You Bet Your Life

7

My cash supply was down, and I didn’t have time to call Louis B. or Warren Hoff. There was also a chance that if I did, they’d tell me I was fired. That wouldn’t stop me from what I was doing, but it would cut into my fraying pocket. As long as they didn’t fire me, they owed me for each day I worked.

I got on a streetcar, where a thin conductor with gloves and a blue uniform gave me a transfer and told me to go to the Loop and take a Douglas Park train to Pulaski Road. The ride to the Loop was short, and the straw mat seats of the streetcar cold, but I kept my mind off Chicago’s environment by making entries in my little book of expenses. The book was growing thick with breakfasts, cabs, phone calls, cold tablets, hotel bills, Kleenex, gambling losses, and top coats.

Downtown, I climbed the steps to the El trains at State and Lake and waited for a Douglas Park train. The wait was long and cold. Trains didn’t run very often on Sunday. A Negro woman waited with me and some loud teenage kids with big city bluster. The kids were about thirteen, too old to be cute and too young to smash in the mouth. I tried to get past the fear of pneumonia by remembering the small, soft body and warm mouth of Merle G. It helped.

When the one-car train pulled in, the loud kids pushed ahead and ran to the front. The old woman moved to the back and so did I. There weren’t many people on the train, and the car was cold and noisy as it rattled and teetered around the Loop and headed west on tracks thirty feet above the ground. Out the window on my side I couldn’t see the tracks, just the street below and the houses a few feet away. A nagging worry about the body of Leonard Bistolfi and the possible reasons why he was killed in my hotel room intruded on my fear of falling to my death. Each turn gave me a shiver of panic, and I had to tell myself that these trains had been running in Chicago for more than forty years. My old man had mentioned them once when I was a kid, after he had visited his sister in the Windy City.

Neighborhoods shot by outside the iced window. Churches, old and heavy. Wind went wild down narrow streets, lifting sheets of snow in jerky dances. I shivered through a few dozen stops at wooden platforms. A family got on at someplace called Ashland, sat in front of me, and overlapped around me. The parents-dark, pale and serious-spoke in a European language that wasn’t German, French, Spanish, or anything like them. It was deep and slushy, a language spoken in the back of the mouth and deep in the throat, a language to keep the cold out-Russian or Polish maybe. Three dark, pale kids, two boys, one girl, pushed their noses to the cold windows and chattered in their language and in English. Every once in a while one of them moved near their talking parents, who would touch the child’s face or hair absently and lovingly.

It made me try to remember how my brother’s two kids looked-David and Nate. I couldn’t remember, probably because I hardly ever went to see them. I decided to bring them a present from Chicago when I went back home, but I didn’t know what a Chicago present might be.

The conductor called out “Crawford Avenue, Pulaski Road,” and I got out with the happy family and went down a flight of rusty metal steps to the street. At a newsstand outside the station door, a chunky old man shifted from foot to foot in front of a metal garbage can with a fire going inside it. The Sunday Chicago papers were fat, and I couldn’t carry one, so I just asked him which way Nineteenth Street was. He told me to head north two blocks and there I’d be. I hustled through the snow past a storefront hot dog place named Vic’s, with a cartoon of a guy eating a sandwich on the window. The steamy smell of red hots and onions came through the closed door. I thought of stopping by, but went on past a closed candy store, a cleaning store, a Polish meat market with a sign in the window for blood soup, and a corner tavern called Mac’s.

One place was open on the street-a gas station where a skinny, serious-looking kid wearing a baseball cap and earmuffs was changing a tire. I crossed the street and walked over to him. He paused every few seconds to blow on his cold red fingers.

“Forty thirty-eight Nineteenth,” I said.

He pointed down the street behind the gas station.

“Know a kid named Canetta?” I tried. “Wears an orange jacket?”

He nodded that he knew him.

“What do you know about him?” I said, plunging my hands deep in my pockets and shifting like the newsy from leg to leg.

“Enough not to talk about him to people I don’t know,” said the kid in a surprisingly deep voice as he pulled the tire free from the jacked-up DeSoto.

“I’m not a friend,” I said.

The kid sort of smiled.

