Chicago Noir

by Joe Meno

  For a day or two they did not question him specially and he had time to get rid of the knife. He took a long walk and threw it away into the river in South Chicago where the two abandoned coal barges lay rotting under the bridge, the bridge he had crossed when on the summer evenings he walked to the streetcar with the girl who was virginal and pure, who was far off and unattainable, like a star and yet not like a star.

  And then he was arrested and right away he confessed—told everything. He said he did not know why he killed his wife and was careful to say nothing of the girl at the office. The newspapers tried to discover the motive for the crime. They are still trying. Someone had seen him on the few evenings when he walked with the girl and she was dragged into the affair and had her picture printed in the papers. That has been annoying for her as of course she has been able to prove she had nothing to do with the man.

  * * *

  Yesterday morning a heavy fog lay over our village here at the edge of the city and I went for a long walk in the early morning. As I returned out of the lowlands into our hill country I met the old man whose family has so many and such strange ramifications. For a time he walked beside me holding the little dog in his arms. It was cold and the dog whined and shivered. In the fog the old man’s face was indistinct. It moved slowly back and forth with the fog banks of the upper air and with the tops of trees. He spoke of the man who has killed his wife and whose name is being shouted in the pages of the city newspapers that come to our village each morning. As he walked beside me he launched into a long tale concerning a life he and his brother, who has now become a murderer, once lived together. “He is my brother,” he said over and over, shaking his head. He seemed afraid I would not believe. There was a fact that must be established. “We were boys together, that man and I,” he began again. “You see, we played together in a barn back of our father’s house. Our father went away to sea in a ship. That is the way our names became confused. You understand that. We have different names, but we are brothers. We had the same father. We played together in a barn back of our father’s house. For hours we lay together in the hay in the barn and it was warm there.”

  In the fog the slender body of the old man became like a little gnarled tree. Then it became a thing suspended in air. It swung back and forth like a body hanging on the gallows. The face beseeched me to believe the story the lips were trying to tell. In my mind everything concerning the relationship of men and women became confused, a muddle. The spirit of the man who had killed his wife came into the body of the little old man there by the roadside.

  It was striving to tell me the story it would never be able to tell in the courtroom in the city, in the presence of the judge. The whole story of mankind’s loneliness, of the effort to reach out to unattainable beauty, tried to get itself expressed from the lips of a mumbling old man, crazed with loneliness, who stood by the side of a country road on a foggy morning holding a little dog in his arms.

  The arms of the old man held the dog so closely that it began to whine with pain. A sort of convulsion shook his body. The soul seemed striving to wrench itself out of the body, to fly away through the fog, down across the plain to the city, to the singer, the politician, the millionaire, the murderer, to its brothers, cousins, sisters, down in the city. The intensity of the old man’s desire was terrible and in sympathy my body began to tremble. His arms tightened about the body of the little dog so that it cried with pain. I stepped forward and tore the arms away and the dog fell to the ground and lay whining. No doubt it had been injured. Perhaps ribs had been crushed. The old man stared at the dog lying at his feet as in the hallway of the apartment building the worker from the bicycle factory had stared at his dead wife. “We are brothers,” he said again. “We have different names but we are brothers. Our father, you understand, went off to sea.”

  * * *

  I am sitting in my house in the country and it rains. Before my eyes the hills fall suddenly away and there are the flat plains and beyond the plains the city. An hour ago the old man of the house in the forest went past my door and the little dog was not with him. It may be that as we talked in the fog he crushed the life out of his companion. It may be that the dog like the workman’s wife and her unborn child is now dead. The leaves of the trees that line the road before my window are falling like rain—the yellow, red, and golden leaves fall straight down, heavily. The rain beat them brutally down. They are denied a last golden flash across the sky. In October leaves should be carried away, out over the plains, in a wind. They should go dancing away.

  Kaddish for the Kid

  by MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  West Town

  (Originally published in 1998)

  The first operative I ever took on in the A-1 Detective Agency was Stanley Gross. I hadn’t been in business for even a year—it was summer of ’33—and was in no shape to be adding help. But the thing was—Stanley had a car.

  Stanley had a ’28 Ford coupe, to be exact, and a yen to be a detective. I had a paying assignment, requiring wheels, and a yen to make a living.

  So it was that at three o’clock in the morning, on that unseasonably cool summer evening, I was sitting in the front seat of Stanley’s Ford, in front of Goldblatt’s department store on West Chicago Avenue, sipping coffee out of a paper cup, waiting to see if anybody came along with a brick or a gun.

  I’d been hired two weeks before by the manager of the downtown Goldblatt’s on State, just two blocks from my office at Van Buren and Plymouth. Goldblatt’s was sort of a working-class Marshall Field’s, with six department stores scattered around the Chicago area in various white ethnic neighborhoods.

  The stores were good-size—two floors taking up as much as half a block—and the display windows were impressive enough; but once you got inside, it was like the pushcarts of Maxwell Street had been emptied and organized.

