Chicago Lightning : The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories

by Collins, Max Allan

  “What I don’t understand,” the pitiful voice over the phone said, “is why Rose was so distant to me, those last weeks. Why she’d acted in a way that made me think—”

  “Mr. Vinicky, your wife knew her sister’s husband was a lying louse, a degenerate gambler, stealing from the both of you. That was what was on her mind.”

  “…I hadn’t thought of it that way. By God, I think you’re right, Mr. Heller…. You know something funny? Odd. Ironic, I mean?”

  “What?”

  “I got a long, lovely letter from Rich Miller today. Handwritten. A letter of condolence. He heard about Rose’s death, and said he was sick about it. That she was a wonderful lady and had been kind to him. After all the people who’ve said Rose was hard-hearted to the people who worked for us? This, this…it’s a kind of…testament to her.”

  “That’s nice, Mr. Vinicky. Really is.”

  “Postmarked Omaha. Wonder what Miller’s doing there?”

  Hiding from the legbreakers, I thought.

  And, knowing him, doing it at the dog tracks.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  George Hagenauer discovered the Vinicky case in an obscure true-detective magazine. I have compressed time and omitted aspects of the investigation; and some of the names in this story have been changed.

  In March of 1947, I got caught up in the notorious Overell case, which made such headlines in Los Angeles, particularly during the trial that summer. The double murder—laced as it was with underage sex in a lurid scenario that made “Double Indemnity” seem tame—hit the front pages in Chicago, as well. But back home I never bragged about my little-publicized role, because—strictly speaking—I was the one guy who might have headed the whole thing off.

  I was taking a deductible vacation, getting away from an Illinois spring that was stubbornly still winter, in trade for Southern California’s constant summer. My wife, who was pregnant and grouchy, loved L.A., and had a lot of friends out there, which was one of the reasons for the getaway; but I was also checking in with the L.A. branch office of the A-1 Detective Agency, of which I was the president.

  I’d recently thrown in with Fred Rubinski, a former Chicago cop I’d known since we were both on the pickpocket detail, who from before the war had been running a one-man agency out of a suite in the Bradbury Building at Third and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles.

  It was Friday morning, and I was flipping through the pages of Cue magazine in the outer office, occasionally flirting with Fred’s good-looking blonde receptionist—like they say, I was married but I wasn’t dead—waiting to get together with Fred, who was in with a client. The guy had just shown up, no appointment, but I didn’t blame Fred for giving him precedence over me.

  I had seen the guy go in—sixtyish, a shade taller than my six feet, distinguished, graying, somewhat fleshy, in a lightweight navy suit that hadn’t come off the rack; he was clearly money.

  After about five minutes, Fred slipped out of the office and sat next to me, speaking sotto voce.

  My partner looked like a balding, slightly less ugly Edward G. Robinson; a natty dresser—today’s suit was a gray pinstripe with a gray and white striped tie—he was a hard round ball of a man.

  “Listen, Nate,” he said, “I could use your help.”

  I shrugged. “Okay.”

  “You’re not tied up today—I know you’re on vacation…”

  “Skip it. We got a well-heeled client who needs something done, right away, and you don’t have time to do it yourself.”

  The bulldog puss blinked at me. “How did you know?”

  “I’m a detective. Just keep in mind, I’ve done a few jobs out here, but I don’t really know the town.”

  Fred sat forward. “Listen, this guy is probably worth a cool million—Walter E. Overell, he’s a financier, land developer, got a regular mansion over in Pasadena, in the Flintridge district, real exclusive digs.”

  “What’s he want done?”

  “Nothin’ you can’t handle. Nothin’ big.”

  “So you’d rather let me hear it from him?”

  Fred grinned; it wasn’t pretty. “You are a detective.”

  In the inner office, Overell stood as Fred pulled up a chair for me next to the client’s. As the financier and I shook hands, Fred said, “Mr. Overell, this is Nathan Heller, the president of this agency, and my most trusted associate.”

  He left out that I wasn’t local. Which I didn’t disagree with him for doing—it was good tactically.

