Triple Play: A Nathan Heller Casebook

by Collins, Max Allan

  Late afternoon, Kruger caught my eye and I went over to him.

  “That basement with the laundry tubs,” he said quietly. “In one of the drains, there were traces of blood, chips of bone, fragments of flesh, little clumps of hair.”

  “Oh God.”

  “I’m advising Chief of Detectives Storms to send teams out looking.”

  “Looking for what?”

  “What do you think?”

  “God.”

  “Heller, I want to get started right now. I can use you. Give Keenan some excuse.”

  I went over to Bob, who sat on the edge of a straight-backed chair by the phone stand. His glazed eyes were fixed on the phone.

  “I’m going to run home for supper,” I told him. “Little woman’s in the family way, you know, and I got to check in with her or get in dutch. Can you hold down the fort?”

  “Sure, Nate. Sure. You’ll come back, though?”

  I patted his shoulder. “I’ll come right back.”

  Kruger and I paired up; half a dozen other teams, made up of plainclothes and uniformed men already at the scene, went out into the field as well. More were on the way. We were to look under every porch, behind every bush, in every basement, in every coal bin, trash can, any possible hiding place where a little body—or what was left of one—might be stowed.

  “We’ll check the sewers, too,” Kruger said, as we walked down the sidewalk. It was dusk now; the streetlamps had just come on. Coolness off the lake helped you forget it was July. The city seemed washed in gray-blue, but night hadn’t stolen away the clarity of day.

  I kept lifting manhole covers and Kruger would cast the beam of his flashlight down inside, but we saw nothing but muck.

  “Let’s not forget the catch basins,” I said.

  “Good point.”

  We began checking those as well, and in the passageway between two brick apartment buildings directly across from the similar building that housed those bloody laundry tubs, the circular iron catch-basin lid—like a manhole cover, but smaller—looked loose.

  “Somebody opened that recently,” Kruger said. His voice was quiet but the words were ominous in the stillness of the darkening night.

  “We need something to pry it up a little,” I said, kneeling. “Can’t get my fingers under it.”

  “Here,” Kruger said. He plucked the badge off the breast pocket of his jacket and, bending down, used the point of the star to pry the lid up to where I could wedge my fingers under it.

  I slid the heavy iron cover away, and Kruger tossed the beam of the flashlight into the hole.

  A face looked up at us.

  A child’s face, framed in blonde, muck-dampened, darkened hair.

  “It looks like a doll,” Kruger said. He sounded out of breath.

  “That’s no doll,” I said, and backed away, knowing I’d done as my wife had requested: I’d found Bob Keenan’s little girl.

  Part of her, anyway.

  We fished the little head out of the sewer; how, exactly, I’d rather not go into. It involved the handle of a broom we borrowed from the janitor of one of the adjacent buildings.

  Afterward, I leaned against the bricks in the alleylike passageway, my back turned away from what we’d found. Kruger tapped me on the shoulder.

  “You all right, Heller?”

  Uniformed men were guarding the head, which rested on some newspapers we’d spread out on the cement near the catch basin; they were staring down at it like it was some bizarre artifact of a primitive culture.

  “About lost my lunch,” I said.

  “You’re white as an Irishman’s ass.”

  “I’m okay.”

  Kruger lighted up a cigarette; its amber eye glowed.

  “Got another of those?” I asked.

  “Sure.” He got out a deck of Lucky Strikes. Shook one out for me. I took it hungrily and he thumbed a flame on his Zippo and lit me up. “Never saw you smoke before, Heller.”

  “Hardly ever do. I used to, overseas. Everybody did, over there.”

  “I bet. You were on Guadalcanal, I hear.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Pretty rough?”

  “I thought so till tonight.”

  He nodded. “I made a call. Keenan’s assistant, guy that runs the ration board, he’s on his way. To make the ID. Can’t put the father through that shit.”

  “You’re thinking, Kruger,” I said, sucking on the cigarette. “You’re all right.”

