The Million-Dollar Wound

“Sounds like he was getting his house in order.”

Stege shook his head, flicked cigar ash to the grass. “Here’s a guy who owns a yacht, who’s got an ocean villa, a four-hundred-acre farm, a house like a palace in Glencoe, and your occasional spare penthouse on the side. Who hangs around at the Illinois Athletic Club with the sporting crowd and the money boys. Who chums with judges and mayors and governors and respected people. Who says publicly he will have no truck with gangsters and yet he’s in bed with ’em and ends up this way.”

“Welcome to Chicago, Captain.”

He smiled again, just a little. Then it faded. His eyes became slits. “Were you part of this, Heller?’

“No.”

“I’d like to believe you.”

“Go right ahead and believe me, then.”

“Would you like a ride back to your office?”

“Please.”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “You can catch the El at Western and Eighteenth.”

I did.

It was after six when I got back to the office, and everybody was gone for the day. I found a stack of memos Gladys had left on my desk, all of them calls that had come in in the late afternoon, in the aftermath of the O’Hare shooting, from reporters wanting a statement. I made a big wad out of them and dropped it in the circular file. Then I fished my keys out of my pocket and unlocked the bottom left-hand drawer of my desk and got out the automatic, the nine-millimeter Browning I’d had since my police days, all tangled up in its shoulder holster. I untangled the gun, took it out of the holster, put it on the desk; then I got out of my topcoat, slipped off my suitcoat, slung on the holster, sat and cleaned and oiled the gun like O’Hare had before me, an irony not lost on me I assure you, loaded it, stood, put on my suitcoat, put on my topcoat, slid the gun not under my arm but into my deep right-hand topcoat pocket, keeping my hand on the gun, rose from my desk and locked up and left.

It was dark now. A cold, nearly freezing rain was spitting at me; I kept my hand in my pocket gripping the gun. I felt tired-the evening may have been young, but the day and I felt old. Cutting down Plymouth, I thought for a moment about stopping in at Binyon’s, a favorite restaurant of mine that fortune had put just around the corner from my office. I was hungry enough, despite what I’d witnessed; being close to death doesn’t necessarily kill your appetite-matter of fact, it can make you appreciate life all the more, including such simple, taken-for-granted pleasures as good eats.

Instead I walked on to the Morrison, going in the main entrance on Madison, through the plush lobby with its high ceiling and inlaid marble and dark wood and overstuffed furniture and potted plants. To the left was a bank of elevators, but I stopped first at the marble-and-bronze check-in desk.

“Any messages?” I asked the assistant manager, a pockmarked young man named Williams, whose neatly tended slick black hair and tiny mustache complemented his pointlessly superior attitude.

“That’s an understatement,” he said, with more disgust than humor. He turned to his wall of boxes and withdrew a fat handful of notes; I glanced at them-phone messages from reporters. Davis of the Daily News had called half a dozen times, alone. Some journalistic joker, frustrated in not reaching me it would seem, had left the name Westbrook Pegler. Very funny. Pegler, of course, was a star columnist for Hearst, and hadn’t worked the Chicago beat in years.

I pushed the stack back at Williams, said, “Toss those for me, would you?”

His tiny mustache twitched with momentary displeasure, but he did it.

“And hold all my calls,” I said. “Unless it’s somebody from my office-that would be my secretary or my two operatives.”

He jotted their names down; at least he was efficient. Then he smirked at me. “I suppose you realize you have a guest.”

“A guest?”

“Yes,” he said, a little surprised that I was surprised. “An attractive woman. She said she was a friend and I gave her a key.”

My right hand was still in my pocket, gripping the automatic; with my left I pointed a finger at him like a gun, almost touching his nose. His eyes involuntarily crossed for a moment, trying to focus on the finger.

“Never do that,” I said.

“Well, I’m sorry… I just assumed…”

“Never let anybody in my room. Never give anybody my key.”

“She’s a very attractive woman, Mr. Heller. She said she was a friend, a close friend.”

“Never do that. Never let anybody in my room. Never give anybody my key.”

I was still pointing the finger at him.

He swallowed, his mouth obviously gone dry on him. “I assure you it will never happen again.”

“Good.”

I got on the nearest elevator; I wasn’t alone: in addition to the red-uniformed operator, there was a mustached midget in a gaudy yellow suit. The little man was smoking a big cigar and reading Variety. He got off on the fourteenth floor, and, when he was gone, the operator, a Swedish kid, said, “He’s a World’s Fair midget.” And I said, “What?” And the operator said, “He’s a World’s Fair midget. We have a troop of forty-five of them visiting from the New York World’s Fair. Appearing in town someplace.” I said, “Oh.”

He took me up to the tower. The Morrison was the tallest hotel in the city, its main building twenty-one stories high, a nineteen-story tower sitting on top of that. My suite (which is to say my apartment) number was 2324. The operator let me off at the twenty-third floor and I walked toward a room that almost certainly had an uninvited somebody waiting inside for me.

Probably not the attractive woman, though. Who wasn’t my girlfriend, or even a girlfriend, because I hadn’t been seeing anybody lately. Most probably this dish was sent to con a key out of the clerk, said key then being turned over to a male accomplice or accomplices with a gun or guns. And that’s who’d be waiting for me inside my room.

So, the Outfit considered me a stray thread from this afternoon; well, I didn’t feel like getting picked off.

I could have called the cops, or the house dick, but fuck it, I was a cop, I was a dick, and I had a gun and this was my apartment and the goddamn Outfit, goddamn Nitti who was supposed to have all this respect for me, had very nearly killed me this afternoon. If I hadn’t hopped out of that car, I’d be as dead as O’Hare right now. Deader.

So I got out my keys and I got out my gun and I worked the key in the door and when I swung it open, I was down low, lower to the ground than that goddamn midget, and I was pointing the gun directly into the sitting room of my small suite, where Sally Rand was sitting on my couch reading Collier’s.

Sally had the biggest blue eyes in creation, but they were bigger right now than I’d ever seen them; she had her long light blond hair back in a bun and was wearing a light blue blouse and a darker blue skirt and silk stockings and she’d kicked off her heels and made herself at home, already.

I hadn’t seen her in over five years.

“Some greeting, Heller,” she said.

I let out a major sigh. Stood and shut the door behind me and latched it and tossed my gun, lightly, on an easy chair nearby.

“I had kind of a rough day,” I said, slipping out of the topcoat, tossing it on another chair. The room we were in wasn’t large, though there was a kitchenette at the far end by a window overlooking North Clark Street; the walls were papered in yellow and tan stripes, like a faded tiger. There was a console radio, a servidor, a standing bookcase.

And Sally.

She wasn’t a large woman, and, as I stood before her, she looked almost like a child sitting there, a child who’d tried to please and now was afraid of being scolded.

“I didn’t think you’d mind,” she said. “I flirted with the desk clerk and he gave me a key.”

“That answers a mystery I hadn’t been able to solve,” I said.