Chicago Lightning : The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories

by Collins, Max Allan

It wasn’t even Christmas and already here was a second screen goddess who wanted to hop in the sack with me. I must have really been something.

  “Listen, if you like me, just say so. But we’re not making a business arrangement—I got a client, already.”

  Then she suggested I do to myself what she’d just offered to do for me. She was full of ideas.

  So was I. I was pretty sure Thelma and Eastman were indeed having an affair, but it was of the on-again-off-again variety. One night they’d be affectionate, in that sickening Hollywood sweetie-baby way; the next night he would be cool to her; the next she would be cool to him. It was love, I recognized it, but the kind that sooner or later blows up like an overheated engine.

  Ten days before Christmas, Thelma was honored by Lupino Lane—the famous British comedian, so famous I’d never the hell heard of him—with a dinner at the Troc. At a table for twelve upstairs, in the swanky cream-and-gold dining room, Thelma was being feted by her show-biz friends, while I sat downstairs in the oak-paneled Cellar Lounge with other people not famous enough to sit upstairs, nursing a rum and Coke at the polished copper bar. I didn’t feel like a polished copper, that was for sure. I was just a chauffeur with a gun, and a beautiful client who didn’t need me.

  That much was clear to me: in the two months I’d worked for Thelma, I hadn’t spotted anybody following her except a few fans, and I couldn’t blame them. I think I was just a little bit in love with the ice-cream blonde myself. We’d only had that one slightly inebriated night together—and neither of us had mentioned it since, or even referred to it. Maybe we were both embarrassed; I didn’t figure either of us were exactly the type to be ashamed.

  Anyway, she was a client, and she slept around, and neither of those things appealed to me in a girl—though everything else about her, including her money, did.

  About half an hour into the evening, I heard a scream upstairs. A woman’s scream, a scream that might have belonged to Thelma.

  I took the stairs four at a time and had my gun in my hand when I entered the fancy dining room. Normally when I enter fancy dining rooms with a gun in my hand, all eyes are on me. Not this time.

  Thelma was clawing at her ex-husband, who was laughing at her. She was being held back by Patsy Kelly, the dark-haired rubber-faced comedienne who was Thelma’s partner in the two-reelers. DeCiro, in a white tux, had a starlet on his arm, a blonde about twenty with a neckline down to her shoes. The starlet looked frightened, but DeCiro was having a big laugh.

  I put my gun away and took over for Patsy Kelly.

  “Miss Todd,” I said, gently, whispering into her ear, holding onto her two arms from behind, “don’t do this.”

  She went limp for a moment, then straightened and said, with stiff dignity, “I’m all right, Nathan.”

  It was the only time she ever called me that.

  I let go of her.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked. I was asking both Thelma Todd and her ex-husband.

  “He embarrassed me,” she said, without any further explanation.

  And without any further anything, I said to DeCiro, “Go.”

  DeCiro twitched a smile. “I was invited.”

  “I’m uninviting you. Go.”

  His face tightened and he thought about saying or doing something. But my eyes were on him like magnets on metal and instead he gathered his date and her decolletage and took a powder.

  “Are you ready to go home?” I asked Thelma.

  “No,” she said, with a shy smile, and she squeezed my arm, and went back to the table of twelve where her party of Hollywood types awaited. She was the guest of honor, after all.

  Two hours, and two drinks later, I was escorting her home. She sat in the back of the candy-apple red Packard in her mink coat and sheer mauve-and-silver evening gown and diamond necklace and told me what had happened, the wind whipping her ice-blonde hair.

  “Nicky got himself invited,” she said, almost shouting over the wind. “Without my knowledge. Asked the host to reserve a seat next to me at the table. Then he wandered in late, with a date, that little starlet, which you may have noticed rhymes with harlot, and sat at another table, leaving me sitting next to an empty seat at a party in my honor. He sat there necking with that little tramp and I got up and went over and gave him a piece of my mind. It…got a little out of hand. Thanks for stepping in, Heller.”

  “It’s what you pay me for.”

