The Million-Dollar Wound

by Collins, Max Allan

  Eliot nodded.

  I said, “It could well be. But it sure isn’t Nitti’s style.”

  He nodded again. “I tend to agree. On the other hand, a million dollars is a lot of money.”

  “So you know about that? The Stagehands ‘income-tax’ fund.”

  “Yes. And that’s a conservative estimate. I’ve heard as high as two million, and the most frequent figure is one point five mil.”

  “Your point being?”

  He lifted his eyebrows and set them back down. “A torture killing is hardly Nitti’s style, granted. Estelle Carey was enough of a celebrity in this town to guarantee her murder attracting headlines. Knowing that, Nitti would seem more likely either to have arranged an ‘accident’ or at the very least brought in out-of-town torpedoes to neatly do the deed. Estelle was running with Eddie McGrath, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t. And who the hell is Eddie McGrath?”

  “A New York crumb. Very high ranking in the Joe Adonis/Frank Costello circle. She’d been seeing him down in Miami Beach.”

  “In other words, if Nitti wanted her dead, he could bring in out-of-town talent and the blame easily be placed on New York.”

  “Right. He’s done it before.”

  “E. J. O’Hare,” I said. “Tommy Maloy.”

  “Certainly. And others. So I agree that using what appears to be local talent on a torture killing doesn’t fit Nitti’s pattern. But there are rumors, Nate, that Nitti’s slipping.”

  “Nitti slipping? How?”

  He shrugged. “Mentally. Physically. Some say Ricca’s more powerful than Nitti, now. Or anyway coming up fast. You yourself mentioned Accardo and Giancana, so you had to have noticed it starting even before you left town, last year.”

  I shook my head no. “I don’t buy it. Nitti slipping? No way. Never.”

  “He’s not a god, Nate. Or some kind of satan, either. He’s a crafty, intelligent, amoral human being. But he is a human being. His wife Anna died a year and a half ago, you know.”

  “I did see that in the papers…”

  He gestured with two open hands. “He was devoted to her. His family is all to him, they say.”

  I remembered him showing me the photo of his little boy.

  “He’s had some financial setbacks,” Eliot went on. “He’s got this federal grand jury breathing down his neck, and the income-tax boys are after him again. He’s been in and out of the hospital for his ulcers and back pain. It’s closing in on him.”

  “And this, you think, might lead to him condoning what happened to Estelle Carey today?”

  “Possibly. That money she supposedly had hidden away for Dean was something Nitti might well have instructed his killers to find out the whereabouts of, by whatever means necessary, before finishing the job. A million bucks, Nate! Or possibly even two. Sure it’s possible.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t want to think so.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I’m not stupid. But I think you, well… Nate, you look up to the guy, somehow. Admire him.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You just can’t remember when this wasn’t his town. You just can’t accept change.”

  “I didn’t know I had a choice. I tried to buy a pair of shoes, late this afternoon, they told me I needed a goddamn ration ticket. I told ’em I was at Guadalcanal fighting to preserve their way of life, and they suggested I go back there and ask for a ration book.”

  He laughed. “I bet you took that well.”

  “Funny thing is, I did. I started out bad, and was shouting, the guy was shouting back, and then I just sort of faded away. Wandered back out on the street.”

  “Well, you’d just come back from that ghastly scene at the Carey apartment…”

  “That was part of it. But I can’t handle this place.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “What place?”

  “This place. The real world. You know, I thought when I got back here it would be the same.”

  “And it changed on you.”

  “Not really, not in any important way. That’s the trouble. I came back, and it was the same trivial everyday life waiting for me, my job, credit checks and insurance adjusting and divorce surveillance, and is that what we’re the fuck fighting for?”

  “Maybe. Maybe it’s enough.”

  “And then there’s the killing. The Outfit or whoever, they’re still at it, I mean here we are fighting for democracy over there and over here people are pouring whiskey on people and setting them on fire, and cutting them up and…”

  He grabbed my arm, squeezed. Apparently it had been shaking, my arm.

  “Nate.”

