The Million-Dollar Wound

“That’s as it should be,” I said.

“So we had the partitions taken out next door,” he went on, “and put your desk in there, as well as some of the personal items you’d put in storage. Some furniture from your old suite at the Morrison. You remember that old Murphy bed of yours that’s been stored in the basement, for years?”

I sat down on the couch, put a hand on the sea bag. “Don’t tell me.”

“We had it hauled back upstairs. It’s in there. You can have that whole office to yourself, and live in it, too, temporarily, till you find something else.”

“Full circle,” I said.

“What?” Gladys said.

“Nothing,” I said.

Lou said to her, “He lived in his office when he started out. That office.”

“Oh,” Gladys said, not getting it. Irony wasn’t her strong suit.

I stood. “I appreciate you going to that trouble.”

“If you like,” Lou said, gesturing with two open hands, “I’ll use that office, and you can use the one in here, and just sleep in there. I just figured, with clients used to dealing with me, it wouldn’t hurt to have a transition period, where…”

“Don’t say another word. You stay put, Lou. It’s going to take me a while to get into the swing of things again. For the next few weeks, at least, consider yourself the boss.”

“Am I wrong in assuming you’ll be wanting to get right back to work?”

“No. Anyway, I don’t think you are.”

“Mr. Heller,” Gladys said, her brow knit. I didn’t bother correcting her; “Nate” was just not in her vocabulary. “You do look a little peaked, if you’ll excuse me saying.”

“Gladys,” Lou said, harshly.

“It’s okay, Lou,” I said. “She’s right. I look like hell. But I just spent sixteen hours or so sitting on a train, with no place to sleep, and…” The train had been filthy, crowded; I was lucky to find room to stow my sea bag and plant my butt. The saddest thing had been the pregnant women, of whom there had seemed to be a batallion, and gals with small children in tow, trying to diaper ’em, feed ’em, in the most cramped god-awful conditions, all of these young mothers present and future on their way to see their overseas-bound husbands one last time, or coming back from having seen ’em off.

Lou and Gladys were both staring at me, pity in their eyes, as I’d trailed off in mid-sentence and got lost in thought, thinking about the train ride. That was going to happen; me going in and out of focus like that.

“You might as well get your minds set,” I said. “I’m going to be out of step for a while. Not long ago I was on a tropical island getting shot at. The comparative peace and quiet of Chicago is going to take some getting used to.”

Lou stepped in my, or his, office and got into his overcoat. “Binyon’s okay?” he said.

“Binyon’s is fine,” I said.

As we were leaving, Gladys called out, “Should I tell people you’re in, if they call?”

I stopped, the door open; Lou was already out in the hall. The abortionist was still in business.

“Why should they even know I’m back?” I said.

“Your friend Hal Davis on the News did a story about you. Or rather it was about your friend Mr. Ross, with you in it. How you’re a couple of heroes who are coming back to Chicago.”

“That cocksucker!”

“Mr. Heller!”

“Gladys, I’m sorry. Forgive that. I’ve got a bad case of serviceman’s mouth, and I’ll try to get over it quick.”

“Yes, Mr. Heller.”

“Good girl.”

“Mr. Heller-did, uh, did you see Frankie over there?”

“Uh, no, Gladys. Sorry. It’s a big war. Why, is he in the Pacific?’

“He’s on Guadalcanal, too, didn’t you know?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t. He must’ve been one of the Army boys who came in to spell us. Is he with the Americal Division?”

“Why, yes,” she said. The concern on her face was easy enough to read. Specifically, she was looking at gray, skinny, hollow-eyed me and had to wonder about how her husband was faring. She was Mrs. Fortunato now, you see; they’d gotten hitched just before he joined up.

“Will he be all right, Mr. Heller?”

I knew enough not to assure her of that, but I could in good conscience say, “The Island’s a mop-up operation, now, honey. He should be fine. Barney and me did the hard work; all he’s got to do is clean up after us.”

She liked hearing that; she even smiled. For a girl with no sense of humor, she had a great fucking smile. Nice tits, too. It made me feel good to know I could still appreciate the finer things.

Like Binyon’s. My appetite at St. E’s had been lousy, but the corned beef platter (albeit a smaller serving now) in the familiar male-dominated restaurant with its wooden booths and spare decor reminded me of the simple pleasure of good food. In fact, I attacked the plate like a Jap whose bayonet I’d taken away and was using on him. I think I embarrassed Lou. He didn’t say a word through the meal.

I wiped my face off with a cloth napkin. A cloth napkin; ain’t civilization something. I said, “I didn’t eat on the train ride. No dining car, and if you got off when they made a stop you could lose your seat.”

“No explanation necessary, Nate. This is Lou, remember? We go way back.”

Somebody laughed; me, apparently. “I guess two guys who got falling down drunk together as often as we did, in the old days, ought to cut each other some slack.”

“That’s how I see it.”

“I’m goddamn sorry about your brother.” I couldn’t keep my eyes off his armband.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“But it isn’t,” I said.

“No it isn’t, but it’s not something I can talk about. I thank God you made it back. I was afraid I might never see you again, you dumb son of a bitch. You were too old to go in the service, what were you thinking of?”

“Ya talked me out of it,” I said. “I’m not going in.”

The waiter brought us each a second beer.

Lou shrugged, smiled. “I understand the impulse. I’m older than you and I thought about it, too.”

“When your brother enlisted,” I said, beer at the ready, “you went down the next day and took the physical. If you hadn’t flunked, you’d be in right now.”

Wide-eyed, smiling, he said, “How do you know that?”

“I’m a detective.” I took a sip of beer. “Anyway, I used to be. How much play did Davis give me in the News?”

“‘Barney Ross’s Private Eye Pal.’ Pretty corny. All the Cermak and Dillinger and Nitti stuff, dredged up. The Pegler bit, too. But just one story. Yesterday.”

“Fuck. Did I understand Gladys to say Barney’s coming back to town?”

“I believe so. His malaria flared up, and he was off Guadalcanal before New Year’s; he’s been in the States for-”

“I know,” I said. “They let us read the papers in the bughouse. It’s just sharp objects they kept from us.”

“No offense meant, Nate…”

“Me neither. Anyway, I know about Barney. I talked to him on the phone once, even. Did you know Roosevelt pinned the medals on him, personal?”

“We get the papers here, too,” Lou said, smiling faintly.

“But he didn’t say anything about coming back to Chicago, on this extended furlough they’re promising him. He said he was going out to Hollywood, to be with his girlfriend. Wife, I mean.”

“Well,” Lou said, “he’s changed his mind, apparently. My guess is he’s needed to pump some business into his cocktail lounge. His brother Ben just isn’t the manager that Barney was.”

“Shit-Barney was a terrible manager, Lou. But he was a draw. A celebrity.”

Lou shrugged facially. “Now that he’s a war hero, they’ll flock there to see him.”

For some reason I didn’t like to hear that. I didn’t know why, exactly, but I could feel anger behind my eyes.

Lou said, “Do you want to hear about our business, or not?”

“Sure. How have I been doing?”

“You’re not getting rich, but you’re no pauper. Business is off slightly-divorce work is way down-but there’s still too much for one op to handle. If Frankie were here, one of us might be feather-beddin’, but there’s plenty here for the two of us.”

Why didn’t I care? I tried to look interested and said, “Such as?”

“Half a dozen suburban banks are using us for investigating loan applicants and credit; also some personnel investigation, and inspection of property and businesses. We got plenty of retail credit-risk checks to do, and four lawyers are now using us to serve their papers…”

I couldn’t listen. I tried. I swear I tried. But after while I was just looking at his face and his mouth was moving but I couldn’t make myself listen.

This is your business, a voice in my head was saying, this is what you worked so hard to build, once upon a time, so jump back in, jump back in, but I didn’t give a shit.

“Nate?” he said. His change of expression, to concern, made me tune his words in. “Are you all right? You seemed…distant, all of a sudden.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” I sighed. Sipped the beer. “You just drop a stack of work on my desk and I’ll get to it. I promise you.”

“You’re the boss,” he said.

“In name only. You got to run the show till I get back on the ball. I had amnesia, did you know that?”

“No,” he said. Trying not to show his surprise. “We were told…battle fatigue. Shell shock…”

“I blocked it all out,” I said. “Forgot everything I could. My name. Who I am. Who I was. I don’t know if I can remember how to be a detective, to be quite honest with you.”

He smiled a little, swirled his beer in its glass. “Nate Heller with amnesia is still twice the detective of any other man I can think of.”

“That’s horseshit, Lou, but I do appreciate it.”

He looked in the beer, not at me, as he said, “I took the liberty of setting up an appointment for you this afternoon.”

“Really? I don’t think I’m in any mood to see a client just yet, Lou-”

“It’s not a client, and this is something you might just as well deal with right away, ’cause they’re not going to let loose of you till you do. They been calling for weeks, trying to set something up.”

“Oh. The federal prosecutor. That grand jury thing.”

“Yeah. Treasury and Justice Department investigators been swarming around town for weeks. Months. They’re really trying to put the screws to the Outfit. For whatever good it’ll do ’em. The prosecutor’s name is Correa, by the way.”

“Don’t know him.”

“He’s out of New York. That’s where the grand jury will eventually meet. But much of the investigation’s going on here. Most of their witnesses, and those they indict, will be from here, so Correa keeps a local office. And there’s an Illinois-based grand jury in the works, as well. Same subject-the Syndicate infiltrating the unions.”

“Aw shit.”

“They want to talk to you, bad.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“There’ll be somebody to talk to you, informally, at the office at two this afternoon. If you don’t want to face it, duck out. Me, I’d suggest you get it out of the way. You won’t get any rest till you do.”

“Shit.”

“Correa won’t be there; he’s in New York at the moment. But a couple of old friends of yours will be.”

“Such as?”

“Such as your favorite cop, for instance.”

“Stege?”

“Stege?” Lou shook his head, grinned. “You’re behind the times, Nate. Stege retired months ago, while you were overseas.”

I felt a strange pang; a sense of loss. Funny.

“I’m talking about our buddy from pickpocket-detail days,” Lou said. “Bill Drury.”

Drury. That lovable hard-ass.

“I should’ve guessed,” I said. “He always has had a hard-on against the Outfit. He would get involved in something like this. You said two old friends.”

“What?”

“You said two old friends were going to meet with me about this grand jury deal. Drury, and who else?”

He smiled on one side of his face. “If you were Uncle Sam, and you wanted to convince Nathan Heller to testify, who would you send?”

“Oh, no,” I said.

Lou toasted me with his beer.

“That’s right,” he said. Drank some beer. “Mr. Untouchable himself.”

Eliot Ness.

Eliot was fifteen minutes early.

He walked into the big single-room office-into which he’d walked so often, years before-and the sight of the Murphy bed against the wall, in its long-ago position, and me sitting behind my big old scarred oak desk in my long-ago position, made him smile.

“Isn’t that a Murphy bed?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s a housing shortage. It’s been in all the papers.”

I got up from around the desk and I thought I could make out a slight tightening around his eyes as he got his first good look at me, skinny, gray, sunken-eyed me. I put the sore into sight for sore eyes.

He, on the other hand, looked much the same; a slight salt-and-peppering around the ears was the only noticeable difference. All else was familiar: a comma of dark brown hair falling down on his rather high forehead, a ruddy, handsome six-footer who was pushing forty and didn’t look it, partly due to the trail of freckles across his nose that kept him looking boyish in the face of time.

We shook hands, exchanging grins. His topcoat was over his arm, hat in hand; his gray suit with vest and dark tie was nicely tailored, giving him an executive look. I took the coat and hung it on the tree by the door.

“You look good, Nate.”

“You’re a liar, Eliot.”

“Well, you look good to me. You crazy SOB, what’s a grown man doing fighting a young man’s war?”

SOB was about as blue as Eliot’s language got.

“I’m not fighting it anymore,” I said, and got back behind the desk, gesturing to one of the two waiting chairs I’d placed opposite me in anticipation of my visitors. “What are you doing in Chicago, anyway? Who’s minding the store?”

“If you mean Cleveland,” Eliot said, crossing his legs, resting an ankle on a knee, “I resigned.”

That was a shock; the public safety director slot-which was essentially like being commissioner of both the police and fire departments-was perfect for Eliot. He’d had a lot of glory, a good salary, and accomplished plenty. I thought he’d die in that job, an old bearded public servant.

“First I heard of it,” I said.

“It was while you were away.”

“I knew you’d had that trouble…”

In March of ’42 Eliot had been involved in an auto accident that had found him, wrongly, briefly, accused of a hit-and-run; as a public safety man known for taking a tough stand on traffic violators, Eliot caught a lot of public heat.

“The press never left me alone after that,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact but his expression just barely revealing a buried hurt.

“Fuck ’em! You’ve been their fair-haired boy for years. You were cleared, weren’t you? Goddamn newspapers. Why couldn’t the bastards give you a fair shake…?”

He shrugged. “I think it was the fact that Evie and I had both been drinking. We weren’t drunk, Nate, I swear-but we had been drinking, and, well, you know my reputation as the big-shot prohibition agent. It made me look like a hypocrite.”

“How are you and Evie?”

Evie was his wife; his second wife.

“Not so good,” he admitted. “A little rocky. I’m traveling a lot.”

I was sorry to hear that, and said so. He just shrugged again.

Then I said, “What are you doing these days? Since you’re here to quiz me for the grand jury, I assume you’re back in the law enforcement business. So what is it? Treasury or Justice or what?”

“Nothing so glamorous,” he said, with a chagrined grin.

“Come on. Spill.”

“Actually,” he said, sitting up straight, summoning his self-respect, “it’s a pretty important job. I’m working for the Federal Security Agency. Specifically, the Office of Defense Health and Welfare.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Well,” he said, shrugging, “I’m the Chief Administrator of their Division of Social Protection.”

“What’s that mean?”

“We’re dealing with social problems of the sort that inevitably develop when there’s a rapid expansion of a work force in a community, or a large concentration of armed forces.”

“What are you talking about?”

He pursed his lips, mildly irritated, or was that embarrassment? “I’m talking about safeguarding the health and morale of the armed forces and of workers in defense industry. What do you think I’m talking about?”

“I think you’re talking about VD.”

He sighed; laughed. “I am talking about VD.”

“I think I saw some of your movies while I was in the Corps.”

That did embarrass him, and he waved it off. “That’s only a small part of it, Nate. I’m supervising the activities of twelve regional offices, and what we’re primarily doing is trying to help the local law enforcement people cut back on prostitution, especially in areas close to military and Naval bases, or industrial areas. And in cities where military and Naval personnel are likely to go on leave. That’s why they brought an old copper like me in to be in charge.”

“I see.”

“You can sit there and grin if you like. But VD’s a big problem; in the first war, soldiers suffered more cases of venereal disease than wounds in battle.”

“I think you’re right. What we need in this world is more killing and less fucking.”

He smiled wearily. “Only you would look at it that way, Nate. I look at it as important work.”

“You don’t have to sell me, Eliot. I know enough to wear my rubbers when it rains.”

“You haven’t changed much.”

“Neither have you. You’re still with the goddamn Untouchables.’’

He laughed and so did I. It was a nice moment. But then the moment was gone, and silence filled the room, somewhat awkwardly. An El rumbled by and eased the tension.

“You know why I’m here,” he said, tentatively.

“Yup. I don’t know why they sent the top VD G-man to do a grand jury prosecutor’s job, though.”

“I am still a G-man, and that’s why I’m in town, doing a joint workshop with the FBI over at the Banker’s Building. We got cops from all over the city and the suburbs coming in.”

I bet I knew the conference room they were using-the one next to the old FBI HQ, that big room whose windows faced the Rookery across the way, windows from which agents like Melvin Purvis and Sam Cowley hung suspects out by their ankles till they talked. At least one suspect had been dropped. It made a splash in the papers. And on the cement.

Now Eliot Ness was using it to teach cops about whores. Wasn’t law enforcement a wonderful thing?

“Let me guess,” I said. “The steel mill district on the east side must be hooker heaven about now.”

He nodded. “The Pullman plant, just west of there, is another key area.”

They were Pullman Aircraft, for the duration. Electromotive was near there, too; even before I joined up, it was rumored they were making tanks.

He got up and got himself a Dixie cup of water from the cooler over by the bathroom. “The cops in these industrial districts never had a prostitution problem the like of this before; it’s an epidemic. We’re helping ’em out.”

“You and the FBI.”

“Yeah.” Sitting back down, sipping his water.

“So if they ask you to help them out, by talking to a contrary cuss name of Heller, you say, why sure.”

“Do you resent that, Nate?”

I shook my head. “I could never resent you, Eliot. Not much, anyway. But it’s been ten years now that you’ve been trying to turn me into a good citizen. Won’t you ever give up?”

“What are you talking about? I’ve heard you tell the truth on the witness stand before. With my own ears. Saw it with my own eyes.”

“Who else’s were you planning on using?”

“Well, you did do it. You told the truth.”

“Once. That doesn’t make me a saint.”

“Nate, you’re not on Nitti’s side. You never were.”

“That’s right. I’m on my own side.”

“Which is whichever side is safest, you mean.”

“Or the most profitable.”

He crumpled the paper cup in a fist and gestured with it. “The Outfit is strangling every union in this town. Can you honestly think about your father, and what he gave to unionism, and sit back and let that happen?”

I pointed at him, gently. “Eliot, you’re my friend, but when you bring up my old man, you’re pushing it. And when you suggest that I could in any way single-handedly clean up union corruption that goes back years, decades, you’re screwier than the guys I was bunking with back at the bughouse.”

He tossed the crumpled cup at the wastebasket by my desk; it went in. “The investigation is centering on the IA movie extortion racket, you know.”

“So?”

“So you were involved in Pegler’s initial investigation of the racket.”

“Something you dragged me into, by the way, giving my name to your federal pals. I never thanked you for that, did I?”

“I guess you didn’t.”

“That’s because at the time I felt like kicking you in the slats.”

He ignored that, pressed on: “You know plenty about that racket, Nate. You had contact with most of the principals.”

“I don’t know anything firsthand. All I did was talk to some people.”

“One of whom was Frank Nitti.”

Shit.

I said, “Nobody knows that for sure.”

“Federal agents have a record of you going to see him several times, over a seven-year period, including in November 1939. At the Bismarck Hotel?”

“Christ.”

“The Grand Jury is going to want to know what was said in those meetings. Going way back, Nate. Back to Cermak.”

I sat up and gave my friend as nasty a grin as I’d ever given him. “What about back to Dillinger? How would the FBI like to have what I know about the Dillinger hit go public? How at best the feds aided and abetted crooked Indiana cops in a police execution, and at worst shot the wrong man? If what I knew came out, Hoover would shit his fucking pants.”

He shrugged elaborately. “That would be fine with me. Hoover’s overrated anyway. All I care about is the truth.”

“Oh, Eliot, please. You’re not naive. Don’t pretend to be.”

“Your testimony could be very valuable. You are the only non-mob-tainted party known to have had frequent private meetings with Nitti. Your testimony would have credence well beyond that of Bioff and Browne and Dean.”

“So the Three Stooges are talking, huh?”

He nodded. “They didn’t talk at their first trial, but when those stiff sentences came down, and they found out how much different prison life was than the El Mocambo, they started fishing for a deal.”

“It was the Trocadero where they hung out in Hollywood, Eliot, but never mind. I still don’t want to play.”

There was a knock at the door and I said, “It’s open.”

Bill Drury came in.

He wasn’t a big man, really-perhaps five-nine, a hundred and sixty pounds-but he was broad-shouldered and he had great energy, and a physical presence that could overwhelm you. He hung his camel-hair topcoat next to Eliot’s, and his fedora, too, revealing his typically dapper attire, a black-vested suit with gray pinstripes and a colorful blue-and-red-patterned tie and a fifty-cent shine. Bill was the best-dressed honest cop I ever met.

