by Otto Penzler
Touchdown slammed a fist against the hard edge of a guardrail as Yellow Mama crossed the finish line.
“What the hell has Tomasino’s bullshit Sicily story got to do with what just happened here?” he asked through clenched teeth.
“I told him about Yellow Mama and by the end of the story he did two amazing things,” I said. “Two things I never in my wildest dreams would ever imagine him doing.”
“Spill,” Touchdown said, his tough veneer starting to wilt under the hot sun.
“First, he offered me a hundred grand for the horse,” I said. “On top of which he included a nice salary for me and Blue to keep taking care of her. All I had to promise him was never to lay down another bet in my life. On anything.”
“What’s the second thing?” Touchdown asked.
“He laid a million-dollar bet on Yellow Mama to win,” I said. “Hard for me to believe a nice old man like that has that kind of cash sitting around, but he does. He covered his action with your bookies. I did, too. Not as much, only five hundred thousand, but then me and Old Man Tomasino don’t play ball in the same league.”
Touchdown lifted me off the ground and tossed me against the railing, hard, the pain in my back shooting down to my legs. “What are you so pissed about?” I asked. “I got the fifty thousand I owe you, back in my office near the stables. You can have one of your boys pick it up, if you want. Or, you can just subtract it from the dough your bookies need to come across with early tomorrow morning. I’m sure Old Man Tomasino will be first in line looking to collect a million-plus winnings. But, I’ll be there right behind him.”
“You’re not going to be around to collect anything,” Touchdown said. “You’ll be dead by morning.”
“I work for Old Man Tomasino now and he wants me to train Yellow Mama,” I said. “Just like he expects Blue to race her. You step into that and you’re in bigger trouble than you already are. So go ahead and kill me. But if I were you, Touchdown, I’d be looking to raise that million plus that needs to be paid out come sunup.”
I stared over at Touchdown, savored his defeat, then surveyed his silent crew. I fixed my jacket, ignored the pain in my back and started to walk away.
“Who the hell you think you are, walking away from me?” Touchdown asked. “A small-time loser like you.”
I turned to Touchdown and smiled for the first time that weekend. “I’m not a loser,” I said, my arms stretched out. “You’re looking at a winner. Across the board. At least for today.”
I left Touchdown and his crew in the paddock area and walked at a steady pace toward the stables. I reached into my left jacket pocket and pulled out a paper bag filled with roasted chestnuts.
A warm gift for Yellow Mama.
THAT KIND OF NAG
A Nathan Heller Stroy
Max Allan Collins
When the cute high school girl, screaming bloody murder, came running down the steps from the porch of the brown-brick two-story, I was sitting in a parked Buick reading The Racing News.
At ten after eleven in the a.m., Chicago neighborhoods didn’t get much quieter than Englewood, and South Elizabeth Street on this sunny day in May 1945 ran to bird chirps, muffled radio programs and El rattle. A banshee teenager was enough to attract the attention of just about anybody, even a drowsy detective who was supposed to be watching the very house in question.
A guy in T-shirt and suspenders, mowing the lawn next door, got to her just before me.
“Sally, honey, calm down,” the guy said.
“Bob, Bob, Bob,” she said to her neighbor.
His name, apparently, was Bob. Like I said, I’m a detective.
“What’s wrong, honey?” I asked the girl.
She was probably sixteen. Blonde hair bounced off her shoulders, and with those blue eyes and that heart-shaped face, she would have been a knockout if she hadn’t been devoid of makeup and wearing a navy jumper that stopped mid-calf, abetted by a white blouse buttoned to her throat.
“It’s… it’s Mother” she said, and in slow motion she turned toward the narrow front of the brick house and pointed, like the Ghost of Christmas Future indicating Scrooge’s gravestone.
“Look at me,” I said, and she did, mouth and eyes twitching. “I’m a policeman. Tell me what happened.”
“Something… something terrible.”
Then she pushed past me, and sat on the curb and buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
Bob, who was bald and round-faced and about forty, said, “You’re a cop?”
