Max Allan Collins

Dying in the Post-War World

1

Life was pretty much perfect.

I had a brand-new brown-brick G.I. Bill bungalow in quietly suburban Lincolnwood; Peggy, my wife since December of last year, was ripely pregnant; I’d bribed a North Side car dealer into getting one of the first new Plymouths; and I’d just moved the A-1 Detective Agency into the prestigious old Rookery Building in the Loop.

True, business was a little slow — a good share of A-1’s trade, over the years, has been divorce work, and nobody was getting divorced right now. It was July of 1947, and former soldiers and their blushing brides were still fucking, not fighting, but that would come. I was patient. In the meantime, there were plenty of credit checks to run. People were spending dough, chasing after their post-war dreams.

Sunlight was filtering in through the sheer curtains of our little bedroom, teasing my beautiful wife into wakefulness. I was already up — it was a quarter to eight, and I tried to be in to work by nine (when you’re the boss, punctuality is optional). I was standing near the bed, snugging my tie, when Peg looked up at me through slits.

“I put the coffee on,” I said. “I can scramble you some eggs, if you like. Fancier than that, you’re on your own.”

“What time is it?” She sat up; the covers slid down the slope of her tummy. Her swollen breasts poked at the gathered top of her nightgown.

I told her the time, even though a clock was on the nightstand nearby.

She swallowed thickly. Blinked. Peg’s skin was pale, translucent; a faint trail of freckles decorated a pert nose. Her eyebrows were thick, her eyes big and violet. Without makeup, her dark brown curly locks a mess, seven months pregnant, first thing in the morning, she was gorgeous.

She, of course, didn’t think so. She had told me repeatedly, for the last two months — when her pregnancy had begun to make itself blatantly obvious — that she looked hideous and bloated. Less than ten years ago, she’d been an artist’s model; just a year ago, she’d been a smartly dressed young businesswoman. Now, she was a pregnant housewife, and not a happy one.

That was why I’d been making breakfast for the last several weeks.

Out in the hall, the phone rang.

“I’ll get it,” I said.

She nodded; she was sitting on the bed, easing her swollen feet into pink slippers, a task she was approaching with the care and precision of a bomb-squad guy removing a detonator.

I got it on the third ring. “This is Heller,” I said.

“Nate... this is Bob.”

I didn’t recognize the voice, but I recognized the tone: desperation, with some despair mixed in.

“Bob...?”

“Bob Keenan,” the tremulous voice said.

“Oh! Bob.” And I immediately wondered why Bob Keenan, who just a passing acquaintance, would be calling me at home, first thing in the morning. Keenan was a friend and client of an attorney I did work for, and I’d had lunch with both of them, at Binyon’s, around the corner from my old office on Van Buren, perhaps four times over the past six months. That was the extent of it.

“I hate to bother you at home... but something... something awful’s happened. You’re the only person I could think of who can help me. Can you come, straightaway?”

“Bob, do you want to talk about this?”

“Not on the phone! Come right away. Please?”

That last word was a tortured cry for help.

I couldn’t turn him down. Whatever was up, this guy was hurting. Besides which, Keenan was well off — he was one of the top administrators at the Office of Price Administration. So there might be some dough in it.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

He gave me the address (of his home), and I wrote it down and hung up; went out in the kitchen, where Peg sat in her white terry cloth bathrobe, staring over her black coffee.

“Can you fix yourself something, honey?” I asked. “I’m going to have to skip breakfast.”

Peg looked at me hollow-eyed.

“I want a divorce,” she said.

I swallowed. “Well, maybe I do have time to fix you a little breakfast.”

She looked at me hard. “I’m not kidding, Nate. I want a divorce.”

I nodded. Sighed, and said, “We’ll talk about it later.”

She looked away. Sipped her coffee. “Let’s do that,” she said.

I slipped on my suit coat and went out into the bright, sunny day. Birds were chirping. From down the street came the gentle whir of a lawn mower. It would be hot later, but right now it was pleasant, even a little cool.

The dark blue Plymouth was at the curb and I went to it. Well, maybe this wasn’t all bad: maybe this meant A-1’s business would be picking up, now that divorce had finally come home from the war.

2

The house — mansion, really — had been once belonged to a guy named Murphy who invented the bed of the same name, one of which I had slept in many a night, back when my office and my apartment were one and the same. But the rectangular cream-color brick building, wearing its jaunty green hat of a roof, had long ago been turned into a two-family dwelling.

Nonetheless, it was an impressive residence, with a sloping lawn and a twin-pillared entrance, just a block from the lake on the far North Side. And the Keenan family had a whole floor to themselves, the first, with seven spacious rooms. Bob Keenan was doing all right, with his OPA position.

Only right now he wasn’t doing so good.

He met me at the front door; in shirtsleeves, no tie, his fleshy face long and pale, eyes wide with worry. He was around forty, but something, this morning, had added an immediate extra ten years.

“Thank you, Nate,” he said, grasping my hand eagerly, “thank you for coming.”

“Sure, Bob,” I said.

He ushered me through the nicely but not lavishly furnished apartment like a guy with the flu showing a plumber where the busted toilet was.

“Look in here,” he said, and he held his palm out. I entered what was clearly a child’s room, a little girl’s room. Pink floral wallpaper, a graceful tiny wooden bed, slippers on the rug nearby, sheer feminine curtains, a toy chest on which various dolls sat like sweetly obedient children.

I shrugged. “What...?”

“This is JoAnn’s room,” he said, as if that explained it.

“Your little girl?”

He nodded. “The younger of my two girls. Jane’s with her mother in the kitchen.”

The bed was unmade; the window was open. Lake wind whispered in.

“Where’s JoAnn, Bob?” I asked.

“Gone,” he said. He swallowed thickly. “Look at this.”

He walked to the window; pointed to a scrap of paper on the floor. I walked there, knelt. I did not pick up the greasy scrap of foolscap. I didn’t have to, to read the crudely printed words there:

“Get $20,000 Ready & Waite for Word. Do Not Notify FBI or Police. Bills in 5’s and 10’s. Burn this for her safty!”

I stood and sucked in some air; hands on hips, I looked into Bob Keenan’s wide, red, desperate eyes and said, “You haven’t called the cops?”

“No. Or the FBI. I called you.”

Sounding more irritable than I meant to, I said, “For Christ’s sake, why?”

“The note said no police. I needed help. I may need an intermediary. I sure as hell need somebody who knows his way around this kind of thing.”

I gestured with open, raised palms, like a mime making a wall. “Don’t touch anything. Have you touched anything?”

“No. Not even the note.”

“Good. Good.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “Now, just take it easy, Bob. Let’s go sit in the living room.”

I walked him in there, hand never leaving his shoulder.

“Okay,” I said gently, “why exactly did you call me?”

He was next to me on the couch, sitting slumped, staring downward, legs apart, hands clasped. He was a big man — not fat: big.

He shrugged. “I knew you worked on the Lindbergh case.”

Yeah, and hadn’t that worked out swell.

“I was a cop, then,” I said. “I was the liaison between the Chicago PD and the New Jersey authorities. And that was a long time ago.”

“Well, Ken mentioned it once.”

“Did you call Ken before you called me? Did he suggest you call me?”

Ken was the attorney who was our mutual friend and business associate.

“No. Nate... to be quite frank with you, I called because, well... you’re supposed to be connected.”

I sighed. “I’ve had dealings with the Outfit from time to time, but I’m no gangster, Bob, and even if I was...”

“I didn’t mean that! If you were a gangster, do you think I would have called you?”

“I’m not understanding this, Bob.”

His wife, Norma, entered the room tentatively; she was a pretty, petite woman in a floral-print dress that was like a darker version of the wallpaper in her little girl’s room. Her pleasant features were distorted; there was a wildness in her face. She hadn’t cried yet. She was too upset.

I stood. If I’d ever felt more awkward, I couldn’t remember when.

“Is everything all right, Bob? Is this your detective friend?”

“Yes. This is Nate Heller.”

She came to me and gave me a skull-like smile. “Thank for you coming. Oh, thank you so much for coming. Can you help us?”

“Yes,” I said. It was the only thing I could say.

Relief filled her chest and filtered up through her face; but her eyes remained wild.

“Please go sit with Jane,” Bob said, patting her arm. He looked at me as if an explanation were necessary. “Jane and her little sister are so very close. She and JoAnn are only two years apart.”

I nodded, and the wife went hurriedly away, as if rushing to make sure Jane were still there.

We sat back down.

“I know you’ve had dealings with the mob,” Keenan said. “The problem is... so I have I. Or actually, the problem is, I haven’t.”

“Pardon?”

He sighed and shook his head. “I only moved here six months ago. I’d been second-in-command in the New York office. In Albany.”

“Of the OPA, you mean?”

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “I guess I don’t have to tell you the pressures a person in my position is under. We’re in charge of everything from building and industrial materials to meat to gasoline to... well. Anyway. I didn’t play ball with the mobsters out there. There were threats against me, against my family, but I didn’t take their money. I asked for a transfer. I was sent here.”

Chicago? That was a hell of a place to hide from mobsters.

He read the thought in my face.

“I know,” he said, raising an eyebrow, “but I wasn’t given a choice in the matter. Oddly, none of that type of people have contacted me here. But then, things are winding down... rationing’s all but a thing of the past.” He laughed mirthlessly. “That’s the irony. The sad goddamn irony.”

“What is?”

He was shaking his head. “The announcement will be made later this week: the OPA is out of business. They’re shutting us down. I’m moving over to a Department of Agriculture position.”

“I see.” I let out another sigh; it was that kind of situation. “So, because the note said not to notify the authorities, and because you’ve had threats from gangsters before, you called me in.”

I had my hands on my knees; he placed his hand over my nearest one, and squeezed. It was an earnest gesture, and embarrassed hell out of me.

“You’ve got to help us,” he said.

“I will. I will. I’ll be glad to serve as an intermediary, and I’ll be glad to advise you and do whatever you think will be useful.”

“Thank God,” he said.

“But first we call the cops.”

“What...?”

“Are you a gambling man, Bob?”

“Well, yes, I suppose, in a small way, but not with my daughter’s life, for God’s sake!”

“I know what the odds are in a case like this. In a case like this, children are recovered unharmed more frequently when the police and FBI are brought in.”

“But the note said...”

“How old is JoAnn?”

“She’s six.”

“That’s old enough for her to be able to describe her kidnappers. That’s old enough for her to pick them out of a lineup.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Bob.” And now I reached over and clasped his hand. He looked at me with haunted, watery eyes. “Kidnapping’s a federal offense, Bob. It’s a capital crime.”

He swallowed. “Then they’ll probably kill her, won’t they? If she isn’t dead already.”

“Your chances are better with the authorities in on it. We’ll work it from both ends: negotiate with the kidnappers, even as the cops are beating the bushes trying to find the bastards. And JoAnn.”

“If she’s not already dead,” he said.

I just looked at him. Then I nodded.

He began to weep.

I patted his back, gently. There there. There there.

3

The first cop to arrive was Detective Kruger from Summerdale District station; he was a stocky man in a rumpled suit with an equally rumpled face. His was the naturally mournful countenance of a hound. He looked a little more mournful than usual as he glanced around the child’s bedroom.

Keenan was tagging along, pointing things out. “That window,” he said, “I only had it open maybe five inches, last night, to let in the breeze. But now it’s wide open.”

Kruger nodded, taking it all in.

“And the bed-clothes — JoAnn would never fold them back neatly like that.”

Kruger looked at Keenan with eyes that were sharp in the folds of his face. “You heard nothin’ unusual last night?”

Keenan flinched, almost as if embarrassed. “Well... my wife did.”

“Could I speak to her?”

“Not just yet. Not just yet.”

“Bob,” I said, prompting him, trying not to intrude on Kruger but wanting to be of help, “what did Norma hear?”

“She heard the neighbor’s dog barking — sometime after midnight. She sat up in bed, wide awake, thought she heard JoAnn’s voice. Went to JoAnn’s door, listened, didn’t hear anything... and went back to bed.”

Kruger nodded somberly.

“Please don’t ask her about it,” Keenan said. “She’s blaming herself.”

We all knew that was foolish of her; but we all also knew there was nothing to done about it.

The Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory team arrived, as did the photographer attached to Homicide, and soon the place was swarming with suits and ties. Kruger, who I knew a little, which was why I’d asked for him specifically when I called the Summerdale station, buttonholed me.

“Look, Heller,” he said pleasantly, brushing something off the shoulder of my suit coat. “I know you’re a good man, but there’s people on the force who think you smell.”

A long time ago, I had testified against a couple of crooked cops — crooked even by Chicago standards. By my standards, even. But cops, like crooks, weren’t supposed to rat each other out; and even fifteen years later that put me on a lot of shit lists.

“I’ll try to stay downwind,” I said.

“Good idea. When the feds show, they’re not going to relish havin’ a private eye on the scene, either.”

“I’m only here because Bob Keenan wants me.”

“I think he needs you here,” Kruger said, nodding, “for his peace of mind. Just stay on the sidelines.”

I nodded back.

Kruger had turned to move on, when as an afterthought he looked back and said, “Hey, uh — sorry about your pal Drury. That’s a goddamn shame.”

I’d worked with Bill Drury on the pickpocket detail back in the early ’30s; he was that rare Chicago animal: an honest cop. He also had an obsessive hatred for the Outfit, which had gotten him in trouble. He was currently on suspension. “Let that be a lesson to you,” I said cheerfully. “That’s what happens to cops who do their jobs.”

Kruger shrugged and shambled off, to oversee the forensic boys.

The day was a long one. The FBI arrived in all their officious glory; but they were efficient, putting a tape recorder on the phone, in case a ransom call should come in. Reporters got wind of the kidnapping, but outside the boys in blue roped off the area and were keeping them out for now — a crime lab team was making plaster impressions of footprints and probable ladder indentations under the bedroom window. A radio station crew was allowed to come in so Bob could record pleas to the kidnappers (“She’s just a little girl... please don’t hurt her... she was only wearing her pajamas, so wrap a blanket around her, please”). Beyond the fingerprinting and photos, the only real police work I witnessed was a brief interrogation of the maid of the family upstairs; a colored girl named Leona, she reported hearing JoAnn say, “I’m sleepy,” around half past midnight. Leona’s room was directly above the girl’s.

Kruger came over and sat on the couch next to me, around lunchtime. “Want to grab a bite somewhere, Heller?”

“Sure.”

He drove me to a corner café four blocks away and we sat at the counter. “We found a ladder,” he said. “In a backyard a few houses to the south of Keenan’s.”

“Yeah? Does it match the indentations in the ground?”

Kruger nodded.

“Any scratches on the bricks near the window?”

Kruger nodded again. “Matches those, too. Ladder was a little short.”

The first-floor window was seven and a half feet off the ground; the basement windows of the building were mostly exposed, in typical Chicago fashion.

“Funny thing,” Kruger said. “Ladder had a broken rung.”

“A broken rung? Jesus. Just like...” I cut myself off.

“Like the Lindbergh case,” Kruger said. “You worked that, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“They killed that kid, didn’t they?”

