“Don’t tell me. Of your Uncle Jim.”
“Well, he does! I’ve spent a lot of time with him this week, in Vegas, at the Flamingo. He works hard. He’s really…a very nice guy. People around him love him. He’s so…dedicated to what he wants. He’s like a…visionary.”
“He’s like a gangster, Peg.”
The boat lurched and I held her, one hand on the padded shoulder of her Eisenhower jacket. She let me. She didn’t seem to like it, but she let me.
“I find him charming, too,” I admitted. “I think I might even like the guy, given half the chance. But he came up the hard way. Don’t ever forget that. He kills people.”
“I don’t believe it. It’s just stories.”
“Well, the stories I’ve heard, and they’re not stories, are that he likes getting into the rough stuff, personally. A boss is supposed to limit himself to ordering hits-he’s supposed to plan ’em out, then get the hell to someplace where his alibi is ironclad. But don’t-call-him-Bugsy went out on a contract personally a few years back; just couldn’t resist, I guess, and went along with the boys to make sure it was done right, and pulled the trigger himself, and he almost went to the gas chamber over it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“The only reason he didn’t is because one witness got shot to death, a guy who happened to be Ben’s brother-in-law, in case you’re wondering why a charming guy like that is divorced. And also there was this hitman turned witness who got pushed out a hotel window at Coney Island a while back. Guy named Abe Reles. Murder Incorporated? Remember that from the papers?”
She folded her arms across her chest; she was squinting, not just from the sea spray that was hitting her, but from inward stubbornness. “He just doesn’t seem like that kind of man to me. And, anyway, I think he’s trying to make a new start of it. You should see this resort he’s building. It’s going to be fabulous. It’s exciting just to be around it, to be any small part of it.”
“Christ, you come out here to see if this guy tried to kill your uncle, and wind up president of his fan club! Did he do anything?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you sleep with him?”
She pulled away from me, glared at me. “How can you ask that?”
“I was gonna ask if he screwed you, but I thought that might be a little on the crude side.”
Working our voices up over the motor like we had to meant some of our nuzzling co-passengers heard an occasional word of ours; several of them were looking at us now and I gave them a big sarcastic insincere smile and they looked away.
She huddled to herself. “You’re terrible. He was a perfect gentleman.”
“You walked out on me.”
“I left word.”
“I ought to throw you off this goddamn boat.”
She made a face at me. “Why don’t you just try?”
“I oughta belt you.”
“You really know how to win a girl back, Heller.”
“I didn’t know I’d lost you.”
“I don’t think you quite have, yet. But keep trying.”
We sat in silence for a while-silence but for the launch’s motor and the boat riding through the whitecaps. And some of our fellow passengers whispering about us. I hadn’t had so much fun on a boat since the landing on Red Beach at Guadalcanal.
Then I said: “The point here is that we both believe Siegel is not who paid those guys in the truck to hit your uncle.”
She nodded.
“For me it’s woman’s intuition,” she said, putting her anger away, if not her poutiness. “What’s your detective’s instinct say?”
I ignored her smart-ass tone, saying, “It’s more than instinct. Siegel laid it out perfect-he’s better off with Jim alive. So, logically, Siegel’s not the guy who hired the hit.”
She was nodding. “And Jake Guzik is.”
“Jake Guzik is. The fat little man has been playing it real cute all along. Pulling me in, Jim’s own security man, and ‘confiding’ in me that the Outfit wasn’t behind it. Guzik even bought off one of my own men, but knew me well enough to know, I’d beat the truth out of the guy, so they were careful to make all contacts by phone and money drops. And he didn’t use Outfit guys for the shooters, but hired a couple of West Side bookies, to further confuse the issue. Then he sends me to Jim with a new, more generous offer, but also sends his two gunmen up the Meyer House fire escape, playing it from both ends. Those greasy thumb prints have been all over this from the beginning. I should’ve figured it. Took Siegel himself to wake me up.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means I’m going to tell your uncle that Guzik is responsible. I’m going to tell him to keep that in mind when entering any new negotiations with him.”
