Max Collins - True Detective

But brother, was he.

I moved through the crowd as quickly as I could without attracting attention or getting swung at; Dipper was following a guy and studying him to make the hook, and I had time.

Then about ten feet from him I got overanxious, and pushed past a guy, who pushed back and said, “Hey! Watch it, bub!”

And Dipper turned, and saw me.

And recognized me.

To him, I supposed, I was still just a pickpocket detail cop. And he could see I was moving toward him, fast enough, furious enough, to have caused a commotion (goddamnit!), and he started pushing through the crowd himself, and was out the door and into the starry night.

I followed him, and he left an angry trail of people, as the fans in front of the stadium, lingering, chatting about the great fight, were in both our ways, and got pushed out of it, and we had to be well away from the stadium and into the residential district surrounding it before either of us could really run.

And one thing a pickpocket can do is run.

Cooney, who’d kept his weight down to help with the college kid pose, was light, small, wiry, and he had half a block on me.

But I wanted him bad.

I ran full throttle after him, feeling like a track star, and I shouted, “Cooney! I’m not the cops anymore!”

He kept running.

So did I.

“Cooney!” I yelled. “I just want to talk, goddamnit,” and that last was just to myself; my side was starting to ache. I never ran this fast, this far, before.

The neighborhood was mostly two-flats and row houses, and it was almost midnight, so we were alone on our sidewalk track, nothing, nobody in our way, and I began to cut the distance, and then he was just out in front of me and I threw myself at him, tackled the son of a bitch, and we skidded, skinned ourselves on the sidewalk and landed in a pile.

I didn’t have a gun on me, but that was okay: pickpockets rarely carry guns, as it takes up stash space and weights ’em down. And I was bigger than this forty-year-old college kid, and I crawled on top of him like a rapist and grabbed the front of his shirt and the two green eyes in the midst of that freckle-face looked up at me round as the colored kid’s in Our Gang.

“What the fuck you want, Heller?” he managed. He was panting. So was I. I hoped my breath was better than his. “You ain’t no goddamn cop no more.”

“You know about that?”

“I can read. I seen the papers.”

“Then why’d you run?”

He thought about it. “Force of habit. Let me up.”

“No.”

“I won’t run. I’m winded, Heller. Let me up.”

Cautiously, I did. But I kept the front of his shirt wadded in one fist.

“I just want some answers,” I said.

“You still sound like a cop.”

“I’m private.”

That stirred a memory. “Oh. Okay. Yeah, maybe I remember reading that. You’re a private dick now.”

“Right. And this isn’t police business.”

We were on a side street; a car angled down it, somebody leaving the stadium, probably. I let go of his shirt, so it wouldn’t attract the driver’s attention. Cooney thought about running. Just thought.

“In fact,” I said, “there’s a double sawbuck in it for you.”

His attitude changed; running was now out of the question. “You’re kiddin’? What do I know that’s worth a double sawbuck to you, Heller?”

“It’s just a case I’m working, a missing persons case.”

“Yeah?”

“Kid named Jimmy Beame. His sister and father are looking for him.”

He rubbed his chin. “I think I know a Jimmy Beame.”

“Give.”

“You give. You were talkin’ double sawbuck a minute ago.”

I dug in my pocket and got out a ten; gave it to him.

“You can have another,” I said, “if I like what you have to say.”

“Fair enough,” he shrugged. “I was in the Tri-Cities, must’ve been a year and a half or two ago. This kid Beame was thick with the local mugs. Small-timers... but they were connected to some Chicago folks.”

“Go on.”

“This kid wanted in.”

“In where?”

“The mob. He wanted some fast money, he said. He’d been bootlegging and such — some of it in Chicago, he said, for these Tri-Cities mugs. But he wanted something bigger.”

“What, exactly?”

“He wanted to work with the Capone gang.”

“What? He was just a hick kid!”

“Yeah, but he’d been around a bit. Had a gun on him, when he traveled with me. And I helped him out; he paid me to.”

“So what did you do for him?”

“How ‘bout the other sawbuck?”

I grabbed his shirt again. Another car came rolling down the side street and I let go.

“Easy,” he said, brushing his college sweater off.

“What did you do for him?”

“I called Nitti. I done work for him, you know, time to time. Said the kid was all right, and Nitti said send him, and I gave the kid the address and that’s that.”

“That’s that?”

“That’s that,” Cooney shrugged, and the car going by slowed as the driver extended an arm with a gun in its fist and I dove for the bushes as three silenced bullets danced across Cooney’s chest.

Then the car was gone, and so was Cooney.

Night at the fair.

White lights bouncing off colored surfaces, colored lights careening off white surfaces, the modernistic lines of buildings brought out by tricks of incandescent bulbs, arc lights, neon tubes, a night aglow with pastels, like some freak occurrence, like a diamond necklace caught fire and flung along the lakeshore.

That was the view from atop the east tower of the Sky Ride, on Northerly Island, anyway, where Mary Ann had dragged me. But even down on the grounds of the fair, the effect was otherworldly. This was not the first time Mary Ann had asked me to bring her to the fair at night: the half dozen times we’d been here together, with the exception of that first afternoon, had been after the sun fell and the lights came up, and the futuristic city looming along the lake became even more unreal.

Of course I hadn’t really brought her here tonight; I had met her at the Hollywood pavilion, which was her favorite place at the exposition — and where, tonight, she’d been working. A special broadcast of “Mr. First-Nighter” had emanated from one of the two radio studios within Hollywood, which sprawled over five acres on the tip of Northerly Island, just south of the Enchanted Island playground. Much of Hollywood was a bulky structure in shades of red that, despite the massive round Sound Stage entryway, was strangely lacking the futuristic grace of the rest of a fair which was itself more a reflection of Hollywood’s notion of the future than science’s. Outdoor sets surrounded the building, and movies were shot here daily by a crew making two-reelers for Monogram, often featuring name stars, admittedly not of Dietrich or Gable stature, but stars (Grant Withers was here for the duration), and amateur movie photographers and the just plain star-struck could watch talkies being made, and afterward have a beer and sandwich in the outdoor replica of the Brown Derby restaurant. And there were several sound stages indoors, one of them an auditorium that seated six hundred, which was also used for radio broadcasts, and was where Mary Ann and the rest of the “Mr. First-Nighter” troupe had broadcast this evening.

I’d seen Mary Ann doing radio before: several times I’d picked her up at the massive nineteenth-floor NBC studios at the Merchandise Mart, in Studio A, the largest radio studio in the world, where I stood in the glassed-in soundproofed balcony and listened to whatever soap opera she was working on that day come in via small speakers. She would stand before the unwieldy microphone and read her script, and she was good, all right, but I can’t say her talent bowled me over.