Max Collins - Chicago Lightning

The doc had a doll, that’s all there was to it. Nonetheless, I decided to scout the neighborhood feacock’s auto. I went two blocks in all directions and saw no sign of it. I was about to call it an afternoon, and a long one at that, when I extended the canvassing to include a third block, and on the 6000 block in North Francisco Avenue, I saw it: a black Caddy sedan with the license 25-682.

I approached the car, which was parked alongside a vacant lot, across from several brownstones. I peeked in; in the backseat was a topcoat, but the topcoat was covering something. Looking in the window, you couldn’t tell what. I tried the door. It was unlocked.

I pulled the rider’s seat forward, and there he was, in a kneeling position, in the back, facing the rear, the top half of him bent over the seat, covered by the topcoat. Carefully, I lifted it off, resting it on the hood of the car. Blood was spattered on the floor and rear windows; the seat was crusty black with it, dried. His blood-flecked felt hat, wadded up like a discarded tissue, lay on the seat. His medical bag was on the seat next to him; it too had been sheltered from sight by the topcoat, and was open and had been disturbed. The little street map book, with the address on it in Mrs. Peacock’s handwriting, was nearby, speckled with blood.

A large caliber bullet had gone in his right temple and come out behind the left ear. His skull was crushed; his brain was showing, but scrambled. His head and shoulders bore numerous knife slashes. His right hand was gloved, but his left was bare and had been caught, crushed, in the slamming car door.

This was one savage killing.

Captain Stege himself arrived, after I called it in; if my name hadn’t been attached to it, he probably wouldn’t have come. The tough little cop had once been Chief of Detectives till, ironically, a scandal had cost him-one of Chicago’s few verifiably honest cops-his job. Not long ago he’d been chief of the PD’s Dillinger squad. It was on the Dillinger case that Stege and I had put our feud behind us; we were uneasily trying to get along these days.

I quickly showed him two more discoveries I’d made, before he or any of his boys in blue had arrived: a .45 revolver shell that was in the snow, near the car, on the vacant lot side; and a pinkish stain in the snow, plus deep tire tracks and numerous cigarette butts, in front of the apartment building at 6438 North Whipple. The tire tracks and cigarettes seemed to indicate that whoever had lured the doctor from his bed had indeed waited at this address; the pink stain pointed toward the violence having started there.

“What’s your part in this?” he said, as we walked back to the scene of the crime. He was a small gray man in a gray topcoat and gray formless hat; tiny eyes squinted behind round, black-rimmed lenses. “How’d you happen to find the body, anyway?”

I explained that Mrs. Peacock had hired me to find her husband. Which, after all, I had.

A police photographer was taking pictures, the body not yet moved.

“How do you read this, Heller?”

“Not a simple robbery.”

“Oh?”

I pointed to the corpse. “He took God knows how many brutal blows; he was slashed and slashed again. It takes hate to arouse pointless violence like that.”

“Crime of passion, then.”

“That’s how I see it, Captain.”

“The wife have an alibi?”

“Don’t even bother going down that road.”

“You mind if I bother, Heller? You ever seen the statistics of the number of murders committed within families?”

“She was home with her daughter. Go ahead. Waste your time. But she’s a nice lady.”

“I’ll remember that. Give your statement to Phelan, and go home. This isn’t your case, anymore.”

“I know it isn’t. But do you mind if I, uh…if I’m the one to break the news to Mrs. Peacock?”

Stege cleared his throat; shot a wad of phlegm into the nearby snow. “Not at all. Nobody envies duty like that.”

So I told her. I wanted her told by somebody who didn’t suspect her and, initially, I’d be the only one who qualified.

She sat in a straightback chair at her dining room table, in the Peacock’s conservative yet expensively appointed apartment high in the Edgewater Beach, and wept into a lace hanky. I sat with her for fifteen minutes. She didn’t ask me to go, so I didn’t.

Finally she said, “Silber was a fine man. He truly was. A perfect husband and father. His habits regular and beyond reproach. No one hated Silber. No one. He was lured to his death by thieves.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Did you know that once before he was attacked by thieves, and that he did not hesitate to fight them off? My husband was a brave man.”

“I’m sure he was.”

I left her there, with her sorrow, thinking that I wished she was right, but knowing she was wrong. I did enough divorce work to know how marriages, even “perfect” ones, can go awry. I also had a good fix on just how much marital cheating was going on in this Christian society.

The next morning I called Stege. He wasn’t glad to hear from me, exactly, but he did admit that the wife was no longer a suspect; her alibi was flawless.

“There was a robbery of sorts,” Stege said.

“Oh?”

“Twenty dollars was missing from Peacock’s wallet. On the other hand, none of his jewelry-some of it pretty expensive stuff-was even touched.”

“What was taken from the medical bag?” I asked.

“Some pills and such were taken, but apparently nothing narcotic. A baby specialist doesn’t go toting dope around.”

“An addict might not know that; an addict might’ve picked Dr. Peacock’s name at random, not knowing he was a baby doc.”

“And what, drew him to that vacant lot to steal a supposed supply of narcotics?”

“Yeah. It might explain the insanity, the savagery of the attack.”

“Come on, Heller. You know as well as I do this is a personal killing. I expect romance to rear its lovely head any time, now. Peacock was rich, handsome enough, by all accounts personable. And he had, we estimate, upwards of five hundred patients. Five hundred kiddies all of whom have mothers who visited the doctor with them.”

“You know something, Captain.”

“What?”

“I’m glad this isn’t my case anymore.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I wish you and your boys all the best doing those five hundred interviews.”

He grumbled and hung up.

I did send Mrs. Peacock a bill, for one day’s services-$20 and $5 expenses-and settled back to watch, with some discomfort, the papers speculate about the late doctor’s love life. Various screwball aspects to the case were chased down by the cops and the press; none of it amounted to much. This included a nutty rumor that the doctor was a secret federal narcotics agent and killed by a dope ring; and the Keystone Kops affair of the mysterious key found in the doctor’s pocket, the lock to which countless police hours were spent seeking, only to have the key turn out to belong to the same deputy coroner who had produced it. The hapless coroner had accidentally mixed a key of his own among the Peacock evidence.

More standard, reliable lines of inquiry provided nothing: fingerprints found in the car were too smudged to identify; witnesses who came forth regarding two people arguing in the death car varied as to the sex of the occupants; the last-minute phone call Peacock made in the lobby turned out to have been to one of his business partners; interviews of the parents of five hundred Peacock patients brought forth not a single disgruntled person, nor a likely partner for any Peacock “love nest.”

Peacock had been dead for over two weeks, when I was brought back into the case again, through no effort of my own.