The Million-Dollar Wound

“That was supposed to be imported talent, too,” I said.

Stege studied me for a moment, then, impulsively, he took something from his pocket and showed it to me, saying, “What do you make of this?”

It was a memo. It read: Mr. Woltz phoned and he wants to know if you know anything about Clyde Nimerick. He said you are to call Mr. Bennett. It was signed Toni. The secretary had graceful, feminine handwriting; but there was strength in it, too.

“Where did you find this?” I asked.

“In his topcoat pocket.”

Talk about convenient. “There’s your motive.”

“Yes,” Stege nodded. “Woltz and Bennett are FBI agents. And Clyde Nimerick is a small-timer from O’Hare’s shyster days in St. Louis. A bank robber.”

“So O’Hare was up to his informing tricks again, and the Outfit rubbed him out.”

“Or some St. Louis hoodlums connected to Nimerick did.”

It was a setup, of course. Another sweet setup with Nitti’s crafty name all over it. O’Hare hadn’t been informing again; but Nitti, for some reason, had wanted to make it look like he was. Five’ll get you ten Toni Cavaretta had planted that note in O’Hare’s topcoat pocket, in front of me, when she pretended to be looking for his keys. To bring O’Hare’s federal connection out in the open.

I didn’t mention any of this to Stege. It just wasn’t any of my business. At least it wasn’t any business that I wanted to be mine.

“You know what else he had on him?” Stege asked, smiling humorlessly. “A crucifix, a religious medallion and a rosary.”

“Sounds like he was getting his house in order.”

Stege shook his head, flicked cigar ash to the grass. “Here’s a guy who owns a yacht, who’s got an ocean villa, a four-hundred-acre farm, a house like a palace in Glencoe, and your occasional spare penthouse on the side. Who hangs around at the Illinois Athletic Club with the sporting crowd and the money boys. Who chums with judges and mayors and governors and respected people. Who says publicly he will have no truck with gangsters and yet he’s in bed with ’em and ends up this way.”

“Welcome to Chicago, Captain.”

He smiled again, just a little. Then it faded. His eyes became slits. “Were you part of this, Heller?’

“No.”

“I’d like to believe you.”

“Go right ahead and believe me, then.”

“Would you like a ride back to your office?”

“Please.”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “You can catch the El at Western and Eighteenth.”

I did.

It was after six when I got back to the office, and everybody was gone for the day. I found a stack of memos Gladys had left on my desk, all of them calls that had come in in the late afternoon, in the aftermath of the O’Hare shooting, from reporters wanting a statement. I made a big wad out of them and dropped it in the circular file. Then I fished my keys out of my pocket and unlocked the bottom left-hand drawer of my desk and got out the automatic, the nine-millimeter Browning I’d had since my police days, all tangled up in its shoulder holster. I untangled the gun, took it out of the holster, put it on the desk; then I got out of my topcoat, slipped off my suitcoat, slung on the holster, sat and cleaned and oiled the gun like O’Hare had before me, an irony not lost on me I assure you, loaded it, stood, put on my suitcoat, put on my topcoat, slid the gun not under my arm but into my deep right-hand topcoat pocket, keeping my hand on the gun, rose from my desk and locked up and left.

It was dark now. A cold, nearly freezing rain was spitting at me; I kept my hand in my pocket gripping the gun. I felt tired-the evening may have been young, but the day and I felt old. Cutting down Plymouth, I thought for a moment about stopping in at Binyon’s, a favorite restaurant of mine that fortune had put just around the corner from my office. I was hungry enough, despite what I’d witnessed; being close to death doesn’t necessarily kill your appetite-matter of fact, it can make you appreciate life all the more, including such simple, taken-for-granted pleasures as good eats.

Instead I walked on to the Morrison, going in the main entrance on Madison, through the plush lobby with its high ceiling and inlaid marble and dark wood and overstuffed furniture and potted plants. To the left was a bank of elevators, but I stopped first at the marble-and-bronze check-in desk.

“Any messages?” I asked the assistant manager, a pockmarked young man named Williams, whose neatly tended slick black hair and tiny mustache complemented his pointlessly superior attitude.

“That’s an understatement,” he said, with more disgust than humor. He turned to his wall of boxes and withdrew a fat handful of notes; I glanced at them-phone messages from reporters. Davis of the Daily News had called half a dozen times, alone. Some journalistic joker, frustrated in not reaching me it would seem, had left the name Westbrook Pegler. Very funny. Pegler, of course, was a star columnist for Hearst, and hadn’t worked the Chicago beat in years.

I pushed the stack back at Williams, said, “Toss those for me, would you?”

His tiny mustache twitched with momentary displeasure, but he did it.

“And hold all my calls,” I said. “Unless it’s somebody from my office-that would be my secretary or my two operatives.”

He jotted their names down; at least he was efficient. Then he smirked at me. “I suppose you realize you have a guest.”

“A guest?”

“Yes,” he said, a little surprised that I was surprised. “An attractive woman. She said she was a friend and I gave her a key.”

My right hand was still in my pocket, gripping the automatic; with my left I pointed a finger at him like a gun, almost touching his nose. His eyes involuntarily crossed for a moment, trying to focus on the finger.

“Never do that,” I said.

“Well, I’m sorry… I just assumed…”

“Never let anybody in my room. Never give anybody my key.”

“She’s a very attractive woman, Mr. Heller. She said she was a friend, a close friend.”

“Never do that. Never let anybody in my room. Never give anybody my key.”

I was still pointing the finger at him.

He swallowed, his mouth obviously gone dry on him. “I assure you it will never happen again.”

“Good.”

I got on the nearest elevator; I wasn’t alone: in addition to the red-uniformed operator, there was a mustached midget in a gaudy yellow suit. The little man was smoking a big cigar and reading Variety. He got off on the fourteenth floor, and, when he was gone, the operator, a Swedish kid, said, “He’s a World’s Fair midget.” And I said, “What?” And the operator said, “He’s a World’s Fair midget. We have a troop of forty-five of them visiting from the New York World’s Fair. Appearing in town someplace.” I said, “Oh.”

He took me up to the tower. The Morrison was the tallest hotel in the city, its main building twenty-one stories high, a nineteen-story tower sitting on top of that. My suite (which is to say my apartment) number was 2324. The operator let me off at the twenty-third floor and I walked toward a room that almost certainly had an uninvited somebody waiting inside for me.

Probably not the attractive woman, though. Who wasn’t my girlfriend, or even a girlfriend, because I hadn’t been seeing anybody lately. Most probably this dish was sent to con a key out of the clerk, said key then being turned over to a male accomplice or accomplices with a gun or guns. And that’s who’d be waiting for me inside my room.

So, the Outfit considered me a stray thread from this afternoon; well, I didn’t feel like getting picked off.

I could have called the cops, or the house dick, but fuck it, I was a cop, I was a dick, and I had a gun and this was my apartment and the goddamn Outfit, goddamn Nitti who was supposed to have all this respect for me, had very nearly killed me this afternoon. If I hadn’t hopped out of that car, I’d be as dead as O’Hare right now. Deader.

So I got out my keys and I got out my gun and I worked the key in the door and when I swung it open, I was down low, lower to the ground than that goddamn midget, and I was pointing the gun directly into the sitting room of my small suite, where Sally Rand was sitting on my couch reading Collier’s.

Sally had the biggest blue eyes in creation, but they were bigger right now than I’d ever seen them; she had her long light blond hair back in a bun and was wearing a light blue blouse and a darker blue skirt and silk stockings and she’d kicked off her heels and made herself at home, already.

I hadn’t seen her in over five years.

“Some greeting, Heller,” she said.

I let out a major sigh. Stood and shut the door behind me and latched it and tossed my gun, lightly, on an easy chair nearby.

“I had kind of a rough day,” I said, slipping out of the topcoat, tossing it on another chair. The room we were in wasn’t large, though there was a kitchenette at the far end by a window overlooking North Clark Street; the walls were papered in yellow and tan stripes, like a faded tiger. There was a console radio, a servidor, a standing bookcase.

And Sally.

She wasn’t a large woman, and, as I stood before her, she looked almost like a child sitting there, a child who’d tried to please and now was afraid of being scolded.

“I didn’t think you’d mind,” she said. “I flirted with the desk clerk and he gave me a key.”

“That answers a mystery I hadn’t been able to solve,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Whether that guy likes girls or not.”

She smiled, now, her wide, unabashed smile, and she stood slowly, smoothing her dress, shoulders back so that I could see how nice her body still was, as if there was any doubt, and she said, “Why don’t you kiss me?”

“Why don’t I?” I said.

And I took her in my arms.

She was such a sweet fit, in my arms, Sally was. She was a sweet fit elsewhere, as well.

But that had been a long time ago, and the spontaneous kiss at first reminded us how well we’d known each other once but by the time we broke our clinch we remembered how very long it had been, and then it was awkward, then we were sitting next to each other wondering what to say next.

I broke the ice. “What in hell are you doing here?”

“You’re such a sweet talker, Heller.”

“I’m known for my smooth line with the ladies. It’s great to see you again. It’s wonderful. That goes without saying.”

“No it doesn’t. Say it.”

“It’s great to see you again. It’s wonderful.”

“That’s better.” She leaned over and up and kissed me again, softly, briefly. But comfortably.

“It’s been over five years, Helen.”

Her smile turned into something sad. “It must be,” she said. “Because it’s been at least that long since anybody called me Helen.”

She’d been born Helen Beck; when I’d met her, in the summer of ’34, when she hired me to check up on a would-be suitor, I’d taken to calling her by her real name, at least some of the time. In bed, for example.

She laughed a little. Not much humor in it. “Even my mother calls me ‘Sally’ now.”

“Well, you’re a famous girl.”

“I’m not really a girl, anymore.”

“You could’ve fooled me.”

“I’m a woman past thirty, Heller. Never mind how far past thirty.”

“Yeah, you’re a wreck all right.”

Now the smile went crinkly. “Stop it, you. I’m…well preserved; it’s my job to be. But I do have a few miles on me.”

“Don’t we all.”

She did look her age, though, close up at least; I was sure with makeup and lighting, on stage, from a distance, she still looked like the Sally Rand who was the hit of the Chicago World’s Fair in the summer of ’33 (with her fan dance) and ’34 as well (with her bubble dance). She was still a top box-office draw, although she hadn’t played Chicago in some time.

Anyway, she looked her age, but a beautiful woman of, say, thirty-five who looks thirty-five is hardly over the hill. In fact, one of the oddities about being in my thirties myself was that women about my age seemed more attractive to me now than the sweet young things.

“Why the gun?” she asked, a little concerned, nodding over at the automatic that was sitting on the chair.

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“I like long stories.”

I told her about O’Hare. Unlike my report to Stege, I told her everything. The summer I’d spent with her had been a rough one-I’d been involved in the Dillinger case up to my ass, and she’d seen some of the rough stuff go down, or anyway saw the aftermath of the rough stuff, and had taken it in stride. She was a tough cookie, Sally, without being hard; and she was a good sounding board, had helped me figure some things out. She was smarter than me, I’d discovered. Probably still was.

“Frank Nitti,” she said, shaking her head. “After all this time. You told me you intended to steer clear of him, for once and forever.”

I shrugged. “It’s his town. In my line, I’m bound to bump up against his interests from time to time.”

“He almost bumped up against you, this time.”

“You’re telling me. He told me he owed me one, once. Maybe he forgot the debt.” I thought back. “Or maybe he remembered I forgave it without exacting payment.”

The wide eyes narrowed. “You thought Nitti might have sent someone here, to your hotel suite, to…?”

Another shrug. “Definite possibility.”

“Why?” she said, indignantly. “What did you do?”

“I spent time alone with O’Hare just before he died. They may think he told me something damaging, something I could carry to the cops or the papers.”

“You talked to Captain Stege already, didn’t you? And told him nothing?”

“Yeah. And Tubbo Gilbert will see Stege’s report, and Tubbo will tell the Outfit that I either don’t know anything, or chose to keep my mouth shut And the morning papers will show I haven’t talked to the press. So if I can just last the night, I may be all right.”

She slipped tier arm in mine; sat very close to me. “We’ll just stay inside your cozy little place, then, just you and me. Have you had supper?”

“No.”

“I checked your Frigidaire. All you have is eggs and beer and half a loaf of bread. Is there an all-night grocery I could slip out to, and…”

“You know what I’d like. Helen? One of those breakfasts you used to make me. Nobody makes an omelet better than Sally Rand.”

“You’re right. It’s not exactly what I’m famous for, but you’re right.”

Soon she was serving me half of a big fluffy omelet, serving herself the other half-like the Kingfish says on “Amos n’ Andy,” she even gave me the “bigges’” half; she also toasted up some bread and managed to round up some butter somewhere. We drank beer out of glasses. Real elegant like.

We were midway through the meal when I finally asked her again.

“Helen, what the hell are you doing here? I saw your bags near the bedroom door as I came in.”

She ate some eggs. Between bites, blandly, she said, “I’m bankrupt.”

“What?”

“I’ve gone bankrupt. It’ll be in the papers soon enough.”

“That’s crazy. You’re one of the top nightclub draws in the country!”

She nodded. “Right after Sophie Tucker and Harry Richman. And nobody can touch me in vaudeville and the picture houses.”

“So what happened?”

She cocked her head; it was a shrug of sorts, but her expression was reflective, the big blue eyes searching. “Got too big for my britches, I guess.”

“Helen, you don’t wear any britches in your business.”

Now her smile was wistful. “You should’ve taken me up on my offer that time, and been my business partner. You’re more conservative than I am. You’d have stopped me.”

“Stopped you from what?”

“Overdoing. Maybe you heard, I put together a thing called Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch. We played the San Diego and Forth Worth fairs. Set record gates at both. Then for this San Francisco Exposition-which is trying to compete with the New York World’s Fair, you know-I went all out. Top-flight costumes, lighting, scenery, the works. Built and paid for my own buildings to house the show. Hired forty girls. Overextended myself.”

“It could happen to anyone.”

She shook her head. “Never thought it would happen to me. I have the reputation of being a savvy businesswoman, you know. Me and my shows have generated over three million bucks’ worth of business, the past six years, starting with the Century of Progress. I was making forty-five hundred a week, not so long ago.”

Her weekly wage was a yearly wage many men would’ve killed for. And here she was broke.

We’d finished eating now, but we stayed at the table. City lights winked at us through the adjacent window. She pushed the plates aside and reached out and held my hands in hers. “I had to let my girls go,” she said, as if apologizing to them through me. “I have to start over, as a single. The natural place to do that is Chicago, I got the right connections, I could find a top club easy enough. But I couldn’t even afford a room while I went about it.”

“So you thought of me.”

“I thought of you. Oh, I had a room lined up with a girl who used to be in my chorus line at the City of Paris, but it fell through ’cause she suddenly shacked up with some guy. Which recalled that summer when you were sleeping in a Murphy bed in your office, and how on so many nights you slept with me instead in my soft round bed in that fancy-ass suite at the Drake. I thought maybe you’d return me the favor.”

I nodded toward the small sitting room. “This isn’t exactly your suite at the Drake.”

“No, but it’ll do quite nicely, thanks. You do seem to be doing well, Nate. Business is good?”

“It’s good. I don’t make forty-five hundred a week for dancing in my nothin’ at all, but…”

“Neither do I, at the moment. And maybe I won’t be able to. I wasn’t appearing with the revue, you know.”

“Sally Rand herself wasn’t in Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch?”

“No. I staged and directed and, obviously, financed the show. But I wasn’t in it. I’m getting older.”

“You’re afraid you won’t be able to make a comeback, huh?”

“A little.”

“You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think you’ll still be strutting around in your birthday suit when I’m in the old-age home. Looking good, and getting paid the same way.”

“You’re sweet. You never married, Nate?”

“Not yet. I’ve had a few close calls.”

Her smile was tinged with sadness again. “Like me, for instance?”

“Like you, for instance. You aren’t married, are you, Sally?”

“Other than to my work? No. And I wish you’d keep calling me Helen.”

“I think I can manage that.”

Somebody knocked at the door.

“Get on the floor,” I told her.

“Don’t be silly.”

“Do it! Get under that table.”

She made a face but she did it.

I got up and got the automatic and unlatched the door and, standing to one side of it, reached over and flung it open.

And shoved my gun right in the chest of a short but massive man in a brown suit and hat; the eyes in the lumpy face were dark and cold and unimpressed. He had an envelope in his hand, and, while I sensed he might be playing messenger, he sure wasn’t Western Union.

I was pointing my automatic at Louis “Little New York” Campagna. Frank Nitti’s right-hand man. A powerful man in every sense of the word-a killer who had moved up the ranks into management in the business of crime.

I backed off, but my gun was still pointed at him.

“That’s something you don’t want to do,” he said, pointing a finger at me gently. His finger seemed far more menacing than my gun.

I lowered the gun but kept it in hand. I did not ask him in.

I said, “I was almost killed today.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here.” He handed me the envelope.

I took it; I peeked out into the hall, to see if he was alone. He seemed to be.

“Put the rod away,” he said, “and look in the envelope.”

I let some air out. I stuck the gun in my waistband and looked in the unsealed envelope. Ten fifty-dollar bills. Five hundred dollars.

“Is this what Nitti thinks my life’s worth?” I said. Anger made my voice tremble. Fear, too.

“No,” he said. “Who could put a price on a life?”

“Some people do it everyday.”

He lifted his shoulders and set them down again. “Some people put a price on death. That’s different.”

Now I was arguing semantics with Little New York Campagna. Well, it’s an interesting life.

“Frank would like to thank you for showing such good sense,” he said, “where the cops was concerned.”

Tubbo had acted fast.

“And if you could keep your story simple for the papers, Frank would be grateful. Can you manage that?”

He touched his hat by way of bidding me good-bye and started off.

I stepped out into the hall. “Don’t you want my answer?” I said.

Stupid question.

Campagna turned back and smiled at me; it was like a crack in a stone wall. “I got your answer. I got your number, too, Heller.” He turned and walked away. Then he turned back and, almost reluctantly, said, “Uh, Frank said to say he’s pleased you are still amongst us.”

“Well. Thank Frank for his concern.”

“Sure. Beats being dead, don’t it?”

And then he was gone.

I shut the door, latched it, put the gun back on the chair. Seemed as good a place as any.

Sally crawled out from under the table, straightening her clothes. “Sounds like you’re going to be okay, where the boys are concerned.”

“Sounds like,” I nodded, tentatively. “Campagna isn’t an errand boy, anymore. Sending him was a gesture from Nitti of how serious he takes this.”

“Is that a good sign or bad?”

“You got me. Look, Sally. Helen. You’re welcome to stay. You’re most very welcome to stay. But there’s no, uh, rent here. No strings. No obligations. By which I mean to say, you’re welcome to my bed and I’ll sleep out here on the couch.”

“Shut up,” she said, and began unbuttoning her blouse.

I didn’t make it into the office the next morning till almost ten-thirty. We’d had another breakfast, Sally and I, and I don’t mean anything racy by that: simply that I bought her some breakfast, this time, in the Morrison’s coffee shop. And we sat drinking orange juice and putting pancakes away and then cup upon cup of coffee as we filled each other in on our lives for the past five years. Then she noticed the time and remembered she had an eleven o’clock appointment with the manager of the Brown Derby and was off.

And I walked to the office, where Gladys greeted me, if “greeted” is the word, with a disgusted expression and a hand outthrust with another stack of memos.

“Reporters,” I asked, only it wasn’t really a question.

“Reporters,” she said. She had on a pale blue blouse and a navy skirt with a wide black patent leather belt and was everything a man could want in a woman except friendly. “Do you realize Westbrook Pegler’s been trying to call you?”

“Yeah, right,” I said. I went on through to my office.

I was sitting behind the desk, glancing at some insurance adjusting reports that Gladys had typed neatly up, when herself was standing in the doorway-never leaning, that wasn’t her style-and saying, “He really has been calling. Three times already today.”

