You Bet Your Life

2

The waiting room of the station had a high ceiling and was filled with wooden benches. It was a church with all the pews facing a big ad for Woodbury soap. There were a few people on the benches, but they weren’t worshipping the soap for the skin you love to touch. Some were sleeping. Some were reading. Most were looking at each other, or nowhere.

The two cops led me slowly around the benches toward a short order counter that jutted out on one side of the hall and sent out a smell of sweet grease. There were lots of stools open. The plainclothes cop pointed to the one I should take. It had a piece of yellow food on it. He swept it away and waited for me to sit. The cops sat on either side of me. A semicatatonic woman sat next to the plainclothes cop, drinking yellow coffee and silently gnawing a sodden sweetroll.

I put my suitcase by my feet and watched a lemon-shaped waitress bring yellow coffee for the three of us without being asked. The cops were waiting for me to say something. I was waiting for them. I’d been a cop once and I’d stepped into mistakes often enough to know that you kept your mouth shut with cops until you had to talk.

“My name’s Kleinhans,” said the red-nosed guy, “Sergeant Kleinhans. You can call me Chuck or Kleinhans, whatever suits you. The gentleman on your right is Officer Jackson. You can call him Officer Jackson. Officer Jackson is about to take his coffee to that seat over there where he can be alone with his thoughts.”

I shut up and drank my coffee from a thick, porcelin cup with a big handle. The coffee didn’t taste bad. It had no taste. My cup was more interesting. It had a branching crack in it. I followed the crack with my eyes and let the steam of the coffee hit my face. Kleinhans gripped his cup in two hands.

“Hot cup against your palm on a cold night feels good,” he said. I put on a wry grin and nodded my head knowingly. Kleinhans went on talking very softly into his cup without looking up at me.

“We got a call about you from Miami,” he said. “Well, anyway, my boss got a call. Seems you’re here to check up on something involving some of our good friends in the criminal world.”

I was ready to say something, but having started, Kleinhans wanted to finish his piece.

“I work out of the Maxwell Street Station not too far from here,” he went on, savoring the feel of hot porcelin in his hands. “I sort of specialize in gambling problems related to the citizens in question. Would you like a roll?”

I said no, but that I would like some cereal. The waitress brought him a cheese Danish and me a bowl of what looked like Rice Krispies. Crumbs fell from Kleinhans’ sugary Danish. He swept them off with the back of his arm. They snowed on the catatonic woman. She didn’t complain.

“Maybe we can be of service to each other,” Kleinhans went on. “I’ll tell you how to get in touch with certain people, and you keep me informed about what you find out. Now this isn’t exactly the way I’d play it with you if I had my way, but my boss says to treat you right. You’ve got connections. And who knows? You might come up with something I can use.”

“You mean you might be able to use me?” I said.

He nodded his head sagely and said “mmm” as he wiped sugar from his mouth with a napkin.

“We understand each other,” he beamed. “Here’s my office number and home number.” He pulled out a pencil and wrote two numbers on the napkin he had just used on his mouth. “Take it. Call me if and when, and at least “once a day.” He shrugged. “Trains and planes leave here every day for the bright sunshine of California. If I were you, Senor Peters, I’d get a ticket and head for the sun tonight. You’re not dressed for our weather.”

“I think I’ll stick around.”

“Figured you would,” he said, clapping my back with a broad right hand. “No trouble from you-” he pointed to me, “no trouble from me,” he pointed at himself. His pronoun references were unmistakable, but I wasn’t exactly sure of what his definition of trouble might be.

“It’s a deal,” I said.

“Nope. It’s the way I say things are going to be. We’re not partners, Mike Shayne. Now, we’ll drop you at a hotel where you can get some sleep, and you can give me call in the morning. You want to stay fancy or cheap?”

“It’s on MGM,” I said, “but I’m used to small rooms. Too much space makes me nervous.”

“We’ll compromise on the LaSalle.” He got up, threw some money on the counter, glanced at Officer Jackson, and turned away. Jackson wasn’t finished, but swallowed the rest of his donut and spilled some of his coffee on his uniform trying to get his money’s worth.

