True Crime

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.