“You won the Silver Star, didn’t you?”
I was getting embarrassed. I nodded.
“So did Jack.”
“Jack?”
“My husband. He was a marine, too. You were on Guadalcanal?”
“Yes.”
“So was Jack.” She smiled. Then the smile faded and she sucked smoke in again. “Only he didn’t come back.”
“Lot of good men didn’t. I’m sorry.”
She made a dismissive gesture with a red-nailed hand. “Mr. Heller, why are you looking into this?”
“I think it may relate to another case. That’s all.”
“The Lipstick Killer?”
I hesitated, then nodded. “But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t say anything about it to anybody just yet.”
“Why haven’t the cops done anything about this?”
“You mean, the Lipstick Killer, or what happened to you...?”
“Both! And, why have you made this connection, when they haven’t?”
I shrugged. “Maybe I’m more thorough. Or maybe I’m just grasping at straws.”
“Well, it occurred to me there might be a connection. You’d think it would’ve occurred to the police, too!”
“You’d think.”
“You know, there’s something... never mind.”
“What?”
She shook her head, tensed her lips. “There was something... creepy... that I never told anybody about.” She looked at me with eyes impossibly large, so dark brown the irises were lost. “But I feel like I can talk to you.”
She touched my hand. Hers was warm. Mine felt cold.
“On the floor... in the bathroom... I found something. Something I just... cleaned up. Didn’t tell anybody about. It embarrassed me.”
“You’re a nurse...”
“I know. But I was embarrassed just the same. It was... come.”
“What?”
“There was come on the floor. You know — ejaculate. Semen.”
12
When I got home, I called Drury and told him about Katherine Reynolds.
“I think you may be on to something,” Drury said. “You should tell Lt. Kruger about this.”
“I’ll call him tomorrow. But I wanted to give you the delivery boy’s description first — see if it rang any bells.”
Drury made a clicking sound. “Lot of kids in those black leather jackets these days. Don’t know what the world’s coming to. Lot of kids trying to act like they’re in street gangs, even when they’re not.”
“Could he be a University of Chicago student?”
“Pulling crimes on the North Side?”
Even a cop as good as Drury wore the geographical blinders.
“Yeah,” I said. “There’s this incredible new mode of transportation they call the El. It’s just possible our boy knows about it.”
Drury ignored the sarcasm. “Lot of greasy-haired would-be underage hoods around, Nate. Doesn’t really narrow the field much.”
“That look like a young Cornell Wilde?”
“That want to,” Drury said, “yes.”
We sighed, and hung up.
Eavesdropping, Peg was half in the kitchen, half in the hall. She wore a white apron over the swell of her tummy. She’d made meat loaf. The smell of it beckoned. Despite herself, Peg was a hell of a cook.
“Good-looking?” she asked.
“What?”
“This nurse you went and talked to,” she said.
“Oh. I didn’t notice.”
She smirked; went back into the kitchen. I followed. I waited at the table while she stirred gravy.
“Blonde?” she asked, her back to me.
“No. Brunette, I think.”
She looked over her shoulder at me. “You think?”
“Brunette.”
“Nice and slender, I’ll bet. With a nice shape. Not fat and sloppy. Not a cow. Not an elephant.”
“Peg...”
She turned; her wooden spoon dripped brown gravy onto the linoleum. “I’m going crazy out here, Nate. I’m ugly, and I’m bored.”
“You’re not ugly. You’re beautiful.”
“Fuck you, Heller! I’m an ugly cow, and I’m bored out here in the sticks. Jesus, couldn’t we live someplace where there’s somebody for me to talk to?”
“We have neighbors.”
“Squirrels, woodchucks, and that dip down the street who mows his lawn on the even days and washes his car on the odd. It’s all vacant lots and nurseries and prairie out here. Why couldn’t we live closer to the city? I feel like I’m living in a goddamn pasture. Which is where a cow like me belongs, I suppose.”
I stood. I went to her and held her. She was angry, but she let me.
She didn’t look at me as she bit off the words. “You go off to the Loop and you can be a businessman and you can be a detective and you have your coworkers and your friends and contacts and interview beautiful nurses and you make the papers and you’re living a real life. Not stuck out here in a box with a lawn. Listening to ‘Ma Perkins.’ Peeling potatoes. Ironing shirts.”
“Baby...”
She thumped her chest with a forefinger. “I used to have a life. I was a professional woman. I was an executive secretary.”
“I know, I know.”
“Nate... Nate, I’m afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid I’m not cut out to be a housewife. Afraid I’m not cut out to be a mother.”
I smiled at her gently; touched her face the same way. Touched her tummy. “You’re already a mother, by definition. Give it a chance. The kid will change things. The neighborhood will grow.”
“I hate it here.”
“Give it a year. You don’t like it, we’ll move. Closer to town.”
She smiled tightly, bravely. Nodded. Turned back to the stove.
The meal was good. We had apple pie, which may have been sarcasm on Peg’s part, but if so it was delicious sarcasm. We chatted about business; about family. After the tension, things got relaxed.
We were cuddled on the couch listening to big band music on the radio when the phone rang. It was Drury again.
“Listen,” he said, “sorry to bother you, but I’ve been thinking, and something did jog loose, finally.”
“Swell! What?”
“There was this kid I busted a few years back. He was nice-looking, dark-haired, but kind of on the hoody side, though he had a good family. His dad was a security guard with a steel mill. Anyway, the boy was a good student, a bright kid — only for kicks, he stole. Furs, clothes, jewelry, old coins, guns.”
“You were working out of Town Hall Station at the time?”
“Yeah. All his robberies were on the North Side. He was just thirteen.”
“How old is he now?”
“Seventeen.”
“Then this was a while ago.”
“Yeah, but I busted him again, on some ten burglaries, two years ago. He’s agile, Nate — something of human fly, navigating ledges, fire escapes... going in windows.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, he did some time at Gibault.” That was a correctional institution for boys at Terre Haute. “But supposedly he came out reformed. He’s a really good student — so good, at seventeen, he’s a sophomore in college.”
“At the University of Chicago?” I said.
“Yeah,” Drury said. “And guess what his part-time job is?”
“Delivery boy,” I said.
“What a detective you are,” Drury said.
13
Jerome Lapps, precocious seventeen-year-old sophomore science student, resided at a dormitory on the University of Chicago campus.
On the phone Drury had asked, “You know where his folks live?”
“What, you take me for a psychic?”
“You could’ve tripped over this kid, Nate. The Lapps family lives in Lincolnwood.”