I knocked.
It took a while, but a slender, attractive woman of perhaps thirty in a floral dress and a white apron opened the door wide.
“Oh!” she said. Her face was oblong, her eyes a luminous brown, her hair another agreeable shade of brown, cut in a bob that was perhaps too young for her.
“Didn’t mean to startle you, ma’am. Are you Mrs. Donovan?”
“Yes, I am.” She smiled shyly. “Sorry for my reaction-I was expecting my son. We’ll be eating in about half an hour…”
“I know this is a bad time to come calling. Perhaps I could arrange another time…”
“What is your business here?”
I gave her one of my A-1 Detective Agency cards. “I’m working for the Wynekoops. Nathan Heller, president of the A-1 agency. I’m hoping to find Rheta’s killer.
Her eyes sparkled. “Well, come in! If you don’t mind sitting in the kitchen while I get dinner ready…”
“Not at all,” I said, following her through a nicely but not lavishly furnished living room, overseen by an elaborate print of the Virgin Mary, and back to a good-size blue and white kitchen.
She stood at the counter making cole slaw while I sat at the kitchen table nearby.
“We were very good friends, Rheta and I. She was a lovely girl, talented, very funny.”
“Funny? I get the impression she was a somber girl.”
“Around the Wynekoops she was. They’re about as much fun as falling down the stairs. Do you think the old girl killed her?”
“What do you think?”
“I could believe it of Earle. Dr. Alice herself, well…I mean, she’s a doctor. She’s aloof, and she and Rheta were anything but close, of course. But kill her?”
“I’m hearing that the doctor gave Rheta gifts, treated her like a family member.”
Verna Duncan shrugged, putting some muscle into her slaw-making efforts. “There was no love lost between them. You’re aware that Earle ran around on her?”
“Yes.”
?
“Well, that sort of thing is hard on a girl’s self-esteem. I helped her get over it as much as I could.”
“How?”
She smiled slyly over her shoulder. “I’m a divorcee, Mr. Heller. And divorcees know how to have a good time. Care for a taste?”
She was offering me a forkful of slaw.
“That’s nice,” I said, savoring it. “Nice bite to it. So, you and Rheta went out together? Was she seeing other men, then?”
“Of course she was. Why shouldn’t she?”
“Anyone in particular?”
“Her music teacher. Violin instructor. Older man, very charming. But he died of a heart attack four months ago. It hit her hard.”
“How did she handle it?”
“Well, she didn’t shoot herself in the back over it, if that’s what you’re thinking! She was morose for about a month…then she just started to date all of a sudden. I encouraged her, and she came back to life again.”
“Why didn’t she just divorce Earle?”
“Why, Mr. Heller…she was a good Catholic girl.”
She asked me to stay for supper, but I declined, despite the tempting aroma of her corned beef and cabbage, and the tang of her slaw. I had another engagement, at a drugstore at Madison and Kedzie.
While I waited for Officer March to show up, I questioned the pharmacist behind the back counter.
“Sure I remember Miss Shaunesey stopping by that night,” he said. “But I don’t understand why she did.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, Dr. Wynekoop herself stopped in a week before, to fill a similar prescription, and I told her our stock was low.”
“She probably figured you’d’ve got some in by then,” I said.
“The doctor knows we only get a shipment in once a month.”
I was mulling that over at the lunch counter when Officer March arrived. He was in his late twenties and blond and much too fresh-faced for a Chicago cop.
“Nate Heller,” he said, with a grin. “I’ve heard about you.”
We shook hands.
“Don’t believe everything Captain Stege tells you,” I said.
He took the stool next to me, took off his cap. “I know Stege thinks you’re poison. But that’s ‘cause he’s an old-timer. Me, I’m glad you helped expose those two crooked bastards.”
“Let’s not get carried away, Officer March. What’s the point of being a cop in this town if you can’t take home a little graft now and then?”
“Sure,” March said. “But those guys were killers. West Side bootleggers.”
“I’m a West Side boy myself,” I said.
“So I understand. So what’s your interest in the Wynekoop case?”
“The family hired me to help clear the old gal. Do you think she did it?”
He made a clicking sound in his cheek. “Hard one to call. She seemed pretty shook up, at the scene.”
“Shook up like a grieved family member, or a murderer?”
“I couldn’t read it.”
“Order yourself a sandwich and then tell me about it.”
He did. The call had come in at nine-fifty-nine over the police radio, about five blocks away from where he and his partner were patrolling.
“The girl’s body was lying on that table,” March said. “She was resting on her left front side with her left arm under her, with the right forearm extending upward so that her hand was about on a level with her chin, with her head on a white pillow. Her face was almost out of sight, but I could see that her mouth and nose were resting on a wet, crumpled towel. She’d been bleeding from the mouth.”
“She was covered up, I understand,” I said.
“Yes. I drew the covers down carefully, and saw that she’d been shot through the left side of the back. Body was cold. Dead about six hours, I’d guess.”
“But that’s just a guess.”
“Yeah. The coroner can’t nail it all that exact. It can be a few hours either direction, you know.”
“No signs of a struggle.”
“None. That girl laid down on that table herself-maybe at gun point, but whatever the case, she did it herself. Her clothes were lying about the floor at the foot of the examination table, dropped, not thrown, just as though she’d undressed in a leisurely fashion.”
“What about the acid burns on the girl’s face?”
“She was apparently chloroformed before she was shot. You know, that confession Stege got out of Dr. Wynekoop, that’s how she said she did it.”
The counterman brought us coffee.
“I’ll be frank, officer,” I said, sipping the steaming java. “I just came on this job. I haven’t had a chance to go down to a newspaper morgue and read the text of that confession.”
He shrugged. “Well, it’s easily enough summed up. She said her daughter-in-law was always wanting physical examinations. That afternoon, she went downstairs with the doctor for an exam, and first off, stripped, to weigh herself. She had a sudden pain in her side and Dr. Wynekoop suggested a whiff of chloroform as an anesthetic. The doc said she massaged the girl’s side for about fifteen minutes, and…”
“I’m remembering this from the papers,” I said, nodding. “She claimed the girl ‘passed away’ on the examining table, and she panicked. Figured her career would be ruined, if it came out she’d accidentally killed her own daughter-in-law with an overdose of chloroform.”
“Right. And then she remembered the old revolver in the desk, and fired a shot into the girl and tried to make it look like a robbery.”
The counterman came and refilled our coffee cups.
“So,” I said, “what do you make of the confession?”
“I think it’s bullshit any way you look at it. Hell, she was grilled for almost three days, Heller-you know how valid that kind of confession is.”
I sipped my coffee. “She may have thought her son was guilty, and was covering up for him.”
“Well, her confession was certainly a self-serving one. After all, if she was telling the truth-or even if her confession was made up outa whole cloth, but got taken at face value-it’d make her guilty of nothing more than involuntary manslaughter.”
I nodded. “Shooting a corpse isn’t a felony.”
“But she had to know her son didn’t do it.”