“Who?”

“Westbrook Pegler! The columnist!”

“Gladys, my dear, you’re mistaken-you’ve apparently never read him. Pegler’s no Red.”

She did a slow burn. “I said columnist, not communist.”

I kept trolling for a sense of humor with the girl and coming up old rubber tires.

“My dear,” I started again, and she reminded me humorlessly that she wasn’t my dear. She reminded me further that she preferred “Miss Andrews,” to which I replied, “Gladys-that’s Hal Davis of the Daily News calling, needling me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Why would Westbrook Pegler be in Chicago, for Christ’s sakes, and if he was, why would he be calling about some Chicago racetrack tycoon getting pushed?”

“Pushed?”

She hadn’t been affiliated with the detective business long.

“Killed,” I explained. “Shot. Rubbed out. Liquidated. Mob style.”

“If you say so,” she said, disinterested but lingering.

“Shoo. Go file.”

“Yes, Mr. Heller.”

God, what I wouldn’t have given for even some sarcasm out of that kid. She was cute as lace panties but not nearly so much fun.

A client kept an eleven o’clock appointment, the office manager from the Swift Plant; he was white collar, but he brought the fragrance of the stockyards with him. He had a recurring pilferage problem-desks, lockers, cabinets forced open, pocketbooks gotten into. I explained how we could plant valuable articles in obvious places, as decoys to invite theft, articles to which thief-branding dyes would be applied. I was explaining how I preferred dry dyes of the sort that didn’t immediately stain, but that perspiration would soon bring out, when Gladys leaned in and interrupted.

“He’s here.”

It wasn’t like her to interrupt; most unbusinesslike.

“Who?” I said.

“Mr. Pegler.”

I shook my head, smiled; Gladys hadn’t met Davis yet. “Tell him to go to hell.”

“I will not.”

“Then tell him it’ll cost him a C-note if he wants a quote. That’ll get rid of him.”

She pursed her lips; she wasn’t blowing me a kiss. “What is a C-note?”

“A hundred dollars. Go.”

She went.

“Excuse me,” I said to my client. “Where were we?”

“Dry dyes,” the stockyard office manager said, looking bewildered.

The door flew open and I could hear Gladys saying, “Please,” and a big red-faced man was in the doorway. I yanked the automatic out from under my arm and yelled, “Up with ’em!”

Gladys screamed, the office manager dropped to the floor and the big man’s face whitened. He swallowed, thickly. He was very well dressed; double-breasted gray pinstripe suit with stylish wide lapels, a flourish of a hanky in his breast pocket, a wide, thick-knotted, dark blue tie patterned with white abstract shapes. He put his hands slowly in the air, narrowing his eyes, which hid under shaggy, cultivated-to-points satanic eyebrows.

“Put that ridiculous thing away,” he said. The words were strong, but the tenor voice had something of a quaver. The voice wasn’t as big as the man, that’s all there was to it.

I came around the desk, saying, “Just keep ’em up,” and patted him down. He stood for the frisk, but scowled all the while. He had on heavy, masculine lotion; pine needles.

He was clean. Which is to say no weapon, but also well tailored and freshly bathed. This guy had money and I didn’t think it came from the rackets. Not of the Nitti variety, anyway.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked, lowering the gun but not putting it away.

“Who the hell do you think? Westbrook Pegler!”

“Oh.” Now I was swallowing. “I’ll be damned if I don’t think you are.” I turned to the stockyards office manager who was crouching on the floor, looking up like a big bug. “We about had our business taken care of, didn’t we, Mr. Mertz?”

He got up, brushing himself off, said, “Yes,” and I told him my secretary would call him and set up an on-site meeting with one of my operatives as he scurried out. I closed the door on Gladys’s pretty, glowering face.

“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Pegler?”

“I’m not sure I’m staying. I’m not delighted with having guns pointed at me.”

“But then, who is? Please,” I said, smiling nervously, pulling up a chair for him.

He cleared his throat, in a grumbling manner, and sat and I got behind the desk. Slipped the gun away, under my shoulder, feeling embarrassed and trigger-happy.

“Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

“Not at all.”

He took a gold, FWP-emblazoned case from his inside suitcoat pocket and a cigarette from the case and lit it up and I pushed the ashtray his way, saying, “This wasn’t a story I expected someone of your stature to be interested in covering.”

“What story is that?”

“The O’Hare shooting.”

“Oh. Afraid I just glanced at the headlines, this morning; he was a racetrack promoter, wasn’t he? Why, were you involved in that?”

“If I might explain,” I said, and briefly I told him about yesterday’s incident, and my fears about mob retaliation and my reluctance to talk to any newshound.

“I didn’t believe for a minute that Westbrook Pegler had called me,” I said.

“Admittedly Chicago isn’t my beat,” he granted. “But they do carry my column here.”

That they did. I often read Pegler, who was basically one of those journalistic attack dogs who latched onto whichever side of an issue grabbed him by the seat of the pants. He was the king of the “meatball” journalists, always on whichever side was the most entertaining and/or controversial, the side most likely to get the loudest cheers, or boos, from the grandstand. You couldn’t peg Pegler for the left or the right, politically; one day he was praising a lynch party for ridding the world of a killer, and the next he was bemoaning poverty in the slums. Champion of the underdog, on Monday, he might be defender of the rich, on Tuesday.

“Do you know a man named Willie Bioff?” he asked.

Willie Bioff? Why in hell would Westbrook Pegler be asking about that fat little creep?

“I used to,” I said.

“What do you know of him?”

I shrugged. “He used to be a pimp. He was a union slugger, too. He’s still involved in union organizing, isn’t he?”

“That’s an understatement. Ostensibly, he’s the bodyguard of a man named George Browne. In reality, he runs…” And here he paused, in order to spit each of the following words out like distasteful seeds: “…the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.”

“The Stagehands Union,” I nodded. “Yeah, I know Browne. He’s a drunk, and a blowhard. But when you prop him up he can make a speech and get the rank and file stirred up. He’s got patriotism and mom and apple pie and ten other kinds of baloney, for any occasion.”

“But you see him as a figurehead.”

“Yeah, sure. Bioff’s been the brains behind Browne for a long, long time. They say Browne drinks a hundred bottles of beer a day. He better have somebody’s brains behind him.”

Pegler drew on the cigarette; smiled a little. Just being polite, I thought. He said, “I met…or rather, encountered Willie Bioff once, many years ago. 1913, I’d say. That was the last time I worked a Chicago beat steadily. My father was the star rewrite man for the American, at the time, and they took me on as a favor to him.”

“You must’ve just been a kid.”

“Seventeen,” he said, his elaborate shrug not masking his pride. “And working for the United Press at the same time. I may live in the East, Mr. Heller, but I’m of the Chicago school of journalism. The New York school represents…” And these words, too, were distasteful seeds to spit. “…ethics and manners. Reporters on rival papers actually cooperated with each other in gathering facts when working on the same story.” The thought of it was beyond him, and he smiled as he described the Chicago school: “We, on the other hand, sanctioned the commission of any crime short of burglary in pursuit of an exclusive, and wouldn’t’ve helped a rival reporter if he was bleeding in the street. Ha! We fought and tricked and, to be honest about it, hated each other.”

He seemed lost in nostalgia; what this had to do with Willie Bioff or George Browne, or Nathan Heller, for that matter, was lost on me.

Then he answered my unasked question: “I saw Bioff when I was covering the police stations and police courts. I did a little bit of everything in those days-chased fires, took pictures, held down City Hall on weekends, where I lost at poker to the likes of Ben Hecht and Jake Lingle. The Harrison Street police court was perhaps the most eye-opening of my experiences…”

It would have been. West Harrison Street gave its name to a precinct that included one of the most depressed sections of the city, immigrants and colored and Chinese seeking the dream of America and finding the reality of tenements. And a red-light district second to none, the prostitutes a dreary rainbow of races and colors.

“The court enjoyed a steady diet of stabbings, shootings and sluggings,” Pegler said, pretending disgust at a memory he relished. “Judge Hopkins would get bored with the violence, and would shout, ‘Bailiff, bring me in some whores!’ The judge enjoyed badinage with the girls; he loved it when a girl would say she hadn’t the wherewithal to pay his five-dollar fine. ‘Oh, I think you do, dearie,’ he’d say, and give her time to earn the money. But he wasn’t a bad judge, just the same. It was a grim atmosphere, and gallows humor, especially from a judge, was to be expected. Winos, ginsoaks, stewbums, hopheads and lesser delinquents were a constant parade before the bench. And the ever-present ladies of the evening.”

“And where there are whores,” I said, “there are pimps.”

He smiled, not just being polite now, showing some teeth this time. “You anticipate me. I like that. Yes, it was in one of the police courts-Harrison Street, perhaps, though my memory isn’t exact on that account-that I first saw young Willie Bioff. It made an impression on me, barely eighteen myself, seeing a panderer who was younger than me, years younger. The judge asked him his age and he said, ‘Thirteen,’ proudly. He was fined and released. But I remembered him.”

“Why?”

“As I said, his age. Younger than me, but eons older. The street had done it to him, the liberals would say, and perhaps they’re right to a point. But even at his age he had a gleefulness about who he was and what he did. And cold, piglike eyes that bore no human compassion.”

“You had this impression just from a court appearance you were routinely covering?”

He shrugged facially; the bushy eyebrows danced. “Well, I saw Bioff again, a few months later. His name had stuck with me; I’m a literary man myself, after all, and the Dickensian name, ‘buy off,’ made its mark on my memory. Have you ever heard of the old Arsonia Cafe?”

“Bit before my time, but wasn’t that Mike Fritzel’s saloon?”

Nodding, the memory obviously a fond one, Pegler said, “Yes, back before the Great War, and a wild place it was. Fritzel’s gal Gilda Gray would allow herself to be hoisted up onto the bar for an impromptu performance of her well-known shimmy.”

Judging from the gleam in his eyes, the shimmy had made its mark on his memory as well.

“At any rate,” he continued, putting out his cigarette, getting the gold case back out again, “we reporters would occasionally congregate at the Arsonia, which was frequented by prostitutes and their panderers, and other denizens of the night.”

“And that’s where you saw Bioff again.”

“Precisely. Like any good reporter, I observed these creatures closely-it was an education of sorts for a lad like myself. I happened to spot Bioff, the teenage pimp, wearing a silk shirt, talking with some older examples of his ilk; there he stood, gesturing with his mug of beer, its contents sloshing onto the floor as he bragged.” This memory seemed anything but a fond one, but it was vividly recalled: “I assumed a spot at the bar nearby, and soon discovered Bioff was regaling his fellow panderers with his technique for ‘keeping his girls in line.’ Do you have a strong stomach, Mr. Heller?”

“I’ve lived in Chicago all my life, Mr. Pegler.”

“Sound answer. Here, more or less, is what I heard him say: ‘If you slug a girl half silly and then tie her down, you can stuff her…’” He paused, shook his head. “‘…her cunt with powdered ice. They tell me it’s so cold in there it feels like fire. You got to gag the girl, she screams so loud, but you don’t really hurt her permanent. But after ten minutes of that, she will get down on her knees to you any time you say the word ice.’”

He lighted a new cigarette; his hand was shaking. I didn’t blame him. It was an ugly story.

“You have a memory any reporter would envy you for, Mr. Pegler.”

“Is it any wonder I remember it?” he said, a bit defensively. “I was an impressionable lad of eighteen, and I was hearing detailed and horrid descriptions of sexual perversion from a boy four or five years my junior. A boy whose polished nails caught the light, shining his financial success in my ten-dollar-a-week face. Is it any wonder I viewed it as an insult?”

I didn’t point out that Pegler had in fact been eavesdropping, that Bioff hadn’t intended to impress anybody but his fellow pimps. Still, I could see this man, as a boy, taking it as an insult.

“I saw him again, years later, in another bar,” Pegler continued, “on the North Side. He looked familiar, and I asked my drinking companion if he knew the fat, dapper little man, and my friend said, ‘Why, that’s Willie Bioff-the union slugger and pimp.’”

“And of course the name rang a bell. When was this?”

“Nineteen twenty-seven, perhaps,” he said. “I didn’t know you were in Chicago then.”

“I didn’t live here. I was working for the Tribune Syndicate, however, and touched bases often. Working a sports beat, traveling all over. Got here quite often.”

“I see.”

“Let me bring you up to date,” he said, sitting forward. “If you’ve indeed read my columns, you must know that I’ve waged something of a war against the crooked unions.”

“Yeah.”

He was getting wound up, his eyes staring, not looking at me, as he said, “The newspaper guild soured me on unionism once and for all, you see; it was a hotbed of Reds, and as for the AFL, that great, arrogant, corrupt, hypocritical, parasitic racket, well, I…”

“I’ve read your column,” I said. He was starting to irritate me, now. My father was an old union man, he gave his heart and soul to the movement, and while Pegler’s opinions weren’t entirely baseless, they still rubbed me the wrong way.

He sensed it. “Let me stress that the idea of unionism is something I can admire; what it is rapidly degenerating into is something I can only abhor.”

“Understood.”

“At any rate. I usually make two or three cross-country jaunts each year, looking for material for my column. I think of myself as a reporter, and while I’m paid handsomely to air my opinions, those opinions mustn’t be formed in a vacuum. I need to get out and be a newspaperman from time to time. Last week I was in Los Angeles, that modern Babylon, and I found a real story.” He drew on the cigarette, relishing the moment. “I was at a party given by Joe Schenck, the Twentieth Century-Fox film executive. Across a wide room, filled with Hollywood stars and directors and producers, with all the fancy trimmings, cocktails and caviar, I spied a familiar face.”

“Bioff?”

Pegler nodded, smugly. “Oh, he was older than a teenager, now, by some distance. As was I. But that fat round smiling face was the same, and, as I drew nearer, the hard little pig’s eyes, behind wire-rim glasses now, were as cold and inhuman as ever. Oh, he was handsomely turned out, in the Hollywood style, double-breasted pinstripe suit, a handkerchief with a monogram, WB.”

Except for the initials, Pegler might have been describing his own wardrobe.

“I asked my host if that man’s name wasn’t Bioff,” Pegler said, “and he replied, ‘Yes it is-that’s one of our most illustrious citizens. Would you like to be introduced to him?’ I said I wouldn’t shake hands with Willie Bioff if I were wearing gloves.”

“I wasn’t aware Bioff was in Hollywood; I didn’t know what became of him, frankly.” I shrugged. “I guess I assumed he was still involved with Browne and the Stagehands Union. Browne moved his office to the East Coast years ago.”

A humorless smile made a slant on Pegler’s fleshy face. “Well, it’s in Hollywood, now, and has been since 1935. I did some checking. I talked to Arthur Unger, the editor of the Daily Variety, and he informed me that the Stagehands Union now controls some twenty-seven different unions. Browne, or in reality Bioff, controls not just the stagehands and the movie projectionists, but ushers, treasurers, porters and hatcheck concessionaires in legitimate theaters coast to coast, and movie studio mechanics, sound technicians, laboratory technicians, virtually everyone involved in the manufacturing end of the film industry. A hundred and seventy-five thousand dues-paying members.”

“That’s a lot of power for our fat little former pimp.”

“It is indeed.” He straightened up in his chair and smiled tightly, smugly. “Mr. Heller, I intend to expose Willie Bioff for the panderer he is.”

“That should be easy. He’s been arrested enough times.”

“Yes, but has he been convicted?”

“At least once that I know of.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I was the arresting officer,” I said.

He smiled. “That was a rumor we heard, but we’ve not been able to verify it.”

So that’s how my name got picked out of the hat to be the dick Pegler pegged for his legwork.

“I’m not sure I want to be involved in this,” I said. “I hear Browne is tied in with Nicky Dean, and Dean’s an Outfit man. If this is an Outfit operation, my future health precludes my involvement.”

“You don’t need to decide this instant. Have you ever been to California?”

“No.”

He reached in his inside pocket and produced an envelope, which he handed to me.

I took it.

“Look inside,” he prompted.

I did. Two one-hundred-dollar bills and an airline ticket.

“Your flight to Hollywood leaves at six-twenty this evening,” he said.

Train travel I was used to; plane travel was something new, and a little frightening. Truth be told, I slept through a lot of it. Twenty-five other hearty souls and I sat within the DC-3 “Flagship,” a noisy, rattling projectile that churned through the night sky like a big kitchen mixer. The businessman I sat next to actually read Fortune magazine, as if this sort of travel was an everyday thing to him. Maybe it was. We spoke a few polite words, but, sitting over the wing, fighting the sound of the propellers, there just wasn’t much to be said. I was relieved when the thing sat down in Dallas, sometime after one o’clock in the morning, and was surprised to find I could make my stomach accept a little something in the airport cafeteria, where oddly enough the people working had Southern accents. Within an hour I was on a sleeper plane, within which two facing seats in a sort of train-type compartment were converted to a berth by a good-looking blonde woman in a vaguely military outfit, a “stewardess” she was called, who then shut the curtains and I got awkwardly undressed, hanging my clothes in the netting provided, and slipped under cool sheets and I’ll be damned if the sound of the props and the up-and-down motion didn’t put me to sleep. Some hours later the stewardess woke me to let me know the airliner was landing-at Tucson, Arizona, which, unlike my present confusion, was a state I’d never been in. I dressed, and then helped her turn the berth back into two seats, into one of which I was strapped, and we landed. Another airport, another cafeteria. Soon I was sleeping again, in my pants atop the blankets this time, and before long it was eight o’clock in the morning in Los Angeles (ten o’clock in the real world, but never mind).

But this wasn’t the real world, it was Glendale, where I caught a cab, despite the six-mile ride I was in for. All expenses were paid on this little jaunt, after all; that was the deal: two hundred bucks, all expenses, no strings. I could enjoy the trip to sunny California, pocket the two C’s, and head back for the windy city, even should I refuse the job.

Which well I might, but I didn’t see how I could turn down this preliminary offer. Besides, I was going to meet a real-life movie star, unless that was a contradiction in terms.

“Where to?” the cabby said. He was a blond handsome kid of about twenty, who’d been sitting behind the wheel at the curb reading something called the Hollywood Reporter.

“One forty-four Monovale Drive,” I said.

“That’s in Beverly Hills,” he said, matter of factly.

“If you say so.”

I climbed out of my raincoat, folding it up and easing it into my overnight bag; anticipating warmer weather here, I’d taken the lighter coat, but was already warm in spite of it. The sun was bright in a blue sky, bouncing off the asphalt, slicing between the fronds of palm trees. This was California, all right.

“What street is this?” I asked, after a while. This seemed to be a central business and amusement district-shops, movie houses, office buildings, some of the latter approaching skyscraper stature (if not Loop skyscraper stature).

“The Boulevard,” he said. He wasn’t friendly; he wasn’t unfriendly.

“Hollywood Boulevard?”

“Right.”

I’d thought people might sleep till noon out here, but I was wrong. Either side of the Boulevard was busy with folks sauntering along looking at each other and themselves, reflected in the shop windows, where fancy displays showed manikins wearing expensively informal clothing, the latest polo shirts and sport jackets for men, sporty blouses and slacks for women, earlier examples of which the window-watchers were already wearing, white their predominant color. A few years before, I’d been in Florida; this seemed much the same, and not just because of the sun and pastel art-deco look-the spirit here was similarly that odd combination of sophistication and naivete I’d noticed in Miami.

Not that I wasn’t impressed.

“That’s the Brown Derby,” I almost shouted, pointing over toward the east side of Vine Street, where a great big hat squatted. Chicago’s Brown Derby was just a building.

“Sure is,” the cabby said, blase.

Pretty soon he turned off on a side street, into an area of stores, taverns, small hotels, motor courts, drive-in markets, apartment houses. We passed green parkways, pepper trees, palms. A pastel rainbow of stucco bungalows, white, pink, yellow, blue, with tile roofs, often red.

Then we turned onto a major thoroughfare. “What’s this?”

“Sunset Boulevard.”

