Chicago Lightning : The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories

by Collins, Max Allan

  “Of course not. I’m no different than you. I’m a public servant.”

  “How…how do you figure that, Lloyd?” My feet weren’t tied to the chair; if he’d just step around in front of me…

  “I only dispose of the flotsam. Not to mention jetsam.”

  “Not to mention that.”

  “Tramps. Whores. Weeding out the stock. Survival of the fittest. You know.”

  “That makes a lot of sense, Lloyd. But I’m not flotsam or jetsam. I’m a cop. You don’t want to kill a cop. You don’t want to kill a fellow public servant.”

  He thought about that.

  “I think I have to, this time,” he said.

  He moved around the chair, stood in front of me, stroking his chin, the cleaver gripped tight in his right hand, held about breastbone level.

  “I do like you,” Lloyd said, thoughtfully.

  “And I like you, Lloyd,” I said, and kicked him in the balls.

  Harder than any man tied to a chair should be able to kick; but you’d be surprised what you can do, under extreme circumstances. And things rarely get more extreme than being tied to a chair with a guy with a cleaver coming at you.

  Only he wasn’t coming at me, now: now, he was doubled over, and I stood, the chair strapped to my back; managed, even so, to kick him in the face.

  He tumbled back, gripping his groin, tears streaming down his checks, cords in his neck taut; my shoe had caught him on the side of the face and broken the skin. Flecks of blood, like little red tears, spattered his cheeks, mingling with the real tears.

  That’s when the window shattered, and Vivian squeezed down in through; pretty legs first.

  And she gave me the little gun to hold on him while she untied me.

  He was still on the dirt floor, moaning, when we went up the stairs and out into the sunny day, into a world that wasn’t dank, onto earth that was grass-covered and didn’t have God knows what buried under it.

  We asked Eliot to meet us at his boathouse; we told him what had happened. He was livid; I never saw him angrier. But he held Vivian for a moment, and looked at her and said, “If anything had happened to you, I’d’ve killed you.”

  He poured all of us a drink; rum as usual. He handed me my mine and said, “How could you get involved in something so harebrained?”

  “I wanted to give my client something for his money,” I said.

  “You mean his daughter’s killer.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve been looking for the bastard three years, and you come to town and expect to find him in three days.”

  “Well, I did.”

  He smirked, shook his head. “I believe you did. But Watterson’s family would bring in the highest-paid lawyers in the country and we’d be thrown out of court on our cans.”

  “What? The son of a bitch tried to cut me up with a cleaver!”

  “Did he? Did he swing on you? Or did you enter his house under a false pretense, misrepresenting yourself as a law officer? And as far as that goes, you assaulted him. We have very little.”

  Vivian said, “You have the name of the Butcher.”

  Eliot nodded. “Probably. I’m going to make a phone call.”

  Eliot went into his den and came out fifteen minutes later.

  “I spoke with Franklin Watterson, the father. He’s agreed to submit his son for a lie detector test.”

  “To what end?”

  “One step at a time,” Eliot said.

  Lloyd Watterson took the lie detector test twice—and on both instances denied committing the various Butcher slayings; his denials were, according to the machine, lies. The Watterson family attorney reminded Eliot that lie detector tests were not admissible as evidence. Eliot had a private discussion with Franklin Watterson.

  Lloyd Watterson was committed, by his family, to an asylum for the insane. The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run—which to this day is marked “unsolved” in the Cleveland police records—did not strike again.

  At least not directly.

  Eliot married Evie MacMillan a few months after my Cleveland visit, and their marriage was from the start disrupted by crank letters, postmarked from the same town as the asylum where Watterson had been committed. “Retribution will catch up with you one day,” said one postcard, on the front of which was a drawing of an effeminate man grinning from behind prison bars. Mrs. Ness was especially unnerved by these continuing letters and cards.

