Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 14 Read online

  I said, “Hiya, Frank. Ava.”

  The actress looked away.

  Frank said, “Have you been ducking me, Melvin?”

  He was calling everybody Melvin that year.

  “No. Uh, this is Vera Palmer. She’s a client.”

  Frank beamed at the girl and extended his hand. “Pleasure, Miss Palmer.”

  Ava stamped out her cigarette on the tablecloth and said in her husky alto, “I suppose you’re sleeping with this broad!”

  Frank looked at her, aghast. “What? I just met her! Are you crazy?”

  “I must be,” Ava said, and scooted out of the booth, grabbing her wrap, and then stormed out through the restaurant, brushing Vera roughly aside.

  “Excuse me,” Frank said, and followed her.

  Vera looked at me as though she’d been poleaxed.

  I shrugged. “That’s pretty much par for the course with those two. Let’s go back to our booth.”

  Which we did, and we were on our second cup of coffee (Fred was off schmoozing with other customers) when Frank—looking like a whipped puppy—came back in, spotted us, and joined us, sitting next to me.

  “Jesus,” he said. “All I have to do is look at a pretty girl, and bam, Ava and me, we’re off to the races.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was irritated with him; we’d known each other a long time, and I knew he was a tomcat, but I didn’t think he’d ever leave Nancy and the kids. And after what I’d been through myself, I wasn’t too keen on cheaters.

  “I can’t stay,” Frank said, “but I’ll be in Chicago next week, at the Chez Paree. Are you heading back, by any chance?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “Well, either way, we need to talk. Listen, Melvin, I’m in a world of shit. This guy Miller at Columbia has me making novelty records, trying to compete with Frankie the fuck Laine, for Christ’s sake. Then I managed to piss Mayer off and lost my movie contract. I do have a TV series coming up—CBS. That’s a good thing.”

  “That’s a very good thing, Frank. TV’s the hot deal, these days.”

  “Yeah, and those lousy Senate hearings are all over it! That’s what’s really got me in a vise. The feds…these fucking feds…. Excuse me, Miss Palmer.”

  Vera was gaping at him like she was a tourist and he was the Grand Canyon. “That’s all right, Mr. Sinatra.”

  “Fucking feds,” he continued, “they’re squeezing me like a goddamn pimple.”

  “How so?”

  “That hick from Tennessee wants me to talk about Charley and Joey and the boys.”

  The “boys” he referred to were mobsters, mostly from Chicago—like Charley, Joey, and Rocco Fischetti, Capone cousins who were high in the Outfit.

  “I’ve been ducking that bastard Kefauver myself,” I admitted.

  Frank was lighting up a cigarette. “Yeah, but at least you don’t have that cheese-eating Red-baiter on your butt.”

  “What, McCarthy?”

  He smirked. “Yeah, I’m not just a gangster, you know— I’m a Red!”

  “McCarthy thinks all Democrats are communists.”

  Sinatra’s fabled blue eyes locked onto me. “You know him, don’t you?”

  “Some. I did a job for Drew Pearson involving McCarthy, and got to know the guy.”

  Pearson was a nationally known muckraking syndicated columnist I’d handled occasional investigations for over the years: Senator McCarthy had been a source of his I’d checked.

  Sinatra’s eyebrows climbed his forehead. “So you’re friendly with McCarthy?”

  “Friendly enough to drink with.”

  “Great! Perfect, Melvin.” And the skinny singer stood, patting me on the arm, flashing me his charismatic if shopworn smile. “We’ll talk soon…. I gotta try to catch up with that crazy broad.”

  And he was gone.

  “He seemed nice,” Vera said.

  “He can be. You ready?”

  “It’s too late for me to go back to the dorm. Can I stay at your place?”

  We went out the glass doors and walked arm in arm under the Sherry’s canopy, with Vera leaning against my shoulder.

  “You know a lot of famous people, don’t you?” she asked. Her spike heels clicked on the sidewalk.

  “That’s part of my business, Vera. You want to be famous?”

  “Oh, yes. My parents brought me to Hollywood on vacation, when I was a little girl—about ten. I stood on the corner of Hollywood and Vine and I just knew this town would belong to me someday.”

