“Just a fluke. Not the sort of thing that happens every day in your business. Yes, I know. I’ve heard you say that over and over. I’ve also heard your stories about the Lingle killing and the Frank Nitti shooting and the Cermak assassination and Nate, give it up. Come live with me.”
“And be your love?”
She laughed. “Poetry, huh? You’re full of surprises, aren’t you, Heller.”
“My father ran a bookshop. A little of it rubbed off.”
“My father had a farm. A little of that rubbed off on me—enough to make me long for some of the traditional virtues, like having a man who loves me around.”
“A bookshop and a farm. Neither one of us seems to have gone into the family business. Though we each have our own cockeyed idea of how to go about making a living, don’t we?”
She stroked my face with the back of her cool long-nailed hand. “Let’s merge.”
“Yeah,” I said, “let’s,” and kissed her again.
Now, the next day, a balmly Friday afternoon, I sat behind my desk in my dreary little office thinking about life with Sally Rand and show business and how any guy in his right mind would jump at this chance.
If I was so goddamn set in my ways, where the A-1 Detective Agency was concerned, I should’ve been doing my fucking job instead of sitting staring at my new office furniture. I had an afternoon’s worth of phone calls I was supposed to be making; credit checks. But I couldn’t seem to do anything but sit there and stare and wonder about my future. Would I be in this same office, a year from now? Five years from now? Ten years from now? Would I ever have a secretary? Operatives under me? How ’bout a wife and kiddies? Or was I destined to plod along making just enough money to deceive myself into thinking I had a “growing” business. Never getting far enough ahead to feel secure enough to make a home and family. Just sitting in this office till hell froze over.
I’d used up part of the six hundred-some dollars I’d cleared off the Dillinger fiasco to improve my office. I’d got rid of the patched brown-leather couch and put in a modern one, artificial-leather maroon cushions on the left and right and cream cushions in the middle, sitting on a swooping chrome-tube frame. I’d picked up a matching chair with maroon seat and cream back cushion; it looked like an electric chair out of Buck Rogers, and the couch was like something in the drinking car on the Silver Streak. A little steel smoking stand with an ebony Formica top was to one side of the couch, and in front of it was a steel, ebony-Formica-topped coffee table. The woman at Sears said the stuff was “as modern as tomorrow.” And on sale today.
Sally had helped me pick it out, and her thinking had been to make my office look more like an office, and in the showroom she seemed to make sense—this streamlined modern furniture seemed just the ticket to pull me up into the twentieth century. Today it all seemed silly to me, absurd in the same room as my Murphy bed and scarred old desk and cracked plaster walls.
On a more practical note I’d put in a water cooler, which was humming over against the wall near the washroom. No use carrying that bottle too far to fill it back up. I’d picked it up used from a small import-export business down the hall, that went under a few weeks before. The heat wave had let up a bit but wasn’t exactly gone, and the little paper cups of refrigerated water made life slightly more bearable.
I was filling one of the cups and the water cooler was saying, “Glug glug,” when somebody knocked on my door.
“It’s open,” I said, and drank my water.
The door opened slowly and a thin man of about forty stepped one foot tentatively inside and peeked in around as if looking to see if the coast was clear.
“Mr. Heller?”
“Yes. Can I help you?”
“Might I step in, sir?”
“Certainly.” I gestured with the now-empty paper cup toward the maroon-and-cream, chrome-tube throne I was now providing for clients, opposite my desk.
He came all the way in, a man about my height but twenty pounds lighter; his face was gaunt, weathered, lined with work, with eyes of that odd light blue color like the sky on certain washed-out summer days. He held his straw hat—not a boater—in his hands, and smiled one of those polite smiles that barely qualifies as smiling and nodded as I walked behind my desk and made his way uncertainly toward the chair of tomorrow.
He clearly was a man of yesterday. He slouched a bit—not from the weight of the world, but from something much heavier: he wore a sense of personal tragedy like a topcoat. A snug-fitting one. His clothes didn’t make as close a fit: his dark brown suit wasn’t cheap but wasn’t tailored (like my furniture, it might’ve been gotten at Sears—though in his case surely by mail-order catalog) and shiny brown shoes and his light brown bow tie were obviously Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, and he was less than comfortable in them. If he’d ever been comfortable in his life.
