When the cute high school girl, screaming bloody murder, came running down the steps from the porch of the brown-brick two-story, I was sitting in a parked Buick reading The Racing News.
At ten after eleven in the a.m., Chicago neighborhoods didn’t get much quieter than Englewood, and South Elizabeth Street on this sunny day in May, 1945, ran to bird chirps, muffled radio programs and El rattle. A banshee teenager was enough to attract the attention of just about anybody, even a drowsy detective who was supposed to be watching the very house in question.
A guy in tee-shirt and suspenders, mowing the lawn next-door, got to her just before me.
“Sally, honey, calm down,” the guy said.
“Bob, Bob, Bob,” she said to her neighbor.
His name, apparently, was Bob. Like I said, I’m a detective.
“What’s wrong, honey?” I asked the girl.
She was probably sixteen. Blonde hair bounced off her shoulders, and with those blue eyes and that heart-shaped face, she would have been a knockout if she hadn’t been devoid of make-up and wearing a navy jumper that stopped midcalf, abetted by a white blouse buttoned to her throat.
“It’s…it’s Mother,” she said, and in slow motion she turned toward the narrow front of the brick house and pointed, like the Ghost of Christmas Future indicating Scrooge’s gravestone.
“Look at me,” I said, and she did, mouth and eyes twitching. “I’m a policeman. Tell me what happened.”
“Something…something terrible.”
Then she pushed past me, and sat on the curb and buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
Bob, who was bald and round-faced and about forty, said, “You’re a cop?”
“Actually, private. Is that kid named Vinicky?”
“Yes. Sally Vinicky—she goes to Visitation High. Probably home for lunch.”
That explained the prim get-up: Visitation was a Catholic all-girl’s school.
Another neighbor was wandering up, a housewife in an apron, hair in a net, eyes wide; she had flecks of soap suds on her red hands. I brought her into my little group.
“My name is Heller,” I said. “I’m an investigator doing a job for that girl’s father. I need one of you to look after Sally…ma’am? Would you?”
The woman nodded, then asked, “Why, what’s wrong?”
“I’m going in that house and find out. Bob, call the Englewood Station and ask them to send a man over.”
“What should I tell them?”
“What you saw.”
As the housewife sat beside the girl on the curb and slipped an arm around her, and Bob headed toward the neighboring house, a frame bungalow, I headed up the steps to the covered porch. The girl had left the door open and I went on in.
The living room was off to the left, a dining room to the right; but the living room got my attention, because of the dead woman sprawled on the floor.
A willowy dame in her mid-thirties and blue-and-white floral dress, Rose Vinicky—I recognized her from the photos her husband had provided—lay on her side on the multi-color braided rug between an easy chair and a spinet piano, from which Bing Crosby smiled at me off a sheet music cover, “I Can’t Begin to Tell You.” Not smiling back, I knelt to check her wrist for a pulse, but judging by the dark pool of blood her head rested in, I was on a fool’s errand.
Beyond the corpse stood a small table next to the easy chair with a couple of magazines on it, Look, Life. On the floor nearby was a cut-glass ashtray, which the woman presumably had knocked off when she fell forward, struck a vicious blow from behind. A lipstick-tipped cigarette had burned itself out, making a black hole in the braiding of the rug. I wasn’t sure whether she’d been reaching for the smoke when the killer clubbed her, or whether she’d gone for the table to brace her fall.
With her brains showing like that, though, she was probably already unconscious or even dead on the way down.
She looked a little like her daughter, though the hair was darker, almost brunette, short, tight curls. Not pretty, but attractive, handsome; and no mid-length skirt for Rose: she had liked to show off those long, slender, shapely legs, which mimed in death the act of running away.
She’d been a looker, or enough of one, anyway, to make her husband suspect her of cheating.
I didn’t spend a lot of time with Rose—she wasn’t going anywhere, and it was always possible her killer was still around.
But the house—nicely appointed with older, in some cases antique furniture—was clear, including the basement. I did note that the windows were all closed and locked, and the back door was locked, too—with no signs of break-in. The killer had apparently come in the front door.
That meant the murder took place before I’d pulled up in front of the Vinicky home around ten. I’d seen no one approach the house in the little more than an hour my car and ass had been parked across the way. It would’ve been embarrassing finding out a murder had been committed inside a home while I was watching it.
On the other hand, I’d been surveilling the place to see with whom the woman might be cheating when here she was, already dead. Somehow that didn’t seem gold-star worthy, either.
I had another, closer look at the corpse. Maybe she hadn’t been dead when she fell, at that—looked like she’d suffered multiple blows. One knocked her down, the others finished her off and opened up her skull. Blood was spattered on the nearby spinet, but also on the little table and even the easy chair.