And one of the friendliest, unless you were part of the Outfit. He strode over to us with his ready smile, shaking my hand first, then Eliot’s. His dark thinning hair was combed across his scalp to give an impression of more but the effect was less. His dark, alert eyes crowded a jutting nose under which a firm jaw rested on the beginnings of a double chin.

“Heller,” he said, cheerfully, sitting down next to Eliot, “you truly look like death warmed over.”

“An honest man at last,” I said. “You look fat and sassy.”

“When your wife works,” he said with an expansive gesture of one hand, “why not?”

I had no argument with that.

“I presume Eliot has filled you in,” he said.

“Somewhat.”

“We were asked, because we’re old friends of yours, to pave the way for the federal prosecutor. They’d like you to be a witness.”

“Then I presume they’ll subpoena me.”

“They’d like you to be a friendly witness.”

“You know me, Lieutenant. Friendly as the day is long.”

“And the days are getting shorter, I know, I know. And it’s ‘Captain,’ now.”

“Really? How the world does change when you go off on a pleasure cruise.”

Eliot turned to Bill and said, “I get the feeling Nate feels we’re imposing upon his friendship.”

“If we are,’’ Bill said to me, flatly sincere, “I apologize. I think you know what sort of stranglehold the Outfit’s had on the unions, here, and we’re finally getting a chance to break it. Your inside knowledge could play a major role in that.”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“The IA’s extortion racket is going to blow the lid off. We’re talking about ending gangster control of not just the IA, but the laborer’s council, which includes twenty-five local unions, twenty-thousand members, street cleaners, tunnel workers, streetcar company employees, you name it. Then, beyond the laborer’s council, there’s the sanitary engineers union, the hotel employees, the bartenders, the truckers, the laundry workers, the retail clerks-”

“I get the point, Bill.”

“Then cooperate with the grand jury.”

“Let me ask you something. Both of you. You keep talking about the IA’s movie ‘extortion’ racket. What extortion is that? As I recall, it was collusion between the movie moguls and the mob. Since when is strike prevention insurance ‘extortion’?”

Drury finally bristled. “I don’t know what else you’d call it.”

I put my feet up on the desk and leaned back in my swivel chair. “I tell you what. I’ll come testify. I’ll come spill my guts about every secret meeting I ever had with Nitti. I’ll tell you and the grand jury things that’ll make the hair on your head curlier than the hair in your shorts. I’ll tell God and everybody things that’ll guarantee me ending up in an alley with a bullet in my brain. But first you got to assure me of one thing. You got to assure me that those movie moguls are going to be indicted right alongside Nitti and company.”

Eliot had given up; he was staring out the window. Drury sat up in the chair, straight as his principles. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “I only know this is our chance to put Nitti and Campagna and Ricca and that whole sorry crowd away.”

“And then the next crowd’ll step in, and will they be any better? What are we talking-Accardo? Giancana? That’ll be swell. Nitti, at least, has kept the bloodshed to a minimum.”

Drury shook his head. “How in God’s name can you find anything good to say about that evil son of a bitch?”

“Nitti’s no worse than the next guy in his slot, and possibly a damn sight better. I remember the Capone days, and so do you, Bill.”

“Nate, I’m disappointed in you.”

“I told you I’d testify. I’ll sing like Nelson Eddy sitting on hot coals. But I want to see Louie B. Mayer and Jack Warner and Joe Schenck sitting in cells next to Nitti and Campagna and Ricca.”

“Schenck did time.”

“On income tax, and not much.”

Eliot looked at me, glumly. “They can subpoena you anyway, Nate. You know that.”

“Haven’t you heard? I’m battle-fatigued. I’m shell-shocked. I got amnesia, remember? Just ask the medics.”

Eliot shook his head, looked at the floor.

Bill sat there, dumbfounded. “I don’t get you, Heller.”

“Bill, those Hollywood schmucks Bioff and Browne and Dean plucked were just trying to get off cheap where paying the help was concerned. And the rank and file knew they had gangsters in their union but figured all that muscle was getting ’em some extra bucks, and looked the other way accordingly. So I say screw ’em. Screw ’em all.”

Drury started to say something, but the phone rang. It was Gladys, next door; for Drury.

“I left my number,” he said, taking the phone. “Hope you don’t mind.”

I waved that off.

Drury was mostly listening, so I said to Eliot, quietly, “No hard feelings?”

He smiled wearily again. “None. I’m just glad you’re back from that hellhole in one piece. Why don’t I buy you dinner tonight?”

“Why don’t you?”

Drury barked, “Jesus Christ,” into the phone, and we looked at him. Then he said, “Right away,” and handed me the receiver, and stood.

“Why don’t you come with me, Heller,” he said, his face ashen. “There’s something you might be interested in.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. A good example of your theory how Nitti and company soft-peddle the bloodshed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Grab your coat and we’ll go over to Addison Street, in Lakeview. You might be interested in seeing what’s become of Estelle Carey.”

She was naked under her red silk housecoat, but she wasn’t much to look at. Not in the way she had been, once.

She lay on the plush carpet partially under a straight-back chair in the dining room of her third-floor five-room apartment at 512 West Addison in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of wall-to-wall apartment buildings near the lake on the North Side. She’d been living well. Dying had been something else again.

Her hair-she’d dyed it red since I saw her last-was a fright wig, clumps of it torn away from or possibly cut off at the scalp, scattered on the floor nearby, like a barbershop. The face was recognizably hers, despite the cuts and bruises and welts that added touches of purple and red and black to her white face, and despite too the jagged slash through her left eye and the ice-pick punctures on her cheeks and her bloodied broken nose and her smashed pulpy lips. Her throat had been cut, ear to ear, but superficially, a mark of torture, not murder. She had lived through most of this.

The red silk housecoat was scorched from the waist down, and so was she, till her legs were virtually charred. So were her hands and arms. Someone had set the housecoat afire-had splashed whiskey on it and set a match to it, it would seem-and she had put the fire out with her hands, or tried to. She’d been somewhat successful, because only the lower part of her was burned, and even the red silk housecoat could still be seen to be a red silk housecoat. But the fire had spread to the carpet, where it met the broken and apparently not empty whiskey bottle and got ambitious. The two nearby walls were black from floor to ceiling, dripping wet from the firemen’s hose, the lingering smoke smell still strong, acrid in the room. Not enough to wipe out the smell of death, however, the smell of scorched human flesh. Not enough to smother the memory of a certain foul wind, of dead, rotting flesh, Japs bloating in the sun in the kunai grass, charred grinning corpses by a wrecked tank along the Matanikau and then I was out in the hall, leaning against the wall, doubled over, trying not to puke, trying to keep that corned beef platter from Binyon’s down where it belonged.

Drury was right there beside me, a hand on my shoulder, looking ashamed of himself. I’d been in there standing looking at Estelle Carey, frozen by the burned sight of her, for I don’t know how long, while he got filled in by the detectives already on the scene. Now he was embarrassed, saying, “Damnit, Heller. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”

I was breathing too hard to speak.

He said, “I was trying to make a point. This came up, and bringing you along seemed like the perfect way to make a point.”

I said, “Don’t say ‘this came up’ to a guy who’s trying not to lose his lunch, okay, Bill?”

“Nate. I’m sorry. Shit. I feel like a heel.”

I let go of the wall; I seemed able to stand, without any help. “Well, you are a heel, Bill. But…who isn’t, from time to time?”

“Why don’t you go, Nate. Go on home. If you’re interested in how this sad affair plays out, I’ll keep you posted.”

I swallowed. Shook my head no. “I’ll stay.”

“I was a bastard to use that dead girl like this. I hope my apology’s enough. After what you been through overseas, I shoulda had sense enough not to…”

“Will you shut the fuck up? Let’s go back inside.”

Drury, having been one of my partners back on the pickpocket detail, knew very well that Estelle and I had been an item, once. So it was cruel of him to expose me to this. But then he hadn’t seen the condition of the corpse yet, when he made the decision; if he had, I doubt he’d have called me in.

He had an excuse though; I was the one who, officially, identified the body.

My lunch was staying down, but I was shaking. We moved through the vestibule into the living room and back into the dining room; it was cold, the windows open to air out the smoky place, letting in the winter chill. Eliot hadn’t joined us-he had business at the Banker’s Building; Drury had driven me over in an unmarked car. The firemen-who had been the first to the scene, the neighbor across the hall calling in to report smoke seeping out under the front door-had been and gone. The fire had been contained to the one room, only two walls of which were scorched. Present now were two patrol officers, Drury and two detectives; this was Drury’s bailiwick, as he was currently working out of nearby Town Hall Station. More police and related personnel would descend soon. Photographers, medical examiner, dicks from downtown. This was a good chance to get a look around before the professionals stumbled over themselves ruining evidence.

I walked into the next room, through a doorless archway, stepping around a shattered glass, which had apparently been hurled against one wall of the compact white modern kitchen. To my left was a small maple table with two maple chairs, one of them pulled away from the table, at an unnatural angle. Against the wall were cabinets and a sink and more cabinets; the cabinets to the far left were blood-smeared; there was blood spattered in the sink, too.

“The most recent thing cooked up in here,” I said, “was Estelle’s murder. Look at this.”

I pointed to the floor where a blood-stained bread knife, a blood-spattered rolling pin, a blood-tipped ice pick and a ten-inch blackjack lay, here and there, as if casually dropped when done. Nearby was a kitchen chair pulled away from a small table, on which was a flat iron, used to batter her, I figured, and a glass ashtray with a number of crushed butts therein; spatterings of blood were on the table, chair and floor underneath.

“This is where it started,” Drury said, hands on hips, appraising the chair. Still in his camel-hair coat. He really was too well-dressed to be a cop. Honest cop.

“Not quite,” I said. “Take a look.”

I stood and pointed to two cups on the kitchen counter. One of them was half-filled with hot cocoa; cold cocoa, now. In the bottom of the other cup was the dry cocoa powder, ready for hot milk to be poured in. The milk was still simmering on the stove, opposite.

“This is where it started,” I said.

“How do you figure?”

“She was fixing a cup of cocoa for one of her guests, her back turned as she faced the counter. She was already drinking a cup herself. They grabbed her, tossed her in that chair, started beating her.”

Drury pushed his hat back on his head; the dark eyes, set so close on either side of the formidable nose, narrowed. “That makes sense, I guess. But why do you assume more than one ‘guest’?”

“It’s two people. Probably a man and a woman.”

“How do you figure that?”

“The broken whiskey bottle out in the other room, a glass of which was poured in here and then hurled against that wall.” You could see the dried splash it had made.

“So?”

“So Estelle didn’t drink. I also don’t think it was her practice to keep a liquor cabinet for guests, though I could be wrong.”

“You aren’t wrong,” Drury granted. He said his detectives had already determined that.

“My guess,” I said, “is that bottle of whiskey was brought in, by one of her killers, in that paper bag there.”

A wadded-up paper bag was tossed in the corner.

Drury went to it, bent and picked it up, uncrumpled it, looked inside. “There’s a receipt in here. This is a neighborhood liquor store.”

“In the detective business we call that a clue, Captain.”

He only smiled at that; we’d been friends a long time. “Well, I’d tend to agree with you that the whiskey was probably brought in by a man. But just because Estelle was fixing a second cup of cocoa doesn’t mean the other party was necessarily a woman. Men have been known to drink cocoa, you know.”

“It’s a man and a woman. The man used the heavy male weapon-the blackjack-and the woman used makeshift female weapons, flat iron, kitchen utensils like a rolling pin, ice pick, bread knife.”

He thought about that, nodded slowly.

“Also,” I went on, pointing toward the ashtray, “Estelle didn’t smoke, either. Yet some of these butts-and there’s some heeled-out ones on the dining room floor, too-show lipstick. And some don’t. Man and a woman.”

Drury smiled in defeat, shrugged. “Man and a woman.”

I moved toward the archway, kneeling. “After while they dragged her into the dining room-by the hair, I’d say. There’s some strands right here. Red. Hers.”

He knelt down next to me. “You haven’t forgotten how to be a detective, have you?”

I didn’t tell him that the only way I could handle this charnel house was to revert into being a cop; that I was forcing myself, like a man trying to put toothpaste back into the tube, into once again looking at the world from a detached, strictly business perspective. To keep from thinking about scorched flesh, the smell of which was in my nostrils. To keep from remembering the soft pink flesh of a girl I’d loved once.

“They were friends of hers,” I said, standing.

Drury stood, too. “Friends? Not hardly!”

“Well-not in the long run, no. But the firemen had to kick down the front door, right? It was night-latched, correct?”

“Yes,” he said. “So we can presume she kept it latched, and only let in people she knew.”

“And felt secure enough, having let this lovely couple in, to latch it behind her.”

“So she knew them. I’ll give you that. Not necessarily friends, though.”

“Friends. They knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t have liquor in the place and brought their own. She invited them into her kitchen. She was making one of them cocoa. Friends.”

He smiled a little and shrugged. “Friends,” he agreed.

“This back door is locked, too,” I noted.

“Yeah. We got ourselves a regular locked-room mystery here.”

“No mystery,” I said, unlocking it, looking it over. “This is a spring lock. The killers went out the back way, the door locking behind them.”

Drury gave me a wry one-sided grin. “There’s nothing here I wouldn’t have figured out for myself, you know.”

“Sure,” I said, managing to grin back at him. “But I don’t mind taking a couple of minutes and saving you two or three hours of brain work.”

“You should be on the radio. Cantor could use the help. Want a look at the bedroom? Maybe you can save me from thinking in there, too.”

Like the rest of the apartment, the bedroom had been tossed; the mattress had been gutted with a knife, even its pink fluffy spread slit open. The white French provincial furnishings were scattered, occasionally broken.

“What were they looking for?” I said. “They obviously were torturing her, trying to make her talk. What was she hiding? What did she know?”

He shrugged. “I’m not so sure they were trying to make her talk at all. I think she was being made an example of.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Isn’t it obvious? It’s this grand jury thing, Nate. Nicky Dean was the last to squeal. Bioff went first, Browne cracked next but only recently has Dean loosened up. Only recently has he cooperated at all with Uncle Sam-now that a reduced sentence has been dangled in front of him.”

“And killing his girl is a warning from the Outfit for Nicky to clam back up?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Then why not just kill her? Why torture her like this?”

“This’ll have more impact, Nate. This’ll smack Nicky between his bushy eyebrows.”

“Yeah, right, only Nitti doesn’t work this way.”

“The old Nitti didn’t. But he’s been under a lot of pressure.”

“Since when?”

“Like the song says, since you went away. There was a big scandal about Nitti-owned linen services having contracts with the public schools. When the press got hold of that, he lost the contracts, which were lucrative, and then Mayor Kelly, to save face, let us crack down on Nitti’s bookie joints and nightclubs. Even the Colony Club got shuttered.”

“Where was Estelle working, then?”

He gestured to the sheared bed. “Right out of here, I’d say.”

“What do you base that on?”

“Sergeant Donahoe’s already given this room a cursory once-over, and he reports her affects indicate a call-girl operation.”

He walked me over to a dresser, on its side; one drawer had been taken out, its contents scattered, bundles of letters, mostly. I wondered if it had been done by the killers or the police. Drury poked around, found a little black address book, which he plucked from the rubble. He began thumbing through it. Smiling as he read.

“Well, well, well,” he said, running his finger down a page, then going on to the next page and running his finger down that one. “Some very familiar names. Of some very wealthy men-doctors, lawyers, here’s Wyman, the iron construction man. He was involved in a messy divorce not so long ago…”

“So she was a call girl, then.”

“Looks like.” He kept thumbing through it. “And get this-some of these other names…friends of hers from her twenty-six girl days. High-class hookers.”

“What, you figure she was their madam?”

He shrugged. “Of sorts, maybe. Maybe she was a referral service, if you will. But any way you look at it, she was making her living on her back.”

I couldn’t argue with him.

“Well, then,” I said, “you’re going to have a merry time sticking this on the Outfit.”

His expression darkened. “Why’s that?”

“If she wasn’t being tortured to make her talk, what does that leave? She was being made an example of, like you say. Or-she was tortured by somebody who wanted to see her suffer, for the sheer sweet pleasure of it. For revenge.”

“Yeah. So?”

“So what you got here is the torture slaying of a dead call girl who’s been seeing a lot of high-hats, and one of her tormenters, one of her slayers, seems to be a woman. Now, off the top of your head, what does that all add up to?”

He grunted. “Jealous wife.”

“You got it. See if the papers don’t land on that with both feet.”

“Maybe,” he said, giving me his best official look. “And we’ll pursue that avenue. I don’t rule anything out. You heard, when we came in, the downstairs neighbor say she saw a guy in the alley.” Around two-thirty, running, with fur coats in his arms, she’d said. “Well, there’s been a series of apartment fur thefts going on in Lakeview for the past three months. So I don’t rule that out either, though in my opinion the killer just grabbed the coats on the way out to make this look more like a robbery, not a mob hit. Nonetheless, I smell the Outfit all over this.”

I could only smell scorched flesh. My lunch was acting up again. Be a cop, a voice said.

“Somebody was looking for something,” I said, making myself get back into this on that level. “What?”

Shrug. “Jewels, maybe. Estelle was known to have ’em. That doesn’t rule out this being a hit; why shouldn’t an assassin pick up a little extra something in the bargain? At the same time confusing the police as to the motive.”

That made sense, but then, on cue, Sergeant Donahoe, a heavyset middle-aged detective with a basset-hound mug, came in from the other room with his hands full of obviously expensive jewelry, including a diamond ring and a glittering diamond bracelet.

“We found this in a baseboard hiding place,” Donahoe said, “in the living room.” His hound-dog expression made the news sound unintentionally woeful.

“So much for jewels,” I said.

“That just means the killers didn’t find the goddamn things,” Drury said, shrugging it off.

“Also,” Donahoe said, piling the jewels in one hand, reaching in his pocket with the other, “this was tucked away in there.” A little silver.25 automatic with a pearl handle.

Drury took the gun. “Didn’t do her much good hid away, did it?” Dropped it in his pocket.

“And there’s a sable coat in the front closet,” Donahoe said glumly, and went out.

“So much for fur robbery as a motive,” I said. “If they weren’t looking for furs or jewels, what’s left?”

“Money,” Drury said.

“A popular item,” I admitted. “But Estelle was known for socking her dough away, in banks, in safe deposit boxes. She was notorious for sponging off people; she rarely had a cent on her, or in her place.”

“There is a rumor,” Drury said carefully, and I had the feeling he had waited till we were alone to say this, “that a fund Nicky Dean was in charge of-something to do with ‘taxing’ the Stagehands Union members-was emptied just before he was sent up. Dean refuses to discuss it, but the estimate is somewhere in the million-dollar area.”

The infamous 2 percent income tax Montgomery had once told me about.

“Jesus.” I finished the scenario myself: “And, I suppose, rumor further has it that Estelle was entrusted with this dough? By and for Nicky, till he got out of stir?”

Drury nodded.

“Then this could have been anybody, Bill. Anybody who knew Estelle and knew about the million. They tortured her and she didn’t talk. She held on to her dough till the last. Which is like her, the greedy little bitch. Damn her!”

“Nate, I’m sorry I brought you in on this…”

“Shut up. Quit saying that.”

“Let me ask you something.”

“Ask.”

“Suppose I can prove Nitti was behind this. Not necessarily in court, ’cause God only knows if that’s even possible. You know the department’s record where solving gangland murders is concerned. But suppose I can prove to your satisfaction that Nitti did this. Would you tell what you know on the witness stand when the grand jury calls you?”

Estelle’s death in my nostrils, I said, “Yes.”

He grinned and shook my hand; his enthusiasm was not matched by anything of the kind from me. I was feeling weak. Be a cop, the voice said.

