She had an arm around me. I was hunched forward cupping my hands over my face. She was offering me a handkerchief that she’d had in her hand, at the ready; she’d been talking to Barney, all right.
“Ain’t very dignified for a tough copper,” I said, swallowing snot. “I been on this crying jag for so long my goddamn eyes burn.”
“Is that why you’re drinking, Nate? Does the flow of booze stop the flow of tears?”
I grunted something like a laugh. “You don’t drink much, do you, Helen? Getting drunk is the one socially pardonable way a man can cry in public. Nobody blames a drunk for crying in his beer.”
“I hear you’ve been hitting something a little stronger.”
“Yeah. But not today. Today I’m stone-cold sober. And it scares hell out of me.”
She looped her arm in mine, moving closer. “Let’s go to bed.”
I shook my head, violently. “No! No. That won’t solve anything... that won’t solve anything.”
“We don’t have to do anything, Nate. We’ll just get under the sheets and be together. What do you say?”
“I’m so goddamn tired I’d fall asleep in a second.”
“That’s okay. What else is Sunday afternoon good for?”
The satin sheets felt good; for a moment it was like I’d never left this room. Like I’d been here with Sally forever. For a moment I felt like myself again.
For a moment.
“Did you love her, Nate?”
She really had talked to Barney; I’d spilled my guts to the little palooka, and he’d spilled his to her. Damn him. Bless him.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It was too rushed. She wasn’t... she wasn’t like you, Sally. She was just this dumb little farm girl.”
“I’m just an intelligent little farm girl, Nate.”
I found myself almost managing to smile again. “She was like you, a little. She could’ve been like you, if she’d had a break or two in her goddamn life. She wasn’t as smart as you, Helen. She wasn’t stupid, but she didn’t have your brains, your drive, your luck. You both found a way out, a way off of the farm. You just found a better way.”
“Did you love her, Nate?”
“I don’t know. It hadn’t got that far, really.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
I wondered how much Barney had told her.
“No,” I said.
She smiled like a wicked madonna. “You don’t lie worth a damn, Heller.”
Somebody laughed. Me?
I said, “It probably wouldn’t’ve lasted. But that isn’t the point. She was this sweet naïve thing who had a father who beat her and a husband who beat her some more. And then she fell in with... a bad crowd, and I came along, and she trusted me, and I killed her. I fucking killed her.”
She stroked my arm. “You didn’t kill anybody.”
“As good as. I took her right to the son of a bitch who did. For a thousand dollars.”
It had come in an envelope, with a bunch of stamps stuck on it, the Monday after. A fat envelope full of twenties. I’d hurled it against the wall, and the money spilled out like green confetti. Later, in one of my rare recent sober moments, I’d picked it up and stacked it and put it in a new envelope. It was in my bank deposit box, now. Money was money; it didn’t know where it came from. And even though I did know, I kept it. Out of perversity in a way. Because I had earned that money. Brother had I earned it.
“Why demand the impossible of yourself, Nate?” Sally asked. “There was no way you could have known that man wasn’t really her father.”
“I should have checked up on him. That’s twice lately somebody’s come in off the street and told me a story and I swallowed hook, line and sinker. I’m supposed to be a guy with some street savvy. Stick around — some guy’ll sell me the Wrigley Building, before the summer’s out.”
Smiling, she said, “You’re starting to sound like Nate Heller again, whether you like it or not.”
I sighed. “It’d be all right with me to come out of this. And I will. Being here’s a good sign.”
“I think you’re right.”
“I’m getting off the rum, that much I promise you. I seen too many guys sitting in doorways in rags sucking a bottle in a bag. I’ll eat my piece before I go that route.”
“You’re no suicide, Heller. You’re not the type.”
“My father was.”
“Maybe that’s why you aren’t.”
Seth Pearson had been. Louise’s husband. I’d sat in the De Kalb County Sheriff’s Office that Saturday afternoon, for hours, giving a statement, and gathered that everybody in town knew Seth was crazy with jealousy, rage and sorrow over his runaway wife, though the sheriff’s people, at least, were surprised it had gone this far. I didn’t tell them anything about retrieving Louise from the outlaw life; just that Pearson, posing as Joshua Petersen, had come to me so I’d find his “daughter.” The real Joshua Petersen, I was told, had died several months ago.
The story got little play in the Chicago papers, just an item buried on the inside — any crime of passion in the state was bound to get at least that much ink. Louise’s outlaw past did not catch up with her, or it’d have got more, much more.
“She almost told me,” I said, shaking my head. “She was surprised that the photo I had of her came from her father — it was a picture of her and the husband, you see. But I didn’t pick up on it. I was too thick, too eager to make that grand.”
“You got to quit punishing yourself! That girl was a lost cause before you met her. Her fate, as we say in the theater, was sealed. You couldn’t have prevented it. Some things you can’t prevent, Nate. Some things you can’t control, or stop. You’re just a man.”
“I’m a cop. A detective.”
“Yes, right, and that’s why you are a detective — you want to put this messy world in some kind of recognizable order. And that’s of course impossible. But you do seem to manage to tidy up an occassional corner, now and again, you know. Give yourself a little credit. You saved J. Edgar Hoover’s life, didn’t you? Or at least his dignity.”
“Barney told you about that, too, did he?”
“Yeah. You managed that one pretty well, wouldn’t you say, Heller?”
“Ten of Hoover isn’t worth one of her.”
“Well, it doesn’t work that way, that isn’t the way life plays, is it?” She got out of bed and went over to the window and pointed. “Before you know it, winter’ll be here, and those rich Gold Coast bastards’ll wear mink coats while a couple blocks away people’ll be freezing to death in the street. Is that fair?”
“No. But wouldn’t you like to change it?”
“Sure. In my small way, I try. But I’m not going to fling myself out the window. I’m not going to throw my mink coat out, either, or give it to a peddler. Or cry in my beer.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Survive. Best I can. Do my job. Best I can. Remember telling me that?”
I was smiling. Just a little; but it didn’t feel unnatural, anyway.
She came back and got in bed, sitting up. “Why don’t you quit depressing yourself with the what-ifs and the why-didn’t-Is. Why don’t you tell me about meeting Dillinger.”
Barney really did tell her everything.
“I swore that little SOB to secrecy!”
“You’re keeping secrets from me, Heller? Don’t even bother trying.
So I told her about meeting Dillinger.
And I told her about how Cowley pretended to think the man named Sullivan I’d met was only bullshitting about being Dillinger — since Dillinger was obviously dead. The headlines had made Dillinger’s death at the Biograph true. What was really going on in Cowley’s mind, and Purvis’, and even Hoover’s, was then and is now beyond me. They had to know, or strongly suspect, that I was right. That Dillinger was alive. But they stuck to the party line. Hoping Dillinger would stay underground and dead; or, if he went back on the outlaw trail, turn up dead with a new face and end up in some potter’s field unidentified. Underground or under the ground — either way was fine.