“By the afternoon edition, it’ll be there.”
We each knew what the other was talking about: soon Giorgio (George) Morello would be just another of the hundreds of Chicago’s unsolved gangland killings.
“Lost a friend of mine last night,” Sam said.
“My condolences. But I don’t think he was such a good friend. He loused up that job with the girl, and he tried to sell me a cemetery plot last night.”
The possibility of a phone tap kept the conversation elliptical; but we were right on track with each other.
“In other words,” Sam said, “you only did what you had to do.”
“That’s right.”
“What about that item you were gonna try to obtain for me?”
“It’s in the hands of the U.S. Postal Service right now. Sealed tight—marked personal. I sent it to you at your liquor store on the West Side.”
“That was prompt. You just got hold of the thing last night, right?”
“Right. No time to make copies. I didn’t want a copy, Sam. Your business is your business. Anything I can do to make your happy home stay that way is fine with me. I got a wife, too. I understand these things.”
There was a long, long pause.
Then: “I’ll put your check in the mail, Heller. Pleasure doin’ business with you.”
“Always glad to hear from a satisfied customer.”
There was a briefer pause.
“You wouldn’t want to go on a yearly retainer, would you, Heller?”
“No thanks, Sam. I do appreciate it. Like to stay on your good side.”
“That’s wise, Heller. Sorry you had that trouble last night. Wasn’t my doing.”
“I know, Sam.”
“You done good work. You done me a favor, really. If I can pay you back, you know the number.”
“Thanks, Sam. That check you mentioned is plenty, though.”
“Hey, and nice going on that other thing. That sex-maniac guy. Showed the cops up. Congratulations, war hero.”
The phone clicked dead.
I swallowed and sat there at my desk, trembling.
While I had no desire to work for Sam Flood ever again, I did truly want to stay on his good side. And I had made no mention of what I knew was a key factor in his wanting that photo back.
It had little, if anything, to do with keeping his wife from seeing him pictured with his former girlfriend: it was the table of Sam’s friends, glimpsed behind Sam and the girl in the photo. Top mobsters from Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and Detroit. Some of kind of informal underworld summit meeting had been inadvertently captured by a nightclub photographer. Proof of a nationwide alliance of organized crime families, perhaps in a major meeting to discuss post-war plans.
If Sam suspected that I knew the true significance of that photo, I might not live to see my kid come into the world.
And I really wanted to.
17
A little over a week later, I was having lunch at Binyon’s with Ken Levine, the attorney who had brought Bob Keenan and me together. The restaurant was a businessman’s bastion, wooden booths, spartan decor; my old office was around the corner, but for years I’d been only an occasional customer here. Now that business was good, and my suits were Brooks Brothers not Maxwell Street, I could afford to hobnob on a more regular basis with the brokers, lawyers, and other well-to-do thieves.
“You couldn’t ask for better publicity,” Ken said. He was a small handsome man with sharp dark eyes that didn’t miss anything and a hairline that was a memory.
“I’m taking on two more operatives,” I said, sipping my rum cocktail.
“That’s great. Glad it’s working out so well for you.” He made a clicking sound in his cheek. “Of course, the Bar Association may have something to say about the way that Lapps kid has been mistreated by Chicago’s finest.”
“I could bust out crying at the thought,” I said.
“Yeah, well they’ve questioned him under sodium pentathol, hooked his nuts up to electrodes, done all sorts of zany stuff. And then they leak these vague, inadmissible ‘confessions’ to the papers. These wild stories of ‘George’ doing the crimes.”
Nobody had connected George Morello to the case. Except me, of course, and I wasn’t talking.
“The kid faked a coma for days,” I said, “and then claimed amnesia. They had to do something.”
Ken smiled wryly. “Nate, they brought in a priest and read last rites over him, to try to trick him into a ‘deathbed’ confession. They didn’t feed him any solid food for four days. They held him six days without charging him or letting him talk to a lawyer. They probably beat the shit out of him, too.”