“What about those letters?” I heard myself say. Working by rote, now.

He went over and bent down at the dresser where the bundled letters lay. One of the bundles was already undone; he read a sample. Skimmed another, saying, “From some serviceman. Love letters. This one’s in answer to a letter of hers, so she was exchanging ’em with him. Pretty hot stuff. ‘If only I could see and fold you in my arms,’ ha. Hey, he’s pissed in this one-‘Damn your cruel heart.’ Jeez, you don’t think she was seeing some other guy besides him, do you? Heaven forbid. There’s no name on any of these that I can see, just signs his initials-A. D. Year of our Lord? Ha. Anyway, there’s a San Diego address for referral overseas. Well, we’ll track him down soon enough. Huh, and there’s a photo, too.” He held it up for me to see, a portrait of a young Marine in dress blues.

“Nate-what’s wrong? You’re white as a ghost.”

“Nothing. I think it’s time I got out of here, is all.”

I didn’t tell him it was a face I’d seen before. The last time had been in a shell hole on Guadalcanal.

D’Angelo.

She floated across the dance floor, which was her stage, which was hers alone, graceful as a ballet dancer, naked as the human id but considerably more controlled, a huge ostrich feather fan in either hand, first this fan and then that one, one or the other, strategically placed at all times, granting flashes of flesh at her whim, feathers swooping, fluttering, moving on the toes of her high-heeled pumps, blond hair stacked in curls upon an angelic countenance, no hint of the devil in her smile as her fleeting glimpses of nakedness turned the men in the house into peeping toms and the women into jealous janes.

The music, as usual, was classical-“Moonlight Sonata,” her theme song-filtered through the big-band sound of Pichel and Blank’s Orchestra, men in white jackets sitting on risers behind her, enjoying the uncensored rear view. The lighting was soft and blue, and from where I sat with Eliot, ringside at Rinella’s Brown Derby, at Monroe and Wabash, in “the heart of the Loop!” she didn’t look a day older than she had when I’d seen her at the World’s Fair almost ten years ago, cavorting with a “bubble,” a big balloon she’d temporarily traded in for her ostrich feathers. It had been the second year of the fair and a new gimmick was called for. Even beautiful naked blonde women had to keep up with the changing times. Only time wasn’t keeping up with Sally, apparently. She was eternally beautiful. Unlike Estelle Carey, fate had been kind. Fate and soft lighting.

And now she was reaching the climax of her act, the moment all had been waiting for, when she unashamedly threw up the feather fans and they loomed over her as she stood like the statue of Winged Victory, smiling, proud, one leg lifted gently, knee up, keeping one small region a secret, a secret she’d shared with me, but long ago. Her smile was regal, her head back, proud of her beauty, her body, her talent. The house went wild with applause.

The lights grew dim and the applause continued but when the lights came back up Sally was gone, and no amount of clapping could bring her back. Once she raised her fans and showed her all, there was no encore possible. For those eager enough for another glimpse of the goddess in the full-figured flesh, there were two more shows tonight. This had been the finale of the eight-thirty dinner show, and as the orchestra began playing schmaltzy dance music, “Serenade in Blue,” Eliot and I were working on our third after-dinner drink. Which was beer, as that and wine were the only options; distillers had been banned from producing drinking liquor since last October.

For an ex-prohibition agent-an understated way of describing him indeed-Eliot Ness could really put the beer away. He would have preferred scotch, just as I would have preferred rum. But there was a war on.

“She really brought the house down,” Eliot said, latest beer in hand.

“She always does.”

“How long’s it been since she played Chicago?”

“Last time I know of was in ’41. She may have played here while I was away, though.”

“Probably not,” he said, taking a sip. “The billing said, ‘Triumphant Return’-that sounds like it’s been a while. You’d think she could play Chicago any time she wanted.”

“She could,” I said, “if she was willing to play the burlesque houses. But she only plays nightclubs and other classy…what is the word she uses? Venues.”

“Ha. Uh, how well do you know her, anyway?”

“Not well, anymore. I haven’t talked to her in years.”

“You knew her well once?”

“I knew a lot of women once. Damn few twice.”

He smiled. “You always feel sorry for yourself when you drink.”

I smiled. “Fuck you.”

A young lady at the table next to us spilled her wine; her older beau glared at me. Both were in evening dress. Both should have been less easily shocked for people who’d bribed a maitre d’ for the front-row seat at a strip show.

Eliot said, “You’re going to have to watch that mouth.”

“Out with soap?” I drank my beer. “Yeah, I know. I’m not fit for the real world, yet. Could you do me a favor?”

“Try to.”

“I’d like to track down a service buddy of mine.”

He shrugged. “Shouldn’t be any problem. In my capacity, I work hand in hand with the military brass, every day.”

“You mean, as the guy safeguarding the health and morals of the armed forces.”

“That’s morale, but yes. I’m well connected.”

“You should’ve shown some of your movies to Capone.”

Eliot smirked. “Al and I are fighting syphilis each in his own way.”

The young lady spilled her wine again; I waved and smiled as her beau glared.

“Of course,” he said, “if your friend is still overseas, it could take a while to track him.”

“He should be stateside by now. He was pretty badly wounded. He was one of the guys in that shell hole with Barney and me.”

His eyes narrowed. “Oh. You figure he was hospitalized over here.”

“Yeah. He might even be out by now. The kind of wound I had, they keep you inside longer.”

“What’s his name?”

“D’Angelo. B Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Regiment, 2nd Marine Division.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” He dug inside his suitcoat and came back with a little notebook and a pen. He had me repeat the information.

“What’s his first name?”

“Anthony, I think.”

“You think?”

“We weren’t much on first names.”

He put the notebook and pen away, smiled tightly. “Get right on it, first thing tomorrow.”

“Thanks. I’ll be in the office.”

“This sounds pressing.”

“It is. Somebody else will be looking for him, and I want to get there first.”

Eliot thought about that for a moment, then smiled again and said, “It’s your business. You asked a favor, and it’s yours, no questions asked. I don’t expect an explanation.”

“I know you don’t. And I’m not going to give you one, either.”

He laughed and finished the beer. Waved at a waitress, cute as candy in her skimpy black and white lacy outfit, who came over and brought him a new bottle. Manhattan brand; the Capone mob’s label, forced upon the local niteries by union pressure. I was still working on my previous bottle of Nitti nectar.

“This afternoon sounds like it was pretty rough,” he said, pouring the bottle’s contents into his glass, meaning Estelle.

“Rough enough. That’s something else you could do for me.”

“Oh?”

“Keep me posted, Eliot. Now that Estelle’s been murdered, the shit’s gonna hit the federal fan.”

The young lady got up and threw her napkin down and the beau went rushing after her.

“You mean, specifically,” he said, “you’re interested in how this event affects Nicky Dean and his willingness to testify.”

“Precisely, my dear Watson. And my prediction is he zips his lip.”

“Do you agree with Drury that it’s a mob hit, or not?”

“Why, did Drury fill you in on his views?”

Eliot nodded.

I said, “It could well be. But it sure isn’t Nitti’s style.”

He nodded again. “I tend to agree. On the other hand, a million dollars is a lot of money.”

“So you know about that? The Stagehands ‘income-tax’ fund.”

“Yes. And that’s a conservative estimate. I’ve heard as high as two million, and the most frequent figure is one point five mil.”

“Your point being?”

He lifted his eyebrows and set them back down. “A torture killing is hardly Nitti’s style, granted. Estelle Carey was enough of a celebrity in this town to guarantee her murder attracting headlines. Knowing that, Nitti would seem more likely either to have arranged an ‘accident’ or at the very least brought in out-of-town torpedoes to neatly do the deed. Estelle was running with Eddie McGrath, you know.”

“No, I didn’t. And who the hell is Eddie McGrath?”

“A New York crumb. Very high ranking in the Joe Adonis/Frank Costello circle. She’d been seeing him down in Miami Beach.”

“In other words, if Nitti wanted her dead, he could bring in out-of-town talent and the blame easily be placed on New York.”

“Right. He’s done it before.”

“E. J. O’Hare,” I said. “Tommy Maloy.”

“Certainly. And others. So I agree that using what appears to be local talent on a torture killing doesn’t fit Nitti’s pattern. But there are rumors, Nate, that Nitti’s slipping.”

“Nitti slipping? How?”

He shrugged. “Mentally. Physically. Some say Ricca’s more powerful than Nitti, now. Or anyway coming up fast. You yourself mentioned Accardo and Giancana, so you had to have noticed it starting even before you left town, last year.”

I shook my head no. “I don’t buy it. Nitti slipping? No way. Never.”

“He’s not a god, Nate. Or some kind of satan, either. He’s a crafty, intelligent, amoral human being. But he is a human being. His wife Anna died a year and a half ago, you know.”

“I did see that in the papers…”

He gestured with two open hands. “He was devoted to her. His family is all to him, they say.”

I remembered him showing me the photo of his little boy.

“He’s had some financial setbacks,” Eliot went on. “He’s got this federal grand jury breathing down his neck, and the income-tax boys are after him again. He’s been in and out of the hospital for his ulcers and back pain. It’s closing in on him.”

“And this, you think, might lead to him condoning what happened to Estelle Carey today?”

“Possibly. That money she supposedly had hidden away for Dean was something Nitti might well have instructed his killers to find out the whereabouts of, by whatever means necessary, before finishing the job. A million bucks, Nate! Or possibly even two. Sure it’s possible.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t want to think so.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m not stupid. But I think you, well… Nate, you look up to the guy, somehow. Admire him.”

“Bullshit.”

“You just can’t remember when this wasn’t his town. You just can’t accept change.”

“I didn’t know I had a choice. I tried to buy a pair of shoes, late this afternoon, they told me I needed a goddamn ration ticket. I told ’em I was at Guadalcanal fighting to preserve their way of life, and they suggested I go back there and ask for a ration book.”

He laughed. “I bet you took that well.”

“Funny thing is, I did. I started out bad, and was shouting, the guy was shouting back, and then I just sort of faded away. Wandered back out on the street.”

“Well, you’d just come back from that ghastly scene at the Carey apartment…”

“That was part of it. But I can’t handle this place.”

He narrowed his eyes. “What place?”

“This place. The real world. You know, I thought when I got back here it would be the same.”

“And it changed on you.”

“Not really, not in any important way. That’s the trouble. I came back, and it was the same trivial everyday life waiting for me, my job, credit checks and insurance adjusting and divorce surveillance, and is that what we’re the fuck fighting for?”

“Maybe. Maybe it’s enough.”

“And then there’s the killing. The Outfit or whoever, they’re still at it, I mean here we are fighting for democracy over there and over here people are pouring whiskey on people and setting them on fire, and cutting them up and…”

He grabbed my arm, squeezed. Apparently it had been shaking, my arm.

“Nate.”

“I’m… I’m sorry.”

“Here,” he said. He handed me a handkerchief.

Apparently I’d been crying. I wiped my face with it.

“Goddamnit, I’m sorry, Eliot.”

Then the head waiter was standing next to me, and I figured I was finally getting thrown out of the joint.

I was wrong.

“Miss Rand would like to see you backstage, sir,” he said. Politely. Only the faintest trace of distaste.

I asked him how to get there and he pointed to a door to the right of where the orchestra was playing.

“Eliot, come with me,” I said.

“No. This should be a private reunion.”

“I’m not up to it. You come along.”

Reluctantly, he rose, and we moved along the edge of the crowded dance floor where couples, old men and young women mostly, were clutching each other to “Be Careful, It’s My Heart.” We went up some stairs and in a hallway we found a door with a gold star; not a service flag, either. I knocked.

She opened the door and smiled at me, looking just a little older, but not much; her blue eyes, the bluest light blue eyes in the world, stood out startlingly, partly due to the long theatrical lashes, partly due to God. She had on a silk robe, not unlike Estelle’s but blue, yawning open a little to reveal creamy talcumed breasts; no doubt she was naked underneath it, like Estelle, albeit in better condition.

Then she saw Eliot, and her eyes just barely revealed her disappointment that I wasn’t alone, but her smile stayed, and stayed sincere, and she was shaking Eliot’s hand without my having introduced her, saying, “Eliot Ness-this is a real treat. I knew you and Nate were friends, but somehow it never seemed real to me till this very moment.”

She cinched the belt ’round her robe tighter, and gestured for us to step in. It was a small, neat dressing room with a large lightbulb-framed makeup mirror, a few chairs and a hinged dressing screen.

“Where do you keep your feathers?” Eliot asked, with a cute wry little smile. He always did well with the ladies, by the way. Except in marriage.

“That’s the prop man’s department,” she said, with her own cute little wry smile. “Union rules, you know.”

“Nate knows all about the Stagehands Union.”

Sally didn’t get the joke. “Really?” she said, looking at me, a bit confused.

“Inside joke,” I said. “You were wonderful tonight.”

“Thank you,” she said. Her smile tried to stay polite but I could sense the ice forming. “You might’ve told a girl you were coming.”

I shrugged. “Last minute. Eliot showed up and invited me out for supper…”

“And,” Eliot said, saving me, “I’d noticed you were appearing in town, and knew you two were old pals, so I hauled him down here. He, uh…he only got back just this morning.”

She stood near me, looked at me carefully. Touched my face. “I can see that. You dear. You poor, poor dear.”

There was no sarcasm in it.

I swallowed. “Please, Sally. I…please.”

She turned to Eliot and said, “Could we have a moment alone, please? I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Ness.”

“It’s Eliot, and don’t be silly,” he said, and was gone.

“You’re still mad at me,” she said.

“I don’t remember being mad at all.”

“Do you remember not returning my phone calls the last two times I was in town?”

“That was years ago.”

“I haven’t seen you since…when was it?”

“Nineteen forty?”

“November 1939,” she said. “That night I bribed my way into your apartment. That gangster… Little New York…he showed up and you pulled a gun on him. Do you remember that?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Do you remember how sweet that night was?”

I couldn’t look at her. Her blue eyes were just too goddamn blue for me to look at them. “It was a swell night, Sally.”

“I wish you’d call me Helen.”

“There’s no going back.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was too long ago. There’s no going back.”

“Nate, I know it was wrong of me to just leave you a note like that. I should’ve stuck around, or called you the next day, but it was a bad time for me-I was bankrupt, I was working my ass off getting my business life back together, and my personal life just got lost in the shuffle, and…”

“That’s not it.”

“What is it, then?”

“There’s no going back,” I said. “Excuse me.”

I opened the door; Eliot was standing out there, leaning against the far wall. “We better go,” I said.

“If you want,” he said.

“Sally, you look great,” I said, my back to her. “It was great seeing you again.”

I went back to the table. Eliot trailed after, in a few minutes.

“Where have you been?” I said, and it sounded nasty. I hadn’t meant it to, really, but it did.

“Talking to a fine lady,” he said, angry with me but holding himself back. “She thinks a lot of you, and you should’ve treated her better.”

“What did you talk about, anyway?”

Very tightly he said, “She’s concerned about you. Why, I don’t know. But she asked me a few questions, and I answered them. Why, is your civilian status a military secret?”

“Hell,” I said, getting up, “my life’s an open book.”

And I got up and walked outside. Stood on the corner and listened to the El roar by. I could smell the lake.

Eliot joined me, after paying the bill. He looked sad, not angry. I felt sheepish.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Forget it. You want to get another beer someplace?”

“No.”

“Want a lift someplace? I got a car, at the hotel garage. Better still, I got an E sticker.”

I laughed shortly. “You and every politician in town, I’ll wager.”

“For a guy just back from overseas,” he said, “you’re catching on fast.”

“This isn’t my first time in Chicago.”

“No? Then maybe you could recommend someplace else we could have a beer. What do you say?”

I said, finally, yes, and we walked to Barney’s Cocktail Lounge, where Barney’s brother Ben hugged me, even though we’d never been friends, really. I was the closest thing he could get to his brother, so I made do for a surrogate hugee. He’d talked to Barney long-distance in Hollywood just today. Barney indeed would be home soon, but Ben didn’t know when exactly.

The bar closed at one o’clock-another wartime sacrifice, but as a wise man once said, if you can’t get soused by one you ain’t trying-and Eliot and I stumbled out onto the street, and he set out toward his hotel, the LaSalle, and I walked home.

I wasn’t drunk, really. I’d had six or seven bottles of beer all told, spread well out over the evening. But you would think I’d drunk enough to make me tired. You would think I’d had long enough a day, shitty enough a day, to be sleepy.

But instead I sat at my desk in my skivvies with the glow of the neon night sunning me through the window. I sat there slumped on my folded arms like a kid sleeping on his desk at school, only I wasn’t sleeping. I sat there staring at the Murphy bed, folded down, fresh sheets and blankets waiting, that bed I’d slept in so many times, so many years before. Janey. Louise.

I reached under the desk and searched for and found the key I’d taped there, long ago. I removed it and worked it in the bottom drawer. There, waiting for me, was a bottle of rum, and my nine-millimeter automatic, both tangled up in my shoulder holster. I untangled them, left the gun in its holster out on the desk and drank from the rum like it was a bottle of pop.

But I still couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t even think of sleeping.

Who killed you, Estelle?

D’Angelo, are you back, too? Are you fighting the homefront war like I am? Was Estelle a casualty?

Monawk-who killed you, buddy? Bullets flying everywhere, Monawk screaming, Barney pitching grenades, D’Angelo, where are you?

Somebody screamed.

Me.

I sat up.

I had slept. Just for a moment. I was sweating, as if from a fever. Neon pulsed over me. I sat there, chilled, wondering if I could ever sleep again without returning to that shell hole. Wondering if I could ever sleep again until I knew what happened to Monawk.

And Estelle. They were tied together in my mind, now, those two deaths, those two murders, and D’Angelo was the knot.

Somebody knocked at the door.

I glanced at my watch; it was after two.

I jerked the nine millimeter from the holster.

I walked slowly to the door and flung it open and pointed it at the person standing there.

A tiny little person, smelling like talcum, wearing a tailored mannish suit with high square padded shoulders, only it wasn’t a man. Sally stood with her purse in front of her like a fig leaf and her blonde curls piled on her head like a friendly offering to an unfriendly god, and I stood there in my skivvies with a gun in my hand and she smiled, sweetly, sadly, and said, “Please don’t shoot.”

I dropped the gun to the floor and took her in my arms and held her. Held her.

“Helen,” I said. “Helen.”

The next morning it was snowing, the wind off the lake turning modest flurries into a whistling, swirling near storm. I dug my hands in my overcoat pockets, my hat pulled down, looking down, getting snow tossed in my face anyway, like fine particles of icy glass, as I walked the several blocks from the El to the Linn Funeral Home, for Estelle’s services.

The Linn’s tiny mortuary chapel was in a low-rise business district in the blue-collar section of Lakeview, two blocks south of Wrigley Field. Only a handful of mourners showed up. I squeezed the hand of Estelle’s weeping mother, and shook the hand of her confused stepfather; I’d never met either before, but her mother remembered my name from when I’d dated Estelle, back when she was a girl working the counter at Rickett’s. I could see Estelle’s pert beauty lurking in the older woman’s thin face, those same green eyes, only the mother’s were behind wire-rim glasses and lacked the gloss of greed. I shook the hand of an attractive brunette in a fur stole, a cousin of Estelle’s; five would get you ten she was a 26 girl, too.

Last night’s papers, and this morning’s, were already filled with tales of the “queen of the dice gal’s” many suitors; but none of them seemed to have showed. The small colorless chapel wasn’t a third full, and the only men present were the stepfather, the undertaker, Drury’s boss Chief of Detectives Sullivan, and me. No clergy. Her mother had tried, but no luck: it was unhallowed ground for Estelle. Half a dozen glamour girls in fashionable black, ladies of the evening whose beauty looked harder in the daytime, sat weeping into hankies, or trying to remember how to weep. Those who could were crying for themselves, I supposed, knowing that there but for the grace of God…

The functional gray-metal casket was closed, of course. No mortician alive could have restored that face. Atop the coffin lay a simple spray of orchids. The card read: “To a good pal.” Unsigned, it seemed to me obviously Dean’s work. A real sentimental guy, that Nicky.

