Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 14

by Chicago Confidential (v5. 0)

  “I heard they were camped out at the Crime Commission, with Virgil Peterson.”

  Lou nodded. “Officially, yes. But they’re using the Stevens for talking to potential witnesses and, uh…”

  “Informants?”

  He shrugged. “Better a live informant than a dead witness. Anyway, you better get it out of the way. Go over there—see if you can convince them you don’t know jack shit. Head this fucking thing off.”

  “You’ve talked to Robinson?”

  Lou’s eyes rolled. “Oh, only six or twelve times, about this. You want me to call, and set it up?”

  I sighed. Nodded.

  “For when?”

  “Soon as the hell possible,” I said. “This morning, even—just allow me time to deal with Tubbo.”

  Lou nodded, breathed dragon smoke, and rose. Heading for the door, he said, “I’ll take care of it,” and went out.

  I was halfway through my mail when Gladys buzzed, and informed me my “ten o’clock” was here. I told her to usher him in, which she did.

  “Quite a step up from Van Buren Street,” Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert said jovially, after we’d shook hands and he’d settled into a leather chair across from me.

  If Bill Drury was the best-dressed honest cop in town, Dan Gilbert was the best-dressed bent one…which was a bigger distinction, after all.

  Pushing sixty, a fleshy six-footer in a three-piece three-hundred-buck double-breasted gray pinstripe suit with a blood-drop ruby stickpin in his gray-and-blue tie and several diamond-and-gold rings on various pudgy fingers, Tubbo sat with an ankle on a knee and his pearl gray homburg in his lap. His keg of a head sat on an ample double chin, and his dark eyes in their pouches were sharp with cunning if not quite intelligence. His nose was flat and pointed, like Jack Frost’s icicle snout starting to melt; his chin cleft, a Kirk Douglas dimple; his hair neatly combed salt-and-pepper, nicely barbered; his eyebrows thick dark slashes that might have been borrowed from Rocco or Charley Fischetti.

  “I guess you haven’t been over to our new offices before, Tub,” I said, leaning back in the swivel chair, arms folded, giving him a faint meaningless smile.

  “You should come over to my suite at the Sherman,” he said. “Very nice. Nothing like an office with room service.”

  Tubbo was on leave of absence from the State’s Attorney’s office, for the duration of his campaign for sheriff—not that he’d ever spent much time at the office out of which he supposedly supervised one hundred detectives.

  “How’s the campaign going?” I asked.

  “Swell. Public’s really responding to our message.”

  “What message is that? I’ve been out of town.”

  “Oh. Well. I’m going to drive all the gambling out of Cook County—just give me your vote, and six months.”

  I had to grin. “Does that include that handbook of yours, over on West Washington?”

  Tubbo didn’t take offense; he just flashed me a yellow grin, and reached inside his suitcoat pocket. I knew he wasn’t going for a weapon—well, not a weapon that used bullets.

  The envelope he flopped onto my desk would have green ammunition in it, no doubt.

  “Take a look,” he said. “Two grand in fifties.”

  During his thirty-three years as a police officer, Tubbo Gilbert had been a busy boy. He’d been a labor organizer prior to his first assignment on the P.D.—patrolman—and in less than nine years, he made captain. And it didn’t interfere with his continued union organizing, at all. After he became chief investigator for the State’s Attorney’s office, few Chicago-area labor crimes were solved; and in his eighteen years with the State’s Attorney, gambling flourished in suburban Cook County, while not one major Capone hoodlum went to jail—although Tubbo did find time to frame a few of the Outfit’s competitors, notably bootlegger Roger Touhy.

  These minor lapses didn’t keep Tubbo from achieving distinction as a law enforcement officer in Chicago. He was considered the city’s top cop—above the commissioner and the chief of police—and was undoubtedly the most important law enforcement officer in the county. His real claim to fame, however—cemented by various newspaper articles—was as “the world’s richest cop.”

  An underpaid public servant could get wealthy, he explained to reporters, by investing wisely on the Chicago Commodity Market.

  “It’s two grand, all right,” I said, thumbing through the greenbacks; then I tossed the envelope back on the desk—nearer to myself than Tubbo.

  “Would you like to know what that’s for, Nate?”

