“Damn! Sounds like Mrs. Peacock has been right all along. Her husband fought off his attackers; that’s what prompted their beating him.”
“The poor bastard was a hero and the papers paint him a philanderer.”
“Well, we handed ’em the brush.”
“Perhaps we did, Heller. Anyway, thanks.”
“Any suspects?”
“No. But we got the pattern now. From eye-witness descriptions it seems to be kids. Four assailants, three tall and husky, the other shorter.”
A bell was ringing, and not outside my window. “Captain, you ever hear of Rose Kasallis?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“I tracked a runaway girl to her place two summers ago. She’s a regular female Fagin. She had a flat on North Maplewood Avenue that was a virtual ‘school for crime.’”
“I have heard of that. The West North Avenue cops handled it. She was keeping a way-station for fugitive kids from the reform school at St. Charles. Sent up the river for contributing to the delinquency of minors?”
“That’s the one. I had quite a run-in with her charming boy Bobby. Robert Goethe is his name.”
“Oh?”
“He’s eighteen years old, a strapping kid with the morals of an alley cat. And there were a couple of kids he ran with, Emil Reck, who they called Emil the Terrible, and another one whose name I can’t remember…”
“Heller, Chicago has plenty of young street toughs. Why do you think these three might be suspects in the Peacock case?”
“I don’t know that they are. In fact, last I knew Bobby and the other two were convicted of strong-arming a pedestrian and were sitting in the Bridewell. But that’s been at least a year ago.”
“And they might be out amongst us again, by now.”
“Right. Could you check?”
“I’ll do that very thing.”
Ten minutes later Stege called and said, “They were released in December.”
January 2 had been Silber Peacock’s last day on earth.
“I have an address for Bobby Goethe’s apartment,” Stege said. “Care to keep an old copper company?”
He swung by and picked me up-hardly usual procedure, pulling in a private dick on a case, but I had earned this-and soon we were pulling up in front of the weathered brownstone in which Bobby Goethe lived. And there was no doubt he lived here.
Because despite the chilly day, he and Emil the Terrible were sitting on the stoop, in light jackets, smoking cigarettes and drinking bottles of beer. Bobby had a weak, acned chin, and reminded me of photos I’d seen of Clyde Barrow; Emil had a big lumpy nose and a high forehead, atop which was piled blond curly hair-he looked thick as a plank.
We were in an unmarked car, but a uniformed man was behind the wheel, so as soon as we pulled in, the two boys reacted, beer bottles dropping to the cement and exploding like bombs.
Bobby took off in one direction, and Emil took off in the other. Stege just watched as his plainclothes detective assistant took off after Emil, and I took off after Bobby.
It took me a block to catch up, and I hit him with a flying tackle, and we rolled into a vacant lot, not unlike the one by the Caddy in which Peacock’s body had been found.
Bobby was a wiry kid, and wormed his way out of my grasp, kicking back at me as he did; I took a boot in the face, but didn’t lose any teeth, and managed to reach out and grab that foot and yank him back hard. He went down on his face in the weeds and rocks. One of the larger of those rocks found its way into his hand, and he flung it at me, savage little animal that he was, only not so little. I ducked out of the rock’s way, but quickly reached a hand under my topcoat and suitcoat and got my nine millimeter Browning out and pointed it down at him.
“I’m hurt,” he said, looking up at me with a scraped, bloody face.
“Shall we call a doctor?” I said.
Emil and Bobby and their crony named Nash, who was arrested later that afternoon by West North Avenue Station cops, were put in a show-up for the various doctors who’d been robbed to identify. They did so, without hesitation. The trio was separated and questioned individually and sang and sang. A fourth boy was implicated, the shorter one who’d been mentioned, seventeen-year-old Mickey Livingston. He too was identified, and he too sang.
Their story was a singularly stupid one. They had been cruising in a stolen car, stopped in a candy store, picked Peacock’s name at random from the phone book, picked another name and address, altered it, and called and lured the doctor to an isolated spot they’d chosen. Emil the Terrible, a heavy club in hand, crouched in the shadows across the street from 6438 North Whipple. Nash stood at the entrance, and Goethe, gun in hand, hid behind a tree nearby. Livingston was the wheel man, parked half a block north.
Peacock drove up and got out of his car, medical bag in hand. Bobby stuck the gun in the doctor’s back and told him not to move. Peacock was led a block north after Emil the Terrible had smacked him “a lick for luck.” At this point Peacock fought back, wrestling with Bobby, who shot the doctor in the head. Peacock dropped to the ground, and Emil the Imbecilic hit the dead man again and again with the club. A scalpel from the medical bag in one hand, the gun held butt forward in the other, Bobby added some finishing touches. Nash pulled up in the doctor’s car, Livingston following. The corpse was then tossed in the backseat of the Caddy, which was abandoned three blocks away.
Total take for the daring boys: $20. Just what I’d made on the case, only they didn’t get five bucks expenses.
What Bobby, Emil and Nash did get was 199 years plus consecutive terms of one year to life on four robbery counts. Little Mickey was given a thirty-year sentence, and was eventually paroled. The others, to the best of my knowledge, never were.
R Peacock moved to Quincy, Illinois, where she devoted the rest of her life to social service, her church and Red Cross work, as well as to raising her two daughters, Betty Lou and Nancy. Nancy never knew her father.
Maybe that’s why Ruth Peacock was so convinced of her husband’s loyalty, despite the mysterious circumstances of his death.
She was pregnant with his child at the time.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Research materials consulted for this fact-based story include “The Peacock Case” by LeRoy F. McHugh in Chicago Murders (1947) and various true-crime magazines of the day.
MARBLE MILDRED
In June 1936, Chicago was in the midst of the Great Depression and a sweltering summer, and I was in the midst of Chicago. Specifically, on this Tuesday afternoon, the ninth to be exact, I was sitting on a sofa in the minuscule lobby of the Van Buren Hotel. The sofa had seen better days, and so had the hotel. The Van Buren was no flophouse, merely a moderately rundown residential hotel just west of the El tracks, near the LaSalle Street Station.
Divorce work wasn’t the bread and butter of the A-l Detective Agency, but we didn’t turn it away. I use the editorial “we,” but actually there was only one of us, me, Nathan Heller, “president” of the firm. And despite my high-flown title, I was just a down-at-the-heels dick reading a racing form in a seedy hotel’s seedy lobby, waiting to see if a certain husband showed up in the company of another woman.
Another woman, that is, than the one he was married to: the dumpy, dusky dame who’d come to my office yesterday.
“I’m not as good-looking as I was fourteen years ago,” she’d said, coyly, her voice honeyed by a Southern drawl, “but I’m a darn sight younger looking than some women I know.”
“You’re a very handsome woman, Mrs. Bolton,” I said, smiling, figuring she was fifty if she was a day, “and I’m sure there’s nothing to your suspicions.”
She had been a looker once, but she’d run to fat, and her badly hennaed hair and overdone makeup were no help; nor was the raccoon stole she wore over a faded floral print housedress. The stole looked a bit ratty and in any case was hardly called for in this weather.