Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Read online

  “Jeez, I’m sorry—it’s a hotel. You said I could contact you here—”

  “I like to keep what I do for a living separate from my private life—specifically, away from my wife. Do you understand, Arnold?”

  “Sure, Mr. Heller.”

  “Call me Nate, Arnold. Now let’s go talk to your friend Bobby Savarino.”

  Eliot’s presence seemed to make Wilson nervous—I didn’t know whether the cook had ever heard of Eliot before, but Ness was not hard to make as a cop (even if he wasn’t one, anymore)—so I suggested to my old friend that he go ahead and get settled in his room. Peg and I would be going out for a late supper and he could join us later.

  Eliot went along with this, but he knew what I was up to: Savarino was more likely to talk freely, one-on-one.

  Soon I was behind the Buick’s wheel, following Wilson up Sunset in his beat-up Ford, taking a right on North La Brea. The Savarinos lived on North Sycamore just off Hollywood Boulevard, near the Tinsel Town business district, tonight typified by a premiere down the block at Grauman’s Chinese, complete with stars, searchlights, limousines, radio announcers, cops holding back fans behind roped-off carpeted aisles—the world of glamour so many clamored after.

  But just a block or two away, around the corner, was the sort of quiet residential neighborhood others of us longed for, a bouquet of one- and two-story stucco bungalows—white, green, yellow, pink, blue—with driveways to two-car garages, and close-cropped lawns with the occasional palm or pepper tree. In the ivory of moonlight, daubed with streetlamp glow, these bungalows looked damn near idyllic to a returning combat veteran like yours truly. That a petty heist artist, pretending to be a war hero, had achieved this postwar paradise was a little grating.

  I parked behind Wilson and followed the scarecrow-in-dungarees up the winding walk of one of the larger dwellings on the block, a pink, red-tile-roofed two-story stucco. On the little cement stoop, Wilson grinned down nervously at me as he punched the doorbell, making a tiny electric-chair buzz.

  “Bobby may not like you being a reporter,” Wilson said.

  “I told you I’m not a reporter—just a dick doing some backgrounding.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s a lot better—makes you a reporter with a gun.”

  Wilson had a good eye. I was in fact wearing the nine-millimeter under my left arm—I’d taken the time to sling it on, under a sportcoat supposedly tailored not to reveal its presence, before taking this little excursion into the home life of armed robbers.

  The door opened to reveal a pretty, pretty hard bottle blonde in her early thirties with permed curls, dead blue eyes, and a painted-on beauty mark near an overly red-rouged mouth, from which dangled a recently lit cigarette. Her complexion was a mystery beneath layers of pancake, but her busty figure wasn’t, in a light blue short-sleeved, V-necked angora sweater and formfitting gray slacks. She had a glass of beer in one red-nailed hand.

  “Hiya, Helen,” Wilson said to her.

  When she spoke, her voice was nasal and high pitched and as melodic as a car horn; she was a little drunk. “This is the guy wants to talk to Bobby?” she asked Wilson.

  “Yeah.”

  She looked me over, then decided to smile—it wasn’t half bad, even fairly white. “You’re kinda cute.”

  “You don’t make my eyes bleed, either.”

  “You know just what to say to a girl. Come on in, boys.”

  She made a sweeping gesture for us to enter. We were in the vestibule of a two-flat: steps to an apartment rose in front of us, and Helen was holding open a door at right. Wilson went in and as I passed her, Helen brushed the angora shelf of her bosom against me and gave me a promising look—which was the most fun I’d had all day.

  The interior walls were stucco, too, same shade of pink as the exterior—you could turn this house inside out and nobody would notice. We were in a living room, which connected with a dining room off which a door fed a hallway to a bathroom and, presumably, bedrooms. The kitchen could be glimpsed beyond the dining room.

  Everything was very nice, very new, and as mismatched as a Sears and Roebuck warehouse sale—a royal-blue mohair couch with walnut trim, a big flamingo-trimmed mirror over it; a mint-green button-tufted lounge chair; a console radio-phonograph in a mahogany cabinet, emitting the soft strains of a Benny Goodman platter; occasional pieces in stylings both modern and colonial, walnut and oak, dark and blond.

