Chicago Lightning

“An alcoholic schoolgirl,” Ev said with a smirk, and a martini sip.

“…You want me to talk to him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe…. I think this case, these poor homeless men being victimized again, got memories stirred up.”

“Of the Butcher case, you mean.”

“Yes…and Nate, we’ve been getting postcards from that crazy man.”

“What crazy man? Capone?”

“No! The Butcher…threatening postcards postmarked the town where that asylum is.”

“Is there any chance Watterson can get out?”

Lloyd Watterson: the Butcher.

“Eliot says no,” Ev said. “He’s been assured of that.”

“Well, these killings aren’t the work of a madman. This is murder for profit, plain and simple. Good old-fashioned garden variety evil.”

“Help him clear this up,&8221; she said, and an edge of desperation was in her voice. “I think it would…might…make a difference.”

Then Eliot was back, and sat down with a fresh martini in hand.

“I hope I didn’t miss anything good,” he said.

My room was small but seemed larger due to the sparseness of the furnishings, metallic, institutional-gray clothes cabinet, a chair and a metal cot. A bare bulb bulged from the wall near the door, as if it had blossomed from the faded, fraying floral-print wallpaper. The wooden floor had a greasy, grimy look.

Katie was saying, “Hope it will do.”

“You still haven’t said what my duties are.”

“I’ll think of something. Now, if you need anything, I’m down the hall. Let me show you….”

I followed her to a doorway at the end of the narrow gloomy hallway. She unlocked the door with a key extracted from between her massive breasts, and ushered me into another world.

The livingroom of her apartment held a showroom-like suite of walnut furniture with carved arms, feet and base rails, the chairs and davenport sporting matching green mohair cushions, assembled on a green and blue wall-to-wall Axminster carpet. Pale yellow wallpaper with gold and pink highlights created a tapestry effect, while floral satin damask draperies dressed up the windows, venetian blinds keeping out prying eyes. Surprisingly tasteful, the room didn’t look very lived in.

“Posh digs,” I said, genuinely impressed.

“Came into some money recently. Spruced the joint up a little…. Now, if you need me after hours, be sure to knock good and loud.” She swayed over to a doorless doorway and nodded for me to come to her. “I’m a heavy sleeper.”

The bedroom was similarly decked out with new furnishings—a walnut-veener double bed, dresser and nightstand and three-mirror vanity with modern lines and zebrawood design panels—against ladylike pink-and-white floral wallpaper. The vanity top was neatly arranged with perfumes and face powder and the like, their combined scents lending the room a feminine bouquet. Framed prints of airbrushed flowers hung here and there, a large one over the bed, where sheets and blankets were neatly folded back below lush overstuffed feather pillows, as if by a maid.

“I had this room re-done, too,” she said. “My late husband, rest his soul, was a slob.”

Indeed it was hard to imagine a man sharing this room with her. There was a daintiness that didn’t match up with its inhabitant. The only sign that anybody lived here were the movie magazines on the bedstand in the glow of the only light, a creamy glazed pottery-base lamp whose gold parchment shade gave the room a glow.

The only person more out of place in this tidy, feminine suite than me, in my tattered secondhand store suit, was my blowsy hostess in her polka-dot peasant blouse and flowing dark skirt. She was excited and proud, showing off her fancy living quarters, bobbing up and down like an eager kid; it was cute and a little sickening.

Or maybe that was the cheap beer. I wasn’t drunk but I’d had three glasses of it.

“You okay, Bill?” she asked.

“Demon meatloaf,” I said.

“Sit, sit.”

And I was sitting on the edge of the bed. She stood before me, looming over me, frightening and oddly comely, with her massive bosom spilling from the blouse, her red-rouged mouth, her half-lidded long-lashed green eyes, mother/goddess/whore.

“It’s been lonely, Bill,” she said, “without my man.”

“Suh…sorry for your loss.”

“I could use a man around here, Bill.”

“Try to help.”

“It could be sweet for you.”

She tugged the peasant blouse down over the full, round, white-powdered melons that were her bosom, and pulled my head between them. Their suffocation was pleasant, even heady, and I was wondering whether I’d lost count of those beers when I fished in my trousers for my wallet for the lambskin.

I wasn’t that far gone.

I had never been with a woman as overweight as Kathleen O’Meara before, and I don’t believe I ever was again; many a man might dismiss her as fat. But the sheer womanliness of her was overwhelming; there was so much of her, and she smelled so good, particularly for a saloonkeeper, her skin so smooth, her breasts and behind as firm as they were large and round, that the three nights I spent in her bed remain bittersweet memories. I didn’t love her, obviously, nor did she me—we were using each other, in our various nasty ways.

But it’s odd, how many times, over the years, the memory of carnality in Katie’s bed pops unbidden into my mind. On more than one occasion, in bed with a slender young girlish thing, the image of womanly, obscenely voluptuous Katie would taunt me, as if saying, Now I was a real woman!

Katie was also a real monster. She waited until the second night, when I lay next to her in the recently purchased bed, in her luxuriant remodeled suite of rooms in a waterfront rooming house where her pitiful clientele slept on pancake-flat piss-scented mattresses, to invite me to be her accomplice.

“Someday I’ll move from here,” she said in the golden glow of the parchment lamp and the volcanic sex we’d just had. She was on her back, the sheet only half-covering the globes of her bosom; she was smoking, staring at the ceiling.

I was on my back, too—I wasn’t smoking, cigarettes being one filthy habit I didn’t partake of. “But, Katie—this place is hunky-dory.”

“These rooms are nice, love. But little Katie was meant for a better life than the Angles can provide.”

“You got a good business, here.”

She chuckled. “Better than you know.”

“What do you mean?”

She leaned on one elbow and the sheet fell away from the large, lovely bosoms. “Don’t you wonder why I’m so good to these stumblebums?”

“You give a lot of free beer away, I noticed.”

“Why do you suppose Katie does that?”

“’Cause you’re a good Christian woman?”

She roared with laughter, globes shimmering like Jello. “Don’t be a child! Have you heard of burial insurance, love?”

And she filled me in on the scheme—the lottery portion of it, at least, taking out policies on men who were good bets for quick rides to potter’s field. But she didn’t mention anything about helping speed the insured to even quicker, surer deaths.

“You disappointed in Katie?” she asked. “That I’m not such a good Christian woman?”

I grinned at her. “I’m tickled pink to find out how smart you are, baby. Was your old man in on this?”

“He was. But he wasn’t trustworthy.”

“Lucky for you he croaked.”

“Lucky.”

“Hey…I didn’t mean to be coldhearted, baby. I know you miss him.”

Her plump pretty face was as blank as a bisque baby’s. “He disappointed me.”

“How’d he die?”

“Got drunk and stepped in front of a car.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t pay for a dipso to run a bar, too much helpin’ himself…. I notice you don’t hit the sauce so hard. You don’t drink too much, and you hold what you do drink.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re just a good joe, down on his luck. Could use a break.”

“Who couldn’t?”

“And I can use a man. I can use a partner.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Just be friendly to these rummies. Get ’em on your good side, get ’em to sign up. Usually all it takes is a friendly ear and a pint of rotgut.”

“And when they finally drink themselves into a grave, we get a nice payday.”

“Yup. And enough nice paydays, we can leave the Angles behind. Retire rich while we’re still young and pretty.”

His name was Harold Wilson. He looked at least sixty but when we filled out the application, he managed to remember he was forty-three.

He and I sat in a booth at O’Meara’s and I plied him with cheap beers, which Katie’s hollow-eyed daughter dutifully delivered, while Harold told me, in bits and pieces, the sad story that had brought him to the Angles.

Hunkered over the beer, he seemed small, but he’d been of stature once, physically and otherwise. In a fahat was both withered and puffy, bloodshot powder-blue eyes peered from pouches, by turns rheumy and teary.

He had been a stock broker. When the Crash came, he chose to jump a freight rather than out a window, leaving behind a well-bred wife and two young daughters.

“I meant to go back,” Harold said, in a baritone voice whose dignity had been sandpapered away, leaving scratchiness and quaver behind. “For years, I did menial jobs…seasonal work, janitorial work, chopping firewood, shoveling walks, mowing grass…and I’d save. But the money never grew. I’d either get jackrolled or spend it on…”

He finished the sentence by grabbing the latest foamy mug of warm beer from Maggie O’Meara and guzzling it.

I listened to Harold’s sad story all afternoon and into the evening; he repeated himself a lot, and he signed three burial policies, one for $450, another for $750 and finally the jackpot, $1000. Death would probably be a merciful way out for the poor bastard, but even at this stage of his life, Harold Wilson deserved a better legacy than helping provide for Katie O’Meara’s retirement.

Late in the evening, he said, “Did go back, once…to Elmhurst…. Tha’s Chicago.”

“Yeah, I know, Harold.”

“Thomas Wolfe said, ‘Can’t go home again.’ Shouldn’t go home again’s more like it.”

“Did you talk to them?”

“No! No. It was Chrissmuss. Sad story, huh? Looked in the window. Didn’t expect to see ’em, my family; figured they’d lose the house.”

“But they didn’t? How’d they manage that?”

“Mary…that’s my wife…her family had some money. Must not’ve got hurt as bad as me in the Crash. Figure they musta bought the house for her.”

“I see.”

“Sure wasn’t her new husband. I recognized him; fella I went to high school with. A postman.”

“A mail carrier?”

“Yeah. ’Fore the Crash, Mary, she woulda looked down on a lowly civil servant like that…. But in Depression times, that’s a hell of a good job.”

“True enough.”

The eyes were distant and runny. “My girls was grown. College age. Blond and pretty, with boy friends, holdin’ hands…. The place hadn’t changed. Same furniture. Chrissmuss tree where we always put it, in the front window…. We’d move the couch out of the way and…anyway. Nothing different. Except in the middle of it, no me. A mailman took my place.”

For a moment I thought he said “male man.”

O’Meara’s closed at two a.m. I helped Maggie clean up, even though Katie hadn’t asked me to. Katie was upstairs, waiting for me in her bedroom. Frankly, I didn’t feel like doing my duty tonight, pleasant though it admittedly was. On the one hand, I was using Katie, banging this br I was undercover, and undercovers, to get the goods on, which made me a louse; and on the other hand, spending the day with her next victim, Harold Wilson, brought home what an enormous louse she was.

I was helping daughter Maggie put chairs on tables; she hadn’t said a word to me yet. She had her mother’s pretty green eyes and she might have been pretty herself if her scarecrow thin frame and narrow, hatchet face had a little meat on them.

The room was tidied when she said, “Nightcap?”

Surprised, I said, “Sure.”

“I got a pot of coffee on, if you’re sick of warm beer.”

The kitchen in back was small and neat and Maggie’s living quarters were back here, as well. She and her mother did not live together; in fact, they rarely spoke, other than Katie issuing commands.

I sat at a wooden table in the midst of the small cupboard-lined kitchen and sipped the coffee Maggie provided in a chipped cup. In her white waitress uniform, she looked like a wilted nurse.

“That suit you’re wearing,” she said.

Katie had given me clothes to wear; I was in a brown suit and a yellow-and-brown tie, nothing fancy but a step or two up from the threadbare duds “Bill O’Hara” had worn into O’Meara’s.

“What about ’em?”

“Those were my father’s.” Maggie sipped her coffee. “You’re about his size.”

I’d guessed as much. “I didn’t know. I don’t mean to be a scavenger, Miss O’Meara, but life can do that to you. The Angles ain’t high society.”

“You were talking to that man all afternoon.”

“Harold Wilson. Sure. Nice fella.”

“Ma’s signing up policies on him.”

“That’s right. You know about that, do you?”

“I know more than you know. If you knew what I knew, you wouldn’t be so eager to sleep with that cow.”

“Now, let’s not be disrespectful…”

“To you or the cow?…. Mr. O’Hara, you seem like a decent enough sort. Careful what you get yourself into. Remember how my papa died.”

“No one ever told me,” I lied.

“He got run down by a car. I think he got pushed.”

“Really? Who’d do a thing like that?”

The voice behind us said, “This is cozy.”

She was in the doorway, Katie, in a red Kimono with yellow flowers on it; you could’ve rigged out a sailboat with all that cloth.

“Mr. O’Hara helped me tidy up,” Maggie said coldly. No fear in her voice. “I offered him coffee.”

“Just don’t offer him anything else,” Katie snapped. The green eyes were har20;jade.

Maggie blushed, and rose, taking her empty cup and mine and depositing them awkwardly, clatteringly, in the sink.

In bed, Katie said, “Good job today with our investment, Bill.”

“Thanks.”

“Know what Harold Wilson’s worth, now?”

“No.”

“Ten thousand…. Poor sad soul. Terrible to see him suffering like that. Like it’s terrible for us to have to wait and wait, before we can leave all this behind.”

“What are you sayin’, love?”

“I’m sayin’, were somebody to put that poor man out of his misery, they’d be doin’ him a favor, is all I’m sayin’.”

“You’re probably right, at that. Poor bastard.”

“You know how cars’ll come up over the hill…25^th Street, headin’ for the bridge? Movin’ quick through this here bad part of a town?”

“Yeah, what about ’em?”

“If someone were to shove some poor soul out in front of a car, just as it was coming up and over, there’d be no time for stoppin’.”

I pretended to digest that, then said, “That’d be murder, Katie.”

“Would it?”

“Still…You might be doin’ the poor bastard a favor, at that.”

“And make ourselves $10,000 richer.”

“…. You ever do this before, Katie?”

She pressed a hand to her generous bare bosom. “No! No. But I never had a man I could trust before.”

Late the next morning, I met with Eliot in a back booth at Mickey’s, a dimly lit hole-in-the-wall saloon a stone’s throw from City Hall. He was having a late breakfast—a bloody Mary—and I had coffee.

“How’d you get away from Kathleen O’Meara?” he wondered. He looked businesslike in his usual three-piece suit; I was wearing a blue number from the Frank O’Meara Collection.

“She sleeps till noon. I told her daughter I was taking a walk.”

“Long walk.”

“The taxi’ll be on my expense account. Eliot, I don’t know how much more of this I can stand. She sent the forms in and paid the premiums on Harold Wilson, and she’s talking murder all right, but if you want to catch her in the act, she’s plannin’ to wait at least a month before we give Harold a friendly push.”

“That’s a long time for you to stay undercover,” Eliot admitted, stirring his bloody Mary with its celery stalk. “But it’s in my budget.”

I sighed. “I never knew being a city employee could be so exhausting.”

“I take it you and Katie are friendly.”

“She’s a ride, all right. I’ve never been so disgusted with myself in my life.”

“It’s that distasteful?”

“Hell, no, I’m having a whale of time, so to speak. It’s just shredding what little’s left of my self-respect, and shabby little code of ethics, is all. Banging a big fat murdering bitch and liking it.” I shuddered.

“This woman is an ogre, no question…and I’m not talking about her looks. Nate, if we can stop her, and expose what’s she done, it’ll pave the way for prosecuting the other women in the Natural Death, Inc., racket…or at the very least scaring them out of it.”

That evening Katie and I were walking up the hill. No streetlights in this part of town, and no moon to light the way; lights in the frame and brick houses we passed, and the headlights of cars heading toward the bridge, threw yellow light on the cracked sidewalk we trundled up, arm in arm, Katie and me. She wore a yellow peasant blouse, always pleased to show off her treasure chest, and a full green skirt.

“Any second thoughts, handsome?”

“Just one.”

She stopped; we were near the rise of the hill and the lights of cars came up and over and fell like prison searchlights seeking us out. “Which is?”

“I’m willing to do a dirty deed for a tidy dollar, don’t get me wrong, love. It’s just…didn’t your husband die this same way?”

“He did.”

“Heavily insured and pushed in front of his oncoming destiny?”

There was no shame, no denial; if anything, her expression—chin high, eyes cool and hard—spoke pride. “He did. And I pushed him.”

“Did you, now? That gives a new accomplice pause.”

“I guess it would. But I told you he cheated me. He salted money away. And he was seeing other women. I won’t put up with disloyalty in a man.”

“Obviously not.”

“I’m the most loyal steadfast woman in the world…’less you cross me. Frank O’Meara’s loss is your gain…if you have the stomach for the work that needs doing.”

A truck came rumbling up over the rise, gears shifting into low gear, and for a detective, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t know we’d been shadowed; but we had. We’d been followed, or anticipated; to this day I’m not sure whether she came from the bushes or behind us, whether fate had helped her or careful planning and knowledge of her mother’s ways. Whatever the case, Maggie O’Meara came flying out of somewhere, hurling her skinny stick-like arms forward, shoving the much bigger woman into the path of the truck.

Katie had time to scream, and to look back at the wild-eyed smiling face of her daughter washed in the yellow headlights. The big rig’s big tires rolled over her, her girth presenting no problem, bones popping like twigs, blood streaming like water.

The trucker was no hit-and-skip guy. He came to a squealing stop and hopped out and trotted back and looked at the squashed shapeless shape, yellow and green clothing stained crimson, limbs, legs, turned to pulp, head cracked like a melon, oozing.

I had a twinge of sorrow for Katie O’Meara, that beautiful horror, that horrible beauty; but it passed.

“She just jumped right out in front of me!” the trucker blurted. He was a small, wiry man with a mustache, and his eyes were wild.

I glanced at Maggie; she looked blankly back at me.

“I know,” I said. “We saw it, her daughter and I…poor woman’s been despondent.”

I told the uniform cops the same story about Katie, depressed over the loss of her dear husband, leaping in front of the truck. Before long, Eliot arrived himself, topcoat flapping in the breeze as he stepped from the sedan that bore his special EN-1 license plate.

“I’m afraid I added a statistic to your fatalities,” I admitted.

“What’s the real story?” he asked me, getting me to one side. “None of this suicide nonsense.”

I told Eliot that Katie had been demonstrating to me how she wanted me to push Harold Wilson, lost her footing and stumbled to an ironic death. He didn’t believe me, of course, and I think he figured that I’d pushed her myself.

He didn’t mind, because I produced such a great witness for him. Maggie O’Meara had the goods on the Natural Death racket, knew the names of every woman in her mother’s ring, and in May was the star of eighty witnesses in the Grand Jury inquiry. Harold Wilson and many other of the “unwitting pawns in the death-gambling insurance racket” (as reporter Clayton Fritchey put it) were among those witnesses. So were Dr. Alice Jeffers, investigator Gaspar Corso and me.

That night, the night of Katie O’Meara’s “suicide,” after the police were through with us, Maggie had wept at her kitchen table while I fixed coffee for her, though her tears were not for her mother or out of guilt, but for her murdered father. Maggie never seemed to put together that her dad had been an accomplice in the insurance scheme, or anyway never allowed herself to admit it.

Finally, she asked, “Are you…are you really going to cover for me?”

That was when I told her she was going to testify.

She came out of it, fine; she inherited a lot of money from her late mother—the various insurance companies did not contest previous pay-outs—and I understand she sold O’Meara’s and moved on, with a considerable nest egg. I have no idea what became of her, after that.

Busting the Natural Death, Inc., racket was Eliot’s last major triumph in Cleveland law enforcement. The following March, after a night of dining, dancing and drinking at the Vogue Room, Eliot and Ev Ness were in an automobile accident, Eliot sliding into another driver’s car. With Ev minorly hurt, Eliot—after checking the other driver and finding him dazed but all right—rushed her to a hospital and became a hit-f eun driver. He made some efforts to cover up and, even when he finally fessed up in a press conference, claimed he’d not been intoxicated behind that wheel; his political enemies crucified him, and a month later Eliot resigned as Public Safety Director.

During the war, Eliot headed up the government’s efforts to control venereal disease on military bases; but he never held a law enforcement position again. He and Ev divorced in 1945. He married a third time, in 1946, and ran, unsuccessfully for mayor of Cleveland in ’47, spending the rest of his life trying, without luck, to make it in the world of business, often playing on his reputation as a famed gangbuster.

In May, 1957, Eliot Ness collapsed in his kitchen shortly after he had arrived home from the liquor store, where he had bought a bottle of Scotch.

He died with less than a thousand dollars to his name—I kicked in several hundred bucks on the funeral, wishing his wife had taken out some damn burial insurance on him.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed within this story, which is based on an actual case in the career of Eliot Ness.

