Chicago Lightning : The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories

by Collins, Max Allan

  “Are you Rosalie’s sister?”

  “Yes. Is she in trouble?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I just know Rosalie, that’s all. That man isn’t really her husband, is he? That Mr. Riggs.”

  “No.”

  “Are you here about her accident?”

  “No. Where is she?”

  “Are you a police officer?”

  “I’m a detective. Where did she go?”

  “Papa’s inside. He’s afraid he’s going to be in trouble.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Rosalie put her car in our garage yesterday. She said she was in an accident and it was damaged and not to use it. She’s going to have it repaired when she gets back from vacation.”

  “What does that have to do with your papa being scared?”

  “Rosalie’s going to be mad as H at him, that he used her car.” She shrugged. “He said he looked at it and it didn’t look damaged to him, and if mama was going to have to look after Rosalie’s g.d. canary, well he’d sure as H use her gas not his.”

  “I can see his point. Where did your sister go on vacation?”

  “She didn’t say. Up north someplace. Someplace she and Mr. Riggs like to go to, to…you know. To get away?”

  I called Sgt. Pribyl from a gas station where I was getting Barney’s Hupmobile tank re-filled. I suggested he have another talk with bartender Alex Davidson, gave him the address of “Mr. and Mrs. Riggs,” and told him where he could find the maroon Plymouth.

  He was grateful but a little miffed about all I had done on my own.

  “So much for not showboating,” he said, almost huffily. “You’ve found everything but the damn suspects.”

  “They’ve gone up north somewhere,” I said.

  “Where up north?”

  “They don’t seem to’ve told anybody. Look, I have a piece of evidence you may need.”

  “What?”

  “When you talk to Davidson, he’ll tell you about a matchbook Rooney wrote the girl’s number on. I got the matchbook.”

  It was still in my pocket. I took it out, idly, and shut the girl’s number away, revealing the picture on the matchbook cover: a blue moon hovered surrealistically over a white lake on which two blue lovers paddled in a blue canoe—Eagle River Lodge, Wisconsin.

  “I suppose we’ll need that,” Pribyl’s voice over the phone said, “when the time comes.”

  “I suppose,” I said, and hung up.

  Eagle River was a town of 1,386 (so said the sign) just inside the Vilas County line at the junction of US 45 and Wisconsin State Highway 70. The country was beyond beautiful—green pines towering higher than Chicago skyscrapers, glittering blue lakes nestling in woodland pockets.

  The lodge I was looking for was on Silver Lake, a gas station attendant told me. A beautiful dusk was settling on the woods as I drew into the parking of the large resort sporting a red city-style neon saying, DINING AND DANCE. Log-cabin cottages were flung here and there around the periphery like Paul Bunyan’s tinker-toys. Each one was just secluded enough—ideal for couples, married or un-.

  Even if Rooney and his dark-haired honey weren’t staying here, it was time to find a room: I’d been driving all day. When Barney loaned me his Hupmobile, he’d had no idea the kind of miles I’d put on it. Dead tired, I went to the desk and paid for a cabin.

  The guy behind the counter had a plaid shirt on, but he was small and squinty and Hitler-mustached, smoking a stogie, and looked more like a bookie than a lumberjack.

  I told him some friends of mine were supposed to be staying here.

  “We don’t have anybody named Riggs registered.”

  “How ’bout Mr. and Mrs. Rooney?”

  “Them either. How many friends you got, anyway?”

  “Why, did I already catch the limit?”

  Before I headed to my cabin, I grabbed some supper in the rustic restaurant. I placed my order with a friendly brunette girl of about nineteen with plenty of personality, and make-up. A road-company Paul Whiteman outfit was playing “Sophisticated Lady” in the adjacent dance hall, and I went over and peeked in, to look for familiar faces. A number of couples were cutting a rug, but not Rooney and Rosalie. Or Henry Berry or Herbert Arnold, either. I went back and had my green salad and fried trout and well-buttered baked potato; I was full and sleepy when I stumbled toward my guest cottage under the light of a moon that bathed the woods ivory.

  Walking along the path, I spotted something: snuggled next to one of the secluded cabins was a blue LaSalle coupe with Cook County plates.

