Chicago Lightning : The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories

by Collins, Max Allan

  “I know what you’re going to ask,” she said, quickly, before I’d asked anything. All I’d done was show her my investigator’s i.d. and say I was in Mrs. Peacock’s employ. “Dr. Peacock had no patient named Smale; I’ve been digging through our files ever since Mrs. Peacock called this morning, just in case my memory is faulty.”

  She didn’t look like she had a faulty anything.

  “What’s even stranger,” she said, with a tragic expression, “he almost never answered night calls. Oh, he once upon a time did—he hated to turn away any sick child. His regular patients seldom asked him to do so, however, and this practice has become so large that he wasn’t accepting any new cases. It’s unbelievable that…”

  She paused; I’d been doing my job, asking questions, listening, but a certain part of me had been undressing the attractive nurse in my mind’s eye—everybody needs a hobby—and she misread my good-natured lechery toward her for something else.

  “Please!” she said. “You mustn’t leap to horrid conclusions. Dr. Peacock was a man of impeccable character. He loved his family and his home, passionately. He was no playboy; he loathed night clubs and all they stand for. He didn’t even drink!”

  “I see,” I said.

  “I hope you do,” she said curtly. “That he might have been involved in an affair with a woman other than his wife is unthinkable. Please believe me.”

  “Perhaps I do. But could you answer one question?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why are you referring to the doctor in the past tense?”

  She began to cry; she’d been standing behind a counter—now she leaned against it.

  “I…I wish I believed him capable of running around on Ruth, his wife. Then I wouldn’t be so convinced that something…something terrible has happened.”

  I felt bad; I’d been suspicious of her, been looking to find her between the doctor’s sheets, and had made her cry. She was a sincere young woman, that was obvious.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said, meaning it, and turned to go.

  But before I went out, another question occurred to me, and I asked it: “Miss Mulrooney—had the parents of any patient ever blamed Dr. Peacock for some unfortunate results of some medical treatment he administered? Any threats of reprisal?”

  “Absolutely not,” she said, chin trembling.

  On this point I didn’t believe her; her indignation rang shrill. And, anyway, most doctors make enemies. I only wished she had pointed to one of those enemies.

  But I’d pushed this kid enough.

  I dropped by the Edgewater Beach Apartments—not to talk to Mrs. Peacock. I went up to the attendant in the lobby, a distinguished-looking blue-uniformed man in his late fifties; like so many doormen and lobby attendants, he looked like a soldier from some foreign country in a light opera.

  Unlike a good solider, he was willing to give forth with much more than his name and rank. I had hoped to get from him the name of the night man, who I hoped to call and get some information from; but it turned out he was the night man.

  “George was sick,” he said. “So I’m doing double-duty. I can use the extra cash more than the sleep.”

  “Speaking of cash,” I said, and handed him a buck.

  “Thank you, sir!”

  “Now, earn it: what can you tell me about Dr. Peacock? Does he duck out at night very often?”

  The attendant shook his head no. “Can’t remember the last time, before the other night. Funny thing, though.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He was rushing out of here, then all of a sudden stopped and turned and stood five minutes blabbing in the phone booth over there.”

  Back in the Auburn, my mind was abuzz. Why else would Dr. Peacock use the lobby phone, unless it was to make a call he didn’t want his wife to hear? The “poor sick child” call had been a ruse. The baby specialist obviously had a babe.

  I didn’t have a missing persons case at all. I had a stray husband who had either taken off for parts unknown with his lady love or, more likely considering the high-hat practice the doc would have to leave behind, would simply show up with some cock-and-bull story for the missus after a torrid twenty-four hour shack-up with whoever-she-was.

  I drove to 6438 North Whipple Street. What my reverse phone book hadn’t told me was that this was an apartment building, a six-flat. Suddenly the case warmed up again; I found a place for the Auburn along the curb and walked up the steps into the brownstone.

  No “G. Smale” was a resident, at least not a resident who had a name on any of the vestibule mailboxes.

