Max Collins - True Detective

“Mr. Beame said you’re here to talk to me about his son,” Reagan said, adjusting his glasses, “but I never knew Jimmy. I’ve only been at WOC four months.”

“But you were a close friend of another announcer here who did know Jimmy.”

“Jack Hoffmann. Sure.”

“Mr. Beame thought Jimmy might have come up in conversation with Hoffmann.”

Beame said, “It’s a long shot, Dutch. But Jimmy had so few friends...”

Reagan thought about it; his face was so earnest it hurt. “Can’t think of anything, sir. I’m really sorry.”

I shrugged. “Like the man said, it was a long shot. Thanks, anyway.”

“Sure. Oh, Mr. Heller. Could I have a word with you? Could you step in the studio for a second?”

“Fine,” I said.

Beame looked curious, and Reagan said, “I want to ask Mr. Heller to look up a friend of mine in Chicago. No big deal.”

Beame nodded, and Reagan and I went into the studio, a room hung with dark blue velvet drapes, for soundproofing purposes, though the ceiling was crossed by more trees, bark and all, attached to which were various stuffed birds, poised as if in flight, though they weren’t going anywhere.

“I didn’t want to talk in front of Mr. Beame,” Reagan said. “I do know some things about his son, but they aren’t very flattering.”

“Oh?”

Beame was watching us through the window; stuffed birds watched us from tree beams above.

“Yeah. He was in with a rough crowd. Hanging around in speakeasies. Drinking. Fooling around with the ladies, using that term loosely, if you get my drift.”

“I get it. You know what joints he might’ve been frequenting?”

Reagan smiled on one side of his face. “I’m no teetotaler. I’m Irish.”

“That means you might know where some of those places are.”

“Yeah. Jack Hoffmann and I used to hit some of ’em, occasionally. And those I haven’t been in, I know about. Why?”

“You working tonight?”

“No.”

“Busy?”

“Are you buyin’?”

“That’s right.”

“I live at the Perry Apartments, corner of East Fourth and Perry. I’ll be waiting out front at eight tonight. Swing by.”

“I’ll do that,” I said, and we shook hands, and he smiled at me, and it was an infectious smile.

“Irish, huh?” I said.

“That’s what they tell me,” he said, and went back in his announcer’s booth, which was visible through a window in the left draped wall, where a bulky WOC microphone could also be glimpsed.

In the rustic reception room, Mary Ann’s father said, “What was that all about?”

“Old girl friend of his he wants me to check up on.”

“Oh.”

“Nice guy.”

“Yes. Yes, he is. Now, then. I’ve made an appointment with Paul Traynor, for ten o’clock, at the newspaper. In the meantime, I’ve got to stay up here and get to work. I’ll leave you at my daughter’s mercy.”

“Come along,” Mary Ann said, taking my arm as we got on the elevator. “That appointment’s at ten and it’s only half past eight now. I’m going to take you on a tour of my favorite place in the world. Or anyway, the Tri-Cities.”

“Really? And what’s that?”

“‘A Little Bit O’ Heaven.’ Ever hear of it?”

“Can’t say I have. Where is it?”

“Next door.”

Soon I was walking with Mary Ann across an oriental courtyard, past a thirty foot-long writhing rock-and-tile and chipped-stone snake, by two idols with human heads and monkey bodies, under shell-and-stone umbrellas, through a four-ton revolving door inlaid with thousands of pearl chips and semiprecious stones, into a big pagoda of a building in which ancient hindu idols coexisted with Italian marble pieces that luxuriated in lushly lit waterfalls; where rock gardens and pools and ponds and fish and fauna and petrified wood and growing plants and shells and agates came together to form a place I — and no one — had ever seen the like of before. Trouble was, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

I said little as she led me around; she was enthralled — I wasn’t. The money that had been sunk into this combination rock garden and museum seemed excessive, considering the times. This was not a curator’s notion of a museum, it was a collector’s conceit, a conglomeration whose sum was considerably less than its parts.

“This is B. J. Palmer’s personal collection, you know,” Mary Ann said, as we stood in front of an immense black idol, a sign telling us this “Wishing Buddha” was over a thousand years old. “I think it’s wonderful of him to open it up to the public like this.”

“We paid a dime.”

“What’s a dime?”

“Two cups of coffee. A sandwich.”

“Don’t get serious on me, Nathan. Can’t you see the benefit of a place like this?”

“You mean a world that isn’t the real world? Sure. It’s nice to go someplace unreal once in a while.”

“You’re damn right,” she said, and tugged at me, and said, “This is my favorite part,” and soon we were in a tiny wedding chapel, formed of pebbles and stones and mortar, with a rock altar eight feet wide, eight feet deep, ten feet high.

“The smallest Christian church in the world,” she said in a hushed tone.

“No kiddin’.”

We were holding hands; she squeezed mine.

“Hundreds of couples are married here every year,” she said.

That she could be warmed by a cool, stone closet like this was a testament to her imagination and sense of the romantic.

“Isn’t it splendid?” she said.

“Well...”

She put her arms around me, looked up at me with that innocent look that I had come to know was only partly artifice.

“When we get married,” she said, “let’s get married here.”

“Are you asking for my hand, madam?”

“Among other things.”

“Okay. If we get married, we’ll do it here.”

“If?”

“If and when.”

“When.”

“All right,” I said. “When.”

She pulled me out of there, almost running, like a schoolgirl. When we were out in the oriental court, with a little brook babbling nearby, she babbled, too: “This was our favorite place.”

“What?”

“Jimmy’s and mine. When we were kids. We came here every week. We’d make up stories, run around till the guides’d get cross and stop us. Even when we were teenagers, we’d come here now and then.”

I said nothing.

She sat on a stone bench. “The day before Jimmy left, we came here. Walked around and took it all in. There’s a greenhouse we’ve yet to see, Nate.” She stood. “Come on.”

“Just a second.”

“Yes?”

“Your brother. I don’t mind looking for him. It’s my job. You’re paying me to do that. Or you were. I’m not inclined to take any of your money, from here on out. But, anyway, your brother...”

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to hear about him anymore.”

Her face crinkled into an amused mask. “You’re jealous!”

“You’re goddamn right,” I said. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of heaven.”

She kissed me.

“Okay,” she said.

“Jimmy’s a good kid,” Paul Traynor said, “just a little on the wild side.”

Traynor was only a few years older than me, but his hair was already mostly gray, his lanky frame giving over to a potbelly, his nose starting to go vein-shot, the sad gray eyes looking just a shade rheumy. He was sitting at his typewriter at a desk on the first floor of the newspaper building, in a room full of desks, about half of which were occupied, primarily by cigar-puffing men who sat typing through a self-created haze.

“He grew up during the Looney years,” Traynor said, “and developed this fascination for gangsters. And, you know, we always have run a lot of Chicago news in the Democrat. We cover the gangland stuff pretty good, ‘cause it has reader appeal, and ‘cause the Tri-Cities liquor ring is tied to the Capone mob. So a kid around here could easily grow up equatin’ that stuff with the wild west or whatever.”