I stood there and looked at the casket and tried to believe she was in there. That pretty, greedy little dame. I couldn’t. No tears would come to my eyes either, and a part of me was trying. Well, I’d cried for her last night. That was good enough. So long, baby.

The undertaker locked the chapel doors, to keep out the morbid, though the snow had already done the job, for the most part, and walked to a small podium and spoke a few muffled words, made virtually inaudible by the wracking sobs of Estelle’s mother.

It soon came time for the casket to be borne to a waiting hearse, only there were no pallbearers. The undertaker recruited Chief Sullivan and me, but six were needed to do the job. Of the handful of the curious who stood in the snow outside-mostly the professionally curious, which is to say reporters-three were enlisted and we carried Estelle to the hearse, which had a C sticker, by the way, like most vehicles used for delivery. The family was being helped into a limo by the undertaker’s assistant. A four-car procession, led by the hearse, was all it took to bear the mourners. There was a black limo across the street, parked, its engine going, the windows fogged up; but, oddly, it didn’t pull in behind the other cars, as they left for St. Joseph’s Cemetery, driving into the blustering snow. But then I didn’t go with them, either. I just stood there letting the particles of icy snow flick at my face.

One of the pallbearing reporters was an old friend of mine. Hal Davis of the News. Even with a heavy overcoat on, and a pulled-down fedora, his head seemed too large for his body; the bright eyes in his boyish face-he was approaching fifty but looked thirty-five-grew brighter as he recognized me.

“Hey, it’s Heller. I must’ve been walking behind you. For all the men she boffed, you’d think they wouldn’t have to resort to strangers to cart her away.”

I decked him.

He hit the snowy sidewalk, or anyway his ass did, sending up puffs of powdery white. He hadn’t landed so hard, really. He looked up at me, his pride more wounded than anything else, a small trickle of blood at one corner of his mouth.

“What was that for?”

“General principle. You’ve had that coming for years.”

“Fuck you! Help me up.”

I did.

He brushed himself off, his coat first; the few other reporters were dispersing, smiling at Davis’s fate. He dusted off his hat. “And here I wrote that nice piece about you the other day.”

I decked him again.

He looked up, rubbed his face. “Didn’t like the piece, huh?”

I helped him up again. “Don’t say anything else. I might hurt you next time.”

“There’s a hundred in it for the personal story of your love life with Estelle. Don’t do it! I’ll press charges, Heller, I really will!”

“Go away, Davis.”

“Goddamn. The war sure has soured you. What happened to your sense of humor? Used to be a guy could depend on you, when a C-note was involved.”

“Go away.”

He looked at me like I was some weird animal he’d never seen before, shook his head, dug his hands in his overcoat pocket and walked toward his parked auto. It had a C sticker, too. For purposes of delivering horseshit, I would imagine.

I crossed the street, heading toward the El station, when the front door of the parked limo swung open and a uniformed chauffeur stepped out and said, “Mr. Heller. Excuse me, sir?”

I’d never heard “Excuse me, sir” posed as a question before; it was novel enough an event to make me stop in my tracks, and back up, despite the cold and the snow.

The chauffeur was a pallid fleshy-faced man of about forty-five with a bottle-bloodshot nose; terrific choice for a driver.

He said, “Mr. Wyman would like to speak to you.”

“Who? Oh. Yeah. Sure.”

He opened the back door and I climbed in. A man of medium but powerful build, in his mid-fifties, in a gray suit and a dark tie, his overcoat folded neatly on the seat beside him, sat morosely, staring forward, wet trails on his ruggedly handsome face.

This was Earl Wyman, self-made man, a construction worker who bettered himself, the president of an ornamental iron company with a fancy Michigan Avenue office, now, a man who two years ago had been messily, publicly divorced by his wife, who had named one Estelle Carey as a correspondent in the proceedings.

I got in and sat there and Wyman said, without looking at me, “Could I drop you at the El station?”

“Certainly. It’s nasty weather even for a short walk.”

He tapped on the window separating us from the front seat and the chauffeur, who responded to the tap by pulling out into the street. We were not headed toward the El station, and I said as much.

Wyman, still not looking at me, said, “We’ll just drive for a few minutes, if that’s all right. I’d like a word with you, Mr. Heller.”

I unbuttoned my overcoat; it was hot in here. The car’s heater was a furnace.

“How is it you know me?”

He smiled faintly, just for a second. “I might say from the newspapers. You’ve had occasion to be in them. Most recently just the other day. And, in passing, last night and this morning. But your experiences on Guadalcanal are quite…stirring. You must be a brave young man.”

“I’m not particularly brave, and youth, I find, is fleeting.”

He looked at me. His eyes were gray. And red.

“A wise observation, Mr. Heller.”

“Not really. More like trite. Estelle told you about me. That’s where you know me from.”

He nodded, slowly. “She trusted you. I’d even say…she came close to loving you. Or at any rate I could tell she had been in love with you once. As much as she could love any man, that is. Of course she loved mammon best of all.”

Well, that was a little arch, but I couldn’t argue with him.

I said, “She loved Estelle, not wisely, but too well. And so did you.”

He looked away from me. “I loved her very, very much, for the little good it did me. She could be very cruel. No-that’s not fair. She didn’t have a mean bone in her body. She was just so very…acquisitive.”

“Yeah. She was that. What can I do for you, Mr. Wyman?”

He didn’t answer. Not directly. “I’m so…ashamed of myself. I came here today, full well intending to go in and sit among the mourners, but… I came here for the inquest, you know, early this morning, and they continued it till a few weeks from now, so I came out to my limousine to wait, and then the reporters began showing up, and I… I was a coward.” His head lurched forward and he covered his face and began weeping. “I was a coward. A craven coward. I loved her so. And I didn’t, couldn’t so much as go in and…”

I shifted in my seat. This was the most uncomfortable limo I’d ever sat in, and it wasn’t just the heat, and it didn’t have anything to do with the seat cushions.

“Look, Mr. Wyman,” I said. “She’s dead. It doesn’t matter whether you went in there and paid your last respects or not. Say good-bye to her in your own way…in your, you know, your own heart.”

He wiped his face off, with almost frantic swipes of one palm, as if noticing for the first time that tears were there, suddenly embarrassed by them, saying, “I… I like to think she knows I came today. That I… I did, in my own private way, pay my proper respects. That I did, that I do, still love her. That she’s watching, from above.”

If Estelle was watching, it probably wasn’t from that particular vantage point; if she was watching, it was probably hotter there than this car. Or her apartment had been, at the end. If she’d gone anywhere.

But I said, “Sure, Mr. Wyman. That’s the ticket. I’m sure she knows how you feel. Now, uh, the next train leaves in ten minutes. What can I do for you?”

He looked at me, tentatively. “The papers mentioned you were one of the first at the…scene.”

“That’s right.”

“Did you happen to have a look around the apartment? Did you aid the detectives in examining Estelle’s things?”

I nodded. “Up to a point, yes.”

“The, uh, stories said that certain personal effects were found…letters from a serviceman, photos, an address book…my name was in the latter, though the papers don’t have that. Yet.”

“I saw all that stuff, yes.”

Now he looked at me sharply, intensely. The gray eyes alert. “Did you see anything else?”

“I saw a lot of things, including Estelle herself and various instruments of torture.”

He shuddered. “That’s not what I’m inquiring about.”

It was so hot in this goddamn car, I was sweating; snow storm outside, and I’m sweating. “Mr. Wyman, I appreciate your grief, I share it, but will you get to the fucking point?”

He sighed. “I understand your frustration. I hope you can forgive my, well…I’m out of sorts today, Mr. Heller. This has shaken me. This…”

“Get to the point. I have a train to catch.”

He turned to the fogged-up window next to him, as if looking out. “Did you see a red book?”

“A red book?”

He stared at the fogged window. “With a clasp. Perhaps two inches thick. The book, I mean.”

“A diary?”

Now he looked at me. “A diary.”

“Estelle kept a diary?”

“Yes. Did you see it?”

“No. There was no diary. And I was one of the first on the scene, as you said.”

His eyes narrowed. “Not the very first.”

“The firemen were the very first. Some patrolmen and detectives after that.”

He was quite forceful, now, as he spoke; for the first time, I could see the successful man of business in him.

He said, “I believe that someone stole that diary. Perhaps one of those…public servants who preceded you.”

I shrugged. “That’s certainly possible.”

“I would like you to get it back.”

“That would be withholding evidence, Mr. Wyman.”

He gestured in an open-handed way meant to suggest how reasonable he was. “Mr. Heller, you can read the damn thing if you find it. If what is in the diary should seem to you potentially helpful, in an investigation of her murder, why by all means turn it over to the police.”

“After tearing out any pages referring to you, you mean.”

Tiny smile. “Of course. You see, I’m about to be remarried. And, I’ve reason to believe, Estelle…recorded personal things about me. About us.”

“Sexual things, you mean.”

He pursed his lips. Then said, “That is correct. I’ll give you two thousand dollars, and expenses.”

“I want a grand retainer. No refunds if I can’t come through for you.”

“Done.” P. T. Barnum was right.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

“Mr. Heller, I’m engaged to a lovely woman. From a good family. You must help me keep this scandal contained.”

“I thought you loved Estelle.”

“I did. I do. I was still seeing her, from time to time. I won’t deny that. I’ve admitted as much to my fiancee, and we’re working that out. But another public display of my indiscretions could ruin me. Personally. Financially.”

He reminded me of Eliot talking about how Nitti was slipping.

I said, “When did you last see Estelle?”

“Sunday.”

This was Wednesday.

“That recently?”

“That recently. It was a…farewell dinner of sorts. I told her this would be our last evening together, because I was going to be married again. I…think I even believed what I was saying. At any rate, I called for her at 9:00 P.M.” He smiled, privately. “We wore evening clothes. She was lovely. We spent the evening at the Buttery, where we dined and danced. As usual, Estelle didn’t drink and she didn’t smoke. She seemed in exceptionally high spirits. She was doing well; she had a lot of money in the bank, she said. I shouldn’t worry about her future.” Tears were rolling again; God, I felt uncomfortable. It wasn’t the heat, it was the humanity. “I don’t know where she got her money. She hadn’t worked for several years.”

He didn’t know she was a call girl, then; well, the papers would tell him about it soon enough.

Speaking of which.

“Mr. Wyman,” I said, “if a cop or somebody lifted that diary, and didn’t turn it in as evidence, then it’s going to be sold to the papers. That’s the only reason a cop would swipe it. To make a buck in that fashion.”

His expression was firm. “Let it be known-let it quietly be known-that I will double any newspaper’s highest bid.”

“Okay,” I said. “But you better consider this. The killers themselves may have taken it. If it incriminated them, that’s quite likely.”

“I’ve considered that.”

“They may even have known about its existence, and its hiding place in the apartment may have been information they tortured out of her.”

“I’ve considered that as well.”

“That’s just dandy, ’cause finding Estelle’s killers, well-that’s something I don’t know if I’m up to. I’ll be frank. I’d like to find them. I’d like to blow their brains out. But Captain Drury is looking, too, and he’s much better equipped than I am. And he’s every bit the detective I am, and twice the cop. And there will be dozens of suspects in this thing. Estelle got around. So I’m not promising anything.”

He leaned over and touched my hand. I felt even more uncomfortable, now.

He said, quite earnestly, “Estelle had faith in you. I have faith in you, too.”

“Swell. I got faith in that thousand-buck retainer. You can make me out a check now, or send it over by messenger.”

He looked away, seeming disappointed in me, and in life and the world in general, said he’d send a messenger, and I got out and took the El.

I met Eliot for a late lunch at the Berghoff. Just because we were at war with Germany didn’t mean I couldn’t eat some Wienerschnitzel, if I felt like it. They were even still serving beer in steins, though the menu now described the cuisine as “Bavarian.” Also, my serving of schnitzel seemed postage-stamp size, hardly the Berghoff’s style. War is hell.

We sat in one corner of the busy open room, where waiters in black tails with long white aprons held trays of steaming food high on upturned palms as they wound swiftly around and through the scattered, clustered tables like acrobats with a mission. It was comforting being in this no-nonsense, wood-and-glass Protestant church of a restaurant, a true Chicago fixture dating back before anybody was alive, a bastion single-handedly stemming the tide of change, despite such minor setbacks as meat rationing and “Bavarian” euphemism. Here I felt at home. Here I felt like I was in the Chicago I remembered.

Also, it was the sort of noisy, bustling room, brimming with people, that provided cover for a private conversation.

“I made those calls first thing,” Eliot said, referring to his efforts to track down D’Angelo’s whereabouts. “No response yet. Will you be in your office all afternoon?”

“I plan to be.”

“If I get word, I’ll let you know.”

“I’d appreciate that. Sooner the better.” Drury, working from the letters signed with the initials “A.D.,” that photo and the San Diego referral address, would not be far behind me.

Eliot was eating pig’s knuckles and sauerkraut, a Berghoff specialty. Between bites, he said, “You were right about Dean, by the way.”

“What d’you mean?”

“He’s clammed up, all right. Whether Estelle Carey’s murder was a message somebody sent him or not, he sure took it that way.”

“So he won’t be testifying, then?”

Eliot smirked humorlessly. “Not as simple as that. He’ll testify. He’ll just have a…selective memory.”

“Well, you did say Dean was the last to cooperate.”

“That’s right, and he’s only gradually been revealing bits and pieces of this and that. He’s never mentioned Nitti or Ricca or Campagna or Capone by name, for instance.”

The Capone in question was Ralph “Bottles” Capone, the soft-drink bottler, one of Al’s brothers.

“But he has backed up Browne and Bioff’s admissions,” Eliot went on, “about the Hollywood shakedowns.”

“In other words, he’s trying to tell just enough to get his sentence reduced.”

“Without buying himself a cement overcoat when he finally gets sprung, yes. It’s unlikely he’ll retract anything he’s already admitted; he won’t go opening himself up to contempt or perjury or anything. But it’s clear he’s remembered all he’s going to remember.”

“What about Lum and Abner?”

He smiled, wryly. “Bioff and Browne? The effect has been quite different. If anything, the boys are going to spill even more, if that’s possible.” His expression darkened. “Both their wives got anonymous phone calls last night, telling ’em to tell their husbands to keep their mouths shut or ‘you’ll get cut-your kids, too.’ This morning, I understand, Willie was raving and ranting-‘We sit around in jail for those bastards and they go around killing our families. The hell with ’em.’ That sort of thing.”

“Those phone calls don’t necessarily mean Estelle’s murder was a mob hit, you know.”

He shook his head, smiled wearily. “You still can’t buy that as something Nitti would do.”

“No. It just isn’t in character. I keep thinking of the Cermak hit, and the lengths he went to, to have his revenge without stirring up the heat. This is a man who had the mayor of Chicago killed, Eliot, and got away with it.”

“That was ten years ago, Nate. This is a different time, and Nitti’s a different man.”

I drank some beer. “You may be right. We’ll see.”

“Are you looking into this Carey matter yourself?”

“Not officially. Let’s just say I’m on the outskirts.”

“Those are dangerous outs to skirt. Didn’t you tell me once that Nitti told you to stay out of his business? That was good advice. Drury’s a top-notch cop; let him handle it.”

I shrugged. “That’s good advice, too.”

“Take it, then.”

“What else do you have for me?”

He shook his head again, smiled with good-natured frustration. “Well, I can tell you that the FBI talked to Estelle a few weeks ago. I don’t know if they got anything out of her or not. But I do know they talked to her. So did the tax boys.”

“In reference to Dean’s missing million?”

“Mostly. And the grand jury investigation in general.”

“Would she have been called to testify?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Would she have talked?”

“I don’t know. Maybe somebody didn’t want to risk she might.” He sipped his beer, gave me a crafty look. “There’s also a theory that it was her that blew the whistle on Dean.”

I sat forward. “Hell, I heard she hid out with Nick, when he was ducking his indictment. That she dyed her hair black and moved into a cheap flat with him, in Cicero.”

“Yes, which is where Hoover’s finest picked him up,” Eliot said. “After somebody tipped them off as to where he was, that is.”

“Estelle?”

“That I didn’t find out. It’s an interesting wrinkle, though, isn’t it? Makes Nicky Dean himself a suspect, if it was a contract hit, that is.”

“Can’t you find out whether she fingered him or not?”

“That information’ll likely be given Drury, in good due course. Besides, I can only do so much sniffing around for you, you know. It’s got to seem casual, gossipy. If I poke too hard, somebody’ll poke back.”

“I know that, Eliot, and I appreciate it, what you’re doing.”

Pig knuckles put away, he used his napkin. Smiled again. “Enjoy me while you can, because tomorrow I’m out of here. It’s back to Cleveland.”

“To see the wife?”

“Yes, and to check in with the Defense Health regional office there. I’m on a swing where I’m spending a few days at each of our regional offices-there’s twelve of ’em, from Boston to San Francisco-giving this co-op workshop with the FBI.”

“Gee, do they have VD in Cleveland now? That place is really getting up to date.”

“Sure there’s VD. It takes the proper stamp out of your ration book to get it, however.”

“Which reminds me,” I said, standing, throwing my napkin down. “I got to walk over to the courthouse and get mine.”

“VD?”

“Ration book.”

He shrugged, stood, reached for the bill. “You’re fighting the battle of the home front, now, Nate.”

“Ain’t we all,” I said, and plucked the bill from his hands. “This is my treat. Consider it a payoff.”

“When in Rome.”

He walked out on the street with me; the snow had let up, but the wind was blowing it around, so it didn’t make much difference.

“You take care of yourself,” he told me.

“Sure, kid.”

He looked at me carefully. “Are you getting any sleep?”

“Some.”

“You look like hell.”

“You look like shit.”

“No wonder we can’t get laid,” he said, and walked off.

An hour later, ration book in my billfold, I sat in my office, and started making phone calls, working my way down a list of credit checks that Sapperstein had left on my desk. Gladys came in and asked me if I’d like some coffee. I said, sure-blonde and sweet. She said, huh? And I explained that was G.I. for sugar and cream, and now I was sipping it, between calls, slouched comfortably in my swivel chair, as the phone rang.

“A-1 Detective Agency,” I said, for the first time in some while.

“Heller?”

It was a hoarse, familiar voice, but I couldn’t place it.

“Speaking.”

“This is Louis Campagna.”

An old chill went up my spine. I sat up.

“Hello, Louie.”

“You did pretty good over there.”

“Where?”

“Over there with those Jap bastards. You did pretty good. Frank said to tell you he was proud of ya. We’re glad you’re back safe and sound and everything.”

“Well, uh, thank you, Louie.”

Silence.

Which he finally broke: “Safe and sound is a nice way to be.”

“It sure is.”

“You got in the papers your first day back, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. How ’bout that?”

“How did you manage that, Heller?”

“Just one of those things. Drury happened to be in my office when he got the Carey call. He was welcoming me back. We were on the pickpocket detail together, you know, in the old days.”

Silence.

“So I went along,” I said. “I knew Estelle, you know.”

“Yeah, we know. That was an awful thing that happened to her.”

I tried to find hidden meaning or menace in the voice; I couldn’t quite.

“Awful thing,” I agreed.

“You ought to stay out of that.”

“The investigation, you mean.”

“Yeah.”

“I have an interest in who killed Estelle, Louie. But I’ll leave that to Drury.”

“That’s smart.”

“I can’t seem to make myself buy that Frank had anything to do with it.”

Silence.

“It just wasn’t his style,” I said.

Silence.

