Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 (33 page)

She gave it a moment of thought, nodded.

“So, Bobby,” I said, “who was it offered you twenty-five hundred to bump off Mickey Cohen?”

His wife answered, green eyes flashing. “That son of a bitch Jack Dragna!”

I said to her husband, “Jack Dragna personally? What, did he come here to the house?”

Which was about as likely as Louis B. Mayer dropping a film print off at a theater.

“It wasn’t Dragna hisself,” Savarino said. He had a husky, medium-pitched voice. When he spoke, he emphasized points with wags and nods of his head, making his curly hair bounce. “Three guys I never seen before come around, it was three weeks ago last night, Thursday night . . . I know ’cause we was listening to
Burns and Allen
. Henry and Helen and Arnie here was over, having beers and just listening to that daffy dame on the radio.”

“That Gracie Allen kills me,” Hassau said, smiling absently.

The blonde he was married to sipped her beer.

Taking no time to reflect on this cozy evening at home among felons, I asked Savarino, “And you never saw these guys before?”

“Don’t look so surprised. We’re not local. We come out from the East Coast, been here less than a year, knocking over scores. These guys offered me twenty-five hundred to take Cohen out.”

“You’re no torpedo, Bobby—why you?”

He shrugged, sighed, holding on to his wife’s hand; the beautiful redhead was gazing at him supportively. “I was pals with Benny Gamson, you know—the Meatball.”

So-called because he was shaped like a meatball, his legs like toothpicks stuck in it.

“When I knew Gamson in Chicago,” I said, “he and Cohen were buddies—the Meatball was a card mechanic in Cohen’s bust-out joint.”

Savarino was shaking his head. “They weren’t buddies out here. Cohen gets something like two-fifty a week protection payoff, each, from all the other bookies in town . . . only the Meatball tells him to go stuff hisself.”

Gamson had been shot to death in October.

“How did you and Gamson get friendly?” I asked him.

“He was my bookie. He was willing to extend credit, no strongarm stuff, no leg-breaking. Hell of a nice guy. But I didn’t love him—I wouldn’t whack Mickey Cohen over him, even for that kind of money.”

His wife said, rather proudly, “My Bobby’s not a killer.”

From the other room Hassau said, in his thin high-pitched voice, “These guys Dragna sent, they knew we was associated with Al Green, and that Al was pals with Benny Siegel, and that meant we had easy entree to Cohen, who is also pals with Siegel.”

Apparently bored with this criminal flow chart, Hassau’s wife got up to go into the nearby kitchen.

“Incidentally,” I said to Hassau, “did your friends the Ringgolds bail out Green and that other guy from your string?”

“Marty?” Hassau said. “Marty Abrams? Naw, him and Al can
afford their own bail. The Ringgolds was helping us out, so that Al didn’t have, you know, the whole financial burden.”

The blonde in the angora sweater returned with a fresh glass of beer. She said to her husband, “Tell ’em about what happened after you turned those bastards down.”

But it was Savarino who picked up on the story. “A couple days later, Patsy answers the door, and they push right past her—Christ, her pregnant like that, they coulda hurt her or the baby or something, just bulled right in.”

“We were playin’ cards,” Hassau said, “with the girls.”

Savarino, trembling with the memory, said, “They were big wops, three of ’em . . . One held a rod on us, and the other two started beating the shit out of us, one at time.”

His wife was running her fingers through his curly hair, soothing him, settling him.

“Fuckers,” Hassau said. “In front of our wives!”

Helen Hassau, unimpressed, sipped her beer, leaning so far over the table, her angora-clad breasts flattened out.

“They used a rubber hose on me,” Savarino said, “and pistol-whipped poor Henry, there.”

“I had a goose egg for a week,” Hassau said, with the expression of a kid who had a bully steal his prize marble.

“They didn’t want you to squeal to Cohen,” I said.

“No,” Savarino said, shaking his head. “See, Jack Dragna acts like he gets along with Cohen, but really he hates that little Jew like poison. Cohen and Siegel got shoved down Dragna’s throat by the East Coast Combination.”

“So you didn’t warn Cohen about the hit?” I said.

“Hell no. Anyway, they musta called the thing off, ’cause nobody’s thrown any bullets at Mickey, lately.”

“I’d like to get my hands on those guys what roughed us up,” Hassau whined.

His blonde wife was gulping her beer. She was the kind of broad you’d kill for to get in bed, and die if you woke up next to.

