by Various
“A bright, beautiful garland of flowers.”
He kissed her soft shoulder and she felt different. She had changed and she felt a kind of sadness she had never fathomed: bottomless, hopeless, hollow, and hard. She had Tom. She had won, hadn’t she? She smiled unhappily and sat passively and let him kiss at her sweet soft arm.
Stakeout on Rush Street
Max Allan Collins with Matthew V. Clemens
CHICAGO, 1943
I missed Bobby.
My husband, Bobby, that is—Robert Winters, a captain in General George Patton’s Third Army, currently slogging through North Africa somewhere.
I’d done my best to keep the home fires burning, by taking over Bobby’s detective agency while he was overseas. But frankly that hadn’t been working out as well as I’d hoped. Divorce work was on the slides. After all, most of the men were off fighting the Germans or the Japanese, and those not-able-bodied men that were left behind seemed prejudiced against a dick in high heels and lipstick.
Even other women seemed hesitant to trust a female private eye, particularly one as (let’s face it) attractive as yours truly, or as young (twenty-two); but I managed, now and then, to convince a few of them—the open-minded (and self-confident) ones. Plus I still had a couple of Bobby’s old clients throwing me some business—like Mutual Fidelity Insurance and Boeheim Security—and there was the occasional credit check for Carswell National Bank.
Things might have been a little tough, but they weren’t impossible, and I figured I still had it easier than Bobby did. Looking down at my new black shoes with the classy ebony high heels—at the end of some shapely stems, courtesy of my folks and God—I realized that things weren’t completely horrible. I had had my eye on these spiked babies for nearly a month before I finally bought them, when a couple of deadbeat clients had finally come through with the money they owed, after I had a little heart-to-heart with them.
Like Al Capone said, you can get more with a smile and a gun than with just a smile.
My office on the fourth floor of the Danton Building, just a couple of blocks outside the Loop, kept the Winters Agency close to the action with the banks and insurance companies. Sitting behind the mammoth oak desk Bobby had picked up second hand, I put my feet up on the foot stool I kept on the left side of the desk and admired my new shoes again in the morning sun. The row of three windows faced east and the spring sunshine poured through the open Venetian blinds like melted butter looking for a lobster.
On the wall to the right of my desk, two doors kept company, side by side—one led to a side hall so my clients could exit quietly without being noticed, and behind the other was a tiny but sufficient bathroom. The wall on the left contained a Murphy bed, which I almost never used, and a photo of Bobby looking businesslike and professional in his best gray fedora.
The door the desk faced—and most of that wall for that matter—was pebbled glass up top, dark wood below. Beyond the door, in the outer office, my secretary, Judy, sat punching out a letter on the typewriter. I couldn’t see her, but I could hear the clack click clack of the Olivetti.
I’d been skeptical of Judy when Bobby hired her. An old girlfriend of his, about my age, she was a real looker, and I wasn’t too happy when I’d first met her. But when Bobby entered the service, it would have been easy for Judy to ditch me for a steadier paying job; but she hadn’t, and over the last few months we’d become pals.
When the typewriter stopped its racket, I looked up just as Judy was knocking before coming in without waiting for a response, closing the door behind her. Maybe a couple of inches shorter than my five-four, Judy had bobbed blond hair; mine was dark brown and fell in gentle natural waves to the midpoint of my back. Her eyes were blue as the sky, mine brown. Judy had a cute little Alice Faye pug nose, while mine was long and straight, Joan Crawford-ish.
Otherwise there was a bit of a resemblance, actually—we both had full lips and high cheekbones. We were both slim and had Grable-worthy shapes—today Judy showed off hers in a tight yellow floral dress while I wore a red dress with a black belt, a black necklace and earrings, and my wonderful new black heels. I loved the shoes so much that I forgave them for being impractical for either detecting or my other mission.
“Betty, that man is here again,” Judy said, her voice low, her face sour. “I’ll throw his keister outta here, if you want.”
