True Detective (2 page)

I fired my agent, and ignored my mentor. (Fortunately, my other, even more famous mentor- Mickey Spillane- also read the manuscript, called me up and said it was the best private eye novel he'd ever read. Let me tell you- that felt good.)

Because this novel broke so many rules, I had to write it on "spec"- that is, I could not just send a proposal to one of my publishers and hope for a contract. The writing of it was an ordeal for my wife Barb and me. The historical nature of the novel meant that the research was ongoing and ever-shifting, and for the longest time, I could not get past the first chapter, which I rewrote and rewrote (and retyped and retyped on my trusty IBM Selectric). So I ended up selling one of our two cars to buy a newfangled gizmo called a word processor. It cost five grand and was an amazing machine, fast as the wind- 16k!

Shortly after the manuscript was completed, I was informed by my wife that she was pregnant. After the ultrasound told us we had a boy on the way, Barb- caught up in the novel herself- asked if maybe "Nathan" wouldn't be a good name for our son.

"Okay," I said. "If we sell the book before you deliver the kid, he's Nathan. But if we haven't sold it, we'll go with something else- I'll be damned if I'll have a walking rejection slip running around this house."

Our son, Nathan Allan Collins, was bora November 5, 1982.

True Detective
- my original title, by the way. was
Tower Town
(how glad I am my editor asked to come up with something else!)- sold to the first publishing house my new agent. Dommick Abel, approached. The book won widespread and glowing reviews, as well as the 1983 Best Novel Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, in a very tough year- the other nominees included the likes of James Crumley, Robert B. Parker and Stanley Ellin.

In addition, the novel set me on a new path as a writer of historical crime fiction- eleven more Heller novels have followed, as well as four Eliot Ness novels and another half-dozen historical crime novels, including
The Titanic Murders
, a paperback bestseller a few years ago. Heller also led to my writing a graphic novel called
Road to Perdition
, which takes place in the same world of Frank Nitti, Al Capone and Eliot Ness that you are about to enter. But
Road to Perdition
, as successful as it's been (thanks to the Tom Hanks/Paul Newman/Sam Mendes film fashioned from it), is only a spin-off of the Heller series. Specifically,
Road to Perdition
grows out of the first three Heller novels, the "Frank Nitti Trilogy," of which
True Detective
is the first installment.

I hope you enjoy the novel. I think you'll find Nate Heller good company… even if he does take the occasional bribe. He sleeps around, too.

- Max Allan Collins October

He felt like somebody had taken the lid off his life and let him look at the works.

- Dashiell Hammett

The Blind Pig December 19- December 22,

I was off-duty at the time, sitting in a speak on South Clark Street drinking rum out of a coffee cup.

When two guys in topcoats and snap-brim hats came in and walked over without crawling out of 'em, I started to reach for the automatic under my jacket. But as they neared the table, I recognized them: Lang and Miller. The mayor's bagmen.

I didn't know them exactly, but everybody
knew
them: the two Harrys- Harry Lang and Harry Miller, the detectives handpicked by Mayor Cermak to handle the dirty linen. Lang I'd spoken to before; he was a guy about ten years my senior, thirty-seven or eight maybe, and a couple of inches under my six feet, a couple pounds over my 180. He had five-o'clock shadow and coal black hair and cold black eyes and the sort of shaggy eyebrows you don't trust; even the impression of hair was a lie: under the hat his forehead kept going. Miller was forty and fat and five eight, with a blank face and blanker eyes- the kind you can take for stupidity if you aren't careful. He was cleaning off the lenses of his wire-frames with a hanky, the glasses having got fogged up in the cold. His ears stuck out; when he put his glasses on, they stuck out more. The Coke-bottle lenses magnified the blank eyes, and it struck me he looked like an owl- an owl that could kick the crap out of an eagle, that is.

Before he was a cop, Miller was a bootlegger- one of the Miller Gang, who were West Side Boys. That made it Old Home Week: we were all West Side Boys. Maxwell Street, where my father's stall had been, was where I knew Lana from.

