Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Page 26

  I shrugged, and stood. “Your choice.”

  Savarino patted his wife’s hand, which was gripping his arm. “Baby, let me talk to Mr. Heller, alone, for a minute. We really can use that extra fifty bucks.”

  She sighed and watching that impressive chest rise and fall was the second most fun I’d had today. Then she pouted, folded her arms, and gave her husband one quick nod.

  We talked on the porch—sitting out on the cement steps in the cool evening, the sounds of Hollywood Boulevard wafting their muffled way across the quiet neighborhood. The little stucco bungalows had a quaint look, a very Hollywood look, like maybe Snow White’s dwarfs lived inside.

  “So was Beth Short really Helen Hassau’s friend?” I asked him. “No bullshit, now.”

  “They were friends. I mean, I knew Beth first . . . met her at the cafe. She lived in the neighborhood, you know. I gave her the war hero routine, and she melted like butter—couldn’t keep her hands off me. Anyway, when I started seeing a lot of Beth, that’s when her and Helen really got to be pals—Beth and my wife barely knew each other, and, frankly, my wife don’t really care for Helen that much . . . thinks she’s a lush and a bossy little bitch, which is true, but we both put up with her ’cause Henry’s my buddy and, well, partner in crime.”

  He said that last archly, like it was a joke and not a fact.

  I asked, “Had Beth been here to the house?”

  “Yes . . . no . . . not our apartment, except a few times when Pasty wasn’t home—you know how it is . . . but Helen invited Beth over, now and then . . . Beth even stayed here, there, upstairs with the Hassaus I mean, till about the time she got, you know . . . killed.”

  “Beth was your girl friend.”

  “Yeah. You could say that.”

  “What were you doing with a girl friend, Bobby? You got a wife. A beautiful one. Pregnant with your kid.”

  He shook his head, dark curls bouncing. “I know, I know, you think I don’t spend half my time kicking myself?”

  “Just half?”

  “Hey, you’re a good-looking guy. Are you telling me that dames don’t give you the come-on? And that you don’t do something about it?”

  “Not since I got married I don’t.”

  “How long you been married?”

  “Little over a month.”

  “Yeah, just wait! Your wife gets pregnant, and she’s got a belly out to here, wait and see if you don’t get tempted. Wait and see, then fucking judge.”

  “Is it true you gave Beth an engagement ring?”

  “Yeah . . . that was stupid. But jewelry, half the time we’re swimmin’ in it, and Patsy and me, we’d had a bad fight and I really was thinkin’ of leaving her, and . . . yeah, I gave her a ring, and it was stupid.”

  “Didn’t Beth eventually find out you were married?”

  “Yeah, of course. She took it surprisingly good, like she expected men to do bad, stupid shit in her life. Besides, I told her I was gonna break up with Patsy—though, you know, I told her I was gonna wait till after the baby came.”

  “Sure. You wouldn’t walk out on your wife till after the baby came.”

  The pretty face frowned. “Hey, fuck you, what’s your name? Heller? I’m trying to level with you. I was in love with Beth Short.”

  I managed not to laugh. “You weren’t in love with your wife anymore?”

  He shrugged. “I loved her, too. When I was with the one, I loved her; when I was with the other, I loved that one. Haven’t you ever been in that situation?”

  “Was Beth pregnant, too, Bobby?”

  “I think maybe she was.”

  “You think?”

  “It wasn’t mine, if so.”

  “No?”

  “No. I never fucked her.”

  “You never fucked her.”

  “No—she said she wanted to wait till after we were married.”

  “So that’s why you got ‘engaged’ to her . . . thought she’d give it up that way. . . .”

  “Fuck you! Anyway, it didn’t work. She was still ‘saving herself’ for our friggin’ wedding night.”

  I drew a breath, looked up at the sky where Grauman’s searchlights were streaking across like a prisoner had escaped. “Let me get this straight. Your wife can’t service you sexually because she’s too far along . . . so you start dating a girl who’s saving herself for marriage? And this girl, who talks like a virgin, also happens to be pregnant, just not very pregnant? Am I missing anything here?”

