Neon Mirage (3 page)

“This is no life for you. That guy Epstein, he’s a glorified bookie.”

Ingenuously she said, “I thought he was an accountant.”

“He is. From what I hear, he works for the Capone mob, on the side—helping Jake Guzik with the books. Making sure nobody else goes to jail over income tax.”

She smiled a little. “I met Al Capone before.”

That didn’t make any sense. Capone was sent up in ’32. She was about nineteen years old.

“We go to the same church,” she explained. “I’ve seen his wife a lot. St. Bernard’s. I dated one of her bodyguards.”

“Swell! That sort of life appeals to you, huh? Do you know my name?”

She thought hard. Then she said, “Nat?”

“Close but no cigar. Nate. Don’t sleep with strange men. My name’s Nathan Heller, and I’m a private detective. I carry a gun sometimes.”

She smiled, showed me her wonderful white teeth; first thing in the morning and they looked brushed without brushing. “Really?”

“You think that’s swell, I suppose?”

She shrugged. “I don’t see why life has to be dull.”

“Take my advice,” I said, throwing her blue satin gown at her. “Go to school. Find a job. Find a husband. Stay away from Virginia Hill. She’ll make a whore out of you.”

That made her mad.

She got out of bed and stood there stark naked and shook her finger at me. I’d never seen a girl—or a woman for that matter— just stand before me naked like that without a thought about it. As she shook her finger, her delicately-veined, perfect little breasts bobbled. Her pubic triangle was bushy and near black and a gentle trail of hair tickled its way up to her belly button.

“Don’t you call me a whore, you crummy louse. I never took a dime from
any
man.”

I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Watching her was having an effect on me. She noticed and stopped being mad. She smiled, covered her mouth, catching the laugh.

“You’re pretty self-righteous, aren’t you, Nathan Heller—for a man whose dirty mind is sticking out.”

That embarrassed me, and I went in the other room and got dressed. She came out a few minutes later, wearing the flimsy satin blue gown, sweet little boobs bobbling, and said. “You wouldn’t happen to have a car, would you?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but it’s parked behind my office. That’s only a couple blocks from here, though.”

“Would you pick me up out front, and take me home? I can’t hop a streetcar like this”—she gestured sweepingly toward herself—” and I don’t have cab fare.”

“I could give you cab fare.”

Her jaw tightened. “I don’t want any money from you, Nat. Nate.”

“Sure I’ll give you a ride.”

She smiled; no teeth, but plenty of dimples. She had a face like an angel and a hell of a body.

“Sorry I was so rough on you,” I said, later, picking her up out front, as she slid in on the rider’s side of my ’32 Auburn.

“It’s okay. It’s nice that you care.”

“You should stay away from these gamblers and gangsters. And Virginia Hill.”

“You were friendly enough with her.”

“Yeah, but I’m a lowlife. You find some other social circle to move in. Don’t go taking off your clothes posing for no calendar artists, either.”

“It pays pretty good money. Times are hard.”

“You’ve done okay. I don’t imagine your family fell on hard times much. I bet you get an allowance.”

“Is that what you think.”

“I think you’re a spoiled brat, is what I think.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. And check back in with me after you grow up.”

“Why?”

“I’d like to spoil you a little myself.”

And I’d dropped her at her flat, young Peggy Hogan, and hadn’t seen her since, though I’d thought of her from time to time, and her perfume that smelled like roses.

Now here she was, some eight years later, looking older but not much older. She did seem wiser. That was my impression, anyway. Later I’d learn better.

For right now, I sat across from her desk in the lawyer’s cramped outer office and said, “You look like you took my advice about school.”

“Yes—but I didn’t find a husband.”

Yet
hung in the air. It didn’t scare me. If she was on the lookout for a husband, I could think of worse ways a man could invest his fife.

“Well,” I said, “you did find a right proper job.”

She smiled sadly. “It took me a while. I’ve only been working a little over two years.”

“Oh?”

“Only since Dad’s first stroke. I tried to be an actress, after I graduated from Sawyer Secretarial. Lived in an apartment in Tower Town; made the Little Theater scene.”

That made me flinch. “I, uh, used to have a girl down there who did the same thing.”

“Oh? Who?”

I told her; it was an actress whose name she recognized.

“I’ve seen her pictures!” she said, the violet eyes getting even larger.

“Me too,” I admitted. “When did you give up acting?”

“Like I said—when Dad died. I have five sisters, Nate, of which I’m the oldest. I had one brother.”

“I know. Your uncle mentioned it. I’m sorry.”