“He’s lived around here maybe two months. Brought a car in once with Indiana plates. Goes out of town a lot.”

“Ever see him with anyone?”

The kid lifted a fixed tire and heaved it onto the wheel.

“Yeah,” he said with a grunt as he adjusted the tire. “Kind of big guy was in the car yesterday. Had a hat on, didn’t get out or talk. They just got gas. Nothing else I can give you.”

He tightened the lugs on the wheel, stood up, and warmed his hands under his arms before dropping the car.

“Thanks a lot,” I said. “Aren’t you going to ask why I want to know?”

He shook his head no.

“If I don’t ask, I don’t know when someone else asks. Makes it easier.”

“You got a point,” I said and headed down Nineteenth.

There was an empty lot on the corner of Nineteenth and Komensky. Some kids wearing thin jackets were playing football in the snow. They called each other Al, Irwin, and Melvin and they screamed and laughed. One of the kids had one arm.

Forty thirty-eight was a three-story yellow building across from a wide, three-block long prairie. Cars were parked in the prairie near the street. The wind ran over a field of frozen weeds, hitting the cars and rocking them. The ground around the cars was covered with tire ruts made in the rain and now frozen solid and partly filled with shifting snow. A little kid sat in the recess of a narrow window on one side of the entrance to the building. The recess kept the worst of the wind away. The kid was about six, with a knit green cap over his head and ears. He wore corduroy knickers and a fuzzy jacket too light for the weather. The kid watched the cars and wind and played with a loose tooth in the front of his mouth.

“Hi,” I said pulling my collar around my neck. “My name’s Toby Peters. I’m a detective. What’s your name?”

“Stgsmmm,” he said, with a finger in his mouth.

“Stugum?”

“No,” he said with weary impatience removing his finger, “Stu-ard.”

“You live here?”

“Yuh.”

“Know a guy named Canetta? Wears an orange jacket?”

A sour look crossed Stu-ard’s face. His head went up and down once, showing he knew him.

“Second floor. Over us.”

“He there now?”

“Yuh, another guy too. Maybe two other guys.”

“You know the guys?”

“One’s Morris, comes here sometimes. I don’t know the other guy-a big guy I seen here yesterday.”

“Thanks,” I said, opening the door. “What are you doing out here in the cold?”

“Hit my baby sister and ran away,” he said, going back to his tooth. I gave him my scarf and wrapped it around his neck awkwardly, getting a suspicious look.

“Detectives get scarves free,” I explained.

“Detectives catch rats?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Dirty rats and killers.”

“I mean real rats,” the kid explained. I thought I saw a drop of blood on his gum from the squirming tooth. “We caught one in the phoney fireplace today. My dad’s home.”

I went inside and found Canetta’s name on the mailbox, scrawled in pencil right on the metal. The downstairs door in the hall was open. The hall was clean. I went up squeaky steps covered with clean but tired carpeting and stopped in front of the two doors on the second floor.

Behind the door on the left I could hear the bark of a small dog, and a woman shouting, “Quiet Peanuts.” Then she said something like, “Sheldon will find out about the noise when he gets home.”

I decided that wasn’t my door. The wind sang bass as I tried the handle on the second door and held my other hand on the.38, which lay cool and comfortable in my coat pocket.

The door was locked. I decided to knock and heard something scuttling inside-maybe one of the rats I was looking for. My nose was running again, but I didn’t have time or a free hand. I knocked again and thought I heard the scuttling sound move toward the door. It came slow and as it got closer, it sounded more like the dragging foot of the mummy from some Universal picture.

“Hello,” I said with a heavy Yiddish accent picked up from vague memories of my grandfather, “is here a Mister Canetta? I’m from landlord mitten da pipes.”

Someone fumbled at the lock inside and I stepped back, expecting to face the kid who had tried to steal my suitcase and whose nose I had broken. The door came open a crack and stayed that way.

“Somevone dere?” I asked. No answer.

