Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 08 (2 page)

A very pretty female face caught my attention, as pretty female faces are wont to do, but it sure wasn’t blank. In fact, it was smiling and sparkling-eyed and animated.

She was blonde with Shirley Temple’s curls and Jean Harlow’s body, and wore a wispy white summery dress with red polka dots and had a big purse tucked under one pale arm.

Something about that all-American-beauty face was a little harder than it ought to be; this was what you got when you asked the madam at a bordello for a virgin. But she was good: the clothes were just sexy enough to attract attention, but not so sexy as to outrage a matron.

Right now she was moving through the crowd, stopping occasionally to look toward the platform, where Huey was managing to find still more unflattering things to say about the President of the United States. Then she would move along, weaving her way through the throng like a snake with lipstick.

I was fairly sure I knew what this was about, but I didn’t make a move yet. I waited till she stopped for longer than just a moment and, finally, she did.

She paused beside a heavyset, well-dressed, patently prosperous farmer with a square, bare head and short-cropped white hair, standing with his thumbs in his suspenders, like Clarence Darrow at the monkey trial.

He was alone—his wife either home, or entering a bake-off or something, in a pavilion elsewhere on the fairgrounds.

As she pretended to watch Huey, the lipstick cutie was doing something else. Specifically, she was fanning her mark, checking for a fat wallet, and then she dropped her purse, and both her pretty head and the farmer’s square one disappeared under the sea of other heads. He was picking her purse up for her, no doubt, and she was flashing her smile and her baby blues.

A flirt is the best kind of stall there is, in a two-handed pickpocket mob.

Their heads appeared again, and he was smiling and blushing at her, handing her the purse—his hands kept busy, which is the way a stall frames her mark—and she was acting all coquettish, like. The blond pale boy of maybe twenty who could have been (and maybe even was) her brother moved through the crowd, behind them, brushing by just barely; he was wearing a white seersucker suit, not unlike mine.

By this time I had angled up to Joe Messina, who glared at me like a fifth-grade bully planning to get me after school.

“Want to do something useful, for a change?” I whispered.

“Huh?”

“See that dame? With the curls and the shape?”

“Yeah. So?”

“See that guy moving through the crowd, over there?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So they’re dips. Not
your
kind: pickpockets.”

He lurched forward and I grabbed his arm; his bicep was like a cannonball.

“Wait ’til they clear the crowd,” I said. I hung back a few seconds, then said, “Come on.”

We moved slowly through, as Huey was explaining to the crowd that FDR didn’t scare him (“Never touch a porcupine, less’n you expect to get some quills stuck in your hide”). We excused ourselves; we weren’t moving fast: we had our quarry in our sights.

Out on the midway, where on either side of us in open tents the barkers sang their siren song, the terraced hoopla stands behind them laden with such treasures as stuffed toys, bottles of perfume and pen-and-pencil sets, we trailed behind the pretty girl and the blond boy. We wandered past a brick pavilion as the scent of popcorn mingled with that of disinfectant and manure. We wove through kids with cotton candy and balloons on strings, and circumvented guys arm-in-arm with gals, the former in search of shooting booths where an eagle-eye might attain a prize that might coax an even better reward from the latter.

And we watched as the blond boy in seersucker white sidled up to the pretty girl in the dress with red polka dots; saw him hand her the fat wallet, and her hand him a smile.

He put his hand on her rump and her smile turned dirty. Maybe they weren’t brother and sister. In this part of the country, maybe just cousins.

“You take the boy,” I said.

“You take the girl,” Messina offered shrewdly.

“Nothin’ gets past you, does it, Joe?”

We slipped up beside them, and I took the dish by her soft arm and said, “On you, that dime-store perfume smells good.”

She frowned at me, tried to pull away. “Don’t handle the merchandise, buster!”

Beside her, Messina had halted her fella, too, clutching him roughly by the arm.

“Just dump the goods on the sawdust, sis,” I whispered, “and we’ll leave the coppers out of it.”

It was only half a smile, but with that mouth and that lipstick, it would have got a rise out of an archbishop.

Cotton candy had nothing on the sound of her voice. “Isn’t there some
other
arrangement we can make?”