“Actually, private. Is that kid named Vinicky?”
“Yes. Sally Vinicky—she goes to Visitation High. Probably home for lunch.”
That explained the prim getup: Visitation was a Catholic all-girl’s school.
Another neighbor was wandering up, a housewife in an apron, hair in a net, eyes wide; she had flecks of soapsuds on her red hands. I brought her into my little group.
“My name is Heller,” I said. “I’m an investigator doing a job for that girl’s father. I need one of you to look after Sally… ma’am? Would you?”
The woman nodded, then asked, “Why, what’s wrong?”
“I’m going in that house and find out. Bob, call the Englewood Station and ask them to send a man over.”
“What should I tell them?”
“What you saw.”
As the housewife sat beside the girl on the curb and slipped an arm around her, and Bob headed toward the neighboring house, a frame bungalow, I headed up the steps to the covered porch. The girl had left the door open and I went on in.
The living room was off to the left, a dining room to the right; but the living room got my attention, because of the woman’s body sprawled on the floor.
A willowy dame in her mid-thirties and blue-and-white floral dress, Rose Vinicky—I recognized her from the photos her husband had provided—lay on her side on the multicolor braided rug between an easy chair and a spinet piano, from which Bing Crosby smiled at me off a sheet music cover, “I Can’t Begin to Tell You.” Not smiling back, I knelt to check her wrist for a pulse, but judging by the dark pool of blood her head rested in, I was on a fool’s errand.
Beyond the corpse stood a small table next to the easy chair with a couple of magazines on it, Look, Life. On the floor nearby was a cut-glass ashtray, which the woman presumably had knocked off the table when she fell forward, struck by a fatal blow from behind. A lipstick-tipped cigarette had burned itself out, making a black hole in the braiding of the rug. I wasn’t sure whether she’d been reaching for the smoke when the killer clubbed her, or whether she’d gone for the table to brace her fall.
With her brains showing like that, though, she was probably already unconscious or even dead on the way down.
She looked a little like her daughter, though the hair was darker, almost brunette, short, tight curls. Not pretty, but attractive, handsome; and no midlength skirt for Rose: She had liked to show off those long, slender, shapely legs, which mimed in death the act of running away.
She’d been a looker, or enough of one, anyway, to make her husband suspect her of cheating.
I didn’t spend a lot of time with Rose—she wasn’t going anywhere, and it was always possible her killer was still around.
But the house—nicely appointed with older, in some cases antique, furniture—was clear, including the basement. I did note that the windows were all closed and locked, and the backdoor was locked, too—with no signs of break-in. The killer had apparently come in the front door.
That meant the murder took place before I’d pulled up in front of the Vinicky home around ten. I’d seen no one approach the house in the little more than an hour my car and ass had been parked across the way. It would’ve been embarrassing finding out a murder had been committed inside a home while I was watching it.
On the other hand, I’d been surveilling the place to see with whom the woman might be cheating when here she was, already dead. Somehow that didn’t seem gold-star worthy, either.
I had another, closer look at the corpse. Maybe she hadn’t been dead when she fell, at that—looked like she’d suffered multiple blows. One knocked her down, the others finished her off and opened up her skull. Blood was spattered on the nearby spinet, but also on the little table and even the easy chair.
Whoever did this would had to have walked away covered in blood…
Her right hand seemed to be reaching out, and I could discern the pale circle on her fourth finger that indicated a ring, probably a wedding ring, had been there until recently. Was this a robbery, then?
Something winked at me from the pooled blood, something floating there. I leaned forward, got a better look: a brown button, the four-eyed variety common to a man’s suit—or sportcoat.
I did not collect it, leaving that to…
“Stand up! Get away from that body.”
Sighing, I got to my feet and put my hands in the air and the young patrolman—as fresh-faced as that Catholic schoolgirl—rushed up and frisked me, finding no weapon.
