Chicago Lightning : The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories

by Collins, Max Allan

  She shook her head, not believing that for a minute. “Arthur just isn’t the type. He’s a poor, weak sister. He never had enough pep to hurt a fly.”

  It was all conjecture, but I turned it over to Stege, anyway. Thompson’s alibi checked out. Yet another dead-end.

  The next day I was reading the morning papers over breakfast in the coffee shop at the Morrison Hotel. A very small item, buried on an inside page, caught my eye: Dr. Joseph Soldinger, 1016 North Oakley Blvd, had been robbed at gunpoint last night of $37, his car stolen.

  I called Stege and pointed out the similarity to the Peacock case, half expecting him to shrug it off. He didn’t. He thanked me, and hung up.

  A week later I got a call from Stege; he was excited. “Listen to this: Dr. A.L. Abrams, 1600 Milwaukee Avenue, $56 lost to gunmen; Dr. L.A. Garness, 2542 Mozart Avenue, waylaid and robbed of $6. And there’s two more like that.”

  “Details?”

  “Each features a call to a doctor to rush to a bedside. Address is in a lonely neighborhood. It’s an appointment with ambush. Take is always rather small. Occurrences between ten and eleven p.m.”

  “Damn! Sounds like Mrs. Peacock has been right all along. Her husband fought off his attackers; that’s what prompted their beating him.”

  “The poor bastard was a hero and the papers paint him a philanderer.”

  “Well, we handed ’em the brush.”

  “Perhaps we did, Heller. Anyway, thanks.”

  “Any suspects?”

  “No. But we got the pattern now. From eye-witness descriptions it seems to be kids. Four assailants, three tall and husky, the other shorter.”

  A bell was ringing, and not outside my window. “Captain, you ever hear of Rose Kasallis?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “I tracked a runaway girl to her place two summers ago. She’s a regular female Fagin. She had a flat on North Maplewood Avenue that was a virtual ‘school for crime.’”

  “I have heard of that. The West North Avenue cops handled it. She was keeping a way-station for fugitive kids from the reform school at St. Charles. Sent up the river for contributing to the delinquency of minors?”

  “That’s the one. I had quite a run-in with her charming boy Bobby. Robert Goethe is his name.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s eighteen years old, a strapping kid with the morals of an alley cat. And there were a couple of kids he ran with, Emil Reck, who they called Emil the Terrible, and another one whose name I can’t remember…”

  “Heller, Chicago has plenty of young street toughs. Why do you think these three might be suspects in the Peacock case?”

  “I don’t know that they are. In fact, last I knew Bobby and the other two were convicted of strong-arming a pedestrian and were sitting in the Bridewell. But that’s been at least a year ago.”

  “And they might be out amongst us again, by now.”

  “Right. Could you check?”

  “I’ll do that very thing.”

  Ten minutes later Stege called and said, “They were released in December.”

  January 2 had been Silber Peacock’s last day on earth.

  “I have an address for Bobby Goethe’s apartment,” Stege said. “Care to keep an old copper company?”

  He swung by and picked me up—hardly usual procedure, pulling in a private dick on a case, but I had earned this—and soon we were pulling up in front of the weathered brownstone in which Bobby Goethe lived. And there was no doubt he lived here.

  Because despite the chilly day, he and Emil the Terrible were sitting on the stoop, in light jackets, smoking cigarettes and drinking bottles of beer. Bobby had a weak, acned chin, and reminded me of photos I’d seen of Clyde Barrow; Emil had a big lumpy nose and a high forehead, atop which was piled blond curly hair—he looked thick as a plank.

  We were in an unmarked car, but a uniformed man was behind the wheel, so as soon as we pulled in, the two boys reacted, beer bottles dropping to the cement and exploding like bombs.

  Bobby took off in one direction, and Emil took off in the other. Stege just watched as his plainclothes detective assistant took off after Emil, and I took off after Bobby.

  It took me a block to catch up, and I hit him with a flying tackle, and we rolled into a vacant lot, not unlike the one by the Caddy in which Peacock’s body had been found.

