Yes,” I said. “I teach at Marshall High. I completed my teaching duties and signed out about three fifteen. I went to the Loop and shopped until a little after five and went home.”

“What, at about six?”

“Or a little after. When I came home, Dr. Alice was in the kitchen, preparing dinner. She fried up some pork chops. Made a nice salad, cabbage, potatoes, peaches. It was just the two of us. We’re good friends.”

“Earle was out of town, of course, but what about Rheta?”

“She was supposed to dine with us, but she was late. We went ahead without her. I didn’t think much of it. The girl had a mind of her own; she frequently went here and there—music lessons, shopping.” There was a faint note of disapproval, though the conduct she was describing mirrored her own after-school activities of that same day.

“Did Dr. Wynekoop seem to get along with Rheta?”

“They had their tiffs, but Dr. Alice loved the girl. She was family. That evening, during dinner, she spoke of Rheta, in fact.”

“What did she say?”

“She was worried about the girl.”

“Because she hadn’t shown up for supper?”

“Yes, and after the meal she telephoned a neighbor or two, to see if they’d seen Rheta. But she also expressed a more general concern—Rheta was fretting about her health, you see. As I said, Rheta frequently stayed out. We knew she’d probably gone into the Loop to shop and, as she often did, she probably went to a motion picture. That was what we thought.”

“I see.”

Miss Shaunesey sat up, her expression suddenly thoughtful. “Of course, I’d noticed Rheta’s coat and hat on the table here in the library, but Dr. Alice said that she’d probably worn her good coat and hat to the Loop. Anyway, after dinner we talked, and then I went to the drug store for Dr. Alice, to have a prescription refilled.”

“When did you get back?”

“Well, you see, the drug store is situated at Madison and Kedzie. That store did not have as many tablets as Dr. Alice wanted, so I walked to the drug store at Homan and Madison and got a full bottle.”

“So it took a while,” I said, trying not to get irritated with her fussy old-maid-school-teacher thoroughness. It beat the hell out of an uncooperative, unobservant witness, though. I guessed.

“I was home by half past seven, I should judge. Then we sat down in the library and talked for about an hour. We discussed two books—Strange Interlude was one and the other was The Forsyte Saga.”

“Did Dr. Wynekoop seem relaxed, or was she in any way preoccupied?”

“The former,” Miss Shaunesey said with certainty. “Any concern about Rheta’s absence was strictly routine.”

“At what point did Dr. Wynekoop go downstairs to her consultation room?”

“Well, I was complaining of my hyperacidity. Dr. Alice said she had something in her office that she thought I could use for that. It was in a glass case in her consulting room. Of course, she never got that medicine for me.”

Dr. Wynekoop had been interrupted in her errand by the discovery of the body of her daughter-in-law Rheta. The corpse was face down on the examination table, head on a white pillow. Naked, the body was wrapped in a sheet and a blanket, snugged in around the feet and pulled up over the shoulders, like a child lovingly tucked into bed. Rheta had been shot, once, in the back. Her lips were scorched as if by acid. A wet towel was under her mouth, indicating perhaps that chloroform had been administered. A half-empty bottle of chloroform was found on the washstand. And a gauze-wrapped .32 Smith and Wesson rested on the pillow above the girl’s head.

“Dr. Wynekoop did not call the police?” I asked, knowing the answer. This much I remembered from the papers.

“No.”

“Or an undertaker, or the coroner’s office?”

“No. She called her daughter, Catherine.”

Earle looked up from his sherry long enough to interject: “Catherine is a doctor, too. She’s a resident at the Children’s Department at Cook County Hospital.”

And that was my logical first stop. I took the El over to the hospital, a block-square graystone at Harrison and Ogden; this job was strictly a West Side affair.

Dr. Catherine Wynekoop was a beautiful woman. Her dark hair was pulled back from her pale, pretty face; in her doctor’s whites, she sat in the hospital cafeteria stirring her coffee as we spoke.

“I was on duty here when Mother called,” she said. “She said, ‘Something terrible has happened at home…it’s Rheta…she’s dead…she has been shot.’”

“How did she sound? Hysterical? Calm?”

“Calm, but a shocked sort of calm.” She sighed. “I went home immediately. Mother seemed all right, but I noticed her gait was a little unsteady. Her hands were trembling, her face was flushed. I helped her to a chair in the dining room and rushed out in the kitchen for stimuli. I put a teaspoonful of aromatic spirits of ammonia in water and had her drink it.”

“She hadn’t called anyone bt you, as yet?”

“No. She said she’d just groped her way up the stairs, that on the way everything went black, she felt dizzy, that the next thing she knew she was at the telephone calling me.”

“Did you take charge, then?”

A half-smile twitched at her cheek. “I guess I did. I called Mr. Ahearn.”

“Mr. Ahearn?”

“The undertaker. And I called Dr. Berger, our family physician.”

“You really should have called the coroner.”

“Mother later said that she’d asked me to, on the phone, but I didn’t hear that or understand her or something. We were upset. Once Dr. Berger and Mr. Ahearn arrived, the coroner’s office was called.”

She kept stirring her coffee, staring into it.

“How did you and Rheta get along?”

She lifted her eyebrows in a shrug. “We weren’t close. We had little in common. But there was no animosity.”

She seemed goddamn guarded to me; I decided to try and knock her wall down, or at least jar some stones loose.

I said: “Do you think your mother killed Rheta?”

Her dark eyes rose to mine and flashed. “Of course not. I never heard my mother speak an unkind word to or about Rheta.” She searched her mind for an example, and came up with one: “Why—whenever Mother bought me a dress, she bought one for Rheta, also.”

She returned her gaze to the coffee, which she stirred methodically.

Then she continued: “She was worried about Rheta, actually. Worried about the way Earle was treating her. Worried about all the…well, about the crowd he started to run around with down at the World’s Fair. Mother asked me to talk to him about it.”

“About what, exactly?”

“His conduct.”

“You mean, his girl friends.”

She looked at me sharply. “Mr. Heller, my understanding is that you are in our family’s employ. Some of these questions of yours seem uncalled for.”

I gave her my most charming smile. “Miss Wynekoop…doctor…I’m like you. Sometimes I have to ask unpleasant questions, if I’m going to make the proper diagnosis.”

She considered that a moment, then smiled. It was a honey of a smile, making mine look like the shabby sham it was.

“I understand, Mr. Heller.” She rose. She’d never touched the coffee once. “I’m afraid I have afternoon rounds to make.”

She extended her hand; it was delicate, but her grasp had strength, and she had dignity. Hard to believe she was Earle’s sister.

I had my own rounds to make, and at a different hospital; it took a couple of streetcars to do the job. The County Jail was a grim, low-slung graystone lurking behind the Criminal Courts Building. This complex of city buildings was just south of a West Side residential area, just eight blocks south of Douglas Park. Old home week for me.

Alice Wynekoop was sitting up in bed, reading a medical journal, when I was led to her by a matron. She was in the corner and had much of the ward to herself; the beds on either side were empty.

She was of average size, but frail-looking; she appeared much older than her sixty-three years, her flesh freckled with liver spots, her neck creped. The skin of her face had a wilted look, dark patches under the eyes, saggy jowls.

But her eyes were dark and sharp. And her mouth was a stern line.

“Are you a policeman?” she asked. Her tone was neutral.