But I didn't know Lang well enough to merit the old-drinking-pals camaraderie he suggested in his words if not his tone: "Hiya, Red. Heard you hung out here."

Red wasn't my name. Heller was. Nathan Heller. Nate. Never Red, despite my mother's reddish-brown hair I was earning around.

"The joint's halfway between Dearborn and LaSalle Street stations." I shrugged. "It's handy for me."

It was around three in the afternoon, and we had the place pretty much to ourselves: just me, the mayor's front-office dicks, the guy at the door, the guy behind the bar. But it was a cramped, boxlike joint with lots of dark wood and a mirror behind the bar and framed photos everywhere: celebrities and near-celebrities, signatures on their faces, were staring at me.

So were Lana and Miller.

"Buy you a cup of coffee?" I said, rising a little. I was a plainclothes officer, working the pickpocket detail, bucking for detective status. These guys were the best-paid detectives in town, sergeants yet, and they maybe didn't deserve respect, exactly, but I knew enough to give them some.

They made no move to sit down. Lang just stood there, hands in his topcoat pockets, snow brushing his shoulders like dandruff, and rocked on his heels, like a hobbyhorse; but whether it was from nerves, or from boredom, I couldn't say: I could just sense there was something I wasn't being let in on. Miller stood planted there like one of the lions in front of the Art Institute, only meaner-looking. Also, the lions were bronze and he was tarnished copper.

Then Miller spoke.

"We need a third" he said. He had a voice like somebody trying to sound tough in a talkie: monotone and slightly off-pitch. It should've been funny. It wasn't.

"A third what?" I said.

"A third man," Lang chimed in. "A third player."

"What's the same?"

"We'll tell you in the car."

They both turned toward the door. I was supposed to follow- them, apparently. I grabbed my topcoat and hat.

The speak was on the corner of Clark and Polk. Out on the street the wind was whipping at package-clutching pedestrians heading for Dearborn Station, which was around the comer and a block down, where I should be getting back to, to protect these shoppers from losing whatever dough they had left after Marshall Field's got through with them. Skirts and overcoats flapped, and everybody walked with heads lowered, watching the pavement, ignoring the occasional panhandler; dry, wind-scattered snow was like confetti being tossed out of the windows during a particularly uninspiring parade. Across the way the R.E.A. Station was busy, trucks pulling in and out, others being loaded up. Four women, pretty, in their late twenties, early thirties, bundled with packages, went giggling into the speak we'd just exited.

It was a week to Christmas, and business was picking up for everybody. Except for Saint Peter's Church-maybe, which was cattycorner from where we stood; business there looked slow.

There was no parking in and near the Loop (which was loosely defined as the area within the El tracks), but Lang and Miller had left their black Buick by the curb anyway, half a block down, across the street; it was the model people called the Pregnant Guppy, because the sides bulged out over the running boards. The running board next to the curb had a foot on it: a uniformed cop was writing a ticket. Miller walked up and reached over and tore it off the cop's pad and wadded it up and tossed it to the snow-flecked breeze. He didn't have to show the cop his detective's shield. Every copper in town knew the two Harrys,

But I liked the way the uniformed man handled it, a Paddy of about fifty who'd been pounding the beat longer than these two had been picking up the mayor's graft, that was for sure. And clean, as Chicago cops went, or he wouldn't still be pounding it. He put his book and pencil away slowly and gave Miller a look that was part condescension, part contempt, said, "My mistake, lad," and cleared his throat and shot phlegm toward Lang's feet. And turned on his heel and left, swinging his nightstick.

Lang, who'd had to hop back, and Miller, his face hanging like a loose rubber mask, stood watching him walk away, wondering what they should do about such unbridled arrogance, when I tapped Lang on the shoulder and said, "I'm freezing my nuts off, gentlemen. What exactly is the party'?"

Miller smiled. It was wide but it didn't turn up at the corners and the teeth were big and yellow, like enormous kernels of corn. It was the worst goddamn smile I ever saw.

