Chicago Lightning : The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories

by Collins, Max Allan

  “The girl’s body was lying on that table,” March said. “She was resting on her left front side with her left arm under her, with the right forearm extending upward so that her hand was about on a level with her chin, with her head on a white pillow. Her face was almost out of sight, but I could see that her mouth and nose were resting on a wet, crumpled towel. She’d been bleeding from the mouth.”

  “She was covered up, I understand,” I said.

  “Yes. I drew the covers down carefully, and saw that she’d been shot through the left side of the back. Body was cold. Dead about six hours, I’d guess.”

  “But that’s just a guess.”

  “Yeah. The coroner can’t nail it all that exact. It can be a few hours either direction, you know.”

  “No signs of a struggle.”

  “None. That girl laid down on that table herself—maybe at gun point, but whatever the case, she did it herself. Her clothes were lying about the floor at the foot of the examination table, dropped, not thrown, just as though she’d undressed in a leisurely fashion.”

  “What about the acid burns on the girl’s face?”

  “She was apparently chloroformed before she was shot. You know, that confession Stege got out of Dr. Wynekoop, that’s how she said she did it.”

  The counterman brought us coffee.

  “I’ll be frank, officer,” I said, sipping the steaming java. “I just came on this job. I haven’t had a chance to go down to a newspaper morgue and read the text of that confession.”

  He shrugged. “Well, it’s easily enough summed up. She said her daughter-in-law was always wanting physical examinations. That afternoon, she went downstairs with the doctor for an exam, and first off, stripped, to weigh herself. She had a sudden pain in her side and Dr. Wynekoop suggested a whiff of chloroform as an anesthetic. The doc said she massaged the girl’s side for about fifteen minutes, and…”

  “I’m remembering this from the papers,” I said, nodding. “She claimed the girl ‘passed away’ on the examining table, and she panicked. Figured her career would be ruined, if it came out she’d accidentally killed her own daughter-in-law with an overdose of chloroform.”

  “Right. And then she remembered the old revolver in the desk, and fired a shot into the girl and tried to make it look like a robbery.”

  The counterman came and refilled our coffee cups.

  “So,” I said, “what do you make of the confession?”

  “I think it’s bullshit any way you look at it. Hell, she was grilled for almost three days, Heller—you know how valid that kind of confession is.”

  I sipped my coffee. “She may have thought her son was guilty, and was covering up for him.”

  “Well, her confession was certainly a self-serving one. After all, if she was telling the truth—or even if her confession was made up outa whole cloth, but got taken at face value—it’d make her guilty of nothing more than involuntary manslaughter.”

  I nodded. “Shooting a corpse isn’t a felony.”

  “But she had to know her son didn’t do it.”

  “Why?”

  March smirked. “He sent her a telegram; he was in Peoria, a hundred and ninety miles away.”

  “Telegram? When did she receive this telegram?”

  “Late afternoon. Funny thing, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “Initially, Dr. Wynekoop said she’d seen Earle last on November twelfth, when he left on a trip to the Grand Canyon, to take some photographs. But Earle came back to Chicago on the nineteenth, two days before the murder.”

  I damn near spilled my coffee. “What?”

  March nodded emphatically. “He and his mother met at a restaurant, miles from home. They were seen sitting in a back booth, having an intense, animated, but hushed, conversation.”

  “But you said Earle was in Peoria when his wife was killed…”

  “He was. He left Chicago, quietly, the next day—drove to Peoria. And from Peoria he went to Kansas City.”

  “Do his alibis hold up? Peoria isn’t Mars; he could’ve established an alibi and made a round trip…”

  “I thought you were working for the family?”

  “I am. But if I proved Earle did it, they’d spring his mother.”

  March laughed hollowly. “She’d be pissed off at you, partner.”

  “I know. But I already got their retainer. So. Tell me. What did you hold back from the papers?”

  It was standard practice to keep back a few details in a murder case; that helped clear up confessions from crazy people.

  “I shouldn’t,” he said.

  I handed him a folded fin.

  He slipped it in the breast pocket of his uniform blouse.

