Max Collins - Chicago Lightning

I sat on the edge of the desk, rubbing my eyes. “Speaking.”

“This is Captain John Stege.”

I slid off the desk. “What can I do for you?”

“Steer clear of my case, you son of a bitch.”

“What case is that, Captain?”

Stege was a white-haired fireplug with dark-rimmed glasses, a meek-looking individual who could scare the hell out of you when he felt like it. He felt like it.

“You stay out of the goddamn Wynekoop case. I won’t have you mucking it up.”

How did he even know I was on the case? Had Officer March told him?

“I was hired by the family to try to help clear Dr. Wynekoop. It’s hardly uncommon for a defendant in a murder case to hire an investigator.”

“Dr. Alice Lindsay Wynekoop murdered her daughter-in-law! It couldn’t be any other way.”

“Captain, it could be a lot of other ways. It could be one of her boy friends; it could be one of her husband’s girl friends. It could be a break-in artist looking for drugs. It could be…”

“Are you telling me how to do my job?”

“Well, you’re telling me how not to do mine.”

There was a long pause.

Then Stege said: “I don’t like you, Heller. You stay out of my way. You go manufacturing evidence, and I’ll introduce you to every rubber hose in this town…and I know plenty of ’em.”

“You have the wrong idea about me, Captain,” I said. “And you may have the wrong idea about Alice Wynekoop.”

“Bull! She insured young Rheta for five grand, fewer than thirty days before the girl’s death. With double indemnity, the policy pays ten thousand smackers.”

I hadn’t heard about this.

“The Wynekoops have money,” I said. “A murder-for-insurance-money scheme makes no sense for a well-to-do family like that…”

“Dr. Wynekoop owes almost five thousand dollars back taxes and has over twenty thousand dollars in overdue bank notes. She’s prominent, but she’s not wealthy. She got hit in the crash.”

“Well…”

“She killed her daughter-in-law to make her son happy, and to collect the insurance money. If you were worth two cents as a detective, you’d know that.”

“Speaking of detective work, Captain, how did you know I was on this case?”

“Don’t you read the papers?”

The papers had me in them, all right. A small story, but well placed, on several front pages in fact; under a picture of Earle seated at his mother’s side in the jail hospital, the News told how the Wynekoops had hired a local private inestigator, one Nathan Heller, to help prove Dr. Alice’s innocence.

I called Earle Wynekoop and asked him to meet me at the County Jail hospital wing. I wanted to talk to both of my clients.

On the El, I thought about how I had intended to pursue this case. Having done the basic groundwork with the family and witnesses, I would begin searching for the faceless break-in artist whose burglary had got out of hand, leading to the death of Rheta Wynekoop. Never mind that it made no sense for a thief to take a gun from a rolltop desk, make his victim un-dress, shoot her in the back, tuck her in like a child at bedtime, and leave the gun behind. Criminals did crazy things, after all. I would spend three or four days sniffing around the West Side pawn shops and re-sale shops, and the Maxwell Street market, looking for a lead on any petty crook whose drug addiction might lead to violence. I would comb the flophouses and bars hopheads were known to frequent, and….

But I had changed my mind, at least for the moment.

Earle was at his mother’s bedside when the matron left me there. Dr. Alice smiled in her tight, business-like manner and offered me a hand to shake; I took it. Earle stood and nodded and smiled nervously at me. I nodded to him, and he sat again.

But I stayed on my feet.

“I’m off this case,” I said.

“What?” Earle said, eyes wide.

Dr. Alice remained calm. Her appraising eyes were as cold as the weather.

“Captain Stege suggested it,” I said.

“That isn’t legal!” Earle said.

“Quiet, Earle,” his mother said, sternly but with gentleness.

“That’s not why I’m quitting,” I said. “And I’m keeping the retainer, too, by the way.”

“Now that isn’t legal!” Earle said, standing.

“Shut-up,” I said to him. To her, I said: “You two used me. I’m strictly a publicity gimmick. To help you make you look sincere, to help you keep up a good front…just like staying in the jail’s hospital ward, so you can pose for pitiful newspaper pics.”

Dr. Alice blinked and smiled thinly. “You’re revealing an obnoxious side, Mr. Heller, that is unbecoming.”

“You killed your daughter-in-law, Dr. Wynekoop. For Sonny Boy, here.”

Earle’s face clenched like a fist, and he clenched his fists, too, while he was at it. “I ought to…”

I looked at him hard. “I wish to hell you would.”

His eyes flickered at me, then he glanced at his mother. She nodded and motioned for him to sit again, and he did.

“Mr. Heller,” she said, “I assure you, I am innocent. I don’t know what you’ve been told that gave you this very false impression, but…”

“Save it. I know what happened, and why. You discovered, in one of your frequent on-the-house examinations of your hypochondriac daghter-in-law, that she really was ill. Specifically, she had a social disease.”

Anger flared in the doctor’s eyes.

“You could forgive Earle all his philandering…even though you didn’t approve. You did ask your daughter to talk to him about his excesses of drink and dames. But those were just misdemeanors. For your husband’s wife to run around, to get a nasty disease that she might just pass along to your beloved boy, should their marriage ever heat up again, well, that was a crime. And it deserved punishment.”

“Mr. Heller, why don’t you go. You may keep your retainer, if you keep your silence.”

“Oh, hitting a little close to home, am I? Well, let me finish. You paid for this. I don’t think it was your idea to kill Rheta, despite the dose of syph she was carrying. I think it was Earle’s idea. She wouldn’t give him a divorce, good Catholic girl that she was, and Earle’s a good Catholic, too, after all. It’d be hell to get excommunicated, right, Earle? Right, Mom?”

Earle was shaking; his hands clasped, prayerfully. Dr. Wynekoop’s wrinkled face was a stern mask.

“Here’s what happened,” I said, cheerfully. “Earle came to you and asked you to put the little woman to sleep…she was a tortured girl, after all, if it were done painlessly, why, it would be a merciful act. But you refused-you’re a doctor, a healer. It wouldn’t be right.”

Earle’s eyes were shifting from side to side in confirmation of my theory.

I forged ahead: “But Earle came to you again, and said, Mother dear, if you don’t do it, I will. I’ve found father’s old .32, and I’ve tried it…fired two test rounds. It works, and I know how to work it. I’m going to kill Rheta myself.”

Earle’s eyes were wide as was his mouth. I must have come very, very close, even perhaps to his very language. Dr. Alice continued to maintain a poker face.

“So, Mom, you decided to take matters in hand. When Earle came back early from his Grand Canyon photo trip, the two of you rendezvoused away from home-though you were seen, unfortunately-and came up with a plan. Earle would resume his trip, only go no farther than Peoria, where he would establish an alibi.”

Earle’s face was contorted as he took in every damning word.

“On the day of the murder,” I told her, “you had a final private consultation with your daughter-in-law…you overdosed her with chloroform, or smothered her.”