Soon, he condescended to inform me, we were on the “Strip”: he pointed out such movie-colony night spots as the Trocadero and Ciro’s and the Mocambo. Many buildings along the Strip were painted white with green shutters, housing various little shops with windows boasting antiques or couturiers or modistes and other French-sounding, expensive-sounding nonsense, and restaurants with Venetian blinds protecting patrons from the glare of sun and passersby.

Hollywood was every bit as strange a place as I’d expected. Later that day, in another cab, I’d pass a small independent movie studio where chaps in chaps and sunglasses and Stetsons, and girls in slacks and sunglasses and bright kerchiefs (protecting their permanent waves) were standing at a corner hot dog stand either flirting or talking shop or maybe a little of both. The hot dog stand, of course, looked like a great big hot dog. Giantism was big out here: fish and puppy and ice cream cone buildings, mingling with papier-mache castles. It was like the ’33 World’s Fair, but screwier. People ate in their cars.

Right now, however, I was in a cab winding its way through the rolling foothills of Beverly Hills, on which were mansions, luxuriating behind fences in the midst of obscene green lawns, two stories, three stories, white Spanish stucco, white English brick, yellow stucco, red brick, you name it. The rich north suburbs of Chicago had nothing on these babies.

“This is Robert Montgomery’s house,” the cabby said, breathlessly, pausing before entering onto the private drive.

“So what?” I said, unimpressed.

After all, what was it to me? Just another rambling two-story Colonial “farmhouse,” white frame and brick, surrounded by a rustic rock garden, perched on a hill against a horizon of more hills. Hell, there’s one of them on every third corner back in Chicago.

He took me up the winding drive, up the sloping lawn. Plenty of trees, too, and not a palm in sight. Clearly this Montgomery was a guy with dough who wasn’t afraid to spend it. Clearly, too, this was a guy who’d rather not be in Hollywood, to the point of reinventing the place into New England.

I got out of the cab and handed in a sawbuck to the guy, saying, “Keep it.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Do you know Robert Montgomery?”

“We’re like this,” I said, holding up crossed fingers.

“I’m an actor, too,” he said, earnestly.

“Aren’t we all,” I said, and turned my back on him and went up the sidewalk.

I knocked on the polished white door, and soon it swung open and a small, attractive woman in her thirties, with light brown hair and a fine smile, greeted me, smoothing her crisp print dress, blue on white, as she spoke.

“You’d be Mr. Heller,” she said.

I had my hat in my hands. All I could think of was I hadn’t brushed my teeth since that goddamn sixteen-hour plane ride.

“Yes I am,” I said, the soul of wit.

“I’m Mrs. Montgomery,” she said.

I hadn’t taken her for a servant.

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

She offered me her hand and I accepted it, a smooth, cool hand which I gently grasped rather than shook.

“Please step inside,” she said, taking my overnight bag (although I could use the toothbrush therein about now) and she stepped graciously aside and then I was in.

The hall was knotted pine, and the smell of pine was in the place too; it brought to mind Pegler’s aftershave, which was fitting I suppose, since Pegler brought me here. Mrs. Montgomery paused to gracefully point toward an elaborately framed picture that seemed a little out of place, amidst the otherwise early American trimmings of the place: a bunch of royal-looking dopes in a carriage.

“This picture is a special prize,” she said. “We were in England at the time of the Silver Jubilee, and this is a signed copy of the Jubilee picture. Painted by Munnings.”

“By Munnings. Really.”

“Yes. That’s Queen Mary and King George V on their way to Ascot. And there in the carriage are the Prince of Wales and his brother who became, of course, King Edward VIII and King George VI, respectively.”

“Of course.”

A stairway curved gently to the left; also opening to the left was the open-beamed dining room, where dark mahogany early American furniture was surrounded by wallpaper brightly depicting scenes from the Revolutionary War, redcoats and bluecoats cheerfully fighting. I guess I knew who Queen Mary and King George V would’ve rooted for. At a bay window, next to sheer ruffled curtains, sat a small oval table. At the small oval table sat Robert Montgomery. He was reading the Daily Variety, a cup of coffee before him.

“Mr. Heller’s here, Bob,” Mrs. Montgomery said, and Montgomery rose and smiled. It was the same urbane smile I’d seen in any number of light comedies; it was also the same urbane smile of the killer in Night Must Fall.

He was about my size, six foot, and weight, one-seventy, casually attired in white shirt and brown slacks; and, like me, was in his mid-thirties or so. His eyes were blue and his hair brown, and he wasn’t strikingly handsome, exactly-it was one of those faces that seemed soft and strong at once-but you knew you were in the presence of somebody.

We shook hands. He had a solid, strong grip, and his hands were not the smooth movie-star hands I’d expected; this man had, at some time in the not too distant past, worked a real job.

“Please join me,” he said, gesturing to the chair opposite him at the small oval table, and he sat down, and I sat down.

“We waited breakfast for you. Is French toast all right? Orange juice and coffee?”

“Sure. That’s very gracious of you.”

He folded the Variety and put it to one side of his place setting; only his coffee cup was before him-he really had waited to have breakfast till I got there.

“I knew what time you were getting in,” he said, shrugging, smiling just a little. “And I know what those flights are like. You’ve grabbed a random bite at this airport cafeteria and that one. And, despite sleeping on the trip, you’re very tired, aren’t you?”

I was. I hadn’t noticed it, really, but I was bone tired.

“I guess I am,” I said.

“Well, you can relax some, while you’re here. You’re to stay at least overnight. I’ve made reservations for you at the Roosevelt.”

“Yes, that was my understanding. Thank you.”

“Thanks for coming out here on such short notice.”

His wife brought the food in and served it; again, no servants, at least none in sight.

“It looks delicious,” I told her, and it did.

“Breakfast is usually a one-man affair at our house,” she said. “I’m sure Bob will appreciate the company.”

They smiled at each other, quite warmly, and she left. This was a civilized house, that was for sure. Of course with dough like this, they could afford to be civilized.

Well, the breakfast tasted as good as it looked, the orange juice everything fresh-squeezed California orange juice is supposed to be including pulpy, and we didn’t talk about the pending case, rather talked about my flight and other general small talk. At one point he asked me what I thought about FDR seeking a third term; and I said, I didn’t know it was official; and he said it wasn’t, but that it was going to happen; and I said, I’d probably vote for the guy again.

“I worked for him in ’33 and ’37,” he said, thoughtfully, seriously, “but it goes against my grain to support any president for a third term. We stop short of royalty in this country, thank God.”

Jubilee painting or not.

“I liked you in that movie where you played the killer,” I said.

He smiled, but it wasn’t the killer’s smile. “It was the role I liked best,” he admitted.

“You got an Academy Award nomination for that, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” He laughed to himself. “Do you know what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences really is?”

“Uh, not exactly, no.”

“A company union.” Now he smiled the killer’s smile. “A failed company union. You see, Louie B. Mayer wanted to fight any legitimate unionization of actors and directors. The Academy was to be the contract arbitrator between the studio and the guilds. You can imagine just how impartial that arbitration would be. Well, we put a stop to that.”

“That’s good.”

After breakfast he ushered me into the nearby “study,” which was bigger than my entire suite at the Morrison: fireplace, built-in shelves of leather-bound books, hunting prints on pine walls, tan leather furniture (none of it patched with tape, either). He settled at one end of an absurdly long leather couch and helped himself to the pipes and tobacco on a small round table before him. He nodded to an overstuffed leather chair opposite him and I sat down in it, and I mean down, in, it.

“Smoke, if you like,” he said, lighting up the pipe.

“I don’t smoke.”

“I thought all private eyes smoked.”

“Nope. And my secretary isn’t in love with me, either.”

That amused him. “So the Hollywood cliches don’t apply in real life, hmmm? Well, some do.”

“How’s that?”

“Let’s just say, Jimmy Cagney, Eddie Robinson, and George Raft seem to be drawing from life.”

Well, Raft, anyway.

“By that you mean,” I said, “there really are gangsters in this wicked old world.”

“Precisely. And in this wicked old Hollywood as well.”

“Pegler told me Willie Bioff has muscled into the unions out here. And that that’s what you wanted to talk to me about.”

He nodded sagely, puffing at the pipe, getting it going. “I’m one of the people who got SAG off the ground. A three-time past president.”

“SAG?”

“Screen Actors Guild. We aren’t under Bioff’s thumb-yet. He’s been making some moves in that direction. Now, I invoke Bioff’s name, but in fact the president of the IATSE is Browne.”

“But Browne’s just the figurehead.”

“Right. Do you know a man named Circella?”

“Uh, isn’t that Nicky Dean’s real last name?”

“Yes it is. He and Bioff and Browne are all but inseparable, out here.”

“That’s bad, Mr. Montgomery.”

“Bob.”

“Bob. And if you’d call me Nate, that’d be just swell, too, but I don’t think I’m going to take this job. I hate to have taken your money and your plane ride and breakfast and all, only to turn you down, but…”

“But what, Nate?”

“Nicky Dean is an Outfit man.”

“Syndicate, you mean. Crime Syndicate.”

“Yes. He’s one of Frank Nitti’s people. And I’m from Chicago. I live in Chicago. I work in Chicago. And I can’t do either of those things, particularly the first, if I get on Frank Nitti’s bad side. It’s his town.”

“So will this be, if something isn’t done.”

I started to rise. “That’s very noble, and I hope you can do something about it. I just ain’t going to be part of it.”

Patiently, he gestured for me to sit. “Hear me out.”

“Mr. Montgomery-”

“Bob. Hear me out. You came this far, after all.”

“Well. Yeah, I did come a distance. Okay. I’ll hear you out. But I’m afraid I’ll be wasting your time on top of your money.”

He sat forward, tapped his finger on a manila folder on the little table between us. “Bioff’s got one foot in the figurative grave already. Evidence gathered by an investigator, a former FBI man whom I hired with SAG’s approval, has already been turned over to the Treasury Department.” He pushed the folder toward me. “Those are your copies.”

I picked the folder up and looked in it. Photostats of letters on IATSE stationery from Browne and Bioff both; statements from disgruntled union members; nothing much. Except for one thing: a photostat of a check made out to Bioff for $100,000. Signed by Joe Schenck.

“Isn’t Schenck…?”

“Vice president of Twentieth Century-Fox,” Montgomery said, smiling like an urbane killer again.

“How did your investigator get this?”

He shrugged. “There are rumors of a break-in at the IA offices.”

“That’s illegal.”

“So is extortion.”

I flapped the folder at him. “Is that what you think Bioff’s doing? Extorting money out of the movie executives? Selling them strike-prevention insurance?”

He shrugged again, puffed at his pipe. “It would certainly be cheaper for the studios than paying their help what they’re worth.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking around. “It’s a tough life.”

He sat up straight; bristled. “Don’t judge Hollywood by these standards. I’m a lucky, lucky man. The rank-and-file union members in this town-in whose behalf Bioff and Browne are supposedly fighting-are average working joes and janes. They deserve better than being sold out.”

“But is that little pimp powerful enough to blackmail somebody like Schenck?”

Nodding forcefully, he said. “Or Thalberg or Mayer or Jack Warner or anybody else. Remember, Bioff has under his thumb the movie projectionists, who alone can shut down every theater in every major city in the country. And a few such dark days would deliver a blow to the industry that the studios couldn’t recover from.”

“If the Treasury Department has this evidence, they should be able to prosecute Bioff.”

“Perhaps. On income-tax evasion, which is fine, but I need to show Bioff for what he is. His drunkard friend Browne is a convincing public speaker; and conditions for workers were so wretched prior to unionization that Bioff and Browne can sell the working man out and he won’t even know it.”

“So you’d like to see Bioff smeared, to keep him and Browne and the union they represent from attracting any converts. Specifically, to keep the actors out from under their greasy thumb.”

“Yes. But ‘smear’ isn’t the word.” He pointed with the pipe. “Expose.”

“Yeah. That’s why you linked up with Pegler.”

“Certainly. He’s a yellow journalist; a muckraker. But that’s what’s called for in this situation.”

“You have Pegler. You don’t need me.”

“I need a good man in Chicago. So does Pegler.”

“You’ve already hired a private detective.”

“He’s an L.A. man. Nate, the SAG board authorized me to spend five thousand dollars to investigate Bioff. You see, I assured them if the investigation didn’t prove that Bioff is a very sour apple, I’d personally refund the five thousand.”

“Five grand, huh? Uh, how much have you spent so far?”

“Let’s just say I’m prepared to offer you a thousand-dollar retainer, on top of the two hundred dollars you’ve already received, plus expenses, and if your daily fee eats up the thousand, I can authorize you up to another thousand.”

My mouth felt dry. “That’s a lot of money.” It wasn’t the most money I’d been offered for a case this week, but then again, unlike Eddie O’Hare, Montgomery was alive.

Montgomery gestured with his pipe, quietly convincing; he could’ve sold Ford a Buick. “You are reputed to be street-smart, where Chicago and especially the Nitti Outfit are concerned. You would in this instance work essentially undercover. Just talk to people you know, find out what you can, and prepare a confidential report for me. You wouldn’t have to appear in court. Your name would never be revealed. But the information would be shared with federal agents, the SAG board and, possibly, probably, leaked to the press.”

“And my name wouldn’t be attached to any of it?”

“Well, with one exception. We understand you once arrested Willie Bioff.”

“That’s a matter of public record.”

“It is?”

“Sure. He was convicted of pandering. I was the arresting officer.”

Montgomery smiled. “So we heard. It’s nice to have it confirmed.”

“Where did you hear all this stuff about me? How the hell did you and Pegler get a line on me in the first place?”

“Is that important?”

“Ness! Damnit, of course. You’ve been talking to Treasury agents, and your private dick’s an ex-FBI man. You asked them for a reliable, Mob-savvy Chicago private cop, and they checked with somebody they knew who’d know that sort of thing about Chicago, which was Eliot, and Eliot mentioned me. My old friend Eliot probably remembered hearing me ranting and raving about how much I hated that little fat prick pimp Bioff, remembered me saying I arrested him once and passed that along to you!”

“Mr. Heller. You are a detective.”

“Mr. Montgomery. Goddamnit. You just hired one.”

A little after nine that evening, dressed to the nines in a rental tux Montgomery had sent around, I strolled out of the Roosevelt Hotel into a balmy breeze with a touch of ocean in it and climbed in a cab.

“Eighty-six ten Sunset Boulevard,” I told the cabbie, and we rolled off into a night made day by neon.

Montgomery was picking up the tab for this night on the town, which with luck might turn into work. He wanted me to hit the Trocadero, one of the swankier joints in Hollywood, because Bioff, Browne and Dean frequently held court there. It seemed the “Troc,” as it was affectionately known, was owned by William “Billy” Wilkerson, an enterprising gent who had made the Strip what it was today, which is to say a gaudy, expensive trap for tourists, and stars and would-be stars looking for publicity, as the Trocadero and the Vendome (Wilkerson’s luncheon-only complement to the Troc) were gossip-columnist haunts. This was partly due to Wilkerson also being editor and publisher of the Daily Reporter, and, as Billy was eager to stay in Bioff and Browne’s good graces, no negative stories about the Stagehands Union and the Unholy Trinity who ran it should ever be expected to appear therein.

“Thank God for Arthur Unger,” Montgomery had said.

“You mean the guy who tipped Pegler to Bioff’s racket,” I said, recalling the columnist’s mention of the Variety editor. “But why would a big-shot newspaperman like Wilkerson be intimidated by Bioff and company?”

“Because he and Browne have the power to call Wilkerson’s restaurant employees out on strike. About the only story Billy’s ever run on Bioff is one in which he called the little pimp ‘the type of man the IATSE should be grateful for.’” Here Montgomery had paused, thoughtfully. “Although the winds may be blowing differently now,” he went on, “because there was a story in the Reporter just yesterday criticizing, however mildly, the IA’s labor methods. I’m surprised it got through.”

I resisted the notion of having any contact with Bioff, Browne and/or Dean while I was in Hollywood, but Montgomery suggested it would be safer than not.

“Let’s bring your trip to California out in the open, and not risk anyone finding out about it and reading something in. Develop a cover story, an invented reason for being here. And then you can run into the gentlemen from the Stagehands Union, casually, and perhaps they’ll invite a fellow Chicagoan to sit at their table, in which case maybe they’ll spill something more than Browne’s latest bottle of imported beer.”

“Bioff knows I hate his guts,” I said, shaking my head. “Browne I barely know. Dean I’ve had some contact with, but we’re by no means chums; hell, I used to see his girlfriend Estelle from time to time, before she was his girlfriend, that is. I admit it might be smart for me to try to mend some fences with Bioff, if I’m going to be nosing around…but no matter how you slice it, I wouldn’t count on them rolling out the red carpet.”

“We’ll see. At any rate, it will give you a firsthand chance to see how high on the hog these union officials are living. Did I mention the two percent ‘income tax’ they’ve assessed all their members?”

“No…”

“Since 1936 they’ve been getting two percent of all their union members’ salaries. We estimate their take in this regard alone is a million a year.”

“Jesus! This is no small operation.”

“No. And if they get their hands on SAG, it will mushroom further. Check out the Trocadero. You’ll see how union officials of the IA spend the rank and file’s hard-earned dues.”

The Troc was a long, low, rambling building, white-frame colonial with a red-tiled roof with a large central gable and a couple of smaller ones on either side, lorded over by an incongruously folksy weather vane. A striped canopy ran across the long front of the building, and at right, just over the canopy in squat art-deco neon, the words CAFE TROCADERO were tacked on like an afterthought; underneath the pastel glowing letters a smaller neon said PHIL OHMAN’S MUSIC. Potted plants stood like World’s Fair midgets along the front of the building. This hodgepodge of architecture and oddball trimmings didn’t add up to anything much in particular, and like a lot of structures out here it looked like one you could put your foot through without half trying. Hollywood’s idea of swank was just another plasterboard fantasy.

A colored doorman in a white linen double-breasted uniform with gold salad on the shoulders let me in; I wouldn’t have tipped the guy in Chicago, but this was Hollywood so I gave him a dime out of embarrassment; he said thank you sir, but didn’t show me his teeth. Maybe opening a door was worth a quarter out here. Inside the dark, vaguely Parisian place I smiled at the hatcheck girl, who I would have rather given the dime to. She had short dark hair and a nice smile, was wearing peach-color Chinese pajamas, and made me sorry I was out here alone. I wondered what she was doing later, but I had no hat to check so I stopped at the velvet rope where the captain asked if I had a reservation and I said I did if Robert Montgomery called one in for me like he said he was going to.

That didn’t impress anybody of course, including me, but I did have a reservation, although it would be fifteen minutes before my table was ready, so I made my entrance down a stairway designed for making entrances, into the bar. This was a Thursday night but crowded, the patrons at the bar standing two-deep; since there was just the one of me, I soon found a place to stand and had some rum, and nibbled at a bowl of parched corn, and took the place in. The French decor gave way to American colonial, here, red-and-black plaid, hanging copper utensils; either way, I sure wasn’t in Chicago. I didn’t see a lot of movie stars, though; somebody who might have been Cesar Romero was having cocktails with a little starlet over in the corner, but that was about it.

Finally I was shown to a table upstairs; most of the patrons were in evening dress, tuxes on the men mostly, an occasional white jacket, the women in slinky gowns, black sequins and silver lame, velvet trimmed with feathers, silk touched with fur. You’d have to check in at a nudist colony to find more female flesh unembarrassedly exposed. I wasn’t complaining.

It was almost ten o’clock before I ate, and since a movie star was paying I had the lobster, only it wasn’t as good as I could’ve got at Ireland’s at Clark and Ontario. I was wiping the butter off my chin when somebody tapped me on the shoulder.

When I looked up it was a honey-haired blue-eyed blonde in a black dress with her tits hanging out. That’s an inelegant way to put it, perhaps, but that’s what went instantly through my mind, a thought most any man this side of the limp-wrist set would’ve had.