  She sat in silence for a while; only the wind spoke. It was a cold Saturday night, as cold as a chilled martini. I had asked her if she wanted the top up on the convertible, but she said no. She began to look behind us as we moved slowly down Sunset.

  “Heller,” she said, “someone’s following us.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Somebody’s following us, I tell you!”

  “I’m keeping an eye on the rear-view mirror. We’re fine.”

  She leaned forward and clutched my shoulder. “Get moving! Do you want me to be kidnapped, or killed? It could be Luciano’s gangsters, for God’s sake!”

  She was the boss. I hit the pedal. At speeds up to seventy miles per, we sailed west around the curves of Sunset; there was a service station at the junction of the boulevard and the coast highway, and I pulled in.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  I turned and looked into the frightened blue eyes. “I’m going to get some gas, and keep watch. And see if anybody comes up on us, or suspicious goes by. Don’t you worry. I’m armed.”

  I looked close at every car that passed by the station. I saw no one and nothing suspicious. Then I paid the attendant and we headed north on the coast highway. Going nice and slow.

  “I ought to fire you,” she said, pouting back there.

  “This is my last night, Miss Todd,” I said. “I’m getting homesick for Chicago. They got a better breed of dishonest people back there. Anyway, I like to work for my money. I feel I’m taking yours.”

  She leaned forward, clutched my shoulder again. “No, no, I tell you, I’m frightened.”

  “Why?”

  “I…I just feel I still need you around. You give me a sense of security.”

  “Have you had any more threatening notes?”

  “No.” Her voice sounded very small, now.

  “If you do, call me, or the cops. Or both.”

  It was two a.m. when I slid the big car in in front of the sprawling Sidewalk Café. I was shivering with cold; a sea breeze was blowing, Old Man Winter taking his revenge on California. I turned and looked at her again. I smiled.

  “I’ll walk you to the door, Miss Todd.”

  She smiled at me, too, but this time the smile didn’t light up her face, or the world, or me. This time the smile was as sad as her eyes. Sadder.

  “That won’t be necessary, Heller.”

  I was looking for an invitation, either in her eyes or her voice; I couldn’t quite find one. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Do me one favor. Work for me next week. Be my chauffeur one more week, while I decide whether or not to replace you with another bodyguard, or…what.”

  “Okay.”

  “Go home, Heller. See you Monday.”

  “See you Monday,” I said, and I watched her go in the front door of the Café. Then I drove the Packard up to the garage above, on the Palisades, and got in my dusty inelegant 1925 Marmon and headed back to the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. I had a hunch Thelma Todd, for all her apprehensions, would sleep sounder than I would, tonight.

  My hunch was right, but for the wrong reason.

  Monday morning, sunny but cool if no longer cold, I pulled into one of the parking places alongside the Sidewalk Café; it was around ten thirty and mine was the only car. The big front door was locked. I knocked until the Spanish cleaning woman let me in. She said she hadn’t seen Miss Todd yet this morning. I went up the private stairway off the kitchen that led up to the two apartments. The door at the top of the stairs was unlocked; beyond it were the two f
acing apartment doors. I knocked on hers.

  “Miss Todd?”

  No answer.

  I tried for a while, then went and found the cleaning woman again. “Maria, do you have any idea where Miss Todd might be? She doesn’t seem to be in her room.”

  “She might be stay up at Meester Eastmon’s.”

  I nodded, started to walk away, then looked back and added as an afterthought, “Did you see her yesterday?”

  “I no work Sunday.”

  I guess Maria, like God, Heller and Thelma Todd, rested on Sunday. Couldn’t blame her.

  I thought about taking the car up and around, then said to hell with it and began climbing the concrete steps beyond the pedestrian bridge that arched over the highway just past the Café. These steps, all two-hundred and eighty of them, straight up the steep hill, were the only direct access from the coast road to the bungalow on Cabrillo Street. Windblown sand had drifted over the steps and the galvanized handrail was as cold and wet as a liar’s handshake.

