Max Allan Collins

Kisses of Death

1

You can almost see it on the cover of Photoplay or Modern Screen, can’t you, circa 1954? “I Was Marilyn Monroe’s Bodyguard!” with a subhead reading, “A Private Eye’s Hollywood Dream Assignment!”... but in the end, “A New York Nightmare of Depravity” was more like it, worthy of Confidential or Whisper.

Not that Miss Monroe was involved in any of that depravity — no such luck — though we did have a promising first meeting, and it was in neither Hollywood nor New York, but in my native Chicago, at the Palmer House, where the A-1 Detective Agency was providing security for the American Booksellers Association’s annual convention.

I didn’t do any of the security work at the booksellers shindig myself — that was for my staff, and a few add-on ops I rounded up. After all, I was Nathan Heller, president of the A-1, and such lowly babysitting was simply beneath my executive position.

Unless, of course, the baby I was sitting was Miss Marilyn Monroe, curled up opposite me on a couch, sweetly sitting in her suite’s sitting room, afternoon sunlight coming in behind her, making a hazy halo of her carefully coifed platinum pageboy.

“I hope this isn’t a problem for you,” she said, shyly, with only a hint of the mannered, sexy exaggeration I’d noted on the screen. “Such short notice, I mean.”

Normally I didn’t cancel a Friday night date with a Chez Paree chorus girl to take on a bodyguard job, but I only said, “I had nothing planned. My pleasure, Miss Monroe.”

“Marilyn,” she corrected gently. “Is it Nate, or Nathan?”

Her manner was surprisingly deferential, and disarmingly reserved. Like other movie stars I’d encountered over the years, from George Raft to Mae West, she was smaller than I expected, though her figure lived up to expectations, partly because her black short-sleeved cotton sweater and her dark gray Capri pants were strategically snug.

“Nate’s fine,” I said. “Or Nathan.”

I would gladly have answered to Clem or Philbert, if she were so inclined. I was forty-seven years of age, and she was, what? Twenty-five? Twenty-six? And I felt like a schoolboy, tongue thick, hands awkward, penis twitching, rearing its head threateningly as I crossed my legs.

Her barefoot casualness (her toenails, like her fingernails, were painted a platinum that matched her hair) was offset by the flawlessness of her surprisingly understated makeup, her complexion luminously, palely perfect, a glorious collaboration between God and Max Factor. The startling red of her lipsticked lips was ideal for her world-famous smile — sex-saturated, open-mouthed, accompanied by a tilt-back of the head and bedroom-lidded eyes — only I never saw that smile once, that afternoon.

Instead, only rare tentative fleeting smiles touched those bruised baby lips, and for all her sex appeal, the in-person Marilyn Monroe’s undeniable charisma invoked in me unexpected stirrings, which is to say, Not Entirely Sexual. I wanted to protect this girl. And she did seem a girl to me, for all her womanly charms.

“I read about you in Life,” she said, dark blue eyes twinkling.

She’d read about me in Life. Was she kidding?

Actually, she probably wasn’t. Last year the magazine had done a spread on me, and my career, touching on the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Sir Harry Oakes murder, and several other of my more headline-worthy cases of years past, but focusing more on the current success of my Hollywood branch of the A-1, which was developing into the movie stars’ private detective agency of choice.

On the other hand, I’d read about her not only in Life, but Look, and the Saturday Evening Post, and Esquire, not to mention the Police Gazette, Coronet, and Modern Man. She was also the reason why I hadn’t, in June of 1953, gotten around to taking down a certain 1952 calendar as yet. My most vivid memory of Miss Monroe, prior to meeting her face to face, was a rear view of her walking slowly away from the camera in a movie called Niagara (which I walked away from after her character got prematurely bumped off).

“When Ben told me about the party tonight, at Riccardo’s,” she said, “I simply had to be there. I’m afraid I invited myself...”

As if there’d be an objection.

“...and Ben suggested we ask you to accompany us. He thinks it’s a necessary precaution.”

“I agree with him,” I said. “That joint’ll be crawling with reporters.”

She shivered. “Oh, and I’ve had my fill of the press today, already.”

Marilyn Monroe was in town on a press swing to promote the imminent release of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; when I’d arrived at her suite, she had just wrapped up an interview with Irv Kupcinet, of the Sun Times.

“If they see me at your side,” I said, “they may be more inclined to behave themselves.”

“That’s sort of what Ben said. He said people know you in Chicago. That you have quite a reputation.”

“Reputations can deceiving.”

“Oh yes,” she said with a lift of her eyes and a flutter of lashes. “Nathan, can I get you something to drink?”

“A Coke would be nice.”

She flashed just a hint of the famous smile, said, “I’ll have one, too,” rose and walked to a little bar in one corner, and in those painted-on Capri pants, she provided a rear view even more memorable than Niagara.

Soon she was behind the bar, pouring Coca-Cola over ice, saying, “How did you meet Ben? I met him on monkey business.”

“Met him how?”

She walked over to where I was sitting, a tumbler in either hand, a study in sexy symmetry as her breasts did a gentle braless dance under the sweater. “On the movie — Monkey Business. Ben wrote it. That was a good role for me. Nice and funny, and light. How did you meet him?”

I took my Coke from her. “You better let Ben tell it.”

I figured that was wise, because I had no idea where or when I’d first met Ben Hecht, though according to Ben we’d known each other since I was a kid. I had no memory of encountering Hecht back in those waning days of the so-called Chicago literary Renaissance of the late teens and early twenties, though when he approached me to do a Hollywood job for him, a few years ago, he insisted we were old friends... and since he’d been the client, who was I to argue?

Hecht, after all, was a storyteller, and reinventing his own life, revising his own memories into better tales, was in his nature.

She sat up, now, and forward, hands folded in her lap around the glass of Coke, an attentive schoolgirl. “Ben says your father had a radical bookshop.”

“That’s right,” I said. “We were on the West Side, and most of the literary and political shenanigans were centered in Tower Town...”

“Tower Town?”

“That’s the area that used to be Chicago’s Greenwich Village; still is, sort of, but it’s dying out. On the Near North Side. But most of the freethinkers and radicals and artsy types found their way into Heller’s Books, from Clarence Darrow to Carl Sandburg.”

Her eyes went wide as Betty Boop’s. “You know Carl Sandburg?”

“Sure. He used to play his guitar and sing his god-awful folks songs in this little performance area we had.”

Her sigh could only be described as wistful. “I love his poetry.”

“Yeah, he’s become a big deal, hasn’t he? Nice guy.”

Hope danced in the wide eyes. “Will he be there tonight?”

Imagine a homely wart like Charlie getting a dish like this warmed up over him.

“I kind of doubt it. He doesn’t get back to Chicago all that much.”

Her disappointment was obvious, but she perked herself up, saying, “Ben’s arranged this party as a benefit for Maxwell Bodenheim, you know.”

“Are you serious?”

Misinterpreting my displeasure as something positive, she nodded and said, “Oh, yes. Ben said Mr. Bodenheim and his wife flew in from New York last night. Do you know him?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know Max. I’m surprised you’ve even heard of him, Marilyn.”

“I read a lot of poetry,” she said. “His Selected Poems is a delightful collection.”

Who was I to rain on her parade? How could she know that Bodenheim, who I vividly remembered from childhood, had been a womanizing, sarcastic, self-important, drunken leach? The only writer my softhearted father had ever banished from his store, when he caught Bodenheim shoplifting copies of his own books.

“I haven’t thought of that guy in probably thirty years,” I said. “I didn’t even know he was still alive.”

Her brow furrowed with sympathy. “Ben says Mr. Bodenheim has fallen on hard times. It’s difficult to make a living as a poet.”

I sipped my Coke. “He used to write novels, too. He had some bestsellers in the twenties.”

Sexy potboilers, with titles like Replenishing Jessica, Georgie May, and Naked on Roller Skates, that had seemed pretty racy in their day; Jessica had even been busted as pornography. Of course, in the modern era of Erskine Caldwell and Mickey Spillane, the naughty doings of Bodenheim’s promiscuous jazz-age heroines would probably seem pretty mild.

Still, if Bodenheim was broke, it was only after squandering the fortune or two a bestselling writer would naturally accrue.

“I just think it’s wonderful of Ben to help his old friend out like this,” she said, her smile radiant, as madonnalike as she imaged Hecht’s intentions to be saintly.

Bodenheim was indeed an “old friend” of Hecht’s, but my understanding was that they’d had a major falling out, long ago; in fact, while I don’t remember ever meeting Hecht in the old days, I do remember my father talking about how violently these two one-time literary collaborators had fallen out. Hecht had even written a novel, Count Bruga, lampooning his pretentious former crony, to which Bodenheim replied with his own novel, Duke Herring, about a self-centered sellout clearly patterned on Hecht.

The gathering tonight at Riccardo’s was a Renaissance reunion, organized by Hecht, who was one of that movement’s stellar graduates, albeit not in the literary way of such figures as Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, and Margaret Anderson. Hecht — whose archly literary novels and would-be avant-garde pornography of the twenties had made him a king among local bohemians — had literally gone Hollywood.

After the success of his play The Front Page, a collaboration with Charlie MacArthur, another former Chicago newspaper-man, Hecht began a wildly successful screenwriting career — Scarface, Gunga Din, Spellbound, and Notorious, to name a few of his credits — that would be impressive by anybody’s standards. Except, perhaps, those of the literary types among whom he’d once dwelled.

Like Bodenheim.

Of course, I didn’t figure — other than Bodenheim — there would be many people at the party that Hecht would owe any apology to. The crowd that Ben and Bodenheim had hung out with, sharing the pages of literary magazines, and the stages of little theaters and the wild and wooly Dill Pickle Club, was pretty well thinned out by now. The most exotic demise was probably that of Harriet Monroe (presumably no relation to Marilyn); the editor of the prestigious magazine Poetry, Harriet had died in 1936, on some sort of mountain-climbing expedition in Peru (Sherwood Anderson also died in South America, but less exotically, succumbing to peritonitis on a goodwill tour). Vachel Lindsay had died a suicide, Edgar Lee Masters died broke in a convalescent home. This poetry was a rough racket.