I grinned, sighed. “If it was just me…”

Then she shoved me, hard, and her fella shoved Messina, and they both took off, down the midway, bulldozing fairgoers aside (“Hey!”), and rounding the corner down another sawdust pathway.

I was on my ass; Messina hadn’t gone down—buildings don’t topple, just ’cause you shove them.

He helped me up. Apparently he wasn’t holding a grudge.

“What now?” he asked thickly.

“We go after them, you lamebrain!”

And I was running. Messina, huffing and puffing like a steam-engine train, was bringing up the rear.

“I’ll take the girl!” I yelled.

“I’ll take the boy!”

What a fucking imbecile.

She was faster than her boyfriend, but I was faster than both of them, and I brought her down with a flying tackle that sent us tumbling onto the grass under the shadow of a Ferris wheel. It was fun, for a while. She was a sweet-smelling bundle of blonde hair and soft curves and silky-stockinged legs, but when a little hard fist went flying toward my nuts, I gave her the side of my leg to hit, and slapped her, once, hard.

The boy was still running.

Messina had stopped, and was standing there, bent over, hands on his thighs, trying to catch his breath; muscular as he was, the beer belly had stopped him.

“Get him!” I yelled.

And then Messina did something that damn near made me dirty my drawers.

He drew that pearl-handled revolver from its holster.

I was hauling the bundle of pretty pickpocket to her feet, and getting to mine, when I called, “No…”

But it was too late: Messina fired.

The gunshot cracked the afternoon into a million pieces.

Screams of surprise and fright seized the midway, and Huey’s amplified voice said, “Shit!” Knowing the Kingfish, who was not the bravest individual I ever met, he’d be cowering on the floor of that platform about now.

Amazingly, Messina had had the presence of (his excuse for a) mind to fire into the air.

And the blond boy stood there, on the grass, by a merry-go-round, frozen, and slowly put up his hands.

Messina lumbered over to him like a squashed version of the Frankenstein monster, the revolver thrust forward in a trembling hand; he was breathing like an asthmatic, and his frog eyes were bulging. Veins stood out in his forehead like exclamation marks.

“Joe…” I said.

He was headed for that blond kid, who had turned around, hands still in the air, to find himself looking down the barrel of that .38.

“Don’t shoot him, Joe,” I said.

“Don’t shoot him, Joe!” the girl called out, hysterically, as if she knew Messina. I had the wallet in one hand, and her arm in the other, and was hauling both toward Messina, who was facing his quavering captive, looking very much resolved to remove him from the planet.

“Joe,” I said, nearing him, “no…
no.
It would make the Kingfish look bad.”

“What the hell’s this about?” an authoritative male voice called.

“Drop those guns!” a second male voice chimed in.

We turned and a pair of uniformed cops, whose own guns were drawn, were closing in.

Messina lowered his revolver.

“We’re bodyguards for Senator Long,” I explained.

“That don’t give you leave to go wavin’ rods around,” said the older of the cops, “shooting ’em in the air like a goddamn Wild West show.” Like many a cop, he could say all this through his teeth, barely parting his lips. It’s an art.

I pulled the girl over, virtually handed her to the second cop. Messina monkey-see-monkey-do’ed, pushing forward the blond kid, who looked both frightened and relieved. Couldn’t blame him.

“Couple dips working the crowd,” I said.

Messina and I stood to one side, while the cops searched the pair. The kid had several watches and assorted jewelry in his coat pockets, and—when dumped out on the grass—the girl’s big purse was laden with wallets and watches.

“How’d you spot ’em?” the older cop asked.

“I used to be on the pickpocket detail,” I explained, “back in Chicago.”

He made a disgusted face. “Well, what the hell are you doin’
here?
”

Good question.

On a pleasantly warm afternoon, the Friday before, a taxi I’d caught at Newark Airport deposited me in Manhattan on Eighth Avenue between Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth streets, just to the rear of Penn Station, near the garment district. I paid the cabbie off, tipping him well, in return for sparing me any sightseeing remarks on the ride in.

