Макс Коллинз - True Crime

It was a hot night, tolerable only when you thought back to the day, and a few people were still sitting out on porches, on the stairs, cooling off as best they could. Now and then people would look in the direction of the lake, wondering where the breeze was.

But it was ten-thirty, and a lot of people were in bed by now — possibly including Polly and her guest — and it wasn’t hard for me to find an empty stoop approximately across from the place, to sit on and seem like just another neighborhood joe trying to beat the heat.

I couldn’t stay here all night, though; if I’d brought my car up here instead of taking the El, I could’ve parked on the street and most likely got away with maintaining a watch. But an all-night stakeout wasn’t practical here. Sooner or later somebody — a cop possibly — would question my presence. I’d have to make my stay a short one.

From the look of the building, the flats within were probably single rooms. This was the address my client had given me for his and his wife’s home; so this was where they lived together, when he wasn’t on the road — meaning he must not’ve been making much, hawking his feed and grain. He’d said he made “good money,” but that’s a vague term. Just because his wallet seemed fairly fat didn’t mean anything — it could’ve been his life savings. Probably that fifty-buck retainer cut him deep.

Of course they hadn’t been married long; he’d said he just landed a new territory, so maybe they planned on moving up in the world soon. Nothing wrong with the neighborhood (if you didn’t mind cemeteries — and dead neighbors seldom keep you up at night with their loud parties). But this was the least classy building on Malden. Then, who was I to talk, a guy who slept in his office.

Half an hour dragged by. There were lights on in some of the windows, but most were dark; all were open. It wasn’t good weather to keep the windows shut. It wasn’t good weather period. I felt like I was wearing the heat; like it was something I had on. Something heavy.

Heavy like the guilt that had settled over me for having fucked pretty Polly one drunken night in a room over the bar on the corner of Willow and Halsted. And feeling guilty was stupid, as well as pointless: How was I supposed to know the little prostie would quit the business, and marry some poor putz who thought she was just a waitress or something? A pathetic chump who would then, thanks to God’s sick sense of humor, hire me to ascertain his bride’s virtue? A hardworking salt-of-the-earth salesman who wondered why his wife seemed to know things in bed that he hadn’t taught her...

I wondered if Polly really had quit hustling. Maybe dapper Dan wasn’t a boyfriend — maybe he was a john. Maybe, like her waitress job, this was something she was up to while her hubby was on the road, something designed to fight her boredom and keep her wearing nice clothes and build a nest egg to help move ’em both into a nicer apartment.

And if she was hustling, should I tell the husband?

Of course I should. I wasn’t paid to decide whether or not the information I turned up was good for my client’s health; if my client paid for me finding out certain information, he deserved to get it. And brother was he going to get it.

Maybe this was innocent; maybe they were in there having tea and milk. Polly wasn’t necessarily over there boffing that guy in the glasses. Right. He probably took ’em off first.

What the hell. I already had enough to tell my client what he didn’t want to know. I could get up off this stoop and walk over to the Wilson Avenue El and go back to the office and get a good night’s sleep, and to hell with traveling salesmen and traveling salesmen’s wives and guys that boffed traveling salesmen’s wives.

At that point, after having been in there an hour, the dapper Dan came out of the building and walked up to Wilson Avenue and hailed a cab.

I hailed one, too.

Followed him to a nice three-story apartment building, a big brick place that probably had flats running to six and eight rooms. It was on Pine Grove Avenue, near the lake, near Lincoln Park. Dapper Dan had dough — more dough than a traveling salesman, that was for sure.

He went in, and my cabbie drove on.

I had him drop me at the El station. I’d planned to stay overnight at the room I’d rented, at the Wilson Arms, but now I couldn’t see any point in it. I did figure to give my client some more of my time, tomorrow, but I also figured to follow Polly around in my car, to hell with this cab noise.

So I didn’t return to Uptown till near seven the next night. I spent the day in Evanston investigating an insurance claim; why sit in that little hotel room, looking out the window at Polly’s sandwich shop? It wasn’t going anywhere. And neither would she, till after work.

My ’29 Chevy coupe with me in it was parked down the street when she came out of the S & S just after seven, wearing a light blue dress and a darker blue hat that fit snug to her head, and waited for her boyfriend to show up. That’s the way it seemed, at least: her behavior today was no different than yesterday.

Neither was dapper Dan’s.

With one exception: while he arrived in a cab again, he shooed it on, and they walked arm in arm, east on Wilson. He looked jaunty, with a straw boater and a white shirt with dark pinstripes and a blue tie and pale yellow slacks.

I got out of the car and shadowed them.

They walked under the El and across to a waffle shop on Sheridan. It was a small place, but at this point I figured I could risk them making me. After all, I’d pretty well established what was going on here; I’d already earned my client’s money — did it really matter whether Dan was her boyfriend, or just another john? Either way, she was fucking somebody who wasn’t her husband, and that’s all I’d been paid to find out. But for some reason, which I cloaked in giving my client his money’s worth, I couldn’t let go of this just yet.

They sat at a table; I sat at the counter. We all had waffles and bacon. We all had coffee.

Then we all went to the picture show. Viva Villa with Wallace Beery, which was playing at Balaban and Katz’s Uptown on Broadway. We didn’t sit together. And I didn’t get spotted. There were better than four thousand seats in the Uptown, all of them full; there wasn’t an air-cooled movie palace in town that wasn’t doing land-office business, and the cavernous, opulent Uptown, with its sculptures and murals and gold drapes, was no exception.

I almost lost Polly and Dan, when the show was over; the fancy lobby was mobbed, and I had just squeezed out onto the street when I saw them pull away in a Checker cab. I caught the next cab and fell in behind them.

Tonight, they went to his place, that fancy apartment house near the lake; maybe her room in the Malden Plaza was too cramped. Maybe she had a Murphy bed; speaking from experience, I can say that making whoopee in a Murphy bed’ll do till the real thing comes along — but Dan probably had six or seven rooms in his flat, one of which was no doubt a room with a bed in it that didn’t fall down out of a box or the wall.

It was too ritzy a neighborhood to risk my sitting-on-the-stoop ruse, so I stayed in the cab and headed back to her place, the Malden Plaza. There I took my position on a stoop opposite and waited for Polly to come home. After two hours, I decided she probably wasn’t going to.

So I walked over to the Wilson Arms and finally used that bed I’d paid for.

The S & S opened at six-thirty, so I wandered across the street at seven. I’d made a decision — in my sleep apparently, because there it was in my brain when I crawled out of the sack: I was going to talk to Polly.