“Could you join us?” she asked, in a chirpy, innocent voice.

I turned around in my seat and suddenly figured out that Montgomery must have requested a table in this specific area; because not far away, in a corner booth, sat Nicky Dean and George Browne and another girl, a stunning redhead, in a white dress with her…you finish it.

Dean smiled a little-very little-and waved me over. He was a round-faced man in a snazzy white evening jacket, with slicked-back black hair, a better-looking Edward G. Robinson. Even seated, the incongruously tall, slim frame below the balloon puss was evident. He had a single drink before him, and a cigarette rested regally in the hand he was motioning with. Next to him in the booth was the redhead, and next to her was George Browne, in a tent of a tux, double-chinned, wire-rim glasses, fat, bland-looking; what distinguished him was the array of beer bottles before him, half a dozen of them, various foreign labels. He was pouring one into a glass.

“Nate Heller,” Nicky Dean said, appraising me with the dark, matinee-idol eyes that were his best feature. The blonde was sliding in next to him; I was just standing there, rum cocktail in hand.

“Nicky Dean,” I said. “Who’s minding the store?”

By that I meant the Colony Club, his Rush Street joint, which had a restaurant and bar downstairs and a casino upstairs, a pretty fancy layout.

“My girl Estelle,” he said, without any apparent concern for, or effect on, the bosomy little blonde next to him who was smiling at him with considered affection, running her fingers idly through his slick black hair. “You remember Estelle, don’t you?”

So Estelle had mentioned me to Dean.

“I knew her back in my pickpocket-detail days,” I said, smiling nervously, shrugging the same way. “Cute kid. Smart as a whip.”

“Cute. Smart. She sure is. I miss her. Sit down, Heller. Slide in next to Dixie.”

I did. “Hi, Dixie,” I said.

“Hiya,” Dixie said, just barely looking at me, but she was the kind of girl who could load an hour of promise into a split second of glance.

Browne was drinking his latest beer. A barmaid in black and white with her legs showing came over and brought him three more bottles with three other labels and piled the empties on her tray while Browne handed her a hundred-dollar bill and said, “Let me know when that’s gone. Keep the last five for yourself, honey.”

She thanked him, and was gone, and he looked over at me. “I know you,” he said, bloodshot eyes narrowing on either side of a bloodshot nose. “You’re that dick.”

The two girls looked at me.

“That’s right,” I said. “I have my own little agency on Van Buren.”

The girls looked away.

Dean blew a smoke ring and said, “What brings you to Tinseltown?”

“Business. What brings you boys here?”

Dean smiled at Browne, but Browne wasn’t looking; he was pouring his next beer.

Dean said, “We work out here. For the Stagehands Union.”

“Really? Is that a good racket?”

Browne belched into his hand. “It’s not a racket,” he said, having to reach for the indignation. “We serve the working man. Without us, they’d be out on a limb. You can trust an employer just so long as you’re shaking hands with him. When he relaxes his grip, you’re had, unless we’re on your side. Excuse.”

Browne had chosen the outside seat for a reason; he was up and gone.

“Little boy’s room,” the redhead explained to me. “He does that every half hour.”

“You could set your watch by it,” the blonde said.

“Girls,” Dean said, and that meant they were to be quiet. “What kind of business you out here on, Heller?”

“Wandering daughter job. A Gold Coast swell hired me to find his little girl. She’s out here trying to make it in the movies.”

“I’m an actress,” the blonde said.

The redhead chose not to declare herself.

“You’ll find there’s lots of actresses out here,” Dean said. “Any luck?”

“Yeah. The father had an old address on her, which I checked out. Found she’d been doing a little work as an extra. Tracked her through SAG.”

Mention of the Screen Actors Guild didn’t raise a ripple out of Dean. He merely said, “The girl going back home?”

I shook my head no. “I didn’t expect her to. They had me give her some dough, which’ll underwrite another six months out here.”

This story was more or less true, by the way, should Dean go checking-only the job dated back a couple months and had been handled by me over the phone from Chicago. This afternoon I’d called the moneybags papa long distance and asked if he wanted me to look in on his daughter, while I was out here, and see how she was doing; he’d said yes, and to write her a check up to five C’s if she needed money, for which he’d reimburse me and then some. The bit about finding her through SAG was baloney, though-she’d left her new address with her old landlady-but Montgomery had checked for me and she did carry a card. The story would hold.

“If she’s a good-looking kid,” Dean said, “she won’t need their money.”

The blonde sipped her drink; the redhead lowered her eyes-I thought I saw contempt there. Whether for Dean or herself or the world in general, I couldn’t say.

“You may be right,” I said, “but she took the dough.”

Dean shrugged. The orchestra was starting up, across the room. They were playing “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

Browne returned, sidled his heft back in the booth. “Where’s that waitress? I’m down to one beer.”

Nobody answered him.

Dean said to the little blonde, “Do you want to dance, Dix?”

“Oh, sure, Nicky.”

He turned his dark gaze on me. “Dance with her, Heller, would you.” It wasn’t a question.

“My pleasure.”

I threaded Dixie through tables to the crowded dance floor and held her close. She smelled good, like new hay. I hated the thought of the kid being in Dean’s arms.

However, the first thing she said was, “Isn’t Nicky sweet?”

“He’s a peach.”

“Inn’t he, though? Ooh, look. There’s Sidney Skolsky.”

“Who?”

“You know, Sidney Skolsky, the columnist! I wish you were somebody. I could get in his column.”

“I was somebody last time I looked.”

She looked at me, with melting embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that to sound like that.”

“It’s okay, Dixie. Is it okay if I call you Dixie?”

“Sure. How should I call you?”

“Any time you want.”

She giggled and snuggled to me and we moved around the small packed floor awhile; we danced three or four numbers. It turned out Dixie was her stage name-the last half of which was “Flyer”-but she didn’t want to say what her real name was.

“Oooh, look! There’s Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor!”

I looked over and there they were, at a little table together. They looked small.

“Inn’t it nice,” she said, “that people leave them alone here? I hope when I’m famous people aren’t all the time bothering me for autographs.”

“There’s worse problems in the world,” I said, looking at Dean looking at us from the booth. Browne wasn’t; he was just drinking his current beer.

“There sure is! Hey, you’re kind of cute. What’s your name again?”

I told her, and the orchestra let up, and we made our way back. I waited for Dixie to slide in next to Dean, then slid in next to her.

“You two make a cute couple,” Dean said.

“Thanks,” Dixie said.

I didn’t say anything.

“We must have similar taste in dames,” he said, with a cold little smile. “Where you staying?”

“Pardon?”

“While you’re in town. What hotel you staying?”

“Roosevelt,” I said.

Dean’s faint smile now seemed honestly amused. “Ha. Joe Schenck’s joint.”

“What do you mean?’’

“Guy at Twentieth we know,” he said, glancing at Browne, who didn’t glance back. “He owns that hotel, him and some other guys.”

Montgomery had a wry sense of humor, I’d give him that much.

“Mr. Dean?” somebody said.

I looked over and a mustached, dapper little man in evening dress was standing, almost bowing, before the booth; he seemed nervous, even frightened.

“Hello, Billy,” Dean said. The words were like two ice cubes dropping in an empty glass.

“I’m relieved to see you back at the old stand tonight,” he said. “I was afraid we’d seen the last of you for a while.”

“We’re funny people, in this day and age,” Dean said. “We believe in staying loyal to our friends.”

The man stepped closer. “Allow me to explain.”

Dean said nothing.

“For whatever mistake I have made, I stand willing to do anything you dictate, to make it up,” the man said, his voice barely audible, trying, it would seem, to keep the humiliation of this scene from being broadcast. “There was an unfortunate circumstance, caused by a new man on the desk covering union news.”

“Aren’t you the boss?” Dean said.

“I have to take responsibility for it, I know. That story got through, which to you says I broke my word. But please believe there was no intention not to take care of you, as you have of me.”

Dean said nothing.

“It was a horrible mistake,” the man continued, filling the awful silence, “and I stand willing to rectify it. Please. Command me.”

“Forget it. All is forgiven.”

The little man smiled, almost crumpling under the humiliation, and said good evening, and moved quickly away.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Billy Wilkerson,” Dean said. “He owns the joint.”

And the Hollywood Reporter. That had been about the negative piece on the IA that Montgomery mentioned had run in the Reporter yesterday. These boys did have clout.

Half an hour on the second and Browne was getting out of the booth again, saying, “Excuse.”

“Anyway, Heller,” Dean said. “You must not have a car out here. Maybe we can drop you off at your hotel?”

I didn’t think there was anything sinister in that; and, if there was, I couldn’t think of a graceful way out, so I said, “That’d be swell.”

“Maybe you’d like to show Dixie your etchings.”

Dixie, whose fingers were working in Dean’s hair, smiled at me shyly. Maybe she did have a future as an actress. As for whether or not I took Dean and Dixie up on this, I’m not going to say. You might be disappointed in me, either way.

Browne came back and settled his fat ass in the booth and said, “Willie wants to see you while you’re out here.”

I didn’t know that was directed toward me, at first; then Browne repeated it, saying he’d phoned Willie at home to say Wilkerson had eaten crow, and I said, “Bioff’s out here, too?”

“Sure,” he said. “Kind of unofficially these days, but he’s out here.”

“Willie and I go way back.”

“Yeah,” Dean said. “You hate each other’s goddamn guts.”

“I don’t hate anybody,” I said, smiling, sipping some rum. “I haven’t seen Willie in years. If he’s making good, more power to him.”

“He’s making good,” Dean said.

“Anyway,” Browne said, wiping some foam off his face, “he wants to see you.”

“Why would he want to see me?”

“I don’t know. When I called him, I mentioned we run into you. He wants you to come out to his place.”

“I’m leaving tomorrow afternoon.”

“Go out to his place at Bel Air tomorrow morning. Hell, I’ll drive you out there myself. He says to tell you it’s worth a C-note minimum.”

The thought of George Browne driving a car was a sobering thought.

But I said, “Call him back and tell him sure,” anyway.

“In half an hour I will,” Browne said, and lifted another bottle.

Browne driving was no problem: he picked me up in a chauffeured limo, a big shiny black Caddy. I tried not to make anything out of the fact that the last big shiny black car I went riding in was E. J. O’Hare’s. Besides, that was overcast, chilly Chicago and this was warm, sunny Hollywood.

There was plenty of legroom, despite the extra passenger that sat between us on the floor: a tub of ice and beer. It was ten o’clock in the morning and Browne was already at it. Maybe the tale about him putting away one hundred bottles of imported beer a day wasn’t an exaggeration; maybe it was an understatement.

Probably it was the constant drinking that did it, but he showed no signs of the night before having taken any effect; he was wearing a baggy brown suit and had a glow in his cheeks, not to mention his nose. We were on our way to Westwood, on the other side of Beverly Hills, and we had plenty of time to talk.

“You have any idea why Willie wants to see me, George?”

“Not a clue,” he said, cheerfully, bottle in hand. “But Willie always has his reasons.”

“You guys been partners a long time.”

Swigging, nodding, he said, “Long time.”

“Even before the soup kitchen?”

In 1932 the Stagehands Union, which is to say Browne and Bioff, had opened up a soup kitchen in the Loop, at Randolph and Franklin Streets to be exact, two blocks west of City Hall. The 150 working members of the local would pay 35 cents a meal, which-along with the donations of food from merchants and money from theater owners-helped ensure that the 250 unemployed members could eat free.

“Oh yeah, sure,” Browne said, “before that. Willie was running a kosher butchers union, similar to what I was doing with the gentile poultry dealers.”

“You were already head of the Stagehands local, though.”

“Yeah, sure. My ‘Poultry Board of Trade’ was just a sideline. No, the soup kitchen was what taught me to listen to Willie, what taught me Willie had brains. That was a sweetheart idea, that soup kitchen.”

“Made you a lot of friends,” I said agreeably. “Nice publicity.”

Browne’s smile was a proud fold in his flabby face. “We served thirty-seven hundred meals a week, most of ’em free. The biggest actors in the land passed through our portals-Harry Richman, Helen Morgan, Texas Guinan, Jolson, Cantor, Olson and Johnson, everybody.”

“So did a lot of politicians and reporters.”

Browne swigged and swallowed and grinned. “Being close to City Hall didn’t hurt. It’s like Willie always says: never seen a whore who wasn’t hungry or a politician who wasn’t a whore. So we let the politicians eat for nix. And the reporters.”

That bought the boys a lot of good will-particularly considering the Bioff-Browne chefs maintained a deluxe menu for celebrities and politicos and press, including such first-rate fare as orange-glazed roast duck, prime rib and porterhouse steaks. What the hell-even a cynical soul like me had to hand it to ’em: the out-of-work stagehands ate the majority of the meals, in a time when otherwise God knows where or how they’d have eaten at all. Still, I always suspected Bioff and Browne were squeezing more out of the deal than just the means to keep the newspapers and politicians friendly.

Three beers later we were in Westwood, which was just more of the Beverly Hills same except less rolling, and Bioff’s estate, which we pulled into the driveway of, was an impressive sprawling double-story wood-and-stone ranch-style which (Browne informed me) Bioff had dubbed “Rancho Laurie,” after his wife. Compared to Montgomery’s mansion, it came in a fairly distant second; next to a room at the Morrison Hotel, it was paradise. The little pimp from South Halsted Street had gone Hollywood, all right.

I followed Browne around the side of the perfectly tended, gently sloping grounds, an occasional tree throwing some shade on us, and there, reclining on a lounge chair, next to a kidney-shaped pool somewhat smaller than Lake Michigan, was Willie Bioff.

I’d always thought of him as fat, and I guess he was fat, but not in the dissipated George Browne way. His barrel chest was covered with tight curls of black hair as were his muscular arms and legs; he was neckless, stocky but hard, like a wrestler-he had once been a union slugger, after all. Under the black body hair, the flesh I remembered as Illinois pasty was California tan. He wore money-green bathing trunks and blood-red house slippers-not a bead of water on him; my guess was he didn’t swim much-and sunglasses and had a cigarette in one hand and a glass of ice water in the other.

He rose quickly as we approached and smiled broadly and extended a hand to me. “Thanks for coming out here, Heller.”

We shook hands. His was a strong grip. Stronger than mine.

“I was surprised to be invited, Willie. We aren’t exactly pals.”

He waved that off, taking a lime monogrammed crushed velvet robe off a nearby lounge chair and belting it around him. He exchanged his sunglasses for clear rimless octagonal ones from a pocket of the robe. “I told you once, we should let bygones be bygones. I meant it then, I mean it now.”

“Okay.”

He turned a hard, hooded gaze on Browne and said, “I want to talk to Heller alone.”

“Sure thing, Willie. I’ll just sit here by the pool.”

“Why don’t you go down to the office?”

“Friday’s a slow day. You know that.”

“You should be there.”

“Look, Willie, I’ll just sit by the pool. Could you send your house-boy out with some beer?”

“Why don’t you sit in your car and drink your own?”

Browne seemed more sad than embarrassed by this exchange, wandering off without another word, as Willie showed me inside, through glass doors into a big white modern kitchen.

“You’ll have to pardon my lush of a partner,” Bioff said. “He can be a real cluck. You care for anything to drink?”

“No thanks.”

“I gave the help the morning off,” Bioff said, as if needing to explain the emptiness of the kitchen, and the house beyond. “My wife and kids are at our place in Canoga Park-I’ll be joining them this afternoon for the weekend. But I wanted to see you first.”

“Why, Willie?”

“I’ll get to that. Come with me.”

For a place called Rancho Laurie, where you’d expect rustic to be the word, it was pretty posh. We padded across a plush carpet, past a formal dining room, and various antique furniture, none of it early American, and paintings in the manner of old masters, and Chinese vases seemed to be set on anything that wasn’t moving.

I never imagined I’d find myself in Willie Bioff’s bedroom, but neither did I imagine it would be an elegant Louis XV affair. He led me into a walk-in closet where dozens upon dozens of tailored suits hung; the back of the door was heavy with racks of ties, dozens of ties, every color, every pattern in creation; snappy snap-brim hats sat on a long shelf in a row, as if supervising. Shoes polished like black mirrors lined the floor. I thought he was going to change clothes, but that wasn’t the point of this.

“What do you think of my ties?” he said, running a caressing hand over some of them.

“They’re real nice, Willie.”

He sucked on the cigarette, smiling with immense satisfaction. Then he said, “How about those suits?”

“They’re swell. Hats, too. Like your shoes.”

He looked at me and smiled, just a little. “I’m not showing off. I just wanted to share this with you. You were a poor Chicago street kid yourself. You can appreciate how sweet my life is, compared to what shit it was once.”

“Sure.”

He led me out of the closet and I sat down while he changed into slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt in the adjacent bathroom, losing the cigarette. Then he led me back down the stairs and we were soon in a knotty-pine library that was uncomfortably similar to Montgomery’s study. About the only difference was the lack of hunting prints-Willie had instead some handsome tinted photos of outdoor landscapes (“I took those,” he said proudly, as I looked at them)-and the leather furniture here wasn’t oversize, and was black not tan. On the couch, spread open face down, as if to save a place, was a book: Das Kapital by Karl Marx. I didn’t think I’d have found that at Montgomery’s; of course I didn’t expect to find it here, either.

I sat down next to the book. “Are you reading this, Willie?”

“A great man wrote that book,” he said defensively. “We’ll be living that way sometime in the future.”

And then we’ll all have closets full of suits and ties and hats and shoes. “Why am I here, Willie? Besides to look at your suits and ties and hats and shoes.”

He sat beside me. “You still think I’m a low uncouth man, don’t you?”

“The question isn’t whether you own Chinese vases, Willie. The question is how you paid for ’em.”

He sneered, and looked more like I remembered him. “Are you sure you’re from Chicago? Jesus, Heller, I come up the hard way, you know that. I slept in my share of doorways, stomach growling like a stray dog; like the man said, bread is expensive when your pockets are empty. I learned to earn a buck any way I could. But I’m legit now. I’m doing good work for the unions out here, lookin’ after my members.”

“Why do you feel you have to justify yourself to me, of all people? I’m just an ex-cop who busted you once.”

“That’s why. I want you to understand I don’t hold any grudge against you. You were doing your job. I was doing mine. Hell, they were the same job, really.”

“How do you figure?”

He shrugged. “We were both maintaining law and order. I just happened to be maintaining it in a whorehouse.”

“Slapping women around.”

“I never slapped a woman in my life. I got great respect for women. I have slapped some whores in my time. Of various sex. Like the man said, most businessmen are nothing but two-bit whores with a clean shirt and a shine.” The moon face beamed. “Only now I know more subtle ways of slapping them around than just plain slapping.”

“I guess greedy people just rub you the wrong way.”

“Be sarcastic if you want, but I’m a union man. I look out for the little guy!” Unconsciously or not, he was pointing a thumb at his own barrel chest as he said that.

“Why am I here, Willie?”

“To maybe do a job for me.”

“Aren’t there any detectives in California?”

“Sure. But not the Chicago variety. When Georgie called me from the Troc last night, I thought, this is perfect. Just the ticket.”

“What is?”

“You being here. You know what irony is?”

“We’ve met.”

“Well, then you can appreciate this. You know who Westbrook Pegler is?”

My mouth went dry.

“Irony’s sister?” I said.

“You know who he is. He’s in Chicago right now. He’s looking for dirt on me. To spread in his column.”

“I know,” I admitted.

It was the only way to play it.

The hard dark pig eyes behind the rimless glass squinted. “You know?”

I shrugged. “Yeah. He stopped by my office the other day. He wanted to know if I was the arresting officer on your pandering charge, years ago.”

He went a little pale, sat up. “What did you say to him?”

I shrugged again. “I said yes.”

“Shit. Did you give him any details?”

“No. It was a long time ago, Willie. He just asked if the rumor that I arrested you for pimping, once, was true, and I said it was. He asked if you were convicted, and I said you were.”

