True Crime

by Collins, Max Allan

  “Four?”

  “Besides you and I, and Anna, there’s my immediate superior, Captain O’Neill. He’s in town today, too.”

  “He always accompany you to pick up collection money from madams?”

  “Heller, we were in town following up leads on the Dillinger case. We had a tip our man was in Chicago, on the North Side.”

  “From Anna?”

  “No. From a gambler I know, a Croatian. But never mind that. When I talked to Anna yesterday—not long after she’d talked to you—I realized our man was within our grasp. We have a vested interest in Mr. Dillinger in Indiana, you know.”

  “Besides the twenty-thousand-dollar reward money, you mean.”

  “Of course. Dillinger’s an embarrassment to Indiana—a native son gone wrong.”

  “Is Leach in on this?”

  Captain Matt Leach was the Indiana state cop who had devoted his entire career, of late, to tracking down Dillinger. A publicity seeker who made Purvis and Ness seem modest by comparison, Leach was hated by a lot of cops, but he was known to be a tireless, even obsessive pursuer of Dillinger.

  “No,” Zarkovich said tersely. “He’s not involved. This is East Chicago business.”

  “A minute ago you said Dillinger was Indiana business.”

  “Specifically, East Chicago.”

  “Why?”

  “He killed a cop there.”

  “Oh. That’s the one killing they have him for.”

  “That’s right. He killed a cop on his way out the door of the First National Bank, killed him with a machine gun. And there were plenty of witnesses.”

  “And you knew this man, this cop Dillinger killed.”

  “Yes—a fine man, who left a widow and children.”

  “So you’d like to get Dillinger.”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to be in on the kill.”

  “You might say that.”

  “As opposed to the capture.”

  “Heller, do you really think Dillinger could be taken alive?”

  “Why not? He’s been caught plenty of times before.”

  “But he knows this time he won’t get away; there wouldn’t be any repeat of the Crown Point disaster—no female sheriffs or shoe-polish guns.”

  “Maybe you’re right. I don’t know. In any case I don’t think I’m interested.”

  “Suit yourself. You’re not planning to talk to Cowley, then? Or Purvis, again?”

  “No. But if you want revenge for that East Chicago cop, then Purvis is the man to see. He’ll shoot first and ask questions later, all right.”

  Zarkovich stood and put his hat on, smiled wryly, cigarette holder still in his mouth. “I’ve dealt with Purvis before. A very excitable boy. He’s just too young for the job.”

  “His ‘men’ are even younger.”

  “I know. The boy’s bungled every job he was ever sent on; he should never have been put in charge of things. It’s a good thing…never mind.”

  “It’s a good thing the East Chicago police are around this time to help him out?”

  “Yes,” Zarkovich smiled. “Exactly.”

  I stood behind my desk. “Just out of curiosity, Sergeant—what are you going to do?”

  “Try to arrange a deal in Anna Sage’s behalf.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “Anna’s got some problems with the immigration people. She thinks maybe these government men could swing things her way, if she helps out with Dillinger.”

  “Maybe they could. I take it you won’t be going to the Chicago cops, then.”

  “Hell, no! Would you?”

  “Stege is a good man.”

  “That’s funny, coming from you.”

  “Just because he doesn’t like me doesn’t mean I don’t respect him. He’s honest and tough. You’d be much better off with him than Purvis.”

  “Thanks for the opinion, Heller. You’re out, then?”

  “I’m out.”

  “That doesn’t make much sense to me, you know.”

  “Just as long as it makes sense to me,” I said.

  He shrugged and left. The topic of going back down to have a mutual beer with Barney never came up.

  But I went down and joined Barney, who asked me why I was so rude to Zarkovich.

  I explained that he was a bagman for East Indiana politicos.

  “And he’s got ties to the Capone crowd,” I said. “Not just because the brothels are Syndicate controlled, either. He was up on a federal conspiracy charge about four years ago. He sided with the Capone faction in a gang war that involved some local East Chicago hoods. He got off, ’cause his politico pals clouted him off. But that is one dirty cop, my friend.”

