Triple Play: A Nathan Heller Casebook

by Collins, Max Allan

  “Are you really, Nathan?”

  “No.”

  She smiled at that. Then, looking out the window at the Loop gliding by, she said rather absently, “I’d never heard of him.”

  “Never heard of Joltin’ Joe?”

  She looked back and me and a tiny laugh bubbled in her throat. “It was a blind date. My girlfriend said he was a famous ballplayer who liked blondes. I didn’t even know what kind of ballplayer she meant, football or baseball or what. Didn’t want to look any dumber than I already did, but he was a real sweetheart on the date, and you should’ve seen people slapping him on the back, asking him for autographs. They were completely ignoring me.”

  “And you liked that?”

  “I respected it…. Are you married, Nathan?”

  “Not right now.”

  Riccardo’s was a converted warehouse at 437 North Rush; it began in ’34 as a hole-in-the-wall gathering place for artists, writers, and theatrical types, but had been revamped and expanded a decade ago to accommodate the wider clientele its arty atmosphere and exotic reputation attracted.

  The evening was pleasantly warm, with just the right hint of lake breeze, and the tables that spilled out from under the awning onto the sidewalk were packed with patrons enjoying dinner and drinks and a magnificent view of the parking lot. Heads swiveled and eyes widened as I guided Marilyn through the tables and into the restaurant, which somehow managed an intimate ambience despite expansive, open seating and bright lighting designed to show off the framed paintings that were everywhere.

  “Looks more like an art gallery than a restaurant,” Marilyn said breathlessly, her gaze skimming above the heads of diners who were admiring the work of art walking among them.

  “It’s both,” I said, moving her gently through the crowd. “This main dining room is an exhibit hall for young midwestern artists.”

  “What a lovely notion! So the paintings are constantly changing?”

  I nodded. “One-man shows lasting a month.”

  This month’s genius seemed adept at filling canvases with dull gray backgrounds on which danced amoebalike blobs of garish purple, red, and green.

  “Ah,” I said, “here’s Ric…”

  In a black suit and tie, tall, slender, a youthful fifty with his gray crew cut and black eyebrows and mustache, looking like a Mephistophelean maitre d’, Ric Riccardo approached, eyes twinkling, hand outstretched.

  “The Chicago Sherlock,” he said, as we shook hands. “And no introduction is required of this lovely lady…”

  He gently took her fingertips in his and kissed the back of her hand and she smiled and raised her eyebrows, appreciation murmuring behind her kiss of a pursed smile.

  “Marilyn, this is Ric Riccardo.”

  She frowned. “You don’t look much like Desi Arnaz.”

  Ric looked mildly wounded. I wasn’t sure whether she was kidding or not, but somehow with her it didn’t matter.

  “This is the original,” I said, “and he’s Italian, not Cuban.”

  Her bare shoulders lifted and sat themselves down, doing a fine job of it, too, I must say. “I just love the idea of your restaurant, Mr. Riccardo! You’re a true patron of the arts.”

  Ric made a dismissive gesture. “I’m afraid I only did it to have a place to hang my own canvases.”

  “You’re an artist, too?”

  “I’ve never been able to decide whether I paint badly,” Ric sighed, “or whether people just can’t understand what I paint. But at least, here, I sell a canvas now and then.”

  “Don’t let him kid you,” I told her, “his artwork’s even better than his veal scaloppine.”

  Ric’s eyes narrowed. “Which brings us to a difficult subject—my friends, you’ve missed the buffet, and I’m afraid the party has moved from my private dining room into the bar.”

  He led us down into the lower level, where I spotted Ben chatting with a pair of Trib talents, obsessive Sherlock Holmes buff Vincent Starrett and literary section editor Fanny Butcher. Here and there were the likes of bookseller Stuart Brent, Herald American columnist Bob Casey, various other well-known local scribes, John Gunther, Bill Leonard, Bob Cromie, among the bigger names. Mostly, as I had predicted, the crowd consisted of second-stringers and tail-end members from the Renaissance movement, who had gone back to the newspaper world that spawned them.

  “Oooo,” Marilyn said, “look at that odd-shaped bar!”

  “It’s a big artist’s palette,” I said.

  “Oh, it is!” And her laughter chimed.