The unmarked cop car was right outside the door in a no-parking zone. Kleinhans and Jackson walked to it slowly. It was no more than a few feet, but pain shot through my head.

“How cold is it?” I asked, getting into the front seat as directed. Jackson drove. Kleinhans sat in back. I wasn’t a suspect, but one never knew.

“Eleven or twelve above,” said Jackson. “Not too bad.”

Kleinhans serenaded us with a whistled version of “San Antonio Rose.” He even buh-buh-buhed like Bing Crosby a few times. No one talked until Jackson pulled over five minutes later and stopped in front of the LaSalle Hotel.

I said thanks and got out for my dash to the lobby, but Kleinhans called for me to lean over.

“If the bad guys don’t already know you’re here, they will soon. May even have been somebody at the station watching for you. I didn’t spot anybody, but we’re probably not the only ones who got a call about you from Florida.”

Officer Jackson looked out the opposite window. I was no fun anymore.

“I got you,” I said. “Goodnight.”

“Comparatively,” said Kleinhans rolling up his window. I waited for the car to pull away. It didn’t. So I went up the stairs into the lobby. The doorman tried to take my case, but I wasn’t letting it out of my hands again.

It was eleven at night. There were lots of people in the lobby to watch me make my way to the desk in a stiff summer jacket and unmatched pants with a conspicuous crease at the knee. The suitcase didn’t help. It was a second-hand piece I got for three bucks from a pawnshop owner in L.A. named Gittleson. I had muscled a teenage Mexican kid for him when the kid tried to buy a gun and wouldn’t take no for an answer. I was a real class item for the LaSalle Hotel, yes I was.

The clerk on the desk gave me the electric smile with the eyebrows raised to ask what a creature like me wanted in a place like this. He looked like an unprissy version of Franklin Pangborn.

“I’d like a room,” I said, reaching for the desk pen and dipping it in the inkwell. I dripped ink on the blotter while I waited for him to produce the guest book.

“What kind of room?” he said.

“One with a bed and a bath,” I answered. “That’s what hotels usually have. It doesn’t have to be big, just warm.”

He tried to keep from nibbling his upper lip. I didn’t look enough like a bum or a nut to be thrown out, but I didn’t look quite respectable enough to stay. It was my running problem regardless of what clothes I wore, but it was more acute at the moment. People in the lobby were looking toward us, and both of us kept our voices down.

“I’ll pay two days in advance,” I said. “My name is Peters, Toby Peters of MGM.”

The clerk’s eyes opened in understanding and his head rose from despair.

“You’re a movie person?”

“Yes,” I said. “From Hollywood. I was there this morning.”

The clerk obviously believed movie people were exempt from decent dress. He turned the guest book toward me. I signed.

“Yes, Mr. Peters,” he beamed, “I’ve seen some of your work.”

“Good,” I said taking the key to 605 and shooing away the bellboy. I wondered which piece of work he had seen-the guy who fell out of my window in Los Angeles the year before when he tried to kill me, or maybe the flea bag desk clerk I had pushed around a few months ago.

A middle-aged couple got on the elevator with me. By middle age I mean they were a year or two older than me. The lower range of middle age went up miraculously each year, managing to stay just ahead of me. If I lived long enough, I might entirely eliminate middle age from my experience. Someday I’ll just wake up and admit that I’m old.

The thought depressed me almost as much as I depressed the couple on the elevator. I didn’t depress the elevator man. He just looked at his numbers and minded his own business. Up to now he was my favorite person in Chicago.

The couple got off at four. Before the door was closed, they whispered, “Who do you think-”

I got off at six, found the right door, and went in. My room was dark, carpeted, and small. I turned on the radio. Kate Smith was in the middle of “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” I checked my gun and my cash. They were both there. I couldn’t see anything out the window. It was frosted over. Light was coming through from LaSalle Street.

I went back in the hall and pushed the elevator button. It came up empty, and I offered the kid a quarter for the newspaper under his chair. He said I would get my own for two cents by riding down to the lobby. I didn’t want to face the lobby again.

“I’m in the movies,” I explained.

He understood, which was more than I did, and exchanged the paper for a quarter. I locked my door just as Kate sang “and every time I think of him, I’ll think of him that way.” I turned off the radio, ran a hot bath, took off my clothes and soaked my weary back while I read The Chicago Tribune, which told me it was “The World’s Greatest Newspaper.”

