Chicago Lightning : The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories

by Collins, Max Allan

  Eliot shrugged. “It isn’t likely to. The ring and the birthmark are enough to warrant notifying the father.”

  “I can make the call.”

  “No. I’ll let you talk to him when I’m done, but that’s something I should do.”

  And he did. With quiet tact. After a few minutes he handed me the phone; if I’d thought him cold at the scene of the crime, I erased that thought when I saw the dampness in the gray eyes.

  “Is it my little girl?” the deep voice said, sounding tinny out of the phone.

  “I think so, Mr. Jensen. I’m afraid so.”

  I could hear him weeping.

  Then he said: “Mr. Ness said her body was…dismembered. How can you say it’s her? How…how can you know it’s her?”

  And I told him of the ring and the strawberry teardrop.

  “I should come there,” he said.

  “Maybe that won’t be necessary.” I covered the phone. “Eliot, will my identification be enough?”

  He nodded. “We’ll stretch it.”

  I had to argue with Jensen, but finally he agreed for his daughter’s remains to be shipped back via train; I said I’d contact a funeral home this afternoon, and accompany her home.

  I handed the phone to Eliot to hang up.

  We looked at each other and Eliot, not given to swearing, said, “I’d give ten years of my life to nail that butchering bastard.”

  “How long will your people need the body?”

  “I’ll speak to the coroner’s office. I’m sure we can send her home with you in a day or two. Where are you staying?”

  “The Stadium Hotel.”

  “Not anymore. I’ve got an extra room for you. I’m a bachelor again, you know.”

  We hadn’t gotten into that yet; I’d always considered Eliot’s marriage an ideal one, and was shocked a few months back to hear it had broken up.

  “I’m sorry, Eliot.”

  “Me too. But I am seeing somebody. Someone you may remember; another Chicagoan.”

  “Who?”

  “Evie MacMillan.”

  “The fashion illustrator? Nice looking woman.”

  Eliot smiled slyly. “You’ll see her tonight, at the Country Club…but I’ll arrange some female companionship for you. I don’t want you cutting my time.”

  “How can you say such a thing? Don’t you trust me?”

  “I learned a long time ago,” he said, turning to his desk full of paperwork, “not to trust Chicago cops—even ex-ones.”

  Out on the Country Club terrace, the ten-piece band was playing Cole Porter and a balmy breeze from Lake Erie was playing with the women’s hair. There were plenty of good-looking women, here—low-cut dresses, bare shoulders—and lots of men in evening clothes for them to dance with. But this was no party, and since some of the golfers were still here from late afternoon rounds, there were sports clothes and a few business suits (like mine) in the mix. Even some of the women were dressed casually, like the tall, slender blonde in pink shirt and pale green pleated skirt who sat down next to me at the little white metal table and asked me if I’d have a Bacardi with her. The air smelled like a flower garden, and some of it was flowers, and some of it was her.

  “I’d be glad to buy you a Bacardi cocktail,” I said, clumsily.

  “No,” she said, touching my arm. She had eyes the color of jade. “You’re a guest. I’ll buy.”

  Eliot was dancing with his girl Evie, an attractive brunette in her mid-thirties; she’d always struck me as intelligent but sad, somehow. They smiled over at me.

  The blonde in pink and pale green brought two Bacardis over, set one of them in front of me and smiled. “Yes,” she said wickedly. “You’ve been set up. I’m the girl Eliot promised you. But if you were hoping for somebody in an evening gown, I’m not it. I just had to get an extra nine holes in.”

  “If you were looking for a guy in a tux,” I said, “I’m not it. And I’ve never been on a golf course in my life. What else do we have in common?”

  She had a nicely wry smile, which continued as she sipped the Bacardi. “Eliot, I suppose. If I have a few more of these, I may tell you a secret.”

  And after a few more, she did.

  And it was a whopper.

  “You’re an undercover agent?” I said. A few sheets to the wind myself.

