Max Collins - Neon Mirage

“Wouldn’t you fight to hold on to your business, if it was being threatened?”

“Not if I was a sixty-five-year-old millionaire.”

Her eyes were moving back and forth with frantic thought.

She said, “You know, Virginia’s still in town…”

“Stay away from her!”

“She’s always been my friend. I can’t believe she’d try to use me for something…criminal.”

“Yeah, the mind does boggle trying to picture Virginia Hill using somebody for something criminal.”

That stopped her and even made her laugh, a little.

“Why do I love you?” she asked, shaking her head, brown curls shimmering.

“Search me.”

“Okay,” she said, and she ran her smooth small hands under the blankets, down inside my underwear.

“You’re on a fool’s mission,” I said. “You’re not going to find anybody in there-not anybody who isn’t sleeping.”

“Oh? Who’s this?”

“Whoever it is, uh…is waking up.”

“Turn that lamp off.”

“Okay.”

“Just let me give you a goodnight kiss.”

“Okay.”

She crawled up on top of me and kissed me. She put her tongue in my mouth and I told every fiber in my body: everybody up! We weren’t tired anymore. I slid my hands under her nightie, under the lacy panties, cupping her small, perfect ass. She reached a hand down and held me, lifted herself, and slid me up in her. She was tighter than a fist but so much smoother. Heaven. Heaven.

“I should use something,” I said, moving in her.

“Don’t use anything,” she moaned. “You’ll marry me if I get pregnant.”

“I might even marry you if you don’t,” I said.

Then I didn’t say anything; her, either. We just moved together, slowly, her on top, but me driving. I loved her in bed, but I also just plain loved her. She got me into this, goddamn her, shotguns and Jake Guzik and rubber hoses and out-cold bodyguards on the floor with blood and paper flowers.

But I didn’t care. I was in heaven. And I wasn’t even dead yet.

Tuesday afternoon, around three-thirty, against my better judgment, I let Drury pick me up in front of my office in an unmarked car, no police chauffeur, and we headed south on State to Bronzeville. We wound up on the same block where the Ragen shooting had taken place not twenty-four hours before, parking not far from the drug store whose broken window had since been haphazardly patched with cardboard. We had plenty of foul sideways glances and suspicious looks from the men and boys loitering about the street, but, despite the unmarked car, we were so obviously cops that nobody said one word to us, as Drury led me to a hole-in-the-wall saloon a few doors down.

The High Life Inn would have been an apt description for the place if you replaced high with low. The exterior was weathered brick with the peeling ghosts of various pasted-on political campaign posters from the fairly recent past; the words “judge” and “alderman” could still be made out. Above the remains of the posters was a big Coca Cola sign, suggesting a person “Pause…drink,” to which I mentally added “…get mugged.” Above it, smaller, was a wooden sign with the joint’s name on one line in stubby red capitals against yellow; fairly new sign, a trifle weather-blistered. In front of the place, between an Old Gold poster showing a white society girl in a flowery chapeau selecting just the right cigarette from a pack, a somber colored kid perhaps ten wearing a black derby hat, a short-sleeve plaid shirt and baggy brown pants and black tennis shoes sat on an upended crate next to a card table with a homemade display with tiers of small brown stapled bags, above which in a grease-pencil scrawl it said peanuts-5 cents. I paused and selected a bag, tossed the kid a dime, waited for my change.

We went on in, past the propped open door, Drury leading the way. The place was dark, as regards both lighting and clientele. In fact, I had the distinct feeling, as numerous eyes at the bar turned our way, that Bill and I might well be the first white people ever to enter. The boxcar of a room had a long counter at left, where eight or ten men stood (there were no stools), some table seating along the right, mostly empty right now, a small bandstand with a piano at the back, and a small cleared-away area for dancing. No music at the moment. No sound at all, as these dark men took us white boys in.

The bartender was a big lanky bald man in a black shirt; no apron. Behind the bar, beer cartons lined the wall, with the stack toward the middle only going half way up the wall, so some bottles of whiskey and such would have a place to sit. But the patrons standing at the bar weren’t drinking anything but cold sweaty bottles of beer.

In the back of the room, near the bandstand, sitting at a table by himself, was Sylvester Jefferson, the colored cop known variously as “the Terror of the South Side” and “Two-Gun Pete.” He was respected and feared in Bronzeville-which in Bronzeville terms was the same thing-and I knew him, a little. He’d been on the job since the mid-’30s and we’d had some friendly run-ins over the years-he’d helped me out, I’d helped him out.

Pete was a handsome, light-complected Negro who had a somber, almost sad expression on his slightly puffy face; he looked a little like Joe Louis, though with an alertness in the eyes that no boxer has. He was damn near dapper, with a mustache about as wide as Hitler’s but a third as tall, and his just slightly overweight, five-ten frame was bedecked in a tan suit and white shirt with a wide tie with a tiger-skin pattern. His hat, which had a three-inch brim, was on the table next to a bottle of Schlitz and a poured glass.

He smiled tightly, showing no teeth as we approached, standing, gesturing for us to sit down. Drury said hello, but immediately excused himself to go to the bar and get us some beers. That left me to shake hands with Pete, whose suit coat was open and you could see the two guns on the front of two overlapping belts, framing his police star, clipped to the middle of the lower slung of the belts.

“Those are the biggest revolvers I ever saw, Pete,” I said, sitting down.

He grinned and withdrew the guns and set them on the table, like a gunfighter on a riverboat sitting down to play poker at a possibly crooked table. Both guns were nickel-plated and shiny and although light was at a premium in this place, they found some to reflect. One of the guns had a pearl handle and a six-inch barrel, the other a brown handle and a three-inch barrel.

“You’re not still packin’ that candy-ass nine millimeter?” Pete said to me, huskily, sitting back down.

“Fraid I am,” I said. “Sentimental attachment.”

He waggled a thick black finger at me, narrowed the sad eyes. “That’s a bad idea. That’s the gun your daddy killed hisself with, ain’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“Carrying it, that’s your idea of makin’ sure you don’t use your piece too easy, right?”

“That’s it, I guess. I never want to take death too lightly.”

“I’ll tell you what you don’t want to do,” he said, patting the pearl handle of the revolver like a baby’s butt, “you don’t want to have nothing in between you and a shooting situation. You don’t want to be thinking about whether or not you should shoot, or this is the gun my daddy killed hisself with. That’s bullshit, Heller.”

“Well, you may have a point, Pete. But I’ve been under fire a few times in my time, and I seem to be alive.”

He ignored that, saying, “It’s like the night I was out driving along 35th-I was off-duty. Just me and my pal Bob Miller, the undertaker. I hear this woman scream and see a kid, maybe nineteen, run out of a store, with a gun in his mitt. I yell for him to halt, but he ducks in the alley and I follow and he starts to shoot back at me. I think, well, hell, least I got an undertaker along-’cause one of us is sure as shit gonna need him. So the kid ducks in back of this laundry, and when I find him, he’s locked hisself in the shitter. I yell at him to come out, give hisself up-he says, ‘Fuck you, nigger! You want me, you’re gonna have to come in and get me.’ So I empty this baby into the fuckin’ door.” He patted the brown-handled gun. “I didn’t hear nothing for a while, so I went on in. I got him, all right-more than once. He didn’t even make it to Michael Reese. Funny thing, though-when I pulled that poor bastard out of there, dying, holes in his chest, he was puffing on a reefer like a crazy man.” He shook his head. “People is strange.”