I had my hat in hand. “I’m Nathan Heller,” I said. “I’m the private investigator your son hired.”

She smiled in a business-like way, extended her hand for me to shake, which I did. Surprisingly strong for such a weak-looking woman.

“Pull up a chair, Mr. Heller,” she said. Her voice was clear and crisp. Someone very different than the woman she outwardly appeared to be lived inside that worn-out body.

I sat. “I’m going to be asking around about some things…inquire about burglaries in your neighborhood and such.”

She nodded, twice, very business-like. “I’m certain the thief was after narcotics. In fact, some narcotics were taken, but I keep precious few in my surgery.”

“Yes. I see. What about the gun?”

“It was my husband’s. We’ve had it for years. I’ve never fired it in my life.”

I took out my small spiral notebook. “I know you’re weary of telling it, but I need to hear your story. Before I go poking around the edges of this case, I need to understand the center of it.”

She nodded and smiled. “What would you like to know, exactly?”

“When did you last see your daughter-in-law?”

“About three p.m. that Tuesday. She said she was going for a walk with Mrs. Donovan…”

“Who?”

“A neighbor of ours who was a good friend to the child. Verna Donovan. She’s a divorcee; they were quite close.”

I wrote the name down. “Go on.”

“Anyway, Rheta said something about going for a walk with Mrs. Donovan. She also said she might go downtown and get some sheet music. I urged her to go out in the air, as it was a fine day, and gave her money for the music. After she left, I went for a walk myself, through the neighborhood. It was an usually beautiful day for November, pleasantly warm.”

“How long were you gone?”

“I returned at about four forty-five p.m. I came in the front door. Miss Shaunesey arrived from school about six o’clock. I wasn’t worried then about Rheta’s absence, because I expected her along at any minute. I prepared dinner for the three of us—Miss Shaunesey, Rheta and melf—and set the table. Finally, Miss Shaunesey and I sat down to eat…both wondering where Rheta was, but again, not terribly worried.”

“It wasn’t unusual for her to stay out without calling to say she’d miss supper?”

“Not in the least. She was quiet, but rather…self-absorbed. If she walked by a motion-picture marquee that caught her eye, she might just wander on in, without a thought about anyone who might be waiting for her.”

“She sounds inconsiderate.”

Alice Wynekoop smiled tightly, revealing a strained patience. “She was a strange, quiet girl. Rather moody, I’m afraid. She had definite feelings of inferiority, particularly in regards to my daughter, Catherine, who is after all a physician. But I digress. At about a quarter to seven, I telephoned Mrs. Donovan and asked her if she had been with Rheta. She said she hadn’t seen her since three o’clock, but urged me not to worry.”

“Were you worried?”

“Not terribly. At any rate, at about seven o’clock I asked Miss Shaunesey to go and get a prescription filled for me. She left the house and I remained there. She returned about an hour later and was surprised that Rheta had not yet returned. At this point, I admit I was getting worried about the girl.”

“Tell me about finding the body.”

She nodded, her eyes fixed. “Miss Shaunesey and I sat and talked in the library. Then about eight thirty she asked me to get her some medicine for an upset stomach. I went downstairs to the examination room to get the medicine from the cabinet.” She placed a finger against one cheek, thoughtfully. “I recall now that I thought it odd to find the door of the examination room closed, as it was usually kept open. I turned the knob and slipped my hand inside to find the electric switch.”

“And you found her.”

She shuddered, but it seemed a gesture, not an involuntary response. “It is impossible for me to describe my feelings when I saw Rheta lying there under that flood of light! I felt as if I were somewhere else. I cannot find words to express my feelings.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I knew something had to be done at once, and I called my daughter, Catherine, at the county hospital. I told her Rheta was dead. She was terribly shocked, of course. I…I thought I had asked Catherine to notify the coroner and to hurry right over. It seemed ages till she got there. When she did arrive, I had her call Dr. Berger and Mr. Ahearn. It wasn’t until some time after they arrived that I realized Catherine had not called the coroner as I thought I’d instructed her. Mr. Ahearn then called the authorities.”

I nodded. “All right. You’re doing fine, doctor. Now tell me about your son and his wife.”

“What do you mean?”

“It wasn’t a happy union, was it.”

Her smile was a sad crease in her wrinkled face. “At one time it was. Earle went with me to a medical convention in Indianapolis in…must have been ’29. Rheta played the violin as part of the entertainment, there. They began to correspond. A yr later they were wed.”

“And came to live with you.”

“Earle didn’t have a job—you know, he’s taken up photography of late, and has had several assignments, I’m really very proud—and, well…anyway. The girl was barely nineteen, when they married. I redecorated and refurnished a suite of rooms on the second floor for my newlyweds. She was a lovely child, beautiful red hair, and of course, Earle…he’s as handsome a boy as ever walked this earth.”

“But Rheta was moody…?”

“Very much so. And obsessed with her health. Perhaps that’s why she married into the Wynekoop family. She was fearful of tuberculosis, but there were no indications of it at all. In the last month of her life, she was rather melancholy, of a somewhat morbid disposition. I discussed with her about going out into the open and taking exercise. We discussed that often.”

“You did not kill your daughter-in-law.”

“No! Mr. Heller, I’m a doctor. My profession, my life, is devoted to healing.”

I rose. Slipped the notebook in my pocket. “Well, thank you, Dr. Wynekoop. I may have a few more questions at a later date.”

She smiled again, a warm, friendly smile, coming from so controlled a woman. “I’d be pleased to have your company. And I appreciate your help. I’m very worried about the effect this is having on Earle.”

“Dr. Wynekoop, with all due respect…my major concern is the effect this going to have on you, if I can’t find the real killer.”

Her smile disappeared and she nodded sagely. She extended her hand for a final handshake, and I left her there.

I used a pay phone in the visitor’s area to call Sergeant Lou Sapperstein at Central Headquarters in the Loop. Lou had been my boss on the pickpocket detail. I asked him to check for me to see what officer in the Fillmore district had caught the call the night of the Wynekoop homicide.

“That’s Stege’s case,” Lou said. Sapperstein was a hardnosed, fair-minded balding cop of about forty-five seasoned years. “You shouldn’t mess in Stege’s business. He doesn’t like you.”

“God you’re a great detective, picking up on a detail like that. Can you get me the name?”

“Five minutes. Stay where you are.”

I gave him the pay phone number and he called back in a little over three minutes.

“Officer Raymond March, detailed with squad fifteen,” he said.

I checked my watch; it was after four.

“He’s on duty now,” I said. “Do me another favor.”

“Why don’t you get a goddamn secretary?”

“You’re a public servant, aren’t you? So serve, already.”

“So tell me what you want, already.”

“Get somebody you trust at Fillmore to tell Officer March to meet me at the drug store on the corner of Madison and Kedzie. Between six and seven.”

“What’s in it for Officer March?”

“Supper and a fin.”

“Why not,” Lou said, a shrug in his voice.

He called me back in five or six minutes and said the message would be passed.

I hit the streetcars again and was back on Monroe Street by a quarter to five. It was getting dark already, and colder.

Mrs. Verna Donovan lived in the second-floor two-flat of a graystone three doors down from the Wynekoop mansion. The smell of corned beef and cabbage cooking seeped from under the door.

I knocked.

It took a while, but a slender, attractive woman of perhaps thirty in a floral dress and a white apron opened the door wide.