Then he said: “Frank may want to see you.”

“That might not be a good idea. The federal prosecutor knows that Frank and I have met from time to time. I’m going to be questioned about it.”

Silence.

“But you might tell Frank that I have a little medical problem left over from the war. I got amnesia over there.”

“Meaning you forget things.”

“That’s exactly right, Louie.”

“That’s a healthy sickness to have. Frank will like hearing that. Keep us informed as to the G’s interest in you.” By G he meant government. “Get a pencil.”

I got a pencil.

He gave me a phone number.

“Is this a number I can reach you at?” I asked, trying to understand what this was about.

“The party at that number can reach me,” he said. “Reach them, and I’ll reach you.”

And a click in my ear said good-bye.

I should’ve been shaken by the call; instead, I felt oddly reassured. Like the Berghoff, Campagna hadn’t changed much. Another Chicago fixture, and-judging by the black-market talk in the papers, “meat-legging” in particular being attributed to the Nitti Outfit-one unaffected by rationing.

I sipped the sweet creamy coffee, made another credit-check call.

Shortly after three, somebody knocked at my door. A crisp, hard, single knock.

“It’s open,” I said.

A Marine sergeant stepped inside, shut the door behind him. He was about forty, wore pressed blue trousers, khaki shirt, necktie and campaign hat. The shine of his shoes reflected the overhead light. He stood board-straight, not at attention, not even at parade rest, but his bearing strictly military and intimidating as all hell, anyway.

“Private Heller?” he said, taking off the hat. He had something in his other hand, too; a small dark blue box.

“Yes,” I said, standing. He looked familiar. Who was this guy?

He marched over to the desk. “I tried to call before coming, but your line was busy.”

“Uh, yes, sorry. Use the phone a lot in my line of work…hey, I know you. You’re my recruiting sergeant. You’re my goddamn recruiting sergeant.”

I came around the desk and extended my hand; he accepted it, shifting the hat to the hand holding the little box. His smile was as tight as his grip.

“Welcome home, Private,” he said.

“What brings you here, Sergeant?”

He handed me the small square box, the corners of which were rounded off. “It is my honor to present you this, Private Heller.”

I opened the little box, half expecting to find a watch inside. Instead I found a medal. A ribboned star of bronze at the center of which a laurel wreath encircled a small silver star.

“That’s your Silver Star, Private. For gallantry in action. Congratulations.”

“I…well, thank you. I, uh…shit. I don’t know, Sergeant. I feel funny about this.”

“Funny?”

“I don’t feel I did anything worthy of a medal. I did what I had to and that’s all. Only medal I feel comfortable wearing is this.” I pointed with a thumb to the Ruptured Duck on my suitcoat lapel. “I did what I had to. But getting medals for killing people, I don’t know about.”

His mouth was a thin straight line that words miraculously squeezed out of: “Private, the Marine Corps is fucked up in many ways. But one way in which it ain’t fucked up is it don’t give out medals for killin’ people. It gives out medals for savin’ people, which is what you and Corporal Ross did over in that hellhole. So if I was you, I would not have nothing but pride for this here medal.”

I smiled at the tough old bird. Old? Three years older than me, probably. Not that that made him young. Had he served in the first war? He’d have been a kid. But then a lot of Marines were.

Anyway, I offered my hand for him to shake again; he did.

“Thank you, Sergeant. I appreciate your words.”

He gave me another tight smile and turned to go; he was at the door when I called out to him.

“Sergeant?”

“Private.”

“Would you happen to know if one of my buddies from B company is back in town? He was in that same hellhole I was.”

“Would you be referrin’ to Private D’Angelo?”

Another chill shot up my spine; a newer one than the Campagna variety.

“That’s right. Is he back?”

He nodded. “Yes he is. He’s a brave young man, too. I delivered a bronze star to him this morning.”

“I’d like to visit him.”

The sergeants mouth twitched; that was his shrug. “I can give you his address, if you like.”

D’Angelo was living with his aunt and uncle in Kensington, a tiny Italian community at the far south end of the city, right outside of Pullman, just west of Cottage Grove. I took the Illinois Central commuter line out there, passing the Pullman plant where my father had once worked, and Electromotive, both doing war work now, and among Eliot’s VD target areas. As the train passed 103rd Street I could see the smokestacks of steel mills against the sky. I sat on the train thinking about unions, thinking about what the unions had meant to my father, about what my father thought the union idea meant, and what sometimes that idea still meant, but how more often greedy bastards like Bioff and Browne and Dean and Nitti and Ricca and Campagna and various Capones and so many others perverted it into just another racket. Is that what we fought to preserve, D’Angelo and Barney and me?

I got off the IC at a little after four at 115th Street, which I crossed-the obnoxious paint odor of the nearby Sherwin Williams plant mingling incongruously with wondrous spicy smells from various hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurants-to Kensington Avenue, the wide, airy street the little neighborhood was named for. This quaint four-block neighborhood was an Italian oasis in the midst of a Swedish and Polish area; it even had its own church. And Kensington was one Italian neighborhood in Chicago with little or no mob taint.

The bottom floor of the narrow three-story brick building was a grocery store; at the top of the second floor stairs was a landing and a single door, with no number. I knocked.

“Just a second!” a voice from within called. Female voice.

When the door opened, a slender, darkly attractive girl of about twenty stood there; she was in rather form-fitting coveralls with her hair covered by a bandanna, knotted in front, Aunt Jemima style.

“Can I help you?” she said, looking at me rather crossly, her thin frame blocking the doorway. What little of her hair was showing under the bandanna was matted from sweat and her face was smudged here and there.

“My name’s Heller. I’m a friend of Private D’Angelo’s.”

She brightened. Stepped back and gestured for me to come in, saying, “Nathan Heller, sure. You’re Tony’s friend. He told us all about you. Read about ya in the papers, too.”

I stepped inside. It was a small living room with nice but not lavish furnishings, overstuffed sofa, some chairs, radio console, Catholic icons.

She gestured to herself, to her coveralls, her bandanna, smiling widely. Her teeth were very white and her eyes were very brown. “Excuse. I just got off my shift at Pullman.”

I smiled at her. “Rosie the Riveter, huh?”

“Marie the arc welder. Would you like to see my brother?” She seemed hopeful and sad all at once.

“Sure. He’s here, then?”

“Yeah. Sure.” She seemed surprised I’d think otherwise. “It’s close to Roseland Community.” That was a hospital, about a mile from here. She went on: “I think some company might help Tony a little.”

She stepped closer; she smelled sweaty, the sweat of good hard honest work. I liked the way she smelled. She was, in fact, a cute kid, and if I wasn’t here to see if maybe her brother was a murderer I might have asked for her phone number. I never dated an arc welder before. Or the sister of a murderer, that I remembered.

“Is D’Angelo a little down?” I said. I couldn’t seem to bring myself to call him Tony; don’t know why.

She stood very close to me. “He’s been blue as hell. He was okay when he got home. We were all surprised how good his spirits were, considering. But when he saw the paper this morning…”

“The Estelle Carey killing?”

She nodded gravely. “He cried and cried. Don’t tell him I told you.”

“Look, uh, Marie. Let me give you a tip. Some of your brother’s letters and things were found in her apartment.”

The skin around her eyes tightened. “Really?”

“They haven’t connected them to… Tony, yet. But they will. And cops and reporters will be swarming around.”

“Oh dear. What should we do?”

I shrugged. “You may want to have him stay someplace else, till it all blows over. I don’t mean to suggest you keep him away from the police, but you may want to keep the reporters off him.”

She nodded. “Certainly. I appreciate this.”

“That’s okay. I figure you should be warned. And your aunt and uncle downstairs, with their business and all.”

She smiled again. Lovely smile. “It’s nice of you.”

I wasn’t so nice. I was here to confront my old war buddy about a murder. Two murders.

But I owed him this much, this warning. And I liked his sister’s smile.

“I’ll take you back to him,” she said.

“No. You can just point the way.”

“Okay. I need to get a bath, anyway.”

I didn’t want to think about her bathing. I had other things to do.

She pointed me down a hallway, off of which were various bedrooms, and at the end was a small kitchen, with a hoosier cabinet and a table and sink all crowded together. To the left was a bedroom, D’Angelo’s, she said.

But I found him sitting out on the enclosed porch, also off the kitchen. It was a little cold, out there. No insulation. But D’Angelo didn’t seem to notice. He was at a card table, but turned facing a window looking out on the alley, a half-played hand of solitaire spread out before him like a meal he wasn’t hungry enough to eat.

“Hello, D’Angelo.”

He turned slowly and looked at me. His face was hollow-eyed, haunted, like the Marines of the 1st Division we’d come to the Island to spell, those wasted scarecrows who’d met us as we waded ashore off the Higgins boats. Only D’Angelo looked even worse. He’d always been razor-thin, and he still was, only now that razor was dull. His eyes were dead.

But something in them came marginally alive when he recognized me.

“Heller,” he said. It was cold enough for his breath to show. He smiled, just a little.

I went over to the card table and sat next to him. Just looking at him I knew he hadn’t killed Estelle. Monawk was another matter.

“I’m sorry about your girl,” I said.

“Hell of a thing,” he said. His eyes were full of water. “Hell of a thing.” He reached for a deck of Luckies on the card table; shook a smoke out and lit it nervously off a battered silver Zippo lighter from his plaid flannel shirt. “You can’t know what it’s like to come home and your girl’s dead, your goddamn girl’s dead. Murdered! Tortured…”

I said nothing.

“Want a smoke?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. He lit it off his-hospital habit-and handed it to me. I sucked the smoke into my lungs and felt strangely alive.

“What the fuck kind of world is it?” he said. “Come home from what we went through, and somebody murdered your goddamn girl! Your goddamn girl.” He didn’t want to weep in front of me, I knew, but it was killing him holding all that water in his eyes.

“Go ahead and bawl,” I told him. “We all do it.”

He covered his face with his hand and tears dripped through his fingers. I looked away. Smoked.

“Who am I kidding?” he said. He rubbed the tears off his face, as best he could; some smears of moisture remained. “She had a lot of guys. Some of my friends wrote me and said she was out with this swell, and that one. She loved money more than she loved any man.”

That was true.

He looked at me curiously, all of a sudden. “What were you doing there?”

“What?”

“I saw your name in the papers. You were there, at her apartment, with the cops.”

“I know the detective whose case it is, is all. Coincidence.”

He gripped my arm. “If you find something out, you gotta let me know. If you hear something. If I can get my hands on the bastards that did that to her, I swear I’ll wring their fucking necks. How could anybody do that to a beautiful girl like her?” He shook his head. “Aw, shit, Estelle. Why’d you have to love money so goddamn much?”

“I remember back at San Diego,” I said, “you mentioned you worked for Nicky Dean at the Colony Club. Is that where you met her?”

He nodded. “I was a waiter there. Head waiter. I ran errands for Nicky, sometimes.”

“How did you and Estelle get together?”

“She liked my looks. I liked hers. That’s all it takes.”

True enough.

“I knew her once, too,” I said.

“Really?”

“A long, long time ago.”

“Did you go with her?”

“Yeah.”

“Did…you love her, too, Heller?”

“A long, long time ago, I did, yeah.”

“So, then… I guess you do know how it is to come home to something like this.”

“We got that in common, pal.”

“We got a lot in common, don’t we, Heller?”

We sure did. We both had wounds that would never heal.

I said, “How did Monawk die, D’Angelo?”

“What do you mean? The Japs got him. What else?”

“Did you see it happen?”

“No. No. I was out. I bled a lot, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

I sat there with him for a couple of hours. We talked some, but mostly we smoked. Like in that foxhole looking down on the ridge of kunai grass.

When I went out, his sister, wearing a very fresh blue dress with a crisp white collar, her black hair in a shining pageboy, greeted me. I think she liked me. I liked her. She smelled like sweet-smelling soap.

“You’re a good friend to come see him,” she said.

“I’ll be back.”

“I’d like that.”

I wasn’t Prince Charming, but there was a man shortage.

She walked me out to the street. The sky was a glowing red. The steel mills.

“Good night, Marie.”

“Good night, Mr. Heller.”

I didn’t think her brother had killed Monawk; I wasn’t sure, but my gut, my detective’s gut, said no.

Anyway, I knew he hadn’t killed Estelle yesterday.

Not on one leg.

Town Hall Station, a massive faded red-brick building built around the turn of the century, dominated the corner of Addison and Halsted. It was just three blocks west from Estelle’s “death flat” (as the papers were gleefully calling it), and within spitting distance of the Salvation Army’s national training camp, a baracaded, barbed-wire encampment devoted to saving souls.

Which could not exactly be said for the Town Hall Station, up the steps of which I went, through the main door on Addison, up into the big waiting-room area. It was Friday afternoon, and business here was slow-a few juvies were slouched on the hard wooden chairs lining one wall, waiting for their parents to show, flirting with a bored lone hooker sitting polishing her nails, waiting for her pimp or lawyer or somebody to pick her up. I checked in with the fiftyish flabby Irish sergeant who sat behind the booking counter reading a racing form, and was sent on upstairs. I was expected. Sergeant Donahoe, he of the basset-hound countenance, showed me to the small interrogation room where Drury stood grilling the seated Sonny Goldstone, Nicky Dean’s partner from his Colony Club days. A police steno, a plain young woman in matronly blue, sat just behind and to one side of Goldstone, taking it all down.

The cubbyhole was well lit but stuffy. Goldstone’s fleshy face seemed expressionless, even bored. He had the sort of soft, bland, unthreatening features-hooded eyes, straight nose, petulant mouth-that so often belong to the truly cold. He was wearing black-rim glasses tinted a slight brown. He was dressed neatly, successful businessman that he was, in a tailored, vested brown suit with a tasteful two-tone brown striped tie.

Drury’s usual dapper look was absent; he was stripped down to his vest, sleeves rolled up, tie loosened, working up a sweat. He was as good a man as any at the verbal third degree. On the other hand, you still can’t beat a rubber hose.

Drury nodded to me, as I closed the door behind me, and Goldstone’s eyes flicked my way once, then stared back into nothing, ignoring both me and Drury, which was a good trick in this closet. I don’t know whether Goldstone recognized me or not; we’d only seen each other that once, that night in ’39 when Estelle took me up to a third-floor Colony Club suite.

“You were seen going into the apartment building Tuesday afternoon, Sonny,” Drury said, matter-of-fact, confident as God. “Positively identified by the manager of Estelle’s building.”

Looking at nothing, Goldstone said, “She’s nuts. She’s talking nonsense.”

“The woman picked you out of our rogues’ gallery files yesterday. And today she picked you out of a five-man lineup.”

“I remember. I was there.”

“I was there, too, Sonny. I saw her pick you out; no question in her mind.”

Shrug. “A lot of people look like me.”

“You were in that apartment, Sonny.”

Shrug. “I was there before. Not Tuesday. I got twenty or thirty people who saw me elsewhere at the time of the crime.”

“Name one.”

“I’ll wait for the trial. Which there’s never going to be.”

“Did she talk, Sonny? Did she finally tell you where that million was?”

Smirk. “Why, Drury? You want to borrow some of it to buy some more fancy-ass suits?”

This is where a rubber hose comes in handy.

Drury, unfortunately, was not that kind of cop. Donahoe came in and tapped Drury on the shoulder and said, “Visitor’s here.”

He nodded toward Goldstone, saying to Donahoe, “Lock that fat bastard up.”

“You got nothing,” Goldstone said.

Drury pointed at him. “We got bloody fingerprints in that apartment. Think about that in your cell, wise guy.”

We stepped out in the hall.

“You really got fingerprints in blood?” I asked Drury.

“Yeah, from off a kitchen cabinet,” he said, walking toward his office. I followed along.

“You think Sonny’s your man?” I asked.

“Maybe. But he was right about one thing-he really does have a common sort of face. Another Nicky Dean associate, Thomas Stapleton, who we’re looking for now, could be Goldstone’s brother. Ditto for John Borgia, who was tight with Dago Mangano, one of Dean’s partners. As for the bloody fingerprints, they belong to a woman or a small man-not Sonny Goldstone. We’re in the process of pulling in no less than a dozen Colony Club male employees for questioning, and half again that many working girls associated with Estelle, plus her former roommate. And then there’s that Adonis-crowd hood Eddie McGrath being sought for us in New York. And a suspect in the North Side fur thefts we got a line on. That doesn’t touch the thirty-plus respectable gentlemen whose names and numbers were in Estelle’s little black book.”

“Jesus. Why don’t you just gather all the suspects in Chicago Stadium and turn off the lights. It works for Charlie Chan.”

He stopped just outside his office, the door of which was closed. “It gets worse. But I didn’t ask you down here just to hear Sonny Goldstone not talk. There’s somebody waiting inside here who might prove a little more interesting.”

I followed him inside his private office, which was just big enough to comfortably house his desk, a few files and a couple of chairs, one of which was occupied by a small, dark, attractive but rather frail-looking woman in her late thirties, facing his empty desk, waiting for him to fill it. He did, nodding to her, smiling.

“Mrs. Circella,” he said. “Thank you for coming in to see us voluntarily.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” Nicky Dean’s wife said sweetly, with just the faintest hint of an Italian accent. “I’m not a criminal.”

She was smartly attired, wearing a black Persian lamb coat over a navy blue suit and a wide-brimmed navy felt hat. The effect of the dark apparel was almost one of mourning. Her oval face was pale, which made her sensual red-lipsticked mouth seem startling, and next to the full red lips nestled a beauty mark, which was enough to make you wonder if Nicky Dean had been crazy or something. Even with a dish as luscious as Estelle Carey, why cheat on this stunning creature?

Greed, of course. Something Nicky and Estelle had in common.

I just stood and listened, leaning against one wall. The police steno filed in and took her inconspicuous place in the corner, as Drury said, “You don’t mind going on the record with your statement, Mrs. Circella?”

“Of course not. I’m a good citizen. I always cooperate one hundred percent with the authorities.”

If there was any sarcasm in her words, I couldn’t find it.

“I came, at your request,” she said, “although I must admit I don’t understand why you would want to question me in regard to a murder. Particularly one committed while I was out of the city.”

“Where were you on February second?” Drury asked.

She batted long lashes, innocently; her eyes were wide and brown and lovely. “I was in New York City, of course. I was staying at the Alamac Hotel. To be close to my husband in his hour of need. Nicky and I learned of her death together, you know.”

“No, I didn’t.”

She was twisting a lace hanky in her hands, nervously. “We were sitting outside of the grand jury room of the U.S. Courthouse in New York, and someone brought in a copy of a Chicago paper. The Herald-American, I think it was. There was a picture of Estelle on the front page, but at first I didn’t recognize it. I recognized the name, though. So I turned to Nicky and said, ‘Didn’t this girl work for you?’ And he looked at her picture and said, ‘Yes.’ Then he said, ‘Let me read that paper.’”

“What did he have to say?”

She lowered her eyes. “‘That poor girl,’ he said.”

“I see. Let’s start at the beginning. Did you know about Estelle Carey?”

She shook her head, no. “I didn’t know her. I knew who she was, but we never talked. I wouldn’t recognize the sound of her voice if I heard it today. Oh, I saw her from time to time-at the dice tables at the 101 Club and the Colony Club, which Nicky owned.”

Drury smiled, but his eyes and forehead frowned; this woman was either very naive or very crafty, and, either way, it was getting to him. “Mrs. Circella, I didn’t ask if you knew Estelle. I asked if you knew about her. By which I mean…”

She licked the lush lips. “I heard the rumors that she and Nicky were friendly. I could never verify them, though.”

“How hard did you try?”

She smiled slightly, regally. “I didn’t. I never tried. I’m a Catholic, Captain Drury. When I married I made a contract with God. None of us is infallible. I am not my husband’s judge. Nick has been a good husband to me for nineteen years.”

