Chicago Lightning

by Max Allan Collins

  “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?”