True Crime (8 page)
Authors: Max Allan Collins
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“All right, Melvin. Have it your way. Nash wasn’t the target; he just got accidentally machine-gunned. Who else are you looking for, in connection with the massacre?”
“Well, the other two killers, of course—‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd and Adam Richetti.”
“What if I said that was a load of hooey. That Floyd and Richetti weren’t there.”
His thin lips pursed. “I’d say you were mistaken.”
I shook my head, smiled humorlessly. “Well, I hear they weren’t there.”
“You’re mistaken.” And finally some sarcasm crept into the drawl: “Unless your sources of information are better than mine.”
“Melvin, some things you can’t find out looking through a microscope.” I rose. “I’ll see you later.”
“Sit down, Heller. Sit down!”
I didn’t.
I said, “I may have seen Dillinger. I’m going to check into it a little more. You see, the guy who may be Dillinger is hanging around with a client of mine’s girlfriend. And if you and your college boys get her killed, my client’s going to be unhappy with me. So I’m going to take it nice and easy on this one. I’ll get back to you.”
The muscles in his jaw were pulsing. “Is that your final decision, Mr. Heller?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it is. And don’t bother having any of these Harold Teens try to tail me…you and your boys have been embarrassed enough lately.”
His jaw muscles still jumping, he said, “There’s reward money in this, Heller.”
“I know there is. I mean no offense, Purvis. I’ll be back in touch.”
“Soon?”
“Soon.”
With Cowley, I thought.
And left.
I spent the afternoon tailing Lawrence and Polly for what I assured myself was one last time. Around noon I’d driven back to the apartment house on Pine Grove, near the lake, and, with suitcoat and hat off and tie loosened, had just got settled in on the rider’s side with my newspaper when a Checker cab pulled up, and Lawrence and Polly came out and got in. Lawrence was in shirt sleeves and bow tie and straw hat and yellow slacks; and Polly was in a yellow dress and matching hat. They looked like an advert for butter.
I followed ’em to North Lincoln Avenue—just a block or so from Anna’s—and they got out of the cab. As I drove by I saw that, not ten feet away from them, two uniformed cops were standing on the corner, talking. Lawrence didn’t even glance their way. A squad car went by just after I parked, and it swung around to pick up one of the cops, and Lawrence and Polly, strolling along now, didn’t seem to notice or care. If this Lawrence
was
Dillinger, he was one cool customer.
But apparently not so cool, on this blistering day, to be able to resist the strawberry sundaes he and Polly ate, in lieu of lunch, at the soda fountain next to Biograph Billards. Here they split up, with Polly beaming at him and giving him a peck on the cheek; off she went, presumably to shop—North Lincoln being a nifty little shopping area.
I stayed with Lawrence. I hung a loose tail on him—if this really was Dillinger, he’d be picking up on me any time now, unless I was very careful. After all, he might be armed—though I didn’t see how: he had no coat on, and there was no gun bulge in any of the pockets of his yellow slacks.
Whoever he was, he got his hair cut at the Biograph Barber Shop; and then went across to the Biograph Theater and in the door just to the right of the marquee. Visiting his bookmaker, no doubt—there’d been a bookie joint operating in the loft over that theater for years.
A few minutes later he came out and walked down the street to a haberdashery, the Ward Mitchell Company, where he bought a striped shirt. This I’d glimpsed through the storefront window, and was on my way across the street, to maintain my tail at a distance, and almost missed it when Lawrence came out of the store and bumped into a beat cop who was walking by, swinging his stick.
Lawrence dropped his package, and the bull helped him pick it up and they smiled and nodded to each other and walked on.
The hell with it, I thought, and went to my car and headed back to the Loop. That flatfoot sure didn’t think Lawrence was Dillinger, and Lawrence didn’t exactly wet his pants on bumping into the law, either. Hell with it.
