Макс Коллинз - True Crime

“No,” I said.

Ma and Arthur wandered over. Arm in arm. She said, “I called and checked on him.”

Without taking his pale blue eyes off me, Nelson said to her, “Did you check with Nitti?”

“No. I called Slim.”

“Slim Gray?”

“Yeah, and he said this guy was jake.”

He thumped my chest three times with the side of the tommy-gun barrel. “I don’t care if he’s jake — I just want to know if he’s Jimmy whosis.”

“Lawrence,” I said, stopping the barrel of the tommy gun with my palm, before it could thump me a fourth time.

Nelson’s eyes flared. “Don’t touch my gun.”

“Then don’t poke me with it.”

“Yeah? Well, fuck you.”

“I got no beef with you, Nelson. But I’m not going to stand here and be bullied and just take it, understand?”

The tommy-gun nose lowered; chickens were making noise in the background. He said, “I got no beef with you, either, Lawrence — if you’re from Nitti. If you’re a goddamn fed, you’re fuckin’ dead.”

Arthur stepped forward and put a hand on Nelson’s arm; both men were about the same size, but Arthur “Doc” Barker had haunted brown eyes and rather sunken cheeks in a baby face of his own, black widow’s peaked hair starting high on his forehead, and my instinct was he was more dangerous than Nelson.

“Watch your language around my ma,” Doc Barker said, in a flat monotone that, unlike Nelson’s Cagney impression, was menacing without trying to be.

Nelson shook the hand off irritably, but said, “Yeah — okay. Okay.” I said, “You really think a fed would be smart enough to get this far?”

Nelson thought about that, while Doc grinned and said, “Hell no!”

Ma was trundling across the lawn toward the porch, stacks of movie and romance magazines under her flabby arms, leaving the bags for the boys to carry.

“Somebody want to help me with Ma’s things?” I asked.

They both did, Nelson still lugging his tommy gun; it was like an appendage.

Inside the front door we faced the second-floor stairs; a hallway alongside the stairs ended in a closed door. To our left was a sitting room, with a piano and a fireplace and some overstuffed furniture but no people. To our right an archway where floral drapes stood open and fluttered with the summer breeze coming in open windows in the living room beyond. Doc Barker nodded for me to set the bags by the stairs — “We’ll work out sleepin’ quarters later,” he said — and I followed him into the living room, which was larger than the sitting room and just as nicely furnished — but well-populated.

At the left, against the wall with a mirror hanging over it, was an overstuffed bristly cream-color mohair sofa on which sat three women, all of them rather attractive. On the near end of the sofa a cute brunette with wavy hair falling to her shoulders and bright dark perky eyes was smiling up at Nelson, who stood next to her, putting a possessive hand on her shoulder, letting me know this one was his. I could hardly blame him — even though she was sitting down, it was easy to see she had a nice little shape on her, under the thin beige frock, legs crossed under the pleated skirt. On the other end of the sofa was another brunette, with eyes the color of the dark liquid in the glass she held in one hand and a slightly puffy face that indicated the dark liquid wasn’t Dr. Pepper; still, look of the alky about her or not, this one was a looker too, with startling curves under the navy dress with its white polka dots and white collar and white trim.

Between them was a blonde. She wore a pink dress and a little pink beret and she was the best-looking dame of the bunch, her hair bobbed and her eyes big and brown and so far apart you almost had to look at them one at a time. She had beestung lips and rosy cheeks and a complexion like a glass of milk — pasteurized.

The whites of her big brown eyes, however, seemed at the moment to match the pink of her outfit, and she was clutching a hanky in a tight little fist. She’d been crying, and the other two women — the one with the drink in her hand especially — seemed to be giving her some support, some comfort.

The pretty blonde with the bobbed hair and the big brown eyes was Joshua Petersen’s Louise, incidentally. The girl I’d come to fetch.

While I was taking in these good-looking apparent molls, Ma Barker was hugging another of her boys, who’d been sitting on the window seat over by the open windows, but had jumped up upon his beloved mother’s entry.

“Freddie, Freddie,” she was saying, “my good little Freddie.”

“Aw, Ma,” he was saying. “Don’t embarrass me!”

But he clearly loved her attention, grinning with a mouthful of gold, his head on her shoulder as she pressed him to her.

He pushed his mother aside, however, when he caught a glimpse of me.

He was wearing a white shirt and brown pants, was in his early thirties, short, shorter even than Nelson, sandy-haired, shifty-eyed, sunken-cheeked. He looked a lot like his brother Doc, but not as stocky.

“Who’s this?” he said, nodding at me, his cheerfulness dropping away so completely it was hard to remember it’d ever been there.

Doc, standing beside me, pointed a thumb at me; we were just inside the doorway, the archway drapes whispering behind us. He said, “He drove Ma here from Chicago. She says he’s here to see Doc Moran, for the Boys.”

Fred frowned, said, “We don’t like tyin’ in with rackets guys.”

I said, “That’s not what they say in St. Paul.”

The frown eased into something approaching a faint smile. “We don’t like tyin’ in with Chicago rackets guys. How long you intend stayin’?”

“Overnight okay? I could stay in town—”

“No!” Nelson said. He was still standing by the wall, next to the sofa and the perky brunette. “You’ll stay right here till I say different.”

I decided not to push Nelson in front of his girl. I said, “I’m your guest, so it’d be bad manners to do it any other way than yours.”

Nelson smiled at that, smugly, and the little brunette beamed up at him; she was nuts about him. Maybe that perky look in her eyes meant she was a little nuts period.

Then Doc started introducing me around. “That’s Helen, Big George’s wife,” he said, indicating Nelson and his brunette, “and the little lady with the big drink is my brother Fred’s girl, Paula. That’s Fred of course.”

Fred nodded to me and I nodded back. Paula saluted me with her drink and gave me a sly, sexy smile and Fred frowned at her and she stuck her tongue out at him. I made like Buster Keaton.

I moved tentatively toward the sofa and Nelson lifted his head warily; but I wasn’t approaching his wife. I stood in front of Louise and asked, “Who might you be?”

The big brown eyes blinked; pink tongue flicked out nervously over red beestung lips. She looked to each side of her, at each of the two women, as if asking if she should answer. As if she needed permission.

“This is Lulu,” Doc answered for her. “Candy Walker’s girl.” He took me by the arm and pulled me gently away, buttonholed me. “She’s out of sorts at the moment,” he whispered, “’cause her boyfriend’s getting carved up in the kitchen.”

“Huh?”

He gestured to his face. “Plastic surgery. Her boyfriend’s Candy Walker, and Candy’s got pretty hot lately. Pictures in the paper, wanted circulars. You know. So he’s getting his face done over. And Lulu’s nervous about it. She don’t like docs. Except me, of course. And I don’t operate on anything but banks.”

“I hear you’re a regular surgeon,” I said.

He liked that; when he smiled his lip curled up, like he was smelling something unpleasant. “I open ’em up and remove the money,” he said. “Yeah. I’m a regular bank surgeon.”