The Million-Dollar Wound

“Hello, D’Angelo.”

He turned slowly and looked at me. His face was hollow-eyed, haunted, like the Marines of the 1st Division we’d come to the Island to spell, those wasted scarecrows who’d met us as we waded ashore off the Higgins boats. Only D’Angelo looked even worse. He’d always been razor-thin, and he still was, only now that razor was dull. His eyes were dead.

But something in them came marginally alive when he recognized me.

“Heller,” he said. It was cold enough for his breath to show. He smiled, just a little.

I went over to the card table and sat next to him. Just looking at him I knew he hadn’t killed Estelle. Monawk was another matter.

“I’m sorry about your girl,” I said.

“Hell of a thing,” he said. His eyes were full of water. “Hell of a thing.” He reached for a deck of Luckies on the card table; shook a smoke out and lit it nervously off a battered silver Zippo lighter from his plaid flannel shirt. “You can’t know what it’s like to come home and your girl’s dead, your goddamn girl’s dead. Murdered! Tortured…”

I said nothing.

“Want a smoke?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. He lit it off his-hospital habit-and handed it to me. I sucked the smoke into my lungs and felt strangely alive.

“What the fuck kind of world is it?” he said. “Come home from what we went through, and somebody murdered your goddamn girl! Your goddamn girl.” He didn’t want to weep in front of me, I knew, but it was killing him holding all that water in his eyes.

“Go ahead and bawl,” I told him. “We all do it.”

He covered his face with his hand and tears dripped through his fingers. I looked away. Smoked.

“Who am I kidding?” he said. He rubbed the tears off his face, as best he could; some smears of moisture remained. “She had a lot of guys. Some of my friends wrote me and said she was out with this swell, and that one. She loved money more than she loved any man.”

That was true.

He looked at me curiously, all of a sudden. “What were you doing there?”

“What?”

“I saw your name in the papers. You were there, at her apartment, with the cops.”

“I know the detective whose case it is, is all. Coincidence.”

He gripped my arm. “If you find something out, you gotta let me know. If you hear something. If I can get my hands on the bastards that did that to her, I swear I’ll wring their fucking necks. How could anybody do that to a beautiful girl like her?” He shook his head. “Aw, shit, Estelle. Why’d you have to love money so goddamn much?”

“I remember back at San Diego,” I said, “you mentioned you worked for Nicky Dean at the Colony Club. Is that where you met her?”

He nodded. “I was a waiter there. Head waiter. I ran errands for Nicky, sometimes.”

“How did you and Estelle get together?”

“She liked my looks. I liked hers. That’s all it takes.”

True enough.

“I knew her once, too,” I said.

“Really?”

“A long, long time ago.”

“Did you go with her?”

“Yeah.”

“Did…you love her, too, Heller?”

“A long, long time ago, I did, yeah.”

“So, then… I guess you do know how it is to come home to something like this.”

“We got that in common, pal.”

“We got a lot in common, don’t we, Heller?”

We sure did. We both had wounds that would never heal.

I said, “How did Monawk die, D’Angelo?”

“What do you mean? The Japs got him. What else?”

“Did you see it happen?”

“No. No. I was out. I bled a lot, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

I sat there with him for a couple of hours. We talked some, but mostly we smoked. Like in that foxhole looking down on the ridge of kunai grass.

When I went out, his sister, wearing a very fresh blue dress with a crisp white collar, her black hair in a shining pageboy, greeted me. I think she liked me. I liked her. She smelled like sweet-smelling soap.

“You’re a good friend to come see him,” she said.

“I’ll be back.”

“I’d like that.”

I wasn’t Prince Charming, but there was a man shortage.

She walked me out to the street. The sky was a glowing red. The steel mills.

“Good night, Marie.”

“Good night, Mr. Heller.”

I didn’t think her brother had killed Monawk; I wasn’t sure, but my gut, my detective’s gut, said no.

Anyway, I knew he hadn’t killed Estelle yesterday.

Not on one leg.

Town Hall Station, a massive faded red-brick building built around the turn of the century, dominated the corner of Addison and Halsted. It was just three blocks west from Estelle’s “death flat” (as the papers were gleefully calling it), and within spitting distance of the Salvation Army’s national training camp, a baracaded, barbed-wire encampment devoted to saving souls.

Which could not exactly be said for the Town Hall Station, up the steps of which I went, through the main door on Addison, up into the big waiting-room area. It was Friday afternoon, and business here was slow-a few juvies were slouched on the hard wooden chairs lining one wall, waiting for their parents to show, flirting with a bored lone hooker sitting polishing her nails, waiting for her pimp or lawyer or somebody to pick her up. I checked in with the fiftyish flabby Irish sergeant who sat behind the booking counter reading a racing form, and was sent on upstairs. I was expected. Sergeant Donahoe, he of the basset-hound countenance, showed me to the small interrogation room where Drury stood grilling the seated Sonny Goldstone, Nicky Dean’s partner from his Colony Club days. A police steno, a plain young woman in matronly blue, sat just behind and to one side of Goldstone, taking it all down.

The cubbyhole was well lit but stuffy. Goldstone’s fleshy face seemed expressionless, even bored. He had the sort of soft, bland, unthreatening features-hooded eyes, straight nose, petulant mouth-that so often belong to the truly cold. He was wearing black-rim glasses tinted a slight brown. He was dressed neatly, successful businessman that he was, in a tailored, vested brown suit with a tasteful two-tone brown striped tie.

Drury’s usual dapper look was absent; he was stripped down to his vest, sleeves rolled up, tie loosened, working up a sweat. He was as good a man as any at the verbal third degree. On the other hand, you still can’t beat a rubber hose.

Drury nodded to me, as I closed the door behind me, and Goldstone’s eyes flicked my way once, then stared back into nothing, ignoring both me and Drury, which was a good trick in this closet. I don’t know whether Goldstone recognized me or not; we’d only seen each other that once, that night in ’39 when Estelle took me up to a third-floor Colony Club suite.

“You were seen going into the apartment building Tuesday afternoon, Sonny,” Drury said, matter-of-fact, confident as God. “Positively identified by the manager of Estelle’s building.”

Looking at nothing, Goldstone said, “She’s nuts. She’s talking nonsense.”