  I walked out into the cold air, my breath smoking, my mind smoking a little too: the “patient” hadn’t had a phone, but in a nice brownstone like this most likely everybody had a phone. Nothing added up. Except maybe two plus two equals rendezvous.

  The doc had a doll, that’s all there was to it. Nonetheless, I decided to scout the neighborhood for Peacock’s auto. I went two blocks in all directions and saw no sign of it. I was about to call it an afternoon, and a long one at that, when I extended the canvassing to include a third block, and on the 6000 block in North Francisco Avenue, I saw it: a black Caddy sedan with the license 25-682.

  I approached the car, which was parked alongside a vacant lot, across from several brownstones. I peeked in; in the backseat was a topcoat, but the topcoat was covering something. Looking in the window, you couldn’t tell what. I tried the door. It was unlocked.

  I pulled the rider’s seat forward, and there he was, in a kneeling position, in the back, facing the rear, the top half of him bent over the seat, covered by the topcoat. Carefully, I lifted it off, resting it on the hood of the car. Blood was spattered on the floor and rear windows; the seat was crusty black with it, dried. His blood-flecked felt hat, wadded up like a discarded tissue, lay on the seat. His medical bag was on the seat next to him; it too had been sheltered from sight by the topcoat, and was open and had been disturbed. The little street map book, with the address on it in Mrs. Peacock’s handwriting, was nearby, speckled with blood.

  A large caliber bullet had gone in his right temple and come out behind the left ear. His skull was crushed; his brain was showing, but scrambled. His head and shoulders bore numerous knife slashes. His right hand was gloved, but his left was bare and had been caught, crushed, in the slamming car door.

  This was one savage killing.

  Captain Stege himself arrived, after I called it in; if my name hadn’t been attached to it, he probably wouldn’t have come. The tough little cop had once been Chief of Detectives till, ironically, a scandal had cost him—one of Chicago’s few verifiably honest cops—his job. Not long ago he’d been chief of the PD’s Dillinger squad. It was on the Dillinger case that Stege and I had put our feud behind us; we were uneasily trying to get along these days.

  I quickly showed him two more discoveries I’d made, before he or any of his boys in blue had arrived: a .45 revolver shell that was in the snow, near the car, on the vacant lot side; and a pinkish stain in the snow, plus deep tire tracks and numerous cigarette butts, in front of the apartment building at 6438 North Whipple. The tire tracks and cigarettes seemed to indicate that whoever had lured the doctor from his bed had indeed waited at this address; the pink stain pointed toward the violence having started there.

  “What’s your part in this?” he said, as we walked back to the scene of the crime. He was a small gray man in a gray topcoat and gray formless hat; tiny eyes squinted behind round, black-rimmed lenses. “How’d you happen to find the body, anyway?”

  I explained that Mrs. Peacock had hired me to find her husband. Which, after all, I had.

  A police photographer was taking pictures, the body not yet moved.

  “How do you read this, Heller?”

  “Not a simple robbery.”

  “Oh?”

  I pointed to the corpse. “He took God knows how many brutal blows; he was slashed and slashed again. It takes hate to arouse pointless violence like that.”r />
  “Crime of passion, then.”

  “That’s how I see it, Captain.”

  “The wife have an alibi?”

  “Don’t even bother going down that road.”

  “You mind if I bother, Heller? You ever seen the statistics of the number of murders committed within families?”

  “She was home with her daughter. Go ahead. Waste your time. But she’s a nice lady.”

  “I’ll remember that. Give your statement to Phelan, and go home. This isn’t your case, anymore.”

  “I know it isn’t. But do you mind if I, uh…if I’m the one to break the news to Mrs. Peacock?”

  Stege cleared his throat; shot a wad of phlegm into the nearby snow. “Not at all. Nobody envies duty like that.”

  So I told her. I wanted her told by somebody who didn’t suspect her and, initially, I’d be the only one who qualified.

