Three Strikes You're Dead

Chapter 20

The next day at Headquarters was blessedly uneventful — and I heard nothing from Bob Lee, who apparently had put things right with Bernice Martindale after I left his office. After work, I rode the Clark car one stop north of my apartment building, although I did not spot a mob car parked anywhere along the block. Either they had gotten sneakier or the Brother had ordered the surveillance dropped — which I doubted.

It was just past 6:30 when I walked into Kilkenny’s, surprisingly almost deserted except for a half dozen guys at the far end of the bar, none of whom I’d ever seen before. “Hey, where is everybody?” I asked the Killer, who wore a disgruntled expression.

“And where in Hades d’ya think they be, after last night’s little contretemps? They’ve all probably been scared away for a while. Police came in here maybe ten minutes after you left, and they took those two thugs away, both of ’em by this time moaning like mourners at an Irish funeral and holding their heads.

“The cops didn’t question us much,” he continued. “They just wondered who knocked them out, and I said it was me, with the baseball bat I keep behind the bar, which I showed to them. We all said we never saw the thugs before — which is the truth, of course — and that they just came in looking for trouble. One of the cops seemed to recognize the second guy who had walked in, the one Diz plunked just as he came through the door. Diz was hiding upstairs in the storeroom all the while, like I told him to. At least nothing about this got into the papers, so the only ones who know about it are the ones who were in here last night. That’s mostly regulars, so they’ll all be back, I hope. What was it all about, Snap?” he asked, softening the tone and lowering his voice. “You in some trouble with... them?”

“Damn, I’m sorry about what happened, Killer. It’s a long story, but I can tell you this much: They won’t be back in here, either of them. After Galan dropped me off at home last night, did he come back for Dean?”

“Yeah, and by then, the gendarmes were long gone with those goons and their headaches; it’s a wonder one of ’em wasn’t killed by those balls. As it is, they both probably have concussions. I told Diz it might be a good idea to stay away from here for a couple of days until things blew over, and — hey! — did you hear about this afternoon’s game?” He jerked a thumb toward the small radio on the back bar.

“No, how’d it go?”

The Killer slapped the top of the bar. “Friend, I’m about to tell you how it went. Diz shut down the Bees 3 to 1, went the distance. Gents broadcasting the game said he looked sharp, good control.”

“Well, we know there’s sure nothing wrong with his accuracy, judging by the two pitches he threw in here last night. But what about his speed? That fast ball still just a memory?”

“Ah, about that I’m afraid you’re right, Snap. They said on the radio that he was getting Boston out with nothing but the slow stuff, junk, you know? But he’s still got it up here, where it really counts.” The Killer tapped his forehead.

“How many wins does that make for him?” I asked, thinking about the Cub-hating Leo Cahill and his insistence that Dean was washed up.

“Still only four, but he hasn’t been beat yet, so that’s four wins the Cubs wouldn’t have had without him. Lord, I know our boys are only bouncing between third and fourth place, but they’re not all that far back of the others. And the way Bill Lee and Bryant’ve been cranking, if Diz can start winning a few down the stretch, we’ve got ourselves a pennant and a date to the prom with those cursed Yankees.”

I resisted throwing cold water on the Killer’s enthusiasm, but I had to figure the chances of Dean’s winning a few more down the stretch were about the same as me getting invited to the managing editor’s house for Sunday dinner. And as far as the Cubs winning the pennant, I’d already kissed good-bye to the fifty smackers that I’d bet with Leo Cahill.

Rather than go home, I stayed at the Killer’s for dinner — a steak, of course. The place never did fill up much that night, other than those guys at the far end of the bar. They turned out to be Cub fans who had drifted in after the game hoping to meet Dean or some of the other players. They were disappointed, but that didn’t stop them from hanging around celebrating Dean’s victory, buying each other rounds of boilermakers, and singing songs that would make even a sailor blush.

