“I’m Nate Heller,” I said, and I was, even if I was Nate Heller in sunglasses, a Hawaiian-print shirt, chino shorts, and sandals. No trench coat or fedora, despite the goofy pictures I’d posed for, for Life magazine, a hundred years ago. “Private Eye to the Stars,” they called me. We’d opened up our Los Angeles office, by then.
Anyway, the Texan. He was as big as…a Texan. He wore a multicolor Hawaiian shirt that looked like a paint factory drop cloth, unlike my own tasteful purple and white affair. A young guy—maybe fifty-five—he wore new blue jeans and wrap-around black sunglasses, and his hair was white at the temples and suspiciously black everywhere else and curly and dripping with more Vitalis than a Sam Giancana bodyguard. He had a bucket head and a shovel jaw, and the hand he extended was smaller than a frying pan.
I just looked at it.
He took no offense, just reeled in his paw and sat on the edge of the deck chair next to mine, sort of balancing precariously there, asking, after the fact, “Mind if I sit myself down?”
“Who else is gonna do it for you?”
He grinned—his teeth were as white as well-polished porcelain bathroom tiles; caps or dentures. “You’re a hard man to find, Mr. Heller.”
“Maybe you should’ve hired a detective.”
An eyebrow arched above a sunglass lens. “That’s partly why I’m here.”
“I’m retired.” That was the first time I didn’t use “semi”; dropping the prefix was either an admission to myself, or maybe just a lie to cool this Texan’s interest.
“You never answered my letters,” he said. He pronounced “my” like “mah.” Like a lot of Southern men, he managed to sound simultaneously good-natured and menacing.
“No,” I said, “I never did.”
“Least you’re not pretendin’ you never got ’em. Did you read ‘em?”
“About half of the first one.”
A motorboat purred by, pulling a shapely blonde whose hair was made even more golden by the sun; the blue water rippled, and so did the muscles on her tummy.
“The rest you just pitched,” he said.
I nodded.
“Left messages at your office. You never answered them, neither.”
“Nope,” I said, speaking his language.
“Thought when I come up with your home number, there in, where is it? Forest Park? Thought we’d finally connect. But you got one of them tape machines. Pretty fancy hardware.”
I gestured with my rum and Coke. “That guy James Bond, in the movies? He was based on me.”
He chuckled. “Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised. Your name turns up in the damnedest places.”
Peering over my own sunglasses, I said, “I know you’ve come a long way, Tex. So I’m going to do you the courtesy of lettin’ ya speak your piece.”
“And then you’re gonna tell me to haul my fat Texas ass out of here.”
“I would never insult a man’s home state.”
“You knew her, didn’t you?”
“Who?” But I knew who he meant.
He stared at my sunglasses with his sunglasses. “Anybody but me ever track you down, on this subject?”
“…No.”
“I mean, you been talked to enough. I dug back through the files. There was a time you gave plenty of interviews, droppin’ all them famous names.”
“Stirring up business.” I shrugged.
He made a click in his cheek, and his words made me sound like a pecan pie he liked the taste of. “Crony of Frank Nitti and Eliot Ness alike. At the Biograph when Dillinger got his. Pal of Bugsy Siegel’s.” He shifted his body from side to side, like he was really settling into this one-way conversation. “Were you really one of Huey Long’s bodyguards, night they plugged him?”
I sipped my drink. “Another proud moment.”
He filled his chest with air; it was like a dirigible inflating. Then he breathed it out, saying, “’Course, there are those people that say you got a line of bullshit a mile wide and two miles long.”
“Question is, how deep?”
“People that say you took all sorts of credit, for all sorts of famous cases, made yourself ten kinds of important, just to build up your business. That none of this wild shit you talk about ever really happened to ya. You really have an affair with Marilyn Monroe?”
I took my sunglasses off, tossed them on the grass. “I think you’re about there.”
The bathroom tile grin flashed again. “Out the door, you mean? Or knocked on my tail?…I figure your connection with Lindbergh’s how you and A. E. hooked up. You worked that kidnapping, a while, didn’t you? Only weren’t you still on the Chicago police, at the time?”
I sat up, swiveled and faced him. “Is there something you want? Or are you just another mosquito, buzzing around a while? Before you draw blood.”
“And get swatted? Can I just show you somethin’, ’fore I head out? I mean, I come a long way…from Dallas?”
He withdrew a piece of paper from the pocket of his paint-splotch shirt; unfolded, it was a photocopy of a fairly crude drawing, about on the level of a really poor police artist’s sketch.
“One of my associates has what you might call a modicum of art training,” he said, “and worked this up from a native’s description.”
The drawing, rough as it was, was clearly a portrait of a ruggedly handsome young man in a priest’s collar.
“Several natives we showed this to,” he said, “remembered this priest, though not his name. They say he had reddish-brown hair…kinda like yours must’ve been, ’fore the sides turned white. About your size…six foot…your build, ’fore you got that little paunch. No offense. Ain’t near the spare tire I’m carryin.’ “
“Natives where?”
Now his smile turned sly. “Little bitty slice of paradise in the Pacific, no more’n five miles long, fifteen wide. In the Mariana Islands?”
I said nothing.
“’Course the first time I seen it,” he said, “it was about the opposite of paradise, Saipan was. Never saw such a landscape of total fucking devastation. You see, I was there with the Second Division.”
“Marine, huh?”
“Twenty-fifth Regiment. I was there when Captain Sasaki and five hundred other Jap sons of bitches tried to break through at Nafutan Point.”
“So I’m supposed to warm up to you now, ’cause you were a jarhead, too?”
“You know what they say—Semper Fi, Mac. Guadalcanal, weren’t you?”
I thought about cold-cocking him, but only nodded.
“Got out on a Section Eight, I understand. Funny. You don’t look like a nutcase to me.”
“You might be surprised.”
“Of course, according to that Look magazine article, it was battle fatigue. They even made you sound like a kind of hero, holdin’ off the Japs in a foxhole with your boxer pal, Barney Ross. He was a drug addict, wasn’t he? What a life you’ve led.” He folded the photocopy back up and returned it to his pocket. “You want me to leave now?”
I didn’t say anything. Another boat was streaking by; no pretty girl tailing this one, though.
“Nobody ever connected you to Saipan before,” he asked cagily, “did they?”
“No,” I admitted.
“I mean, you been talked to about her. You mentioned her in passing, to this reporter and that one. More of your celebrity name-dropping, to feather your business nest. I know you were her bodyguard for a while, in what, ’thirty-five? Least they didn’t bump her off under your nose, like they done with Mayor Cermak and the Kingfish.”
My hands were turning into fists. “I’m sure there’s a point to this.”
“But nobody ever noticed your name come up in the Mantz divorce proceedings. I never saw that in print anywhere—did you?”
“You have been digging.”
He gave a shrug of the head. “So have a lot of people, for a lot of years. I’ve made three trips back to Saipan so far…and I got another one coming up. I want you to come with me.”