I let him get that out of his system and told him who I was, and what had happened, including what I’d seen. I left the button out, and the missing wedding ring; that could wait for the detectives.
The next hour was one cop after another. Four or five uniformed men showed, a trio of detectives from Englewood Station, a couple of dicks from the bureau downtown, a photographer, a coroner’s man. I went through the story many times.
In the kitchen, a yellow-and white affair with a door on to the alley, Captain Patrick Cullen tried to make a meal out of me. We sat at a small wooden table and began by him sharing what he knew about me.
“I don’t remember ever meeting you, Captain,” I said.
“I know you all too well, Heller—by reputation.”
“Ah. That kind of thing plays swell in court.”
“You’re an ex-cop and you ratted out two of your own. You’re a publicity hound, and a cooze hound, too, I hear.”
“Interesting approach to detective work—everything strictly hearsay.”
A half hour of repartee, at least that scintillating, followed. He wanted to know what I was doing there, and I told him “a job for Sylvester Vinicky,” the husband. He wanted to know what kind of job, and I said I couldn’t tell him, because attorney/client privilege pertained. He accused me of not being an attorney, and I pled guilty.
“But certain of my cases,” I said, “come through lawyers. As it happens, I’m working for an attorney in this matter.”
He asked the attorney’s name and I gave it to him.
“I heard of that guy… divorce shyster, right?”
“Captain, I’d hate to spoil any of your assumptions with a fact.”
He had a face so Irish it could turn bright red without a drop of alcohol, as it did now, while he shook a finger at me. “I’ll tell you what happened, Heller. You got hired to shadow this dame, and she was a looker, and you decided to put the make on her yourself. It got out of hand, and you grabbed the nearest blunt instrument and—”
“I like that. The nearest blunt instrument. How the hell did you get to be a captain? What are you, Jake Arvey’s nephew?”
He came half out of his chair and threw a punch at me.
I slipped it, staying seated, and batted his hat off his head, like I was slapping a child, and the fedora fluttered to the floor.
“You get one” I said.
The red in his face was fading, as he plucked the hat from the linoleum, and the embarrassment in his eyes was almost as good as punching him would’ve been.
“Is that a threat, Heller?”
“This reputation of mine you’ve heard so much about— did you hear the part about my Outfit ties? Maybe you want to wake up in a fucking ditch in Indiana, Captain… That was a threat, by the way.”
Into this Noel Coward playlet came another cop, a guy I did know, from the Detective Bureau in the Loop: Inspector Charles Mullaney, a big fleshy guy who always wore mortician black; he had a spade-shaped face, bright dark eyes and smiled a lot. Unlike many Chicago cops who do that, Mullaney actually had a sense of humor.
“What’s this, Captain?” Mullaney had a lilting tenor, a small man’s voice in the big fat frame. “My friend Nate Heller giving you a hard time?”
Mullaney scooted a chair out and sat between us, Daddy arriving to supervise his two small children. He was grinning at Cullen, but his eyes were hard.
“When you say ’friend,’ Inspector, do you mean—”
“Friend. Don’t believe what you hear about Heller. He and me and Bill Drury go way back—to the Pickpocket Detail.”
Captain Cullen said, defensively, “This guy found the body under suspicious circumstances.”
“Oh?”
For the sixth or seventh time, I told my story. For the first time, somebody took notes—Mullaney.
“Charlie,” I said to him, “I’m working through an attorney on this. I owe it to my client to talk to him before I tell you about the job I was on.”
Frowning, Cullen said, “Yeah, well, we’ll want to talk to your client, too.”
I said, “Might be a good idea. You could inform him his wife is dead. Just as a, you know, courtesy to a taxpayer.”
Mullaney gave me a don’t-needle-this-prick-anymore look, then said, “The husband is in the clear. We’ve already been in touch with him.”
Cullen asked, “What’s his alibi?”
“Well, a Municipal Court judge, for one. He had a ten-thirty at the court, which is where we found him. A former employee is suing him for back wages.”