He didn’t like that. He stood, paced; wandered over to a writing desk decorated with framed pictures of his brood of lads and lit up a cigarette and began smoking nervously. But soon he said: “I can’t expect you to have said otherwise. Thanks for telling me straight out.”

“No thanks needed.”

He sat next to me again, cigarette in hand, his expression painfully earnest. “You got to understand, Heller-the feds have been breathing down my neck for months. I had to step down as the IA’s representative, not long ago, ’cause of this federal heat. Oh, I’m still running things. But from the sidelines; I can’t even go in my own goddamn office, can you picture it?”

So that was why he bitterly bit off Browne’s head for not being at the office: he was jealous he couldn’t be there himself.

“Now, this Pegler shit. Comes at a bad time. I know who put him up to it, too.”

“Who?”

“That bastard Montgomery. The smart-ass actor.”

This irony guy got around.

“Robert Montgomery, you mean?”

“Yeah, him. That smart-ass, no-good, double-crossing bastard…after all I did for him.”

Here was a new wrinkle.

“Why?” I asked. “What did you do for Montgomery?”

He scowled, not looking at me, but at an image of Montgomery fixed in his mind, I’d guess. He said, “Couple years ago SAG-Screen Actors Guild-serves notice on the studios that they now consider themselves a legitimate labor union, and want to be so recognized. You know-they wanted to enter into collective bargaining, like the big kids. So we, the IATSE, me, went to bat for ’em.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, I told that prick L. B. Mayer if he didn’t recognize SAG, he’d have an IA strike to play with. My movie projectionists can shut this industry down overnight, you know.”

“So I hear.”

The round face was reddening. “Thanks to me, Mayer recognized their lousy little Guild, and Montgomery thanked us publicly, but now, fuck him! We’re not good enough for him and the fags and dykes and Reds in his club.”

So much for Karl Marx; Willie seemed more interested in the brothers Marx, or anyway their union dues.

“I’ll tell you whose fault it really is. Frank. Frank’s getting too greedy.”

He meant Nitti. It was Bioff’s first admission that he was working for the Outfit. He let it escape casually and I didn’t react to it as any big deal. All I said was: “How so, Willie?”

“He wants to expand, and it just ain’t the right time. There’s this rival group, a CIO bunch called the United Studio Technicians, and they’re spreading dissent among the IA rank and file. We got them to deal with, we got plenty to do, rather than try and kidnap a union that don’t want anything to do with us, anyway.”

“Why such a fuss, over show business? Aren’t there bigger fish to fry, better unions to go after?”

As if speaking to a slow child, he said, “Heller, no matter what anybody tells you, people do not have to eat. Like the man said, there’s only two things they really got to do-get laid, and see a show, when they can dig up the scratch.”

The philosophy of a pimp turned Hollywood power broker.

“Listen,” he said. “You’ve got a reputation of being a straight shooter. Frank speaks highly of you.”

Nitti again.

“That’s nice to hear,” I said.

“You’re known as a boy who can keep his mouth shut.”

Actually, I was known in at least one instance for singing on the witness stand-when I helped bring the world crashing down on Mayor Cermak’s favorite corrupt cops, Lang and Miller; but I had indeed kept some secrets for Frank Nitti. That was more important, where somebody like Bioff was concerned.

“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” I said.

“How would you like to earn a couple of grand?”

The money was sure flying this week; I wondered if I’d live to spend any of it.

“Sure,” I said. “What’s your poison?”

“Pegler,” he said.

It would be.

He was asking, “When are you heading back?”

“This afternoon,” I said, somehow. “I’ll be in Chicago tomorrow morning.”

“Good. There are some people I want you to see.”

“About what?’

“About me. I want you to find out if Pegler’s been around to see them, and if he has, try and worm out of them what, if anything, they spilled.”

Oh my.

“If he hasn’t been around,” he continued, “warn them him or somebody he’s hired may be around. And tell them if they talk they’ll go to sleep and never wake up.”

I shook my head no. “Willie, I’ll do some checking for you. Gladly. But I won’t threaten anybody for you. And I don’t want to know about that end of it, understood?”

He smiled, friendly as Santa Claus. “Sure, Heller. Sure. They can figure that out for themselves, anyway. Like the man said, when you eat garlic, it speaks for itself. Shall we say a grand down, a grand upon your reporting back to me? By phone is fine.”

“Okay.”

“You want this on your books, or should I give you cash?”

“Cash’ll do.”

“Sit tight and I’ll get you some. Oh, and Heller. Don’t tell anybody about this. Not Nitti or anybody. As far as Nick Dean is concerned, I had you out here to ask you about that O’Hare killing. I knew Eddie, you see, and as a matter of fact I would like to ask you a few questions about that before you go.”

“All right.”

“Anyway, I don’t want Nitti to know I’m nervous about this Pegler deal. It wouldn’t look good. I’m on the spot enough with this federal-tax heat. So be careful-like the man said, when you play both ends against the middle you risk getting squeezed.”

You’re telling me.

He got up and went out and came back shortly with a thousand in hundreds in an IATSE envelope. I put it in my suitcoat pocket, answered his questions about the O’Hare shooting in a similar manner to the way I’d handled Captain Stege’s, and soon he was walking me out of the house, an arm reached up around my shoulder, two old buddies from Chicago.

“Let me tell you about the time Little New York came out to visit,” he said.

Louis Campagna; now there’s a house guest.

“I had my sprinkler system going,” Bioff said, gesturing to his expansive green lawn, “and Campagna-you know, he’s a nature lover-”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Oh yeah, he’s got a farm in Wisconsin, goes fishing all the time, loves the great outdoors. Anyway, he sees my sprinklers, dozens of ’em, turning in full circles, and he asks me what the hell they are, and I tell him, and he says, that’s great! Get me six hundred.”

I laughed.

“So I told him that six hundred of those things could irrigate all the city parks in Chicago. And that they’d freeze up in the cold weather. But he insisted, and he said I should charge ’em to the union. So I called the Waiter and asked him to talk Louie out of it.”

The Waiter was Paul Ricca, rumored to be second in the Outfit only to Nitti.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Ricca wanted three hundred of ’em,” he said, and walked me to the limo where his partner sat in back drinking beer.

On the way he told me who to see in Chicago.

The Southern belle, hoop skirt flouncing, parasol atwirl, a vision in white and pink and lace, strolled coyly to the settee and, with a leisurely grace, took off her red slippers. Then she removed her bonnet. The languid strains of “Swanee River” filling the air began to pick up tempo, build in volume. The belle, who was blond, shoulder-length curls tumbling to lacy shoulders, was rolling down a knee-length silk stocking from a leg extended from under the hoop skirt, foot arched; another slowly peeled stocking fell, and then she stood, stepping ever so ladylike out of her hoop skirt. She was about to step out of her lacy pantaloons as well when somebody tapped me on the shoulder.

“You pay to get in or what?” Jack Barger asked. The balding little Jew with the gone-out cigar in the corner of his mouth and the expensive but slept-in-looking brown suit was the owner of the theater, so he had a right to ask.

“No,” I said. I was standing in back, next to a bored, uniformed usher who was looking at something he’d just picked out of his nose. “I told the girl at the box office I was here to see you.”

Barger put a disgusted look on a puss that was naturally sour anyway, nodded toward the light. “Is that me?”

Across the darkened theater and its bumpy sea of male heads, I could tell at once that the stripper, who was now parading across the stage in lace panties and blue pasties before a cheesy plantation backdrop, was not Jack Barger.

“I’d say no,” I said.

“You ain’t kidding when you claim to be a detective, are you?” he said, typically. Barger was one of those guys whose kidding always seemed to be on the square; I’d known him, casually, for years, but sensed no affection in his sarcasm. If so, it was deep down.

He crooked and wiggled his forefinger at me in a “come along” motion. Though he was barely ten years my senior, he treated me like a kid. But I had a feeling he treated everybody that way.

I followed him through the small, rather bare lobby, with its seedily uniformed ushers and well-stocked concession stand and embarrassed uniformed girl behind it and all-pervasive popcorn smell, toward some stairs. The Rialto, which was on State Street just up the block and around the corner from my office on Van Buren, was the Loop’s only burlesque house. The exterior was flashy enough, with the bright lights and usual promises-CHARMAINE AND HER BROADWAY ROAD SHOW, 250, GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS, with the window-card cheesecake displays and life-size standees to prove it, and of course, on the Rialto screen, this week’s cinema masterpiece, Sinful Souls,ADULTS ONLY. And the promises were pretty much kept, even if the interior was decidedly unracy looking, more along the lines of an unadorned, smallish neighborhood theater. The patrons didn’t mind; like the congregation of a spartanly appointed Protestant church, they didn’t begrudge the lack of a cathedral as long as they could get to heaven.

Judging from how fast and loud the pit band was belting “Swanee River,” now, heaven was well within view.

But not to me. I was following Barger up the jogs of the stairs to the level of purgatory housing his office, a cubbyhole next to the projectionist’s booth.

The office was, like the theater itself, stark-a dark-wood desk and some metal file cabinets and a few framed photos of strippers and baggy-pants comics on one of the pale cream pebbly plaster walls; each and every one of the photos hung crooked.

“You look like something the cat drug in,” Barger said, sitting behind his cluttered desk, lighting up a new cigar. It smelled like wet leaves trying to burn.

I sat across from him, topcoat in my lap. I still had on the suit I’d traveled in, and I didn’t just have bags under my eyes, I had valises. I hadn’t slept well on the plane; the flight had been bumpy, and so were my thoughts regarding my two conflicting clients, Montgomery of SAG and Bioff of the IATSE.

“I been out of town,” I said.

“So I gathered from what you said on the phone,” he said, picking some tobacco off his tongue. “I’m disappointed in you, Heller. Taking work from a rat bastard like Willie Bioff. Don’t quote me.”

“Don’t worry. I’m on Bioff’s payroll, not president of his fan club.”

He shook his head. “Who’d have thought Nate Heller’d be another of Willie Bioff’s whores.”

“Who’d have thought Jack Barger would.”

He laughed humorlessly. “Fair enough,” he said.

“Speaking of Pegler,” I said, “Fair Enough” being the name of his column, “that’s why I’m here.”

He squinted at me. “Westbrook Pegler? The big-shot columnist? What would he want with a minor-league Minsky like me?”

Barger’s humility was false; while he was certainly no Minsky, he was the king of the local grind circuit. And in a convention town like Chicago, that meant money.

“He’s looking to smear Bioff,” I said.

“I’ve seen Pegler’s stuff,” Barger nodded, unimpressed. “He makes a living out of hating the unions, and Bioff’s as good a place as any to start giving unionism a bad name.”

“This has to do with the power the Stagehands Union is building in Hollywood, you know.’’

He expressed his disinterest with a wave of the hand in which the cigar resided, embers flying. “Don’t give me history lessons on Willie Bioff and George Browne. I been around that block so many times your head’d spin. No, far as I know, Westbrook Pegler ain’t been in my establishment. Not unless he likes young tits and old jokes.”

“He doesn’t seem the type,” I admitted. “But he might send somebody around to pump you.”

“Nobody pumps Jack Barger for information.”

“It might not be direct; somebody might come around under false pretenses and-”

“Do I look stupid to you, Heller? Do you think I’m going to advertise what those bastards done to me? That’d make me look like a schmuck, and if Frank Nitti found out I’d been vocal, which he would, I’d wake up with a hole in my head in a goddamn ditch.”

He was talking to me like I was an insider; if I handled this right, I could open him up like a clam.

“I’m not working for Nitti,” I said. “I’m working for Bioff. And I’m only in it for the dough.”

He pointed the cigar at me. “Be careful who you go whoring for, my friend. Those sons of bitches are murderers and thieves. Grow up.”

I knew Barger primarily from the occasional drink he’d have with Barney and me in Barney’s cocktail lounge, when it was still below my office, and just around the corner from the Rialto. He and Barney were friends, hit it off fine, but Barney’s more Jewish than I am. I always felt Irish around guys like Barger.

So I gave him the needle for a change. “You say you’re surprised to see me, Jack. Hell, I was surprised to get your name from Bioff. I didn’t know they had their hooks in you.”

He stirred in his chair. “What’d you think, I don’t have stagehands? Not that I should pay those lazy bastards anything for what little they do. Move some scenery here, carry a prop there. They should pay me for the privilege of working here, the ass they get. Only it don’t work that way. And, fuck, the IA’s got me coming and going, cause I’m a moviehouse, too, I got projectionists to deal with. Shit, I’ve had to put up with that beer-guzzling slob Browne longer than Bioff himself!”

The best way to keep Barger talking was to make him think I already knew more than I did. This required some calculated guessing, which as sluggish as I was from the sixteen-hour plane ride was going to be a good trick.

But I jumped right in-casually: “Browne must’ve been a phantom on your payroll since the Star and Garter days.”

He didn’t hesitate in confirming that: “To the tune of a hundred and fifty smackers a week, the drunken bastard.”

The Star and Garter, a burlesque house at Madison and Halsted, had been Barger’s mainstay prior to the success of the Rialto, which the “minor-league Minksy” opened during the World’s Fair in ’33; the Rialto’s Loop location was closer to the fair, and less threatening for tourist trade, than the Star and Garter’s Skid Row neighborhood.

“Of course a hundred-and-fifty’s cheap,” I said, “compared to what Bioff’s hitting you for, these days. By the way, he said, ‘Give my regards to my partner Jack.’”

Which Bioff had in fact said, and which proved to be what opened Barger’s floodgate: “That arrogant little pimp! Partner! The first time I ever talked to him, what, must’ve been four years ago anyways, he walked in here with Browne and said, ‘Kid,’ called me kid, the condescending little bastard, ‘kid, everybody’s paying to keep the unions happy. So you have to pay.’ What the hell, this is Chicago, I expect that, so I say, ‘How much?’ And Bioff says, ‘Let’s say twenty-five grand to start.’ And I damn near fall off my seat! I say fuck you, go to hell, I ain’t got twenty-five grand, and Bioff says, ‘You want to stay in business, that’s how it’s gotta be.’ I told ’em to get the hell out and they did.”

He smiled to himself, pleased with the memory of getting tough with Bioff and Browne, then noticed his cigar had gone out and was relighting it when I said, “Yet here I am, Jack, giving you a message from your partner Willie.”

His expression turned as foul as the cigar smoke. He said, “The fat little pimp came back alone, next time. No Browne, just the two of us, in this same office, and he said, ‘How’s tricks, partner?’ And I said, ‘I ain’t your goddamn partner, and I suggest you leave.’ And he said, ‘I already talked to the Outfit about our partnership.’ And I told him I’d close my show down before I got in bed with the mob.”

Barger was shaking, now; whether with anger or fear or just the intensity of the memory, I couldn’t say. But he went on speaking, and it seemed more for his own benefit than mine.

“The bastard Bioff says, ‘You’re already in. There’s no getting out. You’re partners with me, and I’m partners with the Outfit.’ He said it’d be foolish for me to close down my show ’cause a man’s gotta work, a man’s gotta eat.” Then with harsh sarcasm he added, “‘Like the man said,’ he said, ‘don’t throw away the blanket because you’re mad at the fleas.’”

He sat smoking, his eyes glowing like the cigar’s tip.

“That’s Willie Bioff,” I said. “A proverb for every occasion.”

Very softly, with what I felt to be self-hate, he said, “And then he said, ‘And just think, if you close the show, there’s always the fact that maybe the mob wouldn’t like it. They’re sensitive people.’”

“And you went along with it,” I said, with a tiny matter-of-fact shrug. “What else could you do?”

He slammed a fist on the desk and the clutter there jumped. “I didn’t go along with it. Not till…aw, fuck it.”

I made an educated guess, based on past experience: “Not till Little New York Campagna invited you in a certain suite at the Bismarck Hotel.”

Where Frank Nitti himself would’ve waited.

Barger only nodded.

Then he sat up, pointed with the cigar. “Some friendly advice, kid. If you can get out from under Bioff, do it. That’s bad company you’re in. I like you, Heller. Any friend of Barney’s is a friend of mine. This is no good for you.”

I had a card left to play. On two occasions, in Barney’s cocktail lounge, I’d seen Barger approached by Frankie Maritote, also known as Frankie Diamond, Al Capone’s brother-in-law, a big ape with a broad homely mug and thick eyebrows like grease smears over beady eyes. It had stuck with me, and, when Bioff mentioned Barger as one of those I was to warn about Pegler, I remembered the mob connection the earlier Barger/Diamond encounters seemed to indicate.

Anyway, I played the card: “How long was it before Frankie Diamond came around?”

Barger shrugged. He seemed defeated. “Not long. They thought I was monkeying with the books, because I said business was off, and they heard we did standing-room-only, which was true, when the fair was in town. Since then it’s weekends and conventions; we die during the week.”

“So they sent a Syndicate bookkeeper over.”

“Yeah. This guy Zevin. He’s the Stagehand Union’s bookkeeper, for this local anyway. He found I was giving myself a salary of two hundred a week. They made me fire myself and take Diamond on as manager. Only he never came around except to collect money from me, me who was doing the actual managing. Then, on one of the happiest days of my life, Diamond leaves town, for some other Syndicate deal, and I figure I’m rid of the leech. And this guy Nick Dean-you know him?’

I nodded. “He’s a cold one.”

He almost shivered. “Freezing. He brings Phil D’Andrea around. Phil D’Andrea!”

D’Andrea was the Capone bodyguard infamous for attending the Big Fellow’s trial armed with a revolver, and getting caught at it. Contempt of court and six months in jail.

Barger was shaking his head. “Now D’Andrea’s the ‘manager.’ That girl down in the box office is his goddamn sister.”

Silence and cigar smoke filled the air.

“I appreciate the words of advice,” I said, rising. “I’ll finish this job for Bioff, and be done with him.”

“You do that. The bastards’ve damn near drained me dry. I had to sell the Star and Garter for a lousy seven gee’s, just to pay my goddamn taxes, and when they found out, they took half of that! Stay the hell clear of ’em, Heller.”

“I’ll do that. And you stay clear of Pegler, or anybody he might send to sniff around.”

“Yeah, yeah. They won’t get word one out of Jack Barger.”

The baggy pants comics and a couple of girls from the pony line were doing the “Crazy House” routine on stage, when I came downstairs, leaving Barger behind. I watched from the back of the house, watched another stripper. good-looking dame with black hair, and somebody tapped me on the shoulder.

Barger again.

“You pay yet?” he asked.

“No.”

“You must still think you’re a cop. Everything’s a free ride. Is it true Sally Rand’s in town?”

“Yeah.”

“You think you’ll see her? Barney says you two were an item, once.”

“I might see her.”

“I hear she’s broke.”

“For the moment.”

“If she’ll stoop to a grand a week, I’ll cancel my next booking and make room for her.”

“I’ll tell her if I see her. But I don’t think she does burlesque.”

“She will. She’s not getting any younger.”

Then he disappeared, and soon so did I, around the corner to my office.

Two other names on Bioff’s list, Barney Balaban of the mighty Balaban and Katz chain, and James Coston, who managed the Warner Brothers chain in Chicago, were not receptive to visits by me. When I called from my office to make appointments, they insisted instead on taking care of our business over the phone.

“Willie Bioff wants you to be aware that Westbrook Pegler is in town,” I told Balaban, “asking embarrassing questions.”

After a long pause a confident baritone returned: “Tell Mr. Bioff that no one has been around to see me, and that should anyone do so, no embarrassing answers will be forthcoming from me. Good afternoon, Mr. Heller.”

Coston was also inclined toward brevity: “Tell Willie not to worry. I won’t talk.”

These distinguished representatives of the Chicago motion picture community had, in their few short phrases, spilled as much in their way as Barger had in his.

They both knew Willie Bioff, and they both shared secrets with him they had no intention of revealing to the press, or anyone else, for that matter.

Coston had told me volumes by simply repeating a typical Bioff aphorism; as a parting shot, I’d said, “Willie said to tell you if you got cornered, somehow, to lie, lie, lie.”

