The Million-Dollar Wound (29 page)
He said, “I’m going out to Kensington and see D’Angelo soon as I can.”
“He’s getting a raw deal in the papers, you know.”
“No, I didn’t,” Barney said, sitting up.
I explained that D’Angelo had been exchanging love letters with Estelle Carey; Barney knew of the Carey killing—apparently it had been getting some national play.
“They’re spreading his love letters all over the damn
papers
?” Barney said. “The lousy bastards!”
“One of the guilty parties is standing right over there.”
“Davis, you mean?”
“That’s him. The man with the purple badge of courage on his jaw.”
“How’d he get that?”
“He earned it.”
“You?”
“Once a Marine, always a Marine.”
“Fuckin’ A told,” Barney said, and slid out of the booth and, with aid of his voodoo cane, hobbled over to Davis, and started reading him off, from asshole to appetite. It was a joy to behold.
I slid out and went over and sat by Cathy. I said, “What’s the matter, honey?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re worried about that little schmuck, aren’t you?”
Her mouth tightened. Then she nodded.
“Why?” I asked.
“He’s very sick, Nate. His malaria is flaring up something awful. Chills and fever. And he’s having trouble sleeping, and when he does sleep he has nightmares.”
Familiar story.
“Hell,” I said. “He looks fine. Look at these dark circles under my eyes. He doesn’t even have
one.
”
My weak attempt to cheer her up had only served to bring her to the verge of tears.
“He’s having simply terrible headaches,” she said. “He’s in so much pain. I want him to put this tour off, but he won’t do it.”
“That’s why you turned down the movie roles. To be at his side if he falls apart.”
She nodded. “I’m afraid for him. I want to be with him so I can watch out for him. He really needs a good six months to recuperate, Nate, but he’s so stubborn, he just won’t hear of it.”
“He’s a scrapper, honey. I thought you knew that.”
“He thinks the world of you, Nate.”
“I think the world of him.”
“Maybe you could talk to him.”
“Maybe I can.”
She gave me a kiss on the cheek.
Then she grinned and said, “You thought I was a gold digger, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. I was wrong. About the digger part, anyway.”
Sally came over with Barney on her arm.
“I caught him bullying the press,” she said. “That’s no way to run a cocktail lounge, is it?”
“Barney, I’m ashamed of you,” I said.
Sally said, “Actually, I don’t blame you, the way that little bastard’s paper’s putting that poor soldier’s love life in print for the world to see and salivate over. How do they get ahold of that stuff, anyway? Isn’t it evidence?”
“It’s supposed to be,” I said, and didn’t give her the rest of the explanation till later, when we were in bed together, in the dark, in her small but swank room at the Drake, overlooking Lake Shore Drive and the lake that went with it.
“You mean, some police detective smuggled those letters out, and made photostatic copies, and sold them to the newspaper bidding highest? What kind of police officer would do that?”
“The Chicago kind,” I said. “Let me tell you a story.”
And I told her about the diary. How a high-hat client had hired me to outbid the papers for that juicy little page-turner. And how I’d arranged with a certain police sergeant to pay him two thousand dollars of my client’s money for the book, which was now in my possession.
“You’re kidding me,” she said. “You have Estelle Carey’s diary?”
“Well, I did.”
“What do you mean? You mean, you turned it over to your rich client?”
“Not exactly.”
“To Drury, then.”
“Not him, either.”
“What,
then?”
“I burned it.”
“What?”
“I burned it. I read it this afternoon, and I realized that none of the names in it were new ones. That is, they’d already turned up in Estelle’s address book or other effects. So there were no new leads, nothing fresh that would be helpful to an investigation, in my considered opinion. But what there
was
was a lot of steamy descriptions by Miss Carey of her love life. Who did what to her, with what, for how long, and how long some of those things were that did those things, and, well, you get my drift.”
“Why’d she keep this diary, d’you think? Eventual blackmail?”
“No. That wasn’t her way. She was greedy, but she was honest, in her dishonest way. She was a dirty girl, in the best sense of the word. She liked sex. She liked doing it. And, judging from what I read today, she liked writing about it, after.”
“So you burned it.”
“I burned the goddamn thing. Rather than see it end up in the papers where they’d make her out an even bigger whore and ruin the lives of dozens of men and women who had the misfortune of being attracted to her.”
“Am I right in guessing that an earlier diary could well have had a Nate Heller chapter in it?”
“You might be. So, yeah, I can put myself in the place of my engaged-to-be-married high-hat client. I know all about Estelle Carey’s charms. So I burned the fucker. What do you think of that, Miss Rand?”
“That’s Helen to you,” she said, snuggling close to me. “And what I think about it is, hooray for Nate Heller, and let’s see if you can’t do something with
me
worth writing down, after…”
Five detectives, Donahoe among them, got transferred and censured after the scandal hit the papers. The other four cops, assigned to back up Drury’s investigation into the Carey case, were attached to the coroner’s office—“deputy coroners,” a job I’d been offered once by the late Mayor Cermak, back before he was late, as a bribe. I hadn’t taken it, for various reasons, not the least of which was the company I’d have been in: severely bent cops like Miller and Lang, owed political favors, tended to land the coroner’s plum investigative positions. But that was over now.
From now on, the coroner would be required to use county investigators, at a savings to the taxpayers of Chicago of six grand a year.