“That’s the story.”

“This one’s dead, too, isn’t she?”

The waitress came and poured us coffee.

“Probably,” I said.

“Keenan thinks maybe the Outfit’s behind this,” Kruger said.

“I know he does.”

“What do you think, Heller?”

I laughed humorlessly. “Not in a million years. This is an amateur, and a stupid one.”

“Oh?”

“Who else would risk the hot seat for twenty grand?”

He considered that briefly. “You know, Heller — Keenan’s made some unpopular decisions on the OPA board.”

“Not unpopular enough to warrant something like this.”

“I suppose.” He was sugaring his coffee — overdoing it, now that sugar wasn’t so scarce. His hound-dog face studied the swirling coffee as his spoon churned it up. “How do you haul a kid out of her room in the middle of the night without causing a stir?”

“I can think of two ways.”

“Yeah?”

“It was somebody who knew her, and she went willingly, trustingly.”

“Yeah.”

“Or,” I said, “they killed her in bed, and carried her out like a sack of sugar.”

Kruger swallowed thickly; then he raised his coffee and sipped. “Yeah,” he said.

4

I left Kruger at the counter where he was working on a big slice of apple pie, and used a pay phone to call home.

“Nate,” Peg said, before I’d had a chance to say anything, “don’t you know that fellow Keenan? Robert Keenan?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I just heard him on the radio,” she said. Her voice sounded both urgent and upset. “His daughter...”

“I know,” I said. “Bob Keenan is who called me this morning. He called me before he called the police.”

There was a pause. Then: “Are you working on the case?”

“Yes. Sort of. The cops and the FBI, it’s their baby.” Poor choice of words. I moved ahead quickly: “But Bob wants me around. In case an intermediary is needed or something.”

“Nate, you’ve got to help him. You’ve got to help him get his little girl back.”

This morning was forgotten. No talk of divorce now. Just a pregnant mother frightened by the radio, wanting some reassurance from her man. Wanting him to tell her that this glorious post-war world really was a wonderful, safe place to bring a child into.

“I’ll try, Peg. I’ll try. Don’t wait supper for me.”

That afternoon, a pair of plainclothes men gave Kruger a sobering report. They stayed out of Keenan’s earshot, but Kruger didn’t seem to mind my eavesdropping.

They — and several dozen more plainclothes dicks — had been combing the neighborhood, talking to neighbors and specifically to the janitors of the many apartment buildings in the area. One of these janitors had found something disturbing in his basement laundry room.

“Blood smears in a laundry tub,” a thin young detective told Kruger.

“And a storage locker that had been broken into,” his older, but just as skinny partner said. “Some shopping bags scattered around — and some rags that were stained, too. Reddish-brown stains.”

Kruger stared at the floor. “Let’s get a forensic team over there.”

The detectives nodded, and went off to do that.

Mrs. Keenan and ten-year-old Jane were upstairs, at the neighbors’, through all of this; but Bob stayed right there, at the phone, waiting for it to ring. It didn’t.

I stayed pretty close to him, though I circulated from time to time, picking up on what the detectives were saying. The mood was grim. I drank a lot of coffee, till I started feeling jumpy, then backed off.

Late afternoon, Kruger caught my eye and I went over to him.

“That basement with the laundry tubs,” he said quietly. “In one of the drains, there were traces of blood, chips of bone, fragments of flesh, little clumps of hair.”

“Oh God.”

“I’m advising Chief of Detectives Storms to send teams out looking.”

“Looking for what?”

“What do you think?”

“God.”

“Heller, I want to get started right now. I can use you. Give Keenan some excuse.”

I went over to Bob, who sat on the edge of a straight-backed chair by the phone stand. His glazed eyes were fixed on the phone.

“I’m going to run home for supper,” I told him. “Little woman’s in the family way, you know, and I got to check in with her or get in dutch. Can you hold down the fort?”

“Sure, Nate. Sure. You’ll come back, though?”

I patted his shoulder. “I’ll come right back.”

Kruger and I paired up; half a dozen other teams, made up of plainclothes and uniformed men already at the scene, went out into the field as well. More were on the way. We were to look under every porch, behind every bush, in every basement, in every coal bin, trash can, any possible hiding place where a little body — or what was left of one — might be stowed.

“We’ll check the sewers, too,” Kruger said, as we walked down the sidewalk. It was dusk now; the streetlamps had just come on. Coolness off the lake helped you forget it was July. The city seemed washed in gray-blue, but night hadn’t stolen away the clarity of day.

I kept lifting manhole covers and Kruger would cast the beam of his flashlight down inside, but we saw nothing but muck.

“Let’s not forget the catch basins,” I said.

“Good point.”

We began checking those as well, and in the passageway between two brick apartment buildings directly across from the similar building that housed those bloody laundry tubs, the circular iron catch-basin lid — like a manhole cover, but smaller — looked loose.

“Somebody opened that recently,” Kruger said. His voice was quiet but the words were ominous in the stillness of the darkening night.

“We need something to pry it up a little,” I said, kneeling. “Can’t get my fingers under it.”

“Here,” Kruger said. He plucked the badge off the breast pocket of his jacket and, bending down, used the point of the star to pry the lid up to where I could wedge my fingers under it.

I slid the heavy iron cover away, and Kruger tossed the beam of the flashlight into the hole.

A face looked up at us.

A child’s face, framed in blonde, muck-dampened, darkened hair.

“It looks like a doll,” Kruger said. He sounded out of breath.

“That’s no doll,” I said, and backed away, knowing I’d done as my wife had requested: I’d found Bob Keenan’s little girl.

Part of her, anyway.

5

We fished the little head out of the sewer; how, exactly, I’d rather not go into. It involved the handle of a broom we borrowed from the janitor of one of the adjacent buildings.

Afterward, I leaned against the bricks in the alleylike passageway, my back turned away from what we’d found. Kruger tapped me on the shoulder.

“You all right, Heller?”

Uniformed men were guarding the head, which rested on some newspapers we’d spread out on the cement near the catch basin; they were staring down at it like it was some bizarre artifact of a primitive culture.

“About lost my lunch,” I said.

“You’re white as an Irishman’s ass.”

“I’m okay.”

Kruger lighted up a cigarette; its amber eye glowed.

“Got another of those?” I asked.

“Sure.” He got out a deck of Lucky Strikes. Shook one out for me. I took it hungrily and he thumbed a flame on his Zippo and lit me up. “Never saw you smoke before, Heller.”

“Hardly ever do. I used to, overseas. Everybody did, over there.”

“I bet. You were on Guadalcanal, I hear.”

“Yeah.”

“Pretty rough?”

“I thought so till tonight.”

He nodded. “I made a call. Keenan’s assistant, guy that runs the ration board, he’s on his way. To make the ID. Can’t put the father through that shit.”

“You’re thinking, Kruger,” I said, sucking on the cigarette. “You’re all right.”

He grunted noncommittally and went over to greet various cops, uniform and plainclothes, who were arriving; I stayed off to one side, back to the brick wall, smoking my cigarette.

The janitor we’d borrowed the broom from sought me out. He was a thick-necked, white-haired guy in his early fifties; he wore coveralls over a flannel shirt rolled up at the sleeves.

“So sad,” he said. His face was as German as his accent.

“What’s on your mind, pop?”

“I saw something.”

“Oh?”

“Maybe is not important.”

I called Lt. Kruger over, to let him decide.

“About five this morning,” the bull-necked janitor said, “I put out some trash. I see man in brown raincoat walking. His head, it was down, inside his collar, like it was cold outside, only it was not cold and not raining, either. He carry shopping bag.”

Kruger and I exchanged sharp glances.

“Where did you see this man walking, exactly?” Kruger asked the janitor.

The stocky Kraut led us into the street; he pointed diagonally — right at the brick mansion where the Keenans lived. “He cut across that lawn, and walk west.”

“What’s your name, pop?” I asked.

“Otto. Otto Bergstrum.”

Kruger gave Otto the janitor over to a pair of plainclothes dicks and they escorted him off to Summerdale District station to take a formal statement.

“Could be a break,” Kruger said.

“Could be,” I said.

Keenan’s OPA coworker, Walter Munsen, a heavy-set fellow in his late forties, was allowed through the wall of blue uniforms to look at the chubby-cheeked head on the spread-out papers. It looked up at him, its sweet face nicked with cuts, its neck a ragged thing. He said, “Sweet Jesus. That’s her. That’s little JoAnn.”

That was good enough for Kruger.

We walked back to the Keenan place. A starless, moonless night had settled on the city, as if God wanted to blot out what man had done. It didn’t work. The flashing red lights of squad cars, and the beams of cars belonging to the morbidly curious, fought the darkness. Reporters and neighbors infested the sidewalks in front of the Keenan place. Word of our grim discovery had spread — but not to Keenan himself.

At the front door, Kruger said, “I’d like you to break it to him, Heller.”

“Me? Why the hell me?”

“You’re his friend. You’re who he called. He’ll take it better from you.”

“Bullshit. There’s no ‘better’ in this.”

But I did the deed.

We stood in one corner of the living room. Kruger was at my side, but I did the talking. Keenan’s wife was still upstairs at the neighbors. I put a hand on his shoulder and said, “It’s not good, Bob.”

He already knew from my face. Still, he had to say: “Is she dead?” Then he answered his own question: “You’ve found her, and she’s dead.”

I nodded.

“Dear lord. Dear lord.” He dropped to one knee, as if praying; but he wasn’t.

I braced his shoulder. He seemed to want to get back on his feet, so I helped him do that.

He stood there with his head hung and said, “Let me tell JoAnn’s mother myself.”

“Bob — there’s more.”

“More? How can there be more?”

“I said it was bad. After she was killed, whoever did it disposed of her body by...” God! What words were there to say this? How do you cushion a goddamn fucking blow like this?

“Nate? What, Nate?”

“She was dismembered, Bob.”

“Dismembered...?”

Better me than some reporter. “I found her head in a sewer catch basin about a block from here.”

He just looked at me, eyes white all around; shaking his head, trying to make sense of the words.

Then he turned and faced the wall; hands in his pockets.

“Don’t tell Norma,” he said, finally.

“We have to tell her,” Kruger said, as kindly as he could. “She’s going to hear soon enough.”

He turned and looked at me; his face was streaked with tears. “I mean... don’t tell her about... the... dismembering part.”

“Somebody’s got to tell her,” Kruger insisted.

“Call their parish priest,” I told Kruger, and he bobbed his dour hound-dog head.

The priest — Father O’Shea of St. Gertrude’s church — arrived just as Mrs. Keenan was being ushered back into her apartment. Keenan took his wife by the arm and walked her to the sofa; she was looking at her silent husband’s tragic countenance with alarm.

The priest, a little white-haired fellow with Bible and rosary in hand, said, “How strong is your faith, my child?”

Keenan was sitting next to her; he squeezed her hand, and she looked up with clear eyes, but her lips were trembling. “My faith is strong, father.”

The priest paused, trying to find the words. I knew the feeling.

“Is she all right, father?” Norma Keenan asked. The last vestiges of hope clung to the question.

The priest shook his head no.

“Is... is she hurt?”

The priest shook his head no.

Norma Keenan knew what that meant. She stared at nothing for several long moments. Then she looked up again, but the eyes were cloudy now. “Did they...” She began again. “Was she... disfigured?”

The priest swallowed.

I said, “No she wasn’t, Mrs. Keenan.”

Somebody had to have the decency to lie to the woman.

“Thank God,” Norma Keenan said. “Thank God.”

She began to sob, and her husband hugged her desperately.

6

Just before ten that night, a plainclothes team found JoAnn’s left leg in another catch basin. Less than half an hour later, the same team checked a manhole nearby and found her right leg in a shopping bag.

Not long after, the torso turned up — in a sewer gutter, bundled in a fifty-pound cloth sugar bag.

Word of these discoveries rocketed back to the Keenan apartment, which had begun to fill with mucky-mucks — the Police Commissioner, the Chief of Detectives and his Deputy Chief, the head of the homicide detail, the Coroner and, briefly, the Mayor. The State’s Attorney and his right-hand investigator, Captain Daniel “Tubbo” Gilbert, came and stayed.

The big shots showing didn’t surprise me, with a headline-bound crime like this. But the arrival of Tubbo Gilbert, who was Outfit all the way, was unsettling — considering Bob Keenan’s early concerns about mob involvement.

“Heller,” well-dressed Tubbo said amiably, “what rock did you crawl out from under?”

Tubbo looked exactly like his name sounded.

“Excuse me,” I said, and brushed past him.

It was time for me to fade.

I went to Bob to say my good-byes. He was seated on the couch, talking to several FBI men; his wife was upstairs, at the neighbors again, under sedation.

“Nate,” Keenan said, standing, patting the air with one hand, his bloodshot eyes beseeching me, “before you go... I need a word. Please.”

“Sure.”

We ducked into the bathroom. He shut the door. My eyes caught a child’s yellow rubber duck on the edge of the claw-footed tub.

“I want you to stay on the job,” Keenan said.

“Bob, every cop in town is going to be on this case. The last thing you need, or they want, is a private detective in the way.”

“Did you see who was out there?”

“A lot of people. Some very good people, mostly.”

“That fellow Tubbo Gilbert. I know about him. I was warned about him. They call him ‘the Richest Cop in Chicago,’ don’t they?”

“That’s true.” And that was saying something, in Chicago.

Keenan’s eyes narrowed. “He’s in with the gangsters.”

“He’s in with a lot of people, Bob, but...”

“I’ll write you a check...” And he withdrew a checkbook from his pants pocket and knelt at the toilet and began filling a check out, frantically, using the lid as a writing table.

This was as embarrassing as it was sad. “Bob... please don’t do this...”

He stood and handed me a check for one thousand dollars. The ink glistened wetly.

“It’s a retainer,” he said. “All I want from you is to keep an eye on the case. Keep these Chicago cops honest.”

That was a contradiction of terms, but I let it pass.

“Okay,” I said, and folded the check up and slipped it in my pocket, smearing the ink, probably. I didn’t think I’d be keeping it, but the best thing to do right now was just take it.

He pumped my hand and his smile was an awful thing. “Thank you, Nate. God bless you, Nate. Thank you for everything, Nate.”

We exited the bathroom and everybody eyed us strangely, as if wondering if we were perverts. Many of these cops didn’t like me much, and were glad to see me go.

Outside, several reporters recognized me and called out. I ignored them as I moved toward my parked Plymouth; I hoped I wasn’t blocked in. Hal Davis of the News, a small man with a big head, bright-eyed and boyish despite his fifty-some years, tagged along.

“You want to make an easy C-note?” Davis said.

“Why I’m fine, Hal. How are you?”

“I hear you were the one that fished the kid’s noggin outa the shit soup.”

“That’s touching, Hal. Sometimes I wonder why you haven’t won a Pulitzer yet, with your way with words.”

“I want the exclusive interview.”

I walked faster. “Fuck you.”

“Two C’s.”

I stopped. “Five.”

“Christ! Success has gone to your head, Heller.”

“I might do better elsewhere. What’s the hell’s that all about?”