  He sighed, shook his head. “You don’t understand.”

  “Oh, and I forgot—you loved her.”

  “No . . . no, I’m talking about, you know . . . the blow jobs.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You can’t imagine the mouth that girl had,” he said, shaking his head, woozy with erotic nostalgia, “and what she could do with it.”

  Maybe I could.

  “Well,” I said, “she was pregnant—somebody fucked her.”

  “She never said she was pregnant. But I figured she was, since she needed money for an operation.”

  “Around five hundred dollars, the going abortion rate.”

  “That’s right. Saving for it, hitting everybody up. And I told her, after this Mocambo score, I’d fix her up with whatever cash she needed. That’s when she got . . . weird on me.”

  “Weird, how?”

  Savarino shook his head, dark curls dancing. “She was an odd duck, man. She seemed so . . . worldly, is that the word? Like she’d been around, like she knew the streets, she was almost a goddamn hooker the way she’d work a guy for drinks. . . . I got a feeling I’m not the only guy she went down on, to buy her dinner.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Still, there was this, whaddayacallit, naive side to her. Yeah, she wore black, and she was in show biz and hung out on the fringes of society, with lowlifes like me. Man, you should have seen her, dolled up in those black outfits, seamed black stockings, with that sweet, innocent face, glowin’ in the night, like a fuckin’ angel.”

  “Your point?”

  “She had no idea what I did for a living—no clue that she was hanging out, there at the McCadden Cafe, in the middle of a nest of goddamn thieves. When I told her I’d give her the rest of the money she needed, outa my share of the heist, she wigged out—blew her friggin’ top, man, scratchin’ me, clawin’ at me, slappin’ me.”

  “And you got a little rough with her.”

  His dark eyes flared. “Well, I grabbed her by the arms and threw her ass offa me, yeah! Wouldn’t you?”

  “Is that when she took off for San Diego?”

  He blinked in surprise. “How did you know—oh yeah, it was in the papers, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. You and Helen and Henry went down there, after her, didn’t you? To the house where she was freeloading?”

  “Sure we went lookin’ for her . . . She’d sent a telegram to Helen, askin’ for money . . . still trying to raise money. So we had the address.”

  “Why did you go all the way down there, Bobby? Why didn’t you let sleeping dogs lie?”

  “I guess . . . I guess maybe I was afraid, as bad as she needed money, she might sell what she knew to somebody . . . about the Mocambo score we was plannin’. You know, tip ’em off.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “No. And after the score, she come back, and she started stayin’ with Helen. Hiding out.”

  “Why hiding out? Hiding from whom?”

  “The cops. Beth figured she was an accomplice to the Mocambo score, since she knew about it, and didn’t do nothing to stop it.”

  She’d been right about that: she would have been considered an accomplice.

  “Anyway,” Savarino was saying, “we fight, get back together, fight, get back, bust up . . . back and forth like that. I kept thinkin’ I was gonna get in her pants, but I never made it past her mouth.”

  “And your wife never got wise?”

  “Naw. Women believe what they
want to believe. Anyway, I’m well rid of that crazy cunt. I’m happy with the one I got.”

  I savored the ambiguity of that for a moment, then asked, “You don’t have any doubt, Bobby, that Dragna had Beth Short killed, as a warning to you?”

  “None. Oh, that sex-crime angle, that’s a good one—keepin’ those dumb-ass cops busy. But when I heard about her face, how it was cut ear to ear, I knew what that meant. And I clammed, man—I clammed.”

  I stood. So did he.

  I gave him the fifty bucks, and said, “Give this to your wife. If you don’t, she’ll come looking for me.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, she is a pistol.”

  “I saw her on stage, Rialto, back in Chicago. She was something.”

  Beaming proudly, he said, “She sure was. Amazing how she could make them tassels go in both directions.”

  “Bobby, you have any idea how lucky you are? Beautiful wife who loves you? Kid on the way?”

  “I know,” he said. He shook his head, curls flouncing, and his sigh started down around his shoes. “Now if only I wasn’t facing no twenty years in stir.”

