True Detective (39 page)

"That's right," I said.

"I tried to get work there," he said "They said I should try a station in the sticks." He grinned and nodded up at the wood overhead. "So I took 'em at their word."

Beame put a hand on the kid's shoulder and said, "Nate Heller, this young man is Dutch Reagan. He's our top sportscaster. In fact we're losing him to our sister station WHO in Des Moines, in a few weeks."

"Glad to meet you, Dutch," I said, and we shook hands: Yes, he was an athlete all right. "Hope we're not interrupting you."

"I don't go on the air for another fifteen minutes yet," he said.

Beame introduced Reagan to Mary Ann, who was obviously impressed by the handsome kid.

"Mr. Beame said you're here to talk to me about his son," Reagan said, adjusting his glasses, "but I never knew Jimmy. I've only been at WOC four months."

"But you were a close friend of another announcer here who aft/know Jimmy."

"Jack Hoffmann. Sure."

"Mr. Beame thought Jimmy might have come up in conversation with Hoffmann."

Beame said, "It's a long shot. Dutch. But Jimmy had so few friends…"

Reagan thought about it; his face was so earnest it hurt. "Can't think of anything, sir. I'm really sorry."

I shrugged. "Like the man said, it was a long shot. Thanks, anyway."

"Sure. Oh, Mr. Heller. Could I have a word with you? Could you step in the studio for a second?"

"Fine," I said.

Beame looked curious, and Reagan said, "I want to ask Mr. Heller to look up a friend of mine in Chicago. No big deal."

Beame nodded, and Reagan and I went into the studio, a room hung with dark blue velvet drapes, for soundproofing purposes, though the ceiling was crossed by more trees, bark and all, attached to which were various stuffed birds, poised as if in flight, though they weren't going anywhere.

"I didn't want to talk in front of Mr. Beame," Reagan said. "I
do
know some things about his son, but they aren't very flattering."

"Oh?"

Beame was watching us through the window; stuffed birds watched us from tree beams above.

"Yeah. He was in with a rough crowd. Hanging around in speakeasies. Drinking. Fooling around with the ladies, using that term loosely, if you get my drift."

"I get it. You know what joints he might've been frequenting?"

Reagan smiled on one side of his face. "I'm no teetotaler. I'm Irish."

"That means you might know where some of those places are."

"Yeah. Jack Hoffmann and I used to hit some of 'em, occasionally. And those I haven't been in. I know about. Why?"

"You working tonight?"

"No."

"Busy?"

"Are you buyin'?"

"That's right."

"I live at the Perry Apartments, corner of East Fourth and Perry. I'll be waiting out front at eight tonight. Swing by."

"I'll do that." I said, and we shook hands, and he smiled at me. and it was an infectious smile.

"Irish, huh?" I said.

"That's what they tell me." he said, and went back in his announcer's booth, which was visible through a window in the left draped wall, where a bulky WOC microphone could also be glimpsed.

In the rustic reception room, Mary Ann's father said, "What was that all about?"

"Old girl friend of Iris he wants me to check up on."

"Oh."

"Nice guy."

"Yes. Yes, he is. Now, then. I've made an appointment with Paul Traynor, for ten o'clock, at the newspaper. In the meantime, I've got to stay up here and get to work. I'll leave you at my daughter's mercy."

"Come along," Mary Ann said, taking my arm as we got on the elevator. "That appointment's at ten and it's only half past eight now. I'm going to take you on a tour of my favorite place in the world. Or anyway, the Tri-Cities."

"Really? And what's that?"

" 'A Little Bit O' Heaven.' Ever hear of it?"

"Can't say I have. Where is it?"

"Next door."

Soon I was walking with Mary Ann across an oriental courtyard, past a thirty-foot-long writhing rock-and-tile and chipped-stone snake, by two idols with human heads and monkey bodies, under shell-and-stone umbrellas, through a four-ton revolving door inlaid with thousands of pearl chips and semiprecious stones, into a big pagoda of a building in which ancient hindu idols coexisted with Italian marble pieces that luxuriated in lushly lit waterfalls; where rock gardens and pools and ponds and fish and fauna and petrified wood and growing plants and shells and agates came together to form a place I and no one- had ever seen the like of before. Trouble was, I wasn't sure I wanted to.

