Neon Mirage

I was riding shotgun, and that wasn’t just an expression: there was a goddamned sawed-off twelve-gauge in my lap, and I didn’t like it. At all.

When you’re the boss of a business, the owner of a company, the fucking president of A-1 Detective Agency, you’re not supposed to draw duty like this. I had six operatives for that; I was thirty-eight years old and had been at this racket long enough, and was successful enough, to pick and choose which jobs I wanted to go out on. If I wanted to spend all day behind my desk, I could do that (and these days I frequently did). I was good on the phone, and that’s eighty percent of being a good private detective. If I ever had any thirst for adventure, Guadalcanal had taken it out of me. I rarely carried a gun, in this glorious post-war world.

But nonetheless, here I was: riding literal shotgun in the bodyguard car following James Ragen and his fancy Lincoln Continental down State Street, filling in last minute for an op of mine who took sick, wondering if today would be the day the Outfit decided to blow my tough little Irishman of a client to kingdom come.

Dealing with the mob was something that couldn’t be avoided in Chicago, if you were in my line, but the last couple years I’d done my best to do less and less of it. I used to know Frank Nitti fairly well-better than I wanted to, really-and had more than once found an unlikely ally in the diminutive, dapper, one-time barber who had been Al Capone’s successor.

Since Nitti’s death, however, I’d with a couple of exceptions kept arm’s length from Outfit guys. Nitti was, compared to those who came before him and those who came after, a relatively benevolent figure. He killed less often, and often schemed, like a master chess player, to have those he did want dead killed by somebody else-the cops or the FBI, for example. He tried to stay out of the headlines-it brought too much “heat,” it was bad for business.

And to him the Outfit was a business; and he was a businessman, and you could trust him. As much as you can trust any Chicago businessman, anyway.

Former pimp Jake Guzik, he of the greasy thumb, was in charge of the Outfit these days, while Paul “The Waiter” Ricca and Louie “Little New York” Campagna sat in stir trying to buy their way out of the sentences they got for their part in the Hollywood extortion racket, the exposure of which had led to Nitti’s demise-a suicide if you believe what you read in the papers. Fat Guzik, mob treasurer for several decades now, who would do anything for money, was somebody I’d never feel close to, though he did owe me a debt of sorts. I hoped that debt would be enough to let me survive acting as protector to Jim Ragen.

I’d tried to keep my distance from the job, assigning various ops to the bodyguard duty-even though Ragen had, from the beginning, wanted me aboard personally.

“Jim,” I’d told him, as we sat in my nicely furnished office in an admittedly less than nice building at Van Buren and Plymouth, speaking over the rumble of the El rushing by, “it’s against my better judgment getting involved in this at all. If we weren’t friends…”

“It’s because we’re friends I come to you,” Ragen had said. He wasn’t a big man; my six feet and one-hundred-eighty pounds was enough to make him look small, despite the bull neck and broad shoulders. You might even mistake him for mild, this balding, bespectacled, ruddy-complected Irishman whose tiny eyes were as blue and benign as a summer sky. Only the dimpled jutting chin hinted at the toughness and determination that had made him one of the most feared and effective circulation sluggers during the great newspaper wars early in the century.

Today this Back-o’-the-Yards, South Side boy was arguably the most powerful, important man in gambling in America. Yet he never gambled, not in the wagering sense; nor did he drink or smoke.

His Continental Press Service was the country’s dominant racing wire service, transmitting all pertinent racing information to bookmakers nationwide. That included track conditions, changes in jockeys, scratches and, as post time approached, up-to-the-minute racing odds. And, of course, results of the races themselves, transmitted immediately as the horses crossed the finish line. A bookmaker without this service, operating under the delay of officially transmitted results, would be easily prey to past-posting-that is, bets placed after post time by a sharpie who has been phoned the results by an on-track accomplice, thus allowing said sharpie to bet on a horse that has already won a race.

Ragen’s Continental service relayed its information from telegraph and telephone wires hooked into 29 race tracks and from those tracks into 223 cities in 39 states (tracks that didn’t cooperate were spied upon by high-powered telescope from trees and buildings). For legal reasons, Continental buffered itself, allowing several dozen “distributors” to supply the wire info to the nation’s thousands of bookie joints.

Ragen, like Frank Nitti, was a business executive in the world of crime. I’d done jobs for him before, and I liked him.

But I’d never seen this tough, irascible little Irishman in a state like this. He seemed shaken as he came into my office, unannounced, no appointment, which was also not like him; he was nothing if not businesslike. Even his gray suit was rumpled, his red and blue striped tie askew.

Of course that day had been no ordinary one in the life of James M. Ragen. That day, in April, James M. Ragen was convinced he’d narrowly missed being bumped off.

That morning two men in a car had trailed Ragen’s Lincoln Continental, from his home, and when he sensed he was being shadowed, he increased his speed to sixty miles an hour, and still they came, still they clung to him. They chased him through the city streets until finally Ragen pulled up in front of, and scurried into, a precinct house-the would-be assassins whooshing by.

It was in the aftermath of that that he came to me, Nathan Heller, president of A-1 Detective Agency, looking for bodyguards. Trustworthy ones.

“Who can I trust in this town but a friend?” Ragen said, his oblong face a dour mask. “The cops offered to provide me ‘protection’-of a sort I’d be safer without, goes without saying. You can buy a Chicago cop and get change for a five-everybody knows that. And most of the private dicks in this town, even them that’s employed by the big agencies, is ex-cops.”

“So am I, Jim,” I said.

“Yeah, but you ain’t for sale, my lad. Not when a friend is what they’re buying.”

I sighed. I think he thought of me as Irish, despite the Jewish last name my father left me. It’s what my Irish Catholic mother bequeathed me that fools people-her blue eyes, regular features and reddish brown hair. Of course, where the latter’s concerned, mine is graying some, at the temples, the only temples I attend, by the way, which’ll give you an idea of about how Jewish I am. Papa was apostate, he didn’t believe in God, Hebrew or whatever else you got, though he tried to see some good in his fellow man; I guess I inherited that from him too, minus the part about my fellow man. As for my mother, she didn’t live long enough for her hair to go gray at all, which may explain why I’m not very Catholic, either. Just the same, I was Irish enough for Ragen.

“Well,” I said, shrugging, “I can fix you up with some bodyguards. But if the Outfit wants you, I’m afraid they’re going to get you. You know that. You know what you’re up against.”

“If they kill me,” he said, chin jutting, eyes slitting, “there’s a Ragen to take my place.”

“Your son Jim, Jr.”

He nodded curtly.

I didn’t think the boy had near the stones his old man had, but I said only, “And if Jim should go the way of all flesh, as well?”

“I have two more sons.”

Oh brother.

“Is it worth it, Jim?”

“Nobody has ever stood up to these dago sons of bitches. If I stand up to ’em, they’ll back down.”

“You really think so?”

“Let ’em run their competing wire service. They’ll never deliver the quality product I can, so they’ll never put me under. I caught ’em tapping my phones, pirating my news, and got a court order against ’em!”

Jesus, I thought. Does this guy really think the courts is where he can win against the Outfit?

But he was ranting on: “There’ll be some poor bastards operating handbooks out there, feelin’ they gotta pay for both services, letting themselves be shook down…but if they want to knuckle under to the Capone crowd, that’s up to them.”

Coming from most people, talk of standing up to the Outfit would go past suicidal into idiotic. But Ragen had coexisted with the Outfit for years; despite all the talk of “dagoes,” he’d been cordial with Guzik and thick with Dan Serritella, the longtime state senator and longertime Capone mob crony. Serritella even had business ties with Ragen, who had taken control of the horse-race wire service business in 1939, shortly before Moe Annenberg, his mentor, got sent up for tax evasion. Since then, the Outfit had been content to pay the price for Ragen’s service; but of late they’d been trying to buy in. Ragen had been resisting all offers, despite Guzik’s assurances that the little Irishman would be kept on as a partner.

“Those greasy sons of bitches would need my know-how at first,” Ragen told me, “but then some fine morning you’d find me gutted in an alley, with my dick stuffed in my mouth.”

“And then what would you have to say for yourself?” I asked.

“And this guy Siegel is a fruitcake,” Ragen said, distastefully, ignoring my remark, shifting in the client’s chair across from my desk. “They call him ‘Bugsy’ and it fits.”

It seems Guzik, in response to Ragen’s rebuffs, had set up a rival wire, Trans-American, in cooperation with the East Coast version of the Outfit, the Combination; the West Coast branch of Trans-American was under this fellow Ben Siegel.

I nodded. “I’ve heard of the guy. Out of the old ‘Bugs and Meyer’ gang in New York. What’s he doing in California, anyway?”

Ragen snorted. “Hanging around with movie stars. Screwing starlets. Pushing his wire service down people’s throats. He’s a thug in a two-hundred-dollar suit.”

“Have you had any run-ins with him?”

“His people roughed up my son-in-law out there-pretty bad,” he said, referring to Russell Brophy, who ran the L.A. Continental office. “The lad went to the hospital over it.”

“No offense, Jim,” I said, with gentle sarcasm, “but there was a day when you used the strongarm approach yourself-back when you were circulation chief for the Herald and Examiner? It proved successful, as I recall.”

Ragen waved that off; then he smirked humorlessly, saying, “Well, the crazy bastard has cut into me, some-in California and other points west. He owns a horse store downtown in Las Vegas, and he’s got that little desert flyspeck in his pocket…” Some humor drifted into the smirk. “…though some of the Vegas boys are paying for my wire, too.”

I tapped my finger on my desk. Said, “I think you should consider selling out. You’re, what? Sixty-five? You can retire and take the Outfit’s dough and get your sons into something legitimate.”

Ragen’s face turned redder than usual and he clutched the arms of the wooden chair, like a guy in the hot squat when they turned on the juice. “My business is legitimate, Heller! But it wouldn’t be if those dago bastards bought their way in! You think Hoover would put up with that? The mob running the interstate race wire business? Why, we’d have the FBI all over us like flies on horse manure-”

“But you’d be out of it. I didn’t say go in business with them. I said sell out to ’em-take their money, and run. You’ve had your fun.”

The red faded but his mouth became a tight line, which parted, in a barely perceptible manner, as he said, “You think I’m getting old, Nate?”

“You’re not getting any younger. Hell, neither am I. But you are rich. Christ, if I had a tenth your dough, I wouldn’t work another hour!”

The tight line curved upward into the slightest smile. “Bullshit, Heller. You love your work.”

“I love to eat, Jim. Without working, I don’t get to.”

“You love your work, you love bein’ in business. What would you do with your time, lad, if you didn’t have your work, your business? Where would you go? What would you do?”

“I’d think of something,” I said, lamely.

“You’ll die in harness, just like me. Christ! I’m not gonna let a bunch of wop pricks muscle me out of my business! Now, are you in, or are you out?”

Quite frankly, I would’ve been out, friendship or not. And what Ragen was calling a friendship was more a friendly acquaintance. But he had a niece named Peggy, about whom I’ll tell you later. At which time you’ll better understand why I said:

“Yeah. I’ll play bodyguard for you. Or anyway, I’ll put two of my ops on it. I don’t want to be around when the bullets start to fly. I’m not anxious to die at all, let alone ‘in harness.’”

But here I was, two months later, a hot late June afternoon at rush hour, just before six o’clock, cruising down State Street in a black Ford behind Ragen’s dark blue Lincoln Continental.

We’d started on foot, at Ragen’s office at 431 South Dearborn; it was hot and muggy and our clothes were sticking to us. Few of the men on the street were wearing their suitcoats; we stood out, some, accordingly. Of course Ragen-wearing a crisp-looking light brown suit and a green and yellow striped tie and a dark brown snap-brim-looked cool, unbothered by the heat. Except for that one day in my office, I’d never seen the little hardass otherwise.

When we reached the parking lot, two blocks later, Jim had climbed into his car alone (once a week his staff bodyguard, a racing sheet truck driver, got the day off, and this was the day) and we-me and Walt Pelitier, an ex-pickpocket detail dick, like most of my ops-got into the bodyguard car, Walt behind the wheel, me riding with shotgun in my hands, my nine millimeter automatic snug under my shoulder, an old friend I’d rather not get reacquainted with.

For fifteen minutes or so, we’d had an uneventful journey. We’d just passed through the remnants of the once-proud Levee district, reduced from its former red-light and saloon glory to a handful of rundown bars and weedy vacant lots. We were heading south on State, making our way to Beverley, a nice neighborhood on the far South West Side, one of those sedate upper-middle-class areas that whispered money. Ragen and his family lived there, in a spacious two-story with a sprawling lawn, at 10756 Seeley. So, for two months now, in the apartment over the garage, had Walt Pelitier.

We were not, at the moment, in a nice neighborhood. We were, in fact, in the midst of a colored corridor that might charitably be described as a slum; we were at the west end of the South Side Bronzeville, and the black faces that watched Ragen’s fancy car slide by were not sympathetic. Several blocks to the right, across the tracks, yet worlds away, was a nice neighborhood. A white neighborhood.

A certain irony, here, was not lost on me: Ragen’s late brother Frank had, in the first couple decades of the century, ruled “Ragen’s Colts,” a vicious street gang which began, as so many gangs in those days did, as a baseball team. Frank, the star pitcher, offered his team’s slugging services to the local Democratic Party, for whom they won votes in much the same muscular manner as brother Jim won readers for the Trib and, later, the Herald and Examiner.

To my knowledge, Jim had never been a part of the notorious Colts, but it still chilled me, momentarily, to be gliding through the very black area where the Colts had, back in 1919, started the city’s biggest race riot. It should be kept in mind that one member of the Colts publicly derided the Ku Klux Klan as “nigger lovers.” On this very street, not so many years ago, blacks had been shot on sight, residences had been burned and dynamited, shops looted. That “nice” white neighborhood, a few blocks over, had been the scene of reprisals, as colored world war veterans dug out their service weapons and returned fire, attacked streetcars, turned over autos, destroyed property. In four days, twenty whites died, fourteen colored died, and a thousand-some others of both races were injured. My father, an old union man who had no truck with bigots, had told me the story many times. It was his favorite example of “man’s inhumanity to man.” In my time I’ve seen plenty more.

This stretch of Bronzeville was so shabby that the riot might have taken place here last week, instead of a few decades ago. Some storefronts were boarded up, as if the depression were still here. For many of these people, it still was, of course. Always would be, probably. An occasional prosperous business-a barber shop, a laundry, a drugstore-seemed the exception, not the rule; the streets were thick with hot, sweating coloreds, men mostly. The curbs were all but empty of parked cars. This was a poor neighborhood. The cars on this street were moving.

Actually, ours was slowing to a stop; maybe it makes me a bigot, too, but in a neighborhood this colored, this poor, I feel uncomfortable whenever a traffic light insists I stop. For a moment I was glad I had a shotgun in my lap.

Up ahead, a gray Buick sedan had stopped at the light; a shabby-looking green Ford delivery truck, with a tan tarp covering its skeletal frame, some orange crates visible in the back end, rolled past Walt and me and came to a slow stop in the righthand lane. I sat up.

“That truck,” I said, pointing.

We were poised just behind Ragen’s car. I had to speak up, because a train was rumbling by on the nearby El; it was to our left, just back of these ramshackle buildings along State Street.

“Huh?” Walt said. He was a puffy-looking, heavy-set man of fifty-some, with hooded eyes. Despite all that, despite the “huh” as well, he was a hardnosed, alert dick.

“No license plates,” I shouted, over the El.

Walt sat forward. “They’re slowing next to Ragen-”

They were indeed; rather than pulling up to the intersection of State and Pershing, next to the gray sedan, they had stopped next to the Lincoln.

And the tan tarp on that same side was parting, down the middle, like theater curtains.

The barrels of two shotguns slid into view. Shiny black metal caught some dying sun and winked at us.

“Christ!” I said, and hopped out, shotgun in my hands, feet slapping cement, firing at the truck.

Or trying to.

The sawed-off jammed. I didn’t even know the fucking things could jam! But the trigger simply wouldn’t squeeze back. I knew the thing was loaded; it wasn’t mine, it was Bill Tendlar’s, the op I was replacing, but I had checked it and it was loaded when I left the office…

And now the afternoon was interrupted by shotgun fire, but not mine, not mine, as the two barrels extending like long black snouts from the side of the delivery truck delivered on Ragen’s car, ripping the metal of the front right door, just under the absent rider’s open window, but you could barely hear the blasts, what with the roar of the El. The train made a great silencer.

Up ahead the traffic light had changed, but the gray sedan before Ragen was keeping its position. Whether the driver had panicked (in which case you’d think the asshole would hit his gas pedal and hightail it away) or was in on the hit, I couldn’t say.

In fact all I could think to say was, “Shit! You bastards,” as I moved quickly toward the truck, yanking the nine millimeter from under my arm and firing on them, three times, right into that fucking tarp.

From which one of the barrels turned upon me and fired and I dove for the cement, between the two cars, as the windshield of the bodyguard car just behind me caught the brunt, spiderwebbing. As if sliding toward home, I landed in the next of the four lanes, sprawled in front of oncoming traffic. Despite the El’s rumble, I heard the screech of tires and wondered if I’d wind up so much spaghetti sauce on the Bronzeville pavement; but I seemed to be alive and rolled into the next lane, the sidewalk my goal, as another shotgun blast ate into the side of Ragen’s once-proud Lincoln, repeatedly puckering the top of the car, entering the rider’s window. I heard a scream, which had to be Jim, and then I screamed something, “Fuck,” I think, and got to my feet and started firing the nine millimeter again. Walt had climbed out of the bodyguard car, which shielded him some as he was shooting, ripping off shot after shot from his revolver, right at the truck. Traffic had finally had sense enough to stop and I stood there, feet apart, gun gripped in both hands, planted in the middle of the empty left lane like the world was my target range. I ripped three off and then a shotgun barrel was aiming my way, in the hands of an indistinct figure in a white sportshirt, but that shotgun was distinct enough, the guy standing up in the truck now, visible over the shot-up Lincoln, and I dove and rolled onto the sidewalk.

The blast that followed blew across the top of the Lincoln and shattered the window of the corner drugstore. The colored pedestrians were running for cover, screaming their lungs out as if needing to be heard over the El, feet doing their stuff and it didn’t have anything to do with being colored. The blast went over my head into that window and I stayed down but shot the nine millimeter up and at the side of that truck, knowing that my bullets were probably too high, having to shoot across two empty lanes of State Street and over the Lincoln, but hoping against hope to get a piece of something, somebody…

Then the nine millimeter was empty and the truck was gone. So was the gray sedan.

Even the El had passed by. The street was silent, but for the occasional outbursts from the colored pedestrians, coming up for air, “Mercy!” “Judas Priest!” “Mama!”

That sedan, which turned right on Pershing, did have plates: Indiana plates, though neither Walt nor I had caught the numbers. Maybe one of the colored witnesses had. The truck was heading on south, gears grinding as it picked up speed.

Walt, who also was out of ammo, helped me up off the sidewalk, and then we were at the Lincoln, looking in, where James M. Ragen, gambling czar, was slumped behind the wheel, teetering between winning and losing, the front of him blood-spattered, his right shoulder and arm a scorched, red, sodden mess.

“Jim,” I said, leaning in the window.

He looked up at me and the little blue eyes damn near twinkled.

“Well, my lad,” he grinned, “you were right…I guess if they want you, they’re going to get you.”

And he either passed out or died.

At that moment I couldn’t tell which.

The year before, in May of ’45, I had taken on another job for Jim Ragen; it, too, had the taint of the Outfit. But it did bring Peggy Hogan back into my life.

I didn’t even know she was Ragen’s niece when he pitched me the job. We had just finished lunch at Binyon’s, a no-nonsense, businessman-oriented restaurant on Plymouth, just around the corner from the seedy building my growing private investigative firm was trying to escape from. He’d had the finnan haddie, I the corned beef and cabbage plate. We were sharing one of the wooden booths, drinking coffee.

