“I guess if anybody’d recognize one, it’d be you.”
She gave me a sharp look and didn’t seem to be trembling now. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It was a crude remark. Forget it.”
“All right. Aren’t you…wondering why I’m here?”
I shrugged. “I know I should be, but I haven’t been feeling good. Probably tomorrow I’ll get around to wondering, if you haven’t told me by then.”
With what tried to be sarcasm but came off as pique, she said, “I’m sorry you don’t feel so good.”
“Some of your ex-husband’s pals worked me over a couple nights ago.”
“My ex-husband’s pals?”
“Sure. He worked for the East Chicago police, didn’t he?”
“I, uh…yes. So?”
“So you divorced him a couple months ago. Was it amicable?”
She looked at me blankly. I liked her mouth; couldn’t help myself.
“Was it friendly? Your splitting up, I mean.”
She shrugged. “I suppose.”
“When did you meet him—while you were working at the Kostur Hotel?”
She nodded, then caught herself. “I thought you didn’t feel so good.”
“Having a pretty girl around seems to pep me up. In fact, I feel so much better, I
She looked at the pool of light on my desk, glumly. “So am I.”
Suddenly I was sick of this game.
“If you don’t know why you’re here,” I said, “you better go. I don’t relish being seen with you.”
That amazed her. “Why?”
“As it is now, I’m on the fringes of this mess. If I’m lucky I won’t get noticed much, when the cops and newshounds start sniffing. But with you in my lap, I’m smack in the middle.”
She leaned an elbow on the desk, cupped her hand and rested her forehead in it; she looked like a child who just heard about death for the first time.
She said, “I’ll go, then.”
But she made no move to. Just sat there looking like a tragic waif. Or trying to. She had too much sex to get by with it, exactly.
“Look, Polly, I was told by Frank Nitti not to get in this any deeper. And yet there I was tonight, out in front of the Biograph. It’s time I dropped out of the picture. And I don’t mean
Still with her head in her cupped hand, she shut her eyes and squeezed out a big tear that angled down her cheek and across her tilted face, her mouth, her chin, in a shiny line, before plopping on my desk like a solitary raindrop.
“I swear I didn’t know,” she said, wiping off her face with the back of her other hand. Her nails were as red as Anna Sage’s dress under the marquee lights.
“Didn’t know what?”
“That they’d kill him.”
“What did you think they’d do?”
“I didn’t think anything. I didn’t even know he was Dillinger.”
“Was he?”
She raised her head from her hand and looked at me, wondering what conversation I was in. “Was he what?”
“Was he Dillinger?”
Her eyes got even wider. Silent-movie wide. “Well, that’s what they’re saying…”
“Who? Who told you it was Dillinger, and when?”
“Well…I heard the federal men say it, just before Anna and me headed down the alley. I went back to the apartment with her for a while, and she admitted she knew he was Dillinger. She knew from the start.”
“Did she admit she’d put him on the spot for the feds tonight?”
Polly shook her head. “She just said she knew he was Dillinger. And then she told me to go home and…lay low for a few days.”
“So you came to see me.”
She shook her head again. “I took the El to the restaurant, first.”
“The S and S?”
