Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 14

Although the historical incidents in this novel are portrayed more or less accurately (as much as the passage of time, and contradictory source material, will allow), fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed here; historical personages exist side by side with composite characters and wholly fictional ones—all of whom act and speak at the author’s whim.

“Chicago is the heaven and haven
of mobsters, gamblers, thieves, killers,
and salesmen of every human sin.”

—Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer

“The Mafia is no fairy tale. It is ominously
real, and it has scarred the face of America.”

—Senator Estes Kefauver

“Murder is the essence of Chicago,
just as blackmail is the essence of Hollywood.”

—Florabel Muir

In Chicago the price is up front, at least, if nonnegotiable. In Hollywood, you don’t even know what you’re buying—just that somewhere beneath the tinsel, down under the layers of phoniness, there’s going to be a price tag.

Maybe that was why this girl Vera Palmer was so refreshing. She still had a wholesome, smalltown, peaches-and-cream glow, for one thing; and for another, she wasn’t even a starlet, just a college girl, out at UCLA. The shimmering brunette pageboy, the heart-shaped face, the full dark red-rouged lips, the wide, wide-set hazel eyes, the impossible wasp waist, the startling flaring hips and the amazing full breasts riding her rib cage like twin torpedoes, had nothing to do with it.

“Mr. Heller, I’m afraid of Paul,” she said. Her voice was breathy yet musical—something of Betty Boop, quite a bit of the young Shirley Temple. A hint of Southern accent was stirred in there, too, despite her best efforts.

She was sitting across from my desk in a cubicle of the A-1 Detective Agency in a suite of offices on the fifth floor of the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles, California. It was mid-September 1950—the air conditioners were shut off, and the breeze through the half-open windows was crisp as an icy Coke. The girls were wearing their skirts long, but the way this one’s shapely legs were crossed under pleated light blue rayon, plenty of calf and even some knee was exposed. Her blouse was the same powder blue with navy trimmings: gaucho collar, edged short sleeves and slot pocket; her elaborately brassiered breasts punched at the light fabric like shells almost breaching a submarine’s hull.

Before this mammarian rhapsody continues, I should point out a few facts. Though I was stuck back among the lowly operatives in this partitioned-off bullpen, I—Nathan Heller—was in fact the president of the A-1 agency. My partner Fred Rubinski—vice president of the A-l—had the spacious main office next door, here in our L.A. branch. My real office was back in Chicago, in the heart of the Loop (the Monadnock Building), and twice the size of Fred’s. I had taken this humble space, in my back corner near a gurgling water cooler, because I was making a temporary home of Los Angeles.

I had recently divorced Peggy—on grounds of adultery, which considering most of my income came from working divorce cases is the first of numerous cheap ironies you’ll encounter in these pages—but was staying close to her to be near my toddler son. My ex-wife and I had taken to spending Sunday afternoons in Echo Park together, enjoying our kid, thanks to the understanding nature of her movie director fiancé. Some of my friends suspected I was hoping to reconcile with that faithless bitch, and maybe I was.

In addition, I was laying low because Chicago had been crawling of late with investigators looking to enlist witnesses to sing in Senator Estes Kefauver’s choir. The Tennessee senator had, starting back in May, launched a major congressional inquiry into organized crime—with Chicago a prime target—and I was not anxious to participate. While not a mob guy myself, I had done jobs for various Outfit types, and had certain underworld associations, and hence did know where a good share of the bodies were buried. Hell, I’d buried some of them.

So my associates in Chicago were instructed not to forward my calls, and—just to occupy myself—I was taking on occasional jobs for the agency, routine matters I handled only when my interest was piqued. And the bosomy, long-stemmed college girl named Vera Palmer had certainly piqued it.

She was only nineteen years old, whereas I was not a teenager. I could barely remember having been a teenager. I was a well-preserved forty-five years old—ruggedly handsome, I’ve been told, with reddish brown hair going gray at the temples, six feet carrying two hundred pounds, chiefly scar tissue and gristle—with precious few bad habits, although my major weakness was sitting across from me with its legs crossed and its breasts staring right at me.

“We broke up at the start of the summer,” she said breathlessly, leaning forward; she smelled good—not perfume, but soap…I made it as Camay. “Paul went off to ROTC—he’s in the reserves—and he kept writing me letters. I never answered them.”

“This was in Dallas?”

Her hands were folded in her lap; lucky hands. “Yes. We were both at the university there. Freshmen. We’d dated in high school. Paul wanted to get married, but I wasn’t ready. Anyway, a month or so after he went off for training, I headed out here.”

