The Million-Dollar Wound by Max Allan Collins Page B

out.
    He sat. “My associations with that crowd are exaggerated, Mr. Heller. Besides, you can make money through such associations and run no risk if you keep it on a business basis, and are forthright in your dealings. Keep it business, and there is nothing to fear.”
    He sounded like he was trying to convince himself, not me.
    I said, “I didn’t mean to be rude, Mr. O’Hare.”
    “Call me Eddie,” he said, getting out a silver cigarette case. He offered one of the cigarettes to Miss Cavaretta; she took it. He offered me one and I politely refused, though I eased an ashtray toward Miss Cavaretta. Our eyes met. She smiled at me with them. She had long legs. They were smiling at me, too.
    “We’ve just closed the season out at Sportsman’s Park,” Edward J. O’Hare said, lighting Miss Cavaretta’s cigarette with a silver lighter shaped like a small horse’s head. He put the cigarettes and lighter away without lighting one up himself.
    I said, “You’ve had a good year, I understand.”
    Sportsman’s Park, of which O’Hare was the president, was a 12,000-seat, half-mile racetrack, converted from dogs to nags back in ’32. It was in Stickney, very near Cicero. In other words, right smack in the middle of mob country.
    “Yes. But we have had a few problems.”
    “Oh?”
    Miss Cavaretta was poised, ready to write something down; she’d written nothing as yet, not even a doodle. She wasn’t the doodler type.
    “As you may know, at a park like ours, some of our clientele is less than savory.”
    “Sure,” I said. “Ex-cons, thieves, bookmakers, whores…excuse my French, Miss Cavaretta.”
    The faintest wisp of a smile.
    “Particularly on the weekdays,” I went on, “when working stiffs can’t get away from the salt mines.”
    “Precisely,” O’Hare said, sitting forward, striving to be earnest. “We’ve done our best to keep out the hoodlums and deadbeats and troublemakers. But there’s only so much we can do, in our business. That’s where you come in, Mr. Heller.”
    “I do?”
    “We’ve been having pickpocket trouble. A regular epidemic. We don’t mind our customers getting their pockets emptied, it’s just that we prefer to do it ourselves.”
    “Naturally.”
    “I understand that you have a certain expertise in that area. Pickpocket control, I mean.”
    “That’s my police background, yes. And, since going private, I’ve done a lot of security work in that area, that’s correct.”
    He smiled—patronizingly, I thought. “I understand you even handled the pickpocket problem at the World’s Fair.”
    “The Chicago one, back in ’33,” I said. “They didn’t invite me out to New York for the new one.”
    “They’re holding it over, I hear,” someone said.
    Surprisingly, it was Miss Cavaretta—who was now in the midst of actually taking a few notes—putting in her two cents, in a lush, throaty voice that was like butter on a warm roll.
    “Maybe they’ll invite you there next year,” she said.
    O’Hare laughed at that, a little too loud I thought. Was he trying to get in her pants? Was that what this was about? And since when did a millionaire have to try so hard to get in his secretary’s panties? Then again, on the other hand, I kept in mind my own situation with Gladys. Of course, I wasn’t a millionaire.
    “Maybe they will invite me,” I said, feeling like the unwanted chaperone on a date.
    “What I would like,” O’Hare said, “is for you to instruct my own security staff in the art of spotting and catching pickpockets. I will want you to spend some time at the park yourself, when the next season opens, supervising. You’ll need to come out, as soon as possible, and take a look around the facility, of course.”
    “Just a moment, please,” I said, and I picked up the phone and called next door.
    In a few moments Lou Sapperstein, wearing his suitcoat, looking spiffy as a hundred bucks, entered, nodding, smiling, eyes lingering just a second on the