“Oh!” she said. Her face was oblong, her eyes a luminous brown, her hair another agreeable shade of brown, cut in a bob that was perhaps too young for her.

“Didn’t mean to startle you, ma’am. Are you Mrs. Donovan?”

“Yes, I am.” She smiled shyly. “Sorry for my reaction—I was expecting my son. We’ll be eating in about half an hour…”

“I know this is a bad time to come calling. Perhaps I could arrange another time…”

“What is your business here?”

I gave her one of my A-1 Detective Agency cards. “I’m working for the Wynekoops. Nathan Heller, president of the A-1 agency. I’m hoping to find Rheta’s killer.

Her eyes sparkled. “Well, come in! If you don’t mind sitting in the kitchen while I get dinner ready…”

“Not at all,” I said, following her through a nicely but not lavishly furnished living room, overseen by an elaborate print of the Virgin Mary, and back to a good-size blue and white kitchen.

She stood at the counter making cole slaw while I sat at the kitchen table nearby.

“We were very good friends, Rheta and I. She was a lovely girl, talented, very funny.”

“Funny? I get the impression she was a somber girl.”

“Around the Wynekoops she was. They’re about as much fun as falling down the stairs. Do you think the old girl killed her?”

“What do you think?”

“I could believe it of Earle. Dr. Alice herself, well…I mean, she’s a doctor. She’s aloof, and she and Rheta were anything but close, of course. But kill her?”

“I’m hearing that the doctor gave Rheta gifts, treated her like a family member.”

Verna Duncan shrugged, putting some muscle into her slaw-making efforts. “There was no love lost between them. You’re aware that Earle ran around on her?”

“Yes.”

̶

“Well, that sort of thing is hard on a girl’s self-esteem. I helped her get over it as much as I could.”

“How?”

She smiled slyly over her shoulder. “I’m a divorcee, Mr. Heller. And divorcees know how to have a good time. Care for a taste?”

She was offering me a forkful of slaw.

“That’s nice,” I said, savoring it. “Nice bite to it. So, you and Rheta went out together? Was she seeing other men, then?”

“Of course she was. Why shouldn’t she?”

“Anyone in particular?”

“Her music teacher. Violin instructor. Older man, very charming. But he died of a heart attack four months ago. It hit her hard.”

“How did she handle it?”

“Well, she didn’t shoot herself in the back over it, if that’s what you’re thinking! She was morose for about a month…then she just started to date all of a sudden. I encouraged her, and she came back to life again.”

“Why didn’t she just divorce Earle?”

“Why, Mr. Heller…she was a good Catholic girl.”

She asked me to stay for supper, but I declined, despite the tempting aroma of her corned beef and cabbage, and the tang of her slaw. I had another engagement, at a drugstore at Madison and Kedzie.

While I waited for Officer March to show up, I questioned the pharmacist behind the back counter.

“Sure I remember Miss Shaunesey stopping by that night,” he said. “But I don’t understand why she did.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, Dr. Wynekoop herself stopped in a week before, to fill a similar prescription, and I told her our stock was low.”

“She probably figured you’d’ve got some in by then,” I said.

“The doctor knows we only get a shipment in once a month.”

I was mulling that over at the lunch counter when Officer March arrived. He was in his late twenties and blond and much too fresh-faced for a Chicago cop.

“Nate Heller,” he said, with a grin. “I’ve heard about you.”

We shook hands.

“Don’t believe everything Captain Stege tells you,” I said.

He took the stool next to me, took off his cap. “I know Stege thinks you’re poison. But that’s ‘cause he’s an old-timer. Me, I’m glad you helped expose those two crooked bastards.”

“Let’s not get carried away, Officer March. What’s the point of being a cop in this town if you can’t take home a little graft now and then?”

“Sure,” March said. “But those guys were killers. West Side bootleggers.”

“I’m a West Side boy myself,” I said.

“So I understand. So what’s your interest in the Wynekoop case?”

“The family hired me to help clear the old gal. Do you think she did it?”

He made a clicking sound in his cheek. “Hard one to call. She seemed pretty shook up, at the scene.”

“Shook up like a grieved family member, or a murderer?”

“I couldn’t read it.”

“Order yourself a sandwich and then tell me about it.”

He did. The call had come in at nine-fifty-nine over the police radio, about five blocks away from where he and his partner were patrolling.

“The girl’s body was lying on that table,” March said. “She was resting on her left front side with her left arm under her, with the right forearm extending upward so that her hand was about on a level with her chin, with her head on a white pillow. Her face was almost out of sight, but I could see that her mouth and nose were resting on a wet, crumpled towel. She’d been bleeding from the mouth.”

“She was covered up, I understand,” I said.

“Yes. I drew the covers down carefully, and saw that she’d been shot through the left side of the back. Body was cold. Dead about six hours, I’d guess.”

“But that’s just a guess.”

“Yeah. The coroner can’t nail it all that exact. It can be a few hours either direction, you know.”

“No signs of a struggle.”

“None. That girl laid down on that table herself—maybe at gun point, but whatever the case, she did it herself. Her clothes were lying about the floor at the foot of the examination table, dropped, not thrown, just as though she’d undressed in a leisurely fashion.”

“What about the acid burns on the girl’s face?”

“She was apparently chloroformed before she was shot. You know, that confession Stege got out of Dr. Wynekoop, that’s how she said she did it.”

The counterman brought us coffee.

“I’ll be frank, officer,” I said, sipping the steaming java. “I just came on this job. I haven’t had a chance to go down to a newspaper morgue and read the text of that confession.”

He shrugged. “Well, it’s easily enough summed up. She said her daughter-in-law was always wanting physical examinations. That afternoon, she went downstairs with the doctor for an exam, and first off, stripped, to weigh herself. She had a sudden pain in her side and Dr. Wynekoop suggested a whiff of chloroform as an anesthetic. The doc said she massaged the girl’s side for about fifteen minutes, and…”

“I’m remembering this from the papers,” I said, nodding. “She claimed the girl ‘passed away’ on the examining table, and she panicked. Figured her career would be ruined, if it came out she’d accidentally killed her own daughter-in-law with an overdose of chloroform.”

“Right. And then she remembered the old revolver in the desk, and fired a shot into the girl and tried to make it look like a robbery.”

The counterman came and refilled our coffee cups.

“So,” I said, “what do you make of the confession?”

“I think it’s bullshit any way you look at it. Hell, she was grilled for almost three days, Heller—you know how valid that kind of confession is.”

I sipped my coffee. “She may have thought her son was guilty, and was covering up for him.”

“Well, her confession was certainly a self-serving one. After all, if she was telling the truth—or even if her confession was made up outa whole cloth, but got taken at face value—it’d make her guilty of nothing more than involuntary manslaughter.”

I nodded. “Shooting a corpse isn’t a felony.”

“But she had to know her son didn’t do it.”

“Why?”

March smirked. “He sent her a telegram; he was in Peoria, a hundred and ninety miles away.”

“Telegram? When did she receive this telegram?”

“Late afternoon. Funny thing, though.”

“Oh?”

“Initially, Dr. Wynekoop said she’d seen Earle last on November twelfth, when he left on a trip to the Grand Canyon, to take some photographs. But Earle came back to Chicago on the nineteenth, two days before the murder.”

I damn near spilled my coffee. “What?”