My secretary was in almost as good a shape as me . . . even though she wasn’t The Chosen One.
Which I was—and even Bobby didn’t know that his blushing bride was that one woman in each generation placed on the Earth to kill vampires. But my husband was off fighting evil in his own way, while I was fighting it on the home front.
“Who’s here?” I asked, actually kind of teasing. From her expression I knew exactly who she meant.
“That . . . weirdo.” She jerked her head toward the outer office. “You know, that combination Lugosi and Karloff.” I couldn’t help but smile. She meant Redmond, my watcher. Judy had no way of knowing that I had met Redmond when I was but fifteen, and that this “weirdo” had trained me in the slaying of the undead. To my secretary, Redmond was just this flaky guy in strange apparel who showed up every now and then, demanding to see me.
“Show the man in,” I said.
Her face screwed up even more. “Is he going to pay this time?”
“Judy,” I said, not unkindly, “that’s my concern, isn’t it?”
“Yeah . . . yeah, I guess.”
But I knew what she was getting at; if we hadn’t become such good friends, it wouldn’t have been an issue.
“Wait a second,” I said, stopping her as she turned to go. I opened the top desk drawer and withdrew her check. “We got a little cash in . . . so we’re caught up.” She looked at the total and gave me a tired but grateful smile. Judy was long overdue for a raise.
“Nice,” she said, glimpsing my new shoes. “Black goes with most everything.”
I nodded; even with the pay boost I’d given her, I felt suddenly uncomfortable that I had allowed myself this small pleasure. I felt myself blushing and quickly said, “You want to get Mr. Redmond?”
“If you insist,” she said, her voice sounding faraway.
Soon Redmond strode in, closing the door behind him. I walked around to my side of the desk and sat down as Redmond parked himself in one of the two chairs across from me. Tall and thin, unseasonably attired in a tan overcoat and deerstalker, giving him a Sherlock Holmes aspect, Marcus Redmond wore his reddish sideburns long and his salt-and-cayenne pepper mustache thick.
The curly red mop that peeked out from beneath the deerstalker constantly looked to be in need of a trim and his nearly albino complexion announced to the world that he spent little, if any, time in the sunshine, preferring instead to stay huddled among the antiquated tomes in his used bookstore on Clark Street. In that pale visage his radiant blue eyes were startling, and his long thin nose—Holmes again—split his face like an ax blade.
Glancing over his shoulder to make sure the door was still closed, Redmond turned back to me, and said, “We have a live one.”
“By which you mean a dead one.”
He nodded, his demeanor at once grave and excited. “A very lively dead one. He approaches the level of a master. No telling how far his power will spread.”
“Ye gods, Redmond,” I said. “It’s a good thing you don’t do press relations for the government. You’d have surrendered after Pearl Harbor.”
“I know you consider me an alarmist,” he said, trying to look wounded, but coming closer to amused.
“I consider you a worry wart.”
And he was a worry wart; he knew it, I knew it, and it really wasn’t that bad a thing to be for either a slayer or a watcher. In that line of work—that line of duty—your first mistake was generally your last one.
Things remained a tad tense between my watcher and me. He had still not forgiven me for marrying Bobby. (“The Chosen One,” he’d intoned, “should stay una
ttached!”) But I had no regrets about that, other than the too-short honeymoon prior to my man heading overseas.
“Our prospect’s name, my dear Elizabeth, is Radu Hunyadi, though we can expect him to be using an alias.”
“And where is Radu at the moment?”
“In Chicago.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“No. You are aware of an altercation in the local underworld, my dear?”
The newspapers had been trying to play the gang war down, but word on the street was this was more than a minor set-to over turf—the worst since the days when Big A1 took over. “If by ‘altercation’ you mean dead bodies in ditches and gutters, I am aware.”
“Donny O’Brien’s gang has . . . I believe the underworld jargon of the moment is ‘rubbed out’ . . . several of Frank Nitti’s underlings.”
“Since when is one gangster killing another gangster a vampire killing?”