Whoever did this would had to have walked away covered in blood….
Her right hand seemed to be reaching out, and I could discern the pale circle on her fourth finger that indicated a ring, probably a wedding ring, had been there until recently. Was this a robbery, then?
Something winked at me from the pooled blood, something floating there. I leaned forward, got a better look: a brown button, the four-eyed variety common to man’s suit-or sportcoat.
I did not collect it, leaving that to…
“Stand up! Get away from that body!”
Sighing, I got to my feet and put my hands in the air and the young patrolman—as fresh-faced as that Catholic schoolgirl—rushed up and frisked me, finding no weapon.
I let him get that all out of his system, and told him who I was, and what had happened, including what I’d seen. I left the button out, and the missing wedding ring; that could wait for the detectives.
The next hour was one cop after another. Four or five uniformed men showed, a trio of detectives from Englewood Station, a couple of dicks from the bureau downtown, a photographer, a coroner’s man. I went through the story many times.
In the kitchen, a yellow-and-white affair with a door onto the alley, Captain Patrick Cullen tried to make a meal out of me. We sat at a small wooden table and began by him sharing what he knew about me.
“I don’t remember ever meeting you, Captain,” I said.
“I know you all too well, Heller—by reputation.”
“Ah. That kind of thing plays swell in court.”
“You’re an ex-cop and you ratted out two of your own. You’re a publicity hound, and a cooze hound, too, I hear.”
“Interesting approach to detective work—everything strictly hearsay.”
A half hour of repartee, at least that scintillating, followed. He wanted to know what I was doing there, and I told him “a job for Sylvester Vinicky,” the husband. He wanted to know what kind of job, and I said I couldn’t tell him, because attorney/client privilege pertained. He accused me of not being an attorney, and I pled guilty.
“But certain of my cases,” I said, “come through lawyers. As it happens, I’m working for an attorney in this matter.”
He asked the attorney’s name and I gave it to him.
“I heard of that guy…divorce shyster, right?”
“Captain, I’d hate to spoil any of your assumptions with a fact.”
He had a face so Irish it could turn bright red without a drop of alcohol, as it did now, while he shook a finger at me. “I’ll tell you what happened, Heller. You got hired to shadow this dame, and she was a looker, and you decided to put the make on her yourself. It got out of hand, and you grabbed the nearest blunt instrument and—”
“I like that. The nearest blunt instrument. How the hell did you get to be a captain? What are you, Jake Arvey’s nephew?”
He came half out of his chair and threw a punch at me.
I slipped it, staying seated, and batted his hat off his head, like I was slapping a child, and the fedora fluttered to the floor.
“You get one,” I said.
The red in his face was fading, as he plucked the hat from the linoleum, and the embarrassment in his eyes was almost as good as punching him would’ve been.
“Is that a threat, Heller?”
“This reputation of mine you’ve heard so much about—did you hear the part about my Outfit ties? Maybe you want to wake up in a fucking ditch in Indiana, Captain…. That was a threat, by the way.”
Into this Noel Coward playlet came another cop, a guy I did know, from the Detective Bureau in the Loop: Inspector Charles Mullaney, a big fleshy guy who always wore mortician black; he had a spade-shaped face, bright dark eyes and smiled a lot. Unlike many Chicago cops who that do that, Mullaney actually had a sense of humor.
“What’s this, Captain?” Mullaney had a lilting tenor, a small man’s voice in the big fat frame. “My friend Nate Heller giving you a hard time?”
Mullaney scooted a chair out and sat between us, daddy arriving to supervise his two small children. He was grinning at Cullen, but his eyes were hard.
“When you say ‘friend,’ Inspector, do you mean—”
“Friend. Don’t believe what you hear about Heller. He and me and Bill Drury go way back—to the Pickpocket Detail.”
Captain Cullen said, defensively, “This guy found the body under suspicious circumstances.”
“Oh?”
For the sixth or seventh time, I told my story. For the first time, somebody took notes—Mullaney.
“Charlie,” I said to him, “I’m working through an attorney on this. I owe it to my client to talk to him before I tell you about the job I was on.”
Frowning, Cullen said, “Yeah, well, we’ll want to talk to your client, too.”
I said, “Might be a good idea. You could inform him his wife is dead. Just as a, you know, courtesy to a taxpayer.”
Mullaney gave me a don’t-needle-this-prick-anymore look, then said, “The husband is in the clear. We’ve already been in touch with him.”
Cullen asked, “What’s his alibi?”
“Well, a Municipal Court judge, for one. He had a ten thirty at the court, which is where we found him. A former employee is suing him for back wages.”
