“Right,” said Chico. “We can play pinochle in our rooms.”
“I didn’t even bring my guitar,” sighed Groucho.
We picked up their bags and caught a cab. On the way back, I asked them if they were ever spotted on the street and asked for autographs. They agreed that they weren’t very often. I was fairly sure that if I didn’t know who they were and couldn’t tell Chico from Harpo at first look, it might not be very difficult for some small, Jewish-looking guy to pass himself off as the real Chico Marx. It was a wacky possibility, but it was worth a try and it gave me something to work on. First, find the guy who passed for Chico, if such a guy existed. Second, set up a meeting with Chico and Servi, so Servi could either lie or say Chico was the wrong guy. The second was dangerous for Chico, but things didn’t look too great for him now. I didn’t know how to go about the first.
After I checked the brothers in at the Drake—as the Rothsteins of Ohio—I headed for a telephone and called Sergeant Kleinhans. It took a while to track him down.
“Where are you, Peters?” he said. “You checked out of the LaSalle.”
“Some friends of Frank Nitti were looking for me,” I said. “I’ve got some news and questions. You want to hear them or do you want to threaten me?”
“Both,” he said. “What have you got?”
“The guy who put the finger on Chico is Gino Servi. Know him?”
“Yep. Keep going.”
“There’s a good chance that if Servi sees Chico Marx, he’ll know he’s the wrong man. Servi doesn’t like me, but I’ll give it a try.”
“You’re going to bring Chico Marx here for that?” said Kleinhans.
“I can get him if I have to,” I said. “The second possibility is to find someone who might have passed himself off as Chico Marx. He doesn’t have to look just like him, maybe wasn’t even gambling before. He might have a record. Between forty or fifty-five or so. Short.”
“That’s nothing to go on,” said Kleinhans. “But I’ll fish around. Where can I reach you?”
“You can’t. I’ll call you back. People in the Chicago police department are on Nitti’s payroll. They knew I was at the LaSalle and about the murder of Bistolfi before you did.”
Kleinhans laughed.
“Tell me something new,” he said. “O.K. Give me a call.”
I hung up, picked up my suitcase, went to the bar, ordered a Fleming flu special, and went outside to call a cab. I told the cabbie to take me to Kitty Kelly’s. There wasn’t a safe hotel for me in Chicago, and my friendships were nonexistent.
Suitcase in hand and collar up, I slouched into Kitty Kelly’s. Before my eyes adjusted to the dark, I blew my nose and did a little play with my coat buttons. Then I made out forms at the bar and the three Twenty-One tables. Merle Gordon was at the same table where I had seen her before.
“You don’t look so good,” she volunteered.
“I’ve been sick,” I sighed.
She rolled the dice and motioned me closer.
“Drop a quarter, pretend you’ve lost, and get the hell out of here,” she whispered. I tried to look down the top of her dress. She caught me, but I hadn’t been trying to hide it. She shook her head and grinned.
“You’re something,” she said. “You mentioned Kitty Kelly’s to get into the Fireside last night. Somebody remembered and came here asking about you.”
“Stumpy guy with a sling?” I guessed.
“Right,” she answered, rolling the dice. “I told him I didn’t know anybody who looked like you and no one else here remembered you, but one of the other girls might notice you right now. So goodbye, and it’s been nice knowing you.”
I didn’t move.
“Nowhere to go,” I said. “Can’t check into a hotel. The bad guys might have them covered, and I don’t know many people in Chicago.”
My eyes went down. I tried to look near defeat, shoulders slumped, eyes moist. Years ago it had worked on my wife Anne, but the last time I tried it on her she wasn’t having any. She had had enough of mothering me.
Merle pulled a pad of paper from under the table and scribbled on it. Then she reached deeper under the table and came up with something that tinkled.
“Reach over and take these,” she said. “And drop another quarter. My address is on the note and that’s the key. There’s juice in the refrigerator. Sleep on the sofa. I’ll be there later. I’m off early today.”
I grinned.
“Forget it,” she said. “You stay on that sofa and away from me. I can’t afford to catch your cold.”
I shrugged with enormous regret, pocketed key and note, and went outside to find a cab.
Merle’s apartment was a little north of the Loop, on a street called Barry. It was a three-story yellow building with a courtyard and maybe twenty apartments in three entrances. Her place was in the second entrance on the second floor. It was small—two rooms with a kitchen area that stood in a corner of the living room. The bedroom was big enough for a single bed. On the chest of drawers near the bed, there was a picture of a good-looking man with a thin smile. The picture looked as if it were a few years old. There was also a picture of a little girl—a cute kid with dark hair, a big grin, and a tooth missing in front. She looked something like Merle.
The furniture looked used or rented. It was clean, but it didn’t look like the kind of thing I would have guessed she had. The refrigerator had a full quart of juice. I drank most of it and looked for cereal while I made coffee. There wasn’t any cereal, so I ate a sandwich with two slices of something that was either pale salami or ripe bologna. There was no bath, just a shower. I used it, shaved, drank my coffee, and stretched out on the sofa with a roll of toilet paper for my nose. I fell asleep. No dreams came. No trip to Cincinnati. No Marx Brothers.
A knock at the door pulled me slowly out of the sofa. I fumbled for my gun and tried not to breathe, which is easy with a deviated septum and the flu. I had figured Merle for someone who’d help a poor bedraggled detective, but I’ve been wrong about women, men and kids all my life. She might just have given Costello a call, claimed a reward or amnesty, and gone back to the dice.
“Wake up and open the door,” she whispered. “You took my only key.”
I opened the door, holding the gun behind my back. She came in and threw her coat on a chair.
“You always sleep with that?” she said, walking to the kitchen.
