Twin Cities Noir

IN MY EYES by Bruce Rubenstein North End (St. Paul)

Lloyd B. Jensen’s funeral cortege wasn’t scheduled to leave the State Capitol for an hour, but a throng of thousands already lined University Avenue for a glimpse as it passed. The November sun wasn’t doing much to warm them so they’d crowded together instinctively, three deep, all the way to the police cordon at Rice Street. It gave them a huddled-masses look appropriate to the occasion. A cynic might say that in this year of our Lord 1934, anybody who advocated the redistribution of wealth could draw a crowd, even if he was dead. As for me, I voted for him once, and I’d have done it again if the iron crab hadn’t taken him down. I wasn’t there to freeze my toes for a peek at his corpse though. I opened the door of The Criterion. It was warm inside, a few bar flies were gathered around their Manhattans, and somewhere in the murk a client was waiting.

Margaret Thornton phoned me after someone steered her to Slap Madigan, who’d recommended my services. The meeting place was my suggestion, but as soon as I laid eyes on her I could see it was a mistake. She wasn’t the kind of woman a man should rendezvous with at a nightclub in mid-afternoon. She said I’d recognize her by the black hat she was wearing, and there she was in a corner booth, veil pinned back over one ear. The rest of her outfit, cloth coat, a glimpse of skirt before I sat down, echoed the darkness of the place as well. That didn’t strike me as a good sign a year after her husband’s murder, but she looked fine in widow’s weeds. Her face might have hardened a bit since it graced the front pages, but there was still a girlish softness about her.

I introduced myself. She nodded nervously. She had raven-colored hair, pale, luminous skin, and a few freckles around her nose that were barely visible in the dim light. Her slender, ringless fingers fidgeted on the table. One of them was chewed to the quick. I ordered a beer, and she turned down a refill on the Presbyterian she’d been nursing. I felt like a heel for arriving stylishly late. The poor kid had probably never been in a joint like this before, at least not alone.

I was in my mid-thirties then, she was about ten years younger, so these weren’t fatherly feelings I was having, but I didn’t stop to analyze them at the time. It wouldn’t have changed anything anyway. We made some small talk. She told me she was Thornton nee Gallagher, a St. Agnes graduate. You can bet that tugged at my heart strings. In fact, it put a face to the premier fantasy in my rich array of hooch-induced fancies: Catholic school girls in Little Bo-Peep shoes, white knee socks, and those short plaid skirts they wear for God only knows what perverse reason. When I was a lad my pals and I would sometimes get a peek of alabaster thigh as they walked away. Of course, if we caught some Protestant or God forbid a sheeny doing the same, the gauntlet went down.

I managed to elicit a fair amount of personal information in the guise of professional inquiry. For example, why a proper young lady like herself married a muckraking Wobbly and a Methodist to boot, who’d published his high-minded broadside out of a cheap storefront on Selby. It came down to this: After eighteen years in the grasp of the nuns, and two more clerking at the Golden Rule department store, she wanted some excitement.

“Walter was always railing about something, and there were all these interesting people around, some with beards even,” she said. “I guess I just got carried away.”

She told me she was living with her mother, that they made ends meet with help from their fellow parishioners at St. Andrew’s and some Reds who’d admired her hubby. I told her Slap was my uncle on my mother’s side, that I was unmarried, an irregular confessor. Close to an hour passed before we got down to business.

Margaret wanted what I had an unsullied reputation for delivering, the truth about an unsolved murder. “I need to get on with my life,” she said.

She had a notion of what the truth was, and she made it clear that she’d be gratified if I validated it. That’s not unusual, most of my clients want their preconceptions confirmed, but her problem was anything but routine.

“Walter was murdered because Harry Ford wanted to stop him publishing,” she explained, and her blue eyes lit with sudden passion. “I don’t blame Lloyd Jensen. I blame the man who has everything but the respectability Lloyd Jensen could bring him. I don’t even care if Mr. Ford is tried for murder. I just want it on the radio and in the newspapers what a dreadful person he is.”

