Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Read online

  I’d forgotten to mention the bristles; I pointed those out.

  Hansen, still kneeling, nodded. “Possibly an effort to remove latent prints.”

  Brown—who, of course, was also kneeling—said, “Maybe she was strangled . . . Look at those ligature marks on her neck.”

  “I’m not so sure she was strangled,” the Hat said. “That large wound to the head could have caused a fatal concussion.”

  I was staring at the girl’s face; I didn’t want to—but I was compelled, as if I were trying to find the pretty features somewhere there, despite the battered forehead and the carved clown’s grin.

  The Hat, standing, brushing off his expensive suit, picked up on that: he didn’t miss much.

  “What is it, Nate? There’s something personal, here. My nose is twitching again.”

  “It’s just the flies, Harry.”

  “Don’t kid a kidder, Nate. What is it? What were you seeing when you looked down at her?”

  And what I told him, as far as it went, was the truth: “It’s . . . she looks like my wife, is all. A little like my wife . . . and it shakes me up, looking at her. You mind if I . . . ?”

  “No. You can move away. Say—where I can reach you?”

  “At the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Very nice. You and Fred must be doing well.”

  “Maybe so, but my suits still aren’t as nice as yours, Harry.”

  The tiny mouth grinned, a hole in his face filled with teeth. “It isn’t just about money, Nate—it’s also about good taste. . . . Ah! Lieutenant Haskins!”

  I turned as Haskins, back from his mission, strode up, giving me an excuse to fade back to the street. That fucking Fowley—where the hell was he?

  “Ray Pinker is on his way,” Haskins said.

  “Fine job, Lieutenant,” the Hat said. He looked toward where the vacant lot yawned at the backyards of distant, finished homes. Several uniformed officers were picking through the weeds and grass. “And what are those gentlemen up to?”

  “I thought we should get started, going over the ground,” Haskins said. “If anything turns up, we’ll have it ready for the lab boys.”

  A smile twitched on the Hat’s tiny mouth. “Call them off, would you? At this rate there won’t be anything for the lab to find.”

  Haskins, embarrassed, nodded, and was turning to take care of that when the Hat clutched him by the shoulder, saying, “Send them out to do something useful—let’s canvass the neighborhood for the woman who made the phone call, and perhaps locate someone else who may have seen something, anything . . . hmmm?”

  “Yes.”

  “And once you’ve done that, I want you to find some newspapers and cover up that poor girl’s body. With the sun coming out, we need to preserve the body from discoloration, for Ray Pinker and the coroner.”

  Haskins looked up at the sky—the sun indeed was starting to poke its streaky fingers through the clouds—then nodded and scurried away.

  Sighing, Harry the Hat—holding up a hand to freeze Brown in place (Simon says Stay!)—wandered over to where I was standing, in the street.

  Sidling up me, the Hat said, “I don’t think the lieutenant understands the sacred nature of a crime scene.”

  “The what?”

  “Nate, it’s sacred, this ground . . . sacred and profane, yes . . . but mostly sacred. Murder is a marriage between victim and slayer—it’s a bond formed between two people that ties them together. It’s more binding than marriage, though . . . you can divorce a mate, you can even remarry a mate . . . but you can only murder somebody once.”

  Was he needling me, with this marriage metaphor, after I mentioned the corpse reminded me of my wife?

  But I said only, “That’s, uh, hard to argue with, Harry.”

  He nodded toward the vacant lot, reached out a hand as if in benediction. “On that sacred ground, murderer and victim were together, one last time—even if he didn’t kill her, even if he only deposited the remains. And that nasty tableau, Nate, it’s a work of art, in the killer’s mind . . . and, frankly, in mine . . . it’s a reflection of his mind, his personality. . . . That sacred ground contains all the clues and evidence we might need to solve this murder, or at least it did before that boob from University allowed reporters and cops and God knows who else to trample around on it.”

  “That was some speech, Harry—but how do you know it’s a ‘he’?”

  That made him wince in thought. “What do you mean, Nate?”

