Chicago Lightning

“What’s wrong, honey?” I asked the girl.

She was probably sixteen. Blonde hair bounced off her shoulders, and with those blue eyes and that heart- shaped face, she would have been a knockout if she hadn’t been devoid of make-up and wearing a navy jumper that stopped midcalf, abetted by a white blouse buttoned to her throat.

“It’s…it’s Mother,” she said, and in slow motion she turned toward the narrow front of the brick house and pointed, like the Ghost of Christmas Future indicating Scrooge’s gravestone.

“Look at me,” I said, and she did, mouth and eyes twitching. “I’m a policeman. Tell me what happened.”

“Something…something terrible.”

Then she pushed past me, and sat on the curb and buried her face in her hands and sobbed.

Bob, who was bald and round-faced and about forty, said, “You’re a cop?”

“Actually, private. Is that kid named Vinicky?”

“Yes. Sally Vinicky-she goes to Visitation High. Probably home for lunch.”

That explained the prim get-up: Visitation was a Catholic all-girl’s school.

Another neighbor was wandering up, a housewife in an apron, hair in a net, eyes wide; she had flecks of soap suds on her red hands. I brought her into my little group.

“My name is Heller,” I said. “I’m an investigator doing a job for that girl’s father. I need one of you to look after Sally…ma’am? Would you?”

The woman nodded, then asked, “Why, what’s wrong?”

“I’m going in that house and find out. Bob, call the Englewood Station and ask them to send a man over.”

“What should I tell them?”

“What you saw.”

As the housewife sat beside the girl on the curb and slipped an arm around her, and Bob headed toward the neighboring house, a frame bungalow, I headed up the steps to the covered porch. The girl had left the door open and I wenton in.

The living room was off to the left, a dining room to the right; but the living room got my attention, because of the dead woman sprawled on the floor.

A willowy dame in her mid-thirties and blue-and-white floral dress, Rose Vinicky-I recognized her from the photos her husband had provided-lay on her side on the multi-color braided rug between an easy chair and a spinet piano, from which Bing Crosby smiled at me off a sheet music cover, “I Can’t Begin to Tell You.” Not smiling back, I knelt to check her wrist for a pulse, but judging by the dark pool of blood her head rested in, I was on a fool’s errand.

Beyond the corpse stood a small table next to the easy chair with a couple of magazines on it, Look, Life. On the floor nearby was a cut-glass ashtray, which the woman presumably had knocked off when she fell forward, struck a vicious blow from behind. A lipstick-tipped cigarette had burned itself out, making a black hole in the braiding of the rug. I wasn’t sure whether she’d been reaching for the smoke when the killer clubbed her, or whether she’d gone for the table to brace her fall.

With her brains showing like that, though, she was probably already unconscious or even dead on the way down.

She looked a little like her daughter, though the hair was darker, almost brunette, short, tight curls. Not pretty, but attractive, handsome; and no mid-length skirt for Rose: she had liked to show off those long, slender, shapely legs, which mimed in death the act of running away.

She’d been a looker, or enough of one, anyway, to make her husband suspect her of cheating.

I didn’t spend a lot of time with Rose-she wasn’t going anywhere, and it was always possible her killer was still around.

But the house-nicely appointed with older, in some cases antique furniture-was clear, including the basement. I did note that the windows were all closed and locked, and the back door was locked, too-with no signs of break-in. The killer had apparently come in the front door.

That meant the murder took place before I’d pulled up in front of the Vinicky home around ten. I’d seen no one approach the house in the little more than an hour my car and ass had been parked across the way. It would’ve been embarrassing finding out a murder had been committed inside a home while I was watching it.

On the other hand, I’d been surveilling the place to see with whom the woman might be cheating when here she was, already dead. Somehow that didn’t seem gold-star worthy, either.

I had another, closer look at the corpse. Maybe she hadn’t been dead when she fell, at that-looked like she’d suffered multiple blows. One knocked her down, the others finished her off and opened up her skull. Blood was spattered on the nearby spinet, but also on the little table and even the easy chair.

Whoever did this would had to have walked away covered in blood….

Her right hand seemed to be reaching out, and I could discern the pale circle on her fourth finger that indicated a ring, probably a wedding ring, had been there until recently. Was this a robbery, then?

Something winked at me from the pooled blood, something floating there. I leaned forward, got a better look: a bro button, the four-eyed variety common to man’s suit-or sportcoat.

I did not collect it, leaving that to…

“Stand up! Get away from that body!”

Sighing, I got to my feet and put my hands in the air and the young patrolman-as fresh-faced as that Catholic schoolgirl-rushed up and frisked me, finding no weapon.

I let him get that all out of his system, and told him who I was, and what had happened, including what I’d seen. I left the button out, and the missing wedding ring; that could wait for the detectives.

The next hour was one cop after another. Four or five uniformed men showed, a trio of detectives from Englewood Station, a couple of dicks from the bureau downtown, a photographer, a coroner’s man. I went through the story many times.

In the kitchen, a yellow-and-white affair with a door onto the alley, Captain Patrick Cullen tried to make a meal out of me. We sat at a small wooden table and began by him sharing what he knew about me.

“I don’t remember ever meeting you, Captain,” I said.

“I know you all too well, Heller-by reputation.”

“Ah. That kind of thing plays swell in court.”

“You’re an ex-cop and you ratted out two of your own. You’re a publicity hound, and a cooze hound, too, I hear.”

“Interesting approach to detective work-everything strictly hearsay.”

A half hour of repartee, at least that scintillating, followed. He wanted to know what I was doing there, and I told him “a job for Sylvester Vinicky,” the husband. He wanted to know what kind of job, and I said I couldn’t tell him, because attorney/client privilege pertained. He accused me of not being an attorney, and I pled guilty.

“But certain of my cases,” I said, “come through lawyers. As it happens, I’m working for an attorney in this matter.”

He asked the attorney’s name and I gave it to him.

“I heard of that guy…divorce shyster, right?”

“Captain, I’d hate to spoil any of your assumptions with a fact.”

He had a face so Irish it could turn bright red without a drop of alcohol, as it did now, while he shook a finger at me. “I’ll tell you what happened, Heller. You got hired to shadow this dame, and she was a looker, and you decided to put the make on her yourself. It got out of hand, and you grabbed the nearest blunt instrument and-”

“I like that. The nearest blunt instrument. How the hell did you get to be a captain? What are you, Jake Arvey’s nephew?”

He came half out of his chair and threw a punch at me.

I slipped it, staying seated, and batted his hat off his head, like I was slapping a child, and the fedora fluttered to the floor.

“You get one,” I said.

The red in his face was fading, as he plucked the hat from the linoleum, and the embarrassment in his eyes