  I bought my socks and underwear at the downtown Goldblatt’s, but that wasn’t how Nathan Heller—me—got hired. I knew Katie Mulhaney, the manager’s secretary; I’d bumped into her on one of my socks-and-underwear-buying expeditions, and it blossomed into a friendship. A warm friendship.

  Anyway, the manager—Herman Cohen—had summoned me to his office, where he filled me in. His desk was cluttered, but he was neat—moon-faced, mustached, bow- (and fit-to-be) tied.

  “Maybe you’ve seen the stories in the papers,” he said in a machine-gun burst of words, “about this reign of terror we’ve been suffering.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Goldblatt’s wasn’t alone; every leading department store was getting hit—stench bombs set off, acid sprayed over merchandise, bricks tossed from cars to shatter plate-glass windows.

  He thumbed his mustache; frowned. “Have you heard of ‘Boss’ Rooney? John Rooney?”

  “No.”

  “Well, he’s secretary of the Circular Distributors Union. Over the past two years, Mr. Goldblatt has provided Rooney’s union with over three thousand dollars of business—primarily to discourage trouble at our stores.”

  “This union—these are guys that hand out ad fliers?”

  “Yes. Yes, and now Rooney has demanded that Mr. Goldblatt order three hundred of our own sales and ad people to join his union—at a rate of twenty-five cents a day.”

  My late father had been a die-hard union guy, so I knew a little bit about this sort of thing. “Mr. Cohen, none of the unions in town collect daily dues.”

  “This one does. They’ve even been outlawed by the AFL, Mr. Heller. Mr. Goldblatt feels Rooney is nothing short of a racketeer.”

  “It’s an extortion scam, all right. What do you want me to do?”

  “Our own security staff is stretched to the limit. We’re getting some support from State’s Attorney Courtney and his people. But they can only do so much. So we’ve taken on a small army of night watchmen, and are fleshing out the team with private detectives. Miss Mulhaney recommended you.”

  Katie knew a good dick when she saw one.

  “S
well. When do I start?”

  “Immediately. Of course, you do have a car?”

  “Of course,” I lied. I also said I’d like to put one of my “top” operatives on the assignment with me, and that was fine with Cohen, who was in a more-the-merrier mood where beefing up security was concerned.

  Stanley Gross was from Douglas Park, my old neighborhood. His parents were bakers two doors down from my father’s bookstore on South Homan. Stanley was a good eight years younger than me, so I remembered him mostly as a pestering kid.

  But he’d grown into a tall, good-looking young man—a brown-haired, brown-eyed six-footer who’d been a star football and basketball player in high school. Like me, he went to Crane Junior College; unlike me, he finished.

  I guess I’d always been sort of a hero to him. About six months before, he’d started dropping by my office to chew the fat. Business was so lousy, a little company—even from a fresh-faced college boy—was welcome.

  We’d sit in the deli restaurant below my office and sip coffee and gnaw on bagels and he’d tell me this embarrassing shit about my being somebody he’d always looked up to.

  “Gosh, Nate, when you made the police force, I thought that was just about the keenest thing.”

  He really did talk that way—gosh, keen. I told you I was desperate for company.

  He brushed a thick comma of brown hair away and grinned in a goofy boyish way; it was endearing, and nauseating. “When I was a kid, coming into your pop’s bookstore, you pointed me toward those Nick Carters, and Sherlock Holmes books. Gave me the bug. I had to be a detective!”

  But the kid was too young to get on the force, and his family didn’t have the kind of money or connections it took to get a slot on the PD.

  “When you quit,” he said, “I admired you so. Standing up to corruption—and in this town! Imagine.”

  Imagine. My leaving the force had little to do with my “standing up to corruption”—after all, graft was high on my list of reasons for joining in the first place—but I said nothing, not wanting to shatter the child’s dreams.

  “If you ever need an op, I’m your man!”

  He said this thousands of times in those six months or so. And he actually did get some security work, through a couple of other, larger agencies. But his dream was to be my partner.

  Owning that Ford made his dream come temporarily true.

  For two weeks, we’d been living the exciting life of the private eye: sitting in the coupe in front of the Goldblatt’s store at Ashland and Chicago, waiting for window smashers to show. Or not.

  The massive gray-stone department store was like the courthouse of commerce on this endless street of storefronts; the other businesses were smaller—resale shops, hardware stores, pawn shops, your occasional Polish deli. During the day, things were popping here. Now, there was just us—me draped across the front seat, Stanley draped across the back—and the glow of neons and a few pools of light on the sidewalks from streetlamps.

  “You know,” Stanley said, “this isn’t as exciting as I pictured.”

  “Just a week ago you were all excited about ‘packing a rod.’”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “That’s right.” I finished my coffee, crumpled the cup, tossed it on the floor.

  “I guess a gun is nothing to feel good about.”

  “Right again.”

  I was stretched out with my shoulders against the rider’s door; in back, he was stretched out just the opposite. This enabled us to maintain eye contact. Not that I wanted to, particularly.

  “Nate . . . if you hear me snoring, wake me up.”

