True Detective

by Max Allan Collins

  "Who the hell won?" Eliot said, almost in a whisper.

  "Damned if I know," I said.

  "I think Barney."

  "I don't know. Maybe a draw."

  "In which case the championship stays with Canzoneri."

  "Yep."

  "He's got it in points, Nate."

  Who?"

  "Barney. Just wait. He's got it on points."

  We waited; the fighters waited. Forever.

  After a while the ring announcer went to the mike, but instead of announcing the winner, begged the crowd's indulgence for the time this was taking; this was, after all, a championship fight…

  I didn't hear the rest because we booed the son of a bitch out of there.

  Finally he came back and did what he was paid for.

  He said: "The new lightweight champion of the"

  And that's all anybody heard, because that meant Barney had won. and the stadium went stark staring nuts, cheering. From ringside, the photogs started flashing, and Barney grinned down at them, tears and sweat streaking his face. I'd never seen him look so happy. Or so tired. He'd given it every ounce he had, and I was proud of him.

  Besides, I'd won twenty bucks on the deal.

  While the windup fight was under way, a six-rounder between a couple middleweights, Eliot took his leave, as he had to work tomorrow and it was getting late; so I made my way down to Barney's dressing room alone.

  Barney was sitting on the training table, fielding questions from reporters, and not terribly well: yes. he would give Canzoneri a return bout; no. he didn't know who he'd take on next. His trainer was working on the cuts over his eyes as the reporters fired their questions, and Barney, bushed, dazed, could barely answer, doing little more than flash his shy grin, which was enough to win the press guys over.

  The two managers, Winch and Pian, a couple deadpan, stocky guys, cleared the room of the reporters. Winch going out with them. Balding Art Winch was an Italian guy who looked Jewish, and dark-haired "Pi" Pian was a Jewish guy everybody took for Italian. Both of them were so businesslike vou wanted to hit 'em with pies- Pi particularly.

  Pi was enthusiastic tonight, however; with a mug that made Buster Keaton look like Santa Claus, he allotted Barney a pat on the back and said, "Well done, fella, well done."

  Haifa dozen or so of Barney's old West Side pals were let in the dressing room, and they were bubbling; they had a big party planned for him at the Morrison, which I knew about and had been looking forward to. Barney promised to drop by.

  "Drop by?" blurted a guy of twenty-eight, with the acne of a thirteen-year-old. "Don't you even wanna celebrate your champeenship?"

  And then Barney's face lit up; the door had opened and Winch was there, escorting a plump, beatifically smiling late-middle-aged woman in a blue dress; behind wire-frame glasses her eyes were Barney's.

  "Ma!" Barney shouted.

  He ran to her. hugged her. tears running down both their faces.

  Then he held her at arm's length and looked at her. "It's Shabbes, Ma! How'd you set here?"

  Solemnly, she said, "It's Shabbes, Beryl," which was Barney's real name, making with an elaborate, Jewish-mother shrug. "I walked. What else?"

  "It's five miles!"

  "I had to come. You see, I knew if I come to see you fight, you win."

  "But you hate fighting. Ma."

  "Sitting home waiting, I hate. Besides, I figure if you can take the punishment, I can take it."

  "Anything you say, Ma. Nate, come over here!"

  I went over. "Hello, Mrs. Ross. Why don't you let me drive you home? You can make an exception on riding on the Shabbes. Sick people do it."

  "Aren't you the smart Shabbes goy? Do I look sick?"

  Barney said, "Nate's right. Ma. You'll collapse or something, and then you will be sick. Let me drive you."

  "No."

  "All right." Barney said. "I'll walk home with you."

  Barney's West Side pals, listening to all this, protested: what about the party?"

  "I'll be there later." Barney promised them. "First I got to walk my girl home."

  And he did; all five miles, with his Ma on his arm.

  Or so he said; I didn't walk along with 'em. I wasn't crazy, and I wasn't near as Jewish.

  I went upstairs and the windup fight was over and folks were wandering up the ramps out into the lobby. They were all wound up. still caught up in the Ross-Canzoneri bout, some of them arguing the decision, most of them saying it was a fight they'd tell their grandkids about, and as I was going down the ramp into the gray cement lobby. I saw him.