  All of this—and the impressive array of gleaming white appliances winking at me from the kitchen—had either been boosted, or bought from (or the results of swaps with) one or more hot-goods fences. Bobby Savarino and the rest of the McCadden Group had discovered the way to achieve their postwar dreams: stealing.

  The pleasantly trampy-looking blonde showed us her firm bottom, packed as it was into the gray slacks, as she headed toward the bedrooms, saying, “I’ll get the kids for you.”

  As she disappeared, I said to Wilson, who had plopped himself in the lounge chair and was lighting up a Chesterfield, “Kids?”

  “She means the happy married couple,” Wilson explained, smoke streaming from his nostrils, dragon-style. “Bobby and Patsy . . . Patsy used to be Patsy Green, the stripper.”

  I blinked. “Not, ‘No Pasties for Patsy’ Green?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Jesus, she played Chicago. The Rialto.”

  Maybe five years ago, I’d seen her perform—never met her—a bosomy jailbait redhead who was notorious for doffing her pasties right before she took her bow.

  Bobby Savarino was holding his wife’s hand as they walked through the dining room into the living room. The petite former stripper was still a beautiful woman, mane of red hair brushing her shoulders, her large, luminous, almond-shaped green eyes heavy with mascara and green eye shadow, her full lips brightly red-lipsticked, her famed bosom bigger than ever, which was not surprising, considering she was easily seven months’ pregnant, in a blue-and-pink floral maternity top, blue-jean pedal pushers, and open-toed sandals.

  I recognized Savarino from his newspaper pictures: good-looking kid with dark curly hair and dark long-lashed eyes, almost pretty. He was in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a black tie loose around his collar, pleated black trousers. He had a slump-shouldered, vaguely embarrassed, air.

  Trailing after Savarino was another guy I recognized from the papers: his accomplice, Henry Hassau, a hook-nosed little guy with a wispy mustache. It soon became clear Hassau had somehow managed to snag the bosomy blonde as his wife.

  Seemed the Hassaus had the upstairs apartment, and the couples spent a lot of time together, mostly downstairs, in the Savarinos’ quarters.

  Introductions were made. I shook Savarino’s hand and Hassau’s, and took off my hat out of respect to the “little” woman, if any seven-months-pregnant dame can so be described. Somebody found me a hardback chair across from Mr. and Mrs. Savarino on the couch, with Wilson smoking in the lounge chair, nearby. The Hassaus sat at the dining room table, but the rooms were so openly adjacent, they could hear everything we said, and pitch in their two cents occasionally, as well.

  Mrs. Hassau asked me if I wanted a beer, and I declined; she seemed to be the only one drinking.

  As we got to business, Mrs. Savarino made the opening salvo in a Betty Boopish yet hard-edged voice. “Mr. Heller, we need to come to an understanding.”

  “All right. What do you have in mind?”

  “Bobby will talk to you for one hundred dollars,” she said, lifting her hand locked in his.

  “That’s kind of steep.”

  “We need to raise some money.”

  “Why don’t you borrow some from your jeweler friends, the Ringgolds?”

  She shifted uncomfortably on the sofa—not entirely due to the pregnancy, I gathered. “We, uh . . . have borrowed quite enough from them, getting Bobby bailed out.”

  “Okay, then. A C-note it is.”

  She raised a red-nailed finger. “And none of us can be quoted—not in p
rint, not in private to the police. We’ll help you gather some facts, but that’s all.”

  “All right,” I said. “Can Bobby talk now?”

  “If you’re going to be a wise-ass,” she said coolly, “it’s going to cost you more.”

  I raised my hands in surrender—this was no average housewife—then got out my billfold and handed her two twenties and a ten.

  “That’s fifty dollars, Mr. Heller,” she said, handing the money to her husband, who folded it and slipped it in a trouser pocket.

  “Fifty more after we’ve talked—after I know it’s worth fifty more. Fair enough?”

  She gave it a moment of thought, nodded.

  “So, Bobby,” I said, “who was it offered you twenty-five hundred to bump off Mickey Cohen?”

  His wife answered, green eyes flashing. “That son of a bitch Jack Dragna!”

  I said to her husband, “Jack Dragna personally? What, did he come here to the house?”

  Which was about as likely as Louis B. Mayer dropping a film print off at a theater.