She looked at me with utter disbelief. “You don’t think my uncle would sell out at this point, after hearing…”
The launch lurched.
“I don’t know. 1 still think it’s his best option, but with this new knowledge he can go for more money and warn Guzik that he’ll cooperate with Drury and turn those affidavits over to the feds now, if the Outfit doesn’t pay now and stay away later.”
“Would that work?”
I shrugged, sighed, shook my head. “Hell, I don’t know. Anyway, the stubborn old bastard will probably want to keep fighting.”
She moved closer to me. “Do you blame him?”
I slipped my arm around her. “Not really. But I don’t envy him, either.”
Before too long we were in a warm bed in my room at the Roosevelt Hotel. The days apart, the recriminations, all of it, receded in the distance, like the Lux. Faded away, like a barely remembered bad dream. Now there was only the two of us, naked, in each other’s arms, loving each other, ready to put it all behind us and go home and start over.
It was a little after midnight when the phone rang and the bad dream kicked back in.
“It’s after two o’clock out there,” I said to Bill Drury’s staticky, disembodied voice. “What’s so important it can’t wait? Did you lose another witness?”
I was sitting up in bed; the phone was on the nightstand beside me. Peggy, asleep till the phone rang, was only half-awake, half-listening.
“Worse,” Bill’s voice said tinnily. “I’ve been trying to get you all evening. Didn’t you check for messages when you got in?”
“I was preoccupied, okay?”
There was silence for a few moments; the phone company charges for that, too, but it was Bill’s nickel so I just waited for him to speak up. Which he finally did:
“You got her back. Is she there with you? Peg, I mean?”
I smiled over at Peg and she smiled lazily at me. Did I ever mention she had violet eyes?
“Yes, Bill. She’s with me. She’s going to stay with me, too. I’m not giving her any choices.”
“You better give her some support, Nate.”
I winced. “What the hell’s happened?”
“Her uncle’s suffered mercury poisoning. Nobody knows how it happened yet.”
“Mercury poisoning…”
Peg sat up in bed, eyes wide now; she held the covers to her breasts, as if seeking protection.
The voice from the phone said: “He’s dying, Nate.”
It was well after visiting hours, in fact approaching midnight Saturday, when Peg and I walked down the hall at Meyer House toward her uncle’s room, footsteps echoing. Lou Sapperstein was standing guard, a uniformed cop sitting next to him, snoozing; Lou was in shirt-sleeves and suspenders and I hadn’t seen him look so haggard since those weeks after his brother died in the war. At least this time Lou wasn’t wearing a black arm band. Jim Ragen was still alive.
“I think he’s sleeping,” Sapperstein said. “His son Jim, Jr., is in there, keeping up the vigil. Family members been taking turns.”
Peg said, “I’m going in there.”
Sapperstein held open the door for her. I stayed out in the hall. This was family. I was
just the hired help.
“You look like shit,” Sapperstein said.
“I feel worse. If God had meant for man to fly, He’d have given airliners comfortable seats.”
“All day ordeal, huh?”
“Yeah. Peg slept a lot, thank God. She was up most of last night, crying, wanting to talk it through. That made her tired enough today to sleep through most of the trip home.”
Lou shook his head. “I’m sorry as hell about this, Nate. I don’t know how our security could’ve been any tighter.”
“What happened, anyway?”
“Nobody’s sure. They’re saying mercury poisoning, but it’s a guess. Uremic poisoning I’m also hearing. He had a kidney operation Thursday. It’s been downhill ever since.”
“I want to talk to one of the medics. Who’s around?”
“One of the two family doctors. Graaf.”
“Where?”
“He’s been in and out. Try that lounge area down the hall- he’s probably grabbing a smoke.”
I walked down there and Dr. Graaf, a short, well-fed, mustached man of about fifty, in a brown rumpled suit, was sitting, smoking, looking dejected and tired.