The headline said “30 Senators For War.” Senator Burton K. Wheeler warned me about “war madness” and said Roosevelt was preaching “hate and fear.” That cheered me almost as much as thinking about middle age, so I moved to another page where I found that the Nazis had attacked sixteen British merchant ships and destroyed twelve. At a mayors’ conference, LaGuardia of New York told mayors to prepare for bombing attacks. Jews in Holland were being barred by the Nazis as blood donors. General Marshall was worried about Japan building up air power in the Pacific. He was answering by sending 500 troops to Manila. The Japs didn’t worry me. I had word straight from the dentist who shares my office in Los Angeles. Dr. Shelly Minck, who had voted for Wilkie, assured me that we could beat the Japanese in two weeks. That was reassuring, but I wondered what those 500 troops were going to do against airplanes.

Even Dick Tracy was depressing. Some guy in a small-town lockup was offering a constable a hundred bucks. “I’d like to take a trip to, say, California,” said the balloon over the guy’s head. So would I, I thought, and found some ads for stores selling coats so I could get a line on costs.

I took a pain pill for my back and went to bed. I dreamt about Cincinnati.

When I got up it was morning. At least my watch said it was morning. Outside the window it was as dark as the night before. A call to the desk said my watch was right and the sun would be rising in a few minutes. The desk added that we would probably never know when it came because of the cloud cover.

I brushed my teeth and shaved slowly with a new blade. Then I put on my last clean shirt and tie, and matched my jacket to my pants. I had an important job this morning-the purchase of a coat. I sneezed, blew my nose, and tried to hold back the possibility that I might be catching a cold. In Chicago you could die in days from a common cold. There were lots of other things you could die from in Chicago, but I hadn’t faced them yet.

In the lobby I asked where the nearest clothing store was, and was told it was a block away. It was nine in the morning, and the temperature couldn’t have topped nine or ten degrees over zero. It reminded me of a line from an old Bert Williams song-“Good Lord, I thought I was prepared, but I wasn’t prepared for that.”

The clothing store was warm, and I was in no mood to bargain. Their price was right-thirty bucks. I knew a little shopping could cut that in half, but I couldn’t fight off pneumonia without a warm coat, and soon. Mayer owed me a coat. I’d sell it to Gittleson as soon as I got back to Los Angeles. The coat was warm and brown with big buttons. I threw in a hat, gloves, and ear muffs. The whole thing came to a little over forty bucks. I made a note of it in my traveling expense book.

Before heading back to my room, I stopped in a corner Steinway drug store for a couple of eggs, bacon, and toast. The place was jammed with people fortifying themselves for the day. A good looking woman next to me wore a suit with padded shoulders and a turban. I ordered some cereal and sneezed in her coffee. She had real class, and never acknowledged that I existed. After picking up a bottle of Bromo Quinine Cold Tablets, I headed back for the hotel to call Sergeant Kleinhans.

Maybe I shouldn’t have bought the ear muffs. Maybe skipping breakfast or the cold tablets would have made the difference. The world is full of maybes and wishes. Some people live on them. I knew I hadn’t been out of that hotel room more than forty minutes.

When I got back the door was the way I had left it, locked. I let myself in, went to the bathroom, had a handful of cold tablets, and went to find Kleinhans’ number. I found it in my other pants. I was spreading the napkin out to read it when I noticed the closet door was open. I read about compulsions once in the Saturday Evening Post. My compulsions are as reasonable as the next guy’s. Doors have to be closed, drawers have to be closed. Taps have to be turned off, and dishes can’t be left overnight.

I kicked the closet door closed with my foot as I looked at the napkin, but the door didn’t stay closed. It opened from the weight of the body behind it. He was a big man in a blue suit. He fell forward fast before I could see his face. All I saw was a splash of red across his chest. But identification was no problem. I could tell from the circle of white hair and the prone pyramid shape that Leonardo had made the trip from Miami to a closet in a Chicago hotel. I’d probably never know what caused that circle of white. My first reaction was to open my suitcase. My.38 was there, unfired. I called Kleinhans’ number. He wasn’t in. I left a message for him to call.

