Chicago Confidential

Max Allan Collins Chicago Confidential

For Gary Warren Niebuhr

and

Ted Hertel,

neither of whom is in this book.

“Chicago is the heaven and haven

of mobsters, gamblers, thieves, killers,

and salesmen of every human sin.”

Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer

“The Mafia is no fairy tale. It is ominously

real, and it has scarred the face of America.”

Senator Estes Kefauver

“Murder is the essence of Chicago,

just as blackmail is the essence of Hollywood.”

Florabel Muir

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.

1

In Chicago the price is up front, at least, if nonnegotiable. In Hollywood, you don’t even know what you’re buying — just that somewhere beneath the tinsel, down under the layers of phoniness, there’s going to be a price tag.

Maybe that was why this girl Vera Palmer was so refreshing. She still had a wholesome, smalltown, peaches-and-cream glow, for one thing; and for another, she wasn’t even a starlet, just a college girl, out at UCLA. The shimmering brunette pageboy, the heart-shaped face, the full dark red-rouged lips, the wide, wide-set hazel eyes, the impossible wasp waist, the startling flaring hips and the amazing full breasts riding her rib cage like twin torpedoes, had nothing to do with it.

“Mr. Heller, I’m afraid of Paul,” she said. Her voice was breathy yet musical — something of Betty Boop, quite a bit of the young Shirley Temple. A hint of Southern accent was stirred in there, too, despite her best efforts.

She was sitting across from my desk in a cubicle of the A-1 Detective Agency in a suite of offices on the fifth floor of the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles, California. It was mid-September 1950 — the air conditioners were shut off, and the breeze through the half-open windows was crisp as an icy Coke. The girls were wearing their skirts long, but the way this one’s shapely legs were crossed under pleated light blue rayon, plenty of calf and even some knee was exposed. Her blouse was the same powder blue with navy trimmings: gaucho collar, edged short sleeves and slot pocket; her elaborately brassiered breasts punched at the light fabric like shells almost breaching a submarine’s hull.

Before this mammarian rhapsody continues, I should point out a few facts. Though I was stuck back among the lowly operatives in this partitioned-off bullpen, I — Nathan Heller — was in fact the president of the A-1 agency. My partner Fred Rubinski — vice president of the A-1 — had the spacious main office next door, here in our L.A. branch. My real office was back in Chicago, in the heart of the Loop (the Monadnock Building), and twice the size of Fred’s. I had taken this humble space, in my back corner near a gurgling water cooler, because I was making a temporary home of Los Angeles.

I had recently divorced Peggy — on grounds of adultery, which considering most of my income came from working divorce cases is the first of numerous cheap ironies you’ll encounter in these pages — but was staying close to her to be near my toddler son. My ex-wife and I had taken to spending Sunday afternoons in Echo Park together, enjoying our kid, thanks to the understanding nature of her movie director fiancé. Some of my friends suspected I was hoping to reconcile with that faithless bitch, and maybe I was.

In addition, I was laying low because Chicago had been crawling of late with investigators looking to enlist witnesses to sing in Senator Estes Kefauver’s choir. The Tennessee senator had, starting back in May, launched a major congressional inquiry into organized crime — with Chicago a prime target — and I was not anxious to participate. While not a mob guy myself, I had done jobs for various Outfit types, and had certain underworld associations, and hence did know where a good share of the bodies were buried. Hell, I’d buried some of them.

So my associates in Chicago were instructed not to forward my calls, and — just to occupy myself — I was taking on occasional jobs for the agency, routine matters I handled only when my interest was piqued. And the bosomy, long-stemmed college girl named Vera Palmer had certainly piqued it.