Chicago Lightning

My client was there, too.

She was slumped in front, sprawled across the steering wheel. She was still in the mink, the mauve-and-silver gown, and the diamond necklace she’d worn to the Troc Satury night. But her clothes were rumpled, in disarray, like an unmade bed; and there was blood on the front of the gown, coagulated rubies beneath the diamonds. There was blood on her face, on her white, white face.

She’d always had pale creamy skin, but now it was as white as a wedding dress. There was no pulse in her throat. She was cold. She’d been dead a while.

I stood and looked at her and maybe I cried. That’s my business, isn’t it? Then I went out and up the side steps to the loft above the garage and roused the elderly fellow named Jones who lived there; he was the bookkeeper for the Sidewalk Café. I asked him if he had a phone, and he did, and I used it.

I had told my story to the uniformed men four times before the men from Central Homicide showed. The detective in charge was Lieutenant Rondell, a thin, somber, detached man in his mid-forties with smooth creamy gray hair and icy eyes. His brown gabardine suit wasn’t expensive but it was well-pressed. His green pork-pie lightweight felt hat was in his hand, in deference to the deceased. Out of deference to me, he listened to my story as I told it for the fifth time. He didn’t seem to think much of it.

“You’re telling me this woman was murdered,” he said.

“I’m telling you the gambling syndicate boys were pressuring her, and she wasn’t caving in.”

“And you were her bodyguard,” Rondell said.

“Some bodyguard,” said the other man from homicide, Rondell’s brutish shadow, and cracked his knuckles and laughed. We were in the garage and the laughter made hollow echoes off the cement, like a basketball bouncing in an empty stadium.

“I was her bodyguard,” I told Rondell tightly. “But I didn’t work Sundays.”

“And she had to go to Chicago to hire a bodyguard?”

I explained my association with Fred Rubinski, and Rondell nodded several times, seemingly accepting it.

Then Rondell walked over and looked at the corpse in the convertible. A photographer from Homicide was snapping photos; pops and flashes of light accompanied the detective’s trip around the car as if he were a star at a Hollywood opening.

I went outside. The smell of death is bad enough when it’s impersonal; when somebody you know has died, it’s like having asthma in a steam room.

Rondell found me leaning against the side of the stucco garage.

“It looks like suicide,” he said.

“Sure. It’s supposed to.”

He lifted an eyebrow and a shoulder. “The ignition switch is turned on. Carbon monoxide.”

“Car wasn’t running when I got here.”

“Long since ran out of gas, most likely. If what you say is true, she’s been there since Saturday night…that is, early Sunday morning.”

I shrugged. “She’s wearing the same clothes, at least.”

“When we fix time of death, it’ll all come clear.”

“Oh, yeah? See what the coroner has to say about that.”

Rondell’s icy eyes froze further. “Why?”

“This cold snap we’ve had, last three days. It’s warmer this morning, but Sunday night, Jesus. That sea breeze was murder—if you’ll pardon the expression.”

Rondell nodded. “Perhaps cold enough to retard decomposition, you mean.”

“Perhaps.”

He pushed the pork pie back on his head. “We need to talk to this bird Eastman.”

“I’ll say. He’s probably at his studio. Paramount. When he’s on a picture, they pick him up by limo every morning before dawn.”

Rondell went to use the phone in old man Jones’ loft flat. Rondell’s brutish sidekick exited the garage and slid his arm around the shoulder of a young uniformed cop, who seemed uneasy about the attention.

“Ice cream blonde, huh?” the big flatfoot said. “I woulda liked a coupla of scoops of that myself.”

I tapped the brute on the shoulder and he turned to me and said, “Huh?”, stupidly, and I cold-cocked him. He went down like a building.

But not out, though. “You’re gonna pay for that, you bastard,” he said, sounding like the school-yard bully he was. He touched the blood in the corner of his mouth, hauled himself up off the cement. “In this, town, you go to goddamn jail when you hit a goddamn cop!”

“You’d need a witness, first,” I said.

“I got one,” he said, but when he turned to look, the young uniformed cop was gone.

I walked up to him and stood damn near belt buckle to belt buckle and smiled a smile that had nothing to do with smiling. “Want to go another round, see if a witness shows?”

He tasted blood and fluttered his eyes like a girl and said something unintelligible and disappeared back inside the garage.

Rondell came clopping down the wooden steps and stood before me and smiled firmly. “I just spoke with Eastman. We’ll interview him more formally, of course, but the preliminary interrogation indicates a possible explanation.” “Oh?”

He was nodding. “Yeah. Apparently Saturday night he bolted the stairwell door around midnight. It’s a door that leads to both apartments up top the Sidewalk Café. Said he thought Miss Todd had mentioned she was going to sleep over at her mother’s that night.”

“You mean, she couldn’t get in?”

“Right.”

“Well, hell, man, she would’ve knocked.”

“Eastman says if she did, he didn’t hear her. He says there was high wind and pounding surf all night; he figures that drowned out all other sounds.”

I smirked. “Does he, really? So what’s your scenario?”

“Well, when Miss Todd found she couldn’t get into her apartment, she must’ve decided to climb the steps to the street above, walked to the garage and spent the rest of the night in her car. She must’ve have gotten cold, and switched on the ignition to keep warm, and the fumes got her.”

I sighed. “A minute ago you were talking suicide.”

“That’s still a possibility.”

“What about the blood on her face and dress?”

He shrugged. “She may have fallen across the wheel and cut her mouth, when she fell unconscious.”

“Look, if she wanted to get warm, why would she sit in her open convertible? That Lincoln sedan next to her is unlocked and has the keys in it.”

“I can’t answer that—yet.”

I was shaking my head. Then I pointed at him. “Ask the elderly gent upstairs if he heard her opening the garage door, starting up the Packard’s cold engine sometime between two a.m. and dawn. Ask him!”

“I did. He didn’t. But it was a windy night, and…”

“Yeah, and the surf was crashing something fierce. Right. Let’s take a look at her shoes.”

“Huh?”

I pointed down to my scuffed-up Florsheims. “I just scaled those two-hundred-and-eighty steps. This shoeshine boy’s nightmare is the result. Let’s see if she walked up those steps.”

Rondell nodded and led me into the garage. The print boys hadn’t been over the vehicle yet, so the Lieutenant didn’t open the door on the rider’s side, he just leaned carefully in.

Then he stood and contemplated what he’d seen. For a moment he seemed to have forgotten me, then he said, “Have a look yourself.”

I had one last look at the beautiful woman who’d driven to nowhere in this immobile car.

She wore delicate silver dress heels; they were as pristine as Cinderella’s glass slippers.

The Coroner at the inquest agreed with me on one point: “The high winds and very low cold prevailing that week-end would have preserved the body beyond the usual time required for decomposition to set in.”

The inquest was, otherwise, a bundle of contradictions, and about as inconclusive as the virgin birth. A few new, sinister facts emerged. She had bruises inside her throat. Had someone shoved a bottle down her throat? Her alcohol level was high—.13 percent—much higher than the three or four drinks she was seen to have had at the Troc. And there was gas left in the car, it turned out—several gallons; yet the ignition switch was turned on….

But the coroner’s final verdict was that Thelma died by carbon monoxide poisoning, “breathed accidentally.” Nonetheless, the papers talked suicide, and the word on the streets of Hollywood was “hush-up.” Nobody wanted another scandal. Not after Mary Astor’s diaries and Busby Berkley’s drunk-driving fatalities.

I wasn’t buying the coroner’s verdict, either.

I knew that three people, on the Monday I’d found Thelma, had come forward to the authorities and reported having seen her on Sunday, long after she had “officially” died.

Miranda Diamond, Eastman’s now ex-wife (their divorce had gone through, finally, apparently fairly amicably), claimed to have seen Thelma, still dressed in her Trocadero fineries, behind the wheel of her distinctive Packard convertible at the corner of Sunset and Vine Sunday, mid-morning. She was, Miranda told the cops, in the company of a tall, swarthy, nattily dressed young man whom Miranda had never seen before.

Mrs. Wallace Ford, wife of the famed director, had received a brief phone call from Thelma around four Sunday afternoon. Thelma had called to say she would be attending the Fords’ cocktail party, and was it all right if she brought along “a new, handsome friend?”

Finally, and best of all, there was Warren Eastman himself. Neighbors had reported to the police that they heard Eastman and Thelma quarreling bitterly, violently, at the bungalow above the restaurant, Sunday morning, around breakfast time. Eastman said he had thrown her out, and that she had screamed obscenities and beaten on the door for ten minutes (and police did find kick marks on the shrub-secluded, hacienda-style door).

“It was a lover’s quarrel,” Eastman told a reporter. “I heard she had a new boy friend—some Latin fellow from San Francisco—and she denied it. But I knew she was lying.”

Eastman also revealed, in the press, that Thelma didn’t own any real interest in her Sidewalk Café; she had made no investment other than lending her name, for which she got 50 percent of the profits.

I called Rondell after the inquest and he told me the case was closed.

“We both know something smells,” I said. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

“Yes,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m going to hang up.”

And he did.

Rondell was a good cop in a bad town, an honest man in a system so corrupt the Borgias would’ve felt moral outrage; even a Chicago boy like me found it disgusting. But he couldn’t do much about movie-mogul pressure by way of City Hall; Los Angeles had one big business and the film industry was it. And I was just an out-of-town private detective with a local dead client.

On the other hand, she’d paid me to protect her, and ultimately I hadn’t. I had accepted her money, and it seemed to me she ought to get something for it, even if it was posthumous.

I went out the next Monday morning—one week to the day since I’d found the ice-cream blonde melting in that garage—and at the Café, sitting alone in the cocktail lounge, reading Variety and drinking a bloody Mary, was Warren Eastman. He was between pictures and just two stools down from where she had sat when she first hired me. He was wearing a blue blazer, a cream silk cravat, and white pants. He lowered the paper and looked at me; he was surprised to see me, but it was not a pleasant surprise, even though he affected a toothy smile under the twitchy lttle mustache.

“What brings you around, Heller? I don’t need a bodyguard.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I said genially, sitting next to him.

He looked down his nose at me through slitted eyes; his diamond-shaped face seemed handsome to some, I supposed, but to me it was a harshly angular thing, a hunting knife with hair.

“What exactly,” he said, “do you mean by that?”

“I mean I know you murdered Thelma,” I said.

He laughed and returned to his newspaper. “Go away, Heller. Find some schoolgirl who frightens easily if you want to scare somebody.”

“I want to scare somebody all right. I just have one question…did your ex-wife help you with the murder itself, or was she just a supporting player?”

He put the paper down. He sipped the bloody Mary. His face was wooden but his eyes were animated.

I laughed gutturally. “You and your convoluted murder mysteries. You were so clever you almost schemed your way into the gas chamber, didn’t you? With your masquerades and charades.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“You were smart enough to figure out that the cold weather would confuse the time of death. But you thought you could make the coroner think Thelma met her fate the next day—Sunday evening, perhaps. You didn’t have an alibi for the early a.m. hours of Sunday. And that’s when you killed her.”

“Is it, really? Heller, I saw her Sunday morning, breakfast. I argued with her, the neighbors heard…”

“Exactly. They heard—but they didn’t see a thing. That was something you staged, either with your ex-wife’s help, or whoever your current starlet is. Some actress, the same actress who later called Mrs. Ford up to accept the cocktail party invite and further spread the rumor of the new lover from San Francisco. Nice touch, that. Pulls in the rumors of gangsters from San Francisco who threatened her; was the ‘swarthy man’ Miranda saw a torpedo posing as a lover? A gigolo with a gun? A member of Artie Lewis’ dance band, maybe? Let the cops and the papers wonder. Well, it won’t wash with me; I was with her for her last month. She had no new serious love in her life, from San Francisco or elsewhere. Your ‘swarthy man’ is the little Latin lover who wasn’t there.”

“Miranda saw him with her, Heller…”

“No. Miranda didn’t see anything. She told the story you wanted her to tell; she went along with you, and you treated her right in the divorce settlement. You can afford to. You’re sole owner of Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café, now. Lock, stock and barrel, with no messy interference from the star on the marquee. And now you’re free to accept Lucky Luciano’s offer, aren’t you?”

That rocked him, like a physical blow. “What?”

“That’s why you killed Thelma. She was standing in your way. You wanted to put a casino in upstairs; it would mean big money, ver big money.”

“I have money.”

“Yes, and you spend it. You live very lavishly. I’ve been checking up on you. I know you intimately already, and I’m going to know you even better.”

His eyes quivered in the diamond mask of his face. “What are you talking about?”

“You tried to scare her at first—extortion notes, having her followed; maybe you did this with Luciano’s help, maybe you did it on your own. I don’t know. But then she hired me, and you scurried off into the darkness to think up something new.”

He sneered and gestured archly with his cigarette holder, the cigarette in which he was about to light up. “I’m breathlessly awaiting just what evil thing it was I conjured up next.”

“You decided to commit the perfect crime. Just like in the movies. You would kill Thelma one cold night, knocking her out, shoving booze down her, leaving her to die in that garage with the car running. Then you would set out to make it seem that she was still alive—during a day when you were very handsomely, unquestionably alibied.”

“You’re not making any sense. The verdict at the inquest was accidental death…”

“Yes. But the time of death is assumed to have been the night before you said you saw her last. Your melodrama was too involved for the simple-minded authorities, who only wanted to hush things up. They went with the more basic, obvious, tidy solution that Thelma died an accidental death early Saturday morning.” I laughed, once. “You were so cute in pursuit of the ‘perfect crime’ you tripped yourself, Eastman.”

“Did I really,” he said dryly. It wasn’t a question.

“Your scenario needed one more rewrite. First you told the cops you slept at the apartment over the café Saturday night, bolting the door around midnight, accidentally locking Thelma out. But later you admitted seeing Thelma the next morning, around breakfast time—at the bungalow.”

His smile quivered. “Perhaps I slept at the apartment, and went up for breakfast at the bungalow.”

“I don’t think so. I think you killed her.”

“No charges have been brought against me. And none will.”

I looked at him hard, like a hanging judge passing sentence. “I’m bringing a charge against you now. I’m charging you with murder in the first degree.”

His smile was crinkly; he stared into the redness of his drink. Smoke from his cigarette-in-holder curled upward like a wreath. “Ha. A citizen’s arrest, is it?”

“No. Heller’s law. I’m going to kill you myself.”

He looked at me sharply. “What? Are you mad…”

“Yes, I’m mad. In sense of being angry, that is. Sometime, within the next year, or two, I’m going to kill you. Just how, I’m not just sure. Might be me who does it, might be one of my Chicago pals. Just when, well…perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps a month from tomorrow. Maybe next Christmas. I haven’t decided yet.”

“You can’t be serious…”

“I’m deadly serious. Right now I’m heading home to Chicago, to mull it over. But don’t worry—I’ll be seeing you.”

And I left him there at the bar, the glass of bloody Mary mixing itself in his hand.

Here’s what I did to Warren Eastman: I hired Fred Rubinski to spend two weeks shadowing him. Letting him see he was being tailed by an ugly intimidating-looking bastard, which Fred was. Letting him extrapolate from this that I was, through my surrogate, watching his every move. Making him jump at that shadow, and all the other shadows, too.

Then I pulled Fred off Eastman’s case. Home in Chicago, I slept with my gun under my pillow for a while, in case the director got ambitious. But I didn’t bother him any further.

The word in Hollywood was that Eastman was somehow—no one knew exactly how, but somehow—dirty in the Todd murder. And nobody in town thought it was anything but a murder. Eastman never got another picture. He went from one of the hottest directors in town, to the coldest. As cold as the weekend Thelma Todd died.

The Sidewalk Café stopped drawing a monied, celebrity crowd, but it did all right from regular-folks curiosity seekers. Eastman made some dough there, all right; but the casino never happened. A combination of the wrong kind of publicity, and the drifting away of the high-class clientele, must have changed Lucky Luciano’s mind.

Within a year of Thelma Todd’s death, Eastman was committed to a rest home, which is a polite way of saying insane asylum or madhouse. He was in and out of such places for the next four years, and then, one very cold, windy night, he died of a heart attack.

Did I keep my promise? Did I kill him?

I like to think I did, indirectly. I like to think that Thelma Todd got her money’s worth from her chauffeur/bodyguard, who had not been there when she took that last long drive, on the night her sad blue eyes closed forever.

I like to think, in my imperfect way, that I committed the perfect crime.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I have taken liberties in this story based on the probable murder of actress Thelma Todd, changing some names and fictionalizing extensively. A number of books dealing with the death of Thelma Todd were consulted, but I wish in particular to cite Marvin J. Wolf and Katherine Mader, authors of Fallen Angels (1986).

Nineteen-thirty-six began for me with a missing persons case. It didn’t stay a missing persons case long, but on that bitterly cold Chicago morning of January 3rd, all Mrs. Peacock knew was that her doctor husband had failed to come home after making a house call the night before.

It was Saturday, just a little past ten, and I was filling out an insurance adjustment form when she knocked. I said come in, and she did, an attractive woman of about ive in an expensive fur coat. She didn’t look high-hat, though: she’d gone out today without any make-up on, which, added to her generally haggard look, told me she was at wit’s end.

“Mr. Heller? Nathan Heller?”

I said I was, standing, gesturing to a chair across from my desk. My office at the time was a large single room on the fourth floor of a less than fashionable building on the corner of Van Buren and Plymouth, in the shadow of the El. She seemed a little posh to be coming to my little one-man agency for help.

“Your name was given to me by Tom Courtney,” she said. “He’s a friend of the family.”

State’s Attorney Thomas J. Courtney and I had crossed paths several times, without any particular mishap; this explained why she’d chosen the A-1 Detective Agency, but not why she needed a detective in the first place.

“My husband is missing,” she said.

“I assume you’ve filed a missing person’s report.”

“Yes I have. But I’ve been told until twenty-four hours elapse, my husband will not be considered missing. Tom suggested if my concern was such that I felt immediate action warranted, I might contact you. Which I have.”

She was doing an admirable job of maintaining her composure; but there was a quaver in her voice and her eyes were moist.

“If you have any reason to suspect a kidnapping or foul play,” I said, keeping my voice calm and soft, to lessen the impact of such menacing words, “I think you’re doing the right thing. Trails can go cold in twenty-four hours.”

She nodded, found a brave smile.

“My husband, Silber, is a doctor, a pediatrician. We live in the Edgewater Beach Apartments.”

That meant money; no wonder she hadn’t questioned me about my rates.

“Last evening Betty Lou, our eight year-old, and I returned home from visiting my parents in Bowen. Silber met us at Union Station and we dined at little restaurant on the North Side—the name escapes me, but I could probably come up with it if it proves vital—and then came home. Silber went to bed; I was sitting up reading. The phone rang. The voice was male. I asked for a name, an address, the nature of the business, doing my best to screen the call. But the caller insisted on talking to the doctor. I was reluctant, but I called Silber to the phone, and I heard him say, ‘What is it?…. Oh, a child is ill? Give me the address and I’ll be there straight away.’”

“Did your husband write the address down?”

She nodded. “Yes, and I have the sheet right here.” She dug in her purse and handed it to me.

In the standard barely readable prescription-pad scrawl of any doctor, the note said: “G. Smale. 6438 North Whipple Street.”

“Didn’t the police want this?”

She shook her head no. “Not until it’s officially a missing persons case they don’t.”

“No phone number?”

“My husband asked for one and was told that the caller had no phone.”

“Presumably he was calling on one.”

She shrugged, with sad frustration. “I didn’t hear the other end of the conversation. All I can say for certain is that my husband hung up, sighed, smiled and said, ‘No rest for the wicked,’ and dressed. I jotted the information from the pad onto the top of the little Chicago street guide he carries, when he’s doing house calls.”

“So he never took the original note with him?”

“No. What you have there is what he wrote. Then Silber kissed me, picked up his black instrument bag and left. I remember glancing at the clock in the hall. It was 10:05 p.m.”

“Did you hear from him after that?”

