“What case? Capone?”
“No—the Butcher.”
I nodded. I’d been part of the capture of the lunatic responsible for those brutal slayings of vagrants; and was one of the handful who knew that Eliot had been forced to make a deal with his influential political backers to allow the son of a bitch—who had a society pedigree—to avoid arrest, and instead be voluntarily committed to a madhouse.
“It bothers him, huh?” I said, and grunted a laugh. “Mr. Squeaky Clean, the ‘Untouchable’ Eliot Ness having to cut a deal like that.”
“I think so,” she admitted. “He never says. You know how quiet he can be.”
“Well, I think he should grow up. For Christ sake, for somebody from Chicago, somebody who’s seen every kind of crime and corruption, he can be as naive as a schoolgirl.”
“An alcoholic schoolgirl,” Ev said with a smirk, and a martini sip.
“…You want me to talk to him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe…. I think this case, these poor homeless men being victimized again, got memories stirred up.”
“Of the Butcher case, you mean.”
“Yes…and Nate, we’ve been getting postcards from that crazy man.”
“What crazy man? Capone?”
“No! The Butcher…threatening postcards postmarked the town where that asylum is.”
“Is there any chance Watterson can get out?”
Lloyd Watterson: the Butcher.
“Eliot says no,” Ev said. “He’s been assured of that.”
“Well, these killings aren’t the work of a madman. This is murder for profit, plain and simple. Good old-fashioned garden variety evil.”
“Help him clear this up,&8221; she said, and an edge of desperation was in her voice. “I think it would…might…make a difference.”
Then Eliot was back, and sat down with a fresh martini in hand.
“I hope I didn’t miss anything good,” he said.
My room was small but seemed larger due to the sparseness of the furnishings, metallic, institutional-gray clothes cabinet, a chair and a metal cot. A bare bulb bulged from the wall near the door, as if it had blossomed from the faded, fraying floral-print wallpaper. The wooden floor had a greasy, grimy look.
Katie was saying, “Hope it will do.”
“You still haven’t said what my duties are.”
“I’ll think of something. Now, if you need anything, I’m down the hall. Let me show you….”
I followed her to a doorway at the end of the narrow gloomy hallway. She unlocked the door with a key extracted from between her massive breasts, and ushered me into another world.
The livingroom of her apartment held a showroom-like suite of walnut furniture with carved arms, feet and base rails, the chairs and davenport sporting matching green mohair cushions, assembled on a green and blue wall-to-wall Axminster carpet. Pale yellow wallpaper with gold and pink highlights created a tapestry effect, while floral satin damask draperies dressed up the windows, venetian blinds keeping out prying eyes. Surprisingly tasteful, the room didn’t look very lived in.
“Posh digs,” I said, genuinely impressed.
“Came into some money recently. Spruced the joint up a little…. Now, if you need me after hours, be sure to knock good and loud.” She swayed over to a doorless doorway and nodded for me to come to her. “I’m a heavy sleeper.”
The bedroom was similarly decked out with new furnishings—a walnut-veener double bed, dresser and nightstand and three-mirror vanity with modern lines and zebrawood design panels—against ladylike pink-and-white floral wallpaper. The vanity top was neatly arranged with perfumes and face powder and the like, their combined scents lending the room a feminine bouquet. Framed prints of airbrushed flowers hung here and there, a large one over the bed, where sheets and blankets were neatly folded back below lush overstuffed feather pillows, as if by a maid.
“I had this room re-done, too,” she said. “My late husband, rest his soul, was a slob.”
Indeed it was hard to imagine a man sharing this room with her. There was a daintiness that didn’t match up with its inhabitant. The only sign that anybody lived here were the movie magazines on the bedstand in the glow of the only light, a creamy glazed pottery-base lamp whose gold parchment shade gave the room a glow.
The only person more out of place in this tidy, feminine suite than me, in my tattered secondhand store suit, was my blowsy hostess in her polka-dot peasant blouse and flowing dark skirt. She was excited and proud, showing off her fancy living quarters, bobbing up and down like an eager kid; it was cute and a little sickening.