  I grunted my way to the top. I’d started out as a young man, had reached middle age by step one hundred and was now ready for the retirement home. I sat on the cold damp top step and poured sand out of my scuffed-up Florsheims, glad I hadn’t bothered with a shine in the last few weeks. Then I stood and looked past the claustrophobic drop of the steps, to where the sun was reflecting off the sand and sea. The beach was blinding, the ocean dazzling. It was beautiful, but it hurt to look at. A seagull was flailing with awkward grace against the breeze like a fighter losing the last round. Suddenly Lake Michigan seemed like a pond.

  Soon I was knocking on Eastman’s front door. No answer. Went to check to see if my client’s car was there, swinging up the black-studded blue garage door. The car was there, all right, the red Packard convertible, next to Eastman’s Lincoln sedan.

  My client was there, too.

  She was slumped in front, sprawled across the steering wheel. She was still in the mink, the mauve-and-silver gown, and the diamond necklace she’d worn to the Troc Saturday night. But her clothes were rumpled, in disarray, like an unmade bed; and there was blood on the front of the gown, coagulated rubies beneath the diamonds. There was blood on her face, on her white, white face.

  She’d always had pale creamy skin, but now it was as white as a wedding dress. There was no pulse in her throat. She was cold. She’d been dead a while.

  I stood and looked at her and maybe I cried. That’s my business, isn’t it? Then I went out and up the side steps to the loft above the garage and roused the elderly fellow named Jones who lived there; he was the bookkeeper for the Sidewalk Café. I asked him if he had a phone, and he did, and I used it.

  I had told my story to the uniformed men four times before the men from Central Homicide showed. The detective in charge was Lieutenant Rondell, a thin, somber, detached man in his mid-forties with smooth creamy gray hair and icy eyes. His brown gabardine suit wasn’t expensive but it was well-pressed. His green pork-pie lightweight felt hat was in his hand, in deference to the deceased. Out of deference to me, he listened to my story as I told it for the fifth time. He didn’t seem to think much of it.

  “You’re telling me this woman was murdered,” he said.

  “I’m telling you the gambling syndicate boys were pressuring her, and she wasn’t caving in.”

  “And you were her bodyguard,” Rondell said.

  “Some bodyguard,” said the other man from homicide, Rondell’s brutish shadow, and cracked his knuckles and laughed. We were in the garage and the laughter made hollow echoes off the cement, like a basketball bouncing in an empty stadium.

  “I was her bodyguard,” I told Rondell tightly. “But I didn’t work Sundays.”

  “And she had to go to Chicago to hire a bodyguard?”

  I explained my association with Fred Rubinski, and Rondell nodded several times, seemingly accepting it.

  Then Rondell walked over and looked at the corpse in the convertible. A photographer from Homicide was snapping photos; pops and flashes of light accompanied the detective’s trip around the car as if he were a star at a Hollywood opening.

  I went outside. The smell of death is bad enough when it’s impersonal; when somebody you know has died, it’s like having asthma in a steam room.

  Rondell found me leaning against the side of the stucco garage.

  “It looks like suicide,” he said.

  “Sure. It’s supposed to.”

  He lifted an eyebrow and a shoulder. “The ignition switch is turned on. Carbon monoxide.”

  “Car wasn’t running when I got here.”

  “Long since ran out of gas, most likely. If what you say is true, she’s been there since Saturday night…that is, early Sunday morning.”

  I shrugged. “She’s wearing the same clothes, at least.”

  “When we fix time of death, it’ll all come clear.”

  “Oh, yeah? See what the coroner has to say about that.”

  Rondell’s icy eyes froze further. “Why?”

  “This cold snap we’ve had, last three days. It’s warmer this morning, but Sunday night, Jesus. That sea breeze was murder—if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  Rondell nodded. “Perhaps cold enough to retard decomposition, you mean.”

  “Perhaps.”

  He pushed the pork pie back on his head. “We need to talk to this bird Eastman.”

  “I’ll say. He’s probably at his studio. Paramount. When he’s on a picture, they pick him up by limo every morning before dawn.”

  Rondell went to use the phone in old man Jones’ loft flat. Rondell’s brutish sidekick exited the garage and slid his arm around the shoulder of a young uniformed cop, who seemed uneasy about the attention.

