DAMNED IN PARADISE
A Nathan Heller Novel
The Memoirs of Nathan Heller
True Detective
True Crime
The Million-Dollar Wound
Neon Mirage
Stolen Away
Carnal Hours
Blood and Thunder
Damned in Paradise
Flying Blind
Majic Man
Angel in Black
Chicago Confidential
Bye Bye Baby
Chicago Lightning (short stories)
Triple Play (novellas)
DAMNED IN PARADISE
A Nathan Heller Novel
MAX ALLAN COLLINS
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright ©2011 Max Allan Collins
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by AmazonEncore
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN: 978-1-61218-100-4
To Michael Cornelison—whose friendship isn’t just an act
Although the historical incidents in this novel are portrayed more or less accurately (as much as the passage of time, and contradictory source material, will allow), fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed here; historical personages exist side by side with composite characters and wholly fictional ones—all of whom act and speak at the author’s whim.
“What the public wants in the way of books on crime is detective stories that appeal to the passions. The public has so long been taught to hate and judge that it seems hopeless to try to teach them any sane and humane ideas of conduct and reasoning.”
—Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life
“Tongue often hang man quicker than rope.”
—Charlie Chan
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
I OWE THEM ONE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
1
Poised at the rail of the steamship Malolo like an Arrow shirt ad come to life, the handsome devil in black tie and white dinner jacket gazed contentedly at the endless shimmer of silver ocean under an art moderne slice of moon.
Occasionally a mist of spray would kiss the rugged planes of his face; occasionally he’d receive an even better kiss from the stunning young society deb snuggled at his arm. She had Harlow’s hair and a bathing beauty’s body, nicely evident under the deep blue skin of her evening gown; the cool trade winds on this warm night perked the buds of her breasts under the sheen of satin. Stars winking above were echoed by diamonds at the supple curve of her throat and on one slender wrist.
She was Isabel Bell, a name that rang twice, a niece of Alexander Graham Bell—meaning she had the kind of money that could travel long distance.
He might have been a wealthy young man from the East Coast; one of the four hundred, maybe—old family, old money. With those cruel good looks he might have belonged to some other element of Cafe Society—a stage or screen actor, perhaps, or a debonair sportsman.
Or a playwright, a man’s man who had chopped down trees and fought bulls and ridden tramp steamers and come back worldly wise beyond his years, penning a Pulitzer prize-winning effort about man’s inhumanity to man, and he would be damned if he would allow those Hollywood infidels to destroy his masterpiece. Not him, an American grassroots genius who had earned the right to hobnob with the elite—even to snuggle and, rumor has it, sneak into the stateroom of a certain Isabel Bell after hours, for some high-society intermingling.
Or perhaps he was a suave detective on his way to a distant tropical isle, having been engaged to solve a dastardly crime perpetrated against some lovely innocent white woman by evil dark men.
Of the hooey you’ve just endured, the closest thing to the truth is, believe it or not (to quote an American grassroots genius named Ripley), the last.
The “handsome devil” at the rail with the frail was only me—Nathan Heller, scion of Maxwell Street, on leave from the Chicago Police Department, on the most unusual assignment a member of that city’s pickpocket detail had ever stumbled into. The crisp white jacket—like the steamship ticket that had cost just a little bit less than my yearly salary—had been provided me by an unlikely patron saint who also resided in Chicago.
The shapely Miss Bell I’d managed to pick up on my own devices. She was under no illusions as to my social standing, but seemed to have a certain fascination for my tawdry line of work. And I was, after all, twenty-seven years old and a handsome devil.
So the real lowdown is…Isabel was slumming—and me?
Damned if I wasn’t on my way to paradise.
Several weeks before, an unexpected phone call from an old family friend had taken me away from a job that already had me way the hell off my Chicago beat. In the early stages of the investigation into the kidnapping of the twenty-month-old son of aviator hero Charles Lindbergh, the involvement of Chicago gangsters was strongly suspected; Al Capone, recently incarcerated for income tax evasion, was making suspicious noises about the snatch from his Cook County jail cell.
So for most of March 1932, I acted as liaison between the Chicago PD and the New Jersey State Police (and Colonel Lindbergh himself), working various aspects of the case in New Jersey, New York, and Washington, D.C.
But by early April, my initial involvement in that frustrating episode (about which I have written at length in a previous memoir) had started to wind down. When a phone call to the Lindbergh estate summoned me for luncheon at Sardi’s, a restaurant in the heart of midtown Manhattan’s theatrical district, I was relieved to be taking a break from a frustrating, heartbreaking dead end of a case.
I left my fedora with the redheaded doll at the hat check stand, and was led by a red-jacketed waiter through a high-ceilinged, open-beamed room that was lent a surprising intimacy by its soft lighting, warmly masculine paneling, and walls arrayed with vivid, full-color celebrity caricatures.
Some of the caricatures were alive. Over to one side, George Jessel—in the company of a blonde chorine—was pronouncing a eulogy over the remains of a lamb chop. Walter Winchell was holding court in one of the reddish-orange booths, his mouth machine-gunning remarks to a packed table of rapt listeners, mostly attractive young women. Barbara Stanwyck, her light brown hair boyishly bobbed, delicately pretty yet projecting the same strength in private as on the screen, was in a tête-à-tête over drinks with a balding older gent who was probably an agent or producer or something. Jack Dempsey—didn’t he have his own restaurant?—was wooing a cutie over cutlets.