“Aren’t you warm in that?” I asked her, sipping a bottle of Pabst. I was in a shortsleeve sportshirt and chinos, my straw fedora at my feet, away from the wind.
“Not really. I get chilled in the spray.” She had a high-pitched voice that seemed younger than her twenty-two years, though the lines around her sky-blue eyes made her seem older. Peggy laughed and smiled a lot, but those eyes were sad, somehow.
I had been introduced to Peggy as a theatrical agent from Chicago. She was a model and dancer, and apparently Clifton figured this lie would help me get laid; this irritated me—being burdened with a fiction of someone else’s creation, and the notion I needed help in that regard. But I hadn’t corrected it.
Janet, it seemed, was also interested in show business; a former dentist’s assistant, she was a couple years older than Peggy. They had roomed together in New York City and came down here a few months ago, seeking sun and fame and fortune.
The afternoon was pleasant enough. Clifton sat at the wheel with Janet cuddling next to him, and Peggy and I sat in the seat behind them. She was friendly, holding my hand, putting her head on my shoulder, though we barely knew each other. We drank in the sun-drenched, invigorating gulf-stream air, as well as our bottled beers, and enjoyed the view—royal palms waving, white-capped breakers peaking, golden sands glistening with sunlight.
The runabout had been bounding along, which—with the engine noise—had limited conversation. But pretty soon fton charted us up and down Indian Creek, a tranquil, seawalled lagoon lined with palm-fringed shores and occasional well-manicured golf courses, as well as frequent private piers and landing docks studded with gleaming yachts and lavish houseboats.
“Have you found any work down here?” I asked the fresh-faced, sad-eyed girl.
She nodded. “Some cheesecake modeling Pete lined up. Swimsuits and, you know…art studies.”
Nudes.
“What are you hoping for?”
“Well, I am a good dancer, and I sing a little, too. Pete says he’s going to do a big elaborate show, soon, with a chorus line and everything.”
“And he’s going to use both you and Janet?”
She nodded.
“Any thoughts beyond that, Peggy? You’ve got nice legs, but show business is a rough career.”
Her chin crinkled as she smiled, but desperation tightened her eyes. “I’d be willing to take a Chicago booking.”
Though we weren’t gliding as quickly over the water now, the engine noise was still enough to keep my conversation with Peggy private while Pete and Janet laughed and kissed and chugged their beers.
“I’m not a booking agent, Peggy.”
She drew away just a little. “No?”
“Pete was…I don’t know what he was doing.”
She shrugged again, smirked. “Pete’s a goddamn liar, sometimes.”
“I know some people who book acts in Chicago, and would be glad to put a word in…but don’t be friendly with me on account of that.”
She studied me and her eyes didn’t seem as sad, or as old, suddenly. “What do you know? The vanishing American.”
“What?”
“A nice guy.”
And she cuddled next to me, put a hand on my leg.
Without looking at me, she asked, “Why do you think I came to Florida, Nate?”
“It’s warm and sunny.”
“Yes.”
“And…” I nodded toward either side of us, where the waterway entrances of lavish estates, trellised with bougainvillea and allamanda, seemed to beckon. “…there’s more money here than you can shake a stick at.”
She laughed. “Yes.”
By four o’clock we were at the girls’ place, in a six-apartment building on Jefferson Street, a white-trimmed-pink geometric affair among many other such streamlined structures of sunny yellow, flamingo pink and sea green, with porthole windows and racing stripes and bas relief zig-zags. The effect was at once elegant and insubstantial, like a movie set. Their one-bedroom apartment was on the second of two floors; the furnishings had an art moderne look too, though of the low-cost Sears showroom variety.
Janet fixed us drinks and we sat in the little pink and white living room area and made meaningless conversation for maybe five minutes. Then Clifton and Janet disappeared into that one bedroom, and Peggy and I necked on the couch. The lights were low, when I got her sweater and bra off her, but I noticed the needle tracks on her arms, just the same.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing…. What are you on? H?”
