Anything But Saintly

Chapter 4

We took our lunch hour en route back to headquarters, and didn’t get back until one P.M. There was a note in the message book that Captain Spangler wanted to see me.

Captain Maurice Spangler is a square-bodied, grizzled man near sixty. With him in his office was a plump, round-faced man of about fifty with drooping eyelids and a button nose.

The captain said in his crisp voice, “You know Mr. Bartkowiak, don’t you, Rudowski?” He always calls me Rudowski instead of Rudd.

I nodded to the south-side politician. “Sure. How are you, Nick?”

Nick Bartkowiak exposed even white teeth in a vote-getting smile. “Fine, Matt. How’s your mom and pop coming along?”

“Okay.”

“And your sister Julie?”

“Still fighting off the wolves.”

“Pretty girl, Julie. Let’s see now, she’s about ten years younger than you, so she must be around twenty, huh?”

Part of Nick Bartkowiak’s talent for gathering votes lay in his ability to remember the vital statistics of practically every Polish family on the south side. He always solicitously inquired after every member of the family by name when he encountered a voter. But he was wasting his charm on me. I didn’t live in his district any more.

I said, “Yeah, she’s twenty now.”

Bartkowiak turned to the captain. “I’ve knowed Matt and his family since he was a kid. We’re old friends, ain’t we, Matt?”

“Bosom pals. But you don’t have to butter me up, Nick. I don’t vote down that way any more. I’ve got an apartment uptown in the sixth district.”

I put a grin on my face to let him know I was joking, and he chuckled as though the joke were hilarious. Captain Spangler frowned. He didn’t approve of the hired help joshing influential politicians.

The captain said, “Mr. Bartkowiak hasn’t told me what he wants, Rudowski. He just said he wanted to talk to the officer in charge of the prostitution detail.” He looked at the politician expectantly.

Bartkowiak said, “Mind if I talk to Matt in private, Captain?”

Spangler flushed slightly, but he wasn’t about to refuse the request of anyone with Bartkowiak’s influence. He said a little stiffly, “Want to use my office?”

I saved myself a later bawling out by suggesting we use a corner of the squadroom. Bartkowiak was agreeable to that. Politely thanking the captain for his time, he followed me out of the office.

No one was in the squadroom except Carl Lincoln, who was reading a newspaper in one corner. We took seats at a table in the opposite corner. Carl glanced our way, but when I shook my head, he went back to reading his paper.

Bartkowiak said, “Matt, you been getting any reports of call girls rolling customers?”

I took out a cigarette, rolled it around in my fingers and put it back in the pack again in order to stall for time. I needed a little time to figure out what brought on this odd question. When no sensible reason for it occurred to me, I said, “Why?”

He raised a pudgy hand in a rueful gesture. “I’ve got kind of a delicate problem, Matt. It makes it easier, you being the cop in charge of the cat detail. Frankly I forgot you was on the force until you walked in the captain’s office. I was figuring on having to get across what I wanted by telling a couple of lies to some cop I didn’t know personally. But you being from the old neighborhood, I can level with you without it going no further, can’t I?”

I let him think he could without actually committing myself. Giving him a friendly smile, I said, “What’s your problem?”

“Well, you know the setup down in the Polish section. And you know Artie Nowak.”

“Uh-huh.”

“There ain’t no use beating around the bush. You and everybody else in the know is aware that Artie runs a little call-girl operation. I never exactly gave him the go-ahead on that, but I never made no kick. It don’t hurt nobody to let guys have a girl when they want one. Maybe it prevents a lot of rapes even. Long as it was a quiet, no-trouble operation, I didn’t care about it.”

He was warping the truth a little. Knowing Nick Bartkowiak, I was reasonably certain he got a cut from every racket run in his district. But if he wanted to pretend his only interest in the call-girl operation was a humanitarian desire to prevent nice girls from being raped on the streets, I wasn’t going to call him a liar.

I said, “And now you think it isn’t a no-trouble operation?”

“I know it ain’t,” he said grimly. “It’s developing big trouble.”

I took out the same cigarette again, and this time I lit it. Nick Bartkowiak watched moodily until I had it going. “I’m listening,” I said.

“I got ears all over town, Matt. I hear things even the cops don’t. And rumors keep seeping down to me about guys getting rolled by call girls. Not just no-account punks. Prominent businessmen.”

So Kitty of the heart-shaped tattoo hadn’t been an isolated incident, I thought. It was a regular racket.

I blew out a perfect smoke ring, watched it climb and expand until it finally disintegrated. I didn’t say anything.

“You know what that kind of thing can start?” Bartkowiak demanded.

“What?”

“A citizens’ reform league. Naturally these guys ain’t going to report to the police they was rolled. Most of them is married. But it leaves them sore. One of these days some character with a lot of influence is going to get sore enough to start yammering for an investigation of the call-girl racket. And every other influential man who has been rolled is going to fall right in behind him. You ever see an aroused group of prominent businessmen and civic leaders go after local rackets?”

I shook my head.

