Just as I was leaving, he said, “If your trouble sleeping persists, check in at the nearest military hospital. They can give you something for it.”
I guess I hadn’t fooled him so good, after all.
“Thanks, Doc,” I said again, and headed back to my ward, to pack my sea bag.
It didn’t matter what happened back there in that shell hole; that was over, that was history. What mattered was not that Monawk died, but that some of us had lived through it. Fremont and Whitey hadn’t, of course, but Watkins did and D’Angelo and the two Army boys and Barney, hell, Barney was a hero. They said he killed twenty-two Japs with those grenades he was lobbing. They also said he was still over there, on the Island. Still fighting. How could he still be over there?
And me here?
I sat on the edge of my rack and thought about how screwy it seemed, going back to Chicago to see some federal prosecutor about Frank Nitti and Little New York Campagna and the Outfit bilking the movie industry. What did that have to do with anything, today? Who cared? Didn’t they know there was a war on? It seemed another world, Nitti’s Chicago-a lifetime ago.
Not three short years…
The deli restaurant on the corner was calling itself the Dill Pickle, now, and the bar next door was under new management. Barney Ross’s Cocktail Lounge had moved to nicer, more spacious digs, across from the Morrison Hotel, where Barney kept an “exclusive” suite. I lived at the Morrison myself, in a two-room suite, not so exclusive.
Which was still a step up from the days, not so long ago, when I slept in my office, on a Murphy bed, playing nightwatchman for my landlord in lieu of rent. My landlord, the owner of the building, was then, and was now, one Barney Ross.
Who had walked over from the Morrison with me on this brisk Monday morning, back to the former site of his cocktail lounge, above which was-or anyway had been-my one-room office. He wasn’t the only one who was expanding.
“I’m anxious to see what you’ve done to the place,” Barney said, working to be heard over the rumble of the El.
I stepped around a wino and opened the door for him and he started up the narrow stairway (Barney, not the wino). “No permanent improvements,” I said to his back as we climbed. “I wouldn’t want your investment to appreciate.”
“Ever since you started paying rent,” he said, grinning back at me like a bulldog who spotted his favorite hydrant, “you just ain’t your charming self.”
Actually, I was feeling very much my charming self this morning. Very much full of my charming self. Life was good. Life was sweet. Because business was good. And that’s sweet in my book.
I was a small businessman, you see. But not as small as I used to be. I was coming up in the world.
You couldn’t tell that based upon Barney’s building, however; this block on Van Buren Street, the hovering El casting its shadow down the middle of the street, remained a barely respectable hodgepodge of bars and hockshops and flophouses. And our building wasn’t exactly the Monadnock. We had a couple of cut-rate doctors, one of whom seemed to be an abortionist, another of whom purported to be a dentist; anyway, they both made extractions, including from wallets, and even an old pickpocket-detail dick like me couldn’t do anything about it. We also had three shysters and one palm reader and various marginal businesses that came and went.
And one detective agency, now proudly expanded to a suite of two offices, count ’em, two. At the far end of the hall on the fourth floor was my old office, now partitioned off and used by my two freshly hired operatives, whereas the office next door, looking out on Plymouth Court and the Standard Club (a scenic view of the El now denied me), was mine and mine alone.
Almost.
I opened the door, the pebbled glass of which bore the fresh inscription A-1 DETECTIVE AGENCY, NATHAN HELLER, PRESIDENT (I was afraid if I touched it, it’d smear), and Barney and I entered my outer office. My outer office! Hot damn. All I needed was a stack of year-old magazines and there wouldn’t be a waiting room in the Loop that had anything on me.
I also had Gladys.
“Good morning, Mr. Heller,” she said, smiling with no sincerity whatsoever. “No calls.”
I glanced at my watch. “It’s five after nine, Gladys.” We opened at nine; Pinkerton never slept-Heller did. “How long have you been here, anyway?”
“Five minutes, Mr. Heller. During which time there were no calls.”
“Call me Nate.”
“That wouldn’t be correct, Mr. Heller.” She stood from behind the small dark beat-up desk Barney had given me from downstairs, when he moved his cocktail lounge. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just keep working on straightening out your files.”
My four wooden file cabinets were in the outer office here with Gladys, now, and she was putting them in order, something which hadn’t been done for a couple of years. Gladys, by the way, was twenty-four years old, had brunette hair that brushed her shoulders, curling in at the bottom, a fashion a lot of girls seemed to be wearing. None more attractively than Gladys; right now, as she stood filing, in her frilly yet somehow businesslike white blouse and a black skirt that was tight around the sweet curves of her bottom and then flared out, she was any lecherous employer’s dream.
Unfortunately, that dream was unlikely ever to come true. I had hired her for her sweet bottom and her delicately featured face-did I mention the dark brown eyes, their long lashes, the pouty puckered mouth? That sulky mouth should’ve tipped me off; some goddamn detective I was. Anyway, I hired her chiefly for her rear end, noting that her secretarial background (letter from former employer, secretarial school diploma) looked pretty good, as well.
But she double-crossed me. She was turning out to be an intelligent, efficient, utterly businesslike secretary, without the slightest personal interest in her boss.
Barney nudged me.
“Uh, Gladys. This is my friend Mr. Ross. He’s our landlord.”
She turned away from the filing cabinet and gave Barney a smile as lovely as it was disinterested “That’s nice,” she said.
“Barney Ross,” I said. “The boxer?”
She’d already turned back to her filing. “I know,” she said, tonelessly. “A pleasure,” she added, without any. She had the cheerfully cold cadence of a telephone operator.
Barney and I moved past her, past the dated-looking “modernistic” black-and-white couch and chairs I’d bought back in ’34, in the art-deco aftermath of the World’s Fair, and opened the door in the midst of the pebbled-glass-and-wood wall that separated Gladys from my inner office. My old desk was in here, a big scarred oak affair I’d grown used to. I had sprung for a new, comfortable swivel chair so I could lean back and not fall out the double windows behind me. Barney got it wholesale for me. There was a secondhand but new-looking tan leather couch from Maxwell Street against the right wall, on which hung several photographs, including portraits of Sally Rand and a certain other actress. Both photos were signed to me “with love.” Something that personal has no business in an office, but the two famous female faces impressed some of my clients, and gave me something to look at when business was slow. Against the other wall were several chairs and some fight photos of Barney, which he’d given me, one of them signed. Not with love.
“She’s a sweet dish,’’ Barney said, jerking a thumb back in Gladys’s direction, “but not a very warm one.”
“I knew it when I hired her,” I said, offhandedly.
“The hell you say!”
“Her looks didn’t mean a damn to me. I looked at her qualifications and saw she was the right man for the job.”
“You looked at her qualifications all right. She was friendlier when she interviewed for the position, I’ll bet.”
“Yup,” I admitted. “And it’s the only position I’ll ever get her in. Oh, well. How’s your love life?”
He and his wife Pearl were separated; he’d gone east, briefly, to work in her father’s clothing business and it hadn’t worked out-the marriage or the business arrangement. Back to the Cocktail Lounge for Barney.
“I got a girl,” he said, almost defensively. “How about you?”
“I’m swearin’ off the stuff.”
“Seriously, Nate, you’re not gettin’ any younger. You’re a respectable businessman. Why don’t you settle down and start a family?”
“You don’t have any kids.”
“It’s not for lack of trying. Aw, it’s probably for the best, since it didn’t work out with Pearl and me. But Cathy, she’s another story.”
His chorus girl.
“Out of the frying pan,” I said. “When you’re in my business, it’s hard to have much faith in the sanctity of marriage.”
He frowned sympathetically. “Doing a lot of that sort of work these days, are ya?”