I hadn’t replied to his expression of sympathy, which seemed about as sincere as a Fuller Brush salesman’s smile.
“I mean,” he said, with a lift of his shoulders, “I know Bill was your friend. You went way back, right?”
“Right.”
He raised an eyebrow, cocked his head. “I tried to call your office, last week, and you weren’t available. We were going to talk, remember? Maybe do some business? Hope you’re not ducking me.”
“Why, do you bruise easily, Lee?”
“Not really.” He blew a smoke ring, which the wind caught and obliterated. “I have a tough enough hide—but you’re a public figure, these days, with your Hollywood clientele. You don’t want to alienate a nationally syndicated columnist, do you?”
I started walking toward the parking lot, edging through the crowd, and Mortimer tagged along. I said, “Actually, Lee, I looked into that Halley matter for you—the chief counsel’s so-called Hollywood connections? A great big pound of air.”
The hard, tiny eyes slitted and he shook his head, as we moved through the mourners. “Then you didn’t look into it hard enough—there’s a major leak on the Crime Committee, and I swear that clown Halley is it…. You going out to the cemetery?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m gonna pass. But we can still do business, you know.”
“Yeah?”
He put a hand on my shoulder and I stopped to look at him. His grin was wide and ghastly, like a skull’s—this was a man who smiled only when he was wheedling or threatening.
Mortimer whispered: “Bill Drury has ceased to be a source for me—as you may have noticed. I need a new one. His murder gives you the perfect ‘in’ with the Crime Committee…. Halley’s turned Estes against me, and—”
I removed his hand as if it were a bug that had settled on my shoulder. “You really think this funeral’s a good place to recruit Bill Drury’s replacement?”
The hearse was gliding by, cars falling in line for the procession to Mt. Carmel cemetery.
“I mean no offense to the dead,” Mortimer said, “but you’re smarter than my previous source. You know what his motto was?”
Actually, I did.
But Mortimer said it: “‘A coward dies a thousand deaths, a brave man only one.’ A man who sees himself as a hero is a fool, Nate. You, on the other hand, are one tough, shrewd, manipulative son of a bitch.”
“Stop. I’ll blush.”
“In short, you could have been a newspaperman.” And he gave me that ghastly smile again. “Tah tah.” And he pitched his cigarette, trailing sparks into the street, and moved through the thinning crowd to go hail a taxi.
I slipped away, heading toward the parking lot. Lou Sapperstein—brown topcoat over a dark suit, his bald head hatless—was waiting at my Olds, leaning against a fender, having a smoke. He and I had been ushers; the pallbearers had been relatives but for ex-captain Tim O’Conner, Bill’s fellow railroaded-off-the-force police pal. I knew O’Conner had taken it hard—he’d been crying, and more than a little drunk, at the funeral home last night.
I had avoided him—I’m half-Irish, and that was enough to be embarrassed by Irish drunks who felt famously sorry for themselves.
At the immaculately landscaped cemetery, after the grave-side service—which was also overseen by the bishop, and well attended—I was walking with Lou along a graveled drive, heading back to my car when O’Conner came striding up alongside me.
“Got a minute, Nate?” the lanky ex-cop asked. With his black suit and tie under a black raincoat, O’Conner might have been the undertaker, not just a pallbearer; he looked like hell—his blue eyes bloodshot, his pockmarked face fish-belly pale, but for a drink-reddened nose.
Somehow I kept the sigh out of my voice. “Sure, Tim.”
His sandy blond hair riffling like thin wheat in the bitter breeze, the wind turning his black tie into a whip, O’Conner turned to Sapperstein, and, a little embarrassed, said, “If you’ll excuse us, Lou—”
Since Lou had also been a cop, and a friend of Drury’s, as well as a member of our poker-playing cadre, this seemed a vaguely insulting exclusion; but Sapperstein just shrugged and nodded and walked over by an oak tree, leaning against it, while O’Conner led me off between rows of headstones with their elaborate carvings and statuary.