“I made a mistake,” Ragen said, tiny blue eyes staring into the steaming black cup; he was the kind of man who could admit a mistake, but couldn’t look you in the eye doing it. “I trusted Serritella.”

“That does sound like a mistake,” I said. “He’d sell out God if the devil was buying.”

“I know, I know,” Ragen said, waving it off. Wearily, he said: “Couple years back, I went partners with the senator, on a tip sheet.”

“The Blue Sheet?”

“Yeah. I thought he was operating for himself, but he was playing his usual tricks, fronting for Guzik and company. I don’t mind doing business with those wops, but I don’t want to be in business with ’em.”

“A fine distinction, don’t you think?”

“Not at all, my lad. Not at all. As customers, I got ’em where I want ’em-putting their money in my pocket. As partners, I wouldn’t trust ’em far as I could throw ’em.”

“You think they’ve been using Serritella to worm their way into your business? Into Continental Press?”

“Hell yes. They’ve had their hand in my pocket ever since I went with Serritella; bilking me right along. Of course, I can’t lay my hands on the books to prove it. And that’s why I’m suing the bums. Serritella and Guzik both.”

“Suing them? Outfit guys?”

“It’s the only way I can get an accounting.”

I shook my head. “Sounds dicey to me.”

“Where would they be without Continental? They’re making noises about starting up their own wire-let ’em try it!”

I sat forward in the booth. “I don’t know where you think I fit into this, Jim, but I don’t do mob-related work. I gave that up the day Frank Nitti blew his brains out.”

He smiled his tight smile. “You played intermediary in the Guzik kidnapping, I hear.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t my idea.”

“I hear Greasy Thumb thinks you’re aces.”

“Let’s keep it that way. And let’s keep him a distant admirer.”

He frowned. “They’re trying to spook my lawyer, Nate. He’s been getting threatening calls; nasty notes.”

“Telling him to drop the case.”

“Yes.”

“Sounds like swell advice to me.”

“His secretary’s been getting the calls. It’s a small office- there’s no receptionist; just one girl, and him. And they’ve threatened her, too.”

“That’s a little nasty, I’ll grant you.”

He leaned forward; spoke softly. “The secretary is my niece. I feel a responsibility, here: I got her this job. Her father died last year, and the family business went with him. I’m trying to help the lass out.” He sighed. “She’s a good girl, though she has a bit of a wild streak that gets away from her sometimes.”

“And you mean to straighten her out,” I said.

“Yes. But my concern right now is her safety. Her family’s had enough tragedy…they lost the only son in the war.”

I sucked some air in. “Yeah, well.”

“Bataan,” Ragen added.

I winced. “What do you want me to do?”

“Spend some time with her.”

“If you’re looking for a bodyguard, I’ll put one of my men on it…”

“I want you, Nate. What’s your rate these days?”

“Twenty-five a day, unless you insist on the boss himself, in which case it’s thirty-five. And even if you do, I still have to run the office; I can’t be on her all the time. I’d talk to the girl, spend the first day with her, then put an op on it. I don’t work just one job at a time, you know-we have sixty-some clients, at the moment.”

“Make it hundred a day, with a week’s retainer.”

That raised my eyebrows and lowered my standards. “What do you expect to accomplish? What do you expect me to accomplish?”

He shrugged elaborately. “I think the threats are so much hot air. Those dagoes can’t afford to fuck with Jim Ragen. They’re just makin’ noise.”

“So do guns.”

He smirked humorlessly and waved that off as well. “We go to court next week. That’ll be the end of it.”

“You didn’t answer me, Jim. What do you want from me, exactly?”

“Be at her side. Make her feel safe. Make her safe.”

“Have you talked to her about this?”

“Yes. She insists she’s not afraid, though I can tell she is…though she resisted the notion of protection, at first. But, who can predict a woman; headstrong lass that she is, she up and turned around and said she’d go along with it.”

“Why, do you think?”

“She said she’d heard of you. You’ve a certain notoriety, after all.”

I’d made the papers a few times. Most of the occasions had been bad for my health but good for business.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Margaret.”

“Ragen?”

“Hogan. She’s my wife’s little sister’s girl. Pretty little lass. You should pay me, for the pleasure.” He raised a stern finger, the tiny eyes getting tinier. “Which isn’t to give you no ideas, lad. Don’t ye lay a hand on ’er, now.”

They always get more Irish when they’re warning you.

“For a hundred bucks a day,” I said, “I can leave my dick in a drawer, if you like.”

“Fine,” he smiled, picking up the check. “And leave the key with me.”

It’s funny I didn’t recognize her name. Hell, I didn’t recognize her, at first, as she sat at a typing stand near her desk in the little wood-paneled outer office on the tenth floor of the Fisher Building. She was small, and what you saw about her first was all that dark brown hair, the sort of dark brown that looks black till you study it, piles of curls cascading to the squared-off shoulders of her yellow dress, a startling dress with black polka dots, shiny cloth, silk perhaps. It hadn’t come cheap, this dress, but it seemed out of place in a law office, even a cubbyhole like this.

She turned to me and smiled, in a business-like way, and then the smile widened.

“Nate,” she said, standing, extending a hand. “It’s been a long time.”

She had pale, pale skin, translucent skin, with the faintest brown trail of freckles over a pert nose. She had a wide full mouth with cherry red lipstick, and big violet eyes. Her eyebrows were rather thick, unplucked, unfashionably beautiful, and she had a couple pounds of eyelashes, apparently real, and the whitest teeth this side of Hollywood. She looked about seventeen, but she was ten years older than that-a few laugh crinkles around the enormous eyes were almost a giveaway-and she had a very slim but nicely shaped frame. The hand she extended, in an almost manly fashion, had short nails with bright red polish, the color of her lipstick.

She was a stunning-looking girl, and in 1938, I’d slept with her once. Well. That was part of what we’d done together that night….

“Peggy,” I said, amazed. “Peggy Hogan.”

Her hand, as I grasped it, was firm and smooth and warm.

Her big grin, dimpling her slightly chubby cheeks, was one of amusement and pleasure.

“You’re still a private eye,” she said.

“You’re still a dish,” I noted.

“You told me I shouldn’t sleep with strange men.”

“I waited till the next morning to give you that advice, though.”

Her smile closed over those white teeth and settled in one dimple; she gestured to a chair, which I pulled up, and she sat behind her desk.

“I was a pretty wild kid,” she said, echoing her uncle’s words.

“I remember.”

“I never did sleep around much, Nate. You were one of a select few.”

“It was my honor. My pleasure, actually.” I felt awkward about this, but was immediately taken with this older version of the fresh young girl I’d once bedded and then lectured and sent on her way.

I’d met her at a party at a fifth-floor suite in the Sheraton. My boxer friend Barney Ross, who’d grown up on the West Side with me, and some other big shots in the sporting world were going to a wingding tossed by Joe Epstein, who ran the biggest horse-race betting commission house in Chicago. Epstein was an overweight, meek-looking little guy in his early thirties, with hornrimmed glasses and a disappearing hairline; but he was a sucker for the night life, and when he wasn’t hitting the local night spots he was throwing his own bashes.

Epstein had a girl friend who’d been around town since the World’s Fair in ’33. She’d danced a pretty fair hootchiekoo for a kid from the sticks-an Alabama girl with a sultry lilting accent and lots of chestnut hair and baby-fat curves and a full pouty mouth. Her name was Virginia Hill and she was looking pretty sophisticated these days, greeting Joe’s guests with a smile and giving them a look at a couple of yards of creamy white bosom; her clingy black gown didn’t leave much of the rest of her to the imagination, either.

“You’re Nate Heller, aren’t you?” Virginia had said, taking my hand. You could’ve camped out on this girl’s tits.

“Yeah. Surprised you remember me.”

“Don’t be silly,” she beamed. “You used to catch pickpockets at the fair.”

“You used to attract crowds,” I shrugged. “That attracts pickpockets.”

She walked me into the suite, a modern-looking job appointed in black and white, the furnishing running to armless sofas and easy chairs, on which were poised pretty girls in their early twenties, wearing low-cut gowns, drinking stingers and the like, waiting for male guests. Paul Whiteman music was coming from a phonograph, louder than a traffic jam.

“Afraid I never gave your girl friend Sally Rand much of any competition,” she said, talking over the music.

She was still holding onto my hand. Her hand was hot, a friendly griddle.

“Sally isn’t my girl friend,” I said. “Never was. We’re just pals.”

“That’s not what I hear,” she said, wrapping her accent around the words, making them seem very dirty indeed.

“Last I saw you, Ginny, you were a waitress at Joe’s Place.”

Joe’s Place was no relation to Joe Epstein: it was a one-arm joint at Randolph and Clark where the waitresses were pretty and wore skimpy skirts and V-neck blouses. A lot of men ate there.

“That’s where Eppy met me,” she said, finally letting go of my hand, her smile a self-satisfied one.

“I heard,” I said, with an appreciative nod for her accomplishment. “You been seeing a lot of him, huh?”

“He’s a wonderful guy, Eppy. A real genius.”

“Where did he find these girls? They look a little young and fresh to be pros.”

Barney and his pals were mixing with the quiff. Drinks and dancing and laughter. Loud men and giggly girls.

“Skilled amateurs,” she explained, walking me to a nearby bar, behind which a colored bartender in a red vest mixed drinks dispassionately. “Party girls.”

“Secretaries and business-college gals and the like, you mean.”

She nodded. “Get you something?”

“Rum,” I said.

“Ice?”

“No ice. No nothing. Rum.”

“Rum,” she said, shrugging, smiling, nodded at the bartender, who poured me a healthy snifter.

“Just girls who want a good time, huh?” I asked.

“Some of ’em might take some money if you forced it on ’em. Why?”

“Some of ’em look a little young to me. You can go to jail for having too much fun, you know.”

She shrugged. “Most of these girls have been around some. They all do some modeling on the side.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. For the local calendar artists. A friend of mine’s tight with the boys who run Brown and Bigelow, the St. Paul advertising firm?”

I nodded. “They put out all those calendars.”

“Right. Several of their regular artists are here in Chicago, and I scout up models for ’em.”

“These little dishes look like they walked off them calendars, I’ll grant you that.”

“See one you’d like to meet?”

“I sure do.”

And the girl had been one Peggy Hogan, who was a little sloshed when we were introduced, but very cute nonetheless. She told me about her ambitions to be an actress, despite her family’s insistence that she go to business school, and I listened. I was a little sloshed myself by the time we wandered into the Morrison Hotel, where I kept a residential apartment, and she was more than a little sloshed when we tumbled into bed together. Despite my condition, that sweet roll in the hay was a memorable one, one I can look back on fondly even now, practically smell her perfume, which was like roses; but the next morning I had been hung over, guilty, and took it out on the girl.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” I told her.

She’d looked at me sad-eyed, sitting up in bed, covers gathered around her, her eye make-up smeared from sleep, putting racoon circles around the impossibly violet eyes.

“I had help,” she pouted.

“I’m not proud of myself, either,” I said. I was standing next to the bed, looming over her like God in His underwear. “You’re a nice kid. You shouldn’t oughta sleep with strange men. Where are you from, anyway?”

“I live on the North Side.”

“Yeah, yeah, you got one of them flats behind the Gold Coast, right? Right. But where’s your family live?”

“Englewood.”

“That’s a nice little neighborhood. White lace Irish. Your father own his own business?”

She nodded.

“And he’s sending you to business school, so you must’ve finished high school.”

She nodded. “With honors.”

“Figures. You’re a smart kid, so you can go to parties every night and still cut the mustard in your classes. You oughta be ashamed.”

She swallowed.

“This is no life for you. That guy Epstein, he’s a glorified bookie.”

Ingenuously she said, “I thought he was an accountant.”

“He is. From what I hear, he works for the Capone mob, on the side-helping Jake Guzik with the books. Making sure nobody else goes to jail over income tax.”

She smiled a little. “I met Al Capone before.”

That didn’t make any sense. Capone was sent up in ’32. She was about nineteen years old.

“We go to the same church,” she explained. “I’ve seen his wife a lot. St. Bernard’s. I dated one of her bodyguards.”

“Swell! That sort of life appeals to you, huh? Do you know my name?”

She thought hard. Then she said, “Nat?”

“Close but no cigar. Nate. Don’t sleep with strange men. My name’s Nathan Heller, and I’m a private detective. I carry a gun sometimes.”

She smiled, showed me her wonderful white teeth; first thing in the morning and they looked brushed without brushing. “Really?”

“You think that’s swell, I suppose?”

She shrugged. “I don’t see why life has to be dull.”

“Take my advice,” I said, throwing her blue satin gown at her. “Go to school. Find a job. Find a husband. Stay away from Virginia Hill. She’ll make a whore out of you.”

That made her mad.

She got out of bed and stood there stark naked and shook her finger at me. I’d never seen a girl-or a woman for that matter- just stand before me naked like that without a thought about it. As she shook her finger, her delicately-veined, perfect little breasts bobbled. Her pubic triangle was bushy and near black and a gentle trail of hair tickled its way up to her belly button.

“Don’t you call me a whore, you crummy louse. I never took a dime from any man.”

I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Watching her was having an effect on me. She noticed and stopped being mad. She smiled, covered her mouth, catching the laugh.

“You’re pretty self-righteous, aren’t you, Nathan Heller-for a man whose dirty mind is sticking out.”

That embarrassed me, and I went in the other room and got dressed. She came out a few minutes later, wearing the flimsy satin blue gown, sweet little boobs bobbling, and said. “You wouldn’t happen to have a car, would you?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but it’s parked behind my office. That’s only a couple blocks from here, though.”

“Would you pick me up out front, and take me home? I can’t hop a streetcar like this”-she gestured sweepingly toward herself-” and I don’t have cab fare.”

“I could give you cab fare.”

Her jaw tightened. “I don’t want any money from you, Nat. Nate.”

“Sure I’ll give you a ride.”

She smiled; no teeth, but plenty of dimples. She had a face like an angel and a hell of a body.

“Sorry I was so rough on you,” I said, later, picking her up out front, as she slid in on the rider’s side of my ’32 Auburn.

“It’s okay. It’s nice that you care.”

“You should stay away from these gamblers and gangsters. And Virginia Hill.”

“You were friendly enough with her.”

“Yeah, but I’m a lowlife. You find some other social circle to move in. Don’t go taking off your clothes posing for no calendar artists, either.”

“It pays pretty good money. Times are hard.”

“You’ve done okay. I don’t imagine your family fell on hard times much. I bet you get an allowance.”

“Is that what you think.”

“I think you’re a spoiled brat, is what I think.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. And check back in with me after you grow up.”

“Why?”

“I’d like to spoil you a little myself.”

And I’d dropped her at her flat, young Peggy Hogan, and hadn’t seen her since, though I’d thought of her from time to time, and her perfume that smelled like roses.

Now here she was, some eight years later, looking older but not much older. She did seem wiser. That was my impression, anyway. Later I’d learn better.

For right now, I sat across from her desk in the lawyer’s cramped outer office and said, “You look like you took my advice about school.”

“Yes-but I didn’t find a husband.”

Yet hung in the air. It didn’t scare me. If she was on the lookout for a husband, I could think of worse ways a man could invest his fife.

“Well,” I said, “you did find a right proper job.”

She smiled sadly. “It took me a while. I’ve only been working a little over two years.”

“Oh?”

“Only since Dad’s first stroke. I tried to be an actress, after I graduated from Sawyer Secretarial. Lived in an apartment in Tower Town; made the Little Theater scene.”

That made me flinch. “I, uh, used to have a girl down there who did the same thing.”

“Oh? Who?”

I told her; it was an actress whose name she recognized.

“I’ve seen her pictures!” she said, the violet eyes getting even larger.

“Me too,” I admitted. “When did you give up acting?”

“Like I said-when Dad died. I have five sisters, Nate, of which I’m the oldest. I had one brother.”

“I know. Your uncle mentioned it. I’m sorry.”

She nodded gravely. “Johnny was the valedictorian of his class. He was all set to go to college and the war came along.”

“He was drafted.”

“Enlisted.”

“I suppose your dad intended for him to take over the business.”

“Yes he did. Dad always liked a drink of whiskey, but after we lost Johnny, he…he got to like it a little too much. The business slipped, and pretty soon Dad was gone. Stroke. Two strokes, actually. The second one killed him.”

She was telling this flatly, not the faintest quaver in her voice; but her eyes were close to overflowing.

“So your uncle helped you out,” I said. “Got you this job.”

“Yes,” she said, brightening, using a tissue from a box on her desk to dab her eyes. “I’d never used the skills I’d learned, way back at Sawyer…and I’ve been surprised to find out I still have those skills, surprised more than that to find I enjoy using them.”

“That’s nice. I’m glad things are working out for you.”

“If things were working out, Nate, you wouldn’t be here, would you?”

“I guess not. You want to tell me about the notes, and the phone calls?”

“I can show you the notes,” she said, getting into a desk drawer. Very business-like, she had them in a manila file folder.

There were three of them; your standard ransom-style, letters-cut-from-papers-and-magazines threats: DROP THE RAGEN CASE OR ELSE; LAY OFF THE BLUE SHEET OR WAKE UP DEAD; FIND A NEW CLIENT OR DIE. Not very original, but the point came across.

“None of these are addressed to you,” I said.

“I’ve been on the end of the phone calls. Most of them have been messages for Mr. Levinson. But they’ve from time to time threatened me, too.”

She didn’t seem very bothered.

“If it’s not too difficult for you, what have they said?”

“Oh, no death threats, not at me. Just that they’ll cut my face up. That kind of thing.”

She was pretty blase about it, and looking at her close, I didn’t think it was a pose. This little dame had balls. So to speak.

“What would you think about me tagging along with you,” I said, “for the next week or so?”

She smiled wryly; one deep dimple. “I’d like that fine. I don’t have a boy friend…at the moment. So you wouldn’t be getting in the way of anything.”

“I’m going to put a man right here in the office with you. I’m personally going to escort you to and from work. We’ll go out for lunch and supper together, too.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Dutch treat?”

“Your uncle’s buying. I’m on an expense account.”

“You know, I’m living at home, now. In Englewood. I’ve been taking the streetcar to work…”

“We’ll put you up at the Morrison.”

“You don’t still live there?”

“Actually, yes. Different room, though. I moved in when I got back from service, temporarily, and I’m still there. I’m looking for something else, but you know the housing situation.”

She nodded. “Do you have a couch?”

“Yes.”

“I could move in with you.”

“That’d be ideal, really. If you think you could trust me…”

“Do you think you could trust me, is the point?”

“I could find out.”

We began sleeping together that night. She made me promise not to tell her uncle. I accepted those terms; I wasn’t crazy. I took his hundred bucks a day, charged him expenses, and slept with his niece. I said I was a lowlife.

On the fourth of our days together, we had just dined at the Berghoff and were walking down West Adams, heading back to the Morrison, when a figure stepped out of the alley. He meant to scare us, and he did, planting himself like an ugly tree before us. He was big and he was pasty-faced and hook-nosed, wearing an ugly blue and white checked sportcoat over a white sportshirt and baggy light blue pants. He looked like a bouncer in a circus museum.

“Tell your boss to drop the case,” he said, and he jerked a thumb at the alley. “Or the next time I come outa one of these, I’m gonna drag yas back in.”

He didn’t seem to know me; hell, he didn’t seem to notice me. I didn’t know him, either, but you didn’t have to be Jimmy Durante to smell mob on this guy.

I eased myself in front of Peg, gently pushing her behind me, shooing her back toward and into the Berghoff, and as I did, the guy frowned at me, as if trying to place me.

Both his big hands were at his side, so there was little risk when I pulled the nine millimeter out from under my shoulder and shoved it in his fat gut and said, “Let’s you and me go in the alley, right now, bozo.”

He swallowed and we did. I smacked him once with the automatic, along one side of his head, and he went down and sat amongst the garbage cans and was out, or pretended to be. His ear was bleeding. He had a gun, too, which I took from under his arm and tossed down the alley, skittering on the bricks into the darkness. I took out one of my business cards and, before sticking it in the guy’s breast pocket, jotted a note on the back of it: ASK GUZIK TO CALL ME.

