Chicago Confidential

10

Since no getaway car was in sight down the alley, I figured the shooters had jumped a backyard fence to cut over to either Addison or Eddy, where their vehicle would be parked, possibly with a wheelman waiting.

As I backed out into Wolcott — catching a break: no cars in either lane — I craned around looking left and right, checking both streets and saw a maroon coupe, a Ford, go flying east on Eddy, the driver hunkered forward, like he was in a goddamn stockcar race.

That was good enough for me.

I swung the Olds around and took pursuit — twilight had faded fully into nighttime — but when I turned onto Eddy, the maroon coupe was not in sight. That was no surprise — after going under the El, Eddy dead-ended just half a block off Wolcott. I could see taillights glowing like red eyes in the darkness, about a block down Ravenswood, a deserted-looking street to my left, and that had to be the coupe, although I’d have to get closer to find out for sure.

I took the left onto Ravenswood, and followed the taillights, warehouses and factory lofts to one side of me, an embankment on the other. The maroon coupe — if that was the coupe up ahead — had slowed down, and I stayed back; unless I wanted a full-blown chase, I needed not to attract their suspicion, which on this desolate stretch wasn’t easy. I cut my headlamps.

Three blocks down Ravenswood, the vehicle turned right on Roscoe, as if tracing the path of the El tracks; in doing so, the coupe revealed itself definitely as the maroon Ford, gliding under a streetlight. The driver wasn’t sitting forward now, and the car was moving along at a legal twenty-five miles per hour. No sign that they’d spotted me...

Soon the coupe had turned right onto Lincoln Avenue, and we were no longer alone, or in the dark — this was a busy shopping district, rich with German bakeries and small shops of every stripe, dominated by a huge Goldblatt’s department store, the sidewalks crowded, the streets clogged with traffic. I put the lights back on, though I hardly needed them. This wide busy thoroughfare allowed me to put several cars between my Olds and the maroon coupe — they still hadn’t made me, it appeared — but when we approached the Lincoln/Belmont/Ashland intersection, I got worried.

This was one of Chicago’s patented crazy three-way intersections, with Lincoln cutting diagonally across Ashland and Belmont, the kind of crossing that can give a tourist an instant nervous breakdown... and even a veteran Chicago driver the shakes...

The coupe did not take the sharp left onto Belmont, but the easier, saner one onto Ashland. That made my life easier, too, if not saner — this was a four-lane boulevard, sharing space with the streetcar line, and gave me more maneuvering room. I was now having no trouble maintaining a tailing distance of almost a block, keeping cars between us. Most of the time I was driving one-handed, as I had never let loose of the nine millimeter in my fist; and no other drivers had noticed — on those occasions I used both hands on the wheel — that I was juggling a Browning automatic.

My hope was that the assassins were on their way to report in to their boss; but even if they weren’t, following them to a destination, any destination, would be better than turning this into a Wild West guns-blazing car chase. Somewhere along Ashland, I took time to put down my Browning for a moment and fish a pack of Camels out of my glove box, a pack Lou Sapperstein had left behind last week; matches were conveniently tucked in the cellophane and I lit up, sucking the smoke into my lungs greedily. The tobacco craving was rare, but when it came, it really came.

The drive down Ashland took us up onto the overpass across the north branch of the Chicago River. For a moment I thought the maroon coupe’s driver had finally made me, when he took a quick left onto Courtland; but I had a feeling it was just a turn he almost missed, and — not wanting to lose him — violated proper surveillance technique and, rather than continuing on straight through the intersection and doubling back, took the Courtland left, myself.

I’d been expecting them to hit Armitage, another busy commercial street, but then I saw the coupe take a right, sliding onto Kingsbury, a dreary rutted road cutting through a canyon of factories, with a railroad track running down the center, to feed the concrete tongues of loading docks on either side. This solitary stretch was all but uninhabited — save, presumably, for the odd night watchman — and the streetlamps were minimal, throwing occasional pools of light into the shadow-soaked world.

Had they spotted me? Were they leading me to a lonely section where they could deal with me, unseen? I had cut my headlights again, as soon as the coupe turned down this tunnel-like passage. I dropped back, a block and a half; they weren’t slowing, or speeding — just proceeding at a legal twenty-five to wherever the hell they were going.

It then occurred to me that we were heading — or at least could be heading — to where Drury and that lawyer Bas were supposed to be meeting the surprise witness, in... I checked my watch... fifteen minutes. Was Bas the boss to whom the hitmen were reporting? Had the lawyer suckered, and betrayed, Drury, with his unlikely story of a witness without a name?

At North Avenue, the coupe turned left; I followed, and almost missed noticing that — two blocks down — they’d taken a fast right onto Orchard. I made a last second turn and got honked at by a startled, pissed-off driver — I’d forgotten my headlamps were off.

