True Crime (2 page)

Somebody had to burst Sally Rand’s bubble.

And I was elected. I was, after all, the guy she’d hired to find out the truth about the self-professed oil millionaire from Oklahoma who’d proposed to her last Saturday night, after a month of flowers and gifts and nights on the town—though Christ knows where Sally found the time for the old boy, what with her various shows at the Paramount Club, the Chicago Theater and of course here at the Streets of Paris, at the world’s fair.

Sally had
made
the world’s fair, you see, or at least that’s what her press agent had led everybody but Chicago to believe. Story was the poor old Century of Progress Exhibition was a dismal flop till Sally dropped her pants and climbed behind her ostrich plumes, at which point the fair’s turnstiles began spinning like the city fathers in their graves.

Only that was a press agent’s dream; the fair was its own dream-come-true, and help from Sally Rand was appreciated, but hardly crucial. Chicago had watched through the fall, winter and spring as the art-deco spires rose from eighty-six acres along the lake, and by summer the city was eager to leave hard times temporarily behind to enter the City of Tomorrow. The turnstiles were spinning from the fair’s first morning, and Sally was only one of a small army of exotic dancers who helped fan the latter-day Chicago fire.

Because there was more than naked women to see at the fair. Like silk stockings being woven, and a Gutenberg Bible (and the press it had been printed on); like the Silver Streak streamliner; and an automobile assembly line; and something called television. You could even see a million dollars (at the Federal Building, under armed guard) or a million dollars worth of diamonds (at the General Exhibits building, similarly guarded). And kids of all ages could wonder at Sinclair Oil’s plaster dinosaurs, and the Seminole village where real, live Indians wrestled real, live alligators. And you could see
Time
and
Fortune
magazine covers two stories high, and a thermometer nineteen stories higher than that. You could see a lot more than just Sally Rand in the nude.

Not that there was anything wrong with seeing Sally Rand in the nude. I’d seen her show last year, the first year of the fair, and she by damn
didn’t
have anything on under there but her. The boys hadn’t been lying! And I understood this year she’d traded her plumes in for a big transparent balloon, a bubble she called it, and was nuder than ever.

I supposed most healthy male Chicagoans had made it out to Sally’s show during the opening week of the fair. But this was my first time this summer to the Century of Progress, though it had been open over a month already—because I’d had my fill of the place the summer before.

Like a lot of people in Chicago, for me the 1933 fair had meant work. Thousands of jobs had been created by the Dawes brothers—Rufus T., president of the fair, and his older brother General Charles G., former vice-president of the United States (under Coolidge), thought by many to be the real brains behind the Century of Progress. Say what you will about the Dawes brothers; dismiss them as businessmen/bankers whose efforts were self-serving, if you like. But they saw to it that a lot of dough got pumped into the Windy City.

Hotels were packed (and the hotels could use it—most of ’em were verging on bankruptcy before the fair) and restaurants and theaters did booming business, as did the newly reopened nightclubs and taverns (or at least newly openly reopened) after beer became legal in April of ’33, during the fair’s first summer. Prohibition gasped its last dry gasp (Repeal was only months away); and the Century of Progress—awash in beer as it was, thanks to the Capone/Nitti Outfit, who were willing to sell people suds even if it
was
legal—became a celebration of a better, wetter, tomorrow.

Of course, many—probably most—of the fairgoers were from out of town; and amid all those solid citizens from the farms and villages of the Midwest were pickpockets from everywhere else. And that’s where I came in.

Me. Nathan Heller. A private operative, but formerly a plainclothes dick on the pickpocket detail. Having that background, I’d been hired to coach the pith-helmeted private police force working the fairgrounds in the fine art of the dip. Or should I say, the fine art of spotting and nabbing the dip. And I’d done some supervising throughout the summer and fall, until the close of the fair in November. The job had paid a pretty penny.

I’d been hired by General Dawes himself, not because I was such a stalwart citizen, but because I had him over a barrel. That’s another story, which has been told elsewhere; for the purposes of this narrative, it’s enough to say that once General Dawes had repaid what he felt was a debt owed me, he saw fit not to hire me back when the Century of Progress was held over for a second year.

