Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 (32 page)

Now it was Eliot who looked wild-eyed. “Just let him go? Are you nuts? He’ll run!”

“Of course I’m nuts. I got out on a Section Eight, didn’t I? But I don’t think our twisted friend here will run—
if
we convince him he’s convinced us.”

“Then what?”

I nodded toward the A-1 office. “We’ll keep this guy tailed day and night—not too hard a job, since he works the fuck next door to my own detective agency. Fred and I have four ops working full-time, who we’ll tap into.”

Finally Eliot was liking this. “And we’ll see who Lloyd intersects with.”

“That’s right.”

Nodding, Eliot said, “Okay. No reason why I can’t haul Lloyd back in a few days . . . but if any more butchered bodies turn up, I’m not going to sleep so good at night.”

“How are you sleeping now?”

“Not so good.”

Then we walked down the iron steps and apologized profusely to Lloyd Watterson, who wanted to believe us so badly—when (as we untied him) we said we believed him—that he did.

18

It was almost nine by the time Eliot and I made it to the Beverly Hills Hotel. We had followed Lloyd in his prewar Chevy to his rented room in a shoddy two-story wood-frame building on East 31st, and—having called Fred Rubinski to put the surveillance in motion—waited until a fresh-faced A-1 operative named Teddy Hertel showed up to take over for us. We warned Ted that Watterson was a dangerous subject, but I wasn’t too worried—Hertel may have looked like a kid, but he had survived Bloodynose Ridge.

In the airy hotel lobby, with its lush plants and lavish floral arrangements, we seemed to have stepped into a decidedly different world from the one in which the Black Dahlia had been murdered. In the aftermath of our confrontation with the Mad Butcher, these soothing pastel surroundings seemed as surrealistic as Welles’ Crazy House. We stood at the front desk as Eliot checked himself in; the desk clerk assured Eliot that a rental car would be delivered at the hotel, as prearranged, tomorrow morning.

Eliot accompanied me to the bungalow—taking in the well-manicured hedges, flowering shrubs, and colorful gardens of the grounds we wound through, on this cool evening—and I unlocked the door, cracking it open, calling, “Peggy! Are you decent? We have company.”

“Come on in, darling,” she called back, pleasantly. “And we already have company.”

I stepped inside and found, sitting on the sofa, next to a less-than-roaring fire, Peggy—radiant at the end of her long day of filming, in a light blue T-shirt and trimly tailored darker trousers, legs crossed, red-painted toenails peeking through open-toed sandals—seated next to a guest.

“Your old friend Mr. Wilson dropped by,” she said, gesturing to the man seated next to her, “and said it was important. I insisted he wait.”

My “old friend” (who dated way back to this afternoon) was one Arnold Wilson—that cadaverous cook from the McCadden Cafe. In this elegant suite, the shabby short-order jockey was like the non sequitur object in a kid’s “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” puzzle.

“Mr. Wilson was telling me how you were in the war together,” she said.

It was hard for me to believe Peggy had let the acne-scarred, Apache-looking Wilson in, considering he was still wearing the threadbare blue-and-white-striped shirt and faded blue jeans; he’d traded his apron for a ratty brown sportcoat, and was gaping at me with a grin displaying more shades of yellow than a paint-store color chart.

He must have sold her one hell of a bill of goods.

While I stood there giving Wilson a look that would have melted ice in a glass and maybe the glass, too, my wife bounded up, and went over to greet Eliot, hugging him.

They were making small talk—since Peggy and I had eloped, this was the first chance Eliot had had to offer congratulations and kiss the bride—and the tall, twig-thin Wilson was rising from the plush couch, trembling, his grin dissolving into an apologetic pout, his big bony hands open in supplication.

I had a hand on his wiry arm, squeezing, staring up into his narrow eyes, pointed nose poking at me, when he whispered, “Sorry I laid it on so thick, Nate . . . Mr. Heller. I just knew it was important to talk to you, right away.”

“Why?”

“Bobby Savarino got bailed out—the Ringgolds were good for it, like I thought they might be. He’s home right now, and he’s willin’ to talk—you said you’d give me another twenty if I set up a meet, remember?”