The next morning Guzik did.

“You slapped the Greek around,” Guzik pointed out in his detached monotone.

“If you’d seen how he was dressed, you’d have helped.”

Guzik grunted; it seemed to be a laugh.

I said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d lay off the girl.”

I didn’t ask him to lay off Ragen. That would be going too far; that wouldn’t be my business.

“She’s your girl?” Guzik asked.

“She’s mine. I’ll kill anybody who touches her.”

Long pause.

Then: “I’ll see to it she’s left alone.”

“Thanks, Mr. Guzik.”

Guzik grunted and hung up.

So did I, trembling.

Peg’s lawyer boss didn’t make it to court: he had a nervous breakdown first. But Ragen found somebody else to take the case (which was still in litigation at the time of the shooting at State and Pershing) and gave Peg a job in his own office in the meantime. We’d been seeing each other, off and on, since then; but with Peg living at home, being the dutiful daughter, and under her uncle’s watchful eye at work and all, we were taking it slow.

And that’s why I went along, when Jim Ragen leaned on me to provide him protection in his ill-advised struggle with the Outfit: I was in love with his goddamned niece.

Ragen wasn’t dead; just unconscious. But the way he was bleeding, he’d be dead soon enough if Walt Pelitier and me didn’t move our couple of asses.

First things first: I crossed State to a corner barber shop, where (now that the shooting was over) coloreds were milling, murmuring amongst themselves, pointing over at the shot-up cars. None of them spoke to me, possibly because I still had a gun in my hand. It was a bus stop, and there was a bench; several colored youths were standing on it, to get a better look. No cops had shown yet. This neighborhood wasn’t patrolled much-that no doubt was one of the reasons why it had been chosen to host the hit. I walked quickly to the modest newsstand along the Pershing side of the barber shop and handed the boy a buck and grabbed a bunch of papers. Then I went out into the street and got in on the pellet-puckered rider’s side of the Lincoln, having to yank at the mangled door some to do it, and began wrapping the bloody, unconscious Ragen’s wounded right arm in newspapers, like the limb was a big dead fish. The papers soaked up the blood. Black and white and red all over.

I used a few pages to clean the blood off my hands. Then I left Ragen with Walt and danced back through the moderate State Street traffic, most of which was slowing for a look (but not stopping-whites didn’t stop in this neighborhood unless, like me, they were shot at or something), and ducked into the drug store, where a thin, white-haired, colored gentleman in a white smock and wire-frame glasses stood behind the prescription counter. He seemed damn near serene, as if his window got shot out every day.

“Has anybody in here called the cops yet?”

The druggist nodded, slowly. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I did.”

“When they get here,” I said, handing him one of my business cards, “give ’em this, and tell ’em I’m driving the victim to the nearest hospital.”

“All right,” he said, still nodding, not glancing at the card.

“That’d be Michael Reese, right?”

He just kept nodding, and I went out, the glass of his window crunching under my shoes.

Michael Reese Hospital was at 29th, a little over ten-block drive, and we’d have to head back north to get there. We took Ragen’s Lincoln-the bodyguard car’s windshield was shattered, and a tire had been flattened, though I was able to pull it over to the curb and park it-and this time I drove while Walt rode figurative shotgun, Ragen between us, leaned against Walt. I turned left on Pershing and floored it and ignored traffic lights, just slowing a tad as I crossed the intersections while oncoming cars climbed curbs and screeched to stops to allow my passage, and I was going fifty, six blocks later, when I took a hard, careening left on South Park Avenue, a wide boulevard with a parkway down the middle where colored kids paused in their play to look with wide eyes upon the shot-up car full of white people that went streaking by.

The gray-brick complex of Michael Reese Hospital stretched along Ellis Avenue like a fortress in a foreign land; to the rear, separated from the hospital only by Lake Park Avenue, the wide W of the central building and its two major wings faced the downward slope of the Illinois Central tracks, beyond which was the lake. Nothing fancy to look at, the six stories of Michael Reese nonetheless towered over the rundown colored neighborhood at its feet, crumbling three-story buildings that huddled together as if only their close proximity kept them from falling down.

The big privately owned hospital had enough specialists on its staff to attract patients the likes of Ragen, even if he weren’t being dragged into the emergency room shot-up, even if it wasn’t just the closest, handiest hospital. But that emergency room was populated by street people, almost exclusively colored, victims of the casual violence their neighborhood bred. The South Side Irish seeking their health in this hospital were upstairs in the small private rooms; the emergency room’s darker clientele would wind up in a charity ward in Reese’s Mandel Clinic or, more likely, be treated as out patients.

As we dragged Ragen in, Walt on one side of him, me on the other, bloody newspaper sheets dropping to the floor like petals from a grotesque flower, a couple orderlies took over and ushered him into the emergency examination room at left, where they eased him onto an examination table and shut a curtain around him. I left Walt to fill in the attending physician, and went back out to the 29th Street ambulance ramp, where we’d left the shot-up Lincoln, doors open, motor running, and parked it in one of the nearby Staff Only stalls. I locked the sawed-off in the trunk; this was no neighborhood to be leaving weapons in the back seat of cars. Of course, what neighborhood in Chicago was?

In the phone booth in the corridor outside the emergency room, I called Ragen’s home first. His wife Ellen answered.

“He’s been shot,” I told her, “but he’s alive.”

There was a long pause.

“Where is he?” she asked; her voice was husky. It tried to be strong, but didn’t make it.

“Michael Reese,” I said, and she said thank you and hung up.

She didn’t ask for any details. There would be time enough for that. I didn’t know Ellen very well-we’d only met a few times-but she wasn’t naive. That much I knew. Jim winding up on the end of a shooting was inevitable. That much she knew.

Then I called my office. It was late-almost seven, now. I knew Gladys Fortunato, my secretary, would be long gone-she was a dedicated girl, Gladys, until five o’clock rolled around, at which point she couldn’t care less about A-1 Detective Agency, and who could blame her?

But Lou Sapperstein might be there. Lou had been out in the field today, investigating loan applicants for a Skokie bank. He was conscientious, and would likely stick around to do his paper work, while the afternoon’s interviews were fresh in his mind. If I let it ring long enough…

“A-1,” Lou’s voice said, finally. It was a soothing baritone; Bing Crosby, only Lou couldn’t carry a tune.

“It’s your boss,” I said.

“And you love it,” Lou said.

He always said that, or words to that effect, when I reminded him who the boss was. He had been my boss on the pickpocket detail, back in the early thirties, when I was the youngest plain-clothes dick on the department and he still had hair, or anyway some hair. Lou was pushing sixty, but was still a hard, lean cop. Don’t let the tortoise-shell eyeglasses fool you.

“Drop everything,” I told him. “You’re working tonight.”

“That’s why you put me on salary, isn’t it? To get sixty hours a week out of me. So what’s up?”

“Jim Ragen’s time. Or it pretty soon will be. Lou, they hit us.”

“Shit! Where? How?”

I gave it to him.

“Now here’s what I want you to do…” I started.

“Don’t waste your breath,” Sapperstein said. “I’ll tell you: you want me to go to Bill Tendlar’s flat over on the near Northwest Side and see just how sick he really is.”

Tendlar was the op who’d called in sick; whose shotgun I’d used.

“If he isn’t sick,” I said, “he’s going to be.”

“And if he is sick,” Sapperstein said, “he’s gonna be sicker.”

“You got it. This was an inside job, and it wasn’t Walt. He was under fire just like I was.”

“What about that truck driver pal of Ragen’s who had the day off?”

“I want him checked out, too. Maybe you can put Richie on that. But my nose says Tendlar. Of all the guys we got working for us, him I know the least about.”

“He was on the pickpocket detail,” Lou said, “but after both our times. We had mutual friends, though. He came recommended.”

“Judas looked good to Jesus, too. It was Tendlar’s shotgun that jammed and almost got me killed. Find him. Sit on him. ’Cause I want him.”

“You’ll have him, if he’s still in town to be had.”

And Lou hung up.

Then I dialed the detective bureau at the Central Police Station, at 11th and State in the Loop. And asked for Lt. Drury.

Bill Drury was another former pickpocket detail dick-only he had stayed on. Recently he’d been acting captain over at Town Hall Station, till he and a handful of the other honest detectives got railroaded out of their jobs by the Civil Service Commission, over supposedly tolerating bookie joints on their beats.

“Drury,” he said.

“Welcome back,” I said.

He laughed. “I been wondering when you’d get around to congratulating me.”

“Well, give me a chance. They only reinstated you Friday. And this is your first day back on the job.”

“It’s not the greatest shift,” he admitted, “but it beats unemployment.”

“How long you been on?”

“Since five o’clock. Where you calling from? Why don’t you come over and I’ll buy you a cup of lousy coffee?”

“I’m calling from Michael Reese. Get your reinstated butt over here and I’ll give you more than a cup of coffee.”

“Oh?”

And I told him, very quickly, about Ragen getting shot up at the corner of State and Pershing.

“Guzik,” Drury said, with a smile in his voice.

“Probably. But remember-I don’t want to end up in the middle of this, now…”

“You’re already in the middle of State Street, exchanging fire with a couple of shotguns-and you don’t want to be in the middle of this?”

“Well, I don’t. Get over here, if you can.”

“Who’s going to stop me?”

I joined Walt in the emergency room, where Ragen, still unconscious but now stripped down to his waist, his pasty Irish flesh even pastier than usual, his wounds dressed, was being rolled out on his back on what looked like a mobile morgue tray, a young fair-haired intern on one side of him, an older heavy-set dark nurse on the other. They were giving him a bottle of plasma.

We followed them out into the corridor, toward an elevator, where they wheeled him on and the intern looked out at me and said, “Who are you?”

“I’m his bodyguard. Let’s hope you’re better at your job than I am at mine.”

I squeezed onto the elevator and so did Walt.

“You can’t come along,” the intern said.

“Watch me,” I said.

It was one of those self-operated elevators.

“What floor?” I asked the nurse, pleasantly.

“Second,” the nurse said, warily.

I pushed the button and we went up.

Walt and I waited outside the surgery, down at one end of a narrow, rather dark corridor, where footsteps echoed on the tile floor and the cool disinfectant-institutional smell constantly reminded us where we were. Ten minutes after Ragen had been wheeled in, two uniformed cops and a detective from the third district joined us.

The detective, a Sgt. Blaine, was a pot-bellied guy in his forties with dark, stupid eyes in a round, stupid face. He pushed his porkpie hat back on his head, to let us know he was appraising us. Big deal. I didn’t know him from Adam, but he’d heard of me.

“Heller,” he said, his humorless one-sided smile buried in a pocket of puffy cheek. “You’re the guy who sided with Frank Nitti over your brother cops.”

“If you’re going to be mean to me,” I said, “I might just bust out crying.”

Now he tried to sneer. “Nobody likes a cop who rats out other cops.”

“Hey, that was twelve, thirteen years ago. And they weren’t cops, they were a couple of West Side hoods Mayor Cermak hired as bodyguards. Okay? Can we move on to new business? Like the guy bleeding to death in the next room? Or do you wanna read the minutes of the last meeting?”

He looked at me like he was thinking of spitting, and maybe he was, but the hospital floor looked too clean. So instead he posted the two uniformed cops at the surgery’s double doors, and got out his little notebook, licked the tip of his pencil, and started asking questions. I knew we’d have to make a more formal statement later on, but I answered the questions, anyway. There was nothing better to do.

“Where’s this shotgun that wouldn’t shoot?” he wanted to know. The first vaguely pertinent question in nearly five minutes of piss-poor interrogation.

“In the trunk,” I told him, and dug out the keys for him. “You’ll be impounding the heap, anyway, right?”

“Yeah, right,” he said, like he’d thought of it too. He tucked the little notebook away, and the Lincoln keys. “I guess you boys can find your way home without it.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” I said. “We work for Ragen.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot,” he smirked. “You’re protectin’ him.”

“That’s right. And we’re sticking, or anyway somebody else from my agency will be sticking, till Ragen or his family sends us away.”

“Listen, buddy.” He prodded the air with a forefinger. “You just take a hike.” He jerked a thumb over one shoulder. “You let the cops do their job.” He pointed at himself with the other thumb.

“Do their job,” I said. “Like look the other way, if the price is right. A fin, say.”

The stupid eyes narrowed, tried to get smart. Without any particular success. He was trying to summon some indignation and come up with something clever or nasty to say, when a finger tapped his shoulder.

“You better call in, sergeant,” Bill Drury said. “I can take over on this end.”

Drury wasn’t big, really, but his broad shoulders and sheer physical presence turned his five-foot-nine, hundred-sixty-pound frame into something formidable. His eyes were just as dark as Blaine’s, but infinitely more intelligent. His hair was thinning, but combed so as to spread what little there was around. His nose was somewhat prominent and his jaw jutting. And, as usual, he was nattily dressed, wearing (despite the heat) a vest with his dark blue suit, the breast pocket of which bore a white flourish of handkerchief, his wide tie a light blue with a yellow sunburst pattern. He was easily the best-dressed honest cop on the Chicago P.D.

Blaine, about the same size as Bill, nonetheless seemed dwarfed by him. He probably felt dwarfed by him, too. The sergeant swallowed, said, “Yes, lieutenant. I should call this information in. You’re right about that.”

And he clip-clopped down the tile floor toward the elevator, and went away.

Drury grinned at me, nodded at Walt. Walt had splotches of Ragen’s blood on his brown suit. I had some on my brown suit, too, I noticed.

Walt excused himself to go grab a smoke. Drury dispatched one of the uniformed cops to stand by the window near the fire escape down the hall, and the other to guard the elevator. Then it was just me and Drury and the surgery double doors.

“Well, Nate,” Drury said. “For a guy who swore off gangsters, you sure pick a hell of a boyo to play bodyguard for. What’s a big executive like you doing work like that for, anyway?”

I smiled at this sarcasm, stalled on the answer; I wanted Lou to have a chance to track Tendlar down before I gave all the details to the cops, even to the honest exception of a cop that was Bill Drury.

“Nobody else was available,” I explained. That wasn’t a lie. It was only marginally the truth, but it wasn’t a lie.

Bill folded his arms, leaned back against the cool brick wall. “I’ve got warrants out on Guzik and Serritella. Also, Murray Humphreys and Joe Batters. And Hymie the Loud Mouth, too.”

“Dago Mangano’s lucky he’s dead,” I said, “or you’d have a warrant out on him, too.”

“I considered it,” Drury said, arching an eyebrow.

“Those guys are just going to love getting hauled in for questioning.”

“Not as much as I’m going to love questioning ’em.”

Bill hated the Outfit boys. It had started back in the early thirties, when he first came on the job; unlike most cops in Chicago, Drury had pulled no political strings to get on the force-no Outfit-beholden ward committeeman, alderman or judge had played a role in his appointment. He’d made it by scoring record high marks on the police entrance exams; and his reputation as a Golden Gloves boxer hadn’t hurt, either. Also, his brother John was a reporter on the Daily News-and the department courted good publicity. So Bill had been allowed on.

Naively, Bill had in his early days treated some of the town’s top Outfit guys like gangsters; imagine. Whenever he met ’em, even if they were dining with their wives and kids, he would make them assume the position against the nearest wall and pat them down like common criminals (as opposed to uncommon criminals). Those Outfit guys began to wonder what they were paying good money to Bill’s superiors for, and soon Bill was forbidden to leave the station house on his tour of duty.

So he’d made a crusade out of it. On his off-duty hours he would stroll Rush Street and Division and various Loop thoroughfares. The time he rousted Guzik himself just outside Marshall Field’s on State Street at high noon, before a jeering crowd, was the capper: Guzik had blown a gasket, screaming, cursing, as Drury coolly frisked him, saying: “Two more words out of you, Jake, and I’ll put the cuffs on you. Two more sentences and I’ll call the Black Maria and get you fitted for a straitjacket.”

Shortly after, Guzik headed for the county building and soon a judge had placed Drury under a peace bond, to prevent future molestation of good citizen Greasy Thumb.

Ever since, Bill had had a hard-on where the Outfit was concerned, in general, and where Guzik was concerned, in particular.

“Did you see who did it, Nate?”

“They were just shapes behind shotguns. Wearing white shirts. Sportshirts, I think-I remember seeing their bare arms holding the shotguns. Aren’t you glad a trained detective was on the scene to pick up on all these details?”

Drury smiled faintly. “I’ve sent a colored cop down to question the eye witnesses.”

“Good idea. Who?”

“Two-Gun Pete.”

“Christ, he won’t question ’em, he’ll kill ’em.”

Drury laughed shortly. “Well, they won’t hide any information from him, that’s for sure. We’re going to nail Guzik’s hide on this one, Nate. I can feel it. I can smell it.”

“That’s disinfectant, Bill.”

“If that tough little bastard pulls through in there,” Drury said, grinning, nodding back at the double doors, “we’ll have Guzik cold.”

“Why, you think Jim’ll cooperate with you?”

“Sure as hell do. He already gave the State’s Attorney’s office a detailed statement.”

“The hell you say-when the fuck was this?”

Drury shrugged. “Last May. Or late April. Right after that car chased him to the Morgan Park police station.”

“He never said a word about it to me! What’s in this statement?”

“Quite a bit. It runs almost a hundred pages in transcript. It’s mostly about Capone.”

“Capone! Capone is ancient history. Capone has the mind of a twelve-year-old kid-and the twelve-year-old kid wants it back.”

“Well, frankly, very little of the statement is anything that can be used. He talks a lot about the ‘Capone mob.’ Not quite naming names. It mostly indicates how pissed off Ragen was that they made an attempt to hit him.”

“In other words, it was a message he was sending to the Outfit. That if they tried it again, he’d really talk.”

Drury nodded. “That’s about how I see it. He gave the statement to State’s Attorney Crowley, after all.”

“Ha. Was he ever sending ’em a message. Jesus.”

Crowley was a close personal pal of George Brieber, Guzik’s attorney.

“He warned ’em not to try it again,” Drury said, matter of factly, “but they tried it again, anyway, didn’t they? And failed.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Jim was shot up pretty bad.”

“You said it was his arm, mostly.”

“His chest was bleeding, too. Don’t forget, he’s not a kid, either.”

The surgery’s double doors swung open and a doctor in a blood-spotted smock appeared; he lowered his mask like a bandit surrendering and said, “Which of you gentlemen represents Mr. Ragen’s family?”

“I guess I do,” I said. “I’m in his employ. I called his wife- she’ll be here soon, if she’s not downstairs already.”

The doctor sighed. He was obviously tired. He said, “We haven’t done much yet, except stop the bleeding. He’s had several transfusions already, and we’re just getting started. He may lose that arm. And his collarbone is shattered. He’ll be crippled for life. No doubt of that.”

“But he will live, doctor?” Drury asked.

“These are nasty wounds, gentlemen,” the doctor said.

“But there’s no foreseeable reason why they should prove fatal.”

The doctor excused himself and moved down the corridor, disappearing around a corner.

Drury looked at me, grinning.

“Your concern for Ragen’s health has me all choked up,” I said.

Drury was laughing softly.

“Now the fun begins,” he said.

Ragen was in surgery for over two hours. Drury left early on, but said he’d be sending up several more boys in blue to help stand guard-and he’d do his best to hand pick ’em. I sent Walt home and kept watch myself. A little after eight-thirty, Drury’s extra cops showed up; he’d actually told the trio to check in with me for deployment. That meant finding places for them to stand. I kept two of them with me at the double doors, and sent the other one outside, to maintain a patrol, particularly the side alleys.

Not long after that I was approached by the hospital’s medical director, Dr. Herman Siskin, a well-fed middle-aged doctor with salt-and-pepper hair and matching mustache. He wore a well-tailored dark gray suit and shades-of-blue striped silk tie-no hospital whites for this boy.

