Finally I was shown to a table upstairs; most of the patrons were in evening dress, tuxes on the men mostly, an occasional white jacket, the women in slinky gowns, black sequins and silver lame, velvet trimmed with feathers, silk touched with fur. You’d have to check in at a nudist colony to find more female flesh unembarrassedly exposed. I wasn’t complaining.
It was almost ten o’clock before I ate, and since a movie star was paying I had the lobster, only it wasn’t as good as I could’ve got at Ireland’s at Clark and Ontario. I was wiping the butter off my chin when somebody tapped me on the shoulder.
When I looked up it was a honey-haired blue-eyed blonde in a black dress with her tits hanging out. That’s an inelegant way to put it, perhaps, but that’s what went instantly through my mind, a thought most any man this side of the limp-wrist set would’ve had.
“Could you join us?” she asked, in a chirpy, innocent voice.
I turned around in my seat and suddenly figured out that Montgomery must have requested a table in this specific area; because not far away, in a corner booth, sat Nicky Dean and George Browne and another girl, a stunning redhead, in a white dress with her…you finish it.
Dean smiled a little-very little-and waved me over. He was a round-faced man in a snazzy white evening jacket, with slicked-back black hair, a better-looking Edward G. Robinson. Even seated, the incongruously tall, slim frame below the balloon puss was evident. He had a single drink before him, and a cigarette rested regally in the hand he was motioning with. Next to him in the booth was the redhead, and next to her was George Browne, in a tent of a tux, double-chinned, wire-rim glasses, fat, bland-looking; what distinguished him was the array of beer bottles before him, half a dozen of them, various foreign labels. He was pouring one into a glass.
“Nate Heller,” Nicky Dean said, appraising me with the dark, matinee-idol eyes that were his best feature. The blonde was sliding in next to him; I was just standing there, rum cocktail in hand.
“Nicky Dean,” I said. “Who’s minding the store?”
By that I meant the Colony Club, his Rush Street joint, which had a restaurant and bar downstairs and a casino upstairs, a pretty fancy layout.
“My girl Estelle,” he said, without any apparent concern for, or effect on, the bosomy little blonde next to him who was smiling at him with considered affection, running her fingers idly through his slick black hair. “You remember Estelle, don’t you?”
So Estelle had mentioned me to Dean.
“I knew her back in my pickpocket-detail days,” I said, smiling nervously, shrugging the same way. “Cute kid. Smart as a whip.”
“Cute. Smart. She sure is. I miss her. Sit down, Heller. Slide in next to Dixie.”
I did. “Hi, Dixie,” I said.
“Hiya,” Dixie said, just barely looking at me, but she was the kind of girl who could load an hour of promise into a split second of glance.
Browne was drinking his latest beer. A barmaid in black and white with her legs showing came over and brought him three more bottles with three other labels and piled the empties on her tray while Browne handed her a hundred-dollar bill and said, “Let me know when that’s gone. Keep the last five for yourself, honey.”
She thanked him, and was gone, and he looked over at me. “I know you,” he said, bloodshot eyes narrowing on either side of a bloodshot nose. “You’re that dick.”
The two girls looked at me.
“That’s right,” I said. “I have my own little agency on Van Buren.”
The girls looked away.
Dean blew a smoke ring and said, “What brings you to Tinseltown?”
“Business. What brings you boys here?”
Dean smiled at Browne, but Browne wasn’t looking; he was pouring his next beer.
Dean said, “We work out here. For the Stagehands Union.”
“Really? Is that a good racket?”
Browne belched into his hand. “It’s not a racket,” he said, having to reach for the indignation. “We serve the working man. Without us, they’d be out on a limb. You can trust an employer just so long as you’re shaking hands with him. When he relaxes his grip, you’re had, unless we’re on your side. Excuse.”
Browne had chosen the outside seat for a reason; he was up and gone.
“Little boy’s room,” the redhead explained to me. “He does that every half hour.”
“You could set your watch by it,” the blonde said.
“Girls,” Dean said, and that meant they were to be quiet. “What kind of business you out here on, Heller?”
“Wandering daughter job. A Gold Coast swell hired me to find his little girl. She’s out here trying to make it in the movies.”
“I’m an actress,” the blonde said.
The redhead chose not to declare herself.
“You’ll find there’s lots of actresses out here,” Dean said. “Any luck?”
“Yeah. The father had an old address on her, which I checked out. Found she’d been doing a little work as an extra. Tracked her through SAG.”
Mention of the Screen Actors Guild didn’t raise a ripple out of Dean. He merely said, “The girl going back home?”
I shook my head no. “I didn’t expect her to. They had me give her some dough, which’ll underwrite another six months out here.”
This story was more or less true, by the way, should Dean go checking-only the job dated back a couple months and had been handled by me over the phone from Chicago. This afternoon I’d called the moneybags papa long distance and asked if he wanted me to look in on his daughter, while I was out here, and see how she was doing; he’d said yes, and to write her a check up to five C’s if she needed money, for which he’d reimburse me and then some. The bit about finding her through SAG was baloney, though-she’d left her new address with her old landlady-but Montgomery had checked for me and she did carry a card. The story would hold.
“If she’s a good-looking kid,” Dean said, “she won’t need their money.”
The blonde sipped her drink; the redhead lowered her eyes-I thought I saw contempt there. Whether for Dean or herself or the world in general, I couldn’t say.
“You may be right,” I said, “but she took the dough.”
Dean shrugged. The orchestra was starting up, across the room. They were playing “I’ll Be Seeing You.”
Browne returned, sidled his heft back in the booth. “Where’s that waitress? I’m down to one beer.”
Nobody answered him.
Dean said to the little blonde, “Do you want to dance, Dix?”
“Oh, sure, Nicky.”
He turned his dark gaze on me. “Dance with her, Heller, would you.” It wasn’t a question.
“My pleasure.”
I threaded Dixie through tables to the crowded dance floor and held her close. She smelled good, like new hay. I hated the thought of the kid being in Dean’s arms.
However, the first thing she said was, “Isn’t Nicky sweet?”
“He’s a peach.”
“Inn’t he, though? Ooh, look. There’s Sidney Skolsky.”
“Who?”
“You know, Sidney Skolsky, the columnist! I wish you were somebody. I could get in his column.”
“I was somebody last time I looked.”
She looked at me, with melting embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that to sound like that.”
“It’s okay, Dixie. Is it okay if I call you Dixie?”
“Sure. How should I call you?”
“Any time you want.”
She giggled and snuggled to me and we moved around the small packed floor awhile; we danced three or four numbers. It turned out Dixie was her stage name-the last half of which was “Flyer”-but she didn’t want to say what her real name was.