But I left the lights off, despite the irate motorist’s bleat, because traffic was sporadic now, as I crawled behind the coupe into the outer circles of Hell. From where we were, and southward, lay Little Hell, the roughest slum of the Near Northside; this had been a Sicilian area, not so long ago — Little Sicily, they’d called it, proud home of Hell’s Corner, the location of more gangland slayings than any other spot in the city.

Though the fringe blocks we were creeping through were still home to a few handfuls of Sicilians, and white faces were not completely unknown in these parts, the area was eighty percent colored, now. At the south end of this nasty neighborhood was some new public housing — the Frances Cabrini Homes, several blocks of tidy row houses — intended for the colored residents of the area, but filled with Sicilians and other whites who moved into the projects, bequeathing to the blacks the truly decrepit slum dwellings of Little Hell — a mix of dilapidated paint-peeling frame houses and crumbling brick tenements, dating back to the Chicago fire.

Little Hell was an apt phrase, except perhaps the “Little” part. These tenement apartments were usually shared by two families, and most buildings were without functioning bathrooms or running water. Sections of the vaulted sidewalks — often used to store coal — were cracked and unsafe, fissures in the cement that might have been the aftermath of an earthquake. Rats the size of small dogs ran these streets and sidewalks as if they owned them — and I wasn’t about to argue with them.

It was five till seven when the maroon coupe pulled over and parked near the corner of Orchard and Scott. I continued on, pulling over half a block down. I sat and smoked and watched in my sideview mirror as two men got out of the front seat of the coupe, leaving it running. Despite that, no driver could be spotted behind the wheel: seemed only two men had been in that coupe after all; hadn’t been a wheelman waiting for them. That might explain why their getaway had been slowed enough for me to catch sight of their escape from Drury’s neighborhood. Nine millimeter in my fist, cigarette in my mouth, I turned in my seat and looked out the back window.

From across the street from where the maroon coupe was parked, where he’d been sitting in his own parked car, a six-foot figure in a dark gray suit under an open raincoat stepped out and crossed to join the two men on the corner, under a streetlamp, one of the few around here that was working.

They were talking — smiles all around, a friendly confab. All three men were an anomaly in this neighborhood: well-dressed white men, lawyer Bas and the two assassins, neither of whom (at this distance, anyway) looked familiar to me. The man who’d been driving the maroon coupe — small, round-faced, mustached — wore a light gray suit, no topcoat, and a darker gray fedora; his lanky partner, also mustached, wore a dark blue topcoat and a lighter blue fedora.

So that fucking Bas was their boss — he’d set Drury up for these natty assassins. But why was the lawyer meeting them here, where the meeting with the (I now assumed) imaginary witness was to have taken place? He did represent some taverns and clubs in this part of town, but still I was just realizing, with a shudder, the faultiness of my original thinking, and reaching for the door handle, thinking that Bas might be innocent, and in danger, when the taller mustached assassin swung something out from under that dark blue topcoat — a shotgun.

Even from half a block away, I could see Bas’s wide-eyed shock, and he turned to flee down the sidewalk, away from them (and me) when the guy opened up — shotgun all right... no doubt the same one that had nailed Drury — and the night exploded. Bas seemed to pause in midair before he pitched face-forward to the cement, his splattered back a modern art study in charcoal and red, worthy of Charley’s penthouse wall.

I was long since out of the car, and running down the street, hat flying off, cigarette trailing sparks into the night, gun tight in my fist, when the guy in the topcoat got in behind the wheel of the parked, motor-running coupe — he’d traded jobs with his partner, who had trotted down to where Bas had belly-flopped onto the cracked cement. The .45 in the round-faced assassin’s hand blasted down at the supine attorney, once, twice, blossoming orange in the darkness.

The round-faced guy ran back to the coupe, climbed in on the rider’s side, and they took off, heading straight at me, though neither had noticed me yet; the glare of their headlights made me squint, but I’d anticipated it, and I saw them, both of their mustached faces (the tall one had a harelip scar), and they saw me too — their expressions as saucer-eyed as Bas’s — as I pointed the nine millimeter at their oncoming windshield and fired.

The shot rang through Little Hell, echoing, and the bullet spiderwebbed the windshield, but I didn’t think I’d hit either one of them, goddamnit, and I dove and rolled as the driver swerved, first to try to run me down, second to take a right that would take them toward and under the El tracks, toward Ogden Avenue.

I was barely back on my feet, when they were gone, out of my view, and — gun still in hand — I ran down to the fallen Bas, knowing it was hopeless, but checking him out, anyway.

Kneeling down to take a closer look, I figured the shotgun blast in his back had probably killed him; but the coup de grace pair of .45 shots in his head made taking his pulse a worthless procedure. I did it anyway.

