His voice was almost a whisper when he added: “Somebody has to stand up against these barbarians.”
“Bill,” I said, softly, looking up at him. “When exactly wasn’t this city under gangster control? Name a time.”
He swallowed, shook his head. “That doesn’t make it right.”
Unlike almost every other cop in Chicago history, Bill Drury hadn’t pulled political strings to land his badge; no graft had been involved, and there was no Outfit connected ward committeeman or alderman or judge in the woodpile. Instead, he had studied hard and scored record high marks on the P.D. entrance exams, and passed the physical requirements with grace and ease, former Golden Gloves champ that he was. The closest thing he’d had to an “in” was that his brother John was a well-known reporter on the Daily News; the department didn’t mind getting a little good publicity now and then, and having a reporter’s kid brother on the job couldn’t hurt.
That had been the late twenties, when gangster rule in Chicago was at its most blatant and violent—from the train-tunnel slaying of newsman Jake Lingle to the blood spattered warehouse of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. A bright young idealistic go-getter—a natural athlete, a scholar—could get ideas about playing Wyatt Earp, and cleaning up this dirty town, like a modern Tombstone or Dodge City. My friend Eliot Ness certainly grew such notions; and so did Bill Drury.
Moving from patrolman to detective in under a year—another Chicago P.D. record—Drury had decided a police officer ought to do something about Al Capone and his boys, and had targeted the Outfit for special attention. Whenever he would spot a known Capone associate, Drury slammed the guy against the nearest wall and made him stand for a frisk.
And Drury didn’t care where this took place—a restaurant, the racetrack, a men’s room, a street corner—and he would gladly embarrass these hoods when they were out with their wives and kiddies.
“Let these families know,” he’d say, “what kind of coward is the head of their household.”
Soon the papers had dubbed Bill the “Watchdog of the Loop”—his sports background, his brother being a reporter, and his own gregarious nature led to friendships with countless newspapermen, who constantly gave him glowing mentions in the press—and the Syndicate boys were scratching their heads wondering why they were paying good dough to Drury’s superiors, when they were getting ballbreaking treatment like this. Before long, Bill was taken off the street and assigned station house duty; then he was transferred to the pickpocket detail, where I first met him. In neither case did these assignments prevent the Watchdog of the Loop from pursuing his mission in life.
Drury spent his off-duty hours sauntering along Rush Street and Division and other Loop thoroughfares, prowling for hoodlums. When he spotted a millionaire thug like Tony Accardo or Murray Humphries, he demanded their identification and leaned them against the nearest building, legs spread, arms and hands and fingers outstretched, patting them down for concealed weapons.
Such vicious killers as Spike O’Donnell, “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, and Frank McErlane were among those he fearlessly badgered. He arrested Louie “Little New York” Campagna on State Street, catching the Capone crony packing a .45. In a North LaSalle office, he nabbed ten mobsters, catching Charley Fischetti carrying heat; and he arrested Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, the notorious Outfit accountant, outside Marshall Field’s, to the delight of jeering onlookers.
“You son of a bitch,” the pudgy, iguana-like Guzik had sputtered. “I’m no vagrant! I got more money in my pocket right now than you earn in a fucking year!”
“Two more words, Jake,” Drury said, “and I’ll snap the cuffs on you. Two more sentences, I’ll get you fitted for a straitjacket.”
This kind of showy bravado had made Bill a favorite of the reform crowd. A socially concerned segment of the social register—with names like Palmer and McCormick—singled him out as their police mascot; he was hired to stand guard in black tie, tails, and top hat at fancy weddings and various fashionable doings (and made the papers doing so). When the swells had jewels, furs, or works of art to be guarded, off-duty Drury would moonlight for them; the Opera House became his second beat. Much as he despised graft, he accepted generous fees from his wealthy patrons, and he always drove a nice car and was widely known as the best-dressed honest cop on the force.
We had a long and tangled history, Bill Drury and me. He had saved my life, back in pickpocket detail days, in a Shootout at Lincoln and Addison with a car thief named Thomas Downey, who’d been eluding the cops for weeks. For that Bill had won the Lambert Tree commendation—the department’s “Medal of Honor” for bravery in the line of duty; he also won my undying friendship.