  We walked around and up the incline into the parking lot.

  “And here I thought you were just a college girl,” I said.

  “I’m a college girl studying to be a movie star.”

  “Careful what you wish for, Vera….”

  We were approaching the Packard when he stepped out from between two cars: Paul, his army uniform looking stained and rumpled. His fists were clenched, but he did not charge at us or anything—just stood with his weak chin high. The wild look was out of his eyes: despair had taken its place.

  “Keep your distance, mister,” he said to me.

  Poor bastard had been following us all night—first saw me take his girl to the hotel, then to Sherry’s….

  I said, “Paul, that’s good advice—keep your distance, or I’m turning you over to the cops for harassing this girl.”

  His voice quavered, but there was strength in it, even some bruised dignity. “I just want to talk to my wife.”

  I glanced sharply at Vera. “Wife?”

  She swallowed and avoided my eyes, though still hugging my arm.

  To the solider, who was maybe ten feet away, I said, “You’re her husband, Paul?”

  Traffic sounds from the Strip provided dissonant background music for this second sad confrontation.

  “That’s right,” he said. “And Jaynie’s afraid I’ll tell the Miss California people she’s married, and a mom, and they’ll toss her out on her sweet behind.”

  I winced at Vera. “Jaynie?”

  Paul answered for her: “Her name is Vera Jayne, mister. And Palmer’s just her maiden name. Our little baby girl, just a few months old, is home with Jayne’s mother.”

  Mildly pissed and vaguely ashamed of myself, I turned to the coed. “This boy is your husband? And you have a baby back in Texas?”

  She still wasn’t looking at me; but she nodded.

  “Go talk to him,” I said, suddenly exhausted. “I’ll wait— I’ll still drive you back to your dorm, if you want. But first talk to him.”

  I leaned against the Packard while they talked. I didn’t eavesdrop, and anyway they kept their voices down. Finally they hugged. Kissed, tentatively.

  Vera came over and said, “Paul’s been called up to active duty—he’s going to Korea. He wants me to be with our little girl, back home in Dallas, and be with him as much as possible…. When his hitch is up, he says he’ll bring me back out here, and let me take my shot at stardom. That’s two years. You think I’ll still be pretty enough, in two years, to try again?”

  “Sure, Vera.”

  Her eyes shimmered with desperation. “Can I call you, then? For a reference to the studios?”

  “Sure—me or Fred, either one of us will help you, Vera.”

  “Really, it’s Jayne. And my married name’s Mansfield.”

  She kissed my cheek and trotted over to rejoin her soldier-boy husband. That motion in her caboose—side-to-side as she moved forward—was worth watching.

  They were still standing there talking when I pulled the Packard out of Sherry’s parking lot, heading for the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  But let’s face it: I was on my way to Chicago. Far as Hollywood was concerned, my roll in the hay with Vera Jayne Mansfield had been the last straw.

  Lake Shore Drive’s majestic mile—once an endless array of magnificent mansions—was now a row of high-rise tombstones; grand residences survived here and there, as a privileged few stubbornly clung to the city. Startin
g at the crossroads of the Gold Coast, where Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue met, posh hotels and plush shops lined the avenue, serving their wealthy, discriminating and oh so exclusive clientele.

  Minutes away, on Clark and Rush Streets, proprietors weren’t so fussy—anyone with five hundred bucks could deflower a virgin, and you don’t want to know what kind of wilted rose three bucks would buy. Guns (from a snubby to a burp), dope (from reefer to horse), and booze (from untaxed bubbly to rotgut whiskey) were available at prices even the middle class could afford.

  It was good to be home.

  The beautiful parks fringing the lake were still greener than money, no sign of the leaves turning yet; these landscaped acres and the broad lakefront boulevards of Chicago’s Northside were a reminder of how the city’s planners had intended things, before commerce and human nature took over. Lake Shore Drive—up which I was tooling my dark blue 1950 Olds 88—had once been strewn with the elaborate domiciles of the wealthy; most of those structures remaining had been converted into schools and other institutions—the U.S. Court of Appeals, for one.