There wasn’t much chance that Nitti, Capone or Guzik were listed in the phone book. A half hour earlier Leonardo could have told me. I went through Leonardo’s pockets. Maybe I’d find something that would tell me what he was doing dead in my hotel room. His wallet had eighty dollars covered with blood and some family pictures-an old woman and three younger boys all of whom looked like Leonardo.

I called Louis B. Mayer, collect. He wasn’t in. I left a message. I called the hotel in Las Vegas where Chico Marx was working. The switchboard operator said Mr. Marx couldn’t be reached, and she sounded as if she had more to say but couldn’t, or wouldn’t. I left a message.

The phone rang, and Kleinhans was on the other end.

“You got a number or address for me?” I said calmly.

“I’ll give you an address in a few hours. Just remember, keep in touch and let me know if you get anything.”

“I’ve already got a couple of things,” I said, looking down at Leonardo.

“You’re fast,” clucked Kleinhans. I could hear squad room noises behind him and tried to imagine the room. I expected to be in it within the hour.

“Well,” I said, “I’ve got a cold.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“I can take care of that,” I said. “I bought a coat and some cold tablets. But I can’t take care of the other thing, the guy with the bullet holes who just fell out of my closet.”

After a pause, Kleinhans sent out a sigh I didn’t need a telephone for.

“You’re lucky you got me, Peters. Cops in Chicago don’t like jokes about bodies.”

“No joke,” I said. “He’s lying on my floor. According to his wallet, he’s Leonardo Bistolfi. You know him?”

“I know him. Don’t move. I’ll be right there.”

I had exhausted everything I could do to keep busy. I knew what would happen as soon as I put the phone down, and it did. The tremor started in my fingers. If I didn’t do something, it would travel up my arms and into my legs. Then I’d start to sweat. If I didn’t stop it then, the next step would be to give up my breakfast. I’d seen corpses before, too many of them, but there is something about finding one in your closet that kicks the crap out of professional distance. A smart-ass voice not too deep inside my chest tried to say, “It could have been you. It could have been you.”

To drown out the voice and give my hands something to do, I sang Pinky Tomlin’s “The Love Bug Will Get You If You Don’t Watch Out,” while I went through Bistolfi’s pockets and clothes again.

By the time I sang “and when he gets you you will sing and shout”, I had discovered that Leonardo Bistolfi bought his suit in Miami and had a thick ring of keys. A decorative metal disc on the key ring had the initials LVB on one side and the word “Fireside” in black enamel on the other. He had sixty-three cents in change, including an 1889 Indian head penny I was tempted to pocket for my nephew Dave who saved coins. I resisted temptation. It was easy. Besides a monogrammed white handkerchief in his jacket pocket and the wallet I’d already looked at, Bistolfi was empty.

I went through the wallet more carefully, but it told me nothing more. No membership cards. No notes. No numbers. No addresses, only Bistolfi’s address in care of Capone, Palm Island, Miami, Florida. I had succeeded in stilling the voice inside me and moved on to my rendition of Tomlin’s “What’s The Reason I’m Not Pleasing You?” Then my eyes fell on Leonardo’s bloody face. He was looking at me in surprise. I put the wallet back, washed my hands, and sat down to wait. My brain had stopped working. It needed a live human or two to get it running again.

Thirteen minutes later, Kleinhans and two uniformed cops were at the door. We all looked at the body for a while, with Kleinhans humming something I didn’t recognize. He nodded to the older of the cops, who moved to the phone. People were gathering outside the open door, so the second cop, who he called Rourke, went outside and closed the door.

“You hear Rourke out there yelling?” said Kleinhans softly as he kneeled.

“No,” I said. There was a hum of voices beyond the door.

“Rourke’s a yeller. If we can’t hear him, this room is the next best thing to soundproof. It’d have to be for someone to do this and not draw curious citizens like flies to Maxwell Street.”

The fat cop was talking on the phone behind us, but he kept his voice down so I only caught a few words. It didn’t take much to guess he was calling the Medical Examiner or Coroner or whatever they called it in Cook County.

