Merle pulled a pad of paper from under the table and scribbled on it. Then she reached deeper under the table and came up with something that tinkled.
“Reach over and take these,” she said. “And drop another quarter. My address is on the note and that’s the key. There’s juice in the refrigerator. Sleep on the sofa. I’ll be there later. I’m off early today.”
I grinned.
“Forget it,” she said. “You stay on that sofa and away from me. I can’t afford to catch your cold.”
I shrugged with enormous regret, pocketed key and note, and went outside to find a cab.
Merle’s apartment was a little north of the Loop, on a street called Barry. It was a three-story yellow building with a courtyard and maybe twenty apartments in three entrances. Her place was in the second entrance on the second floor. It was small-two rooms with a kitchen area that stood in a corner of the living room. The bedroom was big enough for a single bed. On the chest of drawers near the bed, there was a picture of a good-looking man with a thin smile. The picture looked as if it were a few years old. There was also a picture of a little girl-a cute kid with dark hair, a big grin, and a tooth missing in front. She looked something like Merle.
The furniture looked used or rented. It was clean, but it didn’t look like the kind of thing I would have guessed she had. The refrigerator had a full quart of juice. I drank most of it and looked for cereal while I made coffee. There wasn’t any cereal, so I ate a sandwich with two slices of something that was either pale salami or ripe bologna. There was no bath, just a shower. I used it, shaved, drank my coffee, and stretched out on the sofa with a roll of toilet paper for my nose. I fell asleep. No dreams came. No trip to Cincinnati. No Marx Brothers.
A knock at the door pulled me slowly out of the sofa. I fumbled for my gun and tried not to breathe, which is easy with a deviated septum and the flu. I had figured Merle for someone who’d help a poor bedraggled detective, but I’ve been wrong about women, men and kids all my life. She might just have given Costello a call, claimed a reward or amnesty, and gone back to the dice.
“Wake up and open the door,” she whispered. “You took my only key.”
I opened the door, holding the gun behind my back. She came in and threw her coat on a chair.
“You always sleep with that?” she said, walking to the kitchen.
“This,” I said looking at the gun. “I don’t know what this is.”
She touched the coffee, found it cold and turned the heat back on. Then she turned and looked at me. I had taken my clothes off and stood in underwear and a tee shirt with the.38 in my hand. I looked down at myself and shrugged. She laughed and drank her coffee.
“You alone?”
“Peters,” I said. “Toby Peters. If you mean do I have a family, just a brother. Nothing else. I once had a wife.”
“I know how that is,” she said, biting her lower lip.
“You want to talk about it?” I said.
“No,” she said. “I want to finish my coffee and admire your droopy drawers. Then I want to get in bed.”
“I remember,” I said sadly. “You don’t want a cold, and I stay on the sofa.”
“It’s too late,” she said, pulling a napkin from a cabinet and dabbing her nose, “I already caught your cold.”
“Really,” I grinned.
“Really,” she grinned back, a kind of sad, friendly grin.
Ten minutes later we were in the small bed, sneezing, laughing, exploring and coughing. It was love time in the pneumonia ward. Her body was small and perfect. Mine was hard and scarred and imperfect-an attraction of opposites.
“What happened to your nose?” she said, kissing it.
“It put up a gallant but losing fight three times too many.”
“I like it.”
“It’s hard to breathe through it, especially when I have a cold.”
“Are you always this romantic?”
“Only when I’m inspired by royalty.”
An idea hit me, and I rolled over on top of her and we both tumbled off the bed. We bounced together against the wall and stayed that way till someone knocked at the door. She squeezed away from me and called, “Who is it?”
“Ray.”
“Just a second.”
She put on an oversize purple robe and rolled her sleeves up. The bottom of the robe trailed on the floor. She padded barefoot to the door, looking like a kid trying to play grownup. I rolled over and pulled on my shorts.
“Peters,” beamed Ray Narducy, a cab driver
“Hi kid,” I said.
“Find anything?”
“A little,” I answered. “Our friends in the Caddy caught up with me, and I’m trying to keep out of their way.”
He walked comfortably to the refrigerator, opened it, and looked for something to eat while we talked. Merle reached over his head, standing on tiptoe to pull down a box of cookies and hand it to him.
“Need any help?” he said.
“Maybe later,” I told him, “but not while they might be able to link your cab with me.”
We sat around eating cookies and sneezing, swapping stories about the good new days, listening to Narducy’s imitations of Herbert Marshall and Lum Abner. Merle yawned. I said I was tired. Narducy ate cookies and drank a quart of milk. Merle went to bed, and I told Narducy I had to get up early. He said he did too and stayed twenty minutes more, giving me the plot of the last episode of “Lights Out.”
When he left, I flew back into the bed with a grunt and a wheeze.
“Asleep?” I whispered.
“No,” she said. She leaned over in the dark and kissed me. “But I’ve had enough action for the night, on top of a fever. Let’s sleep on our memories.”
I dreamed something, but I don’t know what. When I woke up in the early morning light I held it in the palm of my memory, but it flittered away on dusty moth wings. Merle was still asleep, snoring through a congested nose. The room was full of romance and germs. I got dressed, shaved in the kitchen sink to be quiet, and left a note saying I’d contact her that night. Then I went out in the snow to find a phone. I found one at a lunch counter, where I ate Choco-nuts cereal and had two cups of coffee. It was about nine on Sunday morning, and the place was empty except for me and a guy with a kid he kept patting on the head everytime the kid said anything. Since the kid was only about two, he had a lot to say, but not much of it was clear. I listened for a while and watched. Something like nostalgia or longing started to get to me. I knew I’d have to pull away, or go through some somber hours envying that man with the kid.
Kleinhans wasn’t at the Maxwell Street Station, but he had left a message for me to call him at home. They gave me his home number, and I heard the now familiar but fuzzy voiced Sergeant Chuck Kleinhans.
“What time is it?”
“After nine,” I said. “What have you got for me?”
“A large, heavy chair given to me by my grandfather when he came to this country. There’s still enough strength in these old arms of mine to lift it above my head and bring it down on yours.”
“I’ve offended you,” I said sadly.
He tried to hold back a laugh.
“I’d say you have Peters, and you can ill afford to lose what little patience I have left. When we were in the State Street station a few hundred years ago, you called Indianapolis.”
“Is that a question or a statement?” I said, looking back at the dad and kid who were cutting each other’s waffles.
“It is a warning. Besides owing the City of Chicago a dollar and sixty cents, you played me for a sap.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t resist it. Cops bring out the trickster in me.”
His yawn was enormous.
“I checked on the Canetta kid. He has a Chicago record three sheets long.”