“No I did not. I slept, but fitfully, and woke around one thirty a.m. Silber wasn’t home yet. I remember being irritated with him for taking a call from someone who wasn’t a regular patient; he has an excellent practice, now—there’s no need for it. I called the building manager and asked if Silber’s car had returned to the garage. It hadn’t. I didn’t sleep a wink after that. When dawn broke, so, I’m afraid, did I. I called Tom Courtney; he came around at once, phoned the police for me, then advised me to see you, should I feel the need for immediate action.”

“I’m going to need some further information,” I said.

“Certainly.”

Questioning her, I came up with a working description and other pertinent data: Peacock was forty years old, a member of the staff of Children’s Memorial. He’d been driving a 1931 black Cadillac sedan, 1936 license 25-682. Wearing a gray suit, gray topcoat, gray felt hat. Five foot seven, 150 pounds, wire frame glasses.

I walked her down to the street and helped her hail a cab. I told her I’d get right on the case, and that in future she needn’t call on me; I’d come to her at her Edgewater Beach apartment. She smiled, rather bravely I thought, as she slipped into the backseat of the cab; squeezed my arm and looked at me like I was something noble.

Well, I didn’t feel very noble. Because as her cab turned down Plymouth Court I was thinking that her husband the good doctor had probably simply had himself a big evening. He’d show up when his head stopped throbbing, or when something below the belt stopped throbbing, anyway. In future he’d need to warn his babe to stop calling him at home, even if she did have a brother or a knack for doing a convincing vocal imitation of a male.

Back in my office I got out the private detective’s most valuable weapon—the telephone book—and looked up G. W. Smale. There was a listing with the same street number—6438—but the street was wrong, South Washtenaw. The names and house numbers tallied, yes, but the streets in question were on opposite sides of the city. The reverse directory listing street numbers followed by names and numbers told me that no “G. Smale” was listed at 6438 North Whipple.

What the hell; I called the Smale on South Washtenaw.

“I don’t know any Dr. Peacock,” he said. “I never saw the man in my life.”

“Who do you take your kids to when they’re sick?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody?”

“I don’t have any kids. I’m not a father.”

I talked to him for fifteen minutes, and he seemed forthright enough; my instincts, and I do a lot of phone work, told me to leave him to the cops, or at least till later that afternoon. I wanted to check out the doctor’s working quarters.

So I tooled my sporty ’32 Auburn over to 4753 Broadway, where Dr. Peacock shared sumptuous digs with three other doctors, highly reputable medical specialists all. His secretary was a stunning brunette in her late twenties, a Miss Kathryn Mulrooney. I like a good-looking woman in white; the illusion of virginity does something for me.

“I know what you’re going to ask,” she said, quickly, before I’d asked anything. All I’d done was show her my investigator’s i.d. and say I was in Mrs. Peacock’s employ. “Dr. Peacock had no patient named Smale; I’ve been digging through our files ever since Mrs. Peacock called this morning, just in case my memory is faulty.”

She didn’t look like she had a faulty anything.

“What’s even stranger,” she said, with a tragic expression, “he almost never answered night calls. Oh, he once upon a time did—he hated to turn away any sick child. His regular patients seldom asked him to do so, however, and this practice has become so large that he wasn’t accepting any new cases. It’s unbelievable that…”

She paused; I’d been doing my job, asking questions, listening, but a certain part of me had been undressing the attractive nurse in my mind’s eye—everybody needs a hobby—and she misread my good-natured lechery toward her for something else.

“Please!” she said. “You mustn’t leap to horrid conclusions. Dr. Peacock was a man of impeccable character. He loved his family and his home, passionately. He was no playboy; he loathed night clubs and all they stand for. He didn’t even drink!”

“I see,” I said.

“I hope you do,” she said curtly. “That he might have been involved in an affair with a woman other than his wife is unthinkable. Please believe me.”

“Perhaps I do. But could you answer one question?”

“What’s that?”

“Why are you referring to the doctor in the past tense?”

She began to cry; she’d been standing behind a counter—now she leaned against it.

“I…I wish I believed him capable of running around on Ruth, his wife. Then I wouldn’t be so convinced that something…something terrible has happened.”

I felt bad; I’d been suspicious of her, been looking to find her between the doctor’s sheets, and had made her cry. She was a sincere young woman, that was obvious.

“I’m very sorry,” I said, meaning itde her cry turned to go.

But before I went out, another question occurred to me, and I asked it: “Miss Mulrooney—had the parents of any patient ever blamed Dr. Peacock for some unfortunate results of some medical treatment he administered? Any threats of reprisal?”

“Absolutely not,” she said, chin trembling.

On this point I didn’t believe her; her indignation rang shrill. And, anyway, most doctors make enemies. I only wished she had pointed to one of those enemies.

But I’d pushed this kid enough.

I dropped by the Edgewater Beach Apartments—not to talk to Mrs. Peacock. I went up to the attendant in the lobby, a distinguished-looking blue-uniformed man in his late fifties; like so many doormen and lobby attendants, he looked like a soldier from some foreign country in a light opera.

Unlike a good solider, he was willing to give forth with much more than his name and rank. I had hoped to get from him the name of the night man, who I hoped to call and get some information from; but it turned out he was the night man.

“George was sick,” he said. “So I’m doing double-duty. I can use the extra cash more than the sleep.”

“Speaking of cash,” I said, and handed him a buck.

“Thank you, sir!”

“Now, earn it: what can you tell me about Dr. Peacock? Does he duck out at night very often?”

The attendant shook his head no. “Can’t remember the last time, before the other night. Funny thing, though.”

“Yeah?”

“He was rushing out of here, then all of a sudden stopped and turned and stood five minutes blabbing in the phone booth over there.”

Back in the Auburn, my mind was abuzz. Why else would Dr. Peacock use the lobby phone, unless it was to make a call he didn’t want his wife to hear? The “poor sick child” call had been a ruse. The baby specialist obviously had a babe.

I didn’t have a missing persons case at all. I had a stray husband who had either taken off for parts unknown with his lady love or, more likely considering the high-hat practice the doc would have to leave behind, would simply show up with some cock-and-bull story for the missus after a torrid twenty-four hour shack-up with whoever-she-was.

I drove to 6438 North Whipple Street. What my reverse phone book hadn’t told me was that this was an apartment building, a six-flat. Suddenly the case warmed up again; I found a place for the Auburn along the curb and walked up the steps into the brownstone.

No “G. Smale” was a resident, at least not a resident who had a name on any of the vestibule mailboxes.

I walked out into the cold air, my breath smoking, my mind smoking a little too: the “patient” hadn’t had a phone, but in a nice brownstone like this most likely everybody had a phone. Nothing added up. Except maybe two plus two equals rendezvous.

The doc had a doll, that’s all there was to it. Nonetheless, I decided to scout the neighborhood feacock’s auto. I went two blocks in all directions and saw no sign of it. I was about to call it an afternoon, and a long one at that, when I extended the canvassing to include a third block, and on the 6000 block in North Francisco Avenue, I saw it: a black Caddy sedan with the license 25-682.

I approached the car, which was parked alongside a vacant lot, across from several brownstones. I peeked in; in the backseat was a topcoat, but the topcoat was covering something. Looking in the window, you couldn’t tell what. I tried the door. It was unlocked.

I pulled the rider’s seat forward, and there he was, in a kneeling position, in the back, facing the rear, the top half of him bent over the seat, covered by the topcoat. Carefully, I lifted it off, resting it on the hood of the car. Blood was spattered on the floor and rear windows; the seat was crusty black with it, dried. His blood-flecked felt hat, wadded up like a discarded tissue, lay on the seat. His medical bag was on the seat next to him; it too had been sheltered from sight by the topcoat, and was open and had been disturbed. The little street map book, with the address on it in Mrs. Peacock’s handwriting, was nearby, speckled with blood.

A large caliber bullet had gone in his right temple and come out behind the left ear. His skull was crushed; his brain was showing, but scrambled. His head and shoulders bore numerous knife slashes. His right hand was gloved, but his left was bare and had been caught, crushed, in the slamming car door.

This was one savage killing.

Captain Stege himself arrived, after I called it in; if my name hadn’t been attached to it, he probably wouldn’t have come. The tough little cop had once been Chief of Detectives till, ironically, a scandal had cost him—one of Chicago’s few verifiably honest cops—his job. Not long ago he’d been chief of the PD’s Dillinger squad. It was on the Dillinger case that Stege and I had put our feud behind us; we were uneasily trying to get along these days.

I quickly showed him two more discoveries I’d made, before he or any of his boys in blue had arrived: a .45 revolver shell that was in the snow, near the car, on the vacant lot side; and a pinkish stain in the snow, plus deep tire tracks and numerous cigarette butts, in front of the apartment building at 6438 North Whipple. The tire tracks and cigarettes seemed to indicate that whoever had lured the doctor from his bed had indeed waited at this address; the pink stain pointed toward the violence having started there.

“What’s your part in this?” he said, as we walked back to the scene of the crime. He was a small gray man in a gray topcoat and gray formless hat; tiny eyes squinted behind round, black-rimmed lenses. “How’d you happen to find the body, anyway?”

I explained that Mrs. Peacock had hired me to find her husband. Which, after all, I had.

A police photographer was taking pictures, the body not yet moved.

“How do you read this, Heller?”

“Not a simple robbery.”

“Oh?”

I pointed to the corpse. “He took God knows how many brutal blows; he was slashed and slashed again. It takes hate to arouse pointless violence like that.”

“Crime of passion, then.”

“That’s how I see it, Captain.”

“The wife have an alibi?”

“Don’t even bother going down that road.”

“You mind if I bother, Heller? You ever seen the statistics of the number of murders committed within families?”

“She was home with her daughter. Go ahead. Waste your time. But she’s a nice lady.”

“I’ll remember that. Give your statement to Phelan, and go home. This isn’t your case, anymore.”

“I know it isn’t. But do you mind if I, uh…if I’m the one to break the news to Mrs. Peacock?”

Stege cleared his throat; shot a wad of phlegm into the nearby snow. “Not at all. Nobody envies duty like that.”

So I told her. I wanted her told by somebody who didn’t suspect her and, initially, I’d be the only one who qualified.

She sat in a straightback chair at her dining room table, in the Peacock’s conservative yet expensively appointed apartment high in the Edgewater Beach, and wept into a lace hanky. I sat with her for fifteen minutes. She didn’t ask me to go, so I didn’t.

Finally she said, “Silber was a fine man. He truly was. A perfect husband and father. His habits regular and beyond reproach. No one hated Silber. No one. He was lured to his death by thieves.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Did you know that once before he was attacked by thieves, and that he did not hesitate to fight them off? My husband was a brave man.”

“I’m sure he was.”

I left her there, with her sorrow, thinking that I wished she was right, but knowing she was wrong. I did enough divorce work to know how marriages, even “perfect” ones, can go awry. I also had a good fix on just how much marital cheating was going on in this Christian society.

The next morning I called Stege. He wasn’t glad to hear from me, exactly, but he did admit that the wife was no longer a suspect; her alibi was flawless.

“There was a robbery of sorts,” Stege said.

“Oh?”

“Twenty dollars was missing from Peacock’s wallet. On the other hand, none of his jewelry—some of it pretty expensive stuff—was even touched.”

“What was taken from the medical bag?” I asked.

“Some pills and such were taken, but apparently nothing narcotic. A baby specialist doesn’t go toting dope around.”

“An addict might not know that; an addict might’ve picked Dr. Peacock’s name at random, not knowing he was a baby doc.”

“And what, drew him to that vacant lot to steal a supposed supply of narcotics?”

“Yeah. It might explain the insanity, the savagery of the attack.”

“Come on, Heller. You know as well as I do this is a personal killing. I expect romance to rear its lovely head any time, now. Peacock was rich, handsome enough, by all accounts personable. And he had, we estimate, upwards of five hundred patients. Five hundred kiddies all of whom have mothers who visited the doctor with them.”

“You know something, Captain.”

“What?”

“I’m glad this isn’t my case anymore.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I wish you and your boys all the best doing those five hundred interviews.”

He grumbled and hung up.

I did send Mrs. Peacock a bill, for one day’s services—$20 and $5 expenses—and settled back to watch, with some discomfort, the papers speculate about the late doctor’s love life. Various screwball aspects to the case were chased down by the cops and the press; none of it amounted to much. This included a nutty rumor that the doctor was a secret federal narcotics agent and killed by a dope ring; and the Keystone Kops affair of the mysterious key found in the doctor’s pocket, the lock to which countless police hours were spent seeking, only to have the key turn out to belong to the same deputy coroner who had produced it. The hapless coroner had accidentally mixed a key of his own among the Peacock evidence.

More standard, reliable lines of inquiry provided nothing: fingerprints found in the car were too smudged to identify; witnesses who came forth regarding two people arguing in the death car varied as to the sex of the occupants; the last-minute phone call Peacock made in the lobby turned out to have been to one of his business partners; interviews of the parents of five hundred Peacock patients brought forth not a single disgruntled person, nor a likely partner for any Peacock “love nest.”

Peacock had been dead for over two weeks, when I was brought back into the case again, through no effort of my own.

The afternoon of January 16, someone knocked at my office door; in the middle of a phone credit check, I covered the receiver and called out, “Come in.”

The door opened tentatively and a small, milquetoast of a man peered in.

“Mr. Heller?”

I nodded, motioned for him to be seated before me, and finished up my call; he sat patiently, a pale little man in a dark suit, his dark hat in his lap.

“What can I do for you?”

He stood, smiled in an entirely humorless, business-like manner, extending a hand to be shook; I shook it, and the grip was surprisingly firm.

“I am a Lutheran minister,” he said. “My name, for the moment, is unimportant.”

“Pleased to meet you, Reverend.”

“I read about the Peacock case in the papers.”

“Yes?”

“I saw your name. You discovered the body. You were in Mrs. Peacock’s employ.”

“Yes.”

“I have information. I was unsure of whom to give it to.”

“If you have information regarding the Peacock case, you should give it to the police. I can place a call right now…”

“Please, no! I would prefer you hear my story and judge for yourself.”

“All right.”

“Last New Year’s Day I had a chance meeting with my great and good friend, Dr. Silber Peacock, God rest his soul. On that occasion the doctor confided that a strange man, a fellow who claimed to be a chiropodist, had come bursting into his office, making vile accusations.”

“Such as?”

“He said, ‘You, sir, are having an affair with my wife!’”

I sat forward. “Go on.”

“Dr. Peacock said he’d never laid eyes on this man before; that he thought him a crazy man. ‘Why, I never ran around on Ruth in my life,’ he said.”

“How did he deal with this man?”

“He threw him bodily from his office.”

“When did he have this run-in? Did he mention the man’s name?”

“Last October. The man’s name was Thompson, and he was, as I’ve said, a chiropodist.”

“You should go to the police with this.”

The Reverend stood quickly, nervously. “I’d really rather not.”

And then he was on his way out of the office. By the time I got out from behind my desk, he was out of the room, and by the time I got out into the hall, he was out of sight.

The only chiropodist named Thompson in the Chicago phone book was one Arthur St. George Thompson, whom I found at his Wilson Avenue address. He was a skinny, graying man in his early forties; he and his office were seedy. He had no patients in his rather unkempt waiting room when I arrived (or when I left, for that matter).

“I knew Silber Peacock,” he said, bitterly. “I remember visiting him at his office in October, too. What of it?”

“Did you accuse him of seeing your wife?”

“Sure I did! Let me tell you how I got hep to Peacock and Arlene. One evening last June she came home stinking, her and Ann—that’s the no-good who’s married to Arlene’s brother Carl. Arlene said she’d been at the Subway Club and her escort was Doc Peacock. So I looked in the classified directory. The only Dr. Peacock was Silber C., so I knew it was him. I stewed about it for weeks, months, and then I went to his office. The son of a bitch pretended he didn’t know who I was, or Arlene, either; he just kept denying it, and shoving me out of there, shoved me clear out into the hall.”

“I see.”

“No you don’t. I hated the louse, but I didn’t kill him. Besides, I got an alibi. I can prove where I was the night he was murdered.”

First I wanted to talk to Arlene Thompson, whom I found at her brother’s place, a North Side apartment.

Ann was a slender, giggly brunette, attractive. Arlene was even more attractive, a voluptuous redhead. Both were in their mid-twenties. Ann’s husband wasn’t home, so the two of them flirted with me and we had a gay old time.

“Were you really seeing Doc Peacock?”

The two girls exchanged glances and began giggling and the giggling turned to outright laughter. “That poor guy!” Arlene said.

“Well, yeah, I’d say so. He’s dead.”

“Not him! Arthur! That insane streak of jealousy’s got him in hot water again, has it? Look, good-lookin’—there’s nothing to any of this, understand? Here’s how it happened.”

Arlene and Ann had gone alone to the Subway Cafe one afternoon, a rowdy honky-tonk that had since lost its liquor license, and got picked up by two men. They danced till dusk. Arlene’s man said he was Doc Peacock; no other first name given.

“Arthur went off his rocker when I came in, tipsy. He demanded the truth—so I told it to him! It was all innocent enough, but got him goin’. He talked days on end about Doc Peacock, about how he was going to even the score.”

“Do you think he did?”

The redhead laughed again, said, “Honey, that Dr. Peacock whose puss has been in the papers ain’t the guy I dated. My Peacock was much better looking—wavy hair, tall, a real dreamboat. I think my pick-up just pulled a name out of his hat.”

“Your husband didn’t know that. Maybe he evened the score with the wrong Peacock.”

She shook her head, not believing that for a minute. “Arthur just isn’t the type. He’s a poor, weak sister. He never had enough pep to hurt a fly.”

It was all conjecture, but I turned it over to Stege, anyway. Thompson’s alibi checked out. Yet another dead-end.

The next day I was reading the morning papers over breakfast in the coffee shop at the Morrison Hotel. A very small item, buried on an inside page, caught my eye: Dr. Joseph Soldinger, 1016 North Oakley Blvd, had been robbed at gunpoint last night of $37, his car stolen.

I called Stege and pointed out the similarity to the Peacock case, half expecting him to shrug it off. He didn’t. He thanked me, and hung up.

A week later I got a call from Stege; he was excited. “Listen to this: Dr. A.L. Abrams, 1600 Milwaukee Avenue, $56 lost to gunmen; Dr. L.A. Garness, 2542 Mozart Avenue, waylaid and robbed of $6. And there’s two more like that.”

“Details?”

“Each features a call to a doctor to rush to a bedside. Address is in a lonely neighrhood. It’s an appointment with ambush. Take is always rather small. Occurrences between ten and eleven p.m.”

“Damn! Sounds like Mrs. Peacock has been right all along. Her husband fought off his attackers; that’s what prompted their beating him.”

“The poor bastard was a hero and the papers paint him a philanderer.”

“Well, we handed ’em the brush.”

“Perhaps we did, Heller. Anyway, thanks.”

“Any suspects?”

“No. But we got the pattern now. From eye-witness descriptions it seems to be kids. Four assailants, three tall and husky, the other shorter.”

A bell was ringing, and not outside my window. “Captain, you ever hear of Rose Kasallis?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“I tracked a runaway girl to her place two summers ago. She’s a regular female Fagin. She had a flat on North Maplewood Avenue that was a virtual ‘school for crime.’”

“I have heard of that. The West North Avenue cops handled it. She was keeping a way-station for fugitive kids from the reform school at St. Charles. Sent up the river for contributing to the delinquency of minors?”

“That’s the one. I had quite a run-in with her charming boy Bobby. Robert Goethe is his name.”

“Oh?”

“He’s eighteen years old, a strapping kid with the morals of an alley cat. And there were a couple of kids he ran with, Emil Reck, who they called Emil the Terrible, and another one whose name I can’t remember…”

“Heller, Chicago has plenty of young street toughs. Why do you think these three might be suspects in the Peacock case?”

“I don’t know that they are. In fact, last I knew Bobby and the other two were convicted of strong-arming a pedestrian and were sitting in the Bridewell. But that’s been at least a year ago.”

“And they might be out amongst us again, by now.”

“Right. Could you check?”

“I’ll do that very thing.”

Ten minutes later Stege called and said, “They were released in December.”

