Chicago Lightning : The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories

by Collins, Max Allan

  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 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 all 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 onto 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 that 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 could be 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.”

  “Define ‘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, fulltime,” Vinicky said. “So maybe I shouldn’t be so suspicious about it.”

  “About what?”

  “About coming home and finding Rich Miller sitting in my living room, or my kitchen.”

  “Who is this Miller?”

  “Well, he works for me, or anyway he did till last week. I fired him. I got tired of him flitting and flirting around with Rose.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  A big dumb shrug. “He’s just this knockabout guy who moves around a lot—no wife, no family. Goes from one cheap room to another.”

  “Why would your wife take to some itinerant worker?”

  A big dumb sigh. “The guy’s handsome, looks like that asshole in the movies—Ronald Reagan? He’s got a smooth way, real charmer, and he knows about antiques, which is why he and Rose had something in common.”

  I frowned. “If he’s such a slick customer, why’s he living in cheap flops?”

  “He has weaknesses, Mr. Heller—liquor, for example, and women. And most of all? A real passion for the horses.”

  “Horses over booze and broads?”

  “Oh yeah. Typical horse player—one day he’s broke, next day he hits it lucky and’s rolling in dough.”

  I took the job, but when I tried to put one of my men on it, Vinicky insisted I do the work myself.

  “I heard about you, Mr. Heller. I read about you.”

  “That’s why my day rate’s twice that of my ops.”

  He was fine with that, and I spent Monday through Thursday dogging the heels of Rich Miller, who indeed resembled Dutch Reagan, only skinny and with a mustache. I picked him up outside the residential hotel at 63rd and Halstead, a big brick rococo structure dating back to the Columbian Exposition. The first day he was wearing a loud sportshirt and loose slacks, plus a black fedora with a pearl band and two-tone shoes; he looked like something out of Damon Runyon, not some bird doing pick-up work at a moving company.

  The other days he was dressed much the same, and his destination was always the same, too: a race track, Washington Park. The IC train delivered him (and me) right outside the park—just a short walk across the tracks to the front admission gate. High trees, shimmering with spring breeze, were damn near as tall as the grandstand. Worse ways for a detective to spend a sunny day in May, and for four of them, I watched my man play the horses and I played the horses, too, coming out a hundred bucks ahead, not counting the fifty an hour.

  Miller meeting up with Rose at the track, laying some bets before he laid her, was of course a possibility. But the only person Miller connected with was a tall, broad-shouldered brown-haired guy with the kind of mug janes call “ruggedly handsome” right down to the sleepy Robert Mitchum eyes. They sat in the stands together on two of the four days, going down to the ground-floor windows beneath to place similar smalltime bets—ten bucks at the most, usually to Win.

  Still, Miller (and his two-day companion) would bet every race and cheer the horses on with a fist-shaking desperation that spoke of more at stake than just a fun day at the races. Smalltime bettor though he was, Miller was an every-day-at-the-track kind of sick gambler—the friend only showed twice, remember—and I came to the conclusion that his hard-on was for horses, and if anybody was riding Rose Vinicky to the finish line when her hubby wasn’t home, this joker wasn’t the jockey.

  “That’s why,” Mullaney said, nodding, “you decided to stake out the Vinicky home, this morning.”

  “Yeah.”

  Mullaney’s huge chest heaved a sigh. “Why don’t we talk to the girl, together. Little Sally.”

  Little Sally had a build like Veronica Lake, but I chose not to point that out.

  “Sure,” I said.

  We did it outside, under a shade tree. A light breeze riffled leaves, the world at peace. Of course, so is a corpse.

  Sally Vinicky wasn’t crying now—partly cried out, partly in shock, and as she stood with her hands figleafed before her, she answered questions as politely and completely as she no doubt did when the nuns questioned her in class.

  “I went in the back way,” she said. “Used my key.”

  Which explained why I hadn’t seen the girl go in.

  “I always come home for lunch at eleven, and Mom always has it ready for me—but when I didn’t see anything waiting in the kitchen…sometimes soup, sometimes a sandwich, sometimes both, today, nothing…I went looking for her. I thought for a minute she’d left early.”

  “Left early for where?” I asked.

  “She had errands to do, downtown, this afternoon.”

  Mullaney asked, “What sort of mood was your mother in this morning, when you left for school?”

  “I didn’t see her—Mom sleeps in till nine or sometimes ten. Does some household chores, fixes my lunch and….”

  “How about your father?”

  “He was just getting up as I was leaving—that was maybe a quarter to eight? He said he had to go to the court at ten thirty. Somebody suing us again.”

  I asked, “Again?”

  “Well, Mom’s real strict—if a guy doesn’t work a full hour, he doesn’t get paid. That starts arguments, and some of the men who work for Mom and Dad sometimes say they’ve been shorted…. Oh!”

  Mullaney frowned. “What is it?”

  “We should check Mom’s money!”

  The blanketed body had already been carted out, and the crowd of neighbors milling around the house had thinned. So we walked the girl in through the front. Sally made a point of not looking into the living room where a tape outline on the floor provided a ghost of her mother.

  In her parents’ room, where the bed—a beautiful walnut Victorian antique as beautiful as it was wrong for this house and this neighborhood—was neatly made, a pale brown leather wallet lay on the mismatched but also antique dresser. Before anyone could tell the girl not to touch it, she grabbed the wallet and folded it open.

  No moths flew out, but they might have: it was that empty.

  “Mother had a lot of money in here,” Sally said, eyes searching the yawning flaps, as if bills were hiding from her.

  I asked, “How much is a lot, Sally?”

  “Almost twelve hundr
ed dollars. I’d say that’s a lot!”

  “So would I. Why would your mother have that kind of money in her wallet?”

  “We were going for a trip to California, as soon as my school got out—me, Mother, and my aunt Doris. That was the errand Mother had to do downtown—buy railroad tickets.”

  Mullaney, eyes tight, said, “Who knew about this money?”

  “My dad, of course. My aunt.”

  “Nobody else?”

  “Not that I can think of. Not that I know of. I wish I could be of more help….”

  I smiled at her. “You’re doing fine, Sally.”

  A uniformed officer stuck his head in. “Inspector, Captain Cullen says Mr. Vinicky is here.”

  Sally pushed past Mullaney and me, and the uniformed man, and the girl went rattling down the stairs calling, “Daddy, Daddy!”

  When we caught up with her, she was in her father’s arms in the yellow-and-white kitchen. He held her close. They both cried and patted each other’s backs. Cullen, seated at the kitchen table, regarded this with surprising humanity.

  “I want you to stay with your aunt tonight,” Vinicky said to his daughter.

  “Okay. That’s okay. I don’t want to sleep in this house ever again.”

  He found a smile. “Well, not tonight, anyway, sweetheart. They let me call your aunt—she’s on her way. Do you want to wait in your room?”

  “No. No, I’ll wait outside, if that’s all right.”

  Vinicky, the girl still in his arms, looked past her for permission, his pudgy face streaked with tears, his eyes webbed red.

  Mullaney and Cullen nodded, and a uniformed man walked her out. The father took at seat at the kitchen table. So did Mullaney. So did I.

  Seeming to notice me for the first time, Vinicky looked at me, confusion finding its way past the heartbreak. “What…what’re you doing here, Mr. Heller?”

  “I was watching the house, Mr. Vinicky,” I said, and told him the circumstances as delicately as possible.

  “I take it…I take it you told these gentleman why I hired you.”

  “I did.”

  “Did you see anyone go in, Mr. Heller? Did you see that bastard Miller?”