  Dipper Cooney.

  He was dressed like a college kid: sweater, slacks- that was his game. That was how he turned looking twenty when he was nearly twice that into a living; red-haired, freckle-faced, friendly, he did not look like a pickpocket.

  But brother, was he.

  I moved through the crowd as quickly as I could without attracting attention or getting swung at; Dipper was following a guy and studying him to make the hook, and I had time.

  Then about ten feet from him I got overanxious, and pushed past a guy, who pushed back and said. "Hey! Watch it, bub!"

  And Dipper turned, and saw me.

  And recognized me.

  To him, I supposed, I was still just a pickpocket detail cop. And he could see I was moving toward him, fast enough, furious enough, to have caused a commotion (goddamnit!), and he started pushing through the crowd himself, and was out the door and into the starry night.

  I followed him, and he left an angry trail of people, as the fans in front of the stadium, lingering, chatting about the great fight, were in both our ways, and got pushed out of it, and we had to be well away from the stadium and into the residential district surrounding it before either of us could really run.

  And one thing a pickpocket can do is run.

  Cooney, who'd kept his weight down to help with the college kid pose, was light, small, wiry, and he had half a block on me.

  But I wanted him bad.

  I ran full throttle after him. feeling like a track star, and I shouted, "Cooney! I'm not the cops anymore!"

  He kept running.

  So did I.

  "Cooney!" I yelled. "I just want to talk, goddamnit," and that last was just to myself; my side was starting to ache. I never ran this fast, this far, before.

  The neighborhood was mostly two-flats and row houses, and it was almost midnight, so we were alone on our sidewalk track, nothing, nobody in our way, and I began to cut the distance, and then he was just out in front of me and I threw myself at him, tackled the son of a bitch, and we skidded, skinned ourselves on the sidewalk and landed in a pile.

  I didn't have a gun on me, but that was okay: pickpockets rarely cany guns, as it takes up stash space and weights 'em down. And I was bigger than this forty-year-old college kid, and I crawled on top of him like a rapist and grabbed the front of his shirt and the two green eyes in the midst of that freckle-face looked up at me round as the colored kid's in Our Gang.

  "What the fuck you want. Heller?" he managed. He was panting. So was 1.1 hoped my breath was better than his. "You ain't no goddamn cop no more."

  "You know about that?"

  "I can read. I seen the papers."

  "Then why'd you run?"

  He thought about it. "Force of habit. Let me up."

  "No."

  "I won't run. I'm winded. Heller. Let me up."

  Cautiously, I did. But I kept the front of his shirt wadded in one fist.

  "I just want some answers," I said.

  "You still sound like a cop."

  "I'm private."

  That stirred a memory. "Oh. Okay. Yeah, maybe I remember reading that. You're a private dick now."

  "Right. And this isn't police business."

  We were on a side street; a car angled down it somebody leaving the stadium, probably. I let go of his shirt, so it wouldn't attract the driver's attention. Cooney thought about running. Just thought.

&n
bsp; "In fact," I said, "there's a double sawbuck in it for you."

  His attitude changed; running was now out of the question. "You're kiddin'? What do I know that's worth a double sawbuck to you, Heller?"

  "It's just a case I'm working, a missing persons case."

  "Yeah?"

  "Kid named Jimmy Beame. His sister and father are looking for him."

  He rubbed his chin. "I think I know a Jimmy Beame."

  "Give."

  "You give. You were talkin' double sawbuck a minute ago."

  I dug in my pocket and got out a ten; gave it to him.

  "You can have another." I said, "if I like what you have to say."

  "Fair enough." he shrugged. "I was in the Tri-Cities. must've been a year and a half or two ago. This kid Beame was thick with the local mugs. Small-timers… but they were connected to some Chicago folks."

  "Go on."

  "This kid wanted in."

  "In where?"

  "The mob. He wanted some fast money, he said. He'd been bootlegging and such- some of it in Chicago, he said, for these Tri-Cities mugs. But he wanted something bigger."