  Suddenly I wasn’t sleepy. I walked briskly back to the lodge check-in desk and batted the bell to summon the stogie-chewing clerk.

  “Cabin seven,” I said. “I think that blue LaSalle is my friends’ car.”

  His smirk turned his Hitler mustache Chaplinesque. “You want I should break out the champagne?”

  “I just want to make sure it’s them. Dark-haired doll and an older guy, good-looking, kinda sleepy-eyed, just starting to go bald?”

  “That’s them.” He checked his register. “That’s the Ridges.” He frowned. “Are they usin’ a phony name?”

  “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

  He squinted. “You sure they’re friends of yours?”

  “Positive. Don’t call their room and tell ’em I’m here, though—I want to surprise them….”

  I knocked with my left hand; my right was filled with the nine millimeter. Nothing. I knocked again.

  “Who is it?” a male voice said gruffly. “What is it?”

  “Complimentary fruit basket from the management.”

  “Go away!”

  I kicked the door open.

  The lights were off in the little cabin, but enough moonlight came in with me through the doorway to reveal the pair in bed, naked. She was sitting up, her mouth and eyes open in a silent scream, gathering the sheets up protectively over white skin, her dark hair blending with the darkness of the room, making a cameo of her face. He was diving off the bed for the sawed-off shotgun, but I was there to kick it away, wishing I hadn’t, wishing I’d let him grab it so I could have had an excuse to put one in his forehead, right where he’d put one in Stanley’s.

  Boss Rooney wasn’t boss of anything, now: he was just a naked, balding, forty-four year-old scam artist, sprawled on the floor. Kicking him would have been easy.

  So I did; in the stomach.

  He clutched himself and puked. Apparently he’d had the trout, too.

  I went over and slammed the door shut, or as shut as it could be, half-off its hinges. Pointing the gun at her retching naked boy friend, I said to the girl, “Turn on the light and put on your clothes.”

  She nodded dutifully and did as she was told. In the glow of a nightstand lamp, I caught glimpses of her white, well-formed body as she stepped into her step-ins; but you know what? She didn’t do a thing for me.

  “Is Berry here?” I asked Rooney. “Or Arnold?”

  “N…no,” he managed.

  “If you’re lying,” I said, “I’ll kill you.”

  The girl said shrilly, “They aren’t here!”

  “You can put your clothes on, too,” I told Rooney. “If you have another gun hidden somewhere, do me a favor. Make a play for it.”

  His hooded eyes flared. “Who the hell are you?”

  “The private cop you didn’t kill the other night.”

  He lowered his gaze. “Oh.”

  The girl was sitting on the bed, weeping; body heaving.

  “Take it easy on her, will you?” he said, zipping his fly. “She’s just a kid.”

  I was opening a window to ease the stench of his vomit. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll say kaddish for her.”

  I handcuffed the lovebirds to the bed and called the local law; they in turn called the State Prosecutor’s office in Chicago, and Sergeants Pribyl and Gray made the long drive up the next day to pick up the pair.

  It seemed the two cops
had already caught Henry Berry—a tipster gave them the West Chicago Avenue address of a second-floor room he was holed up in.

  I admitted to Pribyl that I’d been wrong about Tubbo tipping off Rooney and the rest about the raid.

  “I figure Rooney lammed out of sheer panic,” I said, “the morning after the murder.”

  Pribyl saw it the same way.

  The following March, Pribyl arrested Herbert Arnold running a northside handbill distributing agency.

  Rooney, Berry and Rosalie Rizzo were all convicted of murder; the two men got life, and the girl twenty years. Arnold hadn’t been part of the kill-happy joyride that took Stanley Gross’ young life, and got only one to five for conspiracy and extortion.

  None of it brought Stanley Gross back, nor did my putting on a beanie and sitting with the Gross family, suffering through a couple of stints at a storefront synagogue on Roosevelt Road.

  But it did get Barney off my ass.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  While Nathan Heller is a fictional character, this story is based on a real case—names have not been changed, and the events are fundamentally true; source material included an article by John J. McPhaul and information provided by my research associate, George Hagenauer, who I thank for his insights and suggestions on this story and all the others in this collection.