“That’s all? Nothing to it. It should be easy to get the goods on a defenseless fellow like Harry Ford.”

“You can do it, Mr. McDonough. Your uncle says you never fail.”

Her confidence was touching, but it was a daunting prospect. I’d heard rumors that Harry Ford was behind Thornton’s murder, everybody had, but those rumors had no legs because most people loved the guy, and, more important from my perspective, those who didn’t knew better than to cross him.

She brought up the matter of my fee. I said we’d discuss that after I nosed around. I’d known her less than an hour, but she already had me putting first things last. I escorted her out the back, and opened the car door for her. There weren’t many women drivers then, and to me she looked brave and vulnerable behind the wheel, all the more so because I recognized it as the same bucket that shared the front page with her the day after her husband’s murder. They’d iced the poor stiff when he stepped out of this very automobile.

She gave me a little smile that faded quickly, exited down the alley, and over to Sherburne. That spared her a demoralizing sight around front. Lloyd B. Jensen’s cortege was going past, and people were surging into the street, but not to kiss the governor goodbye. Harry Ford was seated at the passenger window of the hearse, and whether they knew it or not they were crowding up because they believed in what he stood for—redemption. They practically trampled each other trying to touch his cashmere coat, as if some of his magic might rub off on them.

According to the story that every Twin Citian knew, Harry Ford was born to a waterfront whore in Seattle. He’d spent his childhood scrapping for change on the docks, and took off for the Wild West at age sixteen. He worked as a saloon bouncer and a gold miner, then soldiered for Pancho Villa. It was in that latter capacity that he made his first fortune, selling the hides of the cattle slaughtered to feed Villa’s army, about two thousand skins a month, at ten dollars each. Those hides were all he’d asked for in return for his valuable services making deals for supplies in U.S. border towns, but he went AWOL pronto when Pancho realized what a good thing he had going.

He spent the next decade “raising hell” (his term) in the Southwest. That must have included some smuggling, but mostly it was one long party that ended when the Feds fitted him up for a nose-candy charge in Denver. He hired some fancy lawyers who took his money but didn’t beat the rap. He was broke when he went to Leavenworth, where he met Herbert Warren of Warren Enterprises, a St. Paul calendar manufacturing company. Warren was in for tax evasion, and terrified of the other inmates. Ford made a deal with him. He would protect Warren in prison, and Warren would give him a job when he got out.

Ford held up his end. Warren tried to renege many times, but Ford had some hex on him. He climbed relentlessly toward the top, and when Warren died mysteriously, he became president. He’d turned Warren Enterprises into the largest advertising company in the country, and made himself a legend in the process. Like many a millionaire before him, Ford dabbled in king-making. He’d palled around with Lloyd B. Jensen when Jensen was the county attorney, then bankrolled him for governor. He was ready to do the same for Jensen’s shot at the presidency on the Populist ticket. The smart money said that with the Depression on and Ford’s bucks behind him, Jensen could beat FDR. Then the poor man got cancer, and died. It was a sad day for many people when that happened, but it came a year late for Margaret Thornton’s husband.

Jensen was famous for his reply when his gubernatorial opponent accused him of being a Socialist. “You’re damn right I am,” he said. That practically sanctified him among many Depression-weary voters, but he was no saint. He’d grown up poor in a mostly Jew neighborhood in Minneapolis. Many friends of his had joined the mockie underworld, which didn’t seem to end their friendship, even though he occasionally had to prosecute them. You might say he had a past by the time he was elected governor, and started making the kind of deals he had to in order to govern. That didn’t bother most voters, but it didn’t sit well with some of his fellow radicals, especially Walter Thornton, who published a yellow sheet devoted to calling Jensen a crook and a sellout. The guy was a pain in the ass who might’ve hurt Jensen’s chances of becoming president, but about the time he was getting worrisome, a car full of droppers pulled up as he arrived home one evening, and ended his career in journalism.