In the alley behind the Keenan house, some cops were holding reporters back while a crime-scene photographer faced a wooden fence, flashbulbs popping, making little explosions in the night.

“Damned if I know,” Davis said, and was right behind me as I moved quickly closer.

The cops kept us back, but we could see it, all right. Written on the fence, in crude red lettering, were the words: “Stop me before I kill more.”

“Jesus Christ,” Davis said, all banjo-eyed. “Is that who did this? The goddamn lipstick Killer?”

“The Lipstick Killer,” I repeated numbly.

Was that who did this?

7

The Lipstick Killer, as the press had termed him, had hit the headlines for the first time last January.

Mrs. Caroline Williams, an attractive forty-year-old widow with a somewhat shady past, was found nude and dead in bed in her modest North Side apartment. A red skirt and a nylon stocking were tied tightly around the throat of the voluptuous brunette corpse. There had been a struggle, apparently — the room was topsy-turvy. Mrs. Williams had been beaten, her face bruised, battered.

She’d bled to death from a slashed throat, and the bed was soaked red; but she was oddly clean. Underneath the tightly tied red dress and nylon, the coroner found an adhesive bandage over the neck wound.

The tub in the bathroom was filled with bloody water and the victim’s clothing, as if wash were soaking.

A suspect — an armed robber who was the widow’s latest gentleman friend — was promptly cleared. Caroline Williams had been married three times, leaving two divorced husbands and one dead one. Her ex-husbands had unshakable alibis, particularly the latter.

The case faded from the papers, and dead-ended for the cops.

Then just a little over a month ago, a similar crime — apparently, even obviously, committed by the same hand — had rattled the city’s cage. Mrs. Williams, who’d gotten around after all, had seemed the victim of a crime of passion. But when Margaret Johnson met a disturbingly similar fate, Chicago knew it had a madman at large.

Margaret Johnson — her friends called her Peggy (my wife’s nickname) — was twenty-nine years old and a beauty. A well-liked, churchgoing small-town girl, she’d just completed three years of war service with the Waves to go to work in the office of a business machine company in the Loop. She was found nude and dead in her small flat in a North Side residential hotel.

When a hotel maid found her, Miss Johnson was slumped, kneeling, at the bathtub, head over the tub. Her hair was wrapped turban-like in a towel, her pajama top tied loosely around her neck, through which a bread knife had been driven with enough force to go in one side and poke out the other.

She’d also been shot — once in the head, again in the arm. Her palms were cut, presumably from trying to wrest the knife from the killer’s hand.

The blood had been washed from the ex-Wave’s body. Damp, bloody towels were scattered about the bathroom floor. The outer room of the small apartment was a shambles, bloodstains everywhere. Most significantly, fairly high up on the wall, in letters three to six inches tall, printed in red with the victim’s lipstick, were the words:

FOR HEAVENS

SAKE CATCH ME

BEFORE I KILL MORE

I CANNOT CONTROL MYSELF

The cops and the papers called the Lipstick Killer (the nickname was immediate) a “sex maniac,” though neither woman had been raped. The certainty of the police in that characterization made me suspicious that something meaningful had been withheld.

I had asked Lt. Bill Drury, who before his suspension had worked the case out of Town Hall Station, and he said semen had been found on the floor in both apartments, near the windows that had apparently given the killer entry in either flat.

What we had here was a guy who needed one hell of a visual aid to jack off.

What these two slain women had in common with the poor butchered little JoAnn Keenan, I wasn’t sure, other than violent death at the hands of a madman with something sharp; the body parts of the child were largely drained of blood. That was about it.

But the lipstick message on that alley fence — even down to the childlike lettering — would serve to fuel the fires of this investigation even further. The papers had already been calling the Lipstick Killer “Chicago’s Jack the Ripper.” With the slaying of the kidnapped girl, the city would undoubtedly go off the deep end.

“The papers have been riding the cops for months,” I told my Peg that night, as we cuddled in bed; she was trembling in the hollow of my arm. “Calling them Keystone Kops, ridiculing the ineffectiveness of their crime lab work. And their failure to nab the Lipstick Killer has been a club the papers’ve beat ’em with.”

“You sound like you think that’s unfair,” Peg said.

“I do, actually. A lunatic can be a lot harder to catch than a career criminal. And this guy’s M.O. is all over the map.”

“M.O.?”

“The way he does his crimes, the kind of crimes he does. Even the two women he killed, there are significant differences. The second was shot, and that, despite the knife through the throat, was the cause of death. Is it okay if I talk about this?”

She nodded. She was a tough cookie.

“Anyway,” I went on, “the guy hasn’t left a single workable fingerprint.”

“Cleans up after himself,” she said.

“Half fetish,” I said, “half cautious.”

“Completely nuts.”

“Completely nuts,” I agreed. I smiled at her. It was dark in the bedroom, but I could see her sweet face, staring into nothing.

Quietly, she said, “You told your friend Bob Keenan that you’d stay on the job.”

“Yeah. I was just pacifying him.”

“You should stay on it.”

“I don’t know if I can. The cops, hell the feds, they’re not exactly going to line up for my help.”

“Since when does that kind of thing stop you? Keep on it. You’ve got to find this fiend.” She took my hand and placed it on her full tummy. “Got to.”

“Sure, Peg. Sure.”

I gave her tummy the same sort of “there there” pat I’d given Bob Keenan’s shoulder. And I felt a strange, sick gratefulness to the Lipstick Killer, suddenly: the day had begun with my wife asking for a divorce.

It had ended with me holding her, comforting her.

In this glorious post-war world, I’d take what I could get.

8

Two days later, I was treating my friend Bill Drury to lunch in that bustling Loop landmark of a restaurant, the Berghoff.

Waiters in tuxes, steaming platters of food lifted high, threaded around tables like runners on some absurd obstacle course. The patrons — mostly businessmen, though a few lady shoppers and matinee-goers were mixed in — created a din of chatter and clinking tableware that made every conversation in this wide-open space a private one.

Bill liked to eat, and had accepted my invitation eagerly, even though it had meant driving in from his home on the North Side. Even out of work, he was nattily dressed — dark blue vested suit with wide orange tie with a jeweled stickpin. His jaw jutted, his eyes were dark and sharp, his shoulders broad, his carriage intimidating. Only a pouchiness under his eyes and a touch of gray in his dark, thinning hair revealed the stress of recent months.

“I’m goddamn glad you beat the indictment,” I said.

He shrugged, buttered up a slice of rye; our Wiener Schnitzel was on the way. “There’s still this Grand Jury thing to deal with.”

“You’ll beat it,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure. Bill had, in his zeal to nail certain Outfit guys, paid at least one witness to testify. I’d been there when the deal was struck.

“In the meantime,” he said cheerfully, “I sit twiddling my thumbs at the old homestead, making the little woman nervous with my unemployed presence.”

“You want to do a little work for A-1?”

He shook his head, frowned regretfully. “I’m still a cop, Nate, suspended or not.”

“It’d be just between us girls. You still got friends at Town Hall Station, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

A waiter old enough to be our father, and looking stern enough to want to spank us, delivered our steaming platters of veal and German fried potatoes and red cabbage.

“I’m working the Keenan case,” I said, sipping my beer.

“Still? I figured you’d have dropped out by now.” He snorted a laugh. “My brother says you picked up a pretty penny for that interview.”

His brother John worked for the News.

“Davis met my price,” I shrugged. “Look, Bob Keenan seems to want me aboard. Makes him feel better. Anyway, I just intend to work the fringes.”

He was giving me his detective look. “That ten grand reward the Trib posted wouldn’t have anything to do with your decision to stick, would it?”

I smiled and cut my veal. “Maybe. You interested?”

“What can I do?”

“First of all, you can clue me in if any of your cop buddies over at Town Hall see any political strings being pulled, or any Outfit strings, either.”

He nodded and shrugged, as he chewed; that meant yes.

“Second, you worked the Lipstick killings.”

“But I got yanked off, in the middle of the second.”

“So play some catch-up ball. Go talk to your buddies. Sort through the files. See if something’s slipped through the cracks.”

His expression was skeptical. “Every cop in town is on this thing, like ugly on a monkey. What makes you think either one of us can find something they’d miss?”

“Bill,” I said pleasantly, eating my red cabbage, “we’re better detectives than they are.”

“True,” he said. He cut some more veal. “Anyway, I think they’re going down the wrong road.”

“Yeah?”

He shrugged a little. “They’re focusing on sex offenders; violent criminals. But look at the M.O. What do you make of it? Who would you look for, Nate?”

I’d thought about that a lot. I had an answer ready: “A second-story man. A cat burglar who wasn’t stealing for the dough he could find, or the goods he could fence, not primarily. But for the kicks.”

Drury looked at me with shrewd, narrowed eyes. “For the kicks. Exactly.”

“Maybe a kid. A j.d., or a j.d. who’s getting just a little older, into his twenties maybe.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Thrill-seeking is a young-at-heart kind of thing, Bill. And getting in the Johnson woman’s apartment took crawling onto a narrow ledge from a fire escape. Took some pretty tricky, almost acrobatic skills. And some recklessness.”

He held up his knife. “Plus, it takes strength to jam a bread knife through a woman’s neck.”

“I’ll have to take your word for that. But it does add up to somebody on the young side.”

He pointed the knife at me. “I was developing a list of just that kind of suspect... only I got pulled off before I could follow up.”

I’d hoped for something like this.

“Where’s that list now?”

“In my field notes,” Drury said. “But let me stop by Town Hall, and nose around a little. Before I give you anything. You want me to check around at Summerdale station, too? I got pals there.”

“No,” I said. “I already got Kruger, there. He’s going to keep me in the know.”

“Kruger’s okay,” Drury said, nodding. “But why’s he cooperating with you, Nate?”

The fried potatoes were crisp and salty and fine, but I wished I’d asked for gravy. “That reward the Trib’s promising. Cops aren’t eligible to cash in.”

“Ah,” Drury said, and drank some dark beer. “Which applies to me, as well.”

“Sure. But that’s no problem.”

“I’m an honest cop, Nate.”

“As honest as they come in this town. But you’re human. We’ll work something out, Bill, you and me.”

“We’ll start,” Bill said, pushing his plate aside, grinning like a goof, “with dessert.”

9

That night I stopped in at the funeral home on East Erie. Peg wasn’t up to it — felt funny about it, since she’d never met the Keenans; so I went alone. A cop was posted to keep curiosity seekers out, but few made the attempt — the war might have been over, but the memory of personal sorrows was fresh.

The little girl lay dressed in white satin with pink flowers at her breast; you couldn’t see the nicks on her face — she was even smiling, faintly. She looked sweetly asleep. She was arranged so that you couldn’t tell the arms were still missing.

Norma Keenan had been told, of course, what exactly had happened to her little girl. My compassionate lie had only lessened her sorrow for that first night. Unbelievably, it had gotten worse: the coroner had announced, this afternoon, that there had been “attempted rape.”

The parents wore severe black and, while family and friends stood chatting sotto voce, were seated to one side. Neither was crying. It wasn’t that they were bearing up well: it was shock.

“Thanks for coming, Nate,” Bob said, rising, and squeezed my hand. “Will you come to the Mass tomorrow?”

“Sure,” I said. It had been a long time since I’d been to Mass; my mother had been Catholic, but she died when I was young.

At St. Gertrude’s the next morning, it turned out not to be a Requiem Mass, but the Mass of the Angels, as sung by the one hundred tender voices of the children’s choir. “A song of welcome,” the priest said, “admitting another to sing before the throne of God.”

JoAnn had belonged to this choir; last Christmas, she’d played an angel in the Scared Heart school pageant.

Now she was an armless corpse in a casket at the altar rail; even the beauty of the children’s voices and faces, even the long, tapering white candles that cast a flickery golden glow on the little white coffin, couldn’t erase that from my mind. When the priest reminded those in attendance that “there is no room for vengeance in our hearts,” I bit my tongue. Speak for yourself, padre.

People wept openly, men and women alike, many hugging their own children. Some thirteen hundred had turned out for the Mass; a detail of policemen protected the Keenans as they exited the church. The crowd, however, was well behaved.

And only a handful of us were at the cemetery. The afternoon was overcast, unseasonably chilly, and the wind coursed through All Saints’ like a guilty conscience. After a last blessing of holy water from the priest, the little white casket was lowered into a tiny grave protected by a solitary maple. Flowers banking the grave fluttered and danced in the breeze.

I didn’t allow myself to cry, not at first. I told myself Keenan was an acquaintance, not a friend; I reminded myself that I had never met the little girl — not before I fished her head out of a goddamn sewer, anyway. I held back the tears, and was a man.

It wasn’t till I got home that night, and saw my pregnant wife, that it hit me; knocked the slats right out from under me.

Then I found myself sitting on the couch, crying like a baby, and this time she was comforting me.

It didn’t last long, but when it stopped, I came to a strange and disturbing realization: everything I’d been through in this life, from close calls as a cop to fighting Japs in the Pacific, hadn’t prepared me for fear like this. For the terror of being a parent. Of knowing something on the planet was so precious to you the very thought of losing it invited madness.

“You’re going to help your friend,” Peg said. “You’re going to get whoever did this.”

“I’m going to try, baby,” I said, rubbing the wetness away with the knuckles of one hand. “Hell, the combined rewards are up to thirty-six grand.”

10

The next day, however, I did little on the Keenan case. I did check in with both Kruger and Drury, neither of whom had much for me — nothing that the papers hadn’t already told me.

Two janitors had been questioned, and considered suspects, briefly. One of them was the old Kraut we’d borrowed the broomstick from — Otto Bergstrum. The other was an Army vet in his early twenties named James Watson, who was the handyman for the nursery from which the kidnap ladder had been stolen. Watson was a prime suspect because, as a juvenile offender, he’d been arrested for molesting an eight-year-old girl.

That long-ago charge had been knocked down to disorderly conduct, however, and meanwhile, back in the present, both Bergstrum and Watson had alibis. Also, they both passed lie-detector tests.

“It doesn’t look like there’s any significance,” Kruger told me on the phone, “to that locker the killer broke into.”

“In the so-called ‘murder cellar,’ you mean?”

“Yeah. Kidnapper stole rags and shopping bags out of it. The guy’s clean, whose locker that is.”

“Any good prints turn up?”

“No. Not in the murder cellar, or the girl’s room. We had two on the window that turned out to be the cleaning lady. We do have a crummy partial off the kidnap note. And we have some picture-frame wire, a loop of it, we found in an alley near the Keenan house; might’ve been used to strangle the girl. The coroner says she was dead before she was cut up.”

“Thank God for that much.”

“We have a couple of odd auto sightings, near the Keenan house, in the night and early morning. We’re looking into that.”

“A car makes sense,” I said. “Otherwise, you’d think somebody would’ve spotted this maniac hand-carrying the body from the Keenans’ over to that basement.”

“I agree. But it was the middle of the night. Time of death, after all, was between one thirty and two a.m.”

Kruger said he’d keep me posted, and that had been that, for me and the Keenan case, on that particular day.

With one rather major exception.