“Mr. Heller,” he said, offering his hand, which I shook. “I understand you’re in charge of Mr. Ragen’s security.”

“That’s right.”

“The facts are these. Mr. Ragen’s wounds are extensive. He’s had five blood transfusions thus far, and penicillin has been administered. Whether or not his right arm can be saved, we don’t yet know. His age, the loss of blood, and the resultant shock condition…well, let’s just say he’s not in for a short stay here at Michael Reese.”

“I see.”

“We have a private room ready for Mr. Ragen,” he said, pointing down the hallway, “and we’re prepared to accommodate his and your needs.”

“Thanks. But let’s start by getting him on a higher floor than the second.”

“Why’s that?”

“You can throw a bomb through a second-floor window.”

That opened his eyes. “Perhaps he’d be better off outside the main building.” Then, as if to assure us both his concern wasn’t for his facility, he added, “Somewhere not as easily accessible to the general public.”

“How about a private wing, where we could maintain tighter security?”

He nodded down the hallway to the left. “I’d suggest the Meyer House-which a patient of Mr. Ragen’s means might prefer, anyway. It’s connected by an enclosed walkway between buildings. You’d have a stairway and an elevator to watch-and the connecting corridor. That’s all.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s have a look.”

Drury’s coppers stayed on duty and I let Dr. Siskin walk me down the hall, through an archway into the connecting corridor to the Meyer House, where we took the elevator to the third floor. Siskin led me down a well-lit, vaulted corridor and showed me to a spacious, warmly appointed room-maple furnishings, a lounge chair upholstered in flowery chintz, wall mounted electric fan, writing desk, chest of drawers, private bath with tub; it was fancy enough to make you sick, or anyway wish you were sick. From the window I saw a wrought-iron-fence-enclosed lawn, beyond which was Lake Park Avenue and the I.C. tracks. It seemed okay, from a security standpoint. The only drawback was a standing fire escape down the hall on the south end wall, maybe thirty feet from Ragen’s door.

“No getting away from fire escapes in a hospital,” the medical director said, with a little shrug.

“We’ll keep a man posted by it,” I said. “Does this building have a separate kitchen?”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, the food service in Meyer House is its pride and joy. This wing was built to serve our wealthier patients-Mr. Ragen can, when he’s up to it, have lobster if he likes. Why do you ask?”

“They may try to poison him.”

He blinked. “I can give you my personal assurance that the head dietician herself will prepare Mr. Ragen’s meals.”

“Your personal assurance is just swell, Doc, but are you willing to prove it by tasting his food before he does?”

His mustache twitched; he found that a little impertinent, I guess, and I guess it was.

“I don’t mean to offend you, Dr. Siskin, and I appreciate your willingness to discuss security measures with me. But I must warn you I’m going to suggest that the Ragen family be extremely cautious. I’ll advise that they use their personal family physician, if possible. I’m also going to suggest that they hire private nurses.”

“Why?”

“Because you have a big staff here. If we don’t do it my way, then anybody in a white uniform will be able to get in that room.”

“And not everyone in a white uniform,” he said, nodding, “is necessarily a doctor.”

I nodded back. “We’ll put together a list of names. Nobody whose name isn’t on that list is going to get past the guards.”

“Mere association with the hospital won’t guarantee admittance, in other words.”

“If you want to put it that way, yeah. We got to be able to monitor who goes in and out of that room-just as carefully as you people are going to monitor his vital signs.”

“Understood.”

“Don’t feel insulted about my keeping the hospital staff out, Doctor. I’m going to try to keep the cops out, as well.”

“Well…I can understand that.”

I grinned. “Chicago born and bred, Doc?”

Under the mustache, a small smile formed. “Yes. And if I can be of help, where keeping the police at bay is concerned, say the word.”

“All you got to do is tell anybody official that Mr. Ragen isn’t ready to receive visitors yet. That he’s not up to the strain.”

“How long would you like me to maintain that posture?”

“Till I say otherwise. Or Ragen himself, of course. He’s the boss.”

Siskin nodded. Then he said, “I’m impressed, Mr. Heller. You seem to know your job. And I can assure you we know ours, as well.”

“I’m sure you do. And don’t be so impressed with me. I’m the schmuck who was bodyguarding him when the shit hit the fan, remember.”

He had to put some things in motion here, so I walked myself back to the main building, where I found Ellen Ragen and two of her sons waiting outside the double doors of the surgery, the two Drury-picked cops still on watch.

Mrs. Ragen was a small, pudgy woman with a lot of dark curly hair-undoubtedly dyed. I didn’t know who she’d been before she married Jim-just some simple Back-o’-the-Yards gal, or a chorus girl or what; but it was clear she’d been a looker once, before age and weight made her face puffy. Now she wore too much bright red lipstick and too much make-up in general, giving her the clown effect of the older woman who was once pretty and keeps trying to get pretty again by applying more and more pancake and rouge. A losing battle. So was the one she was having with her mascara, which was running down those heavily made-up cheeks like narrow black ribbons. Her dress was black, too-premature mourning weeds-with a small gray hat perched amidst the mound of hair and a sort of gray and black speckled vest with a big sparkly brooch.

Her son Jim was a younger (37 or 38, I’d guess) version of his father, minus the glasses and plus hair; he wore a dark suit and kept an arm around his mother. Younger son Daniel, in his early twenties, wore a blue sportshirt and slacks and looked like a college kid, which he was, at DePaul. Facially he resembled his mother, though he was taller. But then so was a fireplug. Daniel-or Danny, as the family called him-looked concerned enough but was fidgeting, hands in pockets.

“Mr. Heller,” Mrs. Ragen said, garish red lips trembling, “what am I going to do if I lose my dear husband?”

The formality of that sounded silly, or it would have if she hadn’t meant it so deeply.

“You’re not going to lose him,” I said.

Jim, Jr., released her and she came toward me, wanting to be hugged, so I hugged her. She smelled like face powder. Her cosmetic-counter efforts to forestall getting older were as ill-advised as her husband’s attempt to beat the Outfit, and just as futile. They had a lot of money, these people, and they were old enough to retire, and young enough to enjoy it. Why didn’t they? As I patted her in a “there, there” manner, she seemed very small, despite her bulk. Like a child.

It embarrassed me, holding this pudgy little woman who I barely knew; but I felt a strange affection for her at that moment. I don’t know how guys feel about their mothers, because I never knew mine. But maybe this was something like that.

Only you couldn’t tell it from Danny.

“Mom,” he said, turning it into a whining two-syllable word, “can I just check in with you and Pop later? The doctor said he was going to pull through okay. Margie’s waiting downstairs. We were supposed to meet some friends tonight, at Riccardo’s-”

If he were my kid, I’d have decked him. But she just eased out of my grasp, a graceful woman despite her heft, and patted him on the cheek and said, “You were a good boy to come by here, Danny. Don’t you worry. Your pop’s going to be all right.”

Danny grasped one of her hands with both of his and put some warmth into his words: “I know he is, Mom. He’s a tough old guy. They aren’t going to get him.”

She beamed at him and he smiled and waved and headed down the hall. Jim, Jr., seemed faintly disgusted by all this. So was I. Even the two coppers guarding the double doors rolled their eyes at each other.

“He’s a good student,” she said to me, smiling, proud, face streaked black by mascara. “He’ll make a wonderful lawyer someday, Mr. Heller.”

“I’m sure he will, Mrs. Ragen.”

“I hope his father lives to see it.”

“Me, too, Mrs. Ragen. I’m sorry I didn’t do a better job today for him. I’m sorry I let this happen.”

She smiled at me sympathetically and patted my cheek like she had her son. Neither of us deserved the treatment.

I showed her and Jim, Jr., to Ragen’s private room in the Meyer House wing. Settled Mrs. Ragen in the lounge chair and her son at the writing desk, and explained the security measures I’d already taken and intended to take, including that they use their own family physicians to attend Jim.

“I’m sure Dr. Graaf will be glad to help out,” Jim, Jr., said.

“And Dr. Snaden is in town,” Mrs. Ragen said, looking at her son eagerly, as he nodded back with a small smile. “He’s been our doctor in Miami for years.” She looked at me and needlessly added, “We have a place down there.”

“Is Snaden going to be in town long?”

“He’s moving his practice out to California someplace,” the son said, nodding. “His practice in Miami has fallen off some, and some of his patients have moved to the West Coast. He was from here originally-still has a place here, in fact-and told me he was going to be on hand for several months, settling various matters.”

“Good. Lucky break. If he and your other doctor will cooperate, it’ll help us keep close tabs on Mr. Ragen’s recovery. I want only a few trusted parties able to get into this room-including medics.”

Mrs. Ragen smiled up at me like I was somebody really special; it was a nice smile, even streaked black like that.

“Mr. Heller,” she said, “I can understand why my niece is in love with you.”

That damn near made me blush; first time this decade.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said.

“Neither do I,” a hard-edged yet melodic voice said.

I turned and looked at Peggy Hogan, who was standing in the doorway of the room, her violet eyes red from crying, her jaw tight but trembling. She was wearing a dark blue dress with a white floral pattern; her hands, at her sides, were fists.

She whisked past me and went to her aunt and said a few words of comfort to her, putting a hand on her shoulder; she smiled and nodded at Jim, Jr., and then she turned to me and said, “Let’s talk in the hall.”

I followed her out there; we walked down to a lounge area between corridors. There were several chairs and couches, but we didn’t sit.

“I should be very angry with you,” she said, lower lip trembling.

“You’re doing a damn good job of faking it, if you aren’t.”

“You promised me you wouldn’t take any dangerous jobs. You promised me that was behind you.”

“Something came up…I had to fill in…”

“People shooting at you in the street! You shooting at them!”

“You used to like life not to be dull.”

“I was a kid, then. I was attracted to danger.”

“Here I thought it was my boyish charm.”

Then she clutched me, held me to her, hugging for dear life.

“Nate, Nate,” she said. She was sobbing. Christ, she was sobbing! What was this about?

She moved back to look at me, keeping her arms around me. Freckles on her nose made her look like a kid. “I was so worried when I heard.”

“How did you hear, anyway?”

“Lou Sapperstein. He called.”

“What did he call you for?”

“He didn’t. He called you and got me. I was waiting for you. At the Morrison. We had a date tonight, remember?”

She had a key.

“Oh, hell. I forgot all about it…”

“Never mind that. Just let me hold you.” She held me. “Hold you.”

I squeezed her tight. She smelled good. Not like face powder, or roses, either. Probably the Chanel #5 I bought her.

Then I broke the clinch.

“Peg, what did Lou want?”

“He said he’d found the guy you were looking for.”

“Tendlar?”

“I think so. Who’s that?”

“A guy that works for me. A guy that used to work for me, anyway. What else did Lou say?”

“He said he was sitting on the guy for you.”

I smiled. “Good. Anything else?”

“He said to tell you this guy wasn’t feeling good and needed some special medicine.” Peggy made a confused face. “He said to tell you you were going to have to feed this guy…this doesn’t make sense…a certain fish.”

I laughed. “It makes sense to me. I’m going to have to make a call, and get somebody to take my place, here.”

“Aren’t you going to look after my uncle?”

“I can’t do it twenty-four hours a day, Peg…but I’m going to do my best to keep him alive.”

“You didn’t do so good this afternoon, did you?”

“Are you scolding me?”

“No.” She came back into my arms. “I was sick when I heard. Worried for you. Scared to death for Uncle Jim. He’s been so good to me, Nate.”

“What am I, chopped liver?”

She kissed me; sweet and long.

“You don’t taste like chopped liver,” she said.

“Neither do you,” I said, and kissed her back.

She pulled away, straightened her dress and said, “Those gangsters did this, didn’t they?”

“Sure.”

“What are we going to do about it?”

“I’m going to try to keep your uncle alive, for the immediate future. And then convince him to sell his business to them.”

The violet eyes popped open like windows whose shades got yanked. “Give in to them?”

“Of course, give in to them. What else?”

She shook a fist. “Well, fight them, of course! Like Uncle Jim!”

“Yeah-just like Uncle Jim. Who’s on his back with his collarbone shattered and his arm mangled, throwing down transfusions like a drunk with a fifth of whiskey and a water glass.”

She shook her head, shook her head. “I don’t believe you’re saying this. Surely you want to get the people who shot Uncle Jim-who tried to kill you! Don’t you think they ought to be brought to justice?”

“What justice is that? They own the cops, or most of the cops, anyway.”

“I don’t know…it just doesn’t seem right. We should do something.”

“You should do nothing but give your relatives some moral support. I’m going to do my job and see if I can’t keep your uncle alive.”

She sighed. She shrugged. “I suppose you’re right.”

“But you’re disappointed in me.”

“No. Not really.”

“What happened to not wanting me to take dangerous assignments?”

“This is different. This is personal. This is family.”

“This is nuts.”

“I just wish you…we…could do something, damnit!”

“I’m not Gary Cooper, honey. Nobody is.”

“Gary Cooper is,” she said, with a little pout.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think his real name is Frank.”

That made her smile, and she came over and gave me another hug. About then, Jim, Jr., came and found us.

“Pop’s back in his room,” he said. He looked ashen. I think the sight of his wounded father had shaken him pretty bad. “He’s awake-wants to see Mr. Heller.”

I walked down there. The little room was crowded. Ellen Ragen was standing holding her husband’s left hand, gently; a bottle of plasma was feeding that left arm some life, trying to put some color in the white little Irishman. A nurse was tending the plasma, while a doctor was writing something down on a clipboard. The doctor, a somber chap in his mid-forties, glanced at the three of us as we squeezed in, and said, “Everyone, including Mrs. Ragen, needs to clear the room. We’re going to be bringing in an oxygen tent momentarily.”

“Give me a minute with my friend here, Doc,” Jim said, nodding-barely, but nodding-toward me.

“No more than that,” the doctor said, sternly, and he went out, taking everybody but the patient, nurse and me with him.

“They’ll try to kill me here, lad,” he said. His eyes, for the first time since that afternoon he hired me as his bodyguard, showed fear. “I’m a dead man, sure.”

“Not yet you aren’t,” I said, and I quickly filled him in on my security plans. He smiled, narrowing his eyes in little facial assents to all of it.

“Can you protect my family?” he asked.

“You bet. I’ll put every op I have on this.”

“God bless you. God bless you.”

“What’s this about a statement to the State’s Attorney’s office?”

“I thought that would warn the bastards off.”

“Don’t think it worked, Jim.”

“It should’ve. It should’ve. They know I made affidavits.”

“Affidavits?”

“I fuckin’ read ’em to Serritella! Three affidavits in my safe deposit box. Had my lawyer write ’em up.”

“What’s in those affidavits, Jim?”

He smiled his thin smile. “Everything. I name all the names, lad. Every dirty deed I’ve been privy to, and I’ve been privy to more than a few. Those affidavits, they’re my insurance policy.”

“From the looks of you, you missed a premium.”

His eyes tightened. “That’s what I don’t understand…but I want the word put out: if I die, if they kill me in my hospital bed, those affidavits will go to the feds!”

“Okay, Jim. Okay. But, look-don’t talk to anybody. Not the papers, and particularly not the cops.”

“I said the feds, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, and I think, when the time comes, that’s the way to go. The cop who seems to be heading up this investigation happens to be an honest one-Bill Drury-and he hates Guzik maybe more than you do. He’s an ally. But he’s one fish surrounded by sharks. If you deal with him, remember what he’s up against, in his own organization.”

“So I should duck Drury, too, you think.”

“For right now. And when you feel up to talking, we’ll get you somebody federal.”

“You know they won’t beat me, Nate. I will not give in.”

“Take it easy, Jim-”

“If they kill me, my associates, my family, will carry on. They may kill others-but somebody in my organization will always be left to fight. I have told my boys this over and over. If we stand together, they can’t take us.”

“Okay, Jim. What do you say we talk about that later?”

“You know what they say, Nate?”

“No. What do they say?”

“The first hundred years are the hardest.”

And the sixty-five-year-old wounded son of a bitch winked at me.

An op of mine named O’Toole showed up a bit after nine to spell me. O’Toole, tall, thin, bored, was a few years older than me and I’d worked with him on the pickpocket detail back in ’32. I trusted him.

I left Peggy to comfort her aunt and found my way down to the main floor lobby and stepped out into an unusually cool evening for late June. I stretched; to my left was a statue of stocky, mustached Michael Reese himself, whoever the hell he was. Odors mingled in the breeze-from the nearby Keeley Brewery, and the stockyards, and the slum. Nasty odors, but I didn’t mind. I’d been on the South Side before.

Visiting hours were getting over and cabbies were picking up their white fares; I considered grabbing a cab myself, though it’s generally against my religion-not giving cab drivers my money is about all the religion I have, actually-but I was in a hurry to get to Bill Tendlar’s flat on the Near Northwest Side, where Lou was probably getting tired of sitting on the guy. And I was on expense account, so what the hell.

But the cabs were full up, and rather than wait and see if another would pull up, I wandered back over toward 29th, and the Mandel Clinic, where I noticed a jitney driver loading up colored passengers in his seven-passenger Chrysler. I walked up and asked the driver, a skinny Negro of maybe twenty-five wearing a brown army uniform stripped of all insignia, if he could take me to Cermak Road.

“If ya got a deece, jack, you got a ride,” he said.

That meant even if I was white, if I had a dime I was welcome aboard, so I flipped him one and his hand caught it like a frog would a fly and I climbed in back of the limo. A burly black guy who might’ve been a beef-lugger from the yards was in the seat next to me; in the seats facing us, a pretty colored gal sat next to a dark heavy-set woman who might have been her mother; the probable mother had a handbag you could hide a head in. The girl, whose hair had been chemically straightened, smiled at me nervously and the mother, whose hair was presumably under her yellow and blue floral scarf, gave me a dirty look that had no nerves in it at all. I stared between them at the back of a male passenger in the front seat.

I didn’t work Bronzeville often, but when I did I used jitneys and instructed my ops to, as well. They drove a little fast, but it was safer than standing on the sidewalk. If you stayed on the line, which was whatever boulevard the jitney driver was working, you could travel four blocks or forty for a dime (side trips cost a little more). But you couldn’t ride past 22nd-graft only bought these illegal overloaded taxis rights to the South Side streets.

As I got out at Cermak, I risked a wink at the pretty colored gal and she smiled at me, momentarily improving race relations; if the mother caught it, you wouldn’t be able to say the same for family relations.

I took the El back to the Loop, adding another twelve cents to my transportation costs, and I got off at Van Buren and Plymouth, right at the doorstep of my office. I would rather have gone straight to the Morrison and my comfortable bed. I was tired. I’d been shot at and scolded; I’d driven a shot-up Lincoln and lugged its shot-up bloody owner into an emergency room; I’d had to teach the director of medicine at Michael Reese what security was about; I’d even taken a jitney ride. But this day, this night, was not yet over.

For one thing, I needed to go up and reload my nine millimeter, and grab a rubber hose while I was at it. We had a little box of such things, saps and brass knucks and the like, on one of the closet floors. Every office has a “miscellaneous items” file, after all.

I headed for the door nestled between the pawn shop and the men only hotel, opened it, relieved not to find a wino sleeping it off there, thinking for perhaps the thousandth time that moving to better digs was way overdue for the A-1 Detective Agency. True, we’d taken over the better part of the fourth floor; but it was becoming an embarrassment to have clients drop by. The block had never been classy-despite Binyon’s and the Standard Club being just around the corner-but my business had come up in the world.

Still, certain things about my business never seemed to change.

He was waiting for me at the top of the first flight of stairs; he was sitting on the floor, hook-nosed and pale, black greasy hair combed back, cigarette dangling from his lips, a pile of butts before him at the center of the V made by his long legs. He was tearing a matchbook with his hairy hands, making something out of it. He wore a green and white checked sportcoat and brown slacks and a pale green shirt and a green and yellow and orange tie that was an offense against nature. His socks were green argyles with some ungodly pattern and his shoes tan loafers. He looked like the golf pro at a country club for felons.

