Triple Play: A Nathan Heller Casebook

by Collins, Max Allan

  His eyes tightened. “I hear the family received a lipstick letter, too, with the same message: ‘Stop me before I kill more’ or whatever.”

  “That’s true.”

  He sighed. Then he looked at me sharply. “Does attorney/client privilege apply to you and me, if I give you a retainer?”

  “Yeah. I’d have to send you a contract with an attorney I work with, to keep it legal. Or we could do it through your attorney. But I don’t know that I want you as a client, Sam. No offense.”

  He raised a finger. “I promise you that working for me will in no way compromise you or put you in conflict of interest with your other client, the Keenan father. If I’m lying, then the deal’s off.”

  I said nothing.

  He thrust a fat, sealed envelope into my lap. “That’s a grand in fifties.”

  “Sam, I…”

  “I’m your client now, Heller. Got that?”

  “Well…”

  “Got it?”

  I swallowed and nodded. I slipped the envelope in my inside suit coat pocket.

  “The Lipstick Killer,” Sam said, getting us back on the track. “The first victim was a Mrs. Caroline Williams.”

  I nodded.

  He thrust his finger in my face; I looked at it, feeling my eyes cross. It was like looking into a gun barrel. “No one, Heller, no one must know about this.” The finger withdrew and the ferretlike gangster sighed and looked out the windshield at the cement wall beyond. “I have a family. Little girls. Got to protect them. Are you a father, Heller?”

  “My wife’s expecting.”

  Sam grinned. “That’s great! That’s wonderful.” Then the grin disappeared. “Look, I’d do anything to protect my Angeline. Some guys, they flaunt their other women. Me, far as my family knows, I never strayed. Never. But…you’re a man—you understand the needs of a man.”

  I was starting to get the picture; or at least part of it.

  “The thing is, I was seeing this woman, this Caroline Williams. For the most part, it was pretty discreet.”

  It must have been, if Bill Drury hadn’t found out about it; he’d been on that case, after all, and his hate-on for the Outfit was legendary.

  As if reading my mind, Sam said, “Not a word to your pal Drury about this! Christ. That guy’s nuts.”

  Mooney should know.

  “Anyway, there was this photo of us together. Her and me, together. I want it back.”

  “Not for sentimental reasons, either.”

  “No,” he admitted frankly. “It crushed me that my friend Mrs. Williams had the bad luck to be this maniac’s victim. But from what I hear, this guy was not just a sex killer. He was some kind of weirdie second-story man.”

  “I think so,” I said. “I think he was a burglar with a hobby.”

  “The police reports indicated that stuff was missing. Undergarments, various personal effects. Anyway, even with Drury on the case, I was able to find out that the picture album she had the photo in wasn’t among her effects.”

  “Maybe her family got it.”

  “I checked that out myself—discreetly.”

  “Then you think…the killer took the photo album?”

  Sam nodded. “Yeah. She had photos of herself in bathing suits and shit. If he took her underwear with him, he could’ve taken that, too.”

  “So what do you want from me?”

  He looked at me hard; he clutched my arm. “All I want is that photo album. Not even that—just that one photo. It was taken in a restaurant, by one of them photo girls who come around.”

  “How I am supposed to find it?”

  “You may find this guy before the cops do. Or, you’re tight enough with the cops on the case to maybe get to it before they do. The photo album, I mean. It would embarrass me to have that come out. It would open up an ugly can of worms, and it wouldn’t have nothing to do with nothing, where these crackpot killings are concerned. It would hurt me and my family and at the same time only muddy up the waters, where the case against the maniac is concerned.”

  I thought about that. I had to agree.

  “So all you want,” I said, “is that photo.”

  “And your discretion.”

  “You’d be protected,” I said. “It would be through an attorney, after all. You’d be his client and he would be my client. I couldn’t say a word if I wanted to.”

  “You’ll take the job?”

  “I already took your money. But what if I don’t get results?”

