Toward the middle of the next afternoon, uptown in the rail-and-harbor city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, a powder-blue Lincoln Continental drew up along the curb of the posh Carteret Hotel. The grandly uniformed doorman moved swiftly down the red carpet in the shadow of the hotel canopy to open the rear right door for the Lincoln’s solitary passenger, beating the chauffeur to the punch. The chauffeur, however, in his neat gray wool uniform with black buttons, was there in time to help the stately lady passenger, Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean, out of the backseat. She wore a black velvet dress with a large quilted black-and-white scarf tied stiffly, squarely around her neck, and a black velvet conical hat, an outfit whose festive styling clashed interestingly with its mournful coloration; but for diamond earrings and a diamond bracelet on one of her white gloves, Mrs. McLean’s jewelry was uncharacteristically absent. Her thin, pretty lips were blood-red. The chauffeur, a rather handsome young man in his twenties with reddish-brown hair, allowed the doorman to usher lithe, lovely Mrs. McLean into the hotel lobby. The chauffeur, by the way, was me.
I got our luggage out of the trunk of the Lincoln-my simple traveling bag and a big heavy leather number for Evalyn; I told her we’d only be one night, and shuddered to think what she’d bring for a weekend away. I turned our things over to the bell captain, who told me I could for a fee park in the private lot behind a nearby bank. On my way back, on foot, I cased the exterior of the hotel a bit.
The Elizabeth Carteret Hotel was a nine-story, heavily corniced brick building between a massive Presbyterian church and various storefront businesses; the Ritz Theater was diagonally across the way. Narrow alleys were at the left and right of the hotel, with a service-and-delivery-only alley in back, a side entrance with a bellman on the right-hand alley, and no outside fire escapes. An exclusive, expensive hotel, with relatively tight security. I was glad I’d come in undercover.
Evalyn was waiting in the marble-and-mahogany lobby, where businessmen and bellboys mingled with overstuffed furniture and potted plants.
“We have separate rooms,” she said quietly, handing me a key, “on the ninth floor.”
“Adjoining?” I asked.
“No. Traveling together like this, just the two of us, is dangerous. If my husband found out, it could be used against me, in court.”
“I get it.”
“But I have a suite.” Her smile was tiny and wicked. “Plenty of room for company.”
Soon I was in my own small but deluxe room on the ninth floor, getting out of my chauffeur’s uniform and into my brown suit, as well as my shoulder holster with nine-millimeter Browning. I really should have boiled the latter, after sticking it in Gaston Means’s yap, but somehow I hadn’t got around to it. I’d had my hands full since yesterday.
First they’d been full of Evalyn, of course, in her gigantic canopy bed with its pink satin sheets that matched the sprawling bedroom’s pink satin walls. Mike the Great Dane, incidentally, who I hadn’t seen much of this trip, I saw plenty of that night: he slept at the foot of her bed. He snored. I let him.
In a way, it was okay, because I had to think. I had to figure out exactly what to do about the lead Gaston Means had literally spit up.
The next morning we’d had an egg-and-bacon souffle in a breakfast nook a family of six could’ve lived in. I sipped my fresh-squeezed orange juice, and asked, “Will you stake me to a couple long-distance calls?”
She looked at me over her coffee cup, a bit surprised. “Well, certainly. Something to do with Means?”
“Yeah.”
“What should I do about that scoundrel?”
“Keep playing along with him, for the time being. Only don’t give him another red cent! I’m an inch away from having you demand your dough back, and then, when he doesn’t cough it up, call in the cops.”
“You think my money’s gone?”
“Is Hitler a stinker?”
She sighed. “It’s not the money. It’s the child. I thought we might get that child.”
“We still may. With Means, it’s hard to know the truth, even when he’s telling it. His wildest stories have twenty or thirty percent reality in them. The rub is narrowing down and identifying that percentage.”
She nodded, with a frustrated smirk. “He knows enough about the kidnapping, then, to make you think he’s had at least some contact with the kidnappers?”
“That would be my guess. With his government and socialite connections in D.C., and his underworld ties, he’s the ideal bagman for a job like this. Only, choosing Gaston Means to collect and deliver money really is, as we say in the Middle West, putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.”
She nodded, wearily. Then she brightened, rather unconvincingly. “Do you want to make those calls? I can have the phone brought to you.”
“Why not?”