A mockie button man named Shay Tilsen was tried for Thornton’s murder. He was acquitted, but everyone figured he’d done it. There just wasn’t enough evidence to convict him. The prosecution offered him a sweet deal to rat on whoever hired him, and it was on the table up to the moment the jury walked in, but he never opened his mouth.

I had no skin in that game so I’d never given Ford’s involvement much thought. I could find out though. My clients think it’s sorcery how I get to the bottom of things, but my reputation rests on two solid facts: one—the majority of murders go unsolved. Your higher-ups don’t spread that around, and since most people don’t know it, they’re also unaware of fact two—the shamuses usually know damn well who the perpetrator is, they just can’t prove it.

The rest of the equation is pretty simple. I’m second-generation Irish, I know most of the cops in town, and I can find out what I need to by dropping into Tin Cups and buying a few shots for the right gumshoe. If there’s any skill involved, it’s knowing who to ask what. My first stop wasn’t Tin Cups, however. I dropped into Kuby’s Place on Front Avenue the next morning. Kuby’s served as a living room for many a retired St. Andrew’s parish fellow, and sure enough, there were about ten of them there, a few alone at the bar, the rest gathered around the wood stove, warming their ale on the firebricks.

When in Kuby’s, do as the Kubans do. I pulled up a stool, ordered coffee and brandy, and put my nose to the crossword puzzle. It wasn’t long before I felt a hearty whack on the back. They don’t call him Slap for nothing. He was freshly shaved and nattily attired, the picture of contented leisure. I don’t know how he does it, I thought, for the umpteenth time. By rights he should be in a bread line.

“Top of the morning,” he said.

I nodded. “I need a four-letter name from Shakespeare that epitomizes cunning.”

“I don’t read that limey bastard, Martin. How did it go with the widow Thornton? And isn’t she a fine example of lace-curtain womanhood?”

“She is, and a welcome respite from the molls I generally consort with. But why did she come to you, Slap?”

“Ah, give me a moment…Yes, a fifteen-letter name that epitomizes cunning. Martin McDonough.”

We both knew why she’d been steered to Slap. Eight years ago Slap was an investigator on the St. Paul force. A bootlegging operation he was looking into with little or no enthusiasm led him straight to the late Lloyd B. Jensen. That piqued his interest, and when Slap got interested he found things out. He’s always clammed up on this, but he must have known plenty. That was why the chief summoned him one day and told him an early retirement was called for. No scandal, he assured him, just a health matter (Slap will outlive me), a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association benefit, and he was a civilian again at age fifty. A lesser man would have been devastated. Not Slap. He lived with his wife and youngest son in a frame house on Oxford, just two doors from the tracks but he claimed that the sound of the Great Northern put him to sleep at night. I think it’s a nip of the Irish that does it, but be that as it may, retirement agreed with him. I don’t know how he maintained their lifestyle, but it was no mystery why Margaret Thornton was sent his way. He was an authority on Lloyd B. Jensen’s affairs.

“What do you think,” I asked, “was Ford behind it?”

“Nah. That husband of hers was preaching to the converted. All that Commie crap. It would’ve helpedget Jensen elected.”

He looked as serious as any guy with a nose like a potato and eternally twinkling eyes can, but he was shoveling a load of malarkey. “C’mon, Slap, he was also repeating rumors that you’re familiar with, that you maybe could verify.”

“Nobody cares about that old bootlegger stuff.”

“A guy who was in bed with gangsters can get elected president?”

“Anybody who can end this Depression can get elected, Martin. FDR has my vote.” He shook his finger under my nose. “What about yours?”

A few of the old gentlemen pricked up their ears at that, but I didn’t take the bait. “Never mind politics. I’ve got other things on my mind. Who hired that mockie to drop Walter Thornton? And another thing. What kind of Jew is named Shay?”