The muffled voices of ops making phone calls—credit checks mostly—and others working typewriters—detailed reports made billing clients easier—provided an office-music backdrop for our conversation.

I asked, “You didn’t tell your ex-boyfriend where you were going?”

“No. I didn’t tell him I was going
anywhere.
Heck, I wasn’t even answering his silly letters. And I gave my mother strict orders not to tell Paul where I’d gone.”

“But she must’ve spilled the beans, Miss Palmer. Or maybe a friend of yours told Paul where—”

She shook her head and the brown hair bounced. “No. He found out when he was home on leave, and saw my picture in the paper.”

“Why was your picture in the paper?”

Her smile was a lush explosion; her whole face went sunny. “Why, don’t you think I’m pretty enough to have my picture in the paper?”

Her shoulders were back, her chin up, the submarine hull threatened worse than ever.

“I think you’re a lovely young woman…but papers need a reason, or anyway an excuse, to run a picture, even of a pretty girl like you—so why’s a Los Angeles picture of Vera Palmer running in a Dallas paper?”

“I’m in a beauty contest. I’m one of the twenty finalists.”

Seemed Miss Palmer had registered at the
Daily News
to enter the Miss California contest. Naive, she hadn’t brought along an 8 by 10, and a news photographer, overhearing this, had volunteered to shoot her picture—he even fronted five bucks for her to go buy a bikini.

“He was so nice,” she purred. “So generous.”

“Yeah, sounds like a real philanthropist.”

The
News
had run a story about the guileless girl who had wandered in to enter the Miss California contest, and how the
News
had helped her out by buying her a swimsuit and taking a photo…which the paper ran. And the wire service picked up.

She shrugged. “I don’t know what’s so special about a picture of me in a bikini.”

Despite her wide eyes, I was starting to understand that she knew very well what was special about her, in or out of a bikini.

“Paul,” I said, getting her back on track.

“Paul,” she said, with a nod. “Last week Paul caught up with me…. He follows me around campus, shows up at the rehearsals for my play, calls my room.”

“Are you in a dorm?”

“Yes, at the MAC.”

“The MAC?”

“That’s short for Masonic Affiliates Club or Clubhouse or something. It’s a student activities center. They have several dorms there. It’s also where we’re rehearsing the play. I’m in a play. I’m a drama major.”

I should’ve known—scratch a college girl out here, find a starlet. Still, she seemed so fresh, so sincere….

“You can ask my two roommates,” she was saying, “ask the girls if Paul hasn’t been a pest.”

“Has he gotten physical?”

She frowned. “I wouldn’t have sex with him again for a million dollars.”

“I mean, has he hit you?”

“He’s grabbed me.” She turned her palms up and I could see small bruises on her inner forearms.

“We can get a court order,” I said.

“What?”

“A restraining order, where he can’t come within a hundred feet of you.”

“No! No, I don’t want to involve the authorities. That’s why I came to you, Mr. Heller.”

“I understand you requested me, specifically?”

“Yes, I read about you in the newspapers.”

I’d had coverage, locally, when I’d been involved on the fringes of the notorious Elizabeth Short murder, the so called Black Dahlia slaying. Other cases of mine over the years had hit the national wire services, too; I was a minor celebrity myself, even if I didn’t look good in a bikini.

“Well,” I said, “you’re lucky to find me. Usually I’m in the Chicago office.”

“Will you take my case?”

“First you better tell me what it is you want me to do. Scare him, hurt him, what?”

She shook her head, eyes tightening in a frown. “I don’t really want him hurt. I was…fond of him, once.”

“Okay. What, then?”

“Just protect me. Talk to Paul…. He’s pretty tough, though. He’s a soldier.”

I smiled. “That’s okay. I used to be a Marine.”

“Ooooo, really?” The “ooooo” had been a sort of squeal. “I love men in uniform.”

“Except for Paul.”

Her smile disappeared, and she nodded, like a school kid realizing she’d gotten a little too wild in the classroom. “Except for Paul…. What do you charge? I don’t have a lot of money.”

“We’ll work something out,” I said.

And all I meant by that was I’d take into consideration that she was just a college kid, a sweet girl from Texas trying to get an education. Really. Honest. No kidding.

“I’m sure we will,” she said, her expression and tone mingled with lasciviousness in a unique way that somehow scared me a little. I felt like the Wolf discovering Little Red Riding Hood was packing heat.

I agreed to meet her in the assembly hall of the MAC at UCLA around seven; she was rehearsing
Death of a Salesman,
of all things.

