Max Collins - Chicago Lightning

“We had several fatal falls-down-stairs, and a surprising number of fatalities by exposure to the cold weather, death by freezing, by pneumonia. Again, I performed autopsies where normally we would not. These victims were invariably intoxicated at the times of their deaths, and in advanced stages of acute alcoholism.”

I was thoroughly confused. “What’s the percentage in bumping off bums? You got another psychopath at large, Eliot? Or is the Butcher back, changing his style?”

I was referring to the so-called Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, who had cut up a number of indigents here in Cleveland, Jack the Ripper style; but the killings had stopped, long ago.

“This isn’t the Butcher,” Eliot confidently. “And it isn’t psychosis…it’s commerce.”

“There’s money in killing bums?”

“If they’re insured, there is.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, nodding, getting it, or starting to. “But if you overinsure some worthless derelict, surely it’s going to attract the attention of the adjusters for the insurance company.”

“This is more subtle than that,” Eliot said. “When Alice informed me of this, I contacted the State Insurance Division. Their chief investigator, Gaspar Corso-who we’ll meet with later this afternoon, Nate-dug through our ‘drunk cards’ on file at the Central Police Station, some twenty thousand of them. He came up with information that corroborated Alice’s, and confirmed suspicions of mine.”

Corso had an office in the Standard Building-no name on the door, no listing in the building directory. Eliot, Dr. Jeffers and I met with Corso in the latter’s small, spare office, wooden chairs pulled up around a wooden desk that faced the wall, so that Corso was swung around facing us.

He was small and compactly muscular-a former high school football star, according to Eliot-bald with calm blue eyes under black beetle eyebrows. A gold watch chain crossed the vest of his three-piece tweed.

“A majority of the drunks dying either by accident or ‘natural causes,’” he said in a mellow baritone, “come from the West Side-the Angles.”

“And they were over-insured?” I asked.

“Yes, but not in the way you might expect. Do you know what industrial insurance is, Mr. Heller?”

“You mean, burial insurance?”

“That’s right. Small policies designed to pay funeral expenses and the like.”

“Is that what these bums are being bumped off for? Pennies?”

A tiny half smile formed on the impassive investigator’s thin lips. “Hardly. Multiple policies have been taken out on these individuals, dozens in some cases…each small policy with a different insurance company.”

“No wonder no alarms went off,” I said. “Each company got hit for peanuts.”

“Some of these policies are for two-hundred-and-fifty dollars, never higher than a thousand. But I have one victim here…” He turned to his desk, riffled through some papers. “…who I determined, by crosschecking with various companies, racked up a $24,000 payout.”

“Christ. Who was the beneficiary?”

“A Kathleen O’Meara,” Eliot said. “She runs a saloon in the Angles, with a rooming house upstairs.”

“Her husband died last month,” Dr. Jeffers said. “I performed the autopsy myself…. He was intoxicated at the time of his death, and was in an advanced stage of cirrhosis of the liver. Hit by a car. But there was one difference.”

“Yes?”

“He was fairly well-dressed, and was definitely not malnourished.”

O’Meara’s did not serve food, but a greasy spoon down the block did, and that’s where Katie took me for supper, around seven, leaving the running of the saloon to her sullen skinny daughter, Maggie.

“Maggie doesn’t say much,” I said, over a plate of meat loaf and mashed potatoes and gray. Like Katie, it was surprisingly appetizing, particularly if you didn’t look too closely and were half-bombed.

We were in a booth by a window that showed no evidence of ever having been cleaned; cold March wind rattled it and leached through.

“I spoiled her,” Katie admitted. “But, to be fair, she’s still grieving over her papa. She was the apple of his eye.”

“You miss your old man?”

“I miss the help. He took care of the books. I got a head for business, but not for figures. Thing is, he got greedy.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, caught him featherin’ his own nest. Skimmin’. He had a bank account of his own he never told me about.”

“You fight over that?”

“Naw. Forgive and forget, I always say.” Katie was having the same thing as me, and she was shoveling meat loaf into her mouth like coal into a boiler.

“I’m, uh, pretty good with figures,” I said.

Her licentious smile was part lip rouge, part gravy. “I’ll just bet you are…. Ever do time, Bill?”

“Some. I’m not no thief, though…I wouldn’t steal a partner’s money.”

“What were you in for?”

“Manslaughter.”

“Kill somebody, did you?”

“Sort of.”

She giggled. “How do you ‘sort of’ kill somebody, Bill?”

“I beat a guy to death with my fists. I was drunk.”

“Why?”

“I’ve always drunk too much.”

“No, why’d you beat him to death? With your fists.”

I shrugged, chewed meat loaf. “He insulted a woman I was with. I don’t like a man that don’t respect a woman.”

She sighed. Shook her head. “You’re a real gent, Bill. Here I thought chivalry was dead.”

Three evenings before, I’d been in a yellow-leather booth by a blue-mirrored wall in the Vogue Room of the Hollenden Hotel. Clean-shaven and in my best brown suit, I was in the company of Eliot and his recent bride, the former Ev McMillan, a fashion illustrator who worked for Higbee’s department store.

Ev, an almond-eyed slender attractive brunette, wore a simple cobalt blue evening dress with pearls; Eliot was in thehree-piece suit he’d worn to work. We’d had prime rib and were enjoying after dinner drinks; Eliot was on his second, and he’d had two before dinner, as well. Martinis. Ev was only one drink behind him.

Personal chit-chat had lapsed back into talking business.

“It’s goddamn ghoulish,” Eliot said. He was quietly soused, as evidenced by his use of the word “goddamn”-for a tough cop, he usually had a Boy Scout’s vocabulary.

“It’s coldblooded, all right,” I said.

“How does the racket work?” Ev asked.

“I shouldn’t have brought it up,” Eliot said. “It doesn’t make for pleasant after-dinner conversation…”

“No, I’m interested,” she said. She was a keenly intelligent young woman. “You compared it to a lottery…how so?”

“Well,” I said, “as it’s been explained to me, speculators ‘invest’ in dozens of small insurance policies on vagrants who were already drinking themselves to imminent graves…malnourished men crushed by dope and/or drink, sleeping in parks and in doorways in all kinds of weather.”

“Men likely to meet an early death by so-called natural causes,” Eliot said. “That’s how we came to nickname the racket ‘Natural Death, Inc.’”

“Getting hit by a car isn’t exactly a ‘natural’ death,” Ev pointed out.

Eliot sipped his martini. “At first, the speculators were just helping nature along by plying their investments with free, large quantities of drink…hastening their death by alcoholism or just making them more prone to stumble in front of a car.”

“Now it looks like these insured derelicts are being shoved in front of cars,” I said.

“Or the drivers of the cars are purposely running them down,” Eliot said. “Dear, this really is unpleasant conversation; I apologize for getting into it…”