True Detective

"Enough," Eliot said, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. "Brother. You've really hit the big time, haven't you, Nate?"

"The biggest," I said, filing my shorts away. "Everybody in town is trying to hire me or bribe me. shut me up or make me talk. I'm popular."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah. Did you know General Dawes and me were thick?"

"Yeah?"

I held up crossed fingers. "Like this. Guess which one I am. He wants me to tell the truth on the stand, when Nitti's trial comes up."

Eliot thought about that. "He wants you to sell Cermak out, you mean?"

"Yowsah."

Eliot took his hat off and tossed it on the desk. "Well, Cermak is making the wrong kind of headlines."

I nodded. "Don't want to scare potential fairgoers off, you know."

"The fair is Dawes' baby, remember. Him and his brother Rufus, who's the president of the thing. You mean to say, he came right out and asked you…"

"Not really. My uncle Louis had to explain it to me. Dawes is a walking garden of platitudes; I needed a translator."

Eliot smiled "I've met him a couple of times. Didn't make much of an impression on me."

"Don't you know he's the guy who got Capone?"

"What? What am I, chopped liver?"

"You were Dawes' tool, my boy."

"Sure," he said, his smile turning to a smirk.

I decided not to pursue the issue; why burst his bubble?

I had asked him to come over here- it wasn't much of a walk from the Transportation Building- to show him my office and to allow him to speak freely, without the other prohibition agents at his office overhearing. I wanted to find out about the Nydick inquest, at which he'd been a witness this morning.

"It was a circus," Eliot said, disgustedly. "The second inquest this week where the coroner sat in judgment of the actions of police officers who, officially, are deputy coroners. Sometimes I think the reason justice is blind is 'cause it's looking the other way."

They had started out at the morgue and moved to the Park Row Hotel where the crime was reenacted- theoretically for the sake of the jurors, but really for the press photogs. (Eliot said this with an uncharacteristic disdain for publicity; on the other hand, this publicity wasn't his.) Mrs. Nydick's attorney had charged that the shooting was unjustified, and that no revolver had been in the dresser drawer before the hoodlum squad entered to arrest her (now-deceased) husband. Miller had to fend off the attorney's questions about possible animosity toward Nydick, but the coroner put an early end to that, saying that if the attorney was soins to be belligerent. he wouldn't be allowed to cross-examine witnesses at all. Miller was exonerated.

"What do you make of it?" I asked.

Eliot shrugged elaborately. "I think the wife set her husband up for her boyfriend Miller to collar, but Miller, on his own initiative, decided to take the opportunity to bump the husband off. And I think the wife took that less than kindly, and sicced her attorney on Miller."

"She might've done that just to make herself look good." I said. "It makes the cover-up look more legit to have some of these questions raised and quashed, you know."

He nodded. "You may be right. And she may not be his girl friend at all. We're just guessing. At any rate. Miller planted the gun."

"If all the guns Lang and Miller planted bore fruit," I said, "we'd be picking bullets off trees."

"Ain't it the truth. The other detectives seemed embarrassed, testifying. I think they felt taken, like you did."

"You don't think they were in on it?"

"Naw. I think Miller planted the thirty-two in the drawer with his back to them. That's my guess, anyway."

"It's as good as any." I admitted.

Eliot looked around. "It's a nice office. Bigger than mine."

"Well, you don't live in yours."

"True. Why'd you give up your room at the Adams?"

"It was getting old. living in the lap of luxury." I explained my night-watchman arrangement with Barney.

"Sounds like a good deal for both of you." Eliot nodded. He reached into an inside pocket. "Say, I've already talked to this guy, and he may have something for you." He handed me a slip of paper across the desk.

I read it aloud. "Retail Credit Company." There was a name and a number, too, and an address in the Jackson Park area.

"Real glamorous work," he said. "All the pavement-pounding a man could hope for. Checking credit ratings, investigating insurance claims. You know- exciting stuff."

"I appreciate this, Eliot."

He shrugged. "What about Sunday?"

"What about it?"

"Christmas. Nate. How about having Christmas dinner with Betty and me."

"Yeah, well that's awful nice of you, but I don't celebrate Christmas, particularly. I'm sort of a Jew, remember?"

"You don't, so why should I? Come on over. We got a huge turkey and only a handful of relatives. Plenty of room for an honest private detective."

"And for me?"

"And for you. And why not bring Janey?"

"Can I call you later? If Janey's already got something planned, then…"

"I understand." He stood; pointed a finger at me. "But if she doesn't, you better both be there."

"Okay. You rushing off. already?"

"I got a press conference this afternoon. We're announcing raids for New Year's Eve. Assuring the public that we're arresting only owners, not patrons."

"It'll probably be legal next New Year's, you know."

"I know, and it's fine with me. But till then. I got to at least go through the motions." He had his hat and coat on now. "Let me know if you change your mind about Christmas."

"I will."

"Good. I got a real nice lump of coal for you, tied with a big red ribbon."

The office was a little cold; the radiator behind my desk seemed largely ornamental. "I think that may come in handy."

"It might," he smiled, waved, went out.

I called the Retail Credit Company in Jackson Park and arranged with the manager, a Mr. Anderson, for a meeting next Monday afternoon. He was friendly, glad to hear from me, expected my call Eliot had really laid some groundwork for me, and that was a nice Christmas present; even better than the coal he'd promised. Then I called the phone company to see if my agency could still get into the '33 phone book, and made it just under the wire. A-1 Detective Agency, Nathan Heller, President. The A-1 should get me listed first in the Yellow Pages, and that alone could bring in some clients.

And I called the other agencies in town to let them know I was in business, and that I could handle their overflow at a reasonable rate: ten dollars a day and expenses. That appealed to a couple of the medium-size agencies, where there were three or four operatives, and occasionally the work load did get too big for them to handle. My rate for the general public would be twenty dollars a day plus expenses, though I didn't plan to post it; better to size a client up and slide the rate up or down, as traffic would allow- in times like these, down was where most of the sliding would be, I supposed.

This took the better part of the afternoon, and at four I got a small suitcase with some toiletries, a change of underwear, a clean shirt, and my relatively clean navy pinstripe, and went over to the Morrison Hotel, to the traveler's lounge, where I showered and shaved, leaving the suitcase and dirty clothes in a locker, before heading over to City Hall to meet Janey.

By that time it was five and already getting dark; the neons gave off a funny, halfhearted glow in the dusk, an effect amplified by the mist, which was what the cloudy day had decided to give us instead of rain or snow. Christmas was looking to be gloomy and wet, not cheery and white. The streets were filled with rush-hour traffic as I walked the concrete canyons to City Hall; once there, I stood within the high marble lobby waiting for Janey, watching city employees get out of there as fast as possible- all of 'em except Janey, of course.

Janey was, like a lot of City Hall employees, a patronage worker. She worked in the county treasurer's office as a clerk, though she did a great deal of secretarial work for the man who ran the office, Dick Daley. The county treasurer was an obese drunken gambler named McDonough; his secretary, the de facto county treasurer, was Daley. Because a lot of the patronage workers in the county treasurer's office were, like Janey, from the Back of the Yards (which is to say the area that included the Union Stockyards), there was a problem for some of the clerks: they couldn't read or write. Janey's father, a drugstore owner and political precinct captain, had seen to it that she got a high school education in a neighborhood where that was an exception, and she had managed to pick up some secretarial skills, which led to her doing a lot of secretarial work in the county treasurer's office, some of it for Daley, whom she seemed to greatly admire.

A mutual friend at City Hall had introduced us almost three years ago, about the same time Janey went to work there. It was a bit unusual for anybody to move out of a neighborhood in Chicago, but I could well see why she might want to get the hell out of the Back of the Yards. The stockyards gave the nation its meat and the South Side its jobs, but it also gave the air a stench; and her neighborhood, Bridgeport, despite her father's relative affluence and influence, was a shabby little collection of frame houses and rented two-flats, though a lot of people found it a pleasant enough place to live. But Janey didn't, and at age twenty-one she had married a man named Dougherty, who was ten years older than her, lived on the North Side (and was a political associate of the powerful alderman Paddy Bauler), and ran a saloon, which became a speakeasy, and one drunken evening was hit by a streetcar and killed deader than he was drunk

Janey had been a widow? for about a year when we met; she rarely spoke of her late husband, and what I mentioned above is the extent of what I knew about him. What I knew? about her was that she did not return to the Back of the Yards after the death of her husband, but instead took a flat in the rooming-house district of the near North Side, an area of drearily similar, soot-stained stone houses, dirt)- alleys, and window? after window with the familial" black-and-white card reading ROOMS TO RENT. Nearby were the fancy apartments and homes of Lake Shore Drive, and the shade-tree-lined streets of the Gold Coast back of them. For someone like Janey, who had an eye on the finer things, this must have provided inspiration and irritation, depending on her varying moods. And they did vary.

The security guards were starting to talk quietly to one another, glancing over at me with obvious suspicion, when at ten after six. Janey finally emerged from an elevator. She looked stunning: her eyes. with their startled lashes, leaped out of her face, and her lips were appropriately red and bee-stung. She walked over like a model, her hands in knit cream-color gloves riding the pockets of her brown alpaca coat, thumbs out; the coat had a big double-breasted collar that rose around her neck, around which was a pale brown scarf, and there were two big buttons above the coat's belt, and two below, and she wore a fur felt hat with a brim that dipped just above one brown eye. A small cream-color purse was tucked under one arm.

I was leaning against a pillar. She approached me and looked up at me with a cute, arrogant smile. "I had to work a little late. For Mr. Daley."

"Fuck Dick Daley," I said.

I hadn't said it loud, but my voice carried a bit in the echoey corridor, and a security guard turned and looked at me with wide eyes.

But Janey didn't shock easy. She just said, "Maybe I would, if he weren't engaged," and her smile got even more arrogant, and even cuter, and she turned her back on me and walked toward the doors. I followed her.

Out on the street, I looped my arm in hers and said, "You just kept me waiting because I've had to stand you up a couple times these last few days."

The smile showed teeth now, and they were cute, too, and the arrogance was pretty¹ much gone. "You're right. But I did have some work to do. And I had to freshen up. It isn't every day we go to the Bismarck dining room."

"No, it isn't. In fact. I've never been there before."

"I've been there with Mr. Daley for lunch lots of times."

"You're a damn liar, Janey."

"I know."

At the intersection of LaSalle and Randolph, the big Bismarck Hotel, rebuilt in '27 on the site of the original hotel, lorded it over German Square, where German clubs, shops, and steamship offices converged at the west end of the Rialto Theatre district. The elaborately uniformed Bismarck doorman let us in and we went up the wide, red-carpeted steps to the huge lobby and into the main dining room.

We checked our coats, and Janey was even lovelier under the alpaca: she wore a rust-color soft wool dress with a gentle V neck, trimmed in white, and a creped, belted skirt. She left the fringed scarf on, and her hat, as we entered the dining room.

"You went to work like this?" I whispered to her. as the maitre d' showed us to our table.

"Of course." she said, not whispering. Then in an affectionate if mocking whisper: "But the scarf and the hat are for you alone, dearest."

"You're too good to me."

"I know."

We had a table for two over to one side, and we sat and took the place in for a while, while a boy in a white coat filled our water glasses with water and ice. The walls were hand-carved walnut, the south one hung with tapestries on either side of a mantel, and brass chandeliers fell from the ceiling. But the room was not what I had expected: it was all very modern, on the art-deco order. The Berghoff, the German restaurant where Janey and I occasionally dined, was a bustling, no-nonsense affair, famous for pigs knuckles and sauerkraut, not atmosphere; but here I had expected an old-world peasant aura, and instead got German modernism. Germany's idea of itself was changing, and the Bismarck dining room reflected that.

Well, I'd already been at one quaint old-world restaurant today, and since it wasn't every day (it wasn't every week), (make that month), that I ate at two top restaurants, I decided to enjoy myself.

We made small talk throughout the meal (we both had Wiener schnitzel and potato pancakes) and Janey, though generally a good poker player, was not hiding her anxiety. She wanted to hear all about my new job, but she didn't want to act like she did, so she was waiting for me to tell her of my own accord. And it was killing her.

Finally, while she ate cheesecake with strawberries and I drank coffee, I said, "I don't think you're going to like my new job."

She kissed her bite of cheesecake and strawberries off her fork and shrugged a little and smiled. "You can't expect your uncle Louis to start you out at the top. These things take time."

"Janey, I didn't say anything about Uncle Louis getting me a job."

That caught her with a forkful of desert in midair. She returned fork to plate and with folded hands looked across the table at me with wide brown eyes that I could've dived into, and said. "I don't understand. You left the department. What else…?"

"You know what I've always talked about."

"I do?"

"Well, think about it. dammit. We're supposed to be engaged. You're supposed to know me better than anyone."

She thought, and played with the diamond ring, turning it slowly from side to side, just a bit. "I know what you've always dreamed about doing. But it's so impractical."

"Well that's what I'm doing."

"You mean you're going to be a private eye. Like Ricardo Cortez in that movie we saw."

"Yes. but I don't think I'm going to get a smoking jacket or a pretty secretary right away, like Cortez."

"Neither do I."

"And I'm not going to be a private eye. I am a private eye. Detective. Operative. Whatever."

She nibbled at her cheesecake.

"I thought you'd be unhappy," I said.

"Did I say I was unhappy?"

"No. I'm psychic."

"Did you think about asking your uncle Louis for a job?"

"No."

"Well, why did you quit the department, anyway?"

"Why do you think?"

"Because you were involved in that Nitti shooting? So what?"

I hadn't really told her that whole story yet; maybe it was time. Maybe I should tell her what really happened. If she was going to be my wife one of these days, I ought to trust her. She should've been told days ago.

I told her.

She shook her head, angrily, as I finished up. "They just came in and grabbed you. didn't even tell you what they were up to? Louses. Bums." She shook her head again. "But why quit over it?"

"Don't you understand? Don't you understand why they picked on me?"

She shrugged. "The Lingle case. I suppose."

"That's right."

"And they'll expect you to testify for them at the Nitti trial."

"Well I will testify for them."

"If you stayed with the department and testified, you could get something out of it. Why quit, and help them cover up, and get nothing out of it?"

"Because I am getting something. I'm getting my private op's license in return."

"Oh."

I told her about the Cermak meeting; that impressed her. She loved that part. And I told her about Nitti. which impressed her in a different way: it seemed to scare her a little. And then I told her about Dawes, and she really liked that.

"What's wrong with you. Nate? Why don't you take advantage of Dawes' offer?"

"Three grand for supervising some pickpocket operations at the fair would'be easy money; it'd make my first year in business a rousing success even if not a single other client walked in my door."

"That's small potatoes. You can get something better out of Dawes and your uncle. You could get a real job. with a bank or a business or something."

"No. You don't seem to get it. Janey. I am in business. I'm the president of A-l Detective Agency. How 'bout some support here? How about you back me a little?"

She looked blankly at the center of the table, where a candle in a silver deco centerpiece glowed. "Where do I fit in? What about us? Our house?"

"I still have that money in the bank. I haven't had to dip into it yet. But I do think we should wait a year and see how I'm doing. If the money's coming in okay, and I haven't had to dip into the nest egg. we can start looking for that house. Does that make you happy?"

She looked up, found a little smile for me. "Sure it does. I only want what's best for you, Nate."

"Then believe in me."

"I do."

"Would you like to see my office?"

"Of course I would."

"It's a short walk; pretty short. Over on Van Buren and Plymouth."

"Near the Standard Club?"

"Yeah. 'Round the corner from there. Hey, I'll treat you to a cab, if you're not up to a walk."

"I'm up to a walk, Nate. Let's get our coats."

So we walked back, in the mist, arm in arm; she snuggled up next to me, but seemed distant, for being so close. She smelled like flowers; I couldn't tell you what flowers, exactly. But I can smell 'em right now…

And at the building. I unlocked the street entrance and had her go on up, and followed her up the stairs, and then led her to the office and let her in. Turned on the light.

"A Murphy bed?" she said.

"I live here, too," I said.

"Well, it's no worse than the Adams."

"It's better. Here I can have female guests. if I like."

"Let's make that singular. okay? Female guest?"

"Okay," I grinned. "What do you think?"

"It's pretty? roomy. For one room."

"Take a look at this." I opened the door to the washroom.

"Deluxe," she said, ambivalently.

I put my hands on her arms. "Look. I know this isn't anything special. But it's all I got. And it means a lot to me."

"I'd rather hear you say that about me."

"Honey. You know I love you."

"I love you, Nate." she said, flatly.

I took her in my aims and held her close; she responded, but her heart didn't seem to be in it.

So I kissed her. Long and hard, and put everything I had into it. including my tongue in her mouth, and she came around; she came on fire, and clutched at me with something like desperation.

She took the alpaca coat off and laid it gently on the desk. She stood with hands on the hips of her smart rust-color dress and said, "I've never used a Murphy bed in a box; only ones in the wall, like at my flat."

I shrugged. "Why, you want to see how this one works?"

"Yeah. I'm interested."

I took the bed down out of its box; it was made: that was probably why I'd been three minutes late for lunch at Saint Hubert's earlier.

"No big deal," I said.

"Oh I don't know," she said. "Get the lights, would you?"

I got the lights.

Neon pulsed in from the street as she undressed. She did it slowly; there was no tease to it, she was just methodical: loosening the belt, unsnapping some snaps under one arm, slipping the dress up and over her head, laying it on the desk. And then she was in a camisole and lacy, flared panties. The points of the perfect handfuls under the camisole poked at the cloth; the lacy panties rode her thighs, a garter belt riding the panties, dark sheer brown hose rising up her thighs to where the bare stretch extended to where the flared panties came down, and then the flared panties came down, and her heart-shaped pubic tuft called to me. She lifted the camisole over her head and the pink points of her breasts scolded me. She stood there with hands on bare hips and basked in the neon and, head back a bit, smiled her impudent, cock>' smile, knowing how beautiful she was, knowing the power she had, and walked slowly over and began undressing me.

She had a Sheik in her hand, in her palm. She'd carried some with her, apparently- we kept a supply at her flat- and had got it from her purse at some point, unbeknown to me, and was now slipping the condom down over me, tenderly, lovingly.

She was the first girl I ever knew who preferred being on top; I didn't mind. She rode me well, and I could watch her, see how lovely she was, as she reared her head back, lost in herself, as was I, and I put my hands on those breasts, filled my hands with those soft firm breasts, filled my mouth with as much of them as I could, and thrust into her, controlling her from below as best I could, and she rode me, slowly, and she rode me, not slowly, and she clutched her breasts and moaned and moaned till the moan was too loud to be called a moan, and too pleasure-filled to be a scream, and I emptied my seed up into her.

Into the condom, actually.

"I wish I was really in you," I said.

She was still on me; she smiled down, sadly. "You'd like a son, wouldn't you?"

"I suppose. I'd like a family. With you."

She got off me, gently, disappeared into the washroom, the cheeks of her rear jiggling engagingly as she went. She was in there awhile, and there was a flushing, and water ran, then she came back and had some tissue and removed the condom from me and went and disposed of it.

She walked to the desk and got into the panties and camisole and came back to bed; we crawled under the covers. She cuddled to me, nuzzled my neck.

We were quiet for a long time- maybe half an hour. I thought she was asleep, but suddenly she said, "Do you think you could still take Cermak up on his offer?"

"What?"

"You know. Get back with the department. Be a sergeant, a deputy coroner; be on one of his special squads."

"On one of the hoodlum squads? You want to hear something about the mayor's hoodlum squads?"

I told her about the Nydick shooting.

"I don't see how that has anything to do with you." she said afterward.

"The hoodlum squads are vile even for Chicago. Janey. I don't mind a little honest graft, but this has got out of hand. Janey. You know how my father died."

"He killed himself with your gun. It was a long time ago, Nate. It's time to let go of that."

"It wasn't that long ago. It was a year and a half ago. He did it because I gave him money."

"I know. I know. You wanted him to be able to renew the lease on his store, and you gave him the thousand dollars you got. along with your promotion, for testifying in the Lingle case. It's an old story. Nate. You got to let go of it."

"I gave him the money and told him I saved it, but he found out from somebody where it came from and he killed himself with my gun."

"I know, Nate."

"And now I've killed somebody with that gun. Somebody I didn't even know, all because my reputation as somebody you can buy in a murder case preceded me. Everybody in town thinks I'm for sale."