I hadn’t seen the guy-who Guzik, on the phone, had once referred to as “the Greek”-since the night he approached Peggy and me on the street. His eyes flickered as he saw me, and he straightened his spine.

“Don’t get up on my account,” I told him, thinking about the unloaded automatic under my arm.

He got up slowly-like a building reassembling itself in a newsreel played slow-motion and backwards-and glowered at me.

“Mr. Guzik wants to see you.”

This wasn’t a point worth discussing.

“All right,” I said.

“Now,” he said, as if I’d refused.

“Fine. Where?”

“The restaurant.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

We walked the few blocks silently. The lake was in the summer breeze. Nice night or not, he was unhappy; he had a constipated look. I figured Guzik had told him not to rough me up or anything, and that ruined the Greek’s evening. It wasn’t the first time I’d ruined his evening, after all.

On narrow Federal Street, at the foot of the Union League Club, was St. Hubert’s English Grill, where I had once lunched with General Charles Gates Dawes himself, former vice-president of these United States, mover and shaker behind Chicago’s Century of Progress, one of the biggest bankers in the city. Dawes had been concerned about Chicago’s image-he was outraged by the Capone gang, this “colony of unnaturalized persons” who “had undertaken a reign of lawlessness and terror in open defiance of the law.” I wondered if Dawes, who undoubtedly still lunched here from time to time, was aware that another powerful figure in Chicago, one Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, sat nightly in this same Dickensian-style inn dispensing graft to district police captains (or the sergeants who collected the payoffs for them) and to the bagmen (often plain-clothes cops) of numerous Chicago politicians, including various Mayors over the years.

Jake Guzik grew up in the rough Levee district on the near South Side, one of five brothers, and it was said he made his first nickel by running an errand for a prostitute. He was a pimp before he was a teenager and owned several whorehouses before he was twenty. His self-taught accounting skills attracted the attention of notorious Levee aldermen “Bath House” John Coughlin and “Hinky Dink” Kenna, who schooled Guzik in the art of the payoff, the place where politics and the underworld met.

He’d moved up in the Outfit, it was said, by virtue of his accounting wizardry, and because he had once warned Al Capone-who he barely knew at the time-of an impending visit by a pair of hitmen. Later, when Jake was roughed up by a hardass thief named Joe Howard-who stuck around the bar where it happened bragging about “making the little Jew whine”-Capone repaid the debt, by confronting Howard at the bar, holding a gun to the man’s cheek, instructing him, “Whine, you fucking fink.” Howard begged a little and Capone shot him in the face. Six times.

Now Capone was crazy as a bedbug, syphilis nibbling his brain while he fished in his swimming pool down in Florida, and Jake was still here. Here in St. Hubert’s; sitting alone at a table for four near an unlit fire place, cutting off his next bite of lamb chop. The low, open-beamed ceiling and prints of fox hunts and other sporting events made this a warmly masculine room. At tables nearby, coldly masculine bodyguards sat, lumpy-faced men in loose-fitting suits under which guns lurked, men with the blank expressions of somebody who could kill you in the morning and forget about it by noon.

Guzik did not look like a killer; he looked like a prosperous, gone-to-seed accountant, which is what he was. He was chubby but small, flesh hanging loose on him everywhere like the underside of a fat lady’s arm. His pouchy eyes huddled behind dark gray tinted wire-rimmed glasses; his flesh was a lighter gray, mottled, aged beyond his perhaps sixty years. His suit was dark blue, nicely tailored but nothing fancy, his tie a solid color blue as well, a shade lighter. He was eating the lamb chop slowly but single-mindedly.

They say the night that Capone threw the testimonial banquet for Scalise and Anselmi at Robinson’s Restaurant in Cicero, only to surprise the boys by pulling a baseball bat out from under the table and clubbing them to death, Guzik just kept calmly eating his dessert while the fatal beating went on. And when Capone, bloody bat in hand, began giving a speech to the stunned assemblage, pointing to the fresh corpses, saying, among other things, “This should teach you to keep your traps shut-and to be loyal,” Guzik tugged Capone’s sleeve and paused between bites to say, “Okay, Al-that’s enough. You made your point.”

“Heller,” Guzik said, glancing up from his plate, his mouth tightening between the jowls into what passed for a smile on that ravaged face.

“Hello, Mr. Guzik.”

A pink-coated waiter, whose English accent struck me as about as real as Mayor Kelly’s campaign promises, had ushered me here, to this side room which Guzik and his retinue had to themselves.

“Sit.” The fat little man gestured. On his pudgy fingers there were no fancy rings-just his wedding band.

“Thanks,” I said, and pulled up a chair across from him.

He nodded to the Greek who’d accompanied me here and the man took a seat at one of the nearby tables with his fellow (if less spectacularly attired) bodyguards.

“How did you and the Greek get along tonight?”

“I didn’t slap him around, and he didn’t kill me. I consider that a fair exchange.”

Guzik grunted his laugh. “Frank got a charge out of you. I can see why.”

He meant Nitti.

“How did you know I’d be going to my office?” I asked.

“I didn’t. I posted a man there and another at the Morrison.”

Fat little bastard thought of everything.

“Mr. Guzik, before we get into anything, there’s something you ought to know: Lt. Drury has a warrant out for your arrest right now.”

Guzik shrugged gently. “I’ll talk to my lawyer. Go in to the station, tomorrow or the next day.”

“But you’re in a public place…”

“Don’t be silly, Heller. Are the police going to bother me here? Who is Drury going to get to make the collar?”

He was referring to the fact that St. Hubert’s was where Guzik acted as paymaster for the police, prosecutors and political bosses of the eight-county metropolitan area. So that pretty much made it hands off. He felt safe here. That was more than I could say.

“I have a job for you,” he said, cutting the lamb.

“I guess you know I’m working for Jim Ragen,” I said, carefully. “I don’t mean to insult you, Mr. Guzik, but there’s such a thing as a conflict of interests.”

“I like you, Heller,” he said, but I didn’t figure he liked me. I didn’t figure he liked anything or anybody, except maybe his family, money and food. Of course that’s true of a lot of people.

He went on: “Loyalty is important. Al was loyal to me, and now I’m loyal to Al. He’s down there in Miami nutty as a squirrel, and a lot of the boys think there’s no need to keep him on the payroll. There’s not a lot of call for brain-damaged people in our business. But I keep him on the payroll. That’s loyalty.”

He ate a bite of lamb, leaving a place for me to say something, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I could feel the eyes of the bodyguards on me.

“We aren’t friends,” he said. “I don’t expect loyalty from you. If you do a job for me, I expect it. But you and me-well, I think you and Frank had an understanding. But to be truthful, to me you’re just a guy who did me a favor once. A guy who can be trusted. That’s a lot. I don’t mean to play that down.”

“I already asked you for a favor, Mr. Guzik,” I said, meaning when I asked him to lay off Ragen’s niece because she was my girl. “I don’t figure you owe me anything.”

“I don’t know about that. When those bookies snatched me, we needed somebody both sides trusted to deliver the dough. And when things got ugly, during the exchange, you came through for me. You did right by me. I don’t forget things like that.”

He was finished with his lamb chop. Since it was after ten o’clock, I wondered if this had been a late supper for him or just a snack.

He poured himself some Mosel wine; then he poured me some.

“Jim Ragen is a friend of mine,” he said. “This has all been a misunderstanding.”

“Mr. Guzik, I was there. I had shots fired on me. I took Ragen’s body to the hospital-he’s been crippled for life from this. Excuse me, but that’s not a misunderstanding.”

Guzik’s eyes went hard behind the gray glass. He pointed a stubby finger at me; it was as steady a finger as has ever been pointed my way.

He said, “That wasn’t my hit. It was that crazy bastard Siegel.”

I felt my face tighten. “Siegel? Bugsy Siegel?”

“Don’t ever call him that or he’ll have you killed.”

Yeah, and you don’t like being called “Greasy Thumb,” either, do you, Jake? But you can’t peel off all those bills without getting some ink on your thumb…

“Why Siegel?” I asked.

“Siegel wants Ragen gone. He figures when Ragen goes, Continental Press will close up shop. The survivors will be too afraid to compete with him and his Trans-American.”

“I thought that was your operation. I thought Siegel was your boy.”

Guzik’s mouth twitched. “He’s supposed to be working for us, and for his Eastern friends.” He shook his head, frustrated. “He was their idea.”

Meyer Lansky’s idea, probably; but I thought it best to leave that unsaid. I was already hearing more from Guzik than I cared to, my curiosity aside.

“I like Jim,” he said. “We’ve had our disagreements. But I think we can come to terms.”

“You’d still like to buy him out.”

“Or go partners. Heller, you got to understand our point of view. Back in 1940, after Jim was convicted on that tax rap, he was on probation-he was ordered by the court to stay out of the racing information business. We ran Continental for him, while he was on probation-we sank money in that we lost. Large sums of money, getting this new business off the ground, after Annenberg had to fold up. Of course Continental went on to be a big success, but without our backing, it couldn’t have gotten started. We feel we already own a part of Continental, based on this indebtedness.”

“None of this is on the books, though. You couldn’t go to court over it.”

“No.” Guzik’s thin smile connected his jowls again. “I get a charge out of Jim, taking us to court, on this, on that. He’s just taking a page out of my book-he knows I sue at the drop of a hat.” He grunted. “I’m paying those judges-why shouldn’t I put ’em to use?”

I sipped my wine.

Guzik sipped his, got reflective, said: “You know how you buy a judge, Heller? By weight-like iron in a junkyard. A justice of the peace or magistrate can be had for a five spot. Municipal court judge’ll cost you ten. Circuit or superior courts, he wants fifteen. And you can’t buy a federal judge for less than a twenty-dollar bill.”

“Ragen got a court order against you, though. And he’s got you tied up in litigation right now.”

Guzik shrugged. “I’m not the only guy in town with money. Jim’s got money, too. Judges don’t care who’s paying.”

“I’ve already advised him to retire. To sell to you.”

“That’s wise. I think Jim will come to his senses, too. He needs to understand that we-I-did not do this thing. He needs to understand that he’s up against a man who is sick in the head.”

“Siegel, you mean.”

“They don’t call him Bugs because he has fleas. You know me, Heller. You’ve known me a while, and you knew of me before you knew me. Am I lying when I say that it’s well-known I stand for a sound business approach? That I always say, don’t kill a guy when you can pay him off?”

“I’ve heard that,” I said. And I had.

“All I want to do is negotiate with Jim. Reason with him.” He shook his head again. “These Irishmen. I remember when Dion O’Bannion got himself in hot water. He was running twenty-some handbooks, forty-some speaks, seventy-some houses. I was ready and willing to buy him out. I offered him a six-figure sum for his territory. Said we’d pay him two grand a month, take in all his people in our Outfit. But he wouldn’t budge. Not an inch. These Irishmen.”

The aforementioned Scalise and Anselmi, they of the baseball bat banquet, had, of course, assassinated O’Bannion in his flower shop back in ’24. So despite all this talk of business and negotiation and reason, Guzik was still threatening to kill Ragen, if he didn’t sell.

“What do you want from me, Mr. Guzik?”

“I want you to do what you did for me before. Be a neutral intermediary.”

“I’m not neutral. I work for Jim. His niece is my girl. I’m just giving it to you straight, Mr. Guzik.”

“I appreciate that. But I only mean that you’re somebody both parties can trust. All I want you to do is get the message to Jim that we did not do this thing. That it is Siegel’s work-that Siegel is a madman and will try it again. I can’t stop it. Maybe someday somebody will stop Siegel; but right now his stock is high with his friends out East. I need to maintain good business relations with them.”

“So Siegel is Jim’s problem.”

“He would be my problem-one I could handle-if Jim were to sell us half interest in Continental. I believe Siegel’s Eastern friends would tell him to shut Trans-American down.”

“Would Siegel go along with that?”

“He’d have no choice. His friends out East aren’t going to say much of anything if he wants to go having a Jim Ragen shot up. But if he goes against us, he would be in effect going against them.”

“I see.”

“Here.” Guzik dug deep into his right pants pocket. He withdrew the fattest roll of paper money I have ever seen, bound by a thick rubber band. You couldn’t begin to get your forefinger and thumb around that wad. He peeled off five bills, like a hand of poker. I looked at them the same way: I had five of a kind. All hundreds.

I swallowed; my tongue felt thick. “Isn’t carrying a roll like that a little dangerous, Mr. Guzik? Even for a guy with bodyguards…”

“Just the opposite. I always carry ten or twenty grand with me.”

He said that like ten or twenty bucks.

“With a roll like this, I don’t have to worry about getting kidnapped no more. I just give the dough to the guys who want to snatch me and they go away more than satisfied.”

“All you want for this five hundred is for me to tell Ragen about Siegel?”

“Yes. And tell him we’re prepared to double our last offer to him.”

“Double it?”

“Yes. That’s two hundred grand for fifty-one percent of the business.”

That sounded like a lot of dough to me.

“What,” I asked, “if he wants to sell out altogether?”

“We’d make a fair offer. All I ask is to negotiate and reason.”

And then, failing that, shoot you dead.

“Okay,” I said. I rose, sticking the five hundred in my wallet. “Is that all you wanted, Mr. Guzik?”

“Yes. Report back to me. I’ll give you a number.” He took a card from his breast pocket and handed it to me. There was no name on it, just a phone number.

“I’ll send flowers, as well,” he said. “He’s in Michael Reese, I understand. I was in there for pneumonia, oh, ten or fifteen years ago, myself. Good hospital. I had ’em put me in that Meyer House wing. Better for security.”

“Really,” I said, slipping his card in my wallet next to the five C-notes.

I was just turning to go when I heard a commotion in the adjacent room.

One of the waiters, in his mock English accent, was saying, “You can’t go back there, sir,” and somebody else was saying, “Oh yes I can.”

And then, big as life, there was Bill Drury standing there in his natty vested blue suit. He was grinning like a fox; of course, the sporting prints on the walls around him were all about foxes getting killed, but that probably didn’t occur to him.

“Jake,” he said, not acknowledging my presence, “stand up. Everybody else, stay seated.”

“Drury,” Guzik said, standing slowly, a dirigible lifting off, “why don’t you wise up. Look at the record.”

“And what will I see if I do, Jake?”

“You’ll see I always reward my friends and punish my enemies.”

“Assume the goddamn position, Jake. That wall will be fine.”

Guzik’s gray face turned pink. He said, “Must I suffer that indignity?”

“Oh, yeah,” Drury said.

“You know I never carry a gun. I never carried a gun in my life.”

“How do I know tonight isn’t the first night? Maybe you didn’t hear-Jim Ragen got shot. You’re a suspect. Assume the fucking position, Jake.”

Guzik’s face tightened-an unlikely sight, considering how flabby that pan of his was-and he shook his head at the two tables of bodyguards, who sat on the edge of their chairs, ready to wade into this; but Guzik’s gesture meant for them to sit it out. He leaned against one wall, a fox hunt print just above his pudgy, splayed hands.

Drury patted him down hard. Came across the fat roll of bills and held it up to look at it, like a piece of evidence he was considering.

“What’s this, Jake?”

“More money than you see in a year. Why don’t you get smart and let me give you some of it?”

“Are you bribing me, Jake?”

Guzik turned away from the wall and looked at Drury with an expressionless expression that somehow oozed hatred. He said, “You came alone, Lt. I don’t think anything I say here is going to hold up in court, now, do you?”

“Well, then, we’ll just settle for hauling you in for questioning, for the moment. Okay? I think we’ll have a little lie detector test…”

“If I took a lie test, twenty of Chicago’s biggest men would jump out of windows.”

Drury threw the roll of dough at Guzik, whose fat hands clapped at it, caught it.

“I’ll try to make sure there’s a window nearby when we test you, then,” Drury said. “Do I have to cuff you, Jake, or will you come along quietly?”

Guzik glared at him, and Drury hauled him out of St. Hubert’s. I followed them out, watched Drury deposit Guzik in the back of an unmarked car pulled up against the yellow curb. A uniformed cop was driving.

“Excuse me, Jake,” Drury said pleasantly. “I need to talk to your little friend for a minute.”

Then he came over and took me by the arm and walked me out of ear shot, up against the front window of St. Hubert’s.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Drury said, edgily.

“Guzik sent for me, by way of armed messenger. I decided to go willingly-I’d already been in a shoot-out today.”

Drury shook his head. “I didn’t know you were in there, Nate-I wouldn’t want to put you on the spot. I’d have waited till you came out.”

“Thanks, but you’re the one putting yourself on the spot. You just had to bust Guzik personally, didn’t you?”

Drury grinned. “Hell, it’s no secret my pal Jake holds court at St. Hubert’s. He just didn’t think any cop would have the balls to beard him in his den.”

“You’re crazier than Ragen,” I said, shaking my head.

“We found your green truck, by the way. Over on 43rd Place and Union Avenue. It was built up with quarter-inch steel plates all ’round.”

“No wonder I never got a piece of them. Anybody seen ditching it?”

He nodded. “Witness saw two white men in white sportshirts get out of it. That’s the extent of the description. It was after dark.”

“Great.”

“Here’s something you’re going to like even less: that shotgun of yours? The one you said jammed?”

“What do you mean that I said jammed? And it wasn’t my shotgun…”

“Whoever’s it was, it’s working now. Sgt. Blaine tested it out this evening, over at the third district station. It fired first time out.”

“What? Somebody pulled a switch, Bill! That sawed-off was rigged against me.”

“Well, so is this, apparently. It’s not going to make you look good. And if the papers get wind of you meeting with Jake tonight…”

“The hell with that. Witnesses saw me charge that truck with a gun in my hand, shooting. Nobody can say I was bought off on this one.”

“People say a lot of things in Chicago.”

“People can go fuck themselves.”

He smiled sympathetically. “Where those colored witnesses are concerned, I got Two-Gun Pete on the job. He’ll come up with something. Hey-you look beat. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?”

I sighed. “Not a bad idea.”

And I walked back toward the office, while Drury joined his “pal” Jake in the unmarked car. I would have loved to take Drury up on his advice, and head for my warm bed in the Morrison. Only I wasn’t ready to sleep just yet.

I still had a trip to make, over to the Northwest Side.

Had to see a man about a shotgun.

It was nearly midnight by the time I got to the Polish neighborhood near Wicker Park where Bill Tendlar’s flat was. I drove my blue ’41 Buick straight up Milwaukee, leaving the Loop behind, ending up on this narrow, dirty side street just south of Division, in the shadow of a huge, ornate Catholic church. God had it great in this neighborhood, but the residents in these sagging two-and three-story frame buildings sure as hell didn’t.

I parked behind a tipped-over trash barrel and locked up the Buick and stood on the sidewalk, the street as quiet as death, the breeze as soothing as the thought of an afterlife. But the paint-peeling dreariness of the gray three-story building before me was a puzzler. I paid my ops a good wage-there was a housing shortage, yes, but Tendlar should’ve been able to afford better than this. Not a lot better, maybe, but better.

The building was dark but for a window on the third floor, light peeking out between the sides of and cracks in the green shade. Tendlar’s room. Worn wooden steps, half-heartedly bordered by a leaning, rusted iron rail, led me to a heavy, paint-curling, unlocked door. The hall, which seemed more narrow than it was, thanks to walls painted a dirty-chocolate brown, was stuffy, and barely lit by a forty-watt bulb in a corroded copper fixture above an old wooden wall-mounted hatrack that in another part of town might’ve sold as an antique. I checked the mailboxes on the opposite wall and saw Tendlar’s name on 3-A. At the end of the hall, between twin rows of closed doors, stairs rose into darkness. That was okay. I had a rubber hose in my hand, not to mention a loaded automatic under my arm.

I went up to the third floor and another poorly lit, dreary hall, to a gray-painted door next to the metallic 3-A hammered into the nearby woodwork. I rapped once.

Lou Sapperstein let me in. He smiled tightly. He had the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up, his red and blue striped tie loose around his neck. He was sweating, face beaded, loops of sweat on his shirt under his arms. His glasses had slid down some on his considerable nose.