January 2 had been Silber Peacock’s last day on earth.

“I have an address for Bobby Goethe’s apartment,” Stege said. “Care to keep an old copper company?”

He swung by and picked me up—hardly usual procedure, pulling in a private dick on a case, but I had earned this—and soon we were pulling up in front of the weathered brownstone in which Bobby Goethe lived. And there was no doubt he lived here.

Because despite the chilly day, he and Emil the Terrible were sitting on the stoop, in light jackets, smoking cigarettes and drinking bottles of beer. Bobby had a weak, acned chin, and reminded me of photos I’d seen of Clyde Barrow; Emil had a big lumpy nose and a high forehead, atop which was piled blond curly hair—he looked thick as a plank.

We were in an unmarked car, but a uniformed man was behind the wheel, so as soon as we pulled in, the two boys reacted, beer bottles dropping to the cement and exploding like bombs.

Bobby took off in one direction, and Emil took off in the other. Stege just watched as his plainclothes detective assistant took off after Emil, and I took off after Bobby.

It took me a block to catch up, and I hit him with a flying tackle, and we rolled into a vacant lot, not unlike the one by the Caddy in which Peacock’s body had been found.

Bobby was a wiry kid, and wormed his way out of my grasp, kicking back at me as he did; I took a boot in the face, but didn’t lose any teeth, and managed to reach out and grab that foot and yank him back hard. He went down on his face in the weeds and rocks. One of the larger of those rocks found its way into his hand, and he flung it at me, savage little animal that he was, only not so little. I ducked out of the rock’s way, but quickly reached a hand under my topcoat and suitcoat and got my nine millimeter Browning out and pointed it down at him.

“I’m hurt,” he said, looking up at me with a scraped, bloody face.

“Shall we call a doctor?” I said.

Emil and Bobby and their crony named Nash, who was arrested later that afternoon by West North Avenue Station cops, were put in a show-up for the various doctors who’d been robbed to identify. They did so, without hesitation. The trio was separated and questioned individually and sang and sang. A fourth boy was implicated, the shorter one who’d been mentioned, seventeen-year-old Mickey Livingston. He too was identified, and he too sang.

Their story was a singularly stupid one. They had been cruising in a stolen car, stopped in a candy store, picked Peacock’s name at random from the phone book, picked another name and address, altered it, and called and lured the doctor to an isolated spot they’d chosen. Emil the Terrible, a heavy club in hand, crouched in the shadows across the street from 6438 North Whipple. Nash stood at the entrance, and Goethe, gun in hand, hid behind a tree nearby. Livingston was the wheel man, parked half a block north.

Peacock drove up and got out of his car, medical bag in hand. Bobby stuck the gun in the doctor’s back and told him not to move. Peacock was led a block north after Emil the Terrible had smacked him “a lick for luck.” At this point Peacock fought back, wrestling with Bobby, who shot the doctor in the head. Peacock dropped to the ground, and Emil the Imbecilic hit the dead man again and again with the club. A scalpel from the medical bag in one hand, the gun held butt forward in the other, Bobby added some finishing touches. Nash pulled up in the doctor’s car, Livingston following. The corpse was then tossed in the backseat of the Caddy, which was abandoned three blocks away.

Total take for the daring boys: $20. Just what I’d made on the case, only they didn’t get five bucks expenses.

What Bobby, Emil and Nash did get was 199 years plus consecutive terms of one year to life on four robbery counts. Little Mickey was given a thirty-year sentence, and was eventually paroled. The others, to the best of my knowledge, never were.

R Peacock moved to Quincy, Illinois, where she devoted the rest of her life to social service, her church and Red Cross work, as well as to raising her two daughters, Betty Lou and Nancy. Nancy never knew her father.

Maybe that’s why Ruth Peacock was so convinced of her husband’s loyalty, despite the mysterious circumstances of his death.

She was pregnant with his child at the time.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Research materials consulted for this fact-based story include “The Peacock Case” by LeRoy F. McHugh in Chicago Murders (1947) and various true-crime magazines of the day.

In June 1936, Chicago was in the midst of the Great Depression and a sweltering summer, and I was in the midst of Chicago. Specifically, on this Tuesday afternoon, the ninth to be exact, I was sitting on a sofa in the minuscule lobby of the Van Buren Hotel. The sofa had seen better days, and so had the hotel. The Van Buren was no flophouse, merely a moderately rundown residential hotel just west of the El tracks, near the LaSalle Street Station.

Divorce work wasn’t the bread and butter of the A-l Detective Agency, but we didn’t turn it away. I use the editorial “we,” but actually there was only one of us, me, Nathan Heller, “president” of the firm. And despite my high-flown title, I was just a down-at-the-heels dick reading a racing form in a seedy hotel’s seedy lobby, waiting to see if a certain husband showed up in the company of another woman.

Another woman, that is, than the one he was married to: the dumpy, dusky dame who’d come to my office yesterday.

“I’m not as good-looking as I was fourteen years ago,” she’d said, coyly, her voice honeyed by a Southern drawl, “but I’m a darn sight younger looking than some women I know.”

“You’re a very handsome woman, Mrs. Bolton,” I said, smiling, figuring she was fifty if she was a day, “and I’m sure there’s nothing to your suspicions.”

She had been a looker once, but she’d run to fat, and her badly hennaed hair and overdone makeup were no help; nor was the raccoon stole she wore over a faded floral print housedress. The stole looked a bit ratty and in any case was hardly called for in this weather.

“Mr. Heller, they are more than suspicions. My husband is a successful businessman, with an office in the financial district. He is easy prey to gold diggers.”

The strained formality of her tone made the raccoon stole make sense, somehow.

“This isn’t the first time you’ve suspected him of infidelity.”

“Unfortunately, no.”

“Are you hoping for reconciliation, or has a lawyer advised you to establish grounds for divorce?”

“At this point,” she said, calmly, the Southern drawl making her words seem more casual than they were, “I wish only to know. Can you understand that, Mr. Heller?”

“Certainly. I’m afraid I’ll need some details…”

She had them. Though they lived in Hyde Park, a quiet, quietly well-off residential area, Bolton was keeping a room at the Van Buren Hotel, a few blocks down the street from the very office in which we sat. Mrs. Bolton believed that he went to the hotel on assignations while pretending to leave town on business trips.

“How did you happen to find that out?” I asked her.

“His secretary told me,” she said, with a crinkly little smile, proud of herself.

“Are you sure you need a detective? You seem to be doing pretty well on your own…”

The smile disappeared and she seemed quite serious now, digging into her big black purse and coming back with a folded wad of cash. She thrust it across the desk toward me, as if daring me to take it.

I don’t take dares, but I do take money. And there was plenty of it: a hundred in tens and fives.

“My rate’s ten dollars a day and expenses,” I said, reluctantly, the notion of refusing money going against the grain. “A thirty-dollar retainer would be plenty…”

She nodded curtly. “I’d prefer you accept that. But it’s all I can afford, remember; when it’s gone, it’s gone.”

I wrote her out a receipt and told her I hoped to refund some of the money, though of course I hoped the opposite, and that I hoped to be able to dispel her fears about her husband’s fidelity, though there was little hope of that, either. Hope was in short supply in Chicago, these days.

Right now, she said, Joe was supposedly on a business trip; but the secretary had called to confide in Mrs. Bolton that her husband had been in the office all day.

I had to ask the usual questions. She gave me a complete description (and a photo she’d had foresight to bring), his business address, working hours, a list of places he was known to frequent.

And, so, I had staked out the hotel yesterday, starting late afternoon. I didn’t start in the lobby. The hotel was a walk-up, the lobby on the second floor; the first floor leased out to a saloon, in the window of which I sat nursing beers and watching people stroll by. One of them, finally, was Joseph Bolton, a tall, nattily attired businessman about ten years his wife’s junior; he was pleasant looking, but with his wire-rimmed glasses and receding brown hair was no Robert Taylor.

Nor was he enjoying feminine company, unless said company was already up in the hotel room before I’d arrived on the scene. I followed him up the stairs to the glorified landing of a lobby, where I paused at the desk while he went on up the next flight of stairs (there were no elevators in the Van Buren) and, after buying a newspaper from the desk clerk, went up to his floor, the third of the four-story hotel, and watched from around a corner as he entered his room.

Back down in the lobby, I approached the desk clerk, an older guy with rheumy eyes and a blue bow tie. I offered him a buck for the name of the guest in Room 3C.

“Bolton,” he said.

“You’re kidding,” I said. “Let me see the register.” I hadn’t bothered coming in earlier to bribe a look because I figured Bolton would be here under an assumed name.

“What it’s worth to you?” he asked.

“I already paid,” I said, and turned his register around and looked in it. Joseph Bolton it was. Using his own goddamn name. That was a first.

“Any women?” I asked.

“Not that I know of,” he said.

“Regular customer?”

“He’s been living here a couple months.”

“Living here? He’s here every night?”

“I dunno. He pays his six bits a day, is all I know. I don’t tuck him in.”

I gave the guy half a buck to let me rent his threadbare sofa. Sat for another couple of hours and followed two women upstairs. Both seemed to be hookers; neither stopped at Bolton’s room.

At a little after eight, Bolton left the hotel and I followed him over to Adams Street, to the Berghoff, the best German restaurant for the money in the Loop. What the hell—I hadn’t eaten yet either. We both dined alone.

That night I phoned Mrs. Bolton with my report, such as it was.

“He has a woman in his room,” she insisted.

“It’s possible,” I allowed.

“Stay on the job,” she said, and hung up.

I stayed on the job. That is, the next afternoon I returned to the Van Buren Hotel, or anyway to the saloon underneath it, and drank beers and watched the world go by. Now and then the world would go up the hotel stairs. Men I ignored; women that looked like hookers I ignored. One woman, who showed up around four thirty, I did not ignore.

She was as slender and attractive a woman as Mildred Bolton was not, though she was only a few years younger. And her wardrobe was considerably more stylish than my client’s—high-collared white dress with a bright colorful figured print, white gloves, white shoes, a felt hat with a wide turned-down brim.

She did not look like the sort of woman who would be stopping in at the Van Buren Hotel, but stop in she did.

So did I. I trailed her up to the third floor, where she was met at the door of Bolton’s room by a male figure. I just got a glimpse of the guy, but he didn’t seem to be Bolton. She went inside.

I used a pay phone in the saloon downstairs and called Mrs. Bolton in Hyde Park.

“I can be there in forty minutes,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I want to catch them together. I’m going to claw that hussy’s eyes out.”

“Mrs. Bolton, you don’t want to do that…”

“I most certainly do. You can go home, Mr. Heller. You’ve done your job, and nicely.”

And she had hung up.

I’d mentioned to her that the man in her husband’s room did not seem to be her husband, but that apparently didn’t matter. Now I had a choice: I could walk back up to my office and write Mrs. Bolton out a check refunding seventy of her hundred dollars, goddamnit (ten bucks a day, ten bucks expenses—she’d pay for my bribes and beers).

Or I could do the Christian thing and wait around and try to defuse this thing before it got even uglier.

I decided to do the latter. Not because it was the Christian thing—I wasn’t a Christian, after all—but because I might be able to convince Mrs. Bolton she needed a few more days’ work out of me, to figure out what was really going on here. It seemed to me she could use a little more substantial information, if a divorce was to come out of this. It also seemed to me I could use the money.

I don’t know how she arrived—whether by El or streetcar or bus or auto—but as fast as she was walking, it could’ve been on foot. She was red in the face, eyes hard and round as marbles, fists churning as she strode, her head floating above the incongruous raccoon stole.

I hopped off my bar stool and caught her at the sidewalk.

“Don’t go in there, Mrs. Bolton,” I said, taking her arm gently.

She swung it away from me, held her head back and, short as she was, looked down at me, nostrils flared. I felt like a matador who dropped his cape.

“You’ve been discharged for the day, Mr. Heller,” she said.

“You still need my help. You’re not going about this the right way.”

With indignation she began, “My husband…”

“Your husband isn’t in there. He doesn’t even get off work till six.”

She swallowed. The redness of her face seemed to fade some; I was quieting her down.

Then fucking fate stepped in, in the form of that swanky dame in the felt hat, who picked that very moment to come strolling out of the Van Buren Hotel like it was the goddamn Palmer House. On her arm was a young man, perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, in a cream-color seersucker suit and a gold tie, with a pale complexion and sky-blue eyes and corn-silk blond hair. He and the woman on his arm shared the same sensitive mouth.

“Whore!” somebody shouted.

Who else? My client.

I put my hand over my face and shook my head and wished I was dead, or at least in my office.

“Degenerate!” Mrs. Bolton sang out. She rushed toward the slender woman, who reared back, properly horrified. The young man gripped the woman’s arm tightly; whether to protect her or himself, it wasn’t quite clear.

Well, the sidewalks were filled with people who’d gotten off work, heading for the El or the LaSalle Street Station, so we had an audience. Yes we did.

And Mrs. Bolton was standing nose to nose with the startled woman, saying defiantly, “I am Mrs. Bolton—you’ve bup to see my husband!”

“Why, Mrs. Bolton,” the woman said, backing away as best she could. “Your husband is not in his room.”

“Liar!”

“If he were in the room, I wouldn’t have been in there myself, I assure you.”

“Lying whore…”

“Okay,” I said, wading in, taking Mrs. Bolton by the arm, less gently this time, “that’s enough.”

“Don’t talk to my mother that way,” the young man said to Mrs. Bolton.

“I’ll talk to her any way I like, you little degenerate.”

And the young man slapped my client. It was a loud, ringing slap, and drew blood from one corner of her wide mouth.

I pointed a finger at the kid’s nose. “That wasn’t nice. Back away.”

My client’s eyes were glittering; she was smiling, a blood-flecked smile that wasn’t the sanest thing I ever saw. Despite the gleeful expression, she began to scream things at the couple: “Whore! Degenerate!”

“Oh Christ,” I said, wishing I’d listened to my old man and finished college.

We were encircled by a crowd who watched all this with bemused interest, some people smiling, others frowning, others frankly amazed. In the street the clop-clop of an approaching mounted police officer, interrupted in the pursuit of parking violators, cut through the din. A tall, lanky officer, he climbed off his mount and pushed through the crowd.

“What’s going on here?” he asked.

“This little degenerate hit me,” my client said, wearing her bloody mouth and her righteous indignation like medals, and she grabbed the kid by the tie and yanked the poor son of a bitch by it, jerking him silly.

It made me laugh. It was amusing only in a sick way, but I was sick enough to appreciate it.

“That’ll be all of that,” the officer said. “Now what happened here?”

I filled him in, in a general way, while my client interrupted with occasional non sequiturs; the mother and son just stood there looking chagrined about being the center of attention for perhaps a score of onlookers.

“I want that dirty little brute arrested,” Mrs. Bolton said, through an off-white picket fence of clenched teeth. “I’m a victim of assault!”

The poor shaken kid was hardly a brute, and he was cleaner than most, but he admitted having struck her, when the officer asked him.

“I’m going to have to take you in, son,” the officer said.

The boy looked like he might cry. Head bowed, he shrugged and his mother, eyes brimming with tears herself, hugged him.

The officer went to a call box and summoned a squad car and soon the boy was sent away, the mother waiting pitifully at the curb as the car pulled off, the boy’s pale face looking back, a sad cameo in the window.

I was at my client’s side.

“Let me help you get home, Mrs. Bolton,” I said, taking her arm again.

She smiled tightly, patronizingly, withdrew her arm. “I’m fine, Mr. Heller. I can take care of myself. I thank you for your assistance.”

And she rolled like a tank through what remained of the crowd, toward the El station.

I stood there a while, trying to gather my wits; it would have taken a better detective than yours truly to find them, however, so, finally, I approached the shattered woman who still stood at the curb. The crowd was gone. So was the mounted officer. All that remained were a few horse apples and me.

“I’m sorry about all that,” I told her.

She looked at me, her face smooth, her eyes sad; they were a darker blue than her son’s. “What’s your role in this?”

“I’m an investigator. Mrs. Bolton suspects her husband of infidelity.”

She laughed harshly—a very harsh laugh for such a refined woman. “My understanding is that Mrs. Bolton has suspected that for some fourteen years—and without foundation. But at this point, it would seem moot, one would think.”

“Moot? What are you talking about?”

“The Boltons have been separated for months. Mr. Bolton is suing her for divorce.”

“What? Since when?”

“Why, since January.”

“Then Bolton does live at the Van Buren Hotel, here?”

“Yes. My brother and I have known Mr. Bolton for years. My son Charles came up to Chicago recently, to find work, and Joe—Mr. Bolton—is helping him find a job.”

“You’re, uh, not from Chicago?”

“I live in Woodstock. I’m a widow. Have you any other questions?”

“Excuse me, ma’am. I’m sorry about this. Really. My client misled me about a few things.” I tipped my hat to her.

She warmed up a bit; gave me a smile. Tentative, but a smile. “Your apology is accepted, mister…?”

“Heller,” I said. “Nathan. And your name?”

“Marie Winston,” she said, and extended her gloved hand.

I grasped it, smiled.

“Well,” I said, shrugged, smiled, tipped my hat again, and headed back for my office.

It wasn’t the first time a client had lied to me, and it sure wouldn’t be the last. But I’d never been lied to in quite this way. For one thing, I wasn’t sure Mildred Bolton knew she was lying. This lady clearly did not have all her marbles.

I put the hundred bucks in the bank and the matter out of my mind, until I received a phone call, on the afternoon of June 14.

“This himrie Winston, Mr. Heller. Do you remember me?”

At first, frankly, I didn’t; but I said, “Certainly. What can I do for you, Mrs. Winston?”

“That…incident out in front of the Van Buren Hotel last Wednesday, which you witnessed…”

“Oh yes. What about it?”

“Mrs. Bolton has insisted on pressing charges. I wonder if you could appear in police court tomorrow morning, and explain what happened?”

“Well…”

“Mr. Heller, I would greatly appreciate it.”

I don’t like turning down attractive women, even on the telephone; but there was more to it than that: the emotion in her voice got to me.

“Well, sure,” I said.

So the next morning I headed over to the south Loop police court and spoke my piece. I kept to the facts, which I felt would pretty much exonerate all concerned. The circumstances were, as they say, extenuating.

Mildred Bolton, who glared at me as if I’d betrayed her, approached the bench and spoke of the young man’s “unprovoked assault.” She claimed to be suffering physically and mentally from the blow she’d received. The latter, at least, was believable. Her eyes were round and wild as she answered the judge’s questions.

When the judge fined young Winston one hundred dollars, Mrs. Bolton stood in her place in the gallery and began to clap. Loudly. The judge looked at her, too startled to rap his gavel and demand order; then she flounced out of the courtroom very girlishly, tossing her raccoon stole over her shoulder, exulting in her victory.

An embarrassed silence fell across the room. And it’s hard to embarrass hookers, a brace of which were awaiting their turn at the docket.

Then the judge pounded his gavel and said, “The court vacates this young man’s fine.”

Winston, who’d been hangdog throughout the proceedings, brightened like his switch had been turned on. He pumped his lawyer’s hand and turned to his mother, seated behind him just beyond the railing, and they hugged.

On the way out Marie Winston, smiling gently, touched my arm and said, “Thank you very much, Mr. Heller.”

“I don’t think I made much difference.”

“I think you did. The judge vacated the fine, after all.”

“Hell, I had nothing to do with that. Mildred was your star witness.”

“In a way I guess she was.”

“I notice her husband wasn’t here.”

Son Charles spoke up. “No, he’s at work. He…well, he thought it was better he not be here. We figured that woman would be here, after all.”

“That woman is sick.”

“In the head,” Charles said bitterly.

“That’s right. You or I couldbe sick that way, too. Somebody ought to help her.”

Marie Winston, straining to find some compassion for Mildred Bolton, said, “Who would you suggest?”

“Damnit,” I said, “the husband. He’s been with her fourteen years. She didn’t get this way overnight. The way I see it, he’s got a responsibility to get her some goddamn help before he dumps her by the side of the road.”

