Max Allan Collins
The Big Bundle
For my grandson
Sam
when the time comes
“The evil is in the people,
and money is the peg they hang it on.”
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.
Book One
Kansas City Shuffle
October 1953
Chapter One
A middle-aged man taking stock of his life is to be expected. But for this to be my midpoint, I would have to make it to 94, and anyway it was the ghosts of my past haunting me, not my conscience, which after all was the nine millimeter Browning automatic I still carried all these years after my father killed himself with it — when I disappointed him taking the Outfit’s money to get ahead on the Chicago PD.
As I write this I’m closer to 94 than 47, which was my age in October 1953 when I caught an Ace Company cab outside the Kansas City Municipal Airport. The cabbie was colored, which in a city where the population was 10 % that persuasion might not have been a surprise. Still, Negro hackies didn’t generally work white areas, though airport runs could make for a decent fare and those who didn’t like the driver’s shade could take the next ride down, and those who didn’t give a damn got a smile and a nod and no funny business like unrequested tours of K.C.
And I didn’t need one of those — I’d done jobs here before. The airport was five minutes from a downtown whose “Petticoat Lane” on Eleventh Street had smart shops and patrons who could afford to frequent them; around Twelfth and Main were the usual stores and palatial movie houses, a few blocks east was a civic center whose plaza included two of the taller buildings, the Courthouse and City Hall, with the massive bunker of Municipal Auditorium to the southeast.
Everything was still up to date in Kansas City. They were giving my toddling town a run on the meat-packing and agricultural fronts. They had an impressive art gallery, fine arts museum and kiddie-pleasing zoo, and the industries included steel, petroleum, and automotive manufacturing. And one once-booming local enterprise that had faded since the ’30s had made a big comeback recently.
“You in town about that kidnapping, boss?” the cabbie asked.
He was grinning at me in the rearview mirror. He looked like Mantan Moreland but with a flattened nose; that and his cauliflower ears made him a former prizefighter. Yes, I’m a detective.
“Why would you think that?”
Now he was looking out his windshield, which was my preference.
“Address rang a bell,” he said.
“Ah.”
“Anyway, boss, I read about you — you that private eye to the stars.”
Life magazine had done a story about me when I opened my L.A. branch.
“Don’t recall your name, though,” he said.
“Nathan Heller,” I said.
“Chicago, right?”
“Right.”
“...So what’s Alan Ladd like?”
“Short.”
“What about Mitchum?”
“Tall.”
That made him laugh.
For the record, I was an inch shorter than Mitchum and weighed around two hundred pounds, my reddish brown hair going white at the temples, and “almost leading man handsome” (the Life writer had said). I made up for the “almost” by being a success in my trade — president of Chicago’s A-1 Detective Agency. By way of evidence I offer the court my Botany 500 suit, Dobbs hat and Burberry raincoat, lining in — it was cold in Kansas City in October, and the sky was trying to make its mind up whether to rain or snow.
We rumbled across the Missouri River by way of the upper deck of the Hannibal Bridge.
No laughter now, as he asked, “You gonna help get that little boy back?”
“Do my best.”
“I got a boy that age myself.”
“So do I.”
“I believe somebody took my boy, I kill his ass.”
“So would I.”
He laughed again, but the sound of it was different.
Just under a week ago, a bit before nine A.M., someone rang the bell at an exclusive Catholic elementary school here in Kansas City. A young, inexperienced nun answered and found a plump, pleasant-looking (though agitated) woman on the doorstep; about forty, the caller looked respectable enough in a brown hat, beige blouse and dark gabardine skirt. The woman even wore white gloves.
She presented herself as the sister of Virginia Greenlease, whose six-year-old son Bobby attended the school, and said she’d just rushed her sister, who’d shown signs of a heart attack while they were out shopping, to the hospital. Virginia was asking to see her son. The nun — new at the school, barely speaking English — fetched the child and turned him over to the woman calling herself the boy’s aunt. The boy went along dutifully, hand-in-hand.
Later that morning the mother superior’s second-in-command called the Greenlease home to check on how Mrs. Greenlease was feeling.
Mrs. Greenlease, who answered the phone herself, said, “Why, just fine.”
The first ransom letter came a few hours later, special delivery.
We moved through an industrial area and then an unpretentious mix of commercial and residential, all pretty sleepy on an early Sunday afternoon. In the plush Country Club District, broad, winding boulevards followed the contours of the terrain, interrupted by public areas overseen by sculptures and fountains; a classy retail plaza ran to Spanish-style stucco and cream-color brick. The homes themselves were near mansions — not just “near,” really — with impeccably landscaped, evergreen-garnished yards that in warmer weather were likely trimmed as often as their owners saw their barbers.
“We in Kansas now, Mr. Heller.”
We’d only been traveling fifteen minutes. “Over the state line already?”
“Yessir. This is Mission Hills. Lots of rich folks. You a golfer, sir?”
“I am.” I disliked the sport, but sometimes it was the best way to keep clients happy.
“Well, they’s three golf courses to choose from. They keep ’em open till the first snow.”
Autumn had turned the plentiful trees into a riot of color, orange, yellow, red, green, even purple, that last desperate burst of life before winter delivered death. But the grass was still green, brown barely intruding, with a scattering of those vivid colors making a patchwork quilt of lawns. Fathers were tossing footballs to sons while littler kids leapt into heaping piles of leaves with a fearlessness they’d yet to outgrow, their mothers leaning on rakes and looking on in worried surrender.
The cab was about to turn onto Verona Road from West 63rd when a figure in a fedora and raincoat ambled out from around the corner and planted himself before us with his arms outstretched. The cabbie hadn’t been traveling fast in this residential area, but it was startling enough to make him hit the brakes with a squeal.
Tall, his long, narrow oval face home to a prominent nose and jutting chin, eyebrows heavy on a high forehead, the interloper came over to the window the cabbie was rolling down and leaned in like an officious carhop.
“Local traffic only,” he said, polite but with an edge.