“I was getting worried,” Lou said, quietly, stepping out into the hall, closing the door partway behind him.

“Guzik sent for me,” I said. “I had to drop by St. Hubert’s for a chat.”

“Gosh, I wish I could’ve been there; sounds like a swell way to cap off your day. What did that fat little monster want, anyway?”

I told him; told him about Drury busting Guzik, too. And about the sawed-off that had fired when the cops tested it out.

“What do you figure-they switched guns?” Lou asked.

“That, or unjammed it, then fired it. Either way, it’s an obvious attempt to make me look dirty.”

“Well, it won’t take.”

“Maybe. What’s been going on?”

Lou shrugged. “I kept it friendly for a while. I found Bill in bed. He’s got a bad cold.”

“I know. He’s been passing it around the office. But this is the first day he’s gone home sick.”

“Right. We just talked for a while. Then after I gave your girl that message, out in the hall pay phone, I came back in and had Bill sit up at his little kitchen table and have a beer with me. Then I pulled his arms behind him and handcuffed him, and he got pissed off, strangely enough. Really chewed me out, for a while there. For the last hour he’s been less indignant and more solicitous.”

“Well, let’s see what he has to say to his boss.”

“His boss,” Lou snorted. “Hell, I was working suspects over with a rubber hose when you were in diapers.”

“Maybe so, but Tendlar didn’t give you a fucked-with sawed-off and send you into battle.”

“Good point.”

We went in. Tendlar, a medium-size guy in his mid-thirties, was sitting, barefooted, in his gray and white striped pajamas on a wooden chair that Sapperstein had pulled out into the middle of the small room; he looked a little like a convict strapped in the electric chair. His hands cuffed behind him, he was otherwise in no discomfort, except psychological. His baby face was made incongruous by a heavy beard-his five o’clock shadow was midnight black at this point-and his eyes were small and dark blue. Bloodshot dark blue at the moment.

“Heller,” Tendlar said; his medium-pitched voice was hoarse from pleading with Sapperstein for several hours. “You can’t believe I’d sell you out.”

“Bill,” I said, pleasantly. “You used to be a cop. How can you expect me to trust you?”

I glanced around the small, shabby room. You could play a game of poker in here, if you didn’t invite more than five players. A cloth-covered brown couch and a cloth-covered brown (but not matching) easy chair and a couple of wobbly end tables were all the furniture in the room. Under my feet was a green Wilton carpet with about as much nap as Sapperstein’s skull. Between a closet door and a Murphy bed was an alcove archway, through which a dingy kitchenette could be seen, with the small table from which Sapperstein got the chair Tendlar was trapped in.

“You want a beer, Nate?” Sapperstein asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“He’s had three of my beers,” Tendlar said, almost pouting. “Hasn’t let me have a one. It’s warm in here.”

The room’s window was open, but the cracked green shade was drawn. He was right. It was warm in here. I took off my suitcoat. His eyes widened at the sight of the shoulder-holstered nine millimeter. Tendlar knew I didn’t carry it often.

“Sapperstein’s a hard man,” I said with mock sympathy, loosening my tie. “I don’t know how you’ve held up under this torture.”

Then, just to be a bastard, I gently slapped the rubber hose with one hand into the palm of the other.

Tendlar gave with a twitch of a one-sided smile.

“I don’t buy that,” he said. “You’re not the type.”

“What type, Bill?”

“The type of cop who’d use a rubber hose on a guy.”

“You know something, Bill, I’ve been a cop of one sort or another for a long time. And I’ve learned one thing in all those years.”

Tendlar swallowed. Smiled bravely. “Yeah, and what’s that, Heller?”

I smiled. “You never can tell about people.”

And I smacked him across the left shoulder with the hose.

He groaned, and it was a little loud.

“Now, Bill,” I said, “if you’re going to make noise, I’m going to have to find a dirty sock to stick in your mouth. I don’t think you’d like that. So you’re going to have to keep it down.”

And I hit him again, across the other shoulder.

He howled, but softly.

“That’s better. We don’t want to wake the neighbors- although I got a feeling this isn’t the kind of building where the cops get called in, much, even if there is a disturbance.”

Tendlar sat there crying, eyes squeezed together, tears rolling down his face. But quietly. He’d gotten the idea.

Lou, who’d come back from the kitchen about midway through all this, handed me a sweating bottle of Pabst. I took a couple of swigs.

“How’s Bill holding up?” he asked.

“Not so well,” I said. “I don’t think anybody ever fed him the goldfish before.”

“Fuck you, Heller,” Tendlar said.

“You know, I had a couple of tough coppers from East Chicago feed me the goldfish, once. Back in ’34, it was. I puked my guts out. I cried my eyes out. And I could barely walk for three days. And the bruises-God, the colors my skin turned. You wouldn’t see that many shades at high noon in Bronzeville.”

“I didn’t sell you out,” he said.

I slapped him hard on the right thigh with the hose.

He made a soft crying sound. Then he coughed some. He did have a cold.

“As a guy who used to be on the cops, Bill, you know the whole routine. Good cop, bad cop. We’re not going to insult your intelligence. We’re not going to subject you to that old wheeze. But we are going to do a variation on good cop/bad cop that we think you’ll appreciate.”

I took another swig of beer and handed the hose to Lou.

“We’re going to both do bad cop,” I said, and Lou whapped him across his other thigh.

“I didn’t sell you out! I didn’t sell you out.”

I grabbed him by his pajama front and looked him right in his beady blue eyes, which were dancing with fear, which was just how I wanted them.

“Listen to me, you little cocksucker. You sent me wading into deep shit, this afternoon. You handed me a jammed-up shotgun, knowing I’d take it into a mob hit getting carried out on our client. But what concern was that of yours? You probably figured you’d never see me again, not alive, anyway. Well, I’m alive, and you’re dead. You’re fuckin’ dead.”

And I yanked him, by his wadded-up pajama front, to one side, hard, and his chair went crashing on its side to the napless rug. Fortunately, the chair didn’t break, and Tendlar didn’t, either, at least nothing important. I set him back upright. He was shivering and he was weeping. His nose was running. Those summer colds are the worst.

“You’re dead unless you talk,” I said through my teeth. “Who bought you. Guzik?”

He was shaking his head side to side, face slick with tears and snot, lips pulled back, teeth showing, and it was not a smile. “I don’t even know Guzik. I never even met the son of a bitch.”

“Give me that fucking thing,” I said to Lou, and held out my hand, and Lou filled it with the hose, and Tendlar cried out, “Don’t! I can’t take any more of it. I don’t know anything, Christ! Honest!”

“Honest?” I said. “Swear to God?”

“Don’t hit me again….”

I hit him again. In the chest.

He coughed and wheezed and moaned.

I turned to Lou, casually. “Did you know we’re only four or five blocks south of the Nitti family deli, Lou? You can spit from Bill’s doorstep and, if the wind is with you, hit an Italian.”

“Really,” Lou said, interested.

I finished my beer, handed the empty to Lou, paced about Tendlar, slapping the rubber hose gently into my palm. “Nice place you got here, Bill. Just you and the rest of the rats.”

“It’s…I know it’s a dump, but I got divorced last year. You know that. Alimony. You know.”

“I pay you better than this. Alimony or not, why are you living in such a goddamn dump?”

“It’s…it’s hard to find a place…”

I went over to one rickety end table where today’s Green Sheet, a racing publication, sat under an empty Pabst bottle; various horses were checked off, various notations had been made.

“One of our client’s publications,” I said, picking up the tip sheet, taking it over and holding it front of him. “He’ll be glad to hear you’re supporting him.”

He sucked some snot up inside him. Tried to pull himself together. Tried to keep his chin from trembling. Couldn’t.

“I knew you gambled some, Bill. I didn’t know it was this serious.”

He swallowed. “You know how it is.”

“Got in a little deep, did you?”

He nodded.

“Not anymore you aren’t. You got out, didn’t you?”

He swallowed again. “I don’t have anything to tell. Honest to Christ I don’t.”

“You’re thinking they’ll kill you if you tell. Well, I’ll kill you if you don’t.”

“You’re no killer.”

“Ask the Japs.”

He looked like he was going to start crying again. “But I really don’t have anything to tell you.”

“Let’s start with the obvious. You did sell me out. Just tell me that much. Never mind who.”

“If…if I said that I did sell you out…I’m not saying I did, Heller…but if I did say that, you wouldn’t make me tell who?”

“I wouldn’t make you tell who, Bill. Just tell me you sold me out.”

He swallowed. He cast his eyes toward the floor. He began to nod.

“You sold me out?”

He kept nodding.

“Say it, Bill.”

“I sold you out, Heller.” He looked up, with a pleading expression. “It was big dough. You’d’ve done it in my place, and I wouldn’t blame you.”

“How much, Bill?”

He coughed. “Damn summer cold,” he said.

“How much, Bill?”

“Five gees.”

I glanced at Lou. He raised his eyebrows. That was a lot of dough.

“It got you out of the hole,” I said.

He nodded frantically. “And then some.”

“Why didn’t you take off? You had to know I’d come around.”

“I didn’t figure you for this…the goddamn rubber hose treatment. You just don’t seem the type.”

“You’d be surprised how testy I get when people try to kill me.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Did they tell you not to run, Bill?”

He nodded again, not frantically. “Yeah…they said if I held up under whatever came…cops or you or whatever…there’d be another gee in it for me.”

“Six thousand to play finger man,” I said. And to Lou: “I wonder what the hell the shooters got paid?”

“Whatever it was,” Lou said, working on a bottle of Pabst, “I bet they have to give it back. They screwed up. Ragen’s alive, after all.”

“That’s true.” I smiled at Bill. “Now. Who?”

“What? You said…”

“I lied. Who bought you?”

“Don’t hit me again.”

“Tell me and I won’t.”

“You won’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

“You’ll think I’m lying. You’ll hit me again.”

“No I won’t. Who?”

“I don’t know, really. It was all done over the phone.”

I hit him again. Across the left bicep.

“You liar,” he said, bitterly.

“I can be a real asshole sometimes,” I admitted, and hit him again.

“You can hit me all you want,” he said, bawling like a baby, “but it’s true. It was all done by phone, and money drops. I never saw nobody. They called me, I never called them; I don’t have a number or nothing. The voice was male, but it didn’t even have no accent. I’m telling the truth.”

I looked at Lou. He shrugged.

“Yeah,” I said, tossing the rubber hose over on the worn couch. “I think you are.”

I told Lou to get a cold wet towel and I wiped Bill’s face off. Lou uncuffed him. I took the Murphy bed down and helped him to bed.

“You’re going to have a couple of rough days,” I said.

He was on his back, pajamas clinging to him damply, eyes closed, arms at his side. He looked like a corpse.

“You’re going to hurt like hell,” I said, “but don’t tip to anybody that we worked you over. We stayed away from your face, so you should be able to pull it off. Don’t tip the cops, don’t tip the newshounds, don’t tip nobody. Not your phone contact, either.”

He nodded. It was barely perceptible, but it was a nod.

“And I wouldn’t skip town if I were you,” I said. “It just wouldn’t look good. In fact, after you had a day in bed, I want you to come back into the office. Business as usual.”

He opened his eyes. “Does this mean I’m not fired?”

I looked at Lou and shook my head. Lou was laughing silently.

“Bill,” I said. “I’m going to keep you on for the next month or two. Till this blows over. You’ll get paid and everything. I’m going to back you when the cops and anybody else, Walt Pelitier for example, asks about your part in this. I’m going to say you’re a stand-up guy and clean as a whistle. I don’t want any bad reflection on the agency, understand?”

He swallowed and nodded.

“But you’re going to stay away from me. Just go to your little cubicle and make your phone credit checks and wait for the day, before very long, when I’m standing before you with a smiling face, telling you to get out of my sight forever or I’ll fucking kill you.”

He looked at me blankly for a long time.

“Oh,” he said, finally. “Then I guess a letter of reference is out of the question?”

At one-thirty in the morning, the plush, high-ceilinged lobby of the Morrison Hotel tended to be about dead as its marble floor. A few clusters of out-of-town businessmen were getting in from their evening’s entertainment in the big city, talking a little loud, a little drunk; a well-dressed older man in a tux and a good-looking dame in a clingy gown were moving arm-in-arm onto an elevator; the overweight, alcoholic house dick, Matthews, was sitting on a divan almost as overstuffed as he was, next to a palm that was also potted. That was about it.

The night man lurking behind the marble-and-bronze check-in counter-skinny, pockmarked, Gable-mustached Williams, who had been assistant manager for going on ten years now, all the while maintaining the supercilious attitude of one rising fast in his chosen trade-was not glad to see me. He didn’t push it, however, because I lived here and took no shit at all off him.

“Messages?” I asked.

He smiled and nodded-which was unusual. I had expected the normal long-suffering sigh of one forced to endure the indignity of the superior doing the bidding of the inferior; instead he rather cheerfully turned to his wall of boxes and came back with a stack of note sheets.

“Reporters,” he said, looking down his nose, mustache twitching, as he smiled thinly so we could share his contempt for such lower life forms.

I shuffled through the messages; Davis of the News had called every hour. This was typical of the aftermath of an episode like this afternoon’s-not that today had been an average day in the life of Nathan S. Heller. If it were, I’d have been dead of old age at twenty-five. Still, I’d been pulled in off the sidelines into the middle of mob activity often enough to know the reporters would swarm in the wake.

“Hold all calls?” Williams asked, almost civilly.

“Yeah, except from Lou Sapperstein. And I guess Lt. Drury; no other cops-if they call, I’m out. Throw these away, would you?”

I pushed the stack of messages his way and he accepted them dutifully if not graciously.

I took an elevator up to the twenty-third floor, which was in the nineteen-story tower atop the Morrison’s central twenty-one stories (all of which made it the city’s tallest hotel), to “suite” 2317, one rather large room with a kitchenette and a smaller bedroom. Not unlike Tendlar’s place, just bigger and nicer.

And, I thought as I worked the key in the door, there was another nice difference: nobody would be handcuffed to a chair waiting for a rubber hose workout from yours truly.

But as the door barely cracked open, I realized somebody had to be waiting in there for me: the light was on, and I hadn’t left it on.

I had one bad moment, hand drifting toward my nine millimeter under my shoulder.

Then I smiled to myself, thinking Peggy, and went on in.

Where, smack in the middle of my floor, face down, kissing the carpet, as if he’d fallen off the nearby couch, was a guy in a lightweight, light brown summer suit. A big guy-not as big as a house, but if he were a garage he’d be the two-car variety. He also had a bloody head, or anyway a bloody back of the head, which otherwise was covered in dark brown, well-greased hair. Around and about his upper torso were the shattered pieces of a porcelain vase and some paper flowers; said vase had once resided on the RCA Victor console radio to the left of the door as you come in.

By this time, I was shutting the door behind me and getting my nine millimeter out, after all. It looked like this ungodly goddamn day wasn’t over yet….

I was bending over the guy, hand on his throat, seeing if he was alive or not, when I heard her.

“Nate…did I kill him?”

She was standing in the doorway to my bedroom. She was still wearing the dark blue dress with the floral pattern, but neither it nor she looked as crisp as at the hospital earlier. Her eyes were as violet as ever but also wider than ever. She had a.45 Colt automatic in her dainty hand. That hand, which was dwarfed by the gun, was trembling. So was the rest of her, but the hand more so.

“He’s alive,” I said, rising, going to her, taking the gun from her, tucking my own away, taking her into my arms. “What the hell happened here?”

“I was waiting for you,” she said, looking into my eyes apologetically. “I wanted to be with you tonight. I just didn’t want to be alone, after what happened to Uncle Jim and you…”

“You wouldn’t have a key if you weren’t always welcome,” I said. “Now, what about Kilroy, there? It was you who busted him over the head with my Aunt Minnie’s vase?”

“I didn’t even know you had an Aunt Minnie!”

“I don’t. It’s the hotel’s vase. I was just trying to keep things light.”

Her eyes and nostrils flared. “Light? Light? I’ve been waiting here with what I thought was a dead body for hours, waiting for you, thinking maybe I killed him, wondering what I should do…Nate…Nate, I’m frightened.”

I held her close, glanced back at the guy. “He showed up hours ago?”

She drew away just a little and nodded. “Don’t know how long, exactly. I let myself in about eleven and he was already here-after I closed the door behind me, he came out of the bedroom with that gun.” She meant the.45 that was now in my hand. “He told me to relax-we were going to wait for my ‘boyfriend.’ That’s you.”

“No kidding. So how did you arrange to smack him with the vase?”

“I was just nice to him for about fifteen minutes-smiling, chatting about the weather, just making an inane commentary-he didn’t tell me to shut up, either. He was smiling at me. He didn’t say much, but when he did, he called me ‘cutie.’” She cringed. “And then I asked him if I could turn on the radio. I said I’d be more comfortable with some music playing. He thought that was a good idea.”

“And he was sitting on the couch, there, with his back mostly to you, and you clobbered him.”

“But good. He fell over like a ton of bricks. Then I got his gun so when he woke up I’d be ready for him-only he never woke up.”

I glanced over toward our sleeping guest. “He’s hurt pretty bad. I better get some medical help for him, or maybe we will have a corpse on our hands.”

“I don’t understand…all I did was hit him with a vase.”

“This isn’t the movies, honey. A blow like that to the head’ll kill you, as often as not.”

“Well, he started it.”

I checked his wallet. According to his driver’s license, his name was Louis J. Fusco and his address was 7240 South Luella Avenue.

“I know this address,” I said, studying the license. “Where do I know it from?”

She raised her heavy dark eyebrows in a facial shrug, as she gazed down innocently at me and my pal Fusco.

“Of course,” I said, smiling, standing. “That’s Guzik’s address!”

Now her eyes narrowed. “Jake Guzik? That Greasy Thumb character that had Uncle Jim shot?” She kicked Fusco; not very hard. “I wish I had killed you,” she told the slumbering thug. “If that’s who you work for.”

“Guzik lives in an apartment house at this address,” I said. “He owns the place. This guy is probably one of his personal bodyguards, with an apartment in the same building. I should’ve known right away.”

“Why?”

“Guzik sent for me earlier. A man of his-that same clown that accosted us on the street, outside of Berghoff’s last year- was waiting in my office building. Guzik mentioned he’d sent a guy here, too. I figured they would’ve remembered to call him off, once they picked me up. They obviously didn’t.”

She cocked her head, looking at me like I was the eighth wonder. “You saw Guzik tonight?”

“I’ll tell you all about it. Let me make a couple of calls first.”

I phoned down to the front desk and Williams answered. “This is Heller. Send Matthews up.”

“Why, certainly, Mr. Heller.”

“How much did he pay you?”

“Pardon me?”

“How much did this mug who’s out cold on my carpet pay you for letting him in with a pass key?”

He gulped. “How can you even suggest…”

“I get suspicious when you don’t treat me like dirt, Mr. Williams. Of course, it could have been Matthews, or one of the bell boys. I’m just too tired to care, let alone look into it. But if this ever happens again, I’m going to feed you the fucking goldfish.”

“The what?”

I cut him off, then called the number on the card Guzik had given me.

“What?” a gruff voice said. Not Guzik’s.

“This is Heller. Your boss sent a guy around to pick me up at my place, and forgot to call him off. My girl crowned your boy with a vase and I think he’s going to need some stitches.”

“Oh. Where are you, the Morrison?”

“That’s right. I’m so pleased that you fellas keep up on my whereabouts. I’m sending him down with the house dick. He’ll have him in the alley, the loading dock area. You go in off Dearborn.”

“I know where it is. I’ll send somebody. Twenty minutes, probably.”

“Take all night, if you want. He might be dead by morning, but that’s your problem.”

I hung up. She was looking at me carefully, the violet eyes still narrowed but filled with wonder. She looked like a kid, freckles trailing across her nose.

“How can you talk to people like that,” she asked, “like that?”

“I have to talk to all kinds of people in my line.”