March nodded emphatically. “He and his mother met at a restaurant, miles from home. They were seen sitting in a back booth, having an intense, animated, but hushed, conversation.”

“But you said Earle was in Peoria when his wife was killed…”

“He was. He left Chicago, quietly, the next day—drove to Peoria. And from Peoria he went to Kansas City.”

“Do his alibis hold up? Peoria isn’t Mars; he could’ve established an alibi and made a round trip…”

“I thought you were working for the family?”

“I am. But if I proved Earle did it, they’d spring his mother.”

March laughed hollowly. “She’d be pissed off at you, partner.”

“I know. But I already got their retainer. So. Tell me. What did you hold back from the papers?”

It was standard practice to keep back a few details in a murder case; that helped clear up confessions from crazy people.

“I shouldn’t,” he said.

I handed him a folded fin.

He slipped it in the breast poket of his uniform blouse.

“Hope for you yet,” I said.

“Two items of interest,” March said softly. “There were three bullets fired from that gun.”

“Three? But Rheta was shot only once…”

“Right.”

“Were the other bullets found?”

“No. We took that examining room apart. Then we took the house apart. Nothing.”

“What do you make of that?”

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask Stege…if you got nerve enough.”

“You said two things.”

March swallowed slowly. “This may not even come out at the trial. It’s not necessarily good for the prosecution.”

“Spill.”

“The coroner’s physician picked up on something of interest, even before the autopsy.”

“What?”

“Rheta had syphilis.”

“Jesus. You’re kidding!”

“A very bad dose.”

I sat and pondered that.

“We asked Earle to submit to a physical,” March said, “and he consented.”

“And?”

“And he’s in perfect health.”

I took the El back to the Loop and got off at Van Buren and Plymouth, where I had an office on the second floor of the corner building. I lived there, since I kept an eye on the building in lieu of paying rent. Before I went up, I drank in the bar downstairs for half an hour so, chatting with bartender Buddy Gold, who was a friend. I asked him if he was following the Wynekoop case in the papers.

“That old broad is innocent,” the lumpy-faced ex-boxer said. “It’s a crime what they’re doin’ to her.”

“What are they doing to her?”

“I saw her picture in the paper, in that jailhouse hospital bed. Damn shame, nice woman like that, with her charities and all.”

“What about the dead girl? Maybe she was ‘nice.’”

“Yeah, but some dope fiend did it. Why don’t they find him and put him in jail?”

I said that was a good idea and had another beer. Then I went up to my office and pulled down the Murphy bed and flopped. It had been a long, weird day. I’d earned my fifteen bucks.

The phone woke me. When I opened my eyes, it was morning but the light filtering in around the drawn shades was gray. It would be a cold one. I picked up the receiver on the fifth ring.

“A-1 Detective Agency,” I said.

“Nathan Heller?” a gravelly maleoice demanded.

I sat on the edge of the desk, rubbing my eyes. “Speaking.”

“This is Captain John Stege.”

I slid off the desk. “What can I do for you?”

“Steer clear of my case, you son of a bitch.”

“What case is that, Captain?”

Stege was a white-haired fireplug with dark-rimmed glasses, a meek-looking individual who could scare the hell out of you when he felt like it. He felt like it.

“You stay out of the goddamn Wynekoop case. I won’t have you mucking it up.”

How did he even know I was on the case? Had Officer March told him?

“I was hired by the family to try to help clear Dr. Wynekoop. It’s hardly uncommon for a defendant in a murder case to hire an investigator.”

“Dr. Alice Lindsay Wynekoop murdered her daughter-in-law! It couldn’t be any other way.”

“Captain, it could be a lot of other ways. It could be one of her boy friends; it could be one of her husband’s girl friends. It could be a break-in artist looking for drugs. It could be…”

“Are you telling me how to do my job?”

“Well, you’re telling me how not to do mine.”

There was a long pause.

Then Stege said: “I don’t like you, Heller. You stay out of my way. You go manufacturing evidence, and I’ll introduce you to every rubber hose in this town…and I know plenty of ’em.”

“You have the wrong idea about me, Captain,” I said. “And you may have the wrong idea about Alice Wynekoop.”

“Bull! She insured young Rheta for five grand, fewer than thirty days before the girl’s death. With double indemnity, the policy pays ten thousand smackers.”

I hadn’t heard about this.

“The Wynekoops have money,” I said. “A murder-for-insurance-money scheme makes no sense for a well-to-do family like that…”

“Dr. Wynekoop owes almost five thousand dollars back taxes and has over twenty thousand dollars in overdue bank notes. She’s prominent, but she’s not wealthy. She got hit in the crash.”

“Well…”

“She killed her daughter-in-law to make her son happy, and to collect the insurance money. If you were worth two cents as a detective, you’d know that.”

“Speaking of detective work, Captain, how did you know I was on this case?”

“Don’t you read the papers?”

The papers had me in them, all right. A small story, but well placed, on several front pages in fact; under a picture of Earle seated at his mother’s side in the jail hospital, the News told how the Wynekoops had hired a local private inestigator, one Nathan Heller, to help prove Dr. Alice’s innocence.

I called Earle Wynekoop and asked him to meet me at the County Jail hospital wing. I wanted to talk to both of my clients.

On the El, I thought about how I had intended to pursue this case. Having done the basic groundwork with the family and witnesses, I would begin searching for the faceless break-in artist whose burglary had got out of hand, leading to the death of Rheta Wynekoop. Never mind that it made no sense for a thief to take a gun from a rolltop desk, make his victim un-dress, shoot her in the back, tuck her in like a child at bedtime, and leave the gun behind. Criminals did crazy things, after all. I would spend three or four days sniffing around the West Side pawn shops and re-sale shops, and the Maxwell Street market, looking for a lead on any petty crook whose drug addiction might lead to violence. I would comb the flophouses and bars hopheads were known to frequent, and….

But I had changed my mind, at least for the moment.

Earle was at his mother’s bedside when the matron left me there. Dr. Alice smiled in her tight, business-like manner and offered me a hand to shake; I took it. Earle stood and nodded and smiled nervously at me. I nodded to him, and he sat again.

But I stayed on my feet.

“I’m off this case,” I said.

“What?” Earle said, eyes wide.

Dr. Alice remained calm. Her appraising eyes were as cold as the weather.

“Captain Stege suggested it,” I said.

“That isn’t legal!” Earle said.

“Quiet, Earle,” his mother said, sternly but with gentleness.

“That’s not why I’m quitting,” I said. “And I’m keeping the retainer, too, by the way.”

“Now that isn’t legal!” Earle said, standing.

“Shut-up,” I said to him. To her, I said: “You two used me. I’m strictly a publicity gimmick. To help you make you look sincere, to help you keep up a good front…just like staying in the jail’s hospital ward, so you can pose for pitiful newspaper pics.”

Dr. Alice blinked and smiled thinly. “You’re revealing an obnoxious side, Mr. Heller, that is unbecoming.”

“You killed your daughter-in-law, Dr. Wynekoop. For Sonny Boy, here.”

Earle’s face clenched like a fist, and he clenched his fists, too, while he was at it. “I ought to…”

I looked at him hard. “I wish to hell you would.”

His eyes flickered at me, then he glanced at his mother. She nodded and motioned for him to sit again, and he did.