“What do you mean?…. Not H.”
“What?”
“M.”
Morphine.
She folded her arms over her bare breasts, but it was her arms she was hiding.
“I was blue,” she said, defensively, shivering suddenly. “I needed something.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Pete has friends.”
Pete had friends, all right. And I was one of them.
“Put your sweater on, baby.”
“Why? Do I…do I make you sick?”
And she began to cry.
So I made love to her there on the couch, sweetly, tenderly, comforting her, telling her she was beautiful, which she was. She needed the attention, and I didn’t mind giving it to her, though I was steaming at that louse Clifton.
Our clothes relatively straightened, Peggy having freshened in the bathroom, we were sitting, chatting, having Cokes on ice like kids on a date, when Clifton—in the pale yellow sportshirt and powder-blue slacks he’d gone boating in—emerged from the bedroom, arm around Janet, who was in a terrycloth robe.
“We better blow, Nate,” he told me with a grin, and nuzzled the giggling Janet’s neck. She seemed to be on something, too. “I got a nine o’clock show to do.”
It was a little after seven.
We made our goodbyes and drove the couple of blocks to his place in his white Lincoln Zephyr convertible.
“Do I take care of you,” he asked with a grin, as the shadows of the palms lining the streets rolled over us, “or do I take care of you?”
“You’re a pal,” I said.
We were slipping past more of those movie theater-like apartment houses, pastel chunks of concrete whose geometric harshness was softened by well-barbered shrubs. The three-story building on West Jefferson, in front of which Clifton drew his Lincoln, was set back a ways, a walk cutting through a golf green of a lawn to the pale yellow cube whose blue cantilevered sunshades were like eyebrows.
Clifton’s apartment was on the third floor, a two bedroom affair with pale yellow walls and a parquet floor flung with occasional oriental carpets. The furnishings were in the art moderne manner, chrome and leather and well-varnished light woods, none of it from Sears.
I sat in a pastel green easy chair whose lines were rounded; it was as comfortable as an old shoe but considerably more stylish.
“How do those unemployed showgirls afford a place like that?” I wondered aloud.
Clifton, who was making us a couple of rum and Cokes over at the wet bar, said, “Did you have a good time?”
“I like Peggy. If I lived around here, I’d try to straighten her out.”
“Oh yeah! Saint Heller. I thought you did straighten her out—on that couch.”
“Are you pimping for those girls?”
“No!” He came over with a drink in either hand. “They’re not pros.”
“But you fix them up with friends and other people you want to impress.”
He shrugged, handing me the drink. “Yeah. So what? Party girls like that are a dime a dozen.”
“Where are you getting the dope?”
That stopped him for a moment, but just a moment. “It makes ’em feel good; what’s the harm?”
“You got ’em hooked and whoring for you, Pete. You’re one classy guy.”
Clifton smirked. “I didn’t see you turning down the free lay.”
“You banging ’em both?�
�
“Never at the same time. What, you think I’m a pervert?”
“No. I think you’re a prick.”
He just laughed at that. “Listen, I got to take a shower. You coming down to the club tonight, or not?”
“I’ll come. But Pete—where are you getting the dope you’re giving those girls?”
“Why do you care?”
“Because I don’t think Frank Nitti would like it. He doesn’t do business with people in that racket. If he knew you were involved…”
Clifton frowned. “You going to tell him?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Maybe I don’t give a shit if you do. Maybe I got a possible new investor for my club, and Frank Nitti can kiss my ass.”
“Would you like me to pass that along?”
A grimace drained all the boyishness from his face. “What’s wrong with you, Heller? Since when did you get moral? These gangsters are like women—they exist to be used.”
“Only the gangsters don’t discard as easily.”
“I ain’t worried.” He jerked a thumb at his chest. “See, Heller, I’m a public figure—they don’t bump off public figures; it’s bad publicity.”