  Bobby was a wiry kid, and wormed his way out of my grasp, kicking back at me as he did; I took a boot in the face, but didn’t lose any teeth, and managed to reach out and grab that foot and yank him back hard. He went down on his face in the weeds and rocks. One of the larger of those rocks found its way into his hand, and he flung it at me, savage little animal that he was, only not so little. I ducked out of the rock’s way, but quickly reached a hand under my topcoat and suitcoat and got my nine millimeter Browning out and pointed it down at him.

  “I’m hurt,” he said, looking up at me with a scraped, bloody face.

  “Shall we call a doctor?” I said.

  Emil and Bobby and their crony named Nash, who was arrested later that afternoon by West North Avenue Station cops, were put in a show-up for the various doctors who’d been robbed to identify. They did so, without hesitation. The trio was separated and questioned individually and sang and sang. A fourth boy was implicated, the shorter one who’d been mentioned, seventeen-year-old Mickey Livingston. He too was identified, and he too sang.

  Their story was a singularly stupid one. They had been cruising in a stolen car, stopped in a candy store, picked Peacock’s name at random from the phone book, picked another name and address, altered it, and called and lured the doctor to an isolated spot they’d chosen. Emil the Terrible, a heavy club in hand, crouched in the shadows across the street from 6438 North Whipple. Nash stood at the entrance, and Goethe, gun in hand, hid behind a tree nearby. Livingston was the wheel man, parked half a block north.

  Peacock drove up and got out of his car, medical bag in hand. Bobby stuck the gun in the doctor’s back and told him not to move. Peacock was led a block north after Emil the Terrible had smacked him “a lick for luck.” At this point Peacock fought back, wrestling with Bobby, who shot the doctor in the head. Peacock dropped to the ground, and Emil the Imbecilic hit the dead man again and again with the club. A scalpel from the medical bag in one hand, the gun held butt forward in the other, Bobby added some finishing touches. Nash pulled up in the doctor’s car, Livingston following. The corpse was then tossed in the backseat of the Caddy, which was abandoned three blocks away.

  Total take for the daring boys: $20. Just what I’d made on the case, only they didn’t get five bucks expenses.

  What Bobby, Emil and Nash did get was 199 years plus consecutive terms of one year to life on four robbery counts. Little Mickey was given a thirty-year sentence, and was eventually paroled. The others, to the best of my knowledge, never were.

  Ruth Peacock moved to Quincy, Illinois, where she devoted the rest of her life to social service, her church and Red Cross work, as well as to raising her two daughters, Betty Lou and Nancy. Nancy never knew her father.

  Maybe that’s why Ruth Peacock was so convinced of her husband’s loyalty, despite the mysterious circumstances of his death.

  She was pregnant with his child at the time.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Research materials consulted for this fact-based story include “The Peacock Case” by LeRoy F. McHugh in Chicago Murders (1947) and various true-crime magazines of the day.

  In June 1936, Chicago was in the midst of the Great Depression and a sweltering summer, and I was in the midst of Chicago. Specifically, on this Tuesday afternoon, the ninth to be exact, I was sitting on a sofa in the minuscule lobby of the Van Buren Hotel. The sofa had seen better days, and so had the hotel. The Van Buren was no flophouse, merely a moderately rundown residential hotel just west of the El tracks, near the LaSalle Street Station.

  Divorce work wasn’t the bread and butter of the A-l Detective Agency, but we didn’t turn
it away. I use the editorial “we,” but actually there was only one of us, me, Nathan Heller, “president” of the firm. And despite my high-flown title, I was just a down-at-the-heels dick reading a racing form in a seedy hotel’s seedy lobby, waiting to see if a certain husband showed up in the company of another woman.

  Another woman, that is, than the one he was married to: the dumpy, dusky dame who’d come to my office yesterday.

  “I’m not as good-looking as I was fourteen years ago,” she’d said, coyly, her voice honeyed by a Southern drawl, “but I’m a darn sight younger looking than some women I know.”

  “You’re a very handsome woman, Mrs. Bolton,” I said, smiling, figuring she was fifty if she was a day, “and I’m sure there’s nothing to your suspicions.”