  “Our murals back behind there,” Ric said proudly, as he led us to a corner table for two, plucking the “reserved” sign off, “are the work of our city’s most well-known artists—the Albrights, Aaron Bohrod, Vincent D’Agostino…”

  “And Desi Arnaz, here,” I said.

  And our host smiled, bowed, and—with us deposited at our cozy table—moved on. Like Ben Hecht, Ric was a pragmatic Renaissance survivor, an artist turned businessman. And like Ben, Ric liked to think he was still a bohemian at heart.

  For all its premeditated hipness, however, Ric’s restaurant bore the square stigmata of Italian restaurants immemorial: instead of the cool tinklings of jazz piano, the air resounded with the strains of “O Sole Mio,” accompanied by violin, mandolin, and concertina, courtesy of strolling singers and musicians in ruffled sleeves and satin trousers.

  Wandering in from the dining room and sidewalk café, where they provided a welcome backdrop for couples romantically dining, came a trio of these singers with a violinist in tow, warbling “Come Back to Sorrento.” This was a misguided sortie into enemy territory, as Ben and other self-styled intellectual and literary lights attending the reunion glanced at them irritably over cocktail glass rims and cigarettes-in-hand.

  A slender ponytail brunette, her olive complexion a stark contrast next to her short-sleeved cream-color dress, planted herself in front of the musicians, hands pressed around a tall glass, swaying to their serenade. At first glance she seemed attractive, even strikingly so, and I pegged her for her midtwenties.

  “She’s having fun,” Marilyn said, not at all judgmentally.

  As the musicians moved through the bar, and closer to us, and the brunette danced sensuously along, I got a closer look at her. The dress was a frayed secondhand-store frock, and she had to be in her thirties. Her big brown eyes were cloudy and dark-circled, her wide mouth slack.

  This girl wasn’t tipsy: she was a lush.

  About this time, the musicians noticed Marilyn—or at least noticed a beautiful blonde—and made their way to our table. I was digging for a half dollar to tip them, and make them go away, when the slender bombed brunette inserted herself between us and the strolling musicians and hip-swayed to their music in a manner that would suit Minksy’s better than Riccardo’s.

  Marilyn’s glance at me was more sad than disapproving.

  The brunette clutched the arm of the nearest singer—a handsome if chubby kid in his twenties, the tenor—and her other hand began moving up and down the thigh of his satin pants.

  “Gentlemen!” a male voice cried, above the syrupy strains. “Please cease.”

  And an absurd figure who might have walked in off a burlesque stage appeared at the fringe of this little tableau, positioning himself alongside the violinist, a foul-smelling corncob pipe in one hand, a double-shot glass of straight whiskey in the other. The four musicians trailed off into stunned silence, and their eyes traveled from the drunken dame to the latest character in this farce, stooped, obviously inebriated, a frail sack of bones swimming in a dark, shabby, slept-in suit set off ever so nattily by a dark frayed food-stained tie and shoes that had long since exploded in wear.

  His face was misshapen from years of drink, the blobby careless first draft of an indifferent sculptor, skull beneath the flesh asserting itself as his features threatened to fall off, his complexion a mottled albino, eyes dark rheumy haunted pools, nose a lumpy sweet potato, mouth a thin crumpled line. His hai
r, unkempt and shaggy as it was, his ears half-covered, sideburns bordering on mutton chop, was the garish reddish brown of a Mercurochrome dye job; it might have been a wig, had this pitiful creature been able to afford one.

  “Could it be,” he said, revealing a jack-o’-lantern smile, his near-toothlessness giving him a Karloff lisp, “that angelic choristers of heaven have invaded this bistro, wings tipped with music vibrating like a flock of wild swans skimming the surface of some enchanted sea?”

  “Shut up, Max,” the brunette said; she had a husky voice that under the right circumstances might have been sexy.

  “Who is that?” Marilyn whispered.

  “The guest of honor,” I said.

  And this was indeed Maxwell Bodenheim, an astonishing husk of the tall, slim, golden-haired ladies’ man I remembered from my father’s bookshop; back then, only his eyebrows had been a devilish red-brown.

  He leaned against the shoulder of the violinist. “And are these the heartwarming, bell-like tones of a Heifetz? Or does the angel Gabriel lurk in your barrel-like form?”

  “Max!” she said. “Can’t a girl dance?”