Mrs. Winston smiled at that, some compassion coming through after all. “You have a very modern point of view, Mr. Heller.”

“Not really. I’m not even used to talkies yet. Anyway, I’ll see you, Mrs. Winston. Charles.”

And I left the graystone building and climbed in my ’32 Auburn and drove back to my office. I parked in the alley, in my space, and walked over to the Berghoff for lunch. I think I hoped to find Bolton there. But he wasn’t.

I went back to the office and puttered a while; I had a pile of retail credit-risk checks to whittle away at.

Hell with it, I thought, and walked over to Bolton’s office building, a narrow, fifteen-story, white granite structure just behind the Federal Reserve on West Jackson, next to the El. Bolton was doing all right—better than me, certainly—but as a broker he was in the financial district only by a hair. No doubt he was a relatively small-time insurance broker, making twenty or twenty-five grand a year. Big money by my standards, but a lot of guys over at the Board of Trade spilled more than that.

There was no lobby really, just a wide hall between facing rows of shops—newsstand, travel agency, cigar store. The uniformed elevator operator, a skinny, pockmarked guy about my age, was waiting for a passenger. I was it.

“Tenth floor,” I told him, and he took me up.

He was pulling open the cage doors when we heard the air crack, three times.

“What the hell was that?” he said.

“It wasn’t a car backfiring,” I said. “You better stay here.”

I moved cautiously out into the hall. The elevators came up a central shaft, with a squared-off “c” of offices all about. I glanced quickly at the names on the pebbled glass in the wood-partition walls, and finally lit upon BOLTON AND SCHMIDT, INSURANCE BROKERS. I swallowed and moved cautiously in that direction as the door flew open and a young woman flew out—a dark-haired dish of maybe twenty with wide eyes and a face drained of blood, her silk stockings flashing as she rushed my way.

She fell into my arms and I said, “Are you wounded?”

“No,” she swallowed, “but somebody is.”

The poor kid was gasping for air; I hauled her toward the bank of elevators. Even under the strain, I was enjoying the feel and smell of her.

“You wouldn’t be Joseph Bolton’s secretary, by any chance?” I asked, helping her onto the elevator.

She nodded, eyes still huge.

“Take her down,” I told the operator.

And I headed back for that office. I was nearly there when I met Joseph Bolton, as he lurched down the hall. He had a gun in his hand. His light brown suitcoat was splotched with blood in several places; so was his right arm. He wasn’t wearing his eyeglasses, which made his face seem naked somehow. His expression seemed at once frightened, pained, and sorrowful.

He staggered toward me like a child taking its first steps, and I held my arms out to him like daddy. But they were more likely his last steps: he fell to the marble floor and began to writhe, tracing abstract designs in his own blood on the smooth surface.

I moved toward him and he pointed the gun at me, a little .32 revolver. “Stay away! Stay away!”

“Okay, bud, okay,” I said.

I heard someone laughing.

A woman.

I looked up and in the office doorway, feet planted like a giant surveying a puny world, was dumpy little Mildred, in her floral housedress and raccoon stole. Her mug was split in a big goofy smile.

“Don’t pay any attention to him, Mr. Heller,” she said, lightly. “He’s just faking.”

“He’s shot to shit, lady!” I said.

Keeping their distance out of respect and fear were various tenth-floor tenants, standing near their various offices, as if witnessing some strange performance.

“Keep her away from me!” Bolton managed to shout. His mouth was bubbling with blood. His body moved slowly across the marble floor like a slug, leaving a slimy red trail.

I moved to Mrs. Bolton, stood between her and Bolton. “You just take it easy…”

Mrs. Bolton, giggling, peeked out from in back of me. “Look at him, fooling everybody.”

“You behave,” I told her. Then I called out to a businessman of about fifty near the elevators. I asked him if there were any doctors in the building, and he said yes, and I said then for Christsake go get one.

“Why don’t you get up and stop faking?” she said teasingly to her fallen husband, the Southern drawl dripping off her words. She craned her neck around me to see him, like she couldn’t bear to miss a moment of the show.

“Keep her away! Keep her away!”

Bolton continued to writhe like a wounded snake, but he kept clutching that gun, and wouldn’t let anyone near him. He would cry out that he couldn’t breathe, beating his legs against the floor, but he seemed always conscious of his wife’s presence. He would move his head so as to keep my body between him and her round cold glittering eyes.

“Don’t you mind Joe, Mr. Heller. He’s just putting on an act.”

If so, I had a hunch it was his final performance.

And now he began to scream in agony.

I approached him and he looked at me with tears in his eyes, eyes that bore the confusion of a child in pain, and he relented, allowed me to come close, handed me the gun, like he was offering a gift. I accepted it, by the nose of the thingdropped it in my pocket.

“Did you shoot yourself, Mr. Bolton?” I asked him.

“Keep that woman away from me,” he managed, lips bloody.

“He’s not really hurt,” his wife said, mincingly, from the office doorway.

“Did your wife shoot you?”

“Just keep her away…”

Two people in white came rushing toward us—a doctor and a nurse—and I stepped aside, but the doctor, a middle-aged, rather heavyset man with glasses, asked if I’d give him a hand. I said sure and pitched in.

Bolton was a big man, nearly two hundred pounds I’d say, and pretty much dead weight; we staggered toward the elevator like drunks. Like Bolton himself had staggered toward me, actually. The nurse tagged along.

So did Mrs. Bolton.

The nurse, young, blond, slender, did her best to keep Mrs. Bolton out of the elevator, but Mrs. Bolton pushed her way through like a fullback. The doctor and I, bracing Bolton, couldn’t help the young nurse.

Bolton, barely conscious, said, “Please…please, keep her away.”

“Now, now,” Mrs. Bolton said, the violence of her entry into the elevator forgotten (by her), standing almost primly, hands folded over the big black purse, “everything will be all right, dear. You’ll see.”

Bolton began to moan; the pain it suggested wasn’t entirely physical.

On the thirteenth floor, a second doctor met us and took my place hauling Bolton, and I went ahead and opened the door onto a waiting room where patients, having witnessed the doctor and nurse race madly out of the office, were milling about expectantly. The nurse guided the doctors and their burden down a hall into an X-ray room. The nurse shut the door on them and faced Mrs. Bolton with a firm look.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Bolton, you’ll have to wait.”

“Is that so?” she said.

“Mrs. Bolton,” I said, touching her arm.

She glared at me. “Who invited you?”

I resisted the urge to say, you did, you fucking cow, and just stood back while she moved up and down the narrow corridor between the offices and examining rooms, searching for a door that would lead her to her beloved husband. She trundled up and down, grunting, talking to herself, and the nurse looked at me helplessly.

“She is the wife,” I said, with a facial shrug.

The nurse sighed heavily and went to a door adjacent to the X-ray room and called out to Mrs. Bolton; Mrs. Bolton whirled and looked at her fiercely.

“You can view your husband’s treatment from in here,” the nurse said.

Mrs. Bolton smiled in tight triumph and drove her taxicab of a body into the room. I followed her. Don’t ask me why.

A wide glass panel looked in on the X-ray room. Mrs. Bolton climbed onto an xamination table, got up on her knees, and watched the flurry of activity beyond the glass, as her husband lay on a table being attended by the pair of frantic doctors.

“Did you shoot him, Mrs. Bolton?” I asked her.

She frowned but did not look at me. “Are you still here?”

“You lied to me, Mrs. Bolton.”

“No, I didn’t. And I didn’t shoot him, either.”

“What happened in there?”

“I never touched that gun.” She was moving her head side to side, like somebody in the bleachers trying to see past the person sitting in front.

“Did your husband shoot himself?”

She made a childishly smug face. “Joe’s just faking to get everybody’s sympathy. He’s not really hurt.”

The door opened behind me and I turned to see a police officer step in.

The officer frowned at us, and shook his head as if to say “Oh, no.” It was an understandable response: it was the same cop, the mounted officer, who’d come upon the disturbance outside the Van Buren Hotel. Not surprising, really—this part of the Loop was his beat, or anyway his horse’s.

He crooked his finger for me to step out in the hall and I did.

“I heard a murder was being committed up on the tenth floor of 166,” he explained, meaning 166 West Jackson. “Do you know what happened? Did you see it?”

I told him what I knew, which for somebody on the scene was damned little.

“Did she do it?” the officer asked.

“The gun was in the husband’s hand,” I shrugged. “Speaking of which…”

And I took the little revolver out of my pocket, holding the gun by its nose again.

“What make is this?” the officer said, taking it.

“I don’t recognize it.”

He read off the side: “Narizmande Eibar Spair. Thirty-two caliber.”

“It got the job done.”

He held the gun so that his hand avoided the grip; tried to break it open, but couldn’t.

“What’s wrong with this thing?” he said.

“The trigger’s been snapped on empty shells, I’d say. After six slugs were gone, the shooter kept shooting. Just once around wouldn’t drive the shells into the barrel like that.”

“Judas,” the officer said.

The X-ray room’s door opened and the doctor I’d shared the elevator and Bolton’s dead weight with stepped into the hall, bloody and bowed.

“He’s dead,” the doctor said, wearily. “Choked to death on his own blood, poor bastard.”

I said nothin; just glanced at the cop, who shrugged.

“The wife’s in there,” I said, pointing.

But I was pointing to Mrs. Bolton, who had stepped out into the hall. She was smiling pleasantly.

She said, “You’re not going to frighten me about Joe. He’s a great big man and as strong as a horse. Of course, I begin to think he ought to go to the hospital this time—for a while.”

“Mrs. Bolton,” the doctor said, flatly, with no sympathy whatsoever, “your husband is dead.”

Like a spiteful brat, she stuck out her tongue. “Liar,” she said.

The doctor sighed, turned to the cop. “Shall I call the morgue, or would you like the honor?”

“You should make the call, Doctor,” the officer said.

Mrs. Bolton moved slowly toward the door to the X-ray room, from which the other doctor, his smock blood-spattered, emerged. She seemed to lose her footing, then, and I took her arm yet again. This time she accepted the help. I walked her into the room and she approached the body, stroked its brow with stubby fingers.

“I can’t believe he’d go,” she said.

From behind me, the doctor said, “He’s dead, Mrs. Bolton. Please leave the room.”

Still stroking her late husband’s brow, she said, “He feels cold. So cold.”

She kissed his cheek.

Then she smiled down at the body and patted its head, as one might a sleeping child, and said, “He’s got a beautiful head, hasn’t he?”

The officer stepped into the room and said, “You’d better come along with me, Mrs. Bolton. Captain Stege wants to talk to you.”

“You’re making a terrible mistake. I didn’t shoot him.”

He took her arm; she assumed a regal posture. He asked her if she would like him to notify any relatives or friends.

“I have no relatives or friends,” she said, proudly. “I never had anybody or wanted anybody except Joe.”

A crowd was waiting on the street. Damn near a mob, and at the forefront were the newshounds, legmen and cameramen alike. Cameras were clicking away as Davis of the News and a couple of others blocked the car waiting at the curb to take Mrs. Bolton to the Homicide Bureau. The mounted cop, with her in tow, brushed them and their questions aside and soon the car, with her in it, was inching into the late afternoon traffic. The reporters and photogs began flagging cabs to take quick pursuit, but snide, boyish Davis lingered to ask me a question.

“What were you doing here, Heller?”

“Getting a hangnail looked at up at the doctor’s office.”

“Fuck, Heller, you got blood all over you!”

I shrugged, lifted my middle finger. “Hell of a hangnail.”

He smirked and I smirked and pushed through the cowd and hoofed it back to my office.

I was sitting at my desk, about an hour later, when the phone rang.

“Get your ass over here!”

“Captain Stege?”

“No, Walter Winchell. You were an eyewitness to a homicide, Heller! Get your ass over here!”

The phone clicked in my ear and I shrugged to nobody and got my hat and went over to the First District Station, entering off Eleventh. It was a new, modern, nondescript high rise; if this was the future, who needed it.

In Stege’s clean little office, from behind his desk, the clean little cop looked out his black-rimmed, round-lensed glasses at me and said, “Did you see her do it?”

“I told the officer at the scene all about it, Captain.”

“You didn’t make a statement.”

“Get a stenographer in here and I will.”

He did and I did.

That seemed to cool the stocky little cop down. He and I had been adversaries once, though were getting along better these days. But there was still a strain.

Thought gripped his doughy, owlish countenance. “How do you read it, Heller?”

“I don’t know. He had the gun. Maybe it was suicide.”

“Everybody in that building agrees with you. Bolton’s been having a lot of trouble with his better half. They think she drove him to suicide, finally. But there’s a hitch.”

“Yeah?”

“Suicides don’t usually shoot themselves five times, two of ’em in the back.”

I had to give him that.

“You think she’s nuts?” Stege asked.

“Nuttier than a fruitcake.”

“Maybe. But that was murder—premeditated.”

“Oh, I doubt that, Captain. Don’t you know a crime of passion when you see it? Doesn’t the unwritten law apply to women as well as men?”

“The answer to your question is yes to the first, and no to the second. You want to see something?”

“Sure.”

From his desk he handed me a small slip of paper.

It was a receipt for a gun sold on June 11 by the Hammond Loan Company of Hammond, Indiana, to a Mrs. Sarah Weston.

“That was in her purse,” Stege said, smugly. “Along with a powder puff, a hanky, and some prayer leaflets.”

“And you think Sarah Weston is just a name Mrs. Bolton used to buy the .32 from the pawn shop?”

“Certainly. And that slip—found in a narrow side pocket in the lining of her purse—proves premeditation.”

“Does it, Captain?” I said,smiling, standing, hat in hand. “It seems to me premeditation would have warned her to get rid of that receipt. But then, what do I know? I’m not a cop.” From the doorway I said, “Just a detective.”

And I left him there to mull that over.

In the corridor, on my way out, Sam Backus buttonholed me.

“Got a minute for a pal, Nate?”

“Sam, if we were pals, I’d see you someplace besides court.”

Sam was with the Public Defender’s office, and I’d bumped into him from time to time, dating back to my cop days. He was a conscientious and skillful attorney who, in better times, might have had a lucrative private practice; in times like these, he was glad to have a job. Sam’s sharp features and receding hairline gave the smallish man a ferretlike appearance; he was similarly intense, too.

“My client says she employed you to do some work for her,” he said, in a rush. “She’d like you to continue—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute—your client? Not Mrs. Mildred Bolton?”

“Yes.”

“She’s poison. You’re on your own.”

“She tells me you were given a hundred-dollar retainer.”

“Well, that’s true, but I figured I earned it.”

“She figures you owe her some work, or some dough.”

“Sam, she lied to me. She misrepresented herself and her intentions.” I was walking out the building and he was staying right with me.

“She’s a disturbed individual. And she’s maintaining she didn’t kill her husband.”

“They got her cold.” I told him about Stege’s evidence.

“It could’ve been planted,” he said, meaning the receipt. “Look, Bolton’s secretary was up there, and Mrs. Bolton says he and the girl—an Angela something, sounds like ‘who-you’—were having an affair.”

“I thought the affair was supposed to be with Marie Winston.”

“Her, too. Bolton must’ve been a real ladies’ man. And the Winston woman was up there at that office this afternoon, too, before the shooting.”

“Was she there during the shooting, though?”

“I don’t know. I need to find out. The Public Defender’s office doesn’t have an investigative staff, you know that, Nate. And I can’t afford to hire anybody, and I don’t have the time to do the legwork myself. You owe her some days. Deliver.”

He had a point.

I gathered some names from Sam, and the next morning I began to interview the participants.

“An affair with Joe?” Angela Houyoux said. “Why, that’s nonsense.”

We were in the outer office of Bolton and midt. She’d given me the nickel tour of the place: one outer office, and two inner ones, the one to the south having been Bolton’s. The crime scene told me nothing. Angela, the sweet-smelling dark-haired beauty who’d tumbled into my arms and the elevator yesterday, did.

“I was rather shaken by Mrs. Bolton’s behavior at first—and his. But then it became rather routine to come to the office and find the glass in the door broken, or Mr. Bolton with his hands cut from taking a knife away from Mrs. Bolton. After a few weeks, I grew quite accustomed to having dictation interrupted while Mr. and Mrs. Bolton scuffled and fought and yelled. Lately they argued about Mrs. Winston a lot.”

“How was your relationship with Mrs. Bolton?”

“Spotty, I guess you’d call it. Sometimes she’d seem to think I was interested in her husband. Other times she’d confide in me like a sister. I never said much to her. I’d just shrug my shoulders or just look at her kind of sympathetic. I had the feeling she didn’t have anybody else to talk to about this. She’d cry and say her husband was unfaithful—I didn’t dare point out they’d been separated for months and that Mr. Bolton had filed for divorce and all. One time…well, maybe I shouldn’t say it.”

“Say it.”

“One time she said she ‘just might kill’ her husband. She said they never convict a woman for murder in Cook County.”

Others in the building at West Jackson told similar tales. Bolton’s business partner, Schmidt, wondered why Bolton bothered to get an injunction to keep his wife out of the office, but then refused to mail her her temporary alimony, giving her a reason to come to the office all the time.

“He would dole out the money, two or three dollars at a time,” Schmidt said. “He could have paid her what she had coming for a month, or at least a week—Joe made decent money. It would’ve got rid of her. Why parcel it out?”

The elevator operator I’d met yesterday had a particularly wild yarn.

“Yesterday, early afternoon, Mr. Bolton got on at the ninth floor. He seemed in an awful hurry and said, ‘Shoot me up to eleven.’ I had a signal to stop at ten, so I made the stop and Mrs. Bolton came charging aboard. Mr. Bolton was right next to me. He kind of hid behind me and said, ‘For God’s sake, she’ll kill us both!’ I sort of forced the door closed on her, and she stood there in the corridor and raised her fist and said, ‘Goddamnit, I’ll fix you!’ I guess she meant Bolton, not me.”

“Apparently.”

“Anyway, I took him up to eleven and he kind of sighed and as he got off he said, ‘It’s just hell, isn’t it?’ I said it was a damn shame he couldn’t do anything about it.”

“This was yesterday.”

“Yes, sir. Not long before he was killed.”

“Did it occur to you, at the time, it might lead to that?”

“No, sir. It was pretty typical, actually. I helped him escape from her before. And I kept her from getting on the elevator downstairs, sometimes. After all, he had an injunction to keep her from ‘molesting him at his place of business,’ he said.”

Even the heavyset doctor up on thirteen found time for me.

“I think they were both sick,” he said, rather bitterly I thought.

“What do you mean, Doctor?”

“I mean that I’ve administered more first aid to that man than a battlefield physician. That woman has beaten her husband, cut him with a knife, with a razor, created commotions and scenes with such regularity that the patrol wagon coming for Mildred is a common-place occurrence on West Jackson.”

“How well did you know Bolton?”

“We were friendly. God knows I spent enough time with him, patching him up. He should’ve been a much more successful man than he was, you know. She drove him out of one job and another. I never understood him.”

“Oh?”

“Well, they live, or lived, in Hyde Park. That’s a university neighborhood. Fairly refined, very intellectual, really.”

“Was Bolton a scholar?”

“He had bookish interests. He liked having the University of Chicago handy. Now why would a man of his sensibilities endure a violent harridan like Mildred Bolton?”

“In my trade, Doc,” I said, “we call that a mystery.”

I talked to more people. I talked to a pretty blond legal secretary named Peggy O’Reilly who, in 1933, had been employed by Ocean Accident and Guarantee Company. Joseph Bolton, Jr., had been a business associate there.

“His desk was four feet from mine,” she said. “But I never went out with him. There was no social contact whatsoever, but Mrs. Bolton didn’t believe that. She came into the office and accused me of—well, called me a ‘dirty hussy,’ if you must know. I asked her to step out into the hall where we wouldn’t attract so much attention, and she did—and proceeded to tear my clothes off me. She tore the clothes off my body, scratched my neck, my face, kicked me, it was horrible. The attention it attracted…oh, dear. Several hundred people witnessed the sight—two nice men pulled her off of me. I was badly bruised and out of the office a week. When I came back, Mr. Bolton had been discharged.”