Slap smiled. “I can tell you how to find out. Drop into a place of worship named Adath Jeshurin Synagogue, in Minneapolis. Tuesday night. It’s their social evening. The scholars get together and discuss some Hebrew hocus-pocus, the businessmen talk business, and a bunch of radicals argue with each other so loud it drives everyone else nuts. I hear Shay Tilsen comes around. I wonder who he consorts with. So should you, Martin.”

Slap never disappoints me, but I still have to crack wise. “Should I ask him why he dropped Thornton?”

“Nah. I was you, I’d talk to one of the Reds. Lou Rothman.”

According to Slap, this Rothman and his buddies had Margaret Thornton’s interests at heart. They took up a collection every week and sent it her way, in honor of her dead husband. “Maybe you can find out a thing or two from them,” he said.

I agreed and stood to leave.

“When was the last time you talked to your mother, Martin?” he asked. I told him a week ago Sunday. “Well, I have a message from her,” he said.

I should’ve seen that coming. I was halfway out the door before you could say home and hearth, but he shouted after me: “GET MARRIED, MARTIN—IN THE CHURCH!”

It was raining Tuesday night, a cold November rain. The kind that turns to snow. I had to park a block away and soak my brogans. I was pursuing Margaret’s case so doggedly you’d have thought there was some money in it, but I’d already decided it was on the cuff. It was smoky and overheated inside. I took off my hat out of decent respect for an alien faith, but soon noticed that everyone else had theirs on.

When in Hymietown…I put mine back on, wet as it was.

There must have been fifty or more men gathered in groups, in a room way too small to hold them. I stood around until an old gent in a black skullcap offered me a glass of disgustingly sweet wine and asked what brought me there. It turned out he was some kind of facilitator. He guided me back to a knot of fellows dressed like laborers. We waited around for a pause in their heated conversation, but it got louder. Pretty soon one guy grabbed another by the collar and twisted. “Stalinist bastard!” he said, and he almost burnt the other guy’s big nose with a smoldering fag protruding from the corner of his mouth. I thought the brawl was on, but a guy about my age stepped in. He had a square jaw and a short, dark beard. He didn’t say much, but whatever he said worked. They separated and rejoined the discussion. A moment later I thought I saw one of them launch a sucker punch, but he was just talking with his hands, a common mode of discourse here, I realized, as I looked around.

A few more minutes passed, then the old gent called out, “Lou,” and the guy who’d short-circuited the donnybrook turned our way. His flat gaze came from behind fragile, wire-rimmed specs, but he looked hard nonetheless. When I told him my name and said I’d like to speak to him, he took off the goggles, came right up close, and squinted at me.

After a few moments he said, “Lou Rothman,” and we shook hands. He had a grip like a teamster.

The face mirrors the soul, and I’m often required to make distinctions between one soul and another, so I pride myself on characterizing faces. Nevertheless, I didn’t find the right simile for Rothman’s map until years later, after Slap’s son Danny became a Lincoln Brigadier in a fit of youthful idealism. Spain cured him of that, and when he came home he said it wasn’t the fascists who’d scared him, it was some of the characters who were nominally on his side. Rothman, it occurred to me, had a face you’d see in a doorway in Barcelona just before the bomb exploded. He was personable enough that night though. He laughed when he heard my first question.

“His name is Isadore,” he said. “‘Shay’ is short for ‘shay-gus.’ It’s Yiddish for a certain kind of Eastern European bully that picks on Jews.”

“So he beat up mockies?”

Rothman gave me another long look, best described as bemused. A couple of the other Reds were in earshot, which meant real close—the din of conversation and smoke-induced coughing in that room was something—but it suddenly got quieter on our end and the whole bunch, must’ve been a dozen of them, were all looking at me. The collar-twister edged my way.

“No,” Rothman said. “It’s an irony. When Isadore was a kid he beat up goyim who picked on Jews. He took pleasure in kicking their mick asses.”

“Hey, I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Okay, neither did I,” he said.

The rest of his group resumed arguing, to my great relief. Now it was my turn to lean in so I could hear what he said.

“What brings you here, McDonough?” he asked. “You didn’t come all the way from St. Paul to find out how Isadore Tilsen got his nickname.”