  “He seemed okay.”

  “He’s slick, and he’s smart. But once he stepped into this picture, an odor turned up. A fishy one.”

  “So you’re getting out of this case,” Barney said. “Or is that ‘job’?”

  “I don’t know what it is,” I said.

  But I didn’t answer the rest of Barney’s question, because I wasn’t sure if I really was out of the Jimmy Lawrence-Polly Hamilton case. Job.

  I drove over to Anna Sage’s three-flat and parked down the street and sat on the rider’s side and pretended to read the Trib while I watched. One of the things I was watching for was Zarkovich. I didn’t see him.

  Around seven-thirty a Checker pulled up and Jimmy Lawrence, with Anna on one arm and Polly on the other, came out of the three-flat, got in the cab, and headed for the Loop.

  I followed them, and guess where they went?

  Down to the lakefront, to the fair.

  Where they caught Sally Rand’s show at the Streets of Paris.

  10

  “That was nice,” Sally Rand said, lighting a cigarette, sitting up in bed with a silk sheet draped across her breasts, “but somehow I don’t think your heart was in it.”

  I propped the pillow up behind me and sat up myself. “I thought my heart was in it,” I shrugged.

  “That wasn’t your heart, sweets. But I’ll settle.” She stroked the side of my face with the back of a gentle, long-nailed hand; the nails felt cool. The whole world felt cool, up here in her air-conditioned suite atop the Drake. “What’s on your mind, Heller? What’s going on behind those brown eyes?”

  “Not much.”

  “You want to get some shut-eye? It’s pretty late.” The radium hand of the little round chrome clock on her white nightstand glowed half-heartedly in the near dark. What light there was in the room came in the windows; she had the shades up, curtains back, and the light from Lake Shore Drive and the Gold Coast and winking boats on the lake came in and bathed us like a cool blue breeze.

  “Sleep if you like, Helen.”

  I was still calling her Helen; at least in bed I was. She seemed to like it. Being called Helen, I mean. And the rest of it, too, I guess.

  She stabbed the cigarette out prematurely in a round glass tray on her nightstand. Then turned back to me, leaned on an elbow and smirked. “Most men in this burg would give up one of the family jewels for a night with Sally Rand. And you somehow don’t seem too thrilled.”

  “It’s not you. Really.”

  “It’s something else.”

  “Yeah. Something else. You get some sleep. I’ll just put on my clothes and head back to my place.”

  “The hell you will! You’ll spend the night, whether you want to or not, Heller. I’ll be damned if I’ll put up with any hit-and-run driving through this joint.”

  I half-smiled at her. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just figured I was lousy company. I’m tickled pink to be sharing a bed with Sally Rand—even if I do happen to know she’s really Helen Beck from Missouri.”

  She hit me with a pillow.

  Then she flicked on the nightstand lamp. It was a translucent glass tube with a silver base, and the light it gave off glowed; it made her, and the room, look like a soft-focus photograph. She leaned forward, pretty breasts swaying
, and kissed me on the mouth for about thirty seconds, then kissed me again, just a smack.

  “Let’s get up,” she said, “and I’ll fix you a midnight snack.”

  “It’s after midnight.”

  “Don’t quibble.”

  “I don’t have any pajamas. Will you take offense if I get dressed?”

  “Yes. Eat in your underwear. I won’t tell anybody.”

  She got up, her body as graceful and supple moving across her bedroom as onstage; she slipped into a white silk kimono, belted it, and waited for me to climb out of bed and follow her. Which I did.

  She led me out through the living room, its soft plush carpet soothing my toes. The room was something out of Hollywood, running to modern, rounded furniture—sofa, divan, chairs, all soft-looking and covered in a sort of sun-bleached gunnysack. Everything was white (except for occasional blond wood) right down to the marble fireplace over which hung an airbrushed painting of orchids. On her way to the kitchen, she stopped to turn on a lamp on the blond end table by the sofa, a lamp that looked like her: a silver nude holding a round piece of frosted glass, like a flat bubble, behind which a pale little light gave off a minimal glow.