Or maybe that was the cheap beer. I wasn’t drunk but I’d had three glasses of it.
“You okay, Bill?” she asked.
“Demon meatloaf,” I said.
“Sit, sit.”
And I was sitting on the edge of the bed. She stood before me, looming over me, frightening and oddly comely, with her massive bosom spilling from the blouse, her red-rouged mouth, her half-lidded long-lashed green eyes, mother/goddess/whore.
“It’s been lonely, Bill,” she said, “without my man.”
“Suh…sorry for your loss.”
“I could use a man around here, Bill.”
“Try to help.”
“It could be sweet for you.”
She tugged the peasant blouse down over the full, round, white-powdered melons that were her bosom, and pulled my head between them. Their suffocation was pleasant, even heady, and I was wondering whether I’d lost count of those beers when I fished in my trousers for my wallet for the lambskin.
I wasn’t that far gone.
I had never been with a woman as overweight as Kathleen O’Meara before, and I don’t believe I ever was again; many a man might dismiss her as fat. But the sheer womanliness of her was overwhelming; there was so much of her, and she smelled so good, particularly for a saloonkeeper, her skin so smooth, her breasts and behind as firm as they were large and round, that the three nights I spent in her bed remain bittersweet memories. I didn’t love her, obviously, nor did she me—we were using each other, in our various nasty ways.
But it’s odd, how many times, over the years, the memory of carnality in Katie’s bed pops unbidden into my mind. On more than one occasion, in bed with a slender young girlish thing, the image of womanly, obscenely voluptuous Katie would taunt me, as if saying, Now I was a real woman!
Katie was also a real monster. She waited until the second night, when I lay next to her in the recently purchased bed, in her luxuriant remodeled suite of rooms in a waterfront rooming house where her pitiful clientele slept on pancake-flat piss-scented mattresses, to invite me to be her accomplice.
“Someday I’ll move from here,” she said in the golden glow of the parchment lamp and the volcanic sex we’d just had. She was on her back, the sheet only half-covering the globes of her bosom; she was smoking, staring at the ceiling.
I was on my back, too—I wasn’t smoking, cigarettes being one filthy habit I didn’t partake of. “But, Katie—this place is hunky-dory.”
“These rooms are nice, love. But little Katie was meant for a better life than the Angles can provide.”
“You got a good business, here.”
She chuckled. “Better than you know.”
“What do you mean?”
She leaned on one elbow and the sheet fell away from the large, lovely bosoms. “Don’t you wonder why I’m so good to these stumblebums?”
“You give a lot of free beer away, I noticed.”
“Why do you suppose Katie does that?”
“’Cause you’re a good Christian woman?”
She roared with laughter, globes shimmering like Jello. “Don’t be a child! Have you heard of burial insurance, love?”
And she filled me in on the scheme—the lottery portion of it, at least, taking out policies on men who were good bets for quick rides to potter’s field. But she didn’t mention anything about helping speed the insured to even quicker,
surer deaths.
“You disappointed in Katie?” she asked. “That I’m not such a good Christian woman?”
I grinned at her. “I’m tickled pink to find out how smart you are, baby. Was your old man in on this?”
“He was. But he wasn’t trustworthy.”
“Lucky for you he croaked.”
“Lucky.”
“Hey…I didn’t mean to be coldhearted, baby. I know you miss him.”
Her plump pretty face was as blank as a bisque baby’s. “He disappointed me.”
“How’d he die?”
“Got drunk and stepped in front of a car.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t pay for a dipso to run a bar, too much helpin’ himself…. I notice you don’t hit the sauce so hard. You don’t drink too much, and you hold what you do drink.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re just a good joe, down on his luck. Could use a break.”
“Who couldn’t?”
“And I can use a man. I can use a partner.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Just be friendly to these rummies. Get ’em on your good side, get ’em to sign up. Usually all it takes is a friendly ear and a pint of rotgut.”
