True Crime (17 page)

Zarkovich and O’Neill had done all the shooting.

Cowley appeared from somewhere and was directing his men to cordon the body off.

“Keep these damn ghouls away!” Cowley ordered.

I approached the body again and looked down at it. Purvis and Cowley were there with me. They glanced at each other, then looked at me. They actually seemed embarrassed.

“I wanted to take him alive,” Purvis said, “but he pulled a gun.”

Cowley nodded, pointed down to the gun in the corpse’s slack hand. “You can see it right there.”

Purvis knelt over the body; with both him and the dead man wearing straw hats, Purvis seemed to be looking down at a ghastly mirror image. “It’s Dillinger, all right. No doubt about it. But it’s amazing the extent of plastic surgery he underwent. All the distinguishing marks on his features have been worked over. It was a good job the surgeon did.”

“Check his pockets,” Cowley said.

Purvis did. He found $7.80 and a gold watch.

Purvis held out the $7.80 in the palm of one hand, and said, “So much for the fruit of crime.”

Cowley took the watch; popped it open. There was a picture inside. He showed it to Purvis.

Purvis said, “That’s Dillinger’s old sweetie, Evelyn Frechette. No doubt about it.”

Cowley nodded.

I took a look at it. The picture was of Polly Hamilton. I didn’t say anything.

A couple of Chicago uniform cops, in blue shirts with badges pinned on, pushed through the crowd.

“So this is John Dillinger,” one of them said, looking down at the corpse.

Purvis said, “Yes it is. Uh…what do we do now?”

The two cops looked at each other. Then they looked at Purvis.

“Who’s in charge here?” one of the cops asked.

“I am,” Purvis and Cowley said.

The Chicago cops shook their heads and one of them said, “I’ll call a meat wagon.”

In minutes it was there, and the dead man was put on a stretcher and slung in back of the wagon; Purvis rode with him, with several other feds. Cowley stayed behind. The crowd remained thick. I pushed through toward my parked Chevy.

In the midst of the crowd, by the tavern, I bumped up against a big guy in a fedora. The tavern’s neon turned his face orange. He had a bandage across his nose. I gave him the hardest kidney punch I could muster.

“Oooofff,” he said, and hit the pavement. People were walking on him.

I kicked him in the ribs, while he was down there, and another East Chicago cop, a guy with a puffy face—courtesy Barney Ross—came pushing through the crowd, having seen what I did, and he swung at me and hit some woman in the side of the head. A barrel-chested man with her, her husband I guess, said, “Hey!” And smacked the East Chicago cop in the face a couple of times.

The crowd was such that it didn’t go further than that—no fight ensued or anything; and I was to my coupe, with a small sense of satisfaction in having somewhat settled a score.

But as I pulled away from the Biograph theater, I felt sick to my stomach, and vaguely ashamed. I’d seen this happening, and I hadn’t been able to stop it. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough or brave enough or tough enough. I must’ve been lacking something.

Because a man had died tonight. A man I had, in a roundabout way at least, fingered.

I’d got my first good close-up look at Jimmy Lawrence tonight, when I’d held his dead head in my hands.

And he’d looked less like John Dillinger close up than at a distance.

But he had looked real dead.

By a quarter till midnight, I was sitting at my desk in my office in the dark. Neon pulsed through the half-open windows in tempo with the rubber-hose aches and pains that had started in again, now that Sally’s last round of aspirins had worn off. I’d considered stopping in at Barney’s Cocktail Lounge for another sort of painkiller, but was in the sort of black mood that drinking would only turn blacker.

This was the first I’d been back to the office since I took that beating. Barney had cleaned the place up; everything was in order. What did I have to complain about? I had the world’s lightweight champ for a personal valet.

My mouth was trying to remember how to smile when the phone rang.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Nate?”

It was Sally.

“Hi, Helen.”

“I
thought
maybe you might’ve gone back to your office…”

“Where are you calling from? Didn’t you have a show tonight?”

