“VD?”
“Ration book.”
He shrugged, stood, reached for the bill. “You’re fighting the battle of the home front, now, Nate.”
“Ain’t we all,” I said, and plucked the bill from his hands. “This is my treat. Consider it a payoff.”
“When in Rome.”
He walked out on the street with me; the snow had let up, but the wind was blowing it around, so it didn’t make much difference.
“You take care of yourself,” he told me.
“Sure, kid.”
He looked at me carefully. “Are you getting any sleep?”
“Some.”
“You look like hell.”
“You look like shit.”
“No wonder we can’t get laid,” he said, and walked off.
An hour later, ration book in my billfold, I sat in my office, and started making phone calls, working my way down a list of credit checks that Sapperstein had left on my desk. Gladys came in and asked me if I’d like some coffee. I said, sure—blonde and sweet. She said, huh? And I explained that was G.I. for sugar and cream, and now I was sipping it, between calls, slouched comfortably in my swivel chair, as the phone rang.
“A-1 Detective Agency,” I said, for the first time in some while.
“Heller?”
It was a hoarse, familiar voice, but I couldn’t place it.
“Speaking.”
“This is Louis Campagna.”
An old chill went up my spine. I sat up.
“Hello, Louie.”
“You did pretty good over there.”
“Where?”
“Over there with those Jap bastards. You did pretty good. Frank said to tell you he was proud of ya. We’re glad you’re back safe and sound and everything.”
“Well, uh, thank you, Louie.”
Silence.
Which he finally broke: “Safe and sound is a nice way to be.”
“It sure is.”
“You got in the papers your first day back, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. How ’bout that?”
“How did you manage that, Heller?”
“Just one of those things. Drury happened to be in my office when he got the Carey call. He was welcoming me back. We were on the pickpocket detail together, you know, in the old days.”
Silence.
“So I went along,” I said. “I knew Estelle, you know.”
“Yeah, we know. That was an awful thing that happened to her.”
I tried to find hidden meaning or menace in the voice; I couldn’t quite.
“Awful thing,” I agreed.
“You ought to stay out of that.”
“The investigation, you mean.”
“Yeah.”
“I have an interest in who killed Estelle, Louie. But I’ll leave that to Drury.”
“That’s smart.”
“I can’t seem to make myself buy that Frank had anything to do with it.”
Silence.
“It just wasn’t his style,” I said.
Silence.
Then he said: “Frank may want to see you.”
“That might not be a good idea. The federal prosecutor knows that Frank and I have met from time to time. I’m going to be questioned about it.”
Silence.
“But you might tell Frank that I have a little medical problem left over from the war. I got amnesia over there.”
“Meaning you forget things.”
“That’s exactly right, Louie.”
“That’s a healthy sickness to have. Frank will like hearing that. Keep us informed as to the G’s interest in you.” By G he meant government. “Get a pencil.”
I got a pencil.
He gave me a phone number.
“Is this a number I can reach you at?” I asked, trying to understand what this was about.
“The party at that number can reach me,” he said. “Reach them, and I’ll reach you.”
And a click in my ear said good-bye.
I should’ve been shaken by the call; instead, I felt oddly reassured. Like the Berghoff, Campagna hadn’t changed much. Another Chicago fixture, and—judging by the black-market talk in the papers, “meat-legging” in particular being attributed to the Nitti Outfit—one unaffected by rationing.
I sipped the sweet creamy coffee, made another credit-check call.
Shortly after three, somebody knocked at my door. A crisp, hard, single knock.
“It’s open,” I said.
A Marine sergeant stepped inside, shut the door behind him. He was about forty, wore pressed blue trousers, khaki shirt, necktie and campaign hat. The shine of his shoes reflected the overhead light. He stood board-straight, not at attention, not even at parade rest, but his bearing strictly military and intimidating as all hell, anyway.
“Private Heller?” he said, taking off the hat. He had something in his other hand, too; a small dark blue box.
“Yes,” I said, standing. He looked familiar. Who was this guy?
He marched over to the desk. “I tried to call before coming, but your line was busy.”
“Uh, yes, sorry. Use the phone a lot in my line of work…hey, I know you. You’re my recruiting sergeant. You’re my goddamn recruiting sergeant.”
I came around the desk and extended my hand; he accepted it, shifting the hat to the hand holding the little box. His smile was as tight as his grip.
“Welcome home, Private,” he said.
“What brings you here, Sergeant?”
He handed me the small square box, the corners of which were rounded off. “It is my honor to present you this, Private Heller.”
I opened the little box, half expecting to find a watch inside. Instead I found a medal. A ribboned star of bronze at the center of which a laurel wreath encircled a small silver star.
“That’s your Silver Star, Private. For gallantry in action. Congratulations.”
“I…well, thank you. I, uh…shit. I don’t know, Sergeant. I feel funny about this.”
“Funny?”
“I don’t feel I did anything worthy of a medal. I did what I had to and that’s all. Only medal I feel comfortable wearing is this.” I pointed with a thumb to the Ruptured Duck on my suitcoat lapel. “I did what I had to. But getting medals for killing people, I don’t know about.”