Sylvester Vinicky ran a small moving company over on nearby South Racine Avenue. He and his wife also ran a small second-hand furniture shop, adjacent.
“Any thoughts, Nate?” Mullaney asked. “Any observations you’d care to share?”
“Did you notice the button?”
“What button?”
So I filled Mullaney in on the sportcoat button, pointed out the possible missing wedding ring, and the inevitability of the killer getting blood-spattered.
“She let the bastard in,” Mullaney said absently.
“Somebody she knew,” I said. “And trusted.”
Cullen asked, “Why do you say that? Could have been a salesman or Mormon or—”
“No,” I said. “He got close enough to her to strike a blow from behind, in the living room. She was smoking—it was casual. Friendly.”
Cullen sighed. “Friendly….”
Mullaney said, “We’re saying ‘he’—but it could be a woman.”
“I don’t think so. Rose Vinicky was tall, and all of those blows landed on the back of her head, struck with a downward swing.”
Cullen frowned. “And how do you know this?”
“Well, I’m a trained detective. There are courses available.”
Ignoring this twaddle, Mullaney said, “She could have been on the floor already, when those blows were struck—hell, there were half a dozen of them.”
“Right. But at least one of them was struck when she was standing. And the woman was five ten, easy. Big girl. And the force of it…skull crushed like an eggshell. And you can see the impressions from multiple blows.”
“A man, then,” Mullaney said. “A vicious son of a bitch. Well. We’ll get him. Captain…would you give Mr. Heller and me a moment?”
Cullen heaved a dramatic sigh, but then he nodded, rose, stepped out.
Mullaney said, “I don’t suppose you’ll stay out of this.”
“Of course I’ll stay out of it. This is strictly police business.”
“I didn’t think you would. Okay, I understand—your name is going to be in the papers, it’s going to get out that the wife of a client was killed on your watch—”
“Hey, she was already dead when I pulled up!”
“That’ll go over big with the newshounds, especially the part where you’re twiddling your thumbs in your car while she lay dead…. Nate, let’s work together on this thing.”
“Define ‘together.’”
He leaned forward; the round face, the dark eyes, held no guile. “I’m not asking you to tag along—I couldn’t ask that. You have ‘friends’ like Captain Cullen all over town. But I’ll keep you in the know, you do the same. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“Why don’t we start with a show of good faith.”
“Such as?”
“Why were you here? What job were you doing for Sylvester Vinicky?”
Thing was, I’d been lying about this coming through a lawyer, though I had a reasonable expectation the lawyer I’d named would cover for me. Really what I’d hoped for was to talk to my client before I spilled to the cops. But Mullaney wasn’t just any cop….
So I told him.
Told him that Sylvester Vinicky had come to my office on Van Buren, and started crying, not unlike his daughter had at the curb. He loved his wife, he was crazy about her, and he felt so ashamed, suspecting her of cheating.
Vinicky had sat across from me in the client’s chair, a working man with a heavy build in baggy trousers, brown jacket and cap. At five nine he was shorter than his wife, and was pudgy where she was slender. Just an average-looking joe named Sylvester.
“She’s moody,” he said. “When she isn’t nagging, she’s snapping at me. Sulks. She’s distant. Sometimes when I call home, when she’s supposed to be home, she ain’t at home.”
“Mr. Vinicky,” I said, “if anything, usually a woman having an affair acts nicer than normal to her husband. She doesn’t want to give him a chance to suspect anything’s up.”
“Not Rose. She’s always been more like my sweetheart than my wife. We’ve never had a cross word, and, hell, we’re in business together, and it’s been smooth sailing at home and at work…where most couples would be at each other’s throats, you know?”
In addition to the moving business, the Vinickys bought and sold furniture—Rose had an eye for antiques, and found many bargains for resale. She also kept the books, and paid off the men.
“Rose, bein’ a mother and all, isn’t around the office, fulltime,” Vinicky said. “So maybe I shouldn’t be so suspicious about it.”
“About what?”
“About coming home and finding Rich Miller sitting in my living room, or my kitchen.”
“Who is this Miller?”
“Well, he works for me, or anyway he did till last week. I fired him. I got tired of him flitting and flirting around with Rose.”
“What do you know about him?”
A big dumb shrug. “He’s just this knockabout guy who moves around a lot—no wife, no family. Goes from one cheap room to another.”
“Why would your wife take to some itinerant worker?”
A big dumb sigh. “The guy’s handsome, looks like that asshole in the movies—Ronald Reagan? He’s got a smooth way, real charmer, and he knows about antiques, which is why he and Rose had something in common.”
I frowned. “If he’s such a slick customer, why’s he living in cheap flops?”