He looked up and smiled wearily. “Mr. Heller. Back from the land of make believe.”
I sat next to him. “That’s right, Doc. I only wish I could make believe this isn’t happening.”
“You want a smoke?”
“Yeah. Why not.”
He fired me up and I sucked the smoke into my lungs, held it there, let it out slow.
“So,” I said, “is he going to make it?”
“If you’d asked me that Monday, I’d have said hell, yes. In a week I’d be calling him fully recovered from the wounds and the shock. Oh, impaired, certainly. But he was damn near out of this place, way ahead of schedule.”
“Then what?”
He sighed, raised his eyebrows. “Then he had a sharp decrease in elimination. Blood pressure rose sharply. Decreased urine output. Bloody stools, vomiting…”
“This is all very colorful, Doc. But what does it mean, besides I just lost my appetite for this year?”
“Those are symptoms of mercury poisoning.”
“So we’re talking foul play, definitely.”
“Very likely.”
“How?”
“How does the poem go? ‘Let me count the ways…’”
“I don’t buy that-I set up the security here myself. We put a lid on this joint.”
Graaf sighed. “Mr. Heller-mercury could enter the body through an alcohol rub, the likes of which Mr. Ragen has gotten daily; by enema; by intravenous or intramuscular injection, or absorption through the skin from an ointment.”
“But not orally?”
“That’s the easiest way of all. A tablet the size of an aspirin would contain approximately twice the dosage it would take to kill a man.”
“That’s the only other way-in a pill?”
“Hardly. The mercury could have been administered in coffee, milk, or tomato juice, or sprinkled on food. It would’ve been as tasteless as it was deadly.”
“You’re saying they’ve killed him.”
Graaf looked at the floor. “We don’t make judgments like that, not when a patient is still breathing. Tell me, Mr. Heller. In your line of work, do you ever take on a job that’s more or less hopeless?”
“Never,” I said, and shook his hand, and ground the cigarette out with my heel, and went back up the hall.
Sapperstein was leaning against the wall, standing next to the seated uniformed cop, who was awake now. Frankly, I trust Chicago cops more when they’re sleeping.
“It’s a poisoning, all right,” I said to Lou. “Somebody on the hospital staff, most likely.”
Sapperstein nodded. “I know. I already started poking around-they got twelve hundred people on staff, and in the menial areas, a lot of turnover.”
“Yeah, but we got a restricted guest list.”
Sapperstein gestured down to the clipboard leaned against the wall. “Sure we do, and that may help us find out who slipped your friend this killer Mickey Finn-but the damage is done, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. It is. Damn.”
“He’s a tough old bird, Nate. I like him. I hate to see it end like this.”
“He’s an idiot. Banging his head up against the wall and expecting not to get it bloody. Goddamnit, I should never have played along on this one!”
Sapperstein, not much given to such demonstrations, put his arm around my shoulder and said, “We did what we could, Nate. I don’t think anybody could’ve done any better. He’s your friend, and your girl’s uncle, and this is a tough one to lose. But you been right all along-there was no winning this game. It was rigged from the start.”
I nodded. Smiled at him and rubbed my fingers over my eyes and got rid of the moisture.
Then I went into the room. Jim was asleep, all right; he already looked dead, only you could see his chest moving some. He looked skinny. Pale as milk but nowhere near as healthy. You could smell death in the room. Death and flowers.
Peg was sitting next to him, leaning in toward him, holding his hand as he slept. She was crying; not making any sound, just tears flowing. She hadn’t cried at all today, before now- when she hadn’t been sleeping, in the window seat next to me, she’d been angry. Not really saying anything about anything, just balling fists and shaking them at the air, face balled up, too. That expression “You’re so beautiful when you’re mad” didn’t apply to her; she was a lovely girl, but anger looked ugly on her.