I tried to get Elmer Irey at his temporary office in New York, but got Frank Wilson instead. Quickly, and with few details, I revealed that Gaston Bullock Means had passed himself off as a negotiator for the kidnap gang. I did not mention Evalyn’s one hundred grand. This was not quite the moment when the boom-whether federal or local-ought be lowered on Means.
“Means is the biggest damn liar,” Wilson said calmly, “on the face of the earth.”
I agreed. “But he is connected to half the bootleggers in the U.S.”
“That’s true enough,” Wilson said reflectively. “Back in the twenties, when he was a Justice Department man, he sold 1410-A’s right out of his office.”
Form 1410-A was a federal government permit to deal in alcohol, meant for druggists and other legitimate users.
“Well,” I said, laying it out on the table, “Means says two bootleggers engineered the kidnapping.”
“Really.” Wilson’s voice had turned as flat as last night’s beer.
“They’re both named Max. Max Greenberg and Max Hassel. Heard of ’em?”
“Waxey Gordon’s two top boys?” His sigh conveyed boredom and irritation. “I hardly think two of the biggest beer barons on the East Coast are going to mess around with kidnapping the goddamn Lindbergh baby.”
“Why not?”
His voice had a shrug in it. “They don’t need the money, Heller. They’re businessmen, and kidnapping is not their racket. Besides which, they’re up to their asses in a beer war.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Dutch Schultz and Waxey Gordon’s respective hoodlums have for several months been shooting at each other with some regularity-which as long as innocent bystanders don’t get killed, is fine with me.”
“Well, I think Greenberg and Hassel are worth looking into.”
“They already are being looked into.”
“In relation to the Lindbergh case?”
“Hell no. In relation to income-tax evasion. And we’re working on their boss Waxey, too.”
“You mean, that’s a case you’re working on personally?”
“No. I mean the Intelligence Unit of the IRS.”
I had to try one more time. “Well then, will you alert the agents handling the case that there may be a Lindbergh connection?”
There was a long pause. Finally, he said, “I appreciate your efforts, Heller. I know you feel frustrated, as do I, as does Chief Irey. And you’ve kept us informed about things that Colonel Lindbergh has unwisely kept to himself. I appreciate that. We appreciate that.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming.”
“But…I’m not going to interfere in another agent’s ongoing case. Not on the say-so of Gaston Bullock Means, for Christsake! Heller, you’re a police liaison from Chicago. Stay out of federal business.”
“What about New Jersey business?”
“When did they move Cook County to New Jersey? Why don’t you call up Colonel Schwarzkopf? I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to hear from you. Is there anything else?”
Fucker.
“What about Capone’s boy, Bob Conroy?” I asked. “You guys were going to track him down.”
“Well, we haven’t. If he’s on the East Coast, he’s well hidden. Maybe he’s taking a swim in cement overshoes.”
Wilson was probably right on that score. “What about the spiritualist church? I would think the Marinellis-who seemed to know about Jafsie before Jafsie knew about Jafsie-would be a hell of a good lead, now that the old boy has paid fifty grand out to God knows who.”
“Heller, Pat O’Rourke joined that church, stayed undercover and joined in on their mumbo-jumbo for three weeks, but found not a damn thing.”
I didn’t know what to say. O’Rourke was a good man. Maybe there wasn’t a damn thing to find.
“So what do you suggest?” I asked Wilson.
“I suggest you think about going back to Chicago. We’ve got fifty grand in marked bills floating around out there, and that’s going to lead us to our kidnappers.”
I thanked him sarcastically and he said “you’re welcome” the same way and we both hung up. Evalyn had listened to my half of the conversation, and seemed to have gotten the drift. She was wide-eyed and astounded, whereas I just felt beaten down.
She was holding her cup up for a colored maid to fill with coffee. “I can’t believe the government won’t follow up on these two Max fellows!”
“I can. You got red tape on the one hand, and the word of Gaston Means, who makes Baron Munchhausen look like Abraham Lincoln, on the other.”
“What now?”
I made another phone call. To Colonel Schwarzkopf at the Lindbergh estate. But I didn’t say a word about the two Maxes.
“I’ve had an anonymous tip,” I told him. “About Violet Sharpe.”
“Reliable?” Schwarzkopf asked skeptically.
“Very,” I said, realizing I must have been the first man in history to refer to Gaston Means as a “very reliable” source.
