“Christ. Who was the beneficiary?”
“A Kathleen O’Meara,” Eliot said. “She runs a saloon in the Angles, with a rooming house upstairs.”
“Her husband died last month,” Dr. Jeffers said. “I performed the autopsy myself…. He was intoxicated at the time of his death, and was in an advanced stage of cirrhosis of the liver. Hit by a car. But there was one difference.”
“Yes?”
“He was fairly well-dressed, and was definitely not malnourished.”
O’Meara’s did not serve food, but a greasy spoon down the block did, and that’s where Katie took me for supper, around seven, leaving the running of the saloon to her sullen skinny daughter, Maggie.
“Maggie doesn’t say much,” I said, over a plate of meat loaf and mashed potatoes and gray. Like Katie, it was surprisingly appetizing, particularly if you didn’t look too closely and were half-bombed.
We were in a booth by a window that showed no evidence of ever having been cleaned; cold March wind rattled it and leached through.
“I spoiled her,” Katie admitted. “But, to be fair, she’s still grieving over her papa. She was the apple of his eye.”
“You miss your old man?”
“I miss the help. He took care of the books. I got a head for business, but not for figures. Thing is, he got greedy.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, caught him featherin’ his own nest. Skimmin’. He had a bank account of his own he never told me about.”
“You fight over that?”
“Naw. Forgive and forget, I always say.” Katie was having the same thing as me, and she was shoveling meat loaf into her mouth like coal into a boiler.
“I’m, uh, pretty good with figures,” I said.
Her licentious smile was part lip rouge, part gravy. “I’ll just bet you are…. Ever do time, Bill?”
“Some. I’m not no thief, though…I wouldn’t steal a partner’s money.”
“What were you in for?”
“Manslaughter.”
“Kill somebody, did you?”
“Sort of.”
She giggled. “How do you ‘sort of’ kill somebody, Bill?”
“I beat a guy to death with my fists. I was drunk.”
“Why?”
“I’ve always drunk too much.”
“No, why’d you beat him to death? With your fists.”
I shrugged, chewed meat loaf. “He insulted a woman I was with. I don’t like a man that don’t respect a woman.”
She sighed. Shook her head. “You’re a real gent, Bill. Here I thought chivalry was dead.”
Three evenings before, I’d been in a yellow-leather booth by a blue-mirrored wall in the Vogue Room of the Hollenden Hotel. Clean-shaven and in my best brown suit, I was in the company of Eliot and his recent bride, the former Ev McMillan, a fashion illustrator who worked for Higbee’s department store.
Ev, an almond-eyed slender attractive brunette, wore a simple cobalt blue evening dress with pearls; Eliot was in thehree-piece suit he’d worn to work. We’d had prime rib and were enjoying after dinner drinks; Eliot was on his second, and he’d had two before dinner, as well. Martinis. Ev was only one drink behind him.
Personal chit-chat had lapsed back into talking business.
“It’s goddamn ghoulish,” Eliot said. He was quietly soused, as evidenced by his use of the word “goddamn”-for a tough cop, he usually had a Boy Scout’s vocabulary.
“It’s coldblooded, all right,” I said.
“How does the racket work?” Ev asked.
“I shouldn’t have brought it up,” Eliot said. “It doesn’t make for pleasant after-dinner conversation…”
“No, I’m interested,” she said. She was a keenly intelligent young woman. “You compared it to a lottery…how so?”
“Well,” I said, “as it’s been explained to me, speculators ‘invest’ in dozens of small insurance policies on vagrants who were already drinking themselves to imminent graves…malnourished men crushed by dope and/or drink, sleeping in parks and in doorways in all kinds of weather.”
“Men likely to meet an early death by so-called natural causes,” Eliot said. “That’s how we came to nickname the racket ‘Natural Death, Inc.’”
“Getting hit by a car isn’t exactly a ‘natural’ death,” Ev pointed out.
Eliot sipped his martini. “At first, the speculators were just helping nature along by plying their investments with free, large quantities of drink…hastening their death by alcoholism or just making them more prone to stumble in front of a car.”
“Now it looks like these insured derelicts are being shoved in front of cars,” I said.
“Or the drivers of the cars are purposely running them down,” Eliot said. “Dear, this really is unpleasant conversation; I apologize for getting into it…”
“Nonsense,” she said. “Who are these speculators?”
“Women, mostly,” he said. “Harridans running West Side beer parlors and roominghouses. They exchange information, but they aren’t exactly an organized ring or anything, which makes our work difficult. I’m siccing Nate here on the worst offender, the closest thing there is to a ringleader-a woman we’ve confirmed is holding fifty policies on various ‘risks.’”
Ev frowned. “How do these women get their victims to go along with them? I mean, aren’t the insured’s signatures required on the policies?”
“There’s been some forgery going on,” Eliot said. “But mostly these poor bastards are willingly trading their signatures for free booze.”
Ev twitched a non-smile above the rim of her martini glass. “Life in slum areas breeds such tragedy.”
The subject changed to local politics-I’d heard rumors of Eliot running for mayor, which he unconvincingly pooh-thed-and, a few drinks later, Eliot spotted some reporter friends of his, Clayton Fritchey and Sam Wild, and excused himself to go over and speak to them.
“If I’m not being out of line,” I said to Mrs. Ness, “Eliot’s hitting the sauce pretty hard himself. Hope you don’t have any extra policies out on him.”
She managed a wry little smile. “I do my best to keep up with him, but it’s difficult. Ironic, isn’t it? The nation’s most famous Prohibition agent, with a drinking problem.”
“Is it a problem?”
“Eliot doesn’t think so. He says he just has to relax. It’s a stressful job.”
“It is at that. But, Ev-I’ve been around Eliot during ‘stressful’ times before…like when the entire Capone gang was gunning for him. And he never put it away like that, then.”
She was studied the olive in her martini. “You were part of that case, weren’t you?”
“What case? Capone?”
“No-the Butcher.”
I nodded. I’d been part of the capture of the lunatic responsible for those brutal slayings of vagrants; and was one of the handful who knew that Eliot had been forced to make a deal with his influential political backers to allow the son of a bitch-who had a society pedigree-to avoid arrest, and instead be voluntarily committed to a madhouse.
“It bothers him, huh?” I said, and grunted a laugh. “Mr. Squeaky Clean, the ‘Untouchable’ Eliot Ness having to cut a deal like that.”
“I think so,” she admitted. “He never says. You know how quiet he can be.”
“Well, I think he should grow up. For Christ sake, for somebody from Chicago, somebody who’s seen every kind of crime and corruption, he can be as naive as a schoolgirl.”
“An alcoholic schoolgirl,” Ev said with a smirk, and a martini sip.
“…You want me to talk to him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe…. I think this case, these poor homeless men being victimized again, got memories stirred up.”
“Of the Butcher case, you mean.”
“Yes…and Nate, we’ve been getting postcards from that crazy man.”
“What crazy man? Capone?”
“No! The Butcher…threatening postcards postmarked the town where that asylum is.”
“Is there any chance Watterson can get out?”
Lloyd Watterson: the Butcher.