I took a deep breath, wiped my nose on my sleeve, pulled out the gun and pushed the door open. I jumped inside and was about to go flat on the floor when I saw him. He was about three or four feet from me in a little reception area. His back was against a mirror on the outside of a closet. His knees were slightly buckled and his mouth was open. Blood trickled from his mouth and poured from his belly. He was a good thirty year older than Canetta-a little guy witha balding head gasping for air he couldn’t get. I moved to him, keeping low in the dark apartment. There was a living room behind me with some light coming in from the morning, but it wasn’t much of a morning.

The living room was furnished with dark, heavy furniture. I kept my back to it, and my eyes down the dark hall going the other way. With my free arm I helped the man sag to the floor. I had never seen him before, but I had the feeling he might be the Chico double I was looking for. The age and size were right. The face and features were probably close, but it was hard to tell. The face in front of me was twisted in pain and surprise. No one would mistake him for a Marx Brother if he were in the same room with the Brothers, but a good bluff might carry it off.

He tried to say something, and his eyes moved in the direction of the hall. I nodded to him that I understood, but I didn’t understand a goddam thing. Something gurgled inside of him and moved up his chest to his throat. It rattled his body and killed him. I lowered him gently and looked at myself in the bloody mirror. My hands were shaking. I held my breath for the count of ten and stepped as quietly as I could over the body and toward the apartment’s hall. The floor was uncarpeted and made of boards that squeaked above the outside wind like a carpenter driving nails.

I moved along the wall, my back against it and my gun pointing forward. A blast of machine gun fire would cut through me like the man in the alcove before I could get off a shot. I hoped the guy with the chopper was gone, but I couldn’t be far behind him. My feet slipped slightly in something wet and sticky, probably the trail of blood from the dead guy who had let me in.

I hit an open door and put as little of myself into it as I could. It was a bedroom with a single window, a single chest of drawers, a painting of a peacock on the wall, and a closet with holes in it. The holes made a curving line, as if someone had done a graph of the weather or stock market in bullets. The man in the hall had probably been shot in the closet, I thought, but something changed my mind-a sound from the closet. I inched along the wall and kicked the door open. There was nothing at eye level and only a few shirts on the hangers inside. Sitting on the floor with a pair of pants and a wire hanger in his clenched fingers was the kid who had tried for my suitcase in Indianapolis. I couldn’t see much of him in the dark, but I saw enough. His nose was bandaged where I had hit him, but it would take more than bandages to take care of what had happened to him now.

One of the bullets that went through the closet had hit him in the neck. Another two had caught him high on the chest. He wasn’t as messy as the guy in the other room, but it looked just as fatal. He saw me and tried to say something.

I got low and moved into the closet, keeping my eyes jumping from him to the bedroom door.

“Get cop,” he sputtered, and started to cough.

“I’ll call the cops,” I said. “They’ll be here in a few minutes. Who shot you?”

He looked at me as if I were crazy. His eyes opened wide and his head moved back and forth. He wet his lips to say something, opened his mouth wide, let out a guttural sound and froze, looking at me. It was a still photograph, a frozen frame of film and time. He would look at me forever unless I moved, because he was dead.

But I didn’t move. The closet door did. It slammed with a crack. I froze.

The question was: was there something about me that made people want to use me for a bullet pin cushion? Did I ask for it by looking like a victim or a person who was worth a quarter of a pound of lead, but not a quarter of an hour of conversation? Those are the kinds of things you think of when you expect to have someone fill you full of holes. At least that’s what I thought. The experience is free for those who have a chance to test it and survive.

Maybe, I thought, I like having people shoot at me. That made me think of my brother’s bullet hole, the only one he had. He didn’t get his on the street chasing some stupid kid who robbed a candy store. He didn’t get his from a former movie star who thought he was coming too close to a secret. He didn’t get his from a mob triggerman in a closet. Phil Pevsner got his in the great war.

Phil had enlisted in 1917 when he was twenty-two. He was big and tough and angry at the Germans. Then he caught a long, thin pointed German rifle bullet in his stomach in some Belgian woods, during some battle that didn’t make the newspapers and was a cinch to miss the history books. Phil had a medal to show for it. The medal had been worth two bucks and a job as a cop. I was sure Phil now imagined suspects as German soldiers-the German soldiers he never got his hands on.