  “I’m… I’m sorry.”

  “Here,” he said. He handed me a handkerchief.

  Apparently I’d been crying. I wiped my face with it.

  “Goddamnit, I’m sorry, Eliot.”

  Then the head waiter was standing next to me, and I figured I was finally getting thrown out of the joint.

  I was wrong.

  “Miss Rand would like to see you backstage, sir,” he said. Politely. Only the faintest trace of distaste.

  I asked him how to get there and he pointed to a door to the right of where the orchestra was playing.

  “Eliot, come with me,” I said.

  “No. This should be a private reunion.”

  “I’m not up to it. You come along.”

  Reluctantly, he rose, and we moved along the edge of the crowded dance floor where couples, old men and young women mostly, were clutching each other to “Be Careful, It’s My Heart.” We went up some stairs and in a hallway we found a door with a gold star; not a service flag, either. I knocked.

  She opened the door and smiled at me, looking just a little older, but not much; her blue eyes, the bluest light blue eyes in the world, stood out startlingly, partly due to the long theatrical lashes, partly due to God. She had on a silk robe, not unlike Estelle’s but blue, yawning open a little to reveal creamy talcumed breasts; no doubt she was naked underneath it, like Estelle, albeit in better condition.

  Then she saw Eliot, and her eyes just barely revealed her disappointment that I wasn’t alone, but her smile stayed, and stayed sincere, and she was shaking Eliot’s hand without my having introduced her, saying, “Eliot Ness—this is a real treat. I knew you and Nate were friends, but somehow it never seemed real to me till this very moment.”

  She cinched the belt ’round her robe tighter, and gestured for us to step in. It was a small, neat dressing room with a large lightbulb-framed makeup mirror, a few chairs and a hinged dressing screen.

  “Where do you keep your feathers?” Eliot asked, with a cute wry little smile. He always did well with the ladies, by the way. Except in marriage.

  “That’s the prop man’s department,” she said, with her own cute little wry smile. “Union rules, you know.”

  “Nate knows all about the Stagehands Union.”

  Sally didn’t get the joke. “Really?” she said, looking at me, a bit confused.

  “Inside joke,” I said. “You were wonderful tonight.”

  “Thank you,” she said. Her smile tried to stay polite but I could sense the ice forming. “You might’ve told a girl you were coming.”

  I shrugged. “Last minute. Eliot showed up and invited me out for supper…”

  “And,” Eliot said, saving me, “I’d noticed you were appearing in town, and knew you two were old pals, so I hauled him down here. He, uh…he only got back just this morning.”

  She stood near me, looked at me carefully. Touched my face. “I can see that. You dear. You poor, poor dear.”

  There was no sarcasm in it.

  I swallowed. “Please, Sally. I…please.”

  She turned to Eliot and said, “Could we have a moment alone, please? I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Ness.”

  “It’s Eliot, and don’t be silly,” he said, and was gone.

  “You’re still mad at me,” she said.
>
  “I don’t remember being mad at all.”

  “Do you remember not returning my phone calls the last two times I was in town?”

  “That was years ago.”

  “I haven’t seen you since…when was it?”

  “Nineteen forty?”

  “November 1939,” she said. “That night I bribed my way into your apartment. That gangster… Little New York…he showed up and you pulled a gun on him. Do you remember that?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Do you remember how sweet that night was?”

  I couldn’t look at her. Her blue eyes were just too goddamn blue for me to look at them. “It was a swell night, Sally.”

  “I wish you’d call me Helen.”

  “There’s no going back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was too long ago. There’s no going back.”

  “Nate, I know it was wrong of me to just leave you a note like that. I should’ve stuck around, or called you the next day, but it was a bad time for me—I was bankrupt, I was working my ass off getting my business life back together, and my personal life just got lost in the shuffle, and…”

  “That’s not it.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “There’s no going back,” I said. “Excuse me.”

  I opened the door; Eliot was standing out there, leaning against the far wall. “We better go,” I said.

  “If you want,” he said.

