Max Collins - Target Lancer

Now Dick was nodding, clearly with me. “Okay, Nate. Maybe you got something. We’ll see what latent prints comes up with.”

“Good. That’s all I ask.”

“Is it?” The milky eye made his gaze unsettling. “You’ve been known to even scores, Nate. Business, schmizness-this was a friend of yours. Are you really content to let law enforcement handle it?”

“I’m old and respectable now, Dick. I don’t play Wild West anymore. That’s for you young go-getters.”

He’d shot a few bad guys in his time-sometimes coming under criticism for the same. Probably had led to his resignation from the PD.

But my remark only made him smile.

“You know, Nate, I think I’m gonna choose to believe you,” he said. “Here comes that waitress again. Maybe we better order lunch before she puts coffee down us with a funnel. You’ll be getting the check, by the way.”

After lunch, I decided to leave the Jag in the Pick-Congress parking ramp and shrugged on my Cortefiel raincoat, snugged on the Dobbs narrow-brim hat, and took a brisk, overcast walk over to the Monadnock Building.

Once upon a time it had been the largest office building in the world; today the Monadnock was a sixteen-story curiosity among its taller, often less-distinguished offspring. Even now the soot-gray brick structure with its flaring base and dramatic bay windows struck a moody yet modern pose that made it a good fit for a detective agency.

I went in the main entrance on West Jackson, walked down a corridor consisting of the ass-end display windows of stores facing Dearborn and Federal, ignored the distinctive open winding stairwells, and took the elevator to seven.

Though we’d taken over much of the office space on this floor, our main area remained the corner suite where the frosted glass-and-wood exterior had stayed the same for decades. The door had been revised slightly:

A-1 Detective Agency

Criminal and Civil Investigations

Nathan S. Heller

President

with in smaller lettering,

Louis K. Sapperstein

Vice President

Like Fred Rubinski out in Hollywood, Lou was a full partner now. Just not full enough to have his name in letters the size of mine.

There were no customers in the reception area, which made me sorry we’d expanded it. The walls bore the framed vintage Century of Progress posters that had been part of the agency since 1934, the furnishings blond Heywood-Wakefield numbers. The reading matter on the end tables included the usual suspects- Time, Newsweek, Redbook, Sports Illustrated -with a few battered ringers mixed in. Like a certain Life issue and a few decade-old true detective-type mags, covering cases of mine. I still got written up in such periodicals, but the covers had grown so sleazy of late, they no longer sent the right waiting-room message.

Our receptionist was a dark-haired looker in her late twenties called Mildred, a name that had always struck me as a bad parental joke. Mildred had a nice smile, was not stupid, but wanted to be Jackie Kennedy so bad I just couldn’t take her seriously. Today she wore a pale-pink dress with a cowl collar. She’d have worn a pillbox hat if I let her get away with it.

“Mr. Heller,” she said, giving me a bright-eyed welcome.

“Mildred,” I said, nodding.

A fairly typical conversation between Mildred and me.

The bullpen was mostly full, only a few agents out in the field-we always had a Monday staff meeting, and unless a case dictated otherwise, everybody was here. My fourteen agents were a wide range of ages and sexes, and we had a Negro and a Chinese guy, too.

Every A-1 detective had a police or military police background. Those not working a case were in business clothes, with those taking a break from fieldwork in street clothes. Their modern metal desks were widely spaced, because I didn’t care for cubicles. Most of the agents did not need privacy with clients because either Lou or I took the first meetings. A wall of windows provided a view onto Jackson Street showcasing the Federal Building, and another wall was strictly metal four-drawer files.

The office was run by Gladys Sapperstein, Lou’s wife. Gladys had been a gorgeous young woman when I hired her in the early ‘40s, who had interviewed warm but proved a cold fish, dashing any Hollywood fantasies I might have harbored about a private eye and his sexy secretary. I’d been made to suffer for my error by way of decades of Gladys’s business acumen and efficiency.

Several years into my employ, Gladys had married one of our operatives, a kid named Fortunato, and when he died in the war, she thawed out some. Not that she and I were ever an item, not by a long shot; and I thought she would never remarry, but then about ten years ago, she and my partner Lou announced that they’d gotten married by a judge over the lunch hour.

I suspected a longtime office affair, but said nothing, since I didn’t give a damn, other than my ego being bruised by the beautiful Gladys never having been tempted by my masculine charms. Lou was a strapping guy, sure, but a dozen years older than me-he’d been my boss on the Pickpocket Detail in the early thirties-and he was bald and bulbous-nosed and bespectacled, and what the hell was wrong with me? Well, I knew. Gladys saw me for the randy, unreliable fucker I was, and Lou for the right guy that he was.

She had her own office now-between Lou’s and mine-and remained attractive, a busty, pleasingly plump brunette in her late fifties wearing jeweled cat’s-eye glasses.

I was about to step into my office when she emerged from hers, looking primly pretty in an orange and green cotton print dress.

She crooked her little finger. That was only slightly less intimidating than a cop turning his siren on.

“Good afternoon, Gladys,” I said, going to her. She rarely came to me.

“Nice to see you made it in.”

“I’m the boss, Gladys. I show up when I feel like it.”

“Oh. Well, that’s interesting. Lou is supposed to be semi-retired, and he’s here more often than you are.”

She never referred to Lou as “my husband” in the office. You would never guess they were married. In fact, she nagged me a hell of a lot more than she ever did Lou.

“Well, this is a surprisingly warm greeting for a Monday, I admit,” I said to her through a strained smile. “Was there something?”

“Don’t slip out after the staff meeting. You have a five-o’clock appointment.”

“That’s a little late for an appointment.”

“Well, she might get here earlier. But she’s driving down from Milwaukee, and has to stop at the morgue on her way, to make some arrangements.”

Gladys paused to cast me a condescending look.

“Oh shit,” I said. “You’re talking about Jean Ellison. My God, she just found out this morning her husband is dead, and she’s driving down here? That’s terrible. You should have talked her out of it.”

She just stared at me. She might have been a stone statue at Easter Island, albeit better-looking. I might have been a bug crawling across the wall.

“Mrs. Ellison,” Gladys said finally, “said that she felt sure you would see her.”

“She’s right, of course. You know who she is?”

“Yes. Her husband did some publicity for us, a few years ago. Very nice man. I take it he’s recently deceased?”

“Murdered. That’s where I was this morning-over at the Pick-Congress, having a look at the crime scene. Killed in his hotel room, money stolen.”

Something flared in her eyes. “Surely that’s a police matter.”

Gladys, ever since being promoted from receptionist to office manager, took a stern, proprietary interest in how I allocated my time.