True Detective

period

Then I realized something.

She came back, got in bed, got into my arms.

I looked at her; she still had that cryptic little smile.

'You were a virgin,' I said.

'Who says?'

'I say. You were a virgin!'

'Does that matter?'

I pushed her away, gently; sat up.

'Of course it does,' I said.

She sat up, too. 'Why are you disturbed?'

'I would never have…'

'That's why I didn't tell you.'

'But you can't be a virgin.'

'I'm not.'

'Don't play games.'

'I'm not.'

'How old are you?'

'Twenty-three.'

'And you're an actress living in Tower Town, sharing a studio with some fairy artist and seeing a psychiatrist and talking about free love and living not existing, and you were a virgin?'

'Maybe the right man finally came along.'

'If you did this so I'd keep looking for your brother, all I've got to say is, it's maybe the one bribe nobody in Chicago ever thought of before.'

'It wasn't a bribe.'

'Do you- love me or something. Mary Ann?'

'I think that's maybe a little premature. What do you think?'

'I think I better find your brother.'

She snuggled close to me. 'Thanks. Nathan.'

'I can't look into it again for a few weeks. I've got some other business to do- Retail Credit work and then I'm going to Florida on a matter.'

'That's fine, Nathan.'

'Aren't you sore?'

'About what?'

'No, I mean aren't you sore? You know. Down there.'

'Why don't you find out.'

The electric moon smiled.

Cold hit Chicago like a fist. The wind conspired with the falling temperature and turned the city to ice: then eleven inches of snow joined in. turning it white. Those people in the Hoovervilles I'd talked to not so long ago probably made it through okay, because they at least had shacks to live in and sometimes a barrel with something burning in it to huddle 'round. But the down-and-outers in the parks froze. To death. Not all of them, but enough of them- though it didn't get much play in the papers. Not good publicity in the year of the fair. Of course the major role the papers played in the lives of the down-and-outers was insulation: wear it over your heart if you hope to wake up in the morning. I wondered if the guy who'd passed that piece of wisdom along to me had woken up this morning.

Me. I was in Florida, wearing a white suit, soaking up the sun, smelling the salt breeze. Men on the streets were in shirt sleeves and straw? hats; women wore summery dresses and tanned legs. The buildings were as white as Chicago's blizzard- though the similarity ended there- and the palm trees along Biscayne Boulevard leaned, as if bored with sunshine. Mayor Cermak should get in town late this afternoon; the blond man Frank Nitti was sending to meet Cermak might already be here.

The first thing I did. when I got off the Dixie Express at a little after seven on this Wednesday morning, was pay a cabbie to take me to the nearest used car lot. A guy in his shirt sleeves with a gold incisor that reflected the Miami sun sold me a '28 Ford coupe for forty dollars. It didn't exactly run like a million bucks- it ran like forty bucks- but it ran, and soon I was having a look around the Magic City.

It was a synthetic paradise, like a movie's elaborate background painting that was supposed to fool you into thinking it was real, but didn't quite make it- and you didn't quite care, because there was a charm to it. to the ice- cream buildings, the transplanted tropical foliage, the bay so blue it made the sky seem not blue enough, the skyline that rose off the flat terrain like Chicago in the imagination of an eight-year-old child. Twenty years ago, this was mangrove swamp, sand dunes, coral rock. Jungle. Now it was a playground for the rich, and the only sign of anyone remembering it having been a jungle was the pith helmets worn by the cops directing traffic, their uniforms pale