“He has weaknesses, Mr. Heller—liquor, for example, and women. And most of all? A real passion for the horses.”
“Horses over booze and broads?”
“Oh yeah. Typical horse player—one day he’s broke, next day he hits it lucky and’s rolling in dough.”
I took the job, but when I tried to put one of my men on it, Vinicky insisted I do the work myself.
“I heard about you, Mr. Heller. I read about you.”
“That’s why my day rate’s twice that of my ops.”
He was fine with that, and I spent Monday through Thursday dogging the heels of Rich Miller, who indeed resembled Dutch Reagan, only skinny and with a mustache. I picked him up outside the residential hotel at 63rd and Halstead, a big brick rococo structure dating back to the Columbian Exposition. The first day he was wearing a loud sportshirt and loose slacks, plus a black fedora with a pearl band and two-tone shoes; he looked like something out of Damon Runyon, not some bird doing pick-up work at a moving company.
The other days he was dressed much the same, and his destination was always the same, too: a race track, Washington Park. The IC train delivered him (and me) right outside the park—just a short walk across the tracks to the front admission gate. High trees, shimmering with spring breeze, were damn near as tall as the grandstand. Worse ways for a detective to spend a sunny day in May, and for four of them, I watched my man play the horses and I played the horses, too, coming out a hundred bucks ahead, not counting the fifty an hour.
Miller meeting up with Rose at the track, laying some bets before he laid her, was of course a possibility. But the only person Miller connected with was a tall, broad-shouldered brown-haired guy with the kind of mug janes call “ruggedly handsome” right down to the sleepy Robert Mitchum eyes. They sat in the stands together on two of the four days, going down to the ground-floor windows beneath to place similar smalltime bets—ten bucks at the most, usually to Win.
Still, Miller (and his two-day companion) would bet every race and cheer the horses on with a fist-shaking desperation that spoke of more at stake than just a fun day at the races. Smalltime bettor though he was, Miller was an every-day-at-the-track kind of sick gambler—the friend only showed twice, remember—and I came to the conclusion that his hard-on was for horses, and if anybody was riding Rose Vinicky to the finish line when her hubby wasn’t home, this joker wasn’t the jockey.
“That’s why,” Mullaney said, nodding, “you decided to stake out the Vinicky home, this morning.”
“Yeah.”
Mullaney’s huge chest heaved a sigh. “Why don’t we talk to the girl, together. Little Sally.”
Little Sally had a build like Veronica Lake, but I chose not to point that out.
“Sure,” I said.
We did it outside, under a shade tree. A light breeze riffled leaves, the world at peace. Of course, so is a corpse.
Sally Vinicky wasn’t crying now—partly cried out, partly in shock, and as she stood with her hands figleafed before her, she answered questions as politely and completely as she no doubt did when the nuns questioned her in class.
“I went in the back way,” she said. “Used my key.”
Which explained why I hadn’t seen the girl go in.
“I always come home for lunch at eleven, and Mom always has it ready for me—but when I didn’t see anything waiting in the kitchen…sometimes soup, sometimes a sandwich, sometimes both, today, nothing…I went looking for her. I thought for a minute she’d left early.”
“Left early for where?” I asked.
“She had errands to do, downtown, this afternoon.”
Mullaney asked, “What sort of mood was your mother in this morning, when you left for school?”
“I didn’t see her—Mom sleeps in till nine or sometimes ten. Does some household chores, fixes my lunch and….”
“How about your father?”
“He was just getting up as I was leaving—that was maybe a quarter to eight? He said he had to go to the court at ten thirty. Somebody suing us again.”
I asked, “Again?”
“Well, Mom’s real strict—if a guy doesn’t work a full hour, he doesn’t get paid. That starts arguments, and some of the men who work for Mom and Dad sometimes say they’ve been shorted…. Oh!”
Mullaney frowned. “What is it?”
“We should check Mom’s money!”
The blanketed body had already been carted out, and the crowd of neighbors milling around the house had thinned. So we walked the girl in through the front. Sally made a point of not looking into the living room where a tape outline on the floor provided a ghost of her mother.
In her parents’ room, where the bed—a beautiful walnut Victorian antique as beautiful as it was wrong for this house and this neighborhood—was neatly made, a pale brown leather wallet lay on the mismatched but also antique dresser. Before anyone could tell the girl not to touch it, she grabbed the wallet and folded it open.
No moths flew out, but they might have: it was that empty.
“Mother had a lot of money in here,” Sally said, eyes searching the yawning flaps, as if bills were hiding from her.
I asked, “How much is a lot, Sally?”
“Almost twelve hundred dollars. I’d say that’s a lot!”