“I’m here on behalf of someone you know. Margaret Thornton.”

“Sure. We collect money for her.”

“So I hear. But why? I thought you fellows, you know, you lefties, liked Lloyd Jensen.”

“Lloyd Jensen and Walter Thornton were both Farmer-Laborers. They stood squarely with the working man, and their differences didn’t matter to us.” He gestured toward his bunch. “Jensen’s widow will be well taken care of, and Thornton’s shouldn’t go begging either.”

He was no Uncle Slap when it came to malarkey, but he was right up there with any Tin Cups hoocher, and that’s saying something. It inspired me to boldness.

“Margaret thinks Harry Ford paid Tilsen to murder her husband. Myself, I hear Jensen had a lot of friends in this part of town. Maybe one of them hired him.”

“Lloyd Jensen grew up in the neighborhood. Many men in this room knew him personally. They liked him, they liked his politics. You could ask if anybody hired someone to kill Thornton, but it couldn’t have been Isadore. The jury found him not guilty. What’s the matter, you don’t you trust our legal system?”

We were nose to nose, but nobody seemed to be taking any notice. In Tin Cups and other venues with which I’m familiar, going nose to nose was the penultimate gesture before fists flew, but Rothman didn’t seem belligerent. He was just making a point.

“Can’t stop people thinking though,” I said. “Tell me, and this is another thing I’m just curious about, why did those two fellows you broke up almost come to blows?”

“They were arguing. Trotskyism or Stalinism.”

“What’s that about?”

“Trotsky doesn’t compromise on world revolution. Stalin talks about Socialism in one country. No question he’s warped the Soviet workers state to fit his own ideological deformity, but some of us wonder if that’s what’s required to fight fascism. The question is—what do the times call for? What is historically necessary? That’s what Meyer almost punched Sherman about.”

“Doesn’t seem worth fighting over.”

“There are two schools of opinion on that, McDonough. Some call it a trivial matter, others believe that perceiving historical necessity and acting to further it is a high calling.”

“You should hear what us micks fight about,” I said. “Nowhere near as elevated…Is Tilsen here?”

Rothman pointed him out through the smoke. “Come with me, I’ll introduce you if you like.”

Tilsen and a couple yeggs were yakking with each other on the far side of the room. They were positioned between a cluster of fellows in broad-brimmed hats and long coats and a group of more worldly looking men. We picked our way through, Rothman nodding to some, edging by others so as not to interrupt.

Tilsen was a big guy, late forties, with sloping shoulders and a thick neck. Rothman tugged the sleeve of his suit coat, and said something in his ear. Tilsen pulled a wad out of his pocket and counted off some bills.

Rothman motioned me over. “This is Martin McDonough,” he said. “Martin, meet Isadore Tilsen.”

His yeggs kept their hands in their pockets and their eyes on mine. He had big, hairy knuckles, reddish hair going gray at the temples, gold teeth. He didn’t offer his hand, just nodded. “You know Louie?” he said. “Louie wants to change the world.”

“Well, uh, it needs changing,” I replied lamely.

“You think?” He nodded. “Nice meeting you, Mr. McDonough.”

I was dismissed.

“He’s a man of few words,” I said on the way back to the radical caucus.

“He’s short with the goyim, doesn’t trust them,” Rothman replied. “He’s a big puppy with his fellow Jews though. When he was a kid he used to beat up the local shaygus for a favor.

He wasn’t much of a scholar, so that was how he earned respect.” He seemed in a forthcoming mood so I popped the obvious question. “What was that business between you and him, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Not at all. We usually collect ten or twelve bucks for Margaret Thornton, but we like to give her thirty. Isadore makes up the difference.”

“Why is that?”

“You’d have to ask him,” he said.

“No thanks. But I do thank you for everything.”

“My pleasure. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll rejoin the discussion. Stay awhile. Have another glass of wine.”