  “I figure you’ll get around to it.”

  “We’ve not had many dealings, you and I.”

  I’d seen to that: steered Tubbo a wide path.

  He went on: “But we’ve had mutual friends, over the years. Frank Nitti said I was his favorite golfing partner.”

  “No kidding.”

  “None. We used to go down to the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, together—great golf course. Owney Madden used to join us. You know, I still use the clubs Frank gave me. Gold-plated. Frank was a generous man.”

  “The clubs he gave me were solid gold.”

  Tubbo frowned—the pouchy eyes seemed hurt, for an instant; then he grinned. “You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?”

  “A little. But I agree with you. Frank Nitti was a hell of a guy.”

  “He put the word out, you know—no one was to screw with Nate Heller. He liked you. You had his protection.”

  “But he’s dead, now. Dead for what—seven years?”

  Tubbo raised a plump, jeweled hand as if in benediction. “It still goes—you still benefit from his goodwill. His respect for you.”

  “Good to know.” I didn’t mention that Tubbo was referring to the same Outfit guys who had cornered Nitti into suicide.

  Captain Gilbert folded his hands on his ample belly. “I don’t see your associate, Mr. Drury, in the office today—or does he have a private office?”

  Didn’t Fischetti fill him in? “Bill doesn’t work here anymore, Tub…. Still want to give me the two grand?”

  “That’s a token of thanks from certain individuals in return for your cooperation in this laughable ‘crime’ inquiry.”

  “Nothing more?”

  “It could be considered a down payment. Have you had a falling out with Drury? Was it on bad terms, his parting from your employ?”

  “Bill saved my life, once. We’ll always be friends. I just don’t want to have anything to do with his crusade.”

  Tubbo twitched a sneer. “Vendetta, you mean.”

  “You think he’s singled you out, Tub?”

  “Not me, really. Charles Fischetti. Drury’s had a chip on his shoulder, for Charley, ever since Charley beat that gun rap, years ago. Silly damn grudge. Childish. As for me, I’ve always gotten along with Bill. I just ran into him in the Sherman Hotel drugstore, the other day—he plays handball in the gym, there.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes, and when you see him, tell him I was serious about my offer. It still stands.”

  I grinned again—trying to bribe Bill Drury? Who was Tubbo trying to kid—himself? “What offer was that, Tub?”

  “After the election, I’ll have an investigator’s slot waiting for him, on the sheriffs department. He’d like to be a cop again, I hear. Well, I’ll make him one.”

  “I’ll pass that along. For what good it’ll do.”

  He raised a fat finger. “You might advise him to watch the company he’s keeping.”

  “What company is that?”

  “These reporters. Did you see the Collier’s piece, by Lester Velie?”

  “I skimmed it.”

  His eyes tightened. “Your friend—your former employee—was the prime source. And of course he’s still feeding Lait and Mortimer wild stories and exaggerations.”

  Jack Lait, a seasoned reporter and veteran of several Chicago papers, was now the editor of the New York Mirror; and Lee Mortimer was a syndicated columnis
t for that same paper. Starting with New York, they’d collaborated on several bestselling books on major cities—half smutty tour guide, half muckraking journalism. The latest one—Chicago Confidential, published early this year—had exposed to a national audience many Outfit secrets, including Tubbo’s role as the “elder statesman of political corruption.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” I said. “Bill was working for the Herald-American before he came to work with me. And his brother was a reporter. So he runs in those circles.”

  The pouchy eyes narrowed; for the first time, a faint edge of menace crept into Tubbo’s voice. “You didn’t know he was feeding these yellow journalists his tripe at the same time he was on your payroll?”

  “I did not.”

  Tubbo shifted in the chair; the leather made a farting sound, as he crossed his other leg. “Have you ever seen these fabled notebooks of his?”

  “The records, the files he keeps? I know about them. He’s mentioned them. He certainly didn’t keep them here.”

  The dimpled chin lifted and he gazed down the pudgy expanse of his excess-ridden face. “If you could find them, they would be…of interest.”

  “To you or to Charley Fischetti?”

  An elaborate shrug. “Does that matter? Find them, secure them, deliver them—and there’s fifty thousand in it.”