“So would I. Why would your mother have that kind of money in her wallet?”
“We were going for a trip to California, as soon as my school got out—me, Mother, and my aunt Doris. That was the errand Mother had to do downtown—buy railroad tickets.”
Mullaney, eyes tight, said, “Who knew about this money?”
“My dad, of course. My aunt.”
“Nobody else?”
“Not that I can think of. Not that I know of. I wish I could be of more help….”
I smiled at her. “You’re doing fine, Sally.”
A uniformed officer stuck his head in. “Inspector, Captain Cullen says Mr. Vinicky is here.”
Sally pushed past Mullaney and me, and the uniformed man, and the girl went rattling down the stairs calling, “Daddy, Daddy!”
When we caught up with her, she was in her father’s arms in the yellow-and-white kitchen. He held her close. They both cried and patted each other’s backs. Cullen, seated at the kitchen table, regarded this with surprising humanity.
“I want you to stay with your aunt tonight,” Vinicky said to his daughter.
“Okay. That’s okay. I don’t want to sleep in this house ever again.”
He found a smile. “Well, not tonight, anyway, sweetheart. They let me call your aunt—she’s on her way. Do you want to wait in your room?”
“No. No, I’ll wait outside, if that’s all right.”
Vinicky, the girl still in his arms, looked past her for permission, his pudgy face streaked with tears, his eyes webbed red.
Mullaney and Cullen nodded, and a uniformed man walked her out. The father took at seat at the kitchen table. So did Mullaney. So did I.
Seeming to notice me for the first time, Vinicky looked at me, confusion finding its way past the heartbreak. “What…what’re you doing here, Mr. Heller?”
“I was watching the house, Mr. Vinicky,” I said, and told him the circumstances as delicately as possible.
“I take it…I take it you told these gentleman why I hired you.”
“I did.”
“Did you see anyone go in, Mr. Heller? Did you see that bastard Miller?”
“I didn’t.” I hadn’t reported to him yet. “Mr. Vinicky, I spent four days watching Miller, and he always went to the track—that’s why I came here. I don’t believe he was seeing your wife.”
But Vinicky was shaking his head, emphatically. “He did it. I know he did it. You people have to find him!”
Cullen said, “We’re already on that, Mr. Vinicky.”
I asked the captain, “Do you need his address? He’s in a residential hotel over on—”
“We know. We sent a detective over there, already—next-door neighbor says this guy Miller used to hang around here a lot. Only now Miller’s nowhere to be seen—his flop is empty. Ran out on a week’s rent.”
Vinicky slammed a fist on the table. “I told you! I told you!”
Mullaney said, “We need you to calm down, sir, and tell us about your day.”
“My day! Tell you about, what…this? The worst day of my life! Worst goddamn day of my life. I loved Rose. She was the best wife any man ever had.”
Neither cop was nasty enough to mention that the bedroom dick this weeping husband had hired was sitting at the table with them.
Vinicky’s story was unremarkable: he’d got up around eight, dressed for the court appearance, stopped at the office first (where he was seen by various employees) and then took breakfast at a restaurant on Halsted. From there he’d gone to the post office, picked up a parcel, and headed downtown by car to Municipal Court. He had littered the South Side and the Loop alike with witnesses who could support his alibi.
“You’re being sued, we understand,” Mullaney said.
“Yeah—but that’s nothing. Kind of standard with us. Rose is…was…a hardnosed businesswoman, God love her. She insisted on a full day’s work for a full day’s pay.”
Mullaney was making notes again. “Did Miller ever complain about getting shorted?”
“Yeah. That’s probably why he was…so friendly with Rose. Trying to get on her good side. Sweet-talk her into giving him the benefit of the doubt on his hours. I was a son of a bitch to ever suspect—”
Cullen asked, “Could you give us a list of employees who’ve made these complaints, over the last two years?”
“Sure. No problem. I can give you some off the top of my head, then check the records at the office tomorrow for any I missed.”
Mullaney wrote down the names.
When that was done, I asked, “Did your wife have a wedding ring?”
“Yes. Of course. Why—wasn’t it on her…on her?”
“No rings.”
Vinicky thought about that. “She might’ve taken it off to do housework. Was it on her dresser? There’s a tray on her dresser…”
“No. What was the ring worth?”
“It was a nice-size diamond—three hundred bucks, I paid. Did the bastard steal it?”
Mullaney said, “Apparently. The money in her wallet was missing, too.”
“Hell you say! That was a small fortune—Rose was going to buy train tickets with that, and cover hotel and other expenses. She was treating her sister to a trip to California, and Sally was going along…. It was robbery, then?”
“We’re exploring that,” Mullaney said.