  Eliot’s political fortunes waned, in the wake of the “unsolved” Butcher slayings. Known for his tough stance on traffic violators, he got mired in a scandal when one pre-dawn morning in March of 1942, his car skidded into an oncoming car on the West Shoreway. Eliot and his wife, and two friends, had been drinking. The police report didn’t identify Eliot by name, but his license number—EN-1, well-known to Cleveland citizens—was listed. And Eliot had left the scene of the accident.

  Hit-and-run, the headlines said. Eliot’s version was that his wife had been injured, and he’d raced her to a hospital—but not before stopping to check on the other driver, who confirmed this. The storm blew over, but the damage was done—Eliot’s image in the Cleveland press was finally tarnished.

  Two months later he resigned as Safety Director.

  Lloyd Watterson kept sending the threatening mail to Eliot for many years. He died in a Dayton, Ohio, asylum in 1965.

  How much pressure those cards and letters put on the marriage I couldn’t say; but in 1945 Eliot and Evie divorced, and Eliot married a third time a few months later. At the time he was serving as federal director of the program against venereal disease in the military. His attempt to run for Cleveland mayor in 1947 was a near disaster: Cleveland’s one-time fairhaired boy was a has-been with a hit-run scandal and two divorces and three marriages going against him.

  He would not have another public success until the publication of his autobiographical book, The Untouchables—but that success was posthumous; he died shortly before it was published, never knowing that television and Robert Stack would give him lasting fame.

  I saw Eliot, now and then, over the years; but I never saw Vivian again.

  I asked him about her, once, when I was visiting him in Pennsylvania, in the early ’50s. He told me she’d been killed in a boating accident in 1943.

  “She’s been dead for years, then,” I said, the shock of it hitting me like a blow.

  “That’s right. But shed a tear for her, now, if you like. Tears and prayers can never come too late, Nate.”

  Amen, Eliot.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Research materials included Four Against the Mob (1961) by Oscar Fraley, and Cleveland—Best Kept Secret (1967) by George E. Condon. Following extensive research at the Case Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, this story was expanded into the non-Heller novel Butcher’s Dozen (1988). The Heller novel Angel in Black (2001) is a sequel to both “The Strawberry Teardrop” and Butcher’s Dozen. My play and film, Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life (2007), also deals with the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run and “Lloyd Watterson.”

  Friday afternoon, December 8, 1939, I had a call from Jake Rubinstein to meet him at 3159 Roosevelt, which was in Lawndale, my old neighborhood. Jake was an all right guy, kind of talkative and something of a roughneck, but then on Maxwell Street, when I was growing up, developing a mouth and muscles was necessary for survival. I knew Jake had been existing out on the fringes of the rackets since then, but that was true of a lot of guys. I didn’t hold it against him. I went into one of the rackets myself, after all—known in Chicago as the police department—and I figured Jake wouldn’t hold that against me, either. Especially since I was private, now, and he wanted to hire me.

  The afternoon was bitterly cold, snow on the ground but not snowing, as I sat parked in my sporty ’32 Auburn across the street from the drug store, over which was the union hall where Jake said to meet him. The Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union, he said. I didn’t know there was one. They had unions for everything these d
ays. My pop, an old union man, would’ve been pleased. I didn’t much care.

  I went up the flight of stairs and into the outer office; the meeting room was adjacent, at my left. The place was modest, like most union halls—if you’re running a union you don’t want the rank and file to think you’re living it up—but the secretary behind the desk looked like a million. She was a brunette in a trim brown suit with big brown eyes and bright red lipstick. She’d soften the blow of paying dues any day.

  She smiled at me and I forgot it was winter. “Would you be Mr. Heller?”

  “I would. Would you be free for dinner?”

  Her smile settled in one corner of her bright red mouth. “I wouldn’t. Mr. Rubinstein is waiting for you in Mr. Martin’s office.”

  And she pointed to the only door in the wall behind her, and I gave her a can’t-blame-a-guy-for-trying look and went on in.

  The inner office wasn’t big but it seemed bigger than it was because it was under-furnished: just a clutter-free desk and a couple of chairs and two wooden file cabinets. Jake was sitting behind the desk, feet up on in, socks with clocks showing, as he read The Racing News.