“I know this shouldn’t be a surprise,” O’Conner said, hands dug in his raincoat pockets, his eyes hollow, “but somehow I thought Bill was…above anything anybody could do to him.”
“Nobody’s above a shotgun, Tim.”
He was shaking his head, staring at the earth, across which a few stray leaves were dancing. “I…this is fucking hard, Nate. Ever since I lost Janet…”
“She didn’t die, Tim. You fucked around on her, and she divorced you and took the kids.”
Now he looked right at me—his eyes tight with surprise. “Are you really this hard?”
“I see in the papers where you barely knew Bill.”
“Oh. That.”
O’Conner had been quoted as saying he’d had no business association with Drury in recent months—that in particular he hadn’t been part of his late friend’s journalistic endeavors. His comments had seemed designed to keep the heat off him with the Outfit.
Embarrassed, looking at the ground again, he said, “That was all true—I just didn’t mention that Bill and I had been working together, cooperating with Kefauver’s staff. I mean—that was confidential stuff.”
“Really? And are you still planning to spend your spare time, Tim, pouring Cokes and coffee for the Crime Committee?”
Chin up, now. “I’m still working for Kurnitz, and he’s still working with Robinson and Halley, yeah. I was hoping you’d come aboard.”
I laughed, once. “You think that’s the way to make this thing right?”
“You know there’s no way to make this right. Bill’s gone forever…and we let him down.”
“Bullshit. Bill was a grown-up. He knew the risks. He relished them.”
He was shaking his head; he looked like he was going to start crying again. “I just don’t want him to have died for nothing. I’m going to stick with the committee and see if I can help them bring these bastards down.”
“You really believe that? That Fischetti and Tubbo Gilbert and Ricca and the rest, that some out-of-town senators trying to make themselves look good politically can change the way life’s always been in Chicago?”
The wind shook the trees around us; the brittle brown leaves might have been laughing.
His chin was trembling as he withdrew a hand to point a finger at me, like a gun. “I’ll tell you this—if Tubbo was involved, he shot himself in his foot, this time. Halley says Kefauver is furious about these killings. Apparently, the senator says, to hell with waiting till after the election for the hearings.”
Maybe Kefauver’s outrage in the press wasn’t all talk.
But I wasn’t convinced. “I’m supposed to believe Kefauver’s not going to wait a little over a month, to protect the local Democratic machine? That he’ll screw over the same people he’ll have to turn to, if he runs for president?”
“It’ll be in the papers, any day now. Kefauver takes these murders as a personal attack on him and his committee, and he’s upping the ante.”
“How in hell?”
“The hearings have been moved up to October fifth.”
I frowned in disbelief. “Next week?”
“Next week. Right across the street from your office, in the Federal Building, Nate. And the senator’s got another couple dozen subpoenas ready to go. Not just the gangsters, this time—politicians, race wire operators, liquor dealers, jukebox distributors, even the wives of the big boys.”
“Why bother with the wives? They can’t testify against their husbands.”
O’Conner shrugged. “Halley says they can. Rules are different with congressional hearings than the usual courtroom procedure.”
If that was true, where did that le
ave the former Jackie Payne?
“Come work with us,” O’Conner said.
“No.”
He found a sneer for me. “Is that it, then? Bill’s in the ground, and you’re just going to walk away?”
“Did I say that?”
Now the leaves seemed to be whispering, but I couldn’t make out what they wanted with me….
“Nate…you’re not thinking of handling this…some other way. Your own way…?”
“I don’t remember saying that, either.”
The bloodshot blue eyes seemed steady, suddenly—looking at me with a fresh focus. “You have a reputation for…sometimes people who have problems with you have been known to disappear.”
“Is that right?”
Car engines were starting here and there; the mourners leaving Bill Drury behind—they were just visiting, after all; he lived here.
O’Conner leaned close to me; surprisingly, he didn’t have liquor on his breath. “Listen—listen to me carefully, Nate. I would do anything to get even for Bill. Anything.”
“Yeah?”
Those blue eyes were hard as marbles, now. “Are you listening? Do you hear me?”