In 1943, when an old girl friend of mine, Estelle Carey, was murdered viciously—tortured and torched—Drury doggedly pursued the Syndicate angles of the slaying. He turned up the heat on various hoods, subjecting them to polygraphs, and this led to trumped-up charges that Drury—then acting captain at Town Hall station—had looked the other way where gambling in his district was concerned. Bill and his friend Tim O’Conner—another rare Chicago cop with an honest reputation—were suspended, though both fought through the courts and were eventually reinstated.
I had also been involved in the case that had finally brought him down: the shooting of James Ragen, who had been rubbed out when he refused to turn his racing news wire service over to the Outfit. Ragen had been my client—I’d been his bodyguard driving down State Street in the heart of Bronzeville when the shotgun assassins opened up on us from a truck otherwise filled with orange crates. The bullets didn’t kill Jim, not immediately; but he died in the hospital, with the help of a mobbed-up doctor who introduced infectious staphylococci into the wounds.
Jim Ragen’s niece, by the way, was Peggy Hogan; and Peggy had been my girl friend at the time (right now she was my ex-wife).
So I had helped Bill track down a trio of colored eyewitnesses to the shotgunning—a Pullman porter, a steel worker, and a drugstore clerk—and three West Side gun men were indicted for the Ragen killing. But one of the witnesses was bumped off, and the other two recanted…and both claimed Drury had offered to share the reward money with them in exchange for their testimony. Bill and his partner Tim O’Conner were called before a grand jury demanding details on their dealings with the two witnesses; when they refused to testify unless granted immunity, the Civil Service Board dismissed both from the force.
Now, as his court battles continued, and his chance of returning to the Chicago P.D. grew ever more remote, Bill Drury was staging a last ditch effort to bring down the Outfit guys who had derailed his career.
“I trusted you, Bill,” I said, still seated on the crate, sighing, shaking my head. “And you’ve put me on the spot.”
Sitting before his feast of tape recorders and guns, he didn’t look at all contrite. He smiled like Father O’Malley and held out his open hands. “Nate…join me.”
“What? Go to hell.”
Now, ridiculously, he looked around as if to make sure no one was eavesdropping; and very quietly he said, “I’m not just investigating, and helping out the committee…. I’m testifying.”
“You’re going on TV?”
He ducked that. “You know about my files, my notebooks, my journals.”
I nodded. Over the years he’d made a hobby of it, following day-by-day movements of Outfit leaders, compiling names, dates, places, which had been useful when he’d turned to writing those newspaper columns. Few people understood the inner workings of the Chicago mob better than Drury; and no one else had chronicled them in this fashion.
“Well,” he said, basking in self-satisfaction, “next Tuesday I’m meeting with Kefauver’s staff. I’m turning over all my notebooks, records, card files, tape recordings, everything.”
I couldn’t stop shaking my head. “Why not just limit it to that, behind closed doors—why advertise it by testifying?”
He sneered. “I’m not afraid of these dago bastar
ds. I don’t operate in the backroom—I’m taking this out in the open!”
Which was why he was sitting in a basement, I supposed, making illegal wiretap tapes.
“Don’t go pious on me, you dumb mick,” I said. “You figure if you can’t wangle your way back on the department, at least you’ll be famous. Maybe write a book—maybe open your own detective agency.”
He had the expression of a lovesick fool proposing to his girl. “I’d rather stay on at the A-1 with you, Nate. We could make that place something special.”
“Yeah—a parking lot.”
“Nate. You have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Join me. Come with me, Tuesday. Meet with Kefauver’s people. Agree to testify.”
I stood and almost bumped my head on the rafters. “Testify! What, are you smoking the evidence?”
He placed his hands on the table; the recorder continued to whir. “Nate. Look—you’re the only guy in this city not mobbed-up who knows the mob like I do…. Fact, you know things I don’t. You worked for them. You were practically Frank Nitti’s goddamn protege.”