  “How are you, Jake,” I said, and held out my hand.

  He put the paper down, stood and grinned and shook my hand; he was a little guy, short I mean, but he had shoulders on him and his grip was a killer. He wore a natty dark blue suit and a red hand-painted tie with a sunset on it and a hat that was a little big for him. He kept the hat on indoors—self-conscious about his thinning hair, I guess.

  “You look good, Nate. Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming yourself and not sending one of your ops.”

  “Any excuse to get back to the old neighborhood, Jake,” I said, pulling up a chair and sitting. “We’re about four blocks from where my pop’s bookshop was, you know.”

  “I know, I know,” he said, sitting again. “What do you hear from Barney these days?”

  “Not much. When did you get in the union racket, anyway? Last I heard you were a door-to-door salesman.”

  Jake shrugged. He had dark eyes and a weak chin and five o’clock shadow; make that six o’clock shadow. “A while ago,” he allowed. “But it ain’t really a racket. We’re trying to give our guys a break.”

  I smirked at him. “In this town? Billy Skidmore isn’t going to put up with a legit junk handler’s union.”

  Skidmore was a portly, dapperly dressed junk dealer and politician who controlled most of the major non-Capone gambling in town. Frank Nitti, Capone’s heir, put up with that because Skidmore was also a bailbondsmen, which made him a necessary evil.

  “Skidmore’s got troubles these days,” Jake said. “He can’t afford to push us around no more.”

  “You’re talking about the income tax thing.”

  “Yeah. Just like Capone. He didn’t pay his taxes and they got ‘im for it.”

  “They indicted him, but that doesn’t mean they got him. Anyway, where do I come in?”

  Jake leaned forward, brow beetling. “You know a guy named Leon Cooke?”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “He’s a little younger than us, but he’s from around here. He’s a lawyer. He put this union together, two, three years ago. Well, about a year back he became head of an association of junkyard dealers, and the rank and file voted him out.”

  I shrugged. “Seems reasonable. In Chicago it wouldn’t be unusual to represent both the employees and the employers, but kosher it ain’t.”

  Jake was nodding. “Right. The new president is Johnny Martin. Know him?”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “He’s been with the Sanitary District for, oh, twenty or more years.”

  The Sanitary District controlled the sewage in the city’s rivers and canals.

  “He needed a hobby,” I said, “so he ran for president of the junk handler’s union, huh?”

  “He’s a good man, Nate, he really is.”

  “What’s your job?”

  “I’m treasurer of the union.”

  “You’re the collector, then.”

  “Well…yeah. Does it show?”

  “I just didn’t figure you for the accountant type.”

  He smiled sheepishly. “Every union needs a little muscle. Anyways, Cooke. He’s trying to stir things up, we think. He isn’t even legal counsel for the union anymore, but he’s been coming to meetings, hanging around. We think he’s been going around talking to the members.”

  “Got an election coming up?”

  “Yeah. We want to know who he’s talking to. We want to know if anybody’s backing him.”

  “You think Nitti’s people might be using him for a front?”

  “Could be. Maybe even Skidmore. Playing both ends against the middle is Cooke’s style. Anyways, can you shadow him and find out?”

  “For fifteen a day and expenses, I can.”

  “Isn’t that a little steep, Nate?”

  “What’s the monthly take on union dues around this joint?”

  “Fifteen a day’s fine,” Jake said, shaking his head side to side, smiling.

  “And expenses.”

  The door opened and the secretary came in, quickly, her silk stockings flashing.

  “Mr. Rubinstein,” she said, visibly upset, “Mr. Cooke is in the outer office. Demanding to see Mr. Martin.”

  “Shit,” Jake said through his teeth. He glanced at me. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  We followed the secretary into the outer office, where Cooke, a man of medium size in an off-the-rack brown suit, was pacing. A heavy top coat was slung over his arm. In his late twenties, with thinning brown hair, Cooke was rather mild looking, with wire-rim glasses and cupid lips. Nonetheless, he was well and truly pissed off.

