Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 09

Although the historical incidents in this novel are portrayed more or less accurately (as much as the passage of time, and contradictory source material, will allow), fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed here; historical personages exist side by side with composite characters and wholly fictional ones—all of whom act and speak at the author’s whim.

“What the public wants in the way of books on crime is detective stories that appeal to the passions. The public has so long been taught to hate and judge that it seems hopeless to try to teach them any sane and humane ideas of conduct and reasoning.”

—Clarence Darrow,
The Story of My Life

“Tongue often hang man quicker than rope.”

—Charlie Chan

Poised at the rail of the steamship
Malolo
like an Arrow shirt ad come to life, the handsome devil in black tie and white dinner jacket gazed contentedly at the endless shimmer of silver ocean under an
art moderne
slice of moon.

Occasionally a mist of spray would kiss the rugged planes of his face; occasionally he’d receive an even better kiss from the stunning young society deb snuggled at his arm. She had Harlow’s hair and a bathing beauty’s body, nicely evident under the deep blue skin of her evening gown; the cool trade winds on this warm night perked the buds of her breasts under the sheen of satin. Stars winking above were echoed by diamonds at the supple curve of her throat and on one slender wrist.

She was Isabel Bell, a name that rang twice, a niece of Alexander Graham Bell—meaning she had the kind of money that could travel long distance.

He might have been a wealthy young man from the East Coast; one of the four hundred, maybe—old family, old money. With those cruel good looks he might have belonged to some other element of Cafe Society—a stage or screen actor, perhaps, or a debonair sportsman.

Or a playwright, a man’s man who had chopped down trees and fought bulls and ridden tramp steamers and come back worldly wise beyond his years, penning a Pulitzer prize-winning effort about man’s inhumanity to man, and he would be damned if he would allow those Hollywood infidels to destroy his masterpiece. Not him, an American grassroots genius who had earned the right to hobnob with the elite—even to snuggle and, rumor has it, sneak into the stateroom of a certain Isabel Bell after hours, for some high-society intermingling.

Or perhaps he was a suave detective on his way to a distant tropical isle, having been engaged to solve a dastardly crime perpetrated against some lovely innocent white woman by evil dark men.

Of the hooey you’ve just endured, the closest thing to the truth is, believe it or not (to quote an American grassroots genius named Ripley), the last.

The “handsome devil” at the rail with the frail was only me—Nathan Heller, scion of Maxwell Street, on leave from the Chicago Police Department, on the most unusual assignment a member of that city’s pickpocket detail had ever stumbled into. The crisp white jacket—like the steamship ticket that had cost just a little bit less than my yearly salary—had been provided me by an unlikely patron saint who also resided in Chicago.

The shapely Miss Bell I’d managed to pick up on my own devices. She was under no illusions as to my social standing, but seemed to have a certain fascination for my tawdry line of work. And I was, after all, twenty-seven years old and a handsome devil.

So the real lowdown is…Isabel was slumming—and me?

Damned if I wasn’t on my way to paradise.

Several weeks before, an unexpected phone call from an old family friend had taken me away from a job that already had me way the hell off my Chicago beat. In the early stages of the investigation into the kidnapping of the twenty-month-old son of aviator hero Charles Lindbergh, the involvement of Chicago gangsters was strongly suspected; Al Capone, recently incarcerated for income tax evasion, was making suspicious noises about the snatch from his Cook County jail cell.

So for most of March 1932, I acted as liaison between the Chicago PD and the New Jersey State Police (and Colonel Lindbergh himself), working various aspects of the case in New Jersey, New York, and Washington, D.C.

But by early April, my initial involvement in that frustrating episode (about which I have written at length in a previous memoir) had started to wind down. When a phone call to the Lindbergh estate summoned me for luncheon at Sardi’s, a restaurant in the heart of midtown Manhattan’s theatrical district, I was relieved to be taking a break from a frustrating, heartbreaking dead end of a case.

I left my fedora with the redheaded doll at the hat check stand, and was led by a red-jacketed waiter through a high-ceilinged, open-beamed room that was lent a surprising intimacy by its soft lighting, warmly masculine paneling, and walls arrayed with vivid, full-color celebrity caricatures.