“Have you been aware of how he’s earned his living during that time?”

“Yes. Nightclubs. But they were no part of my life. I spent my time at home, with our two children. I won’t pretend I liked his business. It’s the one thing we’ve argued about. But when I’ve asked him to give up his nightclubs, his answer is always the same-that he had to do something for a living.”

Drury was drumming his fingers on the desk. “Were you aware that Nick was connected with the Stagehands Union?”

“Yes,” she nodded. “I know Mr. Browne and Willie. But Nicky resigned from the union before all the trouble started.”

“You know nothing of a million-dollar slush fund then?”

She smiled again. “The FBI and the Internal Revenue Service have that same interest. I’m sure if we had a million dollars, I’d know about it.”

“And you don’t?”

“Of course not.”

Drury sighed. “You were in show business once yourself, weren’t you, Mrs. Circella?”

She sat up; she didn’t seem so frail, all of a sudden. “I met Nicky when I was appearing in a show at the Cort Theater. Each night he’d come and listen to my singing. Then he’d send roses. Finally we met through a mutual friend. That was in 1923; we were married the following year.” The past glory faded, and she settled back into the chair, frail again. “Now I can’t even sing the baby to sleep, since I had diphtheria. My vocal cords were affected, but that doesn’t matter. When I married Nicky, I washed my hands of show business. A wife stays home and minds the children, like Nicky says.”

“Getting back to Estelle Carey…”

“I was at fault.”

Drury leaned forward. “Pardon?”

She gestured with the lacy hanky. “I have been a sick wife for a long, long time. Nick couldn’t be blamed for seeking the company of a gorgeous creature like Estelle-and she was gorgeous.”

Was as in past tense.

She went nobly on: “None of us knows what life has in store for us. We are all in God’s hands.”

Anyway, Estelle was.

She smiled bravely. “I have only pity for Estelle Carey. She missed everything that is fine in life-home, family, the respect and esteem that are every woman’s birthright.”

“No bitterness at all, then.”

She shook her head no. “I’m sorry for her from the bottom of my heart. Since this has happened, I’ve gone to church and lit candles in her memory. Her murder was a terrible, terrible thing.”

Drury smiled politely, rising, gesturing to her. “Thank you, Mrs. Circella. You’re free to go now. Thank you for stopping by.”

She rose, smiled politely back at him. Fluttered her eyelashes. Great eyes on this dame. “Certainly, Captain Drury,” she said.

“Sergeant Donahoe, in the hall there, will show you out.”

She walked by me, snugging on navy gloves, trailing a wake of expensive tasteful perfume. I closed the door behind her.

Drury sat back down. “What do you think?”

I was still standing. “Some classy broad.”

“I mean, is she on the level?”

“Yeah. In her way.”

“What do you mean, in her way?”

I shrugged. “She’s lying to herself, not to you. She’s human; she hated Estelle like any good wife would. But she prefers to affect her good-Catholic-wife, stiff-upper-lip, superiority-through-suffering stance. It gets her through the day.”

“In other words, her marriage is an arrangement she can live with.”

“I’d say so.”

“I say if she’d been in town Tuesday, we might have a real suspect.”

“No. I don’t think so. I can’t picture that sweet little thing with an icepick in her hand.”

“Sometimes women can surprise you, Nate.”

“Hell, they always surprise me. Personally, I wouldn’t mind finding a wife like that-beautiful, devoted, expects you to fool around on the side. I didn’t know they made ’em like that anymore.”

“You want a girl just like the girl that married dear old Nick.”

“Maybe. Anyway, I don’t think she’s a killer. I don’t think she even hired a killer.”

“The papers are going to love her,” Drury said, glumly cynical. “They’ll fall all over themselves for that ‘every woman’s birthright’ speech.”

“You got that right. Anything else you’d care to share with me? Or should I let you get back to your couple of hundred suspects?”

His face narrowed into anger, or at least a semblance thereof. He shook his finger at me. “Yes there is. Why didn’t you give me D’Angelo’s name?”

“Oh. So Uncle Sam finally ran him down for you, huh?”

“Yes, and we were out to see him this morning. And we discovered you’d been there Wednesday night. What gives?”

I held my hands out, palms open. “He was on Guadalcanal with me, Bill. He was in that same shell hole as Barney and me. We almost got killed together. I owed him a warning of what was ahead for him-cops, reporters. He had that much coming.”

“Being in the service together doesn’t justify withholding information…”

“Yes it does.”

He shook his head. “Go on, make me feel like a heel. You been to fight the big war and I haven’t. Make me feel like a piker.” He thrust his finger at me. “But if you’re going to be sniffing around the edges of this case, don’t you goddamn dare withhold information or evidence from me again; our friendship isn’t going to cover that, Nate.”

“Understood.”

“Now do me a favor and get the hell out of here.”

I did.

On my way out, I stopped by Sergeant Donahoe’s desk. “You got it?” I asked him.

He nodded and looked around furtively and opened a desk drawer and got out a sack.

“Two gee’s?” he whispered, holding on to the thing with both hands.

“Two gee’s,” I whispered back. “In cash. You’ll have the dough tomorrow.”

“I better,” he said, with his usual hound-dog expression, and handed me the sack.

I took it and walked down the stairs, out of Town Hall Station, in front of which the pretty, petite Mrs. Nick Circella was talking to Hal Davis and some other reporters, halfheartedly shielding her face with a gloved hand whenever a flashbulb went off.

I tucked Estelle Carey’s diary under my arm and walked by them.

That night I met Sally backstage at the Brown Derby at half past one; she stepped out of her dressing room wearing a white sweater and black slacks and a black fur coat and a white turban and looked like a million. Not Nicky Dean’s hidden million, maybe, but a treasure just the same.

“How can you look so chipper?” I asked her. “You just did four shows.”

She touched my cheek with a gentle hand, the nails of which were long and red and shiny. “I get a little sleep at night,” she said. “You ought to try it.”

“I hear it’s the latest rage,” I said.

She looped her arm in mine and we walked to the stage door. “It’ll get better for you. Wait and see.”

We’d spent Tuesday night together, in my Murphy bed, so she knew all about my sleeping trouble. She knew I would toss and turn, and then finally drop off only to quickly wake up in a cold sweat.

“I go back there when I sleep,” I told her. We were walking out on Monroe. It was cold, but not bitterly cold.

“Back there..?”

“To the Island.”

Our feet made flat, crunching sounds on the snowy sidewalk.

“Did you talk to your doctors about this?”

“Not really. I ducked the issue. I wanted to get home. I figured it would let up, once I did.”

She squeezed my arm. “Give it time. This is only your fourth day back. Say. Why don’t you see if a change of scenery helps your sleep habits? I’ve got a room at the Drake, you know.”

I grinned at her. “Surely not that plush white penthouse that fairy friend of yours sublet you, way back when.”

She laughed, sadly. “No. I don’t know what became of him, or his penthouse. It’s just a room. With a bed.”

“You talked me into it.”

We crossed Clark Street, heading for the Barney Ross Cocktail Lounge. Traffic was light for a Friday night. Of course, the bars had already been closed for forty minutes.

“Do you know what this is about?” she asked.

I shook my head no. “All I know is Ben asked me to stop by, after hours tonight. I asked him if I could bring my best girl and he said sure, and drinks would be on the house, and we’d have the place practically to ourselves.”

“Are you positive that’s what he said?” she asked.

We were approaching the entrance, from which came the muffled but distinct sounds of music, laughter, and loud conversation. The door was locked, but through the glass a swarm of beer-swilling people could be seen. We stood there basking in the glow of the blue neon that spelled out Barney’s name and the outline of boxing gloves, wondering what was going on, and finally Ben’s face appeared in the glass of the door, and he grinned like a kid looking in a Christmas window, unlocked it, and we stepped inside.

“What’s up?” I asked him, working to be heard above the din.

“Come on back!” Ben said, still grinning, waving a hand in a “follow me” manner, leading us through the jam-packed, smoky saloon. The jukebox was blaring “Blues in the Night”…mah mama done tole me…and the place was filled with guys from the West Side, older ones my age or better, except for some kids in uniform, and a lot of ’em patted me on the back and grinned and toasted me as we wound through ’em, way to go Nate, you showed them yellow bastards, Heller, that sort of thing. The rest seemed to be people from the sports world, the fight game especially, including Winch and Pian, Barney’s old managers, who I glimpsed standing across the room talking to a young kid who looked like a fighter. I hoped for his and their sake he had a punctured eardrum or flat feet or something, or he wouldn’t have much of a ring career ahead of him, not in the near future anyway. A few reporters were present, mostly sports guys, but Hal Davis was there, and he had a bruise on his jaw that looked kind of nasty. The look he gave me was nastier than the bruise.

We ended up at the farthest back booth, around which the crowd seemed thickest, and Ben called, “Step aside, step aside,” when I was in knee pants, and they did, and I’ll be damned if a gray-haired version of Barney Ross wasn’t sitting there.

He looked at me with those same goddamn puppy-dog eyes in the same old bulldog puss, only his face was less full than it used to be. Like mine. He didn’t seem to have my dark circles under the eyes, though; but his once dark hair, which when last I saw him was salt-and-pepper, was now stone gray. He was sitting next to Cathy, the brunette showgirl he got hitched to at San Diego, but immediately slid out on seeing me, leaning on a native-carved cane he’d brought back from the Island, and stood and looked at me.

“You got old,” he said, smiling.

“You’re the one with the gray hair.”

The music was still loud, who make you to sing the bloooes, but we weren’t yelling over it. We could understand each other.

“You’re gettin’ there yourself,” he said, pointing to the white around my ears. Then he pointed to his own head of gray hair. “Turned this way that night in the shell hole, just like my pa’s did in the Russian pogroms.”

“Christ,” I said, getting a good look at his uniform. “You’re a fucking sergeant!”

His grin drifted to one side of his face. “I see they promoted you, too.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Back to civilian.”

His smile turned lopsided, sad. “Shouldn’t have got you into it, should I, Nate?”

Blues in the night…

“Shut up, schmuck,” I said, and he hugged me and I hugged him back.

“Sally!” he said, to the little vision in black and white standing next to me and looking on benignly at this sorry display of sentimentality. “It’s great to see you, kid!” He hugged her next, and I bet that was more fun than hugging me. “It’s good to see you two back together again.”

“Easy,” I said. “We’re just friends.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Come on, slide in and sit with us!”

A couple of sportswriters had been sitting across from Barney and Cathy, in the booth, and they made way for us, thanking Barney, slipping their notebooks into their pockets. But Sally didn’t join us-Nat Gross, the “town tattler” on the Herald-American, stole her away; Sally smiled and shrugged, handed me her fur coat, said “Publicity’s publicity,” and was soon lost in the smoky throng.

“Reporters,” Barney said, shaking his head. “Take those sports guys, for instance. They wanted to know all about me bein’ voted boxing’s ‘man of the year,’ which is a crazy stupid thing anyway. I ain’t been in the ring since ’38! It’s supposed to be for the man who did the most for boxing last year, and they give it to me. What for?”

“Beats me,” I said. Cathy was beaming at him; they were holding hands. “When d’you get back? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

“My furlough came through early,” he said, shrugging. “I was in New York, getting that ‘man of the year’ deal, and got a chance last night to hop a military flight here. I called Ben before I left to ask him to round some people up. It was his idea to surprise everybody. Anyway, I got in this afternoon, and spent the evening with Ma and the family. Tomorrow there’s going to be a reception with Mayor Kelly and the hometown fans and all; but tonight I just wanted to see my old pals. Damn, it’s great to be home!”

“I saw that stupid picture of you,” I said, smirking, shaking my head, “kissing the ground when you got off the hospital ship at San Diego. Some guys’ll do anything to get in the papers.”

He smiled back at me tightly and waggled a finger at me. “I swore if I ever got back home, my first act would be to stoop and kiss the ground. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“And I keep my promises.”

“You always have, Barney. So promise me you aren’t going back over there.”

“That’s an easy one to keep. I won’t be going back, Nate. I got an arm and leg loaded with shrapnel. It’ll be months before I can get around without my trusty voodoo stick.”

He was referring to his carved native cane, leaned up against the side of the booth next to him. The big head of the cane was a face with mirrorlike stones for eyes. In the mouth were what seemed to be six human teeth.

“Genuine Jap teeth,” Barney said, proudly, noticing me noticing them.

“Good, Barney,” I said. “It’s nice to know you didn’t go Asiatic or anything over there.”

Cathy spoke up. “Barney’s been transferred to the Navy’s Industrial Incentive Division.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with social disease, does it?” I asked him.

He made a face. “Are you nuts?”

“Yeah, but don’t knock it-it got me out of the service.” I explained briefly about Eliot’s VD-busting role, and how he’d tried to hide behind governmental gobbledygook telling me about it. Barney got a laugh out of that.

“They’re gonna send me touring war plants,” he shrugged, seeming embarrassed, “telling the workers how the weapons and stuff they’re making are helping us lick the Japs. Fat duty. Pretty chickenshit, really.”

Cathy looked pointedly, first at him, then at me, and said. “Don’t listen to him. The brass told him this was important duty, just as important in its way as Guadalcanal. There’s a serious absenteeism at some war plants, and a half-time talk from a hero like my husband can really get those workers off their rears and breaking their necks to beat production schedules!”

She was as full of energy as all three Andrews Sisters, but there was something wrong behind all that pep. Something a little desperate. I didn’t know her very well-I’d figured Barney marrying a showgirl was trouble, him being on the rebound from Pearl, his first wife, who I’d liked very much. So I’d resented Cathy, I guess, and never really gave her a chance.

But I could see, tonight, in this smoky gin mill, she really loved the mug. I could also see something was deeply bothering her, where he was concerned.

Barney looked at her, movie-star pretty with her perfect pageboy and smart little blue dress, and it was clear he loved her too. “Cathy’s turned down two movie roles, Nate, just so she can travel around with me. This war-plant tour’s going to mean hitting five, six, sometimes seven plants a day. And we’ll be doing War-Bond rallies and blood-bank drives… I don’t mind, of course-we both know how the boys are suffering in those jungle islands, how bad they need guns and ammo.”

He’d do fine on the “Buy Bonds” circuit.

I said, “How long will you be in town, Barney?”

“It’s an extended furlough. At least a month. And this’ll be our home base, after we start the tour.” He smiled at Cathy and squeezed her hand. She had on an aluminum bracelet he’d given her fashioned from a section of a Jap Zero.

I said, “Remember D’Angelo? He’s here in town.”

Barney’s smile disappeared. “I know. I had Ben invite him here tonight, but he didn’t show.”

“He lost a leg, you know.”

“He’s one up on Watkins,” Barney said. “He lost both of his.”

“Damn. Where is he?”

“San Diego. I stopped in on him. Still in the hospital, but he’s doing pretty good.”

“I want his address.”

“Sure. Those two Army boys pulled through okay; I’ve got their addresses, too, if you want ’em.”

“You wouldn’t know if Monawk had any family, would you?”

He shook his head; his expression was morose. “I checked. No immediate family, anyway.”

I just sat there. The Mills Brothers were singing “Paper Doll” on the jukebox now, which somebody seemed to have turned down.

He said, “I’m going out to Kensington and see D’Angelo soon as I can.”

“He’s getting a raw deal in the papers, you know.”

“No, I didn’t,” Barney said, sitting up.

I explained that D’Angelo had been exchanging love letters with Estelle Carey; Barney knew of the Carey killing-apparently it had been getting some national play.

“They’re spreading his love letters all over the damn papers?” Barney said. “The lousy bastards!”

“One of the guilty parties is standing right over there.”

“Davis, you mean?”

“That’s him. The man with the purple badge of courage on his jaw.”

“How’d he get that?”

“He earned it.”

“You?”

“Once a Marine, always a Marine.”

“Fuckin’ A told,” Barney said, and slid out of the booth and, with aid of his voodoo cane, hobbled over to Davis, and started reading him off, from asshole to appetite. It was a joy to behold.

I slid out and went over and sat by Cathy. I said, “What’s the matter, honey?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re worried about that little schmuck, aren’t you?”

Her mouth tightened. Then she nodded.

“Why?” I asked.

“He’s very sick, Nate. His malaria is flaring up something awful. Chills and fever. And he’s having trouble sleeping, and when he does sleep he has nightmares.”

Familiar story.

“Hell,” I said. “He looks fine. Look at these dark circles under my eyes. He doesn’t even have one.”

My weak attempt to cheer her up had only served to bring her to the verge of tears.

“He’s having simply terrible headaches,” she said. “He’s in so much pain. I want him to put this tour off, but he won’t do it.”

“That’s why you turned down the movie roles. To be at his side if he falls apart.”

She nodded. “I’m afraid for him. I want to be with him so I can watch out for him. He really needs a good six months to recuperate, Nate, but he’s so stubborn, he just won’t hear of it.”

“He’s a scrapper, honey. I thought you knew that.”

“He thinks the world of you, Nate.”

“I think the world of him.”

“Maybe you could talk to him.”

“Maybe I can.”

She gave me a kiss on the cheek.

Then she grinned and said, “You thought I was a gold digger, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. I was wrong. About the digger part, anyway.”

Sally came over with Barney on her arm.

“I caught him bullying the press,” she said. “That’s no way to run a cocktail lounge, is it?”

“Barney, I’m ashamed of you,” I said.

Sally said, “Actually, I don’t blame you, the way that little bastard’s paper’s putting that poor soldier’s love life in print for the world to see and salivate over. How do they get ahold of that stuff, anyway? Isn’t it evidence?”

“It’s supposed to be,” I said, and didn’t give her the rest of the explanation till later, when we were in bed together, in the dark, in her small but swank room at the Drake, overlooking Lake Shore Drive and the lake that went with it.

“You mean, some police detective smuggled those letters out, and made photostatic copies, and sold them to the newspaper bidding highest? What kind of police officer would do that?”

“The Chicago kind,” I said. “Let me tell you a story.”

And I told her about the diary. How a high-hat client had hired me to outbid the papers for that juicy little page-turner. And how I’d arranged with a certain police sergeant to pay him two thousand dollars of my client’s money for the book, which was now in my possession.

“You’re kidding me,” she said. “You have Estelle Carey’s diary?”

“Well, I did.”

“What do you mean? You mean, you turned it over to your rich client?”

“Not exactly.”

“To Drury, then.”

“Not him, either.”

“What, then?”

“I burned it.”

“What?”

“I burned it. I read it this afternoon, and I realized that none of the names in it were new ones. That is, they’d already turned up in Estelle’s address book or other effects. So there were no new leads, nothing fresh that would be helpful to an investigation, in my considered opinion. But what there was was a lot of steamy descriptions by Miss Carey of her love life. Who did what to her, with what, for how long, and how long some of those things were that did those things, and, well, you get my drift.”

“Why’d she keep this diary, d’you think? Eventual blackmail?”

“No. That wasn’t her way. She was greedy, but she was honest, in her dishonest way. She was a dirty girl, in the best sense of the word. She liked sex. She liked doing it. And, judging from what I read today, she liked writing about it, after.”

“So you burned it.”

“I burned the goddamn thing. Rather than see it end up in the papers where they’d make her out an even bigger whore and ruin the lives of dozens of men and women who had the misfortune of being attracted to her.”

“Am I right in guessing that an earlier diary could well have had a Nate Heller chapter in it?”

“You might be. So, yeah, I can put myself in the place of my engaged-to-be-married high-hat client. I know all about Estelle Carey’s charms. So I burned the fucker. What do you think of that, Miss Rand?”