Redmond closed his eyes, shook his head, and a hand went to his temple and pressed. “Child, I taught you to think, so think. Would one not assume a ganglord of Frank Nitti’s stature might not strike back?”
“You know he has. I know he has. The whole city knows.”
“But no corpses from the O’Brien faction have been found,” Redmond said, his eyes still closed, the hand still pressing on his temple.
“So, Nitti’s guys are better at disposing of the evidence. Cement overshoes and Lake Michigan go hand in glove. I still don’t see . . .”
Redmond’s eyes popped open and he sat forward in the chair. “But you should see! I taught you to see, child. See.”
I shook my head. The old boy had always been eccentric; was he losing his marbles, now? But I went along, saying, “You think a vampire made those bodies disappear?”
The glowing blue eyes tightened. “I know a vampire did that, and not just any vampire. Radu Hunyadi himself.”
“How do you know, Redmond?”
With a sigh, he shook his head again, as if he were in the presence of a thick-headed child. “Because I’m the Watcher. It’s my role, my duty, my destiny, to know.”
Now I pressed a hand to my temple. When Redmond got like this, half John Barrymore, half put-upon parent, it was my turn to have the headache. “I simply was wondering if you have any evidence.”
“Until last night, it was just a supposition. Now I know for sure.”
I prodded. “Because . . . ?”
He withdrew some photographs from the folds of his coat and tossed them onto the desk in front of me. I glanced down at the top one, which showed what looked like the cornerstone of a new building with the top half of a body sticking out of it like a ghastly swizzle stick.
The next photo was a closeup of the victim’s face: a white man with a thin scar over his right eyebrow, a nose that had been broken a time or two, and wide thin lips. The black-and-white photo gave him a ghostly pallor starkly white against the dark gray of the concrete.
“Tommy Brannigan,” I said. “A low-life stiff who works for O’Brien.”
“Worked for O’Brien.”
“This doesn’t prove a vamp—” My voice caught in my throat as I looked at the next picture. The photographer had pulled back a little, and I could now see a vicious, gaping wound in the gangster’s neck, the bloody edges black against the pale flesh.
Redmond said, “You see my point.”
“Both of them. And of course he looks so white because he’s been . . .”
“ . . . drained of blood,” the Watcher finished for me.
Redmond had a number of Chicago cops on his private payroll. To them, my watcher was just another source of graft; they had no idea why the strange character wanted them to apprise him of bizarre doings like the ones in this crime scene photos.
“We were fortunate,” Redmond said, “that one of my contacts on the force was among the contingent of Chicago’s finest who interrupted the . . . uh . . . burial.”
“So you think Frank Nitti has hired himself a vampire hitman?”
“I do.”
“And it’s this, this . . .”
“Hunyadi. Radu Hunyadi.”
“A vampire on the Outfit’s payroll?”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“Not many.” I shook my head. “I’m surprised Nitti is involved in this kind of gang war at all. He’s a business executive.”
“He’s only retaliating, my dear. And I doubt he’s aware his new best hitman friend is one of the undead.”
From another fold, another photo appeared, this one smaller, taken by a Brownie or something similar. Redmond held it out to me. I took it.
I recognized the dapper man known as the Enforcer, the barber who had become Capone’s favored gunman and who had risen to Big Al’s right hand. With Capone in stir, Nitti was the top of the Outfit ladder now. To civilians he could be a fairly benign figure—particularly compared to Capone—and my husband Bobby had even done a few noncriminal jobs for him.
In the nighttime photo, Frank Nitti stood on a corner in a dark suit, immaculately attired and groomed (as always), his black hair slicked down and parted on the right, his mustache a trim black shape on his upper lip. In his hands the former barber held a dark Homburg. Next to him was a thin, angularly handsome associate.
“Note the face of that Nitti crony carefully,” Redmond advised.
“All right,” I said with a shrug.