His mouth was a thin straight line that words miraculously squeezed out of: “Private, the Marine Corps is fucked up in many ways. But one way in which it ain’t fucked up is it don’t give out medals for killin’ people. It gives out medals for savin’ people, which is what you and Corporal Ross did over in that hellhole. So if I was you, I would not have nothing but pride for this here medal.”
I smiled at the tough old bird. Old? Three years older than me, probably. Not that that made him young. Had he served in the first war? He’d have been a kid. But then a lot of Marines were.
Anyway, I offered my hand for him to shake again; he did.
“Thank you, Sergeant. I appreciate your words.”
He gave me another tight smile and turned to go; he was at the door when I called out to him.
“Sergeant?”
“Private.”
“Would you happen to know if one of my buddies from B company is back in town? He was in that same hellhole I was.”
“Would you be referrin’ to Private D’Angelo?”
Another chill shot up my spine; a newer one than the Campagna variety.
“That’s right. Is he back?”
He nodded. “Yes he is. He’s a brave young man, too. I delivered a bronze star to him this morning.”
“I’d like to visit him.”
The sergeants mouth twitched; that was his shrug. “I can give you his address, if you like.”
D’Angelo was living with his aunt and uncle in Kensington, a tiny Italian community at the far south end of the city, right outside of Pullman, just west of Cottage Grove. I took the Illinois Central commuter line out there, passing the Pullman plant whe
re my father had once worked, and Electromotive, both doing war work now, and among Eliot’s VD target areas. As the train passed 103rd Street I could see the smokestacks of steel mills against the sky. I sat on the train thinking about unions, thinking about what the unions had meant to my father, about what my father thought the union idea meant, and what sometimes that idea still meant, but how more often greedy bastards like Bioff and Browne and Dean and Nitti and Ricca and Campagna and various Capones and so many others perverted it into just another racket. Is that what we fought to preserve, D’Angelo and Barney and me?
I got off the IC at a little after four at 115th Street, which I crossed—the obnoxious paint odor of the nearby Sherwin Williams plant mingling incongruously with wondrous spicy smells from various hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurants—to Kensington Avenue, the wide, airy street the little neighborhood was named for. This quaint four-block neighborhood was an Italian oasis in the midst of a Swedish and Polish area; it even had its own church. And Kensington was one Italian neighborhood in Chicago with little or no mob taint.
The bottom floor of the narrow three-story brick building was a grocery store; at the top of the second floor stairs was a landing and a single door, with no number. I knocked.
“Just a second!” a voice from within called. Female voice.
When the door opened, a slender, darkly attractive girl of about twenty stood there; she was in rather form-fitting coveralls with her hair covered by a bandanna, knotted in front, Aunt Jemima style.
“Can I help you?” she said, looking at me rather crossly, her thin frame blocking the doorway. What little of her hair was showing under the bandanna was matted from sweat and her face was smudged here and there.
“My name’s Heller. I’m a friend of Private D’Angelo’s.”
She brightened. Stepped back and gestured for me to come in, saying, “Nathan Heller, sure. You’re Tony’s friend. He told us all about you. Read about ya in the papers, too.”
I stepped inside. It was a small living room with nice but not lavish furnishings, overstuffed sofa, some chairs, radio console, Catholic icons.
She gestured to herself, to her coveralls, her bandanna, smiling widely. Her teeth were very white and her eyes were very brown. “Excuse. I just got off my shift at Pullman.”
I smiled at her. “Rosie the Riveter, huh?”
“Marie the arc welder. Would you like to see my brother?” She seemed hopeful and sad all at once.
“Sure. He’s here, then?”
“Yeah. Sure.” She seemed surprised I’d think otherwise. “It’s close to Roseland Community.” That was a hospital, about a mile from here. She went on: “I think some company might help Tony a little.”
She stepped closer; she smelled sweaty, the sweat of good hard honest work. I liked the way she smelled. She was, in fact, a cute kid, and if I wasn’t here to see if maybe her brother was a murderer I might have asked for her phone number. I never dated an arc welder before. Or the sister of a murderer, that I remembered.
“Is D’Angelo a little down?” I said. I couldn’t seem to bring myself to call him Tony; don’t know why.
She stood very close to me. “He’s been blue as hell. He was okay when he got home. We were all surprised how good his spirits were, considering. But when he saw the paper this morning…”
“The Estelle Carey killing?”
She nodded gravely. “He cried and cried. Don’t tell him I told you.”
“Look, uh, Marie. Let me give you a tip. Some of your brother’s letters and things were found in her apartment.”
The skin around her eyes tightened. “Really?”
“They haven’t connected them to… Tony, yet. But they will. And cops and reporters will be swarming around.”
“Oh dear. What should we do?”
I shrugged. “You may want to have him stay someplace else, till it all blows over. I don’t mean to suggest you keep him away from the police, but you may want to keep the reporters off him.”
She nodded. “Certainly. I appreciate this.”
“That’s okay. I figure you should be warned. And your aunt and uncle downstairs, with their business and all.”
She smiled again. Lovely smile. “It’s nice of you.”
I wasn’t so nice. I was here to confront my old war buddy about a murder. Two murders.