“Yes—I’m calling from backstage. I tried to get you at my suite, thinking you’d be back there by now…I
did
give you a key, didn’t I?”

“You did. I just didn’t think I’d be very good company the rest of the night.”

“I understand.”

“You do, Helen?”

“Yes.” A pause. “People are saying John Dillinger was shot.”

“Christ, word travels fast in this town.”

“It’s true, then.”

“Somebody was shot, yeah.”

“Were you there?”

“I was there. I saw it.”

She didn’t say anything right back, and I could hear the Café de la Paix orchestra playing “Whoopee” in the background, Paul Whiteman style.

Then: “I’m going to take a taxi home in about fifteen minutes, Nate. Why don’t you head over to the Drake and meet me?”

“I don’t think I better.”

“We could talk…”

“I don’t think I have any talk left.”

“I’d like to help.”

“If anybody could, it’s you. Tomorrow.”

Another pause; another bride, another groom…

“Tomorrow,” she said.

And hung up. Me too.

I sat in the dark a few minutes; the street sounds were subdued tonight, I was thinking—then the El rushed by. After that I got up to pull the Murphy bed down out of its box. I was reaching up to do that when there was a sharp insistent knock on the door—a three-beat tattoo. Then again.

There was just enough light out there in the hall for me to make out through the frosted glass the shape of the person knocking. It was a small person. Not two cops with a rubber hose.

I unlocked the door and peeked out.

“I’ll be damned,” I said.

She smiled nervously and long lashes fluttered over eyes as blue as Sally Rand’s. But this girl in a white blouse and tan skirt and open-toe sandals was not Sally Rand.

“Hello, Nate,” Polly Hamilton said.

“Hello.”

“Can I come in?”

“Okay, but I’m not going to the movies with you, so don’t bother asking.”

Her lower lip quivered and she glanced down. “You must think I got that coming.”

“Don’t you?” I opened the door wide for her, and she slipped by me, her reddish-brown hair swinging in arcs alongside her face; she smelled like jasmine. I glanced out in the hall to see if anybody else was around. Nobody seemed to be.

I shut and locked the door, reached for the light switch and she touched my hand; her touch was as warm as the air coming in my open windows.

“No,” she said, breathily. “Leave them off.” For a minute I thought she was vamping me, but then I recognized the breathiness as fear. Fear and passion have similar symptoms, after all.

She had a little white purse with her, which she clasped fig-leaf style before her as she looked around the room. The light from the street let her do that.

“I didn’t notice you had that purse at the Biograph,” I said.

She looked at me sharply. “Were you there?”

“Are we going to kid each other, Polly?”

She got wide-eyed and sucked in air.

“No!” she said, as if insulted by the very idea she might be capable of less than truth.

“Yes, Polly, I was there. Across the street with my hands in my pockets, playing with myself. Just like the fed I was with.”

She gave me a reproving look. “Do you have to be so crude?”

“Funny, that’s what that fed’s always asking me. Personally, I think getting shoved on your face and shot in the back a couple times is rather on the crude side.”

She covered her mouth and looked down at the floor with the wide eyes; the hand was shaking. She was shaking. She seemed about to cry. But I didn’t see any tears.

“Why don’t you sit down, Polly?” I pointed to the chair opposite my desk.

She nodded and sat, clutching the little purse, her legs tight together like a virgin on her first real date. And trembling the same way.

I got behind the desk. Sat. Gestured to the lamp, and she nodded she didn’t mind and I turned it on. It didn’t make the room bright—just made a pool of light on the desk, not big enough for either of us to bathe in.

She glanced around the room some more. “Is that a Murphy bed?”

“I guess if anybody’d recognize one, it’d be you.”

She gave me a sharp look and didn’t seem to be trembling now. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It was a crude remark. Forget it.”

“All right. Aren’t you…wondering why I’m here?”