  August 1933 in Chicago was surprisingly cool, unless you were a crook, in which case it was hotter than usual. We were suffering through one of those periodic anti-crime drives the city subjected itself to now and then, and since the Capone/Nitti Outfit got a free pass on its fun and games, small fry like the Blonde Tigress and her “mob” (two male accomplices) got the brunt.

  Did the Blonde Tigress have a damn thing to do with the policeman who got himself shot in a Cook County courtroom? No. She and her gang of two merely got caught up in the over-reaction when the Honorable John Prystalski, the county’s chief judge, ordered all the other judges back from summer vacation to work through the jammed-up docket. Two-hundred-thirty-five defendants got the book thrown at them that August, including three death sentences.

  And that was before the Blonde Tigress had appeared in the dock….

  In my big under-furnished one-room office on Van Buren, I sat at my desk, working on a pile of retail-credit checks, with the window open behind me to let in a cool morning breeze and the occasional rumble of the El.

  I tried to let the phone ring five times before answering, but was short enough on clients to settle for three. “A-1 Detective Agency,” I said. “Nathan Heller speaking.”

  “Nate, Sam Backus.”

  My hopes sank. Backus—small, nervous, with ferret features—was with the Public Defender’s Office, which made him the kind of criminal attorney who couldn’t afford my help.

  “Hiya, Sam. Any of your clients get a ticket for the hot squat today?”

  “No, but the day’s young. Listen, I got the Tigress.”

  I sat up. “What?”

  “You heard me. Eleanor Jarman is my client.”

  All summer, the Blonde Tigress case had been plastered across the front pages, and the radio was all over it, too. The so-called Blonde Tigress—a good-looking lady bandit with “tawny hair” and a “voluptuous figure”—had led her two-man mob on a series of stickups all around the West and Northwest sides. The Tigress was said to carry a big revolver in her purse and a blackjack, too, one of her male accomplices using the gun, the Tigress adept with the jack. The usual target was the small merchant, grocery stores and other shops, the robbery victims often roughed up for intimidation or maybe just the hell of it.

  After the August 4 hold-up of a clothing shop near Oak Park—and the murder of its seventy-year-old proprietor—sometime waitress Eleanor Jarman, her live-in guy George Dale, and Dale’s ex-fighter buddy Leo Minneci had been identified as the perpetrators and brought in by two top Detective Bureau dicks.

  “Well, she’s guilty as sin, isn’t she?” I asked him cheerfully. “Maybe you can arrange for her to sit on her boyfriend’s lap when they fry him, and save the state on its electricity bill.”

  “Nate, I think she’s being railroaded. These characters Dale and Minneci are stick-up guys, sure, and there’s no doubt Dale pulled the trigger on the old boy. But Eleanor’s just the girl friend. Wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Are they being tried separately?”

  “No, but each has separate representation from the Public Defender’s office.”

  I was shaking my head. “If she’s innocent in this, why was she charged? Didn’t Tuohy and Glass make the arrest? They’re as close to real detectives as the police department gets.”

  “Nate, you know about this clean-up and crackdown campaign that’s going on. When did you ever hear of somebody getting arrested for murder in this town and then have the trial go on the same damn month?”

  “Okay, you stumped me. But I—”

  “Think it through, Nate. This is about the papers looking for a hot story, and what’s better than a sexy baby leading her ‘gang’ on a bunch of robberies?”

  I shifted in my chair. “Listen, I don’t care if she’s guilty or not guilty. I’d be glad to work for you, Sam, if you were a real criminal lawyer with some scratch to spend.”

  “That’s the good part about all this press nonsense, Nate. Think about the publicity! There’s no bigger story right now.”

  “Then I’m right—there isn’t any money in this.”

  “Actually, pal, there is.”

  That got my attention, but I said, “Don’t call me ‘pal.’ Makes me nervous. When do I ever see you, Sam, when we aren’t in a courtroom?”

  “Nate, if you take this case, you can peddle your story to one of the papers afterwards, with my blessing. And I’ve got a true detective magazine that’ll pay even better. That’ll beat any of your five-dollar-a-day action, any time.”