The beautiful, enigmatic (i.e., lesbian) editor of the Little Review, Margaret Anderson, wasn’t dead, but she might as well have been: she lived in Paris. I figured the party attendees would mostly be Renaissance refugees who had drifted back into the newspaper business, from whence most of the players had come in the first place, seasoned veterans of Schlogl’s, the legendary Loop tavern where Daily News reporters gathered, even those without literary pretensions.

Of course, Riccardo’s was a newspaper hangout in general, and the entertainment scribes Marilyn had already encountered this trip — Kup, Herb Lyon, Anna Nangle, among others — might be there, as well. I knew all of them and could keep them at bay in a friendly way.

I sipped my Coke. “I gather you and Ben are embarking on some sort of project together.”

“Well, we’re seriously discussing—”

And a knock at the door interrupted her. I offered to answer it for her, and did, and as if he’d arrived specifically to answer my question, there was Ben.

“Madhouse down there,” he said, gesturing with a thumb, as if pointing to Hell, but in reality only meaning the floor where the meetings and seminars of the ABA were being held.

Ben Hecht, a vigorous sixty years of age, brushed by me and went over to greet Marilyn, who rose from the couch to give him a Hollywood hug. His frame was square, large-boned, just under six foot, his attire rather casual for a business occasion, a brown sport jacket over a green sport shirt; a Russian Jew, he looked more Russian than Jewish — a pleasant, even handsome-looking man with an oval head, salt-and-pepper curly hair, a high forehead that was obviously in the process of getting higher, trimmed mustache, deep-blue slightly sunken eyes, and strong jaw worthy of a leading man.

She sat back down, and he nestled next to her, and took her hands in his as if about to propose marriage.

“I talked to the Doubleday people,” Ben said, “and they’re very excited.”

Her eyes Betty-Booped again. “Really?”

“They did somersaults over the idea.”

Now she winced. “I still think I’m a little young to be writing my life story...”

“You’re the hottest thing in show business, kid. Strike while the iron is hot. You liked the sample chapters I wrote, didn’t you?”

“I loved them.” She turned to me, and I was relieved to see that one of them realized I was still there. “We spent an afternoon at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Ben and I, with me talking into a tape recorder, and then a few days later we met again. Ben had turned my ramblings into something marvelous. I laughed... I cried...”

“Well,” he said, withdrawing a cigar from a silver case from inside his sport jacket, “you’ll laugh and cry with joy when you hear the deal Doubleday’s offering. Plus, I talked to some people from the Ladies’ Home Journal, and they’re going to make an offer to serialize.”

For a guy famous for writing ping-pong back-and-forth dialogue, Ben nonetheless spoke in paragraphs, though the words did flow at a machine-gun clip.

“Oh, Ben... this is so wonderful...”

He bit off the end of his cigar. “Kid, they’re going to pay you bushel baskets of money, and the end result is, publicity for you. Only in America.”

“Ben, how can I ever repay you?”

It was a question millions of American men would have died to hear Marilyn Monroe ask.

Ben, patting his jacket pockets as if he were frisking himself, replied with, “You got a light?”

She nodded and pranced over to the bar and got some hotel matches and came bouncing back and fired up his Cuban. It had a strong, pleasant aroma, but the mixture of it and Marilyn’s Chanel Number Five was making me a little queasy.

I asked, “What time’s the party?”

“They got a buffet over there for us,” Ben said, “at seven. I’m kind of the host, so I’ll head over a little early. Marilyn, what time would you like to make your appearance?”

“Maybe around eight,” she offered. Then she looked at me. “Could you meet me in the lobby, Nathan, and escort me over?”

“Be delighted.”

She stood. “Then you boys better scoot. I have to get ready.”

“You are ready,” Ben said, but he was rising at her command just the same. He gestured with his cigar in hand. “These are writers and poets, kid. Come as you are.”

“I’ll wear something nice and casual,” she promised. “But I’d like to relax with a nice long hot bubble bath...”

That was a pretty image to leave on, so we did. In the hall, as we waited for the elevator, I said, “Bodenheim?”

“Yeah,” Hecht said, as if throwing a benefit for his arch literary enemy was a natural thing to do. “We flew him and his wife in. I got them over at the Bismarck, if he hasn’t burned it down by now.”

“What’s he need a benefit for?”

Hecht snorted, spoke around his cigar. “Are you kidding? He’s been living in Greenwich Village for the last, I don’t know, twenty years. Poor bastard’s turned into a bum. Complete alky. You know how he makes his living, such as it is? Hawking his poems on street corners, pinnin’ ’em on a fence, sellin’ ’em for quarters and dimes.”

“Jesus. Even I wouldn’t wish that on him. I mean, he was famous... respected...”

“There was a time,” Hecht said, and the sunken eyes grew distant, “when he was near the peak of poetry in this nation. Ezra Pound wrote him goddamn fan letters. William Carlos Williams, Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore, all expressed their public admiration. Now? Now the son of bitch is sleeping on park benches and, when he’s lucky, in flophouses.”

“What’s this about a wife?”

Hecht got a funny smile going; he flicked ashes from the cigar in the wall ashtray by the elevator buttons. “Her name’s Ruth. He looks like shit, but she’s kind of foxy, in a low-rent kind of way.” Hecht shook his head, laughed. “Son of a bitch always did have a way with the ladies. You know the stories, don’t you, about the suicides?”

I did. There was a period in the twenties, shortly after Bodenheim traded Chicago for New York, that the national papers were filled with the stories of young women driven to suicide by the fickle attentions of the author of Replenishing Jessica.

“I know you fancy yourself a ladies’ man, Nate,” Hecht said with a sly grin. “But committing suicide over your favors never has become a national fad, now, has it?”

“Not yet,” I granted, and the elevator finally arrived. We stepped on. Hecht pushed the button for his floor and I hit lobby. We had the elevator to ourselves, so our conversation remained frank.

“What’s all this about you writing Marilyn’s autobiography? Since when are you reduced to that kind of thing, or are you trying to get a piece of that sweet girl’s personality?”

Hecht had his own reputation as a ladies’ man, or at least, womanizer.

He shrugged. “Straight ghost job. Good payday. I don’t always sign my work, kid. Hell, if I put my name on every script I doctored, I’d be the most famous asshole in Hollywood.”

“Well, doesn’t scriptwriting pay better than books?”

“Hell yes.” His voice remained jaunty but his expression turned grave. “But, frankly, kid — I got my ass in a wringer with this big fat mouth of mine. I’m blacklisted in England, you know, and if a producer uses me on a script, he can’t put my name on the British prints, and if the Brits find out my name was on the American version, they might pass on the thing, anyway.” His sigh was massive. “If you ever hear me gettin’ messed up in politics again, slap my face, okay?”

“What are friends for?”

Hecht, whose apolitical nature was probably the reason why my father’s radical bookshop was an unlikely place for us to have met, had gotten uncharacteristically political, right after the war. Specifically, he got vocal about Israel, outspoken in his opinion that England was the enemy of that emerging state, publicly praising Irgun terrorists for blowing up British trains and robbing British banks and killing British “tommies.”

“Maybe it’s for the best,” he said, as the bell rang and the door drew open at his floor. “It’s putting me back in the world of books, where I belong. Hey, I talked to Simon and Schuster this afternoon, and they’re makin’ an offer on my autobiography... See you at Riccardo’s, kid!”

And with that final machine-gun burst of verbiage, he was gone.

2

Just to be safe, I returned to the Palmer House at seven thirty, walking over from my suite of offices at the Monadnock Building, going in on the State Street side, through the business arcade and up the escalator to the vast high-ceilinged lobby, a cathedral-like affair with arched balconies, Roman travertine walls, and an elaborately painted Italian classical ceiling depicting gods and goddesses, which was only fitting considering who I was escorting tonight.

And since Hollywood divinity occupies a time and space continuum all its own, I had plenty of opportunity, seated comfortably in one of the velvet-upholstered chairs, to study each and every shapely nude, and near-nude, cloud-perched goddess.

As my delight at this assignment gradually wore to irritation (shortly after nine), I began toying with calling up to Miss Monroe’s suite to see if I’d misunderstood when I was to pick her up, or if she’d run into a problem, and just as irritation was bleeding into indignation (nine thirty), she stepped out of an elevator, a vision of twentieth-century womanhood that put to shame the classical dames floating above me.

She wore a simple black linen dress, spaghetti straps and a fairly low, straight-across-the-bosom neckline — no sign of a bra, or any pantyline, either; her heels were black strappy sandals, her legs bare. No jewelry, a small black purse in hand. Doffing my coconut-palm narrow-brim hat, I rose to approach her as she click-clacked toward me across the marble floor and by the time I’d slipped my arm in hers, and gazed into that radiant face with its blazingly red-lipsticked baby-doll pout, my annoyance disappeared, and delight had bloomed again.

She issued no apology for her tardiness, but what she said instead was much better: “Don’t you look handsome.”

And for the first time I witnessed, in person, the practiced, patented open-mouthed smile, as she stroked the sleeve of my green Dacron sport jacket, then straightened and smoothed the lighter-green linen tie that matched my sport shirt, under which my heart went pitty pat.

“I thought bodyguards tried to blend into the woodwork,” she said, eyeing my canary-yellow lightweight slacks.

“This bodyguard wants to be noticed,” I said, as we walked through a lobby whose patrons were wide-eyed with wonder at the presence among them of this goddess. “Not that anyone will...”

In back of the cab, on our way to Riccardo’s, I ventured a question: “Do you mind if I ask something a little personal?”

“Ask and see.”

“Is what I read about in the papers true, about you and Joe DiMaggio?”

She shrugged. “We’ve been dating, kind of off and on.”

“Is it ‘on’ right now?”

“Off.”

“Ah,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you really, Nathan?”

“No.”

She smiled at that. Then, looking out the window at the Loop gliding by, she said rather absently, “I’d never heard of him.”

“Never heard of Joltin’ Joe?”

She looked back and me and a tiny laugh bubbled in her throat. “It was a blind date. My girlfriend said he was a famous ballplayer who liked blondes. I didn’t even know what kind of ballplayer she meant, football or baseball or what. Didn’t want to look any dumber than I already did, but he was a real sweetheart on the date, and you should’ve seen people slapping him on the back, asking him for autographs. They were completely ignoring me.”

“And you liked that?”

“I respected it... Are you married, Nathan?”

“Not right now.”