Vinicky’s eyes tightened to slits. “One of these S.O.B.’s who claimed they were shorted, you think?”
The inspector closed his notebook. “We’re exploring that, too. This list should be very helpful, Mr. Vinicky.”
I gave Mullaney the eye, nodding toward the back door, and he and stepped out there for a word away from both the husband and Captain Cullen.
“How long will you boys be here?” I asked.
“Another hour, maybe. Why, Nate?”
“I have a hunch to play.”
“You want company?”
“No. But I should be back before you’ve wrapped up, here.”
I tooled the Buick over to 63rd Street, a lively commercial district with all the charm of a junkyard. Not far from here, Englewood’s big claim to fame—the multiple murderer H.H. Holmes—had set up his so-called Murder Castle in the late 1880s. The Vinicky case could never hope to compete, so maybe I could make it go away quickly.
In the four days I’d kept an eye on Rich Miller, I’d learned a handful of useful things about the guy, including that when he wasn’t betting at Washington Park, he was doing so with a guy in a back booth at a bar called the Lucky Horseshoe (whose only distinction was its lack of a neon horseshoe in the window).
The joint was dim and dreary even for a South Side gin mill, and business was slow, mid-afternoon. But I still had to wait for a couple of customers to finish up with the friendly bookie in the back booth before I could slide in across from him.
“Do I know you?” he asked, not in a threatening way. He was a small sharp-eyed, sharp-nosed, sharp-chinned sharpie wearing a derby and a bow tie but no jacket—it was warm in the Horseshoe. He was smoking a cigarillo and his sleeves were rolled up, like he was preparing to deal cards. But no cards were laid out on the booth’s table.
I laid mine out, anyway: “My name is Heller, Nate Heller. Maybe you’ve heard of me.”
The mouth smiled enough to reveal a glint of gold tooth; the dark blue eyes weren’t smiling, though.
“I’m gonna take a wild stab,” I said, “and guess they call you Goldie.”
“Some do. You the…‘Frank Nitti’ Heller?”
By that he meant, was I the mobbed-up private eye who had been tight with Capone’s late heir, and remained tight with certain of the Outfit hierarchy.
“Yes.”
“You wanna place a bet, Nate? My bet is…not.”
“Your bet is right. I’m not here to muscle you. I’m here to do you a favor.”
“What favor would that be?”
“There’s a murder a few blocks away—Inspector Mullaney’s on it.”
“Oh. Shit.”
And by that he meant, imagine the luck: one of the honest Chicago cops.
“But, Nate,” he said, and I got the full benefit of a suspiciously white smile interrupted by that gold eyetooth, “why would Goldie give a damn? I have nothin’ to do with murder. Any murder. I’m in the entertainment business.”
“You help people play the horses.”
The tiny shrug conveyed big self-confidence. “It’s a noble sport, both the racing and the betting.”
I leaned toward him. “One of your clients is shaping up as a chief suspect. The favor I’m doing you is: I’m talking to you, rather than just giving you over to the inspector.”
Eyelids fluttered. “Ah. Well, I do appreciate that. What’s the client’s name?”
“Rich Miller.”
The upper lipped peeled back and again showed gold, but this was no smile. “That fucking fourflusher. He’s into me for five C’s!”
“Really. And he’s made no move to pay you off? Today, maybe?”
His laughter cut like a blade. “Are you kidding? One of my…associates…went around to his flop. Miller pulled outa there, owin’ a week’s back rent.”
Which, of course, I already knew.
Goldie was shaking his head, his tone turning philosophical. “You never can tell about people, can you? Miller always paid up on time, before this, whereas that pal of his, who I wouldn’t trust far as I could throw him, that crumb pays up, just when I was ready to call the legbreakers in.”
“What pal of Miller’s?”
He gave me a name, but it meant nothing to me. I wondered if it might be the guy Miller had met at Washington Park, two of the days, and ran a description by Goldie.
“That sounds like him. Big guy. Six four, easy. Not somebody I could talk to myself.”
“Hence the legbreakers.”
“Hence. Nate, if you can keep that goody-two-shoes Mullaney off my ass, it would be appreciated. He’ll come around, make it an excuse to make my life miserable, and what did I ever to do to that fat slob?”
I was already out of the booth. “See what I can do, Goldie.”
“And if you ever wanna place a bet, you know where my office is.”
When I got back to the brown-brick house on South Elizabeth Street, the Catholic school girl was hugging a tall slender woman, who might have been her mother come to life. On closer look, this gal was younger, and a little less pretty, though that may not have been fair, considering her features were taught with grief.
Sally and the woman who I took to be her aunt were beneath the same shady tree where Mullaney and I had stood with the girl, questioning her, earlier.