“Chopper did that,” said Kleinhans. “Relatively clean. Short burst. I’d say someone who knows how to handle it. No needless extra shots. The walls are clean.”

“Maybe he was shot someplace else and brought here,” I suggested, popping another Bromo tablet and blowing my nose into a wad of toilet paper.

Kleinhans sat down in the only chair in the room. I sat on the bed. The cop on the phone kept talking.

“Nope,” said Kleinhans, pursing his lips and scratching his bulbous nose. “And you don’t think so either. According to the stuff we got on you last night from L.A., you were a cop. Maybe not much of a cop, but a cop. How would anyone get a bloody corpse like that up to the sixth floor of a downtown Chicago hotel?”

“A better question is why,” I said.

Kleinhans took his hat off, scratched his scalp like a nervous chimp and examined his fingernails to see what they had found. The cop hung up the phone and said, “They’re on the way.” Kleinhans rubbed his ear and nodded toward the door. The second cop left. I blew my nose.

“Better take care of that,” he said.

“I’m trying,” I said.

Kleinhans looked at the body for a few more seconds before speaking.

“Ever see our friend before?”

“Two days ago in Miami. He was keeping an eye on Capone for someone. Nitti, Guzik, or his brother Ralph. He didn’t say.”

“Must have come up by plane,” he said. “You working some kind of deal with him?”

“Am I going to need a lawyer?”

“I don’t think so,” said Kleinhans, getting up. There was a knock at the door. He opened it and let the fat cop in. They talked without me for a few seconds.

“We’ve got to get out of here for awhile,” Kleinhans said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “State Street district is a few minutes away. Let’s ride down there and talk.”

He was pretty good. He made it all sound like a friendly request. Doctor and patient. Dad and son. In Los Angeles I might have tested him, pulled back to see how mean he could get, but it wasn’t in me. The cold in my head and outside the hotel were getting to me as much as Leonardo was.

“Right,” I said. “Know why he had that circle of white hair on his head?”

“Beats me,” said Kleinhans.

We were at the State Street Station in about five minutes and in an office Kleinhans borrowed from a lieutenant who was home with the flu. My brother’s a cop with an office. My brother’s office was small and almost as old as California. There was no room in it to run if Phil lost his temper, which was about eighty percent of the time. The Chicago lieutenant’s office was a big cold barn with bare wooden floors and an echo. It looked as if someone years earlier had moved all the furniture into the middle of the room to get ready to paint the walls and then forgot about it.

“Tell your story,” said Kleinhans, getting comfortable behind the desk with a cup of coffee. He gave me one, too. We both kept our coats on. I started my tale in Miami, worked my way forward to include my battle with the orange-shirted kid in the train, and made it up to Leonardo in the closet.

Kleinhans was looking out of the window at a passing streetcar when I finished.

“What do you think?” he said.

“I don’t know. Someone went to a lot of trouble to dump the body on me. Maybe it’s a warning. It might be a threat or a screwy accident. Maybe Leonardo decided I got something from Capone or I was on my way to something. Maybe he called Chicago for orders. Maybe he called the kid in Jacksonville and told him to grab my stuff so they could check me out. Maybe Leonardo decided to come here and stop me, but someone stopped him instead.”

“And maybe elephants piss nickels,” sighed Kleinhans, wrinkling his brow for a massive belch that never came.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re lying,” he said, finishing his coffee. “You don’t have a chopper and you’d be one fool to kill a guy in your hotel room and call the cops. It smells like a gang job with you in the middle, but I don’t see how or why. I’ve seen a lot of them put away like Leonardo. Thompson submachine gun bootlegged from a crooked Army supply sergeant somewhere or stolen by a mob kid who spent a few years in the army. Bullets are easy to get. Standard forty-five in ACP rimless cartridges, basic U.S. Army pistol round since 1900. The ammunition is held in a circular drum. Fifty rounds. Our expert at the LaSalle didn’t need more than ten or twelve. He had a pro finger. Those things kick, but they’re nice and easy to work. Just pull back the bolt, push the trigger, the bolt comes forward, throws a round into the magazine and pushes it into the chamber. The round pops into the chamber, drops in place. The firing pin on the bolt crushes the cap, and the bullet flies. The bolt kicks back from the shot, and another slug falls in the chamber. Two or three spit out every second. Takes a soft touch and strong hand to handle a chopper without making a mess.”

