“And came to live with you.”
“Earle didn’t have a job-you know, he’s taken up photography of late, and has had several assignments, I’m really very proud-and, well…anyway. The girl was barely nineteen, when they married. I redecorated and refurnished a suite of rooms on the second floor for my newlyweds. She was a lovely child, beautiful red hair, and of course, Earle…he’s as handsome a boy as ever walked this earth.”
“But Rheta was moody…?”
“Very much so. And obsessed with her health. Perhaps that’s why she married into the Wynekoop family. She was fearful of tuberculosis, but there were no indications of it at all. In the last month of her life, she was rather melancholy, of a somewhat morbid disposition. I discussed with her about going out into the open and taking exercise. We discussed that often.”
“You did not kill your daughter-in-law.”
“No! Mr. Heller, I’m a doctor. My profession, my life, is devoted to healing.”
I rose. Slipped the notebook in my pocket. “Well, thank you, Dr. Wynekoop. I may have a few more questions at a later date.”
She smiled again, a warm, friendly smile, coming from so controlled a woman. “I’d be pleased to have your company. And I appreciate your help. I’m very worried about the effect this is having on Earle.”
“Dr. Wynekoop, with all due respect…my major concern is the effect this going to have on you, if I can’t find the real killer.”
Her smile disappeared and she nodded sagely. She extended her hand for a final handshake, and I left her there.
I used a pay phone in the visitor’s area to call Sergeant Lou Sapperstein at Central Headquarters in the Loop. Lou had been my boss on the pickpocket detail. I asked him to check for me to see what officer in the Fillmore district had caught the call the night of the Wynekoop homicide.
“That’s Stege’s case,” Lou said. Sapperstein was a hardnosed, fair-minded balding cop of about forty-five seasoned years. “You shouldn’t mess in Stege’s business. He doesn’t like you.”
“God you’re a great detective, picking up on a detail like that. Can you get me the name?”
“Five minutes. Stay where you are.”
I gave him the pay phone number and he called back in a little over three minutes.
“Officer Raymond March, detailed with squad fifteen,” he said.
I checked my watch; it was after four.
“He’s on duty now,” I said. “Do me another favor.”
“Why don’t you get a goddamn secretary?”
“You’re a public servant, aren’t you? So serve, already.”
“So tell me what you want, already.”
“Get somebody you trust at Fillmore to tell Officer March to meet me at the drug store on the corner of Madison and Kedzie. Between six and seven.”
“What’s in it for Officer March?”
“Supper and a fin.”
“Why not,” Lou said, a shrug in his voice.
He called me back in five or six minutes and said the message would be passed.
I hit the streetcars again and was back on Monroe Street by a quarter to five. It was getting dark already, and colder.
Mrs. Verna Donovan lived in the second-floor two-flat of a graystone three doors down from the Wynekoop mansion. The smell of corned beef and cabbage cooking seeped from under the door.
I knocked.
It took a while, but a slender, attractive woman of perhaps thirty in a floral dress and a white apron opened the door wide.
“Oh!” she said. Her face was oblong, her eyes a luminous brown, her hair another agreeable shade of brown, cut in a bob that was perhaps too young for her.
“Didn’t mean to startle you, ma’am. Are you Mrs. Donovan?”
“Yes, I am.” She smiled shyly. “Sorry for my reaction-I was expecting my son. We’ll be eating in about half an hour…”
“I know this is a bad time to come calling. Perhaps I could arrange another time…”
“What is your business here?”
I gave her one of my A-1 Detective Agency cards. “I’m working for the Wynekoops. Nathan Heller, president of the A-1 agency. I’m hoping to find Rheta’s killer.
Her eyes sparkled. “Well, come in! If you don’t mind sitting in the kitchen while I get dinner ready…”
“Not at all,” I said, following her through a nicely but not lavishly furnished living room, overseen by an elaborate print of the Virgin Mary, and back to a good-size blue and white kitchen.
She stood at the counter making cole slaw while I sat at the kitchen table nearby.
“We were very good friends, Rheta and I. She was a lovely girl, talented, very funny.”
“Funny? I get the impression she was a somber girl.”
“Around the Wynekoops she was. They’re about as much fun as falling down the stairs. Do you think the old girl killed her?”
“What do you think?”
“I could believe it of Earle. Dr. Alice herself, well…I mean, she’s a doctor. She’s aloof, and she and Rheta were anything but close, of course. But kill her?”
“I’m hearing that the doctor gave Rheta gifts, treated her like a family member.”
Verna Duncan shrugged, putting some muscle into her slaw-making efforts. “There was no love lost between them. You’re aware that Earle ran around on her?”
“Yes.”
?
“Well, that sort of thing is hard on a girl’s self-esteem. I helped her get over it as much as I could.”
“How?”
She smiled slyly over her shoulder. “I’m a divorcee, Mr. Heller. And divorcees know how to have a good time. Care for a taste?”
She was offering me a forkful of slaw.
“That’s nice,” I said, savoring it. “Nice bite to it. So, you and Rheta went out together? Was she seeing other men, then?”
“Of course she was. Why shouldn’t she?”
“Anyone in particular?”
“Her music teacher. Violin instructor. Older man, very charming. But he died of a heart attack four months ago. It hit her hard.”
“How did she handle it?”
“Well, she didn’t shoot herself in the back over it, if that’s what you’re thinking! She was morose for about a month…then she just started to date all of a sudden. I encouraged her, and she came back to life again.”
“Why didn’t she just divorce Earle?”
“Why, Mr. Heller…she was a good Catholic girl.”
She asked me to stay for supper, but I declined, despite the tempting aroma of her corned beef and cabbage, and the tang of her slaw. I had another engagement, at a drugstore at Madison and Kedzie.
While I waited for Officer March to show up, I questioned the pharmacist behind the back counter.
“Sure I remember Miss Shaunesey stopping by that night,” he said. “But I don’t understand why she did.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, Dr. Wynekoop herself stopped in a week before, to fill a similar prescription, and I told her our stock was low.”
“She probably figured you’d’ve got some in by then,” I said.
“The doctor knows we only get a shipment in once a month.”
I was mulling that over at the lunch counter when Officer March arrived. He was in his late twenties and