  Earlier, before tumbling into bed, we’d sat in this living room, having martinis—a drink I hate, but when Sally Rand offers you martinis in her white art-deco suite before going off to bed with you, you can afford to suffer a little—and leafing through her big scrapbook of show biz clippings and such. There were stills of her in a silent called Paris at Midnight (she was wearing her natural light brown hair publicly in 1926) and another called Golf Widows (but by ’28 was blond); and some on-the-set shots with De Mille, as well as some publicity photos from her Orpheum circuit act, “Sally and Her Boys.” Then the huge front-page spread of her Lady Godvia entrance at the Fine Arts Ball, and the many court appearances her nude dancing earned her (she was given a year in jail, but won an appeal before serving a day) and several pamphlets complaining about her act circulated by “anti-indecency leagues” (anti-indeceny being a lot like pro-decency, I would imagine) and a few stills from the movie she’d made not long ago, with George Raft. I mentioned to her that I knew Raft, and she said, “Small world,” and left it at that. Never name-drop with celebrities.

  Now, in the white, modern compact kitchen, where mosaic white tiles chilled my feet, she scrambled some eggs and put me to work squeezing some oranges; she made some American fries, too, and toast, and we sat in the big modern living room, the one little lamp on, the city lights coming through a wall of windows, with the plates on our laps and our feet up on an ottoman.

  “Where’d you learn to cook like this?” I said.

  “Back on the farm. And I’m a bachelor girl pushing thirty, Heller. If I can’t cook by now, I won’t ever learn.”

  “You can cook,” I confirmed. “Why don’t you give up show business and marry me? I’d let you cook like this all the time. Hell, I make good money. It only takes me a year or so to make what you make in a week.”

  She made a crinkly closed-mouth smile, while she dealt with a bite of breakfast. Then she said, “If that’s a serious proposal, I’ll give it some thought. But you might as well know I’ll never give up show business. You have to take me and my fans, too.”

  “Which fans are those? Feathered, or men with their mouths open?”

  “Fans in general. You don’t disapprove of what I do, do you?”

  “No,” I said, meaning it. “It’s harmless. And you’re good at what you do. I admire that. It’s really very lovely, your act.”

  “Thanks, Nate,” she said. Nibbling on a corner of toast. Eyes sparkling. Corners of her mouth upturned. “I could go for you in a big way. I really could.”

  “I bet you say that to all the boys.”

  Her smile faded; she wasn’t mad or anything, just all of a sudden serious. She put a soft, warm hand on my bare arm.

  “You’re ‘all the boys,’ Nate. I’m no floozy.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest…”

  “I know you didn’t. But you got a right to think I sleep around. Any man who had me on my dressing room floor’s got a right to think I might be a trifle…promiscuous. But I’m not. You’re the first man up here in a long time. That ‘oil millionaire’ you checked up on for me, he only dreamed of getting up here.”

  “You mean you never cooked him breakfast?”

  “Not an egg. Got me?”

  “I gotcha.”

  “Good. Just ’cause I take my pants off to make a buck doesn’t make me a…”

  “No it doesn’t. And if I implied that, shame on me.”

  She leaned over and gave me a buttery kiss, buttery from the toast.

  “Thanks, Nate.”

  “It’s okay, Helen.”

  She smiled at that; she had a rather wide smile, too wide by some men’s standards, but I thought it was her best feature.

  I figured we’d shut the book on this subject, but she went on, looking off distractedly toward the windows and the lights of the Gold Coast. “It’s just that I wasn’t raised to entertain men in my rooms. I was raised to believe in virtue triumphant, honesty prevailing…the old homilies, the old values. They don’t hold up in the real world too well, though, do they, Nate?”

  “Not in Chicago they don’t.”

  “Not anywhere. Not in these times. Not since the Crash. How can a man who’s been at his job thirty years suddenly not have a job? How can it be that businesses that have been around for generations suddenly aren’t anymore? I had friends jump out of windows, Nate. With accuracy.”

