Max Collins - Chicago Lightning

I took the stairs four at a time and had my gun in my hand when I entered the fancy dining room. Normally when I enter fancy dining rooms with a gun in my hand, all eyes are on me. Not this time.

Thelma was clawing at her ex-husband, who was laughing at her. She was being held back by Patsy Kelly, the dark-haired rubber-faced comedienne who was Thelma’s partner in the two-reelers. DeCiro, in a white tux, had a starlet on his arm, a blonde about twenty with a neckline down to her shoes. The starlet looked frightened, but DeCiro was having a big laugh.

I put my gun away and took over for Patsy Kelly.

“Miss Todd,” I said, gently, whispering into her ear, holding onto her two arms from behind, “don’t do this.”

She went limp for a moment, then straightened and said, with stiff dignity, “I’m all right, Nathan.”

It was the only time she ever called me that.

I let go of her.

“What’s the problem?” I asked. I was asking both Thelma Todd and her ex-husband.

“He embarrassed me,” she said, without any further explanation.

And without any further anything, I said to DeCiro, “Go.”

DeCiro twitched a smile. “I was invited.”

“I’m uninviting you. Go.”

His face tightened and he thought about saying or doing something. But my eyes were on him like magnets on metal and instead he gathered his date and her decolletage and took a powder.

“Are you ready to go home?” I asked Thelma.

“No,” she said, with a shy smile, and she squeezed my arm, and went back to the table of twelve where her party of Hollywood types awaited. She was the guest of honor, after all.

Two hours, and two drinks later, I was escorting her home. She sat in the back of the candy-apple red Packard in her mink coat and sheer mauve-and-silver evening gown and diamond necklace and told me what had happened, the wind whipping her ice-blonde hair.

“Nicky got himself invited,” she said, almost shouting over the wind. “Without my knowledge. Asked the host to reserve a seat next to me at the table. Then he wandered in late, with a date, that little starlet , which you may have noticed rhymes with harlot, and sat at another table, leaving me sitting next to an empty seat at a party in my honor. He sat there necking with that little tramp and I got up and went over and gave him a piece of my mind. It…got a little out of hand. Thanks for stepping in, Heller.”

“t’s what you pay me for.”

She sat in silence for a while; only the wind spoke. It was a cold Saturday night, as cold as a chilled martini. I had asked her if she wanted the top up on the convertible, but she said no. She began to look behind us as we moved slowly down Sunset.

“Heller,” she said, “someone’s following us.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Somebody’s following us, I tell you!”

“I’m keeping an eye on the rear-view mirror. We’re fine.”

She leaned forward and clutched my shoulder. “Get moving! Do you want me to be kidnapped, or killed? It could be Luciano’s gangsters, for God’s sake!”

She was the boss. I hit the pedal. At speeds up to seventy miles per, we sailed west around the curves of Sunset; there was a service station at the junction of the boulevard and the coast highway, and I pulled in.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

I turned and looked into the frightened blue eyes. “I’m going to get some gas, and keep watch. And see if anybody comes up on us, or suspicious goes by. Don’t you worry. I’m armed.”

I looked close at every car that passed by the station. I saw no one and nothing suspicious. Then I paid the attendant and we headed north on the coast highway. Going nice and slow.

“I ought to fire you,” she said, pouting back there.

“This is my last night, Miss Todd,” I said. “I’m getting homesick for Chicago. They got a better breed of dishonest people back there. Anyway, I like to work for my money. I feel I’m taking yours.”

She leaned forward, clutched my shoulder again. “No, no, I tell you, I’m frightened.”

“Why?”

“I…I just feel I still need you around. You give me a sense of security.”

“Have you had any more threatening notes?”

“No.” Her voice sounded very small, now.

“If you do, call me, or the cops. Or both.”

It was two a.m. when I slid the big car in in front of the sprawling Sidewalk Cafe. I was shivering with cold; a sea breeze was blowing, Old Man Winter taking his revenge on California. I turned and looked at her again. I smiled.

“I’ll walk you to the door, Miss Todd.”

She smiled at me, too, but this time the smile didn’t light up her face, or the world, or me. This time the smile was as sad as her eyes. Sadder.

“That won’t be necessary, Heller.”

I was looking for an invitation, either in her eyes or her voice; I couldn’t quite find one. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. Do me one favor. Work for me next week. Be my chauffeur one more week, while I decide whether or not to replace you with another bodyard, or…what.”

“Okay.”

“Go home, Heller. See you Monday.”

“See you Monday,” I said, and I watched her go in the front door of the Cafe. Then I drove the Packard up to the garage above, on the Palisades, and got in my dusty inelegant 1925 Marmon and headed back to the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. I had a hunch Thelma Todd, for all her apprehensions, would sleep sounder than I would, tonight.

My hunch was right, but for the wrong reason.

Monday morning, sunny but cool if no longer cold, I pulled into one of the parking places alongside the Sidewalk Cafe; it was around ten thirty and mine was the only car. The big front door was locked. I knocked until the Spanish cleaning woman let me in. She said she hadn’t seen Miss Todd yet this morning. I went up the private stairway off the kitchen that led up to the two apartments. The door at the top of the stairs was unlocked; beyond it were the two facing apartment doors. I knocked on hers.

“Miss Todd?”

No answer.

I tried for a while, then went and found the cleaning woman again. “Maria, do you have any idea where Miss Todd might be? She doesn’t seem to be in her room.”

“She might be stay up at Meester Eastmon’s.”

I nodded, started to walk away, then looked back and added as an afterthought, “Did you see her yesterday?”

“I no work Sunday.”

I guess Maria, like God, Heller and Thelma Todd, rested on Sunday. Couldn’t blame her.

I thought about taking the car up and around, then said to hell with it and began climbing the concrete steps beyond the pedestrian bridge that arched over the highway just past the Cafe. These steps, all two-hundred and eighty of them, straight up the steep hill, were the only direct access from the coast road to the bungalow on Cabrillo Street. Windblown sand had drifted over the steps and the galvanized handrail was as cold and wet as a liar’s handshake.

I grunted my way to the top. I’d started out as a young man, had reached middle age by step one hundred and was now ready for the retirement home. I sat on the cold damp top step and poured sand out of my scuffed-up Florsheims, glad I hadn’t bothered with a shine in the last few weeks. Then I stood and looked past the claustrophobic drop of the steps, to where the sun was reflecting off the sand and sea. The beach was blinding, the ocean dazzling. It was beautiful, but it hurt to look at. A seagull was flailing with awkward grace against the breeze like a fighter losing the last round. Suddenly Lake Michigan seemed like a pond.

Soon I was knocking on Eastman’s front door. No answer. Went to check to see if my client’s car was there, swinging up the black-studded blue garage door. The car was there, all right, the red Packard convertible, next to Eastman’s Lincoln sedan.