“And when they finally drink themselves into a grave, we get a nice payday.”
“Yup. And enough nice paydays, we can leave the Angles behind. Retire rich while we’re still young and pretty.”
His name was Harold Wilson. He looked at least sixty but when we filled out the application, he managed to remember he was forty-three.
He and I sat in a booth at O’Meara’s and I plied him with cheap beers, which Katie’s hollow-eyed daughter dutifully delivered, while Harold told me, in bits and pieces, the sad story that had brought him to the Angles.
Hunkered over the beer, he seemed small, but he’d been of stature once, physically and otherwise. In a fahat was both withered and puffy, bloodshot powder-blue eyes peered from pouches, by turns rheumy and teary.
He had been a stock broker. When the Crash came, he chose to jump a freight rather than out a window, leaving behind a well-bred wife and two young daughters.
“I meant to go back,” Harold said, in a baritone voice whose dignity had been sandpapered away, leaving scratchiness and quaver behind. “For years, I did menial jobs…seasonal work, janitorial work, chopping firewood, shoveling walks, mowing grass…and I’d save. But the money never grew. I’d either get jackrolled or spend it on…”
He finished the sentence by grabbing the latest foamy mug of warm beer from Maggie O’Meara and guzzling it.
I listened to Harold’s sad story all afternoon and into the evening; he repeated himself a lot, and he signed three burial policies, one for $450, another for $750 and finally the jackpot, $1000. Death would probably be a merciful way out for the poor bastard, but even at this stage of his life, Harold Wilson deserved a better legacy than helping provide for Katie O’Meara’s retirement.
Late in the evening, he said, “Did go back, once…to Elmhurst…. Tha’s Chicago.”
“Yeah, I know, Harold.”
“Thomas Wolfe said, ‘Can’t go home again.’ Shouldn’t go home again’s more like it.”
“Did you talk to them?”
“No! No. It was Chrissmuss. Sad story, huh? Looked in the window. Didn’t expect to see ’em, my family; figured they’d lose the house.”
“But they didn’t? How’d they manage that?”
“Mary…that’s my wife…her family had some money. Must not’ve got hurt as bad as me in the Crash. Figure they musta bought the house for her.”
“I see.”
“Sure wasn’t her new husband. I recognized him; fella I went to high school with. A postman.”
“A mail carrier?”
“Yeah. ’Fore the Crash, Mary, she woulda looked down on a lowly civil servant like that…. But in Depression times, that’s a hell of a good job.”
“True enough.”
The eyes were distant and runny. “My girls was grown. College age. Blond and pretty, with boy friends, holdin’ hands…. The place hadn’t changed. Same furniture. Chrissmuss tree where we always put it, in the front window…. We’d move the couch out of the way and…anyway. Nothing different. Except in the middle of it, no me. A mailman took my place.”
For a moment I thought he said “male man.”
O’Meara’s closed at two a.m. I helped Maggie clean up, even though Katie hadn’t asked me to. Katie was upstairs, waiting for me in her bedroom. Frankly, I didn’t feel like doing my duty tonight, pleasant though it admittedly was. On the one hand, I was using Katie, banging this br I was undercover, and undercovers, to get the goods on, which made me a louse; and on the other hand, spending the day with her next victim, Harold Wilson, brought home what an enormous louse she was.
I was helping daughter Maggie put chairs on tables; she hadn’t said a word to me yet. She had her mother’s pretty green eyes and she might have been pretty herself if her scarecrow thin frame and narrow, hatchet face had a little meat on them.
The room was tidied when she said, “Nightcap?”
Surprised, I said, “Sure.”
“I got a pot of coffee on, if you’re sick of warm beer.”
The kitchen in back was small and neat and Maggie’s living quarters were back here, as well. She and her mother did not live together; in fact, they rarely spoke, other than Katie issuing commands.
I sat at a wooden table in the midst of the small cupboard-lined kitchen and sipped the coffee Maggie provided in a chipped cup. In her white waitress uniform, she looked like a wilted nurse.