  “Sally, you look great,” I said, my back to her. “It was great seeing you again.”

  I went back to the table. Eliot trailed after, in a few minutes.

  “Where have you been?” I said, and it sounded nasty. I hadn’t meant it to, really, but it did.

  “Talking to a fine lady,” he said, angry with me but holding himself back. “She thinks a lot of you, and you should’ve treated her better.”

  “What did you talk about, anyway?”

  Very tightly he said, “She’s concerned about you. Why, I don’t know. But she asked me a few questions, and I answered them. Why, is your civilian status a military secret?”

  “Hell,” I said, getting up, “my life’s an open book.”

  And I got up and walked outside. Stood on the corner and listened to the El roar by. I could smell the lake.

  Eliot joined me, after paying the bill. He looked sad, not angry. I felt sheepish.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Forget it. You want to get another beer someplace?”

  “No.”

  “Want a lift someplace? I got a car, at the hotel garage. Better still, I got an E sticker.”

  I laughed shortly. “You and every politician in town, I’ll wager.”

  “For a guy just back from overseas,” he said, “you’re catching on fast.”

  “This isn’t my first time in Chicago.”

  “No? Then maybe you could recommend someplace else we could have a beer. What do you say?”

  I said, finally, yes, and we walked to Barney’s Cocktail Lounge, where Barney’s brother Ben hugged me, even though we’d never been friends, really. I was the closest thing he could get to his brother, so I made do for a surrogate hugee. He’d talked to Barney long-distance in Hollywood just today. Barney indeed would be home soon, but Ben didn’t know when exactly.

  The bar closed at one o’clock—another wartime sacrifice, but as a wise man once said, if you can’t get soused by one you ain’t trying—and Eliot and I stumbled out onto the street, and he set out toward his hotel, the LaSalle, and I walked home.

  I wasn’t drunk, really. I’d had six or seven bottles of beer all told, spread well out over the evening. But you would think I’d drunk enough to make me tired. You would think I’d had long enough a day, shitty enough a day, to be sleepy.

  But instead I sat at my desk in my skivvies with the glow of the neon night sunning me through the window. I sat there slumped on my folded arms like a kid sleeping on his desk at school, only I wasn’t sleeping. I sat there staring at the Murphy bed, folded down, fresh sheets and blankets waiting, that bed I’d slept in so many times, so many years before. Janey. Louise.

  I reached under the desk and searched for and found the key I’d taped there, long ago. I removed it and worked it in the bottom drawer. There, waiting for me, was a bottle of rum, and my nine-millimeter automatic, both tangled up in my shoulder holster. I untangled them, left the gun in its holster out on the desk and drank from the rum like it was a bottle of pop.

  But I still couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t even think of sleeping.

  Who killed you, Estelle?

  D’Angelo, are you back, too? Are you fighting the homefront war like I am? Was Estelle a casualty?

  Monawk—who killed you, buddy? Bullets flying everywhere, Monawk screaming, Barney pitching grenades, D’Angelo, where are you?

  Somebody screamed.

  Me.

  I sat up.

  I had slept. Just for a moment. I was sweating, as if from a fever. Neon pulsed over me. I sat there, chilled, wondering if I could ever sleep again without returning to that shell hole. Wondering if I could ever sleep again until I knew what happened to Monawk.

  And Estelle. They were tied together in my mind, now, those two deaths, those two murders, and D’Angelo was the knot.

  Somebody knocked at the door.

  I glanced at my watch; it was after two.

  I jerked the nine millimeter from the holster.

  I walked slowly to the door and flung it open and pointed it at the person standing there.

  A tiny little person, smelling like talcum, wearing a tailored mannish suit with high square padded shoulders, only it wasn’t a man. Sally stood with her purse in front of her like a fig leaf and her blonde curls piled on her head like a friendly offering to an unfriendly god, and I stood there in my skivvies with a gun in my hand and she smiled, sweetly, sadly, and said, “Please don’t shoot.”

  I dropped the gun to the floor and took her in my arms and held her. Held her.

  “Helen,” I said. “Helen.”