I shrugged, sipped my cocktail. It was my second.
“Only it may backfire on ’em,” Ken said. “All this dual personality stuff has the makings of an insanity plea. He’s got some weird sexual deviation—his burglaries were sexually based, you know.”
“How do you mean?”
“He got some kind of thrill out of entering the window of a strange apartment. He’d have a sexual emission shortly after entering. Must’ve been symbolic in his mind—entering through the window for him was like…you know.” He shrugged. “Apparently the kid’s never had normal sex.”
“Thank you, Dr. Freud.”
Ken grinned. “Hey, I could get that little bastard off.”
I was glad it wasn’t Ken’s case.
“Whatever his sex quirk,” I said, “they tied him to the assault on that nurse, Katherine Reynolds. They matched his prints to one left in her apartment. And to a partial print on the Keenan kidnap note.”
“The key word is partial,” Ken said, raising a finger. “They got six points of similarity on the note. Eleven are required for a positive ID.”
“They’ve got an eyewitness ID.”
Ken laughed; there was genuine mirth in it. Lawyers can find the humor in both abstract thinking and human suffering. “Their eyewitness is that old German janitor who was their best suspect till you nabbed Lapps. The old boy looked at four overweight, middle-aged cops and one seventeen-year-old in a lineup and somehow managed to pick out the seventeen-year-old. Before that, his description of the guy he saw was limited to ‘a man in a brown raincoat with a shopping bag.’ Did you know that that janitor used to be a butcher?”
“There was something in the papers about it. That doesn’t mean he cuts up little girls.”
“No. But if he lost his job during the war, ’cause of OPA restrictions, he could bear Bob Keenan a grudge.”
“Bob wasn’t with the OPA long enough for that to be possible. He was with the New York office. Jesus, Ken, what’s your point, here?”
Like most attorneys, Ken was argumentative for the sheer hell of it; but he saw this was getting under my skin and backed off. “Just making conversation, Nate. That kid’s guilty. The prosecutors are just goddamn lucky they got a mean little JD who carried Nietzche around and collected Nazi memorabilia. ’Cause without public opinion, they couldn’t win this one.”
Ken headed back to court and I sat working at my cocktail, wondering if I could get away with a third.
I shared some of Ken’s misgivings about the way the Lapps case was being handled. A handwriting expert had linked the lipstick message on the late Margaret Johnson’s wall with that of the Keenan kidnap note; then matched those to re-creations of both Lapps was made to give.
This handwriting expert’s claim to fame was the Lindbergh case—having been there, I knew the Lindbergh handwriting evidence was a crock—and both the lipstick message and kidnap notes were printed, which made handwriting comparison close to worthless.
Of course, Lapps had misspelled some of the same words as in the note: “waite” and “safty.” Only I’d learned in passing from Lt. Kruger that Lapps had been told to copy the notes, mistakes and all.
A fellow named Bruno Hauptmann had dutifully done the same in his handwriting samples, some years before. The lineup trick Ken had mention
ed had been used to hand Hauptmann on a platter to a weak, elderly eyewitness, too. And the press had played their role in Bruno’s railroading—one overeager reporter had written an incriminating phone number inside Hauptmann’s apartment, to buy a headline that day, and that little piece of creative writing on wainscoting became an irrefutable key prosecution exhibit.
But so what? Bruno was (a) innocent and (b) long dead. This kid was alive, well, and psycho—and as guilty as the Nazi creeps he idolized. Besides which, what Ken had said about the kid’s sexual deviation had made something suddenly clear to me.
I knew Lapps was into burglary for kicks, but I figured it was the violence against women that got him going. This business about strange buildings—and he’d had a certain of type of building, hadn’t he, like some guys liked blondes or other guys were leg men—made a screwy sort of sense.