That was overstating it: I had done jobs for Nitti, and he had done me favors, like not having me whacked. We had come to respect each other—maybe we’d even grown to like each other. I’d even been sorry to see him die.
But all I said was, “Nitti was the best man in his world—that’s all that can be asked of anybody.”
His eyes widened and rolled. “Bullshit, Heller! He was a killer and a thug and a goddamned extortionist and…hell, you know that, you know damn well you should join me and help cleanse this city.”
Now my eyes widened. “Did you say that? Did you really say that? ‘Cleanse this city?’ Can Bill Drury be that naive? That stupid?”
He folded his arms. “I’m not stupid and I’m not naive. And while I don’t share your admiration for Frank Nitti, I do admit he was a damn sight better than the boys upstairs.”
And he jerked a thumb at the ceiling, where fifteen floors above, the Fischettis’ three-story penthouse began.
I wasn’t really following this, and said so: “What makes the Fischettis so special, all of a sudden?”
Leaning forward, he shared his secrets, like a swami who had traded his crystal ball in on firearms and tape recorders. “The power is shifting. Guzik’s way down the ladder, now…last of the old guard. Accardo wants to retire, and there’ll be a successor named, soon. And right now, first in line, is Capone’s sweet cousin, Charley—the worst of a sick lot.”
I shrugged. “The worst I ever heard about Charley, and his brother Rocco for that matter, is they’re woman-beaters.”
“That’s an indication of their savagery, sure. Nate, since the war, Charley’s moved the Outfit full-scale into narcotics…which was something Frank Nitti would never have done.”
That was true about Nitti, and I knew narcotics use in town was up, but I said, “I thought Fischetti’s agenda was encouraging the boys to invest in legit enterprises. All I hear from Outfit sources, these days, is Wall Street and Texas oil.”
He smirked. “Oh, yeah, they’re investing in stocks and bonds and petroleum, all right. But they’re also investing in human misery.” He began counting on his fingers, though the numbers he began tossing around didn’t correlate. “There are fifty thousand drug addicts in this city, Nate—about half of them colored, on the South Side. You know what a habit like that takes to maintain? You got to steal over a hundred bucks worth of goods a day. You add it up.”
“Save the speeches for Kefauver.”
But he was rolling. “Did you ever see a schoolkid hooked on heroin? I have. Think about your baby son, Nate…think about him.”
“Maybe you should think about your own family, Bill.”
“You know I don’t have any kids.”
“No—but you got a wife, a beautiful one who loves your foolish ass. And your mother lives with you, right? And your sister? And her husband? And their kid? It’s not just your life, and mine, you’re risking, you know.”
That chin jutted even more than usual. “Annabel knows what we’re up against. She’s been at my side for a long time, Nate, through all my wars…. You know that.”
My turn for a speech. “Here’s what I know, Bill—you can talk about justice, and wave the flag, and play the violin about schoolkid junkies all you want…. But you know and I know that this isn’t about justice. It’s about getting even.”
He started to respond, then stopped.
I went on: “You picked out these Outfit guys for a target, when you were a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked punk kid, looking to make a reputation. Well, you made that rep, and along the way, also made the worst kind of enemies. They didn’t shoot you, oh no—they killed your career instead, because the way this city…hell, this country…works is, the public wants what the Outfit is selling, and so the politicians and the civil servants, like the whores they are, do their part by climbing in bed with the mob guys. You can’t do anything about that, Bill—people like money, and they like sex, and they like all kinds of things that are bad for them, like gambling and booze and dope. This isn’t about any of that, though, is it, Bill? This is about you getting even with the bastards who took your career away from you…and if you deny it, I’m going to stick that illegal sawed-off shotgun up your ass.”
He avoided my gaze, studying the tape recorder whose reels were whirling, gathering more tainted evidence. Finally he said, “They can subpoena you. I’ll tell them that you know plenty.”
“Then I’ll lie through my teeth, and save my ass.”
He gave me a long, withering look. “You did that once before.”
