The red nosed guy let go of my arm and nodded as if my request were reasonable. We pushed through the door and started up a concrete stairway.
“Welcome to Chicago,” he said.
2
The waiting room of the station had a high ceiling and was filled with wooden benches. It was a church with all the pews facing a big ad for Woodbury soap. There were a few people on the benches, but they weren’t worshipping the soap for the skin you love to touch. Some were sleeping. Some were reading. Most were looking at each other, or nowhere.
The two cops led me slowly around the benches toward a short order counter that jutted out on one side of the hall and sent out a smell of sweet grease. There were lots of stools open. The plainclothes cop pointed to the one I should take. It had a piece of yellow food on it. He swept it away and waited for me to sit. The cops sat on either side of me. A semicatatonic woman sat next to the plainclothes cop, drinking yellow coffee and silently gnawing a sodden sweetroll.
I put my suitcase by my feet and watched a lemon-shaped waitress bring yellow coffee for the three of us without being asked. The cops were waiting for me to say something. I was waiting for them. I’d been a cop once and I’d stepped into mistakes often enough to know that you kept your mouth shut with cops until you had to talk.
“My name’s Kleinhans,” said the red-nosed guy, “Sergeant Kleinhans. You can call me Chuck or Kleinhans, whatever suits you. The gentleman on your right is Officer Jackson. You can call him Officer Jackson. Officer Jackson is about to take his coffee to that seat over there where he can be alone with his thoughts.”
I shut up and drank my coffee from a thick, porcelin cup with a big handle. The coffee didn’t taste bad. It had no taste. My cup was more interesting. It had a branching crack in it. I followed the crack with my eyes and let the steam of the coffee hit my face. Kleinhans gripped his cup in two hands.
“Hot cup against your palm on a cold night feels good,” he said. I put on a wry grin and nodded my head knowingly. Kleinhans went on talking very softly into his cup without looking up at me.
“We got a call about you from Miami,” he said. “Well, anyway, my boss got a call. Seems you’re here to check up on something involving some of our good friends in the criminal world.”
I was ready to say something, but having started, Kleinhans wanted to finish his piece.
“I work out of the Maxwell Street Station not too far from here,” he went on, savoring the feel of hot porcelin in his hands. “I sort of specialize in gambling problems related to the citizens in question. Would you like a roll?”
I said no, but that I would like some cereal. The waitress brought him a cheese Danish and me a bowl of what looked like Rice Krispies. Crumbs fell from Kleinhans’ sugary Danish. He swept them off with the back of his arm. They snowed on the catatonic woman. She didn’t complain.
“Maybe we can be of service to each other,” Kleinhans went on. “I’ll tell you how to get in touch with certain people, and you keep me informed about what you find out. Now this isn’t exactly the way I’d play it with you if I had my way, but my boss says to treat you right. You’ve got connections. And who knows? You might come up with something I can use.”
“You mean you might be able to use me?” I said.
He nodded his head sagely and said “mmm” as he wiped sugar from his mouth with a napkin.
“We understand each other,” he beamed. “Here’s my office number and home number.” He pulled out a pencil and wrote two numbers on the napkin he had just used on his mouth. “Take it. Call me if and when, and at least “once a day.” He shrugged. “Trains and planes leave here every day for the bright sunshine of California. If I were you, Senor Peters, I’d get a ticket and head for the sun tonight. You’re not dressed for our weather.”
“I think I’ll stick around.”
“Figured you would,” he said, clapping my back with a broad right hand. “No trouble from you-” he pointed to me, “no trouble from me,” he pointed at himself. His pronoun references were unmistakable, but I wasn’t exactly sure of what his definition of trouble might be.
“It’s a deal,” I said.
“Nope. It’s the way I say things are going to be. We’re not partners, Mike Shayne. Now, we’ll drop you at a hotel where you can get some sleep, and you can give me call in the morning. You want to stay fancy or cheap?”
“It’s on MGM,” I said, “but I’m used to small rooms. Too much space makes me nervous.”
“We’ll compromise on the LaSalle.” He got up, threw some money on the counter, glanced at Officer Jackson, and turned away. Jackson wasn’t finished, but swallowed the rest of his donut and spilled some of his coffee on his uniform trying to get his money’s worth.
The unmarked cop car was right outside the door in a no-parking zone. Kleinhans and Jackson walked to it slowly. It was no more than a few feet, but pain shot through my head.
“How cold is it?” I asked, getting into the front seat as directed. Jackson drove. Kleinhans sat in back. I wasn’t a suspect, but one never knew.
“Eleven or twelve above,” said Jackson. “Not too bad.”
Kleinhans serenaded us with a whistled version of “San Antonio Rose.” He even buh-buh-buhed like Bing Crosby a few times. No one talked until Jackson pulled over five minutes later and stopped in front of the LaSalle Hotel.
I said thanks and got out for my dash to the lobby, but Kleinhans called for me to lean over.
“If the bad guys don’t already know you’re here, they will soon. May even have been somebody at the station watching for you. I didn’t spot anybody, but we’re probably not the only ones who got a call about you from Florida.”
Officer Jackson looked out the opposite window. I was no fun anymore.
“I got you,” I said. “Goodnight.”
“Comparatively,” said Kleinhans rolling up his window. I waited for the car to pull away. It didn’t. So I went up the stairs into the lobby. The doorman tried to take my case, but I wasn’t letting it out of my hands again.
It was eleven at night. There were lots of people in the lobby to watch me make my way to the desk in a stiff summer jacket and unmatched pants with a conspicuous crease at the knee. The suitcase didn’t help. It was a second-hand piece I got for three bucks from a pawnshop owner in L.A. named Gittleson. I had muscled a teenage Mexican kid for him when the kid tried to buy a gun and wouldn’t take no for an answer. I was a real class item for the LaSalle Hotel, yes I was.
The clerk on the desk gave me the electric smile with the eyebrows raised to ask what a creature like me wanted in a place like this. He looked like an unprissy version of Franklin Pangborn.
“I’d like a room,” I said, reaching for the desk pen and dipping it in the inkwell. I dripped ink on the blotter while I waited for him to produce the guest book.
“What kind of room?” he said.
“One with a bed and a bath,” I answered. “That’s what hotels usually have. It doesn’t have to be big, just warm.”
He tried to keep from nibbling his upper lip. I didn’t look enough like a bum or a nut to be thrown out, but I didn’t look quite respectable enough to stay. It was my running problem regardless of what clothes I wore, but it was more acute at the moment. People in the lobby were looking toward us, and both of us kept our voices down.
“I’ll pay two days in advance,” I said. “My name is Peters, Toby Peters of MGM.”
The clerk’s eyes opened in understanding and his head rose from despair.
“You’re a movie person?”
“Yes,” I said. “From Hollywood. I was there this morning.”
The clerk obviously believed movie people were exempt from decent dress. He turned the guest book toward me. I signed.