  She sat in a straightback chair at her dining room table, in the Peacock’s conservative yet expensively appointed apartment high in the Edgewater Beach, and wept into a lace hanky. I sat with her for fifteen minutes. She didn’t ask me to go, so I didn’t.

  Finally she said, “Silber was a fine man. He truly was. A perfect husband and father. His habits regular and beyond reproach. No one hated Silber. No one. He was lured to his death by thieves.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Did you know that once before he was attacked by thieves, and that he did not hesitate to fight them off? My husband was a brave man.”

  “I’m sure he was.”

  I left her there, with her sorrow, thinking that I wished she was right, but knowing she was wrong. I did enough divorce work to know how marriages, even “perfect” ones, can go awry. I also had a good fix on just how much marital cheating was going on in this Christian society.

  The next morning I called Stege. He wasn’t glad to hear from me, exactly, but he did admit that the wife was no longer a suspect; her alibi was flawless.

  “There was a robbery of sorts,” Stege said.

  “Oh?”

  “Twenty dollars was missing from Peacock’s wallet. On the other hand, none of his jewelry—some of it pretty expensive stuff—was even touched.”

  “What was taken from the medical bag?” I asked.

  “Some pills and such were taken, but apparently nothing narcotic. A baby specialist doesn’t go toting dope around.”

  “An addict might not know that; an addict might’ve picked Dr. Peacock’s name at random, not knowing he was a baby doc.”

  “And what, drew him to that vacant lot to steal a supposed supply of narcotics?”

  “Yeah. It might explain the insanity, the savagery of the attack.”

  “Come on, Heller. You know as well as I do this is a personal killing. I expect romance to rear its lovely head any time, now. Peacock was rich, handsome enough, by all accounts personable. And he had, we estimate, upwards of five hundred patients. Five hundred kiddies all of whom have mothers who visited the doctor with them.”

  “You know something, Captain.”

  “What?”

  “I’m glad this isn’t my case anymore.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I wish you and your boys all the best doing those five hundred interviews.”

  He grumbled and hung up.

  I did send Mrs. Peacock a bill, for one day’s services—$20 and $5 expenses—and settled back to watch, with some discomfort, the papers speculate about the late doctor’s love life. Various screwball aspects to the case were chased down by the cops and the press; none of it amounted to much. This included a nutty rumor that the doctor was a secret federal narcotics agent and killed by a dope ring; and the Keystone Kops affair of the mysterious key found in the doctor’s pocket, the lock to which countless police hours were spent seeking, only to have the key turn out to belong to the same deputy coroner who had produced it. The hapless coroner had accidentally mixed a key of his own among the Peacock evidence.

  More standard, reliable lines of inquiry provided nothing: fingerprints found in the car were too smudged to identify; witnesses who came forth regarding two people arguing in the death car varied as to the sex of the occupants; the last-minute phone call Peacock made in the lobby turned out to have been to one of his business partners; interviews of the parents of five hundred Peacock patients brought forth not a single disgruntled person, nor a likely partner for any Peacock “love nest.”

  Peacock had been dead for over two weeks, when I was brought back into the case again, through no effort of my own.

  The afternoon of January 16, someone knocked at my office door; in the middle of a phone credit check, I covered the receiver and called out, “Come in.”

  The door opened tentatively and a small, milquetoast of a man peered in.

  “Mr. Heller?”

  I nodded, motioned for him to be seated before me, and finished up my call; he sat patiently, a pale little man in a dark suit, his dark hat in his lap.

  “What can I do for you?”

  He stood, smiled in an entirely humorless, business-like manner, extending a hand to be shook; I shook it, and the grip was surprisingly firm.

  “I am a Lutheran minister,” he said. “My name, for the moment, is unimportant.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Reverend.”

  “I read about the Peacock case in the papers.”

  “Yes?”

  “I saw your name. You discovered the body. You were in Mrs. Peacock’s employ.”

  “Yes.”

  “I have information. I was unsure of whom to give it to.”

