The Million-Dollar Wound nh-3

by Max Allan Collins

  Greed, of course. Something Nicky and Estelle had in common.

  I just stood and listened, leaning against one wall. The police steno filed in and took her inconspicuous place in the corner, as Drury said, “You don’t mind going on the record with your statement, Mrs. Circella?”

  “Of course not. I’m a good citizen. I always cooperate one hundred percent with the authorities.”

  If there was any sarcasm in her words, I couldn’t find it.

  “I came, at your request,” she said, “although I must admit I don’t understand why you would want to question me in regard to a murder. Particularly one committed while I was out of the city.”

  “Where were you on February second?” Drury asked.

  She batted long lashes, innocently; her eyes were wide and brown and lovely. “I was in New York City, of course. I was staying at the Alamac Hotel. To be close to my husband in his hour of need. Nicky and I learned of her death together, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  She was twisting a lace hanky in her hands, nervously. “We were sitting outside of the grand jury room of the U.S. Courthouse in New York, and someone brought in a copy of a Chicago paper. The Herald-American, I think it was. There was a picture of Estelle on the front page, but at first I didn’t recognize it. I recognized the name, though. So I turned to Nicky and said, ‘Didn’t this girl work for you?’ And he looked at her picture and said, ‘Yes.’ Then he said, ‘Let me read that paper.’”

  “What did he have to say?”

  She lowered her eyes. “‘That poor girl,’ he said.”

  “I see. Let’s start at the beginning. Did you know about Estelle Carey?”

  She shook her head, no. “I didn’t know her. I knew who she was, but we never talked. I wouldn’t recognize the sound of her voice if I heard it today. Oh, I saw her from time to time-at the dice tables at the 101 Club and the Colony Club, which Nicky owned.”

  Drury smiled, but his eyes and forehead frowned; this woman was either very naive or very crafty, and, either way, it was getting to him. “Mrs. Circella, I didn’t ask if you knew Estelle. I asked if you knew about her. By which I mean…”

  She licked the lush lips. “I heard the rumors that she and Nicky were friendly. I could never verify them, though.”

  “How hard did you try?”

  She smiled slightly, regally. “I didn’t. I never tried. I’m a Catholic, Captain Drury. When I married I made a contract with God. None of us is infallible. I am not my husband’s judge. Nick has been a good husband to me for nineteen years.”

  “Have you been aware of how he’s earned his living during that time?”

  “Yes. Nightclubs. But they were no part of my life. I spent my time at home, with our two children. I won’t pretend I liked his business. It’s the one thing we’ve argued about. But when I’ve asked him to give up his nightclubs, his answer is always the same-that he had to do something for a living.”

  Drury was drumming his fingers on the desk. “Were you aware that Nick was connected with the Stagehands Union?”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “I know Mr. Browne and Willie. But Nicky resigned from the union before all the trouble started.”

  “You know nothing of a million-dollar slush fund then?”

  She smiled again. “The FBI and the Internal Revenue Service have that same interest. I’m sure if we had a million dollars, I’d know about it.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “Of course not.”

  Drury sighed. “You were in show business once yourself, weren’t you, Mrs. Circella?”

  She sat up; she didn’t seem so frail, all of a sudden. “I met Nicky when I was appearing in a show at the Cort Theater. Each night he’d come and listen to my singing. Then he’d send roses. Finally we met through a mutual friend. That was in 1923; we were married the following year.” The past glory faded, and she settled back into the chair, frail again. “Now I can’t even sing the baby to sleep, since I had diphtheria. My vocal cords were affected, but that doesn’t matter. When I married Nicky, I washed my hands of show business. A wife stays home and minds the children, like Nicky says.”

  “Getting back to Estelle Carey…”

  “I was at fault.”

  Drury leaned forward. “Pardon?”

  She gestured with the lacy hanky. “I have been a sick wife for a long, long time. Nick couldn’t be blamed for seeking the company of a gorgeous creature like Estelle-and she was gorgeous.”

