thought about going up to my office for my automatic; but that seemed to be asking for trouble. There would be too many people at the Biograph tonight with guns without my adding to the arsenal.
I’d parked on the same side of the street as the Biograph, just to the right of the mouth of an alley. The marquee was glowing just down the street; between me and it was a grocery store, on the alley corner, and past that the tavern next to the theater. As I got out of my car, it occurred to me that just a few blocks down was the garage where the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre had taken place. Small world.
I fell behind a family, father and mother and a boy of about ten and a girl of about eight—on a summer, non- school night, and in heat like this, parents taking their kids out this late wasn’t unusual—and was just passing the Goetz Country Club tavern when I noticed an ostentatious-looking car, a gray-and-black Pierce Arrow, parked along the curb. I looked down through the open window.
Melvin Purvis was behind the wheel.
He was lighting a cigarette with a hand that was shaking; just a little, but shaking. He wore a jaunty straw hat and blue sports coat. He looked like he should have a debutante next to him. Instead he had in the rider’s seat one of those college-boy agents from the Banker’s Building, who was now looking at me with wide, somehow frightened eyes.
I held my palms up and out, chest-high, and smiled a little.
Looking past his college-boy companion and out at me, Purvis, cigarette lit now, frowned like a housewife whose cake just fell, and motioned at me. I went around on his side and leaned against the car and smiled in at him.
“Hello, Melvin,” I said.
“What the hell are you doing here, Heller?” He squeezed off each word, his Southern accent vanished. His speech pattern reminded me of Walter Winchell’s, at least at that moment it did.
“Just thought I should check in with you, since I was in the neighborhood,” I said cheerfully. “Just for the record, I’m not Dillinger.”
His mouth fell open a little and his eyes glowed like the tip of his cigarette, which dangled from his mouth forgotten.
“I just thought I should point that out,” I said. “I’m in no mood to get shot.”
“You’re interfering with a government job, Heller. Get lost.”
“It’s a free country, Melvin. I thought I might take in the show.”
He glanced over at his companion and his Southern drawl suddenly replaced the clipped Winchell tone. “Agent Brown,” he said, “why don’t you accompany Mr. Heller from the premises.”
I leaned in and stared right into Purvis’ startled face and smiled; I could smell Sen-Sen on his breath. “Send him on out. I never broke a government agent’s arm before.”
“Are you threatening—”
“Promising. Promising a scene bigger than any that ever played that movie house. Want to risk blowing your stakeout over that?”
He bit the words off: “Go to the movie then. Go to hell.”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind standing out here and watching the parade of humanity go by. A detective can always learn something by studying people, you know.”
He looked over at Agent Brown. “Get in the back seat.” Brown did that, and Purvis looked at me; his face looked more than ever like the chiseled kisser of a ventriloquist’s dummy—when he spoke, I was almost surprised my lips didn’t move. He said, “Get in on the rider’s side, Heller. If you’re going to be around, at least you can be under my watchful eye.”
“I know I’ll sleep better tonight for it,” I said.
He jerked with this thumb. “Go around and get in.”
I did.
“Nice car, Melvin,” I said.
“Shut up and don’t bother me.” He was intently studying each passerby. His technique was as subtle as a guy in the front row at a State Street burlesque house.
“Say, uh…Melvin?”
Without looking at me, he snapped, “What?”
“You’re going to burn yourself.”
Then he looked at the cigarette in his fingers, burned down to the point where it would soon sizzle against his skin, and nervously jumped, flicked it out the window.
“Melvin,” I said, suddenly feeling a little sorry for him. “Calm down. Take it easy.”
He looked at me expecting sarcasm, didn’t see any, sighed a little, nodded, and kept looking. He was wearing, in addition to that navy-blue sports jacket with white buttons, white slacks and white shoes. He had a white hanky in his sports jacket pocket; the initials MHP showed. He was as immaculately groomed as Frank Nitti, albeit in an Ivy League manner foreign to Al Capone’s successor.
But he was sweating like a wop; that much they had in common.
He glanced at me, and, in a peacemaking gesture, said, “Would you like a cigarette?”
“No thanks.”
It was 8:15 now. Agent Brown got out to use the phone in the tavern to call Cowley and report no sign yet of John Dillinger.
