Triple Play: A Nathan Heller Casebook

by Collins, Max Allan

I hadn’t heard him. I have no idea where he came from; coal bin, maybe. He was as quiet as nobody there. He was just suddenly behind me and he did have a knife, a long, sharp butcher knife that caught the single bulb’s glow and reflected it, like the glint of a madman’s eyes. Like the glint of this madman’s eyes, as I stepped quickly to one side, the knife slashing down, cutting through the arm of my raincoat, cutting cloth and ripping a wound along my shoulder. My hand involuntarily released the gun, and even though both it and my hand were in the same coat pocket, I was fumbling for it, the gun caught in the cloth, my fingers searching for the grip….

  I recognized this rail-thin, short-haired, sunken-cheeked young man as James Watson—but only from the papers. I’d never met him. He was the handyman at the nursery from which the kidnap ladder had been “stolen”; an Army vet and an accused child molester and, with Otto, a suspect in this case till I hauled Jerome Lapps onstage.

  He was wearing a rain slicker, yellow, and one of those floppy yellow wide-brimmed rain hats; but he didn’t look like he’d been outside. Maybe his raincoat was to keep the blood off.

  He had the knife raised in such a corny fashion; raised in one fist, level with his head, and walking mummy-slow. His dark blue eyes were wide and his grin glazed and he looked silly, like a scarecrow with a knife, a caricature of a fiend. I could have laughed at how hokey this asshole looked, only Otto had grabbed me from behind as Watson advanced.

  With my arms pulled back, one of them bleeding and burning from the slash of a knife that was even now red with my blood, I struggled but with little success. The old German janitor had me locked in his thick hands.

  Watson stabbed savagely with the knife and I moved to the left and the blade, about half of it, went into Otto’s neck and blood spurted. Otto went down, clutching his throat, his life oozing through his fingers, and I was free of him, and while Watson still had the knife in his hand—he’d withdrawn the blade almost as quickly as he’d accidentally sunk it into his cohort’s throat—the handyman was stunned by the turn of events, his mouth hanging open, as if awaiting a dentist’s drill. I grabbed his wrist with my two hands and swung his hand and his knife in a sudden arc down into his stomach.

  The sound was like sticking your foot in thick mud.

  He stood there, doing the oddest little dance, for several seconds, his hand gripped around the handle of the butcher knife, which I had driven in almost to the hilt. He looked down at himself with a look of infinite stupidity and danced some more.

  I pushed his stupid face with the heel of my hand and he went ass-over-teakettle. He lay on his back twitching. He’d released the knife handle. I yanked the knife out of his stomach; there was a little hole in the rain slicker where the knife went in.

  And the sound was like pulling your foot out of thick mud.

  “You’re the one who tried to rape that little girl, aren’t you, Jim?”

  He was blinking and twitching; a thin geyser of blood was coming from the hole in the yellow rain slicker.

  “Poor old Otto just wanted to get even. Pull a little kidnap, make a little money off those socialist sons of bitches who cost him his job. But he picked a bad assistant in you, Jim. Had to play butcher on that dead little girl, trying to clean up after you.”

  There was still life in Watson’s eyes. Otto was over near the laundry tubs, gurgling. Alive, barely.

  I had the knife in one hand, and my blood was soaking my shirt under the raincoat, though I felt little if any pain. I gave some serious thought to waling away on Watson with the butcher knife; just carving the fucker up. But I couldn’t quite cross the line.

  I had George Morello’s pack of Camels in my suit coat pocket. I dug them out and smoked while I watched both men die.

  Better part of two cigarettes, it took.

  Then I wiped off anything I’d touched, dropped the butcher knife near Watson, and left that charnel house behind; went out into a dark, warm summer night and a warm, cleansing summer rain, which put out the second cigarette.

  It was down to the butt, anyway. I tossed it in a sewer.

  19

  The deaths of Otto Bergstrum and James Watson made a bizarre sidebar in the ongoing saga of the Lipstick Killer, but neither the cops nor the press allowed the “fatal falling out between friends” to influence the accepted scenario.

