True Detective

by Max Allan Collins

  "The truth is still the truth. And a bargain is still a bargain."

  "And Mayor Cermak is deceased."

  "Yes. But what does that have to do with our contract?"

  "I don't remember signing a contract with you, Mr. Heller."

  "We had a verbal contract. My uncle here was witness to that."

  Uncle Louis went pale as death.

  I said, "I'm sure my uncle will attest to that."

  My uncle said, "Nathan, please, you're being most rude- "

  Dawes interrupted with a wave of the hand. "Louis, I quite understand your position." He turned his gaze on me and it was like one of those stone lions was looking at me. "You should not have spoken to the papers about this. It was quite a breach of confidence."

  I shrugged. "You said nothing about our agreement being a confidential one. Besides which. I didn't tell the reporters why you offered me the job at the fair- that might have been a breach of confidence. My testimony at the trial made news, you know; my views are of interest to the press at the moment. And they asked me my future plans."

  Dawes leaned his head back and quite literally looked down his nose at me and. as if lecturing, said, "Once a reporter asked me if I were going to take my knickers with me to London- black silk knee breeches are usual court dress, over there- and I asked him if he wanted a diplomatic answer, or the kind the question deserved? And then I told him to go plumb to hell. You might in future take that example to heart."

  "But if you void our deal. General, I'm going to be placed in an embarrassing light; I'll have to let the press know the circumstances. You've already had some unfortunate publicity of late, General- if you'll pardon my adding Insull to injury."

  He looked at me solemnly. "This reeks of blackmail, young man."

  "This reeks of business. And business is about money, and three thousand dollars to a private detective just starting out is good business indeed."

  Uncle Louis was breathing hard.

  The General said, "In my very young days, I had a burning ardor for money, Mr. Heller. But since then I have been interested in it only intermittently. One of the Rothschilds once said he made his fortune because he discovered there are times when one should not try to make money. It strikes me that money is something you are unduly interested in."

  "The Rothschilds can afford that attitude. The Hellers- this Heller, anyway- can't. Now, I apologize for my bad etiquette with the press. But our agreement is binding, as far as I'm concerned, and if you feel differently, I'm going to be noisy about it. I'm not a big wheel, like you, General. But us little wheels can get awful goddamn squeaky when we don't get our grease."

  Uncle Louis sat shaking Iris head, staring blankly at the wall of photos of the famous: Coolidge and Dawes; Hoover and Dawes; Pershing and Dawes; Mellon and Dawes.

  The General lowered his gaze and began shuffling papers. He said. "My secretary will have contracts ready for you to sign this afternoon at four. Please return then, and sign them, Mr. Heller. Good afternoon, gentlemen."

  I rose and went out; Uncle Louis stayed behind, speaking to the General, but the General didn't seem to be having any. Uncle Louis caught up with me at the elevators.

  "Let's you and me talk, Nate," he said, pointing down the hall. "I have an office, too."

  That he did- and his own secretary, an attractive if bookish woman in her early thirties- but the interior office was perhaps a quarter the size of the General's, albeit bigger than my own. And Uncle

  Louis didn't seem to have a Murphy bed.

  He did have a desk, and he sat behind it and tried to look as authoritarian and stem as the General. He damn near pulled it off; but I didn't help matters by refusing to take a chair.

  He fairly spit the words at me. "You know damn good and well that the General's offer was made at a point in time when besmirching Mayor Cermak's name was a desirable thing. Now that Cermak is dead, and a martyr, your testimony at the Nitti trial has only caused the very sort of bad Chicago publicity? the General wishes to avoid. You know all that, don't you? You knew that all along."

  "Sure."

  "And yet you take advantage of the General, and of me. and hold us to a bargain that was made under vastly different circumstances. Where do you get your damn nerve?"

  "I think it's called chatzpa, Uncle Louis."

  "You're an embarrassment to me. You must know all I have to do is tell the General that I'm willing to deny being a witness where that verbal contract is concerned, and your windfall at his- and my- ■ expense will be forfeit."