“Mr. Heller,” she said, “I assure you, I am innocent. I don’t know what you’ve been told that gave you this very false impression, but…”

“Save it. I know what happened, and why. You discovered, in one of your frequent on-the-house examinations of your hypochondriac daghter-in-law, that she really was ill. Specifically, she had a social disease.”

Anger flared in the doctor’s eyes.

“You could forgive Earle all his philandering…even though you didn’t approve. You did ask your daughter to talk to him about his excesses of drink and dames. But those were just misdemeanors. For your husband’s wife to run around, to get a nasty disease that she might just pass along to your beloved boy, should their marriage ever heat up again, well, that was a crime. And it deserved punishment.”

“Mr. Heller, why don’t you go. You may keep your retainer, if you keep your silence.”

“Oh, hitting a little close to home, am I? Well, let me finish. You paid for this. I don’t think it was your idea to kill Rheta, despite the dose of syph she was carrying. I think it was Earle’s idea. She wouldn’t give him a divorce, good Catholic girl that she was, and Earle’s a good Catholic, too, after all. It’d be hell to get excommunicated, right, Earle? Right, Mom?”

Earle was shaking; his hands clasped, prayerfully. Dr. Wynekoop’s wrinkled face was a stern mask.

“Here’s what happened,” I said, cheerfully. “Earle came to you and asked you to put the little woman to sleep…she was a tortured girl, after all, if it were done painlessly, why, it would be a merciful act. But you refused—you’re a doctor, a healer. It wouldn’t be right.”

Earle’s eyes were shifting from side to side in confirmation of my theory.

I forged ahead: “But Earle came to you again, and said, Mother dear, if you don’t do it, I will. I’ve found father’s old .32, and I’ve tried it…fired two test rounds. It works, and I know how to work it. I’m going to kill Rheta myself.”

Earle’s eyes were wide as was his mouth. I must have come very, very close, even perhaps to his very language. Dr. Alice continued to maintain a poker face.

“So, Mom, you decided to take matters in hand. When Earle came back early from his Grand Canyon photo trip, the two of you rendezvoused away from home—though you were seen, unfortunately—and came up with a plan. Earle would resume his trip, only go no farther than Peoria, where he would establish an alibi.”

Earle’s face was contorted as he took in every damning word.

“On the day of the murder,” I told her, “you had a final private consultation with your daughter-in-law…you overdosed her with chloroform, or smothered her.”

“Mr. Heller,” Dr. Alice said icily, looking away from me, “this fantasy of yours holds no interest whatsoever for me.”

“Well, maybe so—but Earle’s all perked up. Anyway, you left the body downstairs, closing the examining room door, locking it probably, and went on about the business of business as usual…cooking supper for your roomer, spending a quiet evening with her…knowing that Earle would be back after dark, to quietly slip in and, what? Dispose of the body somehow. That was the plan, wasn’t it? The unhappy bride would just disappear. Or perhaps turn up dead in ditch, or…whatever. Only it didn’t happen that way. Because Snny Boy chickened out.”

And now Dr. Alice broke form, momentarily, her eyes turning on Earle for just a moment, giving him one nasty glance, the only time I ever saw her look at the louse with anything but devotion.

“He sent you a telegram in the afternoon, letting you know that he was still in Peoria. And that he was going to stay in Peoria. And you, with a corpse in the basement. Imagine.”

“You have a strange sense of humor, Mr. Heller.”

“You have a strange way of practicing medicine, Dr. Wynekoop. You sent your roomer, Miss Shaunesey, on a fool’s errand—sending her to a drug store where you knew the prescription couldn’t be filled. And you knew conscientious Miss Shaunesey would try another drug store, buying you time.”

“Really,” Dr. Alice said, dryly.

“Really. That’s when you concocted the burglary story. You’re too frail, physically, to go hauling a corpse anywhere. But you remembered that gun, across the hall. So you shot your dead daughter-in-law, adding insult to injury, and faked the robbery—badly, but it was impromptu, after all.”

“I don’t have to listen to this!” Earle said.

“Then don’t,” I said. “What you didn’t remember, Dr. Wynekoop, is that two bullets had already been fired from that weapon, when Earle tested it. And that little anomaly bothered me.”

“Did it,” she said, flatly.

“It did. Your daughter-in-law’s syphilis; the two missing bullets; and the hour you spent alone in the house, while the roomer was away and Rheta was dead in your examining room. Those three factors added up to one thing: your guilt, and your son’s complicity.”

“Are you going to tell your story to anyone?” she asked, blandly.

“No,” I said. “You’re my client.”

“How much?” Earle said, with a nasty, nervous little sneer.

I held my hands up, palms out. “No more. I’m keeping my retainer. I earned it.”

I turned my back on them and began to walk away.

From behind me, I heard her say, with no irony whatsoever, “Thank you, Mr. Heller.”

I turned and looked at her and laughed. “Hey, you’re going to jail, lady. The cops and the D.A. won’t need me to get it done, and all the good publicity you cook up won’t change a thing. I have only one regret.”

I made them ask.

Earle took the honors.

“What’s that?” Earle asked, as he stood there trembling; his mother reached her hand out and patted his nearest hand, soothing him.

I smiled at him—the nastiest smile I could muster. “That you won’t be going to jail with her, you son of a bitch.”

And go to jail she did.

But it took a while. A most frail-looking Dr. Alicecarried into the courtroom on the opening day of the trial; still playing for sympathy in the press, I figured.

Then, after eight days of evidence, Dr. Alice had an apparent heart seizure, when the prosecution hauled the blood-stained examination table into court. A mistrial was declared. When she recovered, though, she got a brand-new one. The press milked the case for all its worth; public opinion polls in the papers indicated half of Chicago considered Dr. Alice guilty, and the other half thought her innocent. The jury, however, was unanimous—it took them only fifteen minutes to find her guilty and two hours to set the sentence at twenty-five years.

Earle didn’t attend the trial. They say that just as Dr. Alice was being ushered in the front gate at the Woman’s Reformatory at Dwight, Illinois, an unshaven, disheveled figure darted from the nearby bushes. Earle kissed his mother goodbye and she brushed away his tears. As usual.

She served thirteen years, denying her guilt all the way; she was released with time off for good behavior. She died on July 4, 1955, in a nursing home, under an assumed name.

Earle changed his name, too. What became of him, I can’t say. There were rumors, of course. One was that he had found work as a garage mechanic.

Another was that he had finally re-married—a beautiful redhead.

Dr. Catherine Wynekoop did not change her name, and went on to a distinguished medical career.

And the house at 3406 West Monroe, the Death Clinic, was torn down in 1947. The year Dr. Alice was released.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Research materials for this fact-based story include “The Wynekoop Case” in The Chicago Crime Book (1947) by Craig Rice; “Who Killed Rheta Wynekoop?” by Harry Read in Real Detective magazine, April 1934; and “The Justice Story,” a 1987 New York Daily News column by Joseph McNamara.

She was the first movie star I ever worked for, but I wasn’t much impressed. If I were that easily impressed, I’d have been impressed by Hollywood itself. And having seen the way Hollywood portrayed my profession on the so-called silver screen, I wasn’t much impressed with Hollywood.

On the other hand, Thelma Todd was the most beautiful woman who ever wanted to hire my services, and that did impress me. Enough so that when she called me, that October, and asked me to drive out to her “sidewalk café” nestled under the Palisades in Montemar Vista, I went, wondering if she would be as pretty in the flesh as she was on celluloid.