I did. The wine was awful, but not so awful I couldn’t drink it, and it gave me a chance to sneak a few looks at Tilsen. He and his boys were deep in some kind of conversation. With each other.

It was still raining when I left. I almost ran over a dog in downtown Minneapolis. The streets were deserted except for a few men sleeping in doorways. I nearly got lost trying to find St. Paul, but eventually made my way back to my Rice Street haunts.

Slap thought it unlikely I’d find a bride at Tin Cups, and upon reflection I had to agree. Women had started coming in unescorted after Prohibition—many a shanty-Irish lass, even a few kraut dames from St. Albert’s—but they weren’t the kind you’d bring home to Mom. There was a likely looking group of frails sitting at a table when I walked in, Maggie Quinn among them. She glanced up from a pig’s foot she was gnawing and gave me the eye, but I paid her no mind. Margaret Thornton was in my thoughts, and I was there on business.

Jimmy Brennan was at his usual spot, on the inside curve of the second horseshoe, hard by the well, where only the most determined barman could fail to spot his empty glass. Jimmy was a percentage copper, on the take from two Rondo Street pimps, and possibly some petermen as well. At least, they seemed to have great success blowing safes when Jimmy walked the beat. He had a nose full of popped veins and shrewd little eyes. The way to his heart was through his wallet, so I saved him for special occasions.

I put a twenty on the bar. “What’s your pleasure?” said the bartender.

“A nip of the Irish,” I replied. “Top shelf. And one for my friend here.”

Jimmy nodded, as if to say it was a start, but only just.

The good stuff was dear at Tin Cups. The change came to less than nineteen dollars. I tapped my finger on the notes. “Give me some information and I’ll leave these when I go, Jimmy.” He nodded again. I cut to the chase. “Slap doesn’t think Harry Ford paid to kill the Thornton kid. How about you?”

He chuckled. “Lotta people think Slap is retired, but I get the feeling he still has a job.”

“Why’s that?”

“He ain’t goin’ without.”

“They held a benefit for him, remember?”

“Yeah, I was there. Musta collected about, oh, nine hundred bucks. You could live for a year on that.”

“What are you driving at?”

“Slap carries water for Harry Ford.”

I can’t say something of that nature hadn’t crossed my mind, but blood is thicker than water, so I didn’t disguise my displeasure. “You saying Slap is bent?”

“Hey, the man has to live. You sell what you got, to whoever is buyin’. I’m puttin’ two and two together, that’s all.”

“Four.”

What?”

“Two and two is four. I learned that in the first grade.” I tapped the bills. “Information, please. If all you have is theories I’ll keep the cash, and if all you have is theories that insult my family we’ll be stepping outside.”

“Okay, okay, relax. But that sheeny torpedo would’ve squealed unless he was paid to shut up. Somebody put a bundle down, and who but Harry Ford has that kinda money?”

“Another theory.” I knocked back my shot, and picked up the bills.

“Hold it,” he said. “The name Wicky Hanson mean anything to you?”

It did indeed. Harry Ford was known for hiring ex-cons, one more feather in a cap festooned with plumage. Most of them were nobodies, but Hanson’s reputation preceded him when he came to work on the Warren assembly line. He’d been a Thompson-gunner for Capone in Chicago.

“What about him?”

“He’s another guy lives beyond his means. He’s learnin’ to crack safes, but he still works the old trade occasionally. He was in on the Thornton hit. He knows Ford, he knows Shay Tilsen. Maybe he put’em together.”

“Any chance he’d talk to me?

“He owes me a favor. You could buy it.” He glanced down at the bar. “Not for eighteen bucks though.”

A fight broke out on the other end of the bar, but we didn’t let it distract us, and soon struck a deal. I’d be ashamed to say how much it cost in view of the fee arrangements on this matter. Jimmy said he’d be in touch. I ignored Maggie Quinn again on the way out. I’d decided to pay a call on the widow Thornton soon, with an update and a dozen roses.