That was a low blow. I knew exactly what he was referring to. When I was a young uniformed cop, I had lied on the witness stand as part of a Capone mob cover-up. My father was an old union guy with a leftist bookstore on the West Side, and I knew if he didn’t get an influx of money, and soon, he’d go under. So I lied on the stand, and got the money, and was promoted to detective, and Pop shot himself through the head with my nine millimeter Browning automatic at his kitchen table in the living quarters back of the bookshop. It was still the gun I carried, when I carried a gun, which I wasn’t right now. That gun was the only conscience I had.
“When it’s safe,” I said, calmly, gesturing to the Revere machines on the scarred table, “haul this stuff out of here. Take the recorders, and any other A-1 property you’ve checked out, back to the office.”
He shrugged, nodded. “All right.”
“And Bill? You’re fired.”
Of course, he knew that already; he said nothing else as I found my way out. I paid the janitor his second fin, and walked around the front of the building. I was going to lay a twenty on the doorman, to make sure he forgot my visit.
I was in the process of giving him the bill when Joey Fischetti came out through the lobby and recognized me.
Grinning, Joey Fischetti—having just exited the elevator—trotted across the narrow, modern lobby of Barry Apartments, with its ferns, mirrors, and luxurious furnishings; his footsteps echoed like gunshots off the marble black-and-white tile floor, the first few making me flinch. About five-eight, slender, darkly tanned and immaculately groomed, Joey wore the kind of “casual” outfit it took half an hour to select from a well-stocked closet: a brown-with-white patterned sports jacket, a blue-on-white tattersall vest, gray slacks, a red-and-blue patterned tie, and a sporty charcoal hat with a fuzzy red feather that looked like a fisherman’s fly.
At forty, Joey was the baby of the Fischetti triumvirate, the only one not actively involved in criminal capitalism, with a blank arrest record to prove it; he was generally considered the best-looking of the brothers (though Charley might have taken issue), and the dumbest (no likely challengers on that point).
The latter quality was what I was counting on.
“Nate Heller!” he said, joining the doorman and myself in the crisp fall afternoon air. He was an animated guy drenched with
show biz sincerity. His voice had a husky, high-pitched enthusiasm, and his eyes were as bright as he wasn’t. “Goddamn. Do you believe it? What a coincidence!”
“Isn’t it, though? Good to see you, Joey. Frank sends his best.”
Sinatra and Joey Fischetti were bosom buddies.
He grinned—big glistening white teeth that were either caps or choppers—and shook his head. “You believe that? That’s the second coincidence!”
I still didn’t know what the first coincidence was.
Now his eyes narrowed, in an approximation of thought. “What are you doin’ around these shabby digs, Nate?”
The Barry Apartments were anything but shabby: this was as fashionable as Chicago neighborhoods got, and the Fischetti clan’s luxurious triplex penthouse had once been occupied by Mayor Thompson and Mayor Cermak…one at a time, of course.
I gave him half a smile and said, “I was just bribing your doorman to see if I could come up and see you, without an appointment.”
The doorman’s eyes widened with alarm.
But Joey waved off my remark. “Ah, you don’t need to waste your money on that! Don’t take his money, George.”
George swallowed and said, “No, sir,” and handed the twenty back.
As I was returning the bill to my pocket, Joey slipped his arm around my shoulder and walked me a few steps down the sidewalk, for a little privacy; the baby Fischetti smelled like a Vitalis and Old Spice cocktail. “My brother’s been wanting to talk to you.”
“Rocky or Charley?”
“Charley. Rock’ll probably be in on it, though. See, I was supposed to call you, but I got busy making arrangements for Frank. That’s where I was headed, right now—paving the way for the Voice with Dave Halper, at the Chez Paree.”
Dave Halper was one of the new owners of the club, which Mike Fritzel and Joe Jacobsen—the longtime hosts of a venue that had provided first breaks to the likes of Danny Kaye, Betty Hutton, and Danny Thomas—had sold to him last year. The Fischettis had an interest in this, the city’s biggest, biggest-time nitery: they owned the Gold Key Club, the Chez Paree’s backroom casino.
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