Max Collins - Chicago Lightning

The guy behind the counter had a plaid shirt on, but he was small and squinty and Hitler-mustached, smoking a stogie, and looked more like a bookie than a lumberjack.

I told him some friends of mine were supposed to be staying here.

“We don’t have anybody named Riggs registered.”

“How ’bout Mr. and Mrs. Rooney?”

“Them either. How many friends you got, anyway?”

“Why, did I already catch the limit?”

Before I headed to my cabin, I grabbed some supper in the rustic restaurant. I placed my order with a friendly brunette girl of about nineteen with plenty of personality, and make-up. A road-company Paul Whiteman outfit was playing “Sophisticated Lady” in the adjacent dance hall, and I went over and peeked in, to look for familiar faces. A number of couples were cutting a rug, but not Rooney and Rosalie. Or Henry Berry or Herbert Arnold, either. I went back and had my green salad and fried trout and well-buttered baked potato; I was full and sleepy when I stumbled toward my guest cottage under the light of a moon that bathed the woods ivory.

Walking along the path, I spotted something: snuggled next to one of the secluded cabins was a blue LaSalle coupe with Cook County plates.

Suddenly I wasn’t sleepy. I walked briskly back to the lodge check-in desk and batted the bell to summon the stogie-chewing clerk.

“Cabin seven,” I said. “I think that blue LaSalle is my friends’ car.”

His smirk turned his Hitler mustache Chaplinesque. “You want I should break out the champagne?”

“I just want to make sure it’s them. Dark-haired doll and an older guy, good-looking, kinda sleepy-eyed, just starting to go bald?”

“That’s them.” He checked his register. “That’s the Ridges.” He frowned. “Are they usin’ a phony name?”

“Does a bear shit in the woods?”

He squinted. “You sure they’re friends of yours?”

“Positive. Don’t call their room and tell ’em I’m here, though-I want to surprise them….”

I knocked with my left hand; my right was filled with the nine millimeter. Nothing. I knocked again.

“Who is it?” a male voice said gruffly. “ What is it?”

“Complimentary fruit basket from the management.”

“Go away!”

I kicked the door open.

The lights were off in the little cabin, but enough moonlight came in with me through the doorway to reveal the pair in bed, naked. She was sitting up, her mouth and eyes open in a silent scream, gathering the sheets up protectively over white skin, her dark hair blending with the darkness of the room, making a cameo of her face. He was diving off the bed for the sawed-off shotgun, but I was there to kick it away, wishing I hadn’t, wishing I’d let him grab it so I could have had an excuse to put one in his forehead, right where he’d put one in Stanley’s.

Boss Rooney wasn’t boss of anything, now: he was just a naked, balding, forty-four year-old scam artist, sprawled on the floor. Kicking him would have been easy.

So I did; in the stomach.

He clutched himself and puked. Apparently he’d had the trout, too.

I went over and slammed the door shut, or as shut as it could be, half-off its hinges. Pointing the gun at her retching naked boy friend, I said to the girl, “Turn on the light and put on your clothes.”

She nodded dutifully and did as she was told. In the glow of a nightstand lamp, I caught glimpses of her white, well-formed body as she stepped into her step-ins; but you know what? She didn’t do a thing for me.

“Is Berry here?” I asked Rooney. “Or Arnold?”

“N…no,” he managed.

“If you’re lying,” I said, “I’ll kill you.”

The girl said shrilly, “They aren’t here!”

“You can put your clothes on, too,” I told Rooney. “If you have another gun hidden somewhere, do me a favor. Make a play for it.”

His hooded eyes flared. “Who the hell are you?”

“The private cop you didn’t kill the other night.”

He lowered his gaze. “Oh.”

The girl was sitting on the bed, weeping; body heaving.

“Take it easy on her, will you?” he said, zipping his fly. “She’s just a kid.”

I was opening a window to ease the stench of his vomit. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll say kaddish for her.”

I handcuffed the lovebirds to the bed and called the local law; they in turn called the State Prosecutor’s office in Chicago, and Sergeants Pribyl and Gray made the long drive up the next day to pick up the pair.

It seemed the two cops had already caught Henry Berry-a tipster gave them the West Chicago Avenue address of a second-floor room he was holed up in.

I admitted to Pribyl that I’d been wrong about Tubbo tipping off Rooney and the rest about the raid.

“I figure Rooney lammed out of sheer panic,” I said, “the morning after the murder.”

Pribyl saw it the same way.

The following March, Pribyl arrested Herbert Arnold running a northside handbill distributing agency.

Rooney, Berry and Rosalie Rizzo were all convicted of murder; the two men got life, and the girl twenty years. Arnold hadn’t been part of the kill-happy joyride that took Stanley Gross’ young life, and got only one to five for conspiracy and extortion.

None of it brought Stanley Gross back, nor did my putting on a beanie and sitting with the Gross family, suffering through a couple of stints at a storefront synagogue on Roosevelt Road.

But it did get Barney off my ass.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

While Nathan Heller is a fictional character, this story is based on a real case-names have not been changed, and the events are fundamentally true; source material included an article by John J. McPhaul and information provided by my research associate, George Hagenauer, who I thank for his insights and suggestions on this story and all the others in this collection.

August 1933 in Chicago was surprisingly cool, unless you were a crook, in which case it was hotter than usual. We were suffering through one of those periodic anti-crime drives the city subjected itself to now and then, and since the Capone/Nitti Outfit got a free pass on its fun and games, small fry like the Blonde Tigress and her “mob” (two male accomplices) got the brunt.

Did the Blonde Tigress have a damn thing to do with the policeman who got himself shot in a Cook County courtroom? No. She and her gang of two merely got caught up in the over-reaction when the Honorable John Prystalski, the county’s chief judge, ored all the other judges back from summer vacation to work through the jammed-up docket. Two-hundred-thirty-five defendants got the book thrown at them that August, including three death sentences.

And that was before the Blonde Tigress had appeared in the dock….

In my big under-furnished one-room office on Van Buren, I sat at my desk, working on a pile of retail-credit checks, with the window open behind me to let in a cool morning breeze and the occasional rumble of the El.

I tried to let the phone ring five times before answering, but was short enough on clients to settle for three. “A-1 Detective Agency,” I said. “Nathan Heller speaking.”

“Nate, Sam Backus.”

My hopes sank. Backus-small, nervous, with ferret features-was with the Public Defender’s Office, which made him the kind of criminal attorney who couldn’t afford my help.

“Hiya, Sam. Any of your clients get a ticket for the hot squat today?”

“No, but the day’s young. Listen, I got the Tigress.”

I sat up. “What?”

“You heard me. Eleanor Jarman is my client.”

All summer, the Blonde Tigress case had been plastered across the front pages, and the radio was all over it, too. The so-called Blonde Tigress-a good-looking lady bandit with “tawny hair” and a “voluptuous figure”-had led her two-man mob on a series of stickups all around the West and Northwest sides. The Tigress was said to carry a big revolver in her purse and a blackjack, too, one of her male accomplices using the gun, the Tigress adept with the jack. The usual target was the small merchant, grocery stores and other shops, the robbery victims often roughed up for intimidation or maybe just the hell of it.