  He raised the whiskey glass sloshingly, a parody of a toast, underlined by the threat of flinging it in the nearest face (not much of one, because Bodenheim was unlikely to waste such precious fluid in so foolhardy a manner).

  “Or,” he proclaimed, “are you heathens tempting an innocent child into the ways of the nymph, stirring the wildness in her nature and fomenting the bestial longings in her blood?”

  The brunette threw her hands up. “Jesus Christ, Max!”

  The musicians were looking at each other like the Three Stooges wondering how to explain their latest botched wallpapering job to their boss. Wide eyes peered out of the drifting cigarette smoke around us as the Renaissance reunion got a good look at the man of the hour, who was dramatically draining the whiskey glass, handing the empty vessel to the nearest bewildered musician.

  Then, moving with unexpected quickness, and force, Bodenheim grabbed the woman by the arm and she squealed with pain as he intoned, “Or is this ‘innocent’ the heathen? If we are to believe Schopenhauer, women are incapable of romantic love, yet infinitely capable of unfathomable treachery…”

  “Excuse me,” I told the horrified but spellbound Marilyn, and got up and put my hand on Bodenheim’s shoulder.

  “It is rather unfortunate,” he was saying, still clutching his wife’s arm, his face inches from hers with its wide eyes and lips drawn back in snarl, “that the legs of a girl cannot be nailed to the floor…. It’s hard to keep them in one place, except when they are locked up in closets.”

  I said, “Been a long time, Max.”

  The rheumy blue eyes tried to focus, and he suddenly noticed the hand on his shoulder, looking down at it as if it were an oversize, unpleasant moth that had landed there. “I don’t know you, young man. Kindly remove your meat hook from my shoulder.”

  I did, then extended my hand. “Nate Heller. Mahlon’s son.”

  A wrinkled smile formed under the lumpy nose and the eyes tightened in remembrance. “Heller’s Books. Ah yes. The West Side. Wonderful days. Days of youth and passion.” Ric, just behind us, was rounding up his musicians and herding them out of the bar and back up into the dining room.

  In the meantime, Bodenheim had unhanded the brunette and was gesturing to her rather grandly with his corncob pipe in hand. “Heller’s Books, allow me to introduce Mrs. Maxwell Bodenheim.”

  The pretty, lanky lush smiled at me, looked me up and down with open appreciation, and said, “I’ll have to get Max to bring me to Chicago more often.”

  “You’ll have to forgive Ruth,” Bodenheim said, his smile tightening. “She has the morals of an alley cat, but she can’t help it. She, too, comes from a newspaper background…”

  “You mean like me, Max?” Ben asked, stepping into our rarefied social circle. He had a cigar in the fingers of the hand that held his glass of Scotch. He had the uneasy smile of a host who suddenly realized he had invited a disaster area for a guest.

  Bodenheim beamed at the sight of his old friend and adversary; his smile had more holes than teeth. “I was referring…” He gestured and sneered and stage-whispered: “…to these lesser lights. Literary section editors. Book reviewers. Columnists….”

  Ben smirked. “Try not to alienate them too bad, Bodie, till I pass the hat for ya.”

  Ruth floated off and I returned to the small table where a stilted Marilyn was talking to Herb Lyon of the Trib. He was trying to wrangle an impromptu follow-up interview for his Tower Ticker column; I gently let Herb know this was a social occasion and he drifted off. Soon Marilyn was sipping a glass of champagne; I had a Coke—I was working, after all—while Bodenheim (who had somehow acquired another drink) had Hecht up against a wall, the former getting worked up and Hecht’s patient smile wearing thinner and thinner.

  I only got bits and pieces of it, mostly Bodenheim, saying, “I have always liked your work, my cynical friend, I can honestly say I’ve never slammed it…Count Bruga, of course, excepted…. Ben, you had great ability in fields of prose, where money alone lies. I am an indifferent prose writer and a very good poet. That explains the difference in our purses!”

  “Such a sad, brilliant man,” Marilyn said, working on her second glass of champagne.

  “Sad, anyway.”

  “You don’t think he’s brilliant?”

  “He’s got an impressive line of bullshit,” I said, “for a deadbeat.”

  “How can you say that? His language is beautiful!”

  “But what he says is ugly.”

  “I don’t care. I want to meet him.”

