“Not anymore. I’ve got an extra room for you. I’m a bachelor again, you know.”
We hadn’t gotten into that yet; I’d always considered Eliot’s marriage an ideal one, and was shocked a few months back to hear it had broken up.
“I’m sorry, Eliot.”
“Me too. But I am seeing somebody. Someone you may remember; another Chicagoan.”
“Who?”
“Evie MacMillan.”
“The fashion illustrator? Nice looking woman.”
Eliot smiled slyly. “You’ll see her tonight, at the Country Club…but I’ll arrange some female companionship for you. I don’t want you cutting my time.”
“How can you say such a thing? Don’t you trust me?”
“I learned a long time ago,” he said, turning to his desk full of paperwork, “not to trust Chicago cops-even ex-ones.8221;
Out on the Country Club terrace, the ten-piece band was playing Cole Porter and a balmy breeze from Lake Erie was playing with the women’s hair. There were plenty of good-looking women, here-low-cut dresses, bare shoulders-and lots of men in evening clothes for them to dance with. But this was no party, and since some of the golfers were still here from late afternoon rounds, there were sports clothes and a few business suits (like mine) in the mix. Even some of the women were dressed casually, like the tall, slender blonde in pink shirt and pale green pleated skirt who sat down next to me at the little white metal table and asked me if I’d have a Bacardi with her. The air smelled like a flower garden, and some of it was flowers, and some of it was her.
“I’d be glad to buy you a Bacardi cocktail,” I said, clumsily.
“No,” she said, touching my arm. She had eyes the color of jade. “You’re a guest. I’ll buy.”
Eliot was dancing with his girl Evie, an attractive brunette in her mid-thirties; she’d always struck me as intelligent but sad, somehow. They smiled over at me.
The blonde in pink and pale green brought two Bacardis over, set one of them in front of me and smiled. “Yes,” she said wickedly. “You’ve been set up. I’m the girl Eliot promised you. But if you were hoping for somebody in an evening gown, I’m not it. I just
“If you were looking for a guy in a tux,” I said, “I’m not it. And I’ve never been on a golf course in my life. What else do we have in common?”
She had a nicely wry smile, which continued as she sipped the Bacardi. “Eliot, I suppose. If I have a few more of these, I may tell you a secret.”
And after a few more, she did.
And it was a whopper.
“
“Shhhh,” she said, finger poised uncertainly before pretty lips. “It’s a secret. But I haven’t been doing it much lately.”
“Haven’t been doing what?”
“Well, undercover work. And there’s a double-entendre there that I’d rather you didn’t go looking for.”
“I wouldn’t think of looking under the covers for it.”
The band began playing a tango.
I asked her how she got involved, working for Eliot. Which I didn’t believe for a second, even in my cups.
But it turned out to be true (as Eliot admitted to me when he came over to see how Vivian and I were getting along, when Vivian-which was her name, incidentally-went to the powder room with Evie).
Vivian Chalmers was the daughter of a banker (a solvent one), a divorcee of thirty with no children and a lot of social pull. An expert trapshooter, golfer, tennis player and “all ’round sportswoman,” with a sense of adventure. When Eliot called ooverto case various of the gambling joints he planned to raid-as a socialite she could take a fling in any joint she chose, without raising any suspicion-she immediately said yes. And she’d been an active agent in the first few years of Eliot’s ongoing battle against the so-called Mayfield Road Mob-who controlled prostitution, gambling and the policy racket in the Cleveland environs.
“But things have slowed down,” she said, nostalgically. “Eliot has pretty much cleaned up the place, and, besides, he doesn’t want to use me anymore.”
“An undercover agent can only be effective so long,” I said. “Pretty soon the other side gets suspicious.”
She shrugged, with resigned frustration, and let me buy the next round.
We took a walk in the dark, around the golf course, and ended up sitting on a green. The breeze felt nice. The flag on the hole-13-flapped.
“Thirteen,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Victim thirteen.”
“Oh. Eliot told me about that. Your ‘luck’ today, finding your client’s missing daughter. Damn shame.”
“Damn shame.”
“A shame, too, they haven’t found the son-of-a-bitch.”
She was a little drunk, and so was I, but I was still shocked-well, amused-to hear a woman, particularly a “society” woman, speak that way.
“It must grate on Eliot, too,” I said.
“Sure as hell does. It’s the only mote in his eye. He’s a hero around these parts, and he’s kicked the Mayfield Mob in the seat of the pants, and done everything else from clean up a corrupt police department to throw labor racketeers in jail, to cut traffic deaths in half, to founding Boy’s Town, to….”
“You’re not in love with the guy, are you?”
She seemed taken aback for a minute, then her face wrinkled into a got-caught-with-my-pants-down grin. “Maybe a little. But he’s got a girl.”
“I don’t.”
“You might.”
She leaned forward.
We kissed for a while, and she felt good in my arms; she was firm, almost muscular. But she smelled like flowers. And the sky was blue and scattered with stars above us, as we lay back on the golf-green to look up. It seemed like a nice world, at the moment.
Hard to imagine it had a Butcher in it.
I sat up talking with Eliot that night; he lived in a reconverted boathouse on the lake. The furnishings were sparse, spartan-it was obvious his wife had taken most of the furniture with her and he’d had to all but start over.
I told him I thought Vivian was a terrific girl.
Leaning back in a comfy chair, feet on an ottoman, Eliot, tie loose around his neck, smile go a melancholy way. “I thought you’d hit it off.”
“Did you have an affair with her?”
He looked at me sharply; that was about as personal as I’d ever got with him.
He shook his head, but I didn’t quite buy it.
“You knew Evie MacMillan in Chicago,” I said.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning nothing.”
“Meaning I knew her when I was still married.”
“Meaning nothing.”
“Nate, I’m sorry I’m not the Boy Scout you think I am.”
“Hey, so you’ve slept with girls before. I’ll learn to live with it.”
There was a stone fireplace, in which some logs were trying to decide whether to burn any more or not; we watched them trying.