Not long ago Miami Beach had been a sixteen-hundred-acre stretch of jungle sandbar thick with mangroves and scrub palmetto, inhabited by wild birds, mosquitoes and snakes. Less than thirty years later, the wilderness had given way to plush hotels, high-rent apartment houses and lavish homes, with manicured terraces and swimming pools, facing a beach littered brightly with cabanas and sun umbrellas.

That didn’t mean the place wasn’t still infested with snakes, birds and bugs—just that it was now the human variety.

It was May 22, 1941, and dead; winter season was mid-December through April, and the summer’s onslaught of tourists was a few weeks away. At the moment, the majority of restaurants and nightclubs in Miami Beach were shuttered, and the handful of the latter still doing business were the ones with gaming rooms. Even in off-season, gambling made it pay for a club to keep its doors open.

The glitzy showroom of Chez Clifton had been patterned on (though was about a third the size of) the Chez Paree back home in Chicago, with a similarly set up backroom gambling casino called (in both instances) the Gold Key Club. But where the Chez Paree was home to bigname stars and orchestras—Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Ted Lewis, Martha Raye—the Chez Clifton’s headliner was invariably its namesake: Pete Clifton.

A near ringer for Zeppo, the “normal” Marx Brother, Clifton was tall, dark and horsily handsome, his slicked-back, parted-at-the side hair as black as his tie and tux. He was at the microphone, leaning on it like a jokester Sinatra, the orchestra behind him, accompanying him occasionally on song parodies, the drummer providing the requisite rimshots, the boys laughing heartily at gags they’d heard over and over, prompting the audience.

Not that the audience needed help: the crowd thought Clifton was a scream. And, for a Thursday night, it was a good crowd, too.

“Hear about the gu that bought his wife a bicycle?” he asked innocently. “Now she’s peddling it all over town.”

They howled at that.

“Hear about the sleepy bride?…. She couldn’t stay away awake for a second.”

Laughter all around me, I was settled in at a table for two—by myself—listening to one dirty joke after another. Clifton had always worked blue, back when I knew him; he’d been the opening act at the Colony Club showroom on Rush Street—a mob joint fronted by Nicky Dean, a crony of Al Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti.

But tonight, every gag was filthy.

“Hear about the girl whose boyfriend didn’t have any furniture? She was floored.”

People were crying at this rapier wit. But not everybody liked it. The guy Clifton was fronting for, in particular.

“Nate,” Frank Nitti had said to me earlier that afternoon, “I need you to deliver a message to your old pal Pete Clifton.”

In the blue shade of an umbrella at a small white metal table, buttery sun reflecting off the shimmer of cool blue water, Nitti and I were sitting by the pool at Nitti’s Di Lido Island estate, his palatial digs looming around us, rambling white stucco buildings with green-tile roofs behind bougainvillea-covered walls.

Eyes a mystery behind sunglasses, Nitti wore a blue-and-red Hawaiian print shirt, white slacks and sandals, a surprisingly small figure, his handsome oval face flecked with occasional scars, his slicked back black hair touched with gray and immaculately trimmed. I was the one who looked like a gangster, in my brown suit and darker brown fedora, having just arrived from Chicago, Nitti’s driver picking me up at the railroad station.

“I wouldn’t call Clifton an ‘old pal,’ Mr. Nitti.”

“How many times I gotta tell ya, call me, ‘Frank’? After what we been through together?”

I didn’t like the thought of having been through anything “together” with Frank Nitti. But the truth was, fate and circumstance had on several key occasions brought Chicago’s most powerful gangster leader into the path of a certain lowly Loop private detective—though, I wasn’t as lowly as I used to be. The A-1 Agency had a suite of offices now, and I had two experienced ops and a pretty blonde secretary under me—or anyway, the ops were under me; the secretary wasn’t interested.

But when Frank Nitti asked the President of the A-1 to hop a train to Miami Beach and come visit, Nathan Heller hopped and visited—the blow softened by the three hundred dollar retainer check Nitti’s man Louis Campagna had delivered to my Van Buren Street office.

“I understand you two boys used to go out with showgirls and strippers, time to time,” Nitti said, lighting up a Cuban cigar smaller than a billy club.

“Clifton was a cocky, good-looking guy, and the toast of Rush Street. The girls liked him. I liked the spillover.”

Nitti nodded, waving out his match. “He’s still a good-looking guy. And he’s still cocky. Ever wonder how he managed to open up his own club?”

“Never bothered wondering. But I guess it is a little unusual.”

“Yeah. He ain’t famous. He ain’t on the radio.”

“Not with that material.”

Nitti blew a smoke ring; an eyebrow arched. “Oh, you remember that? How blue he works.”

I shrugged. “It was kind of a gimmick, Frank—clean-cut kid, looks like a matinee idol. Kind of a funny, startling contrast with his off-color material.”

“Well, that’s what I want you to talk to him about.”

“Afraid I don’t follow, Frank….”

“He’s workin’ too blue. Too goddamn fuckin’ filthy.”

I winced. Part of it was the sun reflecting off the surface of the pool; most of it was confusion. Why the hell did Frank Nitti give a damn if some two-bit comic was telling dirty jokes?

“That foulmouth is attracting the wrong kind of attention,” Nitti was saying. “The blue noses are gettin’ up in arms. Ministers are givin’ sermons, columnists are frownin’ in print. There’s this ‘Citizens Committee for Clean Entertainment.’ Puttin’ political pressure on. Jesus Christ! The place’ll get raided—shut down.”

I hadn’t been to Chez Clifton yet, though I assumed it was running gambling, wide-open, and was already on the cops’ no-raid list. But if anti-smut reformers made an issue out of Clifton’s immoral monologues, the boys in blue would have to raid the joint—and the gambling baby would go out the window with the dirty bathwater.

“What’s your interest in this, Frank?”

Nitti’s smile was mostly a sneer. “Clifton’s got a club ’cause he’s got a silent partner.”

“You mean…you, Frank? I thought the Outfit kept out of the Florida rackets….”

It was understood that Nitti, Capone and other Chicago mobsters with homes in Miami Beach would not infringe on the hometown gambling syndicate. This was said to be part of the agreement with local politicos to allow the Chicago Outfit to make Miami Beach their home away from home.

“That’s why I called you down here, Nate. I need somebody to talk to the kid who won’t attract no attention. Who ain’t directly connected to me. You’re just an old friend of Clifton’s from outa town.”

“And what do you want me to do, exactly?”

“Tell him to clean up his fuckin’ act.”

So now I was in the audience, sipping my rum and Coke, the walls ringing with laughter, as Pete Clifton made such deft witticisms as the following: “Hear about the doll who found a tramp under her bed? She got so upset, her stomach was on the bum all night.”

Finally, to much applause, Clifton turned the entertainment over to the orchestra, and couples filled the dancefloor to the strains of “Nice Work if You Can Get It.” Soon the comic had filtered his way through the admiring crowd to join me at my table.

“You look good, you rat bastard,” Clifton said, flashing his boyish smile, extending his hand, which I took and shook. “Getting any since I left Chicago?”

“I wet the wick on occasion,” I said, sitting as he settled in across from me. All around us patrons were sneaking peeks at the star performer who had deigned to come down among them.

“I didn’t figure you’d ever get laid again, once I moved on,” he said, straightening his black tie. “How long you down here for?”

“Couple days.”

He snapped his fingers, pointed at me and winked. “Tell you what, you’re goin’ boating with me tomorrow afternoon. These two cute skirts down the street from where I live, they’re both hot for me—you can take one of ’em offa my hands.”

Smiling, shaking my head, I said, “I thought maybe you’d have found a new hobby, by now, Pete.”

“Not me.” He fired up a Lucky Strike, sucked in smoke, exhaled it like dragon breath from his nostrils. “I never found a sweeter pasttime than doin’ the dirty deed.”

“Doing dames ain’t the only dirty deed you been doing lately, Pete.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“Your act.” I gestured with my rum-and-Coke. “I’ve seen cleaner material on outhouse walls.”

He grinned toothily. “You offended? Getting prudish in your old age, Heller? Yeah, I’ve upped the ante, some. Look at this crowd, weeknight, off season. They love it. See, it’s my magic formula: everybody loves sex; and everybody loves a good dirty joke.”

“Not everybody.”

The grin eased off and his forehead tightened. “Wait a minute…. This isn’t a social call, is it?”

“No. It’s nice seeing you again, Pete…but no. You think you know who sent me—and you’re right. And he wants you to back off the smut.”

“You kidding?” Clifton smirked and waved dismissively. “I found a way to mint money, here. And it’s making me a star.”

“You think you can do that material on the radio, or in the movies? Get serious.”

“Hey, everybody needs an angle, a trademark, and I found mine.”

“Pete, I’m not here to discuss it. Just to pass the word along. You can ignore it if you like.” I sipped my drink, shrugged. “Take your dick out and conduct the orchestra with it, far as I’m concerned.”

Clifton leaned across the table. “Nate, you heard those laughs. You see the way every dame in this audience is lookin’ at me? There isn’t a quiff in this room that wouldn’t get on her back for me, or down on her damn knees.”

“Like I said, ignore it if you like. But my guess is, if you do keep working blue—and the Chez Clifton gets shut down—your silent partner’ll get no.”

The comic thought about that, drawing nervously on the Lucky. In his tux, he looked like he fell off a wedding cake. Then he said, “What would you do, Nate?”

“Get some new material. Keep some of the risque stuff, sure—but don’t be so Johnny One-note.”

Some of the cockiness had drained out of him; frustration colored his voice, even self-pity. “It’s what I do, Nate. Why not tell Joe E. Lewis not to do drunk jokes. Why not tell Eddie Cantor not to pop his eyes out?”

“’Cause somebody’ll pop your eyes out, Pete. I say this as a friend, and as somebody who knows how certain parties operate. Back off.”

He sighed, sat back. I didn’t say anything. The orchestra was playing “I’ll Never Smile Again,” now.

“Tell Nitti I’ll…tone it down.”

I saluted him with my nearly empty rum-and-Coke glass. “Good choice.”

And that was it. I had delivered my message. He had another show to do, and I didn’t see him again till the next afternoon, when—as promised—he took me out on his speedboat, a sleek mahogany nineteen-foot Gar Wood runabout whose tail was emblazoned Screwball.

And, as promised, we were in the company of two “cute skirts,” although that’s not what they were wearing. Peggy Simmons, a slender pretty pugnose blonde, and Janet Windom, a cow-eyed bosomy brunette, were in white shorts that showed off their nice, nicely tanned legs. Janet, who Pete had claimed, wore a candy-striped top; Peggy, who had deposited herself next to me on the leather seat, wore a pink longsleeve angora sweater.

“Aren’t you warm in that?” I asked her, sipping a bottle of Pabst. I was in a shortsleeve sportshirt and chinos, my straw fedora at my feet, away from the wind.

“Not really. I get chilled in the spray.” She had a high-pitched voice that seemed younger than her twenty-two years, though the lines around her sky-blue eyes made her seem older. Peggy laughed and smiled a lot, but those eyes were sad, somehow.

I had been introduced to Peggy as a theatrical agent from Chicago. She was a model and dancer, and apparently Clifton figured this lie would help me get laid; this irritated me—being burdened with a fiction of someone else’s creation, and the notion I needed help in that regard. But I hadn’t corrected it.

Janet, it seemed, was also interested in show business; a former dentist’s assistant, she was a couple years older than Peggy. They had roomed together in New York City and came down here a few months ago, seeking sun and fame and fortune.

The afternoon was pleasant enough. Clifton sat at the wheel with Janet cuddling next to him, and Peggy and I sat in the seat behind them. She was friendly, holding my hand, putting her head on my shoulder, though we barely knew each other. We drank in the sun-drenched, invigorating gulf-stream air, as well as our bottled beers, and enjoyed the view—royal palms waving, white-capped breakers peaking, golden sands glistening with sunlight.

The runabout had been bounding along, which—with the engine noise—had limited conversation. But pretty soon fton charted us up and down Indian Creek, a tranquil, seawalled lagoon lined with palm-fringed shores and occasional well-manicured golf courses, as well as frequent private piers and landing docks studded with gleaming yachts and lavish houseboats.

“Have you found any work down here?” I asked the fresh-faced, sad-eyed girl.

She nodded. “Some cheesecake modeling Pete lined up. Swimsuits and, you know…art studies.”

Nudes.

“What are you hoping for?”

“Well, I am a good dancer, and I sing a little, too. Pete says he’s going to do a big elaborate show, soon, with a chorus line and everything.”

“And he’s going to use both you and Janet?”

She nodded.

“Any thoughts beyond that, Peggy? You’ve got nice legs, but show business is a rough career.”

Her chin crinkled as she smiled, but desperation tightened her eyes. “I’d be willing to take a Chicago booking.”

Though we weren’t gliding as quickly over the water now, the engine noise was still enough to keep my conversation with Peggy private while Pete and Janet laughed and kissed and chugged their beers.

“I’m not a booking agent, Peggy.”

She drew away just a little. “No?”

“Pete was…I don’t know what he was doing.”

She shrugged again, smirked. “Pete’s a goddamn liar, sometimes.”

“I know some people who book acts in Chicago, and would be glad to put a word in…but don’t be friendly with me on account of that.”

She studied me and her eyes didn’t seem as sad, or as old, suddenly. “What do you know? The vanishing American.”

“What?”

“A nice guy.”

And she cuddled next to me, put a hand on my leg.

Without looking at me, she asked, “Why do you think I came to Florida, Nate?”

“It’s warm and sunny.”

“Yes.”

“And…” I nodded toward either side of us, where the waterway entrances of lavish estates, trellised with bougainvillea and allamanda, seemed to beckon. “…there’s more money here than you can shake a stick at.”

She laughed. “Yes.”

By four o’clock we were at the girls’ place, in a six-apartment building on Jefferson Street, a white-trimmed-pink geometric affair among many other such streamlined structures of sunny yellow, flamingo pink and sea green, with porthole windows and racing stripes and bas relief zig-zags. The effect was at once elegant and insubstantial, like a movie set. Their one-bedroom apartment was on the second of two floors; the furnishings had an art moderne look too, though of the low-cost Sears showroom variety.

Janet fixed us drinks and we sat in the little pink and white living room area and made meaningless conversation for maybe five minutes. Then Clifton and Janet disappeared into that one bedroom, and Peggy and I necked on the couch. The lights were low, when I got her sweater and bra off her, but I noticed the needle tracks on her arms, just the same.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing…. What are you on? H?”

“What do you mean?…. Not H.”

“What?”

“M.”

Morphine.

She folded her arms over her bare breasts, but it was her arms she was hiding.

“I was blue,” she said, defensively, shivering suddenly. “I needed something.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Pete has friends.”

Pete had friends, all right. And I was one of them.

“Put your sweater on, baby.”

“Why? Do I…do I make you sick?”

And she began to cry.

So I made love to her there on the couch, sweetly, tenderly, comforting her, telling her she was beautiful, which she was. She needed the attention, and I didn’t mind giving it to her, though I was steaming at that louse Clifton.

Our clothes relatively straightened, Peggy having freshened in the bathroom, we were sitting, chatting, having Cokes on ice like kids on a date, when Clifton—in the pale yellow sportshirt and powder-blue slacks he’d gone boating in—emerged from the bedroom, arm around Janet, who was in a terrycloth robe.

“We better blow, Nate,” he told me with a grin, and nuzzled the giggling Janet’s neck. She seemed to be on something, too. “I got a nine o’clock show to do.”

It was a little after seven.

We made our goodbyes and drove the couple of blocks to his place in his white Lincoln Zephyr convertible.

“Do I take care of you,” he asked with a grin, as the shadows of the palms lining the streets rolled over us, “or do I take care of you?”

“You’re a pal,” I said.

We were slipping past more of those movie theater-like apartment houses, pastel chunks of concrete whose geometric harshness was softened by well-barbered shrubs. The three-story building on West Jefferson, in front of which Clifton drew his Lincoln, was set back a ways, a walk cutting through a golf green of a lawn to the pale yellow cube whose blue cantilevered sunshades were like eyebrows.

Clifton’s apartment was on the third floor, a two bedroom affair with pale yellow walls and a parquet floor flung with occasional oriental carpets. The furnishings were in the art moderne manner, chrome and leather and well-varnished light woods, none of it from Sears.

I sat in a pastel green easy chair whose lines were rounded; it was as comfortable as an old shoe but considerably more stylish.

“How do those unemployed showgirls afford a place like that?” I wondered aloud.

Clifton, who was making us a couple of rum and Cokes over at the wet bar, said, “Did you have a good time?”

“I like Peggy. If I lived around here, I’d try to straighten her out.”

“Oh yeah! Saint Heller. I thought you did straighten her out—on that couch.”

“Are you pimping for those girls?”

“No!” He came over with a drink in either hand. “They’re not pros.”

“But you fix them up with friends and other people you want to impress.”

He shrugged, handing me the drink. “Yeah. So what? Party girls like that are a dime a dozen.”

“Where are you getting the dope?”

That stopped him for a moment, but just a moment. “It makes ’em feel good; what’s the harm?”

“You got ’em hooked and whoring for you, Pete. You’re one classy guy.”

Clifton smirked. “I didn’t see you turning down the free lay.”

“You banging ’em both?”

“Never at the same time. What, you think I’m a pervert?”

“No. I think you’re a prick.”

He just laughed at that. “Listen, I got to take a shower. You coming down to the club tonight, or not?”

“I’ll come. But Pete—where are you getting the dope you’re giving those girls?”

“Why do you care?”

“Because I don’t think Frank Nitti would like it. He doesn’t do business with people in that racket. If he knew you were involved…”

Clifton frowned. “You going to tell him?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Maybe I don’t give a shit if you do. Maybe I got a possible new investor for my club, and Frank Nitti can kiss my ass.”

“Would you like me to pass that along?”

A grimace drained all the boyishness from his face. “What’s wrong with you, Heller? Since when did you get moral? These gangsters are like women—they exist to be used.”

“Only the gangsters don’t discard as easily.”

“I ain’t worried.” He jerked a thumb at his chest. “See, Heller, I’m a public figure—they don’t bump off public figures; it’s bad publicity.”

“Tell Mayor Cermak—he got hit in Florida.”

He blew me a Bronx cheer. “I’m gonna take a shower. You want a free meal down at the club, stick around…but leave the sermons to Billy Sunday, okay?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

I could hear him showering, singing in there, “All or Nothing at All.” Had we really been friends, once? I had a reputation as something of a randy son of a bitch myself; but did I treat woman like Clifton did? The thought make me shudder.

On the oblong glass coffee table before me, a white phone began to ring. I answered it.

“Pete?” The voice was low-pitched, but female—a distinctive, throaty sound.

“No, it’s a friend. He’s in the shower, getting ready for his show tonight.”

“Tell him to meet me out front in five minutes.”

“Well, let me check with him and see if that’s possible. Who should I say is calling?”

There was a long pause.

Then the throaty purr returned: “Just tell him the wife of a friend.”

“Sure,” I said, and went into the bathroom and reported this, over the shower needles, through the glass door, to Clifton, who said, “Tell her I’ll be right down.”

Within five minutes, Clifton—his hair still wet—moved quickly through the living room; he had thrown on the boating clothes from this afternoon.

“This won’t take long.” He flashed the boyish grin. “These frails can’t get enough of me.”

“You want me to leave?”

“Naw. I’ll set somethin’ up with her for later. I don’t think she has a friend, though—sorry, pal.”

“That’s okay. I try to limit myself to one doped-up doxy a day.”

Clifton smirked and waved at me dismissively as he headed out, and I sat there for maybe a minute, then decided I’d had it. I plucked my straw fedora off the coffee table and trailed out after him, hoping to catch up with him and make my goodbyes.

The night sky was cobalt and alive with stars, a sickle-slice of moon providing the appropriate deco touch. The sidewalk stretched out before me like a white ribbon, toward where palms mingled with street lights. A Buick was along the curb and Pete was leaning against the window, like a car hop taking an order.

That sultry, low female voice rumbled through the night like pretty thunder: “For God’s sake, Pete, don’t do it! Please don’t do it!”

As Pete’s response—laughter—filled my ears, I stopped in my tracks, not wanting to intrude. Then Pete, still chuckling, making a dismissive wave, turned toward me, and walked. He was giving me a cocky smile when the first gunshot cracked the night.

I dove and rolled and wound up against a sculpted hedge that separated Clifton’s apartment house from the hunk of geometry next door. Two more shots rang out, and I could see the orange muzzle flash as the woman shot through the open car window.

p height="0%" width="5%">For a comic, Pete was doing a hell of a dance; the first shot had caught him over the right armpit, and another plowed through his neck in a spray of red, and he twisted around to face her to accommodate another slug.