"Everybody in this town is for sale."

"I know that. I'm no virgin."

"You aren't?"

"Cut it out. I just got to live with myself."

"I thought you wanted to live with me."

"I do. I want to live with you, marry you. have babies with you, live happily ever after with you."

"That's a nice dream. It's a dream that could come true real easy, if you just took one of those offers."

"What offers?"

"Cermak's offer. Or Dawes'. Dammit, Nate, even Frank Nitti offered you a job. That would've been money, too."

"Are you saying you'd approve of that?"

"It's not my business how you make your living. If I'm going to be your wife, it's my business to give you moral support."

Say good night. Gracie.

"Look." I said, "I've always wanted to be a detective. The cops turned out not to be the place to do that. Now I've got a chance to try it on my own. for real. It may not pan out. But can't you let me try? Can't you give me. say, a year? Just put that moral support you're talking about behind Nathan Heller, President, A-l Detective Agency, for a year, and if I'm not at least matching my income as a member of the Chicago P.D., I'll hang it up and go to Uncle Louis and beg for a job. Fair enough?"

She thought about that, then nodded. Smiled. "Sure."

She cuddled to me awhile.

Then she said, "You know, working at the county treasurer's office is really interesting. You see a lot of important people; you see a lot of important things happening. Take my boss, Mr. Daley. He's about your age, Nate. Just a couple years older. He's so dynamic. He's involved with the tax end of things, sure, but mostly he's involved in the political end. I pick up on more of that than most people, you know, because my father's a precinct captain, you know. And Mr. Daley, he's just a little older than you, and there he is, in there distributing the jobs, handling the ward committeemen from all over the city, dealing with powerful men, in a powerful way. And then at night he takes night school, can you imagine? He'll be a lawyer before you know it. He lets me help him more than most of the others, because he blows my father so well, and he knows I'll cover for him, if he needs it, when his night school cuts into his duties."

"It's too bad you're already engaged," I said. "Then you could marry the little Mick."

"Oh. he's engaged, too. you know that." she said distantly. Then, catching the slight, wrinkled her chin and said, "Nate. I'm just trying to make a point."

"Which is?"

"Daley's going places."

"He can go to hell, as far as I care."

"You're jealous."

"Pissed off is more like it."

"Oh. Nate. I'm sorry… I just want more for you. I just want you to live up to your potential."

I didn't say anything.

She studied me in the near dark.

She kissed me on the mouth; I didn't kiss back.

"What's wrong?" she grinned, impishly. "Did I take it all out of you?"

I couldn't help grinning back. "Let me do it without using anything."

She kept smiling, then said. "All right." and started climbing on top of me.

"No." I said. "I want to be on top. Janey."

"Okay, Nate. I want you on top. too."

I got on top; I got in her. I'd never been in her without a Sheik before; it was wonderful. It was sweet. It was warm and sweet and wonderful and I pulled out. Rolled over on my back.

"Nate!" She put her hand on my chest. "What is it? What's wrong?"

"Janey. would you mind getting your clothes on?"

"What?"

"Please."

"What did I…?"

"Nothing. Please. Just do it."

She got out of the bed slowly. There were tears in her eyes; she dressed quickly. Put on her alpaca coat. I was dressed by now myself; I got my topcoat on and walked her out of the building and to the El.

We stood and waited for the next train in silence.

Just as it was pulling in. I said. "Janey, I'm sorry. It's just that… well. I've had people trying to control me. to manipulate me all week. I've been bribed just once too many times this week."

She looked at me; the brown eyes were wet, the bee-stung lips were tight, trembling. She took her gloves off, removed the engagement ring, pressed it into my hand.

"Merry Christmas, Nate," she said, and turned toward the waiting train.

Then she turned back, quickly, and kissed my cheek, and got on the train and was gone.

I went back to my office and sat behind the desk, looking at the rumpled bed, smelling her in the room, the flowery perfume scent, the musky scent, too. I could've opened a window and got rid of it. But I didn't. I figured I'd be rid of it soon enough as it was.

It was only nine-thirty. I called Eliot and said I'd be over for Christmas.

The Long Bellyache January 7- April 8,

The body was in a ditch near a telephone pole. No snow. Tall brown weeds leaned in the wind, and the ground was mostly sand with pebbles mixed in. so that our feet made a crunching sound as we approached. The nearby road was gravel, and there were ridges of sandy mud near the ditch, creased with tire tracks, pocked with footprints. A small middle-aged man in a cap and a heavy brown jacket stood near the body, as if claiming it for his own. Next to him was a heavyset man in a western-style hat and a hunting jacket with a badge pinned on it- the sheriff, apparently. Otherwise there was no one around: just the body in the ditch.

Back of the two men and the body, sand dunes rose. The dunes were spotted with khaki-color brush, like gigantic scalps with the hair mostly fallen out. leaving only occasional sick patches behind. Bare trees, skinny, black against a sky such a faded blue it might have been wearing out, stood close together, watching from atop the dunes, some of which ran to a hundred feet; skeletal branches touched to form a black-lace pattern against the horizon. The bitter cold air and the desert-like dunes mocked each other, and the wind blew like a bored fat man with a sense of irony.

We were on a back road near Chesterton, Indiana, about fifteen miles east of Gary, five miles west of nowhere. It was Saturday morning, about seven, and I would rather have been sleeping. But Eliot called and said he was picking me up; there was something he wanted me to see.

The something was the body in the ditch.

Eliot bent over the body, which was sprawled on its side, wearing an overcoat, a hat partially covering the face; he lifted the hat off. set it easily to one side.

"It's Ted Newberry- all right" he said to me.

The man who seemed to be the sheriff thought that was meant for him. "Thought as much." he said. He was about fifty-five with a vein-shot nose that indicated he didn't keep all the laws he was theoretically hired to enforce.

"I'm Ness." Eliot told the apparent sheriff. "A couple more people from Chicago will be showing up soon. A representative of the police department, and the deceased's lawyer."

"What do we do with the body?"

"What do you usually do?"

"We don't have a morgue; we use a local mortuary."

"Use it, then."

"It's okay if I call 'em now?"

"I think that'd be wise. It's a cold enough day, but this boy isn't going to keep forever."

"I got to walk to that farmhouse." the sheriff said, pointing with a hand distorted by a heavy cotton glove. Then he put the hand down and waited for something, and what he got was silence. When Eliot failed to fill the silence, the sheriff grinned, shrugged, said, "Don't have a police radio in my car yet. Like to have one."

Eliot just looked at him, and the sheriff kind of nodded and walked off, his breath preceding him like smoke from a steam engine.

Eliot stood and looked at Newberry. I did the same, but from more of a distance. In life Newberry had been a jaunty sort; hail-fellow-well-met, though I'd never met him. But he had a reputation as such. A big, dark-haired roughly handsome gangster, about forty. Now he was a body sprawled in a ditch, with his pockets turned inside out.

The guy in the cap and brown jacket said to Eliot, "I found him. 'Bout daybreak."

Eliot nodded, waited for more information to come. It didn't.

"Was there anyone else around when you found him?" Eliot asked.

"No. I was by myself."

Eliot pointed to Newberry. "What about him. Was he by himself?"

"I should say."

"Is there anything else you can tell me about this?"

"Looks to me like this boy was took for a ride."

"Stand over by your car. would you?"

"Are the reporters coming soon?"

"Sooner or later."

Reluctantly, the guy went over and stood by his flivver.

Eliot came over to me and shook his head. "Publicity seekers." he said.

I resisted any ironic comment.

"Come over and take a look at Ted"

"I've seen dead bodies before."

"I know you have. Come on."

We walked to the body and Eliot knelt over it again and pointed to Newberry's belt. The buckle was large and jewel-encrusted: diamonds and emeralds.

"Ever see one like that?" Eliot asked.

"Yeah. Jake Lingle had one on. the day he was shot."

Eliot nodded. "Capone gave more than one of his pals fancy belts like that."

"And more than one of'em ended up like Ted, here."

"Lingle included." he said guardedly.

"Lingle included." I said.

Jake Lingle was a subject Eliot had never broached with me directly, though I knew he wanted to. knew his curiosity was killing him and had killed him repeatedly since he'd known me. but out of a sense of courtesy toward me. he'd resisted the urge. My involvement with the Lingle case predated my friendship with Eliot, which had come about when I got into plainclothes, which had come about after my testifying at the Lingle trial. Which meant that Eliot and I would not have become friends if the Jake Lingle case hadn't elevated me to the status of a detective, a peer of the great Eliot Ness.

He said. "You could look at this as an appointment with Capone that finally got kept."

"How do you mean. Eliot?"

He stood, shrugged, still glancing down at the body. "I'm just thinking of a certain morning when Ted and his boss Bugs Moran were delayed a few minutes on the way to meet with the rest of the boys, and when they finally got there, Ted spotted a squad car parked in front of the garage, and he and Bugs and Willie Marks ducked in a cafe to avoid what they figured was the cops running a petty shakedown. Know what morning I'm talking about, Nate?"

Eliot was giving me his best melodramatic deadpan, now.

"Yeah, yeah," I said.

February 14, 1929. Saint Valentine's Day.

I bent over Newberry's body and had a close look; it wasn't hard to reconstruct what had happened. He got the bullethole through the hand, with accompanying powder burns, when, in an effort to keep from getting shot, he'd grabbed a gun pointed at him; that same bullet, or another one from the same gun, had shot off his left earlobe as he struggled. That point, probably, was when he got his skull bashed in, and only then came the final bullet, the one that killed him (unless the bashing had already done the trick): a single execution-style slug, fired from behind, at the base of the skull. There wasn't much blood, here. He'd been killed elsewhere and dumped in the dunes, pockets pulled inside out, in a nod toward faking a robbery.

Eliot was looking at the tire tracks. He studied them for a few minutes, then turned to me. "The car came from the west, dumped Ted, turned around, and went back the way it came."

I moved away from the body, pointing at it as I did. "He had a place near here, didn't he? A summer home?"

Eliot nodded. "At Bass Lake. They probably killed him there."

Last night, at about two, Newberry's lawyer, at the prompting of a worried crony of Ted's who said Ted was two hours late for an appointment, had called the detective bureau and asked if his gangster client had been arrested, and got no answer. Then the lawyer had called Eliot at home and asked if the feds had his boy, and Eliot had told the lawyer to go jump and went back to sleep. A writ of habeas corpus was filed, and by early this morning the chief of detectives and Eliot were in the former's City Hall office, both officially responding to the lawyer that Newberry was not in custody. And at that point the word came in that a body answering Newberry's description had been found in Indiana.

Shortly after the sheriff had returned from his phone call at a nearby farmhouse, a dark blue Cadillac sedan pulled up and a short squat man in a blue pinstripe with a diamond stickpin hopped out; he was Newberry's lawyer.

"Hello, Abe," Eliot said, as the little man trundled toward the body in the ditch.

Without acknowledging Eliot's greeting, the lawyer looked at Newberry and, as if speaking to Ted, said, "Where's the county official?"

The sheriff, standing in the road, called out, "Me, mister!

The lawyer walked up to the sheriff and said, "That man is Edward Newberry. Where will his body be taken?"

The sheriff gave him the name of the mortuary.

The lawyer nodded, said. "We'll be in touch." and got in his Cadillac and drove off.

The man in the cap and brown jacket was still over by his flivver, standing first on one foot, then the other. He said, to no one in particular, "Where's the reporters, anyway?"

"Stick around," Eliot said, and advised the sheriff the same thing, then nodded to me and we walked back to his Ford.

"Aren't you going to wait for the press, Eliot?" I asked him.

He shook his head no. "This is nothing I want to be part of. You, either."

On the way back to Chicago, Eliot said, "That's Nitti's work, of course. So much for Ted Newberry as the mayor's handpicked candidate for running gambling on the North Side."

"That still leaves Touhy in Cermak's pocket."

"Touhy's nothing. Nitti's made an important point here. Newberry offered fifteen thousand for Nitti dead. Well, Nitti's alive and Ted isn't."

"I wonder how Cermak's favorite bodyguards will take the news of Newberry taking a ride."

Eliot smiled a little. "I wonder how Cermak will take it."

"Why'd you want me to see that, anyway?"

Eliot, watching the road, said, "It concerns you."

"Sure. But you could've phoned and told me about it. Why'd you want me along? Outside of me being charming company."

"Newberry was Cermak's man."

"So?"

"He's nobody's man. now."

"Point being?"

He glanced at me. then back at the road. The dunes were still around us: it was like the Midwest was doing a bad but impressive imitation of Egypt.

Eliot said. "Maybe this opens the door for you telling a different story at the Nitti trial."

"Like the true story, you mean."

He shrugged. "You might want to consider it. Newberry's an example of how Nitti operates. And Newberry's also an example of Cermak's current lack of strength in mob circles."

"So, what? You're saying if I stick with Cermak's team. I'm ditch-bound? That's bullshit. Eliot. Nitti knows I'm an innocent bystander in this. You notice that was Newberry dead back there, not Lang or Miller. Frank Nitti doesn't kill the messenger; he kills the guy who sent the message."

Eliot just drove.

I kept talking. "Just because Cermak isn't aligned with a gang of any power, at the moment, doesn't mean he isn't going to be again, soon. He's been playing this game a long time, you know. And if I cross Cermak, I'll get my op ticket, and my gun permit, pulled. Get serious, Eliot."

Eliot didn't say another word to me till he pulled up in front of my building on Van Buren; not until I was getting out, feeling just a little irritated with him.

"Sony, Nate," he said. "I just thought you should see that back there."

I could feel my face was red, and it wasn't the cold. "Christ, Eliot, what is it you want out of me? Are you such a goddamn Boy Scout you expect me to tell the truth because it's the truth? You been in Chicago too long to be that naive."

Which was a lousy thing for me to say, because Eliot might have been a lot of things, but naive about the Chicago facts of life he wasn't.

He gave me a sad little smile.

And said, "I just don't like the idea of you getting on a witness stand and perjuring yourself."

He didn't add "again," but the word hung in his eyes, and it was that flicking Lingle case again, wasn't it? Coming back to haunt me.

I nodded at him to let him know I understood he meant well, and shut the door on the Ford, and he drove off.

It was a little after eleven, and I hadn't had any breakfast, so I went into the deli on the corner for an early lunch. I ate my usual pastrami sandwich but, despite my hunger, barely got it down. Eliot had bothered me, whether I wanted to admit it to myself or not. I sat nibbling dill pickles absently for maybe half an hour, sipping at a ginger ale, when Barney came in through the door that connected the deli with his speak, noticed me, and got this silly grin, like it just occurred to him that he was top contender.

"There's somebody you got to meet," he said, leaning against the table, not sitting down, pointing with a thumb back at the door he'd just come through.

"Does she have nice pins?" I asked.

"It ain't a woman. Nate."

"Then I ain't interested."

"Nate, it's a famous guy."

"Barney,you're a famous guy, and I'm not interested."

"Some mood you're in."

"You're right. I'm sorry. I better start being nice to you or you'll start charging me rent. Who do you want me to meet? Some other goddamn fighter?"

His grin got silly again. "You'll see. Come on."

I finished off the last dill pickle and got up and followed him into the speak. The place was about half-full, and the patrons, all of them men, were craning their necks back to see the far corner booth by the boarded-up street windows, talking among themselves as they did. We headed to the booth that was causing the commotion.

For a second, just a second, I thought it was Frank Nitti. The same slicked-back blue-black hair, the same swarthily handsome, hooded-eyed look, though this guy lacked Nitti's vaguely battered quality, sported no pencil-line mustache, and was younger, thirty-five or fort)'. Like Nitti, he was immaculately groomed, in fact was a snappy dresser, sporting a dark gray pinstripe with lavishly wide lapels, and a black shirt with white tie. And. like Nitti, he wasn't a big man; he was sitting down, but you could tell standing up he wouldn't be more than five six or so. This was a more conventionally handsome Frank Nitti. with a little Valentino tossed in.

Barney and I stood next to the booth and the man smiled at us. rather remotely, while Barney introduced us.

"Georgie," he said, "this is a childhood pal of mine. Nate Heller. Nate, this is George Raft.¹'

We sat in the booth across from Raft, and I smiled at the actor and said, "I'm embarrassed. I should've recognized you."

Raft shrugged, barely perceptibly, smiled the same way. "Maybe if I been flipping a coin."

I nodded. "I saw that picture. Pretty wild."

We were talking about Scarface, the big hit of the year before, which had made Raft a star; it had caused a lot of controversy in Chicago, opening months later than anywhere else in the country, the local censorship board having fits over its depiction of their city (even though it was Chicago's own Ben Hecht who wrote the picture).

"I hear good things about it," Raft said. "I didn't see it myself"

Barney explained. "George never looks at the pictures he's in."

"Why's that?" I asked Raft.

"Who needs it?" he said. "I probably look terrible. My face'd scare babies."

He didn't seem to be kidding. I suddenly realized his remoteness wasn't a tough-guy pose, but a sort of shyness.

"Georgie's in town doing some personal appearances," Barney said. "What's the name of the new picture?"

"Undercover Man," Raft said noncommittally.

"Oh?" I said "Where you appearing?"

"At the Oriental Theater." Raft said. "I come out and talk to the folks, the orchestra plays, and I do some dancing. Did you see Night After Night?"

"Sorry, no," I said.

"That was a pretty good one. Not so much gangster shit. Got to do some dancing."

"Mae West was in that." Barney said, eating this up.

"Yeah " Raft said, smiling faintly, "and she stole everything but the camera."

"How do you two happen to know each other?" I asked Barney, nodding at Raft

"Oh. Georgie's a big fight fan," Barney said. "He was a fighter himself, weren't you, Georgie?"

Raft laughed a little. "Seventeen bouts and ten knockouts."

"That's a good record," I allowed.

"Not when it's you getting KO'd," Raft said.

"You won a few," Barney said.

"Three," Raft said, holding up three fingers.

Buddy Gold came over for my order. I asked for a beer. Neither Barney nor Raft was drinking anything. I knew why Barney wasn't drinking: he had a fight coming up later this month in Pittsburgh, with Johnny Dato.

"Don't you want anything, George?" I asked him.

"I don't drink," Raft said. "Bring me a coffee, would you, Buddy?"

"Sure thing, Mr. Raft."

Raft looked my way and said. "I been following Barney's career real close. He's won me some money. I admit to knowing more about boxing out of the tins than I did in it. I was a fight manager for a while. Discovered Maxie Rosenbloom."

Something was ringing a distant bell in my mind; like the round-ending bell in the ears of a canvas-prone lighter who's just been saved by it.

■ -

"Weren't you involved with Primo Camera?" I asked.

Raft seemed to flinch at that, again, barely perceptibly. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Barney's grin disappear. I'd opened a door better left closed I'd been rude to Barney's guest. But I let it ride.

"Not really." Raft said. "A friend of mine owned a piece of him."

"Owney Madden, you mean," I said.

"Yes," Raft said.

I could tell this was making Barney uneasy, so I didn't pursue it. It was natural that an honest fighter like Barney would be embarrassed by one of his friends being connected to Primo Camera and Owney Madden. Primo Camera was the big, lumbering heavyweight brought over from Italy who, through a succession of fixed fights and sportswriters on the take, was elevated to the Championship of the World. Camera was a slow, awkward giant with a glass jaw, but he made good show business, until a real fighter, Max Baer, took the championship away from him, and damn near killed the poor clown in the doing. New York gangster Owney Madden owned Camera, and Madden and George Raft were lifelong friends. The story I'd heard had Raft, just prior to his Hollywood days, slipping a mickey to "Big Boy" Eddie Petersen, a fighter who had refused to take a dive; Raft's mickey had paved the way for Camera's first major victory'- at Madison Square Garden, no less.

I knew Barney knew' this story: it was him who told it to me, with some disgust, when he was noting the climb of this guy Raft in the talkies, this guy who used to be Owney Madden's boy. But that had been a year ago, before Barney was into the heavy purses- and the papers- and before he met Georgie at Arlington Park, where they shared a mutual love.

"I kinda hate to admit how I got a lot of my boxing savvy," Raft said.

"Why's that?" I asked.

"Well, the boxing arenas were my stomping grounds, back in my pickpocket days. And I understand you're an ex-pickpocket detail dick. Maybe you don't want to be seen in public with an ex-dip."