“Are you sure these goons were Dragna’s?” I asked. “Cohen has other enemies, particularly among bookies he’s muscled.”

Wilson, who had just been sitting quietly smoking, said, “I
checked around on these guys . . . Dragna and this lieutenant of his, Jimmy Utley, have lunch every day at Lucey’s.”

I knew Lucey’s—it was a movie-industry hangout on Melrose across from Paramount Studios.

Wilson was saying, “Two of the three guys who come here, and made that twenty-five-hundred-buck offer—I saw ’em walkin’ Dragna outa the restaurant, after lunch.”

“Bodyguards,” I said.

Wilson nodded and winked, an action that made his gaunt face cartoonish.

“Tell me, Bobby,” I said, turning to the hang-dog Savarino, “what made you decide to share this little episode with the cops?”

“I was tryin’ to cut a deal—I figure, I give ’em a big fish like Dragna, they’ll let me and my friends swim away.”

“As in, they swam and they swam all over the dam?” I asked, referring to the hit parade’s “Three Little Fishies.”

“Somethin’ like that,” Savarino said, glumly.

“Only now you’re wise to the fact that the LAPD is in Dragna’s pocket,” I said.

“Not all of ’em are!” Savarino said, somewhat indignantly. “Take that guy Hansen, f’r instance—he’d love to get Dragna by the short and curlies . . . and the papers, they’d eat it up, right?”

“Maybe.” I said to the redhead, “After your hubby started squealing, did those three Dragna thugs come around again?”

She shook her head. “No, but we got all these threatening phone calls, both Helen and me, terrible, foul, frightening, awful. . . .” She covered her mouth, her eyes moistening.

Finally the blonde perked up. From the dining room, she said, “We got a threatening note in the mail, too—one of them cut-and-paste jobs.”

“Not in the mail,” Mrs. Savarino said, “the mail-
box
—somebody just walked right up and stuck that foul thing in.” She shivered. “They were outside our door, on our front stoop.”

“One of them threatened our baby,” Savarino said.

“Yeah,” the blonde said, “one said on the phone he had a baseball bat all picked out for Patsy’s belly.”

Still shivering, Mrs. Savarino cuddled close to her husband,
who slipped an arm around her. That arm stiffened when I broached my next topic.

“Which brings us to Elizabeth Short,” I said, wondering if that name would create fireworks between the Savarinos.

“She was a friend of Helen’s,” Mrs. Savarino said.

“Real good friend of mine,” Helen chimed in.

All right—so that was the party line.

“So,” I said to them all, “you figure Jack Dragna had this girl killed and her mouth slashed . . . informer-style . . . because by striking somebody within your circle, that would quiet Bobby, here.”

“I have to admit,” Savarino said, “hearing about these phone calls and that threatening note, that didn’t mean shit to me. I didn’t think they’d come near me or my family, with what I had on ’em. And, the spot I was in . . . still am in . . . I figured my best shot was, try to deal my way out. . . .”

“Then the next day the Short girl turns up cut in half in that vacant lot.”

Everybody but me looked at the floor.

“Yeah,” Savarino sighed, nodding, “and that’s when I fucking zipped it—haven’t said a word since . . . and Dragna hasn’t bothered us. Not at all.”

The former stripper hugged her husband’s arm. “That’s all we know, Mr. Heller. You got the rest of our money?”

“It’s risky talking to me,” I said, bothered. “Even without being quoted, if this gets in the papers, Dragna will put two and two together—”

Mrs. Savarino interrupted: “I think that gangster will have the sense to lay low, now that the woman he killed is the biggest story since the war.”

Her chin was high and her eyes narrow and glimmering. She was a tough cookie, Mrs. Savarino—and a beauty. I had to know what kind of idiot would cheat on a woman this gorgeous, and this strong.

“I’ll give you your second fifty, Mrs. Savarino, but only after I have a few minutes in private with Bobby.”

“There are no secrets between us,” she said.

But her husband was sitting there with a whipped-puppy look that told me otherwise.

“I met your terms, Mrs. Savarino—now, meet mine, or you’re gonna have to settle for fifty bucks.”

The ex-stripper said nothing, staring coldly at me for several seconds, then studying her husband, the same way. Then she shook her head.

I shrugged, and stood. “Your choice.”

Savarino patted his wife’s hand, which was gripping his arm. “Baby, let me talk to Mr. Heller, alone, for a minute. We really can use that extra fifty bucks.”