“That’s Helen to you,” she said, snuggling close to me. “And what I think about it is, hooray for Nate Heller, and let’s see if you can’t do something with me worth writing down, after…”

Five detectives, Donahoe among them, got transferred and censured after the scandal hit the papers. The other four cops, assigned to back up Drury’s investigation into the Carey case, were attached to the coroner’s office-“deputy coroners,” a job I’d been offered once by the late Mayor Cermak, back before he was late, as a bribe. I hadn’t taken it, for various reasons, not the least of which was the company I’d have been in: severely bent cops like Miller and Lang, owed political favors, tended to land the coroner’s plum investigative positions. But that was over now.

From now on, the coroner would be required to use county investigators, at a savings to the taxpayers of Chicago of six grand a year.

It seemed that Otto A. Bomark of Elmwood Park, the late Miss Carey’s uncle and administrator of her estate, reported many items missing, including several expensive gowns, thirty-two pairs of nylon hose (better than money these days), three dozen fancy lace handkerchiefs worth ninety bucks a dozen, a set of ladies’ golf clubs, a camera and, oh yes, photographs of Estelle that had apparently been peddled to the papers.

And then there were the persistent rumors of a diary, which had been “stolen” from Estelle’s apartment, possibly by a police officer. But as yet the memoirs of Miss Carey had failed to surface. For some reason.

All this and every other in and out of the Carey case stayed in the headlines of every paper in town for a solid week, except the Tribune, which tastefully backed off after a few days and played it inside. Then on the Tuesday after the Tuesday she was killed, Estelle got bumped out of the headlines.

JAPS GIVE UP GUADALCANAL

Letters several inches high. Impressive as all hell. But abstract. Remote. Somehow, not real to me.

Yet there it was in black and white:

New York, Feb. 9.-(AP)-Japanese imperial headquarters today announced the withdrawal of Jap forces from Guadalcanal Island in the Solomons, the Berlin radio reported in a dispatch datelined Tokyo. This constitutes the first admission from Tokyo in this war of abandonment of important territory.

Why couldn’t I make it feel real? Why couldn’t I make my face smile over this great news? Well, I couldn’t. I could only feel weary, on this clear, cool morning, even though I’d had a relatively good night’s sleep last night, in Sally’s arms, in Sally’s room at the Drake. I wouldn’t be seeing her tonight, though. She was gone, now, and she took her arms with her. Took the train to Baltimore where she was playing a split week at some nightclub or other. I’d have to try to sleep on my own, again, in the old Murphy bed. Good luck to me.

As I came up the stairs onto the fourth floor, I saw a familiar figure, although it wasn’t one I ever expected to see in the building again: my recruiting sergeant, in his pressed blue trousers and khaki shirt and campaign hat. Some of the spring was out of his step, however.

As I met him in the hall, I said, “What’s wrong, Sergeant-haven’t you heard the news?”

I showed him the headline.

“I have heard, Private. Outstanding. Outstanding.”

But his expression remained glum.

“What brings you here?” I said. “Who got a medal today?”

“No one, I’m afraid.” He looked back toward my office. “I’m glad you’re here, Private. There’s a young woman who needs you.”

I ran down the hall and threw the door open and she was sitting there, with the telegram in her hands, sitting on that couch I’d caught them humping on.

She wasn’t crying. She was dazed, like she’d been hit by a board. Prim and pretty in her white frilly blouse and navy skirt. A single rose in a vase on the desk nearby.

Telegram in her hands.

“The newspapers said we beat them,” she said, hollowly.

I sat next to her. “I know.”

“You said he’d just be mopping up.” No accusation in her voice; just an empty observation.

“I’m sorry, Gladys.”

“I don’t think I can work this morning, Mr. Heller.”

“Oh, Gladys, come here.”

And I held her in my arms and she cried into my chest. She cried and cried, heaving racking sobs, and if ever I’d written her off as a cold fish, well, to hell with me.

Sapperstein came in a few minutes later. He was still wearing the black arm band for his brother; it could do double duty, now. I called her mother in Evanston and Lou drove her home.

That left me alone in the office, wondering how Frankie Fortunato could be dead and I could be alive. Young Frankie. Old me. Shit. I wadded up the goddamn newspaper and shoved it in the wastecan. But the crumpled headline, spelling GUADNAL, seemed real enough to me now.

I sat at the desk in the inner office-my office once, Sapperstein’s for the moment-and made some calls regarding an insurance investigation in Elmhurst. It felt good to work. The mundane, which when I first got back had driven me crazy, was becoming my salvation. Day-to-day living, everyday working, was something I could get lost in. By eleven-thirty I even felt hungry. I was about to break for lunch when I heard somebody come in the outer office.

I got up from behind the desk and walked to the door and looked out at a beautiful young woman of about twenty-five in a dark fur stole and a dark slinky dress. Suspiciously slinky for lunchtime, but then when it was showing off a nice slender shape like that, who was complaining?

She stood at an angle facing Gladys’s empty desk. She had seamed nylons on; nice gams.

“My secretary’s out,” I said.

“You’re Mr. Heller?”

“That’s right.”

She smiled, and it was a lovely smile; pearly white teeth, red lipstick glistening on full lips. Her big dark eyes, under strong arching eyebrows, appraised me, amused somehow. Her black hair was pulled back behind her head, on which sat, at a jaunty angle, a black pillbox hat. If she wasn’t a showgirl once, I’d eat her hat. Or something.

“I don’t have an appointment,” she said, moving toward me slowly. Swaying a little. It seemed somewhat calculated, or is the word “calculating”? She extended one dark-gloved hand. I didn’t know whether she wanted me to kiss it or shake it or maybe crouch down and let her knight me. I settled for squeezing it.

“No appointment needed,” I said, smiling at her, wondering why she was so seductively cheerful; most women who come into a private detective agency are nervous and/or depressed, as their business is generally divorce-oriented. What the hell. I showed her into my office.

She took the chair across from the desk, but before I could get back behind it, she said, “Would you mind closing the door?”

“Nobody’s out there,” I said.

She smiled; no teeth this time. Sexy and wry. “Humor me, Mr. Heller.”

“Consider yourself humored,” I said, and shut the door, and sat behind Sapperstein’s desk.

“I’d like you to find something for me,” she said. Hands folded in her lap, in which a small black purse also resided.

“And what would that be?”

“A certain book.”

“A certain book.”

“A diary.”

Okay. I was awake now.

“A diary,” I said. “Yours?”

“No, Mr. Heller. Must we be coy?”

“You’re the one in the tight dress.”

“You’re an amusing fella.”

“In a tight dress I am. I’m a pip in spike heels.”

“Estelle Carey’s diary, Mr. Heller. A thousand dollars, and your assurance that you’ve made no copies.”

I cracked my knuckles. “You see, that’s why I never got in the blackmail business. There’s no way to prove to the customer that you’ve given ’em the only copy of the goods.”

Her smile seemed just a touch nervous, now. “We’d trust you. We hear you’re a man of your word.”

“Who told you that?”

“A certain Mr. Nitti.”

“Gee, I wonder which Mr. Nitti you might be talking about. I’m coy? Who are you, lady?”

No smile at all. “I’m someone who wants to recover Estelle Carey’s dairy. We’ve asked around. We know you have it. We know you bought it. If you’re intending to sell it to the press, we’ll top their best offer. If you’re planning blackmail, we’d advise you against it. You made an investment; I’m here to help you make a killing on it. But if you refuse, well, then, there are killings and killings, aren’t there?”

“Fuck you.”

She stood and she came around the side of Sapperstein’s desk and sat on the edge of it and hiked her dress up, legs open a hair, if you’ll pardon the expression; showgirl, all right.

“That could be arranged,” she said.

I thought about it. Sally was gone again, and this girl had long legs and everything else that went with it; and she smelled like some exotic faraway place. She was also wearing the first pair of black panties I’d seen since I got back in the States-except for one strange guy at St. E’s. I could always boff her and then tell her to go to hell. I was born in Chicago.

“What do you say, Mr. Heller?”

“Get your butt off my desk.”

She stood; she was clutching the little purse tight in one hand.

“You’re a stupid man.”

“You’re a smart bitch. So what? Go away.”

“Name your price.”

“No price! Get the fuck out of my office! If you got a gun in that little purse, I wonder if it’s as big as the one in my desk drawer.” Which from where she was standing she could see my hand was down in.

She sighed. “You’re foolish to prolong this. You won’t get a better price out of us by making us wait.”

“Who’s ‘us’? You and the Outfit?”

“Five thousand dollars.”

“Lady, I burned the goddamn thing.”

She winced. “What?”

“I burned it. I was hired by a client who didn’t want to be embarrassed by its contents, so I fucking burned it.”

“No one would be that stupid.”

“I wasn’t born that stupid, I admit. I worked at it for thirty-some years. Now get the hell out of here. Go away.”

She smiled, only it was more of a sneer. “Why would you even say such a thing? Burned it my ass.”

Her ass indeed. Part of me still wanted her; she was a real doll. And in black panties. I bet her bra was black, too. Fortunately, I was thinking with my higher-up head at the moment. Tempered by a sick heart.

“I just learned one of my business partners was killed in the war,” I said. “So I’m in a particularly lousy mood today. No mood at all to be fucking around with this chickenshit conversation. I’m about to get up from this desk, take that purse and the gun you must have in it away from you, and kick the living shit out of you. I haven’t knocked a woman’s teeth out since my second wife left me, by the way, so I’m going to really enjoy this.”

Her eyes and nostrils flared; she obviously didn’t know what to make of me, or my nonexistent wives.

But she said, “I’ll be back.”

And left.

The door in the outer office was slamming shut as I dialed Drury at his Town Hall office; caught him going out the door to get lunch.

“I’m going to describe a woman to you,” I said.

“This sounds like fun.”

“It might be fun. That’s what the male spider thinks, anyway, when he crawls in the sack with a black widow.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Get an earful of this, and then tell me if it matches up with any of your Carey case suspects.”

I described her, seamed stockings to pillbox hat, and he said, “That would be so nice to come home to…only you may be right about that black widow spider. That sounds very much like Olivia Borgia, John Borgia’s wife.”

“Borgia? That name sounds familiar. Or am I just thinking about famous women not to go out for cocktails with.”

I didn’t mention to Bill that the Borgias had turned up in the diary, albeit briefly; mentioned as friends who’d stopped over a few times. No sexual escapades. Whatever the Borgias thought was in that diary, wasn’t. Or hadn’t been. It was ashes now, after all.

“John Borgia’s an Outfit guy who’s been around for years,” Drury was saying. “Don’t you remember, I mentioned him to you as one of our Carey suspects. He looks a little like Sonny Goldstone, only no glasses. He’s about fifty. An old pal of Dago Mangano’s; connected to Nicky Dean.”

“Wasn’t there something about a kidnapping, back around ’38?”

“Yeah, only it was ’37. Some ex-pals of Dean and Mangano grabbed Olivia and held her for ransom. The guys that did it turned up dead in a ditch. Poor bastards snatched the snatch to get even with Borgia, word was-it was for revenge more than dough; these were some guys Borgia had fired at the 101 Club. Which was where Olivia worked, by the way.”

“Twenty-six girl?”

“At one time. Also a would-be nightclub singer. Why, Nate? What’s this all about?”

“She was just in my office.”

“What? What for?”

“She wanted to know if I had Estelle Carey’s diary.”

“You? Why would she think you had Estelle Carey’s diary?”

“Yeah, it’s nuts, isn’t it? I told her I didn’t have the thing, and she went away. Only she didn’t believe me. She said she’d be back.”

“I didn’t even know she was in town. We’ve been looking for her, and her husband, from the start. I appreciate the tip, Nate. Every radio car in town will be alerted.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“If they did this, Nate, if they were the last guests your friend Estelle entertained, then there can be no doubt it was an Outfit hit.”

“Meaning you’ll expect me to be a good citizen and testify against Nitti.”

“That’s right. Anything else you need? I got lunch to catch.”

“Actually, there is. Some bad news. Frankie Fortunato was killed in action.”

“Aw, shit.”

“Guadalcanal.”

“Hell, the papers say we ran those slant-eyed bastards right off that island!”

“We did. It just wasn’t free.”

We both hung up, and then for a while I sat there staring out the window, where the service flag with Frankie’s star hung.

Then around one, Olivia Borgia’s promise to return lingering in my brain like a bad taste, I went next door and got the nine millimeter out of my bottom desk drawer and the shoulder holster too and took my coat off and slung it on. Guadalcanal was over. But there were always battles to be fought.

Then I walked around the corner to Binyon’s and had the finnan haddie. Meatless Tuesday.

I saw my father. He was sitting at the kitchen table with my gun in his hand. He lifted it to his head and I said, “Stop!”

Then Barney’s hand was over my mouth; he was shaking, wildeyed. His.45 was in his other hand. We were still under the shelter half, in the shell hole. D’Angelo was awake, 45 in hand; the Army boys had.45s in hand too.

“You passed out,” Barney whispered. “Be quiet. Japs.”

Twigs snapping, brush rustling.

Barney took his hand off my mouth; I got the.45 off my hip.

And Monawk woke, in pain, and screamed.

And I shot him. I shot him! Be quiet, you’re gonna get us killed, but he didn’t die, he just looked down at the holes my.45 punched in his chest and his face contorted and he reached for the.45 on his hip and he started firing at me and I sat up in bed, in a cold sweat.

Not screaming, like Monawk. I’d done that a few times, sure. But usually it was like now: jerk awake, dripping with sweat.

I glanced at my watch. A few minutes after 2:00 A.M. I flipped the sheets and blankets off and, wooden floor cold on my feet, padded over to my desk. The nine millimeter in my shoulder holster lay on top of it. The rum bottle was still in the bottom drawer, but almost empty. I sat and, slowly, finished it off, drinking from the bottle, looking out the window at the El. Sitting in the orangeish glow of the neon. Quietly shaking.

Well, this was a new twist. I’d been back in the shell hole many, many times in my dreams. But this time it had been different.

Usually I was just generally back there, mortars landing, machine guns zinging, and the people, why the people weren’t necessarily D’Angelo and Monawk and Barney and the Army boys and Watkins and Whitey and me. No, it could be Eliot and Bill and Lou and Frankie and the guy behind the counter in the deli downstairs. Or anybody I knew, or ever knew.

This time, though, it had followed the script. This time it mirrored what had really happened, right up to the moment I fired the.45 at Monawk…

Had I done that? Had I really done that? Fired at Monawk, to shut him up? To stop the screaming that was telling the Japs right where to find us?

My dream seemed to be saying so, but awake, I couldn’t remember doing it. If the door to the answer had cracked open during my sleep, it had slammed shut again, upon waking.

I couldn’t allow that. I forced myself back there, back to the dream and the event it was trying to tell me about, and then I remembered: in the dream Monawk screamed and I fired at him. In life Barney had clasped his hand over Monawk’s mouth, but it had been too late, a machine gun opened up and D’Angelo dove for Monawk, as if to strangle him, only Barney stopped him.

“Bastard’s gonna get us killed,” D’Angelo had said.

Mortar shells, then, bullets zinging.

Beyond that point, I couldn’t seem to go.

But I knew one thing.

“I didn’t kill him,” I said aloud. I put the empty rum bottle in the wastebasket. I didn’t know why, exactly, but I’d come away from the dream with the very real feeling, even the certain knowledge, that I had not killed Monawk.

Maybe now I could sleep. I padded back over to the Murphy bed, crawled under the covers and was sliding into sleep when I heard the sound from next door.

Your classic bump in the night.

Funny. The El can go rumbling by and I don’t even notice it. The slightest other half-imagined sound and I think the Japs invaded. What the hell. I rolled over and forgot about it and then it bumped again.

I sat up in bed. No cold sweat, this time. Silently as I could, I eased out and went over to the desk and slipped my nine millimeter out of the holster. I listened at the wall, heard muffled sounds, no voices. I put my pants on, and went quietly out into the hall, barefoot, bare-chested, gun in hand.

A light was on in my office. Outer office. Gladys’s goose-neck desk lamp, from the look of it. It enabled me to see, through the pebbled glass, the shadow moving around in there.

Frankie Fortunato’s voice whispered in my ear: it worked before, and I slammed the side of the gun barrel against the pebbled glass and it shattered and I stuck my gun in hand through the opening and there was the beautiful Olivia Borgia, in slacks and sweater and a sporty little beret and a.38 in one hand, the outer office turned topsy-turvy, file drawers emptied, desk drawers stacked, and now cushions of the couch about to be explored. Her lip curled into a sneer and she took a shot at me; the sound of it cracked open the night and I felt it whiz past and shatter the abortionist’s glass and I squeezed the trigger and sent one back at her. It knocked her back, onto the couch, with a yelp; caught her in the shoulder.

“Get comfy right there,” I told her. I stayed out in the hall, pointing my gun at her through the gaping, spiky hole in the window.

She’d dropped the.38, on the impact of my round; the revolver was on the floor, just out of her reach. She sat clutching her shoulder, blood dripping through the cracks of her fingers.

When she spoke, it was almost a snarl.

“Where’s the diary?” she said.

“Why do you want it?”

Sneering smile. “Why should I tell you?”

“Because your gun is on the floor and mine is pointed at your sweet head.”

Arching eyebrow. “You want a piece, then?”

“Sure. I want a piece.”

Blood oozing. “She had a million dollars hidden away. More than a million.”

“And the diary has the answer to where she stowed it?”

Curt nod. “The diary has the answer, yes.”

“I read it, lady. I didn’t see any answer.”

Wide eyes. “It’s there! It’s in the diary.”

“I don’t think so.”

Narrowed eyes. “If not words, then a key, perhaps-taped inside. Something!”

“Why are you so sure?”

Flaring nostrils. “She told us it was.”

“When?”

Sneering smile. “Before she died.”

The El went clattering by. I had to shout to be heard over it; but I’d have shouted anyway: “You killed her! Goddamn. You little bitch. You and your husband killed her! Where is the bastard?”

Gunfire gave me my answer, four fast blasts that barely rose above the El’s rumble, flaming my way from the doorway of my inner office, and, still out in the hall, I hit the deck, glass raining over me.

I stood, meaning to fire again, but he’d ducked back in my office.

His wife hadn’t got that far, though. Bleeding shattered shoulder or not, she had gone for the.38 on the floor; her bloody hand was on the gun when I put a bullet in her brain.

Then I dove through the yawning glass-toothed hole where the window used to be, landed on the couch, some pieces of stray glass crunching beneath me, El in my ears, and he was in the doorway, big automatic in hand, 45 maybe, a big man in heavy sweater and trousers, and he did look like Sonny Goldstone, only it wasn’t Sonny, it was her husband, John Borgia, whose pockmarked fleshy face fell when he saw his pretty wife on the floor, her head cracked like a bloody egg.

“You killed her!” he said, outraged, white showing all the way round his eyes, and he turned to fire at me, but I was off the couch and doing the one thing he hadn’t counted on, moving right toward him, and I was on him before he could even react and my gun was shoved in his gut, firing, firing, and I said, “Who the fuck do you people think you’re dealing with,” and fired again, “who the fuck do you people think you’re dealing with,” and fired again.

He fell back, on the floor, landed hard, flopping, thudding, five scorched puckered holes in his gut and chest with five slow red leaks, eyes still open and looking up at nothing. The wastebasket, which he’d knocked over as he fell, spilled next to him, the wadded-up paper saying, GUADNAL.

I stood over him and looked down and said, “Who the fuck did you people think you were dealing with?”

But he didn’t answer. Neither did she.

I walked out of there, stepping over what used to be Olivia Borgia, a greedy one-time 26 girl who was so much like Estelle Carey it killed them both, walking carefully around the glass shards, as I’d already cut my bare feet in several places, and went back in my office.

I felt strangely calm. The El was as silent as the Borgias, now. I sat there at my desk, soaking my bleeding feet with a cool damp cloth, sorting out my options, wondering if calling Drury was the thing to do. Two dead people in my office. Dead by me. Including a woman. I’d killed a woman. I didn’t care.

I just thought of Estelle’s burned, tortured body and didn’t fucking care.