  “You keep referring to the murderer as ‘he’ . . . Couldn’t it be a ‘she’?”

  “Look at that display, Nate—it’s a sex crime.”

  “Lesbians kill people, too. You see any sign of semen?”

  “She was washed clean of it.”

  “How do you know? And, anyway—ever occur to you that that smile cut in her face might mean something nonsexual?”

  The hooded eyes blinked. “Explain.”

  I shrugged. “Back in Chicago, a corpse dumped with its mouth gashed, we’d read that as somebody who got rubbed out for talking too much . . . and left as an example.”

  Now his eyes were wide; they stayed that way for a while. Then he said, as if bored to tears, “Interesting. . . .You know, I really do respect you as a detective, Nate—these insights, I appreciate them.”

  I couldn’t detect any sarcasm in that; but maybe I just wasn’t a good enough detective to do so.

  He touched his hat brim in a tip-the-hat gesture and said, “Don’t forget to make that phone call to your friend Mr. Ness for me, now, hear?”

  “Sure. I’ll call you.”

  “I wish you would. I may have my hands full.”

  He was just about to amble back to his partner when Fowley’s blue Ford rolled in. The little reporter in the tight hat and loose suit parked in the street and came over and grinned at Hansen.

  “Not surprised to see you, here, Harry,” Fowley said. “This is gonna be a big one.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. Richardson approved an extra.”

  Hansen frowned. “You’re putting out an extra edition on a simple homicide?”

  “You saw her—this is one homicide that ain’t simple. We’re gonna run with this, Harry . . . Don’t tell me you’d mind seein’ that popular feature ‘Mr. Homicide’ in the papers again?”

  The Hat thought about that, just momentarily, and then stepped away from us and—in an uncharacteristic move from someone so softspoken—called out in a booming voice, “Would the members of the press mind converging? Thank you, gentlemen . . . thank you, Aggie . . .”

  About a dozen representatives of the press—reporters and photographers—gathered around the Hat, the tired eyes in his hound-dog countenance almost shut as he made an announcement.

  “Thank you for your cooperation,” the Hat said. “I wanted to inform you of two facts. First, you’re all about to leave this crime scene; I don’t want the crime lab to have to conduct their investigation with you good people peeking over their shoulders, or making further contributions of flashbulbs and cigarette butts. . . .”

  A general rumbling of discontent passed through the little crowd.

  “How are we supposed to get our information, Harry?” Aggie demanded.

  “Through me,” the Hat said. “Exclusively through me. And if any of you attempt to go over my head, and get it from my boss, Captain Donahoe, or from the Chief himself, as some of you have been known to do . . . well then, I promise you, I will cut you off from any future information on this or any case. . . . Good afternoon.”

  The reporters dispersed, grumbling as they went; me, I was happy to be climbing into the Ford with Fowley behind the wheel.

  “What took you so long, you prick?” I demanded.

  He just grinned at me, a happy bulldog. “When I called Richardson, he told me to get the hell in and develop those negatives. That’s a switch, huh? Heller pictures in the paper, and no Heller in the pictures!”

 
That was just how I wanted it.

  “You guys are really going with an extra on this?” I asked him, as he swung his car around, giving me a view of Lieutenant Haskins and a patrolman taking apart newspapers and covering the halved corpse.

  “You bet your lily-white ass,” Fowley said. “The Examiner’s gonna be all over this baby.”

  I looked at the overlapping peaks of newsprint, covering her entirely, except for red-painted toenails—like Peggy’s—sticking out from under the pages.

  “You already are,” I said.

  4

  Elizabeth Short—who I knew as Beth—had come into my life the previous October. I would be lying if I said she meant much more to me than any number of showgirls, waitresses, and secretaries with whom I’d had short-lived affairs. Beth was memorable chiefly because she resembled Peggy Hogan; otherwise, she was just another pretty young starry-eyed thing filled with dreams but no real plans.

