apologizing to them through me. “I have to start over, as a single. The natural place to do that is Chicago, I got the right connections, I could find a top club easy enough. But I couldn’t even afford a room while I went about it.”
“So you thought of me.”
“I thought of you. Oh, I had a room lined up with a girl who used to be in my chorus line at the City of Paris, but it fell through ’cause she suddenly shacked up with some guy. Which recalled that summer when you were sleeping in a Murphy bed in your office, and how on so many nights you slept with me instead in my soft round bed in that fancy-ass suite at the Drake. I thought maybe you’d return me the favor.”
I nodded toward the small sitting room. “This isn’t exactly your suite at the Drake.”
“No, but it’ll do quite nicely, thanks. You do seem to be doing well, Nate. Business is good?”
“It’s good. I don’t make forty-five hundred a week for dancing in my nothin’ at all, but…”
“Neither do I, at the moment. And maybe I won’t be able to. I wasn’t appearing with the revue, you know.”
“Sally Rand herself wasn’t in Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch?”
“No. I staged and directed and, obviously, financed the show. But I wasn’t in it. I’m getting older.”
“You’re afraid you won’t be able to make a comeback, huh?”
“A little.”
“You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think you’ll still be strutting around in your birthday suit when I’m in the old-age home. Looking good, and getting paid the same way.”
“You’re sweet. You never married, Nate?”
“Not yet. I’ve had a few close calls.”
Her smile was tinged with sadness again. “Like me, for instance?”
“Like you, for instance. You aren’t married, are you, Sally?”
“Other than to my work? No. And I wish you’d keep calling me Helen.”
“I think I can manage that.”
Somebody knocked at the door.
“Get on the floor,” I told her.
“Don’t be silly.”
“Do it! Get under that table.”
She made a face but she did it.
I got up and got the automatic and unlatched the door and, standing to one side of it, reached over and flung it open.
And shoved my gun right in the chest of a short but massive man in a brown suit and hat; the eyes in the lumpy face were dark and cold and unimpressed. He had an envelope in his hand, and, while I sensed he might be playing messenger, he sure wasn’t Western Union.
I was pointing my automatic at Louis “Little New York” Campagna. Frank Nitti’s right-hand man. A powerful man in every sense of the word-a killer who had moved up the ranks into management in the business of crime.
I backed off, but my gun was still pointed at him.
“That’s something you don’t want to do,” he said, pointing a finger at me gently. His finger seemed far more menacing than my gun.
I lowered the gun but kept it in hand. I did not ask him in.
I said, “I was almost killed today.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here.” He handed me the envelope.
I took it; I peeked out into the hall, to see if he was alone. He seemed to be.
“Put the rod away,” he said, “and look in the envelope.”
I let some air out. I stuck the gun in my waistband and looked in the unsealed envelope. Ten fifty-dollar bills. Five hundred dollars.
“Is this what Nitti thinks my life’s worth?” I said. Anger made my voice tremble. Fear, too.
“No,” he said. “Who could put a price on a life?”
“Some people do it everyday.”
He lifted his shoulders and set them down again. “Some people put a price on death. That’s different.”
Now I was arguing semantics with Little New York Campagna. Well, it’s an interesting life.
“Frank would like to thank you for showing such good sense,” he said, “where the cops was concerned.”
Tubbo had acted fast.
“And if you could keep your story simple for the papers, Frank would be grateful. Can you manage that?”
He touched his hat by way of bidding me good-bye and started off.
I stepped out into the hall. “Don’t you want my answer?” I said.
Stupid question.
Campagna turned back and smiled at me; it was like a crack in a stone wall. “I got your answer. I got your number, too, Heller.” He turned and walked away. Then he turned back and, almost reluctantly, said, “Uh, Frank said to say he’s pleased you are still amongst us.”
“Well. Thank Frank for his concern.”
“Sure. Beats being dead, don’t it?”
And then he was gone.
I shut the door, latched it, put the gun back on the chair. Seemed as good a place as any.
Sally crawled out from under the table, straightening her clothes. “Sounds like you’re going to be okay, where the boys are concerned.”
“Sounds like,” I nodded, tentatively. “Campagna isn’t an errand boy, anymore. Sending him was a gesture from Nitti of how serious he takes this.”
“Is that a good sign or bad?”
“You got me. Look, Sally. Helen. You’re welcome to stay. You’re most very welcome to stay. But there’s no, uh, rent here. No strings. No obligations. By which I mean to say, you’re welcome to my bed and I’ll sleep out here on the couch.”
“Shut up,” she said, and began unbuttoning her blouse.
I didn’t make it into the office the next morning till almost ten-thirty. We’d had another breakfast, Sally and I, and I don’t mean anything racy by that: simply that I bought her some breakfast, this time, in the Morrison’s coffee shop. And we sat drinking orange juice and putting pancakes away and then cup upon cup of coffee as we filled each other in on our lives for the past five years. Then she noticed the time and remembered she had an eleven o’clock appointment with the manager of the Brown Derby and was off.
And I walked to the office, where Gladys greeted me, if “greeted” is the word, with a disgusted expression and a hand outthrust with another stack of memos.
“Reporters,” I asked, only it wasn’t really a question.
“Reporters,” she said. She had on a pale blue blouse and a navy skirt with a wide black patent leather belt and was everything a man could want in a woman except friendly. “Do you realize Westbrook Pegler’s been trying to call you?”
“Yeah, right,” I said. I went on through to my office.
I was sitting behind the desk, glancing at some insurance adjusting reports that Gladys had typed neatly up, when herself was standing in the doorway-never leaning, that wasn’t her style-and saying, “He really has been calling. Three times already today.”
“Who?”
“Westbrook Pegler! The columnist!”
“Gladys, my dear, you’re mistaken-you’ve apparently never read him. Pegler’s no Red.”
She did a slow burn. “I said columnist, not communist.”
I kept trolling for a sense of humor with the girl and coming up old rubber tires.
“My dear,” I started again, and she reminded me humorlessly that she wasn’t my dear. She reminded me