But I owed him this much, this warning. And I liked his sister’s smile.
“I’ll take you back to him,” she said.
“No. You can just point the way.”
“Okay. I need to get a bath, anyway.”
I didn’t want to think about her bathing. I had other things to do.
She pointed me down a hallway, off of which were various bedrooms, and at the end was a small kitchen, with a hoosier cabinet and a table and sink all crowded together. To the left was a bedroom, D’Angelo’s, she said.
But I found him sitting out on the enclosed porch, also off the kitchen. It was a little cold, out there. No insulation. But D’Angelo didn’t seem to notice. He was at a card table, but turned facing a window looking out on the alley, a half-played hand of solitaire spread out before him like a meal he wasn’t hungry enough to eat.
“Hello, D’Angelo.”
He turned slowly and looked at me. His face was hollow-eyed, haunted, like the Marines of the 1st Division we’d come to the Island to spell, those wasted scarecrows who’d met us as we waded ashore off the Higgins boats. Only D’Angelo looked even worse. He’d always been razor-thin, and he still was, only now that razor was dull. His eyes were dead.
But something in them came marginally alive when he recognized me.
“Heller,” he said. It was cold enough for his breath to show. He smiled, just a little.
I went over to the card table and sat next to him. Just looking at him I knew he hadn’t killed Estelle. Monawk was another matter.
“I’m sorry about your girl,” I said.
“Hell of a thing,” he said. His eyes were full of water. “Hell of a thing.” He reached for a deck of Luckies on the card table; shook a smoke out and lit it nervously off a battered silver Zippo lighter from his plaid flannel shirt. “You can’t know what it’s like to come home and your girl’s dead, your goddamn girl’s dead. Murdered! Tortured…”
I said nothing.
“Want a smoke?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. He lit it off his—hospital habit—and handed it to me. I sucked the smoke into my lungs and felt strangely alive.
“What the fuck kind of world is it?” he said. “Come home from what we went through, and somebody murdered your goddamn girl! Your goddamn girl.” He didn’t want to weep in front of me, I knew, but it was killing him holding all that water in his eyes.
“Go ahead and bawl,” I told him. “We all do it.”
He covered his face with his hand and tears dripped through his fingers. I looked away. Smoked.
“Who am I kidding?” he said. He rubbed the tears off his face, as best he could; some smears of moisture remained. “She had a lot of guys. Some of my friends wrote me and said she was out with this swell, and that one. She loved money more than she loved any man.”
That was true.
He looked at me curiously, all of a sudden. “What were you doing there?”
“What?”
“I saw your name in the papers. You were there, at her apartment, with the cops.”
“I know the detective whose case it is, is all. Coincidence.”
He gripped my arm. “If you find something out, you gotta let me know. If you hear something. If I can get my hands on the bastards that did that to her, I swear I’ll wring their fucking necks. How could anybody do that to a beautiful girl like her?” He shook his head. “Aw, shit, Estelle. Why’d you have to love money so goddamn much?”
“I remember back at San Diego,” I said, “you mentioned you worked for Nicky Dean at the Colony Club. Is that where you met her?”
He nodded. “I was a waiter there. Head wai
ter. I ran errands for Nicky, sometimes.”
“How did you and Estelle get together?”
“She liked my looks. I liked hers. That’s all it takes.”
True enough.
“I knew her once, too,” I said.
“Really?”
“A long, long time ago.”
“Did you go with her?”
“Yeah.”
“Did…you love her, too, Heller?”
“A long, long time ago, I did, yeah.”
“So, then… I guess you do know how it is to come home to something like this.”
“We got that in common, pal.”
“We got a lot in common, don’t we, Heller?”
We sure did. We both had wounds that would never heal.
I said, “How did Monawk die, D’Angelo?”
“What do you mean? The Japs got him. What else?”
“Did you see it happen?”
“No. No. I was out. I bled a lot, you know.”
“Yeah, I know.”
I sat there with him for a couple of hours. We talked some, but mostly we smoked. Like in that foxhole looking down on the ridge of kunai grass.
When I went out, his sister, wearing a very fresh blue dress with a crisp white collar, her black hair in a shining pageboy, greeted me. I think she liked me. I liked her. She smelled like sweet-smelling soap.
“You’re a good friend to come see him,” she said.
“I’ll be back.”
“I’d like that.”
I wasn’t Prince Charming, but there was a man shortage.
She walked me out to the street. The sky was a glowing red. The steel mills.
“Good night, Marie.”
“Good night, Mr. Heller.”
I didn’t think her brother had killed Monawk; I wasn’t sure, but my gut, my detective’s gut, said no.
Anyway, I knew he hadn’t killed Estelle yesterday.
Not on one leg.
CAPTAIN DRURY (WITH CHIEF OF DETECTIVES SULLIVAN)
Town Hall Station, a massive faded red-brick building built around the turn of the century, dominated the corner of Addison and Halsted. It was just three blocks west from Estelle’s “death flat” (as the papers were gleefully calling it), and within spitting distance of the Salvation Army’s national training camp, a baracaded, barbed-wire encampment devoted to saving souls.
The Million-Dollar Wound (Nathan Heller) Page 27