  The remaining members of the old wealthy class—those who had not yet had the decency to die, or move to the suburbs or Florida—lived in the towering modern apartment buildings here and on the other lake-facing avenues, Lincoln Parkway and Sheridan Road, and their cross streets. These über-flats also put roofs over the heads of the Windy City’s new nobility: high-rolling gamblers, mistresses, tavern owners, and, top of the heap, mobsters.

  One block south of Belmont Avenue, where the shoreline curved around glimmering lagoonlike Belmont Harbor, I located something even the most skillful Chicago detectives didn’t often find—a parking place—right across from the nondescript brown-brick building at the corner of Barry and Sheridan. The late Al Capone’s cousins, the Fischetti brothers, nested in the top three penthouse floors, which were set back a ways, sitting on the fifteen stories below like a brimless, too-small top hat.

  The doorman of Barry Apartments, a paunchy fiftyish guy with a drink-splotched face that went well with his red uniform, did not seem to be a Fischetti bodyguard in liveried drag. At least it didn’t look like he was packing, anyway.

  “Visiting someone here, sir?” he asked, hands locked behind him, rocking on his heels.

  “Yeah. I’m sure my name’s on your list.”

  “I don’t have a list, sir.”

  “Sure you do. Name’s Lincoln.” And I gave him my identification.

  He looked at the fin, nodded, said, “Yeah this is you, all right,” and slipped the bill in his pocket. “But the top three floors is off-limits, unless the elevator man is expecting you.”

  So the elevator man was a Fischetti watchdog.

  “I don’t know anybody in the penthouse,” I said. “I just want to talk to the building manager.”

  “We don’t have one on site. We do have a janitorial supervisor. He’s got a staff of three, and an office around back.”

  I nodded. “Any building inspectors, or fire marshals come around lately?”

  “Matter of fact, yeah. Building inspector last week.”

  “Well-dressed for a building inspector, was he?”

  “Funny you should say that. He was a real dapper dan. Nice fella. I sent him around back to see the janitor, too.”

  “Thanks.” I turned to go, then glanced back at him. “This conversation is confidential, by the way.”

  He shot me a yellow grin in the midst of the red-splotchy puss, and touched the brim of his cap. “Mum’s the word, Mr. Lincoln.”

  I walked around back; the paved alley was a single narrow lane, widening into the recess of the building’s modest loading dock, next to which was a door, unlocked. It opened onto an unfinished vestibule with double PUSH doors to the left, the wooden slats of a service elevator straight ahead, and a corner turned into a sort of office at right, with a desk and a couple battered file cabinets in the middle of stacked boxes and bucket-size barrels, all squatting on the cement floor. The air wafted with the bouquet of disinfectant.

  The janitor was skinny, but he had a round piggy face; a balding guy in his forties in wireframe glasses and bib overalls, he had his workshoe-shod feet up on the scarred desktop as he sat reading the Police Gazette with Jane Russell on the cover. A cup of pencils (perhaps abandoned by a blind beggar), several empty pop bottles, and wadded-up balls of grease-spotted brown sandwich paper were the extent of the work spread out on the desk.

  At first I didn’t think he’d heard me come in, but then he chimed out, in a whiny tenor, “Didn’t you see the sign? No soliciting.”

  “I’m here about the guy in your basement,” I said.

  The magazine dropped to his lap. His pig’s nose twitched and so did his buck-toothed mouth; his eyes—a rather attractive china blue, in the midst of all that homeliness—were as round and hard as marbles. But there was fear in them.

  “Nobody in the basement,” he said.

  “Sure there is,” I said, and tossed a fin on the desk.

  He just looked at it; after a while, he blinked a few times.

  “I’m not from the cops,” I said, “and I’m not a Fischetti boy. The guy in the basement? I’m his boss.”

  And I tossed an A-1 Detective Agency business card his way. He took his feet off the desk and sat forward and studied the card, which he held in two hands, like a Treasury agent examining a counterfeit bill.