Some of the caricatures were alive. Over to one side, George Jessel—in the company of a blonde chorine—was pronouncing a eulogy over the remains of a lamb chop. Walter Winchell was holding court in one of the reddish-orange booths, his mouth machine-gunning remarks to a packed table of rapt listeners, mostly attractive young women. Barbara Stanwyck, her light brown hair boyishly bobbed, delicately pretty yet projecting the same strength in private as on the screen, was in a tête-à-tête over drinks with a balding older gent who was probably an agent or producer or something. Jack Dempsey—didn’t he have his
own
restaurant?—was wooing a cutie over cutlets.

But the most vivid living caricature in the room came not from Broadway or Hollywood, or the worlds of press or sport, rather from a distant prairie way station called Chicago. His back to the wall, he sat on the inside of a half-circle booth whose white linen tablecloth was set not just for him, but for two expected guests.

Even seated, he was an impressive figure, a big bucket-skulled broad-shouldered train wreck of a man in an unmade bed of a gray suit, his loose excuse of a bow tie dangling like an absurd noose; his hair was gray, too—what there was of it, combed in transparent disguise over his baldpate, a thick forelock straying like a comma down over his right eye, punctuating a craggy, deeply grooved face characterized by razor-keen gray eyes and Apache cheekbones.

Clarence Darrow was buttering a roll. There was nothing methodical about it; strictly slapdash. The seventy-four-year-old household word of an attorney glanced up at me with an impish smile and, though we had not spoken since my father’s funeral over a year ago, said as casually as if I’d seen him this morning, “You’ll forgive my not rising. My legs aren’t what they once were, and I’m preparing this exhibit for my esophagus.”

“If Ruby saw that,” I said, referring to his doting wife and self-proclaimed manager, “she’d object.”

“Overruled,” he smiled, and he chomped down the roll.

The room was a din of clattering china and silverware and raging egos. The perfect place for an intimate conversation.

Sliding in next to him, I nodded toward the place setting opposite me. “We expecting a third?”

Darrow nodded his shaggy head. “Fella named George S. Leisure. Wall Street attorney, Harvard grad. He’s a law partner of Wild Bill Donovan’s.”

“Ah,” I said. “So that’s how you knew where to find me.”

Donovan, a Congressional Medal of Honor-winning war hero, was a pal of Lindbergh’s and had been involved on the fringes of our efforts to locate the stolen child.

“Donovan’s firm was recommended to me,” Darrow said, talking with his mouthful of roll open, “when Dudley Malone had to bow out.”

As slick as Darrow was rumpled, Malone was almost as famous a trial attorney as Clarence himself, and had worked at his side on a number of cases, including the Scopes evolution trial in Tennessee, in which Darrow had made a monkey of William Jennings Bryan, further cementing the national fame he’d gained by defending the teenage “Thrill Killers” Loeb and Leopold back home in Chicago.

“Bow out of what?” I asked.

“Little case I’m considering.”

“Don’t tell me you’re getting back into harness, C.D. Didn’t you retire? Again?”

“I know you confine your reading material to dime novels and Sherlock Holmes,” Darrow said, slyly wry, “so I would imagine you missed it, when it made the newspapers…but there was a little incident on Wall Street, a while back.”

I grunted. “I heard you got hit pretty hard in the Crash. But I thought you were writing now…. And aren’t you a hot ticket on the lecture circuit?”

He grunted back at me; his was more eloquent than mine. “This so-called depression has dwindled even those meager avenues of revenue. Absurd, publishing an autobiography in an age when only a mystery story has a chance to be a bestseller.”

“You’ve been involved in more than your share of real-life mystery stories, C.D.”

“I have no interest in distorting the facts of my life and my work into any such popular fiction.” He began buttering another roll; he looked at it, not me, but the half-smile that began digging a deeper groove in his left cheek was all mine. “Anyway, son, there’s more to life than money. I would have hoped you’d have learned that by now.”

“I learned a long time ago,” I said, reaching for a roll myself, “that for a man who despises capitalism, you have a more than grudging admiration for a dollar.”

“True,” he acknowledged, and chomped off another bite of buttered roll. “I’m like all humans—weak. Flawed.”

“You’re a true victim of your environment, C.D.,” I said, “not to mention heredity.”

He laughed, once. “You know what I like about you, son? You’ve got wit. And nerve. And brains. Not that those items will ease your suffering to any noticeable degree, in this sorry state of existence that burdens us so.”

C.D. had the most cheerfully bleak outlook on life I’d ever encountered.