I’d driven out Pacific Coast Highway that same morning, a clear cool morning with a blue sky lording it over a vast sparkling sea. Pelicans were playing tag with the breaking surf, flying just under the curl of the white-lipped waves. Yachts, like a child’s toy boats, floated out there just between me and the horizon. I felt like I could reach out for one, pluck and examine it, sniff it maybe, like King Kong checking out Fay Wray’s lingerie.

“Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café,” as a billboard on the hillside behind it so labeled the place, was a sprawling two-story hacienda affair, as big as a beached luxury liner. Over its central, largest-of-many archways, a third-story tower rose like a stubby lighthouse. There weren’t many cars here—it was approaching ten a.m., too early for the luncheon crowd and even I didn’t drink cocktails this early in the day. Not and tell, anyway.

She was waiting in the otherwise unpopulated cocktail lounge, where massive wooden beams in a traditional Spanish mode fought the chromium-and-leather furnishings and the chrome-and-glass-brick bar and came out a draw. She was a big blonde woman with more curves than the highway out front and just the right number of hills and valleys. Wearing a clingy summery white dress, she was seated on one of the bar stools, with her bare legs crossed; they weren’t the best-looking legs on the planet, necessarily. I just couldn’t prove otherwise. That good a detective I’m not.

“Nathan Heller?” she asked, and her smile dimpled her cheeks in a manner that made her whole heart-shaped face smile, and the world smile as well, including me. She didn’t move off the stool, just extended her hand in a manner that was at once casual and regal.

I took the hand, not knowing whether to kiss it, shake it, or press it into a book like a corsage I wanted to keep. I looked at her feeling vaguely embarrassed; she was so pretty you didn’t know where to look next, and felt like there was maybe something wrong with looking anywhere. But I couldn’t help myself.

She had pale, creamy skin and her hair was almost white blonde. They called her the ice-cream blonde, in the press. I could see why.

Then I got around to her eyes. They were blue of course, cornflower blue; and big and sporting long lashes, the real McCoy, not your dimestore variety. But they were also the saddest eyes I’d ever looked into. The smile froze on my face like I was looking at Medusa, not a twenty-nine year-old former six-grade teacher from Massachusetts who won a talent search.

“Is something wrong?” she asked. Then she patted the stool next to her.

I sat and said, “Nothing’s wrong. I never had a movie star for a client before.”

“I see. Thanks for considering this job—for extending your stay, I mean.”

I was visiting L.A. from Chicago because a friend—a fellow former pickpocket detail dick—had recently opened an office out here in sunny Southern Cal. Fred Rubinski needed an out-of-towner to pose as a visiting banker, to expose an embezzler; the firm had wanted to keep the affair in-house.

“Mr. Rubinski recommended you highly.” Her voice had a low, throaty quality that wasn’t forced or affected; she was what Mae West would’ve been if Mae West wasn’t a parody.

“That’s just because Fred hasn’t been in town long enough to make any connections. But if Thelma Todd wants me to consider extending my stay, I’m willing to listen.”

She smiled at that, very broadly, showing off teeth whiter than cameras can record. “Might I get you a drink, Mr. Heller?”

“It’s a little early.”

“I know it is. Might I get you a drink?”

“Sure.”

“Anything special?”

“Anything that doesn’t have a little paper umbrella in it is fine by me…. Make it rum and Coke.”

“Rum and Coke.” She fixed me up with that, and had the same herself. Either we had similar tastes or she just wasn’t fussy about what she drank.

“Have you heard of Lucky Luciano?” she asked, returning to her bar stool.

“Heard of him,” I said. “Haven’t met him.”

“What do you know about him?”

I shrugged. “Big-time gangster from back east. Runs casinos all over southern California. More every day.”

She flicked the air with a long red fingernail, like she was shooing away a bug. “Well, perhaps you’ve noticed the tower above my restaurant.”

“Sure.”

“I live on the second floor, but the tower above is fairly spacious.”

“Big enough for a casino, you mean.”

“That’s right,” she said, nodding. “I was approached by Luciano, more than once. I turned him away, more than once. After all, with my location, and my clientele, a casino could make a killing.”

“You’re doing well enough legally. Why bother with ill?”

“I agree. And if I were to get into any legal problems, that would mean a scandal, and Hollywood doesn’t need another scandal. Busby Berkley’s trial is coming up soon, you know.”

The noted director and choreographer, creator of so many frothy fantasies, was up on the drunk-driving homicide of three pedestrians, not far from this café.

“But now,” she said, her bee-lips drawn nervously tight, “I’ve begun to receive threatening notes.”

“From Luciano, specifically?”

“No. They’re extortion notes, actually. Asking me to pay off Artie Lewis. You know, the bandleader?”

“Why him?”

“He’s in Luciano’s pocket. Gambling markers. And I used to go with Artie. He lives in San Francisco, now.”

“I see. Well, have you talked to the cops?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to get Artie in trouble.”

“Have you talked to Artie?”

“Yes—he claims he knows nothing about this. He doesn’t want my money. He doesn’t even want me back—he’s got a new girl.”

I’d like to see the girl that could make you forget Thelma Todd.

“So,” I said, “you want me to investigate. Can I see the extortion notes?”

“No,” she said, shaking her white blonde curls like the mop of the gods, “that’s not it. I burned those notes. For Artie’s sake.”

“Well, for Nate’s sake,” I said, “where do I come in?”

“I think I’m being followed. I’d like a bodyguard.”

I resisted looking her over wolfishly and making a wise-crack. She was a nice woman, and the fact that hers was the sort of a body a private eye would pay to guard didn’t seem worth mentioning. My fee did.

“Twenty-five a day and expenses,” I said.

“Fine,” she said. “And you can have any meals you like right here at the Café. Drinks, too. Run a tab and I’ll pick it up.”

“Swell,” I grinned. “I was wondering if I’d ever run into a fringe benefit in this racket.”

“You can be my chauffeur.”

“Well…”

“You have a problem with that, Mr. Heller?”

“I have a private investigator’s license, and a license to carry a gun…in Illinois, anyway. But I don’t have a chauffeur’s license.”

“I think a driver’s license will suffice.” Her bee-stung lips were poised in a kiss of amusement. “What’s the real problem, Heller?”

“I’m not wearing a uniform. I’m strictly plainclothes.”

She smiled tightly, wryly amused, saying, “All right, hang onto your dignity…but you have to let me pay the freight on a couple of new suits for you. I’ll throw ’em in on the deal.”

“Swell,” I said. I liked it when women bought me clothes.

So for the next two months, I stayed on in southern Cal, and Thelma Todd was my only client. I worked six days a week for her—Monday through Saturday. Sundays God, Heller and Todd rested. I drove her in her candy-apple red Packard convertible, a car designed for blondes with wind-blown hair and pearls. She sat in back, of course. Most days I took her to the Hal Roach Studio where she was making a musical with Laurel and Hardy. I’d wait in some dark pocket of the sound studio and watch her every move out in the brightness. In a black wig, lacy bodice, and clinging, gypsy skirt, Thelma was the kind of girl you took home to Mother, and if Mother didn’t like her, to hell with Mother.

Evenings she hit the club circuit, the Trocadero and the El Mocambo chiefly. I’d sit in the cocktail lounges and quietly drink and wait for her and her various dates to head home. Some of these guys were swishy types that she was doing the studio a favor appearing in public with; a couple others spent the night.

