was pleased with me, and furious with everybody else.
“Kidnap Hoover! Crazy bastards. The heat that’d bring down woulda made this summer look like the North Pole. I owe you one, Heller.”
“No, Frank—you don’t owe me anything. No more debts either way, between you and me.”
“What d’you mean, kid?”
“I mean, I asked for a favor, and you did me one—but at the same time you used me to finger Doc Moran. I was there when he was killed, Frank. I was part of it—just like when Cermak’s boys tried to gun you down. Remember?”
“Only when I breathe. Look, Moran was already dead. He was walking around, but he was long dead. You had nothin’ to do with it.”
“Sure. Fine. Just I don’t owe you anything, and you don’t owe me anything. Clean slate. Okay?”
“Sure, kid. Except for one last favor I’m gonna do you.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m gonna spread the word Jimmy Lawrence went swimming in cement shoes. Just to keep those crazy bastards from comin’ lookin’ for you.”
“That I would appreciate, Frank.”
“My pleasure. And you don’t owe me nothin’. And, Heller?”
“Yeah?”
“Get a shave. Take a bath—you smell like a brewery.”
Sound advice, touching as it did on two of Nitti’s fields of endeavor.
And today, almost a week later, I’d taken it. Bathed. Shaved. Stopped the sauce. And come to see Sally.
“It’ll pass, Heller.”
“I keep seeing her eyes, Helen. In my dreams. That’s why I kept drinking; when I was passed out, I didn’t dream. Not that I can remember, anyway. But if I sleep, I see her eyes. The dead way.”
“Shhh. Shhh.”
“Helen.”
“Yes?”
“Why don’t you hold me.”
“Why don’t I.”
She held me, and I slept. No dreams.
No Sally, after November.
She left soon after the fair closed; it had disturbed her, what happened then. It was our last night together— that is, the last night of our long summer together. She’d looked out the window at the Gold Coast and said, “Today they completely demolished the Century of Progress. They tore down flags, they tore down streetlights, they tore down walls. It started out being souvenir hunters, but it turned into mass vandalism. It was terribly frightening, Nate…Nate? Nate, this time why don’t you hold
I had, that one last time. It disturbed Sally, and I think it disturbed Chicago, to realize the fair was finally over. The illusion of a streamlined future was just so much scrap lumber now, in this city mired in a dreary present.
We never got back together, Sally and me, after our summer. We remained friends over the years, but she married (several times) and she wasn’t the kind to fool around. She was a very moral girl, Sally Rand.
But she stayed in show business. She never made it in the movies, really, but she kept on fan-and-bubble dancing throughout her life. That wasn’t all, of course—through the thirties she lectured on intellectual and political topics, speaking out for republican forces in the Spanish Civil War; she even went to college, earned a degree. Shortly before she died in 1979, I spoke with her on the phone; I asked her why she was still doing her fan dance after all these years.
“Don’t be so up-tight, Heller!” she’d said. “I do it because I still like doing it. Better than doing needlepoint on the patio.”
I sent a wreath that said, “Good-bye, Helen.” I didn’t go the funeral; it was in California, and I was in Florida, and try to avoid funerals, particularly my own, which at my age is a good trick.
As for the rest of them, well, I kept track of some; others just faded into a well-deserved obscurity.
Still others found a place in history, at least the sort of history “true crime” buffs thrive on.
I remember feeling strangely numb, reading the write-up in the paper, when Inspector Sam Cowley and Baby Face Nelson met for the second time.
November 1934. Cowley and another agent stumbled onto Nelson, his wife and John Paul Chase, their car stalled, spouting steam from a bullet caught in a wild gunfight with several other feds down the road. Helen dove for cover, as Cowley, in a ditch, traded tommy-gun fire with Nelson, who strode slowly, inexorably toward Cowley, machine gun spraying slugs. Cowley hit Nelson several times, but Nelson came on, his tommy gun blazing, sweeping the gun in flaming arcs across the ditch, bullets tearing across Cowley, killing him. A nearby construction worker said later, “It was just like Jimmy Cagney.”
Soon Lester Gillis got in the car and asked his wife to drive. “I’ve been hit,” he said. He had seventeen bullets in him. Helen and Chase abandoned his naked corpse in a drainage ditch.
Helen testified against Chase and got a reduced sentence; Chase went to Alcatraz, mellowed, and painted oils.