A pattern was forming here, one I’d seen before; but usually it was the wife who was battered and yet somehow endured and even encouraged the twisted union. Only Bolton was a battered husband, a strapping man who never turned physically on his abusing wife; his only punishment had been to withhold that money from her, dole it out a few bucks at a time. That was the only satisfaction, the only revenge, he’d been able to extract.

At the Van Buren Hotel I knocked on the door of what had been Bolton’s room. 3C.

Young Charles Winston answered. He looked terrible. Pale as milk, only not near as healthy. Eyes bloodshot. He was in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. The other times I’d seen him he’d been fully and even nattily attired.

“Put some clothes on,” I said. “We have to talk.”

In the saloon below the hotel we did that very thing.

“Joe was a great guy,” he said, eyes brimming with tears. He would have cried into his beer, only he was having a mixed drink. I was picking up the tab, so Mildred Bolton was buying it.

“Is your mother still in town?”

He looked up with sharp curiosity. “No. She’s back in Woodstock. Why?”

“She was up at the office shortly before Bolton was killed.”

“I know. I was there, too.”

“Oh?” Now, that was news.

“We went right over, after the hearing.”

“To tell him how it came out?”

“Yes, and to thank him. You see, after that incident out in front, last Wednesday, when they took me off to jail, Mother went to see Joe. They met at the Twelfth Street Bus Depot. She asked him if he would take care of my bail—she could have had her brother do it, in the morning, but I’d have had to spend the night in jail first.” He smiled fondly. “Joe went right over to the police station with the money and got me out.”

“That was white of him.”

“Sure was. Then we met Mother over at the taproom of the Auditorium Hotel.”

Very posh digs; interesting place for folks who lived at the Van Buren to be hanging out.

“Unfortunately, I’d taken time to stop back at the hotel to pick up some packages my mother had left behind. Mrs. Bolton must’ve been waiting here for me. She followed me to the Auditorium tap-room, where she attacked me with her fists, and told the crowd in no uncertain terms, and in a voice to wake the dead, that my mother was”—he shook his head—“‘nothing but a whore’ and such. Finally the management ejected her.”

“Was your mother in love with Joe?”

He looked at me sharply. “Of course not. They were friendly. That’s the extent of it.”

“When did you and your mother leave Bolton’s office?”

“Yesterday? About one thirty. Mrs. Bolton was announced as being in the outer office, and we just got the hell out.”

“Neither of you lingered.”

“No. Are you going to talk to my mother?”

“Probably.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” he said glumly.

I drank my beer, studying the kid.

“Maybe I won’t have to,” I said, smiled at him, patted his shoulder, and left.

I met with public defender Backus in a small interrogation room at the First District Station.

“Your client is guilty,” I said.

I was sitting. He was standing. Pacing.

“The secretary was in te outer office at all times,” I said. “In view of other witnesses. The Winstons left around one thirty. They were seen leaving by the elevator operator on duty.”

“One of them could have sneaked back up the stairs…”

“I don’t think so. Anyway, this meeting ends my participation, other than a report I’ll type up for you. I’ve used up the hundred.”

From my notes I read off summaries of the various interviews I’d conducted. He finally sat, sweat beading his brow, eyes slitted behind the glasses.

“She says she didn’t do it,” he said.

“She says a lot of things. I think you can get her off, anyway.”

He smirked. “Are you a lawyer now?”

“No. Just a guy who’s been in the thick of this bizarre fucking case since day one.”

“I bow to your experience if not expertise.”

“You can plead her insane, Sam.”

“A very tough defense to pull off, and besides, she won’t hear of it. She wants no psychiatrists, no alienists involved.”

“You can still get her off.”

“How in hell?”

I let some air out. “I’m going to have to talk to her before I say any more. It’s going to have to be up to her.”

“You can’t tell me?”

“You’re not my client.”

Mildred Bolton was.

And she was ushered into the interrogation room by a matron who then waited outside the door. She wore the same floral print dress, but the raccoon stole was gone. She smiled faintly upon seeing me, sat across from me.

“You been having fun with the press, Mildred, haven’t you?”

“I sure have. They call me ‘Marble Mildred.’ They think I’m cold.”

“They think it’s unusual for a widow to joke about her dead husband.”

“They’re silly people. They asked me the name of my attorney and I said, ‘Horsefeathers.’” She laughed. That struck her very funny; she was proud of herself over that witty remark.

“I’m glad you can find something to smile about.”

“I’m getting hundreds of letters, you know. Fan mail! They say, ‘You should have killed him whether you did or not.’ I’m not the only woman wronged in Chicago, you know.”

“They’ve got you dead bang, Mildred. I’ve seen some of the evidence. I’ve talked to the witnesses.”

“Did you talk to Mrs. Winston? It was her fault, you know. Her and that…that boy.”

“You went to see Joe after the boy was fined in court.”

“Yes! I called him and told him that the little degenerate had been convicted and fined. Then I asked Joe, did he have any money, because I didn’t have anything to eat, and he said yes. So I went to the office and when I got there he tried to give me a check for ten dollars. I said, ‘I guess you’re going to pay that boy’s fine and that’s why you haven’t any money for me.’ He said, ‘That’s all you’re going to get.’ And I said, ‘Do you mean for a whole week? To pay rent out of and eat on?’ He said, ‘Yes, that’s all you get.’”

“He was punishing you.”

“I suppose. We argued for about an hour and then he said he had business on another floor—that boy’s lawyer is on the ninth floor, you know—and I followed him, chased him to the elevator, but he got away. I went back and said to Miss Houyoux, ‘He ran away from me.’ I waited in his office and in about an hour he came back. I said, ‘Joe, I have been your wife for fourteen years and I think I deserve more respect and better treatment than that.’ He just leaned back in his chair so cocky and said, ‘You know what you are?’ And then he said it.”

“Said it?”

She swallowed; for the first time, those marble eyes filled with tears. “He said, ‘You’re just a dirty old bitch.’ Then he said it again. Then I said, ‘Just a dirty old bitch for fourteen years?’ And I pointed the gun at him.”

“Where was it?”

“It was on his desk where I put it. It was in a blue box I carried in with me.”

“What did you do with it, Mildred?”

“The box?”

“The gun.”

“Oh. That. I fired it at him.”

I gave her a handkerchief and she dabbed her eyes with it.

“How many times did you fire the gun, Mildred?”

“I don’t know. He fell over in his chair and then he got up and came toward me and he said, ‘Give me that gun, give me that gun.’ I said, ‘No, I’m going to finish myself now. Let go of me because my hand is on the trigger!’” Her teeth were clenched. “He struggled with me, and his glasses got knocked off, but he got the gun from my hand and he went out in the hall with it. I followed him, but then I turned and went back in his office. I was going to jump out of the window, but I heard him scream in the hall and I ran to him. The gun was lying beside him and I reached for it, but he reached and got it first. I went back in the office.”

“Why?”

“To jump out the window, I told you. But I just couldn’t leave him. I started to go back out and when I opened the door some people were around. You were one of them, Mr. Heller.”

“Where did you get that gun, Mildred?”

“At a pawn shop in Hammond, Indiana.”

“To kill Joe?”

“To kill myself.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t. I had plenty of time to do it at home, but I wanted to do it in his office. I wanted to embarrass him.”

“He was shot in the back, Mildred. Twice.”

“I don’t know about that. Maybe his body turned when I was firing. I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“You know that the prosecution will not buy your suicide claims.”

“They are not claims!”

“I know they aren’t. But they won’t buy them. They’ll tell the judge and the jury that all your talk of suicide is just a clever excuse to get around planning Joe’s murder. In other words, that you premeditated the killing and supplied yourself with a gun—and a reason for having a gun.”

“I don’t know about those things.”

“Would you like to walk away from this?”

“Well, of course. I’m not crazy.”

Right.

“You can, I think. But it’s going to be hard on you. They’re going to paint you as a shrew. As a brutal woman who battered her husband. They’ll suggest that Bolton was too much of a gentleman for his own good, that he should have struck back at you, physically.”

She giggled. “He wasn’t such a gentleman.”

“Really?”

“He wasn’t what you think at all. Not at all.”

“What do you mean, Mildred?”

“We were married for fourteen years before he tried to get rid of me. That’s a long time.”

“It sure is. What is it about your husband that we’re getting wrong?”

“I haven’t said.”

“I know that. Tell me.”

“I won’t tell you. I’ve never told a living soul. I never will.”

“I think you should. I think you need to.”

“I won’t. I won’t now. I won’t ever.”

“There were no other women, were there, Mildred?”

“There were countless women, countless!”

“Like Marie Winston.”

“She was the worst!”

“What about her son?”

“That little…” She stopped herself.

“That little degenerate? That’s what you seem to always call him.”

She nodded, pursing her thin wide lips.

“Joe was living in a fleabag hotel,” I said. “A guy with his money. Why?”

“It was close to his work.”

“Relatively. I think it had to do with who he was living with. A young man.”

“A lot of men room together.”

“There were no other women, were there, Mildred? Your husband used you to hide behind, didn’t he, for many years.”

She was crying now. The marble woman was crying now. “I loved him. I loved him.”

“I know you did. And I don’t know when you discovered it. Maybe you never did, really. Maybe you just suspected, and couldn’t bring yourself to admit it. Then, after he left you, after he moved out of the house, you finally decided to find out, really find out. You hired me, springing for a hundred precious bucks you’d scrimped and saved, knowing I might find things out you’d want kept quiet. Knowing I might confirm the suspicions that drove you bughouse for years.”

“Stop it…please stop it…”

“Your refined husband who liked to be near a college campus. You knew there were affairs. And there were. But not with women.”

She stood, squeezing my hanky in one fist. “I don’t have to listen to this!”

“You do if you want to be a free woman. The unwritten law doesn’t seem to apply to women as equally as it does to men. But if you tell the truth about your husband—about just who it was he was seeing behind your back—I guarantee you no jury will convict you.”

Her mouth was trembling.

I stood. “It’s up to you, Mildred.”

“Are you going to tell Mr. Backus?”

“No. You’re my client. I’ll respect your wishes.”

“I wish you would just go. Just go, Mr. Heller.”

I went.

I told Backus nothing except that I would suggest he introduce expert testimony from an alienist. He didn’t. His client wouldn’t hear of it.

The papers continued to have a great time with Marble Mildred. She got to know the boys of the press, became bosom buddies with the sob sisters, warned cameramen not to take a profile pic or she’d break their lens, shouted greetings and wisecracks to one and all. She laughed and talked; being on trial for murder was a lark to her.

Of course, as the trial wore on, she grew less boisterous, even became sullen at times. On the stand she told her story more or less straight, but minus any hint her husband was bent. The prosecution, as I had told her they would, ridiculed her statement that she’d bought the .32 to do herself in. The prosecutor extolled “motherhood and wifehood,” but expressed “the utmost comtempt for Mildred Bolton.” She was described as “dirt,” “filth,” “vicious,” and more. She was sentenced to die in the electric chair.

She didn’t want an appeal, a new trial.

“As far as I am concerned,” she told the stunned judge, “I a perfectly satisfied with things as they now stand.”

But Cook County was squeamish about electrocuting a woman; just half an hour before the execution was to take place, hair shaved above one ear, wearing special females-only electrocution shorts, Mildred was spared by Governor Horner.

Mildred, who’d been strangely blissful in contemplation of her electrocution, was less pleased with her new sentence of 199 years. Nonetheless she was a model prisoner, until August 29, 1943, when she was found slumped in her cell, wrists slashed. She had managed to smuggle some scissors in. It took her hours to die. Sitting in the darkness, waiting for the blood to empty out of her.

She left a note, stuck to one wall:

To whom it may concern. In the event of my death do not notify anybody or try to get in touch with family or friends. I wish to die as I have lived, completely alone.

What she said was true, but I wondered if I was the only person alive who knew that it hadn’t been by choice.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I wish to acknowledge the true-crime article “Joseph Bolton, the Almost Indestructible Husband” by Nellise Child. Also helpful was the Mildred Bolton entry in Find the Woman by Jay Robert Nash. Most names in the preceding fact-based story have been changed or at least altered (exceptions include the Boltons and Captain Stege); fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed therein.

In a garbage dump on East Ninth Street near Shore Drive, in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 17, 1938, a woman’s body was discovered by a cop walking his morning beat.

I got there before anything much had been moved. Not that I was a plainclothes dick—I used to be, but not in Cleveland; I was just along for the ride. I’d been sitting in the office of Cleveland’s Public Safety Director, having coffee, when the call came through. The Safety Director was in charge of both the police and fire department, and one would think that a routine murder wouldn’t rate a call to such a high muckey-muck.

One would be wrong.

Because this was the latest in a series of anything-but-routine, brutal murders—the unlucky thirteenth, to be exact, not that the thirteenth victim would seem any more unlucky than the preceding twelve. The so-called “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” had been exercising his ghastly art sporadically since the fall of ’35, in Cleveland—or so I understood. I was an out-of-towner, myself.

So was the woman.

Or she used to be, before she became so many dismembered parts flung across this rock-and-garbage strewn dump. Her nude torso was slashed and the blood, splashed here, streaked there, was turning dark, almost black, though the sun caught scarlet glints and tossed them at us. Her head was gone, but maybe it would turn up. The Butcher wasn’t known for that, though. The twelve preceding victims had been found headless, and had stayed that way. Somewhere in Cleveland, perhaps, a guy had a collection in his attic. In this weather it wouldn’t smell too nice.

It’s not a good sign when the Medical Examiner gets sick; and the half dozen cops, and the police photographer, were looking green around the gills themselves. Only my friend, the Safety Director, seemed in no danger of losing his breakfast. He was a ruddy-cheeked six-footer in a coat and tie and vest, despite the heat; hatless, his hair brushed back and pomaded, he still seemed—years after I’d met him—boyish. And he was only in his mid-thirties, just a few years older than me.

I’d met him in Chicago, seven or eight years ago, when I wasn’t yet president (and everything else) of the A-I Detective Agency, but still a cop; and he was still a Prohibition Agent. Hell, the Prohibition agent. He’d considered me one of the more or less honest cops in Chicago—emphasis on the less, I guess—and I made a good contact for him, as a lot of the cops didn’t like him much. Honesty doesn’t go over real big in Chicago, you know.

Eliot Ness said, “Despite the slashing, there’s a certain skill displayed, here.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “A regular ballet dancer did this.”

“No, really,” he said, and bent over the headless torso, pointing. He seemed to be pointing at the gathering flies, but he wasn’t. “There’s an unmistakable precision about this. Maybe even indicating surgical training.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I think the doctor lost this patient.”

He stood and glanced at me and smiled, just a little; he understood me: he knew my wise-guy remarks were just my way of holding onto my own breakfast.

“You ought to come to Cleveland more often,” he said.

“You know how to show a guy a good time, I’ll give you that, Eliot.”

He walked over and glanced at a forearm, which seemed to reach for an empty soap box, fingers stretched toward the Gold Dust twins. He knelt and studied it.

I wasn’t here on a vacation, by any means. Cleveland didn’t strike me as a vacation city, even before I heard about the Butcher of Kingsbury Run (so called because a number of the bodies, including the first several, were found in that Cleveland gully). This was strictly business. I was here trying to trace the missing daughter of a guy in Evanston who owned a dozen diners around Chicago. He was one of those self-made men, who started out in the greasy kitchen of his own first diner, fifteen or so years ago; and now he had a fancy brick house in Evanston and plenty of money, considering the times. But not much else. His wife had died four or five years ago, of consumption; and his daughter—who he claimed to be a good girl and by all other accounts was pretty wild—had wandered off a few months ago, with a taxi dancer from the North Side named Tony.

Well, I’d found Tony in Toledo—he was doing a floor show in a roadhouse with a dark-haired girl named FiFi; he’d grown a little pencil mustache and they did an apache routine—he was calling himself Antoine now. And Tony/Antoine said Ginger (which was the Evanston restauranteur’s daughter’s nickname) had taken up with somebody named Ray, who owned (get this) a diner in Cleveland.

I’d gotten here yesterday, and had talked to Ray, and without tipping I was looking for her, asked where was the pretty waitress, the one called Ginger, I think her name is. Ray, a skinny balding guy of about thirty with a silver front tooth, leered and winked and made it obvious that not only was Ginger working as a waitress here, she was also a side dish, where Ray was concerned. Further casual conversation revealed that it was Ginger’s night off—she was at the movies with some girl friends—and she’d be in tomorrow, around five.

I didn’t push it further, figuring to catch up with her at the diner the next evening, after wasting a day seeing Cleveland and bothering my old friend Eliot. And now I was in a city dump with him, watching him study the severed forearm of a woman.

“Look at this,” Eliot said, pointing at the outstretched fingers of the hand.

I went over to him and it—not quickly, but I went over.

“What, Eliot? Do you want to challenge my powers of deduction, or just make me sick?”

“Just a lucky break,” he said. “Most of the victims have gone unidentified; too mutilated. And a lot of ’em have been prostitutes or vagrants. But we’ve got a break, here. Two breaks, actually.”

He pointed to the hand’s little finger. To the small gold filigree band with a green stone.

“A nice specific piece of jewelry to try to trace,” he said, with a dry smile. “And even better…”

He pointed to a strawberry birthmark, the shape of a teardrop, just below the wrist.

I took a close look; then stood. Put a hand on my stomach.

Walked away and dropped to my knees and lost my breakfast.

I felt Eliot’s hand patting my back.

“Nate,” he said. “What’s the matter? You’ve seen homicides before…even grisly ones like this…brace up, boy.”

He eased me to my feet.

My tongue felt thick in my mouth, thick and restless.

“What is it?” he said.

“I think I just found my client’s daughter,” I said.

Both the strawberry birthmark and the filigree ring with the green stone had been part of my basic description of the girl; the photographs I had showed her to be a pretty but average-looking young woman—slim, brunette—who resembled every third girl you saw on the street. So I was counting on those two specifics to help me identify her. I hadn’t counted on those specifics helping me in just this fashion.

I sat in Eliot’s inner office in the Cleveland city hall; the mayor’s office was next door. We were having coffee with some rum in it—Eliot kept a bottle in a bottom drawer of his rolltop desk. I promised him not to tell Capone.

“I think we should call the father,” Eliot said. “Ask him to come and make the identification.”

I thought about it. “I’d like to argue with you, but I don’t see how I can. Maybe if we waited till…Christ. Till the head turns up…”

Eliot shrugged. “It isn’t likely to. The ring and the birthmark are enough to warrant notifying the father.”

“I can make the call.”

“No. I’ll let you talk to him when I’m done, but that’s something I should do.”

And he did. With quiet tact. After a few minutes he handed me the phone; if I’d thought him cold at the scene of the crime, I erased that thought when I saw the dampness in the gray eyes.

“Is it my little girl?” the deep voice said, sounding tinny out of the phone.

“I think so, Mr. Jensen. I’m afraid so.”

I could hear him weeping.

Then he said: “Mr. Ness said her body was…dismembered. How can you say it’s her? How…how can you know it’s her?”

And I told him of the ring and the strawberry teardrop.

“I should come there,” he said.

“Maybe that won’t be necessary.” I covered the phone. “Eliot, will my identification be enough?”

He nodded. “We’ll stretch it.”

I had to argue with Jensen, but finally he agreed for his daughter’s remains to be shipped back via train; I said I’d contact a funeral home this afternoon, and accompany her home.

I handed the phone to Eliot to hang up.

We looked at each other and Eliot, not given to swearing, said, “I’d give ten years of my life to nail that butchering bastard.”

“How long will your people need the body?”

“I’ll speak to the coroner’s office. I’m sure we can send her home with you in a day or two. Where are you staying?”

“The Stadium Hotel.”

“Not anymore. I’ve got an extra room for you. I’m a bachelor again, you know.”

We hadn’t gotten into that yet; I’d always considered Eliot’s marriage an ideal one, and was shocked a few months back to hear it had broken up.

“I’m sorry, Eliot.”

“Me too. But I am seeing somebody. Someone you may remember; another Chicagoan.”

“Who?”

“Evie MacMillan.”

“The fashion illustrator? Nice looking woman.”