Riccardo’s was a converted warehouse at 437 North Rush; it began in ’34 as a hole-in-the-wall gathering place for artists, writers, and theatrical types, but had been revamped and expanded a decade ago to accommodate the wider clientele its arty atmosphere and exotic reputation attracted.

The evening was pleasantly warm, with just the right hint of lake breeze, and the tables that spilled out from under the awning onto the sidewalk were packed with patrons enjoying dinner and drinks and a magnificent view of the parking lot. Heads swiveled and eyes widened as I guided Marilyn through the tables and into the restaurant, which somehow managed an intimate ambience despite expansive, open seating and bright lighting designed to show off the framed paintings that were everywhere.

“Looks more like an art gallery than a restaurant,” Marilyn said breathlessly, her gaze skimming above the heads of diners who were admiring the work of art walking among them.

“It’s both,” I said, moving her gently through the crowd. “This main dining room is an exhibit hall for young midwestern artists.”

“What a lovely notion! So the paintings are constantly changing?”

I nodded. “One-man shows lasting a month.”

This month’s genius seemed adept at filling canvases with dull gray backgrounds on which danced amoebalike blobs of garish purple, red, and green.

“Ah,” I said, “here’s Ric...”

In a black suit and tie, tall, slender, a youthful fifty with his gray crew cut and black eyebrows and mustache, looking like a Mephistophelean maitre d’, Ric Riccardo approached, eyes twinkling, hand outstretched.

“The Chicago Sherlock,” he said, as we shook hands. “And no introduction is required of this lovely lady...”

He gently took her fingertips in his and kissed the back of her hand and she smiled and raised her eyebrows, appreciation murmuring behind her kiss of a pursed smile.

“Marilyn, this is Ric Riccardo.”

She frowned. “You don’t look much like Desi Arnaz.”

Ric looked mildly wounded. I wasn’t sure whether she was kidding or not, but somehow with her it didn’t matter.

“This is the original,” I said, “and he’s Italian, not Cuban.”

Her bare shoulders lifted and sat themselves down, doing a fine job of it, too, I must say. “I just love the idea of your restaurant, Mr. Riccardo! You’re a true patron of the arts.”

Ric made a dismissive gesture. “I’m afraid I only did it to have a place to hang my own canvases.”

“You’re an artist, too?”

“I’ve never been able to decide whether I paint badly,” Ric sighed, “or whether people just can’t understand what I paint. But at least, here, I sell a canvas now and then.”

“Don’t let him kid you,” I told her, “his artwork’s even better than his veal scaloppine.”

Ric’s eyes narrowed. “Which brings us to a difficult subject — my friends, you’ve missed the buffet, and I’m afraid the party has moved from my private dining room into the bar.”

He led us down into the lower level, where I spotted Ben chatting with a pair of Trib talents, obsessive Sherlock Holmes buff Vincent Starrett and literary section editor Fanny Butcher. Here and there were the likes of bookseller Stuart Brent, Herald American columnist Bob Casey, various other well-known local scribes, John Gunther, Bill Leonard, Bob Cromie, among the bigger names. Mostly, as I had predicted, the crowd consisted of second-stringers and tail-end members from the Renaissance movement, who had gone back to the newspaper world that spawned them.

“Oooo,” Marilyn said, “look at that odd-shaped bar!”

“It’s a big artist’s palette,” I said.

“Oh, it is!” And her laughter chimed.

“Our murals back behind there,” Ric said proudly, as he led us to a corner table for two, plucking the “reserved” sign off, “are the work of our city’s most well-known artists — the Albrights, Aaron Bohrod, Vincent D’Agostino...”

“And Desi Arnaz, here,” I said.

And our host smiled, bowed, and — with us deposited at our cozy table — moved on. Like Ben Hecht, Ric was a pragmatic Renaissance survivor, an artist turned businessman. And like Ben, Ric liked to think he was still a bohemian at heart.

For all its premeditated hipness, however, Ric’s restaurant bore the square stigmata of Italian restaurants immemorial: instead of the cool tinklings of jazz piano, the air resounded with the strains of “O Sole Mio,” accompanied by violin, mandolin, and concertina, courtesy of strolling singers and musicians in ruffled sleeves and satin trousers.

Wandering in from the dining room and sidewalk café, where they provided a welcome backdrop for couples romantically dining, came a trio of these singers with a violinist in tow, warbling “Come Back to Sorrento.” This was a misguided sortie into enemy territory, as Ben and other self-styled intellectual and literary lights attending the reunion glanced at them irritably over cocktail glass rims and cigarettes-in-hand.

A slender ponytail brunette, her olive complexion a stark contrast next to her short-sleeved cream-color dress, planted herself in front of the musicians, hands pressed around a tall glass, swaying to their serenade. At first glance she seemed attractive, even strikingly so, and I pegged her for her midtwenties.

“She’s having fun,” Marilyn said, not at all judgmentally.

As the musicians moved through the bar, and closer to us, and the brunette danced sensuously along, I got a closer look at her. The dress was a frayed secondhand-store frock, and she had to be in her thirties. Her big brown eyes were cloudy and dark-circled, her wide mouth slack.

This girl wasn’t tipsy: she was a lush.

About this time, the musicians noticed Marilyn — or at least noticed a beautiful blonde — and made their way to our table. I was digging for a half dollar to tip them, and make them go away, when the slender bombed brunette inserted herself between us and the strolling musicians and hip-swayed to their music in a manner that would suit Minksy’s better than Riccardo’s.

Marilyn’s glance at me was more sad than disapproving.

The brunette clutched the arm of the nearest singer — a handsome if chubby kid in his twenties, the tenor — and her other hand began moving up and down the thigh of his satin pants.

“Gentlemen!” a male voice cried, above the syrupy strains. “Please cease.”

And an absurd figure who might have walked in off a burlesque stage appeared at the fringe of this little tableau, positioning himself alongside the violinist, a foul-smelling corncob pipe in one hand, a double-shot glass of straight whiskey in the other. The four musicians trailed off into stunned silence, and their eyes traveled from the drunken dame to the latest character in this farce, stooped, obviously inebriated, a frail sack of bones swimming in a dark, shabby, slept-in suit set off ever so nattily by a dark frayed food-stained tie and shoes that had long since exploded in wear.

His face was misshapen from years of drink, the blobby careless first draft of an indifferent sculptor, skull beneath the flesh asserting itself as his features threatened to fall off, his complexion a mottled albino, eyes dark rheumy haunted pools, nose a lumpy sweet potato, mouth a thin crumpled line. His hair, unkempt and shaggy as it was, his ears half-covered, sideburns bordering on mutton chop, was the garish reddish brown of a Mercurochrome dye job; it might have been a wig, had this pitiful creature been able to afford one.

“Could it be,” he said, revealing a jack-o’-lantern smile, his near-toothlessness giving him a Karloff lisp, “that angelic choristers of heaven have invaded this bistro, wings tipped with music vibrating like a flock of wild swans skimming the surface of some enchanted sea?”

“Shut up, Max,” the brunette said; she had a husky voice that under the right circumstances might have been sexy.

“Who is that?” Marilyn whispered.

“The guest of honor,” I said.

And this was indeed Maxwell Bodenheim, an astonishing husk of the tall, slim, golden-haired ladies’ man I remembered from my father’s bookshop; back then, only his eyebrows had been a devilish red-brown.

He leaned against the shoulder of the violinist. “And are these the heartwarming, bell-like tones of a Heifetz? Or does the angel Gabriel lurk in your barrel-like form?”

“Max!” she said. “Can’t a girl dance?”

He raised the whiskey glass sloshingly, a parody of a toast, underlined by the threat of flinging it in the nearest face (not much of one, because Bodenheim was unlikely to waste such precious fluid in so foolhardy a manner).

“Or,” he proclaimed, “are you heathens tempting an innocent child into the ways of the nymph, stirring the wildness in her nature and fomenting the bestial longings in her blood?”

The brunette threw her hands up. “Jesus Christ, Max!”

The musicians were looking at each other like the Three Stooges wondering how to explain their latest botched wallpapering job to their boss. Wide eyes peered out of the drifting cigarette smoke around us as the Renaissance reunion got a good look at the man of the hour, who was dramatically draining the whiskey glass, handing the empty vessel to the nearest bewildered musician.

Then, moving with unexpected quickness, and force, Bodenheim grabbed the woman by the arm and she squealed with pain as he intoned, “Or is this ‘innocent’ the heathen? If we are to believe Schopenhauer, women are incapable of romantic love, yet infinitely capable of unfathomable treachery...”

“Excuse me,” I told the horrified but spellbound Marilyn, and got up and put my hand on Bodenheim’s shoulder.

“It is rather unfortunate,” he was saying, still clutching his wife’s arm, his face inches from hers with its wide eyes and lips drawn back in snarl, “that the legs of a girl cannot be nailed to the floor... It’s hard to keep them in one place, except when they are locked up in closets.”

I said, “Been a long time, Max.”

The rheumy blue eyes tried to focus, and he suddenly noticed the hand on his shoulder, looking down at it as if it were an oversize, unpleasant moth that had landed there. “I don’t know you, young man. Kindly remove your meat hook from my shoulder.”

I did, then extended my hand. “Nate Heller. Mahlon’s son.”

A wrinkled smile formed under the lumpy nose and the eyes tightened in remembrance. “Heller’s Books. Ah yes. The West Side. Wonderful days. Days of youth and passion.” Ric, just behind us, was rounding up his musicians and herding them out of the bar and back up into the dining room.

In the meantime, Bodenheim had unhanded the brunette and was gesturing to her rather grandly with his corncob pipe in hand. “Heller’s Books, allow me to introduce Mrs. Maxwell Bodenheim.”

The pretty, lanky lush smiled at me, looked me up and down with open appreciation, and said, “I’ll have to get Max to bring me to Chicago more often.”

“You’ll have to forgive Ruth,” Bodenheim said, his smile tightening. “She has the morals of an alley cat, but she can’t help it. She, too, comes from a newspaper background...”

“You mean like me, Max?” Ben asked, stepping into our rarefied social circle. He had a cigar in the fingers of the hand that held his glass of Scotch. He had the uneasy smile of a host who suddenly realized he had invited a disaster area for a guest.

Bodenheim beamed at the sight of his old friend and adversary; his smile had more holes than teeth. “I was referring...” He gestured and sneered and stage-whispered: “...to these lesser lights. Literary section editors. Book reviewers. Columnists...”