I was about to get into my Plymouth, in a parking garage near the Rookery, when a dark blue 1946 Mercury slid up and blocked me in.

Before I had the chance to complain, the driver looked out at me and grinned. “Let’s take a spin, Heller.”

He was a thin-faced, long-chinned, beak-nosed, gray-complected guy about forty; he wasn’t big, but his presence was commanding. His name was Sam Flood, and he was a fast-rising Outfit guy, currently Tony Accardo’s chauffeur/bodyguard. He was also called “Mooney,” which was West Side street slang for nuts.

“A ‘spin,’ Sam — or a ‘ride’?”

Sam laughed. “Come on, Heller. I got a proposition for you. Since when do you turn your nose up at dough?”

I wasn’t armed, but it was cinch Flood was. Flood was a West Side boy, like me, only I grew up around Maxwell Street while he was from the Near West Side’s notorious “Patch,” and a veteran of the infamous street gang, the 42s.

“Let’s talk right here, Sam,” I said. “Nobody’s around.”

He thought about that; his dark eyes glittered. He pretended to like me, but I knew he didn’t. He hated all cops, including ex-cops. And my status with the Outfit largely had to do with my one-time friendship with the late Frank Nitti, whom Sam had no particular respect for. Sam was, after all, a protégé of Paul Ricca, who had forced Nitti out.

“Okay,” Sam said. He spoke softly, and almost haltingly. “I’m gonna park it right over there in that space. You come sit and talk. Nothing bad’s gonna happen to you in my own fuckin’ car.”

So we sat and talked.

Sam, wearing a dark well-tailored suit and a kelly-green snap-brim, half-turned to look at me. “You know who speaks well of you?”

“Who?”

“Louie Campagna.” He thumbed his chest. “I kept an eye on his missus for him while he was in stir on the movie-union rap.”

“Louie’s all right,” I said politely. Campagna had been Nitti’s right arm; for some reason, Sam wanted to reassure me that we were pals. Or at least, had mutual pals. Back in ’44, I’d encountered Sam for the first time when Outfit treasurer Jake Guzik got kidnapped and I was pulled in as a neutral go-between. From that experience I had learned Sam “Mooney” Flood was one ruthless fucker, and as manipulative as a carnival barker.

“You’re on this Keenan case,” he said.

That would’ve tensed me right there, only I was already wound tight.

“Yeah,” I said casually. “Not in a big way. The father’s a friend, and he wants somebody to keep the cops honest.”

That made him laugh. Whether it was the idea of me keeping somebody honest, or anybody keeping the cops honest, he didn’t say.

I decided to test the waters. “You know why Keenan called me in, don’t you?”

“No,” Sam said. It seemed a genuine enough response.

“He was afraid the kidnapping might have been the mob getting back at him for not playing ball back east. You know, in his OPA job.”

Sam nodded, but then shook his head, no. “That’s not likely, Heller. The eastern mobs don’t make a play on our turf without checking first.”

I nodded; that made sense.

“But just so you know — if you don’t already — up to very recent, I was in the gas and food stamp business.”

I had known that, which was why seeing the little hood show up on my figurative doorstep was so chilling; not that meeting with Sam Flood would warm me up under any circumstances.

“But that’s over,” Sam said. “In fact, it’s been over for a couple months. That racket’s gone the way of speakeasies. And Heller — when we was in that business, I never, and to my knowledge, no Outfit guy never made no approach to that Keenan guy.”

“He never said you did.”

The gaunt face relaxed. “Good. Now — let me explain my interest in this case.”

“Please do.”

“It’s looking like that fucking Lipstick Killer did this awful crime on this little child.”

“Looks like. But some people think a crank might’ve written that lipstick message in the alley.”

His eyes tightened. “I hear the family received a lipstick letter, too, with the same message: ‘Stop me before I kill more’ or whatever.”

“That’s true.”

He sighed. Then he looked at me sharply. “Does attorney/client privilege apply to you and me, if I give you a retainer?”

“Yeah. I’d have to send you a contract with an attorney I work with, to keep it legal. Or we could do it through your attorney. But I don’t know that I want you as a client, Sam. No offense.”

He raised a finger. “I promise you that working for me will in no way compromise you or put you in conflict of interest with your other client, the Keenan father. If I’m lying, then the deal’s off.”

I said nothing.

He thrust a fat, sealed envelope into my lap. “That’s a grand in fifties.”

“Sam, I...”

“I’m your client now, Heller. Got that?”

“Well...”

“Got it?”

I swallowed and nodded. I slipped the envelope in my inside suit coat pocket.

“The Lipstick Killer,” Sam said, getting us back on the track. “The first victim was a Mrs. Caroline Williams.”

I nodded.

He thrust his finger in my face; I looked at it, feeling my eyes cross. It was like looking into a gun barrel. “No one, Heller, no one must know about this.” The finger withdrew and the ferret-like gangster sighed and looked out the windshield at the cement wall beyond. “I have a family. Little girls. Got to protect them. Are you a father, Heller?”

“My wife’s expecting.”

Sam grinned. “That’s great! That’s wonderful.” Then the grin disappeared. “Look, I’d do anything to protect my Angeline. Some guys, they flaunt their other women. Me, far as my family knows, I never strayed. Never. But... you’re a man — you understand the needs of a man.”

I was starting to get the picture; or at least part of it.

“The thing is, I was seeing this woman, this Caroline Williams. For the most part, it was pretty discreet.”

It must have been, if Bill Drury hadn’t found out about it; he’d been on that case, after all, and his hate-on for the Outfit was legendary.

As if reading my mind, Sam said, “Not a word to your pal Drury about this! Christ. That guy’s nuts.”

Mooney should know.

“Anyway, there was this photo of us together. Her and me, together. I want it back.”

“Not for sentimental reasons, either.”

“No,” he admitted frankly. “It crushed me that my friend Mrs. Williams had the bad luck to be this maniac’s victim. But from what I hear, this guy was not just a sex killer. He was some kind of weirdie second-story man.”

“I think so,” I said. “I think he was a burglar with a hobby.”

“The police reports indicated that stuff was missing. Undergarments, various personal effects. Anyway, even with Drury on the case, I was able to find out that the picture album she had the photo in wasn’t among her effects.”

“Maybe her family got it.”

“I checked that out myself — discreetly.”

“Then you think... the killer took the photo album?”

Sam nodded. “Yeah. She had photos of herself in bathing suits and shit. If he took her underwear with him, he could’ve taken that, too.”

“So what do you want from me?”

He looked at me hard; he clutched my arm. “All I want is that photo album. Not even that — just that one photo. It was taken in a restaurant, by one of them photo girls who come around.”

“How I am supposed to find it?”

“You may find this guy before the cops do. Or, you’re tight enough with the cops on the case to maybe get to it before they do. The photo album, I mean. It would embarrass me to have that come out. It would open up an ugly can of worms, and it wouldn’t have nothing to do with nothing, where these crackpot killings are concerned. It would hurt me and my family and at the same time only muddy up the waters, where the case against the maniac is concerned.”

I thought about that. I had to agree.

“So all you want,” I said, “is that photo.”

“And your discretion.”

“You’d be protected,” I said. “It would be through an attorney, after all. You’d be his client and he would be my client. I couldn’t say a word if I wanted to.”

“You’ll take the job?”

“I already took your money. But what if I don’t get results?”

“You keep the retainer. You find and return that picture, you get another four grand.”

“What I really want,” I said, “is that little girl’s murderer. I want to kill that son of a bitch.”

“Have all the fun you want,” Sam said. “But get me my picture back.”

11

Lou Sapperstein, who had once been my boss on the pickpocket detail, was the first man I added when the A-1 expanded. Pushing sixty, Lou had the hard muscular build of a linebacker and the tortoiseshell glasses and bald pate of a scholar; in fact, he was a little of both.

He leaned a palm on my desk in my office. As usual, he was in rolled-up shirtsleeves, his tie loose around his collar. “I spent all morning in the Trib morgue — went back a full year.”

I had asked Lou to check on any breaking-and-entering cases involving assault on women. It had occurred to me that if, as Drury and I theorized, the Lipstick Killer was a cat burglar whose thrill-seeking had escalated to murder, there may have been an intermediate stage, between bloodless break-ins and homicidal ones.

“There are several possibilities,” Lou said, “but one jumped right out at me...”

He handed me a sheet torn from a spiral pad.

“Katherine Reynolds,” I read aloud. Then I read the rest to myself, and said, “Some interesting wrinkles here.”

Lou nodded. “Some real similarities. And it happened right smack in between killings number one and two. You think the cops have picked up on it?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “This happened on the South Side. The two women who were killed were both on the North Side.”

“The little girl, too.”

To Chicago cops, such geographic boundaries were inviolate — a North Side case was a North Side case and a crime that happened on the South Side might as well have happened on the moon. Unfortunately, crooks didn’t always think that way.

So, late that afternoon, I found myself knocking at the door of the top-floor flat of an eight-story apartment building on the South Side, near the University of Chicago. The building had once been a nurse’s dormitory — Billings Hospital was nearby — and most of the residents here still were women in the mercy business.

Like Katherine Reynolds, who was wearing crisp nurse’s whites, cap included, when she answered the door.

“Thanks for seeing me on such short notice, Miss Reynolds,” I said, as she showed me in.

I’d caught her at the hospital, by phone, and she’d agreed to meet me here at home; she was just getting off.

“Hope I’m not interfering with your supper,” I added, hat in hand.

“Not at all, Mr. Heller,” she said, unpinning her nurse’s cap. “Haven’t even started it yet.”

She was maybe thirty, a striking brunette, with her hair chopped off in a boyish cut with pageboy bangs; her eyes were large and brown and luminous, her nose pug, her teeth white and slightly, cutely bucked. Her lips were full and scarlet with lipstick. She was slender but nicely curved and just about perfect, except for a slight medicinal smell.

We sat in the living room of the surprisingly large apartment; the furnishings were not new, but they were nice. On the end table next to the couch, where we sat, was a hand-tinted color photographic portrait of a marine in dress blues, a grinning lantern-jawed young man who looked handsome and dim.

She crossed her legs and the nylons swished. I was a married man, a professional investigator here on business, and her comeliness had no effect on me whatsoever. I put my hat over my hard-on.

“Nice place you got here,” I said. “Whole floor, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said. She smiled meaninglessly. “My sister and another girl, both nurses, share it with me. I think this was the head nurse’s quarters, back when it was a dorm. All the other flats are rather tiny.”

“How long ago was the incident?”

This was one of many questions I’d be asking her that I already knew the answer to.

“You mean the assault?” she said crisply, lighting a cigarette up. She exhaled smoke; her lips made a glistening red O. “About four months ago. The son of a bitch came in through the skylight.” She gestured to it. “It must have been around seven a.m. Sis and Dottie were already at work, so I was alone here. I was still asleep... actually, just waking up.”

“Or did something wake you up?”

“That may have been it. I half-opened my eyes, saw a shadowy figure, and then something crashed into my head.” She touched her brown boyish hair. “Fractured my skull. I usually wear my hair longer, you know, but they cut a lot of it off.”

“Looks good short. Do you know what you were hit with?”

“Your classic blunt instrument. I’d guess, a lead pipe. I took a good knock.”

“You were unconscious.”

“Oh yes. When I woke up, on the floor by the bed, maybe forty minutes later, blood was streaming down my face, and into my eyes. Some of it was sticky, already drying. My apartment was all out of kilter. Virtually ransacked. My hands were tied with a lamp cord, rather loosely. I worked myself free, easily. I looked around and some things were missing.” She made an embarrassed face, gestured with a cigarette in hand. “Underwear. Panties. Bras. But also a hundred and fifty bucks were gone from my purse.”

“Did you call the police at that point?”

“No. That’s when I heard the knock at the door. I staggered over there and it was a kid — well, he could’ve been twenty, but I’d guess eighteen. He had dark hair, long and greased back. Kind of a good-looking kid. Like a young Cornell Wilde. Looked a little bit like a juvenile delinquent, or anyway, like a kid trying to look like one and not quite pulling it off.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he wore a black leather jacket, and a T-shirt and dungarees... but they looked kind of new. Too clean. More like a costume than clothing.”

“What did he want?”

“He said he was a delivery boy — groceries, and he was looking for the right apartment to make his delivery.”

“He was lost.”

“Yes, but we didn’t spend much time discussing that. He took one look at my bloody face and said he would get some help right away.”

“And did he?”

She nodded; exhaled smoke again. “He found the building manager, told him the lady in the penthouse flat was injured, and needed medical attention. And left.”

“And the cops thought he might have been the one who did it? Brought back by a guilty conscience?”

“Yes. But I’m not sure I buy that.”

I nodded. But to me it tied in: the murderer who washed and bandaged his victims’ wounds displayed a similar misguided stop-me-catch-me remorse. Even little JoAnn’s body parts had been cleansed — before they were disposed of in sewers.

“The whole thing made me feel like a jerk,” she said.

That surprised me. “Why?”

She lifted her shoulders; it did nice things to her cupcake breasts. Yes, I know. I’m a heel. “Well, if only I’d reacted quicker, I might have been able to protect myself. I mean, I’ve had all sorts of self-defense training.”

“Oh?”

She flicked ashes into a glass tray on the couch arm. “I’m an Army nurse — on terminal leave. I served overseas. European theater.”

“Ah.”

She gave me a sly smile. “You were in the Pacific, weren’t you?”

“Well, uh, yes.”

“I read about you in the papers. I recognized your name right away. You’re kind of well known around town.”

“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, Miss Reynolds.”

“You won the Silver Star, didn’t you?”

I was getting embarrassed. I nodded.

“So did Jack.”

“Jack?”

“My husband. He was a marine, too. You were on Guadalcanal?”

“Yes.”

“So was Jack.” She smiled. Then the smile faded and she sucked smoke in again. “Only he didn’t come back.”

“Lot of good men didn’t. I’m sorry.”

She made a dismissive gesture with a red-nailed hand. “Mr. Heller, why are you looking into this?”

“I think it may relate to another case. That’s all.”

“The Lipstick Killer?”

I hesitated, then nodded. “But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t say anything about it to anybody just yet.”

“Why haven’t the cops done anything about this?”

“You mean, the Lipstick Killer, or what happened to you...?”

“Both! And, why have you made this connection, when they haven’t?”

I shrugged. “Maybe I’m more thorough. Or maybe I’m just grasping at straws.”

“Well, it occurred to me there might be a connection. You’d think it would’ve occurred to the police, too!”

“You’d think.”

“You know, there’s something... never mind.”

“What?”

She shook her head, tensed her lips. “There was something... creepy... that I never told anybody about.” She looked at me with eyes impossibly large, so dark brown the irises were lost. “But I feel like I can talk to you.”

She touched my hand. Hers was warm. Mine felt cold.

“On the floor... in the bathroom... I found something. Something I just... cleaned up. Didn’t tell anybody about. It embarrassed me.”

“You’re a nurse...”

“I know. But I was embarrassed just the same. It was... come.”

“What?”

“There was come on the floor. You know — ejaculate. Semen.”

12

When I got home, I called Drury and told him about Katherine Reynolds.