I smiled at him, a bit charmed in spite of myself. "Some of my best friends are pickpockets. And as long as they sit across the booth from me, we stay friends."

"I understand you're a private dick now."

"That's right."

"Barney says you got an office upstairs."

"That's right."

"How 'bout giving me a tour? Who knows. I might have to play a private dick in a movie someday."

"Sure. You never know. Barney? You coming?"

Raft got out of the booth. "I'm expecting a phone call. Barney. Would you mind sticking around, in case it comes in? I'm on suspension from Paramount, at the moment, and my agent's Dying to work something out for me."

Barney shrugged, smiled. "Sure. See you guys in a few minutes."

Raft climbed into a black formfitting coat with a velvet collar, pulled a pearl-gray hat down over one eye. With his high trousers, spats, and pointy shoes as shiny as his hair, he seemed a movie star's idea of a gangster- or was it the other way around?

He followed me through the deli out onto the street and up the stairs to my office. He hung his coat and hat on the tree by the door, and took a seat across from my desk before I'd even got behind it. It was clear this was more than a movie star wanting to meet a real private detective for research purposes; besides. I had a feeling George Raft was one Hollywood actor who didn't need help researching underworld-related matters.

I got behind the desk; Raft was eyeing the box against the wall. "That looks like a Murphy bed," he said

"I'm supposed to be the detective." I said.

He smiled: wider, more at ease. "I spent years sleeping in worse places than my own office… lofts, pool halls, subways. Times are tough. You're lucky to be in business."

"You're kind of lucky yourself."

He got a silver cigarette case out from his inside coat pocket. "You said it. You mind?" I nodded I didn't, and he lit up a long cigarette with a bullet-shaped silver lighter.

"What's this really about, Raft?"

"Let's keep it friendly. Let's keep it 'George' and 'Nate,' all right?"

"Sure, George."

"I get the feeling, from that remark about Camera and Madden, that you know a little about me."

"I know you used to be a bootlegger for Madden, and that he helped pull some strings to get you started in Hollywood."

Raft shrugged. "That's no secret. The columnists have had hold of that, and it hasn't hurt me. Nobody thinks a bootlegger's a bad guy; nobody who drinks, that is."

"You don't drink."

"I grew up in Hell's Kitchen. It was no fuckin' picnic. I was in a street gang with Owney. You woulda been too, if you grew up where I did. He went his way. I went mine. I was never a hood, really. I used to see them, though, when I was sitting 'round the dance halls. Sharp young hoods in candy-stripe silk shirts, flashing their roll. Was I green with envy. They had money to spend and their pick of the skirts, and I wanted a candy-stripe silk shirt so bad I was ready to pull one off the first guy I could catch alone in a dark alley."

"But instead you became a movie star."

Raft's hooded eyes blinked a few times, his face impassive. "I'm no saint. I was a pickpocket, a shoplifter. Then I found a trade- dancing. I got into taxi-dancing, I worked up a Charleston act, eventually. Did some vaudeville. Owney was in Sing Sing through all this, but when he got out, after Prohibition came in, he helped me climb. I worked the El Fey with Texas Guinan, and I was doing a little bootlegging on the side, for Owney. And Owney helped me make it to Broadway, and Hollywood. And I ain't ashamed of that. What are friends for?"

"This is all real fascinating," I said, "but what the hell does it have to do with me?"

Raft inhaled on the cigarette. Blew smoke out, like a movie tough guy. "This office. Barney set you up, right? Did a friend a favor?"

"Yeah. Right. So?"

"Friends do favors for friends. Sometimes you even do favors for friends of friends."

"You ought to sew that on a sampler. George."

"Don't be testy. I didn't come 'round here to look up Barney Ross; that was just for appearance sake. though Barney don't know that. It's you I come to see."

"Why, for Christ's sake?"

"I used to work at a place called the Club Durant. Jimmy Durante's place. There was a small garage below street level, connected with the club, that was the largest floating crap game in New York. That's where I got to know Al Brown."

"Al Brown."

"I saw him later, at El Fey's. And he was a good friend of Owney's. too. They were business associates."

"Oh. That 'Al Brown.'"

"Yeah. That one. I was in New York last week, and a friend asked me to do a favor for Al Brown."

"Why you?"

"It had to be somebody neutral. Somebody who could come around and see you without anybody getting any ideas. But somebody important enough for you to take it seriously."

"What does he want?"

"He wants you to come see him." Raft reached in his other inside pocket, withdrew a flat sealed envelope. Handed it to me.

Inside was a thousand dollars in hundreds, a round-trip ticket to Atlanta on the Dixie Express, and credentials identifying me as an attorney with the Louis Piquett firm.

"These tickets are for Monday," I said.

"That's right. I'm told if there's a conflict, they can be switched to any other day next week. No pressure,

Nate."

"Do you know what this is about?"

Raft got up. "I don't want to know what this is about. But I can guess. If it doesn't have something to do with another friend of mine, Frank Nitti, getting shot up by your mayor's favorite cops, I'll go back to taxi-dancing."

I got up. I extended my hand to Raft, who smiled tightly and shook it. "Sorry I was a wiseass," I said.

"I take it you'll do it."

"Why not? A grand is a nice retainer for a guy that sleeps in his office. And it isn't every day that George Raft stops by to play middleman."

"It isn't every day you take on Al Capone for a client," Raft said, and we went down and spent some time with Barney.

I took a sleeper to Atlanta, catching the Dixie Express at Dearborn Station early Monday afternoon; the next morning I was having breakfast in the dining car, finishing my last piece of toast as the train steamed into Atlanta's Union Station at half past eight. I caught a taxi, my topcoat slung over my arm (it was sunny, about sixty degrees not a Chicagoan's idea of a winter morning), and waited till I was in the back of the cab before I said, "McDonough Road and South Boulevard."

The cabbie turned and looked at me, a skinny guy with a Harry Langdon deadpan and a drawl you could hang a hammock on. He said, "Mister, that's the pen."

"Right," I said, and gave him a sawbuck. "This should take about an hour round trip, and you get another one when it's over."

He smiled, shrugged, left the flag on the meter up, drove the four miles to the address I'd given him.

He pulled over by the side of the road, shut the motor off, and waited, as I got out and approached the small barrack from which a blue-uniformed, armed guard came out and asked me my business here. I told him, and he passed me on, and I moved down a walk to a second barrack in front of the barred gates stuck in the midst of a thirty-foot gray granite wall. A second uniformed guard, carrying a Winchester rifle, asked me the same thing as the previous one, and asked if I had a camera or a weapon. I said I had neither.

At the gate in the massive wall, its stones haphazardly cut and set, no doubt reflecting the attitude of the labor that had done the job, a guard looked at me. through the bars, and asked me my business here, for the third time. And one side of the gate groaned open.

Inside the massive granite main building, I was led by a guard to a little desk in the big main corridor; at the end of the corridor was a steel gate, and guards with clubs were watching as blue-denim-garbed inmates shuffled hurriedly along. I was given a small blank sheet of paper on which I was to put the name of the prisoner I wished to see, which I did- ALPHONSE CAPONE- and was told to give my own name and address, and reason for calling upon said inmate. I listed my real name, but gave the address of the Piquett law firm, and stated my business as legal representative. This wasn't a lie, as I was representing that firm, but it did tend to give the impression that I was an attorney.

The guard passed my slip of paper to a second guard, who relayed it to a convict runner stationed in the corridor beyond the second gate, who was sent to fetch the prisoner. The guard and I talked about the differences between Chicago and Atlanta weather, the guard coming to the conclusion that he was glad he lived in Atlanta, and me coming to the silently held conclusion that I was glad I wasn't a prison guard. When five minutes had passed, the guard led me to a nearby reception room about the size of my office, and had me sit on the near side of a long, bare wooden table. I could see a partition that ran underneath the table to the floor- to prevent the passing of items, I presumed- but there was no wire mesh separating the two sides of the table. The walls were gray stone with the windows high and barred. Other than the table, the room was completely bare.

Five minutes later a guard with a club escorted a prisoner into the room: the prisoner was about five ten, weighed perhaps two hundred pounds, and had a nice tan. His thinning dark brown hair was prison-short, his eyebrows bushy and his gray eyes piercing, surrounded by dark circles that showed even against the tan; they were the kind of dark circles that come from genes, not lack of sleep. The head was shaped like a squeezed pumpkin, and along the left cheek were two scars, a long and a short, the latter deep and pronounced; under the jaw. riding a nearly nonexistent neck, was a third scar. Without the guard, he came around the table and sat across from me; with a thick-lipped smile that showed no teeth, he nodded at me, fishing in the pocket of his faded denim jacket for something. It was a cigar; a thick, six-inch one. He fished some more for some matches and lit it. Without saying anything to me, by gesturing with the cigar, he asked if I cared for one, and I shook my head no. He looked over at the guard with a benevolent smile and nodded, and the guard left the room. And Al Capone and I were alone.

He extended his hand to me, and the smile increased, showing some teeth. I shook the hand; Capone had slimmed down, but his hand was still pudgy, soft. His grip wasn't.

"So you're Heller," he said.

"I'm Heller."

"We never met, but you did me a favor once."

I wasn't sure I knew what he meant. I said so.

"No matter, no matter. Sure you don't want one of these?" He waved the cigar; it smelled pretty good. "Two bucks. Havana."

"No thanks."

He leaned on one hand, cigar in his lips, cocked upward. "It ain't so bad in here, you know. This is the first rest I had since Philly."

He was referring to the year stretch he'd done after he was picked up a few years ago in Philadelphia on a gun-carrying charge. Speculation was he'd sought the rap for a cooling-off period, his old mentor Torrio, who was putting the national crime combine together, having advised him to lay low in the wake of the bad publicity of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, among other excesses.

"Still, they screwed me," he said philosophically. "Eleven years the fuckers gave me, when they promised me a couple years tops, if I gave 'em their guilty plea. Those bastards, their word means nothin' to em."

"It looks like Atlanta's agreeing with you."

He shrugged, smiled some more. "It's the tennis. Exercise and sun. It's okay. Be nice if there was some women in here, but what the hell, you can't have it all. You know Rusty Rudensky?"

"No."

"Good little safecracker. Did some work for me years 'n' years ago. Turned out to be one of my cellmates. I'm in with seven other guys, in case you think this is the fuckin' Ritz. But Rusty's okay. He knew the ropes, fixed it up so a trusty pal of his who drives a supply truck can smuggle cash into me. That buys privileges with guards you don't think we're alone just 'cause you're supposed to be my mouthpiece, do you?- and it helps keep me protected. You know, there's a lot of little shots want to take a shot at a big shot. So I got cons playin' bodyguard for me in here, just like Frankie Rio in the old days."

A wave of something went over his face; the smile went. Referring to life on the outside as "the old days" was what did it.

"I'm doin' all right. Heller." he said, as if trying to convince himself. "They got me workin' in a shoe factory, cobblin' shoes, can you buy it? Eight hours a day for seven bucks a month. Hell of a deal, me with a million bucks in half a dozen banks. Sitlin' in a hole like this."

I didn't say anything; I still didn't know what I was doing here, but it was his nickel. His grand, actually.

"I could be in Florida right now," he mused, looking up, like Florida was heaven. "I got a wife and a boy at Palm Island, ya know. I idolize that boy; he's gonna be goddamn president. If I could be with him and his momma in Florida, I'd be the happiest man in the world. God, I'd love to lay under those palm trees. God, I'd love to be at Hialeah followin' the ponies."

I'll be damned if I didn't feel a little sorry for him, but then he pointed a finger and the cigar in his mouth right at me, like two gun barrels, and his beady gray eyes in their dark sockets bored into me, like I'd done something to him.

"And your pal Ness and those other dumb bastard feds go and nail me on a bookkeeping rap! A damn tax rap, and now I'm in here, and the rest of'em are out there splitting up what I built!"

The beady eyes glowed with something that was scary; the fat head seemed like a skull somehow- a skull with eyes.

"They're going to flick it up. Heller. They're gonna piss away what I made, what I… created. If I don't stop 'em." This was said with religious certainty.

I ventured a question. "Who. Mr. Capone?"

"Let's make it 'Al,' okay? What's your first name? Nate? Nate. Nate, Frank's a good boy, he really is. He's family. But he just don't got what it takes to fill my chair."

Nitti. He meant Nitti.

"Now, I know all about what you've been through. I know you got sucked into hitting Frank with Cermak's goons. I can tell you without a doubt that Frank don't hold nothin' against you. You were honorable, quittin' that scumbag police force. Bunch of fuckin' crooks. I hate 'em damn near as much as the politicians, two-faced fuckin crooks. I thought Cermak was different, but he's like the rest. Just another politician spending half his time covering up so the public don't see he's a thief."

"Mr. Capone"

"Al."

"Al. What am I doing here?"

"You're here 'cause I need somebody I can trust. You showed yourself to be honorable, and I ain't forgetting the time you helped me out in the past, though maybe you didn't know it was me you was helping. I can't call on any of my boys, 'cause I gotta handle this… from the outside. And I don't want to mix my brothers in. if I can help it. 'Cause I don't want to go up against Frank, toe to toe. 'cause, what the hell, he's out there, and I'm in here, and how the hell we gonna go toe to toe with bars in between."

"I don't understand."

"Understand this: I'm gonna be out of this cage before the year's over. I'm gonna be sitting in my chair, not Frank. But it's gonna take time. I shelled out two hundred grand and then some to a big shot in Washington who's gonna open these gates up wide, right from D.C. And I got five of the biggest attorneys in the land getting me ready for being sprung. But it'll take time, and in the meantime, I don't want Frank and the rest of them bums flushing my empire down the shithole."

"What makes you think they're doing that?"

He shook his head, sadly; puffed the pool-cue cigar. "I thought Frank was smarter than this. No kiddin', I did. I thought he learned from my mistakes; I thought he learned my lessons. You can't stir up the heat. That's the one mistake I made, and I learned to correct it, but too late, I guess, or otherwise I wouldn't be sitting in here. I stirred up the heat. I put too many bodies on the front page. People want candy on Valentine's Day, not headlines."

I said nothing.

"I tried to play peacemaker, you know. All along. I done that. Just last year, 'bout this time, when I was waiting in the Cook County Jail, they brought that crazy bastard Dutch Schultz and Charlie Luciano in to see me. They been feuding. It was Schultz's fault, horning in on Charlie's territory. The dumb bastard Schultz wouldn't listen, and I didn't end up gettin' nowhere, but the point is I tried, my natural bent's to be a peacemaker. Only how do you make peace with Dutch Schultz? If I'd had him outside, I'd've shoved a gun in his guts."

Capone's cigar, in one pudgy hand now, had gone out; he lit it again, and I sat patiently waiting to see where I fit in.

"When I heard what Frank's planning, I sent word to him: don't do this, Frank. You'll stir up the heat, Frank. You can find a better way, Frank. And you know what he says, what the lawyer says he says? He says, you're inside, Al, and I'm out, and, all due respect, I gotta trust my judgment. I'm outside, he says, and I'm handling things. That's what he says."

There was a great sadness, greater frustration, in his face.

Then he smiled, a small, private smile.

"You know what Frank's planning?" he asked innocently.

"No."

"Guess."

•I- I can't."

"Go on. Guess."

"Gang war? He hit Newberry the other day."

Capone grinned, said, "And about time! That bum jumped from side to side whenever the wind blew his way. He shoulda got his February fourteenth '29. No, you can kill somebody, from time to time, if you don't do it on no big scale, and you don't make a habit of it. But there's some people you just can't hit."

"Like who?"

"Like the mayor of a big city."

"What?"

"Cermak. Frank's gonna hit Cermak."

He leaned back and puffed his cigar and smiled at me, quietly, amused by the look on my face no doubt.

"You're kidding," I said.

"Yeah, I'm kidding. I paid you a grand and brought you down on the Express to tell you my life story."

I thought about it. "I saw Nitti in the hospital." I said. "He hates Cermak, all right. I guess it's possible he'd do something like that… but it seems- "

"Crazy? It's suicide. Heller. Times are hard; the booze business is comin' to a close. And I got to take my business into quieter areas. I made plenty of progress with the unions, for instance. That's the future, Heller. But there ain't gonna be a future, not for my business, if the guy I give it for safekeeping to goes around shooting the mayor of Chicago."

"He's not going to shoot him himself, for Christ's sake- "

"No! He's crazy but he ain't insane. Don't be dumb."

"How's it going to happen?"

"I don't know exactly. That's where you come in."

"Me?"

"I got certain lines of communication; I picked up on some of it. but not all of it. I know where, and sort of when. I even know who the triggerman is."

"So tell."

"Cermak's going to Florida. I wish it was me, not him. Going to Florida, that is, not gettin' hit. He's going to Miami for patronage. Cermak flicked up royal, you know, when he backed Al Smith clear till the last minute, and didn't deliver the important votes to FDR at the convention. He hopped on the bandwagon at the last minute, but he's still shit with the White House, so he's gotta go down there while the president-to-be holds court, and beg for scraps. Kind of a laugh, the king of patronage havin' to be a beggar. Well. Cermak'll be down there a week or so. And sometime during that week, the hit'll go down. Doing the hit outa town, that's Frank's idea of keeping from stirring up the heat. Jesus. Anyway. That's all I know."

"You said you knew the triggerman."

"I know who they plan to use as of today; it could change. We're talkin' next month, and things change. But it's part of why I sent for you. Heller. First, you're a cop; you can handle this. You can tail Cermak. and even if you get seen, so what? You're no hood, just an honest citizen takin' a vacation. And bein' a cop, you can use a gun if you have to. And you'll have a gun permit, don't worry. You'll be down there as a licensed private cop with a gun permit. I got connections in Miami that'll see to that."

"There are plenty of people just as capable as me, Al. So why me?"

"The triggerman's name don't matter. But let me put it this way he's a blond boy. About twenty-eight, thirty. And you seen him before." He grinned at me. "Get it?"

I got it.

Because suddenly I understood what favor it was I'd done for him once; what work I'd done that I didn't know was for him.

In the summer of 1930, Alfred "Jake" Lingle walked down the steps into the tunnel running under Michigan Avenue to Illinois Central Station, to catch the one-thirty racetrack special to Washington Park. As he walked along within the tunnel, reading a racing form, smoking a cigar, wearing a jauntily cocked straw hat, a jauntily cocked.38 was placed just over the back of his collar and a bullet went up through his brain, and he fell dead, on his racing form, cigar still burning.

His slayer, who also wore a straw hat as well as a medium-gray suit, was blond, about five ten, weighed perhaps 160 pounds, and seemed to be in his late twenties. He had held the gun in his left, gloved hand, and dropped the snubnose to the cement, just as Lingle was dropping. And the blond gunman ran. He ran through the startled crowd, pushing his way back to the stairs Lingle had come down, ran back up to Michigan Avenue, crossing it, running west onto Randolph Street, where a traffic cop stationed at Randolph and Michigan, in response to someone's cry of "Get that man," took pursuit. The cop got within arm's reach of him, getting a good look at the blond, but stumbling. and then the gunman angled down an alley and, presumably, followed the maze of alleys back into the Wabash crowds, where he was lost.

And so Jake Lingle, reporter, was dead. And Chicago, particularly his employer Col. Robert R. McCormick (who had never met this particular employee- he had four thousand), was outraged. It was obvious that this sixty-five-dollar-a-week police reporter had "got the goods" on gangland, that he "knew too much" and so had been struck down, martyrlike. The Colonel in Tribune Tower offered a a twenty-five thousand dollar reward for information leading to the murderer's conviction; other papers and civic groups kicked in, bringing the tally to over fifty thousand dollars. The fallen hero, this "first-line solider" in the war on crime, would be avenged.

Then, to Chicago's embarrassment (and Colonel McCormick's), Lingle turned out to be. well… he turned out to be Jake Lingle; sixty-five-dollar-a-week legman with the Trib whose yearly income was easily over sixty thousand dollars; who was known in gangland circles as the "unofficial chief of police" because of the clout he could wield, for a price, if you wanted a speak or a brothel or what-have-you sanctioned by the powers-that-be; whose Lincoln car was chauffeured; who owned a summer home on the Michigan lakeshore, and another in Florida; who lived in a suite at the Stevens Hotel, when in Chicago; who played the stock market and the races with equal abandon; whose closest friend was the commissioner of police, next to Al Capone, of course, who gave him the diamond-studded belt buckle he wore at the time of his murder.