“I’m listening. I hear you.”
“Promise me—if you do decide to try something…I don’t give a shit how crazy…you call me. And I’m there.”
“Be careful, Tim—”
“I know what I’m saying. I know what I’m offering. don’t try to do this alone.”
“Are you sure?”
That pale face was deadpan, now—the softness of self-pity replaced by something hard and cold and resolute. “Dead fucking sure,” he said.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
I rejoined Lou, who was starting a new cigarette.
“What did he want?” Lou asked, exhaling a wreath of smoke.
“Absolution,” I said, as we headed back down the graveled road.
Lou smirked. “Boy, did he come to the wrong guy.”
The phone call seemed more than a little mysterious. I didn’t take it myself—it came in during the morning, when Lou and I were at the Drury funeral. When I drifted in after lunch, Gladys gave me the cryptic message: “Silver Palm, Bas client, come alone, 3 P.M.”
I almost went alone—the nine millimeter in the shoulder sling came along. The Silver Palm sounded like an obscure military medal; but it was a Northside strip club, a somewhat notorious one, and since the late Marvin Bas had been a Forty-second Ward politician, an attorney whose clients included a number of tavern and nightclub owners, that part of the message made a sort of sense. After all, Bas—despite his efforts to expose the incredibly corrupt Tubbo Gilbert—had been a protégé of flamboyant alderman Paddy Bauler, whose well-known slogan was “Chicago ain’t ready for reform!”
What disturbed me was that someone was connecting me to Bas—my former affiliation with Drury was well known; but Bas had only hired me a few hours before he was killed…a new record among A-1 clients.
I found a parking place for the Olds a block and a half away, and walked to the Silver Palm, which nestled under the El on Wilson Avenue near Broadway. My trenchcoat collars were up again—it was cold and drizzling, sending the streetwalkers and dope peddlers into the recesses of doorways for cover. This once respectable stretch had, during World War Two, developed into a war zone of burlesque houses, room-by-the-hour hotels and tattoo parlors, designed to service the servicemen from Fort Sheridan and the Great Lakes Naval Station, taking advantage of the Wilson Avenue express stop on the North Shore Electric railway.
The palm tree motif promised by the neon sign in the smeary window was half-heartedly maintained inside the surprisingly high-ceilinged room, with its faded South Sea hula-girl murals, fake thatched-hut roofing, and velvet paintings of topless native babes. The joint was crowded with chairs and little tables, with plenty of seats to furnish views from every angle, if you could see through smoke thick enough to slice and sell as bacon.
On a raised stage behind an endless bar, a slightly overweight/overage henna-haired stripper in pasties and G-string was bumping-and-grinding for the benefit of an exclusively male audience running from mouth-breathing dirty old men (whose raincoats weren’t as nice as mine) to sailor boys whose wide-eyed expressions indicated naked jiggling female flesh in the raw may have been a new experience for them.
On a Friday, in the middle of the afternoon, the place was maybe half-empty—call it half-full, optimist that I am. Strippers between their onstage stints, wearing diaphanous robes, joined slatternly B-girls to filter through the small crowd, conning customers into buying them watered-down drinks, while almost-attractive waitresses in frayed aloha shirts and tight slacks provided mixed drinks, bottled beer, and bored expressions. Most of the seats at the bar were taken—as this provided the best view of the Silver Palm’s cut-rate pulchritude—but I managed to find one toward one end.
I ordered a rum and Coke from a bartender who looked like he doubled as a bouncer, and watched as the henna-haired broad gave the crowd a flash of pasty-less bosom and bounded off, pleased with herself.
A bleached blonde of about fifty, weighing in at maybe two hundred pounds at five foot three, strutted out in a red-and-yellow muumuu and growled wisecracks into a microphone— “Big Mary, your mistress of ceremonies, but don’t get any ideas.” She worked blue enough to get a few laughs, and stayed on only a minute before introducing the next stripper, wisely not wearing out her welcome.