“I think you may be on to something,” Drury said. “You should tell Lt. Kruger about this.”

“I’ll call him tomorrow. But I wanted to give you the delivery boy’s description first — see if it rang any bells.”

Drury made a clicking sound. “Lot of kids in those black leather jackets these days. Don’t know what the world’s coming to. Lot of kids trying to act like they’re in street gangs, even when they’re not.”

“Could he be a University of Chicago student?”

“Pulling crimes on the North Side?”

Even a cop as good as Drury wore the geographical blinders.

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s this incredible new mode of transportation they call the El. It’s just possible our boy knows about it.”

Drury ignored the sarcasm. “Lot of greasy-haired would-be underage hoods around, Nate. Doesn’t really narrow the field much.”

“That look like a young Cornell Wilde?”

“That want to,” Drury said, “yes.”

We sighed, and hung up.

Eavesdropping, Peg was half in the kitchen, half in the hall. She wore a white apron over the swell of her tummy. She’d made meat loaf. The smell of it beckoned. Despite herself, Peg was a hell of a cook.

“Good-looking?” she asked.

“What?”

“This nurse you went and talked to,” she said.

“Oh. I didn’t notice.”

She smirked; went back into the kitchen. I followed. I waited at the table while she stirred gravy.

“Blonde?” she asked, her back to me.

“No. Brunette, I think.”

She looked over her shoulder at me. “You think?”

“Brunette.”

“Nice and slender, I’ll bet. With a nice shape. Not fat and sloppy. Not a cow. Not an elephant.”

“Peg...”

She turned; her wooden spoon dripped brown gravy onto the linoleum. “I’m going crazy out here, Nate. I’m ugly, and I’m bored.”

“You’re not ugly. You’re beautiful.”

“Fuck you, Heller! I’m an ugly cow, and I’m bored out here in the sticks. Jesus, couldn’t we live someplace where there’s somebody for me to talk to?”

“We have neighbors.”

“Squirrels, woodchucks, and that dip down the street who mows his lawn on the even days and washes his car on the odd. It’s all vacant lots and nurseries and prairie out here. Why couldn’t we live closer to the city? I feel like I’m living in a goddamn pasture. Which is where a cow like me belongs, I suppose.”

I stood. I went to her and held her. She was angry, but she let me.

She didn’t look at me as she bit off the words. “You go off to the Loop and you can be a businessman and you can be a detective and you have your coworkers and your friends and contacts and interview beautiful nurses and you make the papers and you’re living a real life. Not stuck out here in a box with a lawn. Listening to ‘Ma Perkins.’ Peeling potatoes. Ironing shirts.”

“Baby...”

She thumped her chest with a forefinger. “I used to have a life. I was a professional woman. I was an executive secretary.”

“I know, I know.”

“Nate... Nate, I’m afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Afraid I’m not cut out to be a housewife. Afraid I’m not cut out to be a mother.”

I smiled at her gently; touched her face the same way. Touched her tummy. “You’re already a mother, by definition. Give it a chance. The kid will change things. The neighborhood will grow.”

“I hate it here.”

“Give it a year. You don’t like it, we’ll move. Closer to town.”

She smiled tightly, bravely. Nodded. Turned back to the stove.

The meal was good. We had apple pie, which may have been sarcasm on Peg’s part, but if so it was delicious sarcasm. We chatted about business; about family. After the tension, things got relaxed.

We were cuddled on the couch listening to big band music on the radio when the phone rang. It was Drury again.

“Listen,” he said, “sorry to bother you, but I’ve been thinking, and something did jog loose, finally.”

“Swell! What?”

“There was this kid I busted a few years back. He was nice-looking, dark-haired, but kind of on the hoody side, though he had a good family. His dad was a security guard with a steel mill. Anyway, the boy was a good student, a bright kid — only for kicks, he stole. Furs, clothes, jewelry, old coins, guns.”

“You were working out of Town Hall Station at the time?”

“Yeah. All his robberies were on the North Side. He was just thirteen.”

“How old is he now?”

“Seventeen.”

“Then this was a while ago.”

“Yeah, but I busted him again, on some ten burglaries, two years ago. He’s agile, Nate — something of human fly, navigating ledges, fire escapes... going in windows.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, he did some time at Gibault.” That was a correctional institution for boys at Terre Haute. “But supposedly he came out reformed. He’s a really good student — so good, at seventeen, he’s a sophomore in college.”

“At the University of Chicago?” I said.

“Yeah,” Drury said. “And guess what his part-time job is?”

“Delivery boy,” I said.

“What a detective you are,” Drury said.

13

Jerome Lapps, precocious seventeen-year-old sophomore science student, resided at a dormitory on the University of Chicago campus.

On the phone Drury had asked, “You know where his folks live?”

“What, you take me for a psychic?”

“You could’ve tripped over this kid, Nate. The Lapps family lives in Lincolnwood.”

He gave me the address; not so far from Peg and me.

Sobering as that was, what was more interesting was that the kid lived at school, not home; even during summer session. Specifically, he was in Gates Hall on the Midway campus.

The Midway, a mile-long block-wide parkway between 59th and 60th, connected Washington and Jackson parks, and served to separate Hyde Park and the University eggheads from the real South Side. Just beyond the Midway were the Gothic limestone buildings and lushly landscaped acres of the university. At night the campus looked like another world. Of course, it looked like another world in the daylight, too.

But this was night, and the campus seemed largely deserted. That was partly summer, partly not. I left the Plymouth in a quadrangle parking lot and found my way to the third floor of Gates Hall, where I went to Lapps’ room and knocked on the door. No answer. I knocked again. No answer. The door was locked.

A student well into his twenties — probably a vet on the G.I. Bill — told me where to find the grad student who was the resident assistant in charge of that floor.

The resident assistant leaned against the doorjamb of his room with a bottle of beer in his hand and his shirt half tucked in. His hair was red, his eyes hooded, his mouth smirky. He was perhaps twenty years old.

“What can I do for you, bud?” the kid asked.

“I’m Jerry Lapps’ uncle. Supposed to meet him at his room, but he’s not in.”

“Yeah?”

“You got a key? I’d like to wait inside.”

He shrugged. “Against the rules.”

“I’m his uncle Abraham,” I said. And I showed him a five-dollar bill. “I’m sure it’ll be okay.”

The redheaded kid brightened; his eyes looked almost awake. He snatched the five-spot and said, “Ah. Honest Abe. Jerry mentioned you.”

He let me into Lapps’ room and went away.

Judging by the pair of beds, one against either wall, Jerome Lapps had a roommate. But the large single room accommodated two occupants nicely. One side was rather spartan and neat as a boot-camp barracks, while across the room an unmade bed was next to a plaster wall decorated with pictures of baseball players and heartthrob movie actors. Each side of the room had its own writing desk, and again, one was cluttered, while the other was neat.

It didn’t take long to confirm my suspicion that the messy side of the room belonged to the seventeen-year-old. Inside the calculus text on the sloppy desk, the name Jerome C. Lapps was written on the flyleaf in a cramped hand. The handwriting on a notepad, filled with doodles, looked the same; written several times, occasionally underlined, were the words: “Rogers Park.”

Under Jerome C. Lapps’ bed were three suitcases.

In one suitcase were half of the panties and bras in the city of Chicago.

The other suitcase brimmed with jewelry, watches, two revolvers, one automatic, and a smaller zippered pouch of some kind, like an oversize shaving kit. I unzipped it and recoiled.

It was a medical kit, including hypos, knives, and a surgical saw.

I put everything back and stood there and swallowed and tried to get the image of JoAnn Keenan’s doll-like head out of my mind. The best way to do that was to get back to work, which I did, proceeding to the small closet on Jerome’s side of the room. On the upper shelf I found a briefcase.

I opened it on the neater bed across the way. Inside were several thousand bucks in war bonds and postal savings certificates. He’d apparently put any cash he’d stolen into these, and any money from fenced goods, although considering that well-stuffed suitcase of jewelry and such, I couldn’t imagine he’d bothered to fence much if any of what he’d taken.

As typically teenager-sloppy as his side of the dorm room was, Jerry had neatly compartmentalized his booty: ladies underwear in one bag; jewelry and watches in another; and paper goods in the briefcase. Included in the latter were clipped photos of big-shot Nazis. Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels.

Jerry had some funny fucking heroes.

Finally, in the briefcase, was a photo album. Thumbing through it, I saw photos of an attractive woman, frequently in a bathing suit and other brief, summer apparel. There was also a large photo of the same woman with a ferret-faced male friend in a nightclub setting; you could see a table of men sitting behind them as well, clearly, up a tier. A sweet and tender memento of Caroline Williams and Sam Flood’s love affair.

I removed the photo, folded it without creasing it, and slipped it into my inside suit coat pocket. I put the photo album back, closed up the briefcase, and was returning it to the upper shelf of the closet when the dorm-room door opened.

“What the hell are you doing?” a male voice demanded.

I was turning around and slipping my hand under my jacket to get at my gun, at the same time, but the guy reacted fast. His hand must have hit the light switch, because the room went black and I could hear him coming at me, and then he was charging into me.

I was knocked back into the corner, by the many-paned windows, through which some light was filtering, and I saw a thin face, its teeth clenched, as the figure pressed into me and a single fist was smashing into my stomach, powerfully.

The damn guy was almost sitting on me, and I used all my strength to lift up and lift him off, heaving him bodily onto the floor. He was scrambling to his feet when I stuck the nine millimeter in his face and said, “Don’t.”

Somebody hit the lights.

It was the red-headed dorm assistant. Even drunk, he didn’t like the looks of this.

Neither did I: the guy in front of me was not Jerome Lapps, but a slender, towheaded fellow in his mid-twenties. The empty sleeve of his left arm was tucked into a sport-coat pocket.

I was a hell of a tough character: I’d just bested a cripple. Of course, I had to pull a gun to do it.

“What the hell...” the redheaded kid began. His eyes were wide at the sight of the gun in my hand. The one-armed guy in front of me seemed less impressed.

“Police officer,” I said to the redhead. “Go away.”

He swallowed, nodded, and went.

“You’re Jerome’s roommate?” I asked the one-armed fellow.

“Yeah. Name’s Robinson. Who are you? You really a cop?”

“I run a private agency,” I said. “What branch were you in?”

“Army.”

I nodded. “Marines,” I said. I put the gun away. “You got a smoke?”

He nodded; with the one hand he had left, he got some Chesterfields out of his sport-coat pocket. Shook one out for me, then another for himself. He put the Chesterfields back and got out a silver Zippo. He lit us both up. He was goddamn good with that hand.

“Thank God them bastards left me with my right,” he grinned sheepishly.

He sat on his bed. I sat across from him on Lapps’.

We smoked for a while. I thought about a punk kid cutting out pinups of Hitler while sharing a room with a guy who lost an arm over there. I was so happy I’d fought for the little fucker’s freedoms.

“You’re looking for Jerry, aren’t you?” he asked. His eyes were light blue and sadder than a Joan Crawford picture.

“Yeah.”

He shook his head. “Figured that kid would get himself into trouble.”

“You roomed with him long?”

“Just for summer session. He’s not a bad kid. Easy to get along with. Quiet.”

“You know what he’s got under his bed?”

“No.”

“Suitcases full of stolen shit. If you need a new wristwatch, you picked the right roomie.”

“I didn’t know he was doing anything like that.”

“Then what made you think he was going to get himself in trouble?”

“That black leather jacket of his.”

“Huh?”

He shrugged. “When he’d get dressed up like a juvie. That black leather jacket. Dungarees. White T-shirt. Smoking cigarettes.” He sucked on his own cigarette, shook his head. “He’d put that black leather jacket on, not every night, more like every once in a while. I’d ask him where he was going. You know what he’d say?”

“No.”

“On the prowl.”

I thought about that.

“Is his black leather jacket hanging in that closet you were lookin’ in?”

“No,” I said.

“Then guess where he is right now.”

“On the prowl,” I said.

He nodded.

12

Now I was on the prowl.

I went up Lakeshore, turned onto Sheridan, and followed it up to the Loyola El stop. The notepad on Lapps’ desk had sent me here, to Rogers Park, the northernmost neighborhood in Chicago; beyond was Evanston. Here, in a three-block-wide and fourteen-block-long band between the lake and the El tracks was the middle-class residential area that would suit the kid’s M.O.

Lapps seemed partial to a certain type of building; according to Drury, many of the boy’s burglaries were pulled off in tall, narrow apartment buildings consisting of small studio apartments. Same was true of where the two women who’d been killed had lived, and Katherine Reynolds, too.

First I would look for the dark-haired, black-leather-jacketed Lapps around the El stops — he had no car — and then I would cruise the side streets off Sheridan, looking in particular for that one type of building.

Windows rolled down, half-leaned out, I crawled slowly along, cutting the Plymouth’s headlights as I cruised the residential neighborhoods; that way I didn’t announce myself, and I seemed to be able to eyeball the sidewalks and buildings better that way. Now and then another car blinked its brights at me, but I ignored them and cruised on through the unseasonably cool July night.

About two blocks down from the Morse Avenue business district, on a street of modest apartment buildings, I spotted two guys running back the direction I’d come. The one in the lead was a heavy-set guy in his T-shirt; close on his heels was a fellow in a plaid shirt. At first I thought one was chasing the other, but then it was clear they were together, and very upset.

The heavy-set guy was slowing down and gesturing with open hands. “Where d’he go? Where d’he go?”

The other guy caught up to him and they both slowed down; in the meantime, I pulled over and trotted over to them.

“The cops, already!” the heavy-set guy said joyously. He was a bald guy in his forties; five o’clock shadow smudged his face.

I didn’t correct their assumption that I was a cop. I merely asked, “What gives, gents?”

The guy in the plaid shirt, thin, in his thirties, glasses, curly hair, pointed at nothing in particular and said, in a rush, “We had a prowler in the building. He was in my neighbor’s flat!”

“I’m the janitor,” the fat guy said, breathing hard, hands on his sides, winded. “I caught up to the guy in the lobby, but he pulled a gun on me.” He shook his head. “Hell, I got a wife in the hospital, and three kids, that all need me unventilated. I let ’im pass.”

“But Bud went and got reinforcements,” the thin guy said, taking over, pointing to himself, “and my wife called the cops. And we took chase.”

That last phrase almost made me smile, but I said, “Was it a dark-haired kid in a black leather jacket?”

They both blinked and nodded, properly amazed.

“He’s going to hop the El,” I said. I pointed to the thin guy. “You take the Morse El stop, I’ll...”

A scream interrupted me.

We turned toward the scream and it became a voice, a woman’s voice, yelling, “He’s up there!”

We saw her then, glimpsed between two rather squat apartment houses: a stout, older woman, lifting her skirts almost daintily as she barreled down the alley. I ran back there; the two guys were trailing well behind, and not eagerly. A lame horse could have gained the same lead.

The fleeing woman saw me, and we passed each other, her going in one direction, me in the other. She looked back and pointed, without missing a step, saying, “Up on the second-floor porch!” Then she continued on with her escape. It would have been a comic moment, if the alley hadn’t been so dark and I hadn’t been both running and scrambling for my nine millimeter.