  “Of course, Mr. Heller commands our top rate, Mr. Overell—one hundred a day.”

  “No problem.”

  “We get expenses, and require a two-hundred dollar retainer, non-refundable.”

  “Fine.”

  Fred and I made sure not to look at each other throughout my partner’s highway robbery of this obviously well-off client.

  Soon we got down to it. Overell slumped forward as he sat, hands locked, his brow deeply furrowed, his gray eyes pools of worry.

  “It’s my daughter, Mr. Heller. She wants to get married.”

  “A lot of young girls do, Mr. Overell.”

  “Not this young. Louise is only seventeen—and won’t be eighteen for another nine months. She can’t get married at her age without my consent—and I’m not likely to give it.”

  “She could run away, sir. There are states where seventeen is plenty old enough—”

  “I would disinherit her.” He sighed, hung his head. “Much as it would kill me…I would disown and disinherit her.”

  Fred put in, “This is his only child, Nate.”

  I nodded. “Where do things stand, currently?”

  Overell swallowed thickly. “She says she’s made up her mind to marry her ‘Bud’ on her eighteenth birthday.”

  “Bud?”

  “George Gollum—he’s called Bud. He’s twenty-one. What is the male term for a golddigger, anyway?”

  I shrugged. “Greedy bastard?”

  “That will do fine. I believe he and she have…” Again, he swallowed and his clenched hands were trembling, his eyes moist. “…known each other, since she was fourteen.”

  “Pardon me, sir, but you use the term ‘known’ as if you mean in the…Biblical sense?”

  He nodded curtly, turned his gaze away; but his words were clipped: “That’s right.”

  An idea was hatching; I didn’t care for it much, but the idea wasn’t distasteful enough to override my liking of a hundred bucks a day.

  Overell was saying, “I believe he met my daughter when he was on leave from the Navy.”

  “He’s in the Navy?”

  “No! He’s studying at the Los Angeles campus of U.C., now—pre-med, supposedly, but I doubt he has the brains for it. They exchanged letters when he was serving overseas, as a radioman. My wife, Beulah, discovered some of these letters…. They were…filth.”

  His head dropped forward, and his hands covered his face.

  Fred glanced at me, eyebrows raised, but I just said to Overell, “Sir, kids are wilder today than when we were young.”

  He had twenty, twenty-five years on me, but it seemed the thing to say.

  “I’ve threatened to disinherit her, even if she waits till she’s of legal age—but she won’t listen, Louise simply won’t listen.”

  Overell went on, at some length, to tell me of Louise’s pampered childhood, her bedroom of dolls and Teddy bears in their “estate,” the private lessons (tennis, riding, swimming), her French governess who had taught her a second language as well as the niceties of proper etiquette.

  “Right now,” the disturbed father said, “she’s waging a campaign to win us over to this twenty-one-year-old ‘boy friend’ of hers.”

  “You haven’t met him?”

  “Oh, I’ve met him—chased him off my property. But she insists if we get to know Bud, we’ll change our minds—I’ve consented to meet with them, let them make their case for marriage.”

  “Excuse me, but is she pregnant?”
/>   “If she were, that would carry no weight whatsoever.”

  I let the absurdity of that statement stand.

  Overell went on: “I’ve already spoken to Mr. Rubinski about making certain…arrangements…if that is what Louise and her Bud reveal to us tomorrow evening.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes, we have a yacht—the Mary E.—moored at Newport Harbor.” He smiled embarrassedly, the first time he’d smiled in this meeting. “Excuse my pomposity—‘yacht’ is rather overstating it, it’s really just a little forty-seven footer.”

  Little?

  “Louise asked me to invite her and her ‘boy friend’ aboard for the evening, with her mother and myself, so we can all get to know each other better, and talk, ‘as adults.’”

  “And you’re going along with this?”

  “Yes—but only to humor her, and as a…subterfuge for my own feelings, my own desires, my own designs. I want you to explore this boy’s background—I don’t know anything about him, except that he’s local.”

  “And you think if I turn up something improper in this boy’s past, it would matter to your daughter?”

