Max Collins - Chicago Lightning

Frowning, Cullen said, “Yeah, well, we’ll want to talk to your client, too.”

I said, “Might be a good idea. You could inform him his wife is dead. Just as a, you know, courtesy to a taxpayer.”

Mullaney gave me a don’t-needle-this-prick-anymore look, then said, “The husband is in the clear. We’ve already been in touch with him.”

Cullen asked, “What’s his alibi?”

“Well, a Municipal Court judge, for one. He had a ten thirty at the court, which is where we found him. A former employee is suing him for back wages.”

Sylvester Vinicky ran a small moving company over on nearby South Racine Avenue. He and his wife also ran a small second-hand furniture shop, adjacent.

“Any thoughts, Nate?” Mullaney asked. “Any observations you’d care to share?”

“Did you notice the button?”

“What button?”

So I filled Mullaney in on the sportcoat button, pointed out the possible missing wedding ring, and the inevitability of the killer getting blood-spattered.

“She let the bastard in,” Mullaney said absently.

“Somebody she knew,” I said. “And trusted.”

Cullen asked, “Why do you say that? Could have been a salesman or Mormon or-”

“No,” I said. “He got close enough to her to strike a blow from behind, in the living room. She was smoking-it was casual. Friendly.”

Cullen sighed. “Friendly….”

Mullaney said, “We’re saying ‘he’-but it could be a woman.”

“I don’t think so. Rose Vinicky was tall, and all of those blows landed on the back of her head, struck with a downward swing.”

Cullen frowned. “And how do you know this?”

“Well, I’m a trained detective. There are courses available.”

Ignoring this twaddle, Mullaney said, “She could have been on the floor already, when those blows were struck-hell, there were half a dozen of them.”

“Right. But at least one of them was struck when she was standing. And the woman was five ten, easy. Big girl. And the force of it…skull crushed like an eggshell. And you can see the impressions from multiple blows.”

“A man, then,” Mullaney said. “A vicious son of a bitch. Well. We’ll get him. Captain…would you give Mr. Heller and me a moment?”

Cullen heaved a dramatic sigh, but then he nodded, rose, stepped out.

Mullaney said, “I don’t suppose you’ll stay out of this.”

“Of course I’ll stay out of it. This is strictly police business.”

“I didn’t think you would. Okay, I understand-your name is going to be in the papers, it’s going to get out that the wife of a client was killed on your watch-”

“Hey, she was already dead when I pulled up!”

“That’ll go over big with the newshounds, especially the part where you’re twiddling your thumbs in your car while she lay dead…. Nate, let’s work together on this thing.”

“Define ‘together.’”

He leaned forward; the round face, the dark eyes, held no guile. “I’m not asking you to tag along-I couldn’t ask that. You have ‘friends’ like Captain Cullen all over town. But I’ll keep you in the know, you do the same. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Why don’t we start with a show of good faith.”

“Such as?”

“Why were you here? What job were you doing for Sylvester Vinicky?”

Thing was, I’d been lying about this coming through a lawyer, though I had a reasonable expectation the lawyer I’d named would cover for me. Really what I’d hoped for was to talk to my client before I spilled to the cops. But Mullaney wasn’t just any cop….

So I told him.

Told him that Sylvester Vinicky had come to my office on Van Buren, and started crying, not unlike his daughter had at the curb. He loved his wife, he was crazy about her, and he felt so ashamed, suspecting her of cheating.

Vinicky had sat across from me in the client’s chair, a working man with a heavy build in baggy trousers, brown jacket and cap. At five nine he was shorter than his wife, and was pudgy where she was slender. Just an average-looking joe named Sylvester.

“She’s moody,” he said. “When she isn’t nagging, she’s snapping at me. Sulks. She’s distant. Sometimes when I call home, when she’s supposed to be home, she ain’t at home.”

“Mr. Vinicky,” I said, “if anything, usually a woman having an affair acts nicer than normal to her husband. She doesn’t want to give him a chance to suspect anything’s up.”

“Not Rose. She’s always been more like my sweetheart than my wife. We’ve never had a cross word, and, hell, we’re in business together, and it’s been smooth sailing at home and at work…where most couples would be at each other’s throats, you know?”

In addition to the moving business, the Vinickys bought and sold furniture-Rose had an eye for antiques, and found many bargains for resale. She also kept the books, and paid off the men.

“Rose, bein’ a mother and all, isn’t around the office, fulltime,” Vinicky said. “So maybe I shouldn’t be so suspicious about it.”

“About what?”

“About coming home and finding Rich Miller sitting in my living room, or my kitchen.”

“Who is this Miller?”

“Well, he works for me, or anyway he did till last week. I fired him. I got tired of him flitting and flirting around with Rose.”

“What do you know about him?”

A big dumb shrug. “He’s just this knockabout guy who moves around a lot-no wife, no family. Goes from one cheap room to another.”

“Why would your wife take to some itinerant worker?”

A big dumb sigh. “The guy’s handsome, looks like that asshole in the movies-Ronald Reagan? He’s got a smooth way, real charmer, and he knows about antiques, which is why he and Rose had something in common.”

I frowned. “If he’s such a slick customer, why’s he living in cheap flops?”

“He has weaknesses, Mr. Heller-liquor, for example, and women. And most of all? A real passion for the horses.”

“Horses over booze and broads?”

“Oh yeah. Typical horse player-one day he’s broke, next day he hits it lucky and’s rolling in dough.”

I took the job, but when I tried to put one of my men on it, Vinicky insisted I do the work myself.

“I heard about you, Mr. Heller. I rea Heller.”

“That’s why my day rate’s twice that of my ops.”

He was fine with that, and I spent Monday through Thursday dogging the heels of Rich Miller, who indeed resembled Dutch Reagan, only skinny and with a mustache. I picked him up outside the residential hotel at 63 rdand Halstead, a big brick rococo structure dating back to the Columbian Exposition. The first day he was wearing a loud sportshirt and loose slacks, plus a black fedora with a pearl band and two-tone shoes; he looked like something out of Damon Runyon, not some bird doing pick-up work at a moving company.

The other days he was dressed much the same, and his destination was always the same, too: a race track, Washington Park. The IC train delivered him (and me) right outside the park-just a short walk across the tracks to the front admission gate. High trees, shimmering with spring breeze, were damn near as tall as the grandstand. Worse ways for a detective to spend a sunny day in May, and for four of them, I watched my man play the horses and I played the horses, too, coming out a hundred bucks ahead, not counting the fifty an hour.

Miller meeting up with Rose at the track, laying some bets before he laid her, was of course a possibility. But the only person Miller connected with was a tall, broad-shouldered brown-haired guy with the kind of mug janes call “ruggedly handsome” right down to the sleepy Robert Mitchum eyes. They sat in the stands together on two of the four days, going down to the ground-floor windows beneath to place similar smalltime bets-ten bucks at the most, usually to Win.