I alighted with valise in hand, a spongy but surprisingly heavy brown-paper package tucked under my arm. Oblivious to the bored, busy New Yorkers whisking by—shoppers, stenographers, businessmen, office clerks—I stood gaping up like any damn-fool out-of-towner at the second-tallest hotel in the city. Back in Chicago, the forty-story Morrison advertised itself as the tallest structure in the city that invented skyscrapers. But the Hotel New Yorker, with its wide, truncated, vaguely Egyptian structure and its intricate art deco setbacks, would have been impressive even if it didn’t trump the Morrison by three stories.

The air-conditioned lobby was a low-ceilinged, sprawling affair that managed to be both stately and modern. I strolled past the coffee shop, newsstand, and a vast bank of elevators, over to the marble check-in counter, where I found myself expected.

“Your room is ready, Mr. Heller,” bubbled a dark-haired, bright-eyed, cheerfully efficient clerk. “I’ll let Mr. Weiss know you’re here….”

In my racket, you’re seldom so graciously received, but I knew I was basking in reflected glory, and didn’t take it very seriously. I took my valise, my paper-wrapped package and my travel-weary behind over to a soft chair and kept a potted fern company for a while.

Not a long while, however.

I’d been glancing around the lobby, cataloging the pretty girls mostly, when suddenly he was standing before me, like he’d just materialized. The apparition was bald, bottle-shaped and extremely well-dressed, his natty dark brown lightweight three-piece suit set off perfectly by a green-and-brown striped tie with diamond stickpin; my rumpled brown Maxwell Street number was no competition.

He was the kind of homely, slightly overweight man who tried to make up for his physical shortcomings via sartorial elegance.

But Seymour Weiss—Huey Long’s second-in-command—had a lot of homeliness to overcome: wisps of brown hair atop an egg-shaped head like dying desert grass, bulbous nose, bump of a chin, dark dead eyes.

“Good to see you again, Mr. Heller,” he said, and his small line of a mouth made itself into a tiny smile.

“Pleasure, Mr. Weiss,” I said. “Elliott Wisbrod asked me to deliver this package to you, personally.”

“Splendid!”

I handed him the brown-paper package and he held it in both hands, like an award he was gratefully accepting.

“I understand this is the Wisbrod Company’s latest model,” he said.

“That’s what Mr. Wisbrod said.”

Seymour beamed at me, pointed a stubby finger at my chest. “I’d like you to deliver it personally to Senator Long.”

Was that why I’d been asked to play messenger, for a package the mails or R.E.A. could have easily handled?

I thought I knew the answer, but I asked anyway. “Why is that, Mr. Weiss?”

“Huey likes you,” Seymour said quietly. “Maybe coming from you, he won’t be so quick to dismiss this effort….”

“If you say so,” I said, shrugging a little.

After all, I’d flown out on his ticket, and I wasn’t due to fly back till tomorrow, anyway. And an encounter with the Kingfish was always a memorable affair.

“Good,” he said, and smiled his tiny smile, and thrust the package back into my arms, where it crinkled like Christmas paper.

As for the Kingfish liking me, that seemed an over-statement to me. I did know him, or at least we’d met. Friendly acquaintances was as far as I’d push it. Huey Long wasn’t exactly the kind of man it was easy to “know.”

But back in June of ’32, when I was a plainclothes dick on the Chicago P.D., I’d got duty as police liaison to Long and four bodyguards, in town to attend the National Democratic Convention, at which Huey was lobbying for the nomination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In fact, he and his group showed up a week early, so Huey could play politics, get some press and check out the local nightlife—at least ’til
Mrs.
Long arrived for the convention itself.

Sergeant Sapperstein, my boss on the pickpocket detail, said somebody upstairs wanted Huey and his boys baby-sat. Seemed Huey’s bodyguards had been deputized as Chicago police officers to give them firearm-carrying privileges; apparently the Kingfish was nervous about assassination attempts.

Huey wasn’t the only nervous one: so was whoever got the payoff for allowing a Louisiana goon squad to go around town carrying guns—otherwise, I wouldn’t have been showing the governor of Louisiana where in the Windy City one might violate the Eighteenth Amendment, not to mention two or three of the Ten Commandments.