She nodded gravely. “Johnny was the valedictorian of his class. He was all set to go to college and the war came along.”

“He was drafted.”

“Enlisted.”

“I suppose your dad intended for him to take over the business.”

“Yes he did. Dad always liked a drink of whiskey, but after we lost Johnny, he…he got to like it a little too much. The business slipped, and pretty soon Dad was gone. Stroke. Two strokes, actually. The second one killed him.”

She was telling this flatly, not the faintest quaver in her voice; but her eyes were close to overflowing.

“So your uncle helped you out,” I said. “Got you this job.”

“Yes,” she said, brightening, using a tissue from a box on her desk to dab her eyes. “I’d never used the skills I’d learned, way back at Sawyer…and I’ve been surprised to find out I still have those skills, surprised more than that to find I enjoy using them.”

“That’s nice. I’m glad things are working out for you.”

“If things were working out, Nate, you wouldn’t be here, would you?”

“I guess not. You want to tell me about the notes, and the phone calls?”

“I can show you the notes,” she said, getting into a desk drawer. Very business-like, she had them in a manila file folder.

There were three of them; your standard ransom-style, letters-cut-from-papers-and-magazines threats: DROP THE RAGEN CASE OR ELSE; LAY OFF THE BLUE SHEET OR WAKE UP DEAD; FIND A NEW CLIENT OR DIE. Not very original, but the point came across.

“None of these are addressed to you,” I said.

“I’ve been on the end of the phone calls. Most of them have been messages for Mr. Levinson. But they’ve from time to time threatened me, too.”

She didn’t seem very bothered.

“If it’s not too difficult for you, what have they said?”

“Oh, no death threats, not at me. Just that they’ll cut my face up. That kind of thing.”

She was pretty blasé about it, and looking at her close, I didn’t think it was a pose. This little dame had balls. So to speak.

“What would you think about me tagging along with you,” I said, “for the next week or so?”

She smiled wryly; one deep dimple. “I’d like that fine. I don’t have a boy friend…at the moment. So you wouldn’t be getting in the way of anything.”

“I’m going to put a man right here in the office with you. I’m personally going to escort you to and from work. We’ll go out for lunch and supper together, too.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Dutch treat?”

“Your uncle’s buying. I’m on an expense account.”

“You know, I’m living at home, now. In Englewood. I’ve been taking the streetcar to work…”

“We’ll put you up at the Morrison.”

“You don’t still
live
there?”

“Actually, yes. Different room, though. I moved in when I got back from service, temporarily, and I’m still there. I’m looking for something else, but you know the housing situation.”

She nodded. “Do you have a couch?”

“Yes.”

“I could move in with you.”

“That’d be ideal, really. If you think you could trust me…”

“Do you think you could trust
me,
is the point?”

“I could find out.”

We began sleeping together that night. She made me promise not to tell her uncle. I accepted those terms; I wasn’t crazy. I took his hundred bucks a day, charged him expenses, and slept with his niece. I said I was a lowlife.

On the fourth of our days together, we had just dined at the Berghoff and were walking down West Adams, heading back to the Morrison, when a figure stepped out of the alley. He meant to scare us, and he did, planting himself like an ugly tree before us. He was big and he was pasty-faced and hook-nosed, wearing an ugly blue and white checked sportcoat over a white sportshirt and baggy light blue pants. He looked like a bouncer in a circus museum.

“Tell your boss to drop the case,” he said, and he jerked a thumb at the alley. “Or the next time I come outa one of these, I’m gonna drag yas back in.”

He didn’t seem to know me; hell, he didn’t seem to notice me. I didn’t know him, either, but you didn’t have to be Jimmy Durante to smell mob on this guy.

I eased myself in front of Peg, gently pushing her behind me, shooing her back toward and into the Berghoff, and as I did, the guy frowned at me, as if trying to place me.

Both his big hands were at his side, so there was little risk when I pulled the nine millimeter out from under my shoulder and shoved it in his fat gut and said, “Let’s you and me go in the alley, right
now,
bozo.”

He swallowed and we did. I smacked him once with the automatic, along one side of his head, and he went down and sat amongst the garbage cans and was out, or pretended to be. His ear was bleeding. He had a gun, too, which I took from under his arm and tossed down the alley, skittering on the bricks into the darkness. I took out one of my business cards and, before sticking it in the guy’s breast pocket, jotted a note on the back of it: ASK GUZIK TO CALL ME.

The next morning Guzik did.

“You slapped the Greek around,” Guzik pointed out in his detached monotone.

“If you’d seen how he was dressed, you’d have helped.”

