Dying in the Post-War World

7

The Lipstick Killer, as the press had termed him, had hit the headlines for the first time last January.

Mrs. Caroline Williams, an attractive forty-year-old widow with a somewhat shady past, was found nude and dead in bed in her modest North Side apartment. A red skirt and a nylon stocking were tied tightly around the throat of the voluptuous brunette corpse. There had been a struggle, apparently — the room was topsy-turvy. Mrs. Williams had been beaten, her face bruised, battered.

She’d bled to death from a slashed throat, and the bed was soaked red; but she was oddly clean. Underneath the tightly tied red dress and nylon, the coroner found an adhesive bandage over the neck wound.

The tub in the bathroom was filled with bloody water and the victim’s clothing, as if wash were soaking.

A suspect — an armed robber who was the widow’s latest gentleman friend — was promptly cleared. Caroline Williams had been married three times, leaving two divorced husbands and one dead one. Her ex-husbands had unshakable alibis, particularly the latter.

The case faded from the papers, and dead-ended for the cops.

Then just a little over a month ago, a similar crime — apparently, even obviously, committed by the same hand — had rattled the city’s cage. Mrs. Williams, who’d gotten around after all, had seemed the victim of a crime of passion. But when Margaret Johnson met a disturbingly similar fate, Chicago knew it had a madman at large.

Margaret Johnson — her friends called her Peggy (my wife’s nickname) — was twenty-nine years old and a beauty. A well-liked, churchgoing small-town girl, she’d just completed three years of war service with the Waves to go to work in the office of a business machine company in the Loop. She was found nude and dead in her small flat in a North Side residential hotel.

When a hotel maid found her, Miss Johnson was slumped, kneeling, at the bathtub, head over the tub. Her hair was wrapped turban-like in a towel, her pajama top tied loosely around her neck, through which a bread knife had been driven with enough force to go in one side and poke out the other.

She’d also been shot — once in the head, again in the arm. Her palms were cut, presumably from trying to wrest the knife from the killer’s hand.

The blood had been washed from the ex-Wave’s body. Damp, bloody towels were scattered about the bathroom floor. The outer room of the small apartment was a shambles, bloodstains everywhere. Most significantly, fairly high up on the wall, in letters three to six inches tall, printed in red with the victim’s lipstick, were the words:

The cops and the papers called the Lipstick Killer (the nickname was immediate) a “sex maniac,” though neither woman had been raped. The certainty of the police in that characterization made me suspicious that something meaningful had been withheld.

I had asked Lt. Bill Drury, who before his suspension had worked the case out of Town Hall Station, and he said semen had been found on the floor in both apartments, near the windows that had apparently given the killer entry in either flat.

What we had here was a guy who needed one hell of a visual aid to jack off.

What these two slain women had in common with the poor butchered little JoAnn Keenan, I wasn’t sure, other than violent death at the hands of a madman with something sharp; the body parts of the child were largely drained of blood. That was about it.

But the lipstick message on that alley fence — even down to the childlike lettering — would serve to fuel the fires of this investigation even further. The papers had already been calling the Lipstick Killer “Chicago’s Jack the Ripper.” With the slaying of the kidnapped girl, the city would undoubtedly go off the deep end.

“The papers have been riding the cops for months,” I told my Peg that night, as we cuddled in bed; she was trembling in the hollow of my arm. “Calling them Keystone Kops, ridiculing the ineffectiveness of their crime lab work. And their failure to nab the Lipstick Killer has been a club the papers’ve beat ’em with.”

“You sound like you think that’s unfair,” Peg said.

“I do, actually. A lunatic can be a lot harder to catch than a career criminal. And this guy’s M.O. is all over the map.”

“M.O.?”

“The way he does his crimes, the kind of crimes he does. Even the two women he killed, there are significant differences. The second was shot, and that, despite the knife through the throat, was the cause of death. Is it okay if I talk about this?”

She nodded. She was a tough cookie.

“Anyway,” I went on, “the guy hasn’t left a single workable fingerprint.”

“Cleans up after himself,” she said.

“Half fetish,” I said, “half cautious.”

“Completely nuts.”

“Completely nuts,” I agreed. I smiled at her. It was dark in the bedroom, but I could see her sweet face, staring into nothing.

Quietly, she said, “You told your friend Bob Keenan that you’d stay on the job.”

“Yeah. I was just pacifying him.”

“You should stay on it.”

“I don’t know if I can. The cops, hell the feds, they’re not exactly going to line up for my help.”

“Since when does that kind of thing stop you? Keep on it. You’ve got to find this fiend.” She took my hand and placed it on her full tummy. “Got to.”

“Sure, Peg. Sure.”

I gave her tummy the same sort of “there there” pat I’d given Bob Keenan’s shoulder. And I felt a strange, sick gratefulness to the Lipstick Killer, suddenly: the day had begun with my wife asking for a divorce.

It had ended with me holding her, comforting her.

In this glorious post-war world, I’d take what I could get.