  “Where’s that bastard Martin?” he demanded of Jake. Not at all intimidated by the little strongarm man.

  “He stepped out,” Jake said.

  “Then I’ll wait. Till hell freezes over, if necessary.”

  Judging by the weather, that wouldn’t be long.

  “If you’ll excuse us,” Jake said, brushing by him. I followed.

  “Who’s this?” Cooke said, meaning me. “A new member of your goon squad? Isn’t Fontana enough for you?”

  Jake ignored that and I followed him down the steps to the street.

  “He didn’t mean Carlos Fontana, did he?” I asked.

  Jake nodded. His breath was smoking, teeth chattering. He wasn’t wearing a topcoat; we’d left too quick for such niceties.

  “Fontana’s a pretty rough boy,” I said.

  “A lot of people who was in bootlegging,” Jake said, shrugging, “had to go straight. What are you gonna do now?”

  “I’ll use the phone booth in the drug store to get one of my ops out here to shadow Cooke. I’ll keep watch till then. He got enough of a look at me that I don’t dare shadow him myself.”

  Jake nodded. “I’m gonna go call Martin.”

  “And tell him to stay away?”

  “That’s up to him.”

  I shook my head. “Cooke seemed pretty mad.”

  “He’s an asshole.”

  And Jake walked quickly down to a parked black Ford coupe, got in, and smoked off.

  I called the office and told my secretary to send either Lou or Frankie out as soon as possible, whoever was available first; then I sat in the Auburn and waited.

  Not five minutes later a heavy-set, dark-haired man in a camel’s hair topcoat went in and up the union-hall stairs. I had a hunch it was Martin. More than a hunch: he looked well and truly pissed off, too.

  I could smell trouble.

  I probably should have sat it out, but I got out of the Auburn and crossed Roosevelt and went up those stairs myself. The secretary was standing behind the desk. She was scared shitless. She looked about an inch away from crying.

  Neither man was in the anteroom, but from behind the closed door came the sounds of loud voices.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  �
�That awful Mr. Cooke was in using Johnny…Mr. Martin’s telephone, in his office, when Mr. Martin arrived.”

  They were scuffling in there, now.

  “Any objection if I go in there and break that up?” I asked her.

  “None at all,” she said.

  That was when we heard the shots.

  Three of them, in rapid succession.

  The secretary sucked in breath, covered her mouth, said, “My God…my God.”

  And I didn’t have a gun, goddamnit.

  I was still trying to figure out whether to go in there or not when the burly, dark-haired guy who I assumed (rightly) to be Martin, still in the camel’s hair topcoat, came out with a blue-steel revolver in his hand. Smoke was curling out the barrel.

  “Johnny, Johnny,” the secretary said, going to him, clinging to him. “Are you all right?”

  “Never better,” he said, but his voice was shaking. He scowled over at me; he had bushy black eyebrows that made the scowl frightening. And the gun helped. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Nate Heller. I’m a dick Jake Rubinstein hired to shadow Leon Cooke.”

  Martin nodded his head back toward the office. “Well, if you want to get started, he’s on the floor in there.”

  I went into the office and Cooke was on his stomach; he wasn’t dead yet. He had a bullet in the side; the other two slugs went through the heavy coat that had been slung over his arm.

  “I had to do it,” Martin said. “He jumped me. He attacked me.”

  “We better call an ambulance,” I said.

  “So, then, we can’t just dump his body somewhere,” Martin said, thoughtfully.

  “I was hired to shadow this guy,” I said. “It starts and ends there. You want something covered up, call a cop.”

  “How much money you got on you?” Martin said. He wasn’t talking to me.

  The secretary said, “Maybe a hundred.”

  “That’ll hold us. Come on.”

  He led her through the office and opened a window behind his desk. In a very gentlemanly manner, he helped her out onto the fire escape.

  And they were gone.

  I helped Cooke onto his feet.