“You’ll take the job?”
“I already took your money. But what if I don’t get results?”
“You keep the retainer. You find and return that picture, you get another four grand.”
“What I really want,” I said, “is that little girl’s murderer. I want to kill that son of a bitch.”
“Have all the fun you want,” Sam said. “But get me my picture back.”
11
Lou Sapperstein, who had once been my boss on the pickpocket detail, was the first man I added when the A-1 expanded. Pushing sixty, Lou had the hard muscular build of a linebacker and the tortoiseshell glasses and bald pate of a scholar; in fact, he was a little of both.
He leaned a palm on my desk in my office. As usual, he was in rolled-up shirtsleeves, his tie loose around his collar. “I spent all morning in the Trib morgue — went back a full year.”
I had asked Lou to check on any breaking-and-entering cases involving assault on women. It had occurred to me that if, as Drury and I theorized, the Lipstick Killer was a cat burglar whose thrill-seeking had escalated to murder, there may have been an intermediate stage, between bloodless break-ins and homicidal ones.
“There are several possibilities,” Lou said, “but one jumped right out at me...”
He handed me a sheet torn from a spiral pad.
“Katherine Reynolds,” I read aloud. Then I read the rest to myself, and said, “Some interesting wrinkles here.”
Lou nodded. “Some real similarities. And it happened right smack in between killings number one and two. You think the cops have picked up on it?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “This happened on the South Side. The two women who were killed were both on the North Side.”
“The little girl, too.”
To Chicago cops, such geographic boundaries were inviolate — a North Side case was a North Side case and a crime that happened on the South Side might as well have happened on the moon. Unfortunately, crooks didn’t always think that way.
So, late that afternoon, I found myself knocking at the door of the top-floor flat of an eight-story apartment building on the South Side, near the University of Chicago. The building had once been a nurse’s dormitory — Billings Hospital was nearby — and most of the residents here still were women in the mercy business.
Like Katherine Reynolds, who was wearing crisp nurse’s whites, cap included, when she answered the door.
“Thanks for seeing me on such short notice, Miss Reynolds,” I said, as she showed me in.
I’d caught her at the hospital, by phone, and she’d agreed to meet me here at home; she was just getting off.
“Hope I’m not interfering with your supper,” I added, hat in hand.
“Not at all, Mr. Heller,” she said, unpinning her nurse’s cap. “Haven’t even started it yet.”
She was maybe thirty, a striking brunette, with her hair chopped off in a boyish cut with pageboy bangs; her eyes were large and brown and luminous, her nose pug, her teeth white and slightly, cutely bucked. Her lips were full and scarlet with lipstick. She was slender but nicely curved and just about perfect, except for a slight medicinal smell.
We sat in the living room of the surprisingly large apartment; the furnishings were not new, but they were nice. On the end table next to the couch, where we sat, was a hand-tinted color photographic portrait of a marine in dress blues, a grinning lantern-jawed young man who looked handsome and dim.
She crossed her legs and the nylons swished. I was a married man, a professional investigator here on business, and her comeliness had no effect on me whatsoever. I put my hat over my hard-on.
“Nice place you got here,” I said. “Whole floor, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. She smiled meaninglessly. “My sister and another girl, both nurses, share it with me. I think this was the head nurse’s quarters, back when it was a dorm. All the other flats are rather tiny.”
“How long ago was the incident?”
This was one of many questions I’d be asking her that I already knew the answer to.
“You mean the assault?” she said crisply, lighting a cigarette up. She exhaled smoke; her lips made a glistening red O. “About four months ago. The son of a bitch came in through the skylight.” She gestured to it. “It must have been around seven a.m. Sis and Dottie were already at work, so I was alone here. I was still asleep... actually, just waking up.”
“Or did something wake you up?”
“That may have been it. I half-opened my eyes, saw a shadowy figure, and then something crashed into my head.” She touched her brown boyish hair. “Fractured my skull. I usually wear my hair longer, you know, but they cut a lot of it off.”
“Looks good short. Do you know what you were hit with?”
“Your classic blunt instrument. I’d guess, a lead pipe. I took a good knock.”
“You were unconscious.”
“Oh yes. When I woke up, on the floor by the bed, maybe forty minutes later, blood was streaming down my face, and into my eyes. Some of it was sticky, already drying. My apartment was all out of kilter. Virtually ransacked. My hands were tied with a lamp cord, rather loosely. I worked myself free, easily. I looked around and some things were missing.” She made an embarrassed face, gestured with a cigarette in hand. “Underwear. Panties. Bras. But also a hundred and fifty bucks were gone from my purse.”
“Did you call the police at that point?”
“No. That’s when I heard the knock at the door. I staggered over there and it was a kid — well, he could’ve been twenty, but I’d guess eighteen. He had dark hair, long and greased back. Kind of a good-looking kid. Like a young Cornell Wilde. Looked a little bit like a juvenile delinquent, or anyway, like a kid trying to look like one and not quite pulling it off.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he wore a black leather jacket, and a T-shirt and dungarees... but they looked kind of new. Too clean. More like a costume than clothing.”
“What did he want?”
“He said he was a delivery boy — groceries, and he was looking for the right apartment to make his delivery.”
“He was lost.”
“Yes, but we didn’t spend much time discussing that. He took one look at my bloody face and said he would get some help right away.”
“And did he?”
She nodded; exhaled smoke again. “He found the building manager, told him the lady in the penthouse flat was injured, and needed medical attention. And left.”
“And the cops thought he might have been the one who did it? Brought back by a guilty conscience?”
“Yes. But I’m not sure I buy that.”
I nodded. But to me it tied in: the murderer who washed and bandaged his victims’ wounds displayed a similar misguided stop-me-catch-me remorse. Even little JoAnn’s body parts had been cleansed — before they were disposed of in sewers.
“The whole thing made me feel like a jerk,” she said.
That surprised me. “Why?”
She lifted her shoulders; it did nice things to her cupcake breasts. Yes, I know. I’m a heel. “Well, if only I’d reacted quicker, I might have been able to protect myself. I mean, I’ve had all sorts of self-defense training.”
“Oh?”
She flicked ashes into a glass tray on the couch arm. “I’m an Army nurse — on terminal leave. I served overseas. European theater.”
“Ah.”
She gave me a sly smile. “You were in the Pacific, weren’t you?”
“Well, uh, yes.”
“I read about you in the papers. I recognized your name right away. You’re kind of well known around town.”
“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, Miss Reynolds.”