Guzik grunted; it seemed to be a laugh.

I said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d lay off the girl.”

I didn’t ask him to lay off Ragen. That would be going too far; that wouldn’t be my business.

“She’s your girl?” Guzik asked.

“She’s mine. I’ll kill anybody who touches her.”

Long pause.

Then: “I’ll see to it she’s left alone.”

“Thanks, Mr. Guzik.”

Guzik grunted and hung up.

So did I, trembling.

Peg’s lawyer boss didn’t make it to court: he had a nervous breakdown first. But Ragen found somebody else to take the case (which was still in litigation at the time of the shooting at State and Pershing) and gave Peg a job in his own office in the meantime. We’d been seeing each other, off and on, since then; but with Peg living at home, being the dutiful daughter, and under her uncle’s watchful eye at work and all, we were taking it slow.

And that’s why I went along, when Jim Ragen leaned on me to provide him protection in his ill-advised struggle with the Outfit: I was in love with his goddamned niece.

Ragen wasn’t dead; just unconscious. But the way he was bleeding, he’d be dead soon enough if Walt Pelitier and me didn’t move our couple of asses.

First things first: I crossed State to a corner barber shop, where (now that the shooting was over) coloreds were milling, murmuring amongst themselves, pointing over at the shot-up cars. None of them spoke to me, possibly because I still had a gun in my hand. It was a bus stop, and there was a bench; several colored youths were standing on it, to get a better look. No cops had shown yet. This neighborhood wasn’t patrolled much—that no doubt was one of the reasons why it had been chosen to host the hit. I walked quickly to the modest newsstand along the Pershing side of the barber shop and handed the boy a buck and grabbed a bunch of papers. Then I went out into the street and got in on the pellet-puckered rider’s side of the Lincoln, having to yank at the mangled door some to do it, and began wrapping the bloody, unconscious Ragen’s wounded right arm in newspapers, like the limb was a big dead fish. The papers soaked up the blood. Black and white and red all over.

I used a few pages to clean the blood off my hands. Then I left Ragen with Walt and danced back through the moderate State Street traffic, most of which was slowing for a look (but not stopping—whites didn’t stop in this neighborhood unless, like me, they were shot at or something), and ducked into the drug store, where a thin, white-haired, colored gentleman in a white smock and wire-frame glasses stood behind the prescription counter. He seemed damn near serene, as if his window got shot out every day.

“Has anybody in here called the cops yet?”

The druggist nodded, slowly. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I did.”

“When they get here,” I said, handing him one of my business cards, “give ’em this, and tell ’em I’m driving the victim to the nearest hospital.”

“All right,” he said, still nodding, not glancing at the card.

“That’d be Michael Reese, right?”

He just kept nodding, and I went out, the glass of his window crunching under my shoes.

Michael Reese Hospital was at 29th, a little over ten-block drive, and we’d have to head back north to get there. We took Ragen’s Lincoln—the bodyguard car’s windshield was shattered, and a tire had been flattened, though I was able to pull it over to the curb and park it—and this time I drove while Walt rode figurative shotgun, Ragen between us, leaned against Walt. I turned left on Pershing and floored it and ignored traffic lights, just slowing a tad as I crossed the intersections while oncoming cars climbed curbs and screeched to stops to allow my passage, and I was going fifty, six blocks later, when I took a hard, careening left on South Park Avenue, a wide boulevard with a parkway down the middle where colored kids paused in their play to look with wide eyes upon the shot-up car full of white people that went streaking by.

The gray-brick complex of Michael Reese Hospital stretched along Ellis Avenue like a fortress in a foreign land; to the rear, separated from the hospital only by Lake Park Avenue, the wide W of the central building and its two major wings faced the downward slope of the Illinois Central tracks, beyond which was the lake. Nothing fancy to look at, the six stories of Michael Reese nonetheless towered over the rundown colored neighborhood at its feet, crumbling three-story buildings that huddled together as if only their close proximity kept them from falling down.

The big privately owned hospital had enough specialists on its staff to attract patients the likes of Ragen, even if he weren’t being dragged into the emergency room shot-up, even if it wasn’t just the closest, handiest hospital. But that emergency room was populated by street people, almost exclusively colored, victims of the casual violence their neighborhood bred. The South Side Irish seeking their health in this hospital were upstairs in the small private rooms; the emergency room’s darker clientele would wind up in a charity ward in Reese’s Mandel Clinic or, more likely, be treated as out patients.