  The next morning it was snowing, the wind off the lake turning modest flurries into a whistling, swirling near storm. I dug my hands in my overcoat pockets, my hat pulled down, looking down, getting snow tossed in my face anyway, like fine particles of icy glass, as I walked the several blocks from the El to the Linn Funeral Home, for Estelle’s services.

  The Linn’s tiny mortuary chapel was in a low-rise business district in the blue-collar section of Lakeview, two blocks south of Wrigley Field. Only a handful of mourners showed up. I squeezed the hand of Estelle’s weeping mother, and shook the hand of her confused stepfather; I’d never met either before, but her mother remembered my name from when I’d dated Estelle, back when she was a girl working the counter at Rickett’s. I could see Estelle’s pert beauty lurking in the older woman’s thin face, those same green eyes, only the mother’s were behind wire-rim glasses and lacked the gloss of greed. I shook the hand of an attractive brunette in a fur stole, a cousin of Estelle’s; five would get you ten she was a 26 girl, too.

  Last night’s papers, and this morning’s, were already filled with tales of the “queen of the dice gal’s” many suitors; but none of them seemed to have showed. The small colorless chapel wasn’t a third full, and the only men present were the stepfather, the undertaker, Drury’s boss Chief of Detectives Sullivan, and me. No clergy. Her mother had tried, but no luck: it was unhallowed ground for Estelle. Half a dozen glamour girls in fashionable black, ladies of the evening whose beauty looked harder in the daytime, sat weeping into hankies, or trying to remember how to weep. Those who could were crying for themselves, I supposed, knowing that there but for the grace of God…

  The functional gray-metal casket was closed, of course. No mortician alive could have restored that face. Atop the coffin lay a simple spray of orchids. The card read: “To a good pal.” Unsigned, it seemed to me obviously Dean’s work. A real sentimental guy, that Nicky.

  I stood t
here and looked at the casket and tried to believe she was in there. That pretty, greedy little dame. I couldn’t. No tears would come to my eyes either, and a part of me was trying. Well, I’d cried for her last night. That was good enough. So long, baby.

  The undertaker locked the chapel doors, to keep out the morbid, though the snow had already done the job, for the most part, and walked to a small podium and spoke a few muffled words, made virtually inaudible by the wracking sobs of Estelle’s mother.

  It soon came time for the casket to be borne to a waiting hearse, only there were no pallbearers. The undertaker recruited Chief Sullivan and me, but six were needed to do the job. Of the handful of the curious who stood in the snow outside—mostly the professionally curious, which is to say reporters—three were enlisted and we carried Estelle to the hearse, which had a C sticker, by the way, like most vehicles used for delivery. The family was being helped into a limo by the undertaker’s assistant. A four-car procession, led by the hearse, was all it took to bear the mourners. There was a black limo across the street, parked, its engine going, the windows fogged up; but, oddly, it didn’t pull in behind the other cars, as they left for St. Joseph’s Cemetery, driving into the blustering snow. But then I didn’t go with them, either. I just stood there letting the particles of icy snow flick at my face.

  One of the pallbearing reporters was an old friend of mine. Hal Davis of the News. Even with a heavy overcoat on, and a pulled-down fedora, his head seemed too large for his body; the bright eyes in his boyish face—he was approaching fifty but looked thirty-five—grew brighter as he recognized me.

  “Hey, it’s Heller. I must’ve been walking behind you. For all the men she boffed, you’d think they wouldn’t have to resort to strangers to cart her away.”

  I decked him.

  He hit the snowy sidewalk, or anyway his ass did, sending up puffs of powdery white. He hadn’t landed so hard, really. He looked up at me, his pride more wounded than anything else, a small trickle of blood at one corner of his mouth.

  “What was that for?”

  “General principle. You’ve had that coming for years.”

  “Fuck you! Help me up.”

  I did.

  He brushed himself off, his coat first; the few other reporters were dispersing, smiling at Davis’s fate. He dusted off his hat. “And here I wrote that nice piece about you the other day.”