The gun that killed Lingle was traced to Peter von Frantzius, who had also supplied the machine guns used on Saint Valentine's Day. He admitted having sold this gun and several others to one Ted

Newberry.

Newberry was, at that point, in Capone's camp, leading some to believe that the Big Fellow had turned on his old friend Lingle. After all, story was that after Capone got out of jail in Philly, he had snubbed his old pal Jake, rather than give him the usual exclusive coverage. Al, in Florida at the time of Jake's murder, pooh-poohed that to the press.

And a rival tied to the old Bugs Moran faction. Jack Zuta, seemed to be the likely suspect for engineering the Lingle hit: after being grilled by the cops, Zuta was killed, apparently by Capone people avenging the death of Al's old pal Jake.

This did not satisfy Colonel McCormick, who financed his own investigation, and a combined effort between the state attorney's office and 7WZ>-financed investigators led to a fellow named Leo Brothers. The investigators, it was rumored, had got a tip on Brothers from Capone himself, eager to help get the heat off in Chicago, thanks to the bad publicity Lingle's murder had generated, the worst since February 14, 1929.

Brothers, a labor-union terrorist on the ma from St. Louis authorities, was thirty-one, with wavy light brown hair. He was mute throughout the proceedings, and even during the course of the trial; rumor had it he was taking the fall for the mob, for pay. One of his lawyers was a former Trib staffer, a friend of Lingle's; the other lawyer was Louis Piquett, also a friend of Lingle's, who had seen Lingle shortly before the murder and was a witness in these very proceedings.

There were fifteen witnesses. Fourteen of them had been in the tunnel with Lingle and had seen the blond killer flee. Seven of them identified brown-haired Brothers as the blond; the other seven didn't. Still, Brothers was convicted, and sentenced to a strangely lenient fourteen years for the cold-blooded assassination, a sentence that finally got a public comment from Brothers: "I can do that standing on my head."

It was widely held that the prosecution's case was won by the fifteenth witness; a witness who could identify" Brothers as the blond, though this witness (bringing the total to eight who could identify the killer) had not been in the tunnel; but up on the street: the traffic cop who had pursued the killer, who had nearly caught him, who had seen him clearly. Me.

"Jake Lingle," Capone said, almost wistfully, "was a pal. Paid him one hundred thousand dollars for protection on my dog tracks, and got nothing for my money. Then he cut me out of the wire-service action, servicing the handbooks; twenty-five hundred of 'em in the city, it adds up. Then he starts doing business with Moran, on the side. And all the while he's going to my tailor charging four and five suits at a time to my account. Well, something had to give."

I didn't say anything.

"You did us a favor," Capone said, "helping us put the wrong man away."

Meaning Brothers.

"And now it's gonna come in handy," he said, "because you're the only guy who ain't a hood who can recognize this blond guy Nitti's sending to hit Cermak. Ain't that lucky?"

I smiled. "Lucky," I said.

That day I chased that blond kid and lost him had led me to plainclothes, which led me to Nitti's office, which led me here, sitting in front of Al Capone. Who I was about to work for again.

"There's nine grand more in it," he said. "That's ten grand total. And all you got to do is stop it."

"How?"

"That's up to you. But I suggest you do it quiet. If you spot the guy, take him someplace and handle it."

"I'm no killer."

"Did I say kill him? I said stop him. How you do that's between you and him." He smiled broadly, with those fat. faintly purple lips. "Then when that traitor Cermak comes back to Chicago in one piece, I let Frank know who saw to it."

"Nitti won't be happy with me," I said.

"You won't matter. You won't have had nothin' to do with it. It'll be me. Me. sitting here in fuckin' prison, still on top of things. And Frank and the boys'll know better next time."

Behind me. a voice said. "Time."

It was the guard, sticking his head in. almost embarrassed to be interrupting.

Capone nodded to him_; and the guard retreated back outside.

I stood. "Aren't you going to ask me if I'm going to do it?"

"Oh, you'll do it." Capone said, standing. And he went out, leaving me alone in the room with the bars on the windows.

He was right, of course: I'd do it. Not just because it was Al Capone asking, and it would be unwise to say no; not just because there was ten grand in it. though that was no small part of it.

It had to do with something Capone couldn't even guess. I wanted to catch that blond killer, this time.

The Morrison was the tallest hotel in the city and, if its advertising was to be believed, the world The main building was twenty-one stories, with a tower going up another nineteen, with a flagpole atop that, the gold ball atop the flagpole the highest point in the city. Cermak was living in the bungalow atop the tower; if he wanted to ride higher up, he'd have to climb the pole and sit on the ball.

It was Wednesday morning, but I was still tired from the Atlanta trip; I'd got in at Dearborn Station at two yesterday afternoon, giving an unintentional scare to a couple of pickpockets who apparently didn't know I was off the force. I'd spent the rest of the day in my office doing Retail Credit checks over the phone and, after a bite at Binyon's and a solitary nightcap at Barney's, I'd gone up and pulled down the Murphy bed, the plan being to sleep till noon; any noon. But a phone call from Eliot had woken me at seven-thirty this morning- he wanted to meet me for coffee at eight; we settled on nine, in the Morrison Sandwich Shop.

I went in the hotel's main lobby, which was pretty plush: gray marble floors, walls inlaid with marble and wood, overstuffed furniture, bronze lamps, potted ferns, high vaulted ceiling. To the right was the marble-and-bronze check-in desk, to the left a bank of five elevators, one of which I took up to the fifth floor. Most of the hotels in the city were in trouble; one, the Blackstone, was about to go under. But the Morrison Hotel was doing fine, having cut its rates in half; even a relatively posh joint like this had to make concessions for the depression.

I showered and shaved in the traveler's lounge, went to my locker to get dressed; I was buttoning my pants when I felt a finger tap on my shoulder. I turned.

It was Lana.

It was the first I'd seen him since Nitti's office. His five o'clock shadow seemed even darker this time; maybe he was down here to shave. He was in a rumpled suit that looked slept in. and his bald head caught the overhead light and reflected it. His black eyes were shiny, too, and he had something like a smile going, though there was more than a little sneer in it.

He kept tapping the finger against my chest. "You doin' anything special here, Heller?"

"That finger's healed nicely," I said.

He prodded me with it, kind of hard. "It's healed fine."

I grabbed it, twisted it; he grimaced but said nothing.

I said: "Didn't your friend Miller give you my message? You're to keep your distance from me. I don't like either one of you bastards."

I let go of him. He backed away, holding the finger, his reddened face screwed up, and glanced behind him, wishing Miller were around to back him up. He wasn't.

"I just wanted to know what you're doing here, Heller," he said lamely.

"I'm using the traveler's lounge, Lang, just like you are. I presume you're using this 'cause Cermak won't let you use the facilities in his fancy bungalow. Or maybe His Honor just keeps 'em tied up."

"You think you're pretty funny."

"No, I think you're pretty fanny. Now excuse me." I put my suitcoat on. and my hat, slung my topcoat over my arm, ready to leave; he held a palm out, in a stop gesture- but he didn't touch me.

"Look," he said. "Maybe we should get off each other's backs. We're in this together, right?"

I said, "Three peas in a pod, that's us. At the trial. But till then, keep your fucking distance, okay?"

He shrugged, almost embarrassed. "Okay," he said.

Eliot was in a booth in the sandwich shop, sipping coffee; he gave me a weary little smile as I joined him.

"Just saw a friend of mine," I said.

"Who's that?"

"Lang."

"No kidding. You boys keep it friendly?"

"Sure. We're pals."

"He must be looking after Cermak." Eliot pointed upward with a thumb. "That bungalow's something. I hear. Steinway in the living room. Three master bedrooms. Library. Kitchen, dining room, the works."

"Must pay to be a servant of the public."

Eliot laughed humorlessly. "So they tell me."

"What's the word from the streets, on the Nitti hit?"

Eliot shrugged. "People seem to think Nitti was going to use Little New York Campagna as a triggerman, to bump Cermak, and Cermak got wind. Newberry, either at Cermak's suggestion or to be a good team player, offered fifteen thousand dollars to have Nitti hit first. Box score: Nitti's alive. Newberry's dead. Cermak's hiding upstairs."

"Think he's in danger?"

"I hear he bought a bulletproof vest. But. no, I don't think so. Too much publicity. Frank Nitti isn't stupid enough to shoot down the mayor of Chicago."

"He was planning to."

"He could've got away with it. before the shit hit the fan. The Cermak hit could've been pinned on any number of gangs, not just the Capone faction. But after all that's happened, no… I'd say Cermak's safe. Nitti's too smart for that."

I nodded. A pretty waitress with blond hair in a pink-aproned outfit came over. She gave me a nice smile and I asked for coffee. I watched her leave.

"I think I'm in love." I said.

"Maybe you should call Janey."

I turned back to him. "No. That's over."

"If you say so. Look, about last Saturday…"

"What?"

"Taking you along on the Newberry ID. I'm sorry if I sounded like I was lecturing you or something."

"Hey. It could have been worse. I could've been taken for a ride by Nitti. not Ness."

He let go a rueful smile. "I suppose. Say. uh… were you out of town or something?"

"Yeah. For a couple of days."

"Where'd you 20?"

"Out of town. Business."

"I don't mean to snoop."

"I know. Eliot, but you just can't help yourself."

"Say. did you pick up any work from Retail Credit?"

"Yeah. I did. Anderson's giving me some insurance claims to investigate. I appreciate the lead, and the recommendation, Eliot."

"Oh, that's okay, Nate."

"But I'm still not going to tell you where I was yesterday."

"If you don't want to…"

"Okay, I went to Atlanta and took on Capone as a client."

He smirked. "You don't have to be a smart-ass."

I shrugged. "Let's just say I'm working for an attorney and it makes the case more or less privileged information."

"That might be stretching a legal point, but I'll accept it. Besides, it isn't my business. I'm just curious, that's all."

"It's okay."

"What attorney?"

"Jesus. Eliot! Louis Piquett."

He didn't like that: he didn't say so, he just looked into his coffee with Norwegian gloom.

"I'm not thick with him, Eliot. Fact, I haven't even met him."

"Maybe you did go see Capone in Atlanta."

"Yeah," I said good-naturedly, pretending to kid him. "Maybe I did."

"Piquett's connected to Capone, they say."

"I've heard that."

"He was Jake Lingle's killer's lawyer, too."

So there it was: out on the table, between us. Jake Lingle.

"That assumes the guy they sent up really did kill Lingle." I said.

Eliot looked at me. "Oh. I'm sure he was the killer. There were reliable witnesses."

I said nothing; the sarcasm in Eliot's voice had been so faint I could've been imagining it.

"There's something I've wanted to tell you for a long time." Eliot said. "We never talked about the Lingle matter. That happened before we happened. But you seem to be in the thick of it again, in regard to the Capone gang… through no fault of your own." He pointed his thumb Cermak-ward again. "And. well… I can't help but be concerned."

"I appreciate your concern. Eliot. I really do. But…"

"But keep out of it. Fair enough. Only let me tell you this thing I've wanted to tell you. It isn't commonly known. Frank Wilson and I knew about Lingle… we knew he was close to Capone. and could be a major witness, as to the kind of dough Capone spent, to help us build a tax-evasion case. We called Colonel McCormick at the Trib. He knew of Lingle, but didn't know him personally. We didn't tell the Colonel why we wanted to see Lingle- if we had, the Colonel wouldn't have made such a sap out of himself, in the press, defending the fallen hero. But we asked the Colonel to set up an appointment with Lingle for us, at the Tribune Tower. He agreed. We were to meet with Lingle at eleven o'clock the morning of June tenth." He paused melodramatically, and this time it worked, "I don't have to tell you what happened June ninth."

Jake Lingle was murdered.

"No," I said, "you don't."

"It's always bothered me. circumstantial as hell though it is, that Piquett, with his Capone connections, a pal of Lingle himself, himself a witness at the trial for having seen Lingle shortly before the murder, that this very man Piquett should defend the guy who supposedly shot Lingle."

"I can see how that would bother you," I said.

"There've been a lot of theories about who was behind the Lingle killing. Who hired it. Some feel Capone was back of it, many feel otherwise. But I don't have any doubt that it was anyone but Capone."

"Neither do I, Eliot."

"Well," he said gravely, "we won't say anything more about the Lingle matter. But I thought you should know about the appointment at Tribune Tower that Lingle didn't get to keep."

"It's not a bad thing to know. Thanks, Eliot."

The waitress came back and we both had another coffee.

"Listen," Eliot said, "I wanted to see you this morning, not just to pry into your affairs. I wanted to give you some news."

Oh?

"I'm putting in for a transfer."

"Out of Chicago?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"The show's over, here. I'm a lame duck. Chief prohibition agent in a city that'll be selling beer legal 'fore you know it, and everything else, soon as FDR gets 'round to it. I want a real job again."

"Eliot, you always used Prohibition as a weapon against the gangs; an excuse to go after them. Why not keep using that excuse as long as you can get away with it?"

He shook his head. "No. It's over." He looked at me and his eyes were tired: he looked older than twenty-nine. "You know something, Nate. Sometimes I think getting Capone was just… public relations. They brought me in, they sicced me on him, and we did the job, and now he's gone, but hail, hail… the gang's still here. And with Prohibition gone, they'll be less vulnerable. More underground. But here. Still here. And I'm not sure anybody cares."

I didn't say anything for a while.

Then said. "Eliot- surely you knew how much the Capone conviction was a PR effort, from word go. Nobody was better at getting in the papers than you."

He smiled sadly, shook his head some more. "That's a nice way of saying I'm a glory-hound. Nate. I guess maybe I am. Maybe I like my picture in the papers, my name in headlines. But did it ever occur to you that the only clout I had, the only way I could build public support, the only way I could show the concerned citizens and the politicians who brought me in to do the job that I was doing that job was to get in the goddamn papers?"

Actually, it hadn't occurred to me; and I felt kind of ashamed of myself that as one of his best friends. I had been right in there giving Eliot an at least partially bad rap all along, where his supposed publicity hunaer was concerned.

"Where will you go?"

"Where they send me. I'd imagine I'll be here through the summer. They may have some use for me during the fair."

"You'll be missed. I'll even miss you."

"I'm not gone yet. Anyway. I wanted to tell you about it. Kind of_; you know. Get it off my chest."

"I'll be leaving town, myself. For just a week or two."

Oh?

"Yeah. I'll be down in Florida, early next month."

"Isn't that when Cermak'll be down there?"

Ever the detective.

"Is it?" I said, with what I hoped came off as genuine ignorance/innocence.

"Think it is," Eliot said noncommittally, rising, picking up the check, putting down a dime for the tip. I added a nickel. He looked at me. "You are in love."

"I fall in love easy when I haven't been laid in two weeks," I said.

He smiled at that, and didn't have a tired look in his eyes anymore. We walked out on the street together, and I walked over to Dearborn with him and down to the Federal Building, where he left me, and I went on to Van Buren and 'round the corner to my office. It was windy, which was hardly a surprise in January in Chicago, but the wind had real teeth now, and I buried my hands in my topcoat pockets and walked with my head looking at the pavement, because the wind made my eyes burn when I walked into it.

My head was still down as I opened the door and came off the street and into the stairwell, and I raised my head only when I heard footsteps coming down above me.

In the stairwell, half a flight up. a woman was coming down. A woman in her early twenties with a face like Claudette Colbert's, only not as wide. She was rather tall, perhaps five eight or nine, and wore a long black coat with a black fur collar, nothing fancy, yet not quite austere. She had dark black hair, short, a cap of curls that lay close to her head, and another cap cocked over that: a beret. She carried a little black purse in one hand. As we passed on the stairs, I smiled at her and she returned it. She smelled good, but it wasn't a perfumy, flowery scent; it was a fragrance I couldn't place: incense? Whatever the case, I was in love for the second time in an hour.

Then when we'd passed, she called out to me, in a melodious, trained voice that seemed affected, somehow, in a way I couldn't quite define, like the fragrance.

She said, "Do you have an office in this building, or are you just calling on someone?"

I turned to her, leaned on the banister, which wasn't the safest thing in the world to do, but I was trying for a Ronald Colman air.

"I have an office," I said. With understated pride.

"Oh, splendid," she smiled. "Then perhaps you'd know what Mr. Heller's hours are."

"I'm Mr. Heller," I said, losing my air, but managing not to sputter. "Anyway, I'm Heller."

"Oh, splendid! Just who I've come to see."

And she came up the stairs and I allowed her to pass, her body brushing mine, the fragrance still a mystery, and once in the corridor, led her to my office. She went in, I took her coat and hung it on the tree, and she stood poised, purse in two hands like a fig leaf in front of her.

She was stunning, in an oddball way: she was deathly pale, partially from face powder, but her lips were dark red, a red with black in it; she wore black, completely black- a one-piece slinky dress that wanted to be satin but was cotton, with a slit up to her knee, black heels, sheer black hose with a mesh pattern. The effect, with the beret, was vaguely apache dancer, but also vaguely naive. Play-acting was part of this, somehow.

I hung my own topcoat up, gestured to the chair in front of my desk, which I got behind; she sat with her back straight, her head back a bit. She reached a hand out to me across the desk, which I had to stand to take; I wasn't sure if I was supposed to kiss it or shake it, so I just kind of took it, taking the tips of four fingers in my hand and squeezing gently, acknowledging the hand's existence, then sitting down.

"My name is Mary Ann Beame," she said. "That's Beame with an E. A silent one. I don't have a stage name."

"You don't?"

"That's my real name. I don't believe in stage names. I'm an actress."

"Really?"

"I've done some little theater, here and there."

Very little theater. I thought.

"I see," I said.

She sat up even straighter, wide-eyed. "Oh! Don't worry. I'm not destitute. Just because I'm an actress."

"I didn't assume you were."

"I have an income. I work in radio."

"No kidding?"

"Yes. It makes a tidy living for me, till I can go on to something better. Do you listen to the radio?"

"When I get the chance. I been meaning to pick one up for the office."

She looked around, as if trying to see where to put this radio, once I bought it. She noticed the Murphy bed and pointed toward it; the gesture was theatrical, but somehow I didn't think this was coming from snobbishness. "Isn't that a Murphy bed?" she asked.

"It might be," I said.

She shrugged to herself, not bothering to understand either the Murphy bed or my remark, and looked across the desk at me. smiled and said. "Just Plain Bill."

"Pardon?"

"That's the sudser I'm on. 'Just Plain Bill' I do several voices, one of them a lead. I do that regularly, and pick up a lot of other shows. Have you heard 'Mr. First-Nighter'? That's where I've done my best work, I think."

"I'm more an 'Amos 'n' Andy' man, myself."

"They do all their own voices," she said, rather sadly, as it wasn't a market for her wares.

"I'm glad a serious actress like yourself has no compunctions about working in radio. A lot of actresses might feel above it."

"A number of splendid actors and actresses are working in Chicago radio, Mr. Heller. Francis X. Bushman. Irene Rich. Frank Dane."

"Eddie Cantor," I offered.

"Not in Chicago." she corrected.

"Well, then. We've established you're gainfully employed Now, why is it you wanted to employ me?"

Her face took on a serious cast; the pretension dropped, and concern came through. She dug in her little black purse and came up with a dog-eared snapshot.

"Here's a photo of Jimmy."

She handed it across the desk to me; it was a photo of her and a boy who looked a bit like her. though he was pudgy. It was several years old; possibly when they were still in their late teens.

"We were twins," she said. "Still are. I suppose."

"Not identical twins. I hope," I said, venturing a small smile.

"No," she said distantly, not getting it.

I started to hand the picture back, and she shook her head no.

"Keep that," she said. "I want you to find him."

"How long has he been missing?"

"Well, he isn't missing exactly… it's nothing you could go to the police about. I mean, it isn't a missing persons case or anything like that."

"What is it, then, Miss Beame?"

"Call me Mary Ann. Please."

"All right, Mary Ann. Why is your brother not exactly missing?"

"We come from Davenport. Iowa? On the Mississippi. One of the Tri-Cities. Heard of that? Rock Island? Moline?"