I slowed to face the backyard of a two-story brick building and its exposed wooden back stairways and porches. Despite what the fleeing woman had said, the second-floor porch seemed empty, though it was hard to tell: it was dark back here, the El tracks looming behind me, casting their shadow. Maybe she meant the next building down...

As I was contemplating that, a figure rose on the second-floor porch and pointed a small revolver at me and I could see the hand moving, he was pulling the trigger, but his gun wasn’t firing, wasn’t working.

Mine was. I squeezed off three quick rounds and the latticework wood near him got chewed up, splinters flying. I didn’t know if I’d hit him or not, and didn’t wait to see; I moved for those steps, and bolted up one flight, and was at the bottom of the second when the figure loomed up above me, at the top of the stairs, and I saw him, his pale handsome face under long black greasy hair, his black leather jacket, his dungarees, and he threw the revolver at me like a baseball, and I ducked to one side, and swung my nine millimeter up just as he leaped.

He knocked me back before I could fire, back through the railing of the first-floor porch, snapping it into pieces like so many matchsticks, and we landed in a tangle on the grass, my gun getting lost on the trip. Then he was on top of me, like he was fucking me, and he was a big kid, powerful, pushing me down, pinning me like a wrestler, his teeth clenched, his eyes wide and maniacal.

I heaved with all my strength and weight and pitched him off to one side, but he didn’t lose his grip on me, and we rolled, and I was on top now, only he hadn’t given up, he hadn’t let go, he had me more than I had him and that crazed, glazed look on his face scared the shit out of me. I couldn’t punch him, even though I seemed to have the advantage, couldn’t get my arms free, and he rocked up, as if he wanted to take a bite out of my face.

I was holding him down, but it was a standoff at best.

Then I sensed somebody coming up — that janitor and his skinny pal, maybe.

But the voice I heard didn’t belong to either of them: “Is that the prowler?”

Still gripping my powerful captive by his arms, I glanced up and saw hovering over us a burly guy in swimming trunks holding a clay flowerpot in his hands.

“That’s him,” I said, struggling.

“That’s all I wanted to know,” the burly guy said, and smashed the flowerpot over the kid’s head.

15

On the third smack, the flowerpot — which was empty — shattered into fragments and the kid’s eyes rolled back and went round and white and blank like Orphan Annie’s, and then he shut them. Blood was streaming down the kid’s pale face. He was ruggedly handsome, even if Cornell Wilde was stretching it.

I got off him and gulped for my breath and the guy in his bathing trunks said, “Neighbors said a cop was after a prowler.”

I stuck my hand out. “Thanks, buddy. I didn’t figure the cavalry would show up in swim trunks, but I’ll take what I can get.”

His grasp was firm. He was an affable-looking, open-faced, hairy-chested fellow of maybe thirty-five. We stood over the unconscious kid like hunters who just bagged a moose.

“You a cop?”

“Private,” I said. “My name’s Nate Heller.”

He grinned. “I thought you looked familiar. You’re Bill Drury’s pal, aren’t you? I’m Chet Dickinson — I work traffic in the Loop.”

“You’re a cop? What’s that, summer uniform?”

He snorted a laugh. “I live around here. My family and me was just walking back from a long day at the beach, when we run into this commotion. I sent Grace and the kids on home and figured I better check it out. Think we ought to get this little bastard to a hospital?”

I nodded. “Edgewater’s close. Should we call for an ambulance? I got a car.”

“You mind? The son of a bitch could have a concussion.” He laughed again. “I saw you two strugglin’, and I grabbed that flowerpot off a windowsill. Did the trick.”

“Sure did.”

“Fact, I mighta overdid it.”

“Not from my point of view.”

After Dickinson had found and collected the kid’s revolver and contributed his beach towel to wrap the kid’s head in, we drunk-walked Lapps to my car.

The burly bare-chested cop helped me settle the boy in the rider’s seat. “I’ll run over home, and call in, and get my buggy, and meet you over at Edgewater.”

“Thanks. You know, I used to work traffic in the Loop.”

“No kiddin’. Small world.”

I had cuffs in the glove box; I cuffed the unconscious kid’s hands behind him, in case he was faking it. I looked at the pleasant-faced cop. “Look — if anything comes of this, you got a piece of the reward action. It’ll be just between us.”

“Reward action?”

I put a hand on his hairy shoulder. “Chet — we just caught the goddamn Lipstick Killer.”

His jaw dropped and I got in and pulled away, while he ran off, looking in those trunks of his like somebody in a half-assed track meet.

Then I pulled over around a corner and searched the kid. I figured there was no rush getting him to the hospital. If he died, he died.

He had two five-hundred-buck postal savings certificates in a pocket of his leather jacket. In his billfold, which had a University of Chicago student ID card in the name Jerome C. Lapps, was a folded-up letter, typed. It was dated last month. It said:

Jerry—

I haven’t heard from you in a long time. Tough luck about the jail term. You’ll know better next time.

I think they’re catching up to me, so I got to entrust some of my belongings to you. I’ll pick these suitcases up later. If you get short of cash, you can dip into the postal certificates.

I appreciate you taking these things off my hands when I was being followed. Could have dumped it, but I couldn’t see losing all that jewelry. I’ll give you a phone call before I come for the stuff.

George

I was no handwriting expert, but the handwritten signature sure looked like Lapps’ own cramped handwriting from the inside cover of his calculus book.

The letter stuck me immediately as a lame attempt on the kid’s part to blame the stolen goods stashed in his dorm room on some imaginary accomplice. Carrying it around with him, yet — an alibi in his billfold.

He was stirring.

He looked at me. Blinked. His lashes were long. “Who are you, mister? Where am I?”

I threw a sideways forearm into his stomach and doubled him over. He let the air out with a groan of pain that filled the car and made me smile.

“I’m somebody you tried to shoot, is who I am,” I said. “And where you are is up shit creek without a paddle.”

He shook his head, licked his lips. “I don’t remember trying to shoot anybody. I’d never do a thing like that.”

“Oh? You pointed a revolver at me, and when it wouldn’t shoot, you hurled it at me. Then you jumped me. This just happened, Jerry.”

A comma of greasy black hair fell to his forehead. “You... you know my name? Oh. Sure.” He noticed his open billfold on the seat next to us.

“I knew you before I saw your ID, Jerry. I been on your trail all day.”

“I thought you cops worked in pairs.”

“I don’t work for the city. Right now, I’m working for the Robert Keenan family.”

He recognized the name — anybody in Chicago would have — but his reaction was one of confusion, not alarm, or guilt, or anything else I might have expected.

“What does that have to do with me, mister?”

“You kidnapped their little girl, Jerry — you strangled her and then you tried to fuck her and then you cut her in pieces and threw the pieces in the sewer.”

“What... what are you...”

I sidearmed him in the stomach again. I wanted to shove his head against the dash, but after those blows to the skull with that flowerpot, it might kill him. I wasn’t particularly interested in having him die in my car. Get blood all over my new Plymouth. Peg would have a fit.

“You’re the Lipstick Killer, Jerry. And I caught you going up the back stairs, like the cheap little sneak thief you are.”

He looked down at his lap, guiltily. “I didn’t kill those women.”

“Really. Who did?”

“George.”

The letter. The alibi.

“George,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “George did it.”

“George did it.”

“Sometimes I went along. Sometimes I helped him prepare. But I never did it. George did.”

“Is that how you’re going to play it?”

“George did it, mister. George hurt those women.”

“Did George jack off the floor, or did you, Jerry?”

Now he started to cry.

“I did that,” he admitted. “But George did the killings.”

“JoAnn Keenan too?”

Lapps shook his head; his face glistened with tears. “He must have. He must have.”

16

Cops in uniform, and plainclothes too, were waiting at the hospital when I deposited Lapps at the emergency room. I didn’t talk to the kid after that, though I stuck around, at the request of a detective from Rogers Park.

The word spread fast. Dickinson, when he called it in, had spilled the Lipstick Killer connection. The brass started streaming in, and Chief of Detectives Storm took me off to one side and complimented me on my fine work. We decided that my visit to Lapps’ dorm room would be off the record for now; in the meantime, South Side detectives were already on the scene making the same discoveries I had, only with the proper warrants.

I got a kick out of being treated like somebody special by the Chicago police department. Storm and even Tubbo Gilbert were all smiles and arms around my shoulder, when the press showed, which they quickly did. For years I’d been an “ex-cop” who left the force under a cloud in the Cermak administration; now, I was a “distinguished former member of the Detective Bureau who at one time was the youngest plainclothes officer on the force.”

It soon became a problem, having the emergency area clogged with police personnel, politicians, and reporters. Lapps was moved upstairs, and everybody else moved to the lobby.

Dickinson, when he’d gone home, had taken time to get out of his trunks and into uniform, which was smart; the flashbulbs were popping around the husky, amiable patrolman. We posed for a few together, and he whispered to me, “We done good.”

“You and your flowerpot.”

“You’re a hell of cop, Heller. I don’t care what anybody says.”

That was heartwarming.

My persistent pal Davis of the News was among the first of the many reporters to arrive and he buttonholed me with an offer of a grand for an exclusive. Much as I hated to, I had to turn him down.

From his expression you’d think I’d pole-axed him. “Heller turning down a payoff? Why?”

“This is too big to give to one paper. I got to let the whole world love me this time around.” Most of the reward money — which was up to forty grand, now — had been posted by the various newspapers (though the city council had anted up, too) and I didn’t want to alienate anybody.

“It’s gonna be months before you see any of that dough,” Davis whined. “It’s all contingent upon a conviction, you know.”

“I know. I can wait. I’m a patient man. Besides, I got a feeling the A-1 isn’t going to be hurting for business after this.”

Davis smirked. “Feelin’ pretty cocky aren’t you? Pretty smug.”

“That’s right,” I said, and brushed by him. I went to the pay phones and called home. It was almost ten, but Peg usually stayed up at least that late.

“Nate! Where have you been... it’s almost...”

“I know. I got him.”

“What?”

“I got him.”

There was a long pause.

“I love you,” she said.

That beat reward money all to hell.

“I love you, too,” I said. “Both of you.”

I was slipping out of the booth when Lt. Kruger shambled over. His mournful-hound puss was twisted up in a grin. He extended his hand and we shook vigorously.

He took my arm, spoke in my ear. “Did you take a look at the letter in Lapps’ billfold?”

I nodded. “It’s his spare tire of an alibi. He told me ‘George’ did the killings. Is he sticking to that story?”

Kruger nodded. “Only I don’t think there is a George.”

“Next you’ll be spoiling Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny for me.”

“I don’t think that’s what he’s up to.”

“Oh? What is he up to, lieutenant?”

“I think it’s a Jekyll and Hyde routine.”

“Oh. He’s George, only he doesn’t know it. Split personality. There’s a post-war scam for you.”

Kruger nodded. “Insanity plea.”

“The papers will love that shit.”

“They love the damnedest things.” He grinned again. “Tonight they even love you.”

Chief of Detective Storm came and found me, shortly after that, and said, “There’s somebody who wants to talk to you.”

He led me back behind the reception counter to a phone, and he smiled quietly as he handed me the receiver. He might have been presenting an award of valor.

“Nate?” the voice said.

“Bob?”

“Nate. God bless you, Nate. You found the monster. You found him.”

“It’s early yet, Bob. The real investigation has just started...”

“I knew I did the right thing calling you. I knew it.”

I could tell he was crying.

“Bob. You give Norma my love.”

“Thank you, Nate. Thank you.”

I didn’t know what to say. So I just said, “Thanks, Bob. Good night.”

I gave a few more press interviews, made an appointment with Storm to come to First District Station the next morning and give a formal statement, shook Kruger’s hand again, and wandered out into the parking lot. Things were winding down. I slipped behind the wheel of Plymouth and was about to start the engine when I saw the face in my rearview mirror.

“Hello, Heller,” the man said.

His face was all sharp angles and holes: cheekbones, pock-marks, sunken dead eyes, pointed jaw, dimpled chin. His suit was black and well tailored — like an undertaker with style. His arms were folded, casually, and he was wearing kid gloves. In the summer.

He was one of Sam Flood’s old cronies, a renowned thief from the 42 gang in the Patch. Good with a knife. His last name was Morello.

“We need to talk,” he said. “Drive a while.”

His first name was George.

17

“Sam couldn’t come himself,” George said. “Sends his regards, and apologies.”

We were on Sheridan, heading toward Evanston.

“I was going to call Sam when I got home,” I said, watching him in the rearview mirror. His eyes were gray under bushy black brows; spooky fucking eyes.

“Then you did make it to the kid’s pad, before the cops.” George sighed; smiled. A smile on that slash of a craggy face was not a festive thing.

“Yeah.”

“And you got what Sam wants?”

“I do.”

“The photo?”

“Yes.”

“That’s swell. You’re all right, Heller. You’re all right. Pull over into the graveyard, will you?”

Calvary Cemetery was the sort of gothic graveyard where Bela Lugosi and Frankenstein’s monster might go for a stroll. I pulled in under the huge limestone archway and, when George directed, pulled off the main path onto a side one, and slowed to a stop. I shut the engine off. The massive granite wall of the cemetery muffled the roar of traffic on Sheridan; the world of the living seemed suddenly very distant.

“What’s this about, George?” At Statesville, they say, where he was doing a stretch for grand theft auto, George was the prison shiv artist; an iceman whose price was five cartons of smokes, for which an individual who was annoying you became deceased.

Tonight George’s voice was pleasant; soothing. A Sicilian disc jockey. “Sam just wants his photo, that’s all.”

“What’s the rush?”

“Heller — what’s it to you?”

“I’d rather turn it over to Sam personally.”

He unfolded his arms and revealed a silenced Luger in his gloved right hand. “Sam says you should give it to me.”

“It’s in the trunk of the car.”

“The trunk?”

“I had the photo in my coat pocket, but when I realized cops were going to be crawling all over, I slipped it in an envelope in my trunk, with some other papers.”

That was the truth. I did that at the hospital, before I took Lapp inside.

“Show me,” George said.

We got out of the car. George made me put my hands up and, gun in his right hand, he calmly patted me down with his left. He found the nine millimeter under my arm, slipped it out, and tossed it gently through the open window of the Plymouth onto the driver’s seat.

Calvary was a rich person’s cemetery, with mausoleums and life-size statues of dear departed children and other weirdness, all casting their shadows in the moonlight. George kept the gun in hand, but he wasn’t obnoxious about it. I stepped around back of the Plymouth, unlocked the trunk, and reached in. George took a step forward. I doubled him over with the tire iron, then whacked the gun out of his hand, and swung the iron sideways against his cheek as he began to rise up.

I picked up his Luger and put a knee on his chest and the nose of the silenced gun against his bloody cheekbone. I would have to kill him. There was little doubt of that. His gray eyes were narrowed and full of hate and chillingly absent of fear.

“Was killing me Sam’s idea, or yours?”

“Who said anything about killing you?”

I forced the bulky silenced nose of the gun into his mouth. Time for the Chicago lie-detector test.