  “You tired, kid?”

  “Yeah. Ate too much. Today . . . well, today was my birthday.”

  “No kidding! Well, happy birthday, kid.”

  “My pa made the keenest cake. Say, I . . . I’m sorry I didn’t you invite you or anything.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “It was a surprise party. Just my family—a few friends I went to high school and college with.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “But there’s cake left. You want to stop by Pa’s store tomorrow and have a slice with me?”

  “We’ll see, kid.”

  “You remember my pa’s pastries. Can’t beat ’em.”

  I grinned. “Best on the West Side. You talked me into it. Go ahead and catch a few winks. Nothing’s happening.”

  And nothing was. The street was an empty ribbon of concrete. But about five minutes later, a car came barreling down that concrete ribbon, right down the middle; I sat up.

  “What is it, Nate?”

  “A drunk, I think. He’s weaving a little . . .”

  It was a maroon Plymouth coupe; and it was headed right our way.

  “Christ!” I said, and dug under my arm for the nine millimeter.

  The driver was leaning out the window of the coupe, but whether man or woman I couldn’t tell—the headlights of the car, still a good thirty feet away, were blinding.

  The night exploded and so did our windshield.

  Glass rained on me as I hit the floor; I could hear the roar of the Plymouth’s engine, and came back up, gun in hand, saw the maroon coupe bearing down on us, saw a silver swan on the radiator cap, and cream-colored wheels, but people in the car going by were a blur, and as I tried to get a better look, orange fire burst from a gun and I ducked down, hitting the glass-littered floor. Another four shots riddled the car and the night, the side windows cracking, and behind us the plate glass of display windows was fragmenting, falling to the pavement like sheets of ice.

  Then the Plymouth was gone.

  So was Stanley.

  The first bullet must have got him. He must have sat up to get a look at the oncoming car and took the slug head-on; it threw him back, and now he still seemed to be lounging there, against the now-spiderwebbed window, precious “rod” tucked under his arm; his brown eyes were open, his mouth too, and his expression was almost—not quite—surprised.

  I don’t think he had time to be truly surprised before he died.

  There’d been only time enough for him to take the bullet in the head, the dime-size entry wound parting the comma of brown hair, streaking the birthday boy’s boyish face with blood.

  * * *

  Within an hour I was being questioned by Sergeant Charles Pribyl, who was attached to the state’s attorney’s office. Pribyl was a decent enough guy, even if he did work under Captain Daniel “Tubbo” Gilbert, who was probably the crookedest cop in town. Which in this town was saying something.

  Pribyl had a good reputation, however; and I’d encountered him, from time to time, back when I was working the pickpocket detail. He had soft, gentle features and dark alert eyes.

  Normally, he was an almost dapper dresser, but his tie seemed hastily knotted, his suit and hat looked as if he’d thrown them on—which he probably had; he was responding to a call at four in the morning, after all.

  He was looking in at Stanley, who hadn’t been moved; we were waiting for a coroner’s physician to show. Several other plainclothes officers and half a dozen uniformed cops were milling around, footsteps crunching on the glass-strewn sidewalk.

  “Just a kid,” Pribyl said, stepping away from the Ford. “Just a damn kid.” He shook his head. He nodded to me and I followed him over by a shattered display window.

  He cocked his head. “How’d you happen to have such a young operative working with you?”

  I explained about the car being Stanley’s.

  He had an expression you only see on cops: sad and yet detached. His eyes tightened.

  “How—and why—did stink bombs and window smashing escalate into bloody murder?”

  “You expect me to answer that, sergeant?”

  “No. I expect you to tell me what happened. And, Heller—I don’t go into this with any preconceived notions about you. Some people on the force—even some good ones, like John Stege—hold it against you, the Lang and Miller business.”
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  They were two crooked cops I’d recently testified against.

  “Not me,” he said firmly. “Apples don’t come rottener than those two bastards. I just want you to know what kind of footing we’re on.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  I filled him in, including a description of the murder vehicle, but couldn’t describe the people within at all. I wasn’t even sure how many of them there were.

  “You get the license number?”

  “No, damnit.”

  “Why not? You saw the car well enough.”

  “Them shooting at me interfered.”

  He nodded. “Fair enough. Shit. Too bad you didn’t get a look at ’em.”

  “Too bad. But you know who to go calling on.”

  “How’s that?”

  I thrust a finger toward the car. “That’s Boss Rooney’s work—maybe not personally, but he had it done. You know about the Circular Union and the hassles they been giving Goldblatt’s, right?”

  Pribyl nodded, somewhat reluctantly; he liked me well enough, but I was a private detective. He didn’t like having me in the middle of police business.

  “Heller, we’ve been keeping the union headquarters under surveillance for six weeks now. I saw Rooney there today, myself, from the apartment across the way we rented.”

  “So did anyone leave the union hall tonight? Before the shooting, say around three?”

  He shook his head glumly. “We’ve only been maintaining our watch during department-store business hours. The problem of night attacks is where hired hands like you come in.”