The Million-Dollar Wound (Nathan Heller) Page 8

  I wiped some residue of moisture off my face, thinking what a sweet cunning little bitch she was. She knew I was holding back; she knew, hypnosis or not, there were things I hadn’t told Wilcox.

  Hell, there were things I couldn’t tell Wilcox. There were doors that just wouldn’t open. Or was that jumble of events, that rush of images in the shell hole, simply the fever that had gripped me then?

  How the fuck did Monawk die, exactly? He was shot. Who shot him?

  Well, the Japs, of course. Don’t be stupid.

  Then why did he have black, scorchy powder burns on his chest, where he was shot? Why was the hole in his goddamn back big enough to drive a Mack truck through?

  Close range; somebody shot him close range.

  With a .45, that had to be it, like the .45s we all had, Barney, D’Angelo, those Army boys, me.

  Me.

  Like the .45 I had in my hand when I noticed the powder burns on Monawk’s dungaree jacket…

  I bent over, covered my face with my hands. No, I hadn’t told Wilcox about that. I hadn’t told anybody about that. I hadn’t told anybody that I thought I’d seen it happen, Monawk’s murder, but I, goddamnit, I repressed it, it’s stuck back here someplace in my fucking head but I can’t, I won’t remember.

  Did I kill you, Monawk? Did you scream and endanger us all and I killed you?

  “Private Heller?”

  It was the captain. In the doorway of the conference room.

  “Please step in.”

  I did.

  “We’ve reviewed your case,” the captain said, sitting back down behind the table. I remained standing. “We’re quite impressed by your recovery, and are convinced that you are in every way ready to rejoin society.” There were some papers in front of him, with various signatures on them; he handed them to me.

  My Section 8.

  “And here’s your honorable service award,” he said, handing me a little box.

  I didn’t bother opening it; I knew what it was: my Ruptured Duck, the lapel pin all armed forces vets got upon their discharge—so called because the eagle within the little button spread its wings awkwardly.

  “Check with the front receiving desk, and they’ll help you arrange transportation. You should be able to make train reservations for this afternoon, if you like. You’re going back to Chicago, Mr. Heller.”

  I smiled down at my discharge. Then I smiled at the captain. “Thank you, sir.”

  He smiled too and stood and offered his hand and I shook it. I went down the line shaking all their hands. I lingered with Wilcox, squeezing his hand, trying to convey some warmth to this heavyset little man who’d brought me back to myself.

  “Good luck, Nate,” he said.

  “Thanks, Doc.”

  Just as I was leaving, he said, “If your trouble sleeping persists, check in at the nearest military hospital. They can give you something for it.”

  I guess I hadn’t fooled him so good, after all.

  “Thanks, Doc,” I said again, and headed back to my ward, to pack my sea bag.

  It didn’t matter what happened back there in that shell hole; that was over, that was history. What mattered was not that Monawk died, but that some of us had lived through it. Fremont and Whitey hadn’t, of course, but Watkins did and D’Angelo and the two Army boys and Barney, hell, Barney was a hero. They said he killed twenty-two Japs with those grenades he was lobbing. They also said he was still over there, on the Island. Still fighting. How could he still be over there?

  And me here?

  I sat on the edge of my rack and thought about how screwy it seemed, going back to Chicago to see some federal prosecutor about Frank Nitti and Little New York Campagna and the Outfit bilking the movie industry. What did that have to do with anything, today? Who cared? Didn’t they know there was a war on? It seemed another world, Nitti’s Chicago—a lifetime ago.

  Not three short years…

  The deli restaurant on the corner was calling itself the Dill Pickle, now, and the bar next door was under new management. Barney Ross’s Cocktail Lounge had moved to nicer, more spacious digs, across from the Morrison Hotel, where Barney kept an “exclusive” suite. I lived at the Morrison myself, in a two-room suite, not so exclusive.

  Which was still a step up from the days, not so long ago, when I slept in my office, on a Murphy bed, playing nightwatchman for my landlord in lieu of rent. My landlord, the owner of the building, was then, and was now, one Barney Ross.