“She’s apparently the inside man on the kidnapping,” I said, “though she may have been an unwitting one.”
“I’ll put Inspector Welch on it.”
“All right, but tell that son of a bitch to use a little finesse, will you?”
Schwarzkopf said nothing in reply; neither one of us chose to fill the silence with anything, and just hung the hell up.
“One more call,” I said to Evalyn, who was still breathlessly listening. I got the long-distance operator again and caught Eliot Ness at his desk at the Transportation Building back home.
“What can you tell me,” I asked, “about Max Greenberg and Max Hassel?”
“Hassel’s real name is Mendel Gassel, Russian immigrant, career rumrunner who paid a big income-tax fine six or seven years ago,” Eliot said matter-of-factly. “Greenberg is a thug from St. Louis made good. Or bad, depending on how you look at it. They’re both dangerous, but Greenberg’s got the brains.”
“Anything else pertinent?”
“Usual stuff,” he said blandly. “Our Narcotics Unit indicted Greenberg for shipping two trunkfuls of heroin to Duluth, back in ’24 or ’25. They didn’t get a conviction. He beat several arson raps, assault raps, too. Then Big Maxie ran prostitutes out of a hotel he owned in New York somewhere, till bootlegging beckoned.”
“He sounds like quite the capitalist. You guys probably would get along great-you’re both Republicans.”
“You must be doing pretty good out there, if you can afford to insult me at long-distance rates.”
“It’s not my nickel. Look, why are Waxey Gordon and Dutch Schultz mixing it up? I thought they were allies.”
“Irving Wexler and Arthur Flegenheimer,” Eliot said archly, using their real names, “are both anticipating the relatively imminent unemployment of yours truly.”
“Huh?”
“They both know beer’s going to be legal, before long, and they’ve set their beady eyes on a big, legitimate market, meaning more customers than they can supply from their present breweries. Schultz has breweries in Yonkers and Manhattan, and Waxey has ’em in Patterson, Union City and Elizabeth. Each wants the other guy’s facilities, and territory.”
“So they’re shooting holes in each other’s gang.”
“Yes. Which is good.”
“Frank Wilson would agree. Why aren’t those breweries you mentioned shut down?”
Eliot laid the sarcasm on with a trowel. “Why, Nate-they’re making near beer there, didn’t you know that? Brewing ’round the clock-even though only a truck or two leaves each brewery each week.”
No doubt hundreds of gallons of real beer flowed via sewer pipes to hidden bottling and barreling plants.
“Eliot, who would Capone be friendlier with, Schultz or Gordon?”
There was a pause. “Funny you should ask. I honestly don’t know if Snorkey has any ties with Wexler, though I’d be surprised if he didn’t.” Then, with studied blandness, he added, “But Flegenheimer was up to the Cook County Jail, not so long ago, visiting Al.”
That made me sit up. “What?”
“Yeah. Lucky Luciano brought the Dutchman around. I understand there was quite a shouting match. Al was serving as mediator for some East-Coast squabble-jail officials let the boys use the execution chamber for their confab…Al sat in the hot squat, like a king on his throne.”
“Jesus.” Even for Chicago, this was beyond the pale.
“Well, Snorkey isn’t going to win his final appeal,” Eliot said edgily, “and he won’t find the federal pen so accommodating. Why are you asking these questions?”
“I have reason to believe Lindbergh’s kid was snatched by Greenberg and Hassel.”
“And you were wondering if it’s within the realm of possibility that Capone’s reach could extend to them?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
There was a brief crackly silence.
Then I said, “Okay. Only now I’m not sure what I should do about it.”
“Telling Irey and Wilson is your best shot.”
“Right. Well, thanks, Eliot.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Sure. You can apologize for getting me in this shit.”
He laughed, but said, “I do apologize. You’ve been out there a hell of a long time. Maybe it’s time to come home.”
“Soon,” I said, and thanked him and hung up,
So I had decided to talk to Greenberg and Hassel myself.
Evalyn wanted me to approach them and see if I could negotiate the safe return of the baby for her. I said I had the same idea, only if the two copped to the snatch, I’d pull in the feds and we’d nail the bastards.
“No more money gets thrown away,” I said. “Grab the sons of bitches responsible, and let ’em know if their people don’t hand over the kid, they take a hard fall.”
“Can you scare them, men like that?”
“When you put a gun in their mouth, you can.”