I don’t mean to tell tales out of school, but this tale can’t be told at all unless I’m frank about that one thing: Thelma slept around. Later, when the gossip rags were spreading rumors about alcohol and drugs, that was all the bunk. But Thelma was a friendly girl. She had generous charms and enerous with them.

“Heller,” she said, one night in early December when I was dropping her off, walking her up to the front door of the Café like always, “I think I have a crush on you.”

She was alone tonight, having played girl friend to one of those Hollywood funny boys for the benefit of Louella Parsons and company. Alone but for me.

She slipped an arm around my waist. She had booze on her breath, but then so did I, and neither one of us was drunk. She was bathed gently in moonlight and Chanel Number Five.

She kissed me with those bee-stung lips, stinging so softly, so deeply.

I moved away. “No. I’m sorry.”

She winced. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m the hired help. You’re just lonely tonight.”

Her eyes, which I seldom looked into because of the depth of the sadness there, hardened. “Don’t you ever get lonely, you bastard?”

“Never,” I said.

She drew her hand back to slap me, but then she just touched my face, instead. Gentle as the ocean breeze, and it was gentle tonight, the breeze, so gentle.

“Goodnight, Heller,” she said.

And she slipped inside, but left the door slightly ajar.

“What the hell,” I said, and I slipped inside, too.

An hour later, I drove her Packard to the garage that was attached to the bungalow above the restaurant complex; to do that I had to take Montemar Vista Road to Seretto Way, turning right. The Mediterranean-style stucco bungalow, on Cabrillo, like so many houses in Montemar Vista, climbed the side of the hill like a clinging vine. It was owned by Thelma Todd’s partner in the Café, movie director/producer Warren Eastman. Eastman had an apartment next to Thelma’s above the restaurant, as well as the bungalow, and seemed to live back and forth between the two.

I wondered what the deal was, with Eastman and my client, but I never asked, not directly. Eastman was a thin, dapper man in his late forties, with a pointed chin and a small mustache and a window’s peak that his slick black hair was receding around, making his face look diamond shaped. He often sat in the cocktail lounge with a bloody Mary in one hand and a cigarette in a holder in the other. He was always talking deals with movie people.

“Heller,” he said, one night, motioning me over to the bar. He was seated on the very stool that Thelma had been, that first morning. “This is Nick DeCiro, the talent agent. Nick, this is the gumshoe Thelma hired to protect her from the big bad gambling syndicate.”

DeCiro was another darkly handsome man, a bit older than Eastman, though he lacked both the mustache and receding hairline of the director. DeCiro wore a white suit with a dark sportshirt, open at the neck to reveal a wealth of black chest hair.

I shook DeCiro’s hand. His grip was firm, moist, like a fistful of topsoil.

“Nicky here is your client’s ex-husband,” Eastman said, with a wag of his cigarette-in-holder, trying for an air of that effortless deence that Hollywood works so hard at.

“Thelma and me are still pals,” DeCiro said, lighting up a foreign cig with a shiny silver lighter that he then clicked shut with a meaningless flourish. “We broke up amicably.”

“I heard it was over extreme cruelty,” I said.

DeCiro frowned, and Eastman cut in glibly, “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, Heller. Besides, you have to get a divorce over something.”

“But then you’d know that in your line of work,” DeCiro said, an edge in his thin voice.

“Don’t knock it,” I said with my own edge. “Where would your crowd be without divorce dicks? Now, if you gents will excuse me…”

“Heller, Heller,” Eastman said, touching my arm, “don’t be so touchy.”

I waited for him to remove his hand from my arm, then said, “Did you want something, Mr. Eastman? I’m not much for this Hollywood shit-chat.”

“I don’t like your manner,” DeCiro said.

“Nobody does,” I said. “But I don’t get paid well enough for it to matter.”

“Heller,” Eastman said, “I was just trying to convince Nicky here that my new film is perfect for a certain client of his. I’m doing a mystery. About the perfect crime. The perfect murder.”

“No such animal,” I said.

“Oh, really?” DeCiro said, lifting an eyebrow.

“Murder and crime are inexact sciences. All the planning in the world doesn’t account for the human element.”

“Then how do you explain,” Eastman said archly, “the hundreds of murders that go unsolved in this country?”

“Policework is a more exact science than crime or murder,” I admitted, “but we have a lot of bent cops in this world—and a lot of dumb ones.”

“Then there are perfect crimes.”

“No. Just unsolved ones. And imperfect detectives. Good evening, gentlemen.”

That was the most extensive conversation I had with either Eastman or DeCiro during the time I was employed by Miss Todd, though I said hello and they did the same, now and then, at the Café.

But Eastman was married to an actress named Miranda Diamond, a fiery Latin whose parents were from Mexico City, even if she’d been raised in the Bronx. She fancied herself as the next Lupe Velez, and she was a similarly voluptuous dame, though her handsome features were as hard as a gravestone.

She cornered me at the Café one night, in the cocktail lounge, where I was drinking on the job.

“You’re a dick,” she said.

We’d never spoken before.

“I hope you mean that in the nicest way,” I said.

“You’re bodyguarding that bitch,” she said, sitting next to me on a leather and chrome couch. Her nostrils flared; if I’d been holding a red cape, I’d have dropped it and run for the stands.

“Miss Todd is my client, yes, Miss Diamond.”

She smiled. “You recognize me.”

“Oh yes. And I also know enough to call you Mrs. Eastman, in certain company.”

“My husband and I are separated.”

“Ah.”

“But I could use a little help in the divorce court.”

“What kind of help?”

“Photographs of him and that bitch in the sack.” She said “the” like “thee.”

“That would help you.”

“Yes. You see…my husband has similar pictures of me, with a gentleman, in a compromising position.”

“Even missionaries get caught in that position, I understand.” I offered her a cigarette, she took it, and I lit hers and mine. “And if you had similar photos, you could negotiate yourself a better settlement.”

“Exactly. Interested?”

“I do divorce work—that’s no problem. But I try not to sell clients out. Bad for business.”

She smiled; she put her hand on my leg. “I could make it worth your while. Financially and…otherwise.”

It wasn’t even Christmas and already here was a second screen goddess who wanted to hop in the sack with me. I must have really been something.

“Listen, if you like me, just say so. But we’re not making a business arrangement—I got a client, already.”

Then she suggested I do to myself what she’d just offered to do for me. She was full of ideas.

So was I. I was pretty sure Thelma and Eastman were indeed having an affair, but it was of the on-again-off-again variety. One night they’d be affectionate, in that sickening Hollywood sweetie-baby way; the next night he would be cool to her; the next she would be cool to him. It was love, I recognized it, but the kind that sooner or later blows up like an overheated engine.

Ten days before Christmas, Thelma was honored by Lupino Lane—the famous British comedian, so famous I’d never the hell heard of him—with a dinner at the Troc. At a table for twelve upstairs, in the swanky cream-and-gold dining room, Thelma was being feted by her show-biz friends, while I sat downstairs in the oak-paneled Cellar Lounge with other people not famous enough to sit upstairs, nursing a rum and Coke at the polished copper bar. I didn’t feel like a polished copper, that was for sure. I was just a chauffeur with a gun, and a beautiful client who didn’t need me.

