Max Collins - Ask Not

Right now her lap and much of the rest of her was in a green and yellow floral dress and, like Carlos Marcello’s secretary, she wore jeweled cat’s-eye glasses, though I’m fairly sure she didn’t run a four-state call-girl ring.

“Can I bring you coffee?” she asked.

“No thanks, Gladys. I had plenty at home, trying to get my engine started.”

“Car trouble?”

“No. My engine.”

“You noticed the girl in our reception area.” This was delivered in an I’m-stating-the-obvious fashion.

“Why, because she’s a looker? Is that how you think my mind works?”

“Yes,” she said. It was two questions that deserved only one answer. “She’s a prospective client. She has an appointment.”

“When?”

“Nine-thirty. She’s a little early.”

“Well, there is a staff meeting...”

“Really, and you were going to attend that, were you?”

“Gladys, you know I never miss a staff meeting when I’m in town.”

An eyebrow arched. “Never?”

“Seldom.” I checked my watch. “Well, I guess I do have time, at that.”

“Almost an hour.”

“Give me fifteen minutes, then send her in. Good morning, by the way.”

This rather typical conversation should have been over, but she was still blocking my path. “Actually, Lou would like to talk to you about the client first. That young woman is a family friend of his. Could I send him in?”

“You’re asking my permission?”

“You’re in charge around here, aren’t you?”

“Could I have that in writing?”

She just looked at me.

“In triplicate,” I added.

And now she granted me a smile. She said, “Oh you,” and slapped my arm and walked away, putting some wiggle in her fanny. She did both of those things, in that order, about once a day, if I was lucky.

Soon I was behind the old scarred desk in my inner sanctum, the desk (like me) a dinosaur dating back to a one-room office over the Dill Pickle in Barney Ross’s building on Van Buren. Throughout the early years of the A-1, I had lived in that office, which had a Murphy bed and bathroom. Deluxe stuff.

I’d come a distance. This inner office was as big as its whole Van Buren Street predecessor. No Murphy bed, but a comfy leather couch, padded leather client chairs, a row of wooden filing cabinets, and walls where faces from my past stared at me — celebrity clients, celebrity friends, in a few cases celebrity lovers, from Sally Rand to Marilyn Monroe.

I did get around, like Sam’s other favorite group, the Beach Boys, said.

Sam’s framed picture was not on the wall — it was on the desk, twice: a nice solo studio portrait, and a snapshot with his mother, which was maybe an excuse to be able to look at that lovely face of hers. How many times had I said, or at least thought, I could kill that bitch! Yet now, with the threat of... of what ?... hanging over me and Sam and maybe Peggy, I could only wonder if everything I’d accomplished and all the money added up to a big nothing. That every shady deal I’d made, every evil I’d witnessed, every body I’d buried, was finally going to catch up with me.

A shave-and-a-haircut knock told me it was Lou. He had picked that up from Paul Drake on Perry Mason, I figured.

“Come in,” I called.

Bald, bulbous-nosed, bespectacled, he came over and sat, no hello, no preamble, resting his sturdy, muscular frame in the chair opposite, sitting forward as I leaned back. He wore a pale blue shirt and darker blue clip-on tie, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. He was past seventy, but only the wire-frame bifocals tipped it at all.

“How did she react?” he said.

He meant Peg.

“She surprised me,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“No recriminations or any such shit. She appreciated my concern. Approved the precautions. Remember, Peg was Jim Ragen’s niece. She lived through all of that.”

Ragen had run a racing wire service here in Chicago for bookies nationwide. It had got him killed when he refused to sell out to the Outfit. Peg had been around “underworld figures” all her life. Hell, she even dated a Capone bodyguard before she met me.

“Yeah,” Lou said, as if reading my mind. “She dated Bugsy Siegel for a while, too.”

“Thanks for reminding me. But he preferred ‘Ben.’”

Lou sat back, grinned. “Maybe so, but he’s not going to do anything about it now, is he?... You know, two men, twenty-four hours — even for the president of the agency, that’s going to run into money.”

“I got money.”

“Not a bottomless pit of it, you don’t. How long do you figure you can keep it up, round-the-clock surveillance?”

“I don’t know. Long as I have to.”

He was playing it casual but the eyes behind the bifocals were studying me. “Are you going to do anything else about almost getting killed by a runaway Cuban?”

“I could always go to Miami and see if I can find any Cubans named Gonzales and Rodriguez.” I shrugged. “I talked to my CIA contact, I talked to my Outfit guy. What else can I do?”

Lou and I had no secrets, or anyway not many. He even knew about my visit with Carlos Marcello; and he was in on most of what had gone down with Operation Mongoose.

“You sometimes take steps,” he said.

“I’ve taken them. What, do you expect me to crack the JFK killing? I already know who did it. I knew who did it before it was done.”

“Question is... are you a loose end?”

“All I can do is wait, Lou.”

“Wait, and keep your powder dry.”

Now I sat forward. “If they get in my face, I’ll defend myself, and I’ll do it in a messy way. Anybody who wants me dead won’t want the kind of noise I will make along the way.”

“What kind of noise?”

“Shooting back. Shooting my mouth off. All kinds of noise.”

He folded his arms like Big Chief Rain-in-the-Puss. “Your pal Bobby isn’t in a position to help you out anymore.”

Robert Kennedy had stepped down from the attorney general’s chair to run for United States senator in New York.

“He will be someday,” I said.

“Oh yes, someday he’ll be president like his brother, who they shot, if memory serves. In the meantime, you look over your shoulder. And keep your kid and ex-wife under armed guard.”

“I detect a critical tone. You have a suggestion?”

“You could go public with what you know.”

I laughed. “What, go to the feds? J. Edgar was probably sitting in the window next to Oswald, on a box of schoolbooks, handing him rounds. The papers? I’ll be dead before the ink dries — before anything I reveal could turn into hearings and trials. Maybe I could give Hef one of those interviews he sticks in the magazine between nudie shots, to keep him straight with the postal authorities.”

Lou said nothing. He was frowning. He knew I was right.

“I wish I could help,” he said finally, uncrossing his arms. Then he shrugged. “Only suggestion I have is to go on about your business. Get your mind off this mess with some work.”

“So go ahead and tell me,” I said.

He blinked behind the bifocals. “Tell you what?”

“About the girl in reception. The family friend.”

He took a moment, clenched and unclenched his hands, then said, “She’s kind of a family friend of yours, too, Nate. Her father was Jack Halloran.”

Halloran had been a veteran copper on the Pickpocket Detail with us in the early thirties. He quit to take a job as a deputy sheriff in Geneva, where I heard he’d done well for himself, making it to sheriff and holding the office for decades, finally running for mayor and winning when he was in his sixties. But he was no one I’d stayed in touch with.