  “Hope for you yet,” I said.

  “Two items of interest,” March said softly. “There were three bullets fired from that gun.”

  “Three? But Rheta was shot only once…”

  “Right.”

  “Were the other bullets found?”

  “No. We took that examining room apart. Then we took the house apart. Nothing.”

  “What do you make of that?”

  “I don’t know. You’d have to ask Stege…if you got nerve enough.”

  “You said two things.”

  March swallowed slowly. “This may not even come out at the trial. It’s not necessarily good for the prosecution.”

  “Spill.”

  “The coroner’s physician picked up on something of interest, even before the autopsy.”

  “What?”

  “Rheta had syphilis.”

  “Jesus. You’re kidding!”

  “A very bad dose.”

  I sat and pondered that.

  “We asked Earle to submit to a physical,” March said, “and he consented.”

  “And?”

  “And he’s in perfect health.”

  I took the El back to the Loop and got off at Van Buren and Plymouth, where I had an office on the second floor of the corner building. I lived there, since I kept an eye on the building in lieu of paying rent. Before I went up, I drank in the bar downstairs for half an hour so, chatting with bartender Buddy Gold, who was a friend. I asked him if he was following the Wynekoop case in the papers.

  “That old broad is innocent,” the lumpy-faced ex-boxer said. “It’s a crime what they’re doin’ to her.”

  “What are they doing to her?”

  “I saw her picture in the paper, in that jailhouse hospital bed. Damn shame, nice woman like that, with her charities and all.”

  “What about the dead girl? Maybe she was ‘nice.’”

  “Yeah, but some dope fiend did it. Why don’t they find him and put him in jail?”

  I said that was a good idea and had another beer. Then I went up to my office and pulled down the Murphy bed and flopped. It had been a long, weird day. I’d earned my fifteen bucks.

  The phone woke me. When I opened my eyes, it was morning but the light filtering in around the drawn shades was gray. It would be a cold one. I picked up the receiver on the fifth ring.

  “A-1 Detective Agency,” I said.

  “Nathan Heller?” a gravelly male voice demanded.

  I sat on the edge of the desk, rubbing my eyes. “Speaking.”

  “This is Captain John Stege.”

  I slid off the desk. “What can I do for you?”

  “Steer clear of my case, you son of a bitch.”

  “What case is that, Captain?”

  Stege was a white-haired fireplug with dark-rimmed glasses, a meek-looking individual who could scare the hell out of you when he felt like it. He felt like it.

  “You stay out of the goddamn Wynekoop case. I won’t have you mucking it up.”

  How did he even know I was on the case? Had Officer March told him?

  “I was hired by the family to try to help clear Dr. Wynekoop. It’s hardly uncommon for a defendant in a murder case to hire an investigator.”

  “Dr. Alice Lindsay Wynekoop murdered her da
ughter-in-law! It couldn’t be any other way.”

  “Captain, it could be a lot of other ways. It could be one of her boy friends; it could be one of her husband’s girl friends. It could be a break-in artist looking for drugs. It could be…”

  “Are you telling me how to do my job?”

  “Well, you’re telling me how not to do mine.”

  There was a long pause.

  Then Stege said: “I don’t like you, Heller. You stay out of my way. You go manufacturing evidence, and I’ll introduce you to every rubber hose in this town…and I know plenty of ’em.”

  “You have the wrong idea about me, Captain,” I said. “And you may have the wrong idea about Alice Wynekoop.”

  “Bull! She insured young Rheta for five grand, fewer than thirty days before the girl’s death. With double indemnity, the policy pays ten thousand smackers.”

  I hadn’t heard about this.

  “The Wynekoops have money,” I said. “A murder-for-insurance-money scheme makes no sense for a well-to-do family like that…”

  “Dr. Wynekoop owes almost five thousand dollars back taxes and has over twenty thousand dollars in overdue bank notes. She’s prominent, but she’s not wealthy. She got hit in the crash.”

  “Well…”

  “She killed her daughter-in-law to make her son happy, and to collect the insurance money. If you were worth two cents as a detective, you’d know that.”