Ben smirked. “Try not to alienate them too bad, Bodie, till I pass the hat for ya.”

Ruth floated off and I returned to the small table where a stilted Marilyn was talking to Herb Lyon of the Trib. He was trying to wrangle an impromptu follow-up interview for his Tower Ticker column; I gently let Herb know this was a social occasion and he drifted off. Soon Marilyn was sipping a glass of champagne; I had a Coke — I was working, after all — while Bodenheim (who had somehow acquired another drink) had Hecht up against a wall, the former getting worked up and Hecht’s patient smile wearing thinner and thinner.

I only got bits and pieces of it, mostly Bodenheim, saying, “I have always liked your work, my cynical friend, I can honestly say I’ve never slammed it... Count Bruga, of course, excepted... Ben, you had great ability in fields of prose, where money alone lies. I am an indifferent prose writer and a very good poet. That explains the difference in our purses!”

“Such a sad, brilliant man,” Marilyn said, working on her second glass of champagne.

“Sad, anyway.”

“You don’t think he’s brilliant?”

“He’s got an impressive line of bullshit,” I said, “for a deadbeat.”

“How can you say that? His language is beautiful!”

“But what he says is ugly.”

“I don’t care. I want to meet him.”

I didn’t argue with her. Mine was not to reason why. Mine was but to do and sigh.

As I approached Bodenheim, he continued filibustering his old friendly foe: “If we don’t raise at least twenty dollars tonight, Ben, I shan’t be able to get my typewriter out of hock when I return to that shallow, mean, and uncouth frenzy known as New York.”

“Then as you wend your way around this room, Bodie,” Ben said, smiling the world’s tightest smile, “I suggest you find some topic of discussion beside the ‘stench of Capitalism.’ Your old friends, the ones still alive anyway, aren’t radicals anymore. They’re democrats.”

“I do need my typewriter,” Bodenheim said, as if Ben had said nothing, “even though I have not sold one of my short stories or poems yet this year.” He took a healthy swig from his latest glass of whiskey. “But hope is a warmly smiling, stubbornly tottering child — and without a typing machine I would feel like a writer with spinal meningitis.”

I whispered to Ben: “Marilyn wants to meet the Great Man.”

Ben rolled his eyes, and said, “All right, but let’s both chaperone him, then.”

Bodenheim was saying, “You might consider it a persecution complex, but I’m convinced these rejections stem from the days when I threw many a caustic jab at the intellectual dwarfs who pass as literary editors and critics...”

Taking his toothpick arm, I said, “Max, that lovely blonde would like to meet you. She’s quite famous. That’s Marilyn Monroe.”

“Heller Books, it would be my immense pleasure!” he said, something flickering in the cloudy eyes, the ghost of a once-great womanizer, perhaps.

I ushered him over to the table, where Marilyn rose, smiling, almost blushing, saying, “Mr. Bodenheim, I’ve worn my copy of your Selected Poems simply to tatters.”

He took her hand and, much as Ric had, kissed it; I hope she washed it, later. With antiseptic soap.

“My dear,” Bodenheim said, bowing, “your taste is as impeccable as your skin is luminous. May I sit?”

She gestured eagerly. “Please.”

Ben and I commandeered a couple extra chairs and the four of us crowded around the postage-stamp table as the Tattered King of Greenwich Village conferred with Hollywood’s reigning Sex Queen.

“Miss Monroe, I have admired your contributions to the cinema,” he said.

“I would think an artist of your stature wouldn’t find much of value in what I do,” she said, obviously as flattered as she was surprised.

Ben said, “I never knew you to go to a picture show, Bodie.”

“I have slept in some of the finest grindhouses on Forty-Second Street,” he said rather grandly. He was looking around, probably for his wife. She was nowhere in sight. He returned his gaze to the incandescent beauty who hung on his every word.

“I adore your contribution to the arts, my dear,” he said, the sarcasm so faint I wasn’t sure it was there. “You remind me of the Bali woman who walks naked down to her navel, and proudly displays her beautifully formed breasts; making love is as a natural to her as breathing, or singing. Sex is really the song of the spirit as well as the flesh, and my dear, you are a prima donna, a diva, of your art.”

This slice of condescension-laced sexual innuendo made Ben wince, but Marilyn seemed not to mind, even to take it as a compliment.

“But what I do is so... ephemeral,” Marilyn said. “Your poetry will live forever.”

He leaned forward. “Do you know what poetry is, my dear?”

“I think I do... I don’t know if I could put it into words...”

Now he sat back again. “It’s the deep, unformed longing to escape from daily details... to enter delicately imaginative plateaus, unconnected with human beliefs, or fundamental human feelings...”

“Oh, but Mr. Bodenheim...”

He puffed the corncob. “Call me Max, child — or Bodie, as my friends do.”

Ben rolled his eyes, as if to say, What friends?

Marilyn’s expression was heartbreakingly sincere. “But, Max... your poems are filled with human feeling...”

He nodded, exhaling foul smoke; I had a hunch if you took the smoke away, he wouldn’t smell much better.

“I am cursed with a malady of the soul,” the poet said. “I am constantly tempted to desert the sleek jest of this physical existence.”

Her eyes tightened. Her question was a whisper: “Suicide?”

“My life has been a dirty, cruel, involved, crucified mess — with the exception of my glittering words. And sometimes I even hate them, my pretty, glittering words. But where would I be without that golden braid of language that lifts me up out of my life?”

“Would you... would you ever do it? Take your own life?”

“I think not, child. We demonstrate the truth or falsity of our lives by the manner of our deaths.”

“What do you mean?”

“Those who die in a tavern brawl like Christopher Marlowe or in a fit of desperation like Hart Crane leaping off a ship in mid-ocean reveal in their violent deaths the inadequate inner workings of their secret beings... Are you familiar with this one?

I shall walk down the road.

I shall turn and feel upon my feet

The kisses of Death, like scented rain.”

“For Death is a black slave with little silver birds,” Marilyn said, “perched in a sleeping wreath upon his head.”

“You do me great honor,” Bodenheim said, touching a hand to his chest, lowering his head, then chugging some whiskey.

“So many of your poems are about death... and love.”

“I am a man, and man is human, all too human, placed by the theologians a little below the angels. Life is the struggle between the pull of the divine and the downward drag of the beast.”

She was leaning forward, rapt in the wise man’s words. “Is suicide divine, or beastly?”

“Neither. Both. Perhaps I’ll answer your question in my next poem.” Then he shrugged and began working on relighting his corncob. “But as long as Ruth lives, I’ll not take my life.”

“Ruth? Your wife?”

“My sweet better half, with whom I share park benches, flophouse suites, and what remains of my tattered existence. We have an exquisite arrangement — she cheats on me, and I beat on her. An inventive girl. Burned down her parents’ house, you know. There are those who say that she is mad, but who among us does not have eccentricities?”

“Is she a poet, too?”

He had the corncob going again. “She’s a writer.”

Marilyn swallowed, summoned bravery and said, “I write poetry.”

His smile was benevolent. “You do, my child?”

“Would you like to hear one?” She smiled. “I think I’ve had enough champagne to get the nerve...

Life — I am of both your directions

Somehow remaining

Hanging downward the most

Strong as a cobweb in the wind...”

“You wrote that?”

“Yes.”

Bodenheim shook his head. “Sentimental slush.” He stood suddenly. “Stick to the silver screen, sweetie.”

And he rose and stumbled off into the crowd.

Marilyn had turned a ghostly white, her mouth slack, her face without expression, her eyes wide and vacant and yet filled with pain.

Ben touched her arm and said, “Marilyn, I’m sorry... he’s a drunken no-good bastard. Hell, he thinks Ezra Pound stinks...”

“Nathan... could you please take me back to the hotel?”

“Sure.”

But Marilyn was already up and moving out, and I was working to keep up with her. She didn’t begin crying until we were in back of the cab, and I held her in my arms and comforted her, telling her how much I liked her poem.

At the door of her suite, I said, “He’s a Skid Row bum, you’re a goddess. They’ll be watchin’ your movies when this guy’s poems turn to dust.”

She smiled, just a little, and touched my face with the gentlest hand imaginable.

Then she kissed me.

Sweetly. Sadly.

“Do you want me to come in?” I asked.

“Next time, Nathan,” she said.

And sealed herself within.

3

I met Ben for lunch at the Pump Room at the Ambassador East. It was an atmosphere perfect for Marilyn Monroe — deep blue walls, crystal chandeliers, white leather booths, waiters in English Regency attire serving food elegantly from serving carts and off flaming swords.

But the only celebrities in the room were local newspaper-men — fewer than last night at Riccardo’s, actually — and, of course, Ben Hecht and that celebrated “private eye to the stars,” Nathan Heller.

“She flew out this morning,” Ben said, his bloodshot eyes matching the Bloody Mary he was drinking. His second.

“When was she supposed to leave?”

“Not until late this afternoon. We were going to meet with the Doubleday people after lunch.”

“Hope your book deal didn’t get queered.”

“Nah. I’ll meet with Marilyn back in Hollywood, it’ll be fine. How would you like to bodyguard her again?”

“Twist my arm.”

“You two seemed to hit it off.”

“I kept it businesslike.”

“You mean, that fucking Bodie queered it for you.”

I grinned, sipped my rum and Coke. “Bingo.”

“Well, Doubleday wants Marilyn to make an appearance at next year’s ABA, kicking off a promotional tour for the book. If I can talk her into it, which I think I can, I’ll toss the security job A-1’s way.”

“I appreciate that, Ben. Maybe I’ll let you ghost my autobiography.”

“Write your own damn book.” He laughed hollowly; he looked terrible, dark bags, pallid complexion, second chin sagging over his crisp blue bow tie. “Guess how much we raised for Bodie last night?”

“Five bucks?”

“Oh, much more... twelve.”

I chuckled at this pleasant bad news. “He must have got even cuter after I left, to get such an overwhelming acclamation.”

Ben’s smirk made the fuzzy caterpillar of his mustache wriggle. “He caught his wife coming on to a waiter and started screaming flowery obscenities at her and finally slapped her face. When Ric stepped between them, Ruth slapped him and started shouting, ‘I’m Mrs. Maxwell Bodenheim! I’m Mrs. Maxwell Bodenheim!’” He sighed and shook his head and sipped his Bloody Mary. “I think Max may have made the record books on this one — the only guy in history ever to get thrown out of his own benefit party.”