It was ten past 8:00 when I left the bar and started walking north on Clark in the summer twilight. My destination: the Grace Street address of Nicolette Stover. I looked back to see if I was being followed and spotted no tail, although I double-checked by ducking into a half dozen alleys along my route.

Her apartment building was one of those big, U-shaped four-story brick walk-ups with a grassy courtyard, a style that you find by the hundreds all over Chicago — north, south, west. Her doorway was on the right side of the courtyard. I went into the foyer and punched the buzzer for STOVER, 2-B. No answer, but then I hadn’t expected one. The night I had stopped at Harding’s on Wabash for dinner, she didn’t leave until after 8:00 and it was now only 8:30. Assuming she took a bus or streetcar home, she probably wouldn’t get here for another few minutes, maybe even a half hour.

I sauntered across the street and leaned against a tree, from which I had a clear view of the building. It being a warm, clear night, there was a steady flow of pedestrian traffic along the residential block — couples walking arm-in-arm, clusters of noisy teenagers in bathing suits coming back from the Lake Michigan beaches a few blocks east, and the occasional panhandler drifting over from Halsted Street. One old specimen in a scraggly white beard, wearing raggedy clothes and a knapsack, fastened onto me like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner glomming onto the wedding guest. With a gnarled hand clutching my arm, he spun a tale of how he’d ridden the rails in from California.

“Been on the road eight weeks now, Bo,” he said in a sandpapery voice, spitting tobacco into the gutter. “L.A. on down to Tucson in a dust storm, where a railroad bull for the Espee line threw me off into a gully. I luckily didn’t break no bones, though I sure coulda. Then back on the rods over to Gallup and Amarillo, where it were a hunnert-ten in the shade. Came north through Oklahoma to Wichita in an empty boxcar, where another damn bull hit me upside the head with a bar, like to knock me silly, before he tossed me off the train. I stayed in a hobo camp outside Wichita, gettin’ myself mended up for a week ’n some, then I come up through St. Looie and ’crost Illinois to git here. And y’know why, Bo? ’Twas to see my sister, Francine, in an apartment over on Clarendon, who I hain’t laid eyes on fer near onto twenny years now. So what happens? I come to find she hain’t lived there since ’34, and them what’s in the place now say to me they got no idea where she’s up and gone to. So here I be in this damn big town, biggest one I ever seen, with no kin and no grubstake. It’s a helluva life, Bo.”

“It is that, but it could be worse — could be winter here,” I said, slipping him two quarters, more than I’d ever given a panhandler before. But then, he’d related quite a saga, true or otherwise.

“Thankee, brother, thankee, and God bless ye and all yer loved ones,” he cackled, slapping me on the shoulder and loping off to find another sympathetic ear and, with luck, some more loose change.

No sooner had the well-traveled hobo dissolved into the Chicago night than I heard the clicking of heels on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. It was Nicolette Stover, approaching her building and carrying a sack of what appeared to be groceries.

I walked stealthily across the street, staying behind her and getting to the foyer just as she opened the inner door with her key. She spun around, eyes wide, and drew in air as if to scream.

“Not a sound, not a peep,” I ordered, placing a palm lightly against her lips. “Don’t make me use this.” I gestured to the bulge under my suit coat caused by a wadded up newspaper — something I had picked up from a second-rate gangster film, I forget which one.

“I remember you from Harding’s. Why can’t you just leave me alone?” she whisper-yelled as we climbed the creaking, carpeted steps in a stairwell reeking with a mixture of cooking aromas, none of them appetizing.

“I just want to talk to you — that’s all, just talk. I am not going to hurt you,” I murmured as she unlocked the door to her apartment and I pushed in behind her. She spun toward me, hyperventilating. “Then what’s the gun for?” she demanded in a shaky voice.

“It’s not really a gun, see?” I said in a lighthearted tone, opening my coat and pulling out the rolled-up newspaper, which happened to be that evening’s Times. “Look, like I told you in Harding’s, I’m a reporter, doing a feature on Lloyd Martindale, remember?” I whipped out the very same dog-eared calling card that I’d showed her in the restaurant, the one identifying me as the ethereal (read nonexistent) Bob MacNeal of the American. I was especially glad after the set-to involving Martindale’s mother that I hadn’t told her who I really was. A second complaint to Bob Lee and I’d be out trying to find an unoccupied street corner where I could hawk pencils or apples or both.