  “Speaking of detective work, Captain, how did you know I was on this case?”

  “Don’t you read the papers?”

  The papers had me in them, all right. A small story, but well placed, on several front pages in fact; under a picture of Earle seated at his mother’s side in the jail hospital, the News told how the Wynekoops had hired a local private investigator, one Nathan Heller, to help prove Dr. Alice’s innocence.

  I called Earle Wynekoop and asked him to meet me at the County Jail hospital wing. I wanted to talk to both of my clients.

  On the El, I thought about how I had intended to pursue this case. Having done the basic groundwork with the family and witnesses, I would begin searching for the faceless break-in artist whose burglary had got out of hand, leading to the death of Rheta Wynekoop. Never mind that it made no sense for a thief to take a gun from a rolltop desk, make his victim un-dress, shoot her in the back, tuck her in like a child at bedtime, and leave the gun behind. Criminals did crazy things, after all. I would spend three or four days sniffing around the West Side pawn shops and re-sale shops, and the Maxwell Street market, looking for a lead on any petty crook whose drug addiction might lead to violence. I would comb the flophouses and bars hopheads were known to frequent, and….

  But I had changed my mind, at least for the moment.

  Earle was at his mother’s bedside when the matron left me there. Dr. Alice smiled in her tight, business-like manner and offered me a hand to shake; I took it. Earle stood and nodded and smiled nervously at me. I nodded to him, and he sat again.

  But I stayed on my feet.

  “I’m off this case,” I said.

  “What?” Earle said, eyes wide.

  Dr. Alice remained calm. Her appraising eyes were as cold as the weather.

  “Captain Stege suggested it,” I said.

  “That isn’t legal!” Earle said.

  “Quiet, Earle,” his mother said, sternly but with gentleness.

  “That’s not why I’m quitting,” I said. “And I’m keeping the retainer, too, by the way.”

  “Now that isn’t legal!” Earle said, standing.

  “Shut-up,” I said to him. To her, I said: “You two used me. I’m strictly a publicity gimmick. To help you make you look sincere, to help you keep up a good front…just like staying in the jail’s hospital ward, so you can pose for pitiful newspaper pics.”

  Dr. Alice blinked and smiled thinly. “You’re revealing an obnoxious side, Mr. Heller, that is unbecoming.”

  “You killed your daughter-in-law, Dr. Wynekoop. For Sonny Boy, here.”

  Earle’s face clenched like a fist, and he clenched his fists, too, while he was at it. “I ought to…”

  I looked at him hard. “I wish to hell you would.”

  His eyes flickered at me, then he glanced at his mother. She nodded and motioned for him to sit again, and he did.

  “Mr. Heller,” she said, “I assure you, I am innocent. I don’t know what you’ve been told that gave you this very false impression, but…”

  “Save it. I know what happened, and why. You discovered, in one of your frequent on-the-house examinations of your hypochondriac daughter-in-law, that she really was ill. Specifically, she had a social disease.”

  Anger flared in the doctor’s eyes.

  “You could forgive Earle all his philandering…even though you didn’t approve. You did ask your daughter to talk to him about his excesses of drink and dames. But those were just misdemeanors. For your husband’s wife to run around, to get a nasty disease that she might just pass along to your beloved boy, should their marriage ever heat up again, well, that was a crime. And it deserved punishment.”

  “Mr. Heller, why don’t you go. You may keep your retainer, if you keep your silence.”

  “Oh, hitting a little close to home, am I? Well, let me finish. You paid for this. I don’t think it was your idea to kill Rheta, despite the dose of syph she was carrying. I think it was Earle’s idea. She wouldn’t give him a divorce, good Catholic girl that she was, and Earle’s a good Catholic, too, after all. It’d be hell to get excommunicated, right, Earle? Right, Mom?”

  Earle was shaking; his hands clasped, prayerfully. Dr. Wynekoop’s wrinkled face was a stern mask.

