Chicago Lightning : The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories

by Collins, Max Allan

  That should be the end of the story, but the Blonde Tigress had other ideas. For seven years Eleanor served her time at Joliet as (to quote the warden) “an industrious, obedient, and model prisoner in every respect.” Then, on the morning of August 8, 1940, she wore a guard’s dress stolen from a locker and used a rope fashioned from sheets to go over the ten-foot wall.

  Supposedly she had heard her youngest son had threatened to run away from home. The story goes that Eleanor Jarman returned to Sioux City, spent some time with her two boys, and then disappeared, not turning up till she met with family members briefly in 1975 before vanishing again.

  No one, except perhaps her blood relatives, knows how Eleanor spent the rest of her life or where. My take on it was that she was neither the Tigress of the press nor the victim she pretended to be. And maybe seven years was enough time for her to serve, though numerous attempts by her family to get her pardoned went nowhere.

  Anyway, the part I liked best was how she got out of prison.

  By stealing a dress.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction based on an actual murder, and many real names are used. “Tony Minneci” is a composite of Leo Minneci’s real brother and several other peripheral figures in the case, none of whom were shown to have anything to do with the robberies or murder. My longtime research associate George Hagenauer wrote about the Blonde Tigress in The Big Book of Little Criminals (1996). Newspaper accounts, including retrospective ones, were consulted as well as several articles in vintage “true detective” magazines, notably “Smashing the Terror Reign of Chicago’s Blonde Gun Girl” by Robert Faherty in Detective Tabloid, February 1935. Mark Gribben’s internet article, “Eleanor Jarman Please Phone Home,” was also useful.

  I grabbed the Lake Street El and got off at Garfield Park; it was a short walk from there to the “Death Clinic” at 3406 West Monroe Street. That’s what the papers, some of them anyway, were calling the Wynekoop mansion. To me it was just another big old stone building on the West Side, one of many, though of a burnt-reddish stone rather than typical Chicago gray. And, I’ll grant you, the three-story structure was planted on a wealthier residential stretch than the one I’d grown up on, twelve blocks south.

  Still, this was the West Side, and more or less my old stamping grounds, and that was no doubt part of why I’d been asked to drop by the Wynekoop place this sunny Saturday afternoon. The family had most likely asked around, heard about the ex-cop from nearby Douglas Park who now had a little private agency in the Loop.

  And my reputation on the West Side—and in the Loop—was of being just honest enough, and just crooked enough, to get most jobs done.

  But part of why I’d been called, I would guess, was Earle Wynekoop himself. I knew Earle a little, from a distance. We’d both worked at the World’s Fair down on the lakefront last summer and fall. I was working pickpocket duty, and Earle was in the front office, doing whatever front-office people do. We were both about the same age—I was twenty-seven—but he seemed like a kid to me.

  Earle mostly chased skirts, except at the Streets of Paris exhibition, where the girls didn’t wear skirts. Tall, handsome, wavy-haired Earle, with his white teeth and pencil-line mustache, had pursued the fan dancers with the eagerness of a plucked bird trying to get its feathers back. Funny thing was, nobody—including me—knew Earle was a married man, till November, when the papers were full of his wife. His wife’s murder, that is.

  Now it was a sunny, almost-warm afternoon in December, and I had been in business just under a year. And like most small businessmen, I’d had less than a prosperous 1933. A retainer from a family with the Wynekoop’s dough would be a nice way to ring out the old and ring in the new.

  Right now, I was ringing the doorbell. I was up at the top of the first-floor landing; Dr. Alice Wynekoop’s office was in an English basement below. I was expecting a maid or butler to answer, considering the size of this place. But Earle is what I got.

  His white smile flickered nervously. He adjusted his bowtie with one hand and offered the other for me to shake, which I did. His grip was weak and moist, like his dark eyes.

  “Mr. Heller,” he said. “Thank you for stopping by.”

  “My pleasure,” I said, stepping into the vestibule, hat in hand.

  Earle, snappily dressed in a pinstripe worsted, took my topcoat and hung it on a hall tree.

