Authors: Max Allan Collins
She was a nice girl, a very nice girl in spite of the fact that Nolan convinced her to spend the night with him during the first week of their acquaintance. She spent the night with him for two months. She had reddish blond hair, the high-cheekboned beauty of a model, an excellent body and was extremely quiet. All in all, she was everything Nolan wanted in a woman.
But she was something else, too, something Nolan didn’t want: she was a cop.
Sam Franco called Nolan in for a special meeting the day after it became known that the girl was jane law. Sam informed Nolan that the girl would have to be removed. Nolan informed Sam that he had already told her to pack her things. What he did not tell Sam was that he too was packing his things, and would take off with her as soon as this blew over.
Sam said, “You’re going to have to ice her.”
“I can’t do that, Mr. Franco.”
“I’ll tell you what you can and can’t do! Now, this is your fucking mess, clean it up!”
“No.”
“Ice the bitch, Nolan. That’s my final word.”
But Nolan’s final word had been no, and he meant no. He didn’t kill the girl.
Someone else did.
Nolan found her the next day, in his apartment, floating face up in his tub. The tub was overflowing with water turned pink from blood.
She’d been beaten first, to near-death, then drowned. Little of her beauty in life had been retained in death.
The emotional outlet Nolan knew best was violence, and he spent the next twenty minutes demolishing the apartment. He reduced all the furniture to rubble and smashed his fists through its plasterboard walls. When he had calmed down enough to think, he went down to the lobby of the apartment building to use the pay phone, since he had torn his own phone from the wall.
“This is Nolan, Mr. Franco.”
“Yes, Nolan.” Franco’s voice exuded fatherly patience.
“Mr. Franco,” he said, his voice even, his hand white around the receiver, “you were right about the girl. I want to thank you for . . . letting me avoid the dirty work.”
“That’s quite all right, Nolan,” said Sam. “Come on over and we’ll talk business.”
Nolan went to Sam’s penthouse office on Lake Shore Drive where he found Sam at his desk, enjoying the view of Lake Michigan out the picture window.
“Nice view,” Nolan said.
Sam turned in his swivel chair, said, “Oh hello, Nolan. Yes, it is a nice view, particularly in May, when . . .” Sam had begun to get up.
“Don’t get up, Mr. Franco,” Nolan said, and Mr. Franco sat back down, two bullets from Nolan’s .38 in his chest.
The first man through the door caught a bullet in the stomach, the next one through got his in the head. The odds were good that Nolan had gotten the girl’s killer because the two men he had shot were Sam’s personal bodyguards and had taken care of most of Sam’s unpleasant chores.
Nolan waited for everyone to die, watching the doorway to see if anyone else wanted to join the party. When no one did, Nolan turned to the wall-safe opposite Sam’s desk. His mouth etched a faint line of a smile as he twisted the dial to
the proper combination: a few weeks before he’d been in the office for a conference and had watched carefully as Sam opened the safe. As Nolan had been storing away the combination for possible future use, Sam had boasted its being too complicated for anyone but a Franco to master.
Nolan emptied the safe’s contents into a briefcase and walked out into the outer office, where Sam’s secretary was crouching in the corner, waiting for death. Hauling her up by the arm, Nolan used her as a shield to get safely out of the building and into a cab, the .38 in her back making her a willing if not eager accomplice.
The police noted that the incident marked Chicago’s fourth, fifth and sixth gangland slayings of the month, and promptly added them onto the city’s impressive list. The Boys kept Nolan’s name out of it (the secretary Nolan had used as an escort ended up describing him as short, fat, balding and Puerto Rican) because of the pains Nolan could cause them if he ever chose to reveal his knowledge of their organization’s inner workings to the authorities. The Boys’ benevolence, however, ended there.
Charlie and Lou, shocked to see bloodshed come so close to their personal lives, placed the quarter million on Nolan’s head before Sam’s body had even cooled.
Nolan had taken his twenty-thousand dollar bankroll, compliments of Sam’s wall-safe, and headed for a friend’s place, where he holed up two weeks, waiting for the heat to lift off Chicago. The friend who hid him out was named Sid Tisor.
Nolan looked out the bus window and watched the sun go down. He closed his eyes and waited for Peoria.
3
TISOR WAS WAITING
for Nolan at the bus station, asleep behind the wheel of his Pontiac, a blue year-old Tempest. Nolan peeped in at him. Tisor was a small man, completely bald, with unwrinkled pink skin and a kind face. His appearance hardly suited his role of ex-gangster. Nolan opened the car door, tossed his suitcases in the back, hung up his clothes-bags and slid in next to Tisor. He placed his .38 to Tisor’s temple and nudged him awake.
“Nolan . . . what the hell . . .” Though the .38 barrel was cold against Tisor’s skin, he began to sweat.
“Sid, we been friends a long time. Maybe too long. I’m worth a quarter million dead and you’re still on good terms with the Boys. If you’re part of a set-up to get rid of me, tell me now and you got your life and no hard feelings. If I find out later you’re fingering me, I think you know what you’ll get.”
