Max Collins - Chicago Lightning

The afternoon of January 16, someone knocked at my office door; in the middle of a phone credit check, I covered the receiver and called out, “Come in.”

The door opened tentatively and a small, milquetoast of a man peered in.

“Mr. Heller?”

I nodded, motioned for him to be seated before me, and finished up my call; he sat patiently, a pale little man in a dark suit, his dark hat in his lap.

“What can I do for you?”

He stood, smiled in an entirely humorless, business-like manner, extending a hand to be shook; I shook it, and the grip was surprisingly firm.

“I am a Lutheran minister,” he said. “My name, for the moment, is unimportant.”

“Pleased to meet you, Reverend.”

“I read about the Peacock case in the papers.”

“Yes?”

“I saw your name. You discovered the body. You were in Mrs. Peacock’s employ.”

“Yes.”

“I have information. I was unsure of whom to give it to.”

“If you have information regarding the Peacock case, you should give it to the police. I can place a call right now…”

“Please, no! I would prefer you hear my story and judge for yourself.”

“All right.”

“Last New Year’s Day I had a chance meeting with my great and good friend, Dr. Silber Peacock, God rest his soul. On that occasion the doctor confided that a strange man, a fellow who claimed to be a chiropodist, had come bursting into his office, making vile accusations.”

“Such as?”

“He said, ‘You, sir, are having an affair with my wife!’”

I sat forward. “Go on.”

“Dr. Peacock said he’d never laid eyes on this man before; that he thought him a crazy man. ‘Why, I never ran around on Ruth in my life,’ he said.”

“How did he deal with this man?”

“He threw him bodily from his office.”

“When did he have this run-in? Did he mention the man’s name?”

“Last October. The man’s name was Thompson, and he was, as I’ve said, a chiropodist.”

“You should go to the police with this.”

The Reverend stood quickly, nervously. “I’d really rather not.”

And then he was on his way out of the office. By the time I got out from behind my desk, he was out of the room, and by the time I got out into the hall, he was out of sight.

The only chiropodist named Thompson in the Chicago phone book was one Arthur St. George Thompson, whom I found at his Wilson Avenue address. He was a skinny, graying man in his early forties; he and his office were seedy. He had no patients in his rather unkempt waiting room when I arrived (or when I left, for that matter).

“I knew Silber Peacock,” he said, bitterly. “I remember visiting him at his office in October, too. What of it?”

“Did you accuse him of seeing your wife?”

“Sure I did! Let me tell you how I got hep to Peacock and Arlene. One evening last June she came home stinking, her and Ann-that’s the no-good who’s married to Arlene’s brother Carl. Arlene said she’d been at the Subway Club and her escort was Doc Peacock. So I looked in the classified directory. The only Dr. Peacock was Silber C., so I knew it was him. I stewed about it for weeks, months, and then I went to his office. The son of a bitch pretended he didn’t know who I was, or Arlene, either; he just kept denying it, and shoving me out of there, shoved me clear out into the hall.”

“I see.”

“No you don’t. I hated the louse, but I didn’t kill him. Besides, I got an alibi. I can prove where I was the night he was murdered.”

First I wanted to talk to Arlene Thompson, whom I found at her brother’s place, a North Side apartment.

Ann was a slender, giggly brunette, attractive. Arlene was even more attractive, a voluptuous redhead. Both were in their mid-twenties. Ann’s husband wasn’t home, so the two of them flirted with me and we had a gay old time.

“Were you really seeing Doc Peacock?”

The two girls exchanged glances and began giggling and the giggling turned to outright laughter. “That poor guy!” Arlene said.

“Well, yeah, I’d say so. He’s dead.”

“Not him! Arthur! That insane streak of jealousy’s got him in hot water again, has it? Look, good-lookin’-there’s nothing to any of this, understand? Here’s how it happened.”

Arlene and Ann had gone alone to the Subway Cafe one afternoon, a rowdy honky-tonk that had since lost its liquor license, and got picked up by two men. They danced till dusk. Arlene’s man said he was Doc Peacock; no other first name given.

“Arthur went off his rocker when I came in, tipsy. He demanded the truth-so I told it to him! It was all innocent enough, but got him goin’. He talked days on end about Doc Peacock, about how he was going to even the score.”

“Do you think he did?”

The redhead laughed again, said, “Honey, that Dr. Peacock whose puss has been in the papers ain’t the guy I dated. My Peacock was much better looking-wavy hair, tall, a real dreamboat. I think my pick-up just pulled a name out of his hat.”

“Your husband didn’t know that. Maybe he evened the score with the wrong Peacock.”

She shook her head, not believing that for a minute. “Arthur just isn’t the type. He’s a poor, weak sister. He never had enough pep to hurt a fly.”

It was all conjecture, but I turned it over to Stege, anyway. Thompson’s alibi checked out. Yet another dead-end.

The next day I was reading the morning papers over breakfast in the coffee shop at the Morrison Hotel. A very small item, buried on an inside page, caught my eye: Dr. Joseph Soldinger, 1016 North Oakley Blvd, had been robbed at gunpoint last night of $37, his car stolen.

I called Stege and pointed out the similarity to the Peacock case, half expecting him to shrug it off. He didn’t. He thanked me, and hung up.

A week later I got a call from Stege; he was excited. “Listen to this: Dr. A.L. Abrams, 1600 Milwaukee Avenue, $56 lost to gunmen; Dr. L.A. Garness, 2542 Mozart Avenue, waylaid and robbed of $6. And there’s two more like that.”

“Details?”

“Each features a call to a doctor to rush to a bedside. Address is in a lonely neighrhood. It’s an appointment with ambush. Take is always rather small. Occurrences between ten and eleven p.m.”

“Damn! Sounds like Mrs. Peacock has been right all along. Her husband fought off his attackers; that’s what prompted their beating him.”

“The poor bastard was a hero and the papers paint him a philanderer.”

“Well, we handed ’em the brush.”

“Perhaps we did, Heller. Anyway, thanks.”

“Any suspects?”

“No. But we got the pattern now. From eye-witness descriptions it seems to be kids. Four assailants, three tall and husky, the other shorter.”

A bell was ringing, and not outside my window. “Captain, you ever hear of Rose Kasallis?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“I tracked a runaway girl to her place two summers ago. She’s a regular female Fagin. She had a flat on North Maplewood Avenue that was a virtual ‘school for crime.’”

“I have heard of that. The West North Avenue cops handled it. She was keeping a way-station for fugitive kids from the reform school at St. Charles. Sent up the river for contributing to the delinquency of minors?”

“That’s the one. I had quite a run-in with her charming boy Bobby. Robert Goethe is his name.”

“Oh?”

“He’s eighteen years old, a strapping kid with the morals of an alley cat. And there were a couple of kids he ran with, Emil Reck, who they called Emil the Terrible, and another one whose name I can’t remember…”

“Heller, Chicago has plenty of young street toughs. Why do you think these three might be suspects in the Peacock case?”