  It turned out there was even something of a motive: Watson had loaned Otto five hundred dollars to pay off a gambling debt; Otto played the horses, it seemed. Speculation was that Watson, knowing Otto was due reward money from the Keenan case, had demanded payment. Both men were known to have bad tempers. Both had killed in the war—well, each in his individual war.

  The cops never figured out how the two men had managed to kill each other with the one knife, not that anybody seemed to care. It was fine with me. Nobody had seen me in the vicinity that rainy night, or at least nobody who bothered to report it.

  Lapps was indicted on multiple burglary, assault, and murder charges. His lawyers entered into what years later an investigative journalist would term “a strange, unprecedented cooperative relationship” with the State’s Attorney’s office.

  In order to save their client from the electric chair, the defense lawyers—despite the prosecution’s admission of the “small likelihood of a successful murder prosecution of Jerome Lapps”—advised the boy to cop a plea.

  If Lapps were to confess to the murders of Caroline Williams, Margaret Johnson, and JoAnn Keenan, the State’s Attorney would seek concurrent life sentences. That meant parole in twenty years.

  Lapps—reluctantly, I’m told—accepted the plea bargain, but when the boy was taken into a judge’s presence to make a formal admission of guilt, he said instead, “I don’t remember killing anybody.”

  The recantation cost him. Even though Lapps eventually gave everybody the confession they wanted, the deal was off: all he got out of it was avoiding the chair. His three life terms were concurrent with a recommendation of no parole. Ever.

  He tried to hang himself in his cell, but it didn’t take.

  I took a ride on the Rock Island Rocket to Joliet to visit Lapps, about a year after he was sent up.

  The visiting room at Stateville was a long narrow room cut in half by a long wide table with a glass divider. I’d already taken my seat with the other visitors when guards paraded in a handful of prisoners.

  Lapps, like the others, wore blue denims and a blue-and-white striped shirt, which looked like a normal dress shirt, unless the wearer turned to reveal a stenciled number across the back. The husky, good-looking kid had changed little in appearance; maybe he was a little heavier. His dark, wavy hair, though no shorter, was cut differently—it was neater looking, a student’s hair, not a JD’s.

  He sat and smiled shyly. “I remember you.”

  “You should. You tried to shoot me.”

  “That’s what I understand. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No.”

  “The gun you used was one you’d stolen. The owner identified it along with other stuff of his you took.”

  He shrugged; this was all news to him.

  I continued: “The owner said the gun had been his father’s and had been stuck in a drawer for seventeen years. Hadn’t been fired for a long time.”

  His brow knit. “That’s why the gun didn’t go off, when I shot at you?”

  “Yes. But a ballistics expert said the third shot would have gone off. You’d reactivated the trigger.”

  “I’m glad it didn’t.”

  “Me too.”

  We looked at each other. My gaze was hard, unforgiving; his was evasive, shy.

  “Why are you here, Mr. Heller?”

  “I wanted to ask you a question. Why did you confess to all three murders?”

  He shrugged again. “I had to. Otherwise, I’d be dead, my lawyers say. I just made things up. Told them what they wanted to hear. Repeated things back to them. Used what I read in the papers.” One more shrug
. Then his dark eyes tightened. “Why? You asked me like…like you knew I didn’t do them.”

  “You did one of them, Jerry. You killed Margaret Williams and you wrote that lipstick message on her wall.”

  Something flickered in his eyes. “I don’t remember.”

  “Maybe not. But you also assaulted Katherine Reynolds, and you tried to shoot me. As far as I’m concerned, that’s why you’re here.”

  “You don’t think I killed that little girl?”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  An eagerness sprang into his passive face. “Have you talked to my lawyers?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Would you talk to my…”

  “No. I’m not going to help you, Jerry.”

  “Why…why are you telling this, then…?”