  Who had walked over from the Morrison with me on this brisk Monday morning, back to the former site of his cocktail lounge, above which was—or anyway had been—my one-room office. He wasn’t the only one who was expanding.

  “I’m anxious to see what you’ve done to the place,” Barney said, working to be heard over the rumble of the El.

  I stepped around a wino and opened the door for him and he started up the narrow stairway (Barney, not the wino). “No permanent improvements,” I said to his back as we climbed. “I wouldn’t want your investment to appreciate.”

  “Ever since you started paying rent,” he said, grinning back at me like a bulldog who spotted his favorite hydrant, “you just ain’t your charming self.”

  Actually, I was feeling very much my charming self this morning. Very much full of my charming self. Life was good. Life was sweet. Because business was good. And that’s sweet in my book.

  I was a small businessman, you see. But not as small as I used to be. I was coming up in the world.

  You couldn’t tell that based upon Barney’s building, however; this block on Van Buren Street, the hovering El casting its shadow down the middle of the street, remained a barely respectable hodgepodge of bars and hockshops and flophouses. And our building wasn’t exactly the Monadnock. We had a couple of cut-rate doctors, one of whom seemed to be an abortionist, another of whom purported to be a dentist; anyway, they both made extractions, including from wallets, and even an old pickpocket-detail dick like me couldn’t do anything about it. We also had three shysters and one palm reader and various marginal businesses that came and went.

  And one detective agency, now proudly expanded to a suite of two offices, count ’em, two. At the far end of the hall on the fourth floor was my old office, now partitioned off and used by my two freshly hired operatives, whereas the office next door, looking out on Plymouth Court and the Standard Club (a scenic view of the El now denied me), was mine and mine alone.

  Almost.

  I opened the door, the pebbled glass of which bore the fresh inscription A-1 DETECTIVE AGENCY, NATHAN HELLER, PRESIDENT (I was afraid if I touched it, it’d smear), and Barney and I entered my outer office. My outer office! Hot damn. All I needed was a stack of year-old magazines and there wouldn’t be a waiting room in the Loop that had anything on me.

  I also had Gladys.

  “Good morning, Mr. Heller,” she said, smiling with no sincerity whatsoever. “No calls.”

  I glanced at my watch. “It’s five after nine, Gladys.” We opened at nine; Pinkerton never slept—Heller did. “How long have you been here, anyway?”

  “Five minutes, Mr. Heller. During which time there were no calls.”

  “Call me Nate.”

  “That wouldn’t be correct, Mr. Heller.” She stood from behind the small dark beat-up desk Barney had given me from downstairs, when he moved his cocktail lounge. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just keep working on straightening out your files.”

  My four wooden file cabinets were in the outer office here with Gladys, now, and she was putting them in order, something which hadn’t been done for a couple of years. Gladys, by the way, was twenty-four years old, had brunette hair that brushed her shoulders, curling in at the bottom, a fashion a lot of girls seemed to be wearing. None more attractively than Gladys; right now, as she stood filing, in her frilly yet somehow businesslike white blouse and a black skirt that was tight around the sweet curves of her bottom and then flared out, she was any lecherous employer’s dream.

&nbs
p; Unfortunately, that dream was unlikely ever to come true. I had hired her for her sweet bottom and her delicately featured face—did I mention the dark brown eyes, their long lashes, the pouty puckered mouth? That sulky mouth should’ve tipped me off; some goddamn detective I was. Anyway, I hired her chiefly for her rear end, noting that her secretarial background (letter from former employer, secretarial school diploma) looked pretty good, as well.

  But she double-crossed me. She was turning out to be an intelligent, efficient, utterly businesslike secretary, without the slightest personal interest in her boss.

  Barney nudged me.

  “Uh, Gladys. This is my friend Mr. Ross. He’s our landlord.”

  She turned away from the filing cabinet and gave Barney a smile as lovely as it was disinterested “That’s nice,” she said.

  “Barney Ross,” I said. “The boxer?”

  She’d already turned back to her filing. “I know,” she said, tonelessly. “A pleasure,” she added, without any. She had the cheerfully cold cadence of a telephone operator.