  He grunted noncommittally and went over to greet various cops, uniform and plainclothes, who were arriving; I stayed off to one side, back to the brick wall, smoking my cigarette.

  The janitor we’d borrowed the broom from sought me out. He was a thick-necked, white-haired guy in his early fifties; he wore coveralls over a flannel shirt rolled up at the sleeves.

  “So sad,” he said. His face was as German as his accent.

  “What’s on your mind, pop?”

  “I saw something.”

  “Oh?”

  “Maybe is not important.”

  I called Lt. Kruger over, to let him decide.

  “About five this morning,” the bull-necked janitor said, “I put out some trash. I see man in brown raincoat walking. His head, it was down, inside his collar, like it was cold outside, only it was not cold and not raining, either. He carry shopping bag.”

  Kruger and I exchanged sharp glances.

  “Where did you see this man walking, exactly?” Kruger asked the janitor.

  The stocky Kraut led us into the street; he pointed diagonally—right at the brick mansion where the Keenans lived. “He cut across that lawn, and walk west.”

  “What’s your name, pop?” I asked.

  “Otto. Otto Bergstrum.”

  Kruger gave Otto the janitor over to a pair of plainclothes dicks and they escorted him off to Summerdale District station to take a formal statement.

  “Could be a break,” Kruger said.

  “Could be,” I said.

  Keenan’s OPA coworker, Walter Munsen, a heavyset fellow in his late forties, was allowed through the wall of blue uniforms to look at the chubby-cheeked head on the spread-out papers. It looked up at him, its sweet face nicked with cuts, its neck a ragged thing. He said, “Sweet Jesus. That’s her. That’s little JoAnn.”

  That was good enough for Kruger.

  We walked back to the Keenan place. A starless, moonless night had settled on the city, as if God wanted to blot out what man had done. It didn’t work. The flashing red lights of squad cars, and the beams of cars belonging to the morbidly curious, fought the darkness. Reporters and neighbors infested the sidewalks in front of the Keenan place. Word of our grim discovery had spread—but not to Keenan himself.

  At the front door, Kruger said, “I’d like you to break it to him, Heller.”

  “Me? Why the hell me?”

  “You’re his friend. You’re who he called. He’ll take it better from you.”

  “Bullshit. There’s no ‘better’ in this.”

  But I did the deed.

  We stood in one corner of the living room. Kruger was at my side, but I did the talking. Keenan’s wife was still upstairs at the neighbors. I put a hand on his shoulder and said, “It’s not good, Bob.”

  He already knew from my face. Still, he had to say: “Is she dead?” Then he answered his own question: “You’ve found her, and she’s dead.”

  I nodded.

  “Dear lord. Dear lord.” He dropped to one knee, as if praying; but he wasn’t.

  I braced his shoulder. He seemed to want to get back on his feet, so I helped him do that.

  He stood there with his head hung and said, “Let me tell JoAnn’s mother myself.”

  “Bob—there’s more.”

  “More? How can there be more?”

  “I said it was bad. After she was killed, whoever did it disposed of her body by…” God! What words were there to say this? How do you cushion a goddamn fucking blow like this?

  “Nate
? What, Nate?”

  “She was dismembered, Bob.”

  “Dismembered…?”

  Better me than some reporter. “I found her head in a sewer catch basin about a block from here.”

  He just looked at me, eyes white all around; shaking his head, trying to make sense of the words.

  Then he turned and faced the wall; hands in his pockets.

  “Don’t tell Norma,” he said, finally.

  “We have to tell her,” Kruger said, as kindly as he could. “She’s going to hear soon enough.”

  He turned and looked at me; his face was streaked with tears. “I mean…don’t tell her about…the…dismembering part.”

  “Somebody’s got to tell her,” Kruger insisted.

  “Call their parish priest,” I told Kruger, and he bobbed his dour hound-dog head.

  The priest—Father O’Shea of St. Gertrude’s church—arrived just as Mrs. Keenan was being ushered back into her apartment. Keenan took his wife by the arm and walked her to the sofa; she was looking at her silent husband’s tragic countenance with alarm.