  “You keep the retainer. You find and return that picture, you get another four grand.”

  “What I really want,” I said, “is that little girl’s murderer. I want to kill that son of a bitch.”

  “Have all the fun you want,” Sam said. “But get me my picture back.”

  10

  Lou Sapperstein, who had once been my boss on the pickpocket detail, was the first man I added when the A-1 expanded. Pushing sixty, Lou had the hard muscular build of a linebacker and the tortoiseshell glasses and bald pate of a scholar; in fact, he was a little of both.

  He leaned a palm on my desk in my office. As usual, he was in rolled-up shirtsleeves, his tie loose around his collar. “I spent all morning in the Trib morgue—went back a full year.”

  I had asked Lou to check on any breaking-and-entering cases involving assault on women. It had occurred to me that if, as Drury and I theorized, the Lipstick Killer was a cat burglar whose thrill-seeking had escalated to murder, there may have been an intermediate stage, between bloodless break-ins and homicidal ones.

  “There are several possibilities,” Lou said, “but one jumped right out at me…”

  He handed me a sheet torn from a spiral pad.

  “Katherine Reynolds,” I read aloud. Then I read the rest to myself, and said, “Some interesting wrinkles here.”

  Lou nodded. “Some real similarities. And it happened right smack in between killings number one and two. You think the cops have picked up on it?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “This happened on the South Side. The two women who were killed were both on the North Side.”

  “The little girl, too.”

  To Chicago cops, such geographic boundaries were inviolate—a North Side case was a North Side case and a crime that happened on the South Side might as well have happened on the moon. Unfortunately, crooks didn’t always think that way.

  So, late that afternoon, I found myself knocking at the door of the top-floor flat of an eight-story apartment building on the South Side, near the University of Chicago. The building had once been a nurse’s dormitory—Billings Hospital was nearby—and most of the residents here still were women in the mercy business.

  Like Katherine Reynolds, who was wearing crisp nurse’s whites, cap included, when she answered the door.

  “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice, Miss Reynolds,” I said, as she showed me in.

  I’d caught her at the hospital, by phone, and she’d agreed to meet me here at home; she was just getting off.

  “Hope I’m not interfering with your supper,” I added, hat in hand.

  “Not at all, Mr. Heller,” she said, unpinning her nurse’s cap. “Haven’t even started it yet.”

  She was maybe thirty, a striking brunette, with her hair chopped off in a boyish cut with pageboy bangs; her eyes were large and brown and luminous, her nose pug, her teeth white and slightly, cutely bucked. Her lips were full and scarlet with lipstick. She was slender but nicely curved and just about perfect, except for a slight medicinal smell.

  We sat in the living room of the surprisingly large apartment; the furnishings were not new, but they were nice. On the end table next to the couch, where we sat, was a hand-tinted color photographic portrait of a marine in dress blues, a grinning lantern-jawed young man who looked handsome and dim.

  She crossed her legs and the nylons swished. I was a married man, a professional investigator here on business, and her comeliness had no effect on me whatsoever. I put my hat over my
hard-on.

  “Nice place you got here,” I said. “Whole floor, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said. She smiled meaninglessly. “My sister and another girl, both nurses, share it with me. I think this was the head nurse’s quarters, back when it was a dorm. All the other flats are rather tiny.”

  “How long ago was the incident?”

  This was one of many questions I’d be asking her that I already knew the answer to.

  “You mean the assault?” she said crisply, lighting a cigarette up. She exhaled smoke; her lips made a glistening red O. “About four months ago. The son of a bitch came in through the skylight.” She gestured to it. “It must have been around seven a.m. Sis and Dottie were already at work, so I was alone here. I was still asleep…actually, just waking up.”

  “Or did something wake you up?”

  “That may have been it. I half-opened my eyes, saw a shadowy figure, and then something crashed into my head.” She touched her brown boyish hair. “Fractured my skull. I usually wear my hair longer, you know, but they cut a lot of it off.”