  Was as in past tense.

  She went nobly on: “None of us knows what life has in store for us. We are all in God’s hands.”

  Anyway, Estelle was.

  She smiled bravely. “I have only pity for Estelle Carey. She missed everything that is fine in life-home, family, the respect and esteem that are every woman’s birthright.”

  “No bitterness at all, then.”

  She shook her head no. “I’m sorry for her from the bottom of my heart. Since this has happened, I’ve gone to church and lit candles in her memory. Her murder was a terrible, terrible thing.”

  Drury smiled politely, rising, gesturing to her. “Thank you, Mrs. Circella. You’re free to go now. Thank you for stopping by.”

  She rose, smiled politely back at him. Fluttered her eyelashes. Great eyes on this dame. “Certainly, Captain Drury,” she said.

  “Sergeant Donahoe, in the hall there, will show you out.”

  She walked by me, snugging on navy gloves, trailing a wake of expensive tasteful perfume. I closed the door behind her.

  Drury sat back down. “What do you think?”

  I was still standing. “Some classy broad.”

  “I mean, is she on the level?”

  “Yeah. In her way.”

  “What do you mean, in her way?”

  I shrugged. “She’s lying to herself, not to you. She’s human; she hated Estelle like any good wife would. But she prefers to affect her good-Catholic-wife, stiff-upper-lip, superiority-through-suffering stance. It gets her through the day.”

  “In other words, her marriage is an arrangement she can live with.”

  “I’d say so.”

  “I say if she’d been in town Tuesday, we might have a real suspect.”

  “No. I don’t think so. I can’t picture that sweet little thing with an icepick in her hand.”

  “Sometimes women can surprise you, Nate.”

  “Hell, they always surprise me. Personally, I wouldn’t mind finding a wife like that-beautiful, devoted, expects you to fool around on the side. I didn’t know they made ’em like that anymore.”

  “You want a girl just like the girl that married dear old Nick.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, I don’t think she’s a killer. I don’t think she even hired a killer.”

  “The papers are going to love her,” Drury said, glumly cynical. “They’ll fall all over themselves for that ‘every woman’s birthright’ speech.”

  “You got that right. Anything else you’d care to share with me? Or should I let you get back to your couple of hundred suspects?”

  His face narrowed into anger, or at least a semblance thereof. He shook his finger at me. “Yes there is. Why didn’t you give me D’Angelo’s name?”

  “Oh. So Uncle Sam finally ran him down for you, huh?”

  “Yes, and we were out to see him this morning. And we discovered you’d been there Wednesday night. What gives?”

  I held my hands out, palms open. “He was on Guadalcanal with me, Bill. He was in that same shell hole as Barney and me. We almost got killed together. I owed him a warning of what was ahead for him-cops, reporters. He had that much coming.”

  “Being in the service together doesn’t justify withholding information…”

  “Yes it does.”

  He shook his head. “Go on, make me feel like a heel. You been to fight the big war and I haven’t. Make me feel like a piker.” He thrust his finger at me. “But if you’re going to be sniffing around the edges of this case, don�
�t you goddamn dare withhold information or evidence from me again; our friendship isn’t going to cover that, Nate.”

  “Understood.”

  “Now do me a favor and get the hell out of here.”

  I did.

  On my way out, I stopped by Sergeant Donahoe’s desk. “You got it?” I asked him.

  He nodded and looked around furtively and opened a desk drawer and got out a sack.

  “Two gee’s?” he whispered, holding on to the thing with both hands.

  “Two gee’s,” I whispered back. “In cash. You’ll have the dough tomorrow.”

  “I better,” he said, with his usual hound-dog expression, and handed me the sack.

  I took it and walked down the stairs, out of Town Hall Station, in front of which the pretty, petite Mrs. Nick Circella was talking to Hal Davis and some other reporters, halfheartedly shielding her face with a gloved hand whenever a flashbulb went off.

  I tucked Estelle Carey’s diary under my arm and walked by them.