“Tell Mayor Cermak—he got hit in Florida.”
He blew me a Bronx cheer. “I’m gonna take a shower. You want a free meal down at the club, stick around…but leave the sermons to Billy Sunday, okay?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
I could hear him showering, singing in there, “All or Nothing at All.” Had we really been friends, once? I had a reputation as something of a randy son of a bitch myself; but did I treat woman like Clifton did? The thought make me shudder.
On the oblong glass coffee table before me, a white phone began to ring. I answered it.
“Pete?” The voice was low-pitched, but female—a distinctive, throaty sound.
“No, it’s a friend. He’s in the shower, getting ready for his show tonight.”
“Tell him to meet me out front in five minutes.”
“Well, let me check with him and see if that’s possible. Who should I say is calling?”
There was a long pause.
Then the throaty purr returned: “Just tell him the wife of a friend.”
“Sure,” I said, and went into the bathroom and reported this, over the shower needles, through the glass door, to Clifton, who said, “Tell her I’ll be right down.”
Within five minutes, Clifton—his hair still wet—moved quickly through the living room; he had thrown on the boating clothes from this afternoon.
“This won’t take long.” He flashed the boyish grin. “These frails can’t get enough of me.”
“You want me to leave?”
“Naw. I’ll set somethin’ up with her for later. I don’t think she has a friend, though—sorry, pal.”
“That’s okay. I try to limit myself to one doped-up doxy a day.”
Clifton smirked and waved at me dismissively as he headed out, and I sat there for maybe a minute, then decided I’d had it. I plucked my straw fedora off the coffee table and trailed out after him, hoping to catch up with him and make my goodbyes.
The night sky was cobalt and alive with stars, a sickle-slice of moon providing the appropriate deco touch. The sidewalk stretched out before me like a white ribbon, toward where palms mingled with street lights. A Buick was along the curb and Pete was leaning against the window, like a car hop taking an order.
That sultry, low female voice rumbled through the night like pretty thunder: “For God’s sake, Pete, don’t do it! Please don’t do it!”
As Pete’s response—laughter—filled my ears, I stopped in my tracks, not wanting to intrude. Then Pete, still chuckling, making a dismissive wave, turned toward me, and walked. He was giving me a cocky smile when the first gunshot cracked the night.
I dove and rolled and wound up against a sculpted hedge that separated Clifton’s apartment house from the hunk of geometry next door. Two more shots rang out, and I could see the orange muzzle flash as the woman shot through the open car window.
p height="0%" width="5%">For a comic, Pete was doing a hell of a dance; the first shot had caught him over the right armpit, and another plowed through his neck in a spray of red, and he twisted around to face her to accommodate another slug.
Then the car roared off, and Pete staggered off the sidewalk and pitched forward onto the grass, like a diver who missed the pool.
I ran to his sprawled figure, and turned him over. His eyes were wild with dying.
“Them fuckin’ dames ain’t…ain’t so easy to discard, neither,” he said, and laughed, a bloody froth of a laugh, to punctuate his last dirty joke.
People were rushing up, talking frantically, shouting about the need for the police to be called and such like. Me, I was noting where the woman had put her last shot.
She caught him right below the belt.
After a long wait in a receiving area, I was questioned by the cops in an interview room at the Dade County Courthouse in Miami. Actually, one of them, Earl Carstensen—Chief of Detectives of the Miami Beach Detective Bureau—was a cop; the other guy—Ray Miller—was chief investigator for the State Attorney’s office.
Carstensen was a craggy guy in his fifties and Miller was a skinny balding guy with wirerim glasses. The place was air-conditioned and they brought me an iced tea, so it wasn’t exactly the third degree.
We were all seated at the small table in the soundproofed cubicle. After they had established that I was a friend of the late Pete Clifton, visiting from Chicago, the line of questioning took an interesting turn.
