The Million-Dollar Wound

I said, “How long will you be in town, Barney?”

“It’s an extended furlough. At least a month. And this’ll be our home base, after we start the tour.” He smiled at Cathy and squeezed her hand. She had on an aluminum bracelet he’d given her fashioned from a section of a Jap Zero.

I said, “Remember D’Angelo? He’s here in town.”

Barney’s smile disappeared. “I know. I had Ben invite him here tonight, but he didn’t show.”

“He lost a leg, you know.”

“He’s one up on Watkins,” Barney said. “He lost both of his.”

“Damn. Where is he?”

“San Diego. I stopped in on him. Still in the hospital, but he’s doing pretty good.”

“I want his address.”

“Sure. Those two Army boys pulled through okay; I’ve got their addresses, too, if you want ’em.”

“You wouldn’t know if Monawk had any family, would you?”

He shook his head; his expression was morose. “I checked. No immediate family, anyway.”

I just sat there. The Mills Brothers were singing “Paper Doll” on the jukebox now, which somebody seemed to have turned down.

He said, “I’m going out to Kensington and see D’Angelo soon as I can.”

“He’s getting a raw deal in the papers, you know.”

“No, I didn’t,” Barney said, sitting up.

I explained that D’Angelo had been exchanging love letters with Estelle Carey; Barney knew of the Carey killing-apparently it had been getting some national play.

“They’re spreading his love letters all over the damn papers?” Barney said. “The lousy bastards!”

“One of the guilty parties is standing right over there.”

“Davis, you mean?”

“That’s him. The man with the purple badge of courage on his jaw.”

“How’d he get that?”

“He earned it.”

“You?”

“Once a Marine, always a Marine.”

“Fuckin’ A told,” Barney said, and slid out of the booth and, with aid of his voodoo cane, hobbled over to Davis, and started reading him off, from asshole to appetite. It was a joy to behold.

I slid out and went over and sat by Cathy. I said, “What’s the matter, honey?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re worried about that little schmuck, aren’t you?”

Her mouth tightened. Then she nodded.

“Why?” I asked.

“He’s very sick, Nate. His malaria is flaring up something awful. Chills and fever. And he’s having trouble sleeping, and when he does sleep he has nightmares.”

Familiar story.

“Hell,” I said. “He looks fine. Look at these dark circles under my eyes. He doesn’t even have one.”

My weak attempt to cheer her up had only served to bring her to the verge of tears.

“He’s having simply terrible headaches,” she said. “He’s in so much pain. I want him to put this tour off, but he won’t do it.”

“That’s why you turned down the movie roles. To be at his side if he falls apart.”

She nodded. “I’m afraid for him. I want to be with him so I can watch out for him. He really needs a good six months to recuperate, Nate, but he’s so stubborn, he just won’t hear of it.”

“He’s a scrapper, honey. I thought you knew that.”

“He thinks the world of you, Nate.”

“I think the world of him.”

“Maybe you could talk to him.”

“Maybe I can.”

She gave me a kiss on the cheek.

Then she grinned and said, “You thought I was a gold digger, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. I was wrong. About the digger part, anyway.”

Sally came over with Barney on her arm.

“I caught him bullying the press,” she said. “That’s no way to run a cocktail lounge, is it?”

“Barney, I’m ashamed of you,” I said.

Sally said, “Actually, I don’t blame you, the way that little bastard’s paper’s putting that poor soldier’s love life in print for the world to see and salivate over. How do they get ahold of that stuff, anyway? Isn’t it evidence?”

“It’s supposed to be,” I said, and didn’t give her the rest of the explanation till later, when we were in bed together, in the dark, in her small but swank room at the Drake, overlooking Lake Shore Drive and the lake that went with it.

“You mean, some police detective smuggled those letters out, and made photostatic copies, and sold them to the newspaper bidding highest? What kind of police officer would do that?”

“The Chicago kind,” I said. “Let me tell you a story.”

And I told her about the diary. How a high-hat client had hired me to outbid the papers for that juicy little page-turner. And how I’d arranged with a certain police sergeant to pay him two thousand dollars of my client’s money for the book, which was now in my possession.

“You’re kidding me,” she said. “You have Estelle Carey’s diary?”

“Well, I did.”

“What do you mean? You mean, you turned it over to your rich client?”

“Not exactly.”

“To Drury, then.”

“Not him, either.”

“What, then?”

“I burned it.”

“What?”

“I burned it. I read it this afternoon, and I realized that none of the names in it were new ones. That is, they’d already turned up in Estelle’s address book or other effects. So there were no new leads, nothing fresh that would be helpful to an investigation, in my considered opinion. But what there was was a lot of steamy descriptions by Miss Carey of her love life. Who did what to her, with what, for how long, and how long some of those things were that did those things, and, well, you get my drift.”

“Why’d she keep this diary, d’you think? Eventual blackmail?”

“No. That wasn’t her way. She was greedy, but she was honest, in her dishonest way. She was a dirty girl, in the best sense of the word. She liked sex. She liked doing it. And, judging from what I read today, she liked writing about it, after.”

“So you burned it.”

“I burned the goddamn thing. Rather than see it end up in the papers where they’d make her out an even bigger whore and ruin the lives of dozens of men and women who had the misfortune of being attracted to her.”

“Am I right in guessing that an earlier diary could well have had a Nate Heller chapter in it?”

“You might be. So, yeah, I can put myself in the place of my engaged-to-be-married high-hat client. I know all about Estelle Carey’s charms. So I burned the fucker. What do you think of that, Miss Rand?”

“That’s Helen to you,” she said, snuggling close to me. “And what I think about it is, hooray for Nate Heller, and let’s see if you can’t do something with me worth writing down, after…”