Five detectives, Donahoe among them, got transferred and censured after the scandal hit the papers. The other four cops, assigned to back up Drury’s investigation into the Carey case, were attached to the coroner’s office-“deputy coroners,” a job I’d been offered once by the late Mayor Cermak, back before he was late, as a bribe. I hadn’t taken it, for various reasons, not the least of which was the company I’d have been in: severely bent cops like Miller and Lang, owed political favors, tended to land the coroner’s plum investigative positions. But that was over now.
From now on, the coroner would be required to use county investigators, at a savings to the taxpayers of Chicago of six grand a year.
It seemed that Otto A. Bomark of Elmwood Park, the late Miss Carey’s uncle and administrator of her estate, reported many items missing, including several expensive gowns, thirty-two pairs of nylon hose (better than money these days), three dozen fancy lace handkerchiefs worth ninety bucks a dozen, a set of ladies’ golf clubs, a camera and, oh yes, photographs of Estelle that had apparently been peddled to the papers.
And then there were the persistent rumors of a diary, which had been “stolen” from Estelle’s apartment, possibly by a police officer. But as yet the memoirs of Miss Carey had failed to surface. For some reason.
All this and every other in and out of the Carey case stayed in the headlines of every paper in town for a solid week, except the
JAPS GIVE UP GUADALCANAL
Letters several inches high. Impressive as all hell. But abstract. Remote. Somehow, not real to me.
Yet there it was in black and white:
New York, Feb. 9.-(AP)-Japanese imperial headquarters today announced the withdrawal of Jap forces from Guadalcanal Island in the Solomons, the Berlin radio reported in a dispatch datelined Tokyo. This constitutes the first admission from Tokyo in this war of abandonment of important territory.
Why couldn’t I make it feel real? Why couldn’t I make my face smile over this great news? Well, I couldn’t. I could only feel weary, on this clear, cool morning, even though I’d had a relatively good night’s sleep last night, in Sally’s arms, in Sally’s room at the Drake. I wouldn’t be seeing her tonight, though. She was gone, now, and she took her arms with her. Took the train to Baltimore where she was playing a split week at some nightclub or other. I’d have to try to sleep on my own, again, in the old Murphy bed. Good luck to me.
As I came up the stairs onto the fourth floor, I saw a familiar figure, although it wasn’t one I ever expected to see in the building again: my recruiting sergeant, in his pressed blue trousers and khaki shirt and campaign hat. Some of the spring was out of his step, however.
As I met him in the hall, I said, “What’s wrong, Sergeant-haven’t you heard the news?”
I showed him the headline.
“I have heard, Private. Outstanding. Outstanding.”
But his expression remained glum.
“What brings you here?” I said. “Who got a medal today?”
“No one, I’m afraid.” He looked back toward my office. “I’m glad you’re here, Private. There’s a young woman who needs you.”
I ran down the hall and threw the door open and she was sitting there, with the telegram in her hands, sitting on that couch I’d caught them humping on.
She wasn’t crying. She was dazed, like she’d been hit by a board. Prim and pretty in her white frilly blouse and navy skirt. A single rose in a vase on the desk nearby.
Telegram in her hands.
“The newspapers said we beat them,” she said, hollowly.
I sat next to her. “I know.”
“You said he’d just be mopping up.” No accusation in her voice; just an empty observation.
“I’m sorry, Gladys.”
“I don’t think I can work this morning, Mr. Heller.”
“Oh, Gladys, come here.”
And I held her in my arms and she cried into my chest. She cried and cried, heaving racking sobs, and if ever I’d written her off as a cold fish, well, to hell with me.
Sapperstein came in a few minutes later. He was still wearing the black arm band for his brother; it could do double duty, now. I called her mother in Evanston and Lou drove her home.
That left me alone in the office, wondering how Frankie Fortunato could be dead and I could be alive. Young Frankie. Old me. Shit. I wadded up the goddamn newspaper and shoved it in the wastecan. But the crumpled headline, spelling GUADNAL, seemed real enough to me now.
I sat at the desk in the inner office-my office once, Sapperstein’s for the moment-and made some calls regarding an insurance investigation in Elmhurst. It felt good to work. The mundane, which when I first got back had driven me crazy, was becoming my salvation. Day-to-day living, everyday working, was something I could get lost in. By eleven-thirty I even felt hungry. I was about to break for lunch when I heard somebody come in the outer office.
I got up from behind the desk and walked to the door and looked out at a beautiful young woman of about twenty-five in a dark fur stole and a dark slinky dress. Suspiciously slinky for lunchtime, but then when it was showing off a nice slender shape like that, who was complaining?
She stood at an angle facing Gladys’s empty desk. She had seamed nylons on; nice gams.
“My secretary’s out,” I said.
“You’re Mr. Heller?”
“That’s right.”
She smiled, and it was a lovely smile; pearly white teeth, red lipstick glistening on full lips. Her big dark eyes, under strong arching eyebrows, appraised me, amused somehow. Her black hair was pulled back behind her head, on which sat, at a jaunty angle, a black pillbox hat. If she wasn’t a showgirl once, I’d eat her hat. Or something.
“I don’t have an appointment,” she said, moving toward me slowly. Swaying a little. It seemed somewhat calculated, or is the word “calculating”? She extended one dark-gloved hand. I didn’t know whether she wanted me to kiss it or shake it or maybe crouch down and let her knight me. I settled for squeezing it.
“No appointment needed,” I said, smiling at her, wondering why she was so seductively cheerful; most women who come into a private detective agency are nervous and/or depressed, as their business is generally divorce-oriented. What the hell. I showed her into my office.
She took the chair across from the desk, but before I could get back behind it, she said, “Would you mind closing the door?”
“Nobody’s out there,” I said.
She smiled; no teeth this time. Sexy and wry. “Humor me, Mr. Heller.”
“Consider yourself humored,” I said, and shut the door, and sat behind Sapperstein’s desk.
“I’d like you to find something for me,” she said. Hands folded in her lap, in which a small black purse also resided.
“And what would that be?”
“A certain book.”
“A certain book.”
“A diary.”
Okay. I was awake now.
“A diary,” I said. “Yours?”
“No, Mr. Heller. Must we be coy?”
“You’re the one in the tight dress.”
“You’re an amusing fella.”
“In a tight dress I am. I’m a pip in spike heels.”
“Estelle Carey’s diary, Mr. Heller. A thousand dollars, and your assurance that you’ve made no copies.”
I cracked my knuckles. “You see, that’s why I never got in the blackmail business. There’s no way to prove to the customer that you’ve given ’em the only copy of the goods.”