  "What exactly?"

  "He wanted to work with the Capone gang."

  "What? He was just a hick kid!"

  "Yeah, but he'd been around a bit. Had a gun on him, when he traveled with me. And I helped him out: he paid me to."

  "So what did you do for him?"

  "How 'bout the other sawbuck?"

  I grabbed his shirt again. Another car came rolling down the side street and I let go.

  "Easy," he said, brushing his college sweater off.

  "What did you do for him?"

  "I called Nitti. I done work for him, you know, time to time. Said the kid was all right, and Nitti said send him, and I gave the kid the address and that's that."

  "That's that?"

  "That's that," Cooney shrugged, and the car going by slowed as the driver extended an arm with a gun in its fist and I dove for the bushes as three silenced bullets danced across Cooney's chest.

  Then the car was gone, and so was Cooney.

  Night at the fair.

  White lights bouncing off colored surfaces, colored lights careening off white surfaces, the modernistic lines of buildings brought out by tricks of incandescent bulbs, arc lights, neon tubes, a night aglow with pastels, like some freak occurrence, like a diamond necklace caught fire and flung along the lakeshore.

  That was the view from atop the east tower of the Sky Ride, on Northerly Island, anyway, where Mary Ann had dragged me. But even down on the grounds of the fair, the effect was otherworldly. This was not the first time Mary Ann had asked me to bring her to the fair at night: the half dozen times we'd been here together, with the exception of that first afternoon, had been after the sun fell and the lights came up, and the futuristic city looming along the lake became even more unreal.

  Of course I hadn't really brought her here tonight; I had met her at the Hollywood pavilion, which was her favorite place at the exposition- and where, tonight, she'd been working. A special broadcast of "Mr. First-Nighter" had emanated from one of the two radio studios within Hollywood, which sprawled over five acres on the tip of Northerly Island, just south of the Enchanted Island playground. Much of Hollywood was a bulky- structure in shades of red that despite the massive round Sound Stage entryway was strangely lacking the futuristic grace of the rest of a fair which was itself more a reflection of Hollywood's notion of the future than science's. Outdoor sets surrounded the building, and movies were shot here daily by a crew making two-reelers for Monogram, often featuring name stars, admittedly not of Dietrich or Gable stature, but stars (Grant Withers was here for the duration), and amateur movie photographers and the just plain star-struck could watch talkies being made, and afterward have a beer and sandwich in the outdoor replica of the Brown Derby restaurant. And there were several sound stages indoors, one of them an auditorium that seated six hundred, which was also used for radio broadcasts, and was where Mary Ann and the rest of the "Mr. First-Nighter" troupe had broadcast this evening.

  I'd seen Mary Ann doing radio before: several times I'd picked her up at the massive nineteenth-floor NBC studios at the Merchandise Mart, in Studio A, the largest radio studio in the world, where I stood in the glassed-in soundproofed balcony and listened to whatever soap opera she was working on that day come in via small speakers. She would stand before the unwieldy microphone and read her script, and she was good, all right, but I can't say her talent bowled me over.

  Tonight, though, I'd sat in the audience at Hollywood, and Mary Ann had impressed me. It was odd to sit in a theater and- where stage or screen should be- see a big glassed-in sound stage, inside of which were padded walls like an asylum, where not inmates but actors with scripts were caged, standing before mikes, sound effects man at his table with his blank gun and frame door to slam and quarter-flight of steps to climb in the background. Above the forty-foot glass enclosure were two smaller glass-enclosed rooms for the sound engineers; the control rooms were dimly lit, but lights on their console panels winked at the crowd. An impressive theater, unlike anything I'd ever seen before.

  But it was Mary Ann that impressed me most.

  Even with the glass curtain separating her from the audience, they loved her. And she loved them back. The awkwardness of standing reading a script did not keep her from making eye contact with them, from playing out to the hilt her role of damsel-iu-distress in the ludicrous private eye melodrama she was cast in tonight. She had dressed simply, in a milk-chocolate linen dress, with tiny pearl buttons down the front, some puff in the shoulders, the skirt clinging, then flaring a bit at the knees, and of course a matching beret; somehow it made her look innocent and worldly at the same time. When the show signed off the air, and the actors-under-glass took their bows, it was Mary Ann, not guest star Adolphe Menjou, who got the big hand.