  “If you have information regarding the Peacock case, you should give it to the police. I can place a call right now…”

  “Please, no! I would prefer you hear my story and judge for yourself.”

  “All right.”

  “Last New Year’s Day I had a chance meeting with my great and good friend, Dr. Silber Peacock, God rest his soul. On that occasion the doctor confided that a strange man, a fellow who claimed to be a chiropodist, had come bursting into his office, making vile accusations.”

  “Such as?”

  “He said, ‘You, sir, are having an affair with my wife!’”

  I sat forward. “Go on.”

  “Dr. Peacock said he’d never laid eyes on this man before; that he thought him a crazy man. ‘Why, I never ran around on Ruth in my life,’ he said.”

  “How did he deal with this man?”

  “He threw him bodily from his office.”

  “When did he have this run-in? Did he mention the man’s name?”

  “Last October. The man’s name was Thompson, and he was, as I’ve said, a chiropodist.”

  “You should go to the police with this.”

  The Reverend stood quickly, nervously. “I’d really rather not.”

  And then he was on his way out of the office. By the time I got out from behind my desk, he was out of the room, and by the time I got out into the hall, he was out of sight.

  The only chiropodist named Thompson in the Chicago phone book was one Arthur St. George Thompson, whom I found at his Wilson Avenue address. He was a skinny, graying man in his early forties; he and his office were seedy. He had no patients in his rather unkempt waiting room when I arrived (or when I left, for that matter).

  “I knew Silber Peacock,” he said, bitterly. “I remember visiting him at his office in October, too. What of it?”

  “Did you accuse him of seeing your wife?”

  “Sure I did! Let me tell you how I got hep to Peacock and Arlene. One evening last June she came home stinking, her and Ann—that’s the no-good who’s married to Arlene’s brother Carl. Arlene said she’d been at the Subway Club and her escort was Doc Peacock. So I looked in the classified directory. The only Dr. Peacock was Silber C., so I knew it was him. I stewed about it for weeks, months, and then I went to his office. The son of a bitch pretended he didn’t know who I was, or Arlene, either; he just kept denying it, and shoving me out of there, shoved me
clear out into the hall.”

  “I see.”

  “No you don’t. I hated the louse, but I didn’t kill him. Besides, I got an alibi. I can prove where I was the night he was murdered.”

  He claimed that because his practice was so poor of late, he’d taken on menial work at the Medinah Club. An alibi out of a reputable place like that would be hard to break. I’d leave that to Stege, when—or if—I turned this lead over to him.

  First I wanted to talk to Arlene Thompson, whom I found at her brother’s place, a North Side apartment.

  Ann was a slender, giggly brunette, attractive. Arlene was even more attractive, a voluptuous redhead. Both were in their mid-twenties. Ann’s husband wasn’t home, so the two of them flirted with me and we had a gay old time.

  “Were you really seeing Doc Peacock?”

  The two girls exchanged glances and began giggling and the giggling turned to outright laughter. “That poor guy!” Arlene said.

  “Well, yeah, I’d say so. He’s dead.”

  “Not him! Arthur! That insane streak of jealousy’s got him in hot water again, has it? Look, good-lookin’—there’s nothing to any of this, understand? Here’s how it happened.”

  Arlene and Ann had gone alone to the Subway Cafe one afternoon, a rowdy honky-tonk that had since lost its liquor license, and got picked up by two men. They danced till dusk. Arlene’s man said he was Doc Peacock; no other first name given.

  “Arthur went off his rocker when I came in, tipsy. He demanded the truth—so I told it to him! It was all innocent enough, but got him goin’. He talked days on end about Doc Peacock, about how he was going to even the score.”

  “Do you think he did?”

  The redhead laughed again, said, “Honey, that Dr. Peacock whose puss has been in the papers ain’t the guy I dated. My Peacock was much better looking—wavy hair, tall, a real dreamboat. I think my pick-up just pulled a name out of his hat.”

  “Your husband didn’t know that. Maybe he evened the score with the wrong Peacock.”