“As I recall, you and Huey got along famously,” Seymour said, as we stepped into an otherwise unoccupied elevator. It was one of those modern, self-service jobs; he pushed a button on a panel with more numbers on it than a punch-board.

“Yeah, Huey was okay,” I said. “Even offered me a position. Should’ve taken it.” I shook my head. “Thought I had a police career going.”

“What happened?”

“Testified against some bent cops.”

“Sounds noble.”

“Not really. I did it to keep Frank Nitti from having me killed.”

“Oh,” he said. He cleared his throat. “And how was your flight?”

“Fine.”

“Flying doesn’t bother you?”

“Nope. Not since I went up with Lindy.”

Seymour blinked. His expression was that of an iguana studying a fly. “You flew with Lindbergh?”

“Yeah, I was the Chicago police liaison on the kidnapping. In the early days, they figured Capone was responsible.”

“I remember,” Seymour said, nodding.

“Anyway, Slim’s a real practical joker. I’d never been on a plane before, and he went on one of his hedge-hopping stunt-pilot binges, just to initiate me. Ever since, nothing any pilot can do can faze me.”

On the other hand, this elevator was making my ears stop up. The button Seymour had punched read 32.

He seemed faintly amused. “Frank Nitti. Colonel Lindbergh. You’ve become something of a name-dropper, Mr. Heller.”

I hadn’t meant to be; or maybe in the back of my head I wanted to let Huey Long’s majordomo know I’d been around.

“But I do wish you’d taken that job Huey offered you,” Seymour said glumly.

“Yeah?”

“He could use you on his staff about now.”

“From what I read in the papers, Huey doesn’t go anywhere these days without a
battalion
of bodyguards.”

“Trigger-happy thugs, most of them,” Seymour said. “Huey’ll be lucky not to get caught in a cross fire.”

“Which is why you ordered this.” I hefted the brown-paper-wrapped package.

Seymour nodded. The hard dead eyes got as meditative as they were capable of. “Huey engenders strong feelings in the populace,” he said. “He’s worshipped by many….”

“Yeah,” I said, “but you’ve also had armed insurrection in the streets of New Orleans.”

“And Baton Rouge.” Seymour shook his head, his expression grave. “He most definitely needs protection.”

The elevator came to a stop and the door slid open, as I stepped out, swallowing to pop my ears back into full service. I followed Seymour, and it was the damnedest thing: he took small, almost mincing steps, the steps of a guarded man, yet he moved quickly. I almost had trouble keeping up….

He used a key in the door (with a gold plate labeling it 3200) at the end of a hall. I was ushered into an outer sitting room where, at a table meant for dining or perhaps a business conference, two characters out of Damon Runyon sat in a cigar-smoke haze, playing cards.

I knew them both—they’d attended the Chicago convention with Long as part of his four-man bodyguard contingent.

“Hey, it’s the red-headed mick from Chicago!” Big George McCracken said, his lumpy fighter’s face approximating a smile.

Actually, nobody I ever heard of named Heller is a mick, but my Irish Catholic mother had bestowed on me those physical characteristics, whereas all I got from my apostate Jewish father was a last name and bad attitude.

“How you doin’, George?” I asked.

“Can’t complain.” McCracken was in his shirt-sleeves and suspenders, but had his crumpled fedora on. A smoldering stub of a cigar was buried in his cheek as he looked up from a hand of gin. He was winning.

No surprise: his opponent was Joe Messina, who had the mental capacity of a tree stump, and about as much personality. Messina glanced back at me and grunted a greeting, as if my showing up after a three-year absence was completely unremarkable, and studied his cards with all the intensity he could muster.

“Nice to see you again, too, Joe,” I said.

“Comin’ to work with us?” McCracken asked. Next to him, leaned against his chair, I noticed, was a big paper sack, a grocery bag, and in it was a Thompson submachine gun.

A hole in the side of the sack gave him access to the trigger.

“Nope,” I said, following Seymour, who hadn’t bothered speaking to Huey’s roughneck rabble; he was heading past a pair of male aides or secretaries who were seated at another table, going over some papers. They didn’t speak to Seymour or he to them, as he moved toward a closed door, from behind which came the muffled, but enthusiastic, sound of a woman singing.