Now that the shooting had stopped, people were coming out of their houses and tenements, colored faces filling doorways and windows, eyes wider than Willie Best’s and shouts of “Call the police,” and “Buncha white men shootin’ at each other,” and such like, from either side of the street, surrounding me, an accusatory gospel choir singing skyward in the night.

Before the cops or Jesus responded, I ran back to my car and got out of there, hoping to hell we all looked alike to them.

The same red-uniformed doorman as on my previous visit to the Barry Apartments — paunchy, fiftyish George with the drink-splotched face — was on duty; and he remembered me... and my name.

“Oh yes, Mr. Lincoln,” he said, accepting another of my green business cards. “How can I help you tonight?”

“I just want to go up and see my friend Joey Fischetti.”

George shook his head. “I’m not sure any of the Fish family is in, this evening. I came on at four, and the other guy said they’ve all cleared out.”

“Yeah? Vacation?”

“Not sure. They winter in Florida, y’know, but I never saw ’em go down this early, before. You could ask that girl who lives with Rocco. She’s back.”

The corner of my left eye twitched. “Is she?”

“If you can get past Pete, she is,” he said, with a shrug.

“Pete?”

George nodded toward the lobby. “The elevator operator. He’s sort of the guardian at the gate. I work for the Barry Apartments; but Pete works for the Fischettis.”

“I appreciate the information, George.”

“Any time, Mr. Lincoln.”

I had a clear head and I had that cool, detached limbo state of mind that I’d experienced in combat on the Island — Guadalcanal, that is. A distancing that keeps men under fire from going mad.

I clopped across the marble floor of the narrow, mirrored, fern-flung lobby. Over my arm the London Fog was draped, which hid the nine millimeter in my fist; I wasn’t wearing a hat — it was somewhere in Little Hell, having blown off my head when I was running down the street, trying to help Bas, fucking up yet another bodyguard assignment.

Nice thing about bodyguard work is, the clients who survive will write letters of reference; and the dead ones never complain.

Stepping on the elevator, I said, “Ten, please.”

This was the same blue-uniformed, blue-five-o’clock-shadowed thug as before — with the same bulge under his left arm. He glanced at me — maybe he recognized me, maybe he didn’t — but he just did as I asked him. After all, I wasn’t going up to the penthouse.

When the doors slid shut, I pretended to drop my London Fog, and as I was coming up, I slapped the bastard along the side of his head with the Browning barrel. He stumbled into the side wall of the elevator, his ear bleeding, his eyes doing a slot-machine roll; I reached into his coat, withdrew Pete’s .38 revolver from its holster, and stuck it in my waistband.

He lurched at me, grabbing at me like I was a ladder he was trying to climb, and I slapped his other ear with the Browning; now he went down on his knees, like he was praying, or preparing to blow me — neither image appealed to me, so I pushed him all the way to the floor with my left foot, and — now that he was unconscious, or pretending to be — tied his hands behind him with my necktie.

The door opened on ten and, when nobody got on or off, the doors closed again, and I drove myself up to the seventeenth floor. Pete had come groggily around; he was on his side, looking up at me — he seemed puzzled and like maybe his feelings were a little hurt.

“What did I do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Which is what you’re going to keep doing. You got a passkey?”

“Fuck you!”

That meant he did. I searched him and found it in a shallow slanty pocket of his blue uniform’s jacket.

“Are they here?” I asked. “The three Fish brothers?”

“Fuck you,” he said, with no enthusiasm.

That meant they probably weren’t — that George the doorman had been right... goddamnit. At that moment, fresh from the murders of my two clients, I would have loved to return the favor to Rocky and Charley — slowly... Rocky because he was a sadistic son of a bitch, and Charley because he was the brains, and undoubtedly had ordered these hits.

I parked the elevator, flicking the OUT OF SERVICE switch, stepped past Pete, who was on his side, scowling at me, and got off at the entryway, where the golden Egyptian settee and sunburst clock awaited. Using the passkey, I went in, nine millimeter still an extra appendage growing out of my fist — I didn’t think the Fischettis were here, but I might be wrong. My track record tonight wasn’t that great, after all.

Or some other watchdog or two might be present, more competent than the McCarthy-jowled elevator operator.

But I was barely inside when I heard music, coming from the living room.

Someone was playing the piano — “They Say It’s Wonderful,” Irving Berlin, Annie Get Your Gun — and someone was singing, a clear, sweet soprano... exquisitely feminine, and not Ethel Merman.

Jackie Payne was sitting at the grand piano in the spacious living room, near the terrace-style balcony, the curtains open, revealing the sky with its stars and the moon with its glow that was turning the endless lake shimmering silver. Accompanying herself (she played fairly well), Jackie sang with delicacy and feeling, and she looked fine — no black eyes, just those lovely big brown ones; she wore a white short-sleeve blouse and sky-blue pedal pushers, her feet bare, toenails painted blood red.

