Chicago Lightning

by Max Allan Collins

  I knew that three people, on the Monday I’d found Thelma, had come forward to the authorities and reported having seen her on Sunday, long after she had “officially” died.

  Miranda Diamond, Eastman’s now ex-wife (their divorce had gone through, finally, apparently fairly amicably), claimed to have seen Thelma, still dressed in her Trocadero fineries, behind the wheel of her distinctive Packard convertible at the corner of Sunset and Vine Sunday, mid-morning. She was, Miranda told the cops, in the company of a tall, swarthy, nattily dressed young man whom Miranda had never seen before.

  Mrs. Wallace Ford, wife of the famed director, had received a brief phone call from Thelma around four Sunday afternoon. Thelma had called to say she would be attending the Fords’ cocktail party, and was it all right if she brought along “a new, handsome friend?”

  Finally, and best of all, there was Warren Eastman himself. Neighbors had reported to the police that they heard Eastman and Thelma quarreling bitterly, violently, at the bungalow above the restaurant, Sunday morning, around breakfast time. Eastman said he had thrown her out, and that she had screamed obscenities and beaten on the door for ten minutes (and police did find kick marks on the shrub-secluded, hacienda-style door).

  “It was a lover’s quarrel,” Eastman told a reporter. “I heard she had a new boy friend—some Latin fellow from San Francisco—and she denied it. But I knew she was lying.”

  Eastman also revealed, in the press, that Thelma didn’t own any real interest in her Sidewalk Café; she had made no investment other than lending her name, for which she got 50 percent of the profits.

  I called Rondell after the inquest and he told me the case was closed.

  “We both know something smells,” I said. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to hang up.”

  And he did.

  Rondell was a good cop in a bad town, an honest man in a system so corrupt the Borgias would’ve felt moral outrage; even a Chicago boy like me found it disgusting. But he couldn’t do much about movie-mogul pressure by way of City Hall; Los Angeles had one big business and the film industry was it. And I was just an out-of-town private detective with a local dead client.

  On the other hand, she’d paid me to protect her, and ultimately I hadn’t. I had accepted her money, and it seemed to me she ought to get something for it, even if it was posthumous.

  I went out the next Monday morning—one week to the day since I’d found the ice-cream blonde melting in that garage—and at the Café, sitting alone in the cocktail lounge, reading Variety and drinking a bloody Mary, was Warren Eastman. He was between pictures and just two stools down from where she had sat when she first hired me. He was wearing a blue blazer, a cream silk cravat, and white pants. He lowered the paper and looked at me; he was surprised to see me, but it was not a pleasant surprise, even though he affected a toothy smile under the twitchy lttle mustache.

  “What brings you around, Heller? I don’t need a bodyguard.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” I said genially, sitting next to him.

  He looked down his nose at me through slitted eyes; his diamond-shaped face seemed handsome to some, I supposed, but to me it was a harshly angular thing, a hunting knife with hair.

  “What exactly,” he said, “do you mean by that?”

  “I mean I know you murdered Thelma,” I said.

  He laughed and returned to his newspaper. “Go away, Heller. Find some schoolgirl who frightens easily if you want to scare somebody.”

  “I want to scare somebody all right. I just have one question…did your ex-wife help you with the murder itself, or was she just a supporting player?”

  He put the paper down. He sipped the bloody Mary. His face was wooden but his eyes were animated.

  I laughed gutturally. “You and your convoluted murder mysteries. You were so clever you almost schemed your way into the gas chamber, didn’t you? With your masquerades and charades.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?”

  “You were smart enough to figure out that the cold weather would confuse the time of death. But you thought you could make the coroner think Thelma met her fate the next day—Sunday evening, perhaps. You didn’t have an alibi for the early a.m. hours of Sunday. And that’s when you killed her.”