I shrugged. “I know I should be, but I haven’t been feeling good. Probably tomorrow I’ll get around to wondering, if you haven’t told me by then.”

With what tried to be sarcasm but came off as pique, she said, “I’m sorry you don’t feel so good.”

“Some of your ex-husband’s pals worked me over a couple nights ago.”

“My ex-husband’s pals?”

“Sure. He worked for the East Chicago police, didn’t he?”

“I, uh…yes. So?”

“So you divorced him a couple months ago. Was it amicable?”

She looked at me blankly. I liked her mouth; couldn’t help myself.

“Was it friendly? Your splitting up, I mean.”

She shrugged. “I suppose.”

“When did you meet him—while you were working at the Kostur Hotel?”

She nodded, then caught herself. “I thought you didn’t feel so good.”

“Having a pretty girl around seems to pep me up. In fact, I feel so much better, I
am
starting to wonder what you’re doing here.”

She looked at the pool of light on my desk, glumly. “So am I.”

Suddenly I was sick of this game.

“If you don’t know why you’re here,” I said, “you better go. I don’t relish being seen with you.”

That amazed her. “Why?”

“As it is now, I’m on the fringes of this mess. If I’m lucky I won’t get noticed much, when the cops and newshounds start sniffing. But with you in my lap, I’m smack in the middle.”

She leaned an elbow on the desk, cupped her hand and rested her forehead in it; she looked like a child who just heard about death for the first time.

She said, “I’ll go, then.”

But she made no move to. Just sat there looking like a tragic waif. Or trying to. She had too much sex to get by with it, exactly.

“Look, Polly, I was told by Frank Nitti not to get in this any deeper. And yet there I was tonight, out in front of the Biograph. It’s time I dropped out of the picture. And I don’t mean
Manhattan Melodrama
.”

Still with her head in her cupped hand, she shut her eyes and squeezed out a big tear that angled down her cheek and across her tilted face, her mouth, her chin, in a shiny line, before plopping on my desk like a solitary raindrop.

“I swear I didn’t know,” she said, wiping off her face with the back of her other hand. Her nails were as red as Anna Sage’s dress under the marquee lights.

“Didn’t know what?”

“That they’d kill him.”

“What did you think they’d do?”

“I didn’t think anything. I didn’t even know he was Dillinger.”

“Was he?”

She raised her head from her hand and looked at me, wondering what conversation I was in. “Was he what?”

“Was he Dillinger?”

Her eyes got even wider. Silent-movie wide. “Well, that’s what they’re saying…”

“Who? Who told you it was Dillinger, and when?”

“Well…I heard the federal men say it, just before Anna and me headed down the alley. I went back to the apartment with her for a while, and she admitted she knew he was Dillinger. She knew from the start.”

“Did she admit she’d put him on the spot for the feds tonight?”

Polly shook her head. “She just said she knew he was Dillinger. And then she told me to go home and…lay low for a few days.”

“So you came to see me.”

She shook her head again. “I took the El to the restaurant, first.”

“The S and S?”

“Yes. They were just closing. One of the girls there, Maxine, went across the street and had a beer with me. She didn’t want to, though…not proper, two girls alone in a tavern, she said. But she could see I was upset. She could see I needed the company.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Nothing much. I told her Dillinger was dead. She wanted to know how I knew, and I told her to look in the papers tomorrow. And I told her I didn’t feel so good.”

“There’s a lot of that going around.”

“Why do you talk that way?”

“Because it amuses me to. It helps me not think about how much I hurt from your ex-husband’s pals feeding me the goldfish.” “Goldfish” was Chicago for rubber hose.

“Why do you keep saying that? You act like I know something about it, and I don’t.”

“What
do
you know?”

She leaned back in the chair; back away from the light and her face was less distinct. But I could hear her voice just fine: “Anna just told me to…date this guy. Keep him occupied. Keep him…”

“Happy?”

She sighed. “Happy. You mind if I smoke?”