"Frank Nitti's tossing it," he said.

"Only he don't know it," Lang added, and opened the door on the Buick. "Get in back."

I climbed in. The Pregnant Guppy wasn't a popular model, but it was a nice car. Brown mohair seats, varnished wood trim around the windows. Comfortable, too, considering the situation.

Miller got behind the wheel. The Buick turned over right away, despite the cold, though it shuddered a bit as we pulled out into light traffic. Lang turned and leaned over the seat and smiled. "You got a gun with you?"

I nodded.

He passed a small.38, a snubnose, back to me.

"Now you got two," he said.

We were heading north on Dearborn. We drove through Printer's Row, its imposing ornate facades rising to either side of me, aloof to my situation. One of them, tall, gray, half-a-block long, was the Transportation Building, where my friend Eliot Ness was working even now; he seemed a more likely candidate to be calling on Al Capone's heir than yours truly.

"How'd you finally nail Nitti?" I asked after a while.

Lang turned and looked at me, surprised, like he'd forgotten I was there.

"What do you mean?

"What's the charge? Who'd he kill?"

Lang and Miller exchanged glances, and Lang made a sound that was vaguely a laugh, though you could mistake it for a cough.

Miller, in his monotone, said. "That's a good one."

For a second, just a second, despite the gun I'd been handed. I had the feeling I was being taken for a ride. That somehow I'd stepped on somebody's toes and whoever it was was big enough and hurt bad enough to take it on up to the mayor, who Christ knows owed plenty of people favors, and now His Honor's prize flunkies were driving me God knows where- Lake Michigan maybe, where a lot of people went swimming, only some of them had been holding their breath underwater for years now.

But they didn't turn right, toward the lake; they turned left at the Federal Building- which meant the Chicago River was still a possibility and the Union League Club ignored us as we passed. We turned again, right this time, at the Board of Trade. We were in the concrete canyons of the financial district now- and by concrete canyons, I mean just that: in the thick of Chicago's loop, you can see towering buildings at left and right and front and back. Chicago invented the skyscraper and never lets you forget it.

The dustlike snow wasn't coming down hard enough to collect, so the city remained gray, though touched with Christmas red and green: most office windows bore poinsettias, and every utility pole had sprigs of holly or balsam: and now and then an ex-broker in what used to be a nice suit sold bright red apples at a nickel per. Just a few blocks over, on State Street, it would've looked a little more like Christmas, albeit a drunken one: the big stores with their fancy window displays were high on drinking paraphernalia this year, cocktail shakers, hip flasks, hollow canes, home-brew apparatus. All of it legal, but a violation of the law's spirit, as if hookahs were being publicly sold and displayed, just because public opinion suddenly sanctioned smoking dope.

We passed the Bismarck Hotel, where the mayor often lunched; it hadn't been so long ago that the famous old hotel had changed its name to the Randolph, after its location on the southeast corner of Randolph and Wells, to assuage anti-German sentiments during the Great War, though nobody had
ever
called it the Randolph, and a couple years back the name went back to Bismarck, officially. We were on the Palace Theater side, where Ben Bernie and his Lads had top billing ("Free Gifts for the Kids!") and the picture was
Sports Parade
with William Gargan; across the street was City Hall, its Corinthian columns and classical airs making an ironic facade for the goings-on within. Then we crossed under the El, a train rumbling overhead, and I decided they were kidding about Frank Nitti, because the Detective Bureau was on our left and we'd obviously been heading there all along- only we went past.

In the 200 block of North LaSalle, City Hall just a block back, the Detective Bureau less than that. Miller pulled over to the curb again, NO PARKING be damned, and he and Lang got out slowly and I followed them. They drifted casually toward the Wacker-LaSalle Building, a whitestone skyscraper on the corner, the Chicago River across the street from it. A barge was making impatient noises at the nearby example of the massive drawbridges Big Bill Thompson gave the city, but its iron shoulders didn't even shrug.