Max Collins - Chicago Lightning

I said, “I’m an officer of the court,” which in Illinois wasn’t exactly a lie, and I flashed him my badge, but before I could say anything else, his hand reached out and grabbed the front of my shirt, yanked me inside and slammed the door.

He tossed me like a horseshoe, and I smacked into something-the stairway to the second floor, I guess; I don’t know exactly-because I blacked out. The only thing I remember is the musty smell of the place.

I woke up minutes later, and found myself tied in a chair in a dank, dark room. Support beams loomed out of a packed dirt floor. The basement.

I strained at the ropes, but they were snug; not so snug as to cut off my circulation, but snug enough. I glanced around the room. I was alone. I couldn’t see much-just a shovel against one cement wall. The only light came from a window off to my right, and there were hedges in front of the widow, so the light was filtered.

Feet came tromping down the open wooden stairs. I saw his legs, first; white as pastry dough.

He was grinning. In his right hand was a cleaver. It shone, caught a glint of what little light there was.

“I’m no butcher,” he said. His voice was soft, almost gentle. “Don’t believe what you’ve heard….”

“Do you want to die?” I said.

“Of course not.”

“Well then cut me loose. There’s cops all over the place, and if you kill me, they’ll shoot you down. You know what happens to cop killers, don’t you?”

He thought that over, nodded.

Standing just to one side of me, displaying the cold polished steel of the cleaver, in which my face’s frantic reflection looked back at me, he said, “I’m no butcher. This is a surgical tool. This is used for amputation, not butchery.”

“Yeah. I can see that.”

“I wondered when you people would come around.”

“Do you want to be caught, Lloyd?”

“Of course not. I’m no different than you. I’m a public servant.”

“How…how do you figure that, Lloyd?” My fweren’t tied to the chair; if he’d just step around in front of me…

“I only dispose of the flotsam. Not to mention jetsam.”

“Not to mention that.”

“Tramps. Whores. Weeding out the stock. Survival of the fittest. You know.”

“That makes a lot of sense, Lloyd. But I’m not flotsam or jetsam. I’m a cop. You don’t want to kill a cop. You don’t want to kill a fellow public servant.”

He thought about that.

“I think I have to, this time,” he said.

He moved around the chair, stood in front of me, stroking his chin, the cleaver gripped tight in his right hand, held about breastbone level.

“I do like you,” Lloyd said, thoughtfully.

“And I like you, Lloyd,” I said, and kicked him in the balls.

Harder than any man tied to a chair should be able to kick; but you’d be surprised what you can do, under extreme circumstances. And things rarely get more extreme than being tied to a chair with a guy with a cleaver coming at you.

Only he wasn’t coming at me, now: now, he was doubled over, and I stood, the chair strapped to my back; managed, even so, to kick him in the face.

He tumbled back, gripping his groin, tears streaming down his checks, cords in his neck taut; my shoe had caught him on the side of the face and broken the skin. Flecks of blood, like little red tears, spattered his cheeks, mingling with the real tears.

That’s when the window shattered, and Vivian squeezed down in through; pretty legs first.

And she gave me the little gun to hold on him while she untied me.

He was still on the dirt floor, moaning, when we went up the stairs and out into the sunny day, into a world that wasn’t dank, onto earth that was grass-covered and didn’t have God knows what buried under it.

We asked Eliot to meet us at his boathouse; we told him what had happened. He was livid; I never saw him angrier. But he held Vivian for a moment, and looked at her and said, “If anything had happened to you, I’d’ve killed you.”

He poured all of us a drink; rum as usual. He handed me my mine and said, “How could you get involved in something so harebrained?”

“I wanted to give my client something for his money,” I said.

“You mean his daughter’s killer.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve been looking for the bastard three years, and you come to town and expect to find him in three days.”

“Well, I did.”

He smirked, shook his head. “I believe you did. But Watterson’s family would bring in the highest-paid lawyers in the country and we’d be thrown out of court on our cans.”

div›

“What? The son of a bitch tried to cut me up with a cleaver!”

“Did he? Did he swing on you? Or did you enter his house under a false pretense, misrepresenting yourself as a law officer? And as far as that goes, you assaulted him . We have very little.”

Vivian said, “You have the name of the Butcher.”

Eliot nodded. “Probably. I’m going to make a phone call.”

Eliot went into his den and came out fifteen minutes later.

“I spoke with Franklin Watterson, the father. He’s agreed to submit his son for a lie detector test.”

“To what end?”

“One step at a time,” Eliot said.

Lloyd Watterson took the lie detector test twice-and on both instances denied committing the various Butcher slayings; his denials were, according to the machine, lies. The Watterson family attorney reminded Eliot that lie detector tests were not admissible as evidence. Eliot had a private discussion with Franklin Watterson.

Lloyd Watterson was committed, by his family, to an asylum for the insane. The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run-which to this day is marked “unsolved” in the Cleveland police records-did not strike again.

At least not directly.

Eliot married Evie MacMillan a few months after my Cleveland visit, and their marriage was from the start disrupted by crank letters, postmarked from the same town as the asylum where Watterson had been committed. “Retribution will catch up with you one day,” said one postcard, on the front of which was a drawing of an effeminate man grinning from behind prison bars. Mrs. Ness was especially unnerved by these continuing letters and cards.

Eliot’s political fortunes waned, in the wake of the “unsolved” Butcher slayings. Known for his tough stance on traffic violators, he got mired in a scandal when one pre-dawn morning in March of 1942, his car skidded into an oncoming car on the West Shoreway. Eliot and his wife, and two friends, had been drinking. The police report didn’t identify Eliot by name, but his license number-EN-1, well-known to Cleveland citizens-was listed. And Eliot had left the scene of the accident.

Hit-and-run, the headlines said. Eliot’s version was that his wife had been injured, and he’d raced her to a hospital-but not before stopping to check on the other driver, who confirmed this. The storm blew over, but the damage was done-Eliot’s image in the Cleveland press was finally tarnished.

Two months later he resigned as Safety Director.

Lloyd Watterson kept sending the threatening mail to Eliot for many years. He died in a Dayton, Ohio, asylum in 1965.

How much pressure those cards and letters put on the marriage I couldn’t say; but in 1945 Eliot and Evie divorced, and Eliot married a third time a few months later. At the time he was serving as federal director of the program against venereal disease in the military. His attempt to run for Cleveland mayor in 1947 was a near disaster: Cleveland’s one-time fairhaired b was a has-been with a hit-run scandal and two divorces and three marriages going against him.

He would not have another public success until the publication of his autobiographical book, The Untouchables -but that success was posthumous; he died shortly before it was published, never knowing that television and Robert Stack would give him lasting fame.