Sylvester Vinicky ran a small moving company over on nearby South Racine Avenue. He and his wife also ran a small second-hand furniture shop, adjacent.
“Any thoughts, Nate?” Mullaney asked. “Any observations you’d care to share?”
“Did you notice the button?”
“What button?”
So I filled Mullaney in on the sportcoat button, pointed out the possible missing wedding ring, and the inevitability of the killer getting blood spattered.
“She let the bastard in,” Mullaney said absently.
“Somebody she knew,” I said. “And trusted.”
Cullen asked, “Why do you say that? Could have been a salesman or Mormon or—”
“No,” I said. “He got close enough to her to strike a blow from behind, in the living room. She was smoking—it was casual. Friendly.”
Cullen sighed. “Friendly…”
Mullaney said, “We’re saying ’he’—but it couldn’t a woman.”
“I don’t think so. Rose Vinicky was tall, and all of those blows landed on the back of her head, struck with a downward swing.”
Cullen frowned. “And how do you know this?”
“Well, I’m a trained detective. There are courses available.”
Ignoring this twaddle, Mullaney said, “She could have been on the floor already, when those blows were struck— hell, there were half a dozen of them.”
“Right. But at least one of them was struck when she was standing. And the woman was five ten, easy. Big girl. And the force of it… skull crushed like an eggshell. And you can see the impressions from multiple blows.”
“A man, then,” Mullaney said. “A vicious son of a bitch. Well. We’ll get him. Captain… would you give Mr. Heller and me a moment?”
Cullen heaved a dramatic sigh, but then he nodded, rose, stepped out.
Mullaney said, “I don’t suppose you’ll stay out of this.”
“Of course I’ll stay out of it. This is strictly police business.”
“I didn’t think you would. Okay, I understand—your name is going to be in the papers, it’s going to get out that the wife of a client was killed on your watch—”
“Hey, she was already dead when I pulled up!”
“That’ll go over big with the newshounds, especially the part where you’re twiddling your thumbs in your car while she lay dead… Nate, let’s work together on this thing.”
“Defi
ne’ together.’”
He leaned forward; the round face, the dark eyes, held no guile. “I’m not asking you to tag along—I couldn’t ask that. You have ’friends’ like Captain Cullen all over town. But I’ll keep you in the know, you do the same. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“Why don’t we start with a show of good faith.”
“Such as?”
“Why were you here? What job were you doing for Sylvester Vinicky?”
Thing was, I’d been lying about this coming through a lawyer, though I had a reasonable expectation the lawyer I’d named would cover for me. Really what I’d hoped for was to talk to my client before I spilled to the cops. But Mullaney wasn’t just any cop…
So I told him.
Told him that Sylvester Vinicky had come to my office on Van Buren, and started crying, not unlike his daughter had at the curb. He loved his wife, he was crazy about her, and he felt so ashamed, suspecting her of cheating.
Vinicky had sat across from me in the client’s chair, a working man with a heavy build in baggy trousers, brown jacket and cap. At five nine he was shorter than his wife, and was pudgy where she was slender. Just an average-looking joe named Sylvester.
“She’s moody,” he said. “When she isn’t nagging, she’s snapping at me. Sulks. She’s distant. Sometimes when I call home, when she’s supposed to be home, she ain’t at home.”
“Mr. Vinicky,” I said, “if anything, usually a woman having an affair acts nicer than normal to her husband. She doesn’t want to give him a chance to suspect anything’s up.”
“Not Rose. She’s always been more like my sweetheart than my wife. We’ve never had a cross word, and, hell, we’re in business together, and it’s been smooth sailing at home and at work… where most couples would be at each other’s throats, you know?”
In addition to the moving business, the Vinickys bought and sold furniture—Rose had an eye for antiques and found many bargains for resale. She also kept the books and paid off the men.
“Rose, bein’ a mother and all, isn’t around the office, full-time,” Vinicky said. “So maybe I shouldn’t be so suspicious about it.”