“But would the police do that?”
“Evalyn, I am the police.”
It was a little before four when I took the stairs at the rear of the hotel down to the floor below, the eighth, where Means said I’d find the two Maxes. I figured there would be body-guards posted, who’d take me where I wanted to go, one way or the other, particularly with a beer war in progress. I took a deep breath and withdrew the nine millimeter, and hid it behind me before I pushed open the door marked “8”-I knew there’d be muscle to deal with. No way around it….
Only the hall was empty.
For a moment, I was confused; then, slowly, like a heat rash, disgust spread over me.
Had Gaston Means done it again? Sent me, like Evalyn to El Paso, on another wild goose chase? I holstered the nine millimeter and slowly, pointlessly I was sure, prowled the hall.
Then I noticed a door, room 824, on which hung a sign that said “Old Heidelberg.” The lettering was Germanic and I was clearly looking at the logotype of a brand name of beer. Or anyway, “near beer.”
But, again, there were no men posted outside the door. I got the gun out, held it behind me and knocked. There was no answer, so I tried again, and finally the door cracked open and a pasty pockmarked face looked at me past a night-latch chain, skeptically, with eyes blacker and deader than a well-done steak.
“What?” he asked. The single word conveyed both menace and distrust.
“Police,” I said. “I have a warrant.”
The black, dead eyes narrowed and I slipped my toe in the cracked door and shouldered it open, popping the night latch.
My host backed up. He was heavyset and short but with a thin man’s face; his lips were the color of raw liver and his hair was cropped, white and ungreased, and as dead looking as his eyes. He wore a light-brown, expensively tailored suit with a white shirt, the dark-brown silk tie loose around a loosened collar, suit coat open. He didn’t seem to be armed.
“Let’s see the warrant,” he said doubtfully, and loudly, as if trying to warn somebody in the next room.
“It’s right here,” I said, and showed him the nine millimeter; it felt a little unsteady in my hand, but not so you’d notice.
“Shit,” he said, making a three-syllable word of it, rolling the dead black eyes. He put his hands slowly, grudgingly, up.
Shutting the door behind me with my heel, I took in a vast living room appointed in plush modern furniture, in various shades of green, from pastel lime to money-color.
He was shaking a little, but mostly he looked coldly, quietly pissed-off. “How did you get past Louie and Sal?” he wondered.
“I didn’t see Louie,” I said, patting him down with one hand, confirming his lack of hardware, almost choking on his pungent after-shave lotion, “and I didn’t see Sal.”
That confused him a little. “What about Vinnie?”
“I didn’t see Vinnie, either.”
“That’s impossible.”
“This is America. Anything is possible. You Hassel or Greenberg?” It sounded like a Jewish fairy tale.
He licked his liver lips. “Hassel. Maxie’s in the office.”
“Let’s go say hello.”
He led me through the endless living room-a wet bar in one corner was stocked better than a Rush Street speak, and against one wall leaned several fancy pigskin bags of golf clubs. We moved through a bedroom to a closed door, which Hassel grudgingly opened, glancing back unhappily at me.
He went in first, the nose of my nine millimeter in his back, as I followed him into the adjoining, smaller bedroom which had been converted into an office with several desks and filing cabinets. A big fleshy man in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, his suit coat draped over the back of his swivel chair, was hunkered over a ledger book at a rolltop desk against the far left wall, on which an Old Heidelberg neon sign, unlit, mingled with various black-and-white business-related photos. The man at the desk had shiny black hair and a big flat head.
“Maxie,” Hassel said, tentatively.
Maxie waved at him impatiently, without looking back. “Just a minute, just a minute.”
“Maxie…”
Maxie sighed, pushed away from the desk, and without looking at us, said, “Where’s the fuckin’ money go?’ Then he turned and blinked twice, as if that was all the sight deserved, his partner with his hands in the air and a stranger with an automatic pointed in both their general directions. “What the hell’s this about?”
“Put your hands on your knees,” I said.
Maxie’s eyes were dark and mournful, his mouth a thin cold line in a face that was puttylike, unlined, unused, as if no emotions had left their tracks. As he slowly lowered his hands toward his knees, one hand lingered near the right-hand pocket of the draped-on-the-chair suit coat, a pocket with a revolver-size lump in it.
“You could die in that chair,” I pointed out.
Maxie blinked again, swallowed and put his hands on his knees.
