“I’m anxious to see what you’ve done to the place,” Barney said, working to be heard over the rumble of the El.
I stepped around a wino and opened the door for him and he started up the narrow stairway (Barney, not the wino). “No permanent improvements,” I said to his back as we climbed. “I wouldn’t want your investment to appreciate.”
“Ever since you started paying rent,” he said, grinning back at me like a bulldog who spotted his favorite hydrant, “you just ain’t your charming self.”
Actually, I was feeling very much my charming self this morning. Very much full of my charming self. Life was good. Life was sweet. Because business was good. And that’s sweet in my book.
I was a small businessman, you see. But not as small as I used to be. I was coming up in the world.
You couldn’t tell that based upon Barney’s building, however; this block on Van Buren Street, the hovering El casting its shadow down the middle of the street, remained a barely respectable hodgepodge of bars and hockshops and flophouses. And our building wasn’t exactly the Monadnock. We had a couple of cut-rate doctors, one of whom seemed to be an abortionist, another of whom purported to be a dentist; anyway, they both made extractions, including from wallets, and even an old pickpocket-detail dick like me couldn’t do anything about it. We also had three shysters and one palm reader and various marginal businesses that came and went.
And one detective agency, now proudly expanded to a suite of two offices, count ’em, two. At the far end of the hall on the fourth floor was my old office, now partitioned off and used by my two freshly hired operatives, whereas the office next door, looking out on Plymouth Court and the Standard Club (a scenic view of the El now denied me), was mine and mine alone.
Almost.
I opened the door, the pebbled glass of which bore the fresh inscription A-1 DETECTIVE AGENCY, NATHAN HELLER, PRESIDENT (I was afraid if I touched it, it’d smear), and Barney and I entered my outer office. My outer office! Hot damn. All I needed was a stack of year-old magazines and there wouldn’t be a waiting room in the Loop that had anything on me.
I also had Gladys.
“Good morning, Mr. Heller,” she said, smiling with no sincerity whatsoever. “No calls.”
I glanced at my watch. “It’s five after nine, Gladys.” We opened at nine; Pinkerton never slept-Heller did. “How long have you been here, anyway?”
“Five minutes, Mr. Heller. During which time there were no calls.”
“Call me Nate.”
“That wouldn’t be correct, Mr. Heller.” She stood from behind the small dark beat-up desk Barney had given me from downstairs, when he moved his cocktail lounge. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just keep working on straightening out your files.”
My four wooden file cabinets were in the outer office here with Gladys, now, and she was putting them in order, something which hadn’t been done for a couple of years. Gladys, by the way, was twenty-four years old, had brunette hair that brushed her shoulders, curling in at the bottom, a fashion a lot of girls seemed to be wearing. None more attractively than Gladys; right now, as she stood filing, in her frilly yet somehow businesslike white blouse and a black skirt that was tight around the sweet curves of her bottom and then flared out, she was any lecherous employer’s dream.
Unfortunately, that dream was unlikely ever to come true. I had hired her for her sweet bottom and her delicately featured face-did I mention the dark brown eyes, their long lashes, the pouty puckered mouth? That sulky mouth should’ve tipped me off; some goddamn detective I was. Anyway, I hired her chiefly for her rear end, noting that her secretarial background (letter from former employer, secretarial school diploma) looked pretty good, as well.
But she double-crossed me. She was turning out to be an intelligent, efficient, utterly businesslike secretary, without the slightest personal interest in her boss.
Barney nudged me.
“Uh, Gladys. This is my friend Mr. Ross. He’s our landlord.”
She turned away from the filing cabinet and gave Barney a smile as lovely as it was disinterested “That’s nice,” she said.
“Barney Ross,” I said. “The boxer?”
She’d already turned back to her filing. “I know,” she said, tonelessly. “A pleasure,” she added, without any. She had the cheerfully cold cadence of a telephone operator.
Barney and I moved past her, past the dated-looking “modernistic” black-and-white couch and chairs I’d bought back in ’34, in the art-deco aftermath of the World’s Fair, and opened the door in the midst of the pebbled-glass-and-wood wall that separated Gladys from my inner office. My old desk was in here, a big scarred oak affair I’d grown used to. I had sprung for a new, comfortable swivel chair so I could lean back and not fall out the double windows behind me. Barney got it wholesale for me. There was a secondhand but new-looking tan leather couch from Maxwell Street against the right wall, on which hung several photographs, including portraits of Sally Rand and a certain other actress. Both photos were signed to me “with love.” Something that personal has no business in an office, but the two famous female faces impressed some of my clients, and gave me something to look at when business was slow. Against the other wall were several chairs and some fight photos of Barney, which he’d given me, one of them signed. Not with love.
“She’s a sweet dish,’’ Barney said, jerking a thumb back in Gladys’s direction, “but not a very warm one.”
“I knew it when I hired her,” I said, offhandedly.
“The hell you say!”
“Her looks didn’t mean a damn to me. I looked at her qualifications and saw she was the right man for the job.”
“You looked at her qualifications all right. She was friendlier when she interviewed for the position, I’ll bet.”
“Yup,” I admitted. “And it’s the only position I’ll ever get her in. Oh, well. How’s your love life?”
He and his wife Pearl were separated; he’d gone east, briefly, to work in her father’s clothing business and it hadn’t worked out-the marriage or the business arrangement. Back to the Cocktail Lounge for Barney.
“I got a girl,” he said, almost defensively. “How about you?”
“I’m swearin’ off the stuff.”
“Seriously, Nate, you’re not gettin’ any younger. You’re a respectable businessman. Why don’t you settle down and start a family?”
“You don’t have any kids.”
“It’s not for lack of trying. Aw, it’s probably for the best, since it didn’t work out with Pearl and me. But Cathy, she’s another story.”
His chorus girl.
“Out of the frying pan,” I said. “When you’re in my business, it’s hard to have much faith in the sanctity of marriage.”
He frowned sympathetically. “Doing a lot of that sort of work these days, are ya?”
“I have been. Divorces keep many an agency afloat, this one included. But from here on out I’m leaving as much of that horseshit as possible to my operatives. When you’re the boss, you can pick and choose your cases.”
“Speakin’ of your ops, why don’t you take me over to their office and introduce me? Haven’t met either of ’em.”
We walked back out through the inner office, nodding and smiling at Gladys, getting back a nod as she filed on, and went next door, to my old office, the pebbled glass on the door of which said simply: A-1 DETECTIVE AGENCY, PRIVATE. I went in without knocking, Barney following.
It had always seemed such a big room when I’d been working in it; partitioned off into two work areas, desks with extra chairs for clients, it seemed tiny. The plaster walls were painted a pale green, now. Only one of the desks was filled, the one at left. The man behind it, a bald fellow with dark hair around his flat-to-his-skull ears, wire-rim glasses sitting on a bulbous nose, fifty-one years of age, rose; his suit-coat was off, hung on a nearby coatrack, but he still looked very proper, in his vest and neatly snugged solid blue tie.