“This,” I said looking at the gun. “I don’t know what this is.”
She touched the coffee, found it cold and turned the heat back on. Then she turned and looked at me. I had taken my clothes off and stood in underwear and a tee shirt with the .38 in my hand. I looked down at myself and shrugged. She laughed and drank her coffee.
“You alone?”
“Peters,” I said. “Toby Peters. If you mean do I have a family, just a brother. Nothing else. I once had a wife.”
“I know how that is,” she said, biting her lower lip.
“You want to talk about it?” I said.
“No,” she said. “I want to finish my coffee and admire your droopy drawers. Then I want to get in bed.”
“I remember,” I said sadly. “You don’t want a cold, and I stay on the sofa.”
“It’s too late,” she said, pulling a napkin from a cabinet and dabbing her nose, “I already caught your cold.”
“Really,” I grinned.
“Really,” she grinned back, a kind of sad, friendly grin.
Ten minutes later we were in the small bed, sneezing, laughing, exploring and coughing. It was love time in the pneumonia ward. Her body was small and perfect. Mine was hard and scarred and imperfect—an attraction of opposites.
“What happened to your nose?” she said, kissing it.
“It put up a gallant but losing fight three times too many.”
“I like it.”
“It’s hard to breathe through it, especially when I have a cold.”
“Are you always this romantic?”
“Only when I’m inspired by royalty.”
An idea hit me, and I rolled over on top of her and we both tumbled off the bed. We bounced together against the wall and stayed that way till someone knocked at the door. She squeezed away from me and called, “Who is it?”
“Ray.”
“Just a second.”
She put on an oversize purple robe and rolled her sleeves up. The bottom of the robe trailed on the floor. She padded barefoot to the door, looking like a kid trying to play grownup. I rolled over and pulled on my shorts.
“Peters,” beamed Ray Narducy, a cab driver sans protective muffler. His hack hat was pushed back on his head and his glasses had a film of steam over them.
“Hi kid,” I said.
“Find anything?”
“A little,” I answered. “Our friends in the Caddy caught up with me, and I’m trying to keep out of their way.”
He walked comfortably to the refrigerator, opened it, and looked for something to eat while we talked. Merle reached over his head, standing on tiptoe to pull down a box of cookies and hand it to him.
“Need any help?” he said.
“Maybe later,” I told him, “but not while they might be able to link your cab with me.”
We sat around eating cookies and sneezing, swapping stories about the good new days, listening to Narducy’s imitations of Herbert Marshall and Lum Abner. Merle yawned. I said I was tired. Narducy ate cookies and drank a quart of milk. Merle went to bed, and I told Narducy I had to get up early. He said he did too and stayed twenty minutes more, giving me the plot of the last episode of “Lights Out.”
When he left, I flew back into the bed with a grunt and a wheeze.
“Asleep?” I whispered.
“No,” she said. She leaned over in the dark and kissed me. “But I’ve had enough action for the night, on top of a fever. Let’s sleep on our memories.”
I dreamed something, but I don’t know what. When I woke up in the early morning light I held it in the palm of my memory, but it flittered away on dusty moth wings. Merle was still asleep, snoring through a congested nose. The room was full of romance and germs. I got dressed, shaved in the kitchen sink to be quiet, and left a note saying I’d contact her that night. Then I went out in the snow to find a phone. I found one at a lunch counter, where I ate Choco-nuts cereal and had two cups of coffee. It was about nine on Sunday morning, and the place was empty except for me and a guy with a kid he kept patting on the head everytime the kid said anything. Since the kid was only about two, he had a lot to say, but not much of it was clear. I listened for a while and watched. Something like nostalgia or longing started to get to me. I knew I’d have to pull away, or go through some somber hours envying that man with the kid.
Kleinhans wasn’t at the Maxwell Street Station, but he had left a message for me to call him at home. They gave me his home number, and I heard the now familiar but fuzzy voiced Sergeant Chuck Kleinhans.
“What time is it?”
“After nine,” I said. “What have you got for me?”
“A large, heavy chair given to me by my grandfather when he came to this country. There’s still enough strength in these old arms of mine to lift it above my head and bring it down on yours.”
“I’ve offended you,” I said sadly.
He tried to hold back a laugh.
“I’d say you have Peters, and you can ill afford to lose what little patience I have left. When we were in the State Street station a few hundred years ago, you called Indianapolis.”
“Is that a question or a statement?” I said, looking back at the dad and kid who were cutting each other’s waffles.
“It is a warning. Besides owing the City of Chicago a dollar and sixty cents, you played me for a sap.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t resist it. Cops bring out the trickster in me.”
His yawn was enormous.
“I checked on the Canetta kid. He has a Chicago record three sheets long.”
“You have an address for him?”
“Yeah,” said Kleinhans with a sigh, “and not that old Ainslie junk the Indiana cops had. He’s on probation and living at 4038 West Nineteenth Street. You wanna check him, go ahead. I don’t think he’s connected.”
“What about my little old man?”
“Forget it. You didn’t give me enough to frame a nigger newsman.”
“How about a sheeny grocer?”
“Yeah,” chortled Kleinhans, exhausting his range of over-the-phone emotions, “know one?”
“My old man. Stay in touch, Kraut.”
I hung up, knowing Kleinhans would forgive and forget, or hold it against me for turning his words against him. If he was a normal respectable human being, he’d remember.
The snow was an inch thick outside. I looked into the grey sky and into the coffee shop window at the father-son team. The kid had spilled chocolate milk, and the father was cleaning it up with a proud smile. I felt like shit and wondered why I had missed Christmas.
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.
You Bet Your Life: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Three) Page 8