Tisor swallowed hard. He’d never heard Nolan give a speech like that before—he’d never heard more than a clipped sentence or two from Nolan at a time. Never in the ten years he’d known the man.
Tisor said, “I’m with you, Nolan. I don’t have any love for Lou or Charlie or any of the bastards.”
Nolan’s mouth formed a tight thin line, which was as close to smiling as he got. “Okay, Sid,” he said, and put the gun away.
Tisor turned the key in the ignition—it took a couple tries as the weather had turned bitter cold a few days before—and got the Tempest moving. He wasn’t mad at Nolan for the stunt with the .38; he’d almost expected it.
Nolan said, “I haven’t had much sleep, Sid. Take me to a motel, nothing fancy, but I want the sheets clean.”
Tisor said, “You’re welcome at my place. I got two extra beds.”
“No. I’ll stay at a motel.”
Tisor didn’t argue with Nolan. He drove him to the Suncrest Motel. He let Nolan out at the office and waited for three minutes while Nolan got himself set with a room. Nolan came back with key 8, which put him in a little brown cabin close to the end. There were ten cabins, stretched out in a neat row. Nolan walked to his and waved at Tisor to follow him.
Nolan started unpacking his clothes as soon as he got inside the cabin. Tisor said, “You want me to leave now?”
“Wait a minute. We’ll grab some food at the diner across the road. But no talk about your problem till I’ve had a night’s sleep.”
Tisor again didn’t argue with Nolan. He was used to putting up with the ways of the man. He knew Nolan’s mind was his own and it was no use trying to change him. He would just go along with him and everything would work out all right.
The diner was boxcar style, and the two men took a postage-stamp table by a window. The place was cheap but clean, which was all it took to please Nolan. Tisor ordered coffee, Nolan breakfast.
“You were smart to get scrambled eggs,” Tisor said. “Breakfast’s always the best thing a diner serves.”
“Right.”
Damn you, Nolan, Tisor thought. Why is conversation such a task for you, you goddamn hunk of stone?
“You care if I ask you what you been doing the last six years or so?”
Nolan lit a cigarette. “Go ahead.”
Tisor leaned over the table and whispered. “What’s this I been hearing about you robbing the Boys blind? I hear they can’t wipe their ass without Nolan’s stole the toilet paper.”
Nolan decided he might as well tell Tisor everything, so he’d have it out of the way—Tisor would hound him till he got it all, anyway.
“It started,” Nolan said, “with them chasing me. They sent guns wherever I went. Mexico, Canada, Hawaii. Didn’t matter.”
“You ran.”
“Sure I did. At first.”
“At first?”
“Running gets tiresome, Sid. The first month I ran. After that I took my time. I knew the Boys, knew how they thought. Knew their operations. So when my original bankroll of twenty G’s ran out, I went back for more. Looted any of the Boys’ operations that were handy.”
Their food came and they shut up till the waitress laid the plates down and left.
“How do you work it?”
“Huh?” Nolan said. He was eating.
“When you loot ’em. How do you work it?”
“Quick hit, planned a day or so in advance. Just me. Once in a while outside help, on a full-scale operation. Lots of pros working free-lance these days. Not even the Family controls professional thieves. Not many pros are afraid to help me, not with the money that’s in it.”
Tisor didn’t bother Nolan any more. Now that Nolan had his food and was eating, he wouldn’t like to be bothered.
Tisor sipped his coffee and thought about his cold, old friend. What balls the guy had! Nolan had some stones bucking odds like that. And the hell of it was, if he kept moving, Nolan just might be hard enough a character to beat the Boys at their own game.
When both had finished, they got up from the table, Nolan paid the check and Tisor tipped the waitress a quarter. The two men walked out into the raw night air and waited for an opening to jaywalk back across the highway to the motel.
Tisor stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, watching his breath smoke in the chill, while Nolan got his key out and opened the door to the cabin. Nolan did not invite Tisor in.
He said, “See you tomorrow, Sid.”
“Okay, Nolan . . . Nolan?”
“Yeah?”
“You mind if I ask you something else? Just one more thing, then I won’t ask you any more questions.”
Nolan shrugged.
“How much you made off the Boys so far?”
Nolan grinned the flat, humorless grin. “Don’t know for sure. It’s spread around, in banks. Maybe half a million. Maybe a little less.”
Tisor laughed. “Shee-it! How long you gonna keep this up?”
Nolan stepped inside the cabin. He said, “You said one more question, Sid, and you’ve had it. Goodnight.” He closed the door.
Tisor turned and headed for the Tempest. He got it started on the third try and wheeled out of the parking lot.
He knew damn well how long Nolan would play his little game with Charlie Franco.
Till one of them was dead.
4
WHEN TISOR
got out of bed the next morning and went downstairs to make coffee, he found Nolan waiting for him in the living room. Nolan was sitting on the couch, dressed in a yellow short-sleeved button-down shirt and brown slacks. He was smoking a cigarette and looking at the centerfold in Sid’s latest
Playboy
, a photo of a nude girl smoking a cigar.