And he was gone.
“He seemed nice,” Vera said.
“He can be. You ready?”
“It’s too late for me to go back to the dorm. Can I stay at your place?”
We went out the glass doors and walked arm in arm under the Sherry’s canopy, with Vera leaning against my shoulder.
“You know a lot of famous people, don’t you?” she asked. Her spike heels clicked on the sidewalk.
“That’s part of my business, Vera. You want to be famous?”
“Oh, yes. My parents brought me to Hollywood on vacation, when I was a little girl—about ten. I stood on the corner of Hollywood and Vine and I just knew this town would belong to me someday.”
We walked around and up the incline into the parking lot.
“And here I thought you were just a college girl,” I said.
“I’m a college girl studying to be a movie star.”
“Careful what you wish for, Vera….”
We were approaching the Packard when he stepped out from between two cars: Paul, his army uniform looking stained and rumpled. His fists were clenched, but he did not charge at us or anything—just stood with his weak chin high. The wild look was out of his eyes: despair had taken its place.
“Keep your distance, mister,” he said to me.
Poor bastard had been following us all night—first saw me take his girl to the hotel, then to Sherry’s….
I said, “Paul, that’s good advice—keep your distance, or I’m turning you over to the cops for harassing this girl.”
His voice quavered, but there was strength in it, even some bruised dignity. “I just want to talk to my wife.”
I glanced sharply at Vera. “Wife?”
She swallowed and avoided my eyes, though still hugging my arm.
To the solider, who was maybe ten feet away, I said, “You’re her husband, Paul?”
Traffic sounds from the Strip provided dissonant background music for this second sad confrontation.
“That’s right,” he said. “And Jaynie’s afraid I’ll tell the Miss California people she’s married, and a mom, and they’ll toss her out on her sweet behind.”
I winced at Vera. “Jaynie?”
Paul answered for her: “Her name is Vera Jayne, mister. And Palmer’s just her maiden name. Our little baby girl, just a few months old, is home with Jayne’s mother.”
Mildly pissed and vaguely ashamed of myself, I turned to the coed. “This boy is your husband? And you have a baby back in Texas?”
She still wasn’t looking at me; but she nodded.
“Go talk to him,” I said, suddenly exhausted. “I’ll wait— I’ll still drive you back to your dorm, if you want. But first talk to him.”
I leaned against the Packard while they talked. I didn’t eavesdrop, and anyway they kept their voices down. Finally they hugged. Kissed, tentatively.
Vera came over and said, “Paul’s been called up to active duty—he’s going to Korea. He wants me to be with our little girl, back home in Dallas, and be with him as much as possible…. When his hitch is up, he says he’ll bring me back out here, and let me take my shot at stardom. That’s two years. You think I’ll still be pretty enough, in two years, to try again?”
“Sure, Vera.”
Her eyes shimmered with desperation. “Can I call you, then? For a reference to the studios?”
“Sure—me or Fred, either one of us will help you, Vera.”
“Really, it’s Jayne. And my married name’s Mansfield.”
She kissed my cheek and trotted over to rejoin her soldier-boy husband. That motion in her caboose—side-to-side as she moved forward—was worth watching.
They were still standing there talking when I pulled the Packard out of Sherry’s parking lot, heading for the Beverly Hills Hotel.
But let’s face it: I was on my way to Chicago. Far as Hollywood was concerned, my roll in the hay with Vera Jayne Mansfield had been the last straw.
Lake Shore Drive’s majestic mile—once an endless array of magnificent mansions—was now a row of high-rise tombstones; grand residences survived here and there, as a privileged few stubbornly clung to the city. Starting at the crossroads of the Gold Coast, where Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue met, posh hotels and plush shops lined the avenue, serving their wealthy, discriminating and oh so exclusive clientele.
Minutes away, on Clark and Rush Streets, proprietors weren’t so fussy—anyone with five hundred bucks could deflower a virgin, and you don’t want to know what kind of wilted rose three bucks would buy. Guns (from a snubby to a burp), dope (from reefer to horse), and booze (from untaxed bubbly to rotgut whiskey) were available at prices even the middle class could afford.
It was good to be home.
The beautiful parks fringing the lake were still greener than money, no sign of the leaves turning yet; these landscaped acres and the broad lakefront boulevards of Chicago’s Northside were a reminder of how the city’s planners had intended things, before commerce and human nature took over. Lake Shore Drive—up which I was tooling my dark blue 1950 Olds 88—had once been strewn with the elaborate domiciles of the wealthy; most of those structures remaining had been converted into schools and other institutions—the U.S. Court of Appeals, for one.
The remaining members of the old wealthy class—those who had not yet had the decency to die, or move to the suburbs or Florida—lived in the towering modern apartment buildings here and on the other lake-facing avenues, Lincoln Parkway and Sheridan Road, and their cross streets. These über-flats also put roofs over the heads of the Windy City’s new nobility: high-rolling gamblers, mistresses, tavern owners, and, top of the heap, mobsters.
One block south of Belmont Avenue, where the shoreline curved around glimmering lagoonlike Belmont Harbor, I located something even the most skillful Chicago detectives didn’t often find—a parking place—right across from the nondescript brown-brick building at the corner of Barry and Sheridan. The late Al Capone’s cousins, the Fischetti brothers, nested in the top three penthouse floors, which were set back a ways, sitting on the fifteen stories below like a brimless, too-small top hat.
The doorman of Barry Apartments, a paunchy fiftyish guy with a drink-splotched face that went well with his red uniform, did not seem to be a Fischetti bodyguard in liveried drag. At least it didn’t look like he was packing, anyway.
“Visiting someone here, sir?” he asked, hands locked behind him, rocking on his heels.
“Yeah. I’m sure my name’s on your list.”
“I don’t have a list, sir.”
“Sure you do. Name’s Lincoln.” And I gave him my identification.
He looked at the fin, nodded, said, “Yeah this is you, all right,” and slipped the bill in his pocket. “But the top three floors is off-limits, unless the elevator man is expecting you.”
So the elevator man was a Fischetti watchdog.
“I don’t know anybody in the penthouse,” I said. “I just want to talk to the building manager.”
“We don’t have one on site. We do have a janitorial supervisor. He’s got a staff of three, and an office around back.”
I nodded. “Any building inspectors, or fire marshals come around lately?”
“Matter of fact, yeah. Building inspector last week.”
“Well-dressed for a building inspector, was he?”
“Funny you should say that. He was a real dapper dan. Nice fella. I sent him around back to see the janitor, too.”
“Thanks.” I turned to go, then glanced back at him. “This conversation is confidential, by the way.”
He shot me a yellow grin in the midst of the red-splotchy puss, and touched the brim of his cap. “Mum’s the word, Mr. Lincoln.”
I walked around back; the paved alley was a single narrow lane, widening into the recess of the building’s modest loading dock, next to which was a door, unlocked. It opened onto an unfinished vestibule with double PUSH doors to the left, the wooden slats of a service elevator straight ahead, and a corner turned into a sort of office at right, with a desk and a couple battered file cabinets in the middle of stacked boxes and bucket-size barrels, all squatting on the cement floor. The air wafted with the bouquet of disinfectant.