I'd heard of all three: Davenport was where Bix Beiderbecke came from- the jazz cornet player who, till bad bootleg gin killed him in '31. made Paul Whiteman worth listening to; Rock Island I knew from its railroad; and Barney had fought in Moline. But the term "Tri-Cities" was new to me. I didn't bother saying so. because she was off and away.

"My father was a chiropractor. That makes it sound like he's dead, and he isn't. He's alive and well. But Daddy was a chiropractor. Davenport is the home of that, you know… the Palmers, they invented chiropractic. And my father was very thick with them. Very friendly, one of their first students. But he had an accident in an automobile, and his hands were badly burned. He had to stop practicing. He taught at the Palmer College for a while, and ended up as the manager of WOC Radio."

I stopped her. "How did he go from being a bonesetter to the manager of a radio station?"

"The Palmers own WOC. 'World of Chiropractic' Like the Tribune's station WGN stands for 'World's Greatest Newspaper.' Understand? That's where I had my first experience, in radio, was on Daddy's station. I read poems on the air when I was a little girl. When I was older, I had my own program for the kids, reading stories, like fairy tales. That's where I got my experience, and why I was able to come to

Chicago and find work in radio, here."

Having a father in the business who could pull some strings (even if he couldn't crack bones) must not have hurt, either.

"Jimmy and I were always close. We had a lot of the same dreams. I wanted to be an actress, and he wanted to be a reporter. We both read a lot, as kids, and I think that's what fueled our fantasies, and our ambitions. But, anyway, that was Jimmy's dream, only Daddy wanted him to be a chiropractor, as you might guess. Jimmy had a couple of years at Augustana College, taking liberal arts, planning to take journalism, but Daddy wanted him to go on to Palmer, and when Jimmy wouldn't, Daddy cut off the money. And Jimmy left home."

"When was this?"

"A year and a half ago. About June 1931, I'd say. Right after his college got out."

"How long have you been in Chicago?"

"A year. I hoped to run into him here."

"Chicago's a big place to just run into people."

"I know that now. I didn't know that in Davenport."

"Understandable. But you had reason to believe he'd come here?"

"Yes. He wanted to work for the World's Greatest Newspaper."

"The Trib?."

"Yes. Short of that. I think any Chicago paper would do."

"And you think, what? He came to Chicago and applied for jobs at the various papers?"

"I think so, yes. I called all the papers and asked if they had a James Beame working for them and they just laughed at me."

"They thought you were pulling their leg."

"Why?"

"James Beame. Jim Beam. You know."

"No."

"It's a whiskey."

"Oh. I didn't make that connection."

"Well, they probably did. He hasn't contacted your family? Your father, your mother, since he left in the summer of 31?"

"No. Mother's dead, by the way. When she gave birth to us."

I didn't know what to say to that; it was a little late in the game to express condolences. Finally I said. "I take it this is your personal effort to locate your brother… your father isn't involved."

"That's right."

"Is there anything else pertinent you can tell me?"

She thought. "He came by hopping a freight. At least that's what he told me he planned to do."

"I see. It's not a lot to go on."

"But you will try, won't you?"

"Sure. But I can't guarantee you anything. I can check with the papers, and maybe ask around some Hoovervilles."

"Why those?"

"A naive kid. down on his luck, he might fall in with hobos or down-and-outers." If he lived through it.

"Or he might have gone on by freight to someplace else. Do you want to know what my guess is?"

"Certainly."

"He came here and tried to land a job and got nowhere. He was too embarrassed to go back home, so he hit the road. My guess is, he's traveling the rails, seeing the country. And one of these days, God willing, he'll get back in touch with the family, and he'll be a grown-up."

"What are you saying, Mr. Heller?"

"Nate. I'm saying, save your money. I'll take the case if you insist but I think things would work out just as well if you let them work out on their own."

Without hesitation, she said, "Please take the case."

I shrugged. Smiled. "Consider it taken."

"Splendid!" she said. Her smile lit up the room.

"My rates are ten bucks a day. I'll put at least three days into this, so…"

She was already digging into her purse. "Here's a hundred dollars."

"That's too much."

"Please take it. It's a… what is it?"

"Retainer. I can't."

"Please."

"I'd rather not."

"Please."

"Well. Okay."

"Splendid!"

"Listen, do you have an address? A place where I can reach you?"

"I have a studio on East Chestnut. We have a phone." She gave me the number; I wrote it down.

"That's in Tower Town, isn't it?" I said,

"Yes. And you aren't surprised, are you?" That last was delivered impishly.

"No," I admitted. Tower Town was Chicago's version of Greenwich Village, home of the city's self-styled bohemians. "Say. how did you happen to pick me to come to?"

She looked at me with more innocence than I knew still existed in the world; or anyway, Chicago. "You were first in the phone book," she said. Then she stood. "I have to run. I've two parts on a sudser this afternoon."

"Where?"

"Merchandise Mart."

That was where the NBC studios were; CBS was at the Wrigley Building.

"Let me get your coat," I said, and got up from behind the desk.

I put it on her; the smell was incense. That was about as close as Tower Town got to perfume.

She gazed at me with the brownest eyes I ever saw and said, "I think you're going to find my brother for me."

"No promises," I said, and opened the door for her.

I'd give it the old college try, Palmer or otherwise.

I went to the window and looked at her out on the street, straining to see her through the fire escape between us, seeing little more than the top of her head, that beret, as she caught a streetcar.

"I think I'm in love." I said to nobody.

Sundays. I missed Janey.

I missed her other times, too; every night, for instance. Days hadn't been a problem: my new business was keeping me occupied, so far. and I didn't really have time to mope. I worked long days, so nights I was tired, and then there was always Barney's speak waiting for me when I dragged home; not that I got drunk every night, but I drank enough to go to sleep without much effort. Rum, mostly.

But Sunday, goddamn Sunday.

That was our day, Janey's and mine. Good weather, we'd go to a park or a beach or a ball game- summers we played tennis and pee wee golf; we'd go to a matinee in winter, maybe ice-skate at some lagoon, or just spend a day in her flat, and she'd cook for me, and we'd listen to Bing Crosby records, and play Mah-Jongg, and make love two or three times. Now and then Eliot and his wife, Betty, would have us over for Sunday dinner, like family, and we'd play some bridge. Eliot and Betty usually won, but it made for a nice afternoon. A preview of the sweet, quiet life Janey and I'd have after we got married and had a house of our own, maybe even in as respectable a neighborhood as Eliot and Betty's.

But I wasn't living in a dream cottage, I was living in an office, and that had its advantages, but spending Sunday alone in it wasn't one of them. I'd sit and look at the phone and think about calling Janey. I would manage, for minutes at a time, to convince myself there was a percentage in doing that. A full five minutes might go by before I admitted to myself that what was between us was dead.

And today was Sunday.

But I had another woman on my mind, this Sunday: a client. Purely business. I was able to convince myself of that for minutes at a time, too.

I hadn't had a chance, yet. to do much about tracking down Mary Ann Beanie's brother. I had started on the case the afternoon of the day she came to my office. I followed the most obvious course of action, which was to check with all the papers in town, where he'd probably gone looking for work, just another naive teenage kid from the sticks who expected the big town to spread its legs for him, never considering that the town might be on the rag. It had only taken me that one afternoon and part of the next morning. I showed his picture to the information desks and cashiers in their first-floor cages at the Trib, News, Herald-Examiner; I checked with the City News Bureau, too. Nobody remembered him, and why should they? A lot of people were looking for work these days; nobody had been hired in janitorial for a year and a half, let alone editorial. Nobody kept job application forms, because would-be applicants didn't get that far: any reporters that did get hired were pros who would go right to the city editor and ask if he had anything for 'em. Jimmy Beame's plan to be a big-city reporter was a pipe dream: I knew that going in. But I was a detective, and any competent detective knows that most of the legwork he does will account to nothing, so I checked anyway, knowing what I'd find: nothing.

Most of the next week I spent investigating insurance claims for Retail Credit in Jackson Park. Business was so good, I spent seventy-five dollars of Capone's money on a '29 Chevy that was the first car I ever owned: a dark blue coupe with a rumble seat. It made me feel like a rich man, but the people I called on reminded me I wasn't. Not that they were well-to-do- they lived in typical Chicago two-, three-, and six-flat buildings but anybody with steady work and a nice place to live who could afford insurance seemed well-to-do these days. I called on a few merchants, and a lawyer; and a professor at the University of Chicago campus, whose claim was the only one that smelled phony to me: a family heirloom, his grandmother's diamond ring, which now was his wife's, was missing, having been "lost on an outing"; but the description of the ring was specific enough that I thought I might be able to turn it up at one of the North Clark Street pawnshops, and planned to advise Retail Credit as much.

The tree-lined boulevard that I followed out of the university campus was the site of the midway of the last world's fair, the Columbian Exposition. The only overt reminder of that fair- which had begun with much fanfare about the success of the modern age and had ended with the city in the throes of a depression- was the Fine Arts Palace, which had later become the Field Museum, and now was turning into something called the Museum of Science and Industry. Restoration was under way as I drove by, scaffolding still up, as workers worked at getting the joint ready to house exhibits for the next world's fair, opening in May.

I remembered my father talking about the '93 fair: he hadn't liked it; he found it offensive, union man that he was. Within the White City of the fair- its arcanely classical buildings out of sync with Chicago's reputation as the birthplace of modern architecture- fairgoers had lined up for rides on the first Ferris wheel, and men gawked at Little Egypt, while outside, in the Gray City, jobless men had wandered looking for parks to sleep in that weren't littered with Greek and Roman buildings.

Each day as I drove back to the Loop along Leif Eriksen Drive at twilight, angular-shaped structures would rise like a mirage along the lakefront; overtly modern buildings and towers not quite finished, some of them with their skeletons still showing, poked at the sky-, testing it. The winter had been kind, thus far, and snow and cold had not got in the way of the continuing construction of this futuristic city upon land that had, in part, been dredged from the lake.

The new fair was coming: the Century of Progress General Dawes insisted on celebrating, even if it wasn't really a hundred years yet; who was counting?

On the site of the fair, less than a year ago, was a Hooverville. The jobless, the homeless had been made to give way for the Century of Progress. Well, what the hell, maybe the prosperity the fair would bring the city would give the jobless a job or two. And losing the lakefront sure didn't cost Chicago her Hoovervilles.

And the Hoovervilles were my next stop, where Jimmy Beame was concerned. As good a way as any to avoid spending Sunday in my office. And the Hoovervilles wouldn't be closed for the Sabbath, either.

I started with Grant Park, which didn't qualify as a Hooverville, but was an outdoor hotel for the down-and-out just the same; nobody dared put up any shacks there, of course, since the cops would put a quick end to that. But otherwise, as long as things didn't get out of hand, the cops looked the other way- they about had to, since they'd long since stopped picking up vagrants: there wasn't room in the jails to accommodate thai big a crowd.

I walked up there, past the Adams and Congress hotels, and soon was showing Jimmy Beame's smiling well-fed face to gaunt, unshaven men in suits that had once cost more than mine but now were held together with safety pins and string. The men in Grant Park- Lincoln Park was the same- were those who had not succumbed to moving into a Hooverville; they had not accepted their rung on the depression ladder, and were usually not panhandling, yet, were still trying to eke out existences doing odd jobs, like shoveling snow, which is where one old codger I talked to told me he'd got the extra topcoat he had folded up to use as a pillow on the bench he had staked out for himself, this bitter cold Sunday morning.

And there was snow to shovel, now: it had finally hit Chicago; no blizzard, but the few inches we'd got mid week were clinging to the ground, thanks to the consistently cold weather. The old guy with two topcoats was in the minority?; most of the men didn't have even one. and this tall, tough, skinny old bird might be man enough yet to wake up tomorrow morning and still own two.

"I ain't seen this boy," he said, looking at Jimmy Beanie's smiling face. "The gal he's with's a pretty little thing. Like to've met her when I was in my prime."

"That's his sister."

"Looks it." the old guy said.

"Have you eaten today?"

"I ate yesterday."

I started to dig in my pocket; he put a hand on my arm.

"Listen," he said "You plan on showing that picture around? Asking these has-beens and never-wases if they seen this kid?"

I said that I was.

"Then don't give anybody a red cent. Word gets around you're giving out dough, you'll get more information than you can use and none of it'll be worth a slug."

I knew that. But this poor old bastard was in his damn seventies, and out in the cold like this…

He must've known that was going through my mind, though, because he smiled and shook his head.

"Just 'cause I'm the oldest kid on the block, don't make me the neediest or the worse off. If I had some information for you, I'd take your dough. But I don't, so I won't. These other boys won't take that attitude, though. See, I been in this game since before hard times. I been riding the rails twenty years, ever since a woman I lived with for fifteen years throwed me out for reasons that are none of your business. But these other boys… they don't know how to handle this life. It's new to 'em. So don't give any money away. You can't have enough to handle the business you'd do."

I shook his hand, and forced the buck in mine into his. He gave me an almost angry look, but I said, "You worked for that. Your advice was worth it."

He smiled and nodded, and stretched out on his bench for a snooze, the folded topcoat under his head.

Around the base of the statue of Alexander Hamilton, the founder of the Treasury of the United States, sat several more down-and-outers, and I could see they were the sort of man the old hobo had referred to: guys in their twenties, thirties, forties- men who'd had jobs, who'd played by the rules, who'd believed that for the man willing to work there was always work- sitting at the base of Hamilton's statue with faces that still had pride in them. But there was confusion, too, and anger, and as the months passed and these men moved into a shack in one of the Hoovervilles that dotted the outlying parts of town, those faces would rum blank, frozen, and by something more than just the cold.

One of the men, sitting on a step with a Sunday Tribune next to him, had his suitcoat off, and his vest, and was wrapping some newspaper around his trunk, and then buttoned his vest over himself and the papers, and then wrapped some more paper around himself and the vest, before climbing back into the suitcoat.

He noticed me watching him, and had a smile left in him and shared it with me. "Keeps ya from freezin', they tell me," he said.

I didn't have a snappy answer. I managed to say, "Bet it does," and he said, "Gotta make sure you keep one over your heart."

"Oh?"

He shrugged. "That's if you plan on waking up."

"Ever see this guy?"

I showed him the picture.

He studied it. Said. "Any dough in it if I have?"

"No," I said.

"I haven't seen him. I wouldn't even've seen him if there was dough in it."

"Thanks for your trouble." I said.

"Don't mention it," he said, and spread out the rest of the newspaper and lay down on it. He didn't put any on top of him, like blankets, though: there was just enough wind to make that inadvisable.

I showed the picture to the rest of the squatters on Hamilton's pedestal. None of them had ever seen Jimmy Beame; most of them liked the looks of Mary Ann; some of them seemed past caring about the looks of a Mary Ann, even in an abstract way. I questioned some more men, who sat on benches along the lakefront, looking out at the nearly completed city of tomorrow where a sea of shacks had been, not so long ago. One of the men, a gray-complexioned middle-aged guy in hat and topcoat, both of which had cost some dough, though the topcoat's burtons were mostly gone, hadn't seen Jimmy, either, but suggested I get a copy of the photo made and then he could help me show the picture around, and could turn an honest dollar. I turned him down, without a twinge- like that old guy said. I didn't have enough money to do the job without covering my heart over, and with something tougher than newspaper.

I drove to the Hooverville at Harrison and Canal. It was a vista straight out of Krazy Kat: a surrealistic town of shelters built from tar paper and flattened tin cans, scrap lumber and cardboard boxes, packing crates and old car bodies, chicken wire and flapping tarps, anything the city dumps could provide, with an occasional old stovepipe sticking out at an odd. raffish angle. The hovels were rather neatly arranged in a landscaped setting, with walks carved out of the earth and some trees and bushes planted- barren now, of course, except for a couple of evergreens, one of which had probably served as a Christmas tree; no weeds or rubbish in sight, just a strange little town in the snow, many of its occupants huddling around trash-cans, fires in which burned a vivid orange against the gray-white day. This, and a number of other Hoovervilles near the railroad yards and in vacant lots around town, had been around long enough to have become more than a temporary stop: these people lived here, men and women and children, people who seldom were able to wash themselves or their clothes, but who carried themselves with a quiet dignity that said they would if they could. And from the number of children and pregnant women, life here seemed to be going on.

It was the Hoovervilles like this that were the most promising to me in this search: some of these people had been here well over a year, whereas the hobos of the city and the down-and-outers of Grant and Lincoln Park were transient. If Jimmy Beame had come here by freight, in which case he would just about had to have fallen in temporarily with tramps, he could very likely have come back to a Hooverville to spend the nights during his fruitless search for a desk in Tribune Tower. So it was the permanent residents of the city's Hoovervilles who had the best chance of having seen him.

Nobody at Harrison and Canal had ever seen Jimmy Beame.

I hit three more Hoovervilles, the outlying ones, and called it a Sunday. The next morning I tried the loading platforms on lower Wacker Drive, and none of the men there could identify the picture; neither could the men under the Michigan Avenue bridge. The Hoovervilles near the railroad yards were perhaps the best bet, but I got nowhere. I ended up in Barney's speak about seven Monday night and drank mm till I stopped seeing unshaven faces wearing battered fedoras.

Then I spent two days on the near North Side, going up and down North Clark Street with that goddamn picture in my hand. North Clark Street was not the place to go for a man tired of looking at hobos; it was. in fact, hobohemia. Ramshackle old buildings with halfhearted store fronts catered to the drifters who had been the soul of the street since before hard times, and would be after: peddlers and street hawkers had every corner and many spots in between all sewed up. Just a few blocks from here were the fancy shops of North Michigan Avenue, where wealthy women in furs and jewelry bought more furs and jewelry. But this was North Clark Street: pawnshops, whitetile restaurants, chop-suey joints, chili parlors, poolrooms, sleazy theaters, cigar stores, newsstands, secondhand stores, mission soup kitchens, flophouses; a dingy, shabby street that at night turned into a "little white way" of bright lights and hot jazz, with cabarets and "open" dance halls where lonely men and women from the rooming houses could get acquainted and maybe set up some light housekeeping for a week or a year, as well as tens-cents-a-dance halls, where the hookers plied their trade.

But the hobos shuffling these streets, filling the men's hotels and rooming houses, hadn't seen Jimmy Beame; at least not the ones I talked to. Or on LaSalle, Dearborn, State, or Rush streets; or the cross streets below Chicago Avenue, where dozens of flophouses had a bed- or something like a bed- for a homeless gent… assuming he had a quarter a night or a dollar a week. And a lot of people in Chicago didn't.

Didn't have a quarter, and didn't know who the hell Jimmy Beame was, either. That would seem to sum up the hundreds of unshaven, shabbily dressed men I showed that picture to.

I spent a day trying the flops along South Clark. South State, and West Madison- stopped in at the Dawes Hotel for Men. the skid-row charity hotel the General had founded in memory of his dead son. And got nowhere.

Back to North Clark Street. Between Clark and Dearborn streets, in Washington Square, in front of the Newberry Library, was Bughouse Square. If my father were alive, and down-and-out. he'd be here: at night, crowds of men would stand along its curbstones, listening to the oratory of whoever was atop the several soapboxes, propounding upon the favorite topics: the evils of capitalism, and the nonexistence of God. The more intellectual of the drifters and down-and-outers would tend to find their way here, this focal point for reds and I.W.W. sympathizers, intellectuals and agitators. My father would have been at home here.

During the daytime, the soapboxes stood vacant, mostly, and the benches and curbs were taken up by the same sort of unshaven faces I'd been looking at all day for days now (not to mention in my sleep). The major difference was a number of these shabbily dressed citizens were reading newspapers, not wearing them.

A young man on the down-and-out, disillusioned by his rejection from the great newspapers he so idolized, might well end up in Bughouse Square.

I asked several men and got a negative response; then a pale, younger one with wire-frames and longish brown hair seemed to know the face.

"Yes." he said. "I know who this is."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. It's Mary Ann Beame. She lives in a studio in Tower Town. She's an actress."

Great

"Yeah. Well thanks, kid."

"Isn't that worth something?"

"Not really."

"I'm not begging or anything. I just think since I identified the picture…"

"It's the boy I'm trying to find."

"Oh. Him I don't know. Why don't you look up Mary Ann? Maybe she knows him."

Til try that."

"I could use fifty cents. Or a quarter. I could use some lunch."

"Sorry."

"I'm not a hobo, you understand. I'm an inventor."

"Oh really." I started to move away.