In honor of Phil’s failure to get to the Germans during the war, I had renamed our old dog Murphy, Kaiser Wilhelm, knowing Phil’s fondness for throwing a kick at the animal if I wasn’t around. Phil never really appreciated my consideration. Someplace I had a photograph of Phil just before he shipped out for the week he would spend in Europe. He had his uniform pants tucked into shiny boots, his neat jacket, and his doughboy cap right on the top of his head with the chin strap tight under his chin.

Nostalgia was getting me nowhere. With a corpse in my lap, and my back against a cold wall, I started to feel a chill. I could do without irony. I had found the flu in Chicago, but had avoided the backache I had almost learned to live with. If my back hit now, the triggerman wouldn’t even have to shoot. He could just leave me sitting against the cold wall in a cramped position for an hour or two, and I’d never be able to stand up straight again.

Maybe, I thought, I could yell through the door and persuade the killer that I was the harmless remnant of a man, a soon to be elbow-shaped creature worthy of curiosity, not hatred or fear. Those were my semidelirious thoughts at the top level of consciousness. I shared them with the still warm corpse of a kid named Bitter Canetta, who had plenty to be bitter about.

Someplace a lot deeper down, I knew I was going to get on my knees and hope my back had enough spring left in it for me to get out of the closet fast and possibly hit the killer before he could hit me. I listened for footsteps, but I couldn’t tell. The wind and creaking of the building didn’t help at all, and the rats scurrying in the walls weren’t cooperating.

There was a thin space between the bottom of the closet door and the floor. The morbid winter grey light spread through the bullet holes and under the door, but not very far. Clouds and daydreams of killers darkened the beams.

My back tightened low on the left but let me get up on my knees. I had to lift Canetta off of me and into the corner, but there wasn’t much room for moving and lifting in the closet. I remembered seeing something with Lillian Gish years before in which Donald Crisp had locked her in a dark closet. She went crackers, thrashing all over, screaming. I wondered if Al Capone had felt like Lillian Gish when he was on Alcatraz. I wondered if he had felt the way I did in that closet.

My foot slipped on a shoe and some old newspaper. My agility and silence made the USC marching band sound like silent prayer. I was sure I heard something outside the door, in the bedroom. I was sure I saw a shadow through the holes in the door. My knees ached, but my back felt all right. I thought of putting my eye next to one of the bullet holes in the door, but the thought of getting shot in the face made me sick to my stomach. I’d seen a few with slugs in the face. I backed as far as I could against the wall with my gun in my hand, reached out for the handle, and shot my 160 pounds out of the door. The door banged open behind me, closed and opened again.

My spring sent me forward toward where I figured the gunman was, but he wasn’t. I hit the bed and flew over it against the window. The window quivered and held. As I slid to the floor, losing my gun, I got a glimpse of the concrete courtyard two flights down. I could have been splattered on it if I had gone through the glass.

If anyone had been in the room I would have been dead, if he weren’t convulsed with laughter. It would take a pretty wild joker to find the whole thing funny, but my pal with the chopper didn’t seem to be too upset by the corpses he was leaving. I scrambled for my gun, making more noise, and having the flash of an idea that the killer might want to be found and was leaving corpses as Hansel and Gretel left pieces of bread or ginger ale or whatever. If I survived, and he killed enough people, I might be able to follow the trail to him. I also remembered that for some reason Hansel and Gretel’s trick didn’t work and that I hadn’t believed in fairy tales for thirty-five years.

I finally got both hands on my.38 and got up with it. The dead Canetta just looked at me dumbfounded. It was winter in a freezing apartment, and I was sweating.

I wanted to inch my way back to the front door as fast as I could and get the hell out of there. I wanted to tell myself that I had arrived too late and the killer was long gone. But I knew it couldn’t be so. With the bullet holes in them, Canetta and the other guy hadn’t been a long time dying, and besides, the kid downstairs had said three men were up here. I sat listening, trying to hold my breath. I thought I heard a squeak of floor somewhere in the back of the apartment, further into the darkness of that hall. It didn’t have to be a person. It didn’t have to be someone waiting me out, but it probably was.

I got off the squeaking bed, knowing that if someone was back there he sure as hell knew that I was there and had found his bodies. I could have opened the window and yelled “help” into the wind, but I went back to the hall.