“He’s a horse’s ass. What possessed you to fly him and his harpy out here, anyway?”

He didn’t answer the question; instead he said, “That was awful, how he crushed that poor kid, last night. Little Marilyn may be built like a brick shithouse, but she’s delicate, you know, underneath that war paint.”

“I know. I’d have knocked the bastard’s teeth out, if he had any.”

Ben snorted a second to that motion, finished his Bloody Mary, and waved a waiter over, telling him we’d have another round before we ordered lunch.

“Don’t be too tough on Bodie,” Ben said. “Language and a sense of superiority are all he has. He doesn’t have money to eat or buy clothes, just words he can use to make other people feel like they’re bums, too.”

“He’s just a mean old drunk.”

Ben shook his head, smiling grimly. “Problem is, kid, there’s a young man in that old skin. He lives in sort of a child’s world filled with word toys. He’s a poet who lives in a world of poetry...”

“He’s a stumblebum who lives in the gutter.”

The waiter brought Ben’s third Bloody Mary. Ben stared into the drink, as if it were a crystal ball into his past. His voice was hushed as he said: “We made a sort of pact, Bodie and I, back when we were young turks, cynical sentimental souls devoted to Art.” A sudden grin. “Ever hear about the time we spoke at this pompous literary society for a hundred bucks? Which was real cabbage in those days...”

“Can’t say I have.”

“We agreed to put on a full-scale literary debate on an important topic. The hall was full of these middle-class boobs, this was in Evanston or someplace, and I got up and said, ‘Resolved: that people who attend literary debates are imbeciles. I shall take the affirmative. The affirmative rests.’ Then Bodie got up and said, ‘You win.’ And we ran off with the hundred.”

I waited till Ben’s laughter at his own anecdote let up before saying, “So you grew up and made some real money, and Peter Pan flew to the gutter. So what?”

Ben sighed again. “I was hoping last night we’d raise some real money for the son of a bitch...”

“Why?”

“Because, goddamnit, I’ve been supporting him for fucking years! He’d send me sonnets and shit, in the mail, and I sent him two hundred bucks a month. Only, I can’t afford it anymore! Not since my career hit the fan.”

“You got no responsibility to underwrite that bum.”

“Not any more, I don’t. Fuck that toothless sot.” He opened the menu. “Let’s order. I’m on expense account with Doubleday...”

4

I had every reason to expect I’d seen and heard the last of Maxwell Bodenheim, and his lovely souse of a spouse, and to take Ben Hecht at his word, that he was finished with subsidizing the bard of Skid Row.

But the first week of February, at the office, I got a call from Ben.

“You want to do another job for me, kid?”

“If it involves Marilyn Monroe.”

“It doesn’t, really. Unless you consider it an extension of what you did for me, before. Did you hear what happened to Bodenheim, after the party at Riccardo’s?”

“You told me,” I reminded him. “He and the missus got tossed out on their deserving backsides.”

“No, I mean after that. Remember how I told you we raised a grand total of twelve bucks for him?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, he spent it on rubbing alcohol. He was found in the gutter the next morning, beaten to shit, with half a bottle of the stuff clutched in his paws.”

“Mugged?”

“I doubt it. More like he’d been mouthing off and got worked over for it.”

“This didn’t make the papers or I’d know about it.”

“See, you don’t know everything that goes on in Chicago, kid. Even out in Hollywood, I know more about the town than you... I got a call from Van Allen Bradley.”

Bradley was literary editor over at the Daily News. He continued: “Seems the lovely Mrs. Bodenheim, Ruth, came around begging for a book review assignment for Max, so they could raise bus fare back to New York.”

“Ben, don’t tell me you flew ’em out one-way, for that benefit?”

“Hell, yes! I expected to raise a couple thousand for the no-good son of a bitch. How did I know he was going to disintegrate in public?”

“Yeah, who woulda guessed that?”

“Anyway, Bradley assigned some new collection of Edna Vincent Millay, and Ruth brought the review in a day or so later. Bradley says it was well written enough, but figures Ruth wrote it, not Bodie. She stood there at Bradley’s desk till he coughed up the dough.”

“They’re a class act, the Bodenheims.”

“Listen, Heller, do you want the job?”

“What is it?”

“In June, back at the ABA, I talked to an editor with a low-end paperback house, about reprinting some of Bodie’s books — you know, that racy stuff about flappers fucking? Slap on cover paintings of sexy babes and Bodie’s back in business. I got nearly two thousand in contracts lined up for him, which is big money for him.”

“So what do you need me for? Just send him the damn contracts.”

“Nate, I can’t find the SOB. He’s a goddamn street bum, floating somewhere around Greenwich Village, or the Bowery. I know for a while he was staying at this farm retreat on Staten Island, for down-and-outers, run by Dorothy Day, with the Catholic Worker? I had a letter from him from there, and I called Dorothy Day and she said Ruth and Bodie showed up on her doorstep, with his arm and leg in a cast from that beating he took. He was there for several months, healing up, and I guess he even managed to sell a poem or two, to the New York Times, if you can believe it, for I guess ten bucks apiece... but Ruth started flirting with some of the male ‘guests,’ and once his leg healed, Bodie dragged his blushing bride back into the city.”

“I’ll line up a man in New York to handle it for you, Ben. It’ll be cheaper.”

“No, Nate — I want you to do this. Yourself. You got some history with Bodie; you might get through to him where somebody else wouldn’t.”

“This could end up costing you more than these contracts are worth.”

“Hey, I had a little upturn. I can afford it. I want to get some money to Bodie without gettin’ back in the routine of me supportin’ him. Anyway, I think it would do him good to see his work back in print.”

I laughed, once. “You really are that bastard’s friend.”

“He doesn’t deserve it, does he?”

“No.”

5

The Waldorf Cafeteria, on Sixth Avenue near Eighth Street, was within a stone’s throw of MacDougal Alley and its quaint studios and New York’s only remaining gas streetlamps, in the midst of one of Greenwich Village’s several centers of nightlife. Here, where skyscrapers were conspicuous in their absence, and brick buildings and renovated stables held sway, countless little bistros and basement boîtes had sprung up on the narrow, chaotically arranged streets like so many exotic mushrooms. Longhaired men and shorthaired women wandered in their dark, drab clothes and sunglasses, moving through a lightly falling snow like dreary ghosts.

Finding Maxwell Bodenheim took exactly one afternoon. I had begun at Washington Square, where I knew he had once pinned his poems to a picket fence for the dimes and quarters of tourists. A bearded creator of unframed modernistic landscapes working the same racket for slightly inflated fees informed me that “Mad Max” (as I soon found all who knew him in the Village referred to him) had given up selling art to the tourist trade.

“He got too weird for the room, man,” the black-overcoat-clad artiste of perhaps twenty-five told me, between alternating puffs of cigarette smoke and cold-visible breath. “You know, too threatening — half-starved looking and drunk and smelly... the Elks won’t do business with a crazy man.”

“The Elks?”

“Out-of-towners, man — you know, Elks and Rotarians and Babbitts. Or cats from Flatbush or the Bronx who let their hair down when they hit Sheridan Square.”

“So what’s Max up to, now?”

“He’s around. Moochin’ drinks and peddlin’ poems for pennies in bars. Been runnin’ the blinkie scam, I heard, with some Bowery cats.”

I didn’t relish hitting that part of town.

“No idea where he lives?”

“Used to be over on Bleecker, but they got evicted. Him and Ruth got busted for sleepin’ on the subway. Didn’t have the twenty-five bucks fine and spent the night in the can.”

“It’s a little cold for doorways and park benches.”

He shrugged. “They probably still got enough friends to flop for free, here and there. Just start hittin’ the coffeehouses and clubs and somebody’ll lead you to him.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Here’s a contribution to the arts.” And slipped him a fin.

I started to walk away and the guy called out, “Hey man! Did you check with Bellevue? He’s been in and out of there.”

“As a nutcase or alcoholic?”

“Take your pick.”

I called Bellevue, but Max wasn’t currently a guest.

So I hit the streets, which were alive with native bohemians and wide-eyed tourists alike — it was Saturday and the dusting of snow wasn’t stopping anybody. I covered a lot of ground in about three hours, entering smoky cellar joints where coffee and cake were served with a side of free verse, stepping around wildly illustrated apocalyptic Bible verses in chalk on the sidewalks outside the gin mills of West Eighth Street, checking out such tourist traps as the Nut Club and Café Society and the Village Barn, gandering briefly at the strippers at Jimmy Kelly’s, stopping in at cubbyhole restaurants that advertised “health food” in conspicuously unhealthy surroundings, but eating instead at the Café Royal, which advertised itself as “The Center of Second Avenue Bohemia” and served up a mean apple strudel. The name Maxwell Bodenheim was familiar to many, from the Café Reggio to the White Horse Pub, but at the Village Vanguard, a deadpan waif with her raven hair in a pixie cut told me to try the Minneta Tavern, where I learned that the San Remo Café on MacDougal Street was Mad Max’s favorite haunt. But at the San Remo, I was sent on to the Waxworks, as the Waldorf Cafeteria was known to hip locals.

What could have possessed the owners of a respectable, pseudo-elegant chain of cafeterias to open a branch in the heart of Bohemia, a place Maxwell Bodenheim had once dubbed “the Coney Island of the soul”? Its wallpaper yellowed and peeling, its “No Smoking” signs defaced and ignored, its once-gleaming fixtures spotted and dull, its floors dirty and littered, its fluorescent lighting sputtered with electrical shorts even while casting a jaundiced glow on the already-sallow faces of a clientele who had taken this cafeteria hostage, turning it from eating place to meeting place. The clatter of dishes and the ring of the pay-as-you-go cash register provided a hard rhythm for the symphony of egos as poets and painters and actors announced their own genius and denounced the lack of talent in others, while occasionally sipping their dime’s worth of coffee while nibbling at sandwiches brought from home, the cheap flats they called “studios.”

Holding forth at a small side table was the man himself, decked out in a World War One vintage topcoat over the same shabby suit and food-flecked tie he’d worn to the Renaissance reunion, months ago. On the table, as if a meal set out for him, was a worn bulging leather briefcase. Sitting beside him was Ruth, in the pale yellow dress she’d worn to Riccardo’s. Both were smoking — Bodie his corncob with that cheap awful tobacco, Ruth with her elbow resting in a cupped hand, cigarette poised near her lips in a royally elegant chain-smoker posture. To the cups of coffee before them Bodenheim was adding generous dollops from a pint of cheap whiskey.

