“You’re a cop? What’s that, summer uniform?”
He snorted a laugh. “I live around here. My family and me was just walking back from a long day at the beach, when we run into this commotion. I sent Grace and the kids on home and figured I better check it out. Think we ought to get this little bastard to a hospital?”
I nodded. “Edgewater’s close. Should we call for an ambulance? I got a car.”
“You mind? The son of a bitch could have a concussion.” He laughed again. “I saw you two strugglin’, and I grabbed that flowerpot off a windowsill. Did the trick.”
“Sure did.”
“Fact, I mighta overdid it.”
“Not from my point of view.”
After Dickinson had found and collected the kid’s revolver and contributed his beach towel to wrap the kid’s head in, we drunk-walked Lapps to my car.
The burly bare-chested cop helped me settle the boy in the rider’s seat. “I’ll run over home, and call in, and get my buggy, and meet you over at Edgewater.”
“Thanks. You know, I used to work traffic in the Loop.”
“No kiddin’. Small world.”
I had cuffs in the glove box; I cuffed the unconscious kid’s hands behind him, in case he was faking it. I looked at the pleasant-faced cop. “Look — if anything comes of this, you got a piece of the reward action. It’ll be just between us.”
“Reward action?”
I put a hand on his hairy shoulder. “Chet — we just caught the goddamn Lipstick Killer.”
His jaw dropped and I got in and pulled away, while he ran off, looking in those trunks of his like somebody in a half-assed track meet.
Then I pulled over around a corner and searched the kid. I figured there was no rush getting him to the hospital. If he died, he died.
He had two five-hundred-buck postal savings certificates in a pocket of his leather jacket. In his billfold, which had a University of Chicago student ID card in the name Jerome C. Lapps, was a folded-up letter, typed. It was dated last month. It said:
Jerry—
I haven’t heard from you in a long time. Tough luck about the jail term. You’ll know better next time.
I think they’re catching up to me, so I got to entrust some of my belongings to you. I’ll pick these suitcases up later. If you get short of cash, you can dip into the postal certificates.
I appreciate you taking these things off my hands when I was being followed. Could have dumped it, but I couldn’t see losing all that jewelry. I’ll give you a phone call before I come for the stuff.
George
I was no handwriting expert, but the handwritten signature sure looked like Lapps’ own cramped handwriting from the inside cover of his calculus book.
The letter stuck me immediately as a lame attempt on the kid’s part to blame the stolen goods stashed in his dorm room on some imaginary accomplice. Carrying it around with him, yet — an alibi in his billfold.
He was stirring.
He looked at me. Blinked. His lashes were long. “Who are you, mister? Where am I?”
I threw a sideways forearm into his stomach and doubled him over. He let the air out with a groan of pain that filled the car and made me smile.
“I’m somebody you tried to shoot, is who I am,” I said. “And where you are is up shit creek without a paddle.”
He shook his head, licked his lips. “I don’t remember trying to shoot anybody. I’d never do a thing like that.”
“Oh? You pointed a revolver at me, and when it wouldn’t shoot, you hurled it at me. Then you jumped me. This just happened, Jerry.”
A comma of greasy black hair fell to his forehead. “You... you know my name? Oh. Sure.” He noticed his open billfold on the seat next to us.
“I knew you before I saw your ID, Jerry. I been on your trail all day.”
“I thought you cops worked in pairs.”
“I don’t work for the city. Right now, I’m working for the Robert Keenan family.”
He recognized the name — anybody in Chicago would have — but his reaction was one of confusion, not alarm, or guilt, or anything else I might have expected.
“What does that have to do with me, mister?”
“You kidnapped their little girl, Jerry — you strangled her and then you tried to fuck her and then you cut her in pieces and threw the pieces in the sewer.”
“What... what are you...”
I sidearmed him in the stomach again. I wanted to shove his head against the dash, but after those blows to the skull with that flowerpot, it might kill him. I wasn’t particularly interested in having him die in my car. Get blood all over my new Plymouth. Peg would have a fit.
“You’re the Lipstick Killer, Jerry. And I caught you going up the back stairs, like the cheap little sneak thief you are.”
He looked down at his lap, guiltily. “I didn’t kill those women.”
“Really. Who did?”
“George.”
The letter. The alibi.
“George,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “George did it.”
“George did it.”
“Sometimes I went along. Sometimes I helped him prepare. But I never did it. George did.”
“Is that how you’re going to play it?”
“George did it, mister. George hurt those women.”
“Did George jack off the floor, or did you, Jerry?”
Now he started to cry.
“I did that,” he admitted. “But George did the killings.”
“JoAnn Keenan too?”
Lapps shook his head; his face glistened with tears. “He must have. He must have.”
16
Cops in uniform, and plainclothes too, were waiting at the hospital when I deposited Lapps at the emergency room. I didn’t talk to the kid after that, though I stuck around, at the request of a detective from Rogers Park.
The word spread fast. Dickinson, when he called it in, had spilled the Lipstick Killer connection. The brass started streaming in, and Chief of Detectives Storm took me off to one side and complimented me on my fine work. We decided that my visit to Lapps’ dorm room would be off the record for now; in the meantime, South Side detectives were already on the scene making the same discoveries I had, only with the proper warrants.
I got a kick out of being treated like somebody special by the Chicago police department. Storm and even Tubbo Gilbert were all smiles and arms around my shoulder, when the press showed, which they quickly did. For years I’d been an “ex-cop” who left the force under a cloud in the Cermak administration; now, I was a “distinguished former member of the Detective Bureau who at one time was the youngest plainclothes officer on the force.”
It soon became a problem, having the emergency area clogged with police personnel, politicians, and reporters. Lapps was moved upstairs, and everybody else moved to the lobby.
Dickinson, when he’d gone home, had taken time to get out of his trunks and into uniform, which was smart; the flashbulbs were popping around the husky, amiable patrolman. We posed for a few together, and he whispered to me, “We done good.”
“You and your flowerpot.”
“You’re a hell of cop, Heller. I don’t care what anybody says.”
That was heartwarming.
My persistent pal Davis of the News was among the first of the many reporters to arrive and he buttonholed me with an offer of a grand for an exclusive. Much as I hated to, I had to turn him down.
From his expression you’d think I’d pole-axed him. “Heller turning down a payoff? Why?”
“This is too big to give to one paper. I got to let the whole world love me this time around.” Most of the reward money — which was up to forty grand, now — had been posted by the various newspapers (though the city council had anted up, too) and I didn’t want to alienate anybody.