Then the car roared off, and Pete staggered off the sidewalk and pitched forward onto the grass, like a diver who missed the pool.

I ran to his sprawled figure, and turned him over. His eyes were wild with dying.

“Them fuckin’ dames ain’t…ain’t so easy to discard, neither,” he said, and laughed, a bloody froth of a laugh, to punctuate his last dirty joke.

People were rushing up, talking frantically, shouting about the need for the police to be called and such like. Me, I was noting where the woman had put her last shot.

She caught him right below the belt.

After a long wait in a receiving area, I was questioned by the cops in an interview room at the Dade County Courthouse in Miami. Actually, one of them, Earl Carstensen—Chief of Detectives of the Miami Beach Detective Bureau—was a cop; the other guy—Ray Miller—was chief investigator for the State Attorney’s office.

Carstensen was a craggy guy in his fifties and Miller was a skinny balding guy with wirerim glasses. The place was air-conditioned and they brought me an iced tea, so it wasn’t exactly the third degree.

We were all seated at the small table in the soundproofed cubicle. After they had established that I was a friend of the late Pete Clifton, visiting from Chicago, the line of questioning took an interesting turn.

Carstensen asked, “Are you aware that ‘Peter Clifton’ was not the deceased’s real name?”

“I figured it was a stage name, but it’s the only name I knew him by.”

“He was born Peter Tessitorio,” Miller said, “in New York. He had a criminal background—two burglary raps.”

“I never knew that.”

Carstensen asked, “You’re a former police officer?”

“Yeah. I was a detective on the Chicago P.D. pickpocket detail till ’32.”

Miller asked, “You spent the afternoon with Clifton, in the company of two girls?”

“Yeah.”

“What are their names?”

“Peggy Simmons and Janet Windom. They live in an apartment house on Jefferson…I don’t know the address, but I can point you, if you want to talk to them.”

The two men exchanged glances.

“We’ve already picked them up,” Miller said. “They’ve been questioned, and they’re alibiing each other. They say they don’t know anybody who’d want to kill Clifton.”

“They’re just a couple of party girls,” I said.

Carstensen said, “We found a hypo and bottle of morphine in their apartment. Would you know anything about that?”

I sighed. “I noticed the tracks on the Simmons’ kid’s arms. I gave Pete hell, and he admitted to me he was giving them the stuff. He also indicated he had connections with some dope racketeer.”

“He didn’t give you a name?” Miller asked.

“No.”

“You’ve never heard of Leo Massey?”

“No.”

“Friend of Clifton’s. A known dope smuggler.”

I sipped my iced tea. “Well, other than those two girls, I don’t really know any of Clifton’s associates here in Miami.”

An eyebrow arched in Carstensen’s craggy puss. “You’d have trouble meeting Massey—he’s dead.”

“Oh?”

“He was found in Card Sound last September. Bloated and smellin’ to high heavens.”

“What does that have to do with Pete Clifton?”

Miller said, “Few days before Massey’s body turned up, that speedboat of his—the Screwball—got taken out for a spin.”

I shrugged. “That’s what a speedboat’s for, taking it out for a spin.”

“At midnight? And not returning till daybreak?”

“You’ve got a witness to that effect?”

Miller nodded.

“So Pete was a suspect in Massey’s murder?”

“Not exactly,” the State Attorney’s investigator said. “Clifton had an alibi—those two girls say he spent the night with ’em.”

I frowned in confusion. “I thought you had a witness to Clifton takin’ his boat out…”

Carstensen said, “We have a witness at the marina to the effect that the boat was taken out, and brought back—but nobody saw who the captain was.”

Now I was getting it. “And Pete said somebody must’ve borrowed his boat without his permission.”

“That’s right.”

“So, what? You’re making this as a gangland hit? But it was a woman who shot him.”

Miller asked, “Did you see that, Mr. Heller?”

“I heard the woman’s voice—I didn’t actually see her shoot him. Didn’t actually see her at all. But it seemed like she was agitated with Pete.”

Other witnesses had heard the woman yelling at Pete; so the cops knew I hadn’t made up this story.

“Could the woman have been a decoy?” Carstensen asked. “Drawn Clifton to that car for some man to shoot?”

“I suppose. But my instin is, Pete’s peter got him bumped. If I were you, fellas, I’d go over that apartment of his and look for love letters and the like; see if you can find a little black book. My guess is—somebody he was banging banged him back.”

They thanked me for my help, told me to stick around for the inquest on Tuesday, and turned me loose. I got in my rental Ford and drove to the Biltmore, went up to my room, ordered a room service supper, and gave Frank Nitti a call.

“So my name didn’t come up?” Nitti asked me over the phone.

“No. Obviously, I didn’t tell ’em you hired me to come down here; but they didn’t mention you, either. And the way they were giving out information, it would’ve come up. They got a funny way of interrogating you in Florida—they spill and you listen.”

“Did they mention a guy named McGraw?”

“No, Frank. Just this Leo Massey.”

“McGraw’s a rival dope smuggler,” Nitti said thoughtfully. “I understand he stepped in and took over Massey’s trade after Massey turned up a floater.”

“What’s that got to do with Clifton?”

“Nothin’ much—just that my people tell me McGraw’s a regular at the Chez Clifton. Kinda chummy with our comical late friend.”

“Maybe McGraw’s the potential investor Clifton was talking about—to take your place, Frank.”

Silence. Nitti was thinking.

Finally, he returned with, “Got another job for you, Nate.”

“I don’t know, Frank—I probably oughta keep my nose clean, do my bit at the inquest and scram outa this flamingo trap.”

“Another three C’s in it for you, kid—just to deliver another message. No rush—tomorrow morning’ll be fine.”

Did you hear the one about the comic who thought he told killer jokes? He died laughing.

“Anything you say, Frank.”

Eddie McGraw lived at the Delano, on Collins Avenue, the middle of a trio of towering hotels rising above Miami Beach like Mayan temples got out of hand. McGraw had a penthouse on the eleventh floor, and I had to bribe the elevator attendant to take me there.

It was eleven a.m. I wasn’t expecting trouble. My nine millimeter Browning was back in Chicago, in a desk drawer in my office. But I wasn’t unarmed—I had the name Frank Nitti in my arsenal.

I knocked on the door.

The woman who answered was in her late twenties—a brunette with big brown eyes and rather exaggerated features, pretty in a cartoonish way. She had a voluptuous figure, wrapped up like a present in a pink chiffon dressing gown.

“Excuse me, ma’am. Is Mr. McGraw home?”

She nodded. The big brown eyes locked onto me coldly, though her voice was a warm contralto: “Who should I say calling?”

“I’m a friend of Pete Clifton’s.”

“Would you mind waiting in the hall?”

“Not at all.”

She shut the door, and a few seconds later, it flew back open, revealing a short but sturdy looking guy in a red sportshirt and gray slacks. He was blond with wild thatches of overgrown eyebrow above sky-blue eyes; when you got past a bulbous nose, he kind of looked like James Cagney.

“I don’t do business at my apartment,” he said. His voice was high-pitched and raspy. He started to shut the door and I stopped it with my hand.

He shoved me, and I went backward, but I latched onto his wrist, and pushed his hand back, and pulled him forward, out into the hall, until he was kneeling in front of me.

“Frank Nitti sent me,” I said, and released the pressure on his wrist.

He stood, ran a hand through slicked back blond hair that didn’t need straightening, and said, “I don’t do business with Nitti.”

“I think maybe you should. You know about Pete’s killing?”

“I saw the morning paper. I liked Pete. He was funny. He was an all right guy.”

“Yeah, he was a card. Did he by any chance sell you an interest in the Chez Clifton?”

McGraw frowned at me; if he’d been a dog, he’d have growled. “I told you…what’s your name, anyway?”

“Heller. Nate Heller.”

“I don’t do business at my apartment. My wife and me, we got a life separate from how I make my living. Got it?”

“Did Pete sell you an interest in the Chez Clifton?”

He straightened his collar, which also didn’t need it. “As a matter of fact, he did.”

“Then you were wrong about not doing business with Frank Nitti.”

McGraw sneered. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Mr. Nitti would like to discuss that with you himself.” I handed him a slip of paper. “He’s in town, at his estate on Di Lido Island. He’d like to invite you to join him there for lunch today.”

“Why should I?”

I laughed once, a hollow thing. “Mr. McGraw, I don’t care what you do, as long as you don’t put your hands on me again. I’m just delivering a message. But I will tell you this—I’m from Chicago, and when Frank Nitti invites you for lunch, you go.”

McGraw thought about that. Then he nodded and said, “Sorry about the rough stuff.”

“I apologize for bothering you at home. But you don’t keep an office, and you’re unlisted.”

“Yeah, well, nature of my business.”

“Understood.”

I held out my hand. He studied it for a moment, then shook it.

“Why don’t you give Mr. Nitti a call, at that number, and confirm your luncheon engagement.”

He nodded and disappeared inside the apartment.

Half an hour later, I knocked on the door again. Returning had cost me another fin to the elevator boy.

Mrs. McGraw, still in her pink chiffon robe, opened the door and said, “I’m afraid my husband has stepped out.”

“I know he has,” I said, brushing past her into the apartment, beautifully appointed in the usual Miami-tropical manner.

“Leave at once!” she demanded, pointing past the open door into the hall.

“No,” I said, and shut the door. “I recognized your voice, Mrs. McGraw. It’s very distinctive. I like it.”

“What are you talking about?” But her wide eyes and the tremor in her tone told me she was afraid she already knew.

I told her, anyway. “I’m the guy who answered the phone last night, at Pete’s. That’s when I first heard that throaty purr of yours. I also heard you warn him—right before he turned his back on you and you shot him.”

She was clutching herself, as if she were cold. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please leave!”

“I’m not going to stay long. Turn around.”

“What?”

“Turn around and put your hands on that door.”

“Why?”

“I’m gonna frisk you, lady. I don’t figure you have a gun hidden away on you, but I’d like to make sure.”

“No!”

So I took her by the wrist, sort of like I had her husband, and twisted her arm around her back and shoved her against the door. I frisked her all over. She was a little plump, but it was one of the nicer frisks I ever gave.

No gun—several concealed weapons, but no gun.

She stood facing me now, her back to the door, trembling. “Are you…are you a cop?”

“I’m just a friend of Pete’s.”

She raised a hand to her face, fingers curling there, like the petals of a wilting flower. “Are you here to turn me in?”

“We’ll see.”

Now she looked at me in a different way, something flaring in her dark eyes. “Oh. You’re here to…deal.”

“Maybe. Can we sit down over there?” I gestured to the living room—white walls, white carpet, glass tables, white chairs and couch, a white fireplace with a big mirror with flamingos etched in it.

I took an easy chair across from the couch, where she sat, arms folded, legs crossed—nice legs, muscular, supple, tan against the pink chiffon. She seemed to be studying me, trying likt a bead on me.

“I’d like to hear your side of it.”

Her chin titled. “You really think you can make a positive identification, based just on my voice?”

“Ask Bruno Hauptmann. He went to the chair on less.”

She laughed but it wasn’t very convincing. “You didn’t see me.”

“Do you have an alibi? Is your husband in on it?”

“No! Of course not.”

“Your side of it. Let’s have it.”

She looked at the floor. “Your…friend…was a terrible man.”

“I noticed.”

That surprised her. Looking right at me, she asked, “You did?”

“Pete used women like playthings. They weren’t people to him. Is that what he did to you?”

She nodded; her full mouth was quivering—if this was an act, it was a good one.

Almost embarrassed, she said, “I thought he was charming. He was good-looking, clever and…sexy, I guess.”

“You’ve been having an affair with him.”

One nod.

Well, that didn’t surprise me. Just because McGraw was his business partner, and a hood at that, wouldn’t stop Pete Clifton from going after a good-looking doll like Mrs. McGraw.

“Can I smoke?” she asked. She indicated her purse on the coffee table. I checked inside it, found no gun, plucked out the pack of Luckies—Pete’s brand—and tossed it to her. Also her lighter.

“Thanks,” she said, firing up. “It was just…a fling. Stupid goddamn fling. Eddie was neglecting me, and…it’s an old story. Anyway, I wanted to stop it, but…Pete wanted more. Not because…he loved me or anything. Just because…do you know what he said to me?”

“I can imagine.”

“He said, ‘Baby, you’re one sweet piece of ass. You don’t have to like me to satisfy me.’”

I frowned at her. “I don’t know if I’m following this. If you wanted to break it off, how could he—”

“He blackmailed me.”

“With what? He couldn’t tell your husband about the affair without getting himself in a jam.”

She heaved a sigh. “No…but Pete coulda turned my husband in for…for something he had on him.”

And now I knew.

Clifton had loaned McGraw the Screwball for disposal of the body of Leo Massey, the rival dope smuggler, which put Clifton in a position to finger McGraw.

“Okay,” I said, and stood.

She gazed up at me, astounded. “What ean…‘okay’?”

“Okay, I understand why you killed him.”

I walked to the door, and she followed, the sound of her slippers whispering through the thick carpet.

She stopped me at the door, a hand on my arm; she was very close to me, and smelled good, like lilacs. Those brown eyes were big enough to dive into.

Her throaty purr tickled the air between us. “You’re not going to turn me in?”

“Why should I? I just wanted to know if there were any ramifications for my client or me, in this thing, and I don’t see any.”

“I thought Pete was your friend.”

“Hell, he was your lover, and look what you thought of him.”

Her eyes tightened. “What do you want from me?”

“Nothing. You had a good reason to do it. I heard you warn him.”

“You’re very kind….” She squeezed my arm, moved closer, to where her breasts were pressed gently against me. “My husband won’t be home for a while…we could go to my bedroom and—”

I drew away. “Jesus, lady! Isn’t screwin’ around what got you into trouble in the first place?”

And I got the hell out of there.

I said just enough at the inquest to get it over with quick, and was back in Chicago by Wednesday night.

I don’t know whether Frank Nitti and Eddie McGraw wound up doing business together. I do know the Chez Clifton closed down and re-opened under another name, the Beach Club. But Nitti put his Di Lido Island estate up for sale and sold it, shortly after that. So maybe he just got out while the getting was good.

Mrs. McGraw—whose first name I never knew—was never charged with Pete Clifton’s murder, which remains unsolved on the Miami Beach P.D.’s books. The investigation into the Clifton killing, however, did lead the State Attorney’s Office to nailing McGraw on the Massey slaying; McGraw got ninety-nine years, which is a little much, considering all he did was kill another dope smuggler. The two party girls, Peggy and Janet, were charged with harboring narcotics, which was dropped in exchange for their cooperation in the McGraw/Massey inquiry.

Pete Clifton really was a prick, but I always thought of him, over the ensuing years, when so many dirty-mouthed comics—from Lenny Bruce to George Carlin—made it big.

Maybe Clifton got the last laugh, after all.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This work of fiction is based on a real case, but certain liberties have been taken, and some names have been changed. George Hagenauer uncovered this little-known incident in the life of Frank Nitti.

idteight="0%" width="0%">When the cute high school girl, screaming bloody murder, came running down the steps from the porch of the brown-brick two-story, I was sitting in a parked Buick reading The Racing News.

At ten after eleven in the a.m., Chicago neighborhoods didn’t get much quieter than Englewood, and South Elizabeth Street on this sunny day in May, 1945, ran to bird chirps, muffled radio programs and El rattle. A banshee teenager was enough to attract the attention of just about anybody, even a drowsy detective who was supposed to be watching the very house in question.

A guy in tee-shirt and suspenders, mowing the lawn next-door, got to her just before me.

“Sally, honey, calm down,” the guy said.

“Bob, Bob, Bob,” she said to her neighbor.

His name, apparently, was Bob. Like I said, I’m a detective.

“What’s wrong, honey?” I asked the girl.

She was probably sixteen. Blonde hair bounced off her shoulders, and with those blue eyes and that heart-shaped face, she would have been a knockout if she hadn’t been devoid of make-up and wearing a navy jumper that stopped midcalf, abetted by a white blouse buttoned to her throat.

“It’s…it’s Mother,” she said, and in slow motion she turned toward the narrow front of the brick house and pointed, like the Ghost of Christmas Future indicating Scrooge’s gravestone.

“Look at me,” I said, and she did, mouth and eyes twitching. “I’m a policeman. Tell me what happened.”

“Something…something terrible.”

Then she pushed past me, and sat on the curb and buried her face in her hands and sobbed.

Bob, who was bald and round-faced and about forty, said, “You’re a cop?”

“Actually, private. Is that kid named Vinicky?”

“Yes. Sally Vinicky—she goes to Visitation High. Probably home for lunch.”

That explained the prim get-up: Visitation was a Catholic all-girl’s school.

Another neighbor was wandering up, a housewife in an apron, hair in a net, eyes wide; she had flecks of soap suds on her red hands. I brought her into my little group.

“My name is Heller,” I said. “I’m an investigator doing a job for that girl’s father. I need one of you to look after Sally…ma’am? Would you?”

The woman nodded, then asked, “Why, what’s wrong?”

“I’m going in that house and find out. Bob, call the Englewood Station and ask them to send a man over.”

“What should I tell them?”

“What you saw.”

As the housewife sat beside the girl on the curb and slipped an arm around her, and Bob headed toward the neighboring house, a frame bungalow, I headed up the steps to the covered porch. The girl had left the door open and I wenton in.

The living room was off to the left, a dining room to the right; but the living room got my attention, because of the dead woman sprawled on the floor.

A willowy dame in her mid-thirties and blue-and-white floral dress, Rose Vinicky—I recognized her from the photos her husband had provided—lay on her side on the multi-color braided rug between an easy chair and a spinet piano, from which Bing Crosby smiled at me off a sheet music cover, “I Can’t Begin to Tell You.” Not smiling back, I knelt to check her wrist for a pulse, but judging by the dark pool of blood her head rested in, I was on a fool’s errand.

Beyond the corpse stood a small table next to the easy chair with a couple of magazines on it, Look, Life. On the floor nearby was a cut-glass ashtray, which the woman presumably had knocked off when she fell forward, struck a vicious blow from behind. A lipstick-tipped cigarette had burned itself out, making a black hole in the braiding of the rug. I wasn’t sure whether she’d been reaching for the smoke when the killer clubbed her, or whether she’d gone for the table to brace her fall.

With her brains showing like that, though, she was probably already unconscious or even dead on the way down.

She looked a little like her daughter, though the hair was darker, almost brunette, short, tight curls. Not pretty, but attractive, handsome; and no mid-length skirt for Rose: she had liked to show off those long, slender, shapely legs, which mimed in death the act of running away.

She’d been a looker, or enough of one, anyway, to make her husband suspect her of cheating.

I didn’t spend a lot of time with Rose—she wasn’t going anywhere, and it was always possible her killer was still around.

But the house—nicely appointed with older, in some cases antique furniture—was clear, including the basement. I did note that the windows were all closed and locked, and the back door was locked, too—with no signs of break-in. The killer had apparently come in the front door.

That meant the murder took place before I’d pulled up in front of the Vinicky home around ten. I’d seen no one approach the house in the little more than an hour my car and ass had been parked across the way. It would’ve been embarrassing finding out a murder had been committed inside a home while I was watching it.

On the other hand, I’d been surveilling the place to see with whom the woman might be cheating when here she was, already dead. Somehow that didn’t seem gold-star worthy, either.

I had another, closer look at the corpse. Maybe she hadn’t been dead when she fell, at that—looked like she’d suffered multiple blows. One knocked her down, the others finished her off and opened up her skull. Blood was spattered on the nearby spinet, but also on the little table and even the easy chair.

Whoever did this would had to have walked away covered in blood….

Her right hand seemed to be reaching out, and I could discern the pale circle on her fourth finger that indicated a ring, probably a wedding ring, had been there until recently. Was this a robbery, then?

Something winked at me from the pooled blood, something floating there. I leaned forward, got a better look: a bro button, the four-eyed variety common to man’s suit-or sportcoat.

I did not collect it, leaving that to…

“Stand up! Get away from that body!”

Sighing, I got to my feet and put my hands in the air and the young patrolman—as fresh-faced as that Catholic schoolgirl—rushed up and frisked me, finding no weapon.