I went up and introduced myself, keeping vague about the “investigative job” I’d been doing for Mr. Vinicky.
“I’m Doris Stemmer,” she said, Sally easing out of the woman’s embrace. The woman wore a pale yellow dress with white flowers that almost didn’t show. “I’m Rose’s sister.”
She extended her hand and I shook it. Sally stayed close to her aunt.
“Sorry for your grief, Mrs. Stemmer,” I told her. “Have you spoken to Inspector Mullaney yet?”
“Yes.”
“Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”
“But you’re a private detective, aren’t you? What were you doing for Sylvester?”
“Looking into some of the complaints from his employees.”
Her eyes tightened and ice came into her voice. “Those men were a bunch of lazy good-for-nothing whiners. Doris was a good person, fair and with a great heart, wonderful heart. Why, just last year? She loaned Ray three hundred dollars, so we didn’t have to wait to get married.”
“Ray?”
“Yes, my husband.”
“What does he do, if I might ask?”
“He started a new job just last week, at an electrical assembly plant, here on the South Side.”
“New job? What was his old one?”
Her strained smile was a signal that I was pushing it. “He worked for Sylvester in the moving business. You can ask him yourself if Rose wasn’t an angel. Ask him yourself if she wasn’t fair about paying their people.”
“But he did quit…”
“Working as a mover was just temporary, till Ray could get a job in his chosen field.” Her expression bordered on glare. “Mr. Heller—if you want to talk to Ray, he’s waiting by the car, right over there.”
She pointed and I glanced over at a blue Ford coupe parked just behind a squad car. A big rugged-looking dark-haired guy, leaning against the vehicle, nodded to us. He was in a short-sleeve green sportshirt and brown pants. His tight expression said he was wondering what the hell I was bothering his wife about.
Gently as I could, I said, “I might have a couple questions for him, at that, Mrs. Stemmer. Would you and Sally wait here, just a moment? Don’t go anywhere, please…”
I went inside and found Mullaney and Cullen in the living room, contemplating the tape outline. Things were obviously winding down; the crime scene boys were packing up their gear, and most of the detectives were already gone.
“Button button,” I said to them. “Who’s got the button?”
Cullen glared at me, but Mullaney only smiled. “The brown button, you mean? Cullen, didn’t you collect that?”
The captain reached a hand into his suitcoat and came back with the brown button and held out the blood-caked item in his palm.
“You want this, Heller?”
“Yeah,” I said, marveling at the evidence-collecting protocol of the Chicago Police Department, “just for a minute….”
I returned to Mrs. Stemmer, under the tree, an arm around her niece.
“Couple questions about your husband,” I said.
“Why don’t you just talk to him?” she asked, clearly exasperated.
“I will. I’m sorry. Please be patient. Does your husband have a coat that matches those pants he’s wearing?”
“Well…yes. Maybe. Why?”
“Isn’t wearing it today, though.”
“It’s warm. Why would he wear it…?”
“Could this button have come off that jacket?”
She looked at it. “I don’t know…maybe. I guess. That button’s filthy, though—what’s that caked on there?”
Quietly, I said, “When did you say your husband started his new job?”
“Last week.”
“But he didn’t have to go to work today?”
“No…no. He had some things to do.”
“Does he normally get Fridays off?”
“I don’t know. He just started, I told you.”
“So it’s unlikely he’d be given a day off….”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“Mrs. Stemmer, forgive me, but…does your husband have a gambling problem?”
She drew in breath, but said nothing. And spoke volumes.
I ambled over to the tall, broad-shouldered man leaning against the Ford.
“Mr. Stemmer? My name’s Heller.”
He stood straight now, folded his arms, looked at me suspiciously through sleepy eyes. He’d been out of earshot when I spoke to his wife, but could tell I’d been asking her unpleasant questions.
“Why were you bothering my wife? Are you one of these detectives?”
“Yeah. Private detective.”
He batted the air with a big paw. “You’re nobody! I don’t have to talk to you.”
“Private detective,” I picked up, “who followed Rich Miller to the track most of this week.”
“…What for?”
“For Rose’s husband—he thought she and Miller were playing around.”
He snorted a laugh. “Only thing Richie Miller plays is the nags.”
“And you’d know, right, Ray? See, I saw you and your buddy Richie hanging out together at Washington Park. You were betting pretty solid, yourself. Not big dough, but you were game, all right.”
“So what?”
“Well, for one thing, your wife thinks you started a new job last week.”
The sleepy eyes woke up a little. “And I guess in your business, uh…Heller, is it? In your business, you never ran across an instance of a guy lying to his wife before, huh?”