  I didn’t argue with her. Mine was not to reason why. Mine was but to do and sigh.

  As I approached Bodenheim, he continued filibustering his old friendly foe: “If we don’t raise at least twenty dollars tonight, Ben, I shan’t be able to get my typewriter out of hock when I return to that shallow, mean, and uncouth frenzy known as New York.”

  “Then as you wend your way around this room, Bodie,” Ben said, smiling the world’s tightest smile, “I suggest you find some topic of discussion beside the ‘stench of Capitalism.’ Your old friends, the ones still alive anyway, aren’t radicals anymore. They’re democrats.”

  “I do need my typewriter,” Bodenheim said, as if Ben had said nothing, “even though I have not sold one of my short stories or poems yet this year.” He took a healthy swig from his latest glass of whiskey. “But hope is a warmly smiling, stubbornly tottering child—and without a typing machine I would feel like a writer with spinal meningitis.”

  I whispered to Ben: “Marilyn wants to meet the Great Man.”

  Ben rolled his eyes, and said, “All right, but let’s both chaperone him, then.”

  Bodenheim was saying, “You might consider it a persecution complex, but I’m convinced these rejections stem from the days when I threw many a caustic jab at the intellectual dwarfs who pass as literary editors and critics…”

  Taking his toothpick arm, I said, “Max, that lovely blonde would like to meet you. She’s quite famous. That’s Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Heller Books, it would be my immense pleasure!” he said, something flickering in the cloudy eyes, the ghost of a once-great womanizer, perhaps.

  I ushered him over to the table, where Marilyn rose, smiling, almost blushing, saying, “Mr. Bodenheim, I’ve worn my copy of your Selected Poems simply to tatters.”

  He took her hand and, much as Ric had, kissed it; I hope she washed it, later. With antiseptic soap.

  “My dear,” Bodenheim said, bowing, “your taste is as impeccable as your skin is luminous. May I sit?”

  She gestured eagerly. “Please.”

  Ben and I commandeered a couple extra chairs and the four of us crowded around the postage-stamp table as the Tattered King of Greenwich Village conferred with Hollywood’s reigning Sex Queen.

  “Miss Monroe, I have admired your contributions to the
cinema,” he said.

  “I would think an artist of your stature wouldn’t find much of value in what I do,” she said, obviously as flattered as she was surprised.

  Ben said, “I never knew you to go to a picture show, Bodie.”

  “I have slept in some of the finest grindhouses on Forty-Second Street,” he said rather grandly. He was looking around, probably for his wife. She was nowhere in sight. He returned his gaze to the incandescent beauty who hung on his every word.

  “I adore your contribution to the arts, my dear,” he said, the sarcasm so faint I wasn’t sure it was there. “You remind me of the Bali woman who walks naked down to her navel, and proudly displays her beautifully formed breasts; making love is as a natural to her as breathing, or singing. Sex is really the song of the spirit as well as the flesh, and my dear, you are a prima donna, a diva, of your art.”

  This slice of condescension-laced sexual innuendo made Ben wince, but Marilyn seemed not to mind, even to take it as a compliment.

  “But what I do is so…ephemeral,” Marilyn said. “Your poetry will live forever.”

  He leaned forward. “Do you know what poetry is, my dear?”

  “I think I do…I don’t know if I could put it into words…”

  Now he sat back again. “It’s the deep, unformed longing to escape from daily details…to enter delicately imaginative plateaus, unconnected with human beliefs, or fundamental human feelings…”

  “Oh, but Mr. Bodenheim…”

  He puffed the corncob. “Call me Max, child—or Bodie, as my friends do.”

  Ben rolled his eyes, as if to say, What friends?

  Marilyn’s expression was heartbreakingly sincere. “But, Max…your poems are filled with human feeling….”

  He nodded, exhaling foul smoke; I had a hunch if you took the smoke away, he wouldn’t smell much better.

  “I am cursed with a malady of the soul,” the poet said. “I am constantly tempted to desert the sleek jest of this physical existence.”

  Her eyes tightened. Her question was a whisper: “Suicide?”

  “My life has been a dirty, cruel, involved, crucified mess—with the exception of my glittering words. And sometimes I even hate them, my pretty, glittering words. But where would I be without that golden braid of language that lifts me up out of my life?”