It seemed that Otto A. Bomark of Elmwood Park, the late Miss Carey’s uncle and administrator of her estate, reported many items missing, including several expensive gowns, thirty-two pairs of nylon hose (better than money these days), three dozen fancy lace handkerchiefs worth ninety bucks a dozen, a set of ladies’ golf clubs, a camera and, oh yes, photographs of Estelle that had apparently been peddled to the papers.
And then there were the persistent rumors of a diary, which had been “stolen” from Estelle’s apartment, possibly by a police officer. But as yet the memoirs of Miss Carey had failed to surface. For some reason.
All this and every other in and out of the Carey case stayed in the headlines of every paper in town for a solid week, except the
Tribune,
which tastefully backed off after a few days and played it inside. Then on the Tuesday after the Tuesday she was killed, Estelle got bumped out of the headlines.
JAPS GIVE UP GUADALCANAL
Letters several inches high. Impressive as all hell. But abstract. Remote. Somehow, not real to me.
Yet there it was in black and white:
New York, Feb. 9.—(AP)—Japanese imperial headquarters today announced the withdrawal of Jap forces from Guadalcanal Island in the Solomons, the Berlin radio reported in a dispatch datelined Tokyo. This constitutes the first admission from Tokyo in this war of abandonment of important territory.
Why couldn’t I make it feel real? Why couldn’t I make my face smile over this great news? Well, I couldn’t. I could only feel weary, on this clear, cool morning, even though I’d had a relatively good night’s sleep last night, in Sally’s arms, in Sally’s room at the Drake. I wouldn’t be seeing her tonight, though. She was gone, now, and she took her arms with her. Took the train to Baltimore where she was playing a split week at some nightclub or other. I’d have to try to sleep on my own, again, in the old Murphy bed. Good luck to me.
As I came up the stairs onto the fourth floor, I saw a familiar figure, although it wasn’t one I ever expected to see in the building again: my recruiting sergeant, in his pressed blue trousers and khaki shirt and campaign hat. Some of the spring was out of his step, however.
M
R. AND
M
RS
. B
ARNEY
R
OSS
As I met him in the hall, I said, “What’s wrong, Sergeant—haven’t you heard the news?”
I showed him the headline.
“I have heard, Private. Outstanding. Outstanding.”
But his expression remained glum.
“What brings you here?” I said. “Who got a medal today?”
“No one, I’m afraid.” He looked back toward my office. “I’m glad you’re here, Private. There’s a young woman who needs you.”
I ran down the hall and threw the door open and she was sitting there, with the telegram in her hands, sitting on that couch I’d caught them humping on.
She wasn’t crying. She was dazed, like she’d been hit by a board. Prim and pretty in her white frilly blouse and navy skirt. A single rose in a vase on the desk nearby.
Telegram in her hands.
“The newspapers said we beat them,” she said, hollowly.
I sat next to her. “I know.”
“You said he’d just be mopping up.” No accusation in her voice; just an empty observation.
“I’m sorry, Gladys.”
“I don’t think I can work this morning, Mr. Heller.”
“Oh, Gladys, come here.”
And I held her in my arms and she cried into my chest. She cried and cried, heaving racking sobs, and if ever I’d written her off as a cold fish, well, to hell with me.
Sapperstein came in a few minutes later. He was still wearing the black arm band for his brother; it could do double duty, now. I called her mother in Evanston and Lou drove her home.
That left me alone in the office, wondering how Frankie Fortunato could be dead and I could be alive. Young Frankie. Old me. Shit. I wadded up the goddamn newspaper and shoved it in the wastecan. But the crumpled headline, spelling
GUADNAL,
seemed real enough to me now.
I sat at the desk in the inner office—my office once, Sapperstein’s for the moment—and made some calls regarding an insurance investigation in Elmhurst. It felt good to work. The mundane, which when I first got back had driven me crazy, was becoming my salvation. Day-to-day living, everyday working, was something I could get lost in. By eleven-thirty I even felt hungry. I was about to break for lunch when I heard somebody come in the outer office.
I got up from behind the desk and walked to the door and looked out at a beautiful young woman of about twenty-five in a dark fur stole and a dark slinky dress. Suspiciously slinky for lunchtime, but then when it was showing off a nice slender shape like that, who was complaining?
She stood at an angle facing Gladys’s empty desk. She had seamed nylons on; nice gams.
“My secretary’s out,” I said.
“You’re Mr. Heller?”
“That’s right.”
She smiled, and it was a lovely smile; pearly white teeth, red lipstick glistening on full lips. Her big dark eyes, under strong arching eyebrows, appraised me, amused somehow. Her black hair was pulled back behind her head, on which sat, at a jaunty angle, a black pillbox hat. If she wasn’t a showgirl once, I’d eat her hat. Or something.
“I don’t have an appointment,” she said, moving toward me slowly. Swaying a little. It seemed somewhat calculated, or is the word “calculating”? She extended one dark-gloved hand. I didn’t know whether she wanted me to kiss it or shake it or maybe crouch down and let her knight me. I settled for squeezing it.
“No appointment needed,” I said, smiling at her, wondering why she was so seductively cheerful; most women who come into a private detective agency are nervous and/or depressed, as their business is generally divorce-oriented. What the hell. I showed her into my office.