  “Shhhh,” she said, finger poised uncertainly before pretty lips. “It’s a secret. But I haven’t been doing it much lately.”

  “Haven’t been doing what?”

  “Well, undercover work. And there’s a double-entendre there that I’d rather you didn’t go looking for.”

  “I wouldn’t think of looking under the covers for it.”

  The band began playing a tango.

  I asked her how she got involved, working for Eliot. Which I didn’t believe for a second, even in my cups.

  But it turned out to be true (as Eliot admitted to me when he came over to see how Vivian and I were getting along, when Vivian—which was her name, incidentally—went to the powder room with Evie).

  Vivian Chalmers was the daughter of a banker (a solvent one), a divorcee of thirty with no children and a lot of social pull. An expert trapshooter, golfer, tennis player and “all ’round sportswoman,” with a sense of adventure. When Eliot called on her to case various of the gambling joints he planned to raid—as a socialite she could take a fling in any joint she chose, without raising any suspicion—she immediately said yes. And she’d been an active agent in the first few years of Eliot’s ongoing battle against the so-called Mayfield Road Mob—who controlled prostitution, gambling and the policy racket in the Cleveland environs.

  “But things have slowed down,” she said, nostalgically. “Eliot has pretty much cleaned up the place, and, besides, he doesn’t want to use me anymore.”

  “An undercover agent can only be effective so long,” I said. “Pretty soon the other side gets suspicious.”

  She shrugged, with resigned frustration, and let me buy the next round.

  We took a walk in the dark, around the golf course, and ended up sitting on a green. The breeze felt nice. The flag on the hole—13—flapped.

  “Thirteen,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Victim thirteen.”

  “Oh. Eliot told me about that. Your ‘luck’ today, finding your client’s missing daughter. Damn shame.”

  “Damn shame.”

  “A shame, too, they haven’t found the son-of-a-bitch.”

  She was a little drunk, and so was I, but I was still shocked—well, amused—to hear a woman, particularly a “society” woman, speak that way.

  “It must grate on Eliot, too,” I said.

  “Sure as hell does. It’s the only mote in his eye. He’s a hero around these parts, and he’s kicked the Mayfield Mob in the seat of the pants, and done everything else from clean up a corrupt police department to throw labor racketeers in jail, to cut traffic deaths in half, to founding Boy’s Town, to….”

  “You’re not in love with the guy, are you?”

  She seemed taken aback for a minute, then her face wrinkled into a got-caught-with-my-pants-down grin. “Maybe a little. But he’s got a girl.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You might.”

  She leaned forward.

  We kissed for a while, and she felt good in my arms; she was firm, almost muscular. But she smelled like flowers. And the sky was blue and scattered with stars above us, as we lay back on the golf-green to look up. It seemed like a nice world, at the moment.

  Hard to imagine it had a Butcher in it.

  I sat up talking with Eliot that night; he lived in a reconverted boathouse on the lake. The furnishings were sparse, spartan—it was obvious his wife had taken most of the furniture with her and he’d had to all but start over.

  I told him I thought Vivian was a terrific girl.

  Leaning back in a comfy chair, feet on an ottoman, Eliot, tie loose around his neck, smiled in a melancholy way. “I thought you�
��d hit it off.”

  “Did you have an affair with her?”

  He looked at me sharply; that was about as personal as I’d ever got with him.

  He shook his head, but I didn’t quite buy it.

  “You knew Evie MacMillan in Chicago,” I said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning nothing.”

  “Meaning I knew her when I was still married.”

  “Meaning nothing.”

  “Nate, I’m sorry I’m not the Boy Scout you think I am.”

  “Hey, so you’ve slept with girls before. I’ll learn to live with it.”

  There was a stone fireplace, in which some logs were trying to decide whether to burn any more or not; we watched them trying.

  “I love Evie, Nate. I’m going to marry her.”

  “Congratulations.”

  We could hear the lake out there; could smell it some, too.

  “I’d like that bastard’s neck in my hands,” Eliot said.

