But his expression remained glum.
“What brings you here?” I said. “Who got a medal today?”
“No one, I’m afraid.” He looked back toward my office. “I’m glad you’re here, Private. There’s a young woman who needs you.”
I ran down the hall and threw the door open and she was sitting there, with the telegram in her hands, sitting on that couch I’d caught them humping on.
She wasn’t crying. She was dazed, like she’d been hit by a board. Prim and pretty in her white frilly blouse and navy skirt. A single rose in a vase on the desk nearby.
Telegram in her hands.
“The newspapers said we beat them,” she said, hollowly.
I sat next to her. “I know.”
“You said he’d just be mopping up.” No accusation in her voice; just an empty observation.
“I’m sorry, Gladys.”
“I don’t think I can work this morning, Mr. Heller.”
“Oh, Gladys, come here.”
And I held her in my arms and she cried into my chest. She cried and cried, heaving racking sobs, and if ever I’d written her off as a cold fish, well, to hell with me.
Sapperstein came in a few minutes later. He was still wearing the black arm band for his brother; it could do double duty, now. I called her mother in Evanston and Lou drove her home.
That left me alone in the office, wondering how Frankie Fortunato could be dead and I could be alive. Young Frankie. Old me. Shit. I wadded up the goddamn newspaper and shoved it in the wastecan. But the crumpled headline, spelling GUADNAL, seemed real enough to me now.
I sat at the desk in the inner office-my office once, Sapperstein’s for the moment-and made some calls regarding an insurance investigation in Elmhurst. It felt good to work. The mundane, which when I first got back had driven me crazy, was becoming my salvation. Day-to-day living, everyday working, was something I could get lost in. By eleven-thirty I even felt hungry. I was about to break for lunch when I heard somebody come in the outer office.
I got up from behind the desk and walked to the door and looked out at a beautiful young woman of about twenty-five in a dark fur stole and a dark slinky dress. Suspiciously slinky for lunchtime, but then when it was showing off a nice slender shape like that, who was complaining?
She stood at an angle facing Gladys’s empty desk. She had seamed nylons on; nice gams.
“My secretary’s out,” I said.
“You’re Mr. Heller?”
“That’s right.”
She smiled, and it was a lovely smile; pearly white teeth, red lipstick glistening on full lips. Her big dark eyes, under strong arching eyebrows, appraised me, amused somehow. Her black hair was pulled back behind her head, on which sat, at a jaunty angle, a black pillbox hat. If she wasn’t a showgirl once, I’d eat her hat. Or something.
“I don’t have an appointment,” she said, moving toward me slowly. Swaying a little. It seemed somewhat calculated, or is the word “calculating”? She extended one dark-gloved hand. I didn’t know whether she wanted me to kiss it or shake it or maybe crouch down and let her knight me. I settled for squeezing it.
“No appointment needed,” I said, smiling at her, wondering why she was so seductively cheerful; most women who come into a private detective agency are nervous and/or depressed, as their business is generally divorce-oriented. What the hell. I showed her into my office.
She took the chair across from the desk, but before I could get back behind it, she said, “Would you mind closing the door?”
“Nobody’s out there,” I said.
She smiled; no teeth this time. Sexy and wry. “Humor me, Mr. Heller.”
“Consider yourself humored,” I said, and shut the door, and sat behind Sapperstein’s desk.
“I’d like you to find something for me,” she said. Hands folded in her lap, in which a small black purse also resided.
“And what would that be?”
“A certain book.”
“A certain book.”
“A diary.”
Okay. I was awake now.
“A diary,” I said. “Yours?”
“No, Mr. Heller. Must we be coy?”
“You’re the one in the tight dress.”
“You’re an amusing fella.”
“In a tight dress I am. I’m a pip in spike heels.”
“Estelle Carey’s diary, Mr. Heller. A thousand dollars, and your assurance that you’ve made no copies.”
I cracked my knuckles. “You see, that’s why I never got in the blackmail business. There’s no way to prove to the customer that you’ve given ’em the only copy of the goods.”
Her smile seemed just a touch nervous, now. “We’d trust you. We hear you’re a man of your word.”
“Who told you that?”
“A certain Mr. Nitti.”
“Gee, I wonder which Mr. Nitti you might be talking about. I’m coy? Who are you, lady?”
No smile at all. “I’m someone who wants to recover Estelle Carey’s dairy. We’ve asked around. We know you have it. We know you bought it. If you’re intending to sell it to the press, we’ll top their best offer. If you’re planning blackmail, we’d advise you against it. You made an investment; I’m here to help you make a killing on it. But if you refuse, well, then, there are killings and killings, aren’t there?”
“Fuck you.”
She stood and she came around the side of Sapperstein’s desk and sat on the edge of it and hiked her dress up, legs open a hair, if you’ll pardon the expression; showgirl, all right.
“That could be arranged,” she said.