  “Things are getting better, Helen. A little.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just feeling guilty.”

  “Why?”

  “For being a bad girl and taking off my pants to make a buck. It isn’t what my daddy wanted out of me, and it isn’t what I wanted out of me, either. I wanted to be a ballerina. I wanted to be an artist. An actress.”

  “A girl’s gotta eat.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said, eating a last bite of American fries. She chewed somberly, swallowed and said, “Maybe I feel guilty ’cause I get thousands of dollars for strutting around with my pants off, while men with families are getting peanuts for working in a factory or something. Or getting nothing at all, ’cause they can’t even find a factory to work in. It just isn’t right.”

  “Why don’t you give all your money to the poor, then?”

  “Don’t be silly! I can’t feed the world! I’m not that well off, I…you’re needling me, aren’t you? That was the point you were making.”

  I shrugged, smiled, chewed.

  “I don’t know, Nate. I eat caviar, and people a few blocks away are in soup kitchens; I wear mink, and pregnant women in Hoovervilles are wearing rags. I pay five hundred bucks a month to sublet this fancy-ass flat from a fag who’s in Florida, and over in Little Italy, not a mile from here, families are living in basements for six bucks a month. How do you expect me not to choke on my success a little?”

  I sipped my orange juice. “Pay your taxes. Find a church to give some money to. That’s a start. Support some charities, if you like. But don’t climb on the cross. It’s hard to hold those fans with your hands nailed like that.”

  She smiled crookedly. “There’d be too many lechers like you trying to climb up there with me.”

  “That’s the ticket,” I said. “These are sad times, Helen. Your heart can break every time you walk down the street, if you let it. And there isn’t much you can do in this life but your job, if you’re lucky enough to have one, the best you know how. And try not to hurt too many people along the way. And maybe buy an apple from a guy on a street corner, once in a while, even if you don’t like apples.”

  She studied me; she had a pale, beautiful look, right then, that I can see before me now.

  “You’re okay, Heller,” she said. “This town hasn’t got the best of you yet.”

  I laughed a little. “Oh yes it has. Many times.”

  “
Here I been bellyaching about my silly concerns, and it’s you who’s been so troubled and preoccupied all night. What’s going on with you, Heller? And why exactly did you show up unannounced at one of my shows, on a Thursday night? Last I heard from you, you planned to come by on Friday….”

  “I was just anxious to see you.”

  “Horseflop. What’s eating you? Come on, Heller, spill!”

  I sighed, thought it over.

  Then I said, “Can you keep something to yourself, even if it’s pretty hot stuff?”

  She blinked, shrugged. “Sure.”

  “You got newspaper pals, and I—”

  “This won’t be in any of the boys’ columns, I promise you.”

  “I know it won’t. This is front-page stuff, Helen. Ben Hecht would come back to cover this.”

  “Now you gotta tell me.”

  I told her.

  I gave her chapter and verse on the events of the week, from my traveling-salesman client to the guy who seemed to be Dillinger.

  “I know I ought to walk away from this,” I said, “but I feel a sort of…I don’t know, responsibility for Polly Hamilton. Not ’cause I…slept with her once. That was nothing—it was just business. But my client hired me to follow her, and that’s business of another stripe. Now, I know he hired me to see if she was cheating on him—he didn’t pay me to be her bodyguard or anything. But he clearly cares about her, and here I am, leading her into a potentially dangerous situation. Potentially, hell—she’s going to be in the middle of a goddamn shooting gallery.”

  “You really think the federal men will just start blasting away at Dillinger, then.”

  “Hell yes. And I’m not even sure the guy’s really Dillinger. I feel a certain responsibility for putting that poor bastard’s head on the block, too—and even if it is Dillinger, I’m not crazy about setting him up for an execution. That’s a job for a judge and jury.”

  “If you feel this way, why don’t you just warn Polly Hamilton? Get her out of there?”

  I shook my head. “She hasn’t left the guy’s side in days; she’s shacking up with him, for Christ’s sake. I can’t warn her without warning him.”