  "Maybe. Maybe not. The General has old-world notions about keeping his word; part of the way he sees himself includes keeping promises, pretentious old fart that he is."

  He stood and. his face redder than a Communist, thrust an arm out and pointed a finger as close to my face as he could get without hurtling the desk. "Consider yourself disinherited, disowned, you smart-ass, you gonif... you just traded three thousand dollars for more money than you could ever dream of. You're disinherited!"

  "I don't want your money."

  He suddenly seemed embarrassed for his outburst. Whether it was a pose or not, I can't say; but he sat down and folded his hands and, nervously, said, "I have no sons, Nathan. I have two daughters I love very much. But I always thought of you as… the son I never had."

  "Horseshit."

  Maybe it had been a pose: the hands flattened on the desk, fingers spread out but arched, like spiders, and his face turned hard. "You stood to inherit a lot of money, you ridiculous, ridiculous fool. And you threw that money away. Just threw it away. And nothing you can ever say will change it."

  "Fine. So long."

  I started to go.

  "Get out! You're no nephew of mine. As far as I'm concerned, you're dead. As dead as Cermak."

  "As dead as my father?"

  Uncle Louis blanched. "What does your father have to do with it?"

  "Maybe plenty. Maybe he's why I put you on the spot with Dawes. You don't dare not back me up, do you. or Dawes will lose respect for you. He doesn't like outright liars, and he has an overriding sense of family. He idolizes that dead son of his, building fancy flophouses in his memory, and he wouldn't take kindly to the sort of man who would turn on his family, for mere monetary or business concerns."

  "Nate. Nathan Why- why this bitterness? What have I done to you?"

  "You haven't done anything. You've done me favors."

  "Yes I have. I got you on the force. Could your father have done that?"

  "No, and he wouldn't if he could. He hated the cops, and it was the saddest day of his life when I joined up. And you knew that; that's why you helped me get on. You didn't do it for me. You didn't give a damn about me, one way or the other. It was to get back at Pa. Because him you hated."

  Silence hung between us like a curtain.

  Finally he said, "I didn't hate him, Nathan."

  "Then why did you kill him, Uncle Louis?"

  "Kill him? What obscenity are you speaking…"

  "You kept your eye on me. didn't you, Uncle Louis? Kept track of your nephew on the force. You were thick with Cermak, way back when, and you've always been thick with the politicians and all the boys behind the scenes."

  He shrugged, not following me. exactly. "I- I suppose that's right."

  "Well, somebody in the know told my father where the money came from that I gave him for his shop. Somebody told him it was blood money. Somebody told him his son Nathan was a crooked cop."

  Uncle Louis, looking more than ever like a thin version of my father, a shadow of the man my father had been, said nothing; his eyes were wet and his bottom lip trembled.

  "You told him, Uncle Louis. You told him. And he killed himself."

  Uncle Louis said nothing.

  My eyes were wet, too. I pointed my finger at him. "I disinherit you, fucker. I disown you."

  And I left the guilt there with him.

  Tower Town April 9-June 25,

  Winter was over, but it was still c
old. Mary Ann Beame and I set out for a Sunday drive under overcast skies that didn't let the sun peek through once in six hours- which is how long a Sunday drive we took, starting out around noon and heading across the state toward the Mississippi River and the Tri-Cities, where Mary Ann and her lost brother Jimmy had been bora and raised.

  This was my first cross-country trip, and even with paved roads. I was a little uneasy about it. The '29 Chevy had been getting me around the city well enough, but clear across the state? That suddenly seemed overly ambitious, particularly under a sky this nasty.

  But soon I was going a confident 40 mph down U.S. 30, farm country whizzing by us on either side- though I did slow down for the dozen or so little towns along the way. Eviction notices in the farmyards, and out-of-business signs in store windows, said that hard times wasn't something Chicago had cornered the market on. All that farmland, stretching out flat to the horizon, looking wasteland-barren this time of year, broken only by the occasional farmhouse/silo,/barn, came as a shock to a city kid. I knew this rural world surrounded Chicago, but I'd never really seen it before, and when we pulled up to a gas station outside of DeKalb, a farmer in coveralls and floppy straw hat, his face as barren as the land, leaned against his pickup truck, which was getting filled at the next pump, and regarded us like visitors from another planet. So did a couple more farmers sitting leaned back in chairs in front of the station, chewing tobacco, apparently not minding the somewhat chilly day.