A slender brunette minced out overdressed in a Southern hoop skirt affair with Scarlett O’Hara bonnet, and she was down to her petticoats when I got the may-I-cut-in tap on the shoulder.
A thug with a flat nose, dead eyes, and broad shoulders—all wrapped up in a double-breasted blue suit with a blue-and-gray tie and a pearl gray fedora—was standing there like a potted plant with a shoulder holster.
“Yeah?” I said.
Suddenly I realized the thug was looking past me at the brunette, who was taking off her bra to reveal perky little titties with tasseled pasties. For a second I thought the guy wanted my seat; then he blinked and looked at me and remembered why he’d come over.
“Table toward the back,” he said, thickly. He gestured with a bratwurst of a pointing finger.
Through the smoke I could make out a table with a small man seated at it, way in back, off to the side—one of the worst seats in the house. Even the tables nearby were empty, affording this diminutive patron of the arts a modicum of privacy.
I thought I knew who it was—you might even say, I was afraid I knew who it was—and the thug accompanied me as I approached the little guy in the green snapbrim, who wore a gray tailored suit with a pale yellow shirt and darker yellow tie, his oval face dominated by a lumpy schnoz and close-set eyes and a blank impassivity.
Sam Giancana looked up at me and said, “Sit, Heller…. Join me here in my office.” To the thug he said, “Sally—a little breathing room.”
As the thug faded toward the bar and the stage, I sat across from Giancana at the postage-stamp table; the lighting was nil—a glass-and-candle centerpiece remained unlit, the only light near us coming from a bulb placed under a wall-hung velvet painting of a native girl with breasts the size of coconuts…not exactly National Geographic material.
I’d brought my rum and Coke with me; Giancana was drinking coffee—he needed a shave, giving him a scruffiness at odds with his natty apparel.
“This is where Satira started, you know,” Giancana said.
“That stripper who killed her married lover?”
“Yeah—down in Havana Harbor, remember?”
I did—it had been page one stuff.
He was saying, “We paid for her defense, and the cunt paid us back by working for the competition across the street, when she got out. We trumped the bitch, though.”
“How’s that?”
He snorted a laugh. “We hired the widow of the guy she murdered. Booked her in and she out-stripped Satira.”
“That’s show
manship, Sam.”
“That’s nothing—I tried to book both of them. Wouldn’t that have stood Chicago on its ear? The murderer and the widow of her murder victim, peeling side by naked side.”
“That’s entertainment,” I said. “Little surprised to see you, gotta admit. The feds who tried to serve your subpoena think you’re in Florida somewhere—that’s what your gardener told them.”
Giancana shrugged facially, and had a sip of his coffee. “A few of us have to stick around and tend to business. I got a couple rocks left in this town I can crawl under.”
“That message you left at my office was a little vague, Sam. How did you know I’d show?”
“I know what makes you tick, Heller. You’re a fuckin’ snoop. Curiosity is in your blood.”
“And my blood is still in my veins, inside my body. I’m hoping to keep it that way.”
Giancana flashed a sick-looking grin; like Lee Mortimer, he had a gray pallor—I didn’t figure Sam for many camping trips…except maybe to bury an occasional stiff in a field.
“This is a friendly meeting,” Giancana said. He placed both his hands on the table, palms down, fingers spread. “Friendly on my part, anyway. Your friend Drury—that little scuffle we had at the Stevens…you tell anybody about that?”
“No.”
“You think you could keep that unpleasantness to yourself?”
“Yes.”
“That thing, that was nothing. Drury was like that—he saw anybody remotely Outfit, he went off on them. You know that.”
“I know that.”
“He rousted Guzik, Fischetti, even Accardo, tons of times.”
“I know.”
Both eyebrows raised. “You don’t think I had anything to do with what happened to him, do you now?”
I chose my words carefully. “…I think it was Outfit. I don’t make it as anything to do with you, Sam.”
He was studying me like a scientist studies a slide under a microscope. “And why is that your opinion?”
“Because you’re smart, Sam. You have a temper—you’ve been known to lose your head, if you get pissed off…no offense.”
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