  The priest, a little white-haired fellow with Bible and rosary in hand, said, “How strong is your faith, my child?”

  Keenan was sitting next to her; he squeezed her hand, and she looked up with clear eyes, but her lips were trembling. “My faith is strong, father.”

  The priest paused, trying to find the words. I knew the feeling.

  “Is she all right, father?” Norma Keenan asked. The last vestiges of hope clung to the question.

  The priest shook his head no.

  “Is…is she hurt?”

  The priest shook his head no.

  Norma Keenan knew what that meant. She stared at nothing for several long moments. Then she looked up again, but the eyes were cloudy now. “Did they…” She began again. “Was she…disfigured?”

  The priest swallowed.

  I said, “No she wasn’t, Mrs. Keenan.”

  Somebody had to have the decency to lie to the woman.

  “Thank God,” Norma Keenan said. “Thank God.”

  She began to sob, and her husband hugged her desperately.

  5

  Just before ten that night, a plainclothes team found JoAnn’s left leg in another catch basin. Less than half an hour later, the same team checked a manhole nearby and found her right leg in a shopping bag.

  Not long after, the torso turned up—in a sewer gutter, bundled in a fifty-pound cloth sugar bag.

  Word of these discoveries rocketed back to the Keenan apartment, which had begun to fill with mucky-mucks—the Police Commissioner, the Chief of Detectives and his Deputy Chief, the head of the homicide detail, the Coroner and, briefly, the Mayor. The State’s Attorney and his right-hand investigator, Captain Daniel “Tubbo” Gilbert, came and stayed.

  The big shots showing didn’t surprise me, with a headline-bound crime like this. But the arrival of Tubbo Gilbert, who was Outfit all the way, was unsettling—considering Bob Keenan’s early concerns about mob involvement.

  “Heller,” well-dressed Tubbo said amiably, “what rock did you crawl out from under?”

  Tubbo looked exactly like his name sounded.

  “Excuse me,” I said, and brushed past him.

  It was time for me to fade.

  I went to Bob to say my good-byes. He was seated on the couch, talking to several FBI men; his wife was upstairs, at the neighbors again, under sedation.

  “Nate,” Keenan said, standing, patting the air with one hand, his bloodshot eyes beseeching me, “before you go…I need a word. Please.”

  “Sure.”

  We ducked into the bathroom. He shut the door. My eyes caught a child’s yellow rubber duck on the edge of the claw-footed tub.

  “I want you to stay on the job,” Keenan said.

  “Bob, every cop in town is going to be on this case. The last thing you need, or they want, is a private detective in the way.”

  “Did you see who was out there?”

  “A lot of people. Some very good people, mostly.”

  “That fellow Tubbo Gilbert. I know about him. I was warned about him. They call him ‘the Richest Cop in Chicago,’ don’t they?”

  “That’s true.” And that was saying something, in Chicago.

  Keenan’s eyes narrowed. “He’s in with the gangsters.”

  “He’s in with a lot of people, Bob, but…”

  “I’ll write you a check…” And he withdrew a checkbook from his pants pocket and knelt at the toilet and began filling a check out, frantically, using the lid as a writing table.

  This was as embarrassing as it was sad. “Bob…please don’t do this…”

  He stood and handed me a check for one thousand dollars. The ink glistened wetly.

  “It’s a retainer,” he said. “All I want from you is to keep an eye on the case. Keep these Chicago cops honest.”

  That was a contradiction of terms, but I let it pass.

  “Okay,” I said, and folded the check up and slipped it in my pocket, smearing the ink, probably. I didn’t think I’d be keeping it, but the best thing to do right now was just take it.

  He pumped my hand and his smile was an awful thing. “Thank you, Nate. God bless you, Nate. Thank you for everything, Nate.”

  We exited the bathroom and everybody eyed us strangely, as if wondering if we were perverts. Many of these cops didn’t like me much, and were glad to see me go.