  His eyes were so tight, it must have hurt. “If he’s the male equivalent of a golddigger, won’t he have other girls, other women? That would show Louise the light.”

  “Mr. Overell, is your daughter attractive?”

  “Lovely. I…I have a picture in my wallet, but I’m afraid she’s only twelve in it.”

  “Never mind that right now—but you should know there’s every possibility that these two young people…and twenty-one seems younger to me, every day…really are nuts about each other. Gollum may not be seeing anybody else.”

  “But you can find out!”

  “Sure, but…aren’t you overlooking something?”

  “Am I?”

  “Your daughter is underage. If I catch ’em in the backseat of this boy’s jalopy, we can put him away—or at least threaten to.”

  “…Statutory rape?”

  I held up two palms, pushed the air. “I know, I know, it would embarrass your daughter…but even the threat of it oughta to send this rat scurrying.”

  Overell looked at Fred for an opinion. Fred was nodding.

  “Makes sense, Mr. Overell,” he said.

  Overell’s eyes tensed, but his brow unfurrowed some; another sigh seemed to deflate his entire body, but I could sense relief on his part, and resignation, as he said, “All right…all right. Do what you think is best.”

  We got him a contract, and he gave us a check.

  “Can I speak with your wife about this matter?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “I’m here with Beulah’s blessing. You have our address—you can catch her at home this afternoon, if you like.”

  I explained to him that what I could do today would be limited, because Overell understood that his son and daughter were (and he reported this with considerable distaste) spending the day “picnicking in the desert.” But I could go out to the Los Angeles campus of the University of California and ask around about Bud.

  “You can inquire out there about my daughter as well,” he said.

  “Isn’t she still in high school?”

  “Unfortunately, no—she’s a bright girl, skipped a grade. She’s already in college.”

  Sounded like Louise was precocious in a lot of ways.

  Around ten thirty that same morning, I entered at Westwood Boulevard and Le Conte Avenue, rolling in my rental Ford through a lushly terraced campus perched on a knoll overlooking valleys, plains and hills. The buildings were terra cotta, brick and tile in a Romanesque motif.

  I asked a cute coed for directions to the student union, and was sent to Kerckhoff Hall, an imposing building of Tudor design with a pinnacled tower. I was further directed to a sprawling high-ceilinged room where college kids played ping pong or played cards or sat in comfy chairs and couches and drank soda pop and smoked cigarettes. Among sweaters and casual slacks and bobby socks, I stuck out like the thirty-eight-year-old sore thumb I was in my tan summer suit; but the kids were all chatty and friendly. My cover was that Bud had applied for a job—what that job was, of course, I couldn’t say—and I was checking up on him for his prospective employer.

  Not everybody knew Bud Gollum or Louise Overell, of course—too big a campus for that. But a few did.

  Bud, it seemed, was a freshman, going to school on Uncle Sam. Other first-year fellas—younger than Bud, probably nineteen—described him as “a good guy, friendly, and smart,” even “real smart.” But several didn’t hide their dislike of Bud, saying he was smart-alecky, writing him off as a “wiseguy.”

  A mid-twenties junior with an anchor tattooed on his forearm knew Bud as a fellow Navy veteran, and said Bud had been a Radio Man First Class.

  “Listen,” the husky little dark-haired, dark-eyed ex-gob said, “if you’re considering him for a job, give him a break—he’s smarter than his grades make him look.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, when you see his transcripts, you’re going find him pulling down some low junk, so far this year…but it’s that little skirt’s fault. I mean, they don’t let dummies into pre-med around here.”

  “He’s got a girl friend distracting him?”

  The gob nodded. “And it’s pretty damn serious—she’s a young piece of tail, pardon my French, built like a brick shithouse. Can hardly blame him for letting his studies slide.”

  “Well, I hope he wouldn’t be too preoccupied to do a good job—”

  “No, no! He’s a right fella! Lives at home with his mom and stepdad—he’s an assistant scout master, for Christ sakes!”

  “Sounds clean cut.”

  “Sure—he loves the outdoors, always going hiking in the mountains up around Chatsworth, backpacking out into the desert.”