“No, I mean, get so tough with them. Aren’t you afraid of them?”

“Scared shitless. But if you let them push you around, they don’t respect you.”

“You want the respect of such people?”

“Sure. They leave you alone, more, if they respect you.”

She gestured to the unconscious Mr. Fusco on the floor.

“Leave you alone like this, you mean?”

“Tonight’s an exception,” I said. “Is it Tuesday yet?”

“Technically.”

“Good.” I sighed. “I’ve had enough of Monday. You want a beer or something?”

“Please,” she said.

I got a couple of bottles of Blatz out of the Frigidaire and poured hers in a glass. We sat at the table in the kitchenette end of the room, by the window, which was open, the breeze wafting through, some traffic sounds too, and drank our beers and waited for Matthews to come up.

Which he did, in several minutes. The red-faced heavy-set dick in the rumpled brown suit had trouble bending over to help me lift the still out-cold Fusco up off the carpet. I got my first look at Fusco’s face, at this point, and it was nothing to write home about-he was just another dark, craggy dago stooge from the Guzik camp.

“The least you could do,” Matthews said, in his gravelly way, breath like a brewery, “is slip me a fin for my trouble.”

“Somebody let this guy in my room,” I said, helping Matthews usher the heavy Fusco out into the hall, “and it just might’ve been you.”

“I swear it wasn’t, Nate!”

“Well, then why don’t you do some detective work tomorrow and get the fin out of whoever it was that did.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

So I helped him drunk-walk Fusco to the service elevator, though from the smell of him it was Matthews who should’ve been drunk-walked by Fusco and me. We sat Fusco in the corner of the cubicle, and I left the slightly dazed house dick and his charge to descend to the alley without any further help from me.

When I got back to my room, Peggy was on her knees trying to clean the blood off the floor with soap and water. She had put the paper flowers on the couch.

“That’s good enough,” I said, bending, patting her on her padded shoulder, smiling. “I’ll get the hotel to take care of that.”

She gave me an arch look. “Is it their responsibility to clean up bloody stains off a private detective’s carpet?”

“It is when somebody in the hotel let the mug in my room in the first place. I’m going to get some mileage out of that, sugar.”

I eased her up by the arm. “You want to go out for a bite to eat? Plenty of places still open…”

“I couldn’t eat after that. How can you still be standing? You look beat.”

“I am beat. I plan to sleep till Thursday.”

“But Nate-you’ve got to look after Uncle Jim…”

“It was just a figure of speech, honey. I’m going to be on your uncle’s door part of the time myself, and the rest of the time my most trusted people will be there.”

“You told me once you didn’t trust anybody but Nate Heller-and that you sometimes look at yourself suspiciously, in the mirror in the morning.”

“True. But there’s only one of me and I can’t do twenty-four-hour guard duty. Also, I got a business to run. Sometimes you just have to trust people, even if it is against your better judgment.”

I put my arm around her and walked her away from the bloodstains.

“Don’t send me home, Nate. I want to be with you tonight.”

“I’d love you to stay. But let’s just sleep. I’m not up to any romance. I barely have enough energy to strip down to my underwear and flop in bed.”

She embraced me, put her head against my chest. “I couldn’t make love tonight, either, after what happened to Uncle Jim.”

“And me. Don’t forget. I was there getting shot at too, you know.”

“I know. And shooting back. I heard all about it from Uncle Jim tonight. You were very brave.”

We moved into the bedroom.

“How was he doing when you left the hospital?”

Her expression was a disheartened one. “He looked deathly pale. He was in an oxygen tent. They’re going to operate on his arm tomorrow.”

“I hope they can save it-but even if they do, I don’t think he’s going to be pitching for the Cubs.”

She shook her head sadly. “I don’t know if he’ll be able to hold a spoon. It’s really sad. Active man like that.”

“Let’s go to bed,” I said.

“Good idea.”

She had a little short powder-blue nightie she kept with some other things of hers in a drawer in my dresser, a lacy thing that decorated rather than concealed her creamy white flesh, small dark nipples. Just the sight of her, radiant in the muted glow of my bedstand lamp, on her side on one side of my bed, half under the sheet, leaning on an elbow, the piles of brown curls framing her sweet face, was enough to get me going. Almost enough. I truly was beat beyond caring about sex. But the events of the day were still churning through my brain; Peg’s eyes were bright with thought, too.

I crawled in next to her; wore my skivvies to bed. I don’t own anything blue and/or lacy.

“I want you to tell me everything that happened to you tonight,” she said.

“Should I start with the blonde or the redhead?”

She pulled my pillow out from under me and hit me with it.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “You mainly want to hear about Guzik.”

“That’s right.”

I told her. I wasn’t leaving anything out, though I didn’t figure to tell her about the rubber hose session; I’d just gotten to the place where Drury barged into St. Hubert’s when she barged into my story.

“Do you believe what that awful man said? That this character…Bughouse Siegel was responsible, not him?”

I shrugged. “It’s possible. And it’s Bugsy. Actually, it’s Ben. I don’t think he likes being called Bugsy. None of these gangsters like their nicknames. But then, if your nickname was ‘Greasy Thumb’ or ‘Hymie the Loudmouth,’ you might be sensitive, too.”

“You know, I get so mad at myself sometimes.”

“Why’s that?”

“I used to think that men like that were…exciting.”

“Yeah, you dated one of Capone’s bodyguards, didn’t you?”

“He was Mrs. Capone’s bodyguard. He was very handsome. Dark, like Valentino. Very polite. But he was quiet. You couldn’t hold a decent conversation with him. He made me nervous.”

“But it excited you that he carried a gun.”

“Hey, I was an impressionable kid, then. I looked up to my Uncle Jim, thought what he did was thrilling and dangerous.”

“You were right, weren’t you?”

“You gotta understand, Nate-I was never very close to my papa. He was one of those hardworking men who provided well for his family but worked eighty hours a week to do it. Well, it wasn’t just for us. I think he loved his work, loved poring over numbers and figures.”

“It’s important for a man to like his work.”

“You like your work very much, don’t you, Nate?”

“I do as long as it’s not today. Getting shot at in the middle of a Bronzeville street by two guys with shotguns isn’t my idea of a career. But yeah, I like being a businessman, and the business I’m in, private security, confidential investigations, I like it, yeah. I’m good at it. Of course, it’s been a little demanding.”

“How so?”

“Well, when you’re the boss, and you’re building up a business from scratch, you put in a lot of hours, like your dad did. Only at least he managed to marry the girl next door. I haven’t had much of a personal life.”

“You mean you’re thirty-eight years old and still single.”

“If I don’t settle down soon, people are going to start thinking I’m a fag.”

Her face went crinkly with a smile at the thought of that. “I don’t think that’s too likely. Say, you’re not proposing, are you?”

“Not just yet. Not after I saw your work with a flower vase. I bet you’d be murder with a rolling pin.”

She flashed those perfect white teeth. She touched the side of my face. “If you ever do get around to asking me…well, even if you don’t, I’ll still love you, you big lug.”

Men love it when women call them big lugs. Anyway, I do.

“Why will you still love me?” I asked. Begging for more flattery.

“Because you’ve really taught me so much.”

“Oh?”

“About the kind of man I want to marry. Even if it doesn’t turn out to be you. The things I admire about you are the things I saw in my father, and in my Uncle Jim. You care about what you do, and you care about people.”

I knew a certain badly bruised party on the Near Northwest Side who’d disagree with her on the latter, but I let that go.

“You really love your Uncle Jim, don’t you?”

“That’s what I started to say…I always felt closer to my uncle than to my father. Uncle Jim was always swell-he never treated us kids like kids, more like we were just people.”

“I’ve always had the feeling Jim was the black sheep of your family.”

“Well, I don’t know about that. But I know Papa wasn’t crazy about him. About the business he was in.”

“But it seemed kind of glamorous to you.”

“I think so. The gambling, the big money, names from the headlines, men with guns, beautiful women with minks and gowns.”

“Like your old pal Virginia Hill.”

“She’s back in town, by the way.”

I sat up in bed. “What?”

“She’s back in town. Visiting that friend of hers, what was his name? Joe Epstein. They’re still thick, after all these years. Imagine that.”

“Why, have you heard from her?”

“Well, yes. I had lunch with her last Friday. In the Walnut Room at Marshall Field’s. She looked me up.”

“She looked you up!” I gripped her arm. “Tell me about it.”

“Ouch! You’re hurting me.”

“Sorry,” I said. I let go. “Tell me about it.”

“It was no big deal. She called me on the phone, at the office. I’ve seen her a few times over the years. We’ve had lunch before. She’s kept in touch with her girls.”

“What did she want?”

“To have lunch! Nate, what’s the big deal?”

“Did she question you about your uncle, at all? His daily schedule?”

“No,” she said, very confused. “Why would she?”

“Did your uncle come up in conversation in any way?”

“Well-yes. She asked about his business.”

“What did she ask about his business?”

“How he was doing. How’s the tip sheet racket these days, is what she wanted to know. I said my uncle was doing great and left it at that.”

“That was the extent of it?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes I’m sure! Nate…”

“Good girl. Listen, do you remember me telling you, years ago, that Epstein was Jake Guzik’s accountant?”

She rubbed the side of her face; her eyes went dark with worry. “Oh…oh, my. I’d forgotten that…I’ve never seen Epstein, not in years. I never thought past Virginia herself, when she called. I never dreamed…you don’t think she was trying to pump me about my uncle-for Guzik? Nate, you don’t think I inadvertently aided them in setting up Uncle Jim, for that shooting today?”

“If you didn’t say anything about his daily routine, no. If you did…yes.”

“I didn’t.” But her eyes were racing, as she thought back, making sure she hadn’t. Then her look became determined and she said: “I didn’t.”

“Good. Stay away from the Hill dame. I said it before, and I hope to never have to say it again: she’s poison.”

She frowned in thought for a while, then said, “I guess this proves it, then.”

“What?”

“That Guzik was the one responsible for what happened to Uncle Jim.”

“Not really. He’s not the only one La Hill has connections with. Haven’t you kept up on your old mentor’s career?”

“Sure. There’s been a lot in the papers about her. Lee Mortimer’s column, especially. She’s the belle of cafe society- hostess of big cocktail parties in New York and Hollywood. At places like Ciro’s on the Sunset Strip.”

“Ever been to any of those joints?”

“Nathan, I’ve never even been to Hollywood.”

“It’s a great place. The buildings are made of mud and cardboard-you can put your foot through any given wall.”

“I can’t believe that. You’re so cynical. It sounds like a fabulous place to me.”

“Why, you still thinking of becoming an actress?”

“No. I let go of that dream a long time ago. But Ginny was in a movie.”

“Really? I must’ve missed that.”

“Well, it was her only one. Little role. She’s busy with all her social obligations, I guess.”

“Where’s her money coming from, you suppose?”

“Epstein, other guys like him. She used to have this other sugar daddy, Major Riddle.”

I nodded. “He owns the Plantation Club in Moline. Pretty ritzy gambling joint.”

It always came back to gambling, didn’t it?

“She’s done all right,” she said, troubled by the thought that her good, old friend might have tried to use her.

“She’s had another sugar daddy in recent years,” I told her. “Fellow named Joe Adonis.”

Her eyes turned into slits. “Isn’t he a gangster?”

“He ain’t a Greek god. She gets her money from mob guys, baby. Epstein and Riddle, who are tied in through gambling, and the likes of Adonis, who’s tied in to every dirty racket you can imagine, from murder-for-hire to peddling heroin.”

Her eyes widened. “So then what I said was right: Ginny was after information for Guzik.”

“Not necessarily. Adonis is East Coast, and Virginia Hill has been based out in California for years. Hooray for Hollywood, remember? Making movies and tossing parties at Ciro’s? She’s a goddamn bag man, Peg.”

She smiled wryly. “Virginia Hill is no kind of man.”

“Oh yes she is. She’s a bag man for mobsters-shuttling between New York and Chicago and Hollywood with money and messages. It’s no secret.”

“So then…she could’ve been looking out for the interests of this Bugsy Siegel person, when she came to me.”

“Could be, if she knows him. And she undoubtedly does, since he’s the guy running the West Coast end of the mob’s wire service. When I say mob, I’m not just talking the local Outfit, either-I mean the East Coast, too. There are men out there who make Guzik look cuddly.”

“You’ve got to find out, Nate.”

“Find out what?”

She shook a small fist. “Whether it was Siegel or Guzik who tried to have my uncle killed!”

“Ultimately it doesn’t matter.”

“How can you say that?”

“Well, it doesn’t. Your uncle has to sell out to stay alive. If he doesn’t sell, and Siegel doesn’t get him, Guzik eventually will.”

“You’re saying Uncle Jim can’t win in this.”

“Sure he can. He can win big. He’s already a millionaire. He’s a winner when he sells to Guzik for big bucks and retires.”

“Wouldn’t you fight to hold on to your business, if it was being threatened?”

“Not if I was a sixty-five-year-old millionaire.”

Her eyes were moving back and forth with frantic thought.

She said, “You know, Virginia’s still in town…”

“Stay away from her!”

“She’s always been my friend. I can’t believe she’d try to use me for something…criminal.”

“Yeah, the mind does boggle trying to picture Virginia Hill using somebody for something criminal.”

That stopped her and even made her laugh, a little.

“Why do I love you?” she asked, shaking her head, brown curls shimmering.

“Search me.”

“Okay,” she said, and she ran her smooth small hands under the blankets, down inside my underwear.

“You’re on a fool’s mission,” I said. “You’re not going to find anybody in there-not anybody who isn’t sleeping.”

“Oh? Who’s this?”

“Whoever it is, uh…is waking up.”

“Turn that lamp off.”

“Okay.”

“Just let me give you a goodnight kiss.”

“Okay.”

She crawled up on top of me and kissed me. She put her tongue in my mouth and I told every fiber in my body: everybody up! We weren’t tired anymore. I slid my hands under her nightie, under the lacy panties, cupping her small, perfect ass. She reached a hand down and held me, lifted herself, and slid me up in her. She was tighter than a fist but so much smoother. Heaven. Heaven.

“I should use something,” I said, moving in her.

“Don’t use anything,” she moaned. “You’ll marry me if I get pregnant.”

“I might even marry you if you don’t,” I said.

Then I didn’t say anything; her, either. We just moved together, slowly, her on top, but me driving. I loved her in bed, but I also just plain loved her. She got me into this, goddamn her, shotguns and Jake Guzik and rubber hoses and out-cold bodyguards on the floor with blood and paper flowers.

But I didn’t care. I was in heaven. And I wasn’t even dead yet.

Tuesday afternoon, around three-thirty, against my better judgment, I let Drury pick me up in front of my office in an unmarked car, no police chauffeur, and we headed south on State to Bronzeville. We wound up on the same block where the Ragen shooting had taken place not twenty-four hours before, parking not far from the drug store whose broken window had since been haphazardly patched with cardboard. We had plenty of foul sideways glances and suspicious looks from the men and boys loitering about the street, but, despite the unmarked car, we were so obviously cops that nobody said one word to us, as Drury led me to a hole-in-the-wall saloon a few doors down.

The High Life Inn would have been an apt description for the place if you replaced high with low. The exterior was weathered brick with the peeling ghosts of various pasted-on political campaign posters from the fairly recent past; the words “judge” and “alderman” could still be made out. Above the remains of the posters was a big Coca Cola sign, suggesting a person “Pause…drink,” to which I mentally added “…get mugged.” Above it, smaller, was a wooden sign with the joint’s name on one line in stubby red capitals against yellow; fairly new sign, a trifle weather-blistered. In front of the place, between an Old Gold poster showing a white society girl in a flowery chapeau selecting just the right cigarette from a pack, a somber colored kid perhaps ten wearing a black derby hat, a short-sleeve plaid shirt and baggy brown pants and black tennis shoes sat on an upended crate next to a card table with a homemade display with tiers of small brown stapled bags, above which in a grease-pencil scrawl it said peanuts-5 cents. I paused and selected a bag, tossed the kid a dime, waited for my change.

We went on in, past the propped open door, Drury leading the way. The place was dark, as regards both lighting and clientele. In fact, I had the distinct feeling, as numerous eyes at the bar turned our way, that Bill and I might well be the first white people ever to enter. The boxcar of a room had a long counter at left, where eight or ten men stood (there were no stools), some table seating along the right, mostly empty right now, a small bandstand with a piano at the back, and a small cleared-away area for dancing. No music at the moment. No sound at all, as these dark men took us white boys in.

The bartender was a big lanky bald man in a black shirt; no apron. Behind the bar, beer cartons lined the wall, with the stack toward the middle only going half way up the wall, so some bottles of whiskey and such would have a place to sit. But the patrons standing at the bar weren’t drinking anything but cold sweaty bottles of beer.

In the back of the room, near the bandstand, sitting at a table by himself, was Sylvester Jefferson, the colored cop known variously as “the Terror of the South Side” and “Two-Gun Pete.” He was respected and feared in Bronzeville-which in Bronzeville terms was the same thing-and I knew him, a little. He’d been on the job since the mid-’30s and we’d had some friendly run-ins over the years-he’d helped me out, I’d helped him out.

Pete was a handsome, light-complected Negro who had a somber, almost sad expression on his slightly puffy face; he looked a little like Joe Louis, though with an alertness in the eyes that no boxer has. He was damn near dapper, with a mustache about as wide as Hitler’s but a third as tall, and his just slightly overweight, five-ten frame was bedecked in a tan suit and white shirt with a wide tie with a tiger-skin pattern. His hat, which had a three-inch brim, was on the table next to a bottle of Schlitz and a poured glass.

He smiled tightly, showing no teeth as we approached, standing, gesturing for us to sit down. Drury said hello, but immediately excused himself to go to the bar and get us some beers. That left me to shake hands with Pete, whose suit coat was open and you could see the two guns on the front of two overlapping belts, framing his police star, clipped to the middle of the lower slung of the belts.

“Those are the biggest revolvers I ever saw, Pete,” I said, sitting down.

He grinned and withdrew the guns and set them on the table, like a gunfighter on a riverboat sitting down to play poker at a possibly crooked table. Both guns were nickel-plated and shiny and although light was at a premium in this place, they found some to reflect. One of the guns had a pearl handle and a six-inch barrel, the other a brown handle and a three-inch barrel.

“You’re not still packin’ that candy-ass nine millimeter?” Pete said to me, huskily, sitting back down.

“Fraid I am,” I said. “Sentimental attachment.”

He waggled a thick black finger at me, narrowed the sad eyes. “That’s a bad idea. That’s the gun your daddy killed hisself with, ain’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“Carrying it, that’s your idea of makin’ sure you don’t use your piece too easy, right?”

“That’s it, I guess. I never want to take death too lightly.”

“I’ll tell you what you don’t want to do,” he said, patting the pearl handle of the revolver like a baby’s butt, “you don’t want to have nothing in between you and a shooting situation. You don’t want to be thinking about whether or not you should shoot, or this is the gun my daddy killed hisself with. That’s bullshit, Heller.”

“Well, you may have a point, Pete. But I’ve been under fire a few times in my time, and I seem to be alive.”

He ignored that, saying, “It’s like the night I was out driving along 35th-I was off-duty. Just me and my pal Bob Miller, the undertaker. I hear this woman scream and see a kid, maybe nineteen, run out of a store, with a gun in his mitt. I yell for him to halt, but he ducks in the alley and I follow and he starts to shoot back at me. I think, well, hell, least I got an undertaker along-’cause one of us is sure as shit gonna need him. So the kid ducks in back of this laundry, and when I find him, he’s locked hisself in the shitter. I yell at him to come out, give hisself up-he says, ‘Fuck you, nigger! You want me, you’re gonna have to come in and get me.’ So I empty this baby into the fuckin’ door.” He patted the brown-handled gun. “I didn’t hear nothing for a while, so I went on in. I got him, all right-more than once. He didn’t even make it to Michael Reese. Funny thing, though-when I pulled that poor bastard out of there, dying, holes in his chest, he was puffing on a reefer like a crazy man.” He shook his head. “People is strange.”