  That night I met Sally backstage at the Brown Derby at half past one; she stepped out of her dressing room wearing a white sweater and black slacks and a black fur coat and a white turban and looked like a million. Not Nicky Dean’s hidden million, maybe, but a treasure just the same.

  “How can you look so chipper?” I asked her. “You just did four shows.”

  She touched my cheek with a gentle hand, the nails of which were long and red and shiny. “I get a little sleep at night,” she said. “You ought to try it.”

  “I hear it’s the latest rage,” I said.

  She looped her arm in mine and we walked to the stage door. “It’ll get better for you. Wait and see.”

  We’d spent Tuesday night together, in my Murphy bed, so she knew all about my sleeping trouble. She knew I would toss and turn, and then finally drop off only to quickly wake up in a cold sweat.

  “I go back there when I sleep,” I told her. We were walking out on Monroe. It was cold, but not bitterly cold.

  “Back there..?”

  “To the Island.”

  Our feet made flat, crunching sounds on the snowy sidewalk.

  “Did you talk to your doctors about this?”

  “Not really. I ducked the issue. I wanted to get home. I figured it would let up, once I did.”

  She squeezed my arm. “Give it time. This is only your fourth day back. Say. Why don’t you see if a change of scenery helps your sleep habits? I’ve got a room at the Drake, you know.”

  I grinned at her. “Surely not that plush white penthouse that fairy friend of yours sublet you, way back when.”

  She laughed, sadly. “No. I don’t know what became of him, or his penthouse. It’s just a room. With a bed.”

  “You talked me into it.”

  We crossed Clark Street, heading for the Barney Ross Cocktail Lounge. Traffic was light for a Friday night. Of course, the bars had already been closed for forty minutes.

  “Do you know what this is about?” she asked.

  I shook my head no. “All I know is Ben asked me to stop by, after hours tonight. I asked him if I could bring my best girl and he said sure, and drinks would be on the house, and we’d have the place practically to ourselves.”

  “Are you positive that’s what he said?” she asked.

  We were approaching the entrance, from which came the muffled but distinct sounds of music, laughter, and loud conversation. The door was locked, but through the glass a swarm of beer-swilling people could be seen. We stood there basking in the glow of the blue neon that spelled out Barney’s name and the outline of boxing gloves, wondering what was going on, and finally Ben’s face appeared in the glass of the door, and he grinned like a kid looking in a Christmas window, unlocked it, and we stepped inside.

  “What’s up?” I asked him, working to be heard above the din.

  “Come on back!” Ben said, still grinning, waving a hand in a “follow me” manner, leading us through the jam-packed, smoky saloon. The jukebox was blaring “Blues in the Night”…mah mama done tole me…and the place was filled with guys from the West Side, older ones my age or better, except for some kids in uniform, and a lot of ’em patted me on the back and grinned and toasted me as we wound through ’em, way to go Nate, you showed them yellow bastards, Heller, that sort of thing. The rest seemed to be people from the sports world, the fight game especially, including Winch and Pian, Barney’s old managers, who I glimpsed standing across the room talking to a young kid who looked like a fighter. I hoped for his and their sake he had a punctured eardrum or flat feet or something, or he wouldn’t have much of a ring career ahead of him, not in the near future anyway. A few reporters were present, mostly sports guys, but Hal Davis was there, and he had a bruise on his jaw that looked kind of nasty. The look he gave me was nastier than the bruise.

  We ended up at the farthest back booth, around which the crowd seemed thickest, and Ben called, “Step aside, step aside,” when I was in knee pants, and they did, and I’ll be damned if a gray-haired version of Barney Ross wasn’t sitting there.

  He looked at me with those same goddamn puppy-dog eyes in the same old bulldog puss, only his face was less full than it used to be. Like mine. He didn’t seem to have my dark circles under the eyes, though; but his once dark hair, which when last I saw him was salt-and-pepper, was now stone gray. He was sitting next to Cathy, the brunette showgirl he got hitched to at San Diego, but immediately slid out on seeing me, leaning on a native-carved cane he’d brought back from the Island, and stood and looked at me.