  Barney and I moved past her, past the dated-looking “modernistic” black-and-white couch and chairs I’d bought back in ’34, in the art-deco aftermath of the World’s Fair, and opened the door in the midst of the pebbled-glass-and-wood wall that separated Gladys from my inner office. My old desk was in here, a big scarred oak affair I’d grown used to. I had sprung for a new, comfortable swivel chair so I could lean back and not fall out the double windows behind me. Barney got it wholesale for me. There was a secondhand but new-looking tan leather couch from Maxwell Street against the right wall, on which hung several photographs, including portraits of Sally Rand and a certain other actress. Both photos were signed to me “with love.” Something that personal has no business in an office, but the two famous female faces impressed some of my clients, and gave me something to look at when business was slow. Against the other wall were several chairs and some fight photos of Barney, which he’d given me, one of them signed. Not with love.

  “She’s a sweet dish,’’ Barney said, jerking a thumb back in Gladys’s direction, “but not a very warm one.”

  “I knew it when I hired her,” I said, offhandedly.

  “The hell you say!”

  “Her looks didn’t mean a damn to me. I looked at her qualifications and saw she was the right man for the job.”

  “You looked at her qualifications all right. She was friendlier when she interviewed for the position, I’ll bet.”

  “Yup,” I admitted. “And it’s the only position I’ll ever get her in. Oh, well. How’s your love life?”

  He and his wife Pearl were separated; he’d gone east, briefly, to work in her father’s clothing business and it hadn’t worked out—the marriage or the business arrangement. Back to the Cocktail Lounge for Barney.

  “I got a girl,” he said, almost defensively. “How about you?”

  “I’m swearin’ off the stuff.”

  “Seriously, Nate, you’re not gettin’ any younger. You’re a respectable businessman. Why don’t you settle down and start a family?”

  “You don’t have any kids.”

  “It’s not for lack of trying. Aw, it’s probably for the best, since it didn’t work out with Pearl and me. But Cathy, she’s another story.”

  His chorus girl.

  “Out of the frying pan,” I said. “When you’re in my business, it’s hard to have much faith in the sanctity of marriage.”

  He frowned sympathetically. “Doing a lot of that sort of work these days, are ya?”

  “I have been. Divorces keep many an agency afloat, this one included. But from here on out I’m leaving as much of that horseshit as possible to my operatives. When you’re the boss, you can pick and choose your cases.”

  “Speakin’ of your ops, why don’t you take me over to their office and introduce me? Haven’t met either of ’em.”

  We walked back out through the inner office, nodding and smiling at Gladys, getting back a nod as she filed on, and went next door, to my old office, the pebbled glass on the door of which said simply: A-1 DETECTIVE AGENCY, PRIVATE. I went in without knocking, Barney following.

  It had always seemed such a big room when I’d been working in it; partitioned off into two work areas, desks with extra chairs for clients, it seemed tiny. The plaster walls were painted a pale green, now. Only one of the desks was filled, the one at left. The man behind it, a bald fellow with dark hair around his flat-to-his-skull ears, wire-rim glasses sitting on a bulbous nose, fifty-one years of age, rose; his suit-coat was off, hung on a nearby coatrack, but he still looked very proper, in his vest and neatly snugged solid blue tie.

  “Barney,” I said, “this is Lou Sapperstein.”

  Sapperstein grinned, extended a hand across his desk, which Barney, smiling, shook. “You made me some money last year,” Sapperstein said.

  “How’s that?” Barney said.

  “He bet on Armstrong,” I said.

  Barney laughed a little. “What a pal,” he said, meaning me.

  “I wasn’t referring to that,” Lou said, a little embarrassed. “Actually, after you lost, I bet a friend of mine you would quit. Which you did, of course.”

  “How’d you know I’d quit and stay quit? I had plenty of comeback offers, you know.”

  “I can imagine. I couldn’t collect the bet till a year from the day of your Armstrong defeat. That was part of the deal. It was fifty smackers, too. Thanks, Mr. Ross.”

  “Make it ‘Barney,’ please.”

