“The evil is in the people,
and money is the peg they hang it on.”

ROSS MACDONALD

THE BIG BUNDLE

BOOK ONE

Kansas City Shuffle

October 1953

CHAPTER ONE

A middle-aged man taking stock of his life is to be expected. But for this to be my midpoint, I would have to make it to 94, and anyway it was the ghosts of my past haunting me, not my conscience, which after all was the nine millimeter Browning automatic I still carried all these years after my father killed himself with it—when I disappointed him taking the Outfit’s money to get ahead on the Chicago PD.

As I write this I’m closer to 94 than 47, which was my age in October 1953 when I caught an Ace Company cab outside the Kansas City Municipal Airport. The cabbie was colored, which in a city where the population was 10% that persuasion might not have been a surprise. Still, Negro hackies didn’t generally work white areas, though airport runs could make for a decent fare and those who didn’t like the driver’s shade could take the next ride down, and those who didn’t give a damn got a smile and a nod and no funny business like unrequested tours of K.C.

And I didn’t need one of those—I’d done jobs here before. The airport was five minutes from a downtown whose “Petticoat Lane” on Eleventh Street had smart shops and patrons who could afford to frequent them; around Twelfth and Main were the usual stores and palatial movie houses, a few blocks east was a civic center whose plaza included two of the taller buildings, the Courthouse and City Hall, with the massive bunker of Municipal Auditorium to the southeast.

Everything was still up to date in Kansas City. They were giving my toddling town a run on the meat-packing and agricultural fronts. They had an impressive art gallery, fine arts museum and kiddie-pleasing zoo, and the industries included steel, petroleum, and automotive manufacturing. And one once-booming local enterprise that had faded since the ’30s had made a big comeback recently.

“You in town about that kidnapping, boss?” the cabbie asked.

He was grinning at me in the rearview mirror. He looked like Mantan Moreland but with a flattened nose; that and his cauliflower ears made him a former prizefighter. Yes, I’m a detective.

“Why would you think that?”

Now he was looking out his windshield, which was my preference.

“Address rang a bell,” he said.

“Ah.”

“Anyway, boss, I read about you—you that private eye to the stars.”

Life magazine had done a story about me when I opened my L.A. branch.

“Don’t recall your name, though,” he said.

“Nathan Heller,” I said.

“Chicago, right?”

“Right.”

“…So what’s Alan Ladd like?”

“Short.”

“What about Mitchum?”

“Tall.”

That made him laugh.

For the record, I was an inch shorter than Mitchum and weighed around two hundred pounds, my reddish brown hair going white at the temples, and “almost leading man handsome” (the Life writer had said). I made up for the “almost” by being a success in my trade—president of Chicago’s A-1 Detective Agency. By way of evidence I offer the court my Botany 500 suit, Dobbs hat and Burberry raincoat, lining in—it was cold in Kansas City in October, and the sky was trying to make its mind up whether to rain or snow.