  “His girl go in for that?”

  “They go everywhere together, joined at the hip…don’t give me that look, buddy! I mean, haven’t you ever had a female lead you around by the dick?”

  “No,” I said, and when he arched an eyebrow, I added, “Does my wife count?”

  He grinned at me. “Does mine?”

  A table of girls who were smoking and playing pitch allowed me to pull up a chair for a few questions; they weren’t very cute, just enough to make me want to bust out crying.

  “I don’t know what a neat guy like that sees in ol’ Stone Face,” a blonde with blue eyes and braces said. I liked the way she was getting lipstick on her cigarette.

  “Stone Face?”

  “Yeah,” a brunette said. She wasn’t smoking, like her friends, just chewing and snapping her gum. “That gal’s got this round face like a frying pan and’s got about as much expression.”

  “Except when she giggles,” a redhead said, giggling.

  All the girls began to giggle, the blonde saying, “Then she really looks like a dope!”

  “She laughs at everything that idiot says,” the brunette said. “They hang onto each other like ivy—it’s sickening.”

  That was all I learned at the college, and the effort took about three hours; but it was a start.

  Pasadena was the richest city per capita in the nation, and the residential neighborhood where the Overells resided gave credence to that notion—mansions with sunken gardens, swimming pools and tennis courts on winding, flower-edged, palm-flung streets. The white mission-style mansion at 607 Los Robles Drive, with its well-manicured, lavishly landscaped lawn, was no exception.

  Mrs. Overell was younger than her husband by perhaps ten years, an attractive dark-blonde woman whose nicely buxom shape was getting a tad matronly. We sat by the pool watching the mid-afternoon sun highlight the shimmering blue surface with gold. We drank iced tea and she hid her feelings behind dark sunglasses and features as expressionless as the Stone Face with which those coeds had tagged her daughter.

  “I don’t know what I can tell you, Mr. Heller,” she said, her voice a bland alto, “that my husband hasn’t already.�
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  “Well, Mrs. Overell, I’m chiefly here for two reasons. First, I can use a photo of your daughter, a recent one.”

  “Certainly.” A tiny smile etched itself on the rigid face. “I should have thought of that—Walter carries a photo of Louise when she was still a child. He’d like to keep her that way.”

  “You do agree with this effort to break off Louise’s relationship with this Gollum character?”

  “Mr. Heller, I’m not naive enough to think that we can succeed at that. But I won’t stand in Walter’s way. Perhaps we can postpone this marriage long enough for Louise to see through this boy.”

  “You think he’s a male golddigger, too?”

  She shrugged. “He doesn’t come from money.”

  “You know where he lives? Have an address?”

  “He’s here in Pasadena.”

  I couldn’t picture a wrong side of the tracks in this swanky burg.

  “No, I don’t have an address,” she was saying, “but he’s in North Fair Oaks…where so many coloreds have moved in.”

  I had been met at the door by a Negro butler, who I supposed had to live somewhere.

  But I didn’t press the subject. I sipped my tea and offered, gently, “If your daughter is willing to wait to marry this boy till her eighteenth birthday…which I understand is many months from now…perhaps what you ought to do is humor her, and hope this affair cools off.”

  The blue and gold of the sun-kissed pool shimmered in the dark lens of her sunglasses. “I would tend to agree with you, Mr. Heller. In time she might come to her senses of her own volition. But Walter is a father who has not adjusted to losing his little girl…she’s our only child, you know…and I do share his concern about the Gollum boy.”

  “That’s the other reason I wanted to speak with you, directly,” I said, and—delicately—I filled her in on my notion to catch the two in flagrante delicto. I wanted to make sure she wouldn’t mind putting her daughter through the public embarrassment a statutory rape accusation would bring.

  Another tiny smile etched itself. “We’ve gotten quite used to Louise embarrassing us, Mr. Heller.”

  Mrs. Overell thought I might have trouble catching them, however, since they so often went hiking and camping in the West San Fernando Valley—like today. That would be tough: I was used to bagging my quarry in backseats and motel rooms.