I phoned Slap to tell him how things were going. “Jimmy B. says he can put me together with a member of the Thornton hit squad,” I told him. “I didn’t find out much in Minneapolis. Met Lou Rothman, but he had nothing to say.”

“You didn’t see who Tilsen talks to?”

“His palookas. Nobody else. Only interesting thing, he gave Rothman some cash for the widow. Maybe he feels guilty.”

“He just handed the money over without a word, did he?”

“A few words.”

“So he talked to somebody.”

“That was nothing. Hell, he said a few words to me when Rothman introduced us.”

Slap sighed audibly. “Well, press Wicky Hanson hard, Martin. He might have something.”

“How do you know it’s Hanson I’m seeing?”

He laughed. “Jimmy B.’s helping Wicky with his schooling.”

Not much gets by Slap.

I didn’t work the next few days, just waited for Jimmy’s call, and planned my meeting with Margaret. There was a picture in my mind of her soft blue eyes, her cute freckled nose, and an expression on her face that was all yes. As it turned out, that picture was pretty accurate.

I’d decided to surprise her Sunday afternoon. I thought she and her mother would be finishing dinner around 3 p.m. That left a few hours of daylight, and I prayed for a nice afternoon. I thought we’d drive over to Como Park, maybe stop by the lake. I bought a dozen roses and kept them in the icebox Saturday night. Jimmy B. called that evening and said I could meet Hanson the next day. I told him I was indisposed.

“Christ, Martin, I thought this was important,” he said.

“I’ve got something else going. What about Monday?”

“The guy works for a living.”

“Maybe Harry Ford’ll give him the day off. You know I work nights, Jimmy—anywhere he wants, Monday evening.”

Sunday dawned mild and sunny, a September morn in November. Jimmy called about the time both of us should’ve been at Mass, and said to meet Hanson at Chan’s, next evening around 7:00. I had to write it down I was in such a tizzy. This is very unlike me, I thought. I started slicking up for the occasion about noon, and looked my Sunday best when I pulled in front of the Gallagher residence a few minutes before 3:00. I was about to step out of the bucket, when the front door of the house opened and Margaret walked out arm in arm with Lou Rothman.

I processed this as quickly as possible under the circumstances. All I could think of was ducking those roses before they spotted me, but that was unnecessary. They only had eyes for each other. Hers were exactly as I’d pictured them. They walked past me in the general direction of Como Avenue. Margaret looked back when they reached the corner, probably to see if her mother was watching, then kissed him on the cheek.

I cursed the Sunday closing laws, and headed for the back door of a blind pig where a colored man sold me a bottle of something like whiskey. I made good enough use of it that I had a terrible hangover when Monday came. I also had a feeling in the pit of my stomach that had nothing to do with imbibing. Worse yet, although our pitifully one-sided romance was kaput, my business with Margaret was far from finished. She still wanted to know who was behind her husband’s murder. The best I could do was suck it up and come out of this with my reputation intact.

Sorry as I felt for myself Monday evening, I still had some pity to spare for Walter Thornton. He’d stepped out of his flivver anticipating his wife’s lovely face and welcoming arms. Instead, the pockmarked mug of the man across the booth from me ushered him into the next world.

“I could use a drink,” said Wicky Hanson.

“So buy one,” I replied.

“Jeez, I thought you wanted info.”

“I do, and I already paid for it,” I said, but what he told me almost made me sorry I’d been so short.

Hanson cautioned that Tilsen didn’t confide in the non-Jews he occasionally hired, so all he knew was what he overheard. But he had sharp ears and a good memory. He explained that the mood among the five torpedoes on the hit was about what you’d figure—tense and silent on the way, relieved and talkative afterward. Tilsen was the wheel-man.

“There was this one mockie in the front seat next to him,” he said. “Wasn’t no dropper, even though he looked like one—hard guy with a fag in his mouth—but there strictly to finger Thornton. So we’re waiting, car pulls up, guy opens the door, finger-man says, ‘That’s him,’ jumps out, and motions us to follow. We step out and I overhear the mark say to the finger-man, ‘Meyer, what’re you doing?’ And he says, ‘Sorry, Walter, I’m an agent of history.’ Then we start blastin’ and his wife runs out screamin’. That’s about it.”