That much was clear to me: in the two months I’d worked for Thelma, I hadn’t spotted anybody following her except a few fans, and I couldn’t blame them. I think I was just a little bit in love with the ice-cream blonde myself. We’d only had that one slightly inebriated night togeth#8212;and neither of us had mentioned it since, or even referred to it. Maybe we were both embarrassed; I didn’t figure either of us were exactly the type to be ashamed.

Anyway, she was a client, and she slept around, and neither of those things appealed to me in a girl—though everything else about her, including her money, did.

About half an hour into the evening, I heard a scream upstairs. A woman’s scream, a scream that might have belonged to Thelma.

I took the stairs four at a time and had my gun in my hand when I entered the fancy dining room. Normally when I enter fancy dining rooms with a gun in my hand, all eyes are on me. Not this time.

Thelma was clawing at her ex-husband, who was laughing at her. She was being held back by Patsy Kelly, the dark-haired rubber-faced comedienne who was Thelma’s partner in the two-reelers. DeCiro, in a white tux, had a starlet on his arm, a blonde about twenty with a neckline down to her shoes. The starlet looked frightened, but DeCiro was having a big laugh.

I put my gun away and took over for Patsy Kelly.

“Miss Todd,” I said, gently, whispering into her ear, holding onto her two arms from behind, “don’t do this.”

She went limp for a moment, then straightened and said, with stiff dignity, “I’m all right, Nathan.”

It was the only time she ever called me that.

I let go of her.

“What’s the problem?” I asked. I was asking both Thelma Todd and her ex-husband.

“He embarrassed me,” she said, without any further explanation.

And without any further anything, I said to DeCiro, “Go.”

DeCiro twitched a smile. “I was invited.”

“I’m uninviting you. Go.”

His face tightened and he thought about saying or doing something. But my eyes were on him like magnets on metal and instead he gathered his date and her decolletage and took a powder.

“Are you ready to go home?” I asked Thelma.

“No,” she said, with a shy smile, and she squeezed my arm, and went back to the table of twelve where her party of Hollywood types awaited. She was the guest of honor, after all.

Two hours, and two drinks later, I was escorting her home. She sat in the back of the candy-apple red Packard in her mink coat and sheer mauve-and-silver evening gown and diamond necklace and told me what had happened, the wind whipping her ice-blonde hair.

“Nicky got himself invited,” she said, almost shouting over the wind. “Without my knowledge. Asked the host to reserve a seat next to me at the table. Then he wandered in late, with a date, that little starlet, which you may have noticed rhymes with harlot, and sat at another table, leaving me sitting next to an empty seat at a party in my honor. He sat there necking with that little tramp and I got up and went over and gave him a piece of my mind. It…got a little out of hand. Thanks for stepping in, Heller.”

“t’s what you pay me for.”

She sat in silence for a while; only the wind spoke. It was a cold Saturday night, as cold as a chilled martini. I had asked her if she wanted the top up on the convertible, but she said no. She began to look behind us as we moved slowly down Sunset.

“Heller,” she said, “someone’s following us.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Somebody’s following us, I tell you!”

“I’m keeping an eye on the rear-view mirror. We’re fine.”

She leaned forward and clutched my shoulder. “Get moving! Do you want me to be kidnapped, or killed? It could be Luciano’s gangsters, for God’s sake!”

She was the boss. I hit the pedal. At speeds up to seventy miles per, we sailed west around the curves of Sunset; there was a service station at the junction of the boulevard and the coast highway, and I pulled in.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

I turned and looked into the frightened blue eyes. “I’m going to get some gas, and keep watch. And see if anybody comes up on us, or suspicious goes by. Don’t you worry. I’m armed.”

I looked close at every car that passed by the station. I saw no one and nothing suspicious. Then I paid the attendant and we headed north on the coast highway. Going nice and slow.

“I ought to fire you,” she said, pouting back there.

“This is my last night, Miss Todd,” I said. “I’m getting homesick for Chicago. They got a better breed of dishonest people back there. Anyway, I like to work for my money. I feel I’m taking yours.”

She leaned forward, clutched my shoulder again. “No, no, I tell you, I’m frightened.”

“Why?”

“I…I just feel I still need you around. You give me a sense of security.”

“Have you had any more threatening notes?”

“No.” Her voice sounded very small, now.

“If you do, call me, or the cops. Or both.”

It was two a.m. when I slid the big car in in front of the sprawling Sidewalk Café. I was shivering with cold; a sea breeze was blowing, Old Man Winter taking his revenge on California. I turned and looked at her again. I smiled.

“I’ll walk you to the door, Miss Todd.”

She smiled at me, too, but this time the smile didn’t light up her face, or the world, or me. This time the smile was as sad as her eyes. Sadder.

“That won’t be necessary, Heller.”

I was looking for an invitation, either in her eyes or her voice; I couldn’t quite find one. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. Do me one favor. Work for me next week. Be my chauffeur one more week, while I decide whether or not to replace you with another bodyard, or…what.”

“Okay.”

“Go home, Heller. See you Monday.”

“See you Monday,” I said, and I watched her go in the front door of the Café. Then I drove the Packard up to the garage above, on the Palisades, and got in my dusty inelegant 1925 Marmon and headed back to the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. I had a hunch Thelma Todd, for all her apprehensions, would sleep sounder than I would, tonight.

My hunch was right, but for the wrong reason.

Monday morning, sunny but cool if no longer cold, I pulled into one of the parking places alongside the Sidewalk Café; it was around ten thirty and mine was the only car. The big front door was locked. I knocked until the Spanish cleaning woman let me in. She said she hadn’t seen Miss Todd yet this morning. I went up the private stairway off the kitchen that led up to the two apartments. The door at the top of the stairs was unlocked; beyond it were the two facing apartment doors. I knocked on hers.

“Miss Todd?”

No answer.

I tried for a while, then went and found the cleaning woman again. “Maria, do you have any idea where Miss Todd might be? She doesn’t seem to be in her room.”

“She might be stay up at Meester Eastmon’s.”

I nodded, started to walk away, then looked back and added as an afterthought, “Did you see her yesterday?”

“I no work Sunday.”

I guess Maria, like God, Heller and Thelma Todd, rested on Sunday. Couldn’t blame her.

I thought about taking the car up and around, then said to hell with it and began climbing the concrete steps beyond the pedestrian bridge that arched over the highway just past the Café. These steps, all two-hundred and eighty of them, straight up the steep hill, were the only direct access from the coast road to the bungalow on Cabrillo Street. Windblown sand had drifted over the steps and the galvanized handrail was as cold and wet as a liar’s handshake.

I grunted my way to the top. I’d started out as a young man, had reached middle age by step one hundred and was now ready for the retirement home. I sat on the cold damp top step and poured sand out of my scuffed-up Florsheims, glad I hadn’t bothered with a shine in the last few weeks. Then I stood and looked past the claustrophobic drop of the steps, to where the sun was reflecting off the sand and sea. The beach was blinding, the ocean dazzling. It was beautiful, but it hurt to look at. A seagull was flailing with awkward grace against the breeze like a fighter losing the last round. Suddenly Lake Michigan seemed like a pond.

Soon I was knocking on Eastman’s front door. No answer. Went to check to see if my client’s car was there, swinging up the black-studded blue garage door. The car was there, all right, the red Packard convertible, next to Eastman’s Lincoln sedan.