Bodenheim, of course, was talking, and Ruth was nodding, listening, or maybe half-listening; she sat slumped, looking a little bored.

I bought myself a cup of coffee and walked over to them, and bobbed my head toward one of the two untaken chairs at their table. “Mind if I join you?”

As he slipped the pint back in his topcoat pocket, Bodie’s rheumy eyes narrowed in their deep shadowy holes; his lumpy face was the color of tapioca, his cheeks sunken to further emphasize the skull beneath the decaying flesh. Sitting up, pretty Ruth, with her big bedroom eyes, one of which drooped drunkenly, again gave me the once-over, like I was another entrée on the cafeteria serving line.

“My wife and I are having a private conversation,” Bodie said acidly, then cocked his head. “Do I know you, sir?”

“Yes,” I said, sitting down, “from a long time ago, on the West Side of Chicago. But we ran into each other at Riccardo’s last June.”

The thin line of a mouth erupted into a ghastly array of brownish teeth and sporadic gaps. “Heller’s Books! You accompanied that lovely young actress.”

Ruth smirked and snorted derisively, as if compared to her Marilyn Monroe was nothing. Smoke came from her nostrils like dragon’s breath.

“Yes,” I said, “the lovely young actress you humiliated and sent from the room in tears.”

He waved that off with a mottled hand. “That was for that sweet child’s benefit. Cruelty was the kindest gift I could give her.”

“You think?”

“I know.” He patted the bulging briefcase before him. “This is poetry, my poetry, not sentimental drivel, but the work of a serious artist, a distinguished outcast in American letters — hated and feared, an isolated wanderer in the realm of intellect. If I were to encourage the amateurs, the dilettantes, even ones like Miss Monroe, whose skin shimmers like pudding before the spoon goes in, I would lessen both myself and them.”

Ruth cocked her head toward me, rolled her eyes, then winked. She was pretty cute, for a drunk; but I would have had to be pretty drunk, to want to get cute.

“What’s your name?” Ruth asked. Her eyes added “Big Boy.”

“Nate Heller.”

“You’re from Chicago? What brings you to the Village?”

“Ben Hecht asked me to look your husband up.”

That got Bodenheim’s attention and elicited a bitter smirk. “Does my ex-friend wish me to make another cross-country pilgrimage for a twelve-dollar stipend?”

“He’s got a publisher interested in reprinting some of your sex books.”

Ruth’s eyes sobered up and her smile turned from randy to greedy. But the crooked thin line under Bodenheim’s sweet-potato nose was curling into a sneer.

“My novels may indeed be inferior to my poetry — I am nothing if not brutally honest with myself where my literary prowess is concerned — but they are hardly ‘sex books.’ They are not gussied-up pornography, like Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare. Despite certain flaws, those novels sparkle with social satire and a genuine—”

“Whatever they sparkle with,” I said, “there’s a publisher willing to pony up a couple grand for the privilege of putting naked women on the covers.”

Ruth’s eyes were dancing with dollar signs, but Bodenheim was scowling.

“The last time I allowed a cheap pulp publisher... when was it, five years, eight years ago?... they bowdlerized the text, even while presenting my work with the sort of sensational gift-wrapping to which you refer. I won’t have my work simultaneously exploited and censored!”

I leaned forward. “I don’t know anything about that. I would guess the last thing this publisher would want to do is trim the dirty parts. So I wouldn’t worry about your literary integrity.”

Bodenheim froze, his sneering smile dissolving into a hurt, surprised near-pout. “Why, Heller’s Books — you don’t like me, do you?”

“I wasn’t paid to like you. I was paid to find you, and deliver this message.” I patted my chest. “I’ve got the contracts in my inside pocket, if you want me to leave ’em with you. The publisher’s right here in New York, you can talk with them, direct. Ben doesn’t want any finder’s fee, he just wants to see you make a buck or two off your ‘prowess.’”

“I don’t understand who you are,” Bodenheim said, bewildered, the murky eyes suddenly those of a hurt child.

“I’m a private detective.”

“I thought you were a literary man... your father...”

“Ran a bookstore. Me, like the man says on TV, I’m a cop. In business for myself, but a cop.”

“You deal in violence,” Bodenheim said quietly.

“Sometimes.”

Now a look of sadistic superiority gripped the ravaged face. He leaned forward, gesturing with the foul-smelling corncob. “Are you aware, Heller’s Books, of the close connection between the art of murder and the murder of art?”

“I can’t say as I am.”

“Artists are not killed overnight. They are murdered by being kept alive, as poverty, the unseen assassin, exacts from them one last full measure of agony.”

“Is that right.”

“When the arts go down to destruction, the artist perishes with them. For some of us, who do not sell our souls to Mammon, the final resting place is Potter’s Field. For others it is Hollywood.”

“Ben’s just trying to help you out, old man. Why in hell, I don’t know.”

“Why?” Fire exploded in those cloudy eyes. “Because I am the closest thing to a conscience that Ben Hack’t has or ever will have.”

I snorted a laugh. “What do you use for a conscience, old man?”

He settled back into the chair and the eyes went rheumy again; he collapsed into himself and said, very quietly, “My own crushed life sits beside me, staring with sharp, accusing eyes, like a vengeful ghost seeking retribution for some foul murder committed at a time of delirium and terror.”

“I don’t mean to barge in,” a male voice said.

He was a good-looking kid in well-worn jeans and a short-sleeve, slightly frayed white shirt; he had the open face, wide smile, dark-blond pompadour and boyish regular features of the young Buster Crabbe; same broad shoulders, too, only he wasn’t as tall, perhaps five eight at most. He only seemed clean-cut at first glance: then I noticed the scars under his left eye and on his chin, and how that wide smile seemed somehow... wrong.

“Joe,” Ruth said warmly, “sit down! Join us.”

“This is something of a business discussion,” Bodenheim said, tightly.

“Don’t be silly, Bodie,” she said. “Sit down, Joe.”

Joe sat down, next to me, across from Ruth. He was eyeing me suspiciously. I would have sworn the kid was looking at me through the eyes of a jealous boyfriend, but that would be impossible. After all, Ruth was married...

“Joe Greenberg,” he said, offering his hand, wearing that big smile, though the eyes remained wary.

“Nate Heller,” I said. His handshake let me know just how strong he was.

Bodenheim said, “Mr. Greenberg is a dishwasher here at the Waxworks. It’s a career he’s pursued with uncommon distinction at numerous establishments around the Village.”

“Nice to meet you, Joe,” I said. “If you’ll excuse me, I was just going...”

I began to rise but Ruth touched my arm. “Stay for just a little while. Joe, Mr. Heller has wonderful news. A publisher wants to bring some of Max’s books back out.”

Joe’s grin managed to widen, and words streamed out: “Why, Max, that’s wonderful! This is a dream come true, I couldn’t be happier for—”

“It is not wonderful,” Bodenheim said. “It is, like you, Joseph, possibly well-meaning but certainly insulting.”

“Max, don’t say that,” Joe said. “You and Ruth are the best friends I have around here.”

“Look,” I said, “do you want me to leave the contracts or not?”

“My old friend Ben is not aware,” Bodenheim said, with strained dignity, ignoring Joe, who was looking quickly from husband to wife to intruder (me), “that I am currently engaged in the writing of my memoirs for Samuel Roth, publisher of Bridgehead Books.”

“That’s swell,” I said. “Sorry to have bothered you...”

Again, I began to rise and Ruth stopped me, her brown eyes gazing up, pitifully beseeching. “Mr. Heller, what my husband says is true, he’s been going in and writing every day, but the pay is meager. We don’t have enough to even put a roof over our heads... we’ve been sleeping in doorways, and it’s a cold winter...”

Bodie seemed to be pulling down pay sufficient to afford whiskey.

Joe leaned forward, chiming in, “I told you, Ruth — you and Max are welcome to stay with me...”

Now it was Ruth leaning forward; she touched Joe’s hand. “That’s sweet, Joe, but you just have that one small room... it’s an imposition on you...”

Joe squeezed her hand, then with his other hand stroked it, petted it. His mouth was moist; so were his eyes. “I’d love to have you stay with me...”

“Leave her alone,” Bodenheim spat, “or I’ll kill you!”

Joe removed his hand and his face fell into a puttylike expressionless mask. “You hate me, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Bodenheim said, and withdrew his pint and refilled his coffee cup.

“What if I let you two take my room,” Joe said nobly, “and me move in with my friend, Allen.”

And he nodded toward a skinny redheaded busboy with glasses and pimples who was clearing a table across the room.

“I’ll pay the rent,” Joe said, “and when you get on your feet, and get your own place, I’ll move back in.”

“I once warned a girl named Magda,” Bodenheim said as if latching onto a stray thought just floating by, “against the possibility of falling into the hands of some degenerate in whom the death of love and the love of death had combined into a homicidal mania. She was strangled in a hotel bed.”

Joe was shaking his head. “What are you talkin’ about? I’m tryin’ to be nice...”

Ruth said, “Oh, Bodie, don’t you see? Joe’s our friend. Don’t say such cruel things.”

“Today,” Bodie said, patronizingly, “when the world is falling apart like scattered beads from a pearl necklace that once graced the lovely throat of existence, the bestial side of man’s nature is revealing itself... blatantly.”

“Now you’re insulting me!” Joe said. “I know when I’m being insulted.”

“The indignation of fools,” Bodenheim said grandly, “is my crown.”

I’d had enough of this touching scene. I got up, saying, “I’m in town till Monday. At the Lexington. If you change your mind, Max, give me a call.”

As I left, Joe moved around to where I was sitting, nearer to Ruth, and he was leaning forward, speaking quickly, flashing his most ingratiating smile and issuing the best words he could muster, about how his good intentions were being misinterpreted, while Bodenheim sat uncharacteristically silent, frozen with contempt, a sullen wax figure in the Waxworks cafeteria.

6

By the time I got back to my hotel, a message from Max was waiting at the front desk. It had been written down faithfully by the hotel operator: “Mr. Heller — my lovely companion has convinced me to come to my financial senses. Please be so kind as to bring the book contracts tomorrow afternoon between 3 and 4 o’clock to the following address — 97 3rd Avenue, near 13th Street. Fifth floor, room 5D.”

