Neon Mirage

by Max Allan Collins

  “He’s been poisoned. The doctors admit they ‘suspect a metallic poison has been introduced.’ They think if they make it sound formal, it makes them sound like they’re on top of things. That’s a laugh.”

  “I’m sorry, Jim. The sons of bitches got to your father, and I wasn’t even here to try to stop them.”

  “Heller, you’ve done everything anybody could. You put your life on the line more than once. And as for not being here—my father wanted you to go after Peggy. He’s nuts about that kid. And I don’t blame him, really. She’s been aces, all the way—like another sister to us.”

  “I’m nuts about her myself. But this is going to be hard on her. Like it’s going to be on all of you.”

  He shook his head. “Even Danny—I didn’t think he cared that much—he sat here this afternoon just telling Dad how much he loved him. Crying like a baby. Dad just patted him on the head, saying, ‘There, there, my lad,’ comforting him. Can you imagine?”

  “Yeah. I can. You’re going to be under a lot of pressure to sell out, you know.”

  He bristled. “Do you think I’d do that? Do you think after all my father’s been through, I’d…” He buried his face in his hands, bent over. He wasn’t crying. He was past that. “I’m so frightened, Mr Heller…I’m so very frightened…”

  I patted his back. I couldn’t think of anything to say. There, there, my lad was taken.

  “We’re going to lose him, aren’t we? And I’m going to be left to try to stand up to those people.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder again. “When your father is dead, and the responsibility falls to you, and your brothers, then you’re going to have to make your mind what the right thing is to do.”

  He lifted his head and narrowed his eyes. “You’re not…telling me to sell, are you?”

  “I’m telling you when your father’s gone, the responsibility is yours, and so is the decision. Nobody could tell Jim Ragen how to live his life. I don’t think it’s fair for him, even in death, to tell somebody else how to live theirs.”

  The flesh around his eyes tensed, momentarily, and I could see his father in his face, so clearly. Then he reached into a pocket and handed me a card. “What do you make of this, Mr. Heller?”

  It was white, about the size of an index card but without lines. On it was a crude but unmistakable image: a yellow canary. The card was unsigned.

  “Where did you get this? When?”

  “In the mail today. What does it mean?”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “I…I think it’s the underworld’s way of saying my dad shouldn’t have ‘sung.’”

  “That’s right. It’s a warning. For nobody else to get vocal. But it’s more than that.”

  “More?”

  “It means the Outfit is admitting, in its oblique way, that it’s killed your father. He isn’t even dead yet, and they’re telling you they’ve accomplished his killing.”

  I handed the card back to him. He looked as if he were about to crush it in his hand, and I stopped him.

  “You might want to show that to Lt. Drury,” I said.

  He swallowed. “All right.”

  “I don’t suppose it came with a return address?”

  Young Ragen managed a little laugh. “No, not hardly.”

  “Damn,” I said, with mock disappointment. “Detective work is never easy.”

  He smiled at that, momentarily, and I patted his shoulder and rose and said, “Let’s go back to your father’s room.”

  We did. I took over for Sapperstein, tired as I was, buoyed by coffee, and Peg stayed in there at her uncle’s side all night. Dr. Graaf went in a couple of times and so did several other doctors and nurses; I checked everybody against my clipboard, like a good operative. The barn door was open, the horse was gone, but I was keeping a watch on the stall anyway.

  Very early the next morning, shortly after five, Jim, Jr., came out and said, “Dad’s awake. He’s asking for you.”

  I went in. Peggy was standing, holding his hand, looking down at him with what I’m sure she thought was a supportive, encouraging smile. If anybody ever gave me a smile like that, I’d call the morgue myself and save somebody else the trouble.

  I went around on the other side of the bed.

  “Peggy says you found some things out,” Jim said; his voice was weak, but it still had some steel in it. Or maybe that was just the mercury.

  “We did,” I said. “I met Siegel. I’m convinced he didn’t do any of this to you.”

  “Guzik, then.”

  “Guzik.”

  “And I’m expected to do business with that devil.”