“Tell Willie it’s like he told me, once, when he threatened me with a projectionist’s strike: ‘If the only way to get the job done is to kill Grandma, then Grandma’s going to die.’”

Now, only one name remained on Willie’s list: my old flame Estelle Carey.

Nicky Dean’s girl.

She was wearing a skin-pink gown with sequins on the bosom, cut just low enough to maintain interest, her curled pageboy barely brushing her creamy shoulders. Tall, almost willowy, her supple curves and picture-book prettiness made her look twenty, when she was thirty. At least she did in the soft, dim lighting of the Colony Club, Nicky Dean’s ritzy Rush Street cabaret, where Estelle Carey was overseeing a battery of “26” tables-numbered boards about three feet square at which mostly male customers shook dice in a leather cup and “threw for drinks.” Each table was in turn overseen by another young woman, a “26 girl,” a breed as much a Chicago fixture as wind or graft, pretty birds sitting on high stools luring homely pigeons. Here at the Colony, with its upstairs casino, the girls were on the lookout for the compulsive customer ready to graduate from the 26 table to “some real action” on the second floor, roulette, craps, blackjack.

Estelle was the acknowledged queen of the 26 girls; she even rated mention as such in the gossip columns, where the story was often told of her having taken ten grand from one high-roller in two hours.

She wasn’t playing tonight; these days, that was for special occasions only. She was milling, chatting, glad-handing-she was a Chicago celebrity herself, in a minor way; a bush league Texas Guinan. She’d come far from her waitress days at Rickett’s.

Not that Rickett’s was a shabby place for a girl just twenty, at the time, to work. It was the Lindy’s of Chicago, your typical white-tiled lunchroom but open twenty-four hours, a Tower Town mainstay famous for attracting bohemian types and show people and your occasional North Side gangster. Rickett’s was also known for its good, reasonably priced steaks, which was what brought me there, in my early plainclothes days. What kept me coming back, though, was the pretty blonde waitress.

Nick Dean must’ve met her there as well, but that was after I’d stopped seeing her. We only lasted a couple of months, Estelle and me. But they were some months.

I’d run into her occasionally since, but we’d never more than had coffee, and not that, in five or six years.

So now I was edging through the packed Colony Club-this was Saturday night after all-with its art-deco decor, all chromium and glass and shiny black and shiny white, its crowd of conventioneers and upper-income types whose recreation in better weather was sailing skiffs and larger craft in Lake Michigan, the muffled sounds of ersatz Benny Goodman from the dine-and-dance area adjacent mingling with the noise of dice-and-drink, wondering if she’d recognize me.

Then I was facing her.

She gave me her standard, charming smile, one to a customer, and then it sort of melted into another kind of smile, a smile that settled in a dimple in one cheek.

“Nate,” she said. “Nate Heller.”

“I’d forgotten how goddamn green your eyes are.”

“You know what you always said.” Her eyes tried to twinkle, but the effect was melancholy.

“Yeah. That all they lacked was the dollar signs.”

“Maybe you just didn’t look close enough.”

“You mean if I had I’d’ve seen ’em?”

She tossed her blond curls. “Or not.”

Somebody jostled me-we were holding up traffic-and she took me by the arm and led me through the smoky, noisy bar to a wide open stairway, which was fitting for this wide open place. It separated the bar from the restaurant and wound gently up to two shiny ebony doorways overseen by a bouncer in a white coat and black dress pants and a shine he could look down in to check how mean he looked. She and the bouncer nodded at each other, and he pushed the doors open for us and I followed her on through.

We threaded our way through the crowded casino, a big open room with heavily draped walls and indirect lighting and action at every table, noise and smoke and the promise of easy money and easy women. Some of the men here had brought a date or possibly even a wife; but many of these girls in skintight gowns were from the same table as the 26 girls downstairs.

At the bar in back, Estelle approached a fleshy-faced man with wire glasses who stood near, but not quite at, the bar; he wore a white jacket and dress pants and was keeping an eye on the casino before him, arms folded, patrons stopping to chat and him smiling and nodding, occasionally dispatching directions to other, lesser white-jacketed employees.

We waited while he did that very thing, and then Estelle introduced us.

“Sonny, this is Nate Heller.”

He smiled automatically, the professional host’s twitch, but the eyes behind the glasses were trying to place me; as we were shaking hands, his grip moist and unconvincing, they did: “The detective.”

“That’s right. And you’re Sonny Goldstone. I remember you from the 101 Club.” Which had been a Rush Street speakeasy not so long ago, where-like here-he’d been floor manager. Now as then, Goldstone was one of Nicky Dean’s partners-his front man, the ostensible owner of the Colony Club.

“I understand you’ve done some favors for the boys from time to time,” he said in his hoarse, toneless voice.

“That’s right.” That wasn’t exactly true, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you went around denying, especially not to anybody connected.

“Pity about Eddie O’Hare,” he said, impassively.

“Pity,” I said, not reading him at all.

Estelle said, “Sonny, Nate’s an old friend. I haven’t seen him in years, seems like. I’m going to go upstairs with him for a while.”

“The front two suites are in use.”

“All right.”

“Will you be long, Estelle? It’s Saturday night, you know.”

“We’re just going to chat for half an hour or so.”

“The people come here to see you, you know.”

She patted his cheek like he was a naughty child for whom she held a certain reluctant affection. “The people come here to throw away money and their cares. I’m just window dressing. I’m sure you can keep the cash register ringing for a while without me.”

“Have fun,” he said, flatly; it might just as easily been “so long” or “fuck you.”

We threaded back through the casino into the entry area, where we rounded a corner and found a door that said “No Admittance,” which proved its point by being locked. Estelle unlocked it, and we were in a little hallway, off of which were a few doors and a self-service elevator. We took the elevator.

The third floor seemed to be offices and conference rooms and, as promised, a few suites.

Ours wasn’t a lavish suite, just the like of a room in a typical Loop hotel, maybe a touch bigger, in shades of blue, small wet bar, bed and bath. Bed is what she was sitting on, kicking off her shoes, stretching out her million-dollar legs to relax, and show off.

“You want a drink, Nate?”

“When I knew you, you didn’t drink.”

“I still don’t,” she said, tossing her pageboy again. “I don’t smoke either. But when I knew you, you sure did. Drink, I mean. Rum, as I remember. Has that changed?”

“No. I still don’t smoke, though.”

“You sound like a regular all-American boy.”

“You’re an all-American girl, all right. Horatio Alger in a skirt.”

She frowned, just a little. “Why are you angry?”

“Am I?”

She patted the bed next to her. “Sit down.”

I sighed, and did.

“You’re angry because I’m so successful.”

“No! I think your success is swell. It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Exactly what I wanted. And you’ve got what you wanted, all those years, don’t you? Your own business. Your own detective agency.”

I shrugged. “We are expanding,” I said, not being able to help myself from bragging it up a little. I told her how I’d added two operatives and doubled my office space and even had a secretary, no more hunt-and-peck on the typewriter.

She smiled, both dimples. “I bet she’s cute as a button, with a great big crush on her boss. Taken advantage of her yet, Nate?”

“Your psychic powers are failing you on that one, Estelle. I’m sorry I was a grouch, before.”

She touched my shoulder. “I understand. It’s just the same old argument, isn’t it?”

“I guess.”

“We don’t need to have that, anymore, do we?”

“No we don’t.”

“We can’t ever be an item again, so we should live and let live, right? No reason not to be pals, huh?”

“None at all.”

Then I kissed her, and she put her tongue in my mouth, and the sequined dress was coming loose in my hands and then my mouth was on her breasts, frantically switching from one to the other, not able to get enough of either, her nipples startlingly erect, each a hard sweet inch, and her soft generous ass was in my two hands and my trousers were falling to the floor with the thud of a fainting man, and then I was in her, to the hilt, hating myself, hating her, loving her.

The old argument-the dispute that had killed us-had of course been back in her waitress days. We quickly fell headlong in love, or anyway I did, and whenever I wasn’t working we were together, and most of the time had been spent in bed. She was only the third woman I’d ever been with, and the first one I’d ever had a real affair with. And I loved her till I thought my fucking heart would break, which, sure enough, it did.

She always asked for money. Not like a whore. Not right after the act. But before I left her, she’d say she was a few dollars short. Her rent was due. Her mother was sick. Her machinist stepfather was out of work. If I could just help out…

And I would.

But I wasn’t alone. One night they changed my shift on me, and I had a night free I hadn’t anticipated. I went to surprise her, to her little apartment on the near North Side and knocked, and she came to the door, cracking it open, and looked out at me with her wide green eyes and her wide white smile and said, “Nate, I’m afraid I have company.”

I stood outside in the goddamn rain half the night before I gave up the vigil. Whoever he was, he was staying till morning, so fuck it.

The next day’s confrontation was in Rickett’s, where she was behind the gleaming white counter, and I almost lost her her job.

“What was his name?”

Softly, she said, “I see other people, Nate. I never said I didn’t. I got a life besides you.”

“You see other men, you mean.”

“I see other men. Maybe I see women, too. How do you like them apples?”

I grabbed her wrist. “Do they all give you money?”

She smiled at me through gritted teeth, a hateful, arrogant smile.

“Only when I ask them to,” she said.

Now, ten years later, here I was in bed with her again. Or, anyway, on top of a bed with her. A fast frantic fuck, my pants off, my shoes and shirt and tie on; her dress pulled down and up and a jumble around her middle, panties caught on one ankle. We must’ve been a sight.

I pushed off her, embarrassed, ashamed. I couldn’t look at her. I couldn’t look at myself.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

She was touching my shoulder. I wanted to shrug her hand off, violently, but I couldn’t. I wanted to ask her to slip her arm all the way around me, but I couldn’t.

“It’s all right, Nate. I wanted it.”

“You’re Nicky Dean’s girl.”

“I’m my own girl, honey. Nicky’s not one to talk. He’s out in Hollywood cheating on both of us.”

I looked at her. “What do you mean, ‘both of us’?”

She shrugged, shot me a crinkly smile. “Me and his wife.”

“I didn’t know he was married.”

“Neither does he, most of the time. She’s a little chorus-line cutie he married back in the early twenties. She’s still pretty cute, for an older broad. Real sickly, though.”

There was no jealousy in her voice. Very matter of fact.

“You mind if we put our clothes on?” I asked.

“Yes I do,” she said, rolling one of her stockings down; the Southern belle at the Rialto had nothing on her. “I want you to strip down and I’m going to do the same and then we’re going to slide under these cool sheets and turn down the lights and cuddle and chat and see what comes up.”

I looked into that cute, mischievous face, trying to see the cold cynical heart that had to dwell behind it somewhere; but I couldn’t find it.

I could only smile back and sit unprotesting as she undid my tie and my shirt, and soon we were two cool bodies between cool sheets in a dark anonymous room.

I thought of Sally (Helen in bed), and wondered if I was a bastard. Well, perhaps I was a bastard, that was almost certainly the case, but Sally had left town this morning, before I even got back. She was on a sleeper plane to California this very minute, flying the same sky that I crawled down out of this morning. There’d been a note of thanks on the bed, saying she’d made her Brown Derby booking and would be back in town next month; she’d try to see me then. That “try” browned me off. But what the hell-Sally was just a sweet memory I’d had a chance to momentarily relive; there was no future for us.

Just as there was no future with the memory I was holding in my arms now. Like Sally, Estelle was the past. But since there were no women in my present to speak of, the past was better than nothing. Let the future take care of itself.

“Aren’t you even interested why I came around?” I asked her. “To see me, of course.”

“That’s true. But I came looking for you for a reason. I’m working.”

She snuggled against me. “You mean, you’re getting paid for this? Why, Nate Heller, you little whore.”

“You’re more right than you think,” I said. “I’m here on an errand. Willie Bioff sent me.”

She pulled away to have a look at me and her smile was open-mouthed and her green eyes amused but mostly she was just surprised.

“But you hate that little pimp! I remember when you busted him…”

“You remember that?”

“Sure! You were ranting about how he slapped some woman around. You were quite the knight in shiny armor in those days.”

“Hardly. It was pretty tarnished even then. You forget how I moved from uniform to plainclothes.”

She waved that off with a friendly smirk. “So you lied on the witness stand. You know anybody who hasn’t?”

She had me there.

She pulled away from me, just a little, to lean on a pillow and half sit up and appraise me. “Willie Bioff, huh? If he’s in town, why didn’t he stop up and see me personal?”

“He isn’t in town. I just got back from a couple days in California.”

Her laugh was a grunt. “He’s making hay while the sun shines out there, that’s for sure. What put the two of you in bed together? Pardon the expression.”

Briefly, I told her about Pegler investigating Bioff’s past and present; that she should be on the lookout for Pegler himself or somebody Pegler might send around.

“Nobody’s been around yet,” she said. “And I don’t think anybody’d get a single word out of me. But I appreciate the tip. Willie must be afraid his phones are tapped.”

“Or that yours are.”

“Possible,” she said, nodding. “These FBI and internal revenue boys are hard to bribe. They seem intent on doing their goddamn jobs.”

“You never met Eliot Ness, did you?”

“Actually, I did a couple times. He raided the 101 more than once. He was cute. You two boys were thick, later on, I hear. The tarnished knight and the boy scout. Quite a combo.”

“Let’s just say he did his goddamn job. I can respect that; can’t you?”

“Why not? What became of him?”

“He’s public safety director in Cleveland.”

She mock-yawned.

“It’s not really all that dull,” I said. “He’s done his share of gang-busting in those parts. He’s the guy that ran the Mayfield Road Mob out of Cleveland.”

“I just love civic progress.” She shook her head, smiled wryly. “You and Willie Bioff. That’s a match made in hell.”

“He’s not such a bad guy,” I lied. Again, I played a surmise of mine like it was a fact, saying, “So what if he’s hitting up the movie moguls for some strike-prevention insurance? He’s done okay by the rank and file…going back as far as that soup kitchen he and Browne started.”

She started laughing and I didn’t think she was going to stop.

“Estelle, cut it out, you’re gonna bust a gut…”

“The soup kitchen!” Tears were rolling down her face. “Yeah, yeah, the soup kitchen…couple of philanthropists, that’s Bioff and Browne.” Laughing throughout.

“Okay, okay, so I’m a naive jerk. Let me in on the joke, why don’t you?”

She leaned on her elbow, shaking her head, smiling ear to ear. “That soup kitchen was the biggest scam Willie Bioff ever ran on this burg. That’s what got him and Browne started.”

“How do you mean?”

“They used the joint to launder money, you cute impressionable little hick. They went to Barney Balaban of the B and K chain…”

“I talked to him today, for Bioff. Giving him the same warning about Pegler as I gave you.”

“How is he in bed?”

“Cute, Estelle. Very cute.”

She snorted. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time he got screwed. See, after the crash, Balaban got the Stagehands Union to let him get away with a twenty-five percent pay cut. You know, hard times and deflation and all. Then all of a sudden the World’s Fair came in and every kootch show on the midway was needing stagehands and show business in general around here was booming. This next part I love. Balaban is in the hospital for his ulcers, and Willie and George go visit him. They take him flowers and smile at him and ask him how he’s feeling and he says better and smiles back and they inform him that if he doesn’t restore the twenty-five percent pay cut immediately they will call their men out on strike. This would close every one of his four hundred movie theaters. Some treatment for stomach ulcers, huh? Anyway, Balaban said his company couldn’t afford it, and Willie reminded him about the soup kitchen. How there were good Samaritans who donated to it. And Balaban offered ’em a hundred and fifty a week for the soup kitchen, if they’d forget this strike business.”

“And Willie and George grabbed it.”

She gestured with an upraised, lecturing finger. “No. They asked for fifty thousand a year for the soup kitchen.”

“Jesus Christ. Did they get it?”

Knowing chuckle. “They settled for twenty grand. Of course, Browne did use some of the dough for supplies for the kitchen. He bought four cases of canned soup for two dollars and fifty cents each.”

“I always suspected that soup kitchen was some kind of racket.”

“Sure! What else? They sold votes to politicians out of there, too-all those stagehands and their families would vote any way Willie told ’em. That brought in a pretty penny in soup kitchen donations.”

I was impressed. “Estelle, you are one knowledgeable girl. Dean must really trust you to let you in on all this stuff.”

“Ha! What little spider do you think led Bioff and Browne into Nicky’s web in the first place?”

“You?”

Another wry smile. “In case you hadn’t picked up on it, Detective Heller, Browne drinks.”

“Really? My, you are knowledgeable.”

“Shut up, Nate. But Bioff doesn’t drink, not as much anyway. He’s not used to holding his liquor.”

“So?”

“So the night after they took Barney Balaban for twenty grand, they went out on the town. That afternoon they’d bought themselves fancy foreign sportcars, and spiffy new clothes. Bioff likes to look good, good as he can, the fat little greasy bastard. Anyway, guess where they go to celebrate? The 101 Club. Nicks club. Guess how they choose to unwind? With a little game of twenty-six. Guess who the twenty-six girl was? Little ole me.”

I laughed softly. “And guess who started bragging about being in the dough?”

“Exactly right,” she said, green eyes smiling. “I motioned to Nicky and he came over and joined us. Before the night was out we had the whole story.”

“I think I can guess the rest. Nicky told Nitti.”

“Ricca, actually. Little New York and Frankie Rio picked Willie and George up the next day, hauled ’em to the Bismarck. Nitti was in on it, by that time, I’m sure. I don’t know what was said, but the upshot was the Outfit cut themselves in for half.”

“How’d Willie and George take that?”

“The same way they took it when Nitti upped the Outfit’s share to two-thirds, a few years later. Without any fuss, how else do you take something like that? But it paid off for ’em in the long run.”

“It was bound to,” I said. “Nitti’s a financial mastermind, and about as shrewd a planner, as skillful a chessplayer as you could find in the boardroom of the biggest corporation in town.”

“Nate, he is in the boardroom of the biggest corporation in town.”

“My mistake.”

She elaborated: “First thing they did for those union Katzenjammer Kids was get Browne elected national president of the IA. He ran once before and lost. Before he had the Outfit’s support, I mean. This time when they held the election, in Columbus back in ’34, there were more gunmen in the room than voting delegates. Lepke Buchalter was the guy in charge.”

“That could sway a fella’s vote.”

“Like Capone said, you can get more with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word. Anyway, those two horses’ asses have been on the gravy train ever since. They were in New York awhile, where the studios have corporate headquarters-and then they were going to move their office to Washington, at the president’s request, but Nitti vetoed it.”

“What president’s request?”

“You know. The president. The guy with the glasses and funny cigarette holder and dumpy wife? He wanted George and some other union leaders to be close at hand, to be advisors on domestic affairs.”

Maybe Montgomery was right about that third term.

She seemed to be winding down, now. “Three years ago they moved the office to Hollywood, and Nicky went with ’em, to keep an eye on them for the boys. He comes back a lot, though. This club’s his first love.”

“I get the feeling Nitti doesn’t trust Willie and George.”

“It’s not George. George is just a tub of fat, guzzling beer all day long. Willie’s the one who might pull a fast one someday.”

“Well, when Willie sent me here to warn you, he hoped it wouldn’t get back to Nitti. Which means I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell Nicky about this.”

“Sure, honey. You can trust me.”

“I guess Bioff figures he’s on the spot enough, with this income-tax scare.”

Her expression was thoughtful, businesslike. “Willie Bioff could be about to get caught. A lot of money’s been pouring through his chubby fingers. They been getting brown paper bags of cash for years now, from every major studio you can think of-MGM, Twentieth Century-Fox, Paramount, Warner Brothers, you name it. Willie’s latest scam, Nicky says, is making the studios make him their ‘agent’ for buying raw film stock. He gets a seven percent commission on all film stock the studios buy.”

“A money laundry again?”

“Yeah. But that’s a new idea, and there’s a lot of money to wash out there. Anyway, don’t give me this song-and-dance about Willie Bioff looking after the rank and file. He’s been selling out his own union members, agreeing to wage cuts and longer hours, for as long as he’s been a union boss.”