  And he went inside.

  19

  Of the jewels in the glittering bracelet of the Sunset Strip after dark—the Trocadero, the Crescendo, La Rue, and Ciro’s, to name a few—the Mocambo was the brightest, and the gaudiest. The epitome of a Hollywood nightspot, with record-breaking attendance unfettered even by the post–VJ Day slump, the Mocambo sported a deceptively simple exterior. The two-story building’s lower story was red with its name emblazoned in bold stylish white, the upper floor white with red-shuttered windows and a modest neon sign, with only the oversize canopy’s red-and-white-striped awning to suggest anything remarkable might await within.

  The club had a wildly eccentric South American motif, the inside of Carmen Miranda’s mind as depicted by Salvador Dali. Oversize baroque tin wall sculptures of flowers and harlequins and dancing girls mingled with flamboyant terra cotta and soothing shades of blue, the latter perhaps intended to tone things down a bit in a room where striped patterns were everywhere, from draped walls to candy-cane columns wearing chrome crowns with oversize ball fringe dangling, invoking a demented gaucho’s sombrero. An exotic aviary—a cockatoo, several macaws, a quartet of love birds, a couple dozen parakeets—added constant punctuation to the Latin music of house-band leader Phil Ohman (lured from the Trocadero).

  The tariff at the Mocambo was steep—ten bucks a head—but a tourist’s bargain, considering the parade of stars the joint attracted. With Eliot trailing after us like a high-priced bodyguard, Peggy and I were escorted through the packed club by maître d’ Andre (stolen from New York’s “21”). Along the way we passed Judy Garland and her escort, Myrna Loy and hers, Lana Turner with Tony Martin, Marlene Dietrich with Jean Gabin, and Rosalind Russell and an old gent my wife informed me via whisper was Irving Berlin. If a bomb dropped on this place, the only thing left of American show business would be the Ritz Brothers.

  My wife and I were holding hands. I was in a dark suit with a black-and-gray tie and looked pretty snappy; Peggy was a vision in black crepe, her shoulders and midriff bare beneath misty black lace, her dark hair down and flouncing, mouth lushly red-lipsticked. She may have only been a bit player, but every male eye found her, as we wound through the tables. Partly it was her beauty—but some of it had to be her resemblance to the dead girl whose picture had been so prominently in the papers.

  We had already had a fight, a little one back at the hotel, and had kissed and made up, after a bigger problem had taken centerstage.

  The little fight had been over this late-night (our reservation was 11:30 P.M.) engagement to go dancing and drinking with several old friends. One of those old friends was Barney Ross, as Peg—without me knowing—had set this up with Barney’s soon-to-be-ex-wife, Cathy, who was seeing him for the first time since his release from the drug rehabilitation hospital.

  When Peggy informed me of this, I had already agreed to go out, and we were getting ready in the big bathroom in the Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow, me in my shorts, at the mirror, shaving, with Peggy in the tub, also shaving—face and legs, respectively.

  “Barney’s going to be there? Does he know I’m going to be there?”

  “No. Cathy thinks it will be good for him.”

  “You can’t spring me on Barney like this! We haven’t spoken in years.”

  She shrugged and then returned her attention to her soapy, nicely formed calf, stroking it with her Lady Gillette. “I know he was a little put out with you. . . .”

  “Put out! He was a dope addict, and I dried up his hometown street supplies!”

  “But he’s well, now,” she said.

  And all I could think of was Lloyd Watterson saying the same thing.

  “Do you have any idea how few addicts make it?” I asked her in the mirror, royally pissed at her, loving the way the water made her breasts look so smooth and round and shiny. “Almost none!”

  “You were friends since childhood. He’s trying to make a new start. You have to help him.”

  “Surprising him like this is no way to do it!”

  She began to drain the water, stood, and began adjusting the shower nozzle, so she could wash her hair. Over the tub gurgle, she said, “Then I’ll just go without you and when Barney asks, I’ll say you didn’t want to see him.”

  And she turned on the shower, cutting off anything I might say in response.