  “If you do, insist on a hell of a deal.”

  I filled him in, some. He listened alertly, as if oblivious to his pain; but he was feeling some, otherwise he would have interrupted more often.

  “You know it does make sense, lad,” he said. “When the Outfit put Trans-American together, they had to turn to the eastern boys for help. Guzik could handle Chicago and Milwaukee and so on—but he needed Lansky’s help out east, and Siegel out west. “That’s why they want my set-up—it’s national. We’re everywhere.”

  “We can talk about this later, Jim.”

  “No we can’t. I’m dying. Nobody will tell me, but I can feel it. They poisoned me, didn’t they?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How much longer do I have?”

  “Do I look like a doctor, you crazy Irish bastard?”

  “Don’t give me that. How much longer, Nate?”

  “They didn’t tell me. I tell you what—why don’t you just take your own sweet time about it.”

  “I wish I had some time, lad.” He turned to his niece. “Peggy my girl—peg o’ my heart. Give your uncle a kiss.”

  She kissed his cheek.

  She stayed near him and he said, “I know I’m dying—there’s an angel at my side.”

  “Uncle Jim, please don’t say that…”

  “Peg, you’re a good girl. I told Jim, Jr., before—you’re always to have a place in the family business. A piece of it is yours, my dear.”

  “Please, Uncle Jim. I don’t care about that…”

  “I think you do. You’re not just like a daughter to me, lass. You’re like a son. You could run that business of mine, if ye were.”

  “You can run it yourself, Uncle Jim…”

  “I need…need two things from you, lass.”

  “Anything—”

  “I want you to marry this poor excuse for a detective, here. He’s going to need your help. Besides—he’s a good man, even if he is only half a mick.”

  “I do love him, Uncle Jim.”

  “Good. That makes me glad to hear.”

  It made me feel pretty good, too.

  “The other thing is something you have to do right now. You can’t wait.”

  “Yes?”

  “Find me a priest, lass.”

  He died at 6.55 a.m. His son had time to call Ellen Ragen to her husband’s side. Also at his side were his other two sons, and one of the three married daughters.

  The coroner’s initial report barely mentioned the mercury poisoning, attributing Ragen’s death to “hypotensive heart disease and nephritis complicated by gunshot wounds.” There were “traces of mercury found in a qualitative analysis.” And that was that.

  But it wasn’t. Lt. Drury made the point to Coroner Brodie that an important legal question needed to be definitively answered: namely, whether Ragen died due to the gunshot wounds, making for a murder case against the gunmen in the green truck; or heart disease, making it death by natural causes, reducing the charge against the gunmen to attempted murder; or nephritis brought on by mercury poisoning, making for a different murder case, against person or persons yet unknown.

  About this time, Coroner Brodie received several threatening phone calls that he and his family were in danger unless he “minded his own fucking business” where the Ragen matter was concerned. Brodie moved to
a secret office and ordered police guards put on his home, and on the vault at Mt. Olivet, too, where Jim Ragen had been recently interred, the cops protecting the vault till Brodie could receive the permission of the court and Mrs. Ragen to perform a second autopsy.

  Mrs. Ragen did object, but the courts overrode it, and it turned out Jim had enough mercury in him to kill three men.

  The affidavits? Ragen’s so-called insurance policy? It must have lapsed, because via the family lawyer, Ellen Ragen told the press the affidavits would not be released to the authorities or anyone else. They could not, the lawyer claimed, be found.

  An investigation into the hospital staff (not led by Drury, by the way) turned up nothing. Several promising leads fizzled, particularly the revelation that a tube had been inserted in Ragen’s stomach to relieve gas, the night before he died, a tube containing mercury. But the mercury was a different kind than that found in Ragen’s liver and kidneys, a liquid mercury that passes right through the system and can’t be absorbed.

  By the end of August two things were obvious: Jim died due to mercury poisoning; and the killer would never be found.

  Predictably, Peggy couldn’t accept that. She came storming into my inner office, on the last Saturday in August, and said, “What are you going to do about it?”