  “Jesus! Fifty thousand….”

  His smile seemed almost puckish. “I thought that might get your attention.”

  I picked up the envelope, riffled through the bills. This was the moment, in the pulps, in the movies, where the private eye threw that damn money in the crooked cop’s face.

  “Thanks,” I said, and tossed the envelope in my top desk drawer. “I’ll see what I can do…. But those notebooks are a long shot. I’m not promising anything.”

  Tubbo nodded, pleased. He got up—it took a while. He gestured for me not to show him to the door—I wasn’t planning to, anyway. He was halfway there when he paused and asked, “Do you know this attorney—what is it, Bas? Marvin Bas?”

  I shrugged. “Not well. He’s a Republican, pretty active in his ward. Represents some nightclubs, strip joints, on the Near Northside.”

  Now his tone got casual—a little too casual. “Did you know Bas and Drury are thick, these days?”

  “News to me, Tub.”

  “It’s really too bad…distressing. You see, Bas is working for Babb.”

  That was a lot of b’s, but what it meant was, Drury was tight with a high-ranking campaign worker of Tubbo’s opponent in the sheriff’s race. Drury might be digging up dirt on Tubbo—a job that wouldn’t take much of a shovel—for that candidate.

  “It’s a pity,” Tubbo said, and shook his head. “Beating Coughlan woulda been a damn cakewalk.”

  J. Malachy Coughlan, Tubbo’s original opponent in the sheriff’s race, had died in August; young, handsome, personable John E. Babb—an attorney and a World War Two hero—had been chosen to fill the slate.

  “You’re a Democrat, Tub,” I said. “You got to try real hard to lose, in this town.”

  Tubbo nodded that I was right, waved a jeweled hand, and slipped out—and he was barely gone before Sapperstein slipped in. He trotted over and took Tubbo’s well-broken-in chair.

  “Robinson will see you at eleven-thirty at the Stevens,” Lou said. “Suite 1014. Any objections?”

  “No. Thank you for setting it up.” I returned to my mail and then looked up and Lou, bright-eyed behind the tortoise-shells, was staring at me.

  “Are you still here?” I asked.

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “So what’s up with Tubbo—spill!”

  I filled him in, and showed him the envelope of money.

  “You’re keeping that?” Lou asked, mildly surprised.

  “Hell yes. I wasn’t going to testify, anyway.”

  His eyes were wide, his brow tense. “Well, Christ—thanks for making me party to a bribe.”

  I shrugged. “In that case, this never happened, and this two grand goes into my pocket, and not the A-1 account, out of which you get a share.”

  Sapperstein smirked. “You’re funnier than Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.”

  “All of them? Anyway, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, and now it has.”

  “What other shoe?”

  I leaned back, rocking in the chair. “It was too easy, yesterday, with Fischetti.”

  “How so?”

  “Charley just asked me not to testify, and I said don’t worry about it, and that was it. Some money had to change hands, or I’d be worried.”

  He frowned—and with that bald head, the frown went way back and never seemed to stop. “You’re not going to sell Drury out, are you?”

  I almost threw a paperweight at him. “What the fuck kind of thing is that to say? I got lines I don’t cross, for Chrissake!”

  He got up, patting the air with both palms. “I know, Nate, I know, I’m sorry…. It’s just—after all these years, I still have trouble keeping track of what they are, exactly.”

  And he went out.

  The Stevens Hotel was hardly an out-of-the-way hole-in-the-wall where an investigator might discreetly interview informants. On Michigan Avenue between Balbo and Eighth, overlooking Grant Park and Lake Michigan, the massive, rococo hotel was the world’s largest, with its three thousand rooms, twenty-five stories and four finger-like skyscraper towers.

  Still, it made some sense, Kefauver’s team camping out, here. Uncle Sam had a relationship with the Stevens, which had been used by the military during the war, for offices, training, and even billeting. And with all these rooms, all this activity—who knew how many conventions and conferences were going on in the hotel right now?—anybody could get lost in the crowd, or at least have an excuse for being here.