  Outside, several reporters recognized me and called out. I ignored them as I moved toward my parked Plymouth; I hoped I wasn’t blocked in. Hal Davis of the News, a small man with a big head, bright-eyed and boyish despite his fifty-some years, tagged along.

  “You want to make an easy C-note?” Davis said.

  “Why I’m fine, Hal. How are you?”

  “I hear you were the one that fished the kid’s noggin outa the shit soup.”

  “That’s touching, Hal. Sometimes I wonder why you haven’t won a Pulitzer yet, with your way with words.”

  “I want the exclusive interview.”

  I walked faster. “Fuck you.”

  “Two C’s.”

  I stopped. “Five.”

  “Christ! Success has gone to your head, Heller.”

  “I might do better elsewhere. What’s the hell’s that all about?”

  In the alley behind the Keenan house, some cops were holding reporters back while a crime-scene photographer faced a wooden fence, flashbulbs popping, making little explosions in the night.

  “Damned if I know,” Davis said, and was right behind me as I moved quickly closer.

  The cops kept us back, but we could see it, all right. Written on the fence, in crude red lettering, were the words: “Stop me before I kill more.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Davis said, all banjo-eyed. “Is that who did this? The goddamn Lipstick Killer?”

  “The Lipstick Killer,” I repeated numbly.

  Was that who did this?

  6

  The Lipstick Killer, as the press had termed him, had hit the headlines for the first time last January.

  Mrs. Caroline Williams, an attractive forty-year-old widow with a somewhat shady past, was found nude and dead in bed in her modest North Side apartment. A red skirt and a nylon stocking were tied tightly around the throat of the voluptuous brunette corpse. There had been a struggle, apparently—the room was topsy-turvy. Mrs. Williams had been beaten, her face bruised, battered.

  She’d bled to death from a slashed throat, and the bed was soaked red; but she was oddly clean. Underneath the tightly tied red dress and nylon, the coroner found an adhesive bandage over the neck wound.

  The tub in the bathroom was filled with bloody water and the victim’s clothing, as if wash were soaking.

  A suspect—an armed robber who was the widow’s latest gentleman friend—was promptly cleared. Caroline Williams had been married three times, leaving two divorced husbands and one dead one. Her ex-husbands had unshakable alibis, particularly the latter.

&n
bsp; The case faded from the papers, and dead-ended for the cops.

  Then just a little over a month ago, a similar crime—apparently, even obviously, committed by the same hand—had rattled the city’s cage. Mrs. Williams, who’d gotten around after all, had seemed the victim of a crime of passion. But when Margaret Johnson met a disturbingly similar fate, Chicago knew it had a madman at large.

  Margaret Johnson—her friends called her Peggy (my wife’s nickname)—was twenty-nine years old and a beauty. A well-liked, churchgoing small-town girl, she’d just completed three years of war service with the Waves to go to work in the office of a business machine company in the Loop. She was found nude and dead in her small flat in a North Side residential hotel.

  When a hotel maid found her, Miss Johnson was slumped, kneeling, at the bathtub, head over the tub. Her hair was wrapped turbanlike in a towel, her pajama top tied loosely around her neck, through which a bread knife had been driven with enough force to go in one side and poke out the other.

  She’d also been shot—once in the head, again in the arm. Her palms were cut, presumably from trying to wrest the knife from the killer’s hand.

  The blood had been washed from the ex-Wave’s body. Damp, bloody towels were scattered about the bathroom floor. The outer room of the small apartment was a shambles, bloodstains everywhere. Most significantly, fairly high up on the wall, in letters three to six inches tall, printed in red with the victim’s lipstick, were the words:

  For heavens

  Sake catch me

  Before I Kill More

  I cannot control myself.

  The cops and the papers called the Lipstick Killer (the nickname was immediate) a “sex maniac,” though neither woman had been raped. The certainty of the police in that characterization made me suspicious that something meaningful had been withheld.

  I had asked Lt. Bill Drury, who before his suspension had worked the case out of Town Hall Station, and he said semen had been found on the floor in both apartments, near the windows that had apparently given the killer entry in either flat.