“No. Use the ashtray, though.”

“Where is it?”

I pushed it towards her. It was a thick-rimmed little circle of glass that said Morrison Hotel in it.

She lit the cigarette and the orange tip was an eye in the darkness. She blew some smoke out and then started talking.

“He was a good-hearted guy. I got a thrill out of going around in cabs all the time. Twice he gave me money so Maxine and me could go to the fair. Once he gave me forty dollars and said I should go out and buy something with it. Another time he gave me fifty bucks to get my teeth fixed. I bought clothes with it, though. But he wasn’t mad when he found out.”

“He treated you right.”

She nodded through trails of smoke. “We had a lot of fun.”

“Who did you think this guy was?”

“Jimmy Lawrence. He said he was with the Board of Trade.”

“Did you buy that?”

“Well, he had plastic surgery scars, behind his ears. So I figured he was a small-time con Anna was keeping on ice for the Boys.”

“The Outfit, you mean.”

“I guess. I don’t know much about that sort of thing.”

“But Anna does.”

“Sure. She’s a madam, right?”

“You’re asking me?”

The blue eyes flared. “Does needling me make you feel like a big shot, Heller? Is that why you do it?”

“Sorry. Please continue.”

She drew on the cigarette again. “There’s not much more to say. He was a good dresser, clean and neat. He had a nice smile.”

“So keeping him happy for Anna wasn’t much of a chore.”

“That’s the hell of it. I got to like him, I really did. I was crazy about him, Heller. He had this terrific personality—he was kind and good to me. But he couldn’t have
really
been kind and good, and been John Dillinger, too, could he?”

“I’d say not.”

“I didn’t count on that. Liking him. You know, there was one song he was crazy about, from a Joan Crawford picture we saw at the Marbro.” She started to sing, in a pleasant little Betty Boop soprano: “‘All I do is dream of you the whole night through…’” Her lip was quivering. Another tear rolled down her cheek.

“Did he have a good voice?”

“He could carry a tune. You know, he was crazy about the movies. Couldn’t get enough.”

“Till tonight. You really did like him, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“You didn’t know they were going to hit him tonight?”

“No.”

“But you knew he was going to get hit sooner or later.”

“No! And I didn’t know he was Dillinger!”

“Why’d you come see me, Polly?”

“I knew you were following me and Jimmy—or Dillinger—around, before. Anna told me you would be.”

“Did she? Did she say why?”

“No. She just said if I noticed you following me, not to mention it to Jimmy.”

“Did she explain any of this?”

She shook her head. “No she didn’t.”

“Yours was not to reason why.”

“Mine was to do what I was paid to.”

“At least you’re honest about that much.”

“Nate, I’ve been telling you the truth. You got to believe me.”

“Then tell me why you’re here.”

She cleared her throat. “I wanted you to understand that I’m innocent in this.”

I almost fell out of my chair. “Innocent?”

“I didn’t know they’d kill him. I’m no—no finger man.”

“You’re no man, I’ll grant you that. Why tell me?”

“I just wanted you to know. That night we were together, it was special, Nate.”

“Bullshit! I was just another john. A drunk one, at that.”

She leaned forward, stabbed out the cigarette, reached her soft warm hands out and touched the hand I was resting on the desk. She had a pretty smile. Part of me wanted to pitch a tent in those blue eyes, and stay there.

“You were nice to me,” she said. “I liked you.”

“Like you liked Jimmy Lawrence.”

She drew back, pulled her hands away from mine, as if burned.

“You’re a nasty man,” she said.

“Maybe,” I said. “I’m also a live one, and hanging around with you probably wouldn’t do much toward my staying that way.”

“You bastard—”

“My parents were married, lady. I don’t know which side of the sheets you come from, and I don’t care. I do know why you came here, more or less…you’re trying to make yourself look ‘innocent’ in my eyes, so that when I tell my story to the cops and/or the papers you won’t look like Judas in a dress.”