As we dragged Ragen in, Walt on one side of him, me on the other, bloody newspaper sheets dropping to the floor like petals from a grotesque flower, a couple orderlies took over and ushered him into the emergency examination room at left, where they eased him onto an examination table and shut a curtain around him. I left Walt to fill in the attending physician, and went back out to the 29th Street ambulance ramp, where we’d left the shot-up Lincoln, doors open, motor running, and parked it in one of the nearby Staff Only stalls. I locked the sawed-off in the trunk; this was no neighborhood to be leaving weapons in the back seat of cars. Of course, what neighborhood in Chicago was?

In the phone booth in the corridor outside the emergency room, I called Ragen’s home first. His wife Ellen answered.

“He’s been shot,” I told her, “but he’s alive.”

There was a long pause.

“Where is he?” she asked; her voice was husky. It tried to be strong, but didn’t make it.

“Michael Reese,” I said, and she said thank you and hung up.

She didn’t ask for any details. There would be time enough for that. I didn’t know Ellen very well—we’d only met a few times—but she wasn’t naive. That much I knew. Jim winding up on the end of a shooting was inevitable. That much she knew.

Then I called my office. It was late—almost seven, now. I knew Gladys Fortunato, my secretary, would be long gone—she was a dedicated girl, Gladys, until five o’clock rolled around, at which point she couldn’t care less about A-1 Detective Agency, and who could blame her?

But Lou Sapperstein might be there. Lou had been out in the field today, investigating loan applicants for a Skokie bank. He was conscientious, and would likely stick around to do his paper work, while the afternoon’s interviews were fresh in his mind. If I let it ring long enough…

“A-1,” Lou’s voice said, finally. It was a soothing baritone; Bing Crosby, only Lou couldn’t carry a tune.

“It’s your boss,” I said.

“And you love it,” Lou said.

He always said that, or words to that effect, when I reminded him who the boss was. He had been
my
boss on the pickpocket detail, back in the early thirties, when I was the youngest plain-clothes dick on the department and he still had hair, or anyway some hair. Lou was pushing sixty, but was still a hard, lean cop. Don’t let the tortoise-shell eyeglasses fool you.

“Drop everything,” I told him. “You’re working tonight.”

“That’s why you put me on salary, isn’t it? To get sixty hours a week out of me. So what’s up?”

“Jim Ragen’s time. Or it pretty soon will be. Lou, they hit us.”

“Shit! Where? How?”

I gave it to him.

“Now here’s what I want you to do…” I started.

“Don’t waste your breath,” Sapperstein said. “I’ll tell
you
: you want me to go to Bill Tendlar’s flat over on the near Northwest Side and see just how sick he really is.”

Tendlar was the op who’d called in sick; whose shotgun I’d used.

“If he isn’t sick,” I said, “he’s going to be.”

“And if he is sick,” Sapperstein said, “he’s gonna be sicker.”

“You got it. This was an inside job, and it wasn’t Walt. He was under fire just like I was.”

“What about that truck driver pal of Ragen’s who had the day off?”

“I want him checked out, too. Maybe you can put Richie on that. But my nose says Tendlar. Of all the guys we got working for us, him I know the least about.”

“He was on the pickpocket detail,” Lou said, “but after both our times. We had mutual friends, though. He came recommended.”

“Judas looked good to Jesus, too. It was Tendlar’s shotgun that jammed and almost got me killed. Find him. Sit on him. ’Cause I want him.”

“You’ll have him, if he’s still in town to be had.”

And Lou hung up.

Then I dialed the detective bureau at the Central Police Station, at 11th and State in the Loop. And asked for Lt. Drury.

Bill Drury was another former pickpocket detail dick—only he had stayed on. Recently he’d been acting captain over at Town Hall Station, till he and a handful of the other honest detectives got railroaded out of their jobs by the Civil Service Commission, over supposedly tolerating bookie joints on their beats.

“Drury,” he said.

“Welcome back,” I said.

He laughed. “I been wondering when you’d get around to congratulating me.”

“Well, give me a chance. They only reinstated you Friday. And this is your first day back on the job.”

“It’s not the greatest shift,” he admitted, “but it beats unemployment.”

“How long you been on?”

“Since five o’clock. Where you calling from? Why don’t you come over and I’ll buy you a cup of lousy coffee?”

“I’m calling from Michael Reese. Get your reinstated butt over here and I’ll give you more than a cup of coffee.”

“Oh?”

And I told him, very quickly, about Ragen getting shot up at the corner of State and Pershing.

“Guzik,” Drury said, with a smile in his voice.