  I gestured to the client’s chair across from my desk and she sat. She was wearing a simple black suit with pearls and black gloves; she’d either worn black or at least an arm band every day since Jim died.

  “About what?” I ventured.

  “Mickey McBride just bought out Continental!”

  “Really?” Actually, I knew all about it. Jim, Jr., had asked my opinion and I had told him to do what he thought was right.

  The violet eyes flashed with anger. “After everything my uncle did, after all his suffering, his family sells him out! How can they be such weasels!”

  “Peg, your uncle was murdered because he wouldn’t sell out. Nobody else in the family, except maybe you, is dedicated to the racing wire business. It’s not like it’s a noble profession or anything. It’s a racket.”

  “It’s legal!”

  “For the moment, and barely. This is a rough time for your aunt and her children. I don’t happen to think some of ’em have a hell of a lot of backbone, myself, but young Jim seems like a good man, and I think he’s worried about his mother’s health. I don’t think he wants to lose another parent.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying cut ’em some slack.”

  “But they sold Continental! Lock, stock and barrel!”

  “Yeah, to Mickey McBride. Not to Jake Guzik.”

  “What’s to stop Mickey McBride from selling to Guzik?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Goddamnit, Nate—you’re impossible!”

  I gestured with two open hands. “Look, it’s not going to happen right away. Even the Outfit knows if they move in on Continental now, on the heels of your uncle’s murder, the roof’ll come crashing down on ’em. They may cut a backroom deal with McBride, but what the hell—McBride and your uncle were business partners for years. You should be able to accept whatever avenue he decides to take the business. And you should be able to accept him as your new boss.”

  She folded her arms tightly across her chest. “I wouldn’t work for that company now. Not in a million years. I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  “Well, why don’t you take your uncle’s advice, then?”

  “What?”

  “And marry me. Go the picket fence route. Make little Hellers.”

  “Nathan, your timing doesn’t exactly rival Fred Astaire.”

  “Sorry. So what now?”

  She sighed heavily. “What’s happening where those West Side gunmen are concerned?”

  “Drury’s case is progressing pretty well, considering he lost a witness. The other witnesses haven’t backed out, amazingly enough. He’s i.d. ’ed the driver, another West Side bookie—who incidentally was just caught dumping something in Douglas Park Lagoon, which turned out to be a sawed-off shotgun barrel.”

  She sat up. “When was this?”

  “Last night. Drury called me this morning about it. Don’t say I never have any good news for you. Anyway, Drury’s going to have no trouble getting a grand jury indictment, now.”

  I expected that to improve her disposition.

  It didn’t.

  “But those men didn’t kill my uncle. They tried to, but they didn’t. What about whoever did? What about whoever poisoned him?”

  “The cops are looking into that. You know that.”

  “Why don’t you look into it?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Why don’t you just go up to Jake Guzik and shoot him in his fat head?”

  “That’s a swell idea. Then the prison chaplain can marry you and me while I’m walking down that long, long hall. I hope you like weird haircuts.”

  “I don’t think you’re funny.”

  “I don’t find any of this funny. There are things in this world you can’t do a fucking thing about, Peggy. There are battles that can’t be won. Sometimes you just got to be happy to be able to hang on to your life, for a while.”

  “That’s you, all right. Nate Heller. You’re a real survivor.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?”

  She stood. “Well, maybe I want more out of a man. Maybe I want more out of life.”

  “And where are you going to find that? Las Vegas?”

  She lifted her chin and looked down her nose at me; sooner or later every woman I know does that to me. “Maybe I will. I don’t like this town. I don’t think I can live here anymore.”

  “Peg. Why don’t you just sit back down…we’ll talk a little more and…”

  “I’m sick of you. I’m sick of my family. I’m sick of Chicago.”

  And she went out the door.

  I thought about going after her, but I just kept my seat. She was as stubborn as her uncle, after all. And I’d had my fill of hopeless cases for one year.