I said little as she led me around; she was enthralled- I wasn't. The money that had been sunk into this combination rock garden and museum seemed excessive, considering the times. This was not a curator's notion of a museum, it was a collector's conceit, a conglomeration whose sum was considerably less than its parts.

"This is B. J. Palmer's personal collection, you know," Mary Ann said, as we stood in front of an immense black idol, a sign telling us this "Wishing Buddha" was over a thousand years old. "I think it's wonderful of him to open it up to the public like this."

"We paid a dime."

"What's a dime?"

"Two cups of coffee. A sandwich."

"Don't get serious on me. Nathan. Can't you see the benefit of a place like this?"

"You mean a world that isn't the real world? Sure. It's nice to go someplace unreal once in a while."

"You're damn right." she said, and tugged at me, and said. "This is my favorite part," and soon we were in a tiny wedding chapel, formed of pebbles and stones and mortar, with a rock altar eight feet wide, eight feet deep, ten feet high.

"The smallest Christian church in the world," she said in a hushed tone.

"No kiddin'."

We were holding hands; she squeezed mine.

"Hundreds of couples are married here every year," she said.

That she could be warmed by a cool, stone closet like this was a testament to her imagination and sense of the romantic.

"Isn't it splendid?" she said.

Well.

She put her arms around me. looked up at me with that innocent look that I had come to know was only partly artifice.

"When we get married." she said, "let's get married here."

"Are you asking for my hand, madam?"

"Among other things."

"Okay. If we get married, we'll do it here."

"If?"

"If and when."

"When."

"All right," I said. "When."

She pulled me out of there, almost running, like a schoolgirl. When we were out in the oriental court, with a little brook babbling nearby, she babbled, too: "This was our favorite place."

'What?

"Jimmy's and mine. When we were kids. We came here every week. We'd make up stories, run around till the guides'd get cross and stop us. Even when we were teenagers, we'd come here now and then."

I said nothing.

She sat on a stone bench. "The day before Jimmy left, we came here. Walked around and took it all in. There's a greenhouse we've yet to see. Nate." She stood. "Come on."

"Just a second."

"Yes?"

"Your brother. I don't mind looking for him. It's my job. You're paying me to do that. Or you were. I'm not inclined to take any of your money, from here on out. But. anyway, your brother…"

"Yes?"

"I don't want to hear about him anymore."

Her face crinkled into an amused mask. "You're jealous!"

"You're goddamn right." I said. "Come on. Let's get the hell out of heaven."

She kissed me. "Okay," she said.

"Jimmy's a good kid." Paul Traynor said, "just a little on the wild side."

Traynor was only a few years older than me, but his hair was already mostly gray, his lanky frame giving over to a potbelly, his nose starting to go vein-shot, the sad gray eyes looking just a shade rheumy. He was sitting at his typewriter at a desk on the first floor of the newspaper building, in a room full of desks, about half of which were occupied, primarily by cigar-puffing men who sat typing through a self-created haze.

"He grew up during the Looney years," Traynor said, "and developed this fascination for gangsters. And, you know, we always have run a lot of Chicago news in the
Democrat
. We cover the gangland stuff pretty good, 'cause it has reader appeal, and 'cause the Tri-Cities liquor ring is tied to the Capone mob. So a kid around here could easily grow up equatin' that stuff with the wild west or whatever."

"His father said you and Jimmy were pretty friendly. You let him tag along to trials now and then."

"Yeah. Since he was maybe thirteen. He read the true detective magazines, and
Black Mask
, and that sort of thing. Kept scrapbooks about Capone and that crowd and so on. It seemed harmless to me. Till he got out of high school, anyway, and started feelin' his oats."

"Drinking, carousing, you mean? Lots of kids do that, when they hit eighteen or so."

"Sure. A kid out of high school wants to get laid, wants to go out with his pals and get blotto. Flamin'

youth. And so what? No. I
wish
that was the way Jimmy'd gone: hip flasks and raccoon coats. Oh yass."

"You mean instead of hanging around speakeasies."

He had a smile like a fold in cloth. "Yeah. But it's more than even that. He got thick with the local bootleggers themselves. It's possible- just possible- he did some work for 'em. But don't tell his old man; it'd kill his old man."

"Don't worry. Did the kid actually want to
be
a gangster?"