Nicolette’s hands were shaking as she set the grocery sack on the end table in her small living room and switched on a lamp. “There’s nothing I know that can help you with your story. Please leave,” she beseeched, folding thin, white arms across her chest and giving me a pleading, almost tearful look.

“I have just a few questions for you — won’t take much time,” I persisted. “First of all, how long—”

She tensed, now turning hostile. “Where did you get my name?” she demanded. “What makes you even think I knew this... what is his name?”

“A neighbor in Beverly Hills mentioned several families that lived close to the Martindales, and yours happened to be one of them. And that included you. That’s all.” I spread my arms in a gesture meant to convey honesty.

“Me? My God,” she cried, her own arms now thrown out awkwardly as if to encompass — what, her whole existence to this point? “I was only a child when we lived on Longwood Drive all those years ago. There’s nothing I can tell you about him, nothing.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” I said as we faced each other in the dismal room made even more so by the sepia aura cast against stuccoed walls by the light of a single lamp with a depressing brown shade and a low-wattage bulb. “Let’s sit down and talk about it.”

I dropped into the wing chair behind me and took my eyes off Nicolette for no more than two or three seconds, but that was enough to prove that I wasn’t anywhere near ready to hire on either with Fergus Fahey’s boys on the detective detail or with the Pinkerton boys.

By the time my backside had sunk into the cushion, I found myself looking into the working end of a what appeared to be a.32-caliber automatic in the none-too-steady hand of one none-too-steady Nicolette Stover, whose purse lay open on the end table beside her. Score one for the “terrified” woman.

“Now, Mr. O’Neill, or whatever your name is,” she blurted, running the words together as she waggled the gun, “I want you out of here, out of here. And if you don’t go, if you don’t... if you don’t, I’ll shoot!”

I held up a palm. “Wait, I—”

“I mean it, I’ll shoot, shoot, shoot!” She seemed to be in a state of near-hysteria, and although that could have been an act, I was not about to put it to a test. “I will shoot,” she repeated, her eyes open wider than I had seen previously and her hands, both of which gripped the pistol, were unnervingly steady. Now I was truly frightened.

“I’ll tell them you were attacking me,” she spat. “Yes, yes I will. I’ll tell them that you forced your way in here! I’ll tear my clothes!” Now she was screeching. She ripped her dress at one shoulder, exposing a peach-colored brassiere strap. “Now get out, you low-life bastard!” Her eyes were glazed, her body tensed as if she were about to explode. And worse, from my standpoint, the veins stood out on the back of the thin white hand that gripped the automatic.

My mouth was as dry as the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. “Take it easy,” I said gently, edging toward the front door. “I’m leaving.” I took a deliberate step backward, then another and another, until my groping and sweaty hand fastened on the doorknob. I wasn’t about to turn my back on her, figuring it would be harder for her to shoot me as long as I held eye contact. Neither of us blinked while I eased the door open and backed into the hallway.

Once out of the apartment, I slammed the door and flattened myself against the wall lest she start pumping bullets through the door, which wouldn’t have surprised me. As I caught my breath, I heard the click of her door lock, followed by sobbing.

I raced down the stairs to the street, feeling a rush of euphoria at simply being out of that apartment. The exhilaration quickly gave way to frustration, though, when I had settled down enough to tally the events of the last several days: One whack in the face; one dressing down from the managing editor, followed by probation that could lead to the loss of my job; one attempted kidnapping (of me) from my favorite saloon; and now one gun drawn on me by a half-crazed woman who may or may not be new to trigger-pulling.

I started trudging south through the warm night toward that favorite saloon of mine. More than anything else, I needed a drink, and tonight, it would have to be something stronger than beer.