Why hadn’t they found the diary themselves, that awful afternoon? They’d tossed the place, after all. But they’d missed the baseboard hideaway Donahoe had later found, he was a detective, our trusty basset-hound Donahoe, and, besides, Estelle hadn’t mentioned the book till right before she died, meaning after one of them had splashed whiskey over her and smashed the bottle on the floor nearby to frighten her and lit a match and held it over her to frighten her some more, and maybe then she said it, maybe then she said, it’s in my diary-I’ll get it for you, because Donahoe had after all found a gun in that baseboard hideaway as well, only somebody fumbled the match and the housecoat caught fire, and she was aflame, and she was screaming and there was no more talk of diaries as the fire spread from her to the whiskey to the walls, and the place was starting to burn, smoke was starting to fill the place, and they had no choice but to make a run for it, Borgia grabbing a couple of furs to make it look like a robbery.

That was then. What of now? Had anyone heard the shots over the El’s rumble? The building was empty, but for me and those I’d killed. It was the middle of the night. Ten minutes had passed, easily, and no one had come to see what was the matter. No one rushing in. No sirens cutting the night. No nothing.

I dialed a number.

After many rings, a gravelly male voice said, “Yeah?”

“This is Heller. Tell Campagna to call me, right away.”

Pause. Then: “It’s real late.”

“It’s later than you think. Tell him.”

“I’ll ask him.”

“Tell him.”

Three minutes later the phone rang.

“Heller?”

“Hiya, Louie.”

“Are you crazy, Heller?”

“Sure. If I wasn’t, I’d still be in the service, shooting people. But I’m finding it easy enough to keep in practice here at home.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about John and Olivia Borgia.”

Silence.

“They’re dead in my office, Louie. I killed ’em.”

“Jesus H. Christ.”

“They were rifling the place, looking for Estelle Carey’s diary. They didn’t believe me when I said I burned it.”

“You what?”

“I burned it, Louie. Spread the word. The diary is ashes. To ashes. If the secret to her buried treasure was in those pages, it’s going to be a well-kept one. Should I call the cops on this? It’s not going to do much for business, my killing people in the office. You want a chance to clean up after yourself?”

Silence.

“Borgia was Outfit, Louie. You want to clean up after yourself?”

Silence.

“The Borgias killed Estelle Carey, Louie, but then you know that, right? It was an Outfit hit from word go, just like everybody’s been telling me. But I got some outdated notion that Nitti don’t work like that. Well, times change, and people change. Take for instance, this is the very first time I killed a woman in my office.”

“I want you to go someplace.”

“Where, Louie?”

“What’s the closest hotel?”

“Morrison, I guess. They don’t have any rooms.”

“They’ll have one for you by the time you walk over there. Don’t come back to your office before seven.”

The phone clicked in my ear; Louie didn’t want to talk to me anymore.

When I got to the office at nine, a fiftyish guy in coveralls was measuring to put in new glass. All the broken glass had been swept up and removed. Bullets had been dug out of woodwork and puttied and touched up with paint.

“I didn’t send for you,” I said to the guy in coveralls.

“It’s all taken care of,” he said. He pointed with a thumb over to the doctor’s office across the way, where the waiting room and receptionist could be viewed through where opaque glass used to be. “That’s being taken care of, too.”

The office had been tidied up. File cabinets in order; drawers in desks. No dead bodies on the floor. No bloodstains. Lou Sapperstein was standing in the inner office, looking around, puzzled.

“What happened here, last night?” he said. “The glass is broken, everything’s just a little out of place…and it smells like disinfectant, and something else…what? Paint? Did you have somebody in to clean the place up?”

“Elves,” I said. “Tiny Sicilian elves. Lou, I want you to get your things together at the end of the day. I’ll be moving back into my office. And I made arrangements over at the Morrison for a room there, till I can find an apartment. You can have the whole big office next door to yourself, till we find somebody to take Frankie’s place.”

Lou seemed confused, but he said, “Sure. You’re the boss.”

I went next door and sat at my desk. I’d slept pretty good at the Morrison. Restless, but no dreams about shell holes. Or office shoot-outs, either.

Midmorning, the phone rang.

“A-1 Detective Agency.”

“Heller?”

“Louie.”

“No problems, I trust?”

“No. Thanks for the new glass.”

“You’re welcome. Frank said to tell you he appreciated the opportunity to clean up that mess.”

“Well, it was Frank’s mess, after all.”

“No. It wasn’t. They were Outfit, but Frank didn’t send ’em to that apartment on Addison Street. And he didn’t send ’em to your place, neither.”

“Sure.”

“You don’t have to believe it.”

“That’s a relief.”

“Frank says he owes you one.”

“Frank owes me nothing!”

“He says he owes you one. And he’s going to pay it right now. Your boxer pal, Ross?”

What in hell could Frank Nitti have to do with Barney?

“What about him?”

“He’s got a monkey on his back.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s buying morphine from street dealers.”

“What?”

“They must’ve give it to him overseas to kill the pain and he got a taste for it. He’s got a seventy-buck-a-week habit, and it’s gonna get more expensive in a lot of ways as the days go by. Capeesh?”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything.

“Frank just thought you might want to know,” Campagna said.

And hung up.

On March 18, a Thursday, the federal grand jury in New York returned indictments against Nitti, Campagna, Ricca and six other top Outfit figures. It didn’t hit the Chicago papers till the next morning-I, however, got a preview that very afternoon.

I was sleeping on the couch in my inner office under the photos of Sally and another actress from my past; such cat naps were becoming a way of life for me. Gradually, I’d been sleeping better. The shell hole dreams were easing up. Subsiding. But I’d as yet to have a good, full night’s sleep, so once or twice a day, I flopped out here on the couch and snoozed.

And was usually awakened by the phone on my desk ringing, like it was doing right now, and I stumbled over and fumbled for it and the long-distance operator asked for Nate Heller, and I said “Speaking,” thickly, yawning, and then somebody else was speaking-U.S. Attorney Mathias Correa, who was spearheading the investigation into the Outfit’s Hollywood “extortion” racket.

He was calling from New York; he told me about the indictments that had just been handed down against Nitti and the others, and said, “Mr. Heller, I understand your reluctance to come forward. But we feel your testimony may be valuable. You are a former police officer. You are a decorated soldier-a war hero-and one of the few ‘civilians’ known to have had considerable contact with Frank Nitti.”

“Make up your mind-am I soldier or a civilian?”

“I think you get my meaning. We have Willie Bioff and George Browne’s testimony and, in a limited manner at least, Nick Circella’s. But both Bioff and Browne lied on the witness stands in their own trials. Their credibility may be called, justly, into question. You, on the other hand, are the kind of outside, reliable, corroborating witness we need.”

“I made my feelings clear to your emissaries.”

“I’m grateful to Eliot Ness and Bill Drury for paving the way for me. But I’m serving notice on you, Mr. Heller. You’re going to testify in this trial. You’re being subpoenaed. Whether you choose to perjure yourself on the witness stand or not is, of course, your decision. Good afternoon.”

So I called Campagna-or, rather, I called the number Campagna gave me and told the guy I needed to talk to Campagna, and a call from Little New York followed within half an hour.

“They’re going to subpoena me,” I said.

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“I just wanted Frank to know.”

“Okay,” Campagna said, and hung up.

I got back to work on some insurance matters and at a few minutes after four Campagna called again.

“Frank wants to see you,” he said.

“Is that wise? Surely the FBI is keeping him under tight surveillance. That would just link us further. It plays right into Correa’s hands.”

“I know. I agree with you. But Frank wants to see you.”

“Louie, I’m not in the mood to go swimming forever.”

“No Chicago River, no cement shoes. He wants to see you tonight, at his house.”

“His house?”

There was a shrug in his voice. “Show of good faith.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Don’t come heeled.”

“Don’t send me home wounded.”

So around seven that night I walked to a parking garage near Dearborn Station and picked up my ’32 Auburn. I’d only gotten the sporty little number back out of storage last week; while I was overseas, I’d kept it in a client’s garage in Evanston, in lieu of payment for a divorce case. I had the top up-there was still snow on the ground-and my C sticker in the window, and the old buggy was riding well, though I was in no frame of mind to enjoy it. I was on my way to see Frank Nitti, to share a quiet little chat with him in his suburban Riverside home. I turned South on Michigan Avenue, at the Hotel Lexington, Capone’s old headquarters, and headed west on 22nd Street, a.k.a. Cermak Road. I drove through Chinatown. After a while I was within a few blocks of where O’Hare had been gunned down, then crossed through the south end of my old neighborhood, South Lawndale, then Cicero, not far from Sportsman’s Park, and across to Berwyn, catching Riverside Drive to Riverside itself. The ride was like having my life pass before my eyes.

I didn’t want to park the Auburn in front of Nitti’s house, so I left it two blocks up, by a small park, and walked down. It was a cool, clear night, and Nitti’s quiet, quietly wealthy little suburban neighborhood, with its large lawns and oversize bungalows and driveways and backyard swing sets, looked as unreal and ideal as a street in an Andy Hardy movie. As American as apple pie and twice as wholesome. The smell of cordite was not in the air.

712 Shelbourne Road. A relatively modest brown brick house on the corner, story-and-a-half high, with crisp white woodwork. Car parked in the driveway, ’42 Ford sedan, black. A few lights on in the downstairs windows. Shrubs hugging the house; average-size lawn, house well back from the street; postage-stamp patio. Somewhere a dog was barking. Frank Nitti lived here.

Cars parked across the way, turning the narrow street into a one-lane. I wondered if eyes were watching me from those cars. Bodyguard eyes? Federal eyes?

Yes, I was nervous. This was much worse than meeting Nitti in a suite at the Bismarck. His suburban home in Riverside? Wrong. This was wrong.

But, just the same, I walked up the sidewalk, which wound gently up the sloping lawn, to the white front door, over which a light was on. I rang the bell.

The door cracked open, and a sliver of dark attractive female face looked out at me.

Then she was standing in the doorway wearing a Mona Lisa smile and a simple blue dress with a gold broach. A tall, distinctive-looking woman with cold smart dark eyes, wide dark-lipsticked mouth, Roman nose, ironic arching brows. She wasn’t as attractive as she’d been a few years ago, pushing forty now and looking it, and she’d always had a certain hardness, but she was still a handsome woman.

“You’re Toni Cavaretta,” I said. Blurted.

“Mrs. Frank Nitti, now,” she said, in her smoky, throaty manner. “Come in, Mr. Heller.”

I stepped inside and Mrs. Frank Nitti, the former Antoinette Cavaretta, the former secretary of the formerly living E. J. O’Hare, took my coat.

“I’ll just hang this up for you.”

She did so, in the closet I was directly facing, and then I followed her around the corner, out of the vestibule.

“Frank just stepped out for a walk,” she said. “I’ll see if I can catch him.”

Then she went out the way I’d come in and left me there.

To my left was a door; directly before me, stairs; to my right, a big open living room, beyond which the dining room could be seen, the kitchen presumably connecting off that. The furnishings seemed new, and expensive, the woodwork dark and shiny; everything was greens and browns, plush overstuffed sofas, dark wood furniture, very masculine, very soothing, a tastefully decorated room. A little boy eight or nine was sprawled on the floor in the midst of it, reading a comic book. He looked up at me through clear-rim glasses. Slight, serious-looking, dark-haired kid; I could see Nitti in his face.

“Hi, mister,” he said. “Are you a friend of my daddy’s?”

I went over and sat on the sofa near him. “That’s right,” I said. “How old are you, son?”

“Nine.” He closed the cover of the comic book; it said CRIME DOES NOT PAY. He sat Indian-style. “Were you in the war?”

“Yes I was. How did you know?”

He pointed at me. It took me a second to realize he was pointing at the lapel of my suitcoat. His pale blue eyes were alert, his expression serious. “I saw your pin. I got an uncle who has one of those. It’s called a Ruptured Duck.”

“That’s right.”

“I want to be a Marine when I grow up. Maybe a Marine flier. My daddy has a friend who was a Marine.”

“Really.” I nodded toward his comic book. “Do you like to read?”

“Yes, but I like skating better. Daddy says the weather’s going to get better soon and I can get my skates out.”

Mrs. Nitti came back in, shrugging, smiling, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t catch up with him. He must’ve forgotten what time you were coming by. He often takes an evening walk, and with these winding streets, who knows where he is or how long he’ll be?”

I was standing, now, and said, “Well, uh-I could go and come another time, at your husband’s convenience…”

“Nonsense. Why don’t you step into his study and relax. Can I get you a cup of coffee, or some wine?”

“No thanks.”

I followed her through the doorway by the stairs into a small unpretentious study-lots of dark wood, a desk, a black leather couch, built-in-the-wall bookcase.

She gestured to the couch and said, “Why don’t you sit down? When Frank gets back, I’ll tell him you’re here. Just relax.”

She went back out into the living room, where I could hear her say to the boy, “Up to your room, Joseph, and do some studying before bed.”

Toni Cavaretta seemed to be as perfect a housewife as she’d been an executive secretary. And as perfect a mother, too. Well, stepmother, actually. The boy was Nitti’s only son, only child, by his first wife, Anna. Whose picture, in fact, was on his desk in a gilt frame: a beautiful Italian madonna with a glowing expression. Nitti had worshipped her, it was said. Yet here he was, little over a year after his beloved Anna’s death, married to Toni Cavaretta.

It came rushing back, that business with O’Hare. She’d been Nitti’s “man” all the way, keeping tabs on E. J., probably helping set him up for the one-way ride I’d almost taken with him. Planting that note about the feds in his pocket. I’d only checked up on her once, after the hit. I’d asked Stege, probably in ’41 sometime, what had become of her. He said she was managing an Outfit racetrack in Florida-Miami Beach to be precise-a dogtrack that had previously been looked after by O’Hare. Seemed she had stock in the Florida track, as well as Sportsman’s Park; and some people said she and Nitti were like this. And he held his fingers up in a crossed fashion.

The notion of Nitti having a mistress had seemed crazy to me-everybody knew he kept Anna on a pedestal, that he loved his son, that he was a devoted family man-and I’d dismissed Stege’s implication as hogwash. But I also knew Nitti kept a separate home in Miami Beach. And men in his position-particularly men who kept their wives on pedestals-often had side dishes, somebody warm and female and closer to the ground.

Now here he was, beloved Anna gone. Here he was, married to Toni Cavaretta. In his suite at the Bismarck, that time, back in ’39, days after O’Hare’s murder, I’d heard a woman’s voice…

I slapped myself. Knock it off, Heller! These were dangerous speculations to make. They seemed especially dangerous to be making, sitting in Nitti’s own study, even if I was keeping them confined to my mind.

I got up and looked at the books on his shelves. A lot of leatherbound classics, whether read or not I couldn’t say. Some less fancily bound nonfiction books, on accounting mostly, and a couple of books about Napoleon, seemed well read.

I was tired. I sat on the couch again and looked at my watch-I’d been here half an hour already-and tried to fight my heavy eyelids. At some point, I lost the fight, because sounds in the other room suddenly jarred me awake.

I was stretched out on the couch. The room was dark. Why I’d been left to sleep like that, I didn’t know; why the light had been shut off, I couldn’t say. How long I’d been asleep was a mystery, too. The room was so dark I couldn’t read my watch. But if the film in my mouth was any indication, I’d slept for hours.

Conversation had woken me; and muffled conversation was still quite audible, even though I was sitting on the couch and the door to the living room was across the study from me. Occasionally the pitch of the conversation peaked-in anger? One of those peaks had been loud enough to wake me, anyway.

I got up. Slipped out of my shoes. Crept across the study to the door. I didn’t dare crack it open. But I did dare place my ear up to it.

“Frank,” a harsh voice was saying, “you brought Browne and Bioff to us. You masterminded this whole thing-and it went sour.”

“You didn’t complain at the time, Paul.”

Paul?

Jesus Christ-Paul Ricca. The Waiter. The number-two man. Capone had his Nitti; and Nitti had his Ricca.

And I didn’t have a gun.

“There is no point in all of us going down,” Ricca said. “Remember how Al took the fall for us, and went on trial alone? Well, that’s the way we ought to do it now.”

“It ain’t the same situation, Paul.” Nitti’s voice was recognizably his; but something was different. Something had changed.

The strength was gone.

“Frank,” Ricca said, “you can plead guilty and we’ll take care of things till you get out.”

Right. Like Nitti took care of things for Capone.

“This is not that kind of case,” Nitti said, voice firmer now. “This is a conspiracy indictment. Nobody can take the fall for the rest of us in this one. We all have to stick together and try to beat it.”

Ricca began swearing in Sicilian; so did Nitti. And it began to build. Other voices, in English, in Sicilian, were trying to settle the two of them down. I thought I heard Campagna.

I knelt down. Looked through the keyhole. Just like a divorce case.

I could get a glimpse of them, sitting around the living room in their brown suits, just a bunch of businessmen talking-only among them were Frank Nitti, Paul Ricca, Louis Campagna, Ralph Capone and others whose faces I couldn’t see, but, if I could, whose names would no doubt chill me equally to the bone.

Ricca, a thin pockmarked man with high cheekbones, was pale, panting. He pointed at Nitti, as they stood facing each other, Ricca much taller than the little barber.

“Frank, you’re asking for it.”

Five simple words.

Dead silence followed. Nitti was looking to the other men, to their faces. It seemed to me, from my limited vantage point, that all save Campagna were avoiding his eyes. And even Louie wasn’t speaking up for him.

The lack of support meant one thing: Ricca had deposed Nitti. And without the intricate, dangerous chesslike moves Nitti had used to maneuver Capone off the throne and into the pen. Ricca had, through strength of character alone, through sheer will, toppled Nitti.

And Nitti knew it.

He walked toward the front door.

I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it: he opened that door. Cold March air made itself heard.

He walked into my keyhole view again.

And, his back to me, gestured toward the outside.

The men looked at each other, slowly, and rose.

I moved away from the door and went back to the couch and sat, trembling. I knew what this meant. Nitti’s wordless invitation for his guests to leave was a breach of the Sicilian peasant rules of hospitality they’d all been reared under. It was his way of turning his back on them. It was his way of expressing contempt. Defying them. Ricca, especially.

And Ricca’s words-Frank, you’re asking for it-were a virtual death sentence.

I could hear them out there, shuffling around, getting on their coats and hats, no one saying anything.

Although, finally, when they all seemed to be gone, I thought I heard Campagna’s voice. Saying simply, “Frank…”

Clearly, I heard Nitti, who must’ve been standing just outside the study door, say, “Good night, Louie.”

I slipped my shoes back on, stretched out on the couch and closed my eyes. Wondering if I’d ever open them again.

The light above me went on; light glowed redly through my lids. I “slept” on.

A hand gently shook my shoulder.

“Heller,” Nitti said, softly. “Heller, wake up.”

I sat slowly up, sort of groaning, rubbing my face with the heel of a hand, saying, “Excuse me, Frank-oh, hell. Aw. I don’t know what happened. Must’ve dozed off.”

“I know you did. I was out for a walk, and I got back and you were sound asleep. Snoring away. I couldn’t bring myself to wake you. So I just let you sleep.”

He sat next to me. He looked very old; very skinny; very tired. Cheeks almost sunken. His dark eyes didn’t have their usual hardness. His hair was the real tip-off, though: the little barber needed a haircut.

“I didn’t see the harm,” he said, “letting you sleep. Then, to be honest with you, I forgot all about ya.” He gestured out toward the other room. “I had some business come up all of a sudden, and I sent my wife and boy over to the Rongas, and she said now don’t forget about Heller, and I went and forgot about you, anyway.” He laughed. For a man who minutes ago had heard his own death sentence, and who had in return thrown down the gauntlet to Ricca and the whole goddamn Outfit, he was spookily calm.