  “Is it, really? Heller, I saw her Sunday morning, breakfast. I argued with her, the neighbors heard…”

  “Exactly. They heard—but they didn’t see a thing. That was something you staged, either with your ex-wife’s help, or whoever your current starlet is. Some actress, the same actress who later called Mrs. Ford up to accept the cocktail party invite and further spread the rumor of the new lover from San Francisco. Nice touch, that. Pulls in the rumors of gangsters from San Francisco who threatened her; was the ‘swarthy man’ Miranda saw a torpedo posing as a lover? A gigolo with a gun? A member of Artie Lewis’ dance band, maybe? Let the cops and the papers wonder. Well, it won’t wash with me; I was with her for her last month. She had no new serious love in her life, from San Francisco or elsewhere. Your ‘swarthy man’ is the little Latin lover who wasn’t there.”

  “Miranda saw him with her, Heller…”

  “No. Miranda didn’t see anything. She told the story you wanted her to tell; she went along with you, and you treated her right in the divorce settlement. You can afford to. You’re sole owner of Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café, now. Lock, stock and barrel, with no messy interference from the star on the marquee. And now you’re free to accept Lucky Luciano’s offer, aren’t you?”

  That rocked him, like a physical blow. “What?”

  “That’s why you killed Thelma. She was standing in your way. You wanted to put a casino in upstairs; it would mean big money, ver big money.”

  “I have money.”

  “Yes, and you spend it. You live very lavishly. I’ve been checking up on you. I know you intimately already, and I’m going to know you even better.”

  His eyes quivered in the diamond mask of his face. “What are you talking about?”

  “You tried to scare her at first—extortion notes, having her followed; maybe you did this with Luciano’s help, maybe you did it on your own. I don’t know. But then she hired me, and you scurried off into the darkness to think up something new.”

  He sneered and gestured archly with his cigarette holder, the cigarette in which he was about to light up. “I’m breathlessly awaiting just what evil thing it was I conjured up next.”

  “You decided to commit the perfect crime. Just like in the movies. You would kill Thelma one cold night, knocking her out, shoving booze down her, leaving her to die in that garage with the car running. Then you would set out to make it seem that she was still alive—during a day when you were very handsomely, unquestionably alibied.”

  “You’re not making any sense. The verdict at the inquest was accidental death…”

  “Yes. But the time of death is assumed to have been the night before you said you saw her last. Your melodrama was too involved for the simple-minded authorities, who only wanted to hush things up. They went with the more basic, obvious, tidy solution that Thelma died an accidental death early Saturday morning.” I laughed, once. “You were so cute in pursuit of the ‘perfect crime’ you tripped yourself, Eastman.”

  “Did I really,” he said dryly. It wasn’t a question.

  “Your scenario needed one more rewrite. First you told the cops you slept at the apartment over the café Saturday night, bolting the door around midnight, accidentally locking Thelma out. But later you admitted seeing Thelma the next morning, around breakfast time—at the bungalow.”

  His smile quivered. “Perhaps I slept at the apartment, and went up for breakfast at the bungalow.”

  “I don’t think so. I think you killed her.”

  “No charges have been brought against me. And none will.”

  I looked at him hard, like a hanging judge passing
sentence. “I’m bringing a charge against you now. I’m charging you with murder in the first degree.”

  His smile was crinkly; he stared into the redness of his drink. Smoke from his cigarette-in-holder curled upward like a wreath. “Ha. A citizen’s arrest, is it?”

  “No. Heller’s law. I’m going to kill you myself.”

  He looked at me sharply. “What? Are you mad…”

  “Yes, I’m mad. In sense of being angry, that is. Sometime, within the next year, or two, I’m going to kill you. Just how, I’m not just sure. Might be me who does it, might be one of my Chicago pals. Just when, well…perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps a month from tomorrow. Maybe next Christmas. I haven’t decided yet.”

  “You can’t be serious…”

  “I’m deadly serious. Right now I’m heading home to Chicago, to mull it over. But don’t worry—I’ll be seeing you.”

  And I left him there at the bar, the glass of bloody Mary mixing itself in his hand.