Drury arrived with the beers.

“How’s it going, Pete?”

Jefferson stood up, and shook Drury’s hand and put the guns back in their holsters. “I was just telling Heller he should toss that old automatic of his in a dumpster. He oughta get one of these.357s like I got.”

“I thought those were.38s,” Drury said, sitting, pouring some Schlitz in a glass. I was doing the same.

“You can load ’em up with.38s,” he said, matter of factly, “but what I use can shoot clean through a automobile engine block.”

“Lot of call for that, is there, Pete?” I asked, beginning to munch my peanuts. They were pretty good.

He didn’t answer me, not directly. He just said, “A.357 Magnum is the world’s most powerful revolver. These is the finest guns that money can buy.”

“I suppose that’s important down here,” I said.

“The only way to keep law and order and get respect is to earn a reputation for yourself as bein’ as tough or tougher than the roughest s.o.b. on the street.” He patted his guns. “People around here know: they don’t fuck with Mr. Jefferson.”

Like Greasy Thumb and Bugsy and everybody in the world of crime who didn’t like his nickname, Two-Gun Pete was the same. He expected to be called Mr. Jefferson and accepted “Pete” only from friends and fellow cops.

He was a good cop, easily the best in his world, and like most Chicago cops took his share of graft-he wasn’t interested in hassling the bookies or the numbers runners or numbers bankers or the streetwalkers or their madams; but he was hell on muggers and purse-snatchers and con men and heisters and dope pushers. A bachelor, a ladies’ man with a part-time valet and an apartment behind steel bars, Pete Jefferson liked his work.

“So,” Drury said, satisfied that Pete had been allowed to flex his muscles and impress his worth upon the two white cops (who already knew damn well what his worth was), “have you found anything out?”

He glanced at his watch. “In a few minutes you’ll meet the first of my witnesses.”

“How many did you round up?” Drury asked.

“Three so far. Got a line on a fourth.”

“These are witnesses who clearly saw the faces of the two men with shotguns?”

“That’s a fact,” Pete said.

“Did you rough these guys up any?”

“I hardly ever have to rough anybody up no more,” Pete said, almost regretfully. “I just come around and they spill their guts.”

Better than having a.357 Magnum do it for you.

“Pete,” I said, “I have to level with you-I got my doubts. I was there-I was right there in the street shooting it out with those guys, and I didn’t begin to get a look at either of them.”

Pete sipped his beer, licked a foamy mustache off his lip; his real mustache remained. “These boys got a better look than you did. They was on the street. They was not occupied with shooting back.”

“I don’t mean any disrespect,” I said, “but colored witnesses, testifying against white people, in front of a probably mostly white jury and a very white judge, have got to be unimpeachable.”

“I know that,” Pete said, irritably. “I didn’t just fall off a hay wagon, Heller. That’s one reason why I’m rounding up four. Taken together, they’ll be goddamn hard to impeach.”

A few minutes later the first of Pete’s witnesses wandered in; he was a thick-set man of about forty, wearing a frayed white shirt and rumpled brown slacks, with gray in his hair and mustache and bloodshot eyes and hands that were shaky, until Pete put the rest of his own beer in them.

“Okay, Tad,” he said. “Take it easy.”

“Tore one on last night,” Tad said. “Tore one on.”

“This is Theodosius Jones,” Pete said to us. “He used to be a bedbug.”

That meant he’d been a Pullman porter.

“Till last year,” Tad said.

“Drinking on the job?” I asked, tearing the shell off a peanut.

Pete frowned at me; it wasn’t pleasant being frowned at by Pete. I had the feeling he could, if he so chose, tear the shell off me.

But the former bedbug only nodded and gulped at the glass of beer, till it was drained.

I looked at Drury and shook my head, popping the peanut in my mouth.

Drury didn’t give up easily, though; he went up and got a fresh beer for Tad and came back with it and said, “I want to hear your story.”

“Okay,” Tad said, and he reported what he’d seen, very accurately, and described the two white shooters in some detail.

“One was fatter than the other,” he said, “but they was both big men. One of ’em had hair that come to a point…” He gestured to his forehead.

“A widow’s peak?” Drury asked.

Tad nodded. “His hair was black and curly. The other’s hair was going. Not bald, but will be. He had spectacles on. I seen their faces plain as day. If you could show me pictures, I could pick ’em out, if they was in there.”

“I’ll bring you pictures, Tad,” Drury said, smiling.

“Tad,” I said, “are you up to a court appearance?”

“Pardon?”

“You’d need to be on the witness stand, and you’d need not to have been drinking.”

“Got to be sober as a judge,” he said, agreeing with me.

“The judge can get away with being drunk,” I said. “You can’t.”

Tad nodded. “Don’t matter, really. I been thinkin’ of headin’ out.”

“Heading out?” Drury said, sitting up.

“Detroit. I hear they’s jobs up there.”

Drury reached in his pocket and peeled a ten off a small money-clipped roll. “Take it, Tad. More to come.”

“Thank you kindly,” Tad said, smiling.

Pete was looking at me hard. The sullen brown face above the tiger-striped tie seemed to give off heat. He said, “You don’t think my witness here has what it takes, do you, Heller?”

“No offense to Mr. Jones, but I wouldn’t want to build a case on him.”

“No offense taken,” Tad said, toasting me with his beer.

Pete nodded toward me and said, “Tad, do you know who this fella is?”

“Sure. He’s the guy who was shootin’ back at ’em.”

Pete smiled and patted Tad’s shoulder. “I think you’re a damn wonder as a witness, Tad. Why don’t you take your beer on up to the bar, and tell the man behind the log to charge your next one to Mr. Jefferson.”

Tad nodded, took his ten-spot and beer and went and stood at the bar.

“You’re buying witnesses, now?” I said to Drury.

“Every cop pays his snitches,” Drury said.

“You must want Guzik bad.”

“I want him any way I can get him.”

“What if it isn’t Guzik who bought the hit? What if it’s Siegel’s contract?”

“Who told you that fairy tale?” Drury snorted, smirking cynically. “Guzik?”

“Whoever it was,” I said, “I didn’t pay for the information.”

The next two witnesses, who came along at roughly fifteen-minute intervals, were admittedly stronger. One of them was a steel worker, a big guy named James Martin who’d gotten his hair cut at the corner barber shop before he wandered over to pick up some cigarettes at the drugstore, just before the shootout. Martin was a crane operator at Carnegie-Illinois Steel’s South Works, a union man, a family man, and a church deacon; even colored, this was some witness. Like Tad, he recognized me, immediately. All white people did not look alike to these folks. The other witness was Leroy Smith, a nineteen-year-old clerk from the drug store; he was skinny and a little scared but his description of the two shotgunners matched the others’: black curly hair with a widow’s peak, balding with glasses; he too recognized me. These latter two witnesses each had a description of the driver of the truck, as well, which tallied.

When all three witnesses had gone, promising to meet with Drury and Pete again when the detectives had suspect pictures for them to sort through, I leaned back in the wooden chair and admitted to the two tough cops that these witnesses weren’t all that bad.

“I got one more to round up,” Pete said. “We gonna have some depth on our bench.”

Drury said, “Pete, I don’t know how to thank you. I’d have been lost, trying to work down here without your help.”

“My pleasure. I don’t like it when those Outfit bums come shooting up my beat. I don’t like those Outfit bums, period. Do you fellas have any idea how bad the dope problem is gettin’ down here? Not a week goes by we don’t haul in a dozen kids, eighteen years old, sixteen years old, some of ’em been on dope two or three years already. I know where the dope comes from. So do you, Lt. They’re preyin’ on us-ain’t it bad enough you got sixteen or twenty families living in a three-flat building, children sleeping four to a bed, in rat-crawlin’ firetraps? A man can’t find decent quarters for his family, can’t stretch a few dollars from his menial damn job to provide food for ’em. Kids playin’ in garbage-filled alleys, dirt and filth. And Jake Guzik sends his poison down here so these people can flee into some reefer dream, or stick a needle in themself and go hide in their minds, and pretty soon they’re pawning what little they own and after that they’re pulling stickups, whatever it takes to get the stuff. Bill, you want my help, going up against these Outfit bums, you got my help. Any time. Any day.”

Drury was smiling tightly, drinking that in. Me, I was drinking in the beer. That kind of idealistic talk was fine, in the bar room; in real life, it tended to get you killed.

Up toward the front, at the bar, two colored men were starting to push each other around. A couple of working stiffs in overalls, good size men, both a little drunk at this point.

It was starting to get loud, when Pete got up and said, “Pardon,” and took out his long-barreled, pearl-handled, nickel-plated.357 and strode up there.

“Who started this?” he demanded.

Behind the counter, the bartender was leaning against his boxes, smiling. He had a gold tooth.

The two men looked at Pete with wide eyes-they obviously recognized him, and just as obviously hadn’t realized he was in the place-and simultaneously pointed each to the other.

He swung the.357 sideways into the gut of the man at his right and with his left connected with the chin of the other. Both men were soon on the dirty wooden floor, one rubbing his chin, the other doubled over.

“No fighting,” Pete told them, and put his gun away and came back to us and said he had to be going.

What a coincidence.

So did we.

By the following Saturday a lot had happened and nothing had happened.

I did some time at Meyer House on Ragen’s door each day, but mostly turned it over to O’Toole and Pelitier, with Sapperstein doing a turn or two, as well. It was a round-the-clock vigil, so some of my boys put in long hours. The police kept three men on at all times, one outside patrolling Lake Park Avenue, another by the fire escape window, and one more sharing the corridor outside Ragen’s room with an A-1 man.

We got along with the cops just fine-we were all ex-Chicago P.D. ourselves-but of course didn’t trust them far as we could throw ’em. Like I said, we were all ex-Chicago P.D. ourselves.

The fire escape had a landing at each Meyer House floor, trimmed in flowers and plants, making for a regular balcony; Tuesday morning, I’d noticed men in pale green blousy shirts and pants, like pajamas, standing on every level.

“What the hell’s that about?” I asked the cop on guard there. “Can’t you keep that fire escape clear?”

“Aw, I kinda feel sorry for the poor bastards,” the cop said.

They were psyche ward patients, it turned out. The first floor of Michael Reese, where the lobby once was as lavish as that of the finest hotel, had been converted to a psychiatric unit in ’39. Some patients were allowed out in the enclosed yard of Meyer House, where they sat in chairs and/or wandered about the small area facing Lake Park Avenue. Hollow-eyed zombies, most of them.

I knew all about it. I’d done some time in a psyche hospital myself, during the war.

“Yeah, you’re right-let ’em enjoy themselves,” I said. “But if you see anybody on those landings who isn’t a psyche patient, clear ’em the hell off immediately. And nobody on this landing at all, or I’ll hand your ass to Drury. I don’t care if it’s Freud and his favorite patient.”

“Okay, Mr. Heller.”

I talked to Drury every day, to see how the investigation was going. The green truck, it turned out, had been stolen last March; the FBI had lent its fingerprint experts to help dust the vehicle, but nothing came of it. Nor did anything come of the gray sedan with Indiana plates, the license number of which no witness seemed to have gotten. Two-Gun Pete did manage to “round up” his fourth witness, a newsboy (possibly the one I bought those papers from, to soak up Ragen’s blood); and Drury had gone down to Bronzeville and questioned him, and was satisfied another good witness had been found. Early next week the four would be gathered at the Central Police Station to start going through pictures.

Drury had been less than successful with his frontal attack on the Outfit: Guzik, Serritella and the rest were all kicked loose after questioning. Serritella had been badly embarrassed, however, as Drury-around midnight, Monday night, fresh from his St. Hubert’s bust of Guzik-had taken several squads of coppers to surround the home of the First Ward Republican Committeeman (and former State Senator). It got a lot of play in the papers, making Serritella look like the front man for gangsters that he was. Unlike Guzik, though, Serritella submitted to a lie detector test, and passed with flying colors, where complicity in the Ragen shooting was concerned.

At the same time, Mayor Kelly ordered a crackdown on local gambling, handbooks especially; Police Commissioner Prendergast called it “the greatest gambling cleanup” in the city’s history. I figured it’d last maybe a week. Possibly even two.

Ragen’s family made appearances throughout the week, with all the children, including the three married daughters, putting in regular visits, though Mrs. Ragen herself wasn’t seen much from Wednesday on, stopping by during regular visiting hours for an hour or so; she’d collapsed at home on Tuesday after an anonymous phone call came in, a gruff male voice saying, “Tell your old man to get out of the racing business or get fitted for a coffin.” Ellen Ragen was (as her husband put it) “a hypertension blood-pressure individual” and her doctor wanted her to stay in bed, and not answer the phone.

Peggy had stopped going into the office and was keeping her aunt company, playing nurse, although a private nurse was on hand as well; consequently I’d only talked to Peggy a few times since Monday night, mostly over the phone, though tonight, Saturday, we had a date. In the meantime, I had put an op on the Ragen’s Seeley Avenue home, too.

Jim, Jr., had taken over the business reins in his father’s absence, but to his credit he’d managed to come around every day during visiting hours. He seemed shaken and was not really holding up all that well, but hid it from his pop pretty much-of course, his pop wouldn’t have wanted to recognize that, anyway.

I had the enormous pleasure, on Wednesday, of giving the bum’s rush to Wilbert F. Crowley, assistant to State’s Attorney Tuohy. Confiding in the State’s Attorney’s Office was like putting up a billboard in Cicero. The staff at Michael Reese, as well as the two Ragen family physicians attending Jim, were going along with me on keeping the cops and such away from him. We’d put word in to the local FBI office that they would be hearing from us-but kept it strictly “don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

It wasn’t merely a blind, either. Jim was heavily sedated and in an oxygen tent and mostly just slept, from Tuesday through Friday, at which time, after postponements from day to day waiting for him to get strong enough, the operation on his arm was finally performed in a grueling three-hour session, surgeons probing for pellet after pellet in his shattered arm and shoulder.

On Friday, Mickey McBride showed up. Arthur “Mickey” McBride, that is, the onetime partner of Jim Ragen, in Continental, and who was still in charge of the Cleveland end of the operation.

I’d never met him before, but he’d heard all about me from Jim, he said.

“Jim thinks the world of you,” he said, pumping my hand. He was a small man, bigger than Mickey Rooney but just; his face was round, his light brown graying hair thinning some, his face pouchy, his glasses dark-tinted. Physically, he was an Irish, somewhat better preserved version of Guzik. A fairly natty dresser, he wore a gold and brown herringbone suit with a red bow tie and a monogrammed pocket handkerchief.

“He’s mentioned you from time to time, too,” I said, giving him a polite smile. Jim liked Mickey McBride, but I instinctively didn’t. He was too fucking friendly for a stranger. Particularly for a stranger who’d made millions in the rackets.

“You’re a pal of Ness’, aren’t you?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“He made some waves in Cleveland, I’ll give ’im credit for that. Don’t think he liked me much.” He smiled widely, puffing his cheeks; he looked like an aging leprechaun. “Hated it that I was making legal money off gambling.”

“Eliot’s idea of a night on the town involves using an ax to go in a front door.”

“Ain’t it the truth,” McBride said, grinning. “Well, he’s a nice enough guy. Harmless, now. Private business, these days.”

“I don’t think you’ve heard the last of him.”

“Maybe not.” He made a tch-tch sound. “Terrible about Jim. Terrible. Am I gonna get to talk to him today?”

“I don’t know. He’s being operated on, now.”

“He’s got balls, the man does. Going up against Guzik and company.”

“What’s your position on this?”

“Whether he should sell out or not? I don’t tell Jim his business. I sold out my interests years ago.”

“Doesn’t your son still own a piece of Continental?”

“Yes he does.”

“But he’s not very active in the business.”

“He’s a college student, Mr. Heller. Pre-law, down at the University of Miami. But he’ll need a place to work someday.”

“You really want to get your son involved in the race wire business? After what happened to Jim?”

“Mr. Heller, the race wire business has been around for almost sixty years. In all that time, Jim’s the first guy to take a hit, and it looks like he’s gonna pull through. Now, I know a hundred lawyers that got killed in the past forty years…hell, my boy might get hit by a brick from this building and bumped off. Life is a game of chance, my friend.”

“Well, you don’t seem to be getting in the game, at this point, Mr. McBride.”

“Call me Mickey. It’s Jim’s show, Mr. Heller. I’ll back him up, a hundred percent. But I’m not the boss. I’m not even an owner. If Jim wants to go up against Jake Guzik, well he’s a better man than I.”

“Then why don’t you advise him to sell out?”

“I thought you knew Jim, Mr. Heller,” McBride said, his smile finally turning nasty like I knew it could. “You think that stubborn mick would listen to me? Just because I taught him everything he knows about this business? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to find someplace where I can smoke a cigar. Hate the smell of hospitals, don’t you?”

He’d spoken to Jim, later that day-night, actually-but I don’t know what they spoke about. Me, I hadn’t talked to Jim much at all, not since Monday night. And what conversations we’d had were limited to me reassuring him that security here was tight. Between the sedation and the doctor’s advice to keep him calm, I figured the time wasn’t right to spring Guzik’s offer on him.

I took the Saturday morning guard slot. I drove down State, then began cutting over on side streets to avoid the Bud Billikens festivities that would be swarming over the South Side, starting around 29th Street. Bud Billikens was a mythical character concocted by the Chicago Defender, the Negro newspaper, to be a sort of colored Santa Claus, and today was the annual parade and festival at which damn near the entire colored population of Chicago would be in attendance.

I arrived at eight, taking over for a bleary-eyed Walt Pelitier, who’d been on since midnight, and met Dr. Snaden for the first time. He was the Ragens’ Miami doctor who happened to be in town and who, with Dr. Graaf, their Chicago family doc, was attending Jim. At my suggestion.

He was a thin, very tan man of about forty-five; he wore thick, heavy-rimmed glasses that made his eyes look too big for his face.

“Don’t know how we’ve managed to miss each other,” I said, shaking his hand. “I’ve been here mostly evenings.”

“I’ve been here mostly days,” he said with a small smile, though he didn’t seem like the type who smiled much.

“You know, I’d swear I know you from somewhere.”

“We met a long time ago, Mr. Heller, in Miami.”

I snapped my fingers. “You were one of Cermak’s doctors.”

“That’s right,” he said. “I was Mayor Cermak’s personal physician in Miami. I wish I could have done more for him.”

“Well, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. How do you think Jim is coming along?”

He shrugged. “Hard to say. He came through the operation yesterday fairly well. He’ll have somewhat more use of that arm than was first anticipated. But he has several extensive skin graft operations ahead of him. I don’t think he’ll see the outside of this hospital for several months.”

That was going to be a long haul for the A-1 Detective Agency to provide round-the-clock protection. On the other hand, Jim was a millionaire and there was money in it.

“You think he’s up to me talking to him this morning?”

“He’s in there, sitting up, drinking juice right now. I think he’d like to see you, Mr. Heller.”

“Thanks, Doc. I wish you better luck on Jim’s case than you had with the late Mayor.”

“I’ll see if I can’t do a little better this time,” he said, a wry smile cracking his parchment tan. “On the other hand, if I recall, you were Mayor Cermak’s bodyguard as well. Do all your clients get shot up like this?”

“Not more than half,” I said, with a put-in-my-place grin, and the doc smiled thinly and walked on, and I went in.

Jim was indeed sitting up in bed, sipping orange juice through a long plastic straw. He looked skinnier than I ever saw him, and his right arm was heavily bandaged and in a sling, but his cheeks looked damn near rosy. I guess that’s what a dozen transfusions can do for you.

“I feel like a million bucks today, Nate,” he said.

“What, green and wrinkled?”

“That joke’s older than me,” he said, smiling, putting his glass on the bedstand where arrangements of flowers huddled.

“Yeah, but it’ll outlive us both.” I pulled up a chair. “You given any more thought to selling out?”

“I have.”

“And what’s your position?”