  “It wasn’t Dragna hisself,” Savarino said. He had a husky, medium-pitched voice. When he spoke, he emphasized points with wags and nods of his head, making his curly hair bounce. “Three guys I never seen before come around, it was three weeks ago last night, Thursday night . . . I know ’cause we was listening to Burns and Allen. Henry and Helen and Arnie here was over, having beers and just listening to that daffy dame on the radio.”

  “That Gracie Allen kills me,” Hassau said, smiling absently.

  The blonde he was married to sipped her beer.

  Taking no time to reflect on this cozy evening at home among felons, I asked Savarino, “And you never saw these guys before?”

  “Don’t look so surprised. We’re not local. We come out from the East Coast, been here less than a year, knocking over scores. These guys offered me twenty-five hundred to take Cohen out.”

  “You’re no torpedo, Bobby—why you?”

  He shrugged, sighed, holding on to his wife’s hand; the beautiful redhead was gazing at him supportively. “I was pals with Benny Gamson, you know—the Meatball.”

  So-called because he was shaped like a meatball, his legs like toothpicks stuck in it.

  “When I knew Gamson in Chicago,” I said, “he and Cohen were buddies—the Meatball was a card mechanic in Cohen’s bust-out joint.”

  Savarino was shaking his head. “They weren’t buddies out here. Cohen gets something like two-fifty a week protection payoff, each, from all the other bookies in town . . . only the Meatball tells him to go stuff hisself.”

  Gamson had been shot to death in October.

  “How did you and Gamson get friendly?” I asked him.

  “He was my bookie. He was willing to extend credit, no strongarm stuff, no leg-breaking. Hell of a nice guy. But I didn’t love him—I wouldn’t whack Mickey Cohen over him, even for that kind of money.”

  His wife said, rather proudly, “My Bobby’s not a killer.”

  From the other room Hassau said, in his thin high-pitched voice, “These guys Dragna sent, they knew we was associated with Al Green, and that Al was pals with Benny Siegel, and that meant we had easy entree to Cohen, who is also pals with Siegel.”

  Apparently bored with this criminal flow chart, Hassau’s wife got up to go into the nearby kitchen.

  “Incidentally,” I said to Hassau, “did your friends the Ringgolds bail out Green and that other guy from your string?”

  “Marty?” Hassau said. “Marty Abrams? Naw, him and Al can afford their own bail. The Ringgolds was helping us out, so that Al didn’t have, you know, the whole financial burden.”

  The blonde in the angora sweater returned with a fresh glass of beer. She said to her husband, “Tell ’em about what happened after you turned those bastards down.”

  But it was Savarino who picked up on the story. “A couple days later, Patsy answers the door, and they push right past her—Christ, her pregnant like that, they coulda hurt her or the baby or something, just bulled right in.”

  “We were playin’ cards,” Hassau said, “with the girls.”

  Savarino, trembling with the memory, said, “They were big wops, three of ’em . . . One held a rod on us, and the other two started beating the shit out of us, one at time.”

  His wife was running her fingers through his curly hair, soothing him, settling him.

  “Fuckers,” Hassau said. “In front of our wives!”

  Helen Hassau, unimpressed, sipped her beer, leaning so far over the table, her angora-clad breasts flattened out.

  “They used a rubber hose on me,” Savarino said, “and pistol-whipped poor Henry, there.”

  “I had a goose egg for a week,” Hassau said, with the expression of a kid who had a bully steal his prize marble.

  “They didn’t want you to squeal to Cohen,” I said.

  “No,” Savarino said, shaking his head. “See, Jack Dragna acts like he gets along with Cohen, but really he hates that little Jew like poison. Cohen and Siegel got shoved down Dragna’s throat by the East Coast Combination.”

  “So you didn’t warn Cohen about the hit?” I said.

  “Hell no. Anyway, they musta called the thing off, ’cause nobody’s thrown any bullets at Mickey, lately.”

  “I’d like to get my hands on those guys what roughed us up,” Hassau whined.

  His blonde wife was gulping her beer. She was the kind of broad you’d kill for to get in bed, and die if you woke up next to.

  “Are you sure these goons were Dragna’s?” I asked. “Cohen has other enemies, particularly among bookies he’s muscled.”

