"Really? And what's that?"
" 'A Little Bit O' Heaven.' Ever hear of it?"
"Can't say I have. Where is it?"
"Next door."
Soon I was walking with Mary Ann across an oriental courtyard, past a thirty-foot-long writhing rock-and-tile and chipped-stone snake, by two idols with human heads and monkey bodies, under shell-and-stone umbrellas, through a four-ton revolving door inlaid with thousands of pearl chips and semiprecious stones, into a big pagoda of a building in which ancient hindu idols coexisted with Italian marble pieces that luxuriated in lushly lit waterfalls; where rock gardens and pools and ponds and fish and fauna and petrified wood and growing plants and shells and agates came together to form a place I and no one- had ever seen the like of before. Trouble was, I wasn't sure I wanted to.
I said little as she led me around; she was enthralled- I wasn't. The money that had been sunk into this combination rock garden and museum seemed excessive, considering the times. This was not a curator's notion of a museum, it was a collector's conceit, a conglomeration whose sum was considerably less than its parts.
"This is B. J. Palmer's personal collection, you know," Mary Ann said, as we stood in front of an immense black idol, a sign telling us this "Wishing Buddha" was over a thousand years old. "I think it's wonderful of him to open it up to the public like this."
"We paid a dime."
"What's a dime?"
"Two cups of coffee. A sandwich."
"Don't get serious on me. Nathan. Can't you see the benefit of a place like this?"
"You mean a world that isn't the real world? Sure. It's nice to go someplace unreal once in a while."
"You're damn right." she said, and tugged at me, and said. "This is my favorite part," and soon we were in a tiny wedding chapel, formed of pebbles and stones and mortar, with a rock altar eight feet wide, eight feet deep, ten feet high.
"The smallest Christian church in the world," she said in a hushed tone.
"No kiddin'."
We were holding hands; she squeezed mine.
"Hundreds of couples are married here every year," she said.
That she could be warmed by a cool, stone closet like this was a testament to her imagination and sense of the romantic.
"Isn't it splendid?" she said.
Well.
She put her arms around me. looked up at me with that innocent look that I had come to know was only partly artifice.
"When we get married." she said, "let's get married here."
"Are you asking for my hand, madam?"
"Among other things."
"Okay. If we get married, we'll do it here."
"If?"
"If and when."
"When."
"All right," I said. "When."
She pulled me out of there, almost running, like a schoolgirl. When we were out in the oriental court, with a little brook babbling nearby, she babbled, too: "This was our favorite place."
'What?
"Jimmy's and mine. When we were kids. We came here every week. We'd make up stories, run around till the guides'd get cross and stop us. Even when we were teenagers, we'd come here now and then."
I said nothing.
She sat on a stone bench. "The day before Jimmy left, we came here. Walked around and took it all in. There's a greenhouse we've yet to see. Nate." She stood. "Come on."
"Just a second."
"Yes?"
"Your brother. I don't mind looking for him. It's my job. You're paying me to do that. Or you were. I'm not inclined to take any of your money, from here on out. But. anyway, your brother…"
"Yes?"
"I don't want to hear about him anymore."
Her face crinkled into an amused mask. "You're jealous!"
"You're goddamn right." I said. "Come on. Let's get the hell out of heaven."
She kissed me. "Okay," she said.
"Jimmy's a good kid." Paul Traynor said, "just a little on the wild side."
Traynor was only a few years older than me, but his hair was already mostly gray, his lanky frame giving over to a potbelly, his nose starting to go vein-shot, the sad gray eyes looking just a shade rheumy. He was sitting at his typewriter at a desk on the first floor of the newspaper building, in a room full of desks, about half of which were occupied, primarily by cigar-puffing men who sat typing through a self-created haze.
"He grew up during the Looney years," Traynor said, "and developed this fascination for gangsters. And, you know, we always have run a lot of Chicago news in the Democrat. We cover the gangland stuff pretty good, 'cause it has reader appeal, and 'cause the Tri-Cities liquor ring is tied to the Capone mob. So a kid around here could easily grow up equatin' that stuff with the wild west or whatever."
"His father said you and Jimmy were pretty friendly. You let him tag along to trials now and then."
"Yeah. Since he was maybe thirteen. He read the true detective magazines, and Black Mask, and that sort of thing. Kept scrapbooks about Capone and that crowd and so on. It seemed harmless to me. Till he got out of high school, anyway, and started feelin' his oats."
"Drinking, carousing, you mean? Lots of kids do that, when they hit eighteen or so."
"Sure. A kid out of high school wants to get laid, wants to go out with his pals and get blotto. Flamin'
youth. And so what? No. I wish that was the way Jimmy'd gone: hip flasks and raccoon coats. Oh yass."
"You mean instead of hanging around speakeasies."
He had a smile like a fold in cloth. "Yeah. But it's more than even that. He got thick with the local bootleggers themselves. It's possible- just possible- he did some work for 'em. But don't tell his old man; it'd kill his old man."
"Don't worry. Did the kid actually want to be a gangster?"
"Did Jimmy want to be Al Capone when he grew up? Naw. That wasn't it. It was a combination of a couple of things. First, he was just taken with that crowd, road-show Capones that they were. It was the Nick Coin bunch, and Talarico's crowd, that he was hanging around with."
"Those names don't mean anything to me."
"Well. Coin and Mike Talarico were sometimes rivals, sometimes partners. You know how that business goes. Coin was shot down in front of his house last summer. Shotgun. Never found the killers, though they held a guy from Muscatine for it. then released him. Somebody brought in from Chicago did it, was the rumor, of course. Probably hired by Talarico, 'cause Coin had reportedly squealed to the feds. Anyway, Jimmy knew Coin and his crowd. And… well."
Go on.
"Look- John Beanie's a good man; if he's trying to find his son. I'd like to help. But there's something that I can only tell you if you swear to secrecy. Absolute goddamn secrecy."
"All right."
"You gotta understand Jimmy's second reason for hanging around with those lowlifes: he wanted to be a writer, a reporter. He wanted to go to Chicago and write about gangsters for the Trib. He didn't want to get in the game, see; he wanted to sit on the fifty-yard line and do the play-by-play, if you get me."
"I get you."
"And this is the part you got to keep to yourself. Jesus, keep it to yourself." He lowered his voice, leaned toward me. "Jimmy was feeding me stuff. He was hanging around with the Coin crowd, and even doing some minor things for 'em- driving a truck, here and there, no guns or anything, just bootlegging. But he'd keep his ears open, and he'd tell me tilings. Pass along the scuttlebutt, get it? If something big was up- and we've had our share of Chicago-style shootings and bombings and kidnappings and what-have-you- Jimmy'd pass along what he heard. To me."
"Did you encourage this?"
He looked at me hard, the gray eyes looking like smoky glass; his cigar was out, but he didn't seem to have noticed.
"I paid him." he said.
'I see.
"No you don't. You gotta understand the kid was doin' this on his own. And I told him he'd get his damn head blown off if he kept it up. but dammit if he didn't start feeding me some good tips. I couldn't help myself; I'm a reporter. And he was eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old when this was goin' on. He was old enough to be held responsible for his own actions."