Max Collins - Target Lancer

I liked Old Town with its newly put in old-fashioned lampposts and narrow, shade-tree-lined one-way side streets that would twist only to end unexpectedly, with their baroque renovated 1800s houses, some frame, others brick, with the occasional walled garden patio; and the wide boulevard of North Avenue, home to offbeat bars and restaurants, quirky boutiques and coffee houses, and even a Buddhist temple. Somebody had fired the starting gun on what they were calling the Sexual Revolution-probably Hefner, come to think of it-and I liked having the singles bars and nightclubs close at hand, where females gave away what used to be for sale in the same Rush and Division Street area.

As for work, if I didn’t feel like driving there, the El could drop me within a block of the Monadnock Building, and a bus or cab down LaSalle would do just as well.

Or maybe I was getting nostalgic in my middle age. I was just slightly north of what had been Tower Town, the Greenwich Village of Chicago in the twenties and thirties, where I’d once fallen in love with an actress. And not too far from me was the building where the guy they shot down outside the Biograph Theater had been hiding out. We’ll call him Dillinger, for simplicity’s sake.

I’m about to give a tour of an aging bachelor’s pad, and you are free to skip it. Just wait till some dialogue kicks in. On the other hand, as a trained investigator, I have found that the living quarters of a missing person or for that matter a suspected felon can tell you everything you need to know about the individual in question.

You entered from the cast-iron porch into the living room, with a jut of closet to the right and a big open room with off-white wall-to-wall carpet everywhere else. The plaster walls, painted a rust orange, had select framed artwork to break things up-black-and-blue-and-white spatter by Jackson Pollock (a Hef-suggested investment), a small melting clock by Dali, a Picasso lithograph called Still Life, a big Vegas-theme oil by LeRoy Neiman (a gift from the artist), and a little Shel Silverstein cartoon of a dancing nude girl (a gift from that artist).

The right wall was a white bookcase-my taste, I’m afraid, running to popular fiction like Harold Robbins and Ian Fleming, with a dab of Steinbeck and Hemingway, and some nonfiction: Ted White’s Making of the President, Sandburg’s Lincoln, Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich . The shelves were deep enough to address an LP collection that was further evidence of my middlebrow tastes-suspects included Henry Mancini ( Peter Gunn ), Julie London ( Julie Is Her Name ), Johnny Mathis ( Greatest Hits ), Dave Brubeck ( Take Five ), Bobby Darin ( That’s All ). No Sinatra (I knew him too well).

The furnishings ran to overstuffed couches and chairs, some brown, some green, with throw pillows of those same colors. My brown-leather recliner, its back to the bookcase wall, faced the RCA color console TV, with its whopping twenty-one-inch screen, next to a walnut Grundig Majestic stereo console (compliments of the Wilcox-Gay Corp on LaSalle Street, a client). A little Danish modern teakwood bar tucked itself near the corner where what might have been an abstract sculpture was really the spiral staircase to the upstairs, where awaited a bedroom with the de rigueur round bed plus a home office and a shower.

Beyond the living room was a dining room that didn’t get used much, except when parties needed a long table where food could be laid out. A short hall with the other bathroom at left and more closet at right led into the kitchen, a white, fully modern affair vaguely reminiscent of an operating room. I’d been living alone long enough to get good in there. My specialty was breakfast for attractive young women before sending them home in a cab.

Right now I was sitting on a couch next to an attractive woman named Helen Beck, not young. You will be relieved to learn that I was not in a silk smoking jacket. Looked fairly dapper, though, in an olive Cricketeer blazer, light-green Van Heusen button-down with Webley shantung-silk dark-brown tie, and dark-brown Sansabelt slacks. Helen was in a tan jumper over a black turtleneck, a very young-looking outfit for a woman who was around my age, but she pulled it off.

Helen Beck’s stage name was Sally Rand, and I’d met her when I was in charge of pickpocket security at the Chicago World’s Fair. She had caused a sensation there with her nude fan dance in ’33, and a bubble dance encore in ’34. She had been a small, pretty, curvy blonde, and still was.

Her long blonde Lady Godiva tresses had always been a wig, the hair beneath a darker blonde now, shorter and worn up. She had lovely blue-green eyes, pretty features with a mouth that was probably too wide by most standards, but not mine.

The indirect lighting in my bachelor pad was subdued-Mancini jazz was playing ( Mr. Lucky )-so neither one of us looked our age. But she was doing so well at staying youthful that boys were still paying good money to see a woman who was old enough to be their mother dance in the buff.

Helen and I were friends and occasional lovers, though I hadn’t seen her for a long time-at least ten years. I sometimes called her Sally, by the way, but usually Helen … always Helen in bed.

She’d phoned out of the blue, this morning, catching me at the office where I often put in a couple of hours on Saturday. She wondered what I was doing tonight.

“I hope I’m seeing you,” I told her.

“Giving you such short notice, Nate. I’m really sorry.”

“Are you between marriages?”

“As it happens, I am.”

“Then don’t be sorry. Where do I pick you up?”

“I’ll come to you,” she said. “What time? And where are you these days?”

I told her, then said, “Hey, I can probably get us tickets to Second City.”

“But that’s a popular show, isn’t it? Won’t they be sold out?”

“Yeah, but I have my ways.”

I’d done a job for the comedy coffee house’s founder Bernie Sahlins, getting one of his performers, Del Close, out of a jam.

“Make it here by six,” I suggested, “and we’ll have a chance to grab a bite first.”

That all sounded fine to her, and we’d had a fun evening starting with steakburgers at Chances R, where it was a little too loud for us to talk, really. This was followed by several hours of wild humor in the black-walled, table-crammed little venue on Wells that was the Second City.

Helen’s favorite sketch: bully kicks sand in weakling’s face, bully walks off with weakling’s girlfriend, weakling bodybuilds, returns to beach, slugs unfaithful girlfriend, and walks off arm in arm with … bully. My favorite part was a musical number, the Mayor Daley Twist: “ Vote for Mayor Daley and we’ll throw in for free, A trip to Cal City on your Gaslight Key! ”

Now we were back at my place. Helen was a nondrinker, part of her health regimen, but I’d put a few beers away. I made us coffee and we headed for the couch by the front windows, where we could finally get around to some real conversation.

“So what brings you to town, Helen? You’re usually working on a Saturday night.”

“I’m between bookings,” she said, too casually. She sipped at her coffee cup, then set it on the nearby coffee table. “Actually, I’m here to drum up some business.”

“So where are you staying?”

“The Lorraine.”

That spoke volumes. The Lorraine in the Loop was known as a stripper hotel. No fleabag, but at four bucks daily …

“Not exactly the Drake,” she sighed, then forced a little laugh. “Remember that all-white suite I sublet from that flamer? Right out of a Harlow movie, remember?”

“I recall the bedroom. The rest is a little blurry.”