“I’m afraid I play a sort of floozy,” she said.

“I didn’t think you were playing Willie Loman.”

“You know the play?”

“Saw Lee J. Cobb in it in the Chicago run, early this year. Good show—won’t make much of a musical.”

She blinked. “Are they making a musical out of it?”

“That was just a joke.”

Her smile looked like a wax kiss. “You’re quite a kidder, aren’t you, Mr. Heller?”

“I’m hilarious.”

Now she was studying me. “Are you depressed?”

“Depressed? No. Hell no.”

“Did…somebody die in your family?”

Just my marriage.

“No. But you’re a funny kid yourself, Miss Palmer.”

Now her smile shifted, dimpling one cheek. “You think I’m stupid, don’t you? From that musical remark. Well, I have a high IQ, I’ll have you know…and I’m going to make something of myself. That’s why I’m enrolled in college…and that’s why you have to make sure Paul doesn’t spoil things.”

“I’ll see what I can do. You have a photo?”

“Now I do! I had scads taken, after that business at the
Daily News
—”

“No, I mean of Paul.”

“Oh! Yes. Of course.” She dug into her purse and handed me a photo of herself and Paul, dressed up for the prom, apparently; Vera was smiling at the camera—and why not, it loved her—and he was a dark-haired handsome kid with thick dark eyebrows, a weakish chin, and a glazed expression.

“Can I have the photo back when you’re done?”

“Sure,” I said, not getting why she wanted a keepsake of her and this harasser.

She beamed at me, stood, slung her purse strap over a shoulder, and reminded me where I was to meet her; we exchanged goodbyes and I watched her walk away. It was a hell of a thing, her walk, a twitchy affair that seemed to propel her as far to the sides as it did forward.

About two minutes later I was still contemplating that walk when my phone rang. It was my Chicago partner, Lou Sapperstein—bald, sixty, a lean hard op who looked like an accountant, thanks to the tortoise-shell glasses—and his Crosbyish baritone over the long-distance wire was edged with irritation.

“You gotta get your ass back here and do something about your pal,” Sapperstein said.

“My pal? I got lots of pals, Lou. You’re my pal.”

“Screw you. You know who I’m talkin’ about—Drury!”

I sighed. “What’s he up to now?”

“Well, for one thing, he hasn’t followed up on half a dozen assignments I’ve given him. And for another, he’s spending his time playing footsie with Robinson.”

George S. Robinson was Kefauver’s stalking horse, the Senate Crime Investigating Committee’s associate counsel, who’d been working in concert with the Chicago Crime Commission, a citizens’ watchdog group dating back to Prohibition.

“Christ,” I said. “He’s going to get me shot.”

“No, Nate—he’s going to get
me
shot…you’re on the lam in sunny Southern Cal, remember?”

“Yeah, and Bugsy Siegel didn’t get nailed out here in his goddamn living room, I suppose? Fuck—can’t you handle him, Lou?”

“He’s your friend.”

“He’s your friend, too!”

We all dated back to the Chicago P.D. pickpocket detail, in the early thirties, Sapperstein, Bill Drury, and me. After that, Lou and I and Bill’s partner Tim O’Conner played poker together, for years.

“Bill promised he’d lay off,” I said, “while he was on salary with us.”

“Drury is a lunatic on a crusade. Nice guy, great guy, but he’s supposed to be working for the A-1 and instead he’s out gathering evidence for that hick senator in the coonskin cap.”

Kefauver had worn a coonskin cap as a gimmick in his Tennessee campaign to win a Senate seat despite the best corrupt efforts of Boss Crump’s Dixiecrat machine.

“I’ll call Bill,” I said into the phone. “I’ll talk to him.”

“You need to fire him.”

“He’s my friend, Lou—one of my best friends.”

“Then come back and talk some sense into him.”

“I’m in the middle of a job out here.”

“Right—blonde or brunette?”

From the photo on my desk, Vera’s boyfriend Paul was looking up at me accusingly. “I won’t dignify that with a response.”

“Look, you can’t duck this Kefauver thing. You need to get back here, meet with those sons of bitches, tell them you don’t know anything, that they’re wasting their damn subpoenas, and—”

“And go to jail for contempt, and smear our agency’s good name.”

Lou blew me a long-distance raspberry. “Our agency’s ‘good’ name is built on your unsavory reputation, Nate. don’t kid a kidder.”

“Lou—I’ll talk to Drury.”

“Are you coming back? Should I put a light in the window?”