Lapps must have been out on the fire escape, peeking into Caroline Williams’ apartment, casing it for a possible break-in, when he saw George slapping the girl around in the bedroom. He must have heard the Williams woman calling George by name—that planted the “George did it” seed—and got a new thrill when he witnessed George cut the woman’s throat.
Then George had seen the dark, coplike figure out the window, got spooked, and lammed; and Lapps entered the apartment, spilled his seed, did his sick, guilty number washing and bandaging the corpse, and took various mementos, including undies and the photo album.
This new thrill had inspired Lapps to greater heights of madness, and the second girl—Margaret Johnson—had been all his. All his own twisted handiwork…though perhaps in his mind George had done that, as well.
But Lapps, like so many men after even a normal sexual release, felt a sadness and even guilt and had left that lipstick plea on the wall.
That pretty nurse, Katherine Reynolds, had been lucky. Lapps hadn’t been able to kill again; he’d stopped at assault—maybe he’d had his sexual release already, and his remorse kicked in before he could kill her. He’d even come back to help her.
What was bothering me, though, was the Keenan child. Nothing about Lapps’ MO fit this crime. The building wasn’t his “type.” Kidnapping wasn’t his crime, let alone dismembering a child. Had Lapps’ thrill-seeking escalated into sheer depravity?
Even so, one thing was so wrong I couldn’t invent any justification for it. Ken had said it: the kid had probably never had normal sex. The kid’s idea of a fun date was going through a strange window and coming on the floor.
But rape had been attempted on the little girl. The coroner said so. Rape.
“Want some company, Heller?”
Hal Davis, with his oversize head and sideways smile, had already slid in across from me in the booth.
“Sure. What’s new in the world of yellow journalism?”
“Slow day. Jeez, Heller, you look like shit.”
“Thanks, Hal.”
“You should be on top of the world. You’re a local hero. A celebrity.”
“Shut up, Hal.”
Davis had brought a Scotch along with him. “Ain’t this case a pip. Too bad they can’t fry this kid, but in this enlightened day and age, he’ll probably get a padded cell and three squares for the rest of his miserable life.”
“I don’t think they’ll fry a seventeen-year-old, even in a case like this.”
“What a case it’s been. For you, especially.”
“You got your share of mileage out of it, too, Hal.”
He laughed; lit up a cigarette. Shook his head. “Funny.”
“What is?”
“Who’d a thunk it?”
“Thunk what?”
He leaned over conspiratorially. His breath was evidence that this was not his first Scotch of the afternoon. “That the Keenan kidnapper really would turn out to be the Lipstick Killer. For real.”
“Why not? He left his signature on Keenan’s back fence. ‘Stop me before I kill more…’”
“That’s the funny part.” He snorted smugly. “Who do you think wrote that on the fence?”
I blinked. “What do you mean?”
Davis leaned across with a one-sided smirk that split his boyish face. “Don’t be a jerk. Don’t be so gullible. I wrote that there. It made for a hell of a byline.”
I grabbed him by his lapels and dragged him across the table. His Scotch spilled and my drink went over and his cigarette went flying and his eyes were wide, as were those of the businessmen finishing up their two- and three-martini lunches.
“You what?” I asked him through my teeth.
“Nate! You’re hurting me! Let go! You’re makin’ a scene…”
I shoved him back against the booth. I got out. I was shaking. “You did do it, didn’t you, you little cocksucker.”
He was frightened, but he tried not to show it; he made a face, shrugged. “What’s the big fucking deal?”
I grabbed him by the tie and he watched my fist while I decided whether to smash in his face.
Then the fist dissolved into fingers, but I retained my grip on his tie.
“Let’s go talk to the cops,” I said.
“I was just bullshitting,” he said, lamely. “I didn’t do it. Really. It was just the booze talking.”
I put a hand around his throat and started to squeeze. His eyes popped. I was sneering at him when I said, “Stop me, Hal—before I kill more.”
Then I shoved him against the wall, rattling some framed pictures, and got the hell out of there.
