Max Collins - Ask Not

He drew in air and sighed it out. His expression was sympathetic. “Can I help?”

“You can level with me, John. You can answer the big question.”

“Ask it.”

Across the way, an ancient waiter was serving Chasen’s signature desert, the Coupe Snowball — a scoop of vanilla ice cream, sprinkled with shredded coconut and drizzled with chocolate sauce — to an attractive young couple who were about to share it.

I asked, “Have all my good friends decided that the world would be a safer, better place without Nate Heller in it?”

He waved that off with a diamond-ring-laden hand. “Oh, that’s an outlandish suggestion! How can you even say that, Nate?”

“Yeah, it’s crazy. Friends don’t kill friends. But Johnny, as a friend, I’m going to ask you to pass along to any of your friends who might be interested that I am nobody to be worried about. I keep things to myself. I have a long reputation of keeping things to myself that goes back to Frank Nitti. More recently, two years ago? Carlos Marcello told me who he was planning to kill, and I kept quiet about it.”

In this instance, not true: I had conveyed Marcello’s message to Bobby, and he had pooh-poohed it. It was all Mafia braggadocio, Bobby said. It was all that Scotch talking.

The jovial gangster’s expression was solemn now.

“That’s right, Nate,” Rosselli said, nodding just a little. “You’re absolutely right. Your reputation for discretion is widely known.”

My smile was amiable. “On the other hand, it’s also widely known that I am somebody to worry about if fucked with. I brought my family along tonight to make a point, Johnny. My son might have been hit by that car. And my ex-wife, don’t tell her, but there’s still a part of me that loves her. Call me a romantic.”

The jeweled hand held up a traffic-cop palm. “Nate. This ain’t necessary...”

“Tell your friends that if my boy or my ex is touched, I will become extremely unfriendly. That if they try to kill me, that’s one thing. I can handle myself, and even take what’s coming to me, if necessary.”

“Nate... Nathan...”

“But if your friends try to get to me through my family, they won’t like what happens next.”

He was shaking his head now, firmly, though his voice was subdued. “Nate... threats... please. That’s no way to talk.”

“I don’t threaten. I do warn. John, I’m too tangled up in this to go public. It’s that simple. Tell anyone you think might benefit from a warning that I am not a loose end that needs tying off. But I can be a loose cannon if crossed.”

He was nodding. Smiling, too, though it was on the forced side. “I understand. I see your point. And I respect you for this. I really do.”

I slid out of the booth. “Good. Enjoy your meal, John. Attractive girl.”

She was on her way back, navigating the waiters in the aisle with grace, getting looks from men in various booths. Five minutes almost on the dot. I wondered if she’d really powdered her nose all that time.

Teeth blossomed in the brown face. “I’m gonna get her a screen test, Nate.”

“I bet you are.”

I went back to our booth.

“Who is that?” Peggy asked. “Somebody important?”

“Very,” I said.

Our food came and we didn’t talk much. I was busy thinking.

Thinking about how I was going to break it to Peg that our son and for that matter her lovely self were going to be guarded day and night by A-1 operatives until further notice.

Feeling half asleep, I got to the Monadnock Building just after nine A.M. on Monday, a sunny fall day that was doing my bloodshot eyes no favors. I’d spent yesterday in Hollywood with my son, taking in Topkapi at Grauman’s Chinese, dining at Musso & Frank, and goofing off poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Then after Sam’s mom picked him up, I caught the red-eye back to Chicago. Hence my red eyes.

In its day the largest office building in the world, the Monadnock was a towered-over, sixteen-story, gray-brick relic now. But as the home base of a nationally prominent private detective agency, the Monadnock couldn’t be beat for class or mood or history. Going in the main entrance on West Jackson, I passed the rear display windows of stores facing Dearborn and Federal, moved past the open winding stairwells, and caught the elevator to seven.

We maintained the corner suite of this floor. The frosted glass-and-wood exterior hadn’t changed since we moved in, although I now did give billing to a partner:

and smaller,

My Hollywood partner, Fred Rubinski, got similar billing out there, only with the same size lettering as me — always a tough town to negotiate billing in.

In the reception area, with its blond Heywood-Wakefield furnishings and framed Century of Progress posters, sat a slim woman in her early thirties, reading Redbook. She looked prim and crisp in a tailored gingham plaid dress, her blonde hair flipping up at the chin, a style maybe a little young for her, but she had pretty enough features to overcome it. She glanced up at me with big blue eyes and a tiny, hopeful smile touched with pale red lipstick.

I gave her a nod and a smile and moved on.

More likely a girl looking for a job than a prospective client. Well, we could use another swimmer in the secretarial pool. Not much chance she was after investigative work — she just didn’t have the seasoned look of the ex-policewomen we hired.

I paused briefly to acknowledge our receptionist, who wanted to be called Millie now — she felt this was an improvement over Mildred, and maybe it was.

Millie, a dark-haired doll in her late twenties, had a pleasant manner and was sharp as hell. She had shifted from her Jackie Kennedy fixation in favor of Mary Tyler Moore from The Dick Van Dyke Show. It was working okay, though she and office manager Gladys Sapperstein had recently gotten into it over the issue of wearing slacks to work. Today Millie wore a navy blue dress with a V neck and no sleeves.

“Good morning, Mr. Heller,” she said, chipper. She was on her feet, taking my Burberry to hang it up for me. “How was Hollywood?”

“Great,” I said. “I got you Morey Amsterdam’s autograph.”

“Really?”

“No.”

Sharp but gullible.

She crinkled her chin and warbled, “Mr. Hel -ler...”

She said that like Laura Petrie said “Rob” on Van Dyke, and I hadn’t decided yet whether it was cute or annoying.

We had a regular Monday morning staff meeting at eleven, so the bullpen with its modern metal desks — I don’t like cubicles — was well-populated, only a handful of agents out on assignment. Age and sex and color varied — we had three Negroes now — and all our agents had police or military police backgrounds. A wall of windows looked out onto Jackson Street while another wall was home to a lineup of metal four-drawer files.

Office manager Gladys Sapperstein was my partner Lou’s wife. They had no children, unless you counted me. Her office was between Lou’s and mine, and right now she was poised outside of it, her hands filled with paperwork.

Her eyes narrowed as she saw me ambling in her direction. She met me halfway, still an attractive woman after all these years (I’d hired her in 1939) — a busty, pleasingly plump brunette about sixty. She looked like the kind of teacher whose lap a fifth-grade boy wanted to sit in, but didn’t know why.