  “That’s ten and expenses, and what do you have in mind?”

  “Just meet with my client. See if she doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.”

  “So then you have no case?”

  “…I have no case. I need you to go get me one.”

  If I was the private eye who cleared the Blonde Tigress, I’d be in demand with every criminal lawyer in town.

  “I can meet with her,” I said, “any time today.”

  Now a guy can get some pretty funny thoughts sometimes. And by funny, I mean stupid. But while I’d been around, I was only twenty-eight, and I couldn’t keep from wondering if some exotic, erotic encounter might not occur between the Blonde Tigress and me, behind the closed door of that First District Station interrogation room. The matron standing guard would hear the muffled sounds and wonder what might be happening in there, between the curvaceous blonde gun moll and that handsome six-footer with the reddish brown hair, and dare she interrupt?

  I was expecting the combination Jean Harlow and Mata Hari that the papers had been pumping, and in my defense I must say that they’d taken some fairly fetching photos of Eleanor Jarman. And the woman seated at the scarred table in a brick-walled enclosure whose windows were barred and throwing appropriately moody shadows—was certainly attractive, albeit in a quiet, modest, even mousy way.

  Her hair was not tawny, at least not by my standards—more a dishwater blonde, curling-ironed locks framing her heart-shaped face. I’d call her pretty, or anyway pretty enough, with big gray eyes that dominated her face and a nice mouth, full lips lightly rouged. Prisoners awaiting trial were allowed street clothes—in this case, a simple white dress with angular blue stripes and a white collar with a bow, the stripes giving the faintest unintentional prison-uniform touch. She had a nice shape, but “voluptuous” was torturing a point.

  She gave me a big smile and stood and held her hand out for me to shake. The smile was disarming—I might have been a brother she hadn’t seen for some time.

  “Thank you for this, Mr. Heller,” she said warmly, as I took a chair at the table, her at the end, me alongside.r />
  “I haven’t agreed to take the job, Mrs. Jarman,” I said, and took my hat off and tossed it on the table. “I said I’d have a talk with you and see.”

  Her smile remained but she put the teeth away and nodded. “It’s because Mr. Backus can’t afford to hire you. But what if I could?”

  “Could what?”

  “Afford to hire to you.”

  I squinted at her. “How could you afford to hire a private detective if you can’t afford your own lawyer?”

  She shrugged and half a smile lingered. “That was strategy, Mr. Heller. I could’ve hired a lawyer, not an expensive one, but I do have some money salted away. It’s just, well…”

  And I got it.

  “If you could hire a criminal attorney,” I said, “it would make you look more like a criminal. Somebody pulling off heists all summer could afford counsel. Smart.”

  “I’m not rich. But I could offer you one hundred dollars.”

  “I charge ten a day and expenses. That’ll take you a fair way.”

  “Fine. I’ll have it sent over to your office.”

  “You’re not what I expected.”

  She grinned. “Not a Tigress?”

  “Not the femme fatale the papers paint, and not the victim Sam Backus would make you, either.”

  “What, then?”

  “A smart, resourceful cookie.”

  “Thanks. Could I call you something besides ‘Mr. Heller’?”

  “Sure. Nate’ll do. And I’ll call you Eleanor.”

  They had provided a pitcher of ice water and I served us up some. The breezy afternoon was making its way through windows that were open onto their bars.

  “Do you need to hear my story, Nate, before you say yes?”

  “I want to hear your story, but I already said yes to your hundred dollars.”

  She had a whole repertoire of smiles, and she gave me another one, a chin-crinkler. But the gray eyes had a sadness that fit neither her happy kisser nor her business-like brain.

  She started with the story of her life, which didn’t take long, because it wasn’t much of one. She was from Sioux City, Iowa, daughter of immigrant German parents who died in a flu epidemic when she was fourteen, just the right age to start working as a waitress in a joint near the stockyards. She married Leroy Jarman, who told her she deserved better, and gave her two sons and put her to work as a laundress. Earlier this year, after Jarman took a powder, she moved to Chicago, where she continued to do laundry in her little apartment while taking care of her two boys. A neighbor introduced her to George Dale, and her life changed.