“This isn’t about money at all,” he insisted. He squinted one eye, conspiratorially. “But don’t tell Ruby I said so—I have her convinced that our financial plight is the sole stimulus behind my stirring from self-imposed hibernation.”

“What’s
really
behind it?”

His shrug was grandiose. “Boredom. Loafing as an ideal is one thing; as a practice it’s quite something else. Four years of freedom from work may
sound
attractive. But think of four years of monotony. Four years of stagnation.” And now a grandiose sigh. “I’m tired, son—tired of resting.”

I studied him as if he were a key exhibit in a trial that could go either way.

“If you’re talking to lawyers the likes of Malone and Donovan,” I said, “this ‘little case’ must be pretty big.”

The gray eyes twinkled; he was like an immense wrinkled elf. “Big enough to shoulder that little Lindbergh matter you’ve been looking into off to the side of page one.”

I felt a chill, and it wasn’t from the ceiling fans.

Leaning forward, I said, “You’re kidding, right?…Not the
Massie
case?”

The half-smile blossomed into full bloom; he looked different than I remembered him from my childhood: that upper plate was a lot more perfect than his real teeth had been.

“I’ve never been to Honolulu,” he said, as if we were discussing the merits of a travel brochure and not a notorious criminal case. “Never been to that part of the Pacific. I hear it has unusual charm.”

From what I’d read, there was nothing charming about the Massie case: Thalia Massie, the wife of a naval lieutenant stationed at Pearl Harbor, had been abducted and raped; she had identified five “natives” as the assailants, and the men were arrested—but the trial resulted in a hung jury.

Thalia Massie’s mother—a Mrs. Fortescue, something of a society matron—had, with her son-in-law Thomas Massie’s assistance, engineered the kidnapping of one of the alleged assailants, hoping to make him confess; but he had been killed while in their “custody,” shot to death, and now Mrs. Fortescue, Lt. Thomas Massie, and two sailors they’d recruited to help them on their misadventure were to stand trial on a murder charge.

The Lindbergh kidnapping had indeed been edged out of the tabloid limelight by the cocktail of sex, violence, and racial turmoil that was the Massie case. The Hearst papers were reporting a rate of forty rapes against white women per year in Hawaii, and painted a picture of a “deplorable” situation in America’s “Garden of the Pacific.” Good citizens all around the nation were abuzz about the stories of bands of native degenerates who waited in the bushes to leap out and ravage white women. Editorials were calling for stern official measures to curb these sex crimes; headlines cried out of
MELTING POT PERIL
and labeled Hawaii a
SEETHING CRATER OF RADICAL HATE
. News stories out of Washington reported talk of martial law coming from Congress and the White House.

In short, the perfect case for Clarence Darrow’s comeback.

Shaking my head, I said, “Defending the rich again, C.D.? Shame on you.”

A chuckle shook his sunken chest. “Your father would be disappointed in me.”

“He didn’t mind when you represented Loeb and Leopold.”

“Of course not. He was an anti-capital punishment man himself.”

With one exception,
I thought.

His smile was gone now. He was gazing into a sweating water glass as if it were a window on the past. “Your father never forgave me for supplementing my efforts on behalf of coal miners, anarchists, Negroes, and unionists with clients of…dubious distinction.”

“Gangsters and grafters, you mean.”

He raised an eyebrow, sighed. “A hard man, your father. Moral to a fault. No one could live up to his exacting standards. Not even himself.”

“But the Massie case…if what I’ve read is even close to true, you’d be a natural for the
other
side.”

A frown creased the craggy face. “Don’t insult me, son. The case does not exist in which Clarence Darrow would stand for the prosecution.”

But if one did, it would be the Massie case.

I asked, “How are your friends at the NAACP going to—”

“I have friends in organizations,” he said curtly, glibly, “but no organization is my friend.”

“Swell. But isn’t this Mrs. Fortescue…is that her name?”

Darrow nodded.

“Isn’t this Mrs. Fortescue from Kentucky or Virginia or something?”

“Kentucky.”

“And she orchestrates a kidnapping that results in the fatal shooting of a colored man who raped her daughter? Doesn’t that put the Great Friend of the Colored Man square on the side of lynch law…?”

“That’s uncalled for,” he rasped. The gray eyes were flaring. “I have given more of my time, and money, to the Negro cause than any other white man you, or anyone, could name. Don’t question my convictions on the race issue.”