I let go of his arm. “I appreciate this.”

Wilson sighed, relieved; his breath was like old gym socks. “Good. Good.”

Placing a hand up on his scrawny shoulder, I smiled and said, “But, Arnold—I don’t appreciate you invading where I live.”

“Jeez, I’m sorry—it’s a hotel. You said I could contact you here—”

“I like to keep what I do for a living separate from my private life—specifically, away from my wife. Do you understand, Arnold?”

“Sure, Mr. Heller.”

“Call me Nate, Arnold. Now let’s go talk to your friend Bobby Savarino.”

Eliot’s presence seemed to make Wilson nervous—I didn’t know whether the cook had ever heard of Eliot before, but Ness was not hard to make as a cop (even if he wasn’t one, anymore)—so I suggested to my old friend that he go ahead and get settled in his room. Peg and I would be going out for a late supper and he could join us later.

Eliot went along with this, but he knew what I was up to: Savarino was more likely to talk freely, one-on-one.

Soon I was behind the Buick’s wheel, following Wilson up Sunset in his beat-up Ford, taking a right on North La Brea. The Savarinos lived on North Sycamore just off Hollywood Boulevard, near the Tinsel Town business district, tonight typified by a premiere down the block at Grauman’s Chinese, complete with stars, searchlights, limousines, radio announcers, cops holding back fans behind roped-off carpeted aisles—the world of glamour so many clamored after.

But just a block or two away, around the corner, was the sort of quiet residential neighborhood others of us longed for, a bouquet of one- and two-story stucco bungalows—white, green, yellow, pink, blue—with driveways to two-car garages, and
close-cropped lawns with the occasional palm or pepper tree. In the ivory of moonlight, daubed with streetlamp glow, these bungalows looked damn near idyllic to a returning combat veteran like yours truly. That a petty heist artist, pretending to be a war hero, had achieved this postwar paradise was a little grating.

I parked behind Wilson and followed the scarecrow-in-dungarees up the winding walk of one of the larger dwellings on the block, a pink, red-tile-roofed two-story stucco. On the little cement stoop, Wilson grinned down nervously at me as he punched the doorbell, making a tiny electric-chair buzz.

“Bobby may not like you being a reporter,” Wilson said.

“I told you I’m not a reporter—just a dick doing some backgrounding.”

“Oh yeah, that’s a lot better—makes you a reporter with a gun.”

Wilson had a good eye. I was in fact wearing the nine-millimeter under my left arm—I’d taken the time to sling it on, under a sportcoat supposedly tailored not to reveal its presence, before taking this little excursion into the home life of armed robbers.

The door opened to reveal a pretty, pretty hard bottle blonde in her early thirties with permed curls, dead blue eyes, and a painted-on beauty mark near an overly red-rouged mouth, from which dangled a recently lit cigarette. Her complexion was a mystery beneath layers of pancake, but her busty figure wasn’t, in a light blue short-sleeved, V-necked angora sweater and formfitting gray slacks. She had a glass of beer in one red-nailed hand.

“Hiya, Helen,” Wilson said to her.

When she spoke, her voice was nasal and high pitched and as melodic as a car horn; she was a little drunk. “This is the guy wants to talk to Bobby?” she asked Wilson.

“Yeah.”

She looked me over, then decided to smile—it wasn’t half bad, even fairly white. “You’re kinda cute.”

“You don’t make my eyes bleed, either.”

“You know just what to say to a girl. Come on in, boys.”

She made a sweeping gesture for us to enter. We were in the vestibule of a two-flat: steps to an apartment rose in front of us,
and Helen was holding open a door at right. Wilson went in and as I passed her, Helen brushed the angora shelf of her bosom against me and gave me a promising look—which was the most fun I’d had all day.

The interior walls were stucco, too, same shade of pink as the exterior—you could turn this house inside out and nobody would notice. We were in a living room, which connected with a dining room off which a door fed a hallway to a bathroom and, presumably, bedrooms. The kitchen could be glimpsed beyond the dining room.