Carstensen asked, “Are you aware that ‘Peter Clifton’ was not the deceased’s real name?”
“I figured it was a stage name, but it’s the only name I knew him by.”
“He was born Peter Tessitorio,” Miller said, “in New York. He had a criminal background—two burglary raps.”
“I never knew that.”
Carstensen asked, “You’re a former police officer?”
“Yeah. I was a detective on the Chicago P.D. pickpocket detail till ’32.”
Miller asked, “You spent the afternoon with Clifton, in the company of two girls?”
“Yeah.”
“What are their names?”
“Peggy Simmons and Janet Windom. They live in an apartment house on Jefferson…I don’t know the address, but I can point you, if you want to talk to them.”
The two men exchanged glances.
“We’ve already picked them up,” Miller said. “They’ve been questioned, and they’re alibiing each other. They say they don’t know anybody who’d want to kill Clifton.”
“They’re just a couple of party girls,” I said.
Carstensen said, “We found a hypo and bottle of morphine in their apartment. Would you know anything about that?”
I sighed. “I noticed the tracks on the Simmons’ kid’s arms. I gave Pete hell, and he admitted to me he was giving them the stuff. He also indicated he had connections with some dope racketeer.”
“He didn’t give you a name?” Miller asked.
“No.”
“You’ve never heard of Leo Massey?”
“No.”
“Friend of Clifton’s. A known dope smuggler.”
I sipped my iced tea. “Well, other than those two girls, I don’t really know any of Clifton’s associates here in Miami.”
An eyebrow arched in Carstensen’s craggy puss. “You’d have trouble meeting Massey—he’s dead.”
“Oh?”
“He was found in Card Sound last September. Bloated and smellin’ to high heavens.”
“What does that have to do with Pete Clifton?”
Miller said, “Few days before Massey’s body turned up, that speedboat of his—the Screwball—got taken out for a spin.”
I shrugged. “That’s what a speedboat’s for, taking it out for a spin.”
“At midnight? And not returning till daybreak?”
&nb
sp; “You’ve got a witness to that effect?”
Miller nodded.
“So Pete was a suspect in Massey’s murder?”
“Not exactly,” the State Attorney’s investigator said. “Clifton had an alibi—those two girls say he spent the night with ’em.”
I frowned in confusion. “I thought you had a witness to Clifton takin’ his boat out…”
Carstensen said, “We have a witness at the marina to the effect that the boat was taken out, and brought back—but nobody saw who the captain was.”
Now I was getting it. “And Pete said somebody must’ve borrowed his boat without his permission.”
“That’s right.”
“So, what? You’re making this as a gangland hit? But it was a woman who shot him.”
Miller asked, “Did you see that, Mr. Heller?”
“I heard the woman’s voice—I didn’t actually see her shoot him. Didn’t actually see her at all. But it seemed like she was agitated with Pete.”
Other witnesses had heard the woman yelling at Pete; so the cops knew I hadn’t made up this story.
“Could the woman have been a decoy?” Carstensen asked. “Drawn Clifton to that car for some man to shoot?”
“I suppose. But my instin is, Pete’s peter got him bumped. If I were you, fellas, I’d go over that apartment of his and look for love letters and the like; see if you can find a little black book. My guess is—somebody he was banging banged him back.”
They thanked me for my help, told me to stick around for the inquest on Tuesday, and turned me loose. I got in my rental Ford and drove to the Biltmore, went up to my room, ordered a room service supper, and gave Frank Nitti a call.
“So my name didn’t come up?” Nitti asked me over the phone.
“No. Obviously, I didn’t tell ’em you hired me to come down here; but they didn’t mention you, either. And the way they were giving out information, it would’ve come up. They got a funny way of interrogating you in Florida—they spill and you listen.”
“Did they mention a guy named McGraw?”
“No, Frank. Just this Leo Massey.”
Chicago Lightning Page 24