“You’re sure his name was Meyer, and that’s exactly what he said?”

Hanson nodded.

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. When we’re drivin’ away, we’re all laughing and crackin’ wise, even Tilsen. He turns around and says, ‘May not look that way, but we changed the world today, boys.’ Then he nods to this Meyer character. ‘Make sure you tell him we said that,’ he says.”

I put my head in my hands and thought hard. “That it?”

“Well, Jimmy B. says you want facts, not theories.”

“From Jimmy. If you’ve got a theory, go ahead.”

“It’s just that the finger-man probably wasn’t the guy ordered the hit. Tilsen told him to tell someone about this changin’-the-world joke he made. That’s who was behind it.”

I nodded. “I think you’re right.” I motioned to the waitress. “Give this man a drink,” I said, and handed her two bucks.

Next day, two or three times, I was on the verge of calling Margaret and telling her what I’d deduced. It could change your whole life, I told myself. But I couldn’t. Not yet. I wanted to nail it down.

That night I went to the synagogue. They were all there—the radicals, the scholars, Tilsen, the finger-man, the old gent with the skull cap. I took a wine and got right to the point with Rothman.

“You’d have liked to see Lloyd B. Jensen become president, wouldn’t you?”

He knew something was up. He didn’t take off the specs, just gave me a flat stare and nodded yes.

“Was he what the times called for? Was he historically necessary?”

“That’s a complicated question, McDonough. What makes you ask? Thinking of joining the Party?”

“No.” I stepped in closer to make sure he heard. “I’m thinking of telling Margaret Thornton who was behind her husband’s murder.”

He rubbed his beard and took that in. “Let me show you something,” he said.

He took me by the arm and guided me into the thick of things. The air was blue with eye-stinging smoke, and there were so many people talking at once—gesturing, shouting, laughing, cursing—that nothing they said was intelligible. The word that came to mind was babble, but Rothman had another term, which he imparted by shouting in my ear.

“These are the masses,” he said. “Every kind of person with every experience you can imagine is here. Hard workers, lazy bastards, money grubbers, thinkers, doers, devout men, unbelievers, gentlemen, killers. Somebody says something, somebody else hears, passes it on inadvertently or on purpose, pure or changed to suit his own self-interest, and sooner or later, who knows why, somebody does something that matters. Somebody acts.”

“And then it’s history.”

“That’s right,” he agreed. “History is its own imperative. Anything can happen until something does. Then nothing else was ever possible. What are you going to tell Margaret?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, and I turned and walked out. I had goose bumps all the way to the bucket, wondering if someone was going to shoot me in the back.

I mulled it over for a while the next day, and then called Margaret on the phone. I didn’t want to behold her disillusionment, which she made no attempt to disguise. “I don’t know who was behind the killing of your husband,” I told her, “but it wasn’t Ford.”

“There’ll be no charge,” I added, to break the silence.

She didn’t thank me. “I thought you were infallible, Mr. McDonough,” she said, in reference to my lost reputation.

To this day I wonder why I acted as I did. It had little to do with Rothman’s denial, if indeed it was a denial. Maybe the look on her face when they were together did it, the way she kissed him on the cheek. When I told Slap, he couldn’t believe it. “That was your last best chance for a decent marriage,” he said.

It wasn’t Margaret’s, though. She and Rothman married. They have children now, three last I heard. Maggie Quinn moved in with me for a bit, but that didn’t work. We brought out the worst in each other. I actually hit her once, which so mortified me that I decided it was time to end it, and she agreed.

I can’t say that Margaret’s face haunts my dreams. Hoochers don’t dream, but we do have fantasies. Catholic school girls are mine. I’ve shortened their skirts and dirtied up their knee socks a bit over the years. They’re still walking away, but now one of them is looking back over her shoulder, at me.