  “Looks good short. Do you know what you were hit with?”

  “Your classic blunt instrument. I’d guess, a lead pipe. I took a good knock.”

  “You were unconscious.”

  “Oh yes. When I woke up, on the floor by the bed, maybe forty minutes later, blood was streaming down my face, and into my eyes. Some of it was sticky, already drying. My apartment was all out of kilter. Virtually ransacked. My hands were tied with a lamp cord, rather loosely. I worked myself free, easily. I looked around and some things were missing.” She made an embarrassed face, gestured with a cigarette in hand. “Underwear. Panties. Bras. But also a hundred and fifty bucks were gone from my purse.”

  “Did you call the police at that point?”

  “No. That’s when I heard the knock at the door. I staggered over there and it was a kid—well, he could’ve been twenty, but I’d guess eighteen. He had dark hair, long and greased back. Kind of a good-looking kid. Like a young Cornell Wilde. Looked a little bit like a juvenile delinquent, or anyway, like a kid trying to look like one and not quite pulling it off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he wore a black leather jacket, and a T-shirt and dungarees…but they looked kind of new. Too clean. More like a costume than clothing.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He said he was a delivery boy—groceries, and he was looking for the right apartment to make his delivery.”

  “He was lost.”

  “Yes, but we didn’t spend much time discussing that. He took one look at my bloody face and said he would get some help right away.”

  “And did he?”

  She nodded; exhaled smoke again. “He found the building manager, told him the lady in the penthouse flat was injured, and needed medical attention. And left.”

  “And the cops thought he might have been the one who did it? Brought back by a guilty conscience?”

  “Yes. But I’m not sure I buy that.”

  I nodded. But to me it tied in: the murderer who washed and bandaged his victims’ wounds displayed a similar misguided stop-me-catch-me remorse. Even little JoAnn’s body parts had been cleansed—before they were disposed of in sewers.

  “The whole thing made me feel like a jerk,” she said.

  That surprised me. “Why?”

  She lifted her shoulders; it did nice things to her cupcake breasts. Yes, I know. I’m a heel. “Well, if only I’d reacted quicker, I might have been able to protect myself. I mean, I’ve had all sorts of self-defense training.”

  “Oh?”

  She flicked ashes into a glass tray on the couch arm. “I’m an Army nurse—on terminal leave. I served overseas. European theater.”

  “Ah.”

  She gave me a sly smile. “You were in the Pacific, weren’t you?”

  “Well, uh, yes.”

  “I read about you in the papers. I recognized your name right away. You’re kind of well known around town.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, Miss Reynolds.”

  “You won the Silver Star, didn’t you?”

  I was getting embarrassed. I nodded.

  “So did Jack.”

  “Jack?”

  “My husband. He was a marine, too. You were on Guadalcanal?”

  “Yes.”

  “So was Jack.” She smiled. Then the smile faded and she sucked smoke in again. “Only he didn’t come back.”

  “Lot of good men didn’t. I’m sorry.”

  She made a dismissive gesture with a red-nailed hand. “Mr. Heller, why are you looking into this?”

  “I think it may relate to another case. That’s all.”

  “The Lipstick Killer?”

  I hesitated, then nodded. “But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t say anything about it to anybody just yet.”

  “Why haven’t the cops done anything about this?”

  “You mean, the Lipstick Killer, or what happened to you…?”

  “Both! And, why have you made this connection, when they haven’t?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe I’m more thorough. Or maybe I’m just grasping at straws.”

  “Well, it occurred to me there might be a connection. You’d think it would’ve occurred to the police, too!”

  “You’d think.”

  “You know, there’s something…never mind.”

  “What?”

  She shook her head, tensed her lips. “There was something…creepy…that I never told anybody about.” She looked at me with eyes impossibly large, so dark brown the irises were lost. “But I feel like I can talk to you.”

  She touched my hand. Hers was warm. Mine felt cold.