“You like the nags, too, don’t you, Stemmer? Only you don’t like to get nagged—and I bet Rose Vinicky nagged the hell out of you to pay back that three hundred. Did she hold back from your paycheck, too?”
He shook his head, smiled, but it was sickly. “Rose was a sweetheart.”
“I don’t think so. I think she was a hardass who maybe even shorted a guy when he had his hard-earned money coming. Her husband loved her, but anybody working for her? She gladly give them merry hell. She was that kind of nag.”
A sneer formed on his face, like a blister. “I don’t have to talk to you. Take a walk.”
He shoved me.
I didn’t shove back, but I stood my ground; somebody gasped behind me—maybe Doris Stemmer, or the girl.
“You knew about that money, didn’t you, Stemmer? The money Rose was going to use to treat your wife to a Hollywood trip. And you could use eleven-hundred bucks, couldn’t you, pal? Hell, who couldn’t!”
He shoved me again. “You don’t take a goddamn hint, do you, Heller?”
“Here’s a hint for you: when a bookie like Goldie gets paid off, right before the legbreakers leave the gate? That means somebody finally had a winner.”
His face turned white.
“Sure, she let her brother-in-law in the front door,” I said. “She may have had you pegged for the kind of welsher who stiffs his own sister-in-law for a loan, but she probably thought she was at least safe with you, alone in her own house. That should’ve been a sure bet, right? Only it wasn’t. What did you use? A sash weight? A crowbar?”
This time he shoved me with both hands, and he was trying to crawl in on the rider’s side of the Ford, to get behind the wheel, when I dragged him out by the leg. On his ass on the grass, he tried to kick me with the other leg, and I kicked him in the balls, and it ended as it had begun, with a scream.
All kinds of people, some of them cops, came running, swarming around us with questions and accusations. But I ignored them, hauling Stemmer to his feet, and jerking an arm around his back, holding the big guy in place, and Cullen believed me when I said, “Brother-in-law did it,” taking over for me, and I quickly filled Mullaney in.
They found four hundred and fifteen bucks in cash in Stemmer’s wallet—what he had left after paying off the bookie.
“That’s a lot of money,” Mullaney said. “Where’d you get it?”
“I won it on a horse,” Stemmer said.
Only it came out sounding like a question.
After he failed six lie detector tests, Raymond Stemmer confessed in full. Turned out hardnosed businesswoman Rose had quietly fired Stemmer when she found out he’d been stealing furniture from their warehouse. Rich Miller had told Rose that Ray was going to the track with him, time to time, so she figured her brother-in-law was selling the furniture on the side to play the horses. She had given him an ultimatum: pay back the three hundred dollars, and what the furniture was worth, and Rose would not tell her sister about his misdeeds.
Stemmer had stopped by the house around nine thirty and told Rose he’d brought her the money. Instead, in the living room, as she reached for her already burning cigarette, he had paid her back by striking her in the back of the head with a wrench.
Amazingly, she hadn’t gone down. She’d staggered, knocked the ashtray to the floor, only to look over her shoulder at him and say, “You have the nerve to hit me?”
And he found the nerve to hit her again, and another ten times, where she lay on the floor.
He removed the woman’s diamond wedding ring, and went upstairs and emptied the wallet. All of this he admitted in a thirty-page statement. The diamond was found in a toolbox in his basement, the wrench in the Chicago River (after three hours of diving). His guilty plea got him a life sentence.
About a week after I’d found Rose Vinicky’s body, her husband called me at my office. He was sending a check for my services—the five days I’d followed Miller—and wanted to thank me for exposing his brother-in-law as the killer. He told me he was taking his daughter to California on the trip her mother had promised; the sister-in-law was too embarrassed and distraught to accept Vinicky’s invitation to come along.
“What I don’t understand,” the pitiful voice over the phone said, “is why Rose was so distant to me, those last weeks. Why she’d acted in a way that made me think—”
“Mr. Vinicky, your wife knew her sister’s husband was a lying louse, a degenerate gambler, stealing from the both of you. That was what was on her mind.”
“…I hadn’t thought of it that way. By God, I think you’re right, Mr. Heller…. You know something funny? Odd. Ironic, I mean?”
“What?”
“I got a long, lovely letter from Rich Miller today. Handwritten. A letter of condolence. He heard about Rose’s death, and said he was sick about it. That she was a wonderful lady and had been kind to him. After all the people who’ve said Rose was hard-hearted to the people who worked for us? This, this…it’s a kind of…testament to her.”
“That’s nice, Mr. Vinicky. Really is.”
“Postmarked Omaha. Wonder what Miller’s doing there?”
Hiding from the legbreakers, I thought.
And, knowing him, doing it at the dog tracks.