Fear came into his eyes, finally.

I removed the gun, slowly, not taking any teeth, and said, “Your idea or Sam’s?”

“Mine.”

“Why, George?”

“Fuck you, Heller.”

I put the gun in his mouth again.

After I removed it, less gently this time, cutting the roof of his mouth, he said through bloody spittle, “You’re a loose end. Nobody likes loose ends.”

“What’s it to you, George?”

He said nothing; he was shaking. Most of it was anger. Some of it was fear. An animal smell was coming up off him.

“I said, what’s it to you, George? What was your role in it?”

His eyes got very wide; something akin to panic was in them.

And then I knew.

Don’t ask me how, exactly, but I did.

“You killed her,” I said. It was part question, part statement. “You killed Sam’s girlfriend. For Sam?”

He thought about the question; I started to push the gun back in his mouth and he began to nod, lips kissing the barrel. “It was an accident. Sam threw her over, and she was posing a problem.”

I didn’t ask whether that problem was blackmail or going to the press or cops or what. It didn’t much matter.

“So he had you hit her?”

“It was a fuck-up. I was just suppose to put the fear of God in her and get that fucking picture.”

I pressed the gun into his cheek; the one that wasn’t bloody. “That kid — Lapps... he was your accomplice?”

“No! I didn’t know who the hell he was. If we knew who he was, we coulda got that photo a long time ago. Why the fuck you think you were hired?”

That made sense; but not much else did. “So what was the deal, George?”

His eyes tightened; his expression said: You know how it is. “I was slapping her around, trying to get her to tell me where that picture was. I’d already tossed the place, but just sorta half-ass. She was arrogant. Spitting at me. All of a sudden her throat got cut.”

Accidents will happen. “How did that kid get the photo album, then?”

“I heard something at the window; I looked up and saw this dark shape there, out on the fire escape... thought it was a cop or something.”

The black leather jacket.

“I thought fuck it and cut out,” he said. “The kid must’ve come in, stole some shit, found that photo album someplace I missed, and left with it and a bunch of other stuff.”

But before that, he washed the victim’s wounds and applied a few bandages.

“What about the second girl?” I demanded. “Margaret Johnson? And the Keenan child?”

“I had nothing to do with them crimes. You think I’m a fuckin’ psycho?”

I thought that one best left unanswered.

“George,” I said calmly, easing the gun away from his face, “you got any suggestions on how we can resolve our differences, here? Can you think of some way both of us can walk out of this graveyard tonight?”

He licked his lips. Smiled a ghastly, blood-flecked smile. “Let bygones be bygones. You don’t tell anybody what you know — Sam included — and I just forget about you working me over. That’s fair. That’s workable.”

I didn’t see where he got the knife; I hadn’t seen a hand slip into a pocket at all. He slashed through my sleeve, but didn’t cut me. When I shot him in the head, his skull exploded, but almost none of him got on me. Just my gun hand. A limestone angel, however, got wreathed in blood and brains.

I lifted up off him and stood there panting for a while. The sounds of muted traffic reminded me there was a world to go back to. I checked his pockets, found some Camels, and lit one up; kept the pack. Then I wiped my prints off his gun, laid it near him, retrieved my tire iron, put it back in the trunk, which I closed up, and left him there with his peers.

18

The phone call came late morning, which was a good thing: I didn’t even make it into the office till after ten.

“You were a busy fella yesterday, Heller,” Sam Flood’s voice said cordially.

“I get around, Sam.”

“Papers are full of you. Real hero. There’s other news, though, that hasn’t made the papers yet.”

“By the afternoon edition, it’ll be there.”

We each knew what the other was talking about: soon Giorgio (George) Morello would be just another of the hundreds of Chicago’s unsolved gangland killings.

“Lost a friend of mine last night,” Sam said.

“My condolences. But I don’t think he was such a good friend. He loused up that job with the girl, and he tried to sell me a cemetery plot last night.”

The possibility of a phone tap kept the conversation elliptical; but we were right on track with each other.

“In other words,” Sam said, “you only did what you had to do.”

“That’s right.”

“What about that item you were gonna try to obtain for me?”

“It’s in the hands of the U.S. Postal Service right now. Sealed tight — marked personal. I sent it to you at your liquor store on the West Side.”

“That was prompt. You just got hold of the thing last night, right?”

“Right. No time to make copies. I didn’t want a copy, Sam. Your business is your business. Anything I can do to make your happy home stay that way is fine with me. I got a wife, too. I understand these things.”

There was a long, long pause.

Then: “I’ll put your check in the mail, Heller. Pleasure doin’ business with you.”

“Always glad to hear from a satisfied customer.”

There was a briefer pause.

“You wouldn’t want to go on a yearly retainer, would you, Heller?”

“No thanks, Sam. I do appreciate it. Like to stay on your good side.”

“That’s wise, Heller. Sorry you had that trouble last night. Wasn’t my doing.”

“I know, Sam.”

“You done good work. You done me a favor, really. If I can pay you back, you know the number.”

“Thanks, Sam. That check you mentioned is plenty, though.”

“Hey, and nice going on that other thing. That sex-maniac guy. Showed the cops up. Congratulations, war hero.”

The phone clicked dead.

I swallowed and sat there at my desk, trembling.

While I had no desire to work for Sam Flood ever again, I did truly want to stay on his good side. And I had made no mention of what I knew was a key factor in his wanting that photo back.

It had little, if anything, to do with keeping his wife from seeing him pictured with his former girlfriend: it was the table of Sam’s friends, glimpsed behind Sam and the girl in the photo. Top mobsters from Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and Detroit. Some of kind of informal underworld summit meeting had been inadvertently captured by a nightclub photographer. Proof of a nationwide alliance of organized crime families, perhaps in a major meeting to discuss post-war plans.

If Sam suspected that I knew the true significance of that photo, I might not live to see my kid come into the world.

And I really wanted to.

19

A little over a week later, I was having lunch at Binyon’s with Ken Levine, the attorney who had brought Bob Keenan and me together. The restaurant was a businessman’s bastion, wooden booths, spartan decor; my old office was around the corner, but for years I’d been only an occasional customer here. Now that business was good, and my suits were Brooks Brothers not Maxwell Street, I could afford to hobnob on a more regular basis with the brokers, lawyers, and other well-to-do thieves.

“You couldn’t ask for better publicity,” Ken said. He was a small handsome man with sharp dark eyes that didn’t miss anything and a hairline that was a memory.

“I’m taking on two more operatives,” I said, sipping my rum cocktail.

“That’s great. Glad it’s working out so well for you.” He made a clicking sound in his cheek. “Of course, the Bar Association may have something to say about the way that Lapps kid has been mistreated by Chicago’s finest.”

“I could bust out crying at the thought,” I said.

“Yeah, well they’ve questioned him under sodium pentathol, hooked his nuts up to electrodes, done all sorts of zany stuff. And then they leak these vague, inadmissible ‘confessions’ to the papers. These wild stories of ‘George’ doing the crimes.”

Nobody had connected George Morello to the case. Except me, of course, and I wasn’t talking.

“The kid faked a coma for days,” I said, “and then claimed amnesia. They had to do something.”

Ken smiled wryly. “Nate, they brought in a priest and read last rites over him, to try to trick him into a ‘deathbed’ confession. They didn’t feed him any solid food for four days. They held him six days without charging him or letting him talk to a lawyer. They probably beat the shit out of him, too.”

I shrugged, sipped my cocktail. It was my second.

“Only it may backfire on ’em,” Ken said. “All this dual personality stuff has the makings of an insanity plea. He’s got some weird sexual deviation — his burglaries were sexually based, you know.”

“How do you mean?”

“He got some kind of thrill out of entering the window of a strange apartment. He’d have a sexual emission shortly after entering. Must’ve been symbolic in his mind — entering through the window for him was like... you know.” He shrugged. “Apparently the kid’s never had normal sex.”

“Thank you, Dr. Freud.”

Ken grinned. “Hey, I could get that little bastard off.”

I was glad it wasn’t Ken’s case.

“Whatever his sex quirk,” I said, “they tied him to the assault on that nurse, Katherine Reynolds. They matched his prints to one left in her apartment. And to a partial print on the Keenan kidnap note.”

“The key word is partial,” Ken said, raising a finger. “They got six points of similarity on the note. Eleven are required for a positive I.D.”

“They’ve got an eyewitness I.D.”

Ken laughed; there was genuine mirth in it. Lawyers can find the humor in both abstract thinking and human suffering. “Their eyewitness is that old German janitor who was their best suspect till you nabbed Lapps. The old boy looked at four overweight, middle-aged cops and one seventeen-year-old in a lineup and somehow managed to pick out the seventeen-year-old. Before that, his description of the guy he saw was limited to ‘a man in a brown raincoat with a shopping bag.’ Did you know that that janitor used to be a butcher?”

“There was something in the papers about it. That doesn’t mean he cuts up little girls.”

“No. But if he lost his job during the war, ’cause of OPA restrictions, he could bear Bob Keenan a grudge.”

“Bob wasn’t with the OPA long enough for that to be possible. He was with the New York office. Jesus, Ken, what’s your point, here?”

Like most attorneys, Ken was argumentative for the sheer hell of it; but he saw this was getting under my skin and backed off. “Just making conversation, Nate. That kid’s guilty. The prosecutors are just goddamn lucky they got a mean little J.D. who carried Nietzche around and collected Nazi memorabilia. ’Cause without public opinion, they couldn’t win this one.”

Ken headed back to court and I sat working at my cocktail, wondering if I could get away with a third.

I shared some of Ken’s misgivings about the way the Lapps case was being handled. A handwriting expert had linked the lipstick message on the late Margaret Johnson’s wall with that of the Keenan kidnap note; then matched those to re-creations of both Lapps was made to give.

This handwriting expert’s claim to fame was the Lindbergh case — having been there, I knew the Lindbergh handwriting evidence was a crock — and both the lipstick message and kidnap notes were printed, which made handwriting comparison close to worthless.

Of course, Lapps had misspelled some of the same words as in the note: “waite” and “safty.” Only I’d learned in passing from Lt. Kruger that Lapps had been told to copy the notes, mistakes and all.

A fellow named Bruno Hauptmann had dutifully done the same in his handwriting samples, some years before. The lineup trick Ken had mentioned had been used to hand Hauptmann on a platter to a weak, elderly eyewitness, too. And the press had played their role in Bruno’s railroading — one overeager reporter had written an incriminating phone number inside Hauptmann’s apartment, to buy a headline that day, and that little piece of creative writing on wainscoting became an irrefutable key prosecution exhibit.

But so what? Bruno was (a) innocent and (b) long dead. This kid was alive, well, and psycho — and as guilty as the Nazi creeps he idolized. Besides which, what Ken had said about the kid’s sexual deviation had made something suddenly clear to me.

I knew Lapps was into burglary for kicks, but I figured it was the violence against women that got him going. This business about strange buildings — and he’d had a certain of type of building, hadn’t he, like some guys liked blondes or other guys were leg men — made a screwy sort of sense.

Lapps must have been out on the fire escape, peeking into Caroline Williams’ apartment, casing it for a possible break-in, when he saw George slapping the girl around in the bedroom. He must have heard the Williams woman calling George by name — that planted the “George did it” seed — and got a new thrill when he witnessed George cut the woman’s throat.

Then George had seen the dark, coplike figure out the window, got spooked, and lammed; and Lapps entered the apartment, spilled his seed, did his sick, guilty number washing and bandaging the corpse, and took various mementos, including undies and the photo album.

This new thrill had inspired Lapps to greater heights of madness, and the second girl — Margaret Johnson — had been all his. All his own twisted handiwork... though perhaps in his mind George had done that, as well.

But Lapps, like so many men after even a normal sexual release, felt a sadness and even guilt and had left that lipstick plea on the wall.

That pretty nurse, Katherine Reynolds, had been lucky. Lapps hadn’t been able to kill again; he’d stopped at assault — maybe he’d had his sexual release already, and his remorse kicked in before he could kill her. He’d even come back to help her.

What was bothering me, though, was the Keenan child. Nothing about Lapps’ M.O. fit this crime. The building wasn’t his “type.” Kidnapping wasn’t his crime, let alone dismembering a child. Had Lapps’ thrill-seeking escalated into sheer depravity?

Even so, one thing was so wrong I couldn’t invent any justification for it. Ken had said it: the kid had probably never had normal sex. The kid’s idea of a fun date was going through a strange window and coming on the floor.

But rape had been attempted on the little girl. The coroner said so. Rape.

“Want some company, Heller?”

Hal Davis, with his oversize head and sideways smile, had already slid in across from me in the booth.

“Sure. What’s new in the world of yellow journalism?”

“Slow day. Jeez, Heller, you look like shit.”

“Thanks, Hal.”

“You should be on top of the world. You’re a local hero. A celebrity.”

“Shut up, Hal.”

Davis had brought a Scotch along with him. “Ain’t this case a pip. Too bad they can’t fry this kid, but in this enlightened day and age, he’ll probably get a padded cell and three squares for the rest of his miserable life.”

“I don’t think they’ll fry a seventeen-year-old, even in a case like this.”

“What a case it’s been. For you, especially.”

“You got your share of mileage out of it, too, Hal.”

He laughed; lit up a cigarette. Shook his head. “Funny.”

“What is?”

“Who’d a thunk it?”

“Thunk what?”

He leaned over conspiratorially. His breath was evidence that this was not his first Scotch of the afternoon. “That the Keenan kidnapper really would turn out to be the Lipstick Killer. For real.”

“Why not? He left his signature on Keenan’s back fence. ‘Stop me before I kill more...’”

“That’s the funny part.” He snorted smugly. “Who do you think wrote that on the fence?”

I blinked. “What do you mean?”

Davis leaned across with a one-sided smirk that split his boyish face. “Don’t be a jerk. Don’t be so gullible. I wrote that there. It made for a hell of a byline.”

I grabbed him by his lapels and dragged him across the table. His Scotch spilled and my drink went over and his cigarette went flying and his eyes were wide, as were those of the businessmen finishing up their two- and three-martini lunches.

“You what?” I asked him through my teeth.

“Nate! You’re hurting me! Let go! You’re makin’ a scene...”

I shoved him back against the booth. I got out. I was shaking. “You did do it, didn’t you, you little cocksucker.”

He was frightened, but he tried not to show it; he made a face, shrugged. “What’s the big fucking deal?”

I grabbed him by the tie and he watched my fist while I decided whether to smash in his face.

Then the fist dissolved into fingers, but I retained my grip on his tie.

“Let’s go talk to the cops,” I said.

“I was just bullshitting,” he said, lamely. “I didn’t do it. Really. It was just the booze talking.”

I put a hand around his throat and started to squeeze. His eyes popped. I was sneering at him when I said, “Stop me, Hal — before I kill more.”

Then I shoved him against the wall, rattling some framed pictures, and got the hell out of there.

20

The cellar was lit by a single hanging bulb. There were laundry tubs and storage lockers, just like the basement where JoAnn Keenan was dismembered.