A shot lit up the darkness like a flared match and whistled past my head down the hall. It wasn’t a machine gun. I jumped back into the bedroom and heard fast footsteps and the opening of a door.

I went back into the hall, took a shot down the hall to lead the way, and went carefully but fast in the direction of the door sound. I found a toilet and a small dining room that led into a smaller kitchen with a worn yellowish linoleum floor. The back door was open, and the storm door banged in the wind.

I stepped out onto the grey painted wooden porch and listened. I could hear clotheslines creaking and footsteps hurrying below me. I leaned over the railing into the whirling snow and looked down at an empty concrete courtyard. A figure wearing a dark coat and carrying a black case ran across the open space toward the corner of the building. I leveled my pistol and took a shot. Chips of brick sprayed near his head. He didn’t look back.

I ran down the steps, slipping a couple of times on the patches of ice. Somewhere I could hear the wail of police sirens over the weather and the thubbing of my heart. Someone, maybe the old lady who was waiting for Sheldon, had called the cops about machine-gun shots. Even with the wind, someone must have heard what looked like at least forty rounds of explosion.

Running across the snowy sidewalk of the courtyard, I turned the corner and ran through a passageway to a street. Half a block ahead I could see the figure with the suitcase. I figured I had been lucky. I had arrived when he had put the machine gun away. Whoever he was, even if he had a car waiting, couldn’t carry a machine gun through the streets. That was why he had taken the shot at me with a hand gun. The few seconds I had stopped to talk to the kid downstairs had probably kept him from decorating the apartment with me along with Canetta and the little man.

I couldn’t get a good look at the guy, who was moving pretty well on the empty streets in the snow considering the fact that he was carrying a fifteen pound machine gun in a suitcase.

Running was hard. No one shoveled the walks in this neighborhood. It was tough to cut the distance between us. Everytime I tried to hurry, I slipped, but I kept the distance between us the same. There were definitely police cars somewhere behind, but I didn’t stop to worry about them. If the guy with the chopper had someone in a car waiting, it was far from where he had used his gun. If he had a car parked, I had stayed close enough to him to keep him from jumping into it without risking a clean shot from me as he took time to start it and drive away, especially on a snowy street.

We kept chugging through snow, my pant legs dripping wet, steam coming from my mouth. I didn’t know what kind of shape he was in for a cross-country race.

He turned a corner and headed east toward Pulaski. I kept up. In two short blocks he crossed Pulaski. I had cut the distance by about fifteen feet and was sure I’d have him. He was slowing down. Then he got lucky. Streetcars didn’t run often on Sunday in Chicago, but one pulled up at the corner as he crossed the street. It was heading north and he got on. I was too far away to catch it and bothered by the blowing wind and low visibility to make out his face even if he had turned it toward me, which he carefully did not.

The red streetcar headed north and I stood panting. I still had some run left in me, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to take on a streetcar. I decided to give it a try anyway. Maybe a cab would come by and I could catch it and the streetcar. There weren’t many people on the street, which looked like it was normally commercial. Sunday and bad weather kept the number down to a handful as I trotted into unknown territory after the slow-moving streetcar.

It stopped to pick up a passenger on Sixteenth Street but pulled away before I could cut the distance very much. The sidewalks of Pulaski were shoveled reasonably clean, and I would have caught up with the streetcar on a day when it made normal stops to let off and pick up people. As it was, even with traffic lights, I kept it in sight. The streets moved up in numbers. By Twelfth Street, I had managed to keep from losing ground and I was sure the man with suitcase had not gotten off. But it was man against machine. The man was sucking in chilled air fast and feeling the pain of unfamiliar cold.

I leaned against a delicatessen on the corner of Twelfth and Pulaski and was stared at by a small, bearded man dressed entirely in black. He picked up a discarded cigarette butt that had melted a hole in a bank of shoveled snow and turned his back on me.

The streetcar and killer had won. It pulled further into the blowing snow. I stood catching my breath, or trying to. When I could talk, I asked the bearded man where I could get a cab. He answered me in Yiddish. I said thanks and looked around for a cab. There wasn’t any. I gave up and went into the delicatessen, sweating and panting.

