True Crime

He nodded, sort of remembering it.

“What about you, Nate?”

“Me?” I said. “I was drunk, too. But I went upstairs with one of the girls.”

Polly glided by in her man’s arms.

“That one?” he said.

I nodded.

“Oh boy,” Barney said.

Pearl came back, and she and Barney went down for a dance. Across the way, the girl in pink and white and the man in the gold-rim glasses and mustache were getting up to go.

Shortly after, so did I.

They took a cab again; gritting my teeth, I followed in one, too. The expenses were chipping away at my fifty- buck retainer; and my conscience, or that tattered thing that flapped in the wind of my brain where my conscience used to be, chipped at my concentration.

I didn’t know which confused me more: that my traveling-salesman client’s bride was a prostitute—possibly an ex-prostitute, giving her the benefit of the doubt—or that I’d screwed her once.

And, as I recalled, drunk or not, liked it.

5

Back in Uptown, the cab let Polly and her boyfriend off at the corner of Wilson and Malden, and they walked half a block to the Malden Plaza, a four-story residential hotel. It seemed a newer, more modest building than its neighbors, with their terra-cotta trimming and elaborate porches; this building had only some halfhearted gingerbread along the roof and over the entryway, was set back from the sidewalk without a porch, and seemed to have been squeezed in between the two more elaborate apartment buildings on its either side, on what might have been a mutual yard between them, by a landlord whose greed outdistanced his aesthetics.

Gray suitcoat still slung over his arm, Polly’s dapper Dan opened the front door for her and they stepped inside.

My cab went on by, and I got out a block down, near Saint Boniface Cemetery. Malden was an odd little street—existing a scant four blocks, connecting two cemeteries; the other one, Graceland Cemetery, was full of famous dead Chicagoans, in their fancy tombs—George Pullman was in a lead-lined casket under concrete and steel, to keep pissed-off union types from seeing him without an appointment, presumably. I walked down the little street, with death at its either end, coat slung over my shoulder, thinking about how my traveling-salesman client was likely to react when he heard about his wife.

It was a hot night, tolerable only when you thought back to the day, and a few people were still sitting out on porches, on the stairs, cooling off as best they could. Now and then people would look in the direction of the lake, wondering where the breeze was.

But it was ten-thirty, and a lot of people were in bed by now—possibly including Polly and her guest—and it wasn’t hard for me to find an empty stoop approximately across from the place, to sit on and seem like just another neighborhood joe trying to beat the heat.

I couldn’t stay here all night, though; if I’d brought my car up here instead of taking the El, I could’ve parked on the street and most likely got away with maintaining a watch. But an all-night stakeout wasn’t practical here. Sooner or later somebody—a cop possibly—would question my presence. I’d have to make my stay a short one.

From the look of the building, the flats within were probably single rooms. This was the address my client had given me for his and his wife’s home; so this was where they lived together, when he wasn’t on the road—meaning he must not’ve been making much, hawking his feed and grain. He’d said he made “good money,” but that’s a vague term. Just because his wallet seemed fairly fat didn’t mean anything—it could’ve been his life savings. Probably that fifty-buck retainer cut him deep.

Of course they hadn’t been married long; he’d said he just landed a new territory, so maybe they planned on moving up in the world soon. Nothing wrong with the neighborhood (if you didn’t mind cemeteries—and dead neighbors seldom keep you up at night with their loud parties). But this was the least classy building on Malden. Then, who was I to talk, a guy who slept in his office.

Half an hour dragged by. There were lights on in some of the windows, but most were dark; all were open. It wasn’t good weather to keep the windows shut. It wasn’t good weather period. I felt like I was wearing the heat; like it was something I had on. Something heavy.

Heavy like the guilt that had settled over me for having fucked pretty Polly one drunken night in a room over the bar on the corner of Willow and Halsted. And feeling guilty was stupid, as well as pointless: How was I supposed to know the little prostie would quit the business, and marry some poor putz who thought she was just a waitress or something? A pathetic chump who would then, thanks to God’s sick sense of humor, hire me to ascertain his bride’s virtue? A hardworking salt-of-the-earth salesman who wondered why his wife seemed to know things in bed that he hadn’t taught her….

I wondered if Polly really had quit hustling. Maybe dapper Dan wasn’t a boyfriend— maybe he was a john. Maybe, like her waitress job, this was something she was up to while her hubby was on the road, something designed to fight her boredom and keep her wearing nice clothes and build a nest egg to help move ’em both into a nicer apartment.

And if she was hustling, should I tell the husband?

Of course I should. I wasn’t paid to decide whether or not the information I turned up was good for my client’s health; if my client paid for me finding out certain information, he deserved to get it. And brother was he going to get it.

Maybe this was innocent; maybe they were in there having tea and milk. Polly wasn’t necessarily over there boffing that guy in the glasses. Right. He probably took ’em off first.

What the hell. I already had enough to tell my client what he didn’t want to know. I could get up off this stoop and walk over to the Wilson Avenue El and go back to the office and get a good night’s sleep, and to hell with traveling salesmen and traveling salesmen’s wives and guys that boffed traveling salesmen’s wives.