  “Ice cream blonde, huh?” the big flatfoot said. “I woulda liked a coupla of scoops of that myself.”

  I tapped the brute on the shoulder and he turned to me and said, “Huh?”, stupidly, and I cold-cocked him. He went down like a building.

  But not out, though. “You’re gonna pay for that, you bastard,” he said, sounding like the school-yard bully he was. He touched the blood in the corner of his mouth, hauled himself up off the cement. “In this, town, you go to goddamn jail when you hit a goddamn cop!”

  “You’d need a witness, first,” I said.

  “I got one,” he said, but when he turned to look, the young uniformed cop was gone.

  I walked up to him and stood damn near belt buckle to belt buckle and smiled a smile that had nothing to do with smiling. “Want to go another round, see if a witness shows?”

  He tasted blood and fluttered his eyes like a girl and said something unintelligible and disappeared back inside the garage.

  Rondell came clopping down the wooden steps and stood before me and smiled firmly. “I just spoke with Eastman. We’ll interview him more formally, of course, but the preliminary interrogation indicates a possible explanation.” “Oh?”

  He was nodding. “Yeah. Apparently Saturday night he bolted the stairwell door around midnight. It’s a door that leads to both apartments up top the Sidewalk Café. Said he thought Miss Todd had mentioned she was going to sleep over at her mother’s that night.”

  “You mean, she couldn’t get in?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, hell, man, she would’ve knocked.”

  “Eastman says if she did, he didn’t hear her. He says there was high wind and pounding surf all night; he figures that drowned out all other sounds.”

  I smirked. “Does he, really? So what’s your scenario?”

  “Well, when Miss Todd found she couldn’t get into her apartment, she must’ve decided to climb the steps to the street above, walked to the garage and spent the rest of the night in her car. She must’ve have gotten cold, and switched on the ignition to keep warm, and the fumes got her.”

  I sighed. “A minute ago you were talking suicide.”

  “That’s still a possibility.”

  “What about the blood on her face and
dress?”

  He shrugged. “She may have fallen across the wheel and cut her mouth, when she fell unconscious.”

  “Look, if she wanted to get warm, why would she sit in her open convertible? That Lincoln sedan next to her is unlocked and has the keys in it.”

  “I can’t answer that—yet.”

  I was shaking my head. Then I pointed at him. “Ask the elderly gent upstairs if he heard her opening the garage door, starting up the Packard’s cold engine sometime between two a.m. and dawn. Ask him!”

  “I did. He didn’t. But it was a windy night, and…”

  “Yeah, and the surf was crashing something fierce. Right. Let’s take a look at her shoes.”

  “Huh?”

  I pointed down to my scuffed-up Florsheims. “I just scaled those two-hundred-and-eighty steps. This shoeshine boy’s nightmare is the result. Let’s see if she walked up those steps.”

  Rondell nodded and led me into the garage. The print boys hadn’t been over the vehicle yet, so the Lieutenant didn’t open the door on the rider’s side, he just leaned carefully in.

  Then he stood and contemplated what he’d seen. For a moment he seemed to have forgotten me, then he said, “Have a look yourself.”

  I had one last look at the beautiful woman who’d driven to nowhere in this immobile car.

  She wore delicate silver dress heels; they were as pristine as Cinderella’s glass slippers.

  The Coroner at the inquest agreed with me on one point: “The high winds and very low cold prevailing that week-end would have preserved the body beyond the usual time required for decomposition to set in.”

  The inquest was, otherwise, a bundle of contradictions, and about as inconclusive as the virgin birth. A few new, sinister facts emerged. She had bruises inside her throat. Had someone shoved a bottle down her throat? Her alcohol level was high—.13 percent—much higher than the three or four drinks she was seen to have had at the Troc. And there was gas left in the car, it turned out—several gallons; yet the ignition switch was turned on….

  But the coroner’s final verdict was that Thelma died by carbon monoxide poisoning, “breathed accidentally.” Nonetheless, the papers talked suicide, and the word on the streets of Hollywood was “hush-up.” Nobody wanted another scandal. Not after Mary Astor’s diaries and Busby Berkley’s drunk-driving fatalities.