  “On the floor…in the bathroom…I found something. Something I just…cleaned up. Didn’t tell anybody about. It embarrassed me.”

  “You’re a nurse…”

  “I know. But I was embarrassed just the same. It was…come.”

  “What?”

  “There was come on the floor. You know—ejaculate. Semen.”

  11

  When I got home, I called Drury and told him about Katherine Reynolds.

  “I think you may be on to something,” Drury said. “You should tell Lt. Kruger about this.”

  “I’ll call him tomorrow. But I wanted to give you the delivery boy’s description first—see if it rang any bells.”

  Drury made a clicking sound. “Lot of kids in those black leather jackets these days. Don’t know what the world’s coming to. Lot of kids trying to act like they’re in street gangs, even when they’re not.”

  “Could he be a University of Chicago student?”

  “Pulling crimes on the North Side?”

  Even a cop as good as Drury wore the geographical blinders.

  “Yeah,” I said. “There’s this incredible new mode of transportation they call the El. It’s just possible our boy knows about it.”

  Drury ignored the sarcasm. “Lot of greasy-haired would-be underage hoods around, Nate. Doesn’t really narrow the field much.”

  “That look like a young Cornell Wilde?”

  “That want to,” Drury said, “yes.”

  We sighed, and hung up.

  Eavesdropping, Peg was half in the kitchen, half in the hall. She wore a white apron over the swell of her tummy. She’d made meat loaf. The smell of it beckoned. Despite herself, Peg was a hell of a cook.

  “Good-looking?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “This nurse you went and talked to,” she said.

  “Oh. I didn’t notice.”

  She smirked; went back into the kitchen. I followed. I waited at the table while she stirred gravy.

  “Blonde?” she asked, her back to me.

  “No. Brunette, I think.”

  She looked over her shoulder at me. “You think?”

  “Brunette.”

  “Nice and slender, I’ll bet. With a nice shape. Not fat and sloppy
. Not a cow. Not an elephant.”

  “Peg….”

  She turned; her wooden spoon dripped brown gravy onto the linoleum. “I’m going crazy out here, Nate. I’m ugly, and I’m bored.”

  “You’re not ugly. You’re beautiful.”

  “Fuck you, Heller! I’m an ugly cow, and I’m bored out here in the sticks. Jesus, couldn’t we live someplace where there’s somebody for me to talk to?”

  “We have neighbors.”

  “Squirrels, woodchucks, and that dip down the street who mows his lawn on the even days and washes his car on the odd. It’s all vacant lots and nurseries and prairie out here. Why couldn’t we live closer to the city? I feel like I’m living in a goddamn pasture. Which is where a cow like me belongs, I suppose.”

  I stood. I went to her and held her. She was angry, but she let me.

  She didn’t look at me as she bit off the words. “You go off to the Loop and you can be a businessman and you can be a detective and you have your coworkers and your friends and contacts and interview beautiful nurses and you make the papers and you’re living a real life. Not stuck out here in a box with a lawn. Listening to ‘Ma Perkins.’ Peeling potatoes. Ironing shirts.”

  “Baby…”

  She thumped her chest with a forefinger. “I used to have a life. I was a professional woman. I was an executive secretary.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Nate—Nate, I’m afraid.”

  “Afraid?”

  “Afraid I’m not cut out to be a housewife. Afraid I’m not cut out to be a mother.”

  I smiled at her gently; touched her face the same way. Touched her tummy. “You’re already a mother, by definition. Give it a chance. The kid will change things. The neighborhood will grow.”

  “I hate it here.”

  “Give it a year. You don’t like it, we’ll move. Closer to town.”

  She smiled tightly, bravely. Nodded. Turned back to the stove.

  The meal was good. We had apple pie, which may have been sarcasm on Peg’s part, but if so it was delicious sarcasm. We chatted about business; about family. After the tension, things got relaxed.

  We were cuddled on the couch listening to big band music on the radio when the phone rang. It was Drury again.