I let him get that all out of his system, and told him who I was, and what had happened, including what I’d seen. I left the button out, and the missing wedding ring; that could wait for the detectives.

The next hour was one cop after another. Four or five uniformed men showed, a trio of detectives from Englewood Station, a couple of dicks from the bureau downtown, a photographer, a coroner’s man. I went through the story many times.

In the kitchen, a yellow-and-white affair with a door onto the alley, Captain Patrick Cullen tried to make a meal out of me. We sat at a small wooden table and began by him sharing what he knew about me.

“I don’t remember ever meeting you, Captain,” I said.

“I know you all too well, Heller—by reputation.”

“Ah. That kind of thing plays swell in court.”

“You’re an ex-cop and you ratted out two of your own. You’re a publicity hound, and a cooze hound, too, I hear.”

“Interesting approach to detective work—everything strictly hearsay.”

A half hour of repartee, at least that scintillating, followed. He wanted to know what I was doing there, and I told him “a job for Sylvester Vinicky,” the husband. He wanted to know what kind of job, and I said I couldn’t tell him, because attorney/client privilege pertained. He accused me of not being an attorney, and I pled guilty.

“But certain of my cases,” I said, “come through lawyers. As it happens, I’m working for an attorney in this matter.”

He asked the attorney’s name and I gave it to him.

“I heard of that guy…divorce shyster, right?”

“Captain, I’d hate to spoil any of your assumptions with a fact.”

He had a face so Irish it could turn bright red without a drop of alcohol, as it did now, while he shook a finger at me. “I’ll tell you what happened, Heller. You got hired to shadow this dame, and she was a looker, and you decided to put the make on her yourself. It got out of hand, and you grabbed the nearest blunt instrument and—”

“I like that. The nearest blunt instrument. How the hell did you get to be a captain? What are you, Jake Arvey’s nephew?”

He came half out of his chair and threw a punch at me.

I slipped it, staying seated, and batted his hat off his head, like I was slapping a child, and the fedora fluttered to the floor.

“You get one,” I said.

The red in his face was fading, as he plucked the hat from the linoleum, and the embarrassment in his eyes was almost as good as punching him would’ve been.

“Is that a threat, Heller?”

“This reputation of mine you’ve heard so much about—did you hear the part about my Outfit ties? Maybe you want to wake up in a fucking ditch in Indiana, Captain…. That was a threat, by the way.”

Into this Noel Coward playlet came another cop, a guy I did know, from the Detective Bureau in the Loop: Inspector Charles Mullaney, a big fleshy guy who always wore mortician black; he had a spade-shaped face, bright dark eyes and smiled a lot. Unlike many Chicago cops who that do that, Mullaney actually had a sense of humor.

“What’s this, Captain?” Mullaney had a lilting tenor, a small man’s voice in the big fat frame. “My friend Nate Heller giving you a hard time?”

Mullaney scooted a chair out and sat between us, daddy arriving to supervise his two small children. He was grinning at Cullen, but his eyes were hard.

“When you say ‘friend,’ Inspector, do you mean—”

“Friend. Don’t believe what you hear about Heller. He and me and Bill Drury go way back—to the Pickpocket Detail.”

Captain Cullen said, defensively, “This guy found the body under suspicious circumstances.”

“Oh?”

For the sixth or seventh time, I told my story. For the first time, somebody took notes—Mullaney.

“Charlie,” I said to him, “I’m working through an attorney on this. I owe it to my client to talk to him before I tell you about the job I was on.”

Frowning, Cullen said, “Yeah, well, we’ll want to talk to your client, too.”

I said, “Might be a good idea. You could inform him his wife is dead. Just as a, you know, courtesy to a taxpayer.”

Mullaney gave me a don’t-needle-this-prick-anymore look, then said, “The husband is in the clear. We’ve already been in touch with him.”

Cullen asked, “What’s his alibi?”

“Well, a Municipal Court judge, for one. He had a ten thirty at the court, which is where we found him. A former employee is suing him for back wages.”

Sylvester Vinicky ran a small moving company over on nearby South Racine Avenue. He and his wife also ran a small second-hand furniture shop, adjacent.

“Any thoughts, Nate?” Mullaney asked. “Any observations you’d care to share?”

“Did you notice the button?”

“What button?”

So I filled Mullaney in on the sportcoat button, pointed out the possible missing wedding ring, and the inevitability of the killer getting blood-spattered.

“She let the bastard in,” Mullaney said absently.

“Somebody she knew,” I said. “And trusted.”

Cullen asked, “Why do you say that? Could have been a salesman or Mormon or—”

“No,” I said. “He got close enough to her to strike a blow from behind, in the living room. She was smoking—it was casual. Friendly.”

Cullen sighed. “Friendly….”

Mullaney said, “We’re saying ‘he’—but it could be a woman.”

“I don’t think so. Rose Vinicky was tall, and all of those blows landed on the back of her head, struck with a downward swing.”

Cullen frowned. “And how do you know this?”

“Well, I’m a trained detective. There are courses available.”

Ignoring this twaddle, Mullaney said, “She could have been on the floor already, when those blows were struck—hell, there were half a dozen of them.”

“Right. But at least one of them was struck when she was standing. And the woman was five ten, easy. Big girl. And the force of it…skull crushed like an eggshell. And you can see the impressions from multiple blows.”

“A man, then,” Mullaney said. “A vicious son of a bitch. Well. We’ll get him. Captain…would you give Mr. Heller and me a moment?”

Cullen heaved a dramatic sigh, but then he nodded, rose, stepped out.

Mullaney said, “I don’t suppose you’ll stay out of this.”

“Of course I’ll stay out of it. This is strictly police business.”

“I didn’t think you would. Okay, I understand—your name is going to be in the papers, it’s going to get out that the wife of a client was killed on your watch—”

“Hey, she was already dead when I pulled up!”

“That’ll go over big with the newshounds, especially the part where you’re twiddling your thumbs in your car while she lay dead…. Nate, let’s work together on this thing.”

“Define ‘together.’”

He leaned forward; the round face, the dark eyes, held no guile. “I’m not asking you to tag along—I couldn’t ask that. You have ‘friends’ like Captain Cullen all over town. But I’ll keep you in the know, you do the same. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Why don’t we start with a show of good faith.”

“Such as?”

“Why were you here? What job were you doing for Sylvester Vinicky?”

Thing was, I’d been lying about this coming through a lawyer, though I had a reasonable expectation the lawyer I’d named would cover for me. Really what I’d hoped for was to talk to my client before I spilled to the cops. But Mullaney wasn’t just any cop….

So I told him.

Told him that Sylvester Vinicky had come to my office on Van Buren, and started crying, not unlike his daughter had at the curb. He loved his wife, he was crazy about her, and he felt so ashamed, suspecting her of cheating.

Vinicky had sat across from me in the client’s chair, a working man with a heavy build in baggy trousers, brown jacket and cap. At five nine he was shorter than his wife, and was pudgy where she was slender. Just an average-looking joe named Sylvester.

“She’s moody,” he said. “When she isn’t nagging, she’s snapping at me. Sulks. She’s distant. Sometimes when I call home, when she’s supposed to be home, she ain’t at home.”

“Mr. Vinicky,” I said, “if anything, usually a woman having an affair acts nicer than normal to her husband. She doesn’t want to give him a chance to suspect anything’s up.”

“Not Rose. She’s always been more like my sweetheart than my wife. We’ve never had a cross word, and, hell, we’re in business together, and it’s been smooth sailing at home and at work…where most couples would be at each other’s throats, you know?”

In addition to the moving business, the Vinickys bought and sold furniture—Rose had an eye for antiques, and found many bargains for resale. She also kept the books, and paid off the men.

“Rose, bein’ a mother and all, isn’t around the office, fulltime,” Vinicky said. “So maybe I shouldn’t be so suspicious about it.”

“About what?”

“About coming home and finding Rich Miller sitting in my living room, or my kitchen.”

“Who is this Miller?”

“Well, he works for me, or anyway he did till last week. I fired him. I got tired of him flitting and flirting around with Rose.”

“What do you know about him?”

A big dumb shrug. “He’s just this knockabout guy who moves around a lot—no wife, no family. Goes from one cheap room to another.”

“Why would your wife take to some itinerant worker?”

A big dumb sigh. “The guy’s handsome, looks like that asshole in the movies—Ronald Reagan? He’s got a smooth way, real charmer, and he knows about antiques, which is why he and Rose had something in common.”

I frowned. “If he’s such a slick customer, why’s he living in cheap flops?”

“He has weaknesses, Mr. Heller—liquor, for example, and women. And most of all? A real passion for the horses.”

“Horses over booze and broads?”

“Oh yeah. Typical horse player—one day he’s broke, next day he hits it lucky and’s rolling in dough.”

I took the job, but when I tried to put one of my men on it, Vinicky insisted I do the work myself.

“I heard about you, Mr. Heller. I rea Heller.”

“That’s why my day rate’s twice that of my ops.”

He was fine with that, and I spent Monday through Thursday dogging the heels of Rich Miller, who indeed resembled Dutch Reagan, only skinny and with a mustache. I picked him up outside the residential hotel at 63^rd and Halstead, a big brick rococo structure dating back to the Columbian Exposition. The first day he was wearing a loud sportshirt and loose slacks, plus a black fedora with a pearl band and two-tone shoes; he looked like something out of Damon Runyon, not some bird doing pick-up work at a moving company.

The other days he was dressed much the same, and his destination was always the same, too: a race track, Washington Park. The IC train delivered him (and me) right outside the park—just a short walk across the tracks to the front admission gate. High trees, shimmering with spring breeze, were damn near as tall as the grandstand. Worse ways for a detective to spend a sunny day in May, and for four of them, I watched my man play the horses and I played the horses, too, coming out a hundred bucks ahead, not counting the fifty an hour.

Miller meeting up with Rose at the track, laying some bets before he laid her, was of course a possibility. But the only person Miller connected with was a tall, broad-shouldered brown-haired guy with the kind of mug janes call “ruggedly handsome” right down to the sleepy Robert Mitchum eyes. They sat in the stands together on two of the four days, going down to the ground-floor windows beneath to place similar smalltime bets—ten bucks at the most, usually to Win.

Still, Miller (and his two-day companion) would bet every race and cheer the horses on with a fist-shaking desperation that spoke of more at stake than just a fun day at the races. Smalltime bettor though he was, Miller was an every-day-at-the-track kind of sick gambler—the friend only showed twice, remember—and I came to the conclusion that his hard-on was for horses, and if anybody was riding Rose Vinicky to the finish line when her hubby wasn’t home, this joker wasn’t the jockey.

“That’s why,” Mullaney said, nodding, “you decided to stake out the Vinicky home, this morning.”

“Yeah.”

Mullaney’s huge chest heaved a sigh. “Why don’t we talk to the girl, together. Little Sally.”

Little Sally had a build like Veronica Lake, but I chose not to point that out.

“Sure,” I said.

We did it outside, under a shade tree. A light breeze riffled leaves, the world at peace. Of course, so is a corpse.

Sally Vinicky wasn’t crying now—partly cried out, partly in shock, and as she stood with her hands figleafed before her, she answered questions as politely and completely as she no doubt did when the nuns questioned her in class.

“I went in the back way,” she said. “Used my key.”

Which explained why I hadn’t seen the girl go in.

“I always come home for lunch at eleven, and Mom always has it ready for me—but when I didn’t see anything waiting in the kitchen…sometimes soup, sometimes a sandwich, sometimes both, today, nothing…I went looking for her. I thought for a minute she’d left early.”

“Left early for where?” I asked.

“She had errands to do, downtown, this afternoon.”

Mullaney asked, “What sort of mood was your mother in this morning, when you left for school?”

“I didn’t see her—Mom sleeps in till nine or sometimes ten. Does some household chores, fixes my lunch and….”

“How about your father?”

“He was just getting up as I was leaving—that was maybe a quarter to eight? He said he had to go to the court at ten thirty. Somebody suing us again.”

I asked, “Again?”

“Well, Mom’s real strict—if a guy doesn’t work a full hour, he doesn’t get paid. That starts arguments, and some of the men who work for Mom and Dad sometimes say they’ve been shorted…. Oh!”

Mullaney frowned. “What is it?”

“We should check Mom’s money!”

The blanketed body had already been carted out, and the crowd of neighbors milling around the house had thinned. So we walked the girl in through the front. Sally made a point of not looking into the living room where a tape outline on the floor provided a ghost of her mother.

In her parents’ room, where the bed—a beautiful walnut Victorian antique as beautiful as it was wrong for this house and this neighborhood—was neatly made, a pale brown leather wallet lay on the mismatched but also antique dresser. Before anyone could tell the girl not to touch it, she grabbed the wallet and folded it open.

No moths flew out, but they might have: it was that empty.

“Mother had a lot of money in here,” Sally said, eyes searching the yawning flaps, as if bills were hiding from her.

I asked, “How much is a lot, Sally?”

“Almost twelve hundred dollars. I’d say that’s a lot!”

“So would I. Why would your mother have that kind of money in her wallet?”

“We were going for a trip to California, as soon as my school got out—me, Mother, and my aunt Doris. That was the errand Mother had to do downtown—buy railroad tickets.”

Mullaney, eyes tight, said, “Who knew about this money?”

“My dad, of course. My aunt.”

“Nobody else?”

“Not that I can think of. Not that I know of. I wish I could be of more help….”

I smiled at her. “You’re doing fine, Sally.”

A uniformed officer stuck his head in. “Inspector, Captain Cullen says Mr. Vinicky is here.”

Sally pushed past Mullaney and me, and the uniformed man, and the girl went rattling down the stairs calling, “Daddy, Daddy!”

When caught up with her, she was in her father’s arms in the yellow-and-white kitchen. He held her close. They both cried and patted each other’s backs. Cullen, seated at the kitchen table, regarded this with surprising humanity.

“I want you to stay with your aunt tonight,” Vinicky said to his daughter.

“Okay. That’s okay. I don’t want to sleep in this house ever again.”

He found a smile. “Well, not tonight, anyway, sweetheart. They let me call your aunt—she’s on her way. Do you want to wait in your room?”

“No. No, I’ll wait outside, if that’s all right.”

Vinicky, the girl still in his arms, looked past her for permission, his pudgy face streaked with tears, his eyes webbed red.

Mullaney and Cullen nodded, and a uniformed man walked her out. The father took at seat at the kitchen table. So did Mullaney. So did I.

Seeming to notice me for the first time, Vinicky looked at me, confusion finding its way past the heartbreak. “What…what’re you doing here, Mr. Heller?”

“I was watching the house, Mr. Vinicky,” I said, and told him the circumstances as delicately as possible.

“I take it…I take it you told these gentleman why I hired you.”

“I did.”

“Did you see anyone go in, Mr. Heller? Did you see that bastard Miller?”

“I didn’t.” I hadn’t reported to him yet. “Mr. Vinicky, I spent four days watching Miller, and he always went to the track—that’s why I came here. I don’t believe he was seeing your wife.”

But Vinicky was shaking his head, emphatically. “He did it. I know he did it. You people have to find him!”

Cullen said, “We’re already on that, Mr. Vinicky.”

I asked the captain, “Do you need his address? He’s in a residential hotel over on—”

“We know. We sent a detective over there, already—next-door neighbor says this guy Miller used to hang around here a lot. Only now Miller’s nowhere to be seen—his flop is empty. Ran out on a week’s rent.”

Vinicky slammed a fist on the table. “I told you! I told you!”

Mullaney said, “We need you to calm down, sir, and tell us about your day.”

“My day! Tell you about, what…this? The worst day of my life! Worst goddamn day of my life. I loved Rose. She was the best wife any man ever had.”

Neither cop was nasty enough to mention that the bedroom dick this weeping husband had hired was sitting at the table with them.

Vinicky’s story was unremarkable: he’d got up around eight, dressed for the court appearance, stopped at the office first (where he was seen by various employees) and then took breakfast at a restaurant on Halsted. From there he’d gone to the post office, picked up a parcel, and headd downtown by car to Municipal Court. He had littered the South Side and the Loop alike with witnesses who could support his alibi.

“You’re being sued, we understand,” Mullaney said.

“Yeah—but that’s nothing. Kind of standard with us. Rose is…was…a hardnosed businesswoman, God love her. She insisted on a full day’s work for a full day’s pay.”

Mullaney was making notes again. “Did Miller ever complain about getting shorted?”

“Yeah. That’s probably why he was…so friendly with Rose. Trying to get on her good side. Sweet-talk her into giving him the benefit of the doubt on his hours. I was a son of a bitch to ever suspect—”

Cullen asked, “Could you give us a list of employees who’ve made these complaints, over the last two years?”

“Sure. No problem. I can give you some off the top of my head, then check the records at the office tomorrow for any I missed.”

Mullaney wrote down the names.

When that was done, I asked, “Did your wife have a wedding ring?”

“Yes. Of course. Why—wasn’t it on her…on her?”

“No rings.”

Vinicky thought about that. “She might’ve taken it off to do housework. Was it on her dresser? There’s a tray on her dresser…”

“No. What was the ring worth?”

“It was a nice-size diamond—three hundred bucks, I paid. Did the bastard steal it?”

Mullaney said, “Apparently. The money in her wallet was missing, too.”

“Hell you say! That was a small fortune—Rose was going to buy train tickets with that, and cover hotel and other expenses. She was treating her sister to a trip to California, and Sally was going along…. It was robbery, then?”

“We’re exploring that,” Mullaney said.

Vinicky’s eyes tightened to slits. “One of these S.O.B.’s who claimed they were shorted, you think?”

The inspector closed his notebook. “We’re exploring that, too. This list should be very helpful, Mr. Vinicky.”

I gave Mullaney the eye, nodding toward the back door, and he and stepped out there for a word away from both the husband and Captain Cullen.

“How long will you boys be here?” I asked.

“Another hour, maybe. Why, Nate?”

“I have a hunch to play.”

“You want company?”

“No. But I should be back before you’ve wrapped up, here.”

I tooled the Buick over to 63^rd Street, a lively commercial district with all the charm of a junkyard. Not far from here, Englewood’s big claim to fame—the multiple murderer H.H Holmes—had set up his so-called Murder Castle in the late 1880s. The Vinicky case could never hope to compete, so maybe I could make it go away quickly.

In the four days I’d kept an eye on Rich Miller, I’d learned a handful of useful things about the guy, including that when he wasn’t betting at Washington Park, he was doing so with a guy in a back booth at a bar called the Lucky Horseshoe (whose only distinction was its lack of a neon horseshoe in the window).

The joint was dim and dreary even for a South Side gin mill, and business was slow, mid-afternoon. But I still had to wait for a couple of customers to finish up with the friendly bookie in the back booth before I could slide in across from him.

“Do I know you?” he asked, not in a threatening way. He was a small sharp-eyed, sharp-nosed, sharp-chinned sharpie wearing a derby and a bow tie but no jacket—it was warm in the Horseshoe. He was smoking a cigarillo and his sleeves were rolled up, like he was preparing to deal cards. But no cards were laid out on the booth’s table.

I laid mine out, anyway: “My name is Heller, Nate Heller. Maybe you’ve heard of me.”

The mouth smiled enough to reveal a glint of gold tooth; the dark blue eyes weren’t smiling, though.

“I’m gonna take a wild stab,” I said, “and guess they call you Goldie.”

“Some do. You the…‘Frank Nitti’ Heller?”

By that he meant, was I the mobbed-up private eye who had been tight with Capone’s late heir, and remained tight with certain of the Outfit hierarchy.

“Yes.”

“You wanna place a bet, Nate? My bet is…not.”

“Your bet is right. I’m not here to muscle you. I’m here to do you a favor.”

“What favor would that be?”

“There’s a murder a few blocks away—Inspector Mullaney’s on it.”

“Oh. Shit.”

And by that he meant, imagine the luck: one of the honest Chicago cops.

“But, Nate,” he said, and I got the full benefit of a suspiciously white smile interrupted by that gold eyetooth, “why would Goldie give a damn? I have nothin’ to do with murder. Any murder. I’m in the entertainment business.”

“You help people play the horses.”

The tiny shrug conveyed big self-confidence. “It’s a noble sport, both the racing and the betting.”

I leaned toward him. “One of your clients is shaping up as a chief suspect. The favor I’m doing you is: I’m talking to you, rather than just giving you over to the inspector.”

Eyelids fluttered. “Ah. Well, I do appreciate that. What’s the client’s name?”

“Rich Miller.”

