Макс Коллинз - Road to Purgatory

Maybe he had died back in Miami; maybe Capone’s people had shot him full of holes and this was heaven, or possibly a coma he hadn’t come out of, and if so, what was the hurry?

With “I’ll Never Smile Again,” Estelle’s set was over — on the weekends, her performances were timed so that while she was on, the orchestra was off, and vice versa. She drifted over to Michael, appearing through the cigarette fog like a materializing dream; she proved her reality by slipping her hand into his and led him into the chrome-and-glass dining room where a table in back waited.

Don Orlando and his orchestra played rhumbas, the dance floor fairly packed, while Michael ate a rare tenderloin (the modest serving the only sign of wartime shortages) and Estelle a small shrimp salad (anything larger would have shown, in that gown). Afterward they danced — slow romantic tunes, no rhumbas for Michael — in preparation for retiring to the specific third-floor bedroom (the “Rhapsody in Blue” suite) of which Estelle seemed to have sole use.

Michael hoped he was the only other man sharing it with her, now; but he had not yet pressed the point.

In the dim light of Rush Street neons tinted blue by the semi-sheer curtains, the two made love, with the combination of tenderness and urgency that always seemed to characterize the act for them. As usual, she preferred to start on top, her long golden hair undone now, and bouncing off her creamy shoulders, her eyes half-lidded in pleasure, her breasts pert hard-tipped handfuls. Christ, she was lovely ...

Soon she lay naked next to him, a loose sheet halfheartedly covering the couple, his arm round her, her face against his chest, which was largely hairless (“You’re just a boy, you’re just a child,” she would tease); for a while she kissed his chest lazily, and then she slept, snoring very gently against his flesh, almost a purr.

He felt an enormous affection for this willowy creature with her doll-like features, a girl/woman who had learned to use the softness of her charms in so many hard ways. In a wave of sentimentality, which he mistook for deep emotion, Michael wished he could whisk her away from the Chicago of gambling, whoring, and other commercial sins.

She looked so innocent, slumbering against him. So untroubled. So blissfully at rest. But earlier in the week she’d seemed distracted, and on edge.

In this same bed, she had sat up, arms folded over her bare breasts, her brow furrowed. “I may need you to talk to Frank for me. Mr. Nitti, I mean.”

Propped on his elbow, he stared at her. “Why, baby? Problem?”

“You see that business in the papers, about those actresses who got burnt?”

“Anita Louise, you mean? And somebody else famous, right?”

“Yeah — Constance Bennett. They’re in town promoting a new picture.”

The robbery of several thousand in jewels from a hotel room of the two visiting Hollywood beauties had made headlines. Seemed like a hard way to hawk a movie.

“Well, they were here when it happened,” she said with a humorless smirk, pointing a finger downstairs. “Word is the cops think the heist was planned at the Colony.”

“Like somebody kept the girls busy at the club, giving somebody else time to nick the gems at the hotel?”

“Right. But what would we have to do with it?”

Michael shrugged. “Unless it was a bartender or somebody else employed here, nothing.”

“Right!” she said, hair flouncing. “I mean, what the hell — I can’t be responsible for our clientele. We’re a popular place; all kinds of people come here.”

“How about the cops? They come here?”

“Not yet... It’s just, I know Mr. Nitti wants to keep things low-key, about now. Mike, I promise I laid the law down with the girls: no exchange of cash. Big rollers get comped with a little affection, but that’s it.”

“I’ll say something to him, if you want.”

“Would you?”

She’d seemed fine after that, and by the next day, the MOVIE STAR JEWELRY HEIST had, like his Medal of Honor, faded from the headlines.

And now it faded from Michael’s mind, too, as he began drifting off to sleep...

... only to have gunshots rudely wake him .

In half a heartbeat, he was out of the bed in his boxer shorts, snatching the .45 from the holster draped over a chair and heading in bare feet for the door. Behind him, startled to wakefulness, Estelle sat up, fists pulling the sheet to her chin, eyes huge and frightened; but he was in the hallway before she could speak.

Two guys, one skinny, one burly, were barreling right at him. They were in T-shirts and pants and socks, charging down the narrow pink carpet, single file, though he could see them both — and each had a gun in his fist.

The skinny one, at the rear, was firing over a shoulder, three sharp reports, shooting at the stairwell door, punching splintering holes. No one in sight, down there — the door itself seemed to be the guy’s target.

He recognized them, sort of: they’d been hanging around the Colony all week; not local, a couple gladhanders who for the last couple days had been hitting the casino hard.

Right now Michael was between them and the elevator, and the burly guy was raising his gun, teeth bared, eyes intense, motioning, motioning, motioning for Michael to move aside.

Instead, Michael walked into the path of the stampeding gunmen and slapped the first guy across the side of the head with the .45.

Then Michael stepped aside — so that the man could go down and his partner stumble over him. Both men lost their guns, identical .38s that went flying.

The burly man Michael had pistol-whipped was unconscious, and his skinny partner was piled squirming on top of him, like shower night at Joliet. Before the surprised partner could get his bearings, Michael leaned in and slapped him across the side of the head, too, with the .45 barrel.

The partner slumped on top of his pal, as if in postcoital exhaustion.

Michael was collecting the two fallen weapons when the shot-up stairwell door cracked tentatively...

Then it opened wide, and Eliot Ness stepped out, his own .38 in hand.

Ness, very much his public image in fedora and brown suit, had a spooked expression, not at all like his public image. Clearly the gunshots fired at that door had been meant for him. Seeing Michael, Ness opened his mouth.

Before any words could come out, however, Michael yelled at him, “Who the hell are you? What’s going on here?”

Behind Ness, from out the stairwell, came a firm-jawed, dark-haired guy in a homburg and beautifully cut charcoal suit with black vest and red tie. His natty attire might not say plainclothes cop, but his manner — and the badge pinned on his breast pocket, plus the Police Special in his fist — did. As he joined Ness, a pair of uniformed cops with weapons in hand also emerged from the stairs.

Ness strode up the hall, saying, “I’m Eliot Ness, with the Federal Social Protection Division. This is Lieutenant William Drury, from Town Hall Station.”

Drury stayed back, talking to the two cops, sending them into a room down on the right, next to the stairwell.

“These are suspects in a jewelry robbery,” Ness said, nodding toward the fallen duo.

“You mind if I get some clothes on,” Michael asked, “while you handcuff these boys?”

“Not at all.”

Michael rejoined Estelle in the blue suite, where — the bedside lamp switched on — she’d already put on a simple business-like brown-and-white suit. As he got dressed, Michael explained that he’d apparently just captured the two jewelry bandits for the cops.

“But that fed Ness is along for the ride,” Michael said.

Confusion merged with indignation in her response: “What does he have to do with catching jewel robbers?”