Eliot smiled slyly. “You’ll see her tonight, at the Country Club…but I’ll arrange some female companionship for you. I don’t want you cutting my time.”

“How can you say such a thing? Don’t you trust me?”

“I learned a long time ago,” he said, turning to his desk full of paperwork, “not to trust Chicago cops—even ex-ones.8221;

Out on the Country Club terrace, the ten-piece band was playing Cole Porter and a balmy breeze from Lake Erie was playing with the women’s hair. There were plenty of good-looking women, here—low-cut dresses, bare shoulders—and lots of men in evening clothes for them to dance with. But this was no party, and since some of the golfers were still here from late afternoon rounds, there were sports clothes and a few business suits (like mine) in the mix. Even some of the women were dressed casually, like the tall, slender blonde in pink shirt and pale green pleated skirt who sat down next to me at the little white metal table and asked me if I’d have a Bacardi with her. The air smelled like a flower garden, and some of it was flowers, and some of it was her.

“I’d be glad to buy you a Bacardi cocktail,” I said, clumsily.

“No,” she said, touching my arm. She had eyes the color of jade. “You’re a guest. I’ll buy.”

Eliot was dancing with his girl Evie, an attractive brunette in her mid-thirties; she’d always struck me as intelligent but sad, somehow. They smiled over at me.

The blonde in pink and pale green brought two Bacardis over, set one of them in front of me and smiled. “Yes,” she said wickedly. “You’ve been set up. I’m the girl Eliot promised you. But if you were hoping for somebody in an evening gown, I’m not it. I just had to get an extra nine holes in.”

“If you were looking for a guy in a tux,” I said, “I’m not it. And I’ve never been on a golf course in my life. What else do we have in common?”

She had a nicely wry smile, which continued as she sipped the Bacardi. “Eliot, I suppose. If I have a few more of these, I may tell you a secret.”

And after a few more, she did.

And it was a whopper.

“You’re an undercover agent?” I said. A few sheets to the wind myself.

“Shhhh,” she said, finger poised uncertainly before pretty lips. “It’s a secret. But I haven’t been doing it much lately.”

“Haven’t been doing what?”

“Well, undercover work. And there’s a double-entendre there that I’d rather you didn’t go looking for.”

“I wouldn’t think of looking under the covers for it.”

The band began playing a tango.

I asked her how she got involved, working for Eliot. Which I didn’t believe for a second, even in my cups.

But it turned out to be true (as Eliot admitted to me when he came over to see how Vivian and I were getting along, when Vivian—which was her name, incidentally—went to the powder room with Evie).

Vivian Chalmers was the daughter of a banker (a solvent one), a divorcee of thirty with no children and a lot of social pull. An expert trapshooter, golfer, tennis player and “all ’round sportswoman,” with a sense of adventure. When Eliot called ooverto case various of the gambling joints he planned to raid—as a socialite she could take a fling in any joint she chose, without raising any suspicion—she immediately said yes. And she’d been an active agent in the first few years of Eliot’s ongoing battle against the so-called Mayfield Road Mob—who controlled prostitution, gambling and the policy racket in the Cleveland environs.

“But things have slowed down,” she said, nostalgically. “Eliot has pretty much cleaned up the place, and, besides, he doesn’t want to use me anymore.”

“An undercover agent can only be effective so long,” I said. “Pretty soon the other side gets suspicious.”

She shrugged, with resigned frustration, and let me buy the next round.

We took a walk in the dark, around the golf course, and ended up sitting on a green. The breeze felt nice. The flag on the hole—13—flapped.

“Thirteen,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Victim thirteen.”

“Oh. Eliot told me about that. Your ‘luck’ today, finding your client’s missing daughter. Damn shame.”

“Damn shame.”

“A shame, too, they haven’t found the son-of-a-bitch.”

She was a little drunk, and so was I, but I was still shocked—well, amused—to hear a woman, particularly a “society” woman, speak that way.

“It must grate on Eliot, too,” I said.

“Sure as hell does. It’s the only mote in his eye. He’s a hero around these parts, and he’s kicked the Mayfield Mob in the seat of the pants, and done everything else from clean up a corrupt police department to throw labor racketeers in jail, to cut traffic deaths in half, to founding Boy’s Town, to….”

“You’re not in love with the guy, are you?”

She seemed taken aback for a minute, then her face wrinkled into a got-caught-with-my-pants-down grin. “Maybe a little. But he’s got a girl.”

“I don’t.”

“You might.”

She leaned forward.

We kissed for a while, and she felt good in my arms; she was firm, almost muscular. But she smelled like flowers. And the sky was blue and scattered with stars above us, as we lay back on the golf-green to look up. It seemed like a nice world, at the moment.

Hard to imagine it had a Butcher in it.

I sat up talking with Eliot that night; he lived in a reconverted boathouse on the lake. The furnishings were sparse, spartan—it was obvious his wife had taken most of the furniture with her and he’d had to all but start over.

I told him I thought Vivian was a terrific girl.

Leaning back in a comfy chair, feet on an ottoman, Eliot, tie loose around his neck, smile go a melancholy way. “I thought you’d hit it off.”

“Did you have an affair with her?”

He looked at me sharply; that was about as personal as I’d ever got with him.

He shook his head, but I didn’t quite buy it.

“You knew Evie MacMillan in Chicago,” I said.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning nothing.”

“Meaning I knew her when I was still married.”

“Meaning nothing.”

“Nate, I’m sorry I’m not the Boy Scout you think I am.”

“Hey, so you’ve slept with girls before. I’ll learn to live with it.”

There was a stone fireplace, in which some logs were trying to decide whether to burn any more or not; we watched them trying.

“I love Evie, Nate. I’m going to marry her.”

“Congratulations.”

We could hear the lake out there; could smell it some, too.

“I’d like that bastard’s neck in my hands,” Eliot said.

“What?”

“That Butcher. That goddamn Butcher.”

“What made you think of him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Eliot, it’s been over three years since he first struck, and you still don’t have anything?”

“Nothing. A few months ago, last time he hit, we found some of the…body parts, bones and such…in a cardboard box in the Central Market area. There’s a Hooverville over there, or what used to be a Hooverville…it’s a shantytown, is more like it, genuine hobos as opposed to just good folks down on their luck. Most of the victims—before today—were either prostitutes or bums…and the bums from that shantytown were the Butcher’s meat. So to speak.”

The fire crackled.

Eliot continued: “I decided to make a clean sweep. I took twenty-five cops through there at one in the morning, and rousted out all the ’bo’s and took ’em down and fingerprinted and questioned all of ’em.”

“And it amounted to…?”

“It amounted to nothing. Except ridding Cleveland of that shantytown. I burned the place down that afternoon.”

“Comes in handy, having all those firemen working for you. But what about those poor bastards whose ‘city’ you burned down?”

Sensing my disapproval, he glanced at me and gave me what tried to be a warm smile, but was just a weary one. “Nate, I turned them over to the Relief department, for relocation and, I hope, rehabilitation. But most of them were bums who just hopped a freight out. And I did ’em a favor by taking them off the potential victims list.”

“And made room for Ginger Jensen.”

Eliot looked away.

“That wasn’t fair,” I said. “I’m sorry I said that, Eliot.”

“I know, Nate. I know.”

But I could tell he’d been thinking the same thing.

I had lunch the next day with Vivian in a little outdoor restaurant in the shadow of Terminal Tower. We were served lemonade and little ham and cheese and lettuce and tomato sandwiches with the crusts trimmed off the toasted bread. The detective in me wondered what became of the crusts.

“Thanks for having lunch with me,” Vivian said. She had on a pale orange dress; she sat crossing her brown pretty legs.

“My pleasure,” I said.

“Speaking of which…about last night…”

“We were both a little drunk. Forget it. Just don’t ask me to.”

She smiled as she nibbled her sandwich.

“I called and told Eliot something this morning,” she said, “and he just ignored me.”

“What was that?”

“That I have a possible lead on the Butcher murders.”

“I can’t imagine Eliot ignoring that…and it’s not like it’s just anybody approaching him—you did work for him…”

“Not lately. And he thinks I’m just…”

“Looking for an excuse to be around him?”

She nibbled at a little sandwich. Nodded.

“Did you resent him asking you to be with me as a blind date last night?”

“No,” she said.

“Did…last night have anything to do with wanting to ‘show’ Eliot?”

If she weren’t so sophisticated—or trying to be—she would’ve looked hurt; but her expression managed to get something else across: disappointment in me.

“Last night had to do with showing you,” she said. “And…it had a little to do with Bacardi cocktails…”

“That it did. Tell me about your lead.”

“Eliot has been harping on the ‘professional’ way the bodies have been dismembered—he’s said again and again he sees a ‘surgical’ look to it.”

I nodded.

“So it occurred to me that a doctor—anyway, somebody who’d at least been in medical school for a time—would be a likely candidate for the Butcher.”

“Yes.”

“And medical school’s expensive, so, it stands to reason, the Butcher just might run in the same social circles as yours truly.”

“Say, you did work for Eliot.”

She liked that.

She continued: “I checked around with my society friends, and heard about a guy whose family has money—plenty of it. Name of Watterson.”

“Last name or first?”

“That’s the family name. Big in these parts.”

“Means nothing to me.”

“Well, Lloyd Watterson used to be a medical student. He’s a big man, very strong—the kind of strength it might take to do some of the things the Butcher has done. And he has a history of mental disturbances.”

“What kind of mental disturbances?”

“He’s been going to psychiatrist since he was a school kid.”

“Do you know this guy?”

“Just barely. But I’ve heard things about him.”

“Such as?”

“I hear he likes boys.”

Lloyd Watterson lived in a two-story white house at the end of a dead-end street, a Victorian-looking miniature mansion among other such houses, where expansive lawns and towering hedges separated the world from the wealthy who lived within.

This wasn’t the parental home, Vivian explained; Watterson lived here alone, apparently without servants. The grounds seemed well-tended, though, and there was nothing about this house that said anyone capable of mass murder might live here. No blood spattered on the white porch; no body parts scattered about the lawn.

It was mid-afternoon, and I was having second thoughts.

“I don’t even have a goddamn gun,” I said.

“I do,” she said, and showed me a little .25 automatic from her purse.

“Great. If he has a dog, maybe we can use that to scare it.”

“This’ll do the trick. Besides, a gun won’t even be necessary. You’re just here to talk.”

The game plan was for me to approach Watterson as a cop, flashing my private detective’s badge quickly enough to fool him (and that almost always worked), and question him, simply get a feel for whether or not he was a legitimate suspect, worthy of lobbying Eliot for action against. My say-so, Vivian felt, would be enough to get Eliot off the dime.

And helping Eliot bring the Butcher in would be a nice wedding present for my old friend; with his unstated but obvious political ambitions, the capture of the Kingsbury Run maniac would offset the damage his divorce had done him, in conservative, mostly Catholic Cleveland. He’d been the subject of near hero worship, in the press here (Eliot was always good at getting press—Frank Nitti used to refer to him as “Eliot Press”); but theongoing if sporadic slaughter of the Butcher was a major embarrassment for Cleveland’s fabled Safety Director.

So, leaving Vivian behind in the roadster (Watterson might recognize her), I walked up the curved sidewalk and went up on the porch and rang the bell. In the dark hardwood door there was opaque glass behind which I could barely make out movement, coming toward me.

The door opened, and a blond man about six-three with a baby-face and ice-blue eyes and shoulders that nearly filled the doorway looked out at me and grinned. A kid’s grin, on one side of his face. He wore a polo shirt and short white pants; he seemed about to say, “Tennis anyone?”

But he said nothing, as a matter of fact; he just appraised me with those ice-blue, somewhat vacant eyes. I now knew how it felt for a woman to be ogled—which is to say, not necessarily good.

I said, “I’m an officer of the court,” which in Illinois wasn’t exactly a lie, and I flashed him my badge, but before I could say anything else, his hand reached out and grabbed the front of my shirt, yanked me inside and slammed the door.

He tossed me like a horseshoe, and I smacked into something—the stairway to the second floor, I guess; I don’t know exactly—because I blacked out. The only thing I remember is the musty smell of the place.

I woke up minutes later, and found myself tied in a chair in a dank, dark room. Support beams loomed out of a packed dirt floor. The basement.

I strained at the ropes, but they were snug; not so snug as to cut off my circulation, but snug enough. I glanced around the room. I was alone. I couldn’t see much—just a shovel against one cement wall. The only light came from a window off to my right, and there were hedges in front of the widow, so the light was filtered.

Feet came tromping down the open wooden stairs. I saw his legs, first; white as pastry dough.

He was grinning. In his right hand was a cleaver. It shone, caught a glint of what little light there was.

“I’m no butcher,” he said. His voice was soft, almost gentle. “Don’t believe what you’ve heard….”

“Do you want to die?” I said.

“Of course not.”

“Well then cut me loose. There’s cops all over the place, and if you kill me, they’ll shoot you down. You know what happens to cop killers, don’t you?”

He thought that over, nodded.

Standing just to one side of me, displaying the cold polished steel of the cleaver, in which my face’s frantic reflection looked back at me, he said, “I’m no butcher. This is a surgical tool. This is used for amputation, not butchery.”

“Yeah. I can see that.”

“I wondered when you people would come around.”

“Do you want to be caught, Lloyd?”

“Of course not. I’m no different than you. I’m a public servant.”

“How…how do you figure that, Lloyd?” My fweren’t tied to the chair; if he’d just step around in front of me…

“I only dispose of the flotsam. Not to mention jetsam.”

“Not to mention that.”

“Tramps. Whores. Weeding out the stock. Survival of the fittest. You know.”

“That makes a lot of sense, Lloyd. But I’m not flotsam or jetsam. I’m a cop. You don’t want to kill a cop. You don’t want to kill a fellow public servant.”

He thought about that.

“I think I have to, this time,” he said.

He moved around the chair, stood in front of me, stroking his chin, the cleaver gripped tight in his right hand, held about breastbone level.

“I do like you,” Lloyd said, thoughtfully.

“And I like you, Lloyd,” I said, and kicked him in the balls.

Harder than any man tied to a chair should be able to kick; but you’d be surprised what you can do, under extreme circumstances. And things rarely get more extreme than being tied to a chair with a guy with a cleaver coming at you.

Only he wasn’t coming at me, now: now, he was doubled over, and I stood, the chair strapped to my back; managed, even so, to kick him in the face.

He tumbled back, gripping his groin, tears streaming down his checks, cords in his neck taut; my shoe had caught him on the side of the face and broken the skin. Flecks of blood, like little red tears, spattered his cheeks, mingling with the real tears.

That’s when the window shattered, and Vivian squeezed down in through; pretty legs first.

And she gave me the little gun to hold on him while she untied me.

He was still on the dirt floor, moaning, when we went up the stairs and out into the sunny day, into a world that wasn’t dank, onto earth that was grass-covered and didn’t have God knows what buried under it.

We asked Eliot to meet us at his boathouse; we told him what had happened. He was livid; I never saw him angrier. But he held Vivian for a moment, and looked at her and said, “If anything had happened to you, I’d’ve killed you.”

He poured all of us a drink; rum as usual. He handed me my mine and said, “How could you get involved in something so harebrained?”

“I wanted to give my client something for his money,” I said.

“You mean his daughter’s killer.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve been looking for the bastard three years, and you come to town and expect to find him in three days.”

“Well, I did.”

He smirked, shook his head. “I believe you did. But Watterson’s family would bring in the highest-paid lawyers in the country and we’d be thrown out of court on our cans.”

div>

“What? The son of a bitch tried to cut me up with a cleaver!”

“Did he? Did he swing on you? Or did you enter his house under a false pretense, misrepresenting yourself as a law officer? And as far as that goes, you assaulted him. We have very little.”

Vivian said, “You have the name of the Butcher.”

Eliot nodded. “Probably. I’m going to make a phone call.”

Eliot went into his den and came out fifteen minutes later.

“I spoke with Franklin Watterson, the father. He’s agreed to submit his son for a lie detector test.”

“To what end?”

“One step at a time,” Eliot said.

Lloyd Watterson took the lie detector test twice—and on both instances denied committing the various Butcher slayings; his denials were, according to the machine, lies. The Watterson family attorney reminded Eliot that lie detector tests were not admissible as evidence. Eliot had a private discussion with Franklin Watterson.

Lloyd Watterson was committed, by his family, to an asylum for the insane. The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run—which to this day is marked “unsolved” in the Cleveland police records—did not strike again.

At least not directly.

Eliot married Evie MacMillan a few months after my Cleveland visit, and their marriage was from the start disrupted by crank letters, postmarked from the same town as the asylum where Watterson had been committed. “Retribution will catch up with you one day,” said one postcard, on the front of which was a drawing of an effeminate man grinning from behind prison bars. Mrs. Ness was especially unnerved by these continuing letters and cards.

Eliot’s political fortunes waned, in the wake of the “unsolved” Butcher slayings. Known for his tough stance on traffic violators, he got mired in a scandal when one pre-dawn morning in March of 1942, his car skidded into an oncoming car on the West Shoreway. Eliot and his wife, and two friends, had been drinking. The police report didn’t identify Eliot by name, but his license number—EN-1, well-known to Cleveland citizens—was listed. And Eliot had left the scene of the accident.

Hit-and-run, the headlines said. Eliot’s version was that his wife had been injured, and he’d raced her to a hospital—but not before stopping to check on the other driver, who confirmed this. The storm blew over, but the damage was done—Eliot’s image in the Cleveland press was finally tarnished.

Two months later he resigned as Safety Director.

Lloyd Watterson kept sending the threatening mail to Eliot for many years. He died in a Dayton, Ohio, asylum in 1965.

How much pressure those cards and letters put on the marriage I couldn’t say; but in 1945 Eliot and Evie divorced, and Eliot married a third time a few months later. At the time he was serving as federal director of the program against venereal disease in the military. His attempt to run for Cleveland mayor in 1947 was a near disaster: Cleveland’s one-time fairhaired b was a has-been with a hit-run scandal and two divorces and three marriages going against him.

He would not have another public success until the publication of his autobiographical book, The Untouchables—but that success was posthumous; he died shortly before it was published, never knowing that television and Robert Stack would give him lasting fame.

I saw Eliot, now and then, over the years; but I never saw Vivian again.

I asked him about her, once, when I was visiting him in Pennsylvania, in the early ’50s. He told me she’d been killed in a boating accident in 1943.

“She’s been dead for years, then,” I said, the shock of it hitting me like a blow.

“That’s right. But shed a tear for her, now, if you like. Tears and prayers can never come too late, Nate.”

Amen, Eliot.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Research materials included Four Against the Mob (1961) by Oscar Fraley, and Cleveland—Best Kept Secret (1967) by George E. Condon. Following extensive research at the Case Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, this story was expanded into the non-Heller novel Butcher’s Dozen (1988). The Heller novel Angel in Black (2001) is a sequel to both “The Strawberry Teardrop” and Butcher’s Dozen. My play and film, Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life (2007), also deals with the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run and “Lloyd Watterson.”

Friday afternoon, December 8, 1939, I had a call from Jake Rubinstein to meet him at 3159 Roosevelt, which was in Lawndale, my old neighborhood. Jake was an all right guy, kind of talkative and something of a roughneck, but then on Maxwell Street, when I was growing up, developing a mouth and muscles was necessary for survival. I knew Jake had been existing out on the fringes of the rackets since then, but that was true of a lot of guys. I didn’t hold it against him. I went into one of the rackets myself, after all—known in Chicago as the police department—and I figured Jake wouldn’t hold that against me, either. Especially since I was private, now, and he wanted to hire me.

The afternoon was bitterly cold, snow on the ground but not snowing, as I sat parked in my sporty ’32 Auburn across the street from the drug store, over which was the union hall where Jake said to meet him. The Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union, he said. I didn’t know there was one. They had unions for everything these days. My pop, an old union man, would’ve been pleased. I didn’t much care.