She sighed and watching that impressive chest rise and fall was the second most fun I’d had today. Then she pouted, folded her arms, and gave her husband one quick nod.

We talked on the porch—sitting out on the cement steps in the cool evening, the sounds of Hollywood Boulevard wafting their muffled way across the quiet neighborhood. The little stucco bungalows had a quaint look, a very Hollywood look, like maybe Snow White’s dwarfs lived inside.

“So was Beth Short really Helen Hassau’s friend?” I asked him. “No bullshit, now.”

“They were friends. I mean, I knew Beth first . . . met her at the cafe. She lived in the neighborhood, you know. I gave her the war hero routine, and she melted like butter—couldn’t keep her hands off me. Anyway, when I started seeing a lot of Beth, that’s when her and Helen really got to be pals—Beth and my wife barely knew each other, and, frankly, my wife don’t really care for Helen that much . . . thinks she’s a lush and a bossy little bitch, which is true, but we both put up with her ’cause Henry’s my buddy and, well, partner in crime.”

He said that last archly, like it was a joke and not a fact.

I asked, “Had Beth been here to the house?”

“Yes . . . no . . . not our apartment, except a few times when Pasty wasn’t home—you know how it is . . . but Helen invited Beth over, now and then . . . Beth even stayed here, there, upstairs with the Hassaus I mean, till about the time she got, you know . . . killed.”

“Beth was your girl friend.”

“Yeah. You could say that.”

“What were you doing with a girl friend, Bobby? You got a wife. A beautiful one. Pregnant with your kid.”

He shook his head, dark curls bouncing. “I know, I know, you think I don’t spend half my time kicking myself?”

“Just half?”

“Hey, you’re a good-looking guy. Are you telling me that dames don’t give you the come-on? And that you don’t do something about it?”

“Not since I got married I don’t.”

“How long you been married?”

“Little over a month.”

“Yeah, just wait! Your wife gets pregnant, and she’s got a belly out to here, wait and see if you don’t get tempted. Wait and see, then fucking judge.”

“Is it true you gave Beth an engagement ring?”

“Yeah . . . that
was
stupid. But jewelry, half the time we’re swimmin’ in it, and Patsy and me, we’d had a bad fight and I really was thinkin’ of leaving her, and . . . yeah, I gave her a ring, and it was stupid.”

“Didn’t Beth eventually find out you were married?”

“Yeah, of course. She took it surprisingly good, like she expected men to do bad, stupid shit in her life. Besides, I told her I was gonna break up with Patsy—though, you know, I told her I was gonna wait till after the baby came.”

“Sure. You wouldn’t walk out on your wife till after the baby came.”

The pretty face frowned. “Hey, fuck you, what’s your name? Heller? I’m trying to level with you. I was in love with Beth Short.”

I managed not to laugh. “You weren’t in love with your wife anymore?”

He shrugged. “I loved her, too. When I was with the one, I loved her; when I was with the other, I loved that one. Haven’t you ever been in that situation?”

“Was Beth pregnant, too, Bobby?”

“I think maybe she was.”

“You think?”

“It wasn’t mine, if so.”

“No?”

“No. I never fucked her.”

“You never fucked her.”

“No—she said she wanted to wait till after we were married.”

“So that’s why you got ‘engaged’ to her . . . thought she’d give it up that way. . . .”

“Fuck you! Anyway, it didn’t work. She was still ‘saving herself’ for our friggin’ wedding night.”

I drew a breath, looked up at the sky where Grauman’s searchlights were streaking across like a prisoner had escaped. “Let me get this straight. Your wife can’t service you sexually because she’s too far along . . . so you start dating a girl who’s saving herself for marriage? And this girl, who talks like a virgin, also happens to be pregnant, just not very pregnant? Am I missing anything here?”

He sighed, shook his head. “You don’t understand.”

“Oh, and I forgot—you loved her.”

“No . . . no, I’m talking about, you know . . . the blow jobs.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You can’t imagine the mouth that girl had,” he said, shaking his head, woozy with erotic nostalgia, “and what she could do with it.”

Maybe I could.

“Well,” I said, “she was pregnant—
somebody
fucked her.”

“She never said she was pregnant. But I figured she was, since she needed money for an operation.”

“Around five hundred dollars, the going abortion rate.”

“That’s right. Saving for it, hitting everybody up. And I told her, after this Mocambo score, I’d fix her up with whatever cash she needed. That’s when she got . . . weird on me.”