“Probably. But remember—I don’t want to end up in the middle of this, now…”

“You’re already in the middle of State Street, exchanging fire with a couple of shotguns—and you don’t want to be in the middle of this?”

“Well, I don’t. Get over here, if you can.”

“Who’s going to stop me?”

I joined Walt in the emergency room, where Ragen, still unconscious but now stripped down to his waist, his pasty Irish flesh even pastier than usual, his wounds dressed, was being rolled out on his back on what looked like a mobile morgue tray, a young fair-haired intern on one side of him, an older heavy-set dark nurse on the other. They were giving him a bottle of plasma.

We followed them out into the corridor, toward an elevator, where they wheeled him on and the intern looked out at me and said, “Who are you?”

“I’m his bodyguard. Let’s hope you’re better at your job than I am at mine.”

I squeezed onto the elevator and so did Walt.

“You can’t come along,” the intern said.

“Watch me,” I said.

It was one of those self-operated elevators.

“What floor?” I asked the nurse, pleasantly.

“Second,” the nurse said, warily.

I pushed the button and we went up.

Walt and I waited outside the surgery, down at one end of a narrow, rather dark corridor, where footsteps echoed on the tile floor and the cool disinfectant-institutional smell constantly reminded us where we were. Ten minutes after Ragen had been wheeled in, two uniformed cops and a detective from the third district joined us.

The detective, a Sgt. Blaine, was a pot-bellied guy in his forties with dark, stupid eyes in a round, stupid face. He pushed his porkpie hat back on his head, to let us know he was appraising us. Big deal. I didn’t know him from Adam, but he’d heard of me.

“Heller,” he said, his humorless one-sided smile buried in a pocket of puffy cheek. “You’re the guy who sided with Frank Nitti over your brother cops.”

“If you’re going to be mean to me,” I said, “I might just bust out crying.”

Now he tried to sneer. “Nobody likes a cop who rats out other cops.”

“Hey, that was twelve, thirteen years ago. And they weren’t cops, they were a couple of West Side hoods Mayor Cermak hired as bodyguards. Okay? Can we move on to new business? Like the guy bleeding to death in the next room? Or do you wanna read the minutes of the last meeting?”

He looked at me like he was thinking of spitting, and maybe he was, but the hospital floor looked too clean. So instead he posted the two uniformed cops at the surgery’s double doors, and got out his little notebook, licked the tip of his pencil, and started asking questions. I knew we’d have to make a more formal statement later on, but I answered the questions, anyway. There was nothing better to do.

“Where’s this shotgun that wouldn’t shoot?” he wanted to know. The first vaguely pertinent question in nearly five minutes of piss-poor interrogation.

“In the trunk,” I told him, and dug out the keys for him. “You’ll be impounding the heap, anyway, right?”

“Yeah, right,” he said, like he’d thought of it too. He tucked the little notebook away, and the Lincoln keys. “I guess you boys can find your way home without it.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” I said. “We work for Ragen.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot,” he smirked. “You’re
protectin
’ him.”

“That’s right. And we’re sticking, or anyway somebody else from my agency will be sticking, till Ragen or his family sends us away.”

“Listen, buddy.” He prodded the air with a forefinger. “You just take a hike.” He jerked a thumb over one shoulder. “You let the cops do their job.” He pointed at himself with the other thumb.

“Do their job,” I said. “Like look the other way, if the price is right. A fin, say.”

The stupid eyes narrowed, tried to get smart. Without any particular success. He was trying to summon some indignation and come up with something clever or nasty to say, when a finger tapped his shoulder.

“You better call in, sergeant,” Bill Drury said. “I can take over on this end.”

Drury wasn’t big, really, but his broad shoulders and sheer physical presence turned his five-foot-nine, hundred-sixty-pound frame into something formidable. His eyes were just as dark as Blaine’s, but infinitely more intelligent. His hair was thinning, but combed so as to spread what little there was around. His nose was somewhat prominent and his jaw jutting. And, as usual, he was nattily dressed, wearing (despite the heat) a vest with his dark blue suit, the breast pocket of which bore a white flourish of handkerchief, his wide tie a light blue with a yellow sunburst pattern. He was easily the best-dressed honest cop on the Chicago P.D.

Blaine, about the same size as Bill, nonetheless seemed dwarfed by him. He probably felt dwarfed by him, too. The sergeant swallowed, said, “Yes, lieutenant. I should call this information in. You’re right about that.”

And he clip-clopped down the tile floor toward the elevator, and went away.

Drury grinned at me, nodded at Walt. Walt had splotches of Ragen’s blood on his brown suit. I had some on my brown suit, too, I noticed.