“Any messages?” I asked the assistant manager, a pockmarked young man named Williams, whose neatly tended slick black hair and tiny mustache complemented his pointlessly superior attitude.
“That’s an understatement,” he said, with more disgust than humor. He turned to his wall of boxes and withdrew a fat handful of notes; I glanced at them-phone messages from reporters. Davis of the Daily News had called half a dozen times, alone. Some journalistic joker, frustrated in not reaching me it would seem, had left the name Westbrook Pegler. Very funny. Pegler, of course, was a star columnist for Hearst, and hadn’t worked the Chicago beat in years.
I pushed the stack back at Williams, said, “Toss those for me, would you?”
His tiny mustache twitched with momentary displeasure, but he did it.
“And hold all my calls,” I said. “Unless it’s somebody from my office-that would be my secretary or my two operatives.”
He jotted their names down; at least he was efficient. Then he smirked at me. “I suppose you realize you have a guest.”
“A guest?”
“Yes,” he said, a little surprised that I was surprised. “An attractive woman. She said she was a friend and I gave her a key.”
My right hand was still in my pocket, gripping the automatic; with my left I pointed a finger at him like a gun, almost touching his nose. His eyes involuntarily crossed for a moment, trying to focus on the finger.
“Never do that,” I said.
“Well, I’m sorry… I just assumed…”
“Never let anybody in my room. Never give anybody my key.”
“She’s a very attractive woman, Mr. Heller. She said she was a friend, a close friend.”
“Never do that. Never let anybody in my room. Never give anybody my key.”
I was still pointing the finger at him.
He swallowed, his mouth obviously gone dry on him. “I assure you it will never happen again.”
“Good.”
I got on the nearest elevator; I wasn’t alone: in addition to the red-uniformed operator, there was a mustached midget in a gaudy yellow suit. The little man was smoking a big cigar and reading Variety. He got off on the fourteenth floor, and, when he was gone, the operator, a Swedish kid, said, “He’s a World’s Fair midget.” And I said, “What?” And the operator said, “He’s a World’s Fair midget. We have a troop of forty-five of them visiting from the New York World’s Fair. Appearing in town someplace.” I said, “Oh.”
He took me up to the tower. The Morrison was the tallest hotel in the city, its main building twenty-one stories high, a nineteen-story tower sitting on top of that. My suite (which is to say my apartment) number was 2324. The operator let me off at the twenty-third floor and I walked toward a room that almost certainly had an uninvited somebody waiting inside for me.
Probably not the attractive woman, though. Who wasn’t my girlfriend, or even a girlfriend, because I hadn’t been seeing anybody lately. Most probably this dish was sent to con a key out of the clerk, said key then being turned over to a male accomplice or accomplices with a gun or guns. And that’s who’d be waiting for me inside my room.
So, the Outfit considered me a stray thread from this afternoon; well, I didn’t feel like getting picked off.
I could have called the cops, or the house dick, but fuck it, I was a cop, I was a dick, and I had a gun and this was my apartment and the goddamn Outfit, goddamn Nitti who was supposed to have all this respect for me, had very nearly killed me this afternoon. If I hadn’t hopped out of that car, I’d be as dead as O’Hare right now. Deader.
So I got out my keys and I got out my gun and I worked the key in the door and when I swung it open, I was down low, lower to the ground than that goddamn midget, and I was pointing the gun directly into the sitting room of my small suite, where Sally Rand was sitting on my couch reading Collier’s.
Sally had the biggest blue eyes in creation, but they were bigger right now than I’d ever seen them; she had her long light blond hair back in a bun and was wearing a light blue blouse and a darker blue skirt and silk stockings and she’d kicked off her heels and made herself at home, already.
I hadn’t seen her in over five years.
“Some greeting, Heller,” she said.
I let out a major sigh. Stood and shut the door behind me and latched it and tossed my gun, lightly, on an easy chair nearby.
“I had kind of a rough day,” I said, slipping out of the topcoat, tossing it on another chair. The room we were in wasn’t large, though there was a kitchenette at the far end by a window overlooking North Clark Street; the walls were papered in yellow and tan stripes, like a faded tiger. There was a console radio, a servidor, a standing bookcase.
And Sally.
She wasn’t a large woman, and, as I stood before her, she looked almost like a child sitting there, a child who’d tried to please and now was afraid of being scolded.
“I didn’t think you’d mind,” she said. “I flirted with the desk clerk and he gave me a key.”
“That answers a mystery I hadn’t been able to solve,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Whether that guy likes girls or not.”
She smiled, now, her wide, unabashed smile, and she stood slowly, smoothing her dress, shoulders back so that I could see how nice her body still was, as if there was any doubt, and she said, “Why don’t you kiss me?”
“Why don’t I?” I said.
And I took her in my arms.
She was such a sweet fit, in my arms, Sally was. She was a sweet fit elsewhere, as well.
But that had been a long time ago, and the spontaneous kiss at first reminded us how well we’d known each other once but by the time we broke our clinch we remembered how very long it had been, and then it was awkward, then we were sitting next to each other wondering what to say next.
I broke the ice. “What in hell are you doing here?”
“You’re such a sweet talker, Heller.”
“I’m known for my smooth line with the ladies. It’s great to see you again. It’s wonderful. That goes without saying.”
“No it doesn’t. Say it.”
“It’s great to see you again. It’s wonderful.”
“That’s better.” She leaned over and up and kissed me again, softly, briefly. But comfortably.
“It’s been over five years, Helen.”
Her smile turned into something sad. “It must be,” she said. “Because it’s been at least that long since anybody called me Helen.”
She’d been born Helen Beck; when I’d met her, in the summer of ’34, when she hired me to check up on a would-be suitor, I’d taken to calling her by her real name, at least some of the time. In bed, for example.
She laughed a little. Not much humor in it. “Even my mother calls me ‘Sally’ now.”
“Well, you’re a famous girl.”
“I’m not really a girl, anymore.”
“You could’ve fooled me.”
“I’m a woman past thirty, Heller. Never mind how far past thirty.”
“Yeah, you’re a wreck all right.”
Now the smile went crinkly. “Stop it, you. I’m…well preserved; it’s my job to be. But I do have a few miles on me.”
“Don’t we all.”
She did look her age, though, close up at least; I was sure with makeup and lighting, on stage, from a distance, she still looked like the Sally Rand who was the hit of the Chicago World’s Fair in the summer of ’33 (with her fan dance) and ’34 as well (with her bubble dance). She was still a top box-office draw, although she hadn’t played Chicago in some time.
Anyway, she looked her age, but a beautiful woman of, say, thirty-five who looks thirty-five is hardly over the hill. In fact, one of the oddities about being in my thirties myself was that women about my age seemed more attractive to me now than the sweet young things.
“Why the gun?” she asked, a little concerned, nodding over at the automatic that was sitting on the chair.