“Just playing delivery boy,” I added to McCracken, lifting the brown-paper package, and Seymour opened the door.

“…man a king,” the female voice sang in a pleasantly chirpy, Betty Boop-ish way, “every man a king, for you can be a millionaire…”

I trailed Seymour into the large, lavishly appointed, wall-to-wall carpeted bedroom, where next to the window, sun filtering in through sheer drapes, was a spinet piano in front of which stood a pretty little blonde in a slinky white-dotted navy taffeta number. She was swinging a cute fist as she punctuated the lyrics.

“But there’s something belonging to others,” she warbled, “there’s enough for all
pee
-ple to share…”

At the piano was another cutie; neither one of them had seen twenty-five. This one was brunette and wore taffeta, too, white with navy dots, like the photo negative of the other girl’s frock.

“When it’s sunny June, and December, too,” the blonde sang, “or in the wintertime or spring…”

Jumping in enthusiastically, and off-key, from time to time, was their musical director—in green pajamas and bare feet—directing the musical ensemble as if he were guiding a plane in on a runway. With one arm windmilling in a manner that had nothing to do with the beat, the Kingfish was, as usual, in charge.

Then in a croaking baritone, the senator from Louisiana joined in with the blonde on the bouncy melody, “There’ll be peace without end, every neighbor a friend, with ev…ry man…a…
k-i-i-i-i-ng
!”

A little man sitting across the room began to applaud enthusiastically; wire-frame glasses pinched his sharp nose, a red bow tie adding a splash of color to his drab brown suit.

“Lovely, Lila,” Huey said, placing one of the blonde’s small hands between his two bigger ones like he was pressing a prom rose in a book. She beamed at him. Then he let go and touched the shoulder of the brunette at the piano who had turned to smile up at him in awe; this was a celebrity, after all.

“I like that ’un best,” he said, “don’t you, ladies?”

The two girls nodded.

The little man in wire-frames rose from his chair, still applauding, which seemed like overkill to me, and through a strained smile he said, “Very nice, Kingfish, very nice indeed.”

“Well, now, thank ya, Lou.”

Lou went to the piano and tapped the sheets of music manuscript. “But I think you may want one of these
new
songs we commissioned. I mean, Kingfish, this is for your presidential campaign…the public might be a little tired of ‘Every—’”

“Lou,” Huey said with a smile as casual as it was patronizing, “as a theatrical agent, you’re a humdinger. But as a judge of musical composition? Ya ain’t worth the powder and shot it’d take to kill ya.”

The agent frowned in frustration, lifting the handwritten sheets of music and waving them flappingly in the air. “We have compositions from some of the
top
talent on Tin Pan Alley….”

“I like the song
I
wrote. Iffen it’s good enough for the LSU marchin’ band, it’s good enough for the American public.”

“But you wanted a
campaign
song….”

Huey put his hand on the little man’s shoulder. “Tell ya what—we’ll take a vote.” He winked at the blonde and she blushed, or pretended to. “I’m the chairman, I vote we use
my
song, and the motion is carried.”

Seymour and I had been standing just inside the bedroom door through all this, and had as yet to be acknowledged. I stood with my fedora in my hands, wondering if there was a chance in hell the Kingfish would even recognize me.

Suddenly, as if my thoughts had summoned him, Long turned to us. His happy bumpkin face turned into a scowl.

“Where’d
you
run off to, Seymour?” he asked irritably. “I was makin’ a goddamn point!”

“But you and Mr. Irwin have important business,” Seymour said, gesturing to the bow-tied agent.

“We
had
our business,” he said. “Lou, I’ll see you at supper tonight.”

“Looking forward to it, Kingfish.”

Huey slipped one arm around the blonde and the other around the brunette, and walked them toward the door. “It was real sweet of you kids to help the ol’ Kingfish out this afternoon,” he said.

“It was an honor, Senator,” the blonde said, and fluttered her false lashes.

“You thank Nick for me, now, hear?”

“You bet,” the brunette said.

The Kingfish shut the door behind them and his affability evaporated as he walked over to the big double bed and flopped there on his back. There were no pillows; he apparently liked to stretch out, flat. Also, at some point in the last ten minutes, I seemed to have turned invisible.