By four that afternoon I was sitting in a booth in Barney Ross’ Cocktail Lounge, having a beer. Ceiling fans whirred overhead and, with the beer, made the heat almost seem to go away. It was a long, narrow, dark room with a bar against one long wall, a small dance floor at the far end, a few tables by the dance floor, and booths lining the walls. There were framed photos of fighters everywhere, and not just Barney—King Levinsky, Jackie Fields, Benny Leonard, among others. Barney himself was rarely around the place, these days—too public a figure for it, and Pian and Winch, his mother-hen managers, didn’t like him owning a bar, let alone hanging around in one. Barney had a wholesome reputation going for him, and counted plenty of kids among his fans, so him lending his name to the place was bad enough, much less actually being there.
SGT. M
ARTIN
Z
ARKOVICH
And he was busy. Not just with the fight game, but speaking at civic functions (hearing a Barney Ross speech was a pleasure I’d somehow managed to avoid) and generally being Chicago’s favorite son.
So when Barney surprised me and walked up to the booth, I asked him for his autograph and he told me where to go and grinned and sat across from me, and watched with envy as I drank my beer.
“Where’s Pearl?” I asked him.
“State Street.”
Like Polly, Pearl had gone shopping.
“How’s that case coming?” he asked me.
“Private dicks don’t work on cases. Lawyers work on cases. Sherlock Holmes works on cases.”
“Oh, yeah? So what are you working on?”
“A job. At least I was.”
“Oh. The one from the other night.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“You wrap it up, or what?”
“What. I’m thinking about tossing in the towel on this one.”
“Happens to the best of us,” he shrugged, waving for his bartender, an ex-heavyweight named Buddy Gold, to come over. He asked Buddy to bring him a glass of soda water.
“I did what my client paid me to,” I said. Adding, “Even though he lied to me.”
“Doesn’t sound to me like you tossed in the towel.”
“This has gone past the job itself into something else. Something maybe worth serious dough—but I’m not sure I want any part of it.”
“Why not?”
“I’d be the finger man. A guy’d probably die because of me.”
Barney studied me close, to see if I was leading him around the bend.
I said, “A wanted man, you understand. A bad guy. But he would probably die.”
He knew I was serious now. He said, “Nate, uh…”
“What?”
“Why don’t you take a pass on this one—whatever it is.”
“That’s good advice.”
“You don’t need the grief, mentally.” He said mentally like mently.
“I know.”
“You still carrying the gun?”
He meant the automatic that my father had killed himself with.
“I don’t carry it often. But I still got it.”
“It’s what you carry when you feel you need to carry a gun, though.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
His soda water came; he sipped it; smiled.
“Good,” he said.
I smiled at him. I knew what he meant.
A big tall man in a natty dark suit and a gray snap-brim hat was asking a question of Buddy Gold at the bar. Buddy pointed over to us, and the man—a dark, handsome guy in his late thirties—ambled over.
“Another fan,” Barney muttered under his breath.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Mr. Heller,” the man said, nodding to me. “I don’t believe we’ve met. But I’m—”
“I know who you are, Sergeant Zarkovich,” I said. “No, we haven’t met, exactly, but you were pointed out to me several times in East Chicago. This is Barney Ross. Join us, if you like.”
He smiled; it was a winning smile, I’d have liked him immediately if I hadn’t known him to be the crookedest cop in East Chicago. Which was going some.
He said, “I recognized you, of course, Mr. Ross,” and he tipped his hat, “and it’s a real honor to meet you. I saw you take Canzoneri. I won a half a C, thanks to you.”
The big man was still standing there, so Barney, smiling back at him, said, “Thanks. Do join us, why don’t you?”
“No, thanks. And I apologize for busting in. I just wondered if I could have a little of Mr. Heller’s time…in private…when you two men are through talking. I can wait over at the bar….”
He was smooth, I had to give him that. But seeing him here was giving me a sick feeling.
He was the cop in East Chicago who the madams paid off every month; he was the bagman, the collector, who Anna Sage would’ve had dealings with. Would’ve, hell—that was where I’d seen him, where he’d been pointed out to me—in East Chicago, at the Kostur Hotel.