The upper lipped peeled back and again showed gold, but th bet as no smile. “That fucking fourflusher. He’s into me for five C’s!”

“Really. And he’s made no move to pay you off? Today, maybe?”

His laughter cut like a blade. “Are you kidding? One of my…associates…went around to his flop. Miller pulled outa there, owin’ a week’s back rent.”

Which, of course, I already knew.

Goldie was shaking his head, his tone turning philosophical. “You never can tell about people, can you? Miller always paid up on time, before this, whereas that pal of his, who I wouldn’t trust far as I could throw him, that crumb pays up, just when I was ready to call the legbreakers in.”

“What pal of Miller’s?”

He gave me a name, but it meant nothing to me. I wondered if it might be the guy Miller had met at Washington Park, two of the days, and ran a description by Goldie.

“That sounds like him. Big guy. Six four, easy. Not somebody I could talk to myself.”

“Hence the legbreakers.”

“Hence. Nate, if you can keep that goody-two-shoes Mullaney off my ass, it would be appreciated. He’ll come around, make it an excuse to make my life miserable, and what did I ever to do to that fat slob?”

I was already out of the booth. “See what I can do, Goldie.”

“And if you ever wanna place a bet, you know where my office is.”

When I got back to the brown-brick house on South Elizabeth Street, the Catholic school girl was hugging a tall slender woman, who might have been her mother come to life. On closer look, this gal was younger, and a little less pretty, though that may not have been fair, considering her features were taught with grief.

Sally and the woman who I took to be her aunt were beneath the same shady tree where Mullaney and I had stood with the girl, questioning her, earlier.

I went up and introduced myself, keeping vague about the “investigative job” I’d been doing for Mr. Vinicky.

“I’m Doris Stemmer,” she said, Sally easing out of the woman’s embrace. The woman wore a pale yellow dress with white flowers that almost didn’t show. “I’m Rose’s sister.”

She extended her hand and I shook it. Sally stayed close to her aunt.

“Sorry for your grief, Mrs. Stemmer,” I told her. “Have you spoken to Inspector Mullaney yet?”

“Yes.”

“Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”

“But you’re a private detective, aren’t you? What were you doing for Sylvester?”

“Looking into some of the complaints from his employees.”

Her eyes tightened and ice came into her voice. “Those men were a bunch of lazy good-for-nothing whiners. Doris was a good person, fair and with a great heart, wonderful heart. Why, just last year? She loaned Ray three hundred dollars, so we didn’t have to wait to get married.”

“Ray?”

“Yes, my husband.”

“What does he do, if I might ask?”

“He started a new job just last week, at an electrical assembly plant, here on the South Side.”

“New job? What was his old one?”

Her strained smile was a signal that I was pushing it. “He worked for Sylvester in the moving business. You can ask him yourself if Rose wasn’t an angel. Ask him yourself if she wasn’t fair about paying their people.”

“But he did quit…”

“Working as a mover was just temporary, till Ray could get a job in his chosen field.” Her expression bordered on glare. “Mr. Heller—if you want to talk to Ray, he’s waiting by the car, right over there.”

She pointed and I glanced over at a blue Ford coupe parked just behind a squad car. A big rugged-looking dark-haired guy, leaning against the vehicle, nodded to us. He was in a short-sleeve green sportshirt and brown pants. His tight expression said he was wondering what the hell I was bothering his wife about.

Gently as I could, I said, “I might have a couple questions for him, at that, Mrs. Stemmer. Would you and Sally wait here, just a moment? Don’t go anywhere, please…”

I went inside and found Mullaney and Cullen in the living room, contemplating the tape outline. Things were obviously winding down; the crime scene boys were packing up their gear, and most of the detectives were already gone.

“Button button,” I said to them. “Who’s got the button?”

Cullen glared at me, but Mullaney only smiled. “The brown button, you mean? Cullen, didn’t you collect that?”

The captain reached a hand into his suitcoat and came back with the brown button and held out the blood-caked item in his palm.

“You want this, Heller?”

“Yeah,” I said, marveling at the evidence-collecting protocol of the Chicago Police Department, “just for a minute….”

I returned to Mrs. Stemmer, under the tree, an arm around her niece.

“Couple questions about your husband,” I said.

“Why don’t you just talk to him?” she asked, clearly exasperated.

“I will. I’m sorry. Please be patient. Does your husband have a coat that matches those pants he’s wearing?”

“Well…yes. Maybe. Why?”

“Isn’t wearing it today, though.”

“It’s warm. Why would he wear it…?”

“Could this button have come off that jacket?”

She looked at it. “I don’t know1;

Quietly, I said, “When did you say your husband started his new job?”

“Last week.”

“But he didn’t have to go to work today?”

“No…no. He had some things to do.”

“Does he normally get Fridays off?”

“I don’t know. He just started, I told you.”

“So it’s unlikely he’d be given a day off….”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“Mrs. Stemmer, forgive me, but…does your husband have a gambling problem?”

She drew in breath, but said nothing. And spoke volumes.

I ambled over to the tall, broad-shouldered man leaning against the Ford.

“Mr. Stemmer? My name’s Heller.”

He stood straight now, folded his arms, looked at me suspiciously through sleepy eyes. He’d been out of earshot when I spoke to his wife, but could tell I’d been asking her unpleasant questions.

“Why were you bothering my wife? Are you one of these detectives?”

“Yeah. Private detective.”

He batted the air with a big paw. “You’re nobody! I don’t have to talk to you.”

“Private detective,” I picked up, “who followed Rich Miller to the track most of this week.”

“…What for?”

“For Rose’s husband—he thought she and Miller were playing around.”

He snorted a laugh. “Only thing Richie Miller plays is the nags.”

“And you’d know, right, Ray? See, I saw you and your buddy Richie hanging out together at Washington Park. You were betting pretty solid, yourself. Not big dough, but you were game, all right.”

“So what?”

“Well, for one thing, your wife thinks you started a new job last week.”

The sleepy eyes woke up a little. “And I guess in your business, uh…Heller, is it? In your business, you never ran across an instance of a guy lying to his wife before, huh?”

“You like the nags, too, don’t you, Stemmer? Only you don’t like to get nagged—and I bet Rose Vinicky nagged the hell out of you to pay back that three hundred. Did she hold back from your paycheck, too?”

He shook his head, smiled, but it was sickly. “Rose was a sweetheart.”

“I don’t think so. I think she was a hardass who maybe even shorted a guy when he had his hard-earned money coming. Her husband loved her, but anybody working for her? She gladly give them merry hell. She was that kind of nagrry hell. p>

A sneer formed on his face, like a blister. “I don’t have to talk to you. Take a walk.”

He shoved me.

I didn’t shove back, but I stood my ground; somebody gasped behind me—maybe Doris Stemmer, or the girl.

“You knew about that money, didn’t you, Stemmer? The money Rose was going to use to treat your wife to a Hollywood trip. And you could use eleven-hundred bucks, couldn’t you, pal? Hell, who couldn’t!”

He shoved me again. “You don’t take a goddamn hint, do you, Heller?”

“Here’s a hint for you: when a bookie like Goldie gets paid off, right before the legbreakers leave the gate? That means somebody finally had a winner.”

His face turned white.

“Sure, she let her brother-in-law in the front door,” I said. “She may have had you pegged for the kind of welsher who stiffs his own sister-in-law for a loan, but she probably thought she was at least safe with you, alone in her own house. That should’ve been a sure bet, right? Only it wasn’t. What did you use? A sash weight? A crowbar?”

This time he shoved me with both hands, and he was trying to crawl in on the rider’s side of the Ford, to get behind the wheel, when I dragged him out by the leg. On his ass on the grass, he tried to kick me with the other leg, and I kicked him in the balls, and it ended as it had begun, with a scream.

All kinds of people, some of them cops, came running, swarming around us with questions and accusations. But I ignored them, hauling Stemmer to his feet, and jerking an arm around his back, holding the big guy in place, and Cullen believed me when I said, “Brother-in-law did it,” taking over for me, and I quickly filled Mullaney in.

They found four hundred and fifteen bucks in cash in Stemmer’s wallet—what he had left after paying off the bookie.

“That’s a lot of money,” Mullaney said. “Where’d you get it?”

“I won it on a horse,” Stemmer said.

Only it came out sounding like a question.

After he failed six lie detector tests, Raymond Stemmer confessed in full. Turned out hardnosed businesswoman Rose had quietly fired Stemmer when she found out he’d been stealing furniture from their warehouse. Rich Miller had told Rose that Ray was going to the track with him, time to time, so she figured her brother-in-law was selling the furniture on the side to play the horses. She had given him an ultimatum: pay back the three hundred dollars, and what the furniture was worth, and Rose would not tell her sister about his misdeeds.

Stemmer had stopped by the house around nine thirty and told Rose he’d brought her the money. Instead, in the living room, as she reached for her already burning cigarette, he had paid her back by striking her in the back of the head with a wrench.

Amazingly, she hadn’t gone down. She’d staggered, knocked the ashtray to the floor, only to look over her shoulder at him and say, “You have the nerve to hit me?”

And he found the nerve to hit her again, and another ten times, where she lay on the floor.

He removed the woman’s diamond wedding ring, and went upstairs and emptied the wallet. All of this he admitted in a thirty-page statement. The diamond was found in a toolbox in his basement, the wrench in the Chicago River (after three hours of diving). His guilty plea got him a life sentence.

About a week after I’d found Rose Vinicky’s body, her husband called me at my office. He was sending a check for my services—the five days I’d followed Miller—and wanted to thank me for exposing his brother-in-law as the killer. He told me he was taking his daughter to California on the trip her mother had promised; the sister-in-law was too embarrassed and distraught to accept Vinicky’s invitation to come along.

“What I don’t understand,” the pitiful voice over the phone said, “is why Rose was so distant to me, those last weeks. Why she’d acted in a way that made me think—”

“Mr. Vinicky, your wife knew her sister’s husband was a lying louse, a degenerate gambler, stealing from the both of you. That was what was on her mind.”

“…I hadn’t thought of it that way. By God, I think you’re right, Mr. Heller…. You know something funny? Odd. Ironic, I mean?”

“What?”

“I got a long, lovely letter from Rich Miller today. Handwritten. A letter of condolence. He heard about Rose’s death, and said he was sick about it. That she was a wonderful lady and had been kind to him. After all the people who’ve said Rose was hard-hearted to the people who worked for us? This, this…it’s a kind of…testament to her.”

“That’s nice, Mr. Vinicky. Really is.”

“Postmarked Omaha. Wonder what Miller’s doing there?”

Hiding from the legbreakers, I thought.

And, knowing him, doing it at the dog tracks.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

George Hagenauer discovered the Vinicky case in an obscure true-detective magazine. I have compressed time and omitted aspects of the investigation; and some of the names in this story have been changed.

In March of 1947, I got caught up in the notorious Overell case, which made such headlines in Los Angeles, particularly during the trial that summer. The double murder—laced as it was with underage sex in a lurid scenario that made “Double Indemnity” seem tame—hit the front pages in Chicago, as well. But back home I never bragged about my little-publicized role, because—strictly speaking—I was the one guy who might have headed the whole thing off.

I was taking a deductible vacation, getting away from an Illinois spring that was stubbornly still winter, in trade for Southern California’s constant summer. My wife, who was prent and grouchy, loved L.A., and had a lot of friends out there, which was one of the reasons for the getaway; but I was also checking in with the L.A. branch office of the A-1 Detective Agency, of which I was the president.

I’d recently thrown in with Fred Rubinski, a former Chicago cop I’d known since we were both on the pickpocket detail, who from before the war had been running a one-man agency out of a suite in the Bradbury Building at Third and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles.

It was Friday morning, and I was flipping through the pages of Cue magazine in the outer office, occasionally flirting with Fred’s good-looking blonde receptionist—like they say, I was married but I wasn’t dead—waiting to get together with Fred, who was in with a client. The guy had just shown up, no appointment, but I didn’t blame Fred for giving him precedence over me.

I had seen the guy go in—sixtyish, a shade taller than my six feet, distinguished, graying, somewhat fleshy, in a lightweight navy suit that hadn’t come off the rack; he was clearly money.

After about five minutes, Fred slipped out of the office and sat next to me, speaking sotto voce.

My partner looked like a balding, slightly less ugly Edward G. Robinson; a natty dresser—today’s suit was a gray pinstripe with a gray and white striped tie—he was a hard round ball of a man.

“Listen, Nate,” he said, “I could use your help.”

I shrugged. “Okay.”

“You’re not tied up today—I know you’re on vacation…”

“Skip it. We got a well-heeled client who needs something done, right away, and you don’t have time to do it yourself.”

The bulldog puss blinked at me. “How did you know?”

“I’m a detective. Just keep in mind, I’ve done a few jobs out here, but I don’t really know the town.”

Fred sat forward. “Listen, this guy is probably worth a cool million—Walter E. Overell, he’s a financier, land developer, got a regular mansion over in Pasadena, in the Flintridge district, real exclusive digs.”

“What’s he want done?”

“Nothin’ you can’t handle. Nothin’ big.”

“So you’d rather let me hear it from him?”

Fred grinned; it wasn’t pretty. “You are a detective.”

In the inner office, Overell stood as Fred pulled up a chair for me next to the client’s. As the financier and I shook hands, Fred said, “Mr. Overell, this is Nathan Heller, the president of this agency, and my most trusted associate.”

He left out that I wasn’t local. Which I didn’t disagree with him for doing—it was good tactically.

“Of course, Mr. Heller commands our top rate, Mr. Overell—one hundred a day.”

“No problem.”

“We get expenses, and require a two-hundred dollar retainer, non-refundable.”

“Fine.”

Fred and I made sure not to look at each other throughout my partner’s highway robbery of this obviously well-off client.

Soon we got down to it. Overell slumped forward as he sat, hands locked, his brow deeply furrowed, his gray eyes pools of worry.

“It’s my daughter, Mr. Heller. She wants to get married.”

“A lot of young girls do, Mr. Overell.”

“Not this young. Louise is only seventeen—and won’t be eighteen for another nine months. She can’t get married at her age without my consent—and I’m not likely to give it.”

“She could run away, sir. There are states where seventeen is plenty old enough—”

“I would disinherit her.” He sighed, hung his head. “Much as it would kill me…I would disown and disinherit her.”

Fred put in, “This is his only child, Nate.”

I nodded. “Where do things stand, currently?”

Overell swallowed thickly. “She says she’s made up her mind to marry her ‘Bud’ on her eighteenth birthday.”

“Bud?”

“George Gollum—he’s called Bud. He’s twenty-one. What is the male term for a golddigger, anyway?”

I shrugged. “Greedy bastard?”

“That will do fine. I believe he and she have…” Again, he swallowed and his clenched hands were trembling, his eyes moist. “…known each other, since she was fourteen.”

“Pardon me, sir, but you use the term ‘known’ as if you mean in the…Biblical sense?”

He nodded curtly, turned his gaze away; but his words were clipped: “That’s right.”

An idea was hatching; I didn’t care for it much, but the idea wasn’t distasteful enough to override my liking of a hundred bucks a day.

Overell was saying, “I believe he met my daughter when he was on leave from the Navy.”

“He’s in the Navy?”

“No! He’s studying at the Los Angeles campus of U.C., now—pre-med, supposedly, but I doubt he has the brains for it. They exchanged letters when he was serving overseas, as a radioman. My wife, Beulah, discovered some of these letters…. They were…filth.”

His head dropped forward, and his hands covered his face.

Fred glanced at me, eyebrows raised, but I just said to Overell, “Sir, kids are wilder today than when we were young.”

He had twenty, twenty-five years on me, but it seemed the thing to say.

“I’ve threatened to disinherit her, even if she waits till she’s of legal age—but she won’t listen, Louise simply won’t listen.”

Overell went on, at some length, to tell me of Louise’s pampered childhood, her bedroom of dolls and Teddy bears in their “estate,” the private lessons (tennis, riding, swimming), her French governess who had taught her a second language as well as the niceties of proper etiquette.

“Right now,” the disturbed father said, “she’s waging a campaign to win us over to this twenty-one-year-old ‘boy friend’ of hers.”

“You haven’t met him?”

“Oh, I’ve met him—chased him off my property. But she insists if we get to know Bud, we’ll change our minds—I’ve consented to meet with them, let them make their case for marriage.”

“Excuse me, but is she pregnant?”

“If she were, that would carry no weight whatsoever.”

I let the absurdity of that statement stand.

Overell went on: “I’ve already spoken to Mr. Rubinski about making certain…arrangements…if that is what Louise and her Bud reveal to us tomorrow evening.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes, we have a yacht—the Mary E.—moored at Newport Harbor.” He smiled embarrassedly, the first time he’d smiled in this meeting. “Excuse my pomposity—‘yacht’ is rather overstating it, it’s really just a little forty-seven footer.”

Little?

“Louise asked me to invite her and her ‘boy friend’ aboard for the evening, with her mother and myself, so we can all get to know each other better, and talk, ‘as adults.’”

“And you’re going along with this?”

“Yes—but only to humor her, and as a…subterfuge for my own feelings, my own desires, my own designs. I want you to explore this boy’s background—I don’t know anything about him, except that he’s local.”

“And you think if I turn up something improper in this boy’s past, it would matter to your daughter?”

His eyes were so tight, it must have hurt. “If he’s the male equivalent of a golddigger, won’t he have other girls, other women? That would show Louise the light.”

“Mr. Overell, is your daughter attractive?”

“Lovely. I…I have a picture in my wallet, but I’m afraid she’s only twelve in it.”

“Never mind that right now—but you should know there’s every possibility that these two young people…and twenty-one seems younger to me, every day…really are nuts about each other. Gollum may not be seeing anybody else.”

“But you can find out!”

“Sure, but…aren’t you overlooking something?”

“Am I?”

“Your daughter is underage. Iyou tch ’em in the backseat of this boy’s jalopy, we can put him away—or at least threaten to.”

“…Statutory rape?”

I held up two palms, pushed the air. “I know, I know, it would embarrass your daughter…but even the threat of it oughta to send this rat scurrying.”

Overell looked at Fred for an opinion. Fred was nodding.

“Makes sense, Mr. Overell,” he said.

Overell’s eyes tensed, but his brow unfurrowed some; another sigh seemed to deflate his entire body, but I could sense relief on his part, and resignation, as he said, “All right…all right. Do what you think is best.”

We got him a contract, and he gave us a check.

“Can I speak with your wife about this matter?” I asked him.

He nodded. “I’m here with Beulah’s blessing. You have our address—you can catch her at home this afternoon, if you like.”

I explained to him that what I could do today would be limited, because Overell understood that his son and daughter were (and he reported this with considerable distaste) spending the day “picnicking in the desert.” But I could go out to the Los Angeles campus of the University of California and ask around about Bud.

“You can inquire out there about my daughter as well,” he said.

“Isn’t she still in high school?”

“Unfortunately, no—she’s a bright girl, skipped a grade. She’s already in college.”

Sounded like Louise was precocious in a lot of ways.

Around ten thirty that same morning, I entered at Westwood Boulevard and Le Conte Avenue, rolling in my rental Ford through a lushly terraced campus perched on a knoll overlooking valleys, plains and hills. The buildings were terra cotta, brick and tile in a Romanesque motif.

I asked a cute coed for directions to the student union, and was sent to Kerckhoff Hall, an imposing building of Tudor design with a pinnacled tower. I was further directed to a sprawling high-ceilinged room where college kids played ping pong or played cards or sat in comfy chairs and couches and drank soda pop and smoked cigarettes. Among sweaters and casual slacks and bobby socks, I stuck out like the thirty-eight-year-old sore thumb I was in my tan summer suit; but the kids were all chatty and friendly. My cover was that Bud had applied for a job—what that job was, of course, I couldn’t say—and I was checking up on him for his prospective employer.

Not everybody knew Bud Gollum or Louise Overell, of course—too big a campus for that. But a few did.

Bud, it seemed, was a freshman, going to school on Uncle Sam. Other first-year fellas—younger than Bud, probably nineteen—described him as “a good guy, friendly, and smart,” even “real smart.” But several didn’t hide their dislike of Bud, saying he was smart-alecky, writing him off as a “wiseguy.”

A mid-twenties junior with an anchor tattooed on his forearm knew Bud as a fellow Navy veteran, and said Bud had been a Radio Man First Class.