  Here’s what I did to Warren Eastman: I hired Fred Rubinski to spend two weeks shadowing him. Letting him see he was being tailed by an ugly intimidating-looking bastard, which Fred was. Letting him extrapolate from this that I was, through my surrogate, watching his every move. Making him jump at that shadow, and all the other shadows, too.

  Then I pulled Fred off Eastman’s case. Home in Chicago, I slept with my gun under my pillow for a while, in case the director got ambitious. But I didn’t bother him any further.

  The word in Hollywood was that Eastman was somehow—no one knew exactly how, but somehow—dirty in the Todd murder. And nobody in town thought it was anything but a murder. Eastman never got another picture. He went from one of the hottest directors in town, to the coldest. As cold as the weekend Thelma Todd died.

  The Sidewalk Café stopped drawing a monied, celebrity crowd, but it did all right from regular-folks curiosity seekers. Eastman made some dough there, all right; but the casino never happened. A combination of the wrong kind of publicity, and the drifting away of the high-class clientele, must have changed Lucky Luciano’s mind.

  Within a year of Thelma Todd’s death, Eastman was committed to a rest home, which is a polite way of saying insane asylum or madhouse. He was in and out of such places for the next four years, and then, one very cold, windy night, he died of a heart attack.

  Did I keep my promise? Did I kill him?

  I like to think I did, indirectly. I like to think that Thelma Todd got her money’s worth from her chauffeur/bodyguard, who had not been there when she took that last long drive, on the night her sad blue eyes closed forever.

  I like to think, in my imperfect way, that I committed the perfect crime.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have taken liberties in this story based on the probable murder of actress Thelma Todd, changing some names and fictionalizing extensively. A number of books dealing with the death of Thelma Todd were consulted, but I wish in particular to cite Marvin J. Wolf and Katherine Mader, authors of Fallen Angels (1986).

  Nineteen-thirty-six began for me with a missing persons case. It didn’t stay a missing persons case long, but on that bitterly cold Chicago morning of January 3rd, all Mrs. Peacock knew was that her doctor husband had failed to come home after making a house call the night before.

  It was Saturday, just a little past ten, and I was filling out an insurance adjustment form when she knocked. I said come in, and she did, an attractive woman of about ive in an expensive fur coat. She didn’t look high-hat, though: she’d gone out today without any make-up on, which, added to her generally haggard look, told me she was at wit’s end.

  “Mr. Heller? Nathan Heller?”

  I said I was, standing, gesturing to a chair across from my desk. My office at the time was a large single room on the fourth floor of a less than fashionable building on the corner of Van Buren and Plymouth, in the shadow of the El. She seemed a little posh to be coming to my little one-man agency for help.

  “Your name was given to me by Tom Courtney,” she said. “He’s a friend of the family.”

  State’s Attorney Thomas J. Courtney and I had crossed paths several times, without any particular mishap; this explained why she’d chosen the A-1 Detective Agency, but not why she needed a detective in the first place.

  “My husband is missing,” she said.

  “I assume you’ve filed a missing person’s report.”

  “Yes I have. But I’ve been told until twenty-four hours elapse, my husband will not be considered missing. Tom suggested if my concern was such that I felt immediate action warranted, I might contact you. Which I have.”

  She was doing an admirable job of maintaining her composure; but there was a quaver in her voice and her eyes were moist.

  “If you have any reason to suspect a kidnapping or foul play,” I said, keeping my voice calm and soft, to lessen the impact of such menacing words, “I think you’re doing the right thing. Trails can go cold in twenty-four hours.”

  She nodded, found a brave smile.

  “My husband, Silber, is a doctor, a pediatrician. We live in the Edgewater Beach Apartments.”

  That meant money; no wonder she hadn’t questioned me about my rates.

  “Last evening Betty Lou, our eight year-old, and I returned home from visiting my parents in Bowen. Silber met us at Union Station and we dined at little restaurant on the North Side—the name escapes me, but I could probably come up with it if it proves vital—and then came home. Silber went to bed; I was sitting up reading. The phone rang. The voice was male. I asked for a name, an address, the nature of the business, doing my best to screen the call. But the caller insisted on talking to the doctor. I was reluctant, but I called Silber to the phone, and I heard him say, ‘What is it?…. Oh, a child is ill? Give me the address and I’ll be there straight away.’”