Nine millimeter still in hand, I began to clap; the first of the claps — echoing off the slate floor — made her jump, and stop in midnote, hands frozen over the keys.

“Please,” I said, the gun lowered, “don’t stop on my account. You sound fine.”

She just sat there and looked at me, her face as expressionless as a Kewpie doll; then her lip began to tremble and tears rolled down her face. No sound of sobbing, though.

I sighed, walked over, sat next to her on the piano bench, gun in my lap, in my hand, limply now.

“Why?” I asked her.

“I’m not going with you, Nate.”

“Why?”

“I don’t deserve you. You were wonderful, you believe in me, but I’m not ready to kick.”

“Why?”

“I need it — I need the stuff. I can’t get through the day without it.”

“Why?”

“Rocco called — he was crying. I know... I know you can’t believe that, Nate. But he does have a good heart, a soft side. He said he missed me, he couldn’t live without me, and he would never harm me again. He said, if ever he touched so much as a hair on my head, I could leave him forever, and he’d never bother me again. I had to come back to him.”

“Why?”

“He needed me.”

“Why?”

“I love him.”

“Why?”

“He’s good to me. Look at this place. Look around you. And now he’s promised to let me have my career — starting at the Chez, then, eventually, opening for acts in Vegas. Joey owns part of a recording label, you know. And... I can’t do that, any of that, without my... without help, you know — medicinal help.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m just not strong enough without it. Maybe... maybe someday I can shake it. But not now.”

“Why?”

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

She covered her face with her hands and she wept. I let her do that for a while.

Then I asked her, “Where are they?”

Her voice seemed tiny; so did she. “Gone. They’ve let all but a skeleton staff go. Rocco put me in charge of the apartment here. He didn’t want to take me with him.”

“Why?”

The brown eyes, red from tears, flashed at me. “Are you going to start that again? He said he and his brother Charley — I think Joey is in Florida, at his house there — but Rocky and Charley are sort of... on the run. Incommunicado, until this thing, this Kefauver thing, blows over.”

“And Rocky left you here? Knowing if you changed your mind — if I talked sense to you and you changed your mind — you could be a witness against them?”

She shook her head, shrugged. “What could I testify about?”

“You could tell them, for example, just how many times Tubbo Gilbert came calling in recent months.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“You couldn’t? Two men died tonight, Jackie — I saw it. But I couldn’t stop it.”

She frowned and looked at the piano keys. “Oh, Nate... don’t. I don’t want to hear this...”

“Bill Drury, a cop — maybe you read about him in the papers. He saved my life once. He was an honest cop — in Chicago, can you buy that? He and an attorney named Bas... they both have wives who probably love them, and families to support... were trying to get the goods on Charley and Tubbo. And they were murdered, just about an hour ago — Bill in his own garage, that attorney on a public street. Executed. Cattle at the stockyards die with more dignity.”

She swallowed, looked up, stared right at me. “Nate, I couldn’t testify against Rocky, and I don’t know anything about Charley.”

“You couldn’t testify against Rocky? Listen, if they subpoena you, and you’re under oath—”

“Nate! You don’t understand. Listen to me: I can’t testify against Rocky. A wife can’t testify against her own husband.”

I just looked at her. Finally I said, almost spitting at her, “What?”

“We were married this afternoon, at City Hall. Rocky pulled some strings, to get past the waiting period. He has connections.”

“No kidding.”

She was looking at the keys again. “I saw him off at O’Hare. Our honeymoon will have to wait.”

“Where are you and Rocky and your hypodermic planning to go?”

The brown eyes fixed themselves on me — they were soft, even loving; she touched my hand — the one that didn’t have a gun in it.

“Nate... I’ll always love you, you’ll always occupy a special place inside of me. Our few days together — the things you did for me, and tried to do for me — I’ll never forget them. I’ll cherish that memory — like a flower pressed into a book.”

“Swell. I get the honeymoon, but Rocky gets the bride.”

“Please, Nate...”

I sat there, wondering if I should search the penthouse.

I couldn’t think of a reason to; and the brothers were long gone. Probably I needed to get out of there — the cops would be coming to talk to the Fischettis, as soon as the Drury and Bas murders went past the crime scene stage. Of course, Tubbo Gilbert would probably be in charge of the investigation.

“Wait here,” I said, standing.

“What are you...?”

“You’re going to hear some noise. Don’t worry about it. Just stay put. Okay?”

“Why?”

I grinned at her. “You don’t get to ask that question, baby. Just sit tight and shut up.”

Five minutes later, breathing hard, I came back in the living room — my arms ached. Jackie had a startled-deer look — she had to have heard the racket I made; but she had stayed put.

“What on earth — Nate, what did you do?”

“I threw each and every one of them against the wall,” I said. “I broke every goddamn precious fucking train.”

Then I went over and grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her on the mouth.

And got the hell out of there.