  Mary Ann didn't seem to notice these folks as anything special; she'd come from a rather rural community herself, and in fact she sat with her nose in the air, ignoring the riffraff, going high-hat like so many expatriates do when they finally condescend to come home.

  She sat in the Chevy in her white hat and black-and-white-checked dress and waited for me to get her a grape Nehi from inside, where I found more farmers playing rummy at a table, drinking bottles of Zollers beer. I got two bottles of pop from the cooler and paid the attendant, a kid about twenty with red cheeks and bright eyes who asked me where I was from. I told him Chicago.

  "Are those Cubs gonna take it this year?" he asked me.

  He meant the pennant; first nonexhibition game of the season was this coming week.

  "Wouldn't be surprised," I said. They'd won it last year and were favored to again.

  "I been to a same in Chicago." he said, grinning. "More'n once."

  I grinned back at him. "Me. too."

  I went out and stood by the car and handed Mary Ann in her bottle of grape pop; mine was orange. Over to one side of the station, some farm kids were pitching horseshoes.

  "It's a whole different world." I said.

  "What is?" Mary Ann asked flatly, doing her best to drink from the pop bottle with dignity.

  "This is." I said, pointing to two barefoot farm kids about eleven who were going in the station. A minute or so later, they came out. a kid clutching a half-pint of Hey Brothers Ice Cream and another with two small wooden spoons in one fist, fishing a jackknife out of a pocket with his other hand. They sat over by the slightly older kids playing horseshoes, and the kid with the knife cut the carton of ice cream in half and handed one half to the other kid. and they both dug in with the wooden spoons.

  "Doesn't that look good?" I said.

  "What?" Mary Ann said.

  I pointed the kids out to her again.

  She made a face. said. "Too cold for ice cream." and handed me back the empty Nehi bottle.

  I finished my Nehi off. put the bottles in a wooden carton up by the door near the tobacco-chewing farmers, and gave the red-cheeked kid a buck for the gas and told him to keep the change. His face lit up like nobody had ever done that to him before, and maybe they hadn't.

  We rumbled down the road, sitting silently for maybe a hundred miles. I was irritated with Mary Ann. All day so far she had chattered about herself and her ambitions (Hollywood was figuring in her fantasies now), but when I had tried to point out the simple rustic charms of the countryside along the way. like that gas station back there, she had nothing to say- except perhaps. "They're just a bunch of hicks, Nathan," or something similar.

  We ate supper at a roadside cafe called Twin Oaks, just the other side of Sterling-Rock Falls, where we would catch Illinois highway 3. The place was busy, and we had to sit at the counter, and Mary Ann didn't like that; she also didn't like the looks of the greasy Greek who served us, and she didn't like the way I looked at the young woman doing the cooking, who came out to ask me how I'd liked her pie.

  "Little tramp," Mary Ann said as we drove away.

  I shrugged. "She was cute. And the cherry pie was good, too."

  "She was common."

  "What's wrong with common?"

  "Nothing, in your eyes."

  Now she was irritated with me, and didn't speak till we hit the Tri-Cities, cutting through Moline to Rock Island, where a government bridge crossed over to Davenpoit, connecting also to the nearby Rock Island Arsenal. The riverfront, on the Illinois side anyway, was given over to railroad tracks and factories; what residential sections we saw seemed to be nothing special these were workingman's towns, or had been before times got bad. As we crossed the black steel bridge, the lock and dam on either side, the Mississippi below looked dark and choppy. A lot like the sky.