Pulling something else from his mysterious overcoat, Redmond laid a small panel of wood on the desk. It contained the portrait of a warrior from the middle ages, battle helmet atop a head of long, flowing brown hair that trailed down his shoulders. The man had a thick beard, a bushy mustache, and some sort of strange light behind his green eyes.
This vintage portrait appeared to be of the same man Nitti had been speaking to on a Chicago street corner, not long ago.
“Radu Hunyadi,” Redmond announced.
“When was this panel painted?”
“Despite my expertise in ancient documents, I can’t be certain. My guess is about 1642. He was, of course, not a vampire yet.”
“Really?” Looking into the eyes painted on the wood panel set something loose inside me, something that burned, cramped, and stabbed all at the same time. Most slayers merely sensed a vampire: my built-in warning system was strictly four-alarm, and currently in screaming mode.
Redmond’s face clouded in concern. “What’s the matter, child?”
“When this was painted, Hunyadi was already a vampire—already an extremely powerful one, I’d wager.”
“What?” Redmond looked confused.
I pointed to my stomach. “Gut never lies. This isn’t just a bad guy, Redmond. This is evil incarnate.”
Redmond picked up the panel and gaped at it. I could tell he wanted to argue, but he knew better than to question my personal alarm system.
Then his face changed as, finally, he saw it too. “You’re right. There’s something . . . abhorrent . . . in the eyes. I can barely see it, and no one other than a slayer would ever get more than a glimpse of it. You’re right, my dear. And I am proud of you for this insight. Of course, this makes it even more important that we act quickly.”
“Do we know anything about him?”
Sweat seemed to bead instantly on Redmond’s forehead, tiny glistening blossoms of fear. He looked even more colorless than usual. Finally, letting out a long breath, he seemed to get control of himself.
“Hunyadi’s discreet. That’s how he’s stayed in business and out of sight for so long. He hires himself out as an assassin and he feeds on the victims. Before he worked for these gangsters, there hadn’t been a sighting of him since 1896, when he assassinated Nasr-ed-Din, the Shah of Persia. In 1769, he was among Russian troops who occupied Moldavia. What brought him to the States remains a mystery.”
“Not really,” I said. “Population here’s growing, crime is rampant—he doesn’t have three hundred years of history to overcome. Life was probably getting difficult i
n Europe; he had competition from homegrown evil bastards, over there. What do we know about him?”
“Other than this ancient portrait, we don’t have any idea what he looks like—not today.”
I nodded.
“But this picture”—Redmond picked up the Nitti photo—“was taken outside Franco’s, an—”
“Italian restaurant near the river on Rush,” I said. “I know the neighborhood. Guess that’s as good a place as any to start.”
“Franco’s?” Redmond asked. “You’re not just going to . . . breeze in there.”
“You know I’m more subtle than that.”
His only response was an arched eyebrow.
“I think it’s time,” I said, “for a little stakeout on Rush Street.”
* * *
I sat in my black ’39 Chevy, half a block down from Franco’s. A cool breeze blowing off the Chicago River, less than a block behind me, wafted through the open driver’s window and made the warm night feel a little less muggy. I had changed to flats and a pair of Bobby’s old blue jeans, along with a sleeveless print blouse.
After all, I wasn’t going into Franco’s and I sure as hell wasn’t out to impress anybody tonight, so I was dressed casually. That didn’t mean I was casual about my mission; a black bag loaded with stakes lay on the seat next to me.
A number of men in pinstripe suits, with bulges under their jackets, came in and out of the restaurant throughout the evening. Most of them had dolls on their arm and generally the women looked pretty but cheap—flashy dames with slit skirts and low necklines that flaunted the only features these men were interested in.
But it was the faces of the men I was interested in, as they paraded in and out of the restaurant, with its mirrorlike black-glass façade. I wanted to capture Hunyadi on film, or in a way I wanted not to capture his image. . . .
Oh, a vampire’s mug could be caught on film, all right—like in that photo Redmond showed me of Hunyadi and his boss, Nitti. But the creature would not cast a reflection in the restaurant’s sleek glass facade, and my camera would record that lack of image as well.