  “What?”

  “That Butcher. That goddamn Butcher.”

  “What made you think of him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Eliot, it’s been over three years since he first struck, and you still don’t have anything?”

  “Nothing. A few months ago, last time he hit, we found some of the…body parts, bones and such…in a cardboard box in the Central Market area. There’s a Hooverville over there, or what used to be a Hooverville…it’s a shantytown, is more like it, genuine hobos as opposed to just good folks down on their luck. Most of the victims—before today—were either prostitutes or bums…and the bums from that shantytown were the Butcher’s meat. So to speak.”

  The fire crackled.

  Eliot continued: “I decided to make a clean sweep. I took twenty-five cops through there at one in the morning, and rousted out all the ’bo’s and took ’em down and fingerprinted and questioned all of ’em.”

  “And it amounted to…?”

  “It amounted to nothing. Except ridding Cleveland of that shantytown. I burned the place down that afternoon.”

  “Comes in handy, having all those firemen working for you. But what about those poor bastards whose ‘city’ you burned down?”

  Sensing my disapproval, he glanced at me and gave me what tried to be a warm smile, but was just a weary one. “Nate, I turned them over to the Relief department, for relocation and, I hope, rehabilitation. But most of them were bums who just hopped a freight out. And I did ’em a favor by taking them off the potential victims list.”

  “And made room for Ginger Jensen.”

  Eliot looked away.

  “That wasn’t fair,” I said. “I’m sorry I said that, Eliot.”

  “I know, Nate. I know.”

  But I could tell he’d been thinking the same thing.

  I had lunch the next day with Vivian in a little outdoor restaurant in the shadow of Terminal Tower. We were served lemonade and little ham and cheese and lettuce and tomato sandwiches with the crusts trimmed off the toasted bread. The detective in me wondered what became of the crusts.

  “Thanks for having lunch with me,” Vivian said. She had on a pale orange dress; she sat crossing her brown pretty legs.

  “My pleasure,” I said.

  “Speaking of which…about last night…”

  “We were both a little drunk. Forget it. Just don’t ask me to.”

  She smiled as she nibbled her sandwich.

  “I called and told Eliot something this morning,” she said, “and he just ignored me.”

  “What was that?”

  “That I have a possible lead on the Butcher murders.”

  “I can’t imagine Eliot ignoring that…and it’s not like it’s just anybody approaching him—you did work for him…”

  “Not lately. And he thinks I’m just…”

  “Looking for an excuse to be around him?”

  She nibbled at a little sandwich. Nodded.

  “Did you resent him asking you to be with me as a blind date last night?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Did…last night have anything to do with wanting to ‘show’ Eliot?”

  If she weren’t so sophisticated—or trying to be—she would’ve looked hurt; but her expression managed to get something else across: disappointment in me.

  “Last night had to do with showing you,” she said. “And…it had a little to do with Bacardi cocktails…”

  “That it did. Tell me about your lead.”

  “Eliot has been harping on the ‘professional’ way the bodies have been dismembered—he’s said again and again he sees a ‘surgical’ look to it.”

  I nodded.

  “So it occurred to me that a doctor—anyway, somebody who’d at least been in medical school for a time—would be a likely candidate for the Butcher.”

  “Yes.”

  “And medical school’s expensive, so, it stands to reason, the Butcher just might run in the same social circles as yours truly.”

  “Say, you did work for Eliot.”

  She liked that.

  She continued: “I checked around with my society friends, and heard about a guy whose family has money—plenty of it. Name of Watterson.”

  “Last name or first?”

  “That’s the family name. Big in these parts.”

  “Means nothing to me.”

  “Well, Lloyd Watterson used to be a medical student. He’s a big man, very strong—the kind of strength it might take to do some of the things the Butcher has done. And he has a history of mental disturbances.”

  “What kind of mental disturbances?”

  “He’s been going to psychiatrist since he was a school kid.”

  “Do you know this guy?”

  “Just barely. But I’ve heard things about him.”