  “Here’s what happened,” I said, cheerfully. “Earle came to you and asked you to put the little woman to sleep…she was a tortured girl, after all, if it were done painlessly, why, it would be a merciful act. But you refused—you’re a doctor, a healer. It wouldn’t be right.”

  Earle’s eyes were shifting from side to side in confirmation of my theory.

  I forged ahead: “But Earle came to you again, and said, Mother dear, if you don’t do it, I will. I’ve found father’s old .32, and I’ve tried it…fired two test rounds. It works, and I know how to work it. I’m going to kill Rheta myself.”

  Earle’s eyes were wide as was his mouth. I must have come very, very close, even perhaps to his very language. Dr. Alice continued to maintain a poker face.

  “So, Mom, you decided to take matters in hand. When Earle came back early from his Grand Canyon photo trip, the two of you rendezvoused away from home—though you were seen, unfortunately—and came up with a plan. Earle would resume his trip, only go no farther than Peoria, where he would establish an alibi.”

  Earle’s face was contorted as he took in every damning word.

  “On the day of the murder,” I told her, “you had a final private consultation with your daughter-in-law…you overdosed her with chloroform, or smothered her.”

  “Mr. Heller,” Dr. Alice said icily, looking away from me, “this fantasy of yours holds no interest whatsoever for me.”

  “Well, maybe so—but Earle’s all perked up. Anyway, you left the body downstairs, closing the examining room door, locking it probably, and went on about the business of business as usual…cooking supper for your roomer, spending a quiet evening with her…knowing that Earle would be back after dark, to quietly slip in and, what? Dispose of the body somehow. That was the plan, wasn’t it? The unhappy bride would just disappear. Or perhaps turn up dead in ditch, or…whatever. Only it didn’t happen that way. Because Sonny Boy chickened out.”

  And now Dr. Alice broke form, momentarily, her eyes turning on Earle for just a moment, giving him one nasty glance, the only time I ever saw her look at the louse with anything but devotion.

  “He sent you a telegram in the afternoon, letting you know that he was still in Peoria. And that he was going to stay in Peoria. And you, with a corpse in the basement. Imagine.”

  “You h
ave a strange sense of humor, Mr. Heller.”

  “You have a strange way of practicing medicine, Dr. Wynekoop. You sent your roomer, Miss Shaunesey, on a fool’s errand—sending her to a drug store where you knew the prescription couldn’t be filled. And you knew conscientious Miss Shaunesey would try another drug store, buying you time.”

  “Really,” Dr. Alice said, dryly.

  “Really. That’s when you concocted the burglary story. You’re too frail, physically, to go hauling a corpse anywhere. But you remembered that gun, across the hall. So you shot your dead daughter-in-law, adding insult to injury, and faked the robbery—badly, but it was impromptu, after all.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this!” Earle said.

  “Then don’t,” I said. “What you didn’t remember, Dr. Wynekoop, is that two bullets had already been fired from that weapon, when Earle tested it. And that little anomaly bothered me.”

  “Did it,” she said, flatly.

  “It did. Your daughter-in-law’s syphilis; the two missing bullets; and the hour you spent alone in the house, while the roomer was away and Rheta was dead in your examining room. Those three factors added up to one thing: your guilt, and your son’s complicity.”

  “Are you going to tell your story to anyone?” she asked, blandly.

  “No,” I said. “You’re my client.”

  “How much?” Earle said, with a nasty, nervous little sneer.

  I held my hands up, palms out. “No more. I’m keeping my retainer. I earned it.”

  I turned my back on them and began to walk away.

  From behind me, I heard her say, with no irony whatsoever, “Thank you, Mr. Heller.”

  I turned and looked at her and laughed. “Hey, you’re going to jail, lady. The cops and the D.A. won’t need me to get it done, and all the good publicity you cook up won’t change a thing. I have only one regret.”

  I made them ask.

  Earle took the honors.

  “What’s that?” Earle asked, as he stood there trembling; his mother reached her hand out and patted his nearest hand, soothing him.

  I smiled at him—the nastiest smile I could muster. “That you won’t be going to jail with her, you son of a bitch.”

  And go to jail she did.