I went up the flight of stairs and into the outer office; the meeting room was adjacent, at my left. The place was modest, like most union halls—if you’re running a union you don’t want the rank and file to think you’re living it up—but the secretary behind the desk looked like a million. She was a brunette in a trim brown suit with big brown eyes and bright red lipstick. She’d soften the blow of paying dues any day.

She smiled at me and I forgot it was winter. “Would you be Mr. Heller?”

“I would. Would you be free for dinner?”

Her smile settled in one corner of her bright red mouth. “I wouldn’t. Mr. Rubinstein is waiting for you in Mr. Martin’s office.”

And she pointed to the only door in the wall behind her, and I gave her a can’t-blame-a-guy-for-trying look and went on in.

The inner office wasn’t big but it seemed bigger than it was because it was under-furnished: just a clutter-free desk and a couple of chairs and two wooden file cabinets. Jake was sitting behind the desk, feet up on in, socks with clocks showing, as he read The Racing News.

“How are you, Jake,” I said, and held out my hand.

He put the paper down, stood and grinned and shook my hand; he was a little guy, short I mean, but he had shoulders on him and his grip was a killer. He wore a natty dark blue suit and a red hand-painted tie with a sunset on it and a hat that was a little big for him. He kept the hat on indoors—self-conscious about his thinning hair, I guess.

“You look good, Nate. Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming yourself and not sending one of your ops.”

“Any excuse to get back to the old neighborhood, Jake,” I said, pulling up a chair and sitting. “We’re about four blocks from where my pop’s bookshop was, you know.”

“I know, I know,” he said, sitting again. “What do you hear from Barney these days?”

“Not much. When did you get in the union racket, anyway? Last I heard you were a door-to-door salesman.”

Jake shrugged. He had dark eyes and a weak chin and five o’clock shadow; make that six o’clock shadow. “A while ago,” he allowed. “But it ain’t really a racket. We’re trying to give our guys a break.”

I smirked at him. “In this town? Billy Skidmore isn’t going to put up with a legit junk handler’s union.”

Skidmore was a portly, dapperly dressed junk dealer and politician who controlled most of the major non-Capone gambling in town. Frank Nitti, Capone’s heir, put up with that because Skidmore was also a bailbondsmen, which made him a necessary evil.

“Skidmore’s got troubles these days,” Jake said. “He can’t afford to push us around no more.”

“You’re talking about the income tax thing.”

“Yeah. Just like Capone. He didn’t pay his taxes and they got ‘im for it.”

“They indicted him, but that doesn’t mean they got him. Anyway, where do I come in?”

Jake leaned forward, brow beetling. “You know a guy named Leon Cooke?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“He’s a little younger than us, but he’s from around here. He’s a lawyer. He put this union together, two, three years ago. Well, about a year back he became head of an association of junkyard dealers, and the rank and file voted him out.”

I shrugged. “Seems reasonable. In Chicago it wouldn’t be unusual to represent both the employees and the employers, but kosher it ain’t.”

Jake was nodding. “Right. The new president is Johnny Martin. Know him?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“He’s been with the Sanitary District for, oh, twenty or more years.”

The Sanitary District controlled the sewage in the city’s rivers and canals.

“He needed a hobby,” I said, “so he ran for president of the junk handler’s union, huh?”

“He’s a good man, Nate, he really is.”

“What’s your job?”

“I’m treasurer of the union.”

“You’re the collector, then.”

“Well…yeah. Does it show?”

“I just didn’t figure you for the accountant type.”

He smiled sheepishly. “Every union needs a little muscle. Anyways, Cooke. He’s trying to stir things up, we think. He isn’t even legal counsel for the union anymore, but he’s been coming to meetings, hanging around. We think he’s been going around talking to the members.”

“Got an election coming up?”

“Yeah. We want to know who he’s talking to. We want to know if anybody’s backing him.”

“You think Nitti’s people might be using him for a front?”

“Could be. Maybe even Skidmore. Playing both ends against the middle is Cooke’s style. Anyways, can you shadow him and find out?”

“For fifteen a day and expenses, I can.”

“Isn’t that a little steep, Nate?”

“What’s the monthly take on union dues around this joint?”

“Fifteen a day’s fine,” Jake said, shaking his head side to side, smiling.

“And expenses.”

The door opened and the secretary came in, quickly, her silk stockings flashing.

“Mr. Rubinstein,” she said, visibly upset, “Mr. Cooke is in the outer office. Demanding to see Mr. Martin.”

“Shit,” Jake said through his teeth. He glanced at me. “Let’s get you out of here.”

We followed the secretary into the outer office, where Cooke, a man of medium size in an off-the-rack brown suit, was pacing. A heavy top coat was slung over his arm. In his late twenties, with thinning brown hair, Cooke was rather mild looking, with wire-rim glasses and cupid lips. Nonetheless, he was well and truly pissed off.

“Where’s that btard Martin?” he demanded of Jake. Not at all intimidated by the little strongarm man.

“He stepped out,” Jake said.

“Then I’ll wait. Till hell freezes over, if necessary.”

Judging by the weather, that wouldn’t be long.

“If you’ll excuse us,” Jake said, brushing by him. I followed.

“Who’s this?” Cooke said, meaning me. “A new member of your goon squad? Isn’t Fontana enough for you?”

Jake ignored that and I followed him down the steps to the street.

“He didn’t mean Carlos Fontana, did he?” I asked.

Jake nodded. His breath was smoking, teeth chattering. He wasn’t wearing a topcoat; we’d left too quick for such niceties.

“Fontana’s a pretty rough boy,” I said.

“A lot of people who was in bootlegging,” Jake said, shrugging, “had to go straight. What are you gonna do now?”

“I’ll use the phone booth in the drug store to get one of my ops out here to shadow Cooke. I’ll keep watch till then. He got enough of a look at me that I don’t dare shadow him myself.”

Jake nodded. “I’m gonna go call Martin.”

“And tell him to stay away?”

“That’s up to him.”

I shook my head. “Cooke seemed pretty mad.”

“He’s an asshole.”

And Jake walked quickly down to a parked black Ford coupe, got in, and smoked off.

I called the office and told my secretary to send either Lou or Frankie out as soon as possible, whoever was available first; then I sat in the Auburn and waited.

Not five minutes later a heavy-set, dark-haired man in a camel’s hair topcoat went in and up the union-hall stairs. I had a hunch it was Martin. More than a hunch: he looked well and truly pissed off, too.

I could smell trouble.

I probably should have sat it out, but I got out of the Auburn and crossed Roosevelt and went up those stairs myself. The secretary was standing behind the desk. She was scared shitless. She looked about an inch away from crying.

Neither man was in the anteroom, but from behind the closed door came the sounds of loud voices.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“That awful Mr. Cooke was in using Johnny…Mr. Martin’s telephone, in his office, when Mr. Martin arrived.”

They were scuffling in there, now.

“Any objection if I go in there and break that up?” I asked her.

“None at all,” she said.

That was when we heard the shots.

Three of them, in rapid succession.

The secretary sucked in breath, covered her mouth, said, “My God…my God.”

And I didn’t have a gun, goddamnit.

I was still trying to figure out whether to go in there or not when the burly, dark-haired guy who I assumed (rightly) to be Martin, still in the camel’s hair topcoat, came out with a blue-steel revolver in his hand. Smoke was curling out the barrel.

“Johnny, Johnny,” the secretary said, going to him, clinging to him. “Are you all right?”

“Never better,” he said, but his voice was shaking. He scowled over at me; he had bushy black eyebrows that made the scowl frightening. And the gun helped. “Who the hell are you?”

“Nate Heller. I’m a dick Jake Rubinstein hired to shadow Leon Cooke.”

Martin nodded his head back toward the office. “Well, if you want to get started, he’s on the floor in there.”

I went into the office and Cooke was on his stomach; he wasn’t dead yet. He had a bullet in the side; the other two slugs went through the heavy coat that had been slung over his arm.

“I had to do it,” Martin said. “He jumped me. He attacked me.”

“We better call an ambulance,” I said.

“So, then, we can’t just dump his body somewhere,” Martin said, thoughtfully.

“I was hired to shadow this guy,” I said. “It starts and ends there. You want something covered up, call a cop.”

“How much money you got on you?” Martin said. He wasn’t talking to me.

The secretary said, “Maybe a hundred.”

“That’ll hold us. Come on.”

He led her through the office and opened a window behind his desk. In a very gentlemanly manner, he helped her out onto the fire escape.

And they were gone.

I helped Cooke onto his feet.

“You awake, pal?”

“Y-yes,” he said. “Christ, it hurts.”

“Mount Sinai hospital’s just a few blocks away,” I said. “We’re gonna get you there.”

I wrapped the coat around him, to keep from getting blood on my car seat, and drove him to the hospital.

Half an hour later, I was waiting outside Cooke’s room in the hospital hall when Captain Stege caught up with me.

Stege, a white-haired fireplug of a man with black-rimmed glasses and a pasty complexion—and that Chicago rarity, an honest cop—was not thrilled to see me.

“I’m getting sick of you turning up at shootings,” he said.

“I do it just to irritate you. It makes your eyes twinkle.”

“ covereleft a crime scene.”

“I hauled the victim to the hospital. I told the guy at the drugstore to call it in. Let’s not get technical.”

“Yeah,” Stege grunted. “Let’s not. What’s your story?”

“The union secretary hired me to keep an eye on this guy Cooke. But Cooke walked in, while I was there, angry, and then Martin showed up, equally steamed.”

I gave him the details.

As I was finishing up, a doctor came out of Cooke’s room and Stege cornered him, flashing his badge.

“Can he talk, doc?”

“Briefly. He’s in critical condition.”

“Is he gonna make it?”

“He should pull through. Stay only a few minutes, gentlemen.”

Stege went in and I followed; I thought he might object, but he didn’t.

Cooke looked pale, but alert. He was flat on his back. Stege introduced himself and asked for Cooke’s story.

Cooke gave it, with lawyer-like formality: “I went to see Martin to protest his conduct of the union. I told Martin he ought to’ve obtained a pay raise for the men in one junkyard. I told him our members were promised a pay increase, by a certain paper company, and instead got a wage cut—and that I understood he’d sided with the employer in the matter! He got very angry, at that, and in a little while we were scuffling. When he grabbed a gun out of his desk, I told him he was crazy, and started to leave. Then…then he shot me in the back.”

Stege jotted that down, thanked Cooke and we stepped out into the hall.

“Think that was the truth?” Stege asked me.

“Maybe. But you really ought to hear Martin’s side, too.”

“Good idea, Heller. I didn’t think of that. Of course, the fact that Martin lammed does complicate things, some.”

“With all the heat on unions, lately, I can see why he lammed. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt Martin pulled the trigger. But who attacked who remains in question.”

Stege sighed. “You do have a point. I can understand Martin taking it on the lam, myself. He’s already under indictment for another matter. He probably just panicked.”

“Another matter?”

Stege nodded. “He and Terry Druggan and two others were indicted last August for conspiracy. Trying to conceal from revenue officers that Druggan was part owner of a brewery.”

Druggan was a former bootlegger, a West Side hood who’d been loosely aligned with such non-Capone forces as the Bugs Moran gang. I was starting to think maybe my old man wouldn’t have been so pleased by all this union activity.

“We’ll stake out Martin’s place,” Stege said, “for all the good it’ll do. He’s got a bungalow over on Wolcott Avenue.”

“Nice little neighbrhood,” I said.

“We’re in the wrong racket,” Stege admitted.

It was too late in the afternoon to bother going back to the office now, so I stopped and had supper at Pete’s Steaks and then headed back to my apartment at the Morrison Hotel. I was reading a Westbrook Pegler column about what a bad boy Willie Bioff was when the phone rang.

“Nate? It’s Jake.”

“Jake, I’m sorry I didn’t call you or anything. I didn’t have any number for you but the union hall. You know about what went down?”

“Do I. I’m calling from the Marquette station. They’re holding me for questioning.”

“Hell, you weren’t even there!”

“That’s okay. I’m stalling ’em a little.”

“Why, for Christ’s sake?”

“Listen, Nate—we gotta hold this thing together. You gotta talk to Martin.”

“Why? How?”

“I’m gonna talk to Cooke. Cooke’s the guy who hired me to work for the union in the first place, and…”

“What? Cooke hired you?”

“Yeah, yeah. Look, I’ll go see Cooke first thing in the morning—that is, if you’ve seen Martin tonight, and worked a story out. Something that’ll make this all sound like an accident…”

“I don’t like being part of cover-ups.”

“This ain’t no fuckin’ cover-up! It’s business! Look, they got the state’s attorney’s office in on this already. You know who’s taken over for Stege, already?”

“Tubbo Gilbert?”

“Himself,” Jake said.

Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert was the richest cop in Chicago. In the world. He was tied in with every mob, every fixer in town.

“The local will be finished,” Jake said. “He’ll find something in the books and use that and the shooting as an excuse to close the union down.”

“Which’ll freeze wages at current levels,” I said. “Exactly what the likes of Billy Skidmore would want.”

“Right. And then somebody else’ll open the union back up, in six months or so. Somebody tied into the Nitti and Guzik crowd.”

“As opposed to Druggan and Moran.”

“Don’t compare them to Nitti and Guzik. Those guys went straight, Nate.”

“Please. I just ate. Moran got busted on a counterfeit railroad-bond scam just last week.”

“Nobody’s perfect. Nate, it’s for the best. Think of your old man.”

“Don’t do that to me, Jake. I don’t exactly think your union is what my pop had in mind when he was handing out pamphlets on Maxwell Street.”

“Well, it’s all that stands between the working stiffs and the Billy Skidmores.”

“I take it you know where Martin is hiding out.”

“Yeah. That secretary of his, her mother has a house in Hinsdale. Lemme give you the address…”

“Okay, Jake. It’s against my better judgment, but okay…”

It took an hour to get there by car. Well after dark. Hinsdale was a quiet, well-fed little suburb, and the house at 409 Walnut Street was a two-story number in the midst of a healthy lawn. The kind of place the suburbs are full of, but which always seem shockingly sprawling to city boys like yours truly.

There were a few lights on, downstairs. I walked up onto the porch and knocked. I was unarmed. Probably not wise, but I was.

The secretary answered the door. Cracked it open.

She didn’t recognize me at first.

“I’m here about our dinner date,” I said.

Then, in relief, she smiled, opened the door wider.

“You’re Mr. Heller.”

“That’s right. I never did get your name.”

“Then how did you find me?”

“I had your address. I just didn’t get your name.”

“Well, it’s Nancy. But what do you want, Mr. Heller?”

“Make it Nate. It’s cold. Could I step in?”

She swallowed. “Sure.”

I stepped inside; it was a nicely furnished home, but obviously the home of an older person: the doilies and ancient photo portraits were a dead giveaway.

“This is my mother’s home,” she said. “She’s visiting relatives. I live here.”

I doubted that; the commute would be impossible. If she didn’t live with Martin, in his nifty little bungalow on South Wolcott, I’d eat every doilie in the joint.

“I know that John Martin is here,” I said. “Jake Rubinstein told me. He asked me to stop by.”

She didn’t know what to say to that.

Martin stepped out from a darkened doorway into the living room. He was in rolled-up shirt sleeves and no tie. He looked frazzled. He had the gun in his hand.

“What do you want?” he said. His tone was not at all friendly.

“You’re making too big a deal out of this,” I said. “There’s no reason to go on the lam. This is just another union shooting—the papers’re full of ’em.”

“I don’t shoot a man every day,” Martin said.

“I’m relieved to hear that. How about putting the heater away, then?”

Martin sneered and tossed the piece on a nearby floral couch. He was a nasty man to have a nice girl like this. But then, so often nice girls do like nasty men.

I took it upon myself to sit down. Not on the couch: on a chair, with a soft seat and curved wooden arms.

Speaking of curves, Nancy, who was wearing a blue print dress, was standing wringing her hands, looking about to cry.

“I could use something to drink,” I said, wanting to give her something to do.

“Me too,” Martin said. “Beer. For him, too.”

“Beer would be fine,” I said, magnanimously.

She went into the kitchen.

“What’s Jake’s idea?” Martin asked.

I explained that Jake was afraid the union would be steam-rolled by crooked cops and political fixers, should this shooting blow into something major, first in the papers, then in the courts.

“Jake wants you to mend fences with Cooke. Put together some story you can both live with. Then find some way you can run the union together, or pay him off or something.”

“Fuck that shit!” Martin said. He stood up. “What’s wrong with that little kike, has he lost his marbles?”

“A guy who works on the West Side,” I said, “really ought to watch his goddamn mouth where the Jew-baiting’s concerned.”

“What’s it to you? You’re Irish.”

“Does Heller sound Irish to you? Don’t let the red hair fool you.”

“Well fuck you, too, then. Cooke’s a lying little kike, and Jake’s still in bed with him. Damn! I thought I could trust that little bastard…”

“I think you can. I think he’s trying to hold your union together, with spit and rubber bands. I don’t know if it’s worth holding together. I don’t know what you’re in it for—maybe you really care about your members, a little. Maybe it’s the money. But if I were you, I’d do some fast thinking, put together a story you can live with and let Jake try to sell it to Cooke. Then when the dust settles you’ll still have a piece of the action.”

Martin walked over and pointed a thick finger at me. “I don’t believe you, you slick son of a bitch. I think this is a set-up. Put together to get me to come in, give myself up and go straight to the lock-up, while Jake and Cooke tuck the union in their fuckin’ belt!”

I stood. “That’s up to you. I was hired to deliver a message. I delivered it. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

He thumped his finger in my chest. “You tell that little kike Rubinstein for me that…”

I smacked him.

He don’t go down, but it backed him up. He stood there looking like a confused bear and then growled and lumbered at me with massive fists out in front, ready to do damage.

So I smacked the bastard again, and again. He went down that time. I help him up. He swung clumsily at me, so I hit him in the side of the face and he went down again. Stayed down.

Nancy came in, a glass of beer in either hand, and said, “What…?” Her brown eyes wide.

“Thanks,” I said, taking one glass, chugging it. I wiped the foam off my face with the back of a hand and said, “I needed that.”

And I left them there.

The next morning, early, while I was still at the Morrison, shaving in fact, the phone rang.

It was Jake.

“How did it go last night?” he asked.

I told him.

“Shit,” he said. “I’ll still talk to Cooke, though. See if I can’t cool this down some.”

“I think it’s too late for that.”

“Me too,” Jake said glumly.

Martin came in on Saturday; gave himself up to Tubbo Gilbert. Stege was off the case. The story Martin told was considerably different from Cooke’s: he said Cooke was in the office using the phone (“Which he had no right to do!”) and Martin told him to leave; Cooke started pushing Martin around, and when Martin fought back, Cooke drew a gun. Cooke (according to Martin) hit him over the head with it and knocked him down. Then Cooke supposedly hit him with the gun again and Martin got up and they struggled and the gun went off. Three times.

The gun was never recovered. If it was really Cooke’s gun, of course, it would have been to Martin’s advantage to produce it; but he didn’t.

Martin’s claim that Cooke attacked and beat him was backed up by the fact that his face was badly bruised and battered. So I guess I did him a favor, beating the shit out of him.

Martin was placed under bond on a charge of intent to kill. Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert, representing the state’s attorney’s office, confiscated the charter of the union, announcing that it had been run “purely as a racket.” Shutting it down until such time that “the actual working members of the union care to continue it, and elect their own officers.”

That sounded good in the papers, but in reality it meant Skidmore and company had been served.

I talked to Stege about it, later, over coffee and bagels in the Dill Pickle deli below my office on Van Buren.

“Tubbo was telling the truth about the union being strictly a racket,” Stege said. “They had a thousand members paying two bucks a head a month. Legitimate uses counted for only seven hundred bucks’ worth a month. Martin’s salary, for example, was only a hundred-twenty bucks.”

“Well he’s shit out of luck, now,” I said.

“He’s still got his position at the Sanitary District,” Stege said. “Of course, he’s got to beat the rap for the assault to kill charge, first…” Stege smiled at the thought. “And Mr. Cooke tells a more convincing story than Martin does.”