“Well, I have.” He gave a slight shudder. “About thirty years ago, right around when you was born, a bunch of do-gooders split this town wide open. You can defeat reform office seekers at the polls and you can buy off un-cooperative officials who do get into office, but there’s not one damn thing you can do about a bunch of crusading private citizens except sweat it out. These guys thirty years ago had money, social prominence and connections reaching right into the governor’s mansion. They hired their own investigators, they prodded the newspapers into an anti-vice campaign and they stirred up the grand jury by dumping evidence into its lap until it turned into a runaway grand jury. When the dust settled, half the city officials were in prison and the other half had left town. The political organization was a shambles. It took us ten years to get back on our feet again.”

I vaguely remembered hearing of the reform explosion a generation back, but I didn’t know many of the details. I said dryly, “Maybe another reform movement would be good for the town.”

“It ain’t funny, Matt,” he said a shade testily. “This really ain’t a bad town, you know.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Well, you know what I mean. Sure there’s a few rackets. But not as bad as a lot of big cities. You don’t find protection rackets, where goons go around shaking down merchants and dropping bombs in places that refuse to pay off. And there’s no dope racket. At least none with any political protection. A few bookies, some small-time gambling joints, some policy and a few hustlers. Just entertainment-furnishing really. It ain’t a syndicate controlled town. You’re gonna have some rackets, no matter who’s in the driver’s seat. St. Cecilia’s pretty clean. How long’s it been since you remember a gang killing?”

“I guess the powers that be draw the line at murder,” I admitted.

“They draw the line at anything that might get out of hand. You’re never gonna have a cleaner town than you’ve got right now, no matter who’s running things. I’d hate to see some citizens’ league shake things apart and leave the city wide open for maybe somebody like the syndicate to move in.”

I said, “You think a few guys getting rolled might bring things to that point?”

“I ain’t about to find out,” he assured me. “Even a crusade just against the call-girl racket would be bad enough. The general public don’t think much of guys who dabble in woman traffic. If the papers got on Artie’s back, it would ruin him on the south side. And it might ruin me by association, because everybody knows he’s my right-hand.”

“Have you spoken to Artie about this?”

“A while back. He said it wasn’t his girls, that it must be independents pulling it. But there ain’t no independents in the call-girl racket. Streetwalkers, sure, and a few cat houses, but not call girls. Artie’s a good organizer and he don’t like competition. It’s his girls all right, and I kept hearing about the rollings even after I spoke to him. All I can think is he’s deliberately instructing them to roll customers, strictly against my orders.”

I was becoming more puzzled by the minute. In the first place, what Bartkowiak was saying didn’t quite jell with Little Artie’s performance that morning. I had gotten the impression that he was both surprised and irritated to learn that one of his girls had rolled a customer. Of course it was possible he was merely a better actor than I had suspected.

In the second place, I couldn’t understand why Nick Bartkowiak was so frankly baring his innermost secrets to a cop, even though he regarded me as an old friend.

I asked bluntly, “What do you expect me to do about all this, Nick?”

“Your job is to arrest prostitutes, ain’t it?”

After examining his face, I slowly nodded.

“Well, go out and arrest some.”

“You mean break up the operation?”

“I don’t mean pin anything on Artie. He’s a key man in the district and he’d be too hard to replace. Anyway, any dirt you threw at him, some is bound to spatter on me. I just want him rocked back on his heels so he’ll behave in the future.”

I was silent for a few moments, mulling this over. And finally I thought I understood it. I had always known Nick Bartkowiak had a devious mind, but until now I hadn’t known just how devious. He wasn’t of the old school of racketeer who punished insubordination with a gun, or the threat of a gun. Little Artie Nowak was too valuable to him merely to cancel out, but at the same time Bartkowiak wasn’t going to put up with lack of discipline. He meant to bring Artie back into line simply by withdrawing his protection for a time and allowing the police to harass his operation. But he had made it clear he didn’t want Artie himself touched. Undoubtedly he meant to sit back and wait until Artie Nowak came squawking to him that the police were arresting his girls, and then calmly inform the little man that he had withdrawn his protection. When Artie wanted to know why, Bartkowiak would tell him that when the rolling stopped, the harassment would stop.

I felt like batting him for his effrontery in expecting the police department to help him discipline his underlings. But that would only have gotten me batted off the force. I kept my mouth shut.

Bartkowiak rose to his feet. “Of course I expect the background of all this to stay between you and me, Matt. I wouldn’t have given any other cop such a detailed fill-in. I would have had to let some strange cop know it was okay to go after the girls, and just take a chance that I could shut it off before they got to Artie. This way’s better, because now you know just exactly how far you can go. But you can keep that under your hat. All you have to tell the captain is there won’t be any beefs to the commissioner if you start knocking off Artie’s girls.”

“I get it,” I said dourly.

I was tempted to forget the whole thing and not even mention the matter to the captain, because I resented a racketeer-politician maneuvering the police department as though he owned it. Then I decided I had to tell the captain. In the first place, he was going to want to know what Bartkowiak had on his mind, and I’d have to tell him something. In the second place, I was going to end up on Bartkowiak’s blacklist if I sat on my hands. And that was equivalent to asking for a demotion back to uniform.

When the politician walked out, I signaled to Carl and we went in together to see Captain Spangler.