  My voice was barely above a whisper; this was just between us guys. “In case you’re not faking. In case you really don’t remember what you did. I think you got a right to know what you’re doing time for. What you’re really doing time for. And you did kill the second girl. And you almost killed the nurse. And you damn near killed me. That’s why you’re here, Jerry. That’s why I’m leaving you here to rot, and don’t bother repeating what I’m telling you, because I can out-lie every con in Stateville. I used to be a Chicago cop.”

  He was reeling. “Who…who killed the first girl? Who killed that Caroline Williams lady?”

  “Jerry,” I said, rising to go, “George did it.”

  20

  Lapps, as of this writing, is still inside. That’s why, after all these years, as I edge toward senility in my Coral Springs condo, in the company of my second wife, I have put all this down on paper. The Parole for Lapps Committee requested a formal deposition, but I preferred that this take the same form, more or less, as other memoirs I’ve scribbled in my dotage.

  Jerry Lapps is an old man now—not as old as me, but old. A gray-haired, paunchy old boy. Not the greasy-haired JD who I was glad to see go to hell and Stateville. He’s been in custody longer than any other inmate in the Illinois prison system. Long before courses were offered to prisoners, he was the first Illinois inmate to earn a college degree. He then helped and advised other convicts with organizing similar self-help correspondence-course programs. He taught himself electronics and became a pretty fair watercolor artist. Right now he’s in Vienna Prison, a minimum-security facility with no fences and no barred windows. He’s the assistant to the prison chaplain.

  Over the years, the press and public servants and surviving relatives of the murder victims—including JoAnn’s sister Jane—have fought Lapps’ parole. He is portrayed as the first of a particular breed of American urban monster—precursor to Richard Speck, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy.

  Bob Keenan died last year. His wife Norma died three years ago.

  Sam Flood—a.k.a. Sam Giancana—was hit in his home back in ’75, right before he was supposed to testify before a Senate committee about Outfit/CIA connections.

  Of the major players, Lapps is the only one left alive. Lapps and me.

  What the hell. I’ve had my fill of revenge.

  Let the bastard loose.

  If he’s faking rehabilitation like he once faked amnesia, if he hurts anybody else, shit—I’ll haul the nine millimeter out of mothballs and hobble after him myself.

  21

  My son was born just before midnight, on September 27, 1947.

  We named him Nathan Samuel Heller, Jr.

  His mother—exhausted after twelve hours of labor, face slick with sweat, hair matted down—never looked more beautiful to me. And I never saw her look happier.

  “He’s so small,” she said. “Why did he take so long making his entrance?”

  “He’s small but he’s stubborn. Like his mother.”

  “He’s got your nose. He’s got your mouth. He’s gorgeous. You want to hold him, Nate?”

  “Sure.”

  I took the little bundle, and looked at the sweet small face and experienced, for the first and only time before or since, love at first sight.

  “I’m Daddy,” I told the groggy little fellow. He made saliva bubbles. I touched his tiny nose. Examined his tiny hand—the miniature palm, the perfect little fingers. How could something so miraculous happen in such an awful world?

  I gave him back to his mother and she put him to her breast and he began to suckle. A few minutes on the planet, and he was getting tit already. Life wasn’t going to get much better.

  I sat there and watched them and waves of joy and sadness alternated over me. It was mostly joy, but I couldn’t keep from thinking that a hopeful mother had once held a tiny child named JoAnn in her arms, minutes after delivery; that another mother had held little Jerry Lapps in her gentle grasp. And Caroline Williams and Margaret Johnson were once babes in their mother’s arms. One presumes even Otto Bergstrum and James Watson and, Christ, George Morello were sweet infants in their sweet mothers’ arms, once upon a time.

  I promised myself that my son would have it better than me. He wouldn’t have to have it so goddamn rough; the depression was ancient history, and the war to end all wars was over. He’d want for nothing. Food, clothing, shelter, education, they were his birthright.

  That’s what we’d fought for, all of us. To give our kids what we never had. To give them a better, safer place to live in. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

  For that one night, settled into a hard hospital chair, in the glow of my brand-new little family, I allowed myself to believe that that hope was not a vain one. That anything was possible in this glorious post-war world.