“That suit you’re wearing,” she said.
Katie had given me clothes to wear; I was in a brown suit and a yellow-and-brown tie, nothing fancy but a step or two up from the threadbare duds “Bill O’Hara” had worn into O’Meara’s.
“What about ’em?”
“Those were my father’s.” Maggie sipped her coffee. “You’re about his size.”
I’d guessed as much. “I didn’t know. I don’t mean to be a scavenger, Miss O’Meara, but life can do that to you. The Angles ain’t high society.”
“You were talking to that man all afternoon.”
“Harold Wilson. Sure. Nice fella.”
“Ma’s signing up policies on him.”
“That’s right. You know about that, do you?”
“I know more than you know. If you knew what I knew, you wouldn’t be so eager to sleep with that cow.”
“Now, let’s not be disrespectful…”
“To you or the cow?…. Mr. O’Hara, you seem like a decent enough sort. Careful what you get yourself into. Remember how my papa died.”
“No one ever told me,” I lied.
“He got run down by a car. I think he got pushed.”
“Really? Who’d do a thing like that?”
The voice behind us said, “This is cozy.”
She was in the doorway, Katie, in a red Kimono with yellow flowers on it; you could’ve rigged out a sailboat with all that cloth.
“Mr. O’Hara helped me tidy up,” Maggie said coldly. No fear in her voice. “I offered him coffee.”
“Just don’t offer him anything else,” Katie snapped. The green eyes were har20;jade.
Maggie blushed, and rose, taking her empty cup and mine and depositing them awkwardly, clatteringly, in the sink.
In bed, Katie said, “Good job today with our investment, Bill.”
“Thanks.”
“Know what Harold Wilson’s worth, now?”
“No.”
“Ten thousand…. Poor sad soul. Terrible to see him suffering like that. Like it’s terrible for us to have to wait and wait, before we can leave all this behind.”
“What are you sayin’, love?”
“I’m sayin’, were somebody to put that poor man out of his misery, they’d be doin’ him a favor, is all I’m sayin’.”
“You’re probably right, at that. Poor bastard.”
“You know how cars’ll come up over the hill…25th Street, headin’ for the bridge? Movin’ quick through this here bad part of a town?”
“Yeah, what about ’em?”
“If someone were to shove some poor soul out in front of a car, just as it was coming up and over, there’d be no time for stoppin’.”
I pretended to digest that, then said, “That’d be murder, Katie.”
“Would it?”
“Still…You might be doin’ the poor bastard a favor, at that.”
“And make ourselves $10,000 richer.”
“…. You ever do this before, Katie?”
She pressed a hand to her generous bare bosom. “No! No. But I never had a man I could trust before.”
Late the next morning, I met with Eliot in a back booth at Mickey’s, a dimly lit hole-in-the-wall saloon a stone’s throw from City Hall. He was having a late breakfast—a bloody Mary—and I had coffee.
“How’d you get away from Kathleen O’Meara?” he wondered. He looked businesslike in his usual three-piece suit; I was wearing a blue number from the Frank O’Meara Collection.
“She sleeps till noon. I told her daughter I was taking a walk.”
“Long walk.”
“The taxi’ll be on my expense account. Eliot, I don’t know how much more of this I can stand. She sent the forms in and paid the premiums on Harold Wilson, and she’s talking murder all right, but if you want to catch her in the act, she’s plannin’ to wait at least a month before we give Harold a friendly push.”
“That’s a long time for you to stay undercover,” Eliot admitted, stirring his bloody Mary with its celery stalk. “But it’s in my budget.”
I sighed. “I never knew being a city employee could be so exhausting.”
“I take it you and Katie are friendly.”
“She’s a ride, all right. I’ve never been so disgusted with myself in my life.”
“It’s that distasteful?”
“Hell, no, I’m having a whale of time, so to speak. It’s just shredding what little’s left of my self-respect, and shabby little code of ethics, is all. Banging a big fat murdering bitch and liking it.” I shuddered.
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