  As I attempt to share my memories of this ill-fated girl, please keep in mind that the several months prior to Peggy and me reconciling (and marrying) are something of a blur. Like many a spurned lover, I wallowed in self-pity, and when I got sick of that, I would turn to a bottle, and drink myself into a stupor.

  Even my work, which I always relished, had become a mind-numbing bore. Due to extensive Chicago press coverage of my roles in such high-profile cases as the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Cermak assassination, and the Sir Harry Oakes murder, I had acquired a certain minor celebrity. This made it advisable for me to take initial meetings with clients—who sometimes wanted an autograph, and always wanted an assurance that the president of the A-1, Nathan Heller himself, would be handling their oh-so-vital retail-credit-check/divorce-case/personnel investigation, personally.

  So I took these meetings, and my half a dozen operatives did the work. Most of them were, like me, ex-Chicago cops; the senior man was Lou Sapperstein, who took on the more challenging, which is to say rewarding and interesting, jobs.

  Closing in on sixty, Lou—with bald pate, graying temples, bowtie, and tortoiseshell eyeglasses—looked more like an accountant than a private cop. Useful in shadow jobs, his appearance was deceiving: he was one lean, hard op, and little slipped past him—including my state of mind and lackluster performance.

  “This finnan haddie has more color than you,” Lou said, pointing to his plate.

  We were having lunch at Binyon’s, a dark-paneled businessman’s bastion just around the corner from our offices at Plymouth and Van Buren.

  I said, not really giving a shit, “What’s your point, Lou?”

  Shifting in the hard booth, Lou flinched facially and said, “Every day you come in hungover, half the time you forgot to shave, you fall asleep on your couch, you barely stay awake through client conferences, and look at you, a guy who’s never really been much of a tippler, drinking your damn lunch.”

  I shrugged. “I wasn’t hungry. And this is only my second one.”

  By that, I meant rum and Coke.

  He pointed his fork at me. “Maybe you need to get back out in the field. Get back to some investigative work.”

  “Fine. Something lively comes in, I’ll take it on myself.”

  “Do I dare let you? Better you fall asleep in the office than on surveillance, or the middle of an interrogation. Has your malaria kicked back in or something?”

  I sipped my lunch.

  “Listen, Nate, we’ve known each other for a long time . . . but I’m not a hired hand now.”

  A while back, I had given Lou a percentage of the business—not a big one, just a taste, to repay him, and motivate him, so he didn’t get stolen away by the Hargraves Agency, or go out on his own.

  “You’re also not my boss,” I said. “And it’s been a long time since you were.”

  That he’d been my boss on the pickpocket detail had long been a source of friendly kidding between us, but my remark came out sounding not all that friendly.

  “I’m also not your conscience, Nate, or your fairy fuckin’ godmother . . . but I would say you need to get over this.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about Jim Ragen’s niece. I’m talking about Peggy Hogan.”

  I just looked at him.

  He glanced away, embarrassed. “I know. I know. I’m way out of bounds. Your personal life is nobody’s business but yours. . . . Forget it. Forget I said anything.”

  He had a bite of his fish; then he had another.

  I swirled my drink and looked into its blackness. Without looking up, I said, “What do you suggest I do?”

  “Are you asking?”

  “What, you want me to ask twice? If you think my . . . if you think I’m adversely affecting the business by my, I don’t know, fuck, attitude . . . go ahead. Tell me what to do.”

  He thought about that for a second.

  “I never thought I’d hear myself have to say this,” he said, “considering you’re just about the randiest son of a bitch I ever knew . . . but, Nate, really, truly—you need to get laid.”

  That remark caught me by surprise, and actually made me laugh—first time I’d laughed in weeks. But there was truth in his remark: Lou knew I hadn’t been out with a woman since Peggy dumped me. I hailed a passing waiter and ordered a steak sandwich and French-fried potatoes, which—along with not asking for a third rum and Coke—was my way of telling Lou I was going to try to rejoin the human race. Thus ended this rare personal chat between Lou and me.