I moved slowly over there, my back to a wall so I could keep my eyes on both Maxes, and flipped the suit coat off the chair; it dropped to the floor with a clunk. Lucky for us all, his coat didn’t go off.
“Is this a rubout?” Maxie asked, like he was asking the time.
“Not necessarily,” I said, moving back near the doorway, just inside of which I’d left his partner. “We’re just going to talk.”
“If the Dutchman sent you,” he said reasonably, “you’re working the wrong side of the street. We pay real dough. And we can protect you.”
“Listen to Maxie,” Hassel advised, with a nervous sidelong glance.
They didn’t seem to see the inherent fallacy of telling a guy holding a gun on them that they could “protect” him.
“The Dutchman didn’t send me,” I said. “A rich lady from Washington, D.C., did. Named McLean.”
The two men exchanged glances. I couldn’t read anything in it. God knows I tried.
“You fellas look smart enough to know Gaston Means can’t be trusted,” I said.
Maxie Greenberg nodded thoughtfully.
“That bastard lies when he prays,” Hassel confirmed.
“You boys need a new man in the middle,” I said. Which was where I was, keeping the gun on them both, Hassel with his mitts up, Greenberg hands on knees. “I’ll give you the money, you give me the kid.”
Hassel gave me another sidelong nervous glance.
Eyes boring into me like a sniper sighting a victim, Maxie said, “Who are you?”
“A guy looking to make a few bucks and put a kid back in his own crib.”
“What makes you think we got Lindy’s kid?” Hassel said.
“I don’t remember mentioning Lindy’s kid,” I said.
A loud banging out in the other room scared shit out of me; I damn near started firing.
“That’s the door,” Hassel said, flatly. “The one you come in.”
The banging continued, and a voice said, “Boss, it’s Vinnie! It’s Vinnie, boss! Let me in.”
Hassel smiled smugly. “Well, there’s our boy Vinnie. I better let him in, don’t you think?”
“If he’s your boy,” I said, “why doesn’t he have a key?”
“Somebody might take it off him,” Maxie said.
“You gotta be named ‘Max’ to get a key,” Hassel said.
Private club.
“Boss!” the voice called.
“We don’t answer it,” fat Maxie said with the faintest of smiles on his thin lips, “he’ll bust it down.”
I took Hassel by the arm; it was fleshy but there was muscle under there. “Get rid of him. No need to get cute-we’re going to make a straight business deal, here. Fewer faces that see me, the better.”
He looked at me with those black dead eyes, and nodded.
I went over to Maxie, and stood just to his left, between several wooden four-drawer filing cabinets and the corner of the wall the desk was up against.
“If this is business,” Maxie said, hands on his knees, his head tilted to one side in a gesture of reasonableness, “why have any guns at all?”
“I like negotiating from a position of strength.”
There was the garbled sound of conversation out in the living room, then the sound of running, the sound of furniture being knocked over. Maxie started to move, started to rise, but I swung into his gut with the nine millimeter, knocking the wind out of him, sitting him back down, sending him in his chair rattling back against the desk.
And the gunshots started.
They were muffled shots, silenced shots, WHUP! WHUP! WHUP! WHUP! but they were gunshots all right. Some of them were happening in the connecting room, and Maxie, still doubled over, glanced at me with round accusing eyes and I ducked down and flattened back against the wall, using the wooden filing cabinets for cover, and saw Maxie drop his hand toward that coat on the floor, fumbling for the gun in that coat pocket, getting it in hand, a.38 Police Special, sitting on the edge of his chair and looking up toward the doorway, at something and somebody I couldn’t see, looking as if he were about to rise his fat ass up out of that chair, only he never did.
He sat back in the chair, leaning back like a man getting a close shave, but this was no close shave: he was getting bullets pumped into him, into his chest, into his neck, into his face, the top of his head erupting and spattering the Old Heidelberg neon, his legs and feet tap-dancing while the silenced bullets softly sang.
Then the gunshots stopped and left him sitting with his head back and emptying out, blood dripping on the carpeted floor like red rain. Cordite stench scorched the air, gun smoke mixing with blood mist.
And I was cowering against the wall, in the corner made by the wall and the wooden filing cabinet. Unseen, I thought. They didn’t know I was here-did they?
“Phil,” a voice called from the other room. It was a whiny voice, high-pitched. Then, closer: “I did mine.”