Everything was very nice, very new, and as mismatched as a Sears and Roebuck warehouse sale—a royal-blue mohair couch with walnut trim, a big flamingo-trimmed mirror over it; a mint-green button-tufted lounge chair; a console radio-phonograph in a mahogany cabinet, emitting the soft strains of a Benny Goodman platter; occasional pieces in stylings both modern and colonial, walnut and oak, dark and blond.

All of this—and the impressive array of gleaming white appliances winking at me from the kitchen—had either been boosted, or bought from (or the results of swaps with) one or more hot-goods fences. Bobby Savarino and the rest of the McCadden Group had discovered the way to achieve their postwar dreams: stealing.

The pleasantly trampy-looking blonde showed us her firm bottom, packed as it was into the gray slacks, as she headed toward the bedrooms, saying, “I’ll get the kids for you.”

As she disappeared, I said to Wilson, who had plopped himself in the lounge chair and was lighting up a Chesterfield, “Kids?”

“She means the happy married couple,” Wilson explained, smoke streaming from his nostrils, dragon-style. “Bobby and Patsy . . . Patsy used to be Patsy Green, the stripper.”

I blinked. “Not, ‘No Pasties for Patsy’ Green?”

“That’s the one.”

“Jesus, she played Chicago. The Rialto.”

Maybe five years ago, I’d seen her perform—never met her—a bosomy jailbait redhead who was notorious for doffing her pasties right before she took her bow.

Bobby Savarino was holding his wife’s hand as they walked through the dining room into the living room. The petite former stripper was still a beautiful woman, mane of red hair brushing her shoulders, her large, luminous, almond-shaped green eyes heavy with mascara and green eye shadow, her full lips brightly red-lipsticked, her famed bosom bigger than ever, which was not surprising, considering she was easily seven months’ pregnant, in a blue-and-pink floral maternity top, blue-jean pedal pushers, and open-toed sandals.

I recognized Savarino from his newspaper pictures: good-looking kid with dark curly hair and dark long-lashed eyes, almost pretty. He was in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a black tie loose around his collar, pleated black trousers. He had a slump-shouldered, vaguely embarrassed, air.

Trailing after Savarino was another guy I recognized from the papers: his accomplice, Henry Hassau, a hook-nosed little guy with a wispy mustache. It soon became clear Hassau had somehow managed to snag the bosomy blonde as his wife.

Seemed the Hassaus had the upstairs apartment, and the couples spent a lot of time together, mostly downstairs, in the Savarinos’ quarters.

Introductions were made. I shook Savarino’s hand and Hassau’s, and took off my hat out of respect to the “little” woman, if any seven-months-pregnant dame can so be described. Somebody found me a hardback chair across from Mr. and Mrs. Savarino on the couch, with Wilson smoking in the lounge chair, nearby. The Hassaus sat at the dining room table, but the rooms were so openly adjacent, they could hear everything we said, and pitch in their two cents occasionally, as well.

Mrs. Hassau asked me if I wanted a beer, and I declined; she seemed to be the only one drinking.

As we got to business, Mrs. Savarino made the opening salvo in a Betty Boopish yet hard-edged voice. “Mr. Heller, we need to come to an understanding.”

“All right. What do you have in mind?”

“Bobby will talk to you for one hundred dollars,” she said, lifting her hand locked in his.

“That’s kind of steep.”

“We need to raise some money.”

“Why don’t you borrow some from your jeweler friends, the Ringgolds?”

She shifted uncomfortably on the sofa—not entirely due to the pregnancy, I gathered. “We, uh . . . have borrowed quite enough from them, getting Bobby bailed out.”

“Okay, then. A C-note it is.”

She raised a red-nailed finger. “And none of us can be quoted—not in print, not in private to the police. We’ll help you gather some facts, but that’s all.”

“All right,” I said. “Can Bobby talk now?”

“If you’re going to be a wise-ass,” she said coolly, “it’s going to cost you more.”

I raised my hands in surrender—this was no average housewife—then got out my billfold and handed her two twenties and a ten.

“That’s fifty dollars, Mr. Heller,” she said, handing the money to her husband, who folded it and slipped it in a trouser pocket.

“Fifty more after we’ve talked—after I know it’s worth fifty more. Fair enough?”