  KISSES OF DEATH

  1

  You can almost see it on the cover of Photoplay or Modern Screen, can’t you, circa 1954? “I Was Marilyn Monroe’s Bodyguard!” with a subhead reading, “A Private Eye’s Hollywood Dream Assignment!”…but in the end, “A New York Nightmare of Depravity” was more like it, worthy of Confidential or Whisper.

  Not that Miss Monroe was involved in any of that depravity—no such luck—though we did have a promising first meeting, and it was in neither Hollywood nor New York, but in my native Chicago, at the Palmer House, where the A-1 Detective Agency was providing security for the American Booksellers Association’s annual convention.

  I didn’t do any of the security work at the booksellers shindig myself—that was for my staff, and a few add-on ops I rounded up. After all, I was Nathan Heller, president of the A-1, and such lowly babysitting was simply beneath my executive position.

  Unless, of course, the baby I was sitting was Miss Marilyn Monroe, curled up opposite me on a couch, sweetly sitting in her suite’s sitting room, afternoon sunlight coming in behind her, making a hazy halo of her carefully coifed platinum pageboy.

  “I hope this isn’t a problem for you,” she said, shyly, with only a hint of the mannered, sexy exaggeration I’d noted on the screen. “Such short notice, I mean.”

  Normally I didn’t cancel a Friday night date with a Chez Paree chorus girl to take on a bodyguard job, but I only said, “I had nothing planned. My pleasure, Miss Monroe.”

  “Marilyn,” she corrected gently. “Is it Nate, or Nathan?”

  Her manner was surprisingly deferential, and disarmingly reserved. Like other movie stars I’d encountered over the years, from George Raft to Mae West, she was smaller than I expected, though her figure lived up to expectations, partly because her black short-sleeved cotton sweater and her dark gray Capri pants were strategically snug.

  “Nate’s fine,” I said. “Or Nathan.”

  I would gladly have answered to Clem or Philbert, if she were so inclined. I was forty-seven years of age, and she was, what? Twenty-five? Twenty-six? And I felt like a schoolboy, tongue thick, hands awkward, penis twitching, rearing its head threateningly as I crossed my legs.

  Her barefoot casualness (her toenails, like her fingernails, were painted a platinum that matched her hair) was offset by the flawlessness of her surprisingly understated makeup, her c
omplexion luminously, palely perfect, a glorious collaboration between God and Max Factor. The startling red of her lipsticked lips was ideal for her world-famous smile—sex-saturated, open-mouthed, accompanied by a tilt-back of the head and bedroom-lidded eyes—only I never saw that smile once, that afternoon.

  Instead, only rare tentative fleeting smiles touched those bruised baby lips, and for all her sex appeal, the in-person Marilyn Monroe’s undeniable charisma invoked in me unexpected stirrings, which is to say, Not Entirely Sexual. I wanted to protect this girl. And she did seem a girl to me, for all her womanly charms.

  “I read about you in Life,” she said, dark blue eyes twinkling.

  She’d read about me in Life. Was she kidding?

  Actually, she probably wasn’t. Last year the magazine had done a spread on me, and my career, touching on the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Sir Harry Oakes murder, and several other of my more headline-worthy cases of years past, but focusing more on the current success of my Hollywood branch of the A-1, which was developing into the movie stars’ private detective agency of choice.

  On the other hand, I’d read about her not only in Life, but Look, and the Saturday Evening Post, and Esquire, not to mention the Police Gazette, Coronet, and Modern Man. She was also the reason why I hadn’t, in June of 1953, gotten around to taking down a certain 1952 calendar as yet. My most vivid memory of Miss Monroe, prior to meeting her face to face, was a rear view of her walking slowly away from the camera in a movie called Niagara (which I walked away from after her character got prematurely bumped off).

  “When Ben told me about the party tonight, at Riccardo’s,” she said, “I simply had to be there. I’m afraid I invited myself…”

  As if there’d be an objection.

  “…and Ben suggested we ask you to accompany us. He thinks it’s a necessary precaution.”

  “I agree with him,” I said. “That joint’ll be crawling with reporters.”