“Mine’s done, too, Jimmy.” This voice was a baritone with gravel in it.
The nine millimeter was tight in my hand; my breath was sucked in hard, my heart pounding in my ears. I moved my head, my shoulders carefully, oh so slowly, forward, just barely glancing a sliver’s worth around the edge of the filing cabinet.
I could see them, one standing over by, and the other in, the doorway: the one inside the room must have killed Greenberg; he was wearing a brown topcoat and hat, was average in size and build, but his face was distinctive-as flat as a jockey’s ass, no cheekbones at all, eyes tiny, slitted, oriental-looking. The other guy, the one in the doorway, Hassel’s dispatcher, wore a mustard-color tweedy-looking topcoat and was small; his face was round and his nose pug and his eyes round and bright and cheerful.
These were not faces I would forget.
Neither would I forget their guns, though I couldn’t actually see them: they were big automatics, mostly hidden by fuzzy white towels that had been wrapped turbanlike around the barrels and over the muzzles; both towels, around the nose of each gun, were on fire, orange flames flittering on the scorched area around the nose of each automatic. Neither man seemed to notice.
They were talking softly, laughing lightly as they moved into the outer suite.
I waited ten seconds, then carefully stepped past Maxie, who was draped back across the desk, bloody gray matter seeping out his skull onto the ledger book; well, Eliot said the guy had brains.
I moved quickly, quietly, across the room, the nine millimeter in hand. Slowly, I stalked after the torpedoes, but as I was coming out of the office into the adjoining bedroom, I damn near tripped over Hassel, who was on the floor, his face turned to one side, his dead eyes even deader now, his head cracked open like a melon draining its seeds and pulp.
That stopped me a second. And by the time I was out in the living room, they were almost to the door.
“Police!” I called, and shot at them, specifically at their backs. That’s the best place to shoot a man, after all.
But that goddamn living room stretched out forever, and I missed one guy, and only winged the other, the cheerful one, but he wasn’t so cheerful now, yowling like a dog that got its tail stepped on, mustard-color topcoat splotched with ketchup-red, and the other one, the flat-faced fucker, turned and shot at me, no towel on the gun anymore, a big humongous Army Colt, and the room exploded with noise.
I dropped to the floor, and behind me a pigskin golf bag took a slug like a man and clattered on top of me, pinning me, but I squeezed off three more, as they were bolting out the door, my slugs chewing up wood and plaster.
And they were gone.
For perhaps two seconds, I considered pursuing them.
Then I got out from under the golf clubs, stepped past the still-smoldering burnt towels they’d discarded along the way; the makeshift silencers had been effective-the gunshots had obviously attracted no attention outside the suite itself, although these latest, louder ones no doubt would. I had to get the hell out.
In the hall, gun still in hand, I met no one. Later, I learned that Hassel, Greenberg and Waxey Gordon had rented out the entire eighth floor, which explained why no one had reacted to the gunshots yet. As for Louie, Sal and Vinnie, and any other bodyguards, they were either deceased or paid off; maybe that had actually been Vinnie’s voice, in the hall, as he played Judas for an unspecified number of gold coins.
I could have stuck and talked to the local cops. After all, I could describe the gunmen who shot Greenberg and Hassel. But I didn’t give a fuck who shot Greenberg and Hassel-who were, after all, just victims of this goddamn beer war; maybe Lindy’s kid was now another (inadvertent) victim of that war.
And I wasn’t about to become the next victim, either, which is what I would be if I went around identifying and testifying against mob torpedoes. Mrs. Heller’s little boy didn’t get to be a cop because he was stupid.
Yes, they’d seen me, but I was nobody out east, nobody they’d know, or ever recognize.
Eliot was right: it was time to go home.
All of these thoughts took approximately three seconds, as I rushed toward the door to the rear stairs and went up them, two at a time, my gun still in hand; I didn’t slip it into its holster till just before I went through the door to the ninth floor, where I found a wet-eyed, nearly hysterical Evalyn waiting breathlessly.
“I heard gunshots! Nate, are you…?”
“I’m swell,” I said, grabbing her by the arm, walking with studied calmness down a hall where various guests had stepped from their rooms with looks of alarm and confusion. We went inside her suite but I didn’t tell her what happened, not at first. I just lay on her bed and she held me and patted and smoothed my hair while I trembled like a frightened child.