"Did Jimmy want to be Al Capone when he grew up? Naw. That wasn't it. It was a combination of a couple of things. First, he was just
taken
with that crowd, road-show Capones that they were. It was the Nick Coin bunch, and Talarico's crowd, that he was hanging around with."

"Those names don't mean anything to me."

"Well. Coin and Mike Talarico were sometimes rivals, sometimes partners. You know how that business goes. Coin was shot down in front of his house last summer. Shotgun. Never found the killers, though they held a guy from Muscatine for it. then released him. Somebody brought in from Chicago did it, was the rumor, of course. Probably hired by Talarico, 'cause Coin had reportedly squealed to the feds. Anyway, Jimmy knew Coin and his crowd. And… well."

Go on.

"Look- John Beanie's a good man; if he's trying to find his son. I'd like to help. But there's something that I can only tell you if you swear to secrecy. Absolute goddamn secrecy."

"All right."

"You gotta understand Jimmy's second reason for hanging around with those lowlifes: he wanted to be a writer, a reporter. He wanted to go to Chicago and
write
about gangsters for the
Trib
. He didn't want to get
in
the game, see; he wanted to sit on the fifty-yard line and do the play-by-play, if you get me."

"I get you."

"And this is the part you got to keep to yourself. Jesus, keep it to yourself." He lowered his voice, leaned toward me. "Jimmy was feeding me stuff. He was hanging around with the Coin crowd, and even doing some minor things for 'em- driving a truck, here and there, no guns or anything, just bootlegging. But he'd keep his ears open, and he'd tell me tilings. Pass along the scuttlebutt, get it? If something big was up- and we've had our share of Chicago-style shootings and bombings and kidnappings and what-have-you- Jimmy'd pass along what he heard. To me."

"Did you encourage this?"

He looked at me hard, the gray eyes looking like smoky glass; his cigar was out, but he didn't seem to have noticed.

"I paid him." he said.

'I see.

"No you don't. You gotta understand the kid was doin' this on his own. And I told him he'd get his damn head blown off if he kept it up. but dammit if he didn't start feeding me some good tips. I couldn't help myself; I'm a reporter. And he was eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old when this was goin' on. He was old enough to be held responsible for his own actions."

"You wouldn't happen to know some of the places he hung out, would you? And who his 'friends' were?"

"Are you nuts? I never went with him: he couldn't be seen around with me. if he was gonna do this half-assed undercover work. But I can tell you where some of the speaks in town are. if you like."

He started rattling 'em off, and I stopped him till I could get my notepad out. When he'd finished, he said, "I can't really give you any names of the wharf rats he was hanging around with, 'cause he never really said. He wasn't close to the big boys, so talking to Talarico or Lucchesi wouldn't do any good. They probably wouldn't know Jimmy from Adam. Coin knew Jimmy, but Coin's dead."

"Anything else you can tell me?"

"Well. I do know he made some trips to Chicago. This was while he was in college, but during the summers. As early as the summer of'30. That always bothered me. See, his friend Coin was tight with the Chicago boys. Ever hear of a guy named Ted Newberry?"

The body was in a ditch near a telephone pole.

"Yeah," I said. "I heard of him."

"He was the Chicago big shot the Tri-Cities liquor ring was tight with. I covered a trial in the fall of '31, where Newberry and Coin. Talarico and Lucchesi were codefendants. Anyway. Jimmy went to Chicago a couple times, and I always wondered if he was running an errand or something for Coin. I grilled him about it. but he always claimed it was just pleasure trips. Still. I always had the queasy feeling that Jimmy was getting in over his head. All I could think of were those scrapbooks he put together in junior high and high school, full of Chicago and Capone. and couldn't help but wonder about those 'pleasure trips.'"

"Did you talk to him about his plans to go to Chicago and try to get a job there?"

"Yeah. I told him his expectations were unrealistic. That they'd toss him out on his butt. But he had to try, he said. And I guess every kid does have to try. So I didn't try to stop him. I even wrote him a letter of recommendation, in case he did get in for a real interview by some miracle. And I told him if he flopped, he could come back and I'd try to get him on the
Democrat
here, as a copyboy if nothing else. And he said- what was it he said? He seemed confident they'd give him a shot. Almost cocky, the little snotnose. 'Oh, they'll print my stuff,' he said. Something like that. Ever heard anything so ridiculous?"