Free Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 by Angel in Black (v5.0) Page A

I asked.
    “No! It’s . . . something personal. Please don’t ask.”
    Maybe it was V.D. of some kind, in which case I really wasn’t anxious to change our pattern of sexual activity.
    Still, female trouble or not, I was becoming quite taken with Beth Short. She was filling the Peggy void quite nicely, and her enthusiasm for orally servicing me was—I am neither proud, nor particularly ashamed to say—intoxicating.
    On the fourth and final night we were together (she had the evening off from the Oyster House), we dined out at Henrici’s and came back to my Morrison suite, where she announced that she had indeed decided to return to California.
    “Why don’t you try staying on in Chicago, awhile?” I asked her, fixing her a Coke on ice and myself a rum and Coke on ice. “I talked to Patricia Stevens this morning—I can get you an interview.”
    That was the number-one modeling agency in town.
    “No, Nate, I appreciate it. I appreciate everything you’ve done . . . but just this morning, I spoke on the phone to a famous movie director, and he wants me to come to Hollywood, right away, to take a screen test.”
    This sounded like a pipe dream if I ever heard one. I handed her the Coke and sat next to her on the couch. “What famous director?”
    “I can’t say. He asked me not to.”
    “That’s bullshit, Beth—he’s just another asshole who wants to get in your pants.”
    “Don’t be crude, Nate—don’t be mean.”
    I was a little owly at that, at the thought of having thoseexquisite “baby steps” vanish from my life. “I was kind of hoping . . . I mean, I thought we were getting along pretty well. . . .”
    “We are, we are,” she said, and she put her arms around me and we began kissing, and petting, and then her head was in my lap and I was giddy, I was in heaven.
    Which made it a hell of thing to have to accept her leaving. So, as the evening progressed, I did my best to talk her into giving Chicago a go of it, and along the way I had another rum and Coke, and another, and another. . . .
    I don’t remember much more of the evening except Beth saying, “Let’s just forget our problems and enjoy this last night together. . . . Live for today, I always say. . . .”
    At some point in the night I woke up, needing to use the bathroom, and noticed Beth in bed next to me. So—we had finally made it from the couch to the bed. A light was still on in the outer room, filtering in enough that I could lift the covers and have a peek at her busty little frame. She was nude, slumbering peacefully, though snoring a little, something bronchial stirring in her chest. She had washed the lipstick and white pancake away and her high-cheekboned beauty, framed by the mane of black, was even more striking unadorned.
    I remember wondering—as I staggered in to take a pee—if I had finally fucked her, only to have forgotten in my drunkenness; and I remember thinking, if she did have the clap or something, I probably caught it—and deserved to.
    Then, class act that I am, I stumbled back to bed and fell asleep next to her.
    When I awoke, she was gone; and the next time I heard from her was in January, on the telephone, from a pay phone at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.
    And the next time I saw her, she was nude, just as she’d been in my bed, only this time she was in two pieces, in a vacant lot on South Norton Avenue.

5
    Fowley parked his blue Ford in the lot across from the gloomy-looking, five-story cream-colored stucco building at 11th and Broadway. The sun had finally banished the clouds and burned off the smog, making a reflective blur of the Examiner building, a huge American flag flapping above the main entrance, adding a splash of color and just the proper hint of hypocrisy.
    Feeling shaky and sick and trying to hide it, I had suggested—as we’d rolled along Olympic Boulevard, heading to the Examiner —that we postpone our meeting with Fowley’s city editor, Richardson,