  Then I plucked the card back—it was nothing I wanted to leave lying around the Fischetti homestead—and said, “Just point me, and there’s another fivespot in it for you, on my way out.”

  “I could really get in trouble, you know.”

  “How much is my op paying you?”

  “Don’t you know? You’re his boss.”

  “I’m the boss, but he’s kind of his own man. What’s he paying you?”

  The janitor shrugged. “Ten bucks a day. Plus the original C note.”

  “And you do know who lives on the top floor of this joint?”

  His lips farted. “Sure I know.”

  I shook my head. Some people didn’t put much of a premium on their own skins. “Yeah, you could really get in trouble…. Point me.”

  There, amid the labyrinth of pipes and ductwork and the typical junk accumulated in any basement, under the open beams of the low ceiling, in a pool of light provided by a bare hanging bulb, at an old battered table, wearing a dark blue vested suit with gray pinstripes (jacket draped over his chair), his back to the wall, sat former police lieutenant William Drury, like a man preparing to eat a meal. With the exception of a thermos of coffee, the array of items spread out on the table before him, however, wasn’t my idea of nourishment: a .38 revolver; a sawed-off shotgun; a notebook; assorted pencils; his gray homburg; and two suitcase-style Revere tape recorders trailing wires that disappeared into the ductwork. The reels of one of the sleek white machines in the hard-shell brown carrying cases were turning, the other two spools staring up at me like big plastic eyeglasses, the machine not recording, at the moment.

  He had headphones on, but arranged to leave an ear uncovered; so he’d heard me approach—his right hand hovered over the .38—then smiled in chagrined relief when he saw it was me. And the hand moved away from the gun.

  For a guy five foot nine, broad-shouldered Bill Drury had incredible physical presence. But the dark blue eyes, which had always danced with intelligence and good humor, were pouchy now, and the dimpled jutting chin sat on a second, softer one. His complexion had a grayish cast, and his dark thinning hair—combed over ineffectively—was touched with gray; and that ready smile seemed strained.

  “I guess if somebody’s gotta nail me,” Drury said, sheepish, “I’d rather it was you.”

  “Christ, Bill,” I said, shaking my head. I felt woozy, like all the blood had drained out of me; my stomach was turning flip flops. “You’re going to get yourself killed, this time. Worse, you’re going to get me killed.”

  He waved that off, made a dismissive
face. “The Outfit doesn’t kill cops.”

  “Fuck me! We’re not cops. I haven’t been a cop since 1932! And you, Bill—you’re not a cop, either. Not anymore.”

  His eyes tightened. “I will be again. I will be, Nate.”

  “How, by illegal wiretap?” I was still shaking my head. I gestured to the machines on the table. “Why two recorders, Bill?”

  “I’ve got the phone line tied into this one,” he said, nodding toward the Revere at his left, “and this other one I can switch between various rooms in the three apartments.”

  I noticed a small black metal box with several knobs, and said, “The recorders I recognize—they’re the A-1’s. When Lou said you’d checked them out, I figured you were up to something like this. But who made you the gizmo? Somebody on Kefauver’s staff?”

  “I’m not working for the Kefauver Committee, Nate. This is strictly my own show.”

  “No, Bill. This is the A-1’s show—you’re my operative, and those are my machines. You get busted by the cops, or the Fischettis, I get to take the ride with you…whether it’s to the station house or a ditch.”

  He was shaking his head. “Nate, I’d never let that happen.”

  I threw up my hands. “You are letting it happen! Where’s your goddamn judgment gone? Sapperstein warned me about hiring you.”

  “Nate….”

  “You’ve always had a hard-on for these Outfit guys, but breaking into their homes and bugging them? Setting up a listening post in their fucking basement? It’s insanity.”

  Jaw muscles pulsing, he stood; he pointed a finger—Uncle Bill Wanted Me. “Sitting back and watching these bastards get away with murder, that’s insanity! Looking the other way while the city we love falls under gangster control—that is insanity!”

  I found a crate to sit on and sat and sighed, leaning an elbow on my knee; I held a hand to my face. I said nothing. Finally Bill, perhaps a little embarrassed, sat back down, himself.