But this was not that basement. This was a slightly smaller one in a building near the “murder cellar,” a tidy one with tools and cleaning implements neatly lining the walls, like well-behaved prisoners.

This was janitor Otto Bergstrum’s domain.

“Why you want meet with me?” the thick-necked, white-haired Bergstrum asked.

Outside, it was rainy and dark. Close to midnight. I was in a drenched trenchcoat, getting Bergstrum’s tidy cellar damp. I left my hat on and it was dripping, too.

“I told you on the phone,” I said. “Business. A matter of money.”

As before, the husky old fellow was in coveralls, his biceps tight against the rolled-up sleeves of his flannel shirt; his legs were planted well apart and firmly. His hands were fists and the fists were heavily veined.

“You come about reward money,” he said. His eyes were blue and unblinking and cold under unruly salt-and-pepper eyebrows. “You try talk me out of claim my share.”

“That’s not it exactly. You see, there’s going to be several people put in claims.”

“Cops not eligible.”

“Just city cops. I’m eligible.”

“But they not.”

“Right. But I have to kick back a few bucks to a couple of ’em, out of what I haul to shore.”

“So, what? You think I should help you pay them?”

“No. I think you should kick your share back to me.”

His eyes flared; he took a step forward. We were still a number of paces apart, though. Christ, his arms and shoulders were massive.

“Why should I do this?”

“Because I think you kidnapped the Keenan girl,” I said.

He took a step back. His mouth dropped open. His eyes widened.

“I’m in clear,” he said.

That was less than a denial, wasn’t it?

“Otto,” I said, “I checked up on you, this afternoon. Discreetly. You’re a veteran, like me — only you served in the first war. On the other side.”

He jutted his jaw. “I am proud to be German.”

“But you were an American immigrant at the time. You’d been in this country since you were a kid. But still you went back home, to fight for the fatherland... then after they lost their asses, you had the nerve to come back.”

“I was not alone in doing such.”

He wasn’t, either: on the North Side, there was a whole organization of these German World War One vets who got together. They even had dinners with American vets.

“The Butcher’s Union knew about you,” I said, “but you were never a member.”

“Communists,” he said.

“You worked as a butcher in a shop on the West Side, for years — till meat shortages during the war... this last war... got you laid off. You were nonunion, couldn’t find another butcher job... with your background, anything defense-related was out. You wound up here. A janitor. It’s your sister’s building, isn’t it?”

“You go to hell, mister.”

“You know what I think, Otto? I think you blamed the New Deal for your bad deal. I think you got real mad at the government. I think you in particular blamed the OPA.”

“Socialists,” he said.

“Bob Keenan wasn’t even in Chicago when you got laid off, you stupid old fart. But he was in the OPA now, and he was in the neighborhood. He had money, and he had a pretty little daughter. He was as good a place as any for Otto Bergstrum to get even.”

“There is no proof of any of this. It is all air. Wind. You are the fart.”

“What, did you get drunk, was it spur of the moment, or did you plan it? The kidnapping I can see. What I don’t understand is killing the little girl. Did she start to make noise in bed, and you strangled her? Were you just too strong, and maybe drunk, and it was an accident of sorts?”

Now his face was an expressionless mask. His hands weren’t fists any more. His eyes were hooded; his head was slack.

“What I really don’t get, Otto, is the rape. Trying to rape a little girl. Was she already dead? You sick fucker.”

He raised his head. “You have filthy mouth. Maybe I wash it out with lye.”

“I’m going to give you a choice, old man. You can come with me, and come clean at Summerdale station. Or I can kill you right here.”

“You have gun in your coat pocket?”

“I have gun in my coat pocket, yeah.”

“Ah. But my friend has knife.”

I hadn’t heard him. I have no idea where he came from; coal bin, maybe. He was as quiet as nobody there. He was just suddenly behind me and he did have a knife, a long, sharp butcher knife that caught the single bulb’s glow and reflected it, like the glint of a madman’s eyes. Like the glint of this madman’s eyes, as I stepped quickly to one side, the knife slashing down, cutting through the arm of my raincoat, cutting cloth and ripping a wound along my shoulder. My hand involuntarily released the gun, and even though both it and my hand were in the same coat pocket, I was fumbling for it, the gun caught in the cloth, my fingers searching for the grip...

I recognized this rail-thin, short-haired, sunken-cheeked young man as James Watson — but only from the papers. I’d never met him. He was the handyman at the nursery from which the kidnap ladder had been “stolen”; an Army vet and an accused child molester and, with Otto, a suspect in this case till I hauled Jerome Lapps onstage.

He was wearing a rain slicker, yellow, and one of those floppy yellow wide-brimmed rain hats; but he didn’t look like he’d been outside. Maybe his raincoat was to keep the blood off.

He had the knife raised in such a corny fashion; raised in one fist, level with his head, and walking mummy-slow. His dark blue eyes were wide and his grin glazed and he looked silly, like a scarecrow with a knife, a caricature of a fiend. I could have laughed at how hokey this asshole looked, only Otto had grabbed me from behind as Watson advanced.

With my arms pulled back, one of them bleeding and burning from the slash of a knife that was even now red with my blood, I struggled but with little success. The old German janitor had me locked in his thick hands.

Watson stabbed savagely with the knife and I moved to the left and the blade, about half of it, went into Otto’s neck and blood spurted. Otto went down, clutching his throat, his life oozing through his fingers, and I was free of him, and while Watson still had the knife in his hand — he’d withdrawn the blade almost as quickly as he’d accidentally sunk it into his cohort’s throat — the handyman was stunned by the turn of events, his mouth hanging open, as if awaiting a dentist’s drill. I grabbed his wrist with my two hands and swung his hand and his knife in a sudden arc down into his stomach.

The sound was like sticking your foot in thick mud.

He stood there, doing the oddest little dance, for several seconds, his hand gripped around the handle of the butcher knife, which I had driven in almost to the hilt. He looked down at himself with a look of infinite stupidity and danced some more.

I pushed his stupid face with the heel of my hand and he went ass-over-teakettle. He lay on his back twitching. He’d released the knife handle. I yanked the knife out of his stomach; there was a little hole in the rain slicker where the knife went in.

And the sound was like pulling your foot out of thick mud.

“You’re the one who tried to rape that little girl, aren’t you, Jim?”

He was blinking and twitching; a thin geyser of blood was coming from the hole in the yellow rain slicker.

“Poor old Otto just wanted to get even. Pull a little kidnap, make a little money off those socialist sons of bitches who cost him his job. But he picked a bad assistant in you, Jim. Had to play butcher on that dead little girl, trying to clean up after you.”

There was still life in Watson’s eyes. Otto was over near the laundry tubs, gurgling. Alive, barely.

I had the knife in one hand, and my blood was soaking my shirt under the raincoat, though I felt little if any pain. I gave some serious thought to waling away on Watson with the butcher knife; just carving the fucker up. But I couldn’t quite cross the line.

I had George Morello’s pack of Camels in my suit coat pocket. I dug them out and smoked while I watched both men die.

Better part of two cigarettes, it took.

Then I wiped off anything I’d touched, dropped the butcher knife near Watson, and left that charnel house behind; went out into a dark, warm summer night and a warm, cleansing summer rain, which put out the second cigarette.

It was down to the butt, anyway. I tossed it in a sewer.

21

The deaths of Otto Bergstrum and James Watson made a bizarre sidebar in the ongoing saga of the Lipstick Killer, but neither the cops nor the press allowed the “fatal falling out between friends” to influence the accepted scenario.

It turned out there was even something of a motive: Watson had loaned Otto five hundred dollars to pay off a gambling debt; Otto played the horses, it seemed. Speculation was that Watson, knowing Otto was due reward money from the Keenan case, had demanded payment. Both men were known to have bad tempers. Both had killed in the war — well, each in his individual war.

The cops never figured out how the two men had managed to kill each other with the one knife, not that anybody seemed to care. It was fine with me. Nobody had seen me in the vicinity that rainy night, or at least nobody who bothered to report it.

Lapps was indicted on multiple burglary, assault, and murder charges. His lawyers entered into what years later an investigative journalist would term “a strange, unprecedented cooperative relationship” with the State’s Attorney’s office.

In order to save their client from the electric chair, the defense lawyers — despite the prosecution’s admission of the “small likelihood of a successful murder prosecution of Jerome Lapps” — advised the boy to cop a plea.

If Lapps were to confess to the murders of Caroline Williams, Margaret Johnson, and JoAnn Keenan, the State’s Attorney would seek concurrent life sentences. That meant parole in twenty years.

Lapps — reluctantly, I’m told — accepted the plea bargain, but when the boy was taken into a judge’s presence to make a formal admission of guilt, he said instead, “I don’t remember killing anybody.”

The recantation cost him. Even though Lapps eventually gave everybody the confession they wanted, the deal was off: all he got out of it was avoiding the chair. His three life terms were concurrent with a recommendation of no parole. Ever.

He tried to hang himself in his cell, but it didn’t take.

I took a ride on the Rock Island Rocket to Joliet to visit Lapps, about a year after he was sent up.

The visiting room at Stateville was a long narrow room cut in half by a long wide table with a glass divider. I’d already taken my seat with the other visitors when guards paraded in a handful of prisoners.

Lapps, like the others, wore blue denims and a blue-and-white striped shirt, which looked like a normal dress shirt, unless the wearer turned to reveal a stenciled number across the back. The husky, good-looking kid had changed little in appearance; maybe he was a little heavier. His dark, wavy hair, though no shorter, was cut differently — it was neater looking, a student’s hair, not a j.d.’s.

He sat and smiled shyly. “I remember you.”

“You should. You tried to shoot me.”

“That’s what I understand. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“The gun you used was one you’d stolen. The owner identified it along with other stuff of his you took.”

He shrugged; this was all news to him.

I continued: “The owner said the gun had been his father’s and had been stuck in a drawer for seventeen years. Hadn’t been fired for a long time.”

His brow knit. “That’s why the gun didn’t go off, when I shot at you?”

“Yes. But a ballistics expert said the third shot would have gone off. You’d reactivated the trigger.”

“I’m glad it didn’t.”

“Me too.”

We looked at each other. My gaze was hard, unforgiving; his was evasive, shy.

“Why are you here, Mr. Heller?”

“I wanted to ask you a question. Why did you confess to all three murders?”

He shrugged again. “I had to. Otherwise, I’d be dead, my lawyers say. I just made things up. Told them what they wanted to hear. Repeated things back to them. Used what I read in the papers.” One more shrug. Then his dark eyes tightened. “Why? You asked me like... like you knew I didn’t do them.”

“You did one of them, Jerry. You killed Margaret Williams and you wrote that lipstick message on her wall.”

Something flickered in his eyes. “I don’t remember.”

“Maybe not. But you also assaulted Katherine Reynolds, and you tried to shoot me. As far as I’m concerned, that’s why you’re here.”

“You don’t think I killed that little girl?”

“I know you didn’t.”

An eagerness sprang into his passive face. “Have you talked to my lawyers?”

I shook my head no.

“Would you talk to my...”

“No. I’m not going to help you, Jerry.”

“Why... why are you telling this, then...?”

My voice was barely above a whisper; this was just between us guys. “In case you’re not faking. In case you really don’t remember what you did. I think you got a right to know what you’re doing time for. What you’re really doing time for. And you did kill the second girl. And you almost killed the nurse. And you damn near killed me. That’s why you’re here, Jerry. That’s why I’m leaving you here to rot, and don’t bother repeating what I’m telling you, because I can out-lie every con in Stateville. I used to be a Chicago cop.”

He was reeling. “Who... who killed the first girl? Who killed that Caroline Williams lady?”

“Jerry,” I said, rising to go, “George did it.”

22

Lapps, as of this writing, is still inside. That’s why, after all these years, as I edge toward senility in my Coral Springs condo, in the company of my second wife, I have put all this down on paper. The Parole for Lapps Committee requested a formal deposition, but I preferred that this take the same form, more or less, as other memoirs I’ve scribbled in my dotage.

Jerry Lapps is an old man now — not as old as me, but old. A gray-haired, paunchy old boy. Not the greasy-haired J.D. who I was glad to see go to hell and Stateville. He’s been in custody longer than any other inmate in the Illinois prison system. Long before courses were offered to prisoners, he was the first Illinois inmate to earn a college degree. He then helped and advised other convicts with organizing similar self-help correspondence-course programs. He taught himself electronics and became a pretty fair watercolor artist. Right now he’s in Vienna Prison, a minimum-security facility with no fences and no barred windows. He’s the assistant to the prison chaplain.

Over the years, the press and public servants and surviving relatives of the murder victims — including JoAnn’s sister Jane — have fought Lapps’ parole. He is portrayed as the first of a particular breed of American urban monster — precursor to Richard Speck, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy.

Bob Keenan died last year. His wife Norma died three years ago.

Sam Flood — a.k.a. Sam Giancana — was hit in his home back in ’75, right before he was supposed to testify before a Senate committee about Outfit/CIA connections.

Of the major players, Lapps is the only one left alive. Lapps and me.

What the hell. I’ve had my fill of revenge.

Let the bastard loose.

If he’s faking rehabilitation like he once faked amnesia, if he hurts anybody else, shit — I’ll haul the nine millimeter out of mothballs and hobble after him myself.

23

My son was born just before midnight, on September 27, 1947.

We named him Nathan Samuel Heller, Jr.

His mother — exhausted after twelve hours of labor, face slick with sweat, hair matted down — never looked more beautiful to me. And I never saw her look happier.

“He’s so small,” she said. “Why did he take so long making his entrance?”

“He’s small but he’s stubborn. Like his mother.”

“He’s got your nose. He’s got your mouth. He’s gorgeous. You want to hold him, Nate?”

“Sure.”

I took the little bundle, and looked at the sweet small face and experienced, for the first and only time before or since, love at first sight.

“I’m Daddy,” I told the groggy little fellow. He made saliva bubbles. I touched his tiny nose. Examined his tiny hand — the miniature palm, the perfect little fingers. How could something so miraculous happen in such an awful world?

I gave him back to his mother and she put him to her breast and he began to suckle. A few minutes on the planet, and he was getting tit already. Life wasn’t going to get much better.

I sat there and watched them and waves of joy and sadness alternated over me. It was mostly joy, but I couldn’t keep from thinking that a hopeful mother had once held a tiny child named JoAnn in her arms, minutes after delivery; that another mother had held little Jerry Lapps in her gentle grasp. And Caroline Williams and Margaret Johnson were once babes in their mother’s arms. One presumes even Otto Bergstrum and James Watson and, Christ, George Morello were sweet infants in their sweet mothers’ arms, once upon a time.

I promised myself that my son would have it better than me. He wouldn’t have to have it so goddamn rough; the depression was ancient history, and the war to end all wars was over. He’d want for nothing. Food, clothing, shelter, education, they were his birthright.

That’s what we’d fought for, all of us. To give our kids what we never had. To give them a better, safer place to live in. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

For that one night, settled into a hard hospital chair, in the glow of my brand-new little family, I allowed myself to believe that that hope was not a vain one. That anything was possible in this glorious post-war world.

Content

Max Allan Collins
Dying in the Post-War World

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