That, and a few other unpleasant experiences on these fairgrounds, had kept me away this summer, thus far. Now, as I strolled the fair on this sultry July afternoon, the walkway brimming with women in bright print dresses and floppy hats and men in shirt sleeves and straw boaters and kids in short pants and smiles, I felt a sense of nostalgia for the place, I’d spent time here with a woman I loved. Still loved.

But she was in Hollywood, both literally and figuratively, and I was in Chicago, underfed and underworked. Sally Rand was the first client I’d had in two months, outside of the ongoing work I did for a retail credit firm, checking credit ratings and investigating insurance claims. The A-1 Detective Agency (me) had had a good first year; unfortunately, it (I) was deep into its second year, and subsisting mostly on the dwindling proceeds of the first.

If Mr. Roosevelt was leading the country out of the Depression, he was starting somewhere other than Chicago—or anyway, somewhere other than the corner of Van Buren and Plymouth.

So now here I was again, feeling faintly ridiculous in my light-weight white suit and wide-brimmed Panama hat (souvenirs of a Florida job last year), wandering the avenues of the City of Tomorrow, in the shadow of the twin Eiffel-like towers of the fair’s famed Sky Ride, where “rocket cars” skimmed above the flat surfaces and pastel colors of the modernistic pavilions. One of the towers was nicknamed Amos, and the other Andy, but I never could remember which was which. (Except on the radio.) I hopped a double-decker bus, took a wicker seat on the upper open deck, where you could feel a lake breeze cut through the heat; that felt good, but being here at the fair again felt odd. It was like I was my own ghost, somehow; haunting myself. I got off at the Streets of Paris, which you entered through a big blue-and-white-and-red facade designed to look like a steamship.

Inside, the narrow “streets” were patrolled by phony gendarmes, a temporary world of sidewalk cafés with striped awnings and little round tables under big colorful umbrellas, and stalls where you could buy Parisian hats (by a North Side milliner) and charcoal sketches of yourself (by a Tower Town art student in a beret and paste-on mustache), along walkways prowled by chestnut vendors, strolling troubadors and flower girls. (No wildly careening taxicabs or whores, however.) The flat surfaces of flimsy exterior walls were covered with startling bright posters, and an outdoor “Lido” swimming pool boasted free floor shows of bathing beauties every bit as lovely as Miss Rand.

But Miss Rand was a star, now (she’d made a movie in Hollywood with George Raft, since her success here last summer), and she had her own revue in the Café de la Paix, with dancing girls and the works. She had a matinee coming up in half an hour, so I went in and dropped her name and a tuxedoed waiter whose French extended to, “This way, mon sewer,” sat me at a postage-stamp table, near ringside.

The place was nearly full, couples mostly, the men trying to hide anticipatory smiles, the women pretending to be embarrassed, when irritated (if curious) was more like it. Meanwhile, overhead fans kept the place cool—overhead fans and beer.

The show took place on the dance floor, behind which the tuxedoed orchestra was seated in tiers on a stage; there was no seating to the right or left of the polished floor, which extended to draped areas on either side. I was halfway into a second beer when the orchestra began playing something vaguely Parisian and the lights dimmed and the dance floor filled up with blond show girls in filmy dresses, moving around trailing gauzy cloth like untalented but well-endowed Isadora Duncans.

After a while the show girls went away, the lighting went blue, and Sally came gliding on, in a clinging white gown, long blond tresses swaying, accompanied by her big bubble, which she guided, though it seemed to have a mind of its own. The orchestra, who kept their eyes on their music despite the rear view they were getting, played Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata
, while the gown seemed to accidentally slip, and expose a breast. Then it slipped again, and pretty soon it slipped entirely. This was seen in gratefully accepted glimpses, as she moved behind and to either side of the bubble as she bounced and directed it, but as the orchestra eased into a Brahms waltz, the glimpses became more generous, and as the blue light dimmed noticeably, Sally stepped from behind the bubble, nude as a grape, smiling, Godiva-like hair almost glowing, hands arched in a combination of grace and pride.

When I entered her dressing room backstage, she was sitting before her lightbulb-surrounded mirror combing out her medium-length light brown hair; the long blond hair—a wig—was on the head of a dressmaker’s dummy nearby. She wore a silky blue robe and had a bobby pin in her teeth.

