“I get suspicious when you don’t treat me like dirt, Mr. Williams. Of course, it could have been Matthews, or one of the bell boys. I’m just too tired to care, let alone look into it. But if this ever happens again, I’m going to feed you the fucking goldfish.”
“The what?”
I cut him off, then called the number on the card Guzik had given me.
“What?” a gruff voice said. Not Guzik’s.
“This is Heller. Your boss sent a guy around to pick me up at my place, and forgot to call him off. My girl crowned your boy with a vase and I think he’s going to need some stitches.”
“Oh. Where are you, the Morrison?”
“That’s right. I’m so pleased that you fellas keep up on my whereabouts. I’m sending him down with the house dick. He’ll have him in the alley, the loading dock area. You go in off Dearborn.”
“I know where it is. I’ll send somebody. Twenty minutes, probably.”
“Take all night, if you want. He might be dead by morning, but that’s your problem.”
I hung up. She was looking at me carefully, the violet eyes still narrowed but filled with wonder. She looked like a kid, freckles trailing across her nose.
“How can you talk to people like that,” she asked, “like that?”
“I have to talk to all kinds of people in my line.”
“No, I mean, get so tough with them. Aren’t you afraid of them?”
“Scared shitless. But if you let them push you around, they don’t respect you.”
“You want the respect of such people?”
“Sure. They leave you alone, more, if they respect you.”
She gestured to the unconscious Mr. Fusco on the floor.
“Leave you alone like this, you mean?”
“Tonight’s an exception,” I said. “Is it Tuesday yet?”
“Technically.”
“Good.” I sighed. “I’ve had enough of Monday. You want a beer or something?”
“Please,” she said.
I got a couple of bottles of Blatz out of the Frigidaire and poured hers in a glass. We sat at the table in the kitchenette end of the room, by the window, which was open, the breeze wafting through, some traffic sounds too, and drank our beers and waited for Matthews to come up.
Which he did, in several minutes. The red-faced heavy-set dick in the rumpled brown suit had trouble bending over to help me lift the still out-cold Fusco up off the carpet. I got my first look at Fusco’s face, at this point, and it was nothing to write home about-he was just another dark, craggy dago stooge from the Guzik camp.
“The least you could do,” Matthews said, in his gravelly way, breath like a brewery, “is slip me a fin for my trouble.”
“Somebody let this guy in my room,” I said, helping Matthews usher the heavy Fusco out into the hall, “and it just might’ve been you.”
“I swear it wasn’t, Nate!”
“Well, then why don’t you do some detective work tomorrow and get the fin out of whoever it was that did.”
He couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
So I helped him drunk-walk Fusco to the service elevator, though from the smell of him it was Matthews who should’ve been drunk-walked by Fusco and me. We sat Fusco in the corner of the cubicle, and I left the slightly dazed house dick and his charge to descend to the alley without any further help from me.
When I got back to my room, Peggy was on her knees trying to clean the blood off the floor with soap and water. She had put the paper flowers on the couch.
“That’s good enough,” I said, bending, patting her on her padded shoulder, smiling. “I’ll get the hotel to take care of that.”
She gave me an arch look. “Is it their responsibility to clean up bloody stains off a private detective’s carpet?”
“It is when somebody in the hotel let the mug in my room in the first place. I’m going to get some mileage out of that, sugar.”
I eased her up by the arm. “You want to go out for a bite to eat? Plenty of places still open…”
“I couldn’t eat after that. How can you still be standing? You look beat.”
“I am beat. I plan to sleep till Thursday.”
“But Nate-you’ve got to look after Uncle Jim…”
“It was just a figure of speech, honey. I’m going to be on your uncle’s door part of the time myself, and the rest of the time my most trusted people will be there.”
“You told me once you didn’t trust anybody but Nate Heller-and that you sometimes look at yourself suspiciously, in the mirror in the morning.”
“True. But there’s only one of me and I can’t do twenty-four-hour guard duty. Also, I got a business to run. Sometimes you just have to trust people, even if it is against your better judgment.”
I put my arm around her and walked her away from the bloodstains.
“Don’t send me home, Nate. I want to be with you tonight.”
“I’d love you to stay. But let’s just sleep. I’m not up to any romance. I barely have enough energy to strip down to my underwear and flop in bed.”
She embraced me, put her head against my chest. “I couldn’t make love tonight, either, after what happened to Uncle Jim.”
“And me. Don’t forget. I was there getting shot at too, you know.”
“I know. And shooting back. I heard all about it from Uncle Jim tonight. You were very brave.”
We moved into the bedroom.
“How was he doing when you left the hospital?”
Her expression was a disheartened one. “He looked deathly pale. He was in an oxygen tent. They’re going to operate on his arm tomorrow.”
“I hope they can save it-but even if they do, I don’t think he’s going to be pitching for the Cubs.”
She shook her head sadly. “I don’t know if he’ll be able to hold a spoon. It’s really sad. Active man like that.”
“Let’s go to bed,” I said.
“Good idea.”
She had a little short powder-blue nightie she kept with some other things of hers in a drawer in my dresser, a lacy thing that decorated rather than concealed her creamy white flesh, small dark nipples. Just the sight of her, radiant in the muted glow of my bedstand lamp, on her side on one side of my bed, half under the sheet, leaning on an elbow, the piles of brown curls framing her sweet face, was enough to get me going. Almost enough. I truly was beat beyond caring about sex. But the events of the day were still churning through my brain; Peg’s eyes were bright with thought, too.
I crawled in next to her; wore my skivvies to bed. I don’t own anything blue and/or lacy.
“I want you to tell me everything that happened to you tonight,” she said.
“Should I start with the blonde or the redhead?”
She pulled my pillow out from under me and hit me with it.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “You mainly want to hear about Guzik.”
“That’s right.”
I told her. I wasn’t leaving anything out, though I didn’t figure to tell her about the rubber hose session; I’d just gotten to the place where Drury barged into St. Hubert’s when she barged into my story.
“Do you
I shrugged. “It’s possible. And it’s Bugsy. Actually, it’s Ben. I don’t think he likes being called Bugsy. None of these gangsters like their nicknames. But then, if your nickname was ‘Greasy Thumb’ or ‘Hymie the Loudmouth,’ you might be sensitive, too.”
“You know, I get so mad at myself sometimes.”
