Max Collins: Mourn The Living

“Maybe.”

The cop was through talking. Now he was waiting.

“Okay,” Nolan said. “Let’s go.”

The cop’s name was Mitchell. Nolan introduced him to the now fully awake, fully clothed Vicki Trask, who looked much fresher than four-o’clock in the morning. She was wearing a blue and red candy-striped top and a white mini skirt.

“I’m sorry to barge in on you so late, Miss Trask.” Mitchell tried to look embarrassed and was fairly successful.

“That’s all right, Mr. Mitchell. Would you two like anything to drink?”

“Something soft would be fine,” Mitchell told her, “if it wouldn’t be any trouble.”

“Cokes, Vicki,” Nolan said.

The girl walked to the bar and iced two glasses. Mitchell and Nolan sat, the cop wondering with his eyes if they should begin speaking and Nolan shaking his head no. When Vicki brought them the Cokes, Nolan told her quietly to wait for him in the bedroom and she followed his command, scaling the spiral staircase wordlessly and disappearing into the balcony above.

Mitchell said, “I’ll put it to you straight, Nolan. You are wanted for questioning in half a dozen states... Illinois one of them. Matter of fact, it’s kind of a coincidence, because just this afternoon I was glancing at a bulletin on you...”

“Can it.”

“What did you say?”

“I said can it. I’m not wanted for a goddamn thing.”

The cop bristled. “Who the hell do you think you...”

“Okay, Mitchell. You want to haul me in?”

“I...”

“You don’t have a thing on me.”

“I have half a dozen circulars...”

“Bullshit.”

“Now wait just a damn...”

“Bullshit! How’d you know who I was?”

Mitchell swallowed thickly. “Anonymous tip late this afternoon. We were told you were in town. Of course we recognized the name...”

“Oh? What’s my real name?”

“Your real name?”

“My real name. You don’t know it. How about military service? Got anything on my distinguished service medal?”

“Of course I know about your medal, what do you take me for?”

“I take you for a piss-poor bluffer,” Nolan said. “When I was in the service, I got a little mad and beat the hell out of a military cop. Got a bad conduct discharge. That was under my real name, which nobody I can think of knows outside of me. And even I forget it sometimes.”

“You’re a real smart fella, Nolan.”

“You aren’t. What do you want?”

Mitchell’s jaw was tight, his teeth clenched. “I could run your ass out of this town so quick, your head’d spin...”

“Then do it.”

“What?”

“Do it. Run my ass out. Make my head spin. Put any more pressure on and I’ll leave on my own.” Nolan leaned forward and gave the cop a flat grin. “But I don’t think you want me to leave.”

Mitchell’s face split into a wide smile and he helped himself to one of Nolan’s cigarettes in the pack lying on the table. “Okay, Nolan. I guess I’m too used to dealing with punk kids who scare easy. You see through me like a window. You’re right. I don’t want you to leave.”

“What do you want from me, Mitchell?”

“Your help, in a way. Look, I got no bulletins on you, but I sure as hell know about you. A lot of cops across the country’ve heard the scuttlebutt about you and your one- man vendetta against the Chicago outfit.”

“It’s no vendetta.”

“I heard...”

“You heard wrong. I steal from them. That’s it. I get a kick out of upsetting their applecarts. For money. And I’m staying alive when they send people to kill me.”

“You admit you’ve killed?”

“I’m not going to lie to you. There’s no court stenographer sitting here. I’ve killed in self-defense and skipped hanging around for an inquest, sure. I stick in one place that long I get dead quick.”

“You don’t look like the type who’s afraid of much of anything.”

“Only idiots fear nothing. If I can fight something, then no sweat. But you can’t hold ground and fight a bomb in your room. Stay in one spot long enough and they find a way to get you.”

Mitchell leaned back and smoked slowly and thought.

Nolan reached for a cigarette and said, “Make your pitch, Mitchell. Let’s have it.”

Mitchell smiled. “You know how long I’ve lived in Chelsey, Nolan?”

“No, and do you think I give a damn?”

“I was born here. It was a nice little place for a long time, friendly, homey, very Midwest, you know? Called it the intel-lectual corner of Illinois, too, because of the university...”

“Get to the point,” Nolan said. “If there is one.”

“All right.” Mitchell’s face hardened; it was deeply lined, more deeply lined than that of the average man of thirty-five or so years. “I could make things rough for you, Nolan, if I wanted to. I could hold you long enough to find out who you are, especially since you kindly informed me of your trouble during your stay in the army. The army keeps records. Fingerprints and such. A bad conduct discharge shouldn’t be hard to trace.”

“If I was telling the truth,” Nolan shrugged.

“I don’t know what you’re after, Nolan, but I know enough about you to have a general idea. You came to Chelsey to hit the Family’s local set-up, right?”

Nolan just looked at him.

“Now, off the record, as they say... what I want is the man in charge. Give him to me. Then maybe I can start cleaning this town up a little bit.”

“And you’ll give me a free ride home, I suppose?”

“As long as I get the goods on the head man, you’ll be free to go. With anything you might relieve him of in the way of cash.”

Nolan said, “You don’t have any idea who your ‘head man’ is?”

“I’ve been trying to find that out for over a year, since I first started to realize just what kind of corruption was going on here. You don’t mean you already know who he is?”

“Found out the day I got here.”

“How?”

“Never mind that. You said your police chief, Saunders, was killed tonight?”

“One of three dead... so far.”

“Well, Saunders wasn’t in charge, but he was in up to his ass.”

“I knew it!” Mitchell slammed fist into palm. “That son- of-a-bitch has been crippling the force since the day he took office.”

“What about the next man killed?”

“Broome? We think he was involved in some kind of narcotics ring. There was heroin in his blood stream at time of death, and we found a hypo in the room and some H. Couple hits worth.”

“Broome was a junkie and a pusher and a creep. But my money says he’s outside help linking Chelsey to a drug supplier.”

“Broome?”

“That’s right. The Boys in Chicago, the mob in New York, they wouldn’t send a punk like Broome in, because he was a user. But maybe he used to work for the Chicago or New York mob before he got hooked, and still had connections to a supplier.”

Mitchell was confused. “This is beginning to go over my head.”

Nolan didn’t like explaining things, but to handle Mitchell properly, the cop had to be told what was going on. Narcotics, Nolan told Mitchell, were hard to organize; by nature they were a sprawling thing, a pusher here, a pusher there, nothing that could be controlled easily. For years the Commission hadn’t bothered even trying to control it. But the last seven, eight years, Nolan explained, had changed things: the eastern families had put on a big push to organize narcotics once and for all, and with large success.

“But it’s tough to hold rein on narcotics traffic,” Nolan said. “The difference is that now, if you’re a non-Commission sanctioned narcotics dealer and they find you out, you get leaned on.”