  But I did stand, to look out the window and watch her catch a cab. Wondering if she’d really do it. Really go running to Vegas and Siegel and that lunatic Virginia Hill, as if that were really an alternative to the madhouse of Chicago.

  No, I thought. No way in hell.

  She took the morning flight out.

  I got on the train at Union Station on Alameda Boulevard at a quarter to seven that Sunday morning, and promptly fell asleep in my seat. When I woke up mid-morning and looked out the window, I found Los Angeles, and civilization (not that those terms necessarily have anything to do with each other), long gone. In their place was desolation, the literal kind, as opposed to the spiritual brand the City of Angels breeds. I spent the rest of the morning watching the desert roll by my window like a bleached tan carpet covering the world. I kept trying to picture somebody putting up a casino in the middle of all that sand and sagebrush, and couldn’t manage it.

  It was after two when the train rolled into the modern, many-windowed Union Pacific Station at the west end of Fremont Street, and I soon found myself standing, single bag in hand, in a restful shaded park, enjoying a very dry breeze, looking down a busy street lined with wide-open casinos: the Las Vegas Club, the Monte Carlo, the Pioneer, the Boulder, the Golden Nugget. Despite the slight shock of seeing casinos sprawled over two very American blocks, I felt vaguely disappointed. While the Sunday afternoon crowds filled the sidewalks and kept Fremont’s two modest lanes hopping with traffic, it nonetheless looked a little shabby, not at all glamorous. A small boy’s idea of a sinful good time, complete with Hollywood-style frontier trimmings. Maybe at night, when neon lit up Glitter Gulch, I’d revise my jaded Chicagoan’s opinion.

  Shortly before two-thirty, a black Lincoln Continental glided up to the curb. Out of it scrambled a balding, rodent-like man in a three-hundred-dollar black silk suit. His tie was wide and red and his face was oblong and pale.

  “Nate He
ller?” he said, with a sideways smile, thrusting a hand forward.

  I nodded, took the hand, shook it, found it moist, let go of it and, trying not to call attention to the act, wiped the moisture from my palm on my pant leg.

  “Moe Sedway,” he said, jerking a thumb to his chest, smiling nervously, his tiny, close-set eyes as moist as his handshake, his nose a big lumpy thing like a wad of modeling clay stuck there by some kid.

  He took my bag and walked around to the rear of the Lincoln; I followed him there. He put the bag in the car’s trunk, which was bigger than some coldwater flats I’ve seen. “How was L.A.?” he asked.

  “Swell,” I said.

  “So you’re a pal of Fred Rubinski’s, huh?”

  “Yeah. Business partners, actually.”

  “You say that like it’s two different things. Where I come from business partners can be pals, too. In fact they should be.”

  I shrugged at this piece of curbside philosophy. He shut the trunk. With nervous energy to spare, he moved around me and opened the car door on the rider’s side. He gestured for me to get in, smiling nervously.

  I got in. He went around and got behind the wheel. “Ever been to Vegas before?” he said, lighting up a long, thick cigar that was much too big for his face.

  “No,” I said.

  “Want a cigar? Havanas. Two bucks a piece.”

  “No thanks.”

  He’d left the car running. He pulled out and headed up Fremont Street. Mixed in among the tourists, many of whom wore dude-ranch style Western clothes, were occasional real westerners: men with the weathered faces of the true rancher or ranch hand; an Indian woman with a baby cradled on her back; a toothless old prospector who made Gabby Hayes look like a Michigan Avenue playboy.

  Beyond the casinos and clubs was a business district, Western-style souvenir shops and barbecue restaurants mingling with modern offices and the dime store chains.

  “What do you think of our little town?” Sedway said, blowing smoke.

  “It’s not Chicago,” I said.

  Past the downtown was an unimpressive residential district; in fact some of it was downright shabby—trailers and cinder-block houses—distinguished only by tacky wedding chapels, often hooked up with motels, that lined the thoroughfare. Pastel stucco with neon wedding bells and hearts and such. The vows of a lifetime served up like a cheeseburger at a white-tile one-arm joint.