  “Perhaps you don’t remember me,” he said. “I worked in the front office at the fair this summer.”

  “Sure I remember you, Mr. Wynekoop.”

  “Why don’t you call me ‘Earle.’”

  “Fine, Earle,” I said. “And my friends call me ‘Nate.’”

  He grinned nervously and said, “Step into the library, Nate, if you would.”

  “Is your mother here?”

  “No. She’s in jail.”

  “Why haven’t you sprung her?” Surely these folks could afford to make bail. On the phone, Earle had quickly agreed to my rate of fifteen bucks a day and one-hundred-dollar non-refundable retainer. And that was the top of my sliding scale.

  An eyebrow arched in disgust on a high, unwrinkled brow. “Mother is ill, thanks to these barbarians. We’ve decided to let the state pay for her illness, considering they’ve provoked it.”

  He tried to sound indignant through all that, but petulance was the result.

  The interior of the house was on the gloomy side: a lot of dark, expensive, well-wrought woodwork, and heavy, plush furnishings that dated back to the turn of the century, when the house was built. There were hints that the Wynekoops might not be as well fixed as the rest of us thought: ornate antiquated light fixtures, worn Oriental carpets and a layer of dust indicated yesterday’s wealth, not today’s.

  I sat on a dark horsehair couch; two of the walls were bookcases, filled with leather-bound volumes, and the others were hung with somber landscapes. The first thing Earle did was give me an envelope with one hundred dollars in tens in it. Now Earle was getting himself some sherry off a liquor cart.

  “Can I get you something?” Earle asked. His hands were shaking as he poured himself the sherry.

  “This will do nicely,” I said, counting the money.

  “Don’t be a wet blanket, Nate.”

  I put the money-clipped bills away. “Rum, then. No ice.”

  He gave me a glass and sat beside me. I’d have rather he sat across from me; it was awkward, looking sideways at him. But he seemed to crave the intimacy.

  “Mother’s not guilty, you know.”

  “Really.”

  “I confessed, but they didn’t believe me. I confessed five times.”

  “Cops figured you were trying to clear your mama.”

  “Yes. I’m afraid so. I rather botched it, as a liar.”

  It was good rum. “Then you didn’t kill your wife?”

  “Kill Rheta! Don’t be silly. I loved her, once. Just because our marriage had gone…well, anyway, I didn’t do it, and Mother didn’t do it, either.”

  “Who did, then?”

  He smirked humorlessly. “I think some moron did it. Some fool looking for narcotics and money. That’s why I called you, Nate. The police aren’t looking for the killer. They think they have their man in Mother.”

  “What does your mother’s attorney think?”

  “He thinks hiring an investigator is a splendid idea.”

  “Doesn’t he have his own man?”

  “Yes, but I wanted you. I remembered you from the fair…and, I asked around.”

  What did I tell you? Am I detective?

  “I can’t promise I can clear her,” I said. “She confessed, after all—and the cops took her one confession more seriously than your five.”

  “They gave her the third-degree. A sixty-three-year-old woman! Respected in the community! Can you imagine?”

  “Who was the cop in charge?”

  Earle pursed his lips in disgust. “Captain Stege himself, the bastard.”

  “Is thi
s his case? Damn.”

  “Yes, it’s Stege’s case. Didn’t you read about all this in the papers?”

  “Sure I did. But I didn’t read it like I thought I was going to be involved. I probably did read Stege was in charge, but when you called this morning, I didn’t recall…”

  “Why, Nate? Is this a problem?”

  “No,” I lied.

  I let it go at that, as I needed the work, but the truth was, Stege hated my guts. I’d testified against a couple of cops, which Stege—even though he was honest and those two cops were bent even by Chicago standards—took as a betrayal of the police brotherhood.

  Earle was up pouring himself another sherry. Already. “Mother is a sensitive, frail woman, with a heart condition, and she was ruthlessly, mercilessly questioned for a period of over twenty-four hours.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m afraid…” And Earle sipped his sherry greedily. Swallowed. Continued: “I’m afraid I may have made the situation even worse.”