At a booth away from the door, I put my hands on the warm table, waiting for the pain and trembling to pass. The place was full of families and couples having their Sunday meal out. The place was clean and plain, with the smell of hot food and onions.

“What’ll it be?” asked a guy with a pot belly, a sour look, wild grey hair, and a white apron.

“A buck and a half of lunch, a friendly smile, and coffee.”

His thick face moved into a bilious fake grin, and I let out a laugh-more of a laugh than the moment deserved, but I needed it. I was alive. The waiter shrugged, people looked at me and I tried to control myself.

The food was great-hot Jewish food, memories of childhood and a mother long gone. Chicago, murder, and disease had begun to turn me nostalgic. I ate the chopped liver, cold beet borscht with sour cream, kishke, boiled chicken, and rice pudding; downed my coffee, ate a piece of halvah, left a big tip, and asked the waiter how to get downtown. He told me and pocketed the tip without a comment.

I made it back to Merle’s place by late afternoon. She was reading the Sunday paper and listening to Henry Aldrich on the radio. She made some coffee, helped me undress and made me warm all over. I told her my tale, enjoyed her hands on me and giggled once.

Then I fell asleep.

When I woke up, my watch told me it was night, and my eyes told me that Merle was still in her robe. She got dressed, told me what there was to eat, and said she was going out.

“I’m going to see my kid,” she explained somewhat defiantly.

“I didn’t ask,” I said.

She smiled sadly and went out.

The phone was down the hall. I called Kleinhans’ home number, figuring it was still Sunday, but he wasn’t there. I tried the Maxwell Street Station number. He was there.

“Peters,” he sighed enormously, a man of broad telephonic gestures. “What the hell happened on the West Side?”

“I went to see Canetta, but somebody was just ahead of me.”

“We know all about your visit,” he said. “Homicide wants to talk to you.”

“They want to do more than talk, don’t they?”

“Maybe so,” he said. “I told them I thought you were clean. That I knew you were going to see Canetta, that you have no way of getting your hands on a chopper, but they want to talk. They’ve already got witnesses to your being there-some kid-and other witnesses saying you were in the neighborhood running around.”

“Shit, Kleinhans,” I said wearily, “you don’t think I did it. You-”

“I don’t think I like you, Peters, but I don’t think you did this either. You have to admit, three guys have been chopped down around you since you hit town less than two days ago, and you came here straight from a visit with Capone in Miami. I think you’d better come in and do some explaining.”

“That’d keep me tied up too long,” I said. “I’m still trying to save Chico Marx, remember?”

“Suit yourself,” he said. “But the word’s out for you and they’ve called for pictures of you from L.A. You don’t come in, it’s going to look bad and take you longer to get out and on your way back to L.A.”

“Kleinhans, did you see the bodies from that place?”

“Yeah. One of them fits what you were saying about Marx having an impersonator, but the guy isn’t that close. His name’s Morris Kelakowsky, a harmless neighborhood guy who used to act in the Yiddish theater on Ogden Avenue. Did a little neighborhood gambling, small time stuff.

“He fits, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Kleinhans admitted. “But I don’t know what you’re going to do with it now.”

“Someone’s knocking off everyone who might know about this gambling scam,” I explained. “There’s something to find out, and I keep getting close without knowing what I’m close to. Can you give me some time? How about your boss, the one who assigned you to watch me?”

There was a long beat before he answered.

“Sorry kid,” he said. “We just don’t have clout when there’s a homicide. I’ll back you if you come in.”

“By the time I get out, Chico Marx could be plowed under. Thanks anyway.”

“Your funeral,” he said. “I’ll tell the homicide boys you called and what you said. It might keep them from blowing you up on sight.”

I hung up and went back to Merle’s room. I had chills and a lot to worry about. Nitti’s gang and the cops were looking for me. My flu was worse. I still had Chico Marx to protect, and now a killer to catch.

I sweated into delirium on the bed, soaking it through, and got up around midnight with an idea. Merle had come back without my knowing it and had been placing cold washcloths on my head.

“Know why you let me in?” I said to her. “You’re a mother cat. I’ll bet you take in stray animals and feed them and find them homes.”

Her smile said yes.