I showed the desk clerk the address. “Where is that?”

“Lower Fifth Avenue,” said the clerk, a boy in his twenties wearing a mustache to look older. “Pretty rough neighborhood. On the fringe of the Bowery.”

So I was going to make it to the Bowery, after all. What trip to New York would be complete without it?

I spent the rest of the evening in the Lexington bar making the acquaintance of a TWA stewardess, the outcome of which is neither germane to this story nor any of your business; we slept in the next morning, had a nice buffet lunch at the hotel, and I took her to Radio City Music Hall, where How to Marry a Millionaire was playing, one of those new Cinemascope pictures trying to replace 3-D. My companion was lovely, as were the Rockettes, and Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall; but Marilyn made me ache in so many places. She always would.

My new friend caught a cab to the airport, and I grabbed one to the Bowery, where I asked the cabbie to wait for me with the meter running. He warily agreed, and I entered a shambling five-story tenement that looked to be the architectural equivalent of Maxwell Bodenheim himself.

I went up five flights of spongy, creaky stairs, glad I was wearing a topcoat; the building wasn’t heated. A window on the fifth floor offered a sweeping city view, more worthy of a postcard than a dingy rooming house; the Third Avenue El was just below. Apartment 5D was at the end of the hall, on the right, the numbers hammered haphazardly into the wall next to the gray-painted door, which had no knob, simply a padlocked hasp.

There was no answer to my repeated knocks. I considered saying to hell with it — so Bodenheim wasn’t here, so what? How reliable was a boozehound like Max, anyway?

Pretty reliable, if money was waiting — and I had the feeling his brown-eyed soul mate wouldn’t have missed this appointment if even fifty cents were at stake, let alone several thousand. The tiny hairs on the back of my copper’s neck were tingling... and was it my imagination, or was there a stench coming from that room that drowned out the disinfectant and cooking smells and mildew and generally stale air? An all too familiar stench, worse even than Bodie’s corncob pipe...

On the first floor I found the pudgy, fiftyish, groundhog-pussed operator (“Not the super! I’m the lessee! The operator!”) of this grand hotel. His name was Albert Luck, which was something his tenants were all down on.

“So you know this guy in 5D?” Luck demanded, just outside his door, squinting behind thick-lensed wireframes as if my face were tiny print he was trying to make out; he wore baggy pants and suspenders over his long johns. “This guy Harold Weinberg, you know him?”

“Sure,” I lied.

“Son of a bitch Weinberg sneaks in and out like a goddamn ghost,” Luck said. “I can’t never catch him, and he padlocks the place behind him. If you’re such a friend of his, maybe you wanna pay his goddamn rent for him. He’s behind two weeks!”

“How much?”

“Ten bucks.”

“Five a week?”

He nodded. “Five’s the weekly rate; it’s eighty-five cents a night.”

“I’ll pay the back rent,” I said, “if you give me a look around in there.”

“Can’t. It ain’t my padlock on the door.”

I showed him a sawbuck. “Wouldn’t take much to pop the hasp.”

“Make it twenty,” he said, groundhog eyes glittering, “to cover repairs.”

Soon I was following him up the stairs; he wore a plaid hunter’s jacket and was carrying a claw hammer and a heavy screwdriver. “Tenants like your friend I don’t need... This ain’t a flophouse, you know. These are furnished rooms.”

It took him two tries to pop the latch off. I let him open the door, just in case it was a situation where I wouldn’t want to be leaving any fingerprints.

It was.

The blood splashed around in the eight-by-nine-foot cubicle was mostly on one wall, and the ceiling above, and on the nearby metal folding cot, and of course on the body of the woman sprawled there on her stomach, still clad in the frayed yellow dress, splotched brown now, the same dried-blood brown that, with the smell of decay, indicated she had been dead some time; this happened at least this morning, maybe even last night.

She had been stabbed in the back, on the left, four times, over her heart and lungs, deep wounds, hunting-knife-type wounds, and from the amount of blood that had soaked her dress and painted the wall and ceiling with an abstraction worthy of Washington Square’s outdoor art displays, I figured an artery had been hit. Another slash, on her upper left arm, indicated an attempt to ward off a blow. Her face was battered, bloodied, and blue-gray with lividity.

“Sweet lord Jesus,” Albert Luck said. “Who are they?”

“That’s Ruth Bodenheim,” I said, and then I pointed at the other body. “And that’s her husband, Maxwell.”

Max was on the floor, on his back, feet near his wife’s head where it and its ponytail hung down from the side of the bed. The poet’s eyes were wide, seeing nothing, his mouth open and, for once, silent, the flesh as slack on his dead face as if it were melting wax; he had been shot in the chest, a small crusty blossom of brown and black on his dingy white shirt, bloodstain mingled with powder burns, near his tattered tie. His loose black suit coat was on, unbuttoned, open, and his arms were spread as if he were trying to fly, a sleeve torn and bloody with an apparent knife gash. A book lay near him: The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson; his reading had been interrupted by his killing.

“I better call the cops,” Luck said, his eyes huge behind the magnified lenses.

“Keep your shirt on, pops,” I said, taking a look around.

A small table near the bed, slightly splashed with blood, had the empty pint bottle of whiskey and a wine bottle with a label that said Blackberry; also, a pad and pencil and some scribbled lines of poetry obscured by blood spatter. A window nearby opened on an airshaft. On a small electric stove sat a three-gallon pot of beans, cold; resting nearby was Bodie’s corncob pipe and a half-eaten bagel.

In one corner was Bodenheim’s worn leather briefcase, the repository of his art; leaned up against it was a tool of a more recent trade: a crudely lettered beggar’s sign saying, I AM BLIND.

No sign of a gun, or a knife.

“I’m callin’ the cops,” Luck said.

“What does this Harold Weinberg look like?”

Luck frowned. “He’s your friend.”

I gave him a hard look. “Refresh my memory.”

The landlord shrugged, said, “Good-lookin’ kid, pile of greasy hair, talks too much, smiles too much.”

I touched under my left eye, then pointed to my chin. “Scars, here and here?”

“That’s him.”

I got my wallet out and handed him a C-note. “I wasn’t here, understand? The rent was overdue and you got fed up and popped the latch, found them like this.”

Luck was nodding as he slipped the hundred in his pants. “Okay by me, mister.”

My cab was still waiting.

“What scenic part of the city do want to view next?” the cabbie asked.

“The Waldorf.”

“Astoria?”

“Cafeteria. Near MacDougal Alley.”

7

Late Sunday afternoon at the Waxworks was pretty slow: a sprinkling of hipsters, a handful of civilians catching an early supper or a slice of pie before heading back to the real world after a few hours in Little Bohemia.

The skinny redheaded busboy, whose horn-rimmed glasses were patched at the bridge with adhesive tape, his pimples mingling with freckles to create a Jackson Pollock canvas, was taking a break, slouched in a chair propped against a wall, smoking beneath a no smoking sign decorated with cigarette burns. He had the gawky, geeky look of a teenager having a hard time with puberty; but on closer look he was probably in his midtwenties, and he had a tattoo of a hula girl on his thin right forearm. His busboy’s tray was on the table before him like a grotesque meal.

I sat down beside him and he frowned, irritably, but said rather politely, “You want this table, mister?”

“No, Allen,” I said, and smiled, “I want to talk to you.”

His eyes, which were a sickly green, narrowed. “How do you know me?”

“Friend of a friend.”

“What friend?”

“Joe Greenberg. Or do you know him as Harold Weinberg?”

He swallowed nervously, almost lost his balance in his propped-back chair; righting it, he sat forward. “Joe just works here is all. He’s off right now.”

“He’s off, all right. You wouldn’t happen to know where I could I find him?”

Another swallow. He started drumming his fingers on the table and he didn’t look at me as he said, tremulously, “No. I ain’t seen him today. You try his flop?”

“Matter of fact, yeah. He wasn’t there.”

“Oh, well...”

“Two friends of his were. Dead ones.”

The eyes locked right onto me now; he was surprised, genuinely surprised — these murders were news to him.

“Oh, didn’t he mention that, Allen? That he killed two people? Maybe you knew ’em — Max Bodenheim and his wife Ruth. Good customers.”

The ruddy flesh around the pimples and freckles got pale. “Hell. Shit.”

“If you’re letting him hole up at your place, Allen, you’re putting yourself in line for an accessory to murder rap.”

His lips were quivering. “Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ... Are you a cop?”

“Private. I was hired to find Bodenheim on a business matter. I don’t want to get involved any more than you do.”

His voice lowered to a whisper; what he said was like a profane prayer: “Shit... I gotta get him out of there!”

Sometimes it pays to play a hunch.

“Allen, let’s help each other out on this...”

In 1954, I was licensed in five states to carry firearms in the course of my business, and New York was one of them. I had learned long ago that while my need for a weapon was infrequent, traveling naked could be a chilly proposition; after all, even the most innocuous job had the potential to turn ugly.

So, after a detour back to the Lexington to pick up my nine millimeter and shoulder harness, I took a cab to the address Allen Spiegel had given me: 311 East 21st, near Second Avenue. Joe/Harold had come up in the world, all the way from the bleak Bowery to the godforsaken Gashouse district.

A wind was whipping the remnants of yesterday’s snow around in a chilly dust storm. Stepping around a derelict huddling in the doorway, I entered the four-story frame rooming house, a cold, dank breeding ground for cockroaches. Allen was waiting just inside, a frightened host in a shabby sweater and faded jeans.

“The pay phone’s on the second floor,” he whispered, nodding toward the stairway. “Should I go ahead and call ’em?”

“After you see me go in. It’s down that way?”

He nodded and pointed.

“Don’t let him see you,” I advised.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

The busboy’s room was toward the back of the first floor, with (Allen had informed me) a window that looked out on a backyard that served as a courtyard for adjacent tenements. I glanced around to see if anyone was looking — nobody was but Allen, peeking from beside the stairwell — and I took out my nine millimeter and, with my free hand, knocked.

The voice behind the door was Joe’s: “What?”

“Allen sent some food over from the Waxworks,” I said. “He thought you might be hungry.”

The silence that followed lasted forever. Or was it ten seconds?