She wasn’t mad now. She was merely devastated. It hadn’t been that long ago that she’d lost her father to a stroke. Now the man she’d put in her father’s place was slipping away from her, water through her fingers.
Jim, Jr., sat in the flowery chintz lounge chair, but he didn’t look very comfortable. He was in his shirt-sleeves, tie loosened, complexion gray, expression blank.
I went over to the boy-boy, hell he was probably my age- and squeezed his shoulder. “How are you holding up?”
“Okay,” he said, with a small, brave, entirely unconvincing smile. “My dad sets a good example. He never gives up, does he?”
“No. It’s not in him.”
Jim, Jr., swallowed. “Sometimes I wish it was.”
“Yeah. Me, too. Let’s step out into the hall and talk. I don’t want to wake your father.”
He nodded and rose; lost his balance momentarily, and I helped him. He’d obviously been sitting in that chair for hours.
We walked down to the lounge area; Dr. Graaf was no longer around. We sat.
“How’s your mom doing?”
“Terrible,” he said. “Just terrible. She’s so devoted to him. She’s not at all well herself, even without this.”
“Have they got her under sedation?”
“No-she refuses that. She wants to be able to go to Dad’s side, if he takes a turn for the worse.”
“I think he’s taken that turn.”
“I know. He’s going to die, isn’t he?”
“I think so. He’s tough, but…”
“He’s been poisoned. The doctors admit they ‘suspect a metallic poison has been introduced.’ They think if they make it sound formal, it makes them sound like they’re on top of things. That’s a laugh.”
“I’m sorry, Jim. The sons of bitches got to your father, and I wasn’t even here to try to stop them.”
“Heller, you’ve done everything anybody could. You put your life on the line more than once. And as for not being here-my father wanted you to go after Peggy. He’s nuts about that kid. And I don’t blame him, really. She’s been aces, all the way-like another sister to us.”
“I’m nuts about her myself. But this is going to be hard on her. Like it’s going to be on all of you.”
He shook his head. “Even Danny-I didn’t think he cared that much-he sat here this afternoon just telling Dad how much he loved him. Crying like a baby. Dad just patted him on the head, saying,
‘There, there, my lad,’ comforting him. Can you imagine?”
“Yeah. I can. You’re going to be under a lot of pressure to sell out, you know.”
He bristled. “Do you think I’d do that? Do you think after all my father’s been through, I’d…” He buried his face in his hands, bent over. He wasn’t crying. He was past that. “I’m so frightened, Mr Heller…I’m so very frightened…”
I patted his back. I couldn’t think of anything to say. There, there, my lad was taken.
“We’re going to lose him, aren’t we? And I’m going to be left to try to stand up to those people.”
I put my hand on his shoulder again. “When your father is dead, and the responsibility falls to you, and your brothers, then you’re going to have to make your mind what the right thing is to do.”
He lifted his head and narrowed his eyes. “You’re not…telling me to sell, are you?”
“I’m telling you when your father’s gone, the responsibility is yours, and so is the decision. Nobody could tell Jim Ragen how to live his life. I don’t think it’s fair for him, even in death, to tell somebody else how to live theirs.”
The flesh around his eyes tensed, momentarily, and I could see his father in his face, so clearly. Then he reached into a pocket and handed me a card. “What do you make of this, Mr. Heller?”
It was white, about the size of an index card but without lines. On it was a crude but unmistakable image: a yellow canary. The card was unsigned.
“Where did you get this? When?”
“In the mail today. What does it mean?”
“What do you think it means?”
“I…I think it’s the underworld’s way of saying my dad shouldn’t have ‘sung.’”
“That’s right. It’s a warning. For nobody else to get vocal. But it’s more than that.”
“More?”
“It means the Outfit is admitting, in its oblique way, that it’s killed your father. He isn’t even dead yet, and they’re telling you they’ve accomplished his killing.”
I handed the card back to him. He looked as if he were about to crush it in his hand, and I stopped him.
“You might want to show that to Lt. Drury,” I said.
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