Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 09 Read Online Free Page A

the mayor to drop by?”
    “Are you suggesting that was prearranged?”
    “Playin’ Walker for a sucker, aren’t you, C.D.? I bet that poor bastard thinks if he gets on your good side, you’ll defend His Honor at the inquiry into his administration.”
    Darrow shrugged. Definitely not a grandiose shrug.
    “Does Gentleman Jimmy know you’re going to be in Hawaii when he comes under the gun?”
    “The mayor of New York stops by for cheesecake and a pleasant social afternoon of theater,” Darrow said, “and you make a conspiracy out of it.”
    “How much are you getting?”
    “For what?”
    “For what do you think—the Massie defense.”
    He thought about ducking the question, but he knew enough not to lie to me. I was a detective; I would find out, anyway.
    The piercing gray eyes had turned placid as he said, casually, “Thirty thousand—but I have to pay my own expenses.”
    I laughed for a while. Then I slid out of the booth. “Tell you what, C.D. See if you can swing that leave of absence for me, and I’ll think about it. But I want a hundred bucks a week, on top of my copper’s pay.”
    “Fifty,” he said.
    “Seventy-five and full expenses.”
    “Fifty and full expenses.”
    “I thought you were the friend of the working man!”
    “I am, and we are both trapped in a bad, unfair system, stranded on this speck of mud, floating in an endless sky. Fifty and full expenses is as high as I’ll go.”
    “Okay, okay,” I said. “After all, you can’t help yourself—heredity and environment have conspired to turn you into a stingy, greedy old bastard.”
    He tried to look hurt. “I picked up the check, didn’t I?”
    And then he winked at me.

2
     
    On the train, as our four-thousand-mile journey got under way, I did my best to sleep through the two and a half days from Chicago to San Francisco. My tour of duty on the Lindbergh case had left me wrung out like a rag, and some of the reporters tagging along after Darrow (they were aboard for the duration, steamship tickets and all) had got wind of what I’d been working on, which made me more popular with the press than I cared to be.
    “This is like a damn campaign special,” I told Leisure in the club car of the Golden Gate, where I sneaked rum from a flask into both our empty coffee cups.
    Leisure’s wife, Anne—an attractive brunette in her thirties—sat with Ruby Darrow, playing canasta at a table nearby. Ruby, auburn-haired, vivacious, was full-figured but not matronly, a young-looking fifty-some years of age.
    “I know,” Leisure said, nodding his thanks for my contribution to his cup, “and at every whistle-stop there’s another horde of reporters waiting.”
    I smiled a little. “But you notice C.D. hasn’t given them a thing on the Massie case.”
    Omaha was a case in point. Changing trains there, out on the platform, the old boy had been swarmed by reporters hurling questions about the Massie affair; hot words and phrases—“rape,” “murder,” “lynch law,” “honor slaying”—peppered the air like buckshot.
    Darrow had turned his piercing gray-eyed gaze loose on the crowd, hooked his thumbs in his suspenders, and said with a gash of a smile, “Imagine that—a notorious ‘wet’ like me, stranded temporarily in the heart of ‘dry’ country. Nobody to talk to but upstanding moral folk.”
    Several of the newshounds took the bait, and goading questions about Darrow’s anti-Prohibition stance overlapped each other till he stilled them with a raised palm.
    “Is there a man here who’s never taken a drink?”
    The gaggle of reporters grinned at him and each other, but not a man would admit to it.
    “Well, then, what’s your problem?” Darrow growled. “Don’t you want anybody else to have any damn fun?”
    And he’d got on the train.
    As I sipped my rum from the coffee cup, Leisure was frowning; this was our second day of rail travel and he seemed uneasy.
    “Trouble is,” Leisure said, “Mr. Darrow hasn’t