Dying in the Post-War World

15

On the third smack, the flowerpot — which was empty — shattered into fragments and the kid’s eyes rolled back and went round and white and blank like Orphan Annie’s, and then he shut them. Blood was streaming down the kid’s pale face. He was ruggedly handsome, even if Cornell Wilde was stretching it.

I got off him and gulped for my breath and the guy in his bathing trunks said, “Neighbors said a cop was after a prowler.”

I stuck my hand out. “Thanks, buddy. I didn’t figure the cavalry would show up in swim trunks, but I’ll take what I can get.”

His grasp was firm. He was an affable-looking, open-faced, hairy-chested fellow of maybe thirty-five. We stood over the unconscious kid like hunters who just bagged a moose.

“You a cop?”

“Private,” I said. “My name’s Nate Heller.”

He grinned. “I thought you looked familiar. You’re Bill Drury’s pal, aren’t you? I’m Chet Dickinson — I work traffic in the Loop.”

“You’re a cop? What’s that, summer uniform?”

He snorted a laugh. “I live around here. My family and me was just walking back from a long day at the beach, when we run into this commotion. I sent Grace and the kids on home and figured I better check it out. Think we ought to get this little bastard to a hospital?”

I nodded. “Edgewater’s close. Should we call for an ambulance? I got a car.”

“You mind? The son of a bitch could have a concussion.” He laughed again. “I saw you two strugglin’, and I grabbed that flowerpot off a windowsill. Did the trick.”

“Sure did.”

“Fact, I mighta overdid it.”

“Not from my point of view.”

After Dickinson had found and collected the kid’s revolver and contributed his beach towel to wrap the kid’s head in, we drunk-walked Lapps to my car.

The burly bare-chested cop helped me settle the boy in the rider’s seat. “I’ll run over home, and call in, and get my buggy, and meet you over at Edgewater.”

“Thanks. You know, I used to work traffic in the Loop.”

“No kiddin’. Small world.”

I had cuffs in the glove box; I cuffed the unconscious kid’s hands behind him, in case he was faking it. I looked at the pleasant-faced cop. “Look — if anything comes of this, you got a piece of the reward action. It’ll be just between us.”

“Reward action?”

I put a hand on his hairy shoulder. “Chet — we just caught the goddamn Lipstick Killer.”

His jaw dropped and I got in and pulled away, while he ran off, looking in those trunks of his like somebody in a half-assed track meet.

Then I pulled over around a corner and searched the kid. I figured there was no rush getting him to the hospital. If he died, he died.

He had two five-hundred-buck postal savings certificates in a pocket of his leather jacket. In his billfold, which had a University of Chicago student ID card in the name Jerome C. Lapps, was a folded-up letter, typed. It was dated last month. It said:

I was no handwriting expert, but the handwritten signature sure looked like Lapps’ own cramped handwriting from the inside cover of his calculus book.

The letter stuck me immediately as a lame attempt on the kid’s part to blame the stolen goods stashed in his dorm room on some imaginary accomplice. Carrying it around with him, yet — an alibi in his billfold.

He was stirring.

He looked at me. Blinked. His lashes were long. “Who are you, mister? Where am I?”

I threw a sideways forearm into his stomach and doubled him over. He let the air out with a groan of pain that filled the car and made me smile.

“I’m somebody you tried to shoot, is who I am,” I said. “And where you are is up shit creek without a paddle.”

He shook his head, licked his lips. “I don’t remember trying to shoot anybody. I’d never do a thing like that.”

“Oh? You pointed a revolver at me, and when it wouldn’t shoot, you hurled it at me. Then you jumped me. This just happened, Jerry.”

A comma of greasy black hair fell to his forehead. “You... you know my name? Oh. Sure.” He noticed his open billfold on the seat next to us.

“I knew you before I saw your ID, Jerry. I been on your trail all day.”

“I thought you cops worked in pairs.”

“I don’t work for the city. Right now, I’m working for the Robert Keenan family.”

He recognized the name — anybody in Chicago would have — but his reaction was one of confusion, not alarm, or guilt, or anything else I might have expected.

“What does that have to do with me, mister?”

“You kidnapped their little girl, Jerry — you strangled her and then you tried to fuck her and then you cut her in pieces and threw the pieces in the sewer.”

“What... what are you...”

I sidearmed him in the stomach again. I wanted to shove his head against the dash, but after those blows to the skull with that flowerpot, it might kill him. I wasn’t particularly interested in having him die in my car. Get blood all over my new Plymouth. Peg would have a fit.

“You’re the Lipstick Killer, Jerry. And I caught you going up the back stairs, like the cheap little sneak thief you are.”

He looked down at his lap, guiltily. “I didn’t kill those women.”

“Really. Who did?”

“George.”

The letter. The alibi.

“George,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “George did it.”

“George did it.”

“Sometimes I went along. Sometimes I helped him prepare. But I never did it. George did.”

“Is that how you’re going to play it?”

“George did it, mister. George hurt those women.”

“Did George jack off the floor, or did you, Jerry?”

Now he started to cry.

“I did that,” he admitted. “But George did the killings.”

“JoAnn Keenan too?”

Lapps shook his head; his face glistened with tears. “He must have. He must have.”