“How do you feel about that, Estelle? You used to be a working girl.”

She shrugged. “I still am. Willie’s just doing what we all gotta do, Nate. Looking out for himself. You got to look out for yourself; nobody’s gonna do it for you.”

“My old man gave the best years of his life working for the unions.”

“What’d it get him?”

“Nothing. Heartbreak.”

“See? Enough of this. Let’s kick Bioff out of bed and keep it to just the two of us.”

Part of me wanted to be a million miles away from this sugar-sweet, hard-as-nails dame; part of me, and not just the part you’re thinking, didn’t ever want to leave. “Don’t you have to be getting back downstairs?” I asked her, half looking for an out. “Won’t you get in trouble with Sonny?”

Short deep laugh. “Don’t be silly, Nate. Sonny works for me. I own a third of this place, and he owns jack shit. I can stay up here and screw my brains out all night long, if I like, and who’s to stop me?”

“Must you be so romantic, Estelle?”

“Be quiet. I’m a whore, Nate. I can’t remember ever saying it right out like that, before, but it’s true, isn’t it? I’m Nicky Dean’s little whore. And you’re Willie Bioff’s little whore. Well, fuck them both. And fuck us.”

And we did. Repeatedly.

Sunday I slept in till noon. I was in my own bed in my own room at my own hotel, having left the Colony Club around 4:00 A.M., getting the fish eye from Sonny Goldstone but not much caring. I knew there was no way to approach Estelle without Nitti and company learning. But Estelle was an old flame of mine, and besides, any man who ever saw her wouldn’t question my motives for spending six hours in a suite with her.

I’d asked the desk to hold all calls, but on my way to lunch I picked up my messages and found that Pegler had been trying to call me all morning. Why wasn’t he in church, praying for an end to unionism? Anyway, I stopped at a pay phone and called him; he was staying at the Drake.

“I must see you at once,” he said.

“I’m going to get something to eat and then I have some things to do. Meet me at my office around four.”

“Heller, I have a train to catch.”

“When?”

“Eight this evening.”

“Meet me at my office around four,” I repeated, and hung up.

I could have done without meeting with Pegler at all, but I didn’t see any way around it; Montgomery was a client, and he expected me to cooperate with Pegler, to a degree at least. But being seen with Pegler at this point could prove embarrassing, maybe even fatal, which made me glad he was coming up on a Sunday afternoon, not a business day. Of course, if he were to be seen entering my office on a Sunday, that might be interpreted as a secret meeting, and…

What the hell. I felt reasonably secure, and not just because I had an automatic under my shoulder. I’d pulled it off-done my job for Montgomery by doing my job for Bioff. Slight conflict of interest, there, of course, but who was to know? Still, as I walked the Loop on a quiet Sunday afternoon of a winter day that had me turning up my collar and stuffing my gloved hands deep in my topcoat pockets, I felt a little jumpy, looking behind me, seeing if I was being tailed.

I didn’t seem to be, and I had a leisurely solitary luncheon at the Brevoort Hotel dining room-breast of guinea hen, corn fritters, fresh mushrooms. Two cups of hot black coffee, declining a third to keep the jumpiness at bay. The wear and tear of the California trip was starting to fade; the glow of last evening’s sexual adventures still warmed me; and I was comforted by the thought that I would soon be at my office typing up a confidential report to Robert Montgomery, after which I would phone Willie Bioff, and finally dispense with Westbrook Pegler, putting this risky but neatly profitable affair behind me.

It was one-thirty-something when I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of Barney’s building, my footsteps making hollow notes in the otherwise silent Sunday-afternoon symphony the empty building was playing. My keys were already in my hand, I’d fished them out on the stairs, so even that didn’t add a sound.

But something inside my office did.

Through the pebbled glass, at left, adjacent to the door, I could make out a shape, rising, and heard a grunt.

Quietly, quietly, I slipped the gun out from under my arm.

Pegler? No. Not two and a half hours early. Or was Pegler’s hotel phone tapped? Did someone know about our meeting at four, and was waiting to do the both of us in, a Sunday-afternoon two-for-one sale? From the sound of it, whoever it was was making some effort in there, not expecting me here this soon, tossing the office, maybe, looking for something or staging a fake robbery to drop some bodies into and, well, that was enough of that.

The gun tight in my gloved hand, I smashed the pebbled glass, with a powerful swing of the forearm, gun barrel leading, shattered the glass and shards went flying as I thrust my arm, gun in hand, through the jagged teeth where the panel of glass had been and pointed it at where the shape had been as a woman screamed and a man said, “Oh, shit!”

There, on the couch, on my old modernistic black-and-white World’s Fair couch, was Frankie Fortunato, with his bare hairy ass, his bare hairy everything, showing, as he looked back at me with eyes that managed to be narrow and wide at the same time. Under his skinny naked body was a beautiful naked girl.

Specifically, Gladys.

“Whoops,” I said. Lowering the gun.

“Mr. Heller,” Frankie said, and it was the first time he ever used “mister” in front of my name, “I can explain.”

He was crawling off Gladys, leaving the poor girl there to do an embarrassed, impromptu “September Morn” imitation, and not a bad job for somebody lying down. She wasn’t screaming anymore, but her mute humiliation killed the fun of learning that the body under her clothes lived well up to expectations.

I unlocked the door and went in, and Frankie was almost in his pants, and Gladys had reached for her dress, and was sitting now, covering herself up with it, looking scared and ashamed.

“We didn’t have anywhere else to go,” Fortunato explained, lamely, zipping up. “Gladys lives with her mom and I live with my uncle and aunt.”

“Don’t,” I said. Embarrassed myself. Putting the gun away. “Not necessary.”

“Are we fired, Mr. Heller?” Gladys managed to say. Her big brown eyes showed white all around.

I went over and sat on the edge of her desk; assayed the damages. Glass fragments littered the floor like huge misshapen snowflakes. The hole in the pane provided a scenic view of the abortionist’s office across the way.

“Nobody’s fired,” I said. “Get dressed, Gladys. Pick up your things quick like a bunny, I won’t even look, and duck in my office and dress. Shoo.”

She shooed. But I watched out of the corner of my eye. Only the memory of last night with Estelle enabled me to live with the sure knowledge that the only time Gladys’s perfect pink body would be naked in my inner office would be today, putting her clothes back on at my request.

“Jesus, I’m sorry, Heller,” Frankie said. He was fully clothed now. Snugging his tie in place.

The “mister” hadn’t lasted long.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I know how it is. Get it while the getting’s good.”

“You’re not mad?” Smoothing a hand up over his dark widow’s peak.

“I’m jealous.”

Gladys emerged, dressed in a blue-and-white Sunday frock with a virginal bow at the neck. She said, “I’ll pay for the window.”

I looked at Frankie.

He shrugged. “We’ll go dutch.”

“Frankie,” I said, “as long as you’re around, chivalry is not dead. In a coma, maybe, but not dead. I’ll pay for the window. It was my fault.”

“How could it be your fault?” Frankie wondered.

“I’m jumpy today. And, also, some dangerous things have been going on and I haven’t bothered to clue you people in. That’s my mistake, and it comes out of working alone for so long.”

Frankie slipped his arm around Gladys, supportively. “We’ll go now,” he said, “if that’s okay.”

“Sure. I got some work to do, or I’d let you use the couch.”

Fortunato grinned, but Gladys, still embarrassed, looked away from me. But she let him keep his arm around her.

“Oh,” I said to them. “One of you could get the broom from the closet and sweep up that glass, before you go, but be careful. Of course judging by those, I can see you already are…pick them up, too, would you?” I was referring to, pointing to, a package of Sheiks that lay on the floor next to the couch.

Gladys was crying a little, or trying to.

I put a finger under her chin and lifted her head and looked into her wide brown eyes. “I don’t mean to make you feel bad. I’m just jealous, understand?”

And then she did the most remarkable thing, which made the whole embarrassing, expensive encounter worthwhile: she smiled at me.

I went into my inner office and pulled my typing stand around and began pecking out Montgomery’s confidential report. After while I heard glass being dumped into the wastebasket and, surprisingly, it wasn’t Fortunato but Gladys who opened the door and looked in.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Heller.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. Can I ask you a question, though?”

“Sure.”

“Why him?”

She shrugged. “He’s cute.”

And then she was gone, and I was pecking at the report. I put it all in, every rumor, every anecdote, every slip of the tongue that Browne, Dean, Bioff, Barger, Balaban, Coston and Estelle had handed me. But I stated clearly that it was all hearsay, and should be used only as background, or as the starting place for a real investigation. None of these people was likely ever to go public with their knowledge. It took over two hours and I made some corrections in ink and then folded the six single-spaced pages and put them in an envelope, with Montgomery’s home address typed on it. I included no cover letter and no return address. He had promised to keep my name out of it, after all; why not remind him?

I put my feet up on the desk and called Willie Bioff at the number he’d given me, which was his eighty-acre ranch in Canoga Park. A colored maid answered and it took a few minutes for him to come to the phone; calling long distance and hearing silence for several minutes is like watching dollar bills float out the window, but considering I’d wrapped Bioff’s two-grand assignment up in as many days, I could stand to watch a few of ’em float.

“Heller,” Bioff said.

“I talked to your friends.”

“Good. Any problems?”

“No.”

“Any of them say anybody’s been around asking?”

“No.”

“Think they’ll keep mum?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“That’s a fair answer. I’ll send you a cashier’s check for the second grand. We don’t want to trust that much cash to the mails. Those guys ain’t union-yet.”

He hung up, and so did I.

At ten to four I heard somebody enter the outer office. I slipped my gun out of the holster and leaned back in my chair and waited.

Pegler came in.

“You’re early,” I said, gun in hand.

He frowned and waggled a finger at me. “Aren’t we past that?” Then he waggled the finger back where he came from. “And what happened in your outer office? It’s a goddamned mess.”

Not a “goddamn” mess. A “goddamned” mess. Ain’t we grand.

I put the automatic back under my shoulder. “I thought somebody was in my office lyin’ in wait for me, so I broke the glass, but it was just one of my operatives humping the secretary.”

Pegler made a disgusted face, pulled a chair up and sat down. “Very amusing, I’m sure. What have you got to tell me?” He wore another expensive, beautifully tailored suit with lapels wide as wings, light brown this time, with monogrammed pocket kerchief and a dark brown tie touched with white.

“Nothing, really,” I said. “I’m making a confidential report to Robert Montgomery. If he wants to share any of it with you, that’s up to him. But nothing I discovered is anything you’ll be able to easily prove. Nobody who talked to me is going to talk to you, or anybody, not openly.”

“You could be quoted,” he said, with a shrewd little devilish smile. “My column is not a court of law; I’ll admit hearsay evidence, gladly.”

“No. It wouldn’t be healthy to.”

“I see. I didn’t take you for a coward, Heller.”

“I didn’t take you for a jackass. I’ve been risking my life, poking into this. This is Frank Nitti’s business you’re nosing in, and if you really did play cards with Jake Lingle, once upon a time, you’ll know that the Capone mob has been known to kill reporters-so you’re not immune, either.”

He took his cigarette case out of his coat pocket and selected a cigarette and lit it up. “Is it a matter of money?”

“No, it’s a matter of life and death. I don’t want you for a client, Mr. Pegler. I have enough clients already.”

He shrugged elaborately, blew out smoke. “Do what you please. I don’t need your paltry gossip, anyway. You’ve already helped me, Heller, whether you know it or not, whether you want to or not.”

“Really?”

His smile, the tilt of his head, turned coy. “I’ve just spent the last several days looking through old police records. With the help of a local officer, a Lieutenant Bill Drury, and several others, I’ve made some interesting discoveries.”

Bill Drury and I had started out on the pickpocket detail together; he was an honest, ambitious cop who hated the Outfit almost irrationally. He’d rousted every major mob figure in the city, numerous times, just for fun-Nitti, Guzik, Ricca, all of them. Why he was still alive was a mystery it would take a better detective than yours truly to ever solve.

But I meant it when I said, “Bill is as good as they come.”

“He spoke highly of you,” Pegler conceded. “If I hadn’t dropped your name, in fact, I don’t know that he would have devoted the time to this he did. He helped me locate a number of brief jail terms Bioff served, dating back as early as 1922. But more importantly we tracked down the record of your arrest of Bioff. There it was-a lonely faded index card-with your name and Shoemaker’s, as arresting officers.”

“Old Shoes”-another honest cop, a legendary police detective, dead now.

“So what?” I said. “I already told you Bioff got a conviction off that bust.”

Smugness was in every line of his face, every pore. “We needed verification. But we found much more; we hit the proverbial jackpot. You see, Willie Bioff’s never served his six-month sentence for pandering.”

I shrugged. “I could’ve told you that. He clouted his way out of it.”

“Perhaps. But I don’t think you understand-it’s on the records as an ‘open’ conviction-Willie Bioff still owes the state of Illinois six months.”

I sat forward. “Maybe you really do have hold of something. You’re sure about this? My understanding was he appealed it and bought his way out.”

“Money no doubt exchanged hands,” Pegler said, blowing out smoke but not hot air, “and William Morris Bioff did appeal the sentence, and was released pending the decision of the higher court. But when I placed a simple phone call to the clerk of the Supreme Court in Springfield, Illinois, I learned that the appeal had never reached there. The case had been purposely sidetracked in Cook County, somewhere, and conveniently forgotten.”

Jesus. In 1930 I’d been part of a raid on a sleazy South Halsted Street brothel and we’d caught the stocky little pimp slipping out the back with the brothel’s tally sheet in hand; later he’d slapped one of the whores who said the wrong incriminating thing about him, and I’d sworn to myself the little bastard would serve time in the Bridewell for it, Chicago or no Chicago. Now, almost ten years later, it looked like maybe he would.

“I’ve laid the information before State’s Attorney Thomas E. Courtney,” Pegler said grandiosely, “who informs me he’ll request Bioff’s extradition to Illinois.”

“By God, I think you’ve got the little bastard.”

“I’ve got the little kike, all right.”

Silence.

“Watch that, okay, Mr. Pegler?”

Amused little smile. “You’re offended?”

“Nothing much offends me. But sometimes I get pissed off awful fierce. You remember me-the guy with the gun?”

Pegler smirked at that and said, “At any rate, your friend Lieutenant Drury has come up with the goods on George Browne, as well. In 1925 Browne was involved in a gangland shooting, in a restaurant; he was shot in the seat of the pants, and his companion was killed. Browne was quoted as telling the police at the scene, ‘I’ll take care of it, boys.’ Four weeks after he got out of the hospital, the man who fired the shots was himself shot to death, his assailant never found.”

“That’s not as good as an unserved jail sentence,” I said, “but it’ll play in your column. It’ll paint Browne as a union man with a gangster past.”

“They’re both finished,” he said, with quiet glee. “And so is the Stagehands Union.”

“I wouldn’t count on that. Maybe they’ll clean house. Maybe if Bioff and Browne and the Outfit are tossed out, it’ll be a real union again.”

He looked like he had a bad taste in his mouth, as he said, “A real union, what is that? An inert rank and file who go to meetings only when something’s in it for them. And a union boss who’s part ham actor and part Tammany chief, who knows enough not to show too much respect for their intelligence.”

“I don’t want to talk unions with you, Pegler. I’m for exposing Bioff and Browne and Dean and the rest, because they’re perverting something that should work. But your anti-unionism offends me, it’s bullshit. My father-”

“Your father. He was of that particular tribe, I take it?”

“What?”

Pegler rose. Stabbed his cigarette out in the glass tray on my desk. “Nothing. It’s too bad you’re unwilling to put your convictions on the line and tell me what else you’ve discovered, in your own investigation. You’ll be a hero in my column, nonetheless, as the surviving arresting officer, as the man whose hard work ten years ago made possible bringing Willie Bioff to justice today.”

“Spell my name right and mention the agency and I won’t sue you.”

“How generous of you. Are you certain you wouldn’t care to share any further information with me? There’s money in it. A man of your persuasion can appreciate that, I’m sure.”

“My persuasion?”

His lip curled in a patrician sneer. “You’re a Jew, aren’t you? Mr. Heller? You don’t look it, but you are.”

“So fucking what?”

He didn’t like being cursed at; his face reddened and his satanic eyebrows twitched and he said, “Listen to me, you foulmouthed little hebe-if I didn’t need you to make this story float, I’d paint you for the kike coward you are…”

I was out from behind the desk before he could finish and grabbed him by the wings of his suitcoat and dragged him out of my inner office and dragged him through my outer office and hurled him out into the hall, where he bounced up against and off the abortionist’s office, almost shattering that glass.

“I could break you,” Pegler said, sitting in a pile, breathing through his nose like a bull.

“I could kill you,” I said.

He thought that over. I was, after all, a guy who’d pointed a gun at him more than once. And I was breathing hard, too, and looked like I meant it. I did.

He pushed up and straightened himself and walked off without another word.

That evening, in Barney’s Cocktail Lounge, I sat in a rear booth with my ex-boxer pal and said, “I never felt this Jewish before. I never felt particularly Jewish at all. Anyway, not since I was a kid.”

Barney hadn’t been surprised by my Pegler story.

“There’s a lot of it goin’ around,” he said, shrugging.

I knew what he meant.

“Don’t start with me, Barney. Please don’t start.”

He didn’t. But for the first time I think I understood him, and his concerns. I knew that something was loose in the world that was worse than the Chicago Outfit.

For the moment, however, the Outfit was bad enough.

Because suddenly there was Little New York Campagna standing by the booth with his cold dark eyes and impassive putty face trained on me.

And without saying a word, he clearly conveyed to me that somebody in a suite at the Bismarck Hotel was waiting to see me.

Nitti didn’t have an office in the Loop. He did his business out of several restaurants and various hotels-most frequently the Bismarck, on the corner of LaSalle and Randolph, just across from City Hall. I’d met Nitti here before, in this very suite-the Presidential Suite, the little gold plate on the door said. The room was at the dead end of the seventh-floor hall, down at the left after you stepped off the elevator, and I was presently standing in a vestibule facing Louis Campagna.

We’d walked here from Barney’s cocktail lounge; a gentle snow falling. Sunday night in the Loop, and the concrete canyons were strangely peaceful. Like church. My heart was a trip-hammer.

And it hadn’t slowed yet; which was fine with me, since having a heart that was still beating was something I valued. Campagna hadn’t said two words to me on the way here-he hadn’t said one word, either-but he was keeping two eyes on me, rarely blinking, perfecting a cold dark stare that made me wonder just how much trouble I was in.

If I was in serious trouble, wouldn’t I be dead in an alley by now? Or did Nitti merely want to talk to me, first? He’d sent Campagna after me, tonight, just as earlier in the week he’d sent him to deliver a message; and Campagna was beyond that sort of thing-he was in the inner circle, now, not just a bodyguard or an enforcer. Yet Frank had sent him, not some flunkie. What did that mean?

The door opened and Johnny Patton, in a dapper gray topcoat with a dark fur collar, exited, looking back, smiling, saying, “A pleasure as always, Frank,” a black homburg in one gloved hand.

What was Patton-the “boy mayor of Burnham,” Eddie O’Hare’s business partner at Sportsman’s Park-doing here? And why had Nitti let me see him?

Patton put his hat on and walked by without a word, not recognizing me, or not choosing to.

Campagna jerked a thumb toward the door, which Patton had left ajar.

That meant I was to go in.

There were no bodyguards in the suite, at least in the living room that I entered into, the same white-appointed, gold-trimmed room I remembered. A bedroom off the entryway, to my right, had its door cracked open and a light was on; someone was rustling around in there. Whether a bodyguard or a woman or what, I couldn’t say. And I sure as hell didn’t ask.

As for Nitti, he was seated on a white couch, feet on a glass coffee table on which were several stacks of ledger books; he was thumbing through one, reading one of the large, awkward-to-hold books like the latest popular novel. He was wearing a brown silk dressing gown, black dress pants and brown slippers. There was no monogram on the robe. A glass of milk, about a third drunk, was making a ring on the coffee table, next to some ledgers.

