Silence and cigar smoke filled the air.
“I appreciate the words of advice,” I said, rising. “I’ll finish this job for Bioff, and be done with him.”
“You do that. The bastards’ve damn near drained me dry. I had to sell the Star and Garter for a lousy seven gee’s, just to pay my goddamn taxes, and when they found out, they took half of that! Stay the hell clear of ’em, Heller.”
“I’ll do that. And you stay clear of Pegler, or anybody he might send to sniff around.”
“Yeah, yeah. They won’t get word one out of Jack Barger.”
The baggy pants comics and a couple of girls from the pony line were doing the “Crazy House” routine on stage, when I came downstairs, leaving Barger behind. I watched from the back of the house, watched another stripper. good-looking dame with black hair, and somebody tapped me on the shoulder.
Barger again.
“You pay yet?” he asked.
“No.”
“You must still think you’re a cop. Everything’s a free ride. Is it true Sally Rand’s in town?”
“Yeah.”
“You think you’ll see her? Barney says you two were an item, once.”
“I might see her.”
“I hear she’s broke.”
“For the moment.”
“If she’ll stoop to a grand a week, I’ll cancel my next booking and make room for her.”
“I’ll tell her if I see her. But I don’t think she does burlesque.”
“She will. She’s not getting any younger.”
Then he disappeared, and soon so did I, around the corner to my office.
Two other names on Bioff’s list, Barney Balaban of the mighty Balaban and Katz chain, and James Coston, who managed the Warner Brothers chain in Chicago, were not receptive to visits by me. When I called from my office to make appointments, they insisted instead on taking care of our business over the phone.
“Willie Bioff wants you to be aware that Westbrook Pegler is in town,” I told Balaban, “asking embarrassing questions.”
After a long pause a confident baritone returned: “Tell Mr. Bioff that no one has been around to see me, and that should anyone do so, no embarrassing answers will be forthcoming from me. Good afternoon, Mr. Heller.”
Coston was also inclined toward brevity: “Tell Willie not to worry. I won’t talk.”
These distinguished representatives of the Chicago motion picture community had, in their few short phrases, spilled as much in their way as Barger had in his.
They both knew Willie Bioff, and they both shared secrets with him they had no intention of revealing to the press, or anyone else, for that matter.
Coston had told me volumes by simply repeating a typical Bioff aphorism; as a parting shot, I’d said, “Willie said to tell you if you got cornered, somehow, to lie, lie, lie.”
“Tell Willie it’s like he told me, once, when he threatened me with a projectionist’s strike: ‘If the only way to get the job done is to kill Grandma, then Grandma’s going to die.’”
Now, only one name remained on Willie’s list: my old flame Estelle Carey.
Nicky Dean’s girl.
She was wearing a skin-pink gown with sequins on the bosom, cut just low enough to maintain interest, her curled pageboy barely brushing her creamy shoulders. Tall, almost willowy, her supple curves and picture-book prettiness made her look twenty, when she was thirty. At least she did in the soft, dim lighting of the Colony Club, Nicky Dean’s ritzy Rush Street cabaret, where Estelle Carey was overseeing a battery of “26” tables-numbered boards about three feet square at which mostly male customers shook dice in a leather cup and “threw for drinks.” Each table was in turn overseen by another young woman, a “26 girl,” a breed as much a Chicago fixture as wind or graft, pretty birds sitting on high stools luring homely pigeons. Here at the Colony, with its upstairs casino, the girls were on the lookout for the compulsive customer ready to graduate from the 26 table to “some real action” on the second floor, roulette, craps, blackjack.
Estelle was the acknowledged queen of the 26 girls; she even rated mention as such in the gossip columns, where the story was often told of her having taken ten grand from one high-roller in two hours.
She wasn’t playing tonight; these days, that was for special occasions only. She was milling, chatting, glad-handing-she was a Chicago celebrity herself, in a minor way; a bush league Texas Guinan. She’d come far from her waitress days at Rickett’s.
Not that Rickett’s was a shabby place for a girl just twenty, at the time, to work. It was the Lindy’s of Chicago, your typical white-tiled lunchroom but open twenty-four hours, a Tower Town mainstay famous for attracting bohemian types and show people and your occasional North Side gangster. Rickett’s was also known for its good, reasonably priced steaks, which was what brought me there, in my early plainclothes days. What kept me coming back, though, was the pretty blonde waitress.
Nick Dean must’ve met her there as well, but that was after I’d stopped seeing her. We only lasted a couple of months, Estelle and me. But they were some months.
I’d run into her occasionally since, but we’d never more than had coffee, and not that, in five or six years.
So now I was edging through the packed Colony Club-this was Saturday night after all-with its art-deco decor, all chromium and glass and shiny black and shiny white, its crowd of conventioneers and upper-income types whose recreation in better weather was sailing skiffs and larger craft in Lake Michigan, the muffled sounds of ersatz Benny Goodman from the dine-and-dance area adjacent mingling with the noise of dice-and-drink, wondering if she’d recognize me.
Then I was facing her.
She gave me her standard, charming smile, one to a customer, and then it sort of melted into another kind of smile, a smile that settled in a dimple in one cheek.
“Nate,” she said. “Nate Heller.”
“I’d forgotten how goddamn green your eyes are.”
“You know what you always said.” Her eyes tried to twinkle, but the effect was melancholy.
“Yeah. That all they lacked was the dollar signs.”
“Maybe you just didn’t look close enough.”
“You mean if I had I’d’ve seen ’em?”
She tossed her blond curls. “Or not.”
Somebody jostled me-we were holding up traffic-and she took me by the arm and led me through the smoky, noisy bar to a wide open stairway, which was fitting for this wide open place. It separated the bar from the restaurant and wound gently up to two shiny ebony doorways overseen by a bouncer in a white coat and black dress pants and a shine he could look down in to check how mean he looked. She and the bouncer nodded at each other, and he pushed the doors open for us and I followed her on through.
We threaded our way through the crowded casino, a big open room with heavily draped walls and indirect lighting and action at every table, noise and smoke and the promise of easy money and easy women. Some of the men here had brought a date or possibly even a wife; but many of these girls in skintight gowns were from the same table as the 26 girls downstairs.
At the bar in back, Estelle approached a fleshy-faced man with wire glasses who stood near, but not quite at, the bar; he wore a white jacket and dress pants and was keeping an eye on the casino before him, arms folded, patrons stopping to chat and him smiling and nodding, occasionally dispatching directions to other, lesser white-jacketed employees.
We waited while he did that very thing, and then Estelle introduced us.