“Listen,” the husky little dark-haired, dark-eyed ex-gob said, “if you’re considering him for a job, give him a break—he’s smarter than his grades make him look.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, when you see his transcripts, you’re going find him pulling down some low junk, so far this year…but it’s that little skirt’s fault. I mean, they don’t let dummies into pre-med around here.”

“He’s got a girl friend distracting him?”

The gob nodded. “And it’s pretty damn serious—she’s a young piece of tail, pardon my French, built like a brick shithouse. Can hardly blame him for letting his studies slide.”

“Well, I hope he wouldn’t be too preoccupied to do a good job—”

“No, no! He’s a right fella! Lives at home with his mom and stepdad—he’s an assistant scout master, for Christ sakes!”

“Sounds clean cut.”

“Sure—he loves the outdoors, always going hiking in the mountains up around Chatsworth, backpacking out into the desert.”

“His girl go in for that?”

“They go everywhere together, joined at the hip…don’t give me that look, buddy! I mean, haven’t you ever had a female lead you around by the dick?”

“No,” I said, and when he arched an eyebrow, I added, “Does my wife count?”

He grinned at me. “Does mine?”

A table of girls who were smoking and playing pitch allowed me to pull up a chair for a few questions; they weren’t very cute, just enough to make me want to bust out crying.

“I don’t know what a neat guy like that sees in ol’ Stone Face,” a blonde with blue eyes and braces said. I liked the way she was getting lipstick on her cigarette.

“Stone Face?”

“Yeah,” a brunette said. She wasn’t smoking, like her friends, just chewing and snapping her gum. “That gal’s got this round face like a frying pan and’s got about as much expression.”

“Except when she giggles,” a redhead said, giggling.

All the girls began to giggle, the blonde saying, “Then she really looks like a dope!”

“She laughs at everything that idiot says,” the brunette said. “They hang onto each other like ivy—it’s sickening.”

That was all I learned at the college, and the effort took about three hours; but it was a start.

Pasadena was the richest city per capita in the nation, and the residential neighborhood where the Overells resided gave credence to that notion—mansions with sunken gardens, swimming pools and tennis courts on winding, flower-edged, palm-flung streets. The white mission-style mansion at 607 Los Robles Drive, with its well-manicured, lavishly landscaped lawn, was no exception.

Mrs. Overell was younger than her husband by perhaps ten years, an attractive dark-blonde woman whose nicely buxom shape was getting a tad matronly. We sat by the pool watching the mid-afternoon sun highlight the shimmering blue surface with gold. We drank iced tea and she hid her feelings behind dark sunglasses and features as expressionless as the Stone Face with which those coeds had tagged her daughter.

“I don’t know what I can tell you, Mr. Heller,” she said, her voice a bland alto, “that my husband hasn’t already.”

“Well, Mrs. Overell, I’m chiefly here for two reasons. First, I can use a photo of your daughter, a recent one.”

“Certainly.” A tiny smile etched itself on the rigid face. “I should have thought of that—Walter carries a photo of Louise when she was still a child. He’d like to keep her that way.”

“You do agree with this effort to break off Louise’s relationship with this Gollum character?”

“Mr. Heller, I’m not naive enough to think that we can succeed at that. But I won’t stand in Walter’s way. Perhaps we can postpone this marriage long enough for Louise to see through this boy.”

“You think he’s a male golddigger, too?”

She shrugged. “He doesn’t come from money.”

“You know where he lives? Have an address?”

“He’s here in Pasadena.”

I couldn’t picture a wrong side of the tracks in this swanky burg.

“No, I don’t have an address,” she was saying, “but he’s in North Fair Oaks…where so many coloreds have moved in.”

I had been met at the door by a Negro butler, who I supposed had to live somewhere.

But I didn’t press the subject. I sipped my tea and offered, gently, “If your daughter is willing to wait to marry this boy till her eighteenth birthday…which I understand is many months from now…perhaps what you ought to do is humor her, and hope this affair cools off.”

The blue and gold of the sun-kissed pool shimmered in the dark lens of her sunglasses. “I would tend to agree with you, Mr. Heller. In time she might come to her senses of her own volition. But Walter is a father who has not adjusted to losing his little girl…she’s our only child, you know…and I do share his concern about the Gollum boy.”

“That’s the other reason I wanted to speak with you, directly,” I said, and—delicately—I filled her in on my notion to catch the two in flagrante delicto. I wanted to make sure she wouldn’t mind putting her daughter through the public embarrassment a statutory rape accusation would bring.

Another tiny smile etched itself. “We’ve gotten quite used to Louise embarrassing us, Mr. Heller.”

Mrs. Overell thought I might have trouble catching them, however, since they so often went hiking and camping in the West San Fernando Valley—like today. That would be tough: I was used to bagging my quarry in backseats and motel rooms.

As it turned out, Mrs. Overell was able to provide a snapshot, filched from her daughter’s room, of both Louise and her beau. They were in swimsuits, at the beach on towels, leaning back on their elbows smiling up at the camera.

Louise had a nice if faintly mocking, superior smile—not exactly pretty, and indeed round-faced, but not bad; and she was, as that ex-gob had so succinctly put it, built like a brick shithouse. This girl had everything Jane Russell did except a movie contract.

As for Bud, he was blond, boyish, rather round faced himself, with wire-rimmed glasses and a grin that somehow lacked the suggestion of cunning his girl friend’s smile possessed. He had the slender yet solid build so often seen in Navy men.

I spent another hour or so in Pasadena, which had a sleepy air of prosperity spawned by the many resort hotels, the formidable buildings, the pretentious homes, the bounteous foliage. The North Fair Oaks section did seem to have more than its share of colored residents, but this was still nicer than anywhere I’d ever lived. With the help of a service station attendant—the private detective’s best friend in a strange city—I located the home of Dr. Joseph Stomel, married to Bud’s mother, Wilhilmina. But I had no intention of talking to anyone there, as yet. This was strictly a point of reference for the eventual tailing of Gollum.

That was Friday, and between the college and the Pasadena run, I’d earned my hundred bucks. I spent all day Saturday with my wife, and friends, enjoying our premature summer vacation.

Then I went back to work Saturday night, though I looked like a tourist in my blue sportshirt and chinos. The camera I had with me was no tourist’s Brownie, however, rather a divorce dick’s Speed Graphic loaded with infrared film and the world’s least conspicuous flash.

It was around ten o’clock when I turned right off State Highway 55, my rental Ford gliding across the low-slung spit over the mouth of an inlet of landlocked Newport Bay, dotted by sails, glistening with moonbeams, dancing with harbor lights. Seaside cottages clustered along the bay shore, but grander dwellings perched on islands in the lagoon-like bay, California-style Riviera-worthy stucco villas, a suitable backdrop for the fleet of yachts and other pleasure crafted moored here.

My behind was moored in a booth in the Beachfront Cafe, a chrome-heavy diner with a row of windows looking out on the dock and the peaceful, soothing view of lights twinkling and pleasure crafts bobbing on the moon-washed water. I ate a cheeseburger and fries and sipped coffee as I kept watch; I had a perfect view of the sleek cruiser, the Mary E. A few lights were on in the boat, and occasional movement could be made out, but just vague shapes. No different than any number of other boats moored here, gently rocking.

Overell had told me that he and his wife would be entertaining their daughter and her beau aboard the cruiser, having dinner, talking out their problems, perhaps even coming to some sort of understanding. What I had in mind was to follow the young lovers when they left this family powwow.

Since Bud lived at home with his mom, I figured the couple would either go to some lover’s lane to park, or maybe hit a motel. Either way, my Speed Graphic would collect the evidence needed to nail Bud for statutory rape. It’s not elegant, but it’s a living.

Around eleven I spotted them, comng down a ladder, stepping onto the swaying dock: Bud and Louise. Hazel-haired, taller than I’d imagined her, she did have an admirable top-heavy figure, which her short-sleeved pale blue sweater and darker blue pedal pushers showed off nicely. Bud wore a yellow sportshirt and brown slacks, and they held hands as they moved rather quickly away from the boat.

I was preparing to leave the cafe and follow them up to the parking lot, and Bud’s car—Mrs. Overell had given me the make and color, and I’d already spotted it, a blue Pontiac convertible, pre-war, battered but serviceable—only, they threw me a curve in addition to Louise’s.

The couple were heading up the ramp toward the cafe!

Absurdly, I wondered if they’d made me—impossible, since they hadn’t seen me yet—and I hunkered over my coffee as the lovebirds took a couple of stools at the counter, just about opposite my window booth.

At first they were laughing, at some private joke; it seemed rather forced—were they trying to attract attention?

Then they both ordered burgers and fries and sat there talking, very quietly. Even a trained eavesdropper like me couldn’t pick up a word. Perhaps they’d had a rough evening with her folks, because periodically one would seem to be comforting the other, stroking an arm, patting a shoulder, reassuringly.

What the hell was going on? Why did they need a burger, when presumably that luxury cruiser had a well-stocked larder? And if they wanted to get away from her parents and that boat, why hang around the dock? Why not climb in Bud’s convertible and seek a burger joint that wasn’t in her parents’ watery backyard?

Such thoughts bobbed like a buoy in my trained snoop’s mind as the couple sat at the counter and nibbled at their food. It was a meal any respectable young couple could down in a matter of minutes. But forty-five minutes later, the two were still sitting on those stools, sometimes picking at barely eaten, very cold-by-now food, often staring soulfully into each other’s eyes. Every other stool at that counter had seen at least three customer backsides in the same span.

I was long since used to boring stakeout duty; but it was unnerving having my subjects so near at hand, for so long a time. I finally got up and went to the men’s room, partly to test whether they’d use that opportunity to slip away (again, had they made me?), and partly because after three cups of coffee, I needed to take a piss.

When I got back, Bud and Louise were still sitting on their stools, Louise ever so barely swivelling on hers, like a kid in a soda shop. Frustrated, confused, I settled back into my booth, and glanced out the window, and the world exploded.

Actually, it was just the Mary E. that exploded, sending a fireball of flame rising from the cruiser, providing the clear night sky with thunder, hurling burning debris everywhere, making waves out of the placid waters, rocking the pier.

Rocking the cafe patrons, too, most of them anyway. Everyone except the employees leapt to their feet, screaming, shouting, running outside into a night turned orange by flame, dabbed gray by smoke.

Almost everyone—Bud and Louise were still just sitting at the counter, albeit looking out the window, numbly.

Me, I was on my leapt to but then I settled back into the booth, trying to absorb what I’d seen, what I was seeing. I knew my client was dead, and so was his wife—two people I’d spoken to at length, just the day before—as that cruiser was already a listing, smoking shambles, sinking stern first into the bay’s eighteen feet.

Finally, the couple headed outside, to join the gathering crowd at the water’s edge. I followed them. Sirens were cutting the air, getting closer, closer.

Louise was crying now, hysterical, going from one gaping spectator to another, saying, “My father was on that boat! My mother, too! Somebody save them—somebody rescue them…somebody has to rescue them!”

The boy friend remained at the side of the stricken girl as she moved through the crowd, making her presence blatantly known, Bud’s boyish face painted with dismay and shock and reflected flames.

I went to my rental car and got my Speed Graphic. I wouldn’t even need the flash—plenty of light.

Snagging shots of the dying boat, and the distraught daughter and her beau, I heard the speculation among the boating-wise onlookers, as to the explosion’s cause.

“Butane,” one would say.

“Or gasoline,” another would say.

But this ex-Marine wasn’t so easily fooled.

Butane, hell—I smelled dynamite.

Before long, the Coast Guard arrived, and fire trucks, and police from nearby Santa Ana and Orange County Sheriff’s Department personnel. The Chief of the Newport Beach Police showed, took over the investigation, questioned the tearful, apparently anguished Louise Overell and promptly released her, and her boy friend.

Pushing through the bustle, I introduced myself to the chief, whose name was Hodgkinson, and told him I was an investigator who’d been doing a job for Walter Overell.

“A job related to what happened here tonight?” the heavyset chief asked, frowning.

“Very possibly.”

“You suspect foul play?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Where are you staying, Mr. Heller?”

“The Beverly Hills Hotel.”

That impressed him—he didn’t realize it was a perk of my security work for the hotel. “Well, obviously, Mr. Heller, I’m gonna be tied up here quite a while. Can you come by the station tomorrow sometime? Tomorrow’s Sunday—make it Monday. And if I’m not there, I may be back out here.”

“Sure. Why did you let those two kids go?”

“Are you kiddin’? We’ll be dredging her parents’ scorched corpses outa the drink before too long. It’s only decent to spare that girl the sight of that.”

Only decent.

Sunday I took my wife to the beach at Santa Monica—she was only a few months pregnant and still looked great in a swim suit. Peggy was an actress and recently had a small role in a Bob Hope picture, and even out here her Deanna Durbin-ish good looks attracted attention.

She ragged me, a little, because I seemed preoccupied, and wasn’t terribly good company. But that was because I was thinking about the Overell “Yacht Murder” (as the papers had already starting calling it). I had sold my crime scene photos to Jim Richardson, at the Examiner, by the way, for three hundred bucks. I was coming out way ahead of the game, considering my client and his wife had been blown to smithereens the night before.

Call it guilt, call it conscience, call it sheer professionalism, but I knew I hadn’t finished this job. Walter Overell deserved more for that two-hundred buck retainer—just like he’d deserved better from that shrewd sexed-up daughter of his.

So on Monday, bright and early, looking like a tourist in sportshirt and chinos, I began looking. What was I looking for? A slip of paper…a slip of paper in the desert…sounds worse than a needle in a haystack, but it wasn’t. I found the damn thing before noon.

Chatsworth was a mountain-ringed hamlet in the West San Fernando Valley that used a Wild West motif to attract tourists, offering them horseback riding and hiking trails, with the ocean and beaches and desert close at hand for lovers of the outdoors—like that Boy Scout Bud Gollum and his bosomy Campfire Girl.

The guy behind the counter in the sparse storefront at the Trojan Powder Company looked a little like Gabby Hayes—white-bearded, prospector-grizzled, in a plaid shirt and bib overalls. But he had his original teeth and a faint British accent, which took him out of the running for playing a Roy Rogers or Gene Autry sidekick.

This was the owner of the place, and he was looking at the photo I’d handed him, taking a closer look than he had at the Illinois P.I. badge I’d flashed him.

“That young woman will never drown,” he said, with a faintly salacious smile.

“I’m not so much interested whether you recognize her tits as if her face is familiar—or her boyfriend’s.”

“I recognize the whole batch of them—both faces, both bosoms, for that matter. The girl didn’t come in, though—she sat out in their convertible—a Pontiac, I believe. I could see her right through the front window.”

“Did he make a purchase?”

“I should say—fifty sticks of dynamite.”

Jesus, that was a lot of dinah.

“This is fresh in my memory,” the proprietor said, “because it was just last Friday.”

Day before the boat blew up.

“Can anybody stroll in here and buy that stuff?”

“It’s a free country—but back in the early days of the war, when folks were afraid of saboteurs, city and county officials passed an ordinance, requiring purchasers to sign for what they buy.”

I liked the sound of that. “Can I see the signed receipt?”

Bud had not signed his own name—“R.L. Standish” had purchased the fifty sticks of dynamite—but I had no doubt handwriting experts would confirm this as the Boy Scout’s scrawl.

“Some officers from Newport Beach will be along to talk to you,” I told him.

“Fine—what about reporters?”

“Good idea,” I said, and used the phone.

Examiner editor Richardson paid me another C-note for the tip, and the proprietor of the Trojan Powder Company earned his own fifty bucks of Mr. Hearst’s money for providing the exclusive.

I found Chief Hodgkinson at the Newport Beach dock, where the grim, charred wreckage had been surfaced from the depth of eighteen feet—about all that remained was the black blistered hull. The sun was high and golden on the waters, and the idyllic setting of stucco villas in the background and expensive pleasure craft on either side was turned bizarre by the presence of the scorched husk of the Mary E.

Seated in the Beachfront Cafe across from the blue-uniformed, heavyset chief, in the same booth I’d occupied Saturday night, I filled him in on what I’d discovered up Chatsworth way. He excused himself to pass the information along to a couple of D.A.’s investigators who would make the trip to the Trojan Powder Company.

When the chief returned, bearing a plate with a piece of pecan pie with whipped cream, he sat and ate and shared some information.

“Pretty clear your instincts were right about those kids,” he said gruffly but good-naturedly. “It’s just hard to believe—patricide and matricide. Only in California.”

“The late Walter Overell was supposedly worth around a million. And, like I told you, he was threatening to cut his daughter off, if she married her four-eyed romeo.”

“What made you think to go looking for that sales receipt, Mr. Heller?”

“I knew they’d gone ‘picnicking’ in the San Fernando Valley, and a college pal of Bud’s said the loving couple liked to hike up around Chatsworth. Plus, I knew if Bud had been a Radio Man 1st Class in the war, he had the technical knowhow to rig a bomb. Hell, Chief, Saturday night, you could smell the dynamite in the air—and the murder.”

He nodded his agreement. “It’s as cold-blooded a crime as I’ve ever come across. We found thirty-one sticks of unexploded dynamite in the galley, crude time bomb thing, rigged with wire and tape to an alarm clock—second of two charges. Bulkhead kept the larger one from goin’ off. Which was lucky.”

“Not for the Overells.”

“No, the smaller bundle of dynamite was enough to kill ’em plenty dead,” he said, chewing a bite of pecan pie. “But it wasn’t enough to cover up the rest of the evidence.”

“Such as?”

“Such as what the coroner discovered in his autopsies—before the explosion, both Mom and Dad had been beaten to death with a ball-peen hammer we found aboard the ship…. That there was no water in their lungs backs that theory up.”

“Jesus—that is cold.”

A young uniformed officer was approaching; he had a wide-eyed, poleaxed expression.

“Chief,” the young cop said, leaning in, “somebody’s here and wants to talk to you—and you won’t believe who it is.”

Within a minute, a somber yet bright-eyed Louise Overell—in a short-sleeved, cream-colored, well-filled sweater and snug-fitting blue jeans—was standing with her hands fig-leafed before her.

“Hello, Chief Hodgkinson,” she said, cheerfully. “How are you today?”

“Why, I’m just fine,” he said.

“I’m doing better…thanks,” the blue-eyed teenager said, answering a question Hodgkinson hadn’t asked. “The reason I’m here is, I wanted to ask about the car.”

“The car?”

“My parents’ car. I know it was left here in the lot, and I thought maybe I could drive it back up to Flintridge…I’ve been staying up there, since…the tragedy.”

“Excuse me,” I said, getting out, and I flashed the chief a look that I hoped he would understand as meaning he should stall the girl.

“Well,” the chief was saying, “I’m not sure. I think perhaps we need to talk to the District Attorney, and make sure the vehicle isn’t going to be impounded for…”

And I was gone, heading for the parking lot.

Wherever Louise went, so surely too went Bud—particularly since another driver would be needed to transport the family sedan back to the Flintridge estate.

Among the cars in the gravelled lot were my own rental job, several police cars, Bud’s Pontiac convertible, and a midnight blue ‘47 Caddy that I just knew had to have been Walter Overell’s.

This opinion was formed, in part, by the fact that Bud Gollum—in a red sportshirt and denim slacks—was trying to get into the car. I approached casually—the boy had something in his left hand, and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a weapon.

Then I saw: a roll of electrical tape, and spool of wire. What the hell was he up to?

Then it came to me: while little Louise was keeping the chief busy, Bud was attempting to plant the tape and wire…which would no doubt match up with what had been used on the makeshift time bomb…in Overell’s car. When the chief turned the vehicle over to Louise, the “evidence” would be discovered.

But the Caddy was locked, and apparently Louise hadn’t been able to provide a key, because Bud was grunting in frustration as he tried every door.

I just stood there, hands on my hips, rocking on my heels on the gravel. “Is that your plan, Bud? To try to make this look like suicide-murder, planned by ol’ Walter?”

Bud whirled, the eyes wild in the boyish face. “What…who…?”

“It won’t play, kid. The dynamite didn’t do its job—the fractured skulls omb in the autopsy. You’re about two seconds away from being arrested.”

That was when he hurled the tape and the wire at me, and took off running, toward his parked convertible. I batted the stuff away, and ran after him, throwing a tackle that took us both roughly down onto the gravel.

“Shit!” I said, getting up off him, rubbing my scraped forearm.

Bud scrambled up, and threw a punch, which I ducked.

