Only now that she saw me, Peggy’s mouth was, as they say, agape, which amused La Hill no end.
“What’s wrong, honey?” she asked Peggy. “Aren’t you glad to see your little boy friend?”
“Nate,” Peggy said, her always pale face downright ashen now, violet eyes round and wet and tragic, “what are you doing here?”
Miss Hill pressed hand to generous bosom and laughed like a braying mule, managing to say, “I don’t think she’s glad to see you, Heller!”
Siegel let go of my arm and went to Peggy, who suddenly looked very frightened. He touched her arm, gently, and she flinched. He didn’t let go, however.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he told her. “Nate’s a friend of mine. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine. He’ll tell you all about it.”
He let go of her arm and nodded to me. The eyes of the nearby crowd were on us. I felt like I was wearing a fig leaf and it slipped. Nonetheless, I moved to her and she looked at me angry and hurt and confused, but I put my arm around her and walked her away from the table, from the crowd, toward the bar, where Raft looked at us, lifted his eyebrows, put them back down, and looked away.
“Come with me,” I said. “Don’t be afraid.”
“Nate, I…I don’t know what to say…does he know about me?”
“Yeah.”
“You mean, that I was trying to find out…”
“Yeah, but don’t worry. Look, there’s a launch every half hour. We’ll catch the next one.”
In fact, the next launch took off in less than five minutes, and we made it, leaving the Lux behind, a fading blue neon-trimmed shape whose searchlight still fanned the dark sea. We sat with a few other couples, who were nuzzling, but we didn’t nuzzle; we sat close, but didn’t nuzzle.
The ride back was rougher; we felt the spray almost constantly, squinting into it, wiping it from our faces occasionally. We had to speak up to be heard over the motor.
“I figured you’d be mad,” she said, mad. “I don’t blame you for being mad. But how could you come out here and endanger me like this…”
I laughed harshly. “It’s a little late for you to be worried about the danger factor, baby. Now why don’t you shut up and I’ll fill you in.”
She gave me an exasperated look, but sighed and shut up and I filled her in. I told her I’d indeed come out here to retrieve her, but that I’d been careful not to tip her hand where her uncle’s interests were concerned—none of which mattered a whit, I said, considering what Siegel had just told me on the deck of the Lux, and filled her in on that, as well.
She, like me, was stunned.
“Do you believe him?” she asked.
I sighed. Shook my head no, not believing I could be saying, “Yes.”
She swallowed. “I do too.”
“Why?” I had reasons for my opinion; what did she have?
“Ben’s a good man, Nate. He’s gone straight. He just couldn’t have done it.”
Oh. She had opinions for her reason.
And she had more: “He’s an honest man.”
“Well, that’s rich.”
“Well, he is! He reminds me…”
“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…”
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