  In light of the housing shortage, I had held on to a “suite” (a living room with kitchenette and a bedroom) on the twenty-third floor of the Morrison, Chicago’s tallest hotel. I’d stayed off-and-on at the Morrison—which was at Madison and South Clark, a few blocks from the A-1 offices—for almost ten years, and the fact that I still resided in a hotel seemed emblematic of the sorry state of my life. I should have been married by now, preferably to Peggy, and—assuming my connections and money could get past that aforementioned housing shortage—either living in a Gold Coast apartment or a suburban bungalow, pursuing the glorious postwar life I’d fought for.

  The Morrison was also home to the Boston Oyster House, which dated back to just after the Great Fire and rivaled Jim Ireland’s as Chicago’s premier seafood restaurant. It was an elegant yet informal basement dining room refreshingly free of the usual cornball nautical trappings, other than a scattering of marine landscapes. I ate there several times a week, as it was both convenient and good, and—unlike, say, the Berghoff, another of my haunts, which ran to no-nonsense, rather grizzled waiters—orders were taken and delivered by waitresses, many of them attractive and young.

  This is not to say that I was trolling for female companionship, after Lou Sapperstein’s pep talk: I was just hungry. For food. No kidding. I swear.

  The aquamarine uniform with the white collar and cuffs was designed to look primly attractive, not alluring, but her slender, shapely figure had an agenda all its own. I spotted the new girl when I first came in, but it was from a distance, and all I got was the general effect of that classy chassis topped off by a china-doll face and lots of dark curls, shoulder length and yet piled high.

  That and the way she walked: a sensuous, swinging sway that would have done a runway model proud.

  I slipped a fivespot to the maîtresse d’—the warm friendly, unfortunately named Pearl Kuntz, the head waitress now for several decades—for the privilege of having the new girl wait on me.

  “All right, Nate,” the fleshy, perennially blonde Pearl said, eyeing me suspiciously. She wore a black uniform, and was tucking the five in a side pocket. “Just don’t make a madam out of me.”

  “I have nothing ungentlemanly in mind.”

  “It’s not your mind that worries me, Nate.”

  She was showing me to my small table against a wall, where a gilt-framed whaling oil painting awaited to keep me company.

  “You’ve never forgiven me for that pass I made at you in ’32, have you, Pearl?”


  “Sure I have, Nate. What I haven’t forgiven is you not making one since ’38.”

  We grinned at each other, and she handed me a menu and trundled off.

  It wasn’t until the waitress arrived to take my order that I got my first good look at her, which knocked the wind right the hell out of me.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked, her voice low, rich, husky. Her eyes were clear and cool and the same aquamarine as her uniform; that china-doll effect was due to a bright red lipstick and a light shade of pancake over a naturally pale complexion.

  “No,” I said, lowering my menu. “It’s just . . . you remind me of someone.”

  Amusement twitched her full lips; her pencil tapped rhythmically on her order pad. “An old girl friend, by any chance?”

  “Not very original, is it?”

  “Not very.”

  I was shaking my head, astounded. “But I’m not kidding. You really are a ringer for her.”

  The amusement disappeared and the translucent eyes fixed on me, and she stopped tapping the pencil. “That isn’t just a line, is it?”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  Dark eyebrows—thick, unfashionably so—tightened over the gorgeous, limpid-pool eyes. Her voice was soft—private. “You really cared for her.”

  “Yeah. I really cared for her.”

  “She isn’t . . . please excuse me for asking . . . she isn’t dead, is she?”

  “No! No. She’s fine . . . it’s just ‘us’ that’s deceased.”

  She smiled a little. “I get you. . . . Now, what can I get you?”

  I ordered a long-standing menu favorite, Pearl’s Special—surprisingly, not a seafood dish, but a porterhouse steak with baked potato—back on the menu now that ration books were ancient history.

  In Chicago, the coffee was usually served, like the salad, with the meal; but I asked this lovely waitress to bring mine right away. I took it with cream and sugar.

  “Tough guy like you?” the waitress asked, a twinkle in those aquamarines, now.

  “What makes you think I’m a tough guy?”