Then I creamed him with a right hand that damn near broke his jaw—I don’t remember ever enjoying throwing a punch more, though my hand hurt like hell afterward. He dropped prayerfully to his knees, not passing out, but whimpering like a little kid.

“Maybe you aren’t smart enough for pre-med, at that,” I told him.

Ambling up with two uniformed officers, the chief—who had already taken Louise into custody—personally snapped the cuffs on Bud Gollum, who was crying like a little girl—unlike Louise, whose stone face worked up a sneery pout, as she was helped into the backseat of a squad car.

All in all, Bud was pretty much a disappointment as a Boy Scout.

The case was huge in the California press, the first really big crime story since the Black Dahlia. A grand jury convicted the young lovers, and the state attorney general himself took charge of the prosecution.

My wife was delighted when we spent several weeks having a real summer’s vacation, at the expense of the state of California, thanks to me being a major witness for the prosecution.

I didn’t stay for the whole trial, which ran well into October, spiced up by steamy love letters that Louise and Bud exchanged, which were intercepted and fed to the newspapers and even submitted to the jury, after Bud’s “filth” (as the late Mrs. Overell would have put it) had been edited out.

The letters fell short of any confession, and the star-crossed couple presented themselves well in court, Louise coming off as intelligent, mature and self-composed, and Bud seeming boyishly innocent, a big, strangely likable puppy dog.

The trial took many dramatic twists and turns, including a trip to the charred hulk of the Mary E. in drydock, with Louise and Bud solemnly touring the wreckage in the company of watchful jurors.

Not unexpectedly, toward the end of the trial, the respective lawyers of each defendant began trying to place the blame on the other guy, ultimately requesting separate trials, which the judge denied.

After my wife and I had enjoyed our court-paid summer vacation, I kept up with the trial via the press and reports from Fred Rubinski. All along we had both agreed we had never seen such overwhelming, unquestionably incriminating evidence in a murder case—or such a lame defense, namely that Walter Overell had committed suicide, taking his wife along with him.

Confronted by the testimony of handwriting experts, Bud had even admitted buying the dynamite, claiming he had done so at Walter Overell’s request! Medical testimony established that the Overells had died of fractured skulls, and a receipt turned up showing that Bud had bought the alarm clock used in the makeshift time bomb—a clock d given Louise as a gift. Blood on Bud’s effects was shown to match that of the late Overells.

And on, and on…. I had never seen a case more open and shut.

“Are you sitting down?” Fred’s voice said over the phone.

“Yeah,” I said, and I was, in my office in the Loop.

“After deliberating for two days, the six men and six women of the jury found Bud and Louise not guilty.”

I almost fell out of my chair. “What the hell?”

“The poor kids were ‘victims of circumstance,’ so says the jury—you know, like the Three Stooges? According to the jury, the Overells died due to ‘the accident of suicidal tampering with dynamite by Walter Overell.’”

“You’re shitting me….”

“Not at all. Those two fresh-faced kids got off scott free.”

I was stunned—flabbergasted. “How could a jury face such incontestable evidence and let obvious killers go free?”

“I don’t know,” Fred said. “It’s a fluke—I can’t imagine it ever happening again…not even in California.”

The trial took its toll on the lucky pair, however—perhaps because their attorneys had tried to pit Bud and Louise against each other, the girl literally turned her back on the Boy Scout, after the verdict was read, scorning his puppy-dog gaze.

“I’m giving him back his ring,” she told the swarming press.

As far as anybody knows, Louise Overell and Bud Gollum never saw each other again.

Nine months after her release, Louise married one of her jailers—I wondered if he’d been the guy who passed the love letters along to the prosecution. The marriage didn’t last long, though the couple did have a son. Most of Louise’s half million inheritance went to pay for her defense.

Bud flunked out of pre-med, headed east, married a motor-drome rider with a travelling show. That marriage didn’t last long, either, and eventually Bud got national press again when he was nabbed in Georgia driving a stolen car. He did two years in a federal pen, then worked for a radio station in the South, finally dropping out of public view.

Louise wound up in Las Vegas, married to a Bonanza Air Lines radio operator. Enjoying custody of her son, she had a comfortable home and the security of a marriage, but remained troubled. She drank heavily and was found dead by her husband in their home on August 24, 1965.

The circumstances of her death were odd—she was naked in bed, with two empty quart-sized bottles of vodka resting near her head. A loaded, cocked .22 rifle was at her feet—unfired. And her nude body was covered with bruises, as if she’d been beaten to death.

Her husband explained this by saying, “She was always falling down.” And the Deputy Coroner termed her cause of death as acute alcoholism.

I guess if Walter Overell dynamited himself to death, anything is possible.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Fact, speculation and fiction are freely mixed within this story, which is based on an actual case and uses the real names of the involved parties, with the exception of Heller and his partner Fred Rubinski (the latter a fictionalization of real-life private eye, Barney Ruditsky). I would like to acknowledge the following works, which were used as reference: The California Crime Book (1971), Robert Colby; For the Life of Me (1954), Jim Richardson; “Reporters” (1991), Will Fowler; and the Federal Writers’ Project California guide.

The Sunset Strip—the center of Hollywood’s nightlife—lay near the heart of Los Angeles, or would have if L.A. had a heart. I’m not waxing poetic, either: postwar L.A. (circa late summer 1949) sprawled over some 452 square miles, but isolated strips of land within the city limits were nonetheless not part of the city. Sunset Boulevard itself ran from downtown to the ocean, around twenty-five miles; west on Sunset, toward Beverly Hills—roughly a mile and a half, from Crescent Heights Boulevard to Doheny Drive—the Strip threaded through an unincorporated area surrounded by (but not officially part of) the City of Angels.

Prime nightspots like the Trocadero, Ciro’s, the Mocambo, and the Crescendo shared the glittering Strip with smaller, hipper clubs and hideaway restaurants like Slapsy Maxie’s, the Little New Yorker and the Band Box. Seediness and glamour intermingled, grit met glitz, as screen legends, power brokers and gangsters converged in West Hollywood for a free-spirited, no-holds-barred good time.

The L.A. police couldn’t even make an arrest on the Strip, which was under the jurisdiction of County Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz, who cheerfully ignored both the city’s cops and its ordinances. Not that the L.A. coppers would have made any more arrests than the sheriff’s deputies: the Vice Squad was well-known to operate chiefly as a shakedown racket. A mighty bookmaking operation was centered on the Sunset Strip, and juice was paid to both the county sheriff and the city vice squad. This seemed unfair to Mickey Cohen.

The diminutive, dapper, vaguely simian Cohen was a former Ben “Bugsy” Siegel associate who had built his bookie empire on the bodies of his competitors. Rivals with such colorful names as Maxie Shaman, Benny “the Meatball” Gambino, and Tony Trombino were just a few of the violently deceased gangsters who had unwillingly made way for Mickey; and the Godfather of Southern California—Jack Dragna—could only grin and bear it and put up with Cohen’s bloody empire building. Cohen had the blessing of the east coast Combination—Luciano, Meyer Lanksy, the late Siegel’s crowd—and oldtime Prohibition-era mob boss Dragna didn’t like it. A West Coast mob war had been brewing for years.

I knew Cohen from Chicago, where in the late thirties he was strictly a smalltime gambler and general-purpose hoodlum. Our paths had crossed several times since—never in a nasty way—and I rather liked the street-smart, stupid-looking Mick. He was nothing if not colorful: owned dozens of suits, wore monogrammed silk shirts and made-to-order shoes, drove a $15,000 custom-built blue Caddy, lived with his pretty little wife in a $150,000 home in classy Brentwood, and suffered a cleanliness fetish that had him washing his hands more than Lady MacBeth.

A fixture of the Sunset Strip, Mick strutted through clubs spreading dough around like advertising leaflets. One of his primary hangouts was Sherry’s, a cocktail lounge slash restaurant, a favorite film-colony rendezvous whose nondescript brick exterior was offset by an ornate interior.

My business partner Fred Rubinski was co-owner of Sherry’s. Fireplug Fred—who resembled a slightly better-looking Edward G. Robinson—was an ex-Chicago cop who had moved out here before the war to open a detective agency. We’d known each other in Chicago, both veterans of the pickpocket detail, and I too had left the Windy City PD to go private, only I hadn’t gone west, young man.

At least, not until after the war. The A-1 Detective Agency—of which I, Nathan Heller, was president—had (over the course of a decade-and-change) grown from a one-man hole-in-the-wall affair over a deli on Van Buren to a suite of offices in the Monadnock Building rife with operatives, secretaries and clients. Expansion seemed the thing, and I convinced my old pal Fred to throw in with me. So, starting in late ’46, the Los Angeles branch operated out of the Bradbury Building at Third and Broadway, with Fred—now vice president of the A-1—in charge, while I of course kept the Chicago offices going. Only it seemed, more and more, I was spending time in California. My wife was an actress, and she had moved out here with our infant son, after the marriage went quickly south. The divorce wasn’t final yet, and in my weaker moments, I still had hopes of patching things up, and was looking at finding an apartment or small house to rent, so I could divide my time between L.A. and Chicago. In July of ’49, however, I was in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, for whom the A-1 handled occasional security matters, an arrangement which included the perk of free lodgings.

Like Cohen, Fred Rubinski attempted to make up for his homeliness with natty attire, such as the blue suit with gray pinstripes and the gray-and-white silk tie he wore, as he sat behind his desk in his Bradbury Building office, a poolcue Havana shifting from corner to corner of his thick lips.

“Just do it as a favor to me, Nate,” Fred said.

I was seated across from him, in the client chair, ankle on a knee. “You don’t do jobs for Cohen—why should I?”

Fred patted the air with his palms; blue cigar smoke swirled around him like a wreath. “You don’t have to do a job for him—just hear him out. He’s a good customer at Sherry’s and I don’t wanna cross him.”

“You also don’t want to do jobs for him.”

A window air conditioner was chugging; hot day. Fred and I had to speak up over it.

“I use the excuse that I’m too well-known out here,” my partner said. “Also, the Mickster and me are already considered to be cronies, ’cause of Sherry’s. He knows the cops would use that as an excuse to come down on me, hard, if suddenly I was on Mickey Cohen’s retainer.”

“But you’re not asking me to do this job.”

“No. Absolutely not. Hell, I don’t even know what it is.”

“You can guess.”

“Well…I suppose you know he’s been kind of a clay pigeon, lately. Several attempts on his life, probably by Dragna’s people…. Mick probably wants a bodyguard.”

“I don’t do that kind of work anymore. Anyway, what about those Seven Dwarfs of his?”

That was how Cohen’s inner circle of lieutenants/strong-arms were known—Neddie Herbert, Davy Ogul, Frank Niccoli, Johnny Stompanato, Al Snyder, Jimmy Rist, and the late Hooky Rothman, who about a year ago had got his face shot off when guys with shotguns came barging right into Cohen’s clothing shop. I liked my face right where it was.

“Maybe it’s not a bodyguard job,” Fred said with a shrug. “Maybe he wants you for something else.”

I shifted in the chair. “Fred, I’m trying to distance myself from these mobsters. My connections with the Outfit back home, I’m still trying to live down—it’s not good for the A-1…”

“Tell him! Just don’t insult the man…don’t piss him off.”

I got up, smoothing out my suit. “Fred, I was raised right. I hardly ever insult homicidal gangsters.”

“You’ve killed a few, though.”

“Yeah,” I said from the doorway, “but I didn’t insult them.”

The habidashery known poshly as Michael’s was a two-story brick building in the midst of boutiques and nighteries at 8804 Sunset Boulevard. I was wearing a tan tropical worsted sportcoat and brown summer slacks, with a rust-color tie and two-tone Florsheims, an ensemble that had chewed up a hundred bucks in Marshall Field’s men’s department, and spit out pocket change. But the going rates inside this plush shop made me look like a piker.

Within the highly polished walnut walls, a few ties lay on a central glass counter, sporting silky sheens and twenty-five buck price tags. A rack of sportshirts ran seventy-five per, a stack of dress shirts ran in the hundred range. A luxurious brown robe on a headless manikin—a memorial to Hooky Rothman?—cost a mere two-hundred bucks, and the sportcoats went for two-hundred up, the suits three to four. Labels boasted: “Tailored Exclusively for Mickey Cohen.”

A mousy little clerk—a legit-looking joker with a wispy mustache, wearing around five cee’s worth of this stuff—looked at me as if a hobo had wandered into the shop.

“May I help you?” he asked, stuffing more condescension into four words than I would have thought humanly possible.

“Tell your boss Nate Heller’s here,” I said casually, as I poked around at the merchandise.

This was not a front for a bookmaking joint: Cohen really did run a high-end clothing store; but he also supervised his other, bigger business—which was extracting protection money from bookmakers, reportedly $250 per week per phone—out of here, as well. Something in my manner told the effete clerk that I was part of the backroom business, and his patronizing manner disappeared.

His whispered-into-a-phone conversation included my name, and soon he was politely ushering me o thee rear of the store, opening a steel-plated door, gesturing me into a walnut-paneled, expensively-appointed office.

Mayer Harris Cohen—impeccably attired in a double-breasted light gray suit, with a gray and green paisley silk tie—sat behind a massive mahogany desk whose glass-topped surface bore three phones, a small clock with pen-and-pencil holder, a vase with cut flowers, a notepad and no other sign of work. Looming over him was an ornately framed hand-colored photograph of FDR at his own desk, cigarette holder at a jaunty angle.

Standing on either side, like Brillcreamed bookends, were two of Cohen’s dark-eyed Dwarfs: Johnny Stompanato, a matinee-idol handsome hood who I knew a little; and hook-nosed Frank Niccoli, who I knew even less. They were as well-dressed as their boss.

“Thanks for droppin’ by, Nate,” Cohen said, affably, not rising. His thinning black hair was combed close to his egg-shaped skull; with his broad forehead, blunt nose and pugnacious chin, the pint-sized gangster resembled a bull terrier.

“Pleasure, Mickey,” I said, hat in my hands.

Cohen’s dark eyes flashed from bodyguard to bodyguard. “Fellas, some privacy?”

The two nodded at their boss, but each stopped—one at a time—to acknowledge me, as they headed to a side door, to an adjacent room (not into the shop).

“Semper fi, Mac,” Stompanato said, flashing his movie-star choppers. He always said this to me, since we were both ex-Marines.

“Semper fi,” I said.

Niccoli stopped in front of me and smiled, but it seemed forced. “No hard feelings, Heller.”

“About what?”

“You know. No hard feelings. It was over between us, anyway.”

“Frank, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

His hard, pockmarked puss puckered into an expression that, accompanied by a dismissive wave, implied “no big deal.”

When the bodyguards were gone, Cohen gestured for me to sit on the couch against the wall, opposite his desk. He rose to his full five six, and went to a console radio against the wall and switched it on—Frankie Laine was singing “Mule Train”…loud. Then Cohen trundled over and sat next to me, saying quietly, barely audible with the blaring radio going, “You can take Frankie at his word.”

At first I thought he was talking about Frankie Laine, then I realized he meant Niccoli.

“Mick,” I said, whispering back, not knowing why but following his lead, “I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.”

Cohen’s eyes were wide—he almost always had a startled deer look. “You’re dating Didi Davis, right?”

Didi was a starlet I was seeing, casually; I might have been trying to patch up my marriage, but I wasn’t denying myself the simple pleasures.

“Yeah, I met her a couple weeks ago at Sherry’s.”

“Well, Nate, she used to be Frankie’s girl.”

Cohen smelled like a barber shop got out of hand—reeking heavily of talcum powder and cologne, which seemed a misnomer considering his perpetual five o’clock shadow.

“I didn’t know that, Mick. She didn’t say anything….”

A whip cracked on the radio, as “Mule Train” wound down.

Cohen shrugged. “It’s over. She got tired of gettin’ slapped around, I guess. Anyway, if Frankie says he don’t hold no grudge, he don’t hold no grudge.”

“Well, that’s just peachy.” I hated it when girls forgot to mention their last boyfriend was a hoodlum.

Vaughn Monroe was singing “Ghost Riders in the Sky” on the radio—in full nasal throttle. And we were still whispering.

Cohen shifted his weight. “Listen, you and me, we never had no problems, right?”

“Right.”

“And you know your partner, Fred and me, we’re pals.”

“Sure.”

“So I figured I’d throw some work your way.”

“Like what, Mick?”

He was sitting sideways on the couch, to look at me better; his hands were on his knees. “I’m gettin’ squeezed by a pair of vice cops—Delbert Potts and Rudy Johnson, fuckers’ names. They been tryin’ to sell me recordings.”

“Frankie Laine? Vaughn Monroe?”

“Very funny—these pricks got wire recordings of me, they say, business transactions, me and who-knows-who discussing various illegalities…I ain’t heard anything yet. But they’re trying to shake me down for twenty gee’s—this goes well past the taste they’re gettin’ already, from my business.”

Now I understood why he was whispering, and why the radio was blasting.

“We’re not talking protection,” I said, “but straight blackmail.”

“On the nose. I want two things, Heller—I want my home and my office, whadyacallit, checked for bugs…”

“Swept.”

“Huh?”

“Swept for bugs. That’s what it’s called, Mick.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what I want—part of what I want. I also want to put in my own wiretaps and bugs and get those two greedy bastards on my recordings of them shakin’ me down.”

“Good idea—create a standoff.”

He twitched a smile, apparently pleased by my approval. “You up for doing that?”

“It’s not my speciality, Mick—but I can recommend somebody. Guy named Vaus, Jim Vaus. Calls himself an ‘electronics engineering consultant.’ He’s in Hollywood.”

Tdark eyes tightened but retained their deer-in-the-headlights quality. “You’ve used this guy?”

“Yeah…well, Fred has. But what’s important is: the cops use him, too.”

“They don’t have their own guy?”

“Naw. They don’t have anybody like that on staff—they’re a backward bunch. Jim’s strictly freelance. Hell, he may be the guy who bugged you for the cops.”

“But can he be trusted?”

“If you pay him better than the LAPD—which won’t be hard—you’ll have a friend for life.”

“How you wanna handle this, Nate? Through your office, or will this, what’s-his-name, Vaus, kick back a little to you guys, or—”

“This is just a referral, Mick, just a favor…I think I got one of his cards….”

I dug the card out of my wallet and gave it to Cohen, whose big brown eyes were dancing with sugarplumbs.

“This is great, Nate!”

I felt relieved, like I’d dodged a bullet: I had helped Cohen without having to take him on as a client.

So I said, “Glad to have been of service,” and began to get up, only Cohen stopped me with a small but firm hand on my forearm.

Bing Crosby was singing “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” on the radio—casual and easygoing and loud as hell.

“What’s the rush, Nate? I got more business to talk.”

Sitting back down, I just smiled and shrugged and waited for the pitch.

It was a fastball: “I need you should bodyguard me.”

“Jesus, Mick, with guys like Stompanato and Niccoli around? What the hell would you need me for?”

He was shaking his head; he had a glazed expression. “These vice cops, they got friends in the sheriff’s office. My boys been gettin’ rousted regularly—me, too. Half the time when we leave this place, we get shoved up against the wall and checked for concealed weapons.”

“Oh. Is that what happened to Happy Meltzer?”

“On the nose again! Trumped-up gun charge. And these vice cops are behind it—and maybe Jack Dragna, who’s in bed with the sheriff’s department. Dragna would like nothin’ better than to get me outa of the picture, without makin’ our mutual friends back east sore.”

“Hell, Mick, how do you see me figuring in this?”

“You’re a private detective—licensed for bodyguard work. Licensed to carry a weapon! Shit, man, I need somebody armed standin’ at my side, to keep me from gettin’ my ass shot off! Just a month ago, somebody took a blast at me with a shotgun, and then we found a bomb under my house, and…”

He rattled on, as I thought about his former bodyguard, Hooky Rothman, getting his face shot off, in that posh shop just beyond the metal-lined door.

“I got friends in the Attorney General’s office,” he was saying, “and they tell me they got an inside tip that there’s a contract out on yours truly—there’s supposed to be two triggers in from somewheres on the east coast, to do the job. I need somebody with a gun, next to me.”

“Mickey,” I said, “I have to decline. With all due respect.”

“You’re not makin’ me happy, Nate.”

“I’m sorry. I’m in no position to help out. First off, I don’t live out here, not fulltime, anyway. Second, I have a reputation of mob connections that I’m trying to live down.”

“You’re disappointing me….”