  “Such as?”

  “I hear he likes boys.”

  Lloyd Watterson lived in a two-story white house at the end of a dead-end street, a Victorian-looking miniature mansion among other such houses, where expansive lawns and towering hedges separated the world from the wealthy who lived within.

  This wasn’t the parental home, Vivian explained; Watterson lived here alone, apparently without servants. The grounds seemed well-tended, though, and there was nothing about this house that said anyone capable of mass murder might live here. No blood spattered on the white porch; no body parts scattered about the lawn.

  It was mid-afternoon, and I was having second thoughts.

  “I don’t even have a goddamn gun,” I said.

  “I do,” she said, and showed me a little .25 automatic from her purse.

  “Great. If he has a dog, maybe we can use that to scare it.”

  “This’ll do the trick. Besides, a gun won’t even be necessary. You’re just here to talk.”

  The game plan was for me to approach Watterson as a cop, flashing my private detective’s badge quickly enough to fool him (and that almost always worked), and question him, simply get a feel for whether or not he was a legitimate suspect, worthy of lobbying Eliot for action against. My say-so, Vivian felt, would be enough to get Eliot off the dime.

  And helping Eliot bring the Butcher in would be a nice wedding present for my old friend; with his unstated but obvious political ambitions, the capture of the Kingsbury Run maniac would offset the damage his divorce had done him, in conservative, mostly Catholic Cleveland. He’d been the subject of near hero worship, in the press here (Eliot was always good at getting press—Frank Nitti used to refer to him as “Eliot Press”); but the ongoing if sporadic slaughter of the Butcher was a major embarrassment for Cleveland’s fabled Safety Director.

  So, leaving Vivian behind in the roadster (Watterson might recognize her), I walked up the curved sidewalk and went up on the porch and rang the bell. In the dark hardwood door there was opaque glass behind which I could barely make out movement, coming toward me.

  The door opened, and a blond man about six-three with a baby-face and ice-blue eye
s and shoulders that nearly filled the doorway looked out at me and grinned. A kid’s grin, on one side of his face. He wore a polo shirt and short white pants; he seemed about to say, “Tennis anyone?”

  But he said nothing, as a matter of fact; he just appraised me with those ice-blue, somewhat vacant eyes. I now knew how it felt for a woman to be ogled—which is to say, not necessarily good.

  I said, “I’m an officer of the court,” which in Illinois wasn’t exactly a lie, and I flashed him my badge, but before I could say anything else, his hand reached out and grabbed the front of my shirt, yanked me inside and slammed the door.

  He tossed me like a horseshoe, and I smacked into something—the stairway to the second floor, I guess; I don’t know exactly—because I blacked out. The only thing I remember is the musty smell of the place.

  I woke up minutes later, and found myself tied in a chair in a dank, dark room. Support beams loomed out of a packed dirt floor. The basement.

  I strained at the ropes, but they were snug; not so snug as to cut off my circulation, but snug enough. I glanced around the room. I was alone. I couldn’t see much—just a shovel against one cement wall. The only light came from a window off to my right, and there were hedges in front of the widow, so the light was filtered.

  Feet came tromping down the open wooden stairs. I saw his legs, first; white as pastry dough.

  He was grinning. In his right hand was a cleaver. It shone, caught a glint of what little light there was.

  “I’m no butcher,” he said. His voice was soft, almost gentle. “Don’t believe what you’ve heard….”

  “Do you want to die?” I said.

  “Of course not.”

  “Well then cut me loose. There’s cops all over the place, and if you kill me, they’ll shoot you down. You know what happens to cop killers, don’t you?”

  He thought that over, nodded.

  Standing just to one side of me, displaying the cold polished steel of the cleaver, in which my face’s frantic reflection looked back at me, he said, “I’m no butcher. This is a surgical tool. This is used for amputation, not butchery.”

  “Yeah. I can see that.”

  “I wondered when you people would come around.”

  “Do you want to be caught, Lloyd?”