He got up from the bench; he wasn't tall; his eyes were brighter than a puppy's- in terms of shine, anyway.

"I invented a lens," he said, and reached in a corduroy jacket pocket and withdrew a round thick polished piece of glass double the size of a silver dollar.

"That's nice."

"It enables a person to see things a billion times bigger than they really are." He held it up for the sun to bounce off it: the sun was under a cloud.

"No kidding."

"I ground it myself, with emery cloth." He was walking beside me. now; he leaned in and spoke in a hushed tone, touching my arm. "I've been offered a thousand dollars for it. I'm holding out for five thousand."

I removed his hand from my arm. carefully, with a polite smile; I even made some conversation: "How'd you find out that lens was so strong?"

He smiled. Smug. Proud. "I experimented on a bedbug. I put a live bedbug under this glass, and I could see every muscle in its body. I could see its joints and how it worked them. I could see its face; no expression in its eyes, though. Bugs don't have much native intelligence, you know."

"Yeah, I heard that. So long."

He was behind me now. but calling out to me. "You couldn't do that with an ordinary lens!"

No. you couldn't.

I drank too much rum that night, and decided I had to get rid of this fucking case before it turned me into a lush.

In a little over a week I'd be going to Florida; tomorrow. I had to see Mary Ann Beame and tell her I couldn't find her brother.

So the next afternoon I drove north on Michigan Avenue, past the Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower and the Medinah Athletic Club and the Allerton Hotel, toward the landmark those skyscrapers now dwarfed: the old water tower, a Gothic churchlike building with its tower thrust in the air like a gray stone finger- perhaps a middle finger, considering the talk circulating of late that the North Side's sole survivor of the Great Fire was to be torn down to speed the flow of Michigan Avenue traffic.

The water tower, at Michigan and Chicago avenues, gave its name to Tower Town. Chicago's Greenwich Village, and was at the district's center- though the exact boundaries of Tower Town were a bit hard to define. It vaguely encroached on the Gold Coast, north of Division Street, but came to an abrupt halt at Grand Avenue, on the south. It sneaked west of Clark Street, and crossed Michigan Avenue to move eastward into Streeterville. an area named after a squatter who lived in a shack (but which now ran to some of the fanciest apartment buildings in the city)- State Street was its main north-south road, and Chicago Avenue bisected it east-west.

That's where Tower Town was; what it was was streets whose "quaintly" run-down buildings housed tearooms (Ye Black Cat Club), art shops (The Neo Arlimusc), restaurants (The Dill Pickle Club), and bookstalls (The Radical Book Shop). Above the shops were garrets and "studios," as demonstrated by the flower boxes hanging from sills above, and the Studio for Rent signs in some of the shop windows. Like most big-city "bohemias," there was an effort, conscious or not, to attract tourists, and shimmers; but on a cold Thursday at dusk, the wind blowing the snow around like a minor dust storm, its streets were empty of anybody but the young artists and students who lived here, and they tended to have hands burrowed in the pockets of their corduroy coats, moving forward without looking, which was what they were good at, after all.

I'd been to the Dill Pickle Club before; it was a landmark like the water tower. But I never expected to be back a second time. I hadn't been impressed by the garish nude paintings on the walls, or the dark, smoky dance floor, or the little theater that seated fewer people in the audience than onstage, or by the stale, paper-thin chicken sandwiches that passed for food.

Now here I was back at the Dill Pickle, sitting at a table, just me and a candle and no tablecloth, waiting for Mary Ann Beame, trying not to listen as at a nearby table three long-haired boys in denim and dark sweaters talked with two short-haired girls in long black skirts and dark sweaters. They were all smoking, all drinking coffee or tea. Each of them seemed to be carrying on his or her own conversation. One of them was discussing the superiority of his poetry to that of a friend's (not present) and went on at length to point out that if he were an editor he would have none of that shit in his poetry magazine; oh, Harriet Monroe might, but it wasn't good enough for his (nonexistent) magazine. One of the girls was discussing a recent showing of "primitive art" at the Neo Arlimusc by a sixty-two-year-old clothing peddler from Maxwell Street who painted Jewish sweatshop scenes on cardboard: "The artist's expression will out! Poverty-stricken, he seizes upon the only medium within his grasp!" A pale frail-looking male was denouncing Kipling and Shakespeare (to name two) but later spoke admiringly of Kreymborg, while another, better-fed male was telling of his landlady throwing him out because she couldn't understand anyone not having beds and chairs in an apartment, and also because he had long hair. The final girl, a zoftig brunette with a nice full mouth, pretended to be upset that she was prostituting herself by posing nude as an artist's model (outside Tower Town) for a dollar an hour; actually, she was proud of herself. I was about ready to check my wallet for a spare dollar when Mary Ann Beame floated in.

She was wearing the black coat with the black fur collar again. I rose and helped her out of it. and she slung it over an extra chair at the table I'd been eavesdropping on; nobody seemed to mind, or for that matter notice. She wore a beret, white this time, and a navy-blue sweater with a diagonal white zigzag pattern throughout, like lightning, with a navy skirt. She put her little purse on the table and sat down. her wide. Claudette Colbert eyes looking at me expectantly, a little smile hesitantly forming on the red Claudette Colbert lips.

I hadn't spoken to her on the phone: I had got a male voice at the number she gave me. and left a message for her to meet me here, or to call me if she couldn't. So she probably thought I had news about her brother Jimmy. I didn't.

I told her so.

"I spent five days looking," I said, "and didn't find a trace of him. Nothing to indicate he's been in Chicago at all."

She nodded patiently, the eyes narrowing a bit. but still wide enough to get lost in; the lips pursed a bit. like a kiss.

"I tried the papers, most of the Hoovervilles. combed the near North Side…"

"You mean you thought he might've been that close to where / live?"

"Sure. Over on North Clark Street."

"That's full of derelicts."

"Right. And I asked around Bughouse Square. I did find one guy who seemed to know you, but that's as close to a lead as I got."

"What do we do now?"

"I'd suggest give up. My guess is he changed his mind at the last minute and took that freight to California or New York or someplace- someplace other than Chicago."

"No," she said firmly, shaking her head. "His ambition was to be a reporter for the Trib; that's what he would've tried first."

"And he well may have. Tried, got nowhere, and hopped a freight elsewhere."

"I want you to keep looking."

"I think it would be pointless. You'd be wasting your money."

"It's my money."

"It's my time. And I don't want to spend it looking for your brother."

For a minute I thought she was going to cry; but she didn't. She thought about it, but she didn't.

"Look," I said. "He'll turn up. The country's fall of kids riding the rails, looking for excitement." And work. I thought.

A big bushy-haired guy in a black sweater and denims came up to the table and took our order. I asked him how the chicken sandwiches were; he said good as ever. I ordered ham. Mary Ann waved off my suggestion that she order a sandwich and asked only for a cup of tea. I asked for some of that. too.

"Did you just come from the Merchandise Mart?" I asked.

She nodded.

"What, another soap opera?"

She nodded.

"It sounds like interesting work."

She looked away from me, toward a painting of a fat redheaded nude woman.

"Take this," I said, holding my hand out toward her.

She looked at the hand, then at me. "What's that?"

"Fifty bucks change. I worked five days. You gave me a hundred."

"Keep it" she said.

"Quit pouting and take the money, goddamnit."

She glared at me and grabbed the money out of my hand; stuffed it in her little black purse. Apparently she was a free spirit who didn't like getting sweared at.

The ham sandwich came and it was thin and stale and as bad as I remembered the chicken. The tea was okay; it tasted vaguely of oranges. I liked it. She drank hers, too, but whether she liked it or not, I can't tell you.

When we finished, I helped her into her coat and I paid and we went out onto the chilly street; it wasn't snowing, but the wind was still blowing around the snow we already had.

"You want a lift?" I asked her.

"I can walk; it isn't far."

"It's cold. My car's just down the block there. See? Come on."

She shrugged, hugging her black fur collar up around her face, falling into step with me.

I helped her up onto the running board and inside, and got around on the driver's side and got in and started it up.

"I got a heater in this thing." I said, getting that going.

"That's nice." she said noncommittally.

"Where to?"

"East Chestnut." She gave me a street address.

I drove.

"Who was that guy who answered the phone when I called today?"

"That's Alonzo."

"Oh? Who's Alonzo?"

"He's a painter."

"What's he paint?"

As if to a child, she said, "Pictures."

"What kind?"

"Experiments in dynamic symmetry, if you must know."

"Oh. Where's he live?"

"With me."

"Oh."

It was dark now, though my headlights caught the swirling snow; over on the right, two men walked hand in hand. That didn't surprise me, not in Tower Town. Just like Mary Ann living with some guy called Alonzo didn't surprise me; it disappointed me. but it didn't surprise me: it wasn't uncommon to see two names on a mailbox in this neighborhood- one a man's, the other a woman's. Unmarried couples were part and parcel of Tower Town like the talk of free love and individualism. Women in Tower Town liked to hold on to their individuality, and their independence- and their names.

After a while, I pulled over and she started to get out.

Tllwalkyou,"Isaid.

She looked at me; thought that over. Then shrugged.

I turned the car off and followed her down the boardwalk sidewalk to a dilapidated four-story frame building. The entrance was in the alley, up an outdoor staircase that was painted red, perhaps as a political symbol, perhaps symbolizing that one took one's life in hand as well as the flimsy banister when going up those creaky' stairs.

We entered a small kitchen furnished with a table, a one-burner oil stove, and a chair; there was a sink with some dirty dishes in it, and a cupboard- no icebox. The walls were bare yellow plaster, cracking; pieces had fallen off. She lay her coat and beret on the table, and said. "Would you like some tea?"

"Sure," I said.

"Take off your coat and stay awhile." she said flatly, filling an oddly shaped copper teapot at the sink.

I lay my coat on top of hers.

"Go on in and meet Alonzo," she suggested.

What the hell. I thought; I went in and met Alonzo.

He was sitting in the middle of the floor. The room was dimly lit, and so was something he was smoking: from the smell of burning incense in the room. I figured it was a muggle, a marijuana cigarette. He was a little blond boy of about twenty in a vermilion sweater and corduroys; he didn't seem to notice me come in.

It was a big room, with a high ceiling and a skylight; but there wasn't much furniture in it- just a mattress covered by messed-up blankets, and a chest of drawers against one wall, looking lonely and out of place, like it had wandered in accidentally, off the street. The walls were hung with startling modernistic paintings: loud colors, distorted shapes, sound and fury signifying guess what. They hurt the eyes; they hurt mine, anyway.

"You paint this stuff," I asked him.

"I painted them."

"Does that one have a name?" I asked, pointing to a canvas where red, green, and blue weren't getting along.

"Certainly. That's Man's Inhumanity to Man."

"How'd you arrive at that?"

He looked at me with a smirk and eyes the color of soot. "The way I arrive at all my titles."

"Which is?"

He shrugged. "When I finish a work, I hold it one way, then another, and just keep tilting it till it suggests something. Then I title it."

"Tilt and title, huh?"

"You could put it that way."

"I just did. I take it you're Alonzo."

He stood, smiling. "You've heard of me?"

"Mary Ann mentioned you."

"Oh," he said, a little disappointed. "I talked to you on the phone today, didn't I?"

"I believe so."

He sucked on his muggle, held the smoke in; then he spoke, and it was like somebody speaking while taking a crap. "I suppose I'm expected to get the hell out of here."

"I wouldn't know why," I said.

"I don't do menage," he said, waving both hands, including the one with the muggle. which had served its purpose by now. He dropped it to the wooden floor and ground it out, walked to one corner of the room, where an old corduroy jacket was tossed, and put it on and left me alone with the paintings.

Pretty soon Mary Ann came in with two cups and saucers. She handed them both to me and went across the room and through a doorless doorway into darkness. I stood there like a cigar store Indian, balancing the two cups of tea, with no furniture to set them on, and finally walked over and used the top of the dresser for hers, and stood sipping mine.

She came out in a trailing black kimono with red and white flowers on it; it was belted at the waist with a black sash, and the white of her legs flashed as she walked toward me and then stood with hands on her hips.

"How'd you like Alonzo?" she asked, arching an eyebrow.

"About as much as his paintings." I said.

She tried not to smile, then said. "I think they're good."

"Really?"

The smile won out. "No. Not really. Come on."

I followed her through the doorless doorway, which as she pulled an overhead string lit up and turned out to be a small connecting hall, with a bathroom to the right, and another room straight ahead, which she led me to.

It was a smaller room, but big enough for the four-poster bed within; the walls were draped with blue batiks and so was the ceiling. It reminded me of a booth on a midway. Against the dark blue-batiked walls were a couple of pieces of furniture, for a change, including a small dresser and a makeup table with round mirror; on the makeup table was a small cylindrical art-deco lamp that provided the only light in the room. The only window was painted out, black.

"You and Alonzo don't share…" I searched for a polite way to put it.

"A bedroom?" she smiled. "No. Why should we?"

I shrugged. "You live together."

"We're roommates." she nodded. "But mat's the extent of it."

I sat on the edge of the four-poster, then quickly got up; but she tugged my arm until I sat again and sat next to me. with a wry little smile.

"Poor baby." she said. "You're confused."

"I just don't understand Tower Town. I guess."

"Alonzo likes boys."

"You mean he's a fairy?"

"That's it."

"Oh. And you're sharing rent, then."

"That's right. It's a nice big studio apartment, but it took the two of us to throw in together to be able to afford it."

"Why Alonzo?"

"We're friends. He's an actor as well as a painter. We did a play together, with the Impertinent Players. You know… a little theater group."

"Oh."

"Would you like some more tea?"

"No. No, thanks.

She took the cup from me and went trailing out, flashing some more white skin.

I glanced around the room. Over the head of the four-poster was a pale electric quarter-moon, with a man-in-the-moon face, turned off.

She came back in the room, sat next to me.

"Do you smoke that stuff?" I said, gesturing to the other room.

"Muggles? No. I don't even drink. I was raised in a proper home; we never had that sort of thing around, and I never acquired an interest in it, let alone a taste."

"But you don't mind him doing it?"

"Alonzo doesn't drink."

"I meant smoke marijuana."

"No, I don't mind. Alonzo's no dopey, no viper, mind you; he just does that once in a while, to relax. When he paints, or before he goes out to… well, to look for a date."

"Does he… bring his dates here?"

"Sometimes. But he tells me first, if he's planning to. And I can stay in my room and study lines, if I'm in a play; or just read or sleep."

"It doesn't bother you, what's going on out there?"

"Why should it?"

I didn't have an answer for that.

"The motto around here," she explained, "is live your own life. Live, don't just exist."

"Most people these days find just existing tough enough."

She didn't have an answer for that.

"I'm glad to be in your bedroom." I said. "You're a lovely girl, and that's a lovely kimono, and you make a swell cup of tea. But I'm still not going to look for your brother anymore."

I thought that would make her mad; it didn't.

She said, "I know," a bit distantly.

"Then why did you bring me up here?"

Now she did get just a little bit mad; just a little. "Not to bribe you, if that's what you think. There's plenty of other detectives in town."

"That's right, and some of the larger agencies could track your brother nationwide, if you got the dough for it."

"I'm psychologically connected to my brother."

"What?"

"My psychiatrist says that most of my problems are connected to my being a twin. I feel incomplete because my brother is missing."

"You have a psychiatrist?"

"Yes."

"And he says you feel incomplete because your brother is missing?"

"No. I say that. He says most of my problems are connected to my being a twin."

"What problems?"

She shrugged. "He didn't say."

"Why do you go to him?"

"Alonzo suggested it."

"Why?"

"He thinks I'll improve as an actress if I get in touch with my primitive unconscious."

"This is Alonzo's theory, not the psychiatrist's?"

"That's right."

"How much does the psychiatrist cost?"

"Quite a bit."

"How much, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Five dollars an hour."

I sat there and burned. Five dollars an hour. I cut my twenty-buck-a-day rate to ten for her. because I feel sorry for the struggling young actress trying to make it in the big city, and end up shlepping around Hoovervilles and fucking North Clark Street flophouses for five days, and she's paying five dollars an hour to some Michigan Avenue witch doctor.

She said. "Why does that make you mad?"

"What?"

"That I go to a psychiatrist. Why does that make you mad?"

"I've just been looking into too many unshaven faces, lately, that's all."

"I don't understand."

"Men are selling apples on street comers and praying to pull in a buck a day. and you're pissing five bucks away for nonsense."

"That's cruel."

"I suppose. And it's your five bucks. You can do what you want with it."

She didn't say anything; she was looking at her hands, which were folded in her lap.

"You must make good money doing radio," I said.

"Not bad," she admitted. "And I can get money from home, if I need to."

We sat in silence for a while.

I said. "It really isn't my business what you do with your money. Guys selling apples on street comers isn't your fault… and your five bucks isn't going to solve the problem, so forget I said anything. Like I said, I seen too many unshaven faces while I was wandering around Hoovervilles, looking for your brother."

"You think my life's a bunch of hooey, don't you."

"I don't know. I don't go for Tower Town, that's all. All this free love you people talk about, it doesn't seem right somehow."

She smiled, teasingly. "You'd rather pay for it. is that it?"

I smiled back, against my will. "That's not what I meant."

She kissed me.

It was kind of a long kiss; and very sweet. Her lips were soft. Warm. Her lipstick was sticky.

"You taste better than a candy apple." I said.

"Have another bite." she said, and I kissed her, and my tongue slid in her mouth and it seemed to surprise her, but she liked it; she must've, because she slid hers in mine.

And that kimono slid off her shoulders and my hands were on her cool, pale flesh. Her body was soft as her lips, but muscular, too; almost a dancer's body. Her breasts weren't large- just nice handfuls; pretty handfuls with small, little-girl nipples, the areola not much bigger 'round than a piece of Lifesaver candy, with a nipple where the hole would be.

She began to undress me, kissing me while she did, and I helped, and soon we were under the covers in the four-poster. We lay kissing, petting, then as I was about to get on her, she said, "Wait."

"Do you want me to use something?" I asked. I had a Sheik in my billfold.

"No," she said, getting out of bed, going to her makeup table and switching off the lamp. She went out of the room and into the bathroom and came back with a towel, which she lay on the bed, positioning herself on it. then with a pixie smile reached a hand up and turned on the electric moon.

I tried to enter her gently, but it was difficult; she was small, tight.

"Am I hurting you?"

"No." she said. Kissing me. Smiling at me like a ghostly angel.

And I was in all the way.

It was only a few minutes, but it was a wonderful few minutes, and when she came, a moan came out of her that had pain and pleasure in it but transcended both; I came a moment later, withdrawing, spilling onto the towel she'd positioned herself on.

"No," she said, sadly, touching my face. "You should've stayed in me."

I eased off, looked at her; I was on my side. "I thought you wanted me to," I said, and motioned toward where the towel was.

She smiled enigmatically and said, "No. That's not what it was for."

She gathered the towel and got up from the bed: she didn't mean for me to see, but I did: the towel was bloodstained.

I leaned back, waiting for her to return. Oh, I thought, she's in her period

Then I realized something.

She came back, got in bed, got into my arms.

I looked at her; she still had that cryptic little smile.

"You were a virgin," I said.

"Who says?"

"I say. You were a virgin!"

"Does that matter?"

I pushed her away, gently; sat up.

"Of course it does," I said.

She sat up, too. "Why are you disturbed?"

"I would never have…"

"That's why I didn't tell you."

"But you can't be a virgin."

"I'm not."

"Don't play games."

"I'm not."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-three."

"And you're an actress living in Tower Town, sharing a studio with some fairy artist and seeing a psychiatrist and talking about free love and living not existing, and you were a virgin?"

"Maybe the right man finally came along."

"If you did this so I'd keep looking for your brother, all I've got to say is, it's maybe the one bribe nobody in Chicago ever thought of before."

"It wasn't a bribe."

"Do you- love me or something. Mary Ann?"

"I think that's maybe a little premature. What do you think?"

"I think I better find your brother."

She snuggled close to me. "Thanks. Nathan."

"I can't look into it again for a few weeks. I've got some other business to do- Retail Credit work and then I'm going to Florida on a matter."

"That's fine, Nathan."

"Aren't you sore?"

"About what?"

"No, I mean aren't you sore? You know. Down there."

"Why don't you find out."

The electric moon smiled.