  She had been a looker once, but she’d run to fat, and her badly hennaed hair and overdone makeup were no help; nor was the raccoon stole she wore over a faded floral print housedress. The stole looked a bit ratty and in any case was hardly called for in this weather.

  “Mr. Heller, they are more than suspicions. My husband is a successful businessman, with an office in the financial district. He is easy prey to gold diggers.”

  The strained formality of her tone made the raccoon stole make sense, somehow.

  “This isn’t the first time you’ve suspected him of infidelity.”

  “Unfortunately, no.”

  “Are you hoping for reconciliation, or has a lawyer advised you to establish grounds for divorce?”

  “At this point,” she said, calmly, the Southern drawl making her words seem more casual than they were, “I wish only to know. Can you understand that, Mr. Heller?”

  “Certainly. I’m afraid I’ll need some details…”

  She had them. Though they lived in Hyde Park, a quiet, quietly well-off residential area, Bolton was keeping a room at the Van Buren Hotel, a few blocks down the street from the very office in which we sat. Mrs. Bolton believed that he went to the hotel on assignations while pretending to leave town on business trips.

  “How did you happen to find that out?” I asked her.

  “His secretary told me,” she said, with a crinkly little smile, proud of herself.

  “Are you sure you need a detective? You seem to be doing pretty well on your own…”

  The smile disappeared and she seemed quite serious now, digging into her big black purse and coming back with a folded wad of cash. She thrust it across the desk toward me, as if daring me to take it.

  I don’t take dares, but I do take money. And there was plenty of it: a hundred in tens and fives.

  “My rate’s ten dollars a day and expenses,” I said, reluctantly, the notion of refusing money going against the grain. “A thirty-dollar retainer would be plenty…”

  She nodded curtly. “I’d prefer you accept that. But it’s all I can afford, remember; when it’s gone, it’s gone.”

  I wrote her out a receipt and told her I hoped to refund some of the money, though of course I hoped the opposite, and that I hoped to be able to dispel her fears about her husband’s fidelity, though there was little hope of that, either. Hope was in short supply in Chicago, these days.

  Right now, she said, Joe was supposedly on a business trip; but the secretary had called to confide in Mrs. Bolton that her husband had been in the office all day.

  I had to ask the usual questions. She gave me a complete description (and a photo she’d had foresight to bring), his business address, working hours, a list of places he was known to frequent.

  And, so, I had staked out the hotel yesterday, starting late afternoon. I didn’t start in the lobby. The hotel was a walk-up, the lobby on the second floor; the first floor leased out to a saloon, in the window of which I sat nursing beers and watching people stroll by. One of them, finally, was Joseph Bolton, a tall, nattily attired businessman about ten years his wife’s junior; he was pleasant looking, but with his wire-rimmed glasses and receding brown hair was no Robert Taylor.

  Nor was he enjoying feminine company, unless said company was already up in the hotel room before I’d arrived on the scene. I followed him up the stairs to the glorified landing of a lobby, where I paused at the desk while he went on up the next flight of stairs (there were no elevators in the Van Buren) and, after buying a newspaper from the desk clerk, went up to his floor, the third of the four-story hotel, and watched from around a corner as he entered his room.

  Back down in the lobby, I approached the desk clerk, an older guy with rheumy eyes and a blue bow tie. I offered him a buck for the name of the guest in Room 3C.

  “Bolton,” he said.

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “Let me see the register.” I hadn’t bothered coming in earlier to bribe a look because I figured Bolton would be here under an assumed name.

  “What it’s worth to you?” he asked.

  “I already paid,” I said, and turned his register around and looked in it. Joseph Bolton it was. Using his own goddamn name. That was a first.

  “Any women?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of,” he said.

  “Regular customer?”

  “He’s been living here a couple months.”

  “Living here? He’s here every night?”

  “I dunno. He pays his six bits a day, is all I know. I don’t tuck him in.”

  I gave the guy half a buck to let me rent his threadbare sofa. Sat for another couple of hours and followed two women upstairs. Both seemed to be hookers; neither stopped at Bolton’s room.