  “How?”

  He sat again, sighed, shrugged. “As you probably know, I was out of town when Rheta was…slain.”

  That was an odd choice of words; “slain” was something nobody said, a word in the newspapers, not real life.

  “I went straight to the Fillmore police station, when I returned from Kansas City. I had a moment with Mother. I said…” He slumped, shook his head.

  “Go on, Earle.”

  “I said…God help me, I said, ‘For God’s sake mother, if you did this on account of me, go ahead and confess.’” He touched his fingertips to his eyes.

  “What did she say to you?”

  “She…she said, ‘Earle, I did not kill Rheta.’ But then she went in for another round with Captain Stege, and…”

  “And made that cockamamie confession she later retracted.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you think your mother might have killed your wife for you, Earle?”

  “Because…because Mother loves me very much.”

  Dr. Alice Lindsay Wynekoop had been one of Chicago’s most esteemed female physicians for almost four decades. She had met her late husband Frank in medical college, and with him continued the Wynekoop tradition of care for the ill and disabled. Her charity work in hospitals and clinics was well-known; a prominent clubwoman, humanitarian, a leader in the woman’s suffrage movement, Dr. Wynekoop was an unlikely candidate for a murder charge.

  But she had indeed been charged: with the murder of her daughter-in-law, in the basement consultation office in this very house.

  Earle led me there, down a narrow stairway off the dining room. In the central basement hallway were two facing doors: Dr. Wynekoop’s office, at left; and at right, an examination room. The door was open. Earle motioned for me to go in, which I did, but he stayed in the doorway.

  The room was narrow and wide and cold; the steam heat was off. The dominant fixture was an old-fashioned, brown-leather-covered examination table. A chair under a large stained-glass window, whose ledge was lined with medical books, sat next to a weigh-and-measure scale. In one corner was a medicine and instrument cabinet.

  “The police wouldn’t let us clean up properly,” Earle said.

  The leather exam table was blood-stained.

  “They said they might take the whole damn table in,” Earle said. “And use it in court, for evidence.”

  I nodded. “What about your mother’s office? She claimed burglary.”

  “Well, yes…some drugs were taken from the cabinet, in here. And six dollars from a drawer…”

  He led me across the hall to an orderly office area with a big rolltop desk, which he pointed to.

  “And,” Earle said, pulling open a middle drawer, “there was the gun, of course. Taken from here.”

  “The cops found it across the hall, though. By the body.”

  “Yes,” Earle said, quietly.

  “Tell me about her, Earle.”

  “Mother?”

  “Rheta.”

  “She…she was a lovely girl. A beautiful redhead. Gifted musician…violinist. But she was…sick.”

  “Sick how?”

  He tapped his head. “She was a hypochondriac. Imagining she had this disease, and that one. Her mother died of tuberculosis…in an insane asylum, no less. Rheta came to imagine she had t.b., like her mother. What they did have in common, I’m afraid, was being mentally deranged.”

  “You said you loved her, Earle.”

  “I did. Once. The marriage was a failure. I…I had to seek affection elsewhere.” A wicked smile flickered under the pencil mustache. “I’ve never had trouble finding women, Nate. I have a little black book with fifty girl friends in it.”

  It occurred to me that a real man could get by on a considerably shorter list; but I keep opinions like that to myself, when given a hundred-buck retainer.

  “What did the little woman think about all these girl friends? A crowd like that is hard to hide.”

  He shrugged. “We never talked about it.”

  “No talk of a divorce?”

  He licked his lips, avoided my eyes. “I wanted one, Nate. She wouldn’t give it to me. A good Catholic girl.” Four of the most frightening words in the English language, to any healthy male anyway.

  “The two of you lived here, with your mother?”

  “Yes…I can’t really afford to live elsewhere. Times are hard, you know.”

  “So I hear. Who else lives here? Isn’t there a roomer?”

  “Yes. Miss Shaunesey. She’s a high school teacher.”

  “Is she here now?”