Cold hit Chicago like a fist. The wind conspired with the falling temperature and turned the city to ice: then eleven inches of snow joined in. turning it white. Those people in the Hoovervilles I'd talked to not so long ago probably made it through okay, because they at least had shacks to live in and sometimes a barrel with something burning in it to huddle 'round. But the down-and-outers in the parks froze. To death. Not all of them, but enough of them- though it didn't get much play in the papers. Not good publicity in the year of the fair. Of course the major role the papers played in the lives of the down-and-outers was insulation: wear it over your heart if you hope to wake up in the morning. I wondered if the guy who'd passed that piece of wisdom along to me had woken up this morning.

Me. I was in Florida, wearing a white suit, soaking up the sun, smelling the salt breeze. Men on the streets were in shirt sleeves and straw? hats; women wore summery dresses and tanned legs. The buildings were as white as Chicago's blizzard- though the similarity ended there- and the palm trees along Biscayne Boulevard leaned, as if bored with sunshine. Mayor Cermak should get in town late this afternoon; the blond man Frank Nitti was sending to meet Cermak might already be here.

The first thing I did. when I got off the Dixie Express at a little after seven on this Wednesday morning, was pay a cabbie to take me to the nearest used car lot. A guy in his shirt sleeves with a gold incisor that reflected the Miami sun sold me a '28 Ford coupe for forty dollars. It didn't exactly run like a million bucks- it ran like forty bucks- but it ran, and soon I was having a look around the Magic City.

It was a synthetic paradise, like a movie's elaborate background painting that was supposed to fool you into thinking it was real, but didn't quite make it- and you didn't quite care, because there was a charm to it. to the ice-cream buildings, the transplanted tropical foliage, the bay so blue it made the sky seem not blue enough, the skyline that rose off the flat terrain like Chicago in the imagination of an eight-year-old child. Twenty years ago, this was mangrove swamp, sand dunes, coral rock. Jungle. Now it was a playground for the rich, and the only sign of anyone remembering it having been a jungle was the pith helmets worn by the cops directing traffic, their uniforms pale blue, belted white.

Despite hard times, Miami seemed to be doing good business. On showy Biscayne Boulevard, the palm-lined four lane that ran parallel to the sprawling, tropically landscaped Bayfront Park, cars with license plates from all forty-eight states (including, at times, Florida) could be spotted, by anyone so inclined. The shopping district, west of Bayfront Park, was a dozen blocks of predominantly narrow, one-way streets and was a Florida version of Maxwell Street and State Street, slapped together: open-front shops sold fruit boxes and juice, and neckties with colorful hand-painted designs, and ashtrays the shape of the state; department-store manikins lounged in display windows, wearing swimsuits and sunglasses, and contemplated tossing the beach ball around; photo galleries invited patrons to pose before cardboard seashores while holding up a huge stuffed fish and leaning against what purported to be a palm; Seminole families in full tribal regalia sat in curio shops to attract the curious (and their money); theater doormen in elaborate paramilitary' attire hawked the latest screen thrill, while comer pitchmen offered suntan lotion and racing forms- the latter an especially hot commodity'. As I waited for the light to change on Flagler Street, a newsboy about ten years my elder sold me a Miami Herald, but when I said I didn't want a racing form too. he save me a look like I'd said I didn't like women.

I didn't see many down-and-outers as I strolled around downtown Miami, but there were some women in their thirties in pretty summer frocks, housewives I'd guess, who approached occasional paleface tourist types like myself, requesting "a penny a day to keep hunger away from somebody out of a job"; they weren't begging for themselves, of course- the little boxes they earned said "Dade County Welfare Board." Another woman, this one in her forties, but also rather nicely dressed, approached me and handed me a leaflet; she was with the Citizens Taxation Committee- despite falling property values, taxes were being kept at "Boom" levels of earlier years, it seemed.

"Something must be done about the mayor," she said, with her mouth a firm line, her eyes hard behind wire-frames.

I nodded agreement, and went into a restaurant called the Dinner Bell, where I had roast beef, peas, coffee, and apple pie for fifteen cents. A blond guy was sitting at a table nearby, drinking lemonade; he wore a white short-sleeve shirt and gray suspenders and buff trousers, and was about the right age. But he wasn't the blond guy I was looking for. Neither were half a dozen other blond men who passed me on the street that I save as careful a once-over as I had him.

It wouldn't be that easy. I wanted it to be- I wanted to just bump into the blond killer on the street and put my gun in his back and duck him into an alley and slam his head into a wall and, if he was walking around unarmed (which he might be, till he closed in on his target), plant my gun in his pocket and drop him off anonymously on the doorstep of a hospital or a police station, like an unwanted babe. His packing a pistol would be enough to assure him a few days at the expense of Dade County, which should keep him out of circulation till Cermak headed home.

Or I could hang a close tail on him, let him lead me to his hotel. That would allow me to see if he was working with a backup man, in which case I'd plant the gun on the blond and sic a cop on him, and the backup man would probably fade away. As for any confrontation with the blond himself, the best thing would be to clobber him from behind, bad enough to put him in the hospital, but not kill him; another possibility was holding him captive in his room (and running up his room service bill while I did) till Cermak left town. But an approach like that would mean he'd see me, get a good look at me. and the backup man (if there was one) would probably have to be dealt with head on, too, all of which could have nasty repercussions concussion seemed the better approach.

The gun I'd plant on him, incidentally, would not be mine: it would be the.38 Colt Police Special that had been delivered to my office by messenger, along with my train tickets, five hundred dollars expense money, and a letter from the office of Florida's attorney general authorizing Nathan Heller to operate as a private investigator in Florida (including a temporary gun permit). Attorney Louis Piquett apparently had some friends in high places in Florida- or rather Al Capone did. Despite some public posturing by state and city officials when he showed up in Florida, around '28, Capone had been a welcome addition to the community- in fact, a fellow named Lummus, Miami's mayor at the time, was the real estate agent who sold Capone a mansion on Biscayne Bay.

There was no explanation as to why the gun had been sent; none was needed. Capone assumed there was at least the possibility of my killing the man I'd been sent to stop; toward that end. he'd provided something that couldn't be traced to me. I took my automatic along as well, having immediately had the thought of using the Piquett-furnished gun as a plant, should I happen upon the blond gunman prior to any attempt on Cermak's life.

Which was a fantasy I'd nurtured all the way down here on the Express, sitting by the window, watching the midwestern snow dissolve into the bluegrass of Kentucky; crossing rivers, cutting through valleys, skirting mountains, stopping at cities. An American panorama slid by me, and I saw it all… and none of it, because I was thinking about that blond assassin.

And now I was walking the crowded downtown streets of Miami, realizing how futile my fantasy was. There was only one way to do this job; I'd known it all the time, but had pretended not to. I had to shadow Cermak and wait till the blond showed up; in effect, wait until the attempt on Cermak's life was about to be made. And then stop it.

It was risky, to say the least: for Cermak. certainly, but for me, too. The smart thing to do would've been to turn this assignment down. Only it was never smart to turn Al Capone down. It was also never smart to turn down ten thousand dollars, which is what my client had promised me, after all- on the minor condition that I succeed.

So I did some groundwork. I got back in my forty-buck Ford and crossed the county causeway, passing by Palm Island (where the Capone masion was), white sunlight bouncing off pleasure-craft-cluttered Biscayne Bay. Then I was on the ten-mile-long, considerably narrower island that was Miami Beach, following Collins Avenue north through a collage of pseudo-Mediterranean hotels and apartment houses and mansions that (of course) faced the beach, with accompanying terraces and swimming pools (for those who found the Atlantic too crowded or salty or whatever). I rolled by white sand splashed with color by sun umbrellas and bathing-suited figures that scurried to and from cabanas bigger than my office back home; and glimpsed golf courses, private landing docks, the bougainvillea-spread walls of palatial estates, and palm-sheltered coves where yachts moored and speedboats raced. No Hoovervilles, though.

In a subdivision off Collins Avenue, away from the Atlantic and toward a placid lagoon called Indian

Creek, were some comparatively modest homes, not mansions, just vacation bungalows with a meager three or four bedrooms. One of these homes, which were spaced rather far apart with well-tended but not overly tropical front yards, was the winter home of Mayor Cermak's son-in-law, a doctor who, not coincidentally, had recently been appointed Illinois Director of Public Health. A rather modern-looking single-level stucco house, set back from the street and partially obscured by shrubs and palms, this was where Cermak was likely to be staying. I parked my car on the street and walked up the lawn, where a gardener was working on the shrubs by the house.

"Hello," I said.

The gardener, a dark little bowlegged man in coveralls and a floppy hat, turned and glanced at me with a moronic smile and kept clipping the hedge as he did.

"I'm with the Miami Herald," I said. "I was wondering when Mayor Cermak is expected."

"He come pretty soon," the man said. Cuban?

"How soon?"

"Tonight sometime." He kept clipping.

"Is anybody home?"

"They not down here."

Who?"

"The family. They in Chicago."

"Okay. Thanks."

He smiled some more, and then started looking at what he was doing.

I went back to the Ford. So much for Cermak's own security: that guy would've told John Wilkes Booth where Lincoln was sitting. On the other hand. Cermak would undoubtedly have a fleet of bodyguards with him. and security would be stepped up once he moved in.

Next stop was Coral Gables, which joined Miami on the west and, while not as overtly wealthy as Miami Beach, was a well-to-do little community. Some overly zealous city planner had put in a cream-color stucco archway you drove under as you "entered," limited the buildings to a mock-Spanish design, stuck matching awnings on everything, and tinted the sidewalks coral. The Miami Biltmore Hotel loomed above this contrived, palm-bordered landscape, a sprawling hacienda gone out of control, with a central tower adjoining an assortment of wings to face in a gently curving C the putting greens that were its lawn.

The attendant who took my car didn't seem to believe I could be staying at a place this grand; neither could I.I hauled my shabby suitcase across a lobby of potted palms and overstuffed furniture and potted, overstuffed politicos, who were scattered about the lobby in groups of three to six, smoking cigars, laughing, talking loud, having the grand sort of time the victors have when they've been dividing up the spoils.

FDR's right-hand man. Jim Farley- who was to be his postmaster general, and was currently his patronage chief- was not among the Demos loitering about the Biltmore lobby. But his presence was felt: between puffs of cigar and dirty stories were speculations about who would get what, and it was Farley these men were in Miami to see. It was Farley who was Cermak's target.

I had a reservation, and a bellboy took me up to a room with a double-bed and a view of the golf course. It was two in the afternoon; I called the desk and asked for a wake-up call in two hours. I went to sleep immediately, and when the phone rang, I jumped awake. But I felt rested.

I shaved and threw water on my face and got back into the white suit: I had a Panama and sunglasses, too. I looked like a few thousand other people in Miami. I left my suitcase in my suite, but took the two guns with me, my automatic in my shoulder holster (it didn't bulge much under the coat) and the.38 in my belt, where its short barrel nudged my lower belly.

The train station was in downtown Miami, on First off Flagler, near the majestic Dade County Courthouse, a big Gothic wedding cake of a building whose layers rose twenty-eight stories. The Florida East Coast Railway Station, on the other hand, was a long, low-slung mustard-color wood-and-brick affair with an arched overhanging roof from which a large sign said MIAMI, in case you forgot what town you were in: a dinosaur of a building left over from pre-boom Miami, a frontier-style station where you might expect to catch a stagecoach instead of a train. I left the Ford in the parking lot in back and wandered inside, where I bought a Miami Daily News at the newsstand, and found a place on the end of one of the slatted high-backed benches where I could get a view of all doors, and could sit and pretend to read while I watched and waited.

It was five, and Cermak was due in at six. The place was pretty empty when I first got there, but began to fill up quickly with others who. like me. were meeting folks arriving on the Royal Poinciana. which was what the Dixie Flyer out of Chicago turned into at Jacksonville.

I saw several pretty young women- white teeth flashing in tanned faces, tanned legs flashing under colorful print dresses- and exchanged flirty smiles with those who weren't arm in arm with a sweetheart, and a few who were, when the sweetheart wasn't looking. It occurred to me that this wouldn't be a bad town to get laid in. Unfortunately, every time I saw a blonde, it reminded me of my quarry; and every time I saw a dark-haired girl- particularly one with short dark hair- I thought of Mary Ann Beame.

That blond killer hadn't been the only thing my mind had turned over and over, obsessively, on the train ride to Miami. Mary Ann Beame was dancing around my brain like Isadora Duncan; she'd really done a job on me. I hadn't been with that many women. I was no virgin, of course- but I thought the same of her. And it disturbed me. I thought maybe I was in love with her. I also thought she was using me. like an actor in a play she was directing in the little theater of her mind. I never wanted to see her again; I wished I was with her now.

Why not pick up a Florida filly for the night? I didn't owe Mary Ann Beame anything; she was just a client. So she'd given me her virginity; so what? It was just another retainer, wasn't it?

Well, I wasn't in Miami for the sunshine. I was here on a thousand-dollar retainer, which wasn't exactly anybody's cherry, but it was nothing you'd want to lose easily, either. And my night was already planned for me: I'd have to stick by His Honor, when he showed up, possibly through the night. That's why I'd grabbed the two hours sleep at the Biltmore; that's why I had a Thermos of hot coffee waiting in the Ford.

Pretending to read the front page of the News for an hour led to my actually reading most of it, in bits and pieces. There was news of Chicago; it had been two days since I had left, after all, the snow just starting. The storm had paralyzed the city, but fifteen thousand of the unemployed had been hired to dig out Cook County, and efforts to provide relief housing for the down-and-outers in the parks and Hooverville residents had been stepped up. So there were no more deaths by freezing, though some emergency snow-shovelers got hit by streetcars or had heart attacks. That was as far as the News article went. No doubt some of the Chicago papers were cheeky enough to point out that Mayor Cermak left for Florida just after the storm hit: even in the year of the fair, that couldn't go unreported.

General Dawes was on the front page, too. He was in Washington, D.C., subpoenaed by the Senate Stock Exchange Committee to testify' about his role in connection with Samuel Insull. Insull was the utilities tycoon who during the twenties headed companies worth some $4 billion and had a personal fortune around SI50 million. There was a new board game I had played with Janey a few times: Monopoly. Insull had turned the business of electricity and gas, and railroads, into a game of that; and when he was finished, his paper empire was worth about as much as the little colored "money" you used to buy Boardwalk.

Just two years ago, the Chicago banks were turning the city's requests for loans down and honoring Insull's; one of those loans came from the Dawes bank, to the tune of SI 1 million. Now the General was in front of a Senate committee, and Insull was in Europe somewhere.

Not that anything would come of it: the General would weasel his platitudinous way out of it. But the fact that this had made the front page of the Miami Daily News meant that the embarrassment was nationwide- hardly the sort of publicity the General might hope for, in the year of the fair. It made me smile.

More pertinent to my present interests was the small inset article announcing a testimonial dinner for James A. Farley, chairman of the Democratic National Executive Committee, to be held by the Roosevelt for President Club at the Biltmore Saturday. Also as honored guests would be "a group of leading Democrats who are guests of metropolitan Miami this week." That would include Cermak, undoubtedly. Tickets were two dollars each and reservations could be made at the Biltmore. Looked like I better rent a tux. I wondered if I could rent one my automatic wouldn't unduly bulge under.

It was ten till six. and I'd seen a lot of pretty girls, but no blond killer. Normally, that would be okay with me; but any hope of my getting this over with quickly was slipping away. I'd have to be Cermak's shadow for the next few days or week or however long His Honor decided to stay in a sunnier clime; and tailing somebody who knows you isn't the easiest thing in the world to pull off, particularly over a relatively long stretch of time.

You met the trains outside, in front of the station, right out in the middle of the street, with the courthouse looming at left. The sun was on its way down, but it wasn't quite twilight yet, and I felt conspicuous, though I probably wasn't. It was just light enough out to justify leaving the sunglasses on, and I leaned against the building and watched the people waiting, watched the Royal Poinciana come up the middle of a Miami street. Then it was a scramble of redcaps with carts and porters and people getting off the train and others greeting them. Several of the pretty girls I'd been daydreaming about met their husbands or boyfriends and walked out of my life. I watched for the blond. He could be meeting the train; he could even have been on it. I didn't see him.

I saw Cermak. He came down off the train, looking overweight and tired, a hand on his stomach, a conductor helping him down the couple steps. Two watchful bodyguards preceded him- one of them was the son of Chicago's chief of detectives, a pale fellow about thirty; the other was Mulaney, the skinny cop I'd seen in Cermak's suite at the Congress, that time with Miller.

Speaking of whom, Miller and Lang followed Cermak off the train, and I said a silent Shit I'd hoped they wouldn't be along; I'd hoped their notoriety in the Nitti matter would've precluded Cermak's bringing them. But here they were.

Now my work was really cut out for me. The chances of Lang and Miller making me were far greater than Cermak, who might not recognize me if I walked right up to him; to him, I was just another nobody. But with Miller and Lang around, I'd have to keep my distance.

On the other hand, the four bodyguards, and their watchfulness, indicated Cermak was somewhat aware of the danger he was in. It meant this Florida trip might be at least partially an attempt to get away from Chicago till it cooled off, figuratively speaking.

Well, there was no blond killer here to greet the mayor. Instead, two wealthy-looking businessman-types in their late fifties approached him with smiles and outstretched hands. Cermak's tiredness fell away like a discarded garment and he beamed at them, his cheeks turning red, immediately pumping their hands like the politician he was. All the while, the four bodyguards kept around him, almost circling him, looking the crowd over. No one from the press seemed to be present; no fanfare at all. just these two businessman friends, who stood and talked with Cermak while a redcap rounded up his luggage.

I kept well back as I followed them around the station to the parking lot behind. Cermak and his wealthy-looking friends (who seemed to be apologizing for Miami's shabby train station) and Miller got into one of two waiting chauffeured Lincolns. So did Lang and the other two bodyguards; the luggage went with them.

I followed them over the county causeway to Miami Beach; as I expected, they went to Cermak's son-in-law's house. I didn't turn down the street after them, but pulled over and waited till they'd had a chance to unload the Lincoln and go inside. It was twilight by the time I parked across the road and down three quarters of a block, in the shadow of some palms, to keep watch.

The night was cool; I rolled the windows most of the way up, locked the doors, and sat in the back seat. That may sound stupid to you, but it's standard procedure: a person in the back seat is less noticeable, and people at a glance see only the empty front seat and assume the car has been parked and left.

Between eight and eleven, Cermak had several visitors: several more prominent-looking types I thought I recognized Chicago millionaire John Hertz- called on him. So did a carload of what I took to be politicos, come over from the Biltmore. Once in a while one of the bodyguards could be seen strolling across the front yard. That was a good sign, actually: if Cermak's bodyguards were keeping on their toes, I wouldn't have to keep an all-night surveillance.

I stayed till two. and noticed that a shift of bodyguards was keeping watch; once an hour, one of them- so far it had been the young son of the chief of detectives, followed by thin, pale Mulaney- would prowl around the lawn with a flashlight and a gun.

I drove back to the Biltmore and put in for a wake-up call at six. By seven I was sitting down the street from Cermak again, down the other way. three quarters of a block. It was raining; it was cold. Florida was doing its best to make us Chicagoans feel at home.

At eight, a chauffeured limo drove up to the house, and in a few minutes, Cermak and his four bodyguards were getting in, Mulaney holding an umbrella for the mayor.

I followed them back to the Biltmore. That was no surprise: I expected Cermak to meet with Farley as soon as possible. I waited till they were inside before turning the Ford over to the attendant; when I got into the lobby, Cermak was glad-handing it with six or seven politicians who were gathered around him, protecting him at least as well as the bodyguards, who seemed nervous about the crowd. I threaded my way through the lobby, but didn't see the blond- just the cigar-puffing, bullshitting Demos.

A buck bought me Farley's floor from a bellboy, and I went up and looked around: no bodyguards. Apparently Cermak was the only politician here on the run from gangsters. I waited around the corner from the elevators and listened as Cermak and his bodyguards and a couple of other men loudly got off. They went directly to Farley's room; I ducked down the stairs before Lang and Miller and company had a chance to look the floor over.

I had breakfast in the restaurant downstairs, and sat in the lobby and pretended to read the paper again. At eleven-thirty all heads turned as Farley, a big, bald-headed, pleasant-looking man. and a beaming Cermak. bodyguards bringing up his considerable rear, paraded across the Biltmore lobby. This public display meant the Roosevelt forces were at least pretending to be making up with Cermak for his failure to back their boy at the Chicago convention.

