True Crime

True Crime

Nathan Heller [2]

Collins, Max Allan

AmazonEncore (2011)

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Nathan Heller

Nathan Hellerttt

Private Eye Nate Heller trying discover who the gunshot victim was, found next to the Biograph Theatre, the man the FBI confidently identified as John Dillinger. His search for the answer leads him into a confrontation with J. Edgar Hoover.

The Memoirs of Nathan Heller

True Detective

True Crime

The Million-Dollar Wound

Neon Mirage

Stolen Away

Carnal Hours

Blood and Thunder

Damned in Paradise

Flying Blind

Majic Man

Angel in Black

Chicago Confidential

Bye Bye Baby

Chicago Lightning (short stories)

Triple Play (novellas)

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright ©2011 Max Allan Collins

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by AmazonEncore

P.O. Box 400818

Las Vegas, NV 89140

ISBN: 978-1-61218-093-9

For my son Nate

a real Heller

“Let’s do it.”

—Cole Porter

“Let’s do it.”

—Gary Gilmore

Contents

1THE TRAVELING SALESMAN

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

2THE FARMER’S DAUGHTER

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

3WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED

Chapter 42

I OWE THEM ONE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

C

HICAGO

, 1934

C

HICAGO

, 1934

S

ALLY

R

AND AT

T

HE

W

ORLD’S

F

AIR

1

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.