I wasn’t drunk, really. I’d had six or seven bottles of beer all told, spread well out over the evening. But you would think I’d drunk enough to make me tired. You would think I’d had long enough a day, shitty enough a day, to be sleepy.
But instead I sat at my desk in my skivvies with the glow of the neon night sunning me through the window. I sat there slumped on my folded arms like a kid sleeping on his desk at school, only I wasn’t sleeping. I sat there staring at the Murphy bed, folded down, fresh sheets and blankets waiting, that bed I’d slept in so many times, so many years before. Janey. Louise.
I reached under the desk and searched for and found the key I’d taped there, long ago. I removed it and worked it in the bottom drawer. There, waiting for me, was a bottle of rum, and my nine-millimeter automatic, both tangled up in my shoulder holster. I untangled them, left the gun in its holster out on the desk and drank from the rum like it was a bottle of pop.
But I still couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t even think of sleeping.
Who killed you, Estelle?
D’Angelo, are you back, too? Are you fighting the homefront war like I am? Was Estelle a casualty?
Monawk-who killed you, buddy? Bullets flying everywhere, Monawk screaming, Barney pitching grenades, D’Angelo, where are you?
Somebody screamed.
Me.
I sat up.
I had slept. Just for a moment. I was sweating, as if from a fever. Neon pulsed over me. I sat there, chilled, wondering if I could ever sleep again without returning to that shell hole. Wondering if I could ever sleep again until I knew what happened to Monawk.
And Estelle. They were tied together in my mind, now, those two deaths, those two murders, and D’Angelo was the knot.
Somebody knocked at the door.
I glanced at my watch; it was after two.
I jerked the nine millimeter from the holster.
I walked slowly to the door and flung it open and pointed it at the person standing there.
A tiny little person, smelling like talcum, wearing a tailored mannish suit with high square padded shoulders, only it wasn’t a man. Sally stood with her purse in front of her like a fig leaf and her blonde curls piled on her head like a friendly offering to an unfriendly god, and I stood there in my skivvies with a gun in my hand and she smiled, sweetly, sadly, and said, “Please don’t shoot.”
I dropped the gun to the floor and took her in my arms and held her. Held her.
“Helen,” I said. “Helen.”
The next morning it was snowing, the wind off the lake turning modest flurries into a whistling, swirling near storm. I dug my hands in my overcoat pockets, my hat pulled down, looking down, getting snow tossed in my face anyway, like fine particles of icy glass, as I walked the several blocks from the El to the Linn Funeral Home, for Estelle’s services.
The Linn’s tiny mortuary chapel was in a low-rise business district in the blue-collar section of Lakeview, two blocks south of Wrigley Field. Only a handful of mourners showed up. I squeezed the hand of Estelle’s weeping mother, and shook the hand of her confused stepfather; I’d never met either before, but her mother remembered my name from when I’d dated Estelle, back when she was a girl working the counter at Rickett’s. I could see Estelle’s pert beauty lurking in the older woman’s thin face, those same green eyes, only the mother’s were behind wire-rim glasses and lacked the gloss of greed. I shook the hand of an attractive brunette in a fur stole, a cousin of Estelle’s; five would get you ten she was a 26 girl, too.
Last night’s papers, and this morning’s, were already filled with tales of the “queen of the dice gal’s” many suitors; but none of them seemed to have showed. The small colorless chapel wasn’t a third full, and the only men present were the stepfather, the undertaker, Drury’s boss Chief of Detectives Sullivan, and me. No clergy. Her mother had tried, but no luck: it was unhallowed ground for Estelle. Half a dozen glamour girls in fashionable black, ladies of the evening whose beauty looked harder in the daytime, sat weeping into hankies, or trying to remember how to weep. Those who could were crying for themselves, I supposed, knowing that there but for the grace of God…
The functional gray-metal casket was closed, of course. No mortician alive could have restored that face. Atop the coffin lay a simple spray of orchids. The card read: “To a good pal.” Unsigned, it seemed to me obviously Dean’s work. A real sentimental guy, that Nicky.
I stood there and looked at the casket and tried to believe she was in there. That pretty, greedy little dame. I couldn’t. No tears would come to my eyes either, and a part of me was trying. Well, I’d cried for her last night. That was good enough. So long, baby.
The undertaker locked the chapel doors, to keep out the morbid, though the snow had already done the job, for the most part, and walked to a small podium and spoke a few muffled words, made virtually inaudible by the wracking sobs of Estelle’s mother.
It soon came time for the casket to be borne to a waiting hearse, only there were no pallbearers. The undertaker recruited Chief Sullivan and me, but six were needed to do the job. Of the handful of the curious who stood in the snow outside-mostly the professionally curious, which is to say reporters-three were enlisted and we carried Estelle to the hearse, which had a C sticker, by the way, like most vehicles used for delivery. The family was being helped into a limo by the undertaker’s assistant. A four-car procession, led by the hearse, was all it took to bear the mourners. There was a black limo across the street, parked, its engine going, the windows fogged up; but, oddly, it didn’t pull in behind the other cars, as they left for St. Joseph’s Cemetery, driving into the blustering snow. But then I didn’t go with them, either. I just stood there letting the particles of icy snow flick at my face.
One of the pallbearing reporters was an old friend of mine. Hal Davis of the News. Even with a heavy overcoat on, and a pulled-down fedora, his head seemed too large for his body; the bright eyes in his boyish face-he was approaching fifty but looked thirty-five-grew brighter as he recognized me.
“Hey, it’s Heller. I must’ve been walking behind you. For all the men she boffed, you’d think they wouldn’t have to resort to strangers to cart her away.”
I decked him.
He hit the snowy sidewalk, or anyway his ass did, sending up puffs of powdery white. He hadn’t landed so hard, really. He looked up at me, his pride more wounded than anything else, a small trickle of blood at one corner of his mouth.
“What was that for?”
“General principle. You’ve had that coming for years.”
“Fuck you! Help me up.”
I did.
He brushed himself off, his coat first; the few other reporters were dispersing, smiling at Davis’s fate. He dusted off his hat. “And here I wrote that nice piece about you the other day.”
I decked him again.
He looked up, rubbed his face. “Didn’t like the piece, huh?”
I helped him up again. “Don’t say anything else. I might hurt you next time.”
“There’s a hundred in it for the personal story of your love life with Estelle. Don’t do it! I’ll press charges, Heller, I really will!”
“Go away, Davis.”
“Goddamn. The war sure has soured you. What happened to your sense of humor? Used to be a guy could depend on you, when a C-note was involved.”
“Go away.”
He looked at me like I was some weird animal he’d never seen before, shook his head, dug his hands in his overcoat pocket and walked toward his parked auto. It had a C sticker, too. For purposes of delivering horseshit, I would imagine.
I crossed the street, heading toward the El station, when the front door of the parked limo swung open and a uniformed chauffeur stepped out and said, “Mr. Heller. Excuse me, sir?”
I’d never heard “Excuse me, sir” posed as a question before; it was novel enough an event to make me stop in my tracks, and back up, despite the cold and the snow.