  “Did your husband write the address down?”

  She nodded. “Yes, and I have the sheet right here.” She dug in her purse and handed it to me.

  In the standard barely readable prescription-pad scrawl of any doctor, the note said: “G. Smale. 6438 North Whipple Street.”

  “Didn’t the police want this?”

  She shook her head no. “Not until it’s officially a missing persons case they don’t.”

  “No phone number?”

  “My husband asked for one and was told that the caller had no phone.”

  “Presumably he was calling on one.”

  She shrugged, with sad frustration. “I didn’t hear the other end of the conversation. All I can say for certain is that my husband hung up, sighed, smiled and said, ‘No rest for the wicked,’ and dressed. I jotted the information from the pad onto the top of the little Chicago street guide he carries, when he’s doing house calls.”

  “So he never took the original note with him?”

  “No. What you have there is what he wrote. Then Silber kissed me, picked up his black instrument bag and left. I remember glancing at the clock in the hall. It was 10:05 p.m.”

  “Did you hear from him after that?”

  “No I did not. I slept, but fitfully, and woke around one thirty a.m. Silber wasn’t home yet. I remember being irritated with him for taking a call from someone who wasn’t a regular patient; he has an excellent practice, now—there’s no need for it. I called the building manager and asked if Silber’s car had returned to the garage. It hadn’t. I didn’t sleep a wink after that. When dawn broke, so, I’m afraid, did I. I called Tom Courtney; he came around at once, phoned the police for me, then advised me to see you, should I feel the need for immediate action.”

  “I’m going to need some further information,” I said.

  “Certainly.”

  Questioning her, I came up with a working description and other pertinent data: Peacock was forty years old, a member of the staff of Children’s Memorial. He’d been driving a 1931 black Cadillac sedan, 1936 license 25-682. Wearing a gray suit, gray topcoat, gray felt hat. Five foot seven, 150 pounds, wire frame glasses.
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  I walked her down to the street and helped her hail a cab. I told her I’d get right on the case, and that in future she needn’t call on me; I’d come to her at her Edgewater Beach apartment. She smiled, rather bravely I thought, as she slipped into the backseat of the cab; squeezed my arm and looked at me like I was something noble.

  Well, I didn’t feel very noble. Because as her cab turned down Plymouth Court I was thinking that her husband the good doctor had probably simply had himself a big evening. He’d show up when his head stopped throbbing, or when something below the belt stopped throbbing, anyway. In future he’d need to warn his babe to stop calling him at home, even if she did have a brother or a knack for doing a convincing vocal imitation of a male.

  Back in my office I got out the private detective’s most valuable weapon—the telephone book—and looked up G. W. Smale. There was a listing with the same street number—6438—but the street was wrong, South Washtenaw. The names and house numbers tallied, yes, but the streets in question were on opposite sides of the city. The reverse directory listing street numbers followed by names and numbers told me that no “G. Smale” was listed at 6438 North Whipple.

  What the hell; I called the Smale on South Washtenaw.

  “I don’t know any Dr. Peacock,” he said. “I never saw the man in my life.”

  “Who do you take your kids to when they’re sick?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Nobody?”

  “I don’t have any kids. I’m not a father.”

  I talked to him for fifteen minutes, and he seemed forthright enough; my instincts, and I do a lot of phone work, told me to leave him to the cops, or at least till later that afternoon. I wanted to check out the doctor’s working quarters.

  So I tooled my sporty ’32 Auburn over to 4753 Broadway, where Dr. Peacock shared sumptuous digs with three other doctors, highly reputable medical specialists all. His secretary was a stunning brunette in her late twenties, a Miss Kathryn Mulrooney. I like a good-looking woman in white; the illusion of virginity does something for me.