  “You got old,” he said, smiling.

  “You’re the one with the gray hair.”

  The music was still loud, who make you to sing the bloooes, but we weren’t yelling over it. We could understand each other.

  “You’re gettin’ there yourself,” he said, pointing to the white around my ears. Then he pointed to his own head of gray hair. “Turned this way that night in the shell hole, just like my pa’s did in the Russian pogroms.”

  “Christ,” I said, getting a good look at his uniform. “You’re a fucking sergeant!”

  His grin drifted to one side of his face. “I see they promoted you, too.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Back to civilian.”

  His smile turned lopsided, sad. “Shouldn’t have got you into it, should I, Nate?”

  Blues in the night…

  “Shut up, schmuck,” I said, and he hugged me and I hugged him back.

  “Sally!” he said, to the little vision in black and white standing next to me and looking on benignly at this sorry display of sentimentality. “It’s great to see you, kid!” He hugged her next, and I bet that was more fun than hugging me. “It’s good to see you two back together again.”

  “Easy,” I said. “We’re just friends.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. “Come on, slide in and sit with us!”

  A couple of sportswriters had been sitting across from Barney and Cathy, in the booth, and they made way for us, thanking Barney, slipping their notebooks into their pockets. But Sally didn’t join us-Nat Gross, the “town tattler” on the Herald-American, stole her away; Sally smiled and shrugged, handed me her fur coat, said “Publicity’s publicity,” and was soon lost in the smoky throng.

  “Reporters,” Barney said, shaking his head. “Take those sports guys, for instance. They wanted to know all about me bein’ voted boxing’s ‘man of the year,’ which is a crazy stupid thing anyway. I ain’t been in the ring since ’38! It’s supposed to be for the man who did the most for boxing last year, and they give it to me. What for?”

  “Beats me,” I said. Cathy was beaming at him; they were holding hands. “When d’you get back? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

  “My furlough came through early,” he said, shrugging. “I was in New York, getting that ‘man of the year’ deal, and got a chance last night to hop a military flight here. I called Ben before I left to ask him to round some people up. It was his idea to surprise everybody. A
nyway, I got in this afternoon, and spent the evening with Ma and the family. Tomorrow there’s going to be a reception with Mayor Kelly and the hometown fans and all; but tonight I just wanted to see my old pals. Damn, it’s great to be home!”

  “I saw that stupid picture of you,” I said, smirking, shaking my head, “kissing the ground when you got off the hospital ship at San Diego. Some guys’ll do anything to get in the papers.”

  He smiled back at me tightly and waggled a finger at me. “I swore if I ever got back home, my first act would be to stoop and kiss the ground. Remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “And I keep my promises.”

  “You always have, Barney. So promise me you aren’t going back over there.”

  “That’s an easy one to keep. I won’t be going back, Nate. I got an arm and leg loaded with shrapnel. It’ll be months before I can get around without my trusty voodoo stick.”

  He was referring to his carved native cane, leaned up against the side of the booth next to him. The big head of the cane was a face with mirrorlike stones for eyes. In the mouth were what seemed to be six human teeth.

  “Genuine Jap teeth,” Barney said, proudly, noticing me noticing them.

  “Good, Barney,” I said. “It’s nice to know you didn’t go Asiatic or anything over there.”

  Cathy spoke up. “Barney’s been transferred to the Navy’s Industrial Incentive Division.”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with social disease, does it?” I asked him.

  He made a face. “Are you nuts?”

  “Yeah, but don’t knock it-it got me out of the service.” I explained briefly about Eliot’s VD-busting role, and how he’d tried to hide behind governmental gobbledygook telling me about it. Barney got a laugh out of that.

  “They’re gonna send me touring war plants,” he shrugged, seeming embarrassed, “telling the workers how the weapons and stuff they’re making are helping us lick the Japs. Fat duty. Pretty chickenshit, really.”