They went out and got in a Cadillac limo that was apparently Farley's, with only Miller accompanying Cermak. The other bodyguards followed in the Lincoln. I followed in the Ford.

Soon I was driving along an avenue of royal palms towering eighty or one hundred feet, and up ahead was Hialeah Park Racetrack. Amid more palms was the massive, vine-covered grandstand with its bougainvillea-overgrown trelliswork. It was early, but there were plenty of people, despite the damp weather (the rain had let up but the sky remained overcast), and I had plenty of faces to look at.

Farley, Cermak, and crew disappeared into the clubhouse, a little Spanish villa whose back was turned to the grandstand. They went in the side entrance, next to the grandstand, up wide steps that passed a terraced porch where millionaires sat behind a wrought-iron fence, like prisoners, and lunched. I followed Farley's party, or tried to: they went in through an archway, where a guy a bit too big to be a jockey was dressed like one. He stopped me.

"Are you a member, sir?" he asked.

"Pardon?"

"A member of the Jockey Club. It's a private club, sir."

"I'm sorry. I thought it was just a restaurant."

"It's a fine restaurant, sir. But you have to be a member."

I reached in my pocket. "No temporary memberships?"

Deadpan, he said. "No, sir. Excuse me."

That meant I was supposed to leave.

I hung around in front of the grandstand, studying the crowd.

At one-thirty. Farley and Cermak and an ever-increasing entourage went in to watch the races. So did I. They shared a special, centrally located box. I got as close as I felt prudent, and used the binoculars I rented from a vendor to study the crowd around the box.

I didn't place any bets; the damp, grass track would've made handicapping unreliable, anyway. But the crowd- the dampness had kept no one away, apparently, except maybe my blond quarry-- was having a loud, roaring time; many familiar faces from the Biltmore lobby were among the spectators, and they particularly were having a ball.

Even on this dreary day, Hialeah was impressive. It was a new track, built just a year or so ago, or actually rebuilt, as a track had been operating here since 1925, even though legal pari-mutuel betting didn't come to Florida till '31. But Joe Widener, the man who had reportedly spent fifty grand getting that bill pushed through at Tallahassee, had transformed Hialeah into something special. Along the backstretch was a green wall of feather)' pines, against which the jockeys' colors were a bright, bold moving design. The wide oval track surrounded a huge, landscaped area where lawns and flower beds circled a lake that seemed to be a bed of pink water lilies. The water lilies were actually a couple hundred pink flamingos.

"How do they keep those birds quiet?" I asked the guy next to me. between races. "Why don't they flap around more, with all the horses galloping and gunshots and everything?"

He shrugged. "They catch 'em down in Cuba and bring 'em up here and then clip their wings."

I thought about that. The pool of pink flamingos had seemed beautiful; now it didn't.

I had a hot dog and a Coke. The voice on the loudspeaker was getting the crowd worked up over today's big race, the Bahama Cup, which may have explained why so big a crowd was here on so dismal a day. I took a look at Cermak and Farley through the binoculars. They were all smiles, but the smiles seemed forced: they seemed to be talking, more than watching the race. Anyway, Cermak did. Maybe things hadn't gone as well at their meeting this morning as the mayor's smile in the Biltmore lobby might've led one to believe.

The Coke went right through me, and during the Bahama Cup, I figured it would be a good time to hit their normally crowded public facility. I walked out of the stands down to the John and went in. I had it to myself: I stood and emptied my bladder, and thought about what a dull business it was I was in.

A hand settled on my shoulder.

I looked back.

It was Miller. Lang was just behind him. Their smiles were as dull as their eyes.

"Zip up, Heller," Miller said. "You're coming with us."

I zipped up.

Unbuttoned my coat.

Turned around slowly and smiled. "Nice room you got" I said, reaching back, flushing the urinal. "You guys're lucky to find something so suited to you. at the peak of the tourist season. Close to the track and all."

"I said, you're coming with us, wise guy." Miller said, and grabbed my right arm.

With my left I jerked the Police Special out of my waistband and buried it in Miller's gut so hard it backed him up; but I followed him. and the gun stayed where it was, as I reached in under his suitcoat and got his.45 revolver.

I backed him right into a toilet stall, and said, "Sit."

He sat.

Lang had his mouth open and his gun out, a.45 revolver; his.3 8 was back in Chicago being held as evidence in the forthcoming Nitti trial.

I pointed the Police Special at the seated Miller and Miller's .45 at Lang. Pretty soon Lang put his gun away, holding his hands out, palms up, empty, and put on a small but ridiculous conciliatory smile.

I didn't put my guns away.

I said. "You boobs are finished telling me where to go."

"Go to hell," Miller said still sitting.

I leaned in the stall and rapped him on the side of the head with the Police Special; his hat fell off. hitting a damp spot near the stool. He wasn't bleeding, but he wasn't cracking wise anymore, either.

Lang had taken this as an opportunity to move on me. and he was as fast as a fat old lady; I slapped him with Miller's.45 and he went down on his side. He bled, a little. I put the Police Special away, dropped the.45 in the refuse bin, went over and got Lang a couple of paper towels, got one of them wet at the sink, tossed 'em to him.

"Did you guys want to talk to me or something?" I asked.

Lang, on the floor, and Miller, from his stall, exchanged glances; they were big men, and the two of them together could certainly take me. But the Police Special was stuck in my waistband where I could get at it quickly, and they knew my mood was such that going any further with this was going to be expensive.

About this time a man came in and took a leak. With Lang on the floor, and Miller sitting on the stool with his pants up, and me with a thumb and a gun in my waistband, it was obvious something was going on; so the guy didn't bother washing his hands. He probably only did half of what he came to.

"There's better places to talk," Lang said, getting up. brushing himself off. Miller was coming slowly out of the stall, examining the damp spot on his hat, keeping his owllike face blank, but the eyes behind the Coke-bottle lenses were seething.

I buttoned my coat. "Let's go talk outside." I said.

I held the door for them.

The results of the Bahama Cup were being announced over the loudspeaker, and enough people must've placed the right bet. because a cheer went up. We walked down out of the stands and down the stairs onto the lavishly landscaped grounds of Hialeah Park. We found a palm tree to stand under, which was no trick.

"What's going on, Heller?" Lang said. It wasn't a demand: my presence here, understandably, had him confused, and he seemed to be doing his best not to come on tough.

"I'm down here on business," I said. "For a client. An attorney."

Miller, who was standing behind Lang like another palm, said, "What are you doing carrying a heater?"

"I'm here as a private cop," I said. "I'm licensed to work in Florida, and I got a special permit to cany a gun. I'm legal and aboveboard. You boys are nothing but glorified bodyguards, in Miami. Not that you're anything else in Chicago. But you got no jurisdiction here. You got no call to put the strong-arm on me, or anybody."

Miller was openly scowling, now, but Lang was thinking that over.

"Okay," he said. "That sounds reasonable, I guess. What were you doing watching the mayor?"

"What do you mean?"

"We caught the sun glinting off your binoculars, Heller. You been watching Cermak, and he ain't running today."

"Maybe he should be," I said.

Miller said, "What's that supposed to mean?"

"I'll tell Tony," I said. "That's who I'll talk to. Not his stooges."

Lang thought some more. "The mayor can't be bothered right now. He's with some VIPs at the moment."

"He's begging Jim Farley for scraps, you mean."

Lang and Miller looked at each other; it bothered them that I even knew who Farley was.

I surprised them some more: "Is Tony going to move to the Biltmore, now. or stay at his son-in-law's place again?"

That really threw them.

■ ■

"What do you mean?" Lane said.

"Just answer."

Lang shrugged. "His son-in-law's."

"Is he going to see Farley again tonight?"

Lane didn't answer.

"If he isn't," I said, "I could drop by around seven."

"I'll have to ask the mayor," Lang said.

"Why don't you?"

Lang looked at Miller, motioned with his head to come along, and the two went back up into the grandstand.

The rain had let up; the sun peeked through the palms. Some people started to drift out of the stands, now that the Cup was over. Panama hats and pretty women.

Lang came back alone.

He said. "The mayor says he'd like to meet with you in a public place."

"Why?"

"Maybe he thinks there's less likely to be trouble. He's got some people coming to the house this evening, and doesn't want you there, oaky?"

"Okay. Where?"

The Miami Aquarium was a beached ship, the Prim Valdemar, an old Danish barkentine that sank in a storm in the early twenties, blocking the harbor, paralyzing shipping traffic for months. A hurricane in '26 raised the ship and left it on the beach, like driftwood; but it was mostly intact, and in '27 it was turned into an aquarium. At the entrance of the white four-masted ship-tumed-building, pretty girls in pirate outfits drew sketches of patrons, for a modest fee. I stood and let a dazzling brunette do mine and gave her a buck and she gave me a smile and if she hadn't made me start thinking of Mary Ann Beame, I might have done something about it. Behind her, two monkeys chained to a revolving ladder went round and round- like my thoughts.

I strolled through the ship and looked at the glassed-in exhibits: sea turtles, alligators, crocodiles, a couple sea cows, stingrays, sharks, morays, and a slew of mounted specimens. On the upper deck of the sand-locked ship was a restaurant, where Cermak was waiting.

Cermak had a table at portside. perhaps so he could have Miller and Lang toss me overboard- they sat at a separate table opposite him. behind the chair where I'd be sitting; the other two bodyguards were at a table at His Honor's back. At any rate, we had a ringside view of Biscayne Bay. which at twilight was like a mirage, its many houseboats and yachts looking small, unreal, like toys floating in a big blue-gray bath.

The mayor was in a dark gray suit with a blue bow tie, and he rose from the table- there was no one else there- and extended his hand and gave me a smile that must have looked friendly to anybody looking at us. The eyes behind the dark-rimmed glasses were as cold as I remembered

I shook the hand; as before, it seemed a trifle damp. Whether from nerves or a recent trip to the lavatory, I didn't know. He gestured for me to sit and I did.

"I'm surprised to see you in Miami, Mr. Heller," Cermak said, still standing, looking down at me.

"Make it 'Nate.'"

"Fine," he said, sitting, putting his napkin in his lap. "Fine. I hope you like lobster. I took the liberty of picking one out for you."

"Sure. Thanks."

A busboy in white sailor garb came and poured us both some water, asked if we'd like some coffee, and we said yes. A waiter in a blue sailor suit walked by with a tray that bore a quartet of bright red lobsters, with claws like catcher's mitts.

"First goddamn aquarium I ever saw." Cermak said, "where you can eat the exhibits."

I smiled politely. "Right."

He sipped his water. "Why are you in Miami. Heller?"

"Nate. I'm here for a client."

"Who?"

"An attorney."

"What attorney?"

"I consider that privileged information. Your Honor."

"Really."

The waiter put some clam chowder in front of us. I started in on the soup; we'd been served some crackers on the side, Saltines, and Cermak began breaking them up over his chowder.

spoon into the mixture and said. "You were watching me today. Nate. Why?"

"I was watching you at the train station, too. And at your son-in-law's place. And at the Biltmore."

Cermak dropped his spoon; he dropped the smile, too.

"You want to tell me what this is about. Heller?"

"Nate."

"Fuck you, Heller." He was smiling again, and his voice was very soft: no one in the world could hear him but me. "Fuck your cute tough-guy shit. You can be dead in an alley in an hour, if I want it that way, you little bastard. Now what the hell are you doing here? And what does it have to do with me?"

"That's no way to talk to somebody who's trying to keep you alive."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"The attorney I'm working for has a client. The client has an interest in your well-being."

"Who are you talking about?"

"I'm telling you more than I really should. Your Honor. There's a line I can't cross."

The waiter brought us each a plate of coleslaw; I began to eat mine. Cermak ignored his.

"You're saying my life's in danger."

"What do you think? Are you down here strictly to court Jim Farley's favor? Or are you here partly at least to duck Frank Nitti's disfavor?"

"Keep your voice down."

"I wasn't speaking loud. Those words just seem loud. Your Honor."

"You were sent here to protect me? I have bodyguards."

"I know. I said 'boo' to two of'em in the toilet at Hialeah and they peed their pants."

"They're good men. What makes you especially qualified to be my protector?"

"I can recognize the man Nitti is sending."

"I see."

"I know? what he looks like. I've seen him before."

"When? Where?"

"After he shot a man. That's all I care to say about it."

Cermak looked at me for a long time.

Then he said. "What attorney are you working for?"

I thought about whether to answer him or not. Maybe he thought this was a shakedown, or a scam of some kind, growing out of hard feelings I harbored over the lies I'd agreed to tell for him; maybe I needed to make one more point, before he could buy it, before he could believe the truth.

"Louis Piquett," I said.

His face turned whiter than the chowder.

The waiter in blue served the lobsters. He put one in front of the mayor and another in front of me; they were enormous: like the flamingos at the racetrack, they were beautiful, ugly things. I began to crack mine open with the pliers we'd each been provided. The cracks were like gunshots, but Cermak didn't seem to hear them, or see the dead scarlet crustacean on the plate in front of him; he was staring, and not at me, and not out at the darkening bay. He was looking off, somewhere. Nowhere.

Then, suddenly, he dug into the lobster, cracking it apart like the enemy. He sat, determinedly, eating, dunking the lobster's flesh into the pot of melted butter, using his fingers as often as his fork, till they were dripping with butter and juice from the lobster. His table manners were lousy. He ate fast; he ate as if ravenous but I don't think he tasted anything. He was obviously a man who enjoyed eating, who

regarded eating a carnal pleasure- but he wasn't enjoying this meal. He barely noticed it.

He finished way ahead of me. It was the first lobster I'd ever eaten, and I was learning as I went. I liked the way it tasted, though it was nerve-racking, eating the last third of the thing with Cermak staring at me with large eyes behind the round frames of his glasses, looking out at me like the fish behind glass in the aquarium I'd walked through a few minutes ago.

"It surprises me," he said, "that Mr. Piquett's client would still have my best interests at heart, after all these years."

"Quite frankly," I said, through a mouthful of lobster and butter. "I don't think Mr. Piquett's client gives a goddamn whether you live or die. I just think he's somebody who learned the kind of damage bad publicity can do. After all. Saint Valentine's Day is just a few days away, if you get my drift."

He said, "It's a power play, then. To remind 'em who's boss. An attempt to one-up Nitti from inside."

I shrugged "You know how it is. Politics."

He nodded. Then he looked out at the pleasure craft on the bay. Twilight had turned into night and the lights on the boats winked at the mayor. The skyline of Miami shimmered on the water.

A waiter came and took our desert order: we both requested vanilla ice cream, but before it came. Cermak grimaced, apparently hit by a sharp pain. He stood, excused himself, and Miller trailed after his boss, who walked with one hand on his ample belly.

My ice cream came and I ate it. By the time Cermak returned, his ice cream had begun to melt; he ate it slowly, nibbling at it. with uncharacteristic lack of interest.

When he'd finished, he said. "You mean to shadow me. then? And wait for the assassin. And stop him."

I nodded. "I hoped to stop it before it got that far. but, realistically, yes."

"But Miller and Lang saw you at the track and you decided not to try to bluff your way out."

I shrugged. "I could've bluffed my way out if I was prepared to drop the matter. But I've got to stay on it, as long as you don't take steps to stop me."

He let out a short laugh. "Why the hell should I? You're here to keep me alive."

"It means a pretty penny to me to do so, Your Honor."

We had coffee.

"I'd like you to describe this man to me, and to my people," Cermak said.

"Sure."

"And you can maintain your surveillance on me with nothing but cooperation from Lang and Miller and the rest. You can report to me from time to time, if you like. Check with me daily regarding any of my plans." plans.

"Good. What plans do you have?"

"I've done everything where Jim Farley's concerned that I can. He's made a few promises, but precious few. And I have a bigger fence to mend."

"What do you mean?"

"Farley told me Roosevelt plans to come to Miami next Wednesday. It hasn't been announced to the press yet. But there's a lot of big shots in Miami who put the pressure on to have him end up his yacht trip here. Good publicity for the city, and good for the president-elect, too. He's going to give a public speech. All the newsreel boys will be down here, brass bands, radio, the works."

"So?"

"You know about Roosevelt and me, Heller?"

"I know you backed Smith at Chicago."

"Did you know I turned down Farley's repeated personal pleas to switch sides? We were all set to give the favorite-son nomination to that dumb bastard J. Ham…"

J. Ham was J. Hamilton Lewis, the aging, dandyish senator from Illinois who, although a Democrat, was aligned with the reform-minded former mayor. Republican Carter Harrison II. son of Chicago's first world's fair mayor, who before the White City closed down had died from an assassin's bullet.

"… and then J. Ham double-crossed us, pulled out. and I stuck that banker Tray lor in as favorite son in his place."

"But that got J. Ham in solid with Farley, and he stole your patronage thunder."

Cermak frowned at that, but could hardly deny it. He said, "I delivered Chicago to the sons of bitches. Largest presidential vote in Illinois history. They owe me."

"Anyway, that's what you've been telling Farley today."

Cermak looked through me. Sipped his coffee. "I need to make a gesture. I need to be seen in public with FDR. I need to get his ear, privately if I can." He leaned forward. "Farley's going home. Sunday, after his banquet. Then the rest of the boys are planning a side trip to Cuba. By Wednesday, everybody'll be back home in New York or wherever, else layin' on their fat ass on a beach somewhere. But I'll still be here. It'll make an impression on him."

"On Farley? You said he'd be leaving Sunday"

"No! I mean Roosevelt. He'll take it like a personal tribute. Like a public apology for my doing him wrong at the convention."

"You really think so?"

Cermak laughed; it was sort of a snort. "Roosevelt is not only weak in the legs, he's also weak in the head."

"I don't think you should do it."

■

"What do you mean? Don't be stupid."

"Don't you. You figured you were safe down here. You figured because the Syndicate boys vacation down here themselves, because Capone and Fischetti and the rest have homes here, and stay on their good behavior to stay welcome here, you figured nobody'd try to hit you down here."

Cermak shrugged. "Yeah. Right. You don't shit where you eat. Heller."

"Not unless you can make it look like you're doing something else."

"How do you mean?"

"Political assassination. You're down here in the midst of politicians from all over the map, including Roosevelt's entire Kitchen Cabinet. Some nut starts shooting up the Biltmore lobby while you and a hundred other politicians are standing around, and you happen to catch one of the bullets, nobody's going to think Syndicate. They're going to think of the poor unemployed bastards out on the breadline^who're looking for somebody to blame for their troubles. And nobody better to blame than a politician.

And now you want to shoulder up to Roosevelt in public? Did you bring that bulletproof vest you were telling me about along?"

Cermak leaned his elbows on the table, folded his big thick hands, and looked over them at me. "I have to do this. There's no way 'round it. I hate that crippled bastard but we got troubles in Chicago, bigger troubles than fucking Frank Nitti. We got teachers that ain't been paid in months. We need loans from the federal government, and we need 'em fast. Can you grasp that. Heller? Can you grasp something bigger than your own goddamn dick?"

Well. I could've made a smart comment or two. I could've mentioned that I knew one of the patronage posts he was after Farley for was one he intended for yet another son-in-law. that position being internal revenue collector for Chicago, which would come in handy, because word was Cermak was being investigated for income tax evasion. Oh, there were maybe a hundred cynical things I could've said, but, you know, somehow I thought the bohunk bastard meant it. I thought he really did want to get Chicago on its feet again; I thought, for just a moment mind you, that he really did care about the teachers and the cops and the other city workers who were getting paid in scrip…

Cermak said, "Besides, the Secret Service'll be all over that place. There hasn't been a successful presidential assassination since McKinley, you know, and there never will be. 'Cause those boys are good. And my boys'll be there. And you'll be there, Heller. Won't you?"

I nodded. "But till then, stay low. No more public places."

"That could be tricky. It's open to the public."

"Only six hundred seats."

"All right. We can cover that. We'll just run tight security."

"Otherwise. I'll stay at my son-in-law's. With my bodyguards. I have some people to see. but they can come see me."

"Good." I said. "Nitti won't expect that. He won't expect you to lie low. And I don't think he'll hit you at home. I think it has to be a public appearance, to make it look like something the Syndicate wasn't part of."