“Don’t be silly,” Barney said, “join us—have a beer on the management.”
“Well, okay,” Zarkovich said, his smile turning shy. Aw shucks, the bagman said.
He scooted in on Barney’s side, dwarfing the champ.
“I knew you had Canzoneri,” he told Barney. “I wasn’t worried a second.”
“You were the only one, then,” Barney said. “That was too close to call. They didn’t even consider me champ in NYC, till I beat their boy on his home ground.”
“And gave him a good licking.”
Barney made an embarrassed face; but he enjoyed the attention. He was a good guy, but he was human.
“Tried like hell to knock him out,” Barney said, almost apologetically. “Son of a gun just wouldn’t go down.”
“Look, Zarkovich,” I said, leaving off the “Sergeant.” Annoyed with all this small talk. “If you got business with me, let’s go upstairs to my office.”
Barney seemed offended by my lack of manners. “Nate, come on—I’m the one who insisted he join us.”
Zarkovich half-stood. “I apologize for intruding.”
Barney really was embarrassed now, put a hand on Zarkovich’s arm, stopping him. “You’re not intruding. Let me get you that beer—”
I slid out of the booth and stood. “I’d just like to get business out of the way, first. We’ll be back down later, Barney. We’ll both let you buy us a beer—if you’ll be around awhile.”
Barney’s face settled into a distrustful mask. “Uh, sure, Nate. I’m just waiting for Pearl to get back with what’s left of my money. I’ll be here half an hour or so at least.”
Zarkovich thanked Barney for his hospitality and followed me out onto the street, in the shadow of the El, where we went in the door between the cocktail lounge and the pawnshop and up the stairs to my office, where I unlocked the door and ushered him in. We hadn’t said a word on the way.
I opened a window and got back behind my desk and Zarkovich stood till I gestured for him to sit, in one of the chairs opposite me. He took off his hat, and I invited him to take off his suitcoat; he smiled politely and, despite the heat, declined.
“I thought we should talk,” he said.
“I wonder what about.”
“You seem to be ahead of me, Mr. Heller.”
“Let’s drop the ‘mister’ horseshit, okay, Zarkovich? Anna Sage still owns two houses in East Chicago, so you’re here today collecting from her, right?”
His handsome face was impassive.
I went on. “Only this trip Anna happened to tell you a story, and it interested you. A story about a man one of her girls has been seeing.”
He nodded.
“What Anna told you was she thinks the man might be somebody famous,” I said.
He nodded.
“Now I wonder who that somebody famous might be. The Dionne Quints? Charlie McCarthy? John Dillinger?”
He had big hands; he clasped them together and then cracked his knuckles. It sounded like the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.
He said, “Your remarks don’t amuse me, Heller.”
“They were for my own benefit. It’s my office, after all. What the hell.”
“This is a serious business, you know.”
“No. Do tell.”
“You’re just a penny-ante private cop who used to be a penny-ante Chicago cop, Heller. You’re nothing special. You were on the take like everybody else.”
“You’re repeating yourself. You already said I was a Chicago cop.”
“Funny. Just don’t be so high and mighty. Some graft comes my way, all right? I don’t deny it. That doesn’t make me a bad cop. If times weren’t so hard, I—”
“Wouldn’t be wearing a hundred-dollar suit and a ten-dollar tie? I don’t care if you’re a grifter, Zarkovich. If you weren’t, you’d be unnatural, a saint or something. And I wouldn’t feel comfortable around you.”
“You feel comfortable around me, do you?”
“Yeah. I’m at home. I know where you’ve been and where you’re going.”
“I could say the same thing about you. Mind if I smoke?”
“I don’t care if you burn.”
Zarkovich gave me a little twitch of a smile and took out a silver cigarette case, selected a cigarette and inserted it in a black holder, and lit up.
“How did your meeting with Purvis go?” he asked.