  Wilson, who had just been sitting quietly smoking, said, “I checked around on these guys . . . Dragna and this lieutenant of his, Jimmy Utley, have lunch every day at Lucey’s.”

  I knew Lucey’s—it was a movie-industry hangout on Melrose across from Paramount Studios.

  Wilson was saying, “Two of the three guys who come here, and made that twenty-five-hundred-buck offer—I saw ’em walkin’ Dragna outa the restaurant, after lunch.”

  “Bodyguards,” I said.

  Wilson nodded and winked, an action that made his gaunt face cartoonish.

  “Tell me, Bobby,” I said, turning to the hang-dog Savarino, “what made you decide to share this little episode with the cops?”

  “I was tryin’ to cut a deal—I figure, I give ’em a big fish like Dragna, they’ll let me and my friends swim away.”

  “As in, they swam and they swam all over the dam?” I asked, referring to the hit parade’s “Three Little Fishies.”

  “Somethin’ like that,” Savarino said, glumly.

  “Only now you’re wise to the fact that the LAPD is in Dragna’s pocket,” I said.

  “Not all of ’em are!” Savarino said, somewhat indignantly. “Take that guy Hansen, f’r instance—he’d love to get Dragna by the short and curlies . . . and the papers, they’d eat it up, right?”

  “Maybe.” I said to the redhead, “After your hubby started squealing, did those three Dragna thugs come around again?”

  She shook her head. “No, but we got all these threatening phone calls, both Helen and me, terrible, foul, frightening, awful. . . .” She covered her mouth, her eyes moistening.

  Finally the blonde perked up. From the dining room, she said, “We got a threatening note in the mail, too—one of them cut-and-paste jobs.”

  “Not in the mail,” Mrs. Savarino said, “the mail-box—somebody just walked right up and stuck that foul thing in.” She shivered. “They were outside our door, on our front stoop.”

  “One of them threatened our baby,” Savarino said.

  “Yeah,” the blonde said, “one said on the phone he had a baseball bat all picked out for Patsy’s belly.”

  Still shivering, Mrs. Savarino cuddled close to her husband, who slipped an arm around her. That arm stiffened when I broached my next topic.

  “Which brings us to Elizabeth Short,” I said, wondering i
f that name would create fireworks between the Savarinos.

  “She was a friend of Helen’s,” Mrs. Savarino said.

  “Real good friend of mine,” Helen chimed in.

  All right—so that was the party line.

  “So,” I said to them all, “you figure Jack Dragna had this girl killed and her mouth slashed . . . informer-style . . . because by striking somebody within your circle, that would quiet Bobby, here.”

  “I have to admit,” Savarino said, “hearing about these phone calls and that threatening note, that didn’t mean shit to me. I didn’t think they’d come near me or my family, with what I had on ’em. And, the spot I was in . . . still am in . . . I figured my best shot was, try to deal my way out. . . .”

  “Then the next day the Short girl turns up cut in half in that vacant lot.”

  Everybody but me looked at the floor.

  “Yeah,” Savarino sighed, nodding, “and that’s when I fucking zipped it—haven’t said a word since . . . and Dragna hasn’t bothered us. Not at all.”

  The former stripper hugged her husband’s arm. “That’s all we know, Mr. Heller. You got the rest of our money?”

  “It’s risky talking to me,” I said, bothered. “Even without being quoted, if this gets in the papers, Dragna will put two and two together—”

  Mrs. Savarino interrupted: “I think that gangster will have the sense to lay low, now that the woman he killed is the biggest story since the war.”

  Her chin was high and her eyes narrow and glimmering. She was a tough cookie, Mrs. Savarino—and a beauty. I had to know what kind of idiot would cheat on a woman this gorgeous, and this strong.

  “I’ll give you your second fifty, Mrs. Savarino, but only after I have a few minutes in private with Bobby.”

  “There are no secrets between us,” she said.

  But her husband was sitting there with a whipped-puppy look that told me otherwise.

  “I met your terms, Mrs. Savarino—now, meet mine, or you’re gonna have to settle for fifty bucks.”

  The ex-stripper said nothing, staring coldly at me for several seconds, then studying her husband, the same way. Then she shook her head.