“He was a mess,” I said.

Kleinhans shook his head no.

“The St. Valentine’s Day party was a mess. I was on the cleanup. I moved Frank Guzenberg. That was a mess. You want another coffee?”

“No,” I said. “What are you going to do?”

“Have some coffee, Toby my friend. Were I you, I’d get the hell out of here. But I’m not you. I’m going to do nothing much except turn this over to some homicide boys. The hotel is in their district, and happy I am of it. Now I’m going to the can and getting some more coffee. Then you can go back to looking for your gangsters, but I’ve got a feeling one of them has already found you.”

He left the room closing the door behind him. The phone on the desk gave me an idea. Kleinhans wasn’t worried about the mob death of a bodyguard, but I had a lot of reasons for caring. One was that it must have had something to do with the Chico Marx business. The other was that death was too close to me. I blew my nose, took a deep breath and picked up the phone.

“Desk,” came a tired voice.

“Get me Indianapolis Central Police Headquarters and move it fast. If you’re too tired to move, we can get you out on the street.”

The guy on the desk put the call through fast. He didn’t want to be out on the streets of Chicago in the winter. I watched the door and waited. A voice came through the phone, a little tinny, but clear.

“Tashlin.”

“This is Detective Peters in Chicago. You got a pencil?”

“Yeah.”

“Write this number.” I gave him the number on the phone. “Now check on a blotter report for last night. Kid in an orange shirt had his nose broken at the train station.”

“Probably a local,” Tashlin said through his teeth.

“Hey,” I snarled. “You just find it. Don’t guess. The mayor here wants it and he’s on my ass. I don’t know why he wants it or what’s going on, but if he doesn’t get it, I serve you on a platter, Tashlin. When our mayor gets mad, he knows how to use the phone and he’s got your mayor’s number. Got it?”

All he had to do was ask me who the mayor of Chicago was and the game was over, but he took the easy way out, which I figured he would. If he hadn’t, nothing was lost.

“You want to call me back?” I said.

“No,” he said. “Hang on.”

I hung on and Kleinhans came back with his coffee. With my hand over the mouthpiece I explained.

“Local call. MGM office. I need some more cash and the name of a lawyer in case I need one.”

“Next time you ask first.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll pay the nickel.”

“Here’s an address for you,” said Kleinhans, pulling out his pencil and writing it on the torn end of a ratty blotter. “You may find Nitti there or you can leave a message. There’s no phone.”

“Is it far?”

“You can almost walk it from here. It’s over on twenty-second. We’re on twelfth. Ten blocks almost straight.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Your funeral, California,” he grinned.

Tashlin came back on the line.

“Got it,” he said anxious to please. “Kid named Canetta, Carl ‘Bitter’ Canetta. Small time record in Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Jacksonville. Said some guy tried to hype his suitcase. Ran off with it. A woman with a kid backed him up. You want her name?”

“No thanks,” I said, smiling at Kleinhans. “You have an address for our friend, someplace I can reach him?”

“Canetta?”

“Right.”

“Fourteen ten Ainslie in Chicago, but that’s old. Said he was living at the Y in Indianapolis, but hadn’t checked in yet.”

“Thanks,” I said. I hung up.

“Got what you want?” said Kleinhans.

“Not as much as I wanted,” I said, looking at the address on the piece of blotter.

“Better stay away from your room for a few hours. I don’t think they’ll need to lock it up. There won’t be any prints worth looking for. The homicide and coroner’s crew give up easy on these, shove them under-grab the first guy handy or give it up. The papers don’t even care much anymore.”

“You can do something for me,” I said.

“My goal in life,” he answered.

“See if you have a recent address for a small timer named Carl Canetta.”

“I’ll check,” he said, yawning.

I told him that was comforting, blew my nose, promised to call, and stepped out of the office. I wondered if that new medicine Leonardo had told me they were using on Capone was any good for a cold. I stopped in the toilet, stole a roll of paper for my nose, chewed my last Bromo tablet, and went out on State Street looking for a cab to take me to Frank Nitti.