“I’m trying to get my branch office established out here, and you and Fred being friends—you hanging out at Sherry’s—that’s as far as our relationship, personal or professional, can go.”

He thought about that. Then he nodded and shrugged. “I ain’t gonna twist your arm…. Two grand a week, just for the next two weeks?”

That might have tempting, if Cohen hadn’t already narrowly escaped half a dozen hit attempts.

“You say you got friends in the Attorney General’s office?” I asked.

“Yeah. Fred Howser and me are like this.” He held up his right hand, forefinger and middlefinger crossed.

If the attorney general himself was on Cohen’s pad, then those wire recordings the vice cops had might implicate Howser….

“Mick, ask Howser to assign one of his men to you as a bodyguard.”

“A cop?”

“Who better? He’ll be armed, he’ll be protecting a citizen, and anyway, a cop to a hoodlum is like garlic to a vampire. Those triggers’ll probably steer clear, long as a state investigator is at your side.”

Cohen was thinking that over; then he began to nod.

“Not a bad idea,” he said. “Not a bad idea at all.”

I stood. “No consulting fee, Mick. Let’s stay friends—and not do business together.”

He snorted a laugh, stood and went over and shut off the radio, cutting off Mel Torme singing “Careless Hands.” Then he walked me to the steel-lined door and—when I extended my hand—shook with me.

As I was leaving, I heard him, in the private bathroom off his office, tap running, as he washed up—removing my germs.

I had a couple stops to make, unrelated to the Cohen appointment, so it was late afternoon when I made it back to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Entering my bungalow—nothing fancy, just a marble fireplace, private patio and furnishings no more plush than the palace at Versailles—I heard something…someone…in the bedroom. Rustling around in there.

My nine millimeter was in my suitcase, and my suitcase was in the bedroom. And I was just about to exit, to find a hotel dick or maybe call a cop, when my trained detective’s nose sniffed a clue; and I walked across the living room, and pushed the door open.

Didi Davis gasped; she was wearing glittery earrings—just glittery earrings, and the Chanel Number Five I’d nosed—and was poised, pulling back the covers, apparently about to climb into bed. She looked like a French maid who forgot her costume.

“I wanted to surprise you,” she said. She was a lovely brunette, rather tall—maybe five nine—with a willowy figure that would have seemed skinny if not for pert breasts and an impertinent dimpled behind. She was tanned all over. Her hair was up. It wasn’t alone.

“I thought you were working at Republic today,” I said, undoing my tie.

She crawled under the covers and the sheets made inviting, crinkly sounds. “Early wrap…. I tipped a bellboy who let me in.”

Soon I was under covers, equally naked, leaning on a pillow. “You know, I run with kind of a rough crowd—surprises like this can backfire.”

“I just wanted to do something sweet for you,” she said.

And she proceeded to do something sweet for me.

Half an hour later, still in the bedroom, we were getting dressed when I brought up the rough crowd she ran with.

“Why didn’t you mention you used to date Frank Niccoli?”

She was fastening a nylon to her garter belt, long lovely leg stretched out as if daring me to be mad at her. “I don’t know—Nate, you and I met at Sherry’s, after all. You hang around with those kind of people. What’s the difference?”

“The difference is, suppose he’s a jealous type. Niccoli isn’t your average ex-beau—he’s a goddamn thug. Is it true he smacked you around?”

She was putting on her other nylon, fastening it, smoothing it; this kind of thing could get boring in an hour or two. “That’s why I walked out on him. I warned him and he said he wouldn’t do it again, and then a week later, he did it again.”

“Has he bothered you? Confronted you in public? Called you on the phone?”

“No. It’s over. He knows it, and I know it…now you know it. Okay, Nate? Do I ask you questions about your ex-wife?”

Didi didn’t know my wife wasn’t officially my ex, yet; nor that I was still hoping to rekindle those flames. She thought I was a great guy, unaware that I was a heel who would never marry another actress, but would gladly sleep with one.

“Let’s drop it,” I said.

“What a wonderful idea.” She stood, easing her slip down over her nyloned legs, and was shimmying into her casual light-blue dress when the doorbell rang. Staying in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills, incidentally, was the only time I can recall a hotel room having a doorbell.

“I’m not expecting company,” I told her, “but stay in here, would you? And keep mum?”

“I need ut my make-up on—”

The bell rang again—pretty damn insistent.

I got my nine millimeter out of the suitcase, stuffed it in my waistband, slipped on my sportjacket and covered it. “Just sit down—there’s some magazines by the bed. We don’t need to advertise.”

She saw the common sense of that, and nodded. No alarm had registered in her eyes at the sight of the weapon; but then she’d been Niccoli’s girl, hadn’t she?

I shut her in there and went to answer the door.

I’d barely cracked the thing open when the two guys came barging in, the first one in brushing past me, the second slamming the door.

I hadn’t even had a chance to say, “Hey!” when the badge in the wallet was thrust in my face.

“Lieutenant Delbert Potts,” he said, putting the wallet away. He was right on top of me and his breath was terrible: it smelled like anchovies taste. “L.A. vice squad. This is my partner, Sergeant Rudy Johnson.”

Potts was a heavy-set character in an off-the-rack brown suit that looked slept in; hatless, he had greasy reddish-blond hair and his drink-reddened face had a rubbery softness. His eyes were bloodshot, his nose as misshapen as a blob of putty somebody had stuck there carelessly, his lips thick and plump and vaguely obscene.

Johnson was thin and dark—both his features and his physique—and his navy suit looked tailored. He wore a black snapbrim that had set him back a few bucks.

“Fancy digs, Mr. Heller,” Potts said, prowling the place, his thick-lipped smile conveying disgust. He had a slurry voice—he reminded me of a loathsome Arthur Godfrey, if that wasn’t redundant.

“I do some work for the hotel,” I said. “They treat me right when I’m out here.”

“You goin’ back to Chicago soon?” Johnson asked, right next to me. He had a reedy voice and his eyes seemed sleepy unless you noticed the sharpness under the half-lids.

“Not right away.”

I’d never met this pair, yet they knew my name and knew I was from Chicago. And they hadn’t taken me up on my offer to sit down.

“You might re-consider,” Potts said. He was over at the wet bar, checking out the brands.

“Help yourself,” I said.

“We’re on duty,” Johnson said.

“Fellas—what’s this about?”

Potts wandered back over to me and thumped me on the chest with a thick finger. “You stopped by Mickey Cohen’s today.”

“That’s right. He wanted me to do a job for him—I turned him down.”

The bloodshot eyes tightened. “You turned him down? Are you sure?”

“I have a real good memory, Lieutenant. I remember damn near everything that happened to me, all day.”

“Funny#8221; That awful breath was warm in my face—fishy smell. “You wouldn’t kid a kidder, would you?”

Backing away, I said, “Fellas—make your point.”

Potts kept moving in on me, his breath in my face, like a foul furnace, his finger thumping at my chest. “You and your partner…Rubinski…you shouldn’t be so thick with that little kike.”

“Which little kike?”

Johnson said, “Mickey Cohen.”

I looked from one to the other. “I already told you guys—I turned him down. I’m not working for him.”

Potts asked, “What job did he want you for?”

“That’s confidential.”

He swung his fist into my belly—I did not see it coming, nor did I expect a slob like him to have such power. I dropped to my knees and thought about puking on the oriental carpet—I also thought about the gun in my waistband.

Slowly, I got to my feet. And when I did, the nine millimeter was in my hand.

“Get the fuck out of my room,” I said.

Both men backed away, alarm widening their seen-it-all eyes. Potts blurted, “You can be arrested for—”

“This is licensed, and you clowns barged into my room and committed assault on me.”

Potts had his hands up; he seemed nervous but he might have been faking, while he looked for an opening. “I shouldn’ta swung on ya. I apologize—now, put the piece away.”

“No.” I motioned toward the door with the Browning. “You’re about to go, gents…but first—here’s everything you need to know: I’m not working for Cohen, and neither is Fred.”

The two exchanged glances, Johnson shaking his head.

“Why don’t you put that away,” Pott said, with a want-some-candy-little-girl smile, “and we’ll just talk.”

“We have talked. Leave.”

I pressed forward and the two backed up—toward the door.

“You better be tellin’ the truth,” Potts said, anger swimming in his rheumy eyes.

I opened the door for them. “What the hell have you been eating, Potts? Your breath smells like hell.”

The cop’s blotchy face reddened, but his partner let out a sharp, single laugh. “Sardine sandwiches—it’s all he eats on stakeouts.”

That tiny moment of humanity between Johnson and me ended the interview; then they were out the door, and I shut and nightlatched it. I watched them through the window as they moved through the hotel’s garden-like grounds, Potts taking the lead, clearly pissed-off, the flowering shrubs around him doing nothing to soothe him.

In the bedroom, Didi was stretched out on the bed, on her back, head to one side, fast asleep.

I sat nex gentsher, on the edge of the bed, and this woke her with a start. “What? Oh…I must’ve dropped off. What was that about, anyway?”

“The Welcome Wagon,” I said. “Come on, let’s get an early supper.”

And I took her to the Polo Lounge, where she chattered on and on about the picture she was working (with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans) and I said not much. I was thinking about those two bent cops, and how I’d pulled a gun on them.

No retaliation followed my encounter with the two vice squad boys. They had made their point, and I mine. But I did take some precautionary measures: for two days I tailed the bastards, and (with my Speed Graphic, the divorce dick’s best friend) got two rolls of film on them receiving pay-offs, frequently in the parking lot of their favorite coffee shop, Googie’s, on Sunset at Crescent Heights. I had no intention of using these for blackmail purposes—I just wanted some ammunition, other than the nine millimeter variety, with which to deal with these bent sons of bitches. On the other hand, I had taken to wearing my shoulder-holstered nine millimeter, in case things got interesting.

And for over a week, things weren’t interesting—things were nicely dull. I had run into Cohen at Sherry’s several times and he was friendly—and always in the company of a rugged-looking, ruggedly handsome investigator from the Attorney General’s office, sandy-haired Harry Cooper…which rhymed with Gary Cooper, who the dick was just as tall as.

Mick had taken my advice—he now had an armed bodyguard, courtesy of the state of California. His retinue of a Dwarf or two also accompanied him, of course, just minus any artillery. Once or twice, Niccoli had been with him—he’d just smiled and nodded at me (and Didi), polite, no hard feelings.

On Tuesday night, July 19, I took Didi to see Annie Get Your Gun at the Greek Theater; Gertrude Niesen had just opened in the show, and she and it were terrific. Then we had a late supper at Ciro’s, and hit a few jazz clubs. We wound up, as we inevitably did, at Sherry’s for pastries and coffee.

Fred greeted us as we came in and joined us in a booth, Didi—who looked stunning in a low-cut spangly silver gown, her brunette hair piled high—and I were on one side, Fred on the other. A piano tinkling Cole Porter fought with clanking plates and after-theater chatter.

I ordered us up a half-slice of cheesecake for Didi (who was watching her figure—she wasn’t alone), a Napoleon for me, and coffee for both of us. Fred just sat there with his hands folded, prayerfully, shaking his head.

“Gettin’ too old for this,” he said, his pouchy puss even pouchier than usual, a condition his natty navy suit and red silk tie couldn’t make up for.

“What are you doing, playing host in the middle of the night?” I asked him. “You’re an owner, for Christ’s sake! Seems like lately, every time I come in here, in the wee hours, you’re hovering around like a mother hen.”

“You’re not wrong, Nate. Mickey’s been comin’ in almost every night, and with that contract hanging over his head, I feel like…for the protection of my customers…I gotta keep an eye on things.”

“Is he here tonight?”

“Didn’t you see him, holding court over there?”

Over in the far corner of the modern, brightly-lighted restaurant—where business was actually a little slow tonight—a lively Cohen was indeed seated at a large round table with Cooper, Johnny Stompanato, Frank Niccoli and another of the Dwarfs, Neddie Herbert. Also with the little gangster were several reporters from the Times, and Florabel Muir and her husband, Denny. Florabel, a moderately attractive redhead in her late forties, was a Hollywood columnist for the New York Daily News.

Our order arrived, and Fred slid out of the booth, saying, “I better circulate.”

“Fred, what, you think somebody’s gonna open up with a chopper in here? This isn’t a New Jersey clam house.”

“I know…. I’m just a nervous old woman.”

Fred wandered off, and Didi and I nibbled at our desserts; we were dragging a little—it was after three.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“What?”

“You seem a little edgy.”

“Really? Why would I be?”

“Having Niccoli sitting over there.”

“No. That’s over.”

“What did you see in that guy, anyway?”

She shrugged. “He was nice, at first. I heard he had friends in pictures.”

“You’re already under contract. What do you need—”

“Nate, are we going to argue?”

I smiled, shook my head. “No. It’s just…guys like Niccoli make me nervous.”

“But he’s been very nice to both of us.”

“That’s what makes me nervous.” Our mistake was using the restrooms: they were in back, and to use them, we’d had to pass near Cohen and his table. That’s how we got invited to join the party—the two Times reporters had taken off, and chairs were available.

I sat next to Florabel, with Niccoli right next to me; and Didi was beside Cooper, the state investigator, who sneaked occasional looks down Didi’s cleavage. Couldn’t blame him and, anyway, detectives are always gathering information.

Florabel had also seen Annie Get Your Gun, and Cohen had caught a preview last week.

“That’s the best musical to hit L.A. in years,” the little gangster said. He was in a snappy gray suit with a blue and gray tie.

For maybe five minutes, the man who controlled bookie operations in Los Angeles extolled the virtues of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s latest confection, aided and abetted by Irving Berlin.

“Can I quote you in my column?” Florabel asked. She was wearing a cream-color suit with satin lapels, a classy d with a hard edge.

“Sure! That musical gets the Mickey Cohen seal of approval.”

Everyone laughed, as if it had been witty—me, too. I like my gangsters to be in a good mood.

“Mickey,” the columnist said, sitting forward, “who do you think’s been trying to kill you?”

“I really haven’t the slightest idea. I’m as innocent as the driven snow.”

“Yeah, but like Mae West said, you drifted.”

He grinned at her—tiny rodent teeth. “Florabel, I love ya like a sister, I can talk to you about things I can’t even tell my own wife.”

Who was not present, by the way.

“You’re in a neutral corner,” he was saying, “like a referee. There’s nothin’ I can do for you, except help you sell papers, and you ain’t got no axes to grind with me.”

“That’s true—so why not tell me what you really think? Is Jack Dragna behind these attempts?”

“Even for you, Florabel, that’s one subject on which I ain’t gonna spout off. If I knew the killers were in the next room, I wouldn’t go public with it.”

“Why not?”

“People like me, we settle things in our own way.”

She gestured. “How can you sit in an open restaurant, Mick, with people planning to kill you?”

“Nobody’s gonna do nothin’ as long as you people are around. Even a crazy man wouldn’t take a chance shooting where a reporter might get hit…or a cop, like Cooper here.”

I was just trying to stay out of it, on the sidelines, but this line of reasoning I couldn’t let slide.

“Mickey,” I said, “you really think a shooter’s going to ask to see Florabel’s press pass?” Cohen thought that was funny, and almost everybody laughed—except me and Cooper.

Several at the table were nibbling on pastries; Didi and I had some more coffee. At one point, Niccoli got up to use the men’s room, and Didi and I exchanged whispered remarks about how cordial he’d been to both of us. Florabel, still looking for a story, started questioning the slender, affable Neddie Herbert, who had survived a recent attempt on his life.

Herbert, who went back twenty years with Cohen, had dark curly hair, a pleasant-looking grown-up Dead-End Kid with a Brooklyn accent. He had been waylaid in the wee hours on the sidewalk in front of his apartment house.

“Two guys with .38s emptied their guns at me from the bushes.” Herbert was grinning like a college kid recalling a frat-house prank. “Twelves slugs, the cops recovered—not one hit me!”

“How is that possible?” Florabel asked.

“Ah, I got a instinct for danger—I didn’t even see them two guys, but I sensed ’em right before I heard ’em, and I dropped to the sidewalk right before they started shooting. I crawled onto the stairway, outa range, while their bullets were fallin’ all around.”

“Punks,” Cohen said.

“If they’da had any guts,” Herbert said, “they’da reloaded and moved in close, to get me—but they weaseled and ran.”

Fred came over to the table, and—after some small talk—said, “It’s almost four, folks—near closing time. Mind if I have one of the parking lot attendants fetch your car, Mick?”

“That’d be swell, Fred.”

I said, “Fetch mine, too, would you, Fred?”

And as Rubinski headed off to do that, Cohen grabbed the check, fending off a few feeble protests, and everybody gathered their things. This seemed like a good time for Didi and me to make our exit, as well.

Sherry’s was built up on a slope, so there were a couple steps down from the cashier’s counter to an entryway that opened right out to the street. Cohen strutted down and out, through the glass doors, with Neddie Herbert and the six-three Cooper right behind him. Niccoli and Stompanato were lingering inside, buying chewing gum and cigarettes. Florabel and her husband were lagging, as well, talking to some woman who I gathered was the Mocambo’s press agent.

Then Didi and I were standing on the sidewalk just behind Cohen and his bodyguards, under the Sherry’s canopy, out in the fresh, crisp night air…actually, early morning air. The normally busy Strip was all but deserted, only the occasional car gliding by. Just down a ways, the flashing yellow lights of sawhorses marking road construction blinked lazily.

“I love this time of night,” Didi said, hugging my arm, as we waited behind Cohen and his retinue for the attendants to bring our cars. “So quiet…so still….”

And it was a beautiful night, bright with starlight and neon, palm trees peeking over a low-slung mission-style building across the way, silhouetted against the sky like a decorative wallpaper pattern. Directly across from us, however, a vacant lot with a Blatz beer billboard and a smaller FOR INFORMATION CONCERNING THIS PROPERTY PLEASE CALL sign did spoil the mood, slightly.

Didi—her shoulders and back bare, her silvery gown shimmering with reflected light—was fussing in her little silver purse. “Damn—I’m out of cigarettes.”

“I’ll go back and get you some,” I said.

“Oh, I guess I can wait…”

“Don’t be silly. What is it you smoke?”

“Chesterfields.”

I went back in and up the three or four steps and bought the smokes. Florabel was bending over, picking up all the just-delivered morning editions, stacked near the cashier; her husband was still yakking with that dame from the Mocambo. Stompanato was flirting with a pretty waitress; Niccoli was nowhere in sight.

I headed down the short flight of steps and was coming out the glass doors just as Cohen’s blue Caddy drew up, and the young string-tied attendant got out, and the night split open.

It wasn’t thunder, at least noGod’s variety: this was a twelve-gauge boom accompanied by the cracks of a high-power rifle blasting, a deadly duet echoing across the pavement, shotgun bellow punctuated by the sharp snaps of what might have been an M-1, the sound of which took me back to Guadalcanal. As the fusillade kicked in, I reacted first and best, diving for the sidewalk, yanking at Didi’s arm as I pitched past, pulling her down, the glass doors behind me shattering in a discordant song. My sportcoat was buttoned, and it took a couple seconds to get at the nine millimeter under my shoulder, and during those slow-motion moments I saw Mickey get clipped, probably by the rifle.

Cohen dropped to one knee, clawing at his right shoulder with his left hand, blood oozing through his fingers, streaming down his expensive suit. Neddie Herbert’s back had been to the street—he was turned toward his boss when the salvo began—and a bullet, courtesy of the rifle, blew through him, even as shotgun pellets riddled his legs. Herbert—the man who’d just been bragging about his instincts for danger—toppled to the sidewalk, screaming.

The Attorney General’s dick, Cooper, had his gun out from under his shoulder when he caught a belly-full of buckshot and tumbled to the cement, yelling, “Shit! Fuck!” Mickey Cohen, on his knees, was saying, I swear to God, “This is a new goddamn suit!”

The rifle snapping over the shotgun blasts continued, as I stayed low and checked Didi who was shaking in fear, a crumpled moaning wreck; her bare back was red-pocked from two pellets, which seemed not to have entered her body, probably bouncing off the pavement and nicking her—but she was scared shitless.

Still, I could tell she was okay, and—staying low, using the Caddy as my shield—I fired the nine millimeter toward that vacant lot, where orange muzzle flash emanated from below that Blatz billboard. The safety glass of the Caddy’s windows spiderwebbed and then burst into tiny particles as the shotgunning continued, and I ducked down, noting that the rifle fire had ceased. Had I nailed one of them?