He looked heavier than the last time I’d seen him, and older, but good. The mustache he’d had when I first met him was long gone; he was a smooth executive now, despite his rough features, a strong, almost handsome face with flecks of scar tissue here and there, most noticeably on his lower lip. His hair was longer, brushed back with less of that slick look I remembered, a little gray in it, and the part in his hair had wandered from left to right. Maybe he was cutting his own hair, now-I’d known him to be dissatisfied with other barbers. I say “other” barbers, because he’d begun as a barber himself (his first such job in Chicago had been in the same shop as Jake “The Barber” Factor, who later helped Nitti frame Roger Touhy, but that’s another, if typical, Nitti tale) and even before he began to effect the look and style of a business executive, he’d been immaculately groomed.

“Forgive me if I don’t rise,” he said.

I tried to find sarcasm in the words, but couldn’t quite do it. Couldn’t quite rule it out, either.

“Sure, Frank.” Was it still okay to call him that? “Mind if I sit down?”

Still reading the ledger, his eyes having not yet landed on me, Nitti waved one hand with mild impatience, saying, “Sit, sit.”

I sat in a high-backed, gold-upholstered chair near Nitti. I was up higher than him, in this thronelike chair; and he was a relatively small man, perhaps four inches shorter than me. None of which kept me from feeling intimidated, and very small indeed.

After what seemed forever, and was probably a minute, Nitti put the ledger on top of some other ledgers and pointed to his glass of milk. “Care for something? Just ’cause I gotta drink this goddamn stuff doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy yourself.”

“No thanks, Frank.”

“Not a drinking man?”

“Sometimes. Not during business. I assume this isn’t a social call.”

He shrugged, ignored the question, saying, “I’m not a drinking man myself. Some occasional vino, that’s about it. My apologies for bothering you on a Sunday, a Sunday night at that.”

“No, that’s fine,” I said, “it’s good to see you,” trying not to let it sound like a lie.

He gestured with both hands, a very Italian gesture, or in his case Sicilian. “I usually don’t work on Sundays,’’ he said. “I like to spend Sunday with the family. Go to Mass. Play with my boy. Hey, you want to see something?”

I swallowed. “Sure, Frank.”

He dug under the robe. I remembered the story about the night Capone threw a testimonial banquet for Scalise and Anselmi and was toasting them when he reached behind him for a baseball bat and splattered their brains.

But Nitti was only getting his wallet. He opened it, grinning, pushed it in front of me.

It was a picture, in a plastic compartment in the wallet, of Nitti, smiling, his arm around a little boy. Hugging the child; the child was smiling, too, obviously loving his father. As that’s what this obviously was: a snapshot portrait of father and son.

“He’s big for six,” Nitti said, beaming; he withdrew the wallet and looked at the picture himself. “You know, I’m a little guy.”

Right.

“My son’s gonna be a bigger man than me. The men in his mama’s family are six foot, some of ’em. He’ll stand taller than his old man.”

There seemed to be no irony in his words.

“Handsome lad,” I said.

Nitti nodded in agreement, smiled at the picture, and put the wallet back in his pocket.

“Now,” he said, “what’s this about you nosing around in the Outfit’s business?”

I hadn’t seen any baseball bats when I came in; maybe one was behind Nitti’s couch…

“What do you mean, Frank?”

“Don’t shit me, kid.”

I wasn’t a kid anymore, but I didn’t point that out to him; I’d been young enough for him to call me that when we first met, and it was clear I’d be a kid to him till the day he died. Maybe that was a saving grace; maybe his looking on me that way was keeping me alive.

“I did a job for Willie Bioff,” I said. Hoping that was what he wanted to hear. Hoping to Christ he didn’t somehow know about Montgomery. That was the job that would get me the testimonial banquet.

“I know,” Nitti said. He reached for the glass of milk, sipped it; brushed away a small milk mustache with a hand that then extended to point a blunt finger at me. “You shouldn’t try keeping things from me.”

I gestured with two open hands. “Bioff didn’t ask me to keep anything from you, exactly. He just didn’t want this situation advertised. He seemed to think he was in the doghouse enough with you fellas, over the income-tax trouble he was in.”

Nitti’s eyes weren’t narrowed; they seemed as casual as two eyes could be. But I knew they were studying me; watching my every movement. Looking for me to betray myself.

“I sometimes think it was a mistake,” Nitti said, reflective all of a sudden, “letting that pimp represent us. But he was in on the ground floor, on the IA deal, so it only seemed fair.”

“He seems to have done a good job for you.”

“He’s got himself rich, is what he’s done, and I don’t begrudge him. That’s what we’re in it for, all of us, our own financial well-being. How the hell else are a bunch of immigrants like us gonna make it in this world, if we don’t look after ourselves?”

“Right,” I said. He seemed to be including me in that, so I didn’t remind him I was born here.

“Tell me what you did for Bioff, exactly.”

I did. From Barger through the phone calls to the movie circuit bigwigs to Estelle. No details about my method of dealing with the latter party, but Nitti smiled at the mention of her name, anyway.

“Nice work if you can get it,” he said.

“She’s who told you, isn’t she? I mean, Sonny Goldstone obviously reported seeing me at the Colony Club, but then you talked to Estelle, and she spilled about me and Bioff, right?”

“Never trust a whore, kid. Haven’t you learned that yet?”

“I guess not. But, then, I’m tempted to say the same thing to you about pimps.”

“Point well taken,” he said, nodding.

“I, uh, didn’t feel I was working behind your back, Frank. Bioff’s one of yours, after all.”

For the first time this evening, his expression seemed thoughtful, not offhand. “I asked around a little. I hear you hate Bioff. Why would you take work from somebody whose fuckin’ guts you hate?”

Shrug. “Money’s money. And I don’t hate Willie. I don’t feel much about him one way or another.”

“I hear you arrested him once.”

Batter up.

“Uh, Frank, that was a long time ago. I haven’t been on the force since ’32, remember?”

He cracked his knuckles; it sounded like a firing squad warming up. “This guy Pegler,” he said, back to his deceptively casual tone, “this big-deal columnist that Bioff was havin’ you issue the warnings about. You had any contact with him?”

Straight was the only way to play it; pretty straight, anyway.

“Twice,” I said. “He came around early this week asking if I ever arrested Bioff. I said yes, but gave him no details. He came around to my office this afternoon, looking for more information; I didn’t give him any. In fact, I threw him out of my office. And I mean threw him out-bodily.”

He took another slow sip of milk. “Why?”

“He called me a hebe.”

“Why, are you a hebe?”

“My father was Jewish. Does Heller sound Irish to you?”

He liked that small bit of impertinence. He said, “If he called me a wop, I’d have him talked to.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I wouldn’t kill him. I’d like to have him hit, right now, for the trouble he’s drumming up for me, but he’s out of bounds.”

“Hitting a newsman like him would really stir up the heat.”

“Like Al used to say,” he added, with a private smile. He meant Capone. “I hear this Pegler’s found out that Bioff still has six months to serve.”

Nitti knowing that was no surprise: little went on in the police department that wasn’t known to the Outfit.

“He told me as much this afternoon,” I said, confirming it.

“You’ll be made a hero,” he said, still smiling, faintly.

“It’ll stick in Pegler’s craw,” I said. “Hebe that I am.”

Nitti laughed. “That is kinda sweet. He needs to build you up to help tear Willie down.”

“I’m not going along with it, Frank.”

He waved a hand at me. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault you busted that little pimp a hundred years ago. It also ain’t your fault that this old unserved sentence caught up with him. He shoulda served it, or bought his way out, or something-not just let it hang.”

“If I had it to do again,” I said, “I’d still bust the bastard. He was a mean pimp; he hurt his girls.”

“Sometimes I think you’re still a cop at heart, Heller.”

“Sometimes I think I am, too.”

“Then why do I trust you?”

“Because I’m afraid of you, Frank.”

He laughed; it was a booming laugh. I’d never heard him laugh that way before; and I never did again.

He said, “I like you, kid. You got chutzpah, you got integrity, you got brains. Why don’t you close down that little shop of yours and come to work for me?”

“I really am too much a cop, Frank. I respect you. You’re the best man in your world. But the Outfit does a lot of things that make me…uncomfortable.”

“Fair enough,” he said, and I couldn’t help thinking again that that was the name of that goddamn Pegler’s column, “but I got to ask you a favor.”

“Sure.”

All humor, all goodwill, left his face; like a sudden change in the weather, Nitti rained on me: “Stay out of the Outfit’s business. You turned up twice this week in my business. You almost got killed once because of it. I would’ve regretted that. I would’ve sent flowers. But dead is dead, my friend, and that is how you will be if you continue to put your nose in my affairs. Capeesh?”

“Capeesh,” I managed to say.

He leaned back; his face and his voice softened a bit. “You can’t be faulted for taking on a client who offers money. I understand that. I understand the temptation when an O’Hare, a Bioff, comes around and says I will give you money. But next time such a person comes to you, think, next time, remember: Frank Nitti offered you a job. I offered you a job years ago, in a hospital room as a matter of fact, not long after you saved my life from Cermak’s maggots and I don’t forget that, not a second do I forget that, but in truth you turned my offer down. And you turned me down just now, again. From that I take it to mean that you aren’t interested in my business. So stay the hell out of it. I mean this in a friendly way. Final warning.”

I swallowed. “I appreciate your frankness, Frank. I appreciate the warning.”

“Right. Some people wake up dead in the alley. They didn’t rate no warning. You, I figure, got that much coming.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, Frank. I apologize for-”

He waved a hand again. “No apologies. Clients hired you; that’s what you’re in business for. But that was before the law was laid down. Henceforth, stay the fuck out of my affairs.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say, except: “Yes, Frank.”

“Now, you saw some things at O’Hare’s.”

What was he talking about?

“Frank, I don’t know…”

“I want you to forget it. All of it. Anything O’Hare said to you, before he was killed. Anything you saw there, at his office. You just put that out of your mind.”

And as he said that, I put it together: the very thing he didn’t want anyone to put together. Because as he sat there looking at ledgers-fresh from a conference with O’Hare’s partner Johnny Patton-I recalled who was the accountant at Sportsman’s Park: Les Shumway, the witness who helped put Capone away. And who was O’Hare, but the federal informer who helped put Capone away? Yet O’Hare had prospered, in the wake of Capone’s fall, and even Shumway had found refuge, right under Frank Nitti’s nose. Why wasn’t Shumway dead?

Perhaps he was, now, like his boss O’Hare. Or he was out of town, or he was being well taken care of.

Because the man sitting across from me was the real man who put Capone away. It wasn’t Stege or Ness or Irey or Frank J. Wilson or Uncle Sam.

It was Frank Nitti.

I knew, with a certainty that chilled me, something that the papers for all their theorizing had not guessed, something that the feds for all their investigating had not even considered, something that few people living knew, few people but for the handful of conspirators themselves, one of whom, Edward J. O’Hare, was freshly dead.

That Frank Nitti had, through O’Hare and Shumway, set Capone up for the federal fall.

To vacate the throne for himself.

“Well,” he said, “I won’t take up any more of your time. It’s been a busy week for all concerned.”

“I would imagine,” I said, casually I hoped, “what with the big boss coming back in a few days.”

He laughed again; not the booming laugh, but loud enough. “Al’s not getting back in the business, kid.”

“Would I be out of line asking why?”

Matter-of-fact shrug. “We heard rumors, but till they let his own doctor examine him at Lewisburg the other day, we couldn’t be sure.”

“Sure of what?”

His smile stopped just short of gloating. “Kid, Al’s crazier than a bedbug. The syph’s eaten away half his brain. He just didn’t live right, you know.”

And he finished his milk.

I rose. My knees felt weak, but I could stand. I could even walk, and did, out the door.

Campagna, waiting, said, “You want a ride home? Snow’s comin’ down. I got a car.”

I could hear the muffled sound of Nitti talking to a woman, in the entryway back of the closed door behind me.

“No thanks,” I said.

After all, the day might come soon enough when Louis Campagna, or someone like him, took me for a ride at Nitti’s behest.

On November 22, the first of Pegler’s columns exposing Bioff and Browne appeared in hundreds of papers nationwide. For once, Pegler submerged his quirky, alternately folksy and pompous writing style into a flat, clear, straightforward reporter’s voice that helped make his union-busting series something that was taken seriously.

The first column specifically exposed Bioff’s unserved sentence for pandering; later Pegler bared Browne’s gangster-tinged past.

In February 1940, due to public pressure created by Pegler’s columns, Bioff was returned to Chicago and, on April 8 of that year, the clang of a cell door swinging shut at the House of Correction marked the start of his actually serving that long-forgotten six-month sentence. Word was he had a private office-like cell with a fresh tub of iced beer each day, the latter a luxury more suited to Browne than Bioff; and he was sometimes released on a good-conduct pass, and was seen out-and-about in Chicago. What the hell-I was pleased that the bust I’d made so long ago had finally resulted in a jail sentence being served at all, iced beer, private office, good-conduct passes or no.

On May 4, 1941, Pegler was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, for “articles on scandals in the ranks of organized labor.”

Twenty days later, Bioff and his co-defendant Browne were charged in a federal court in New York under the Federal Anti-Racketeering Statute on the film-industry extortion. Shortly thereafter, so was Nick (Dean) Circella. Dean and Browne each received eight years; Bioff ten. All three went to prison without uttering a word about Nitti and the Outfit.

Dean, however, was a fugitive for some months prior to his trial, until FBI agents arrested him in a roadhouse known as Shorty’s Place, in Cicero. He was hiding out with Estelle Carey, who had dyed her hair black and posed with Dean (himself posing as a workman) as his little homebody housewife; it must have been a masquerade Estelle enjoyed not in the least.

The murder of E. J. O’Hare remained (and remains) unsolved.

Me? I went about my business, watching all this from the sidelines, keeping what I knew about the Nitti-directed murder of O’Hare to myself. That week never quite faded from my memory, however, if for no other reason than it was the single most financially rewarding week I had in those early years, and for some time thereafter. Between O’Hare, Nitti, Montgomery and Bioff, I brought in enough mazuma to pay the entire yearly salary of my secretary with some left over toward one of my ops. At the same time I knew the risks I’d taken earning that dough could never be properly compensated. I could still be killed for what I’d done, and for what I knew.

Nonetheless, I thought all this movie-union crap was behind me. I had not been called to testify in the Bioff/Browne/Dean proceedings, and Pegler had in his columns played down my role as much as he could; he probably thought he was getting back at me, but I considered it a favor. I took Nitti’s advice and stayed out of his Outfit’s business-as much as I could, anyway, in a town he owned.

When I came back to Chicago in February 1943, Guadalcanal weighed more heavily on my mind than Willie Bioff and company, and I had no intention of allowing myself to get drawn back into that sordid affair. Nitti’s “final warning,” after all, to stay out of his business, still went-and, battle fatigue and amnesia not withstanding, I clearly remembered that Frank Nitti was not to be taken lightly.

And then Estelle Carey came back into my life, and everything went out the window.

I got a cab at Union Station just before noon, sharing it with two sailors, and sat in the rear holding on to the strap and looking out the window at snowy, grimy streets. I was back in Chicago, all right. It had been less than a year, but the world had changed. Service flags were in every storefront window-one star for each son at war, and most flags bore at least two stars; horse-drawn wagons (“This wagon replaces a truck for the duration!”) mingled with autos, while cabbies caught behind the wagons turned shades of patriotic red, blue and white, swallowing their irritation. The autos all had ration stickers prominently displayed in their windshields, B stickers in evidence mostly, and an occasional C, like my cabbie’s. The sidewalks seemed filled with lovely young women, the edges of their skirts under their winter coats flapping, the city’s famous wind intent on exposing pretty, nylonless legs; but if you had a nickel for every guy under forty you saw on the street, you wouldn’t have busfare-unless you counted the boys in uniform.

Me, I wasn’t in uniform, unlike the gobs I was sharing the cab with, and I wasn’t a boy, either. I was a gray old man in a gray woolen overcoat I’d picked up in D.C. yesterday-under which I was wearing the suit I’d worn to San Diego last year, and it seemed a little big for me, like it belonged to somebody else. Maybe somebody I used to be. I sat there craving a cigarette, but for reasons I couldn’t explain, not giving into it.

The cabbie dropped me in front of the Dill Pickle, the rumble of the El greeting me, making me feel at least a little at home. Up in the window of the A-1 Detective Agency a service flag bore a single star. I wondered if it stood for me, or Frankie Fortunato, who was in the Army. Probably Frankie.

Sea bag slung over my shoulder, I stepped around a wino (4-F or over forty? Hard to say) and started up the familiar narrow stairs; passed some people there, older men, younger women, coming down for lunch, nobody I recognized. I set foot on the fourth floor, feeling like my own ghost. Walked down the familiar hall with its wood and pebbled glass and paused at the door that still had NATHAN HELLER, PRESIDENT, on it. I touched the letters; they didn’t smear.

I turned the knob.

Gladys was sitting behind her desk, on which was a rose in a slender vase. She looked lovely, her brown hair in a slightly longer pageboy, now, her white blouse slightly more feminine and ruffly than I remembered ever seeing her in. She was a little heavier, but it looked good on her-made her bustier. She gave me a big smile.

“Hello, Mr. Heller,” she said.

She stood and came around and hugged me. I hugged her back. It felt good, if a little awkward.

A banner made from a bedsheet said WELCOME HOME, BOSS in crude yet oddly graceful red letters; it was tacked on the wall over that World’s Fair couch where I’d caught Gladys and Frankie humping, years ago.

“You shouldn’t’ve made a fuss,” I said.

“Not that big a fuss,” she said, shrugging.

“No ticker-tape parade?”

She narrowed her eyes; she didn’t get it. Gladys still didn’t have a sense of humor. “This is the extent of it,” she said, gesturing to the banner, which I felt sure she’d made herself. “Except for we have some champagne chilling.”

“That’s fuss enough,” I said. “Lead me to it.”

“You got it,” somebody said.

I turned and saw Lou Sapperstein, looking haggard and wearing a black arm band on one sleeve of his brown suitcoat, standing in the doorway of my inner office, pouring me a Dixie cup of champagne out of a big bottle.

I went over and took the cup with my left hand and shook hands with Lou with my right and drank the champagne and said, “How’s business?”

He was a touch thinner; more lines in his face. He’d switched from wire-rim glasses to tortoise shell, bifocals now; gray tinged the dark hair around his ears. His skull hadn’t lost its shine.

“Business is not bad,” he said. “Let’s have lunch at Binyon’s and I’ll fill you in.”

“Fine. Why the, uh…?”

He lifted the arm with the armband, gently. “My little brother. Fighter pilot. Silliest goddamn thing. Died in the States while still in training.”

“I’m sorry, Lou.”

“I am, too. Hell of a thing.” He looked at Gladys. “Care to join us? We can make it a celebration.”

Gladys was already back behind her desk. “No. Somebody has to hold down the fort.”

Gladys had loosened up, considerably, over the years; but she was still business first.

“Where shall I put this?” I said, referring to the sea bag, currently residing on the couch.

“Why don’t you stick it in the office next door?” Lou said.

“For now,” I said. “But I got to find a place to stay. I should’ve made arrangements while I was still at St. E’s, but it was hard to think that far ahead…”

Gladys said, “They called us, Mr. Heller.”

“For Christ’s sakes, will you call me Nate.”

“Nate,” she said. It was hard for her. “Anyway, one of your doctors called several weeks ago, and we’ve been looking for a room ever since. I’m afraid there’s nothing at the Morrison.”

“Quite a housing shortage,” Lou said, with a fatalistic shrug.

“So we took the liberty of rearranging the office next door,” she said.

“With both you and Frankie gone,” Lou said, “we haven’t been using that office at all. I’ve been working out of your office, of course…” He nodded to my inner office, his expression apologetic.