Max Collins - Neon Mirage

She was nodding. “And Jake Guzik is.”

“Jake Guzik is. The fat little man has been playing it real cute all along. Pulling me in, Jim’s own security man, and ‘confiding’ in me that the Outfit wasn’t behind it. Guzik even bought off one of my own men, but knew me well enough to know, I’d beat the truth out of the guy, so they were careful to make all contacts by phone and money drops. And he didn’t use Outfit guys for the shooters, but hired a couple of West Side bookies, to further confuse the issue. Then he sends me to Jim with a new, more generous offer, but also sends his two gunmen up the Meyer House fire escape, playing it from both ends. Those greasy thumb prints have been all over this from the beginning. I should’ve figured it. Took Siegel himself to wake me up.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means I’m going to tell your uncle that Guzik is responsible. I’m going to tell him to keep that in mind when entering any new negotiations with him.”

She looked at me with utter disbelief. “You don’t think my uncle would sell out at this point, after hearing…”

The launch lurched.

“I don’t know. 1 still think it’s his best option, but with this new knowledge he can go for more money and warn Guzik that he’ll cooperate with Drury and turn those affidavits over to the feds now, if the Outfit doesn’t pay now and stay away later.”

“Would that work?”

I shrugged, sighed, shook my head. “Hell, I don’t know. Anyway, the stubborn old bastard will probably want to keep fighting.”

She moved closer to me. “Do you blame him?”

I slipped my arm around her. “Not really. But I don’t envy him, either.”

Before too long we were in a warm bed in my room at the Roosevelt Hotel. The days apart, the recriminations, all of it, receded in the distance, like the Lux. Faded away, like a barely remembered bad dream. Now there was only the two of us, naked, in each other’s arms, loving each other, ready to put it all behind us and go home and start over.

It was a little after midnight when the phone rang and the bad dream kicked back in.

“It’s after two o’clock out there,” I said to Bill Drury’s staticky, disembodied voice. “What’s so important it can’t wait? Did you lose another witness?”

I was sitting up in bed; the phone was on the nightstand beside me. Peggy, asleep till the phone rang, was only half-awake, half-listening.

“Worse,” Bill’s voice said tinnily. “I’ve been trying to get you all evening. Didn’t you check for messages when you got in?”

“I was preoccupied, okay?”

There was silence for a few moments; the phone company charges for that, too, but it was Bill’s nickel so I just waited for him to speak up. Which he finally did:

“You got her back. Is she there with you? Peg, I mean?”

I smiled over at Peg and she smiled lazily at me. Did I ever mention she had violet eyes?

“Yes, Bill. She’s with me. She’s going to stay with me, too. I’m not giving her any choices.”

“You better give her some support, Nate.”

I winced. “What the hell’s happened?”

“Her uncle’s suffered mercury poisoning. Nobody knows how it happened yet.”

“Mercury poisoning…”

Peg sat up in bed, eyes wide now; she held the covers to her breasts, as if seeking protection.

The voice from the phone said: “He’s dying, Nate.”

It was well after visiting hours, in fact approaching midnight Saturday, when Peg and I walked down the hall at Meyer House toward her uncle’s room, footsteps echoing. Lou Sapperstein was standing guard, a uniformed cop sitting next to him, snoozing; Lou was in shirt-sleeves and suspenders and I hadn’t seen him look so haggard since those weeks after his brother died in the war. At least this time Lou wasn’t wearing a black arm band. Jim Ragen was still alive.

“I think he’s sleeping,” Sapperstein said. “His son Jim, Jr., is in there, keeping up the vigil. Family members been taking turns.”

Peg said, “I’m going in there.”

Sapperstein held open the door for her. I stayed out in the hall. This was family. I was just the hired help.

“You look like shit,” Sapperstein said.

“I feel worse. If God had meant for man to fly, He’d have given airliners comfortable seats.”

“All day ordeal, huh?”

“Yeah. Peg slept a lot, thank God. She was up most of last night, crying, wanting to talk it through. That made her tired enough today to sleep through most of the trip home.”

Lou shook his head. “I’m sorry as hell about this, Nate. I don’t know how our security could’ve been any tighter.”

“What happened, anyway?”

“Nobody’s sure. They’re saying mercury poisoning, but it’s a guess. Uremic poisoning I’m also hearing. He had a kidney operation Thursday. It’s been downhill ever since.”

“I want to talk to one of the medics. Who’s around?”

“One of the two family doctors. Graaf.”

“Where?”

“He’s been in and out. Try that lounge area down the hall- he’s probably grabbing a smoke.”

I walked down there and Dr. Graaf, a short, well-fed, mustached man of about fifty, in a brown rumpled suit, was sitting, smoking, looking dejected and tired.

He looked up and smiled wearily. “Mr. Heller. Back from the land of make believe.”

I sat next to him. “That’s right, Doc. I only wish I could make believe this isn’t happening.”

“You want a smoke?”

“Yeah. Why not.”

He fired me up and I sucked the smoke into my lungs, held it there, let it out slow.

“So,” I said, “is he going to make it?”

“If you’d asked me that Monday, I’d have said hell, yes. In a week I’d be calling him fully recovered from the wounds and the shock. Oh, impaired, certainly. But he was damn near out of this place, way ahead of schedule.”

“Then what?”

He sighed, raised his eyebrows. “Then he had a sharp decrease in elimination. Blood pressure rose sharply. Decreased urine output. Bloody stools, vomiting…”

“This is all very colorful, Doc. But what does it mean, besides I just lost my appetite for this year?”

“Those are symptoms of mercury poisoning.”

“So we’re talking foul play, definitely.”

“Very likely.”

“How?”

“How does the poem go? ‘Let me count the ways…’”

“I don’t buy that-I set up the security here myself. We put a lid on this joint.”

Graaf sighed. “Mr. Heller-mercury could enter the body through an alcohol rub, the likes of which Mr. Ragen has gotten daily; by enema; by intravenous or intramuscular injection, or absorption through the skin from an ointment.”

“But not orally?”

“That’s the easiest way of all. A tablet the size of an aspirin would contain approximately twice the dosage it would take to kill a man.”

“That’s the only other way-in a pill?”

“Hardly. The mercury could have been administered in coffee, milk, or tomato juice, or sprinkled on food. It would’ve been as tasteless as it was deadly.”

“You’re saying they’ve killed him.”

Graaf looked at the floor. “We don’t make judgments like that, not when a patient is still breathing. Tell me, Mr. Heller. In your line of work, do you ever take on a job that’s more or less hopeless?”

“Never,” I said, and shook his hand, and ground the cigarette out with my heel, and went back up the hall.

Sapperstein was leaning against the wall, standing next to the seated uniformed cop, who was awake now. Frankly, I trust Chicago cops more when they’re sleeping.

“It’s a poisoning, all right,” I said to Lou. “Somebody on the hospital staff, most likely.”