“Heller!” she said, looking at me in the mirror. “I saw you, ringside. How’d you like the show?”

“I liked it fine. I’ve always liked classical music.”

She put the hairbrush down and the bobby pin too and turned and looked at me; her wide, red pretty smile seemed sincere. She had the longest eyelashes I ever saw on a woman (or a man, for that matter) and they seemed to be real. Her eyes were the same color blue as her robe.

“Culture lover, huh?” she said. “Take off your hat, and pull up a chair. I like your white suit.”

I took off my hat, pulled up a chair. “I feel like an ice-cream man.”

“The ice-cream man cometh, huh? What did you find out for me?”

A little fan—an electric one, not the kind Sally hid behind—was whirring on a table over to the left, turning in a little half-circle, blowing streamers in the air.

“Your sugar daddy may be a gold digger.”

She looked disappointed, but only mildly. “Oh?”

“He’s in oil, all right. He owns a gas station.”

“The lying little weasel.”

“These are hard times; he used to own a dozen of ’em, all over Oklahoma. He may have been worth a little dough, once. Hell, he still is. A little dough.”

“But he doesn’t make two grand a week like yours truly.”

“Ouch,” I said. “Don’t say that to a man you’re paying ten bucks a day and expenses.”

“Maybe you’re in the wrong business.”

“I’ve been told that before. But so far nobody’s offered me two grand to prance around in my birthday suit.”

She smiled wryly and leaned forward, folded her hands; her silky blue robe fell open, just a little. One well-formed, large but not-too-large breast was half-exposed. I crossed my legs.

“You might look pretty good in your birthday suit,” she ventured.

I shook my head, grinned. “Not two grand worth.”

She lit a cigarette. “You want one of these?”

“No thanks. Not a habit I ever picked up.”

She shrugged. “They say it’s good for you. Anyway, Heller, why haven’t you made a pass at me?”

I didn’t see that coming, so it took me a moment before I could reply.

“You’re a client,” I managed. “It wouldn’t be ethical.”

“Ethical? In Chicago? I think I’ve made it plain I find you attractive. And there’s worse-looking women in town than Sally Rand.”

“So I hear.”

She blew a smoke ring. “Are you afraid of me?”

“Why, ’cause you’re a star? I met famous people before.”

“Did you ever sleep with any?”

“Just Capone. He snores.”

She laughed; it was high-pitched, very feminine. But there was a core of strength in the little dame, no question.

“So my millionaire’s a faker, huh? Easy come, easy go. I guess I didn’t want to quit show business, anyway.” She sighed and turned back to the mirror. “How old are you, Heller?”

“Twenty-eight.”

Her electric fan whirred; streamers tickled the air.

“I’m almost thirty,” she said. “How long can I take my clothes off for a living?”

“From the looks of you, a good long time.”

She
had
been around, though, even if it didn’t show. She’d been a cigarette girl and a chorus girl, a dancer in a Gus Edwards Revue, an extra in the silents, a Hollywood Wampus Baby Star, which led to a contract with De Mille, though when sound came in she was dropped. She was a has-been of twenty-eight when she made her overnight success after fourteen years in show business by dressing as Lady Godiva for a Fine Arts Ball at the Congress Hotel on the eve of the world’s fair.

Now she was peeking out from behind fans and bubbles, when she wasn’t in and out of court—which of course created the publicity that kept her hot.

“My real name is Helen, you know,” she said. “Helen Beck. But very few people still call me Helen.”

“Would you like me to?”

“I’m thinking about it.” She began brushing her hair. Her other hair, the blond wig on the dressmaker’s dummy, was blowing a bit in the electric fan’s breeze. “Do you know where I got my name?”

“Off a Rand McNally map?”

“You’ve read the newspaper stories, then.”

“Who hasn’t? You’re better known than the First Lady.”

“And a damn sight better looking.”

“Yeah, but so am I.”

She turned and smiled and looked at me. “Why are you still here?” She said this with no nastiness.

“I don’t know.”

“Are you thinking about making a pass at me?”

“Maybe.”

“What changed your mind?”