  My mirror began steaming up, and I was steamed too, rubbing a place on the glass for me to finish shaving, muttering to myself, watching her shower, cutting myself when I was paying too much attention to the way the water was streaming down her slender shapely frame, cascading over the tiny cliff of her perfect little breasts, a rivulet trailing through her dampened pubic tuft. . . .

  I was in my underwear sitting on the bed when she came in with her hair wrapped up in a towel and her body tied into a terrycloth robe with the hotel’s gold BHH monogram.

  “I’m not going,” I told her.

  “You have to go,” she said. “Besides, you told Eliot we were going out for a late supper.”

  She came over and sat next to me and sighed heavily, even dramatically, and announced, “Anyway . . . there’s something more important than that we should, well . . .”

  I frowned at her. “What?”

  “Can we talk?”

  Those three words again: now I was starting to know just how deadly they were in married life, trumped only by the fatal four: “We have to talk.”

  But I could tell something was really wrong. The violet eyes were troubled, the smooth brow managing a wrinkle.

  Melting, I said, “Sure, baby.”

  “What I have to tell you is going to make you sad.”

  I slipped an arm around her. “What is it?”

  “Oh, Nathan . . . I know you’re going to be so disappointed . . .” She was tearing up; lips trembling.

  “What, doll?”

  “. . . I got my friend today.”

  “Your friend?”

  “My friend . . . you know—my period.”

  “You can’t get your period—you’re pregnant.”

  “No, I’m not. That’s what I’m trying to tell you—it was a false alarm.”

  She explained that she’d always been as regular as clockwork with her periods (which of course I already knew—just as I knew the bad ones put her in bed for a day or two) and when she’d been late, a week and a half ago, she had assumed the worst. (Exactly how she put it: “The worst.”)

  “But you went to the doctor . . .”

  She swallowed; looked sheepish. “No. I made an appointment, but I never kept it . . . didn’t bother . . . I’ve never missed a period, never had one arrive so late—oh darling, I know how dearly you wanted a child, but we can have another.”

  I felt empty. The emotional roller coaster Peg and I had been riding lately, where this now nonexistent kid was concerned, had finally jumped its tracks; and this ve
ry long day suddenly caught up with me, and I flopped back onto the bed. For some reason, I began tearing up, too. Emotions getting away from me. . . .

  Peggy crawled onto the bed and leaned over me; her face, with no makeup, at all, was lovely. “Nate, darling, when the time is right, we’ll have as big a family as you want—I’ll be your personal baby-making machine.”

  She was so earnest, hovering over me, making that silly statement, that I had to laugh. Smiling, she cuddled close to me.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll make you better.” She slipped her hand into the fly of my boxer shorts, found me, and brought me out for a look. “He’s tiny.”

  “Just what every man hopes to hear from a beautiful woman.”

  “Let’s see what I can do.”

  Then she knelt over me, making me grow, her head bobbing up and down, sliding up and down slowly, quickly, slowly, and it was dizzingly sensual, making me giddy with pleasure, and when I had to come, I warned her, but she didn’t stop, wouldn’t stop. . . .

  It was the best I’d ever had.

  Next to Elizabeth Short.

  A man who has been paid that kind of attention will follow a woman anywhere, and so I was now in the Mocambo, hand in hand with her, Al Capone’s nemesis trailing faithfully behind us, walking over to where my other best friend sat with his former showgirl wife.

  My partner Fred Rubinski was there, as well, seated next to Barney in a spacious corner booth. Everybody had drinks already, and Fred was inflicting a Havana on them.

  Just above and behind where Barney sat with Cathy at the linen-covered table, concealed lighting glowing upward, a huge tin sculpture seemed to float. The life-size figure of a South American native in a headdress of curled tin stood on a round pedestal, exotic fronds and flora at his feet, skeletal body festooned with webbing and ball fringe, arms outstretched, an elaborate electric candelabrum in one hand, a small iron cage in the other.

  The tin figure would have been at home in Welles’ Crazy House, or possibly in a dope addict’s dream.