  “Lou retired after twenty-five years on the force,” I said. “We were on the pickpocket detail together.”

  “I was his boss,” Lou told Barney. “Hiring me is just Nate’s idea of revenge.”

  “Hiring you is my idea of being a nice guy,” I said. “Working your ass off is my idea of revenge. Where’s Fortunato?”

  “Late,” Sapperstein shrugged.

  “On his first day?” I asked, a little stunned.

  Sapperstein shrugged again.

  “I wanted him to start right in on those credit checks,” I said, pointing over to some paperwork on the other desk, which from where Lou was seated he couldn’t see, anyway.

  The door opened behind us and Frankie Fortunato came in; he was small, thin as a knife, with dark widow’s-peaked hair and sharp features. He would’ve looked sinister, but his smile was bright, white and wide. His suit was brown and snappy and his tie was yellow and red.

  “Hey, I’m late,” he said. “Off to a flyin’ start.”

  “You don’t have to be here till nine o’clock,” I said. “Is it asking too much…”

  “You looking for quality, or punctuality?”

  “Actually, I was looking for both.”

  “Heller, you’re turning into an old man. You don’t remember what it was like to be young. I had a hot date last night.” He was over behind his desk, now, dialing his phone.

  “That better be a credit check,” I said.

  “Sugar?” he said into the phone. “It’s Frankie.” He covered the phone, waved us off. “Do you mind? Little privacy.”

  I went over to the phone and took it from his hand. I said, “Hi, sugar. Frankie just called to say he was unemployed.” I handed the phone back to him.

  “Talk to ya later, sugar,” he said into it, and hung up. He grinned. “Just testing the waters, boss. Mind if I get started on these credit checks now?”

  “Go right ahead. This is my friend Barney Ross, by the way.”

  “Listen,” he said to Barney, by way of greeting. “There’s dough in a comeback. It don’t have to be Armstrong. Hey, Canzoneri’s still fighting; a third Ross-Canzoneri fight’d make some tidy dough. We should talk.” He glanced at me and smiled on one side of his face. “After business hours of course.”

  I nodded to both Frankie and Lou and we went out.

  Barney said, “That kid’s cocky, but I bet he’s bright.”

  “Safe bet. I’ll get him straightened out. Much as possible
, anyway.”

  “What’s his background?”

  “He was fired off the force in his first year for rubbing Tubbo Gilbert the wrong way.”

  Captain Daniel “Tubbo” Gilbert was, even in Chicago terms, a notoriously corrupt cop. A notoriously powerful corrupt cop, at that.

  “Aw,” Barney said. “No wonder you like the kid. You see yourself in the little son of a bitch.”

  “Hey,” I said. “I see admirable qualities in a lot of sons of bitches. I’ve even been known to hang around with washed-up ex-pugs.”

  Barney’s expression turned suddenly thoughtful. “You’re liable to lose that kid to the draft, you know.”

  I shook my head. “It’ll never come.”

  We were standing just outside my office now.

  “I think it’s going to have to come, Nate. We might get caught up in it, too, you know.”

  “That I guarantee you will never happen.”

  “I might go whether they ask me or not.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” I said.

  “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

  “In Europe. We been snookered into fighting their battles before—never again.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Sure.”

  “But, Nate, you’re a Jew…”

  “I’m not a Jew. That doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with what’s happening to the Jews in Germany. I don’t like the idea of military seizure of property happening anywhere to anybody. But I don’t feel it has anything special to do with me.”

  “You’re a Jew, Nate.”

  “My pa was a Jew, my ma was Irish Catholic, and me, I’m just another mutt from Chicago, Barney.”

  “Maybe so. But as far as Mr. Hitler’s concerned, you’re just another Jew.”

  Well, he hadn’t scored a knockout punch, by any means, but Barney had made his point. It wasn’t the first time, and was hardly the last.

  So without even trying to crack wise, I sent him on his way, while I went in to get to work. I made several calls on an insurance matter before I noticed the morning was nearly gone.

  Then Gladys stuck her pretty, impersonal puss in my office and said, “Your eleven o’clock appointment is here.”