Макс Коллинз - True Crime

“That’s terrific.”

“I, uh... wanted her to meet Ma, and my brothers and my sis.”

“This sounds serious.”

Barney almost blushed; Pearl just smiled.

“Be true to this guy, Pearl,” I said, “or someday you might have somebody like me following you around.”

Barney leaned forward conspiratorially. “Is that what this is about?”

I nodded. “That pretty apple-cheeked lass and the mustached gent across the way are, well, naughty. Or so it would seem.”

“His wife your client?” Barney asked.

“Her husband,” I said.

He shook his head. “Dirty business you’re in.”

“Beats having some guy bash your head in.”

He smiled a little, cocked his head. “If you’re trying to describe the way I make my living, let me remind you a couple things. First, I make my living by having some guy try to bash my head in — nobody’s quite got the job done yet. And second, my work pays better than yours.”

I took a last bite of brisket. “Yeah, but you can’t eat on the job.”

Pearl was watching us closely, and seemed to have figured out that Barney and me needling each other was just a sign of how deep our friendship ran.

“Incident’ly,” he said, “Pearl’s got her own room, here. Just wanted you to know, before you got any ideas.”

“Barney, with you everything’s got to be kosher,” I said. “Personally, I enjoy being a fallen angel.”

“You’re getting your religions mixed up, Nate.”

“It’s the Irish in me.”

Barney lived in a suite here in the Morrison; and the hotel had even converted a portion of one of their exercise rooms in the traveler’s lounge into a mini-gym — good public relations, having a champ on the premises, accessible to the people.

Pearl, trying to fathom what must’ve seemed at times to be psychic communication between Barney and me, said, “How did you know Nate was supposed to be working tonight?”

Barney looked for a way to say it, but I said it for him.

“Barney’s my landlord,” I said. “Has he taken you to his ‘Barney Ross Cocktail Lounge’ yet?”

“Not yet,” she said.

“It’s about the only investment he’s made that doesn’t have four legs. Anyway, he owns the whole building, in case he hasn’t mentioned it, and my office is there. In exchange for rent, I stay there at night and keep an eye on the premises. On nights my work takes me away from the building, I call the landlord, to warn him his night watchman’s not going to be around.”

“Which is seldom,” Barney said, as if defending his generosity to Pearl, who looked at him with a warm glow that had admiration in it as well as love. I hoped it would last. I hoped they would never have some sorry son of a bitch like me following either one of them around.

Their food came, and I asked Barney about his next fight.

“Not till September,” he said.

“McLarnin again?”

With visible discomfort, he said, “McLarnin again. Fair’s fair — gotta give him another shot at it.”

I’d seen that fight, and while Barney won by a wide margin, he’d taken some hard shots from McLarnin, who was a power-house hitter, particularly his short right cross, which had sent many a good man into dreamland. McLarnin was heavier than Barney, but not slow. The rematch would be no picnic.

“I’ll have some tune-up bouts between now and then,” he shrugged. “No title defenses, though.”

Across the way Polly and her date were heading down to dance some more; Lombardo was doing a version of “Pennies from Heaven” that would’ve made a marshmallow sick to its stomach.

“Don’t you just love that,” Pearl said, looking out at the dance floor.

“The music, you mean?” I asked.

“Of course! What else?”

“The finnan haddie?”

She turned to Barney. “Make an honest woman out of me. Dance with me.”

“Sure,” he said. “Soon as I finish my fish.”

Pearl had already finished her fish, so she took the opportunity to go to the powder room. Shortly thereafter, Polly and her mustached friend glided by. Barney caught a glimpse of them, as he put a final bite of fish into his mouth, and his eyes narrowed.

“Where do I know that girl from?” he said.

“You recognize her, too, huh?”

“I don’t know. She looks kinda familiar.”

“Remember a few months ago when we were doing Uptown, one night?”

He winced. “You mean that night I went off training, a little.”

“Yeah. You went off training a little, like some guys fall off buildings a little.”

“Just don’t tell Winch and Pian.”

Winch and Pian were Barney’s managers, who were stricter than a Catholic upbringing.

“I won’t tell your ma, either. Particularly not where you know that girl from.”

“Oh, shit,” he said, as it came to him.

“That’s right,” I said. “That bar on Halsted? I knew the gal who ran the place, she was from East Chicago? Remember?”

East Chicago wasn’t a part of Chicago; it was in Indiana nearby. Nearby enough that my work took me there from time to time.

Barney glanced around to see if Pearl was coming back yet.

“We didn’t go upstairs with those girls, did we?” he said.

“We started to,” I said. “We were both pretty drunk.”

“God, if the reporters had got hold of that. I got a reputation.”

“The reporters wouldn’t print anything to darken your sickeningly pure name, you little shmuck. You passed out and Anna — that’s the gal that ran the place — laid you out on a bed. By yourself.”

He nodded, sort of remembering it.

“What about you, Nate?”

“Me?” I said. “I was drunk, too. But I went upstairs with one of the girls.”

Polly glided by in her man’s arms.

“That one?” he said.

I nodded.

“Oh boy,” Barney said.

Pearl came back, and she and Barney went down for a dance. Across the way, the girl in pink and white and the man in the gold-rim glasses and mustache were getting up to go.

Shortly after, so did I.

They took a cab again; gritting my teeth, I followed in one, too. The expenses were chipping away at my fifty-buck retainer; and my conscience, or that tattered thing that flapped in the wind of my brain where my conscience used to be, chipped at my concentration.

I didn’t know which confused me more: that my traveling-salesman client’s bride was a prostitute — possibly an ex-prostitute, giving her the benefit of the doubt — or that I’d screwed her once.

And, as I recalled, drunk or not, liked it.

Back in Uptown, the cab let Polly and her boyfriend off at the corner of Wilson and Malden, and they walked half a block to the Malden Plaza, a four-story residential hotel. It seemed a newer, more modest building than its neighbors, with their terra-cotta trimming and elaborate porches; this building had only some halfhearted gingerbread along the roof and over the entryway, was set back from the sidewalk without a porch, and seemed to have been squeezed in between the two more elaborate apartment buildings on its either side, on what might have been a mutual yard between them, by a landlord whose greed outdistanced his aesthetics.

Gray suitcoat still slung over his arm, Polly’s dapper Dan opened the front door for her and they stepped inside.

My cab went on by, and I got out a block down, near Saint Boniface Cemetery. Malden was an odd little street — existing a scant four blocks, connecting two cemeteries; the other one, Graceland Cemetery, was full of famous dead Chicagoans, in their fancy tombs — George Pullman was in a lead-lined casket under concrete and steel, to keep pissed-off union types from seeing him without an appointment, presumably. I walked down the little street, with death at its either end, coat slung over my shoulder, thinking about how my traveling-salesman client was likely to react when he heard about his wife.