When the union was finally re-opened, however, Jake was no longer treasurer. He was still involved in the rackets, though, selling punchboards, working for Ben “Zuckie the Bookie” Zuckerman, with a short time out for a wartime stint in the Air Force. He went to Dallas, I’ve heard, as representative of Chicago mob interests there, winding up running some strip joints. Rumor has it he was involved in other cover-ups, over the years.

By that time, of course, Jake was better known as Jack.

And he’d shortened his last name to Ruby.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

“Scrap” is primarily based upon newspaper research, but I should also acknowledge Maxwell Street (1977) by Ira Berkow; and The Plot to Kill the President (1981) by G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings.

She’d been pretty, once. She was still sexy, in a slutty way, if you’d had enough beers and it was just before closing time.

Kathleen O’Meara, who ran the dingy dive that sported her last name, would have been a well-preserved fifty, if she hadn’t been forty. But I knew from the background materials I’d been provided that she was born in 1899, here in the dirt-poor Irish neighborhood of Cleveland known as the Angles, a scattering of brick and frame dwellings and businesses at the north end of 25^th Street in the industrial flats.

Kathleen O’Meara’s husband, Frank, had been dead barely a month now, but Katie wasn’t wearing black: her blouse was white with red polka dots, a low-cut peasant affair out of which spilled well-powdered, bowling ball-size breasts. Her mouth was a heavily red-rouged chasm within which gleamed white storebought choppers; her eyes were lovely, within their pouches, long-lashed and money-green.

“What’s your pleasure, handsome?” she asked, her soprano voice musical in a calliope sort of way, a hint of Irish lilt in it.

I guess I was handsome, for this crowd anyway, six feet, one-hundred-eighty pounds poured into threadbare mismatched suitcoat and pants, a wilted excuse for a fedora snugged low over my reddish brown hair, chin and cheeks stubbled with two days growth, looking back at myself in the streaked smudgy mirror behind the bar. A chilly March afternoon had driven better than a dozen men inside the shabby walls of O’Meara’s, where a churning exhaust fan did little to stave off the bouquet of stale smoke and beer-soaked sawdust.

“Suds is all I can afford,” I said.

“There’s worse ways to die,” she said, eyes sparkling.

“Ain’t been reduced to canned heat yet,” I admitted.

At least half of he clientele around me couldn’t have made that claim; while those standing at the bar, with a foot on the rail like me, wore the sweatstained workclothes that branded them employed, the men hunkered at tables and booths wore the tattered rags of the derelict. A skinny dark-haired dead-eyed sunken-cheeked barmaid in an off-white waitress uniform was collecting empty mugs and replacing them with foaming new ones.

The bosomy saloonkeeper set a sloshing mug before me. “Railroad worker?”

I sipped; it was warm and bitter. “Steel mill. Pretty lean in Gary; heard they was hiring at Republic.”

“That was last month.”

“Yeah. Found that out in a hurry.”

She extended a pudgy hand. “Kathleen O’Meara, at your service.”

“William O’Hara,” I said. Nathan Heller, actually. The Jewish last name came from my father, but the Irish mug that was fooling the saloonkeeper was courtesy of my mother.

“Two O’s, that’s us,” she grinned; that mouth must have have been something, once. “My pals call me Katie. Feel free.”

“Well, thanks, Katie. And my pals call me Bill.” Nate.

“Got a place to stay, Bill?”

“No. Thought I’d hop a freight tonight. See what’s shakin’ up at Flint.”

“They ain’t hiring up there, neither.”

“Well, I dunno, then.”

“I got rooms upstairs, Bill.”

“Couldn’t afford it, Katie.”

“Another mug?”

“Couldn’t afford that, either.”

She winked. “Handsome, you got me wrapped around your little pinkie, ain’t ya noticed?”

She fetched me a second beer, then attended to the rest of her customers at the bar. I watched her, feeling both attracted and repulsed; what is it about a beautiful woman run to fat, gone to seed, that can still summon the male in a man?

I was nursing the second beer, knowing that if I had enough of these I might do something I’d regret in the morning, when she trundled back over and leaned on the bar with both elbows.

“A room just opened up. Yours, if you want it.”

“I told ya, Katie, I’m flat-busted.”

“But I’m not,” she said with a lecherous smile, and I couldn’t be sure whether she meant money or her billowing powdered bosoms. “I could use a helpin’ hand around here…. I’m a widow lady, Bill, runnin’ this big old place by her lonesome.”

“You mean sweep up and do dishes and the like.”

Her cute nose wrinkled as if a bad smell had caught its attention; a little late for that, in this joint. “My daughter does most of the drudgery.” She nodded toward the barmaid, who was moving througthe room like a zombie with a beer tray. “Wouldn’t insult ya with woman’s work, Bill…. But there’s things only a man can do.”

She said “things” like “tings.”

“What kind of things?”

Her eyes had a twinkle, like broken glass. “Things…. Interested?”

“Sure, Katie.”

And it was just that easy.

Three days earlier, I had been seated at a conference table in the spacious dark-wood and pebbled-glass office of the Public Safety Director in Cleveland’s City Hall.

“It’s going to be necessary to swear you in as a part of my staff,” Eliot Ness said.

I had known Eliot since we were both teenagers at the University of Chicago. I’d dropped out, finished up at a community college and gone into law enforcement; Eliot had graduated and became a private investigator, often working for insurance companies. Somewhere along the way, we’d swapped jobs.

His dark brown hair brushed with gray at the temples, Eliot’s faintly freckled, boyish good looks were going puffy on him, gray eyes pouchy and marked by crow’s feet. But even in his late thirties, the former Treasury agent who had been instrumental in Al Capone’s fall was the youngest Public Safety Director in the nation.

When I was on the Chicago P.D., I had been one of the few cops Eliot could trust for information; and when I opened up the one-man A-1 Detective Agency, Eliot had returned the favor as my only trustworthy source within the law enforcement community. I had remained in Chicago and he had gone on to more government crimebusting in various corners of the Midwest, winding up with this high profile job as Cleveland’s “top cop”; since 1935, he had made national headlines cleaning up the police department, busting crooked labor unions and curtailing the numbers racket.

Eliot was perched on the edge of the table, a casual posture at odds with his three-piece suit and tie. “Just a formality,” he explained. “I caught a little heat recently from the City Council for hiring outside investigators.”

I’d been brought in on several other cases, over the past five or six years.

“It’s an undercover assignment?”

He nodded. “Yes, and I’d love to tackle it myself, but I’m afraid at this point, even in the Angles, this puss of mine is too well-known.”

Eliot, a boyhood Sherlock Holmes fan, was not one to stay behind his desk; even as Public Safety Director, he was known to lead raids, wielding an ax, and go undercover, in disguise.

I said, “You’ve never been shy about staying out of the papers.”

I was one of the few people who could make a crack like that and not get a rebuke; in fact, I got a little smile out of the stone face.

“Well, I don’t like what’s been in the papers, lately,” he admitted, brushing the stray comma of hair off his forehead, for what good it did him. “You know I’ve made traffic safety a priority.”

“Sure. Can’t jaywalk in this burg without getting a ticket.”

When Eliot came into office, Cleveland was ranked the second un-safest city in America, after Los Angeles. By 1938, Cleveland was ranked the safest big city, and by 1939 the safest city, period. This reflected Eliot instituting a public safety campaign through education and “warning” tickets, and reorganizing the traffic division, putting in two-way radios in patrol cars and creating a fleet of motorcycle cops.

“Well, we’re in no danger of receiving any ‘safest city’ honors this year,” he said, dryly. He settled into the wooden chair next to mine, folded his hands prayerfully. “We’ve already had thirty-two traffic fatalities this year. That’s more than double where we stood, this time last year.”

“What’s the reason for it?”

“We thought it had to do with increased industrial activity.”

“You mean, companies are hiring again, and more people are driving to work.”

“Right. We’ve had employers insert ‘drive carefully’ cards in pay envelopes, we’ve made elaborate safety presentations…. There’s also an increase in teenage drivers, you know, kids driving to high school.”

“More parents working, more kids with cars. Follows.”

“Yes. And we stepped up educational efforts, at schools, accordingly. Plus, we’ve cracked down on traffic violators of all stripe—four times as many speeding arrests; traffic violations arrests up twenty-five-percent, intoxication arrests almost double.”

“What sort of results are you having?”

“In these specific areas—industrial drivers, teenage drivers—very positive. These are efforts that went into effect around the middle of last year—and yet this year, the statistics are far worse.”

“You wouldn’t be sending me undercover if you didn’t have the problem pinpointed.”

He nodded. “My Traffic Analysis Bureau came up with several interesting stats: seventy-two percent of our traffic fatalities this year are age forty-five or older. But only twenty percent of our population falls in that category. And thirty-six percent of those fatalities are sixty-five or up…a category that comprises only four percent of Cleveland’s population.”

“So more older people are getting hit by cars than younger people,” I said with a shrug. “Is that a surprise? The elderly don’t have the reflexes of young bucks like us.”

“Forty-five isn’t ‘elderly,’” Eliot said, “as we’ll both find out sooner than we’d like.”

The intercom on Eliot’s nearby rolltop desk buzzed and he rose and responded to it. His secretary’s voice informed us that Dr. Jeffers was here to see him.

“Send her in,” Eliot said.

The woman who entered was small and wore a white shirt and matching trousers, baggy oversize apparel that gave little hint of anyshape beneath; though her heart-shaped face was attractive, she wore no make-up and her dark hair was cut mannishly short, clunky thick-lensed tortoise-shell glasses distorting dark almond-shaped eyes.

“Alice, thank you for coming,” Eliot said, rising, shaking her hand. “Nate Heller, this is Dr. Alice Jeffers, assistant county coroner.”

“A pleasure, Dr. Jeffers,” I said, rising, shaking her cool, dry hand, as she twitched me a smile.

Eliot pulled out a chair for her opposite me at the conference table, telling her, “I’ve been filling Nate in. I’m just up to your part in this investigation.”

With no further prompting, Dr. Jeffers said, “I was alerted by a morgue attendant, actually. It seemed we’d had an unusual number of hit-and-skip fatalities in the last six months, particularly in January, from a certain part of the city, and a certain part of community.”

“Alice is referring to a part of Cleveland called the Angles,” Eliot explained, “which is just across the Detroit Bridge, opposite the factory and warehouse district.”

“I’ve been there,” I said. The Angles was a classic waterfront area, where bars and whorehouses and cheap rooming houses serviced a clientele of workingmen and longshoremen. It was also an area rife with derelicts, particularly since Eliot burned out the Hoovervilles nestling in Kingsbury Run and under various bridges.

“These hit-and-skip victims were vagrants,” Dr. Jeffers said, her eyes unblinking and intelligent behind the thick lenses, “and tended to be in their fifties or sixties, though they looked much older.”

“Rummies,” I said.

“Yes. With Director Ness’s blessing, and Coroner Gerber’s permission, I conducted several autopsies, and encountered individuals in advanced stages of alcoholism. Cirrhosis of the liver, kidney disease, general debilitation. Had they not been struck by cars, they would surely have died within a matter of years or possibly months or even weeks.”

“Walking dead men.”

“Poetic but apt. My contact at the morgue began keeping me alerted when vagrant ‘customers’ came through, and I soon realized that automobile fatalities were only part of the story.”

“How so?” I asked.

“We had several fatal falls-down-stairs, and a surprising number of fatalities by exposure to the cold weather, death by freezing, by pneumonia. Again, I performed autopsies where normally we would not. These victims were invariably intoxicated at the times of their deaths, and in advanced stages of acute alcoholism.”

I was thoroughly confused. “What’s the percentage in bumping off bums? You got another psychopath at large, Eliot? Or is the Butcher back, changing his style?”

I was referring to the so-called Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, who had cut up a number of indigents here in Cleveland, Jack the Ripper style; but the killings had stopped, long ago.

“This isn’t the Butcher,” Eliot confidently. “And it isn’t psychosis…it’s commerce.”

“There’s money in killing bums?”

“If they’re insured, there is.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, nodding, getting it, or starting to. “But if you overinsure some worthless derelict, surely it’s going to attract the attention of the adjusters for the insurance company.”

“This is more subtle than that,” Eliot said. “When Alice informed me of this, I contacted the State Insurance Division. Their chief investigator, Gaspar Corso—who we’ll meet with later this afternoon, Nate—dug through our ‘drunk cards’ on file at the Central Police Station, some twenty thousand of them. He came up with information that corroborated Alice’s, and confirmed suspicions of mine.”

Corso had an office in the Standard Building—no name on the door, no listing in the building directory. Eliot, Dr. Jeffers and I met with Corso in the latter’s small, spare office, wooden chairs pulled up around a wooden desk that faced the wall, so that Corso was swung around facing us.

He was small and compactly muscular—a former high school football star, according to Eliot—bald with calm blue eyes under black beetle eyebrows. A gold watch chain crossed the vest of his three-piece tweed.

“A majority of the drunks dying either by accident or ‘natural causes,’” he said in a mellow baritone, “come from the West Side—the Angles.”

“And they were over-insured?” I asked.

“Yes, but not in the way you might expect. Do you know what industrial insurance is, Mr. Heller?”

“You mean, burial insurance?”

“That’s right. Small policies designed to pay funeral expenses and the like.”

“Is that what these bums are being bumped off for? Pennies?”

A tiny half smile formed on the impassive investigator’s thin lips. “Hardly. Multiple policies have been taken out on these individuals, dozens in some cases…each small policy with a different insurance company.”

“No wonder no alarms went off,” I said. “Each company got hit for peanuts.”

“Some of these policies are for two-hundred-and-fifty dollars, never higher than a thousand. But I have one victim here…” He turned to his desk, riffled through some papers. “…who I determined, by crosschecking with various companies, racked up a $24,000 payout.”

“Christ. Who was the beneficiary?”

“A Kathleen O’Meara,” Eliot said. “She runs a saloon in the Angles, with a rooming house upstairs.”

“Her husband died last month,” Dr. Jeffers said. “I performed the autopsy myself…. He was intoxicated at the time of his death, and was in an advanced stage of cirrhosis of the liver. Hit by a car. But there was one difference.”

“Yes?”

“He was fairly well-dressed, and was definitely not malnourished.”

O’Meara’s did not serve food, but a greasy spoon down the block did, and that’s where Katie took me for supper, around seven, leaving the running of the saloon to her sullen skinny daughter, Maggie.

“Maggie doesn’t say much,” I said, over a plate of meat loaf and mashed potatoes and gray. Like Katie, it was surprisingly appetizing, particularly if you didn’t look too closely and were half-bombed.

We were in a booth by a window that showed no evidence of ever having been cleaned; cold March wind rattled it and leached through.

“I spoiled her,” Katie admitted. “But, to be fair, she’s still grieving over her papa. She was the apple of his eye.”

“You miss your old man?”

“I miss the help. He took care of the books. I got a head for business, but not for figures. Thing is, he got greedy.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, caught him featherin’ his own nest. Skimmin’. He had a bank account of his own he never told me about.”

“You fight over that?”

“Naw. Forgive and forget, I always say.” Katie was having the same thing as me, and she was shoveling meat loaf into her mouth like coal into a boiler.

“I’m, uh, pretty good with figures,” I said.

Her licentious smile was part lip rouge, part gravy. “I’ll just bet you are…. Ever do time, Bill?”

“Some. I’m not no thief, though…I wouldn’t steal a partner’s money.”

“What were you in for?”

“Manslaughter.”

“Kill somebody, did you?”

“Sort of.”

She giggled. “How do you ‘sort of’ kill somebody, Bill?”

“I beat a guy to death with my fists. I was drunk.”

“Why?”

“I’ve always drunk too much.”

“No, why’d you beat him to death? With your fists.”

I shrugged, chewed meat loaf. “He insulted a woman I was with. I don’t like a man that don’t respect a woman.”

She sighed. Shook her head. “You’re a real gent, Bill. Here I thought chivalry was dead.”

Three evenings before, I’d been in a yellow-leather booth by a blue-mirrored wall in the Vogue Room of the Hollenden Hotel. Clean-shaven and in my best brown suit, I was in the company of Eliot and his recent bride, the former Ev McMillan, a fashion illustrator who worked for Higbee’s department store.

Ev, an almond-eyed slender attractive brunette, wore a simple cobalt blue evening dress with pearls; Eliot was in thehree-piece suit he’d worn to work. We’d had prime rib and were enjoying after dinner drinks; Eliot was on his second, and he’d had two before dinner, as well. Martinis. Ev was only one drink behind him.

Personal chit-chat had lapsed back into talking business.

“It’s goddamn ghoulish,” Eliot said. He was quietly soused, as evidenced by his use of the word “goddamn”—for a tough cop, he usually had a Boy Scout’s vocabulary.

“It’s coldblooded, all right,” I said.

“How does the racket work?” Ev asked.

“I shouldn’t have brought it up,” Eliot said. “It doesn’t make for pleasant after-dinner conversation…”

“No, I’m interested,” she said. She was a keenly intelligent young woman. “You compared it to a lottery…how so?”

“Well,” I said, “as it’s been explained to me, speculators ‘invest’ in dozens of small insurance policies on vagrants who were already drinking themselves to imminent graves…malnourished men crushed by dope and/or drink, sleeping in parks and in doorways in all kinds of weather.”

“Men likely to meet an early death by so-called natural causes,” Eliot said. “That’s how we came to nickname the racket ‘Natural Death, Inc.’”

“Getting hit by a car isn’t exactly a ‘natural’ death,” Ev pointed out.

Eliot sipped his martini. “At first, the speculators were just helping nature along by plying their investments with free, large quantities of drink…hastening their death by alcoholism or just making them more prone to stumble in front of a car.”

“Now it looks like these insured derelicts are being shoved in front of cars,” I said.

“Or the drivers of the cars are purposely running them down,” Eliot said. “Dear, this really is unpleasant conversation; I apologize for getting into it…”

“Nonsense,” she said. “Who are these speculators?”

“Women, mostly,” he said. “Harridans running West Side beer parlors and roominghouses. They exchange information, but they aren’t exactly an organized ring or anything, which makes our work difficult. I’m siccing Nate here on the worst offender, the closest thing there is to a ringleader—a woman we’ve confirmed is holding fifty policies on various ‘risks.’”

Ev frowned. “How do these women get their victims to go along with them? I mean, aren’t the insured’s signatures required on the policies?”

“There’s been some forgery going on,” Eliot said. “But mostly these poor bastards are willingly trading their signatures for free booze.”

Ev twitched a non-smile above the rim of her martini glass. “Life in slum areas breeds such tragedy.”

The subject changed to local politics—I’d heard rumors of Eliot running for mayor, which he unconvincingly pooh-thed—and, a few drinks later, Eliot spotted some reporter friends of his, Clayton Fritchey and Sam Wild, and excused himself to go over and speak to them.

“If I’m not being out of line,” I said to Mrs. Ness, “Eliot’s hitting the sauce pretty hard himself. Hope you don’t have any extra policies out on him.”

She managed a wry little smile. “I do my best to keep up with him, but it’s difficult. Ironic, isn’t it? The nation’s most famous Prohibition agent, with a drinking problem.”

“Is it a problem?”

“Eliot doesn’t think so. He says he just has to relax. It’s a stressful job.”

“It is at that. But, Ev—I’ve been around Eliot during ‘stressful’ times before…like when the entire Capone gang was gunning for him. And he never put it away like that, then.”

She was studied the olive in her martini. “You were part of that case, weren’t you?”

“What case? Capone?”

“No—the Butcher.”

I nodded. I’d been part of the capture of the lunatic responsible for those brutal slayings of vagrants; and was one of the handful who knew that Eliot had been forced to make a deal with his influential political backers to allow the son of a bitch—who had a society pedigree—to avoid arrest, and instead be voluntarily committed to a madhouse.

“It bothers him, huh?” I said, and grunted a laugh. “Mr. Squeaky Clean, the ‘Untouchable’ Eliot Ness having to cut a deal like that.”

“I think so,” she admitted. “He never says. You know how quiet he can be.”

“Well, I think he should grow up. For Christ sake, for somebody from Chicago, somebody who’s seen every kind of crime and corruption, he can be as naive as a schoolgirl.”