  We turned left into Davenport, through a warehouse district and into the downtown. It seemed puny to me, like a scale-model of Chicago that might be displayed at the fair next month. The tallest building, which was maybe twenty stories, of which a good portion was a clock tower, had a beacon light, sort of a pocketwatch version of the Lindbergh Beacon atop the Palmolive Building. But to somebody not Chicago-bred, the Tri-Cities might have seemed like a metropolis Davenport's population alone was sixty thousand, Mary Ann said, third largest city- in Iowa- and the five or six blocks of shops and restaurants probably seemed like the big city to the farmers and small-town folks of the surrounding area.

  Mary Ann directed me up a hill, which was Harrison Street, and had me turn to the left, up into an area where Gothic mansions perched on the bluff to look down upon the Tri-Cities; some of the mansions were starting to look a bit down at the mouth and long in the tooth- some seemed to have been turned into apartment houses. The house Mary Ann guided me toward was not one of the Gothic ones, however, but something more modern, a Frank Lloyd Wright-style two-story brown-brick affair that might best be described as a modernistic castle, right down to the art-deco turrets. Sitting at the end of the block, mansions of an earlier day all around, it perched on the edge of the steep hill that fell sharply to a side street below. I pulled into a paved driveway that curved around to the left to a double garage and left the car there. I got my overnight bag and Mary Ann's suitcase out of the rumble seat and a light went on over a side door, near the garage.

  He was thin and distinguished-looking, gray-haired with a dark mustache, wearing a pale gray suit and darker gray tie and, most significantly, gray gloves. He stood in the doorway and waited for us to come to him, but his manner, as he swung open the screen door, was friendly he had a reserved but unfeigned smile going.

  We stepped into a white, modern kitchen, with a nook off to the left, and I put the bags down as Mary

  Ann hugged her father and gestured toward me. almost offhandedly, saying. "This is Nathan Heller. Daddy." and left us there in the kitchen alone.

  His reserved smile turned into a more open, if embarrassed one. and he said. "You'll have to excuse my daughter. Mr. Heller. If you've traveled all the way here from Chicago with her. I suppose you know by now that she has a mind of her own. Unfortunately, that mind at times seems in no way connected to the real world."

  This was said with obvious affection for his daughter, but I did appreciate this immediate honesty from a man whose bearing suggested reticence.

  "Good to meet you, sir," I said, and extended my hand without thinking, even though Mary Ann had told me about her father.

  He extended a gray-gloved hand, which had only two fing
ers in it, the thumb and forefinger, and we shook hands. Despite his having only a fraction of a hand to do it with, the grip was as firm as you'd expect a chiropractor's grip to be. I noticed his other, similarly gloved hand appeared to have all its fingers.

  My face must've revealed my indecision as to whether or not I should apologize for my faux pas, because he smiled compassionately and said, "Think nothing of it, Mr. Heller. Shaking hands with people is something I have never given up, despite a shortage of digits."

  I smiled back at him. "Is that coffee I smell?"

  It was perking over on the stove.

  "It certainly is," he said, going over to a cupboard. "Have you eaten?"

  "Yes. we stopped at Sterling-Rock Falls."

  "Good. My cook has Sunday off. and while I've been a bachelor for twenty-some years now, coffee is as yet my only culinary achievement. I'm afraid you'd have been in for cold cuts, had you needed a meal. The coffee, however, I can guarantee. Care to try a cup?"

  "Love to," I said.

  He gestured toward the nook, and I went over and sat down. He brought two steaming cups over and we sat and drank in silence. He was, I believe, trying to figure out where to begin with me; I was just enjoying the coffee and not being in the Chevy, though the nook was a little reminiscent of a cramped car, at that. A bath and bed sounded good to me.

  But Mary Ann's father wanted to talk, and, since I was here to gather information about Jimmy Beame, I wasn't about to discourage him.

  "My daughter called me a few days ago, Mr. Heller," he said, "and told me who you are, and why you've made this journey."

  "Make it Nate, please."

  "Fine. And my name is John."

  "All right, John. Do you disapprove of my trying to locate your son?"

  "I would've. six months ago. Now… well, I'm inclined to support your efforts. In fact, if my daughter hasn't paid you sufficiently, I would be glad to underwrite your efforts myself."

  "That isn't necessary," I said.

  Somebody cleared her throat.