Then the door cracked open and I got a sliver of Joe’s pasty face before I shouldered my way in, slamming the door behind me, shoving the gun in Joe’s face.

“You want to tell me about it, Joe?”

He backed away. He wore a blue work shirt and jeans and he wasn’t smiling, anymore; his eyes bore raccoon circles. He didn’t have to be told to put up his hands.

The room was no bigger than the one at the other rooming house — another of those “furnished rooms,” which is to say a scarred-up table, a couple ancient kitchen chairs, a rusty food-spotted electric stove, unmade Army cot and a flimsy nightstand, fixtures any respectable secondhand store would turn down. The wallpaper was floral and peeling, the floor bare, the window by the bed had no curtains, but a frayed shade was drawn.

On the nightstand was a hunting knife in a black sheath. No sign of a gun.

“You,” he said, pointing at me, eyes narrowing, “you’re that guy from the Waxworks...”

“That’s right.”

“What are you doing here? What are—”

“I had an appointment this afternoon with Max and Ruth. They couldn’t keep it, so I’m keeping it with you.”

He ventured a facial shrug. “Gee, I haven’t seen them since last night at the Waxworks.”

“Gee, then how’d they wind up dead in your flop?”

He didn’t bother trying to take his lame story any further. He just sat, damn near collapsed, on the edge of the cot. That hunting knife was nearby but he didn’t seem to notice it. Anyway, that was what I was supposed to think.

I dragged over a kitchen chair and sat backward on it, leaning forward, keeping the nine millimeter casually trained on him. “What went wrong with your little party, Joe?”

He exploded in a rush of words: “They were just a couple of low-life Communists! Mad Max, hell, he was a walking dead man, and his wife was a common slut! A couple of lousy Reds, through and through!”

“Not to mention inside and out,” I said. “When you hit that artery, it must have sprayed like a garden hose.”

His eyes widened with the memory I’d just triggered.

“You didn’t mean for this to happen, did you, Joe? You just wanted to get laid, right?”

And that wide smile flashed, nervously. “Yeah. Just wanted to tear off a little piece from that gutter-trash quail, like half the fucking Village before me...” The smile turned sideways, and he shook his head. “Shit. She sure was cute, wasn’t she?”

“How’d it happen, Joe?”

Slumping, staring at nothing, he spoke in the singsongy whine of a child explaining itself: “I thought he fell asleep, reading, the old fart. When he ran out of whiskey, you know, I gave him some wine, and after he drained that, I thought the bastard was out for the night. Or I else wouldn’ta, you know, started fooling around with Ruth on the bed...”

“Only he woke up and caught you at it.”

He shrugged, said, “Yeah, so I took my knife off the table and kind of threatened him with it, told him to get back away from me... then the old fucker took a swing at me... I think he cut his arm when he did... and the knife, it kind of went flying.”

“What did you shoot him with?”

“I kept this old hunting rifle .22, next to my bed. That’s a rough neighborhood, you know. Bad element.”

“No kidding. So you shot him point-blank with the rifle.”

Another shrug. “It was self-defense.”

“Why did you do the woman, Joe?”

His face tightened with indignation; he pointed to himself with a thumb. “That was self-defense, too! She started screaming and clawing at me, after I shot her old man, so I threw the bitch down the bed, and started just kind of slapping her, you know, just to shut her up, but she wouldn’t put a lid on that screaming shit so I hit her a couple times, good ones, only she just yelled louder, and so what the hell else could I do, I grabbed that knife off the floor, and...”

He stopped, swallowed.

So I finished for him: “Stabbed her in the back four or five times. In self-defense.”

That’s when he lunged for me, launching himself from the bed and right at me, knocking me and the chair over, ass over teakettle. Then he dove for the knife, but I was up and on him and slammed the nine-millimeter barrel into the back of his hand, crushing it against the nightstand. He yowled and pulled the hand back, shaking it like he’d been burned, and I laid the barrel along the back of his neck, hard, sending him to the floor, where he whimpered like a kicked dog.

I tucked the sheathed knife in my waistband. “Where’s your damn rifle?”

“Down... down a gutter...”

I gave the place a quick toss, looking for the other weapon, or any other weapon, but he was apparently telling the truth. He sat on the floor with his legs curled around under him, like a pitiful little kid who’d just taken a fearsome beating; he was crying, but the eerie thing was, he had that big crazy smile going, too.

“You stay put, Liberace,” I said. “I’m calling the cops.”

I shut him in there, tucked my gun away, and listened for the sound of the window opening and him clambering out into the courtyard.

It was muffled, but I heard it: “Hold it right there!”

Then a gunshot.

And Joe’s voice, pleading: “Please don’t kill me! I’ll tell you everything!”

Seemed the cops had been waiting when Joe went out that window.

Seemed my friend Allen had spotted a suspicious character in the rooming house hallway, trying various doors, then out back, trying windows, and Allen, being a good citizen, called it in. He thought it might be a fellow he knew from work, a dishwasher named Joe Greenberg with scars on his face and a greasy pompadour, and sure enough, that’s who’d been caught, climbing out Allen’s window, then trying to scramble over a fence when that cop fired a warning shot. Seemed the police were looking for an individual on a Bowery killing who answered Greenberg’s description. Later, a sheathed hunting knife used in the Bowery slaying turned up on the grass by some garbage cans behind Allen’s rooming house.

Anyway, that’s what the papers said.

How I should I know? I was just the Little Man Who Wasn’t There, slipping out the back.

8

Harold Weinberg (Joe Greenberg was an alias) had a history of mental illness, having been first institutionalized at age ten; in 1945, at seventeen, he’d been medically discharged from the Army, and had since racked up a long record of vagrancy and breaking-and-entering arrests. He confessed to the police several times, delivering several variants of what he told me, as well as a version that had Bodenheim killing Ruth and prompting Weinberg to retaliate with the .22, as well as my favorite, one in which a person hiding under the bed did it. Weinberg sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at his arraignment, bragged about ridding the world of two Communists, assured spectators he was “not crazy,” and was promptly committed to Bellevue, where Maxwell Bodenheim and his wife Ruth were also registered, albeit in the morgue.

I claimed the bodies, at Ben Hecht’s behest, who shared funeral expenses with Bodenheim’s first wife, Minna, subject of Max’s first book of poetry. Three hundred attended the poet’s funeral, including such leading literary lights as Alfred Kreymborg and Louis Untermeyer, among a dozen other nationally known figures in the arts, who mingled with lowly Village poets, painters, and thespians. Kreymborg gave a eulogy that included the prediction, “We need not worry about Maxwell Bodenheim’s future — he will be read.”

And Bodenheim’s murder did receive enormous national coverage — probably no Bowery bum in history ever got such a send-off — and by dying violently in a sexually charged situation, the one-time bestselling author of Replenishing Jessica gained a second fifteen minutes of fame (to invoke a later oddball Village luminary).

But Kreymborg’s prediction has otherwise proved less than prescient. Every one of Bodie’s books was out of print at his death, and the same is true as I write this, forty-some years later. As far as I’m aware, the last time a Bodenheim book was in print was 1961, when a low-end paperback publisher put some sexy babes on the cover of the Greenwich Village memoirs he was writing at the time of his death.

The body of the former Ruth Fagan was claimed by her family in Detroit.

As I had intended, and done my best to arrange, my participation in the official investigation into the murder of Maxwell Bodenheim and his wife Ruth was minimal; I gave a statement about the argument I’d seen at the Waxworks on the evening of Saturday, February 7. I was not required to testify, and while I’m sure at some point Weinberg must have told the cops about the guy with the automatic who took a confession from him in Allen Spiegel’s rooming-house room, it was likely written off as just another of the numerous ravings of a madman who was eventually committed to Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane; he was released in 1977, and was behind bars again within a year on an attempted murder charge.

Until his death in 1964, Ben Hecht continued to write (and doctor) movie scripts, if with far less distinction than the glory days of the ’30s and ’40s. His real comeback was as a writer of nostalgic, wry memoirs, including A Child of the Century in 1954, in which he waxed fondly of Max; he tended to write of Chicago, not Hollywood or New York, and glorified the Chicago Renaissance (and himself) whenever possible, never letting the truth stand in the way of a good yarn.

He also completed the Marilyn Monroe “autobiography,” which was entitled My Story, but the project hit an unexpected snag.

“Looks like I won’t be paying you to make goo-goo eyes at Marilyn Monroe at this year’s ABA,” Ben said to me on the phone, in April of ’54.

“Hell you say. Why not? Isn’t she making an appearance?”

“Yeah, but not at the ABA. In court. That bimbo’s suing me!”

Ben’s British agent had peddled the serialization rights to the book overseas, without Marilyn’s permission. Her new husband, Mr. DiMaggio, convinced her she was being swindled and, besides, he didn’t like the idea of the book, anyway. Ben’s agent had violated the agreement with Marilyn, who hadn’t signed a final book contract; the book was pulled, the lawsuit dropped. My Story wasn’t published until 1974, when Marilyn’s former business partner, Milton Greene, sold it to Stein and Day, without mentioning Hecht’s role.

I did, however, encounter Marilyn again, and in fact had heard from her prior to Ben’s news about the busted book project. About a week after Bodenheim’s death, when I was back in Chicago, I received a phone call, at home, at three in the morning.

“I’m sorry to call so late,” the breathy voice said.

“That’s okay...” I said, sitting up in bed, blinking myself awake, pretty sure I recognized the voice, but thinking I was possibly still dreaming.

“This is Marilyn Monroe. You know — the actress?”

“I think I remember you. Very little gets past me. I’m a trained detective.”

She laughed a little, but when the voice returned, it was sad. “I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about what I read in the papers.”

“What did you read?”

“About that poor man. Mr. Bodenheim.”

“He was cruel to you.”

“I know. But life was cruel to him.”

We talked for a good hour, about life and death and poetry and her new husband and how happy she was. It was a sweet, sad phone call. Delicate, gentle, poetic in a way that I don’t think Maxwell Bodenheim ever was, frankly.

The best thing you can say about Max is that, unlike a lot of writers who hit the skids and the bottle, he never stopped writing. He never stopped filling paper with his poetry.

On the other hand, I think about the sign I found in that ten-by-ten hellhole where he died, the cardboard on which he’d scrawled the words: I AM BLIND.

Probably the truest poem he ever wrote.

Content

Max Allan Collins
Kisses of Death

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