  "You were terrific," I said.

  She grinned, crinkling her chin. "You never said that about my acting before."

  "I never saw you wrap an audience around your pinkie before. Say, what kept you?"

  She'd been nearly half an hour after the performance before meeting up with me outside.

  "You won't believe this," she said, "but a scout for Monogram was in the audience."

  "Somebody connected with the movies they're making here, you mean?"

  "Yes, but he works for Monogram in Hollywood. Real Hollywood."

  I wasn't sure there was any such thing, but I said, "And you've been offered a part?"

  She was beaming. "Yes! Isn't it exciting? In August, if I can get a week off from 'Just Plain Bill.' They can write me out: give me the flu or send me on a trip or something. Isn't that just splendid?"

  I was happy for her; I didn't mention that in the weeks previous she had dismissed Monogram as "poverty row." and had pooh-poohed the making of two-reelers here at the fair as a "small-time publicity scheme, catering to these hick crowds." But I also knew she'd filed her name with the Monogram people's casting office, as had most of the actors in Chicago.

  We were walking past the Enchanted Island, and its giant boy on his Radio Flyer wagon. It was a little windy tonight; almost chilly, for summer, but pleasant enough.

  "Mr. Sullivan- he's the director I'll be working with- says it will be a sort of paid screen test. If Mr. Ostrow in Hollywood likes my work in the two-reeler, I could be flown out to Hollywood and put under contract!"

  "It sounds like money in the bank to me," I said, meaning it. She'd been good tonight; she'd connected with that audience like Barney's left and Canzoneri's chin.

  "Nathan," she said quietly, as we moved among the crowd, wandering past the circular court of the Electrical Building, where a fountain fanned water and light in a silver arc before the pastel orange-and-blue building. "You'll come out there with me, if they send for me- won't you?"

  "Sure," I said.

  "Do you mean it?"

  "Sure. I can pack my business in a suitcase in a minut
e flat. California's perfect for my kind of work."

  "You're not just saying this?"

  I stopped her: put my hands on her arms. I looked into the Claudette Colbert eyes and said. "I'd follow you anywhere. To hell, or Hollywood. Got that?"

  She smiled and hugged me; some people going by smiled at us.

  "Then take me to the fair." she said impishly.

  "Where the hell do you think you are?"

  "There's some things we haven't done."

  "Like what?"

  "The Streets of Paris. I want to see Sally Rand take off her clothes."

  "Sally Rand doesn't take off her clothes; she already has her clothes off when she comes out. The trick is to catch a look at her when she's waving these damn ostrich plumes around."

  "You speak as if from experience."

  "This is what the boys tell me. I wouldn't know, myself. Why would I want to go see a gorgeous blonde parade around in her skin? For that matter, why would you?"

  "Just checking out the competition. They say you haven't seen the fair if you haven't seen Sally Rand."

  Actually, I did know why she wanted to check Sally Rand out. It'd been in the papers, just recently: several of the Hollywood studios were after the sensation of the fair to sign with 'em. So Sally Rand w&s competition.

  But I had been hoping to go right home, either to my place or hers, and I told her so. What I didn't tell her was why.

  Yesterday somebody had tried to kill me; I was convinced of that. I didn't know whether or not Dipper Cooney had been silenced on purpose, or had just happened to be there when an attempt on me was made. But my instinct was that I had been the prime target last night. And the only thing I'd been up to lately, outside of working at the fair, was snooping around looking for Mary Ann's brother.

  I couldn't tell her about last night. I couldn't tell anybody, not Eliot, maybe not even Barney. That dark residential side street had been deserted enough for me to risk leaving poor Cooney dead, there on the sidewalk, and I'd walked quickly back the number of blocks to my car in the stadium parking lot and went home, to my Murphy bed. Because me being involved with another shooting right now what with the hostile cops and yellow journalists that would attract was something I could do without.