  At a little after eight, Bolton left the hotel and I followed him over to Adams Street, to the Berghoff, the best German restaurant for the money in the Loop. What the hell—I hadn’t eaten yet either. We both dined alone.

  That night I phoned Mrs. Bolton with my report, such as it was.

  “He has a woman in his room,” she insisted.

  “It’s possible,” I allowed.

  “Stay on the job,” she said, and hung up.

  I stayed on the job. That is, the next afternoon I returned to the Van Buren Hotel, or anyway to the saloon underneath it, and drank beers and watched the world go by. Now and then the world would go up the hotel stairs. Men I ignored; women that looked like hookers I ignored. One woman, who showed up around four thirty, I did not ignore.

  She was as slender and attractive a woman as Mildred Bolton was not, though she was only a few years younger. And her wardrobe was considerably more stylish than my client’s—high-collared white dress with a bright colorful figured print, white gloves, white shoes, a felt hat with a wide turned-down brim.

  She did not look like the sort of woman who would be stopping in at the Van Buren Hotel, but stop in she did.

  So did I. I trailed her up to the third floor, where she was met at the door of Bolton’s room by a male figure. I just got a glimpse of the guy, but he didn’t seem to be Bolton. She went inside.

  I used a pay phone in the saloon downstairs and called Mrs. Bolton in Hyde Park.

  “I can be there in forty minutes,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I want to catch them together. I’m going to claw that hussy’s eyes out.”

  “Mrs. Bolton, you don’t want to do that…”

  “I most certainly do. You can go home, Mr. Heller. You’ve done your job, and nicely.”

  And she had hung up.

  I’d mentioned to her that the man in her husband’s room did not seem to be her husband, but that apparently didn’t matter. Now I had a choice: I could walk back up to my office and write Mrs. Bolton out a check refunding seventy of her hundred dollars, goddamnit (ten bucks a day, ten bucks expenses—she’d pay for my bribes and beers).

  Or I could do the Christian thing and wait around and try to defuse this thing before it got even uglier.

  I decided to do the latter. Not because it was the Christian thing—I wasn’t a Christian, after all—but because I might be able to convince Mrs. Bolton she needed a few more days’ work out of me, to
figure out what was really going on here. It seemed to me she could use a little more substantial information, if a divorce was to come out of this. It also seemed to me I could use the money.

  I don’t know how she arrived—whether by El or streetcar or bus or auto—but as fast as she was walking, it could’ve been on foot. She was red in the face, eyes hard and round as marbles, fists churning as she strode, her head floating above the incongruous raccoon stole.

  I hopped off my bar stool and caught her at the sidewalk.

  “Don’t go in there, Mrs. Bolton,” I said, taking her arm gently.

  She swung it away from me, held her head back and, short as she was, looked down at me, nostrils flared. I felt like a matador who dropped his cape.

  “You’ve been discharged for the day, Mr. Heller,” she said.

  “You still need my help. You’re not going about this the right way.”

  With indignation she began, “My husband…”

  “Your husband isn’t in there. He doesn’t even get off work till six.”

  She swallowed. The redness of her face seemed to fade some; I was quieting her down.

  Then fucking fate stepped in, in the form of that swanky dame in the felt hat, who picked that very moment to come strolling out of the Van Buren Hotel like it was the goddamn Palmer House. On her arm was a young man, perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, in a cream-color seersucker suit and a gold tie, with a pale complexion and sky-blue eyes and corn-silk blond hair. He and the woman on his arm shared the same sensitive mouth.

  “Whore!” somebody shouted.

  Who else? My client.

  I put my hand over my face and shook my head and wished I was dead, or at least in my office.

  “Degenerate!” Mrs. Bolton sang out. She rushed toward the slender woman, who reared back, properly horrified. The young man gripped the woman’s arm tightly; whether to protect her or himself, it wasn’t quite clear.

  Well, the sidewalks were filled with people who’d gotten off work, heading for the El or the LaSalle Street Station, so we had an audience. Yes we did.