18
The cellar was lit by a single hanging bulb. There were laundry tubs and storage lockers, just like the basement where JoAnn Keenan was dismembered.
But this was not that basement. This was a slightly smaller one in a building near the “murder cellar,” a tidy one with tools and cleaning implements neatly lining the walls, like well-behaved prisoners.
This was janitor Otto Bergstrum’s domain.
“Why you want meet with me?” the thick-necked, white-haired Bergstrum asked.
Outside, it was rainy and dark. Close to midnight. I was in a drenched trenchcoat, getting Bergstrum’s tidy cellar damp. I left my hat on and it was dripping, too.
“I told you on the phone,” I said. “Business. A matter of money.”
As before, the husky old fellow was in coveralls, his biceps tight against the rolled-up sleeves of his flannel shirt; his legs were planted well apart and firmly. His hands were fists and the fists were heavily veined.
“You come about reward money,” he said. His eyes were blue and unblinking and cold under unruly salt-and-pepper eyebrows. “You try talk me out of claim my share.”
“That’s not it exactly. You see, there’s going to be several people put in claims.”
“Cops not eligible.”
“Just city cops. I’m eligible.”
“But they not.”
“Right. But I have to kick back a few bucks to a couple of ’em, out of what I haul to shore.”
“So, what? You think I should help you pay them?”
“No. I think you should kick your share back to me.”
His eyes flared; he took a step forward. We were still a number of paces apart, though. Christ, his arms and shoulders were massive.
“Why should I do this?”
“Because I think you kidnapped the Keenan girl,” I said.
He took a step back. His mouth dropped open. His eyes widened.
“I’m in clear,” he said.
That was less than a denial, wasn’t it?
“Otto,” I said, “I checked up on you, this afternoon. Discreetly. You’re a veteran, like me—only you served in the first war. On the other side.”
He jutted his jaw. “I am proud to be German.”
“But you were an American immigrant at the time. You’d been in this country since you were a kid. But still you went back home, to fight for the fatherland…then after they lost their asses, you had the nerve to come back.”
“I was not alone in doing such.”<
br />
He wasn’t, either: on the North Side, there was a whole organization of these German World War One vets who got together. They even had dinners with American vets.
“The Butcher’s Union knew about you,” I said, “but you were never a member.”
“Communists,” he said.
“You worked as a butcher in a shop on the West Side, for years—till meat shortages during the war…this last war…got you laid off. You were nonunion, couldn’t find another butcher job…with your background, anything defense-related was out. You wound up here. A janitor. It’s your sister’s building, isn’t it?”
“You go to hell, mister.”
“You know what I think, Otto? I think you blamed the New Deal for your bad deal. I think you got real mad at the government. I think you in particular blamed the OPA.”
“Socialists,” he said.
“Bob Keenan wasn’t even in Chicago when you got laid off, you stupid old fart. But he was in the OPA now, and he was in the neighborhood. He had money, and he had a pretty little daughter. He was as good a place as any for Otto Bergstrum to get even.”
“There is no proof of any of this. It is all air. Wind. You are the fart.”
“What, did you get drunk, was it spur of the moment, or did you plan it? The kidnapping I can see. What I don’t understand is killing the little girl. Did she start to make noise in bed, and you strangled her? Were you just too strong, and maybe drunk, and it was an accident of sorts?”
Now his face was an expressionless mask. His hands weren’t fists any more. His eyes were hooded; his head was slack.
“What I really don’t get, Otto, is the rape. Trying to rape a little girl. Was she already dead? You sick fucker.”
He raised his head. “You have filthy mouth. Maybe I wash it out with lye.”
“I’m going to give you a choice, old man. You can come with me, and come clean at Summerdale station. Or I can kill you right here.”
“You have gun in your coat pocket?”
“I have gun in my coat pocket, yeah.”
“Ah. But my friend has knife.”
Triple Play: A Nathan Heller Casebook Page 8