  Though the Stevens was only a four-block walk from the Monadnock, a light rain encouraged me to hop a cab, which dropped me at the Michigan Avenue entry. A corridor of store-front windows opened into a two-story, ornate lobby bordered by yawningly wide staircases, leading to ballrooms and, no kidding, an ice-skating rink. Shaking the drizzle from my fedora, I strolled on into the vast white chamber, a world of marble pilasters, luxurious Louis XVI furnishings, and fluffy clouds drifting on a high, carved-plaster, gold-trimmed ceiling’s painted sky—what better setting for Chicago gangsters?

  The elevators were to the left of the check-in counter, near an elegant sitting area of round button-tufted couches and overstuffed chairs. I spotted a small man in a brown suit and green snapbrim, seated in a chair between a couple of potted ferns, legs crossed exposing diamond-pattern socks over brown tasseled loafers. Though his identity was hidden by the Herald-American sports section, which he was holding high and close, something about the guy seemed familiar.

  When I turned my back to this possible sentry—or spy—I continued to watch him in the polished bronze elevator door, to see if he peeked out over or around that sports section. He did not. Maybe I was just being paranoid—but that was okay, because I was, after all, a professional paranoid.

  When I got off on the tenth floor, a short, burly-looking little guy—snappy, in a well-cut blue suit with blue-and-red striped tie and gray feathered hat—was waiting to get on. His hair was black and his eyes were like black buttons in a rumpled oval face made round by five o’clock-shadowed jowls.

  I knew him and he knew me—and we both froze there, long enough for him to miss the elevator. We understood at once why we both were on the tenth floor of the Stevens.

  “Well, hello, Jake,” I said, and offered my hand.

  Jake Rubinstein’s grip was firm, but his smile wasn’t. “Been a long time, Nate. Since before the war, right?”

  “Right. I thought you were in Dallas.”

  “Yeah, yeah I still am.” He hitched his shoulders, Cagney-style, only without the confidence. “I had, uh…business back here.”

  We both knew what kind of business—the Kefauver variety—but th
at went unstated.

  Jake punched the DOWN button, and said, “So is Barney in town?”

  “No, he and Cathy are in L.A. They got remarried.”

  “Ah, that’s great. I heard he shook that monkey off his back. That’s great, too. Gutsy little bastard.”

  This strained exchange referred to our mutual pal, Barney Ross, who had come back from the war with a morphine habit that he managed to kick, going public with his problem.

  All three of us had grown up in the Lawndale district, near Maxwell Street, and we’d all been little street hustlers as kids, only Barney went on to be a world’s champ prizefighter, I became a cop, and Jake a strong-arm goon and bagman for local unions. A few years ago Jake had moved to Dallas, where (among other things) he managed the Silver Spur, a nightclub.

  The elevator made a return stop, and Jake and I bid our goodbyes, and he went on his way, and I on mine.

  Once you got away from the area around the elevators, the halls of the posh hotel got as tight as a train car. I took a right down to the door of the corner suite where I’d been told to come. I knocked on a gold-edged ivory door.

  After peephole inspection, the door swung open and revealed Drury’s fellow exile, ex-police captain Tim O’Conner, a lanky, blue-eyed, sandy-blond Irishman whose narrow, handsomely sharp-featured face was mildly ravaged by pock-marks (cheeks) and drink (nose).

  “Doorman, now, Tim?” I asked, as he ushered me in. “That the only job available to an ex-copper these days?”

  “I’m lucky anybody’ll have me.” Like Drury, O’Conner was well dressed for a cop, his off-the-rack brown suit livened up by a pale yellow shirt and dark yellow tie. “Actually, these gentlemen thought you might warm up to a familiar face.”

  I stopped him in the hall-like entryway of the suite, off of which were closets and a bathroom. “Are you working for the committee?”

  He took my raincoat and hung it up; I kept my hat, but took it off.

  “In a roundabout way,” O’Conner said. “This local lawyer working with the committee, Kurnitz, I hired on as his investigator. He’s here, you’ll meet him, Kurnitz, I mean.”

  “I’ve met him before.”

  Kurnitz was an eccentric, full-of-himself lawyer in the Loop who did a lot of criminal work, both for white-collar criminals, like embezzlers, and blue-collar crooks, like heist men. He didn’t mouthpiece for the mob, though, which explained the committee using him—a guy with connections in the underworld who wasn’t connected.