Макс Коллинз - True Crime

“Don’t you?” I opened the door wide for her, and she slipped by me, her reddish-brown hair swinging in arcs alongside her face; she smelled like jasmine. I glanced out in the hall to see if anybody else was around. Nobody seemed to be.

I shut and locked the door, reached for the light switch and she touched my hand; her touch was as warm as the air coming in my open windows.

“No,” she said, breathily. “Leave them off.” For a minute I thought she was vamping me, but then I recognized the breathiness as fear. Fear and passion have similar symptoms, after all.

She had a little white purse with her, which she clasped fig-leaf style before her as she looked around the room. The light from the street let her do that.

“I didn’t notice you had that purse at the Biograph,” I said.

She looked at me sharply. “Were you there?”

“Are we going to kid each other, Polly?”

She got wide-eyed and sucked in air.

“No!” she said, as if insulted by the very idea she might be capable of less than truth.

“Yes, Polly, I was there. Across the street with my hands in my pockets, playing with myself. Just like the fed I was with.”

She gave me a reproving look. “Do you have to be so crude?”

“Funny, that’s what that fed’s always asking me. Personally, I think getting shoved on your face and shot in the back a couple times is rather on the crude side.”

She covered her mouth and looked down at the floor with the wide eyes; the hand was shaking. She was shaking. She seemed about to cry. But I didn’t see any tears.

“Why don’t you sit down, Polly?” I pointed to the chair opposite my desk.

She nodded and sat, clutching the little purse, her legs tight together like a virgin on her first real date. And trembling the same way.

I got behind the desk. Sat. Gestured to the lamp, and she nodded she didn’t mind and I turned it on. It didn’t make the room bright — just made a pool of light on the desk, not big enough for either of us to bathe in.

She glanced around the room some more. “Is that a Murphy bed?”

“I guess if anybody’d recognize one, it’d be you.”

She gave me a sharp look and didn’t seem to be trembling now. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It was a crude remark. Forget it.”

“All right. Aren’t you... wondering why I’m here?”

I shrugged. “I know I should be, but I haven’t been feeling good. Probably tomorrow I’ll get around to wondering, if you haven’t told me by then.”

With what tried to be sarcasm but came off as pique, she said, “I’m sorry you don’t feel so good.”

“Some of your ex-husband’s pals worked me over a couple nights ago.”

“My ex-husband’s pals?”

“Sure. He worked for the East Chicago police, didn’t he?”

“I, uh... yes. So?”

“So you divorced him a couple months ago. Was it amicable?”

She looked at me blankly. I liked her mouth; couldn’t help myself.

“Was it friendly? Your splitting up, I mean.”

She shrugged. “I suppose.”

“When did you meet him — while you were working at the Kostur Hotel?”

She nodded, then caught herself. “I thought you didn’t feel so good.”

“Having a pretty girl around seems to pep me up. In fact, I feel so much better, I am starting to wonder what you’re doing here.”

She looked at the pool of light on my desk, glumly. “So am I.”

Suddenly I was sick of this game.

“If you don’t know why you’re here,” I said, “you better go. I don’t relish being seen with you.”

That amazed her. “Why?”

“As it is now, I’m on the fringes of this mess. If I’m lucky I won’t get noticed much, when the cops and newshounds start sniffing. But with you in my lap, I’m smack in the middle.”

She leaned an elbow on the desk, cupped her hand and rested her forehead in it; she looked like a child who just heard about death for the first time.

She said, “I’ll go, then.”

But she made no move to. Just sat there looking like a tragic waif. Or trying to. She had too much sex to get by with it, exactly.

“Look, Polly, I was told by Frank Nitti not to get in this any deeper. And yet there I was tonight, out in front of the Biograph. It’s time I dropped out of the picture. And I don’t mean Manhattan Melodrama .”

Still with her head in her cupped hand, she shut her eyes and squeezed out a big tear that angled down her cheek and across her tilted face, her mouth, her chin, in a shiny line, before plopping on my desk like a solitary raindrop.

“I swear I didn’t know,” she said, wiping off her face with the back of her other hand. Her nails were as red as Anna Sage’s dress under the marquee lights.

“Didn’t know what?”

“That they’d kill him.”

“What did you think they’d do?”

“I didn’t think anything. I didn’t even know he was Dillinger.”

“Was he?”

She raised her head from her hand and looked at me, wondering what conversation I was in. “Was he what?”

“Was he Dillinger?”

Her eyes got even wider. Silent-movie wide. “Well, that’s what they’re saying...”

“Who? Who told you it was Dillinger, and when?”

“Well... I heard the federal men say it, just before Anna and me headed down the alley. I went back to the apartment with her for a while, and she admitted she knew he was Dillinger. She knew from the start.”

“Did she admit she’d put him on the spot for the feds tonight?”

Polly shook her head. “She just said she knew he was Dillinger. And then she told me to go home and... lay low for a few days.”

“So you came to see me.”

She shook her head again. “I took the El to the restaurant, first.”

“The S and S?”

“Yes. They were just closing. One of the girls there, Maxine, went across the street and had a beer with me. She didn’t want to, though... not proper, two girls alone in a tavern, she said. But she could see I was upset. She could see I needed the company.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Nothing much. I told her Dillinger was dead. She wanted to know how I knew, and I told her to look in the papers tomorrow. And I told her I didn’t feel so good.”

“There’s a lot of that going around.”

“Why do you talk that way?”

“Because it amuses me to. It helps me not think about how much I hurt from your ex-husband’s pals feeding me the goldfish.” “Goldfish” was Chicago for rubber hose.

“Why do you keep saying that? You act like I know something about it, and I don’t.”

“What do you know?”

She leaned back in the chair; back away from the light and her face was less distinct. But I could hear her voice just fine: “Anna just told me to... date this guy. Keep him occupied. Keep him...”

“Happy?”

She sighed. “Happy. You mind if I smoke?”

“No. Use the ashtray, though.”

“Where is it?”

I pushed it towards her. It was a thick-rimmed little circle of glass that said Morrison Hotel in it.

She lit the cigarette and the orange tip was an eye in the darkness. She blew some smoke out and then started talking.

“He was a good-hearted guy. I got a thrill out of going around in cabs all the time. Twice he gave me money so Maxine and me could go to the fair. Once he gave me forty dollars and said I should go out and buy something with it. Another time he gave me fifty bucks to get my teeth fixed. I bought clothes with it, though. But he wasn’t mad when he found out.”

“He treated you right.”

She nodded through trails of smoke. “We had a lot of fun.”

“Who did you think this guy was?”

“Jimmy Lawrence. He said he was with the Board of Trade.”