I shrugged, sipped my cocktail. It was my second.
“Only it may backfire on ’em,” Ken said. “All this dual personality stuff has the makings of an insanity plea. He’s got some weird sexual deviation — his burglaries were sexually based, you know.”
“How do you mean?”
“He got some kind of thrill out of entering the window of a strange apartment. He’d have a sexual emission shortly after entering. Must’ve been symbolic in his mind — entering through the window for him was like... you know.” He shrugged. “Apparently the kid’s never had normal sex.”
“Thank you, Dr. Freud.”
Ken grinned. “Hey, I could get that little bastard off.”
I was glad it wasn’t Ken’s case.
“Whatever his sex quirk,” I said, “they tied him to the assault on that nurse, Katherine Reynolds. They matched his prints to one left in her apartment. And to a partial print on the Keenan kidnap note.”
“The key word is partial,” Ken said, raising a finger. “They got six points of similarity on the note. Eleven are required for a positive I.D.”
“They’ve got an eyewitness I.D.”
Ken laughed; there was genuine mirth in it. Lawyers can find the humor in both abstract thinking and human suffering. “Their eyewitness is that old German janitor who was their best suspect till you nabbed Lapps. The old boy looked at four overweight, middle-aged cops and one seventeen-year-old in a lineup and somehow managed to pick out the seventeen-year-old. Before that, his description of the guy he saw was limited to ‘a man in a brown raincoat with a shopping bag.’ Did you know that that janitor used to be a butcher?”
“There was something in the papers about it. That doesn’t mean he cuts up little girls.”
“No. But if he lost his job during the war, ’cause of OPA restrictions, he could bear Bob Keenan a grudge.”
“Bob wasn’t with the OPA long enough for that to be possible. He was with the New York office. Jesus, Ken, what’s your point, here?”
Like most attorneys, Ken was argumentative for the sheer hell of it; but he saw this was getting under my skin and backed off. “Just making conversation, Nate. That kid’s guilty. The prosecutors are just goddamn lucky they got a mean little J.D. who carried Nietzche around and collected Nazi memorabilia. ’Cause without public opinion, they couldn’t win this one.”
Ken headed back to court and I sat working at my cocktail, wondering if I could get away with a third.
I shared some of Ken’s misgivings about the way the Lapps case was being handled. A handwriting expert had linked the lipstick message on the late Margaret Johnson’s wall with that of the Keenan kidnap note; then matched those to re-creations of both Lapps was made to give.
This handwriting expert’s claim to fame was the Lindbergh case — having been there, I knew the Lindbergh handwriting evidence was a crock — and both the lipstick message and kidnap notes were printed, which made handwriting comparison close to worthless.
Of course, Lapps had misspelled some of the same words as in the note: “waite” and “safty.” Only I’d learned in passing from Lt. Kruger that Lapps had been told to copy the notes, mistakes and all.
A fellow named Bruno Hauptmann had dutifully done the same in his handwriting samples, some years before. The lineup trick Ken had mentioned had been used to hand Hauptmann on a platter to a weak, elderly eyewitness, too. And the press had played their role in Bruno’s railroading — one overeager reporter had written an incriminating phone number inside Hauptmann’s apartment, to buy a headline that day, and that little piece of creative writing on wainscoting became an irrefutable key prosecution exhibit.
But so what? Bruno was (a) innocent and (b) long dead. This kid was alive, well, and psycho — and as guilty as the Nazi creeps he idolized. Besides which, what Ken had said about the kid’s sexual deviation had made something suddenly clear to me.
I knew Lapps was into burglary for kicks, but I figured it was the violence against women that got him going. This business about strange buildings — and he’d had a certain of type of building, hadn’t he, like some guys liked blondes or other guys were leg men — made a screwy sort of sense.
Lapps must have been out on the fire escape, peeking into Caroline Williams’ apartment, casing it for a possible break-in, when he saw George slapping the girl around in the bedroom. He must have heard the Williams woman calling George by name — that planted the “George did it” seed — and got a new thrill when he witnessed George cut the woman’s throat.
Then George had seen the dark, coplike figure out the window, got spooked, and lammed; and Lapps entered the apartment, spilled his seed, did his sick, guilty number washing and bandaging the corpse, and took various mementos, including undies and the photo album.
This new thrill had inspired Lapps to greater heights of madness, and the second girl — Margaret Johnson — had been all his. All his own twisted handiwork... though perhaps in his mind George had done that, as well.
But Lapps, like so many men after even a normal sexual release, felt a sadness and even guilt and had left that lipstick plea on the wall.
That pretty nurse, Katherine Reynolds, had been lucky. Lapps hadn’t been able to kill again; he’d stopped at assault — maybe he’d had his sexual release already, and his remorse kicked in before he could kill her. He’d even come back to help her.
What was bothering me, though, was the Keenan child. Nothing about Lapps’ M.O. fit this crime. The building wasn’t his “type.” Kidnapping wasn’t his crime, let alone dismembering a child. Had Lapps’ thrill-seeking escalated into sheer depravity?
Even so, one thing was so wrong I couldn’t invent any justification for it. Ken had said it: the kid had probably never had normal sex. The kid’s idea of a fun date was going through a strange window and coming on the floor.
But rape had been attempted on the little girl. The coroner said so. Rape.
“Want some company, Heller?”
Hal Davis, with his oversize head and sideways smile, had already slid in across from me in the booth.
“Sure. What’s new in the world of yellow journalism?”
“Slow day. Jeez, Heller, you look like shit.”
“Thanks, Hal.”
“You should be on top of the world. You’re a local hero. A celebrity.”
“Shut up, Hal.”
Davis had brought a Scotch along with him. “Ain’t this case a pip. Too bad they can’t fry this kid, but in this enlightened day and age, he’ll probably get a padded cell and three squares for the rest of his miserable life.”
“I don’t think they’ll fry a seventeen-year-old, even in a case like this.”
“What a case it’s been. For you, especially.”
“You got your share of mileage out of it, too, Hal.”
He laughed; lit up a cigarette. Shook his head. “Funny.”
“What is?”
“Who’d a thunk it?”
“Thunk what?”
He leaned over conspiratorially. His breath was evidence that this was not his first Scotch of the afternoon. “That the Keenan kidnapper really would turn out to be the Lipstick Killer. For real.”
“Why not? He left his signature on Keenan’s back fence. ‘Stop me before I kill more...’”
“That’s the funny part.” He snorted smugly. “Who do you think wrote that on the fence?”
I blinked. “What do you mean?”
Davis leaned across with a one-sided smirk that split his boyish face. “Don’t be a jerk. Don’t be so gullible. I wrote that there. It made for a hell of a byline.”