True Crime by Max Allan Collins Read Free Book Online Page A

you.”
    “Even if the officers you testified against were guilty.”
    “Every cop I know is guilty. But suppose the force was a bunch of lilies and all I did was pull a couple weeds…I’d still be seen as a squealer.”
    Anna smiled like a wry sphinx. “The world of crime, the world of law. Two sides of the same coin.”
    “A double-headed coin at that.”
    “The last time we met you didn’t strike me as a philosopher.”
    I shook my head. “I probably struck you as a drunk who wanted to get next to one of your girls.”
    “As I recall, you succeeded.”
    “Right. Which is sort of why I’m here…”
    “Sort of?”
    “How well do you know Polly Hamilton?”
    “Is there some reason why I should answer that question?”
    “Is there some reason why you shouldn’t?”
    She thought about it.
    “I could insult you and offer you money, Anna,” I said, making a show of looking around the joint, “but I hate giving money to people who’re doing so much better than me.”
    Annas smile shifted gears to madonna-like. “I won’t ask you for any money, Mr. Heller. I will ask if you’d like some tea, or coffee? Or something stronger?”
    “How about something cool—ice water?”
    “Fine.”
    She rose and left the room; I thought I heard something off to the right. Like somebody moving around in the next room. There were six or eight rooms in this flat, at least. From the sound I heard, maybe she was taking in boarders. Or maybe some of her girls were staying here with her.
    She returned with ice water for me and coffee for her; she didn’t seem to feel the heat, despite her almost wintery apparel.
    “What’s your interest in Polly, Mr. Heller?”
    “It has to do with a job I’m on. Nothing criminal, I assure you; Polly’s not in any trouble. Not…legal trouble.”
    “What other kind is there?”
    “Oh, well—there’s man trouble.”
    “I’ve heard of that,” she allowed, sipping her coffee.
    “Is Polly married, Anna?”
    “She was. To a policeman in East Chicago.”
    “A policeman?”
    Anna nodded. “She met him when she was working for me.”
    “At the Kostur Hotel?” That was where Anna ran her brothel, in Gary; there’d been an infamous speakeasy and gambling casino in the basement, called The Bucket of Blood. Shootings and stabbings were commonplace, though Anna was known to run a clean, straight house upstairs.
    “Yes,” Anna admitted. “At the Kostur.”
    “That’d be a few years ago. Polly looks pretty young to have worked for you at the Kostur, what, eight years ago?”
    “She looked even younger then.”
    “I bet she did. How’d she happen to meet a policeman?”
    Now Anna really smiled. “However could a girl meet a policeman in a brothel?”
    “Sorry. That was dumb. So she married a policeman.”
    “Yes.”
    “And it didn’t last.”
    “It didn’t last.”
    “Could you describe him for me?”
    “Why? Mr. Heller, you’re really overstepping—”
    “Please. Humor me. There’s no harm in it.”
    She sighed. “He’s a tall man, rather lean. Brown hair, with a bald spot. Not unpleasant to look at.”
    That didn’t sound like my client.
    I hadn’t taken the brunette waitress back at the S & S too seriously when she said Polly was divorced; after all, my client had told me his wife was working under her maiden name, and—particularly if she was running around on him and possibly even hustling—she very well might not be spreading around the fact that she was married.
    I tried again. “Her husband’s name wouldn’t have been Howard, would it?”
    “No,” Anna said. “Keele. Roy Keele.”
    “And they were divorced only a few months ago?”
    “That’s right.”
    My client had told me he and Polly had been married over a year. So much for the notion that my traveling salesman might be her second husband, on the rebound from Keele.
    “Tell me,” I said. “Has she had any steady boyfriends?”
    “Yes,” Anna said, nodding. “Several. Lately, one who