  “Yes. I asked if she’d talk to you, and she is more than willing. Anything to help Mother.”

  Back in the library, I sat and spoke with Miss Enid Shaunesey, a prim, slim woman of about fifty. Earle lurked in the background, helping himself to more sherry.

  “What happened that day, Miss Shaunesey?”

  November 21, 1933.

  “I probably arose at about a quarter to seven,” she said, with a little shrug, adjusting her wire-frame glasses. “I had breakfast in the house with Dr. Alice. I don’t remember whether Rheta had breakfast with us or not…I don’t really remember speaking to Rheta at all that morning.”

  “Then you went on to school?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I teach at Marshall High. I completed my teaching duties and signed out about three fifteen. I went to the Loop and shopped until a little after five and went home.”

  “What, at about six?”

  “Or a little after. When I came home, Dr. Alice was in the kitchen, preparing dinner. She fried up some pork chops. Made a nice salad, cabbage, potatoes, peaches. It was just the two of us. We’re good friends.”

  “Earle was out of town, of course, but what about Rheta?”

  “She was supposed to dine with us, but she was late. We went ahead without her. I didn’t think much of it. The girl had a mind of her own; she frequently went here and there—music lessons, shopping.” There was a faint note of disapproval, though the conduct she was describing mirrored her own after-school activities of that same day.

  “Did Dr. Wynekoop seem to get along with Rheta?”

  “They had their tiffs, but Dr. Alice loved the girl. She was family. That evening, during dinner, she spoke of Rheta, in fact.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She was worried about the girl.”

  “Because she hadn’t shown up for supper?”

  “Yes, and after the meal she telephoned a neighbor or two, to see if they’d seen Rheta. But she also expressed a more general concern—Rheta was fretting about her health, you see. As I said, Rheta frequently stayed out. We knew she’d probably gone into the Loop to shop and, as she often did, she probably went to a motion picture. That was what we thought.”

  “I see.”

  Miss Shaunesey sat up, her expression suddenly thoughtful. “Of course, I’d noticed Rheta’s coat and hat on the table here in the library, but Dr. Alice said that she’d
probably worn her good coat and hat to the Loop. Anyway, after dinner we talked, and then I went to the drug store for Dr. Alice, to have a prescription refilled.”

  “When did you get back?”

  “Well, you see, the drug store is situated at Madison and Kedzie. That store did not have as many tablets as Dr. Alice wanted, so I walked to the drug store at Homan and Madison and got a full bottle.”

  “So it took a while,” I said, trying not to get irritated with her fussy old-maid-school-teacher thoroughness. It beat the hell out of an uncooperative, unobservant witness, though. I guessed.

  “I was home by half past seven, I should judge. Then we sat down in the library and talked for about an hour. We discussed two books—Strange Interlude was one and the other was The Forsyte Saga.”

  “Did Dr. Wynekoop seem relaxed, or was she in any way preoccupied?”

  “The former,” Miss Shaunesey said with certainty. “Any concern about Rheta’s absence was strictly routine.”

  “At what point did Dr. Wynekoop go downstairs to her consultation room?”

  “Well, I was complaining of my hyperacidity. Dr. Alice said she had something in her office that she thought I could use for that. It was in a glass case in her consulting room. Of course, she never got that medicine for me.”

  Dr. Wynekoop had been interrupted in her errand by the discovery of the body of her daughter-in-law Rheta. The corpse was face down on the examination table, head on a white pillow. Naked, the body was wrapped in a sheet and a blanket, snugged in around the feet and pulled up over the shoulders, like a child lovingly tucked into bed. Rheta had been shot, once, in the back. Her lips were scorched as if by acid. A wet towel was under her mouth, indicating perhaps that chloroform had been administered. A half-empty bottle of chloroform was found on the washstand. And a gauze-wrapped .32 Smith and Wesson rested on the pillow above the girl’s head.

  “Dr. Wynekoop did not call the police?” I asked, knowing the answer. This much I remembered from the papers.

  “No.”

  “Or an undertaker, or the coroner’s office?”