"I seem to recall." I said, somewhat coyly. "Cermak nominating a friend of yours as favorite-son candidate for president at the national convention last month."
That was Melvin Traylor, president of the First National Bank and perhaps the only banker in Chicago of nearly equal stature to the General.
"Yes." Dawes nodded, "Melvin was a major Cermak supporter. And Frank Loesch. of the Chicago Crime Commission. There were any number of Cermak-for-mayor businessmen's committees. Many of us came to support Mr. Cermak, as the 'lesser evil.'"
"Well," I said, "he has been helping you bankers out on the tax front, hasn't he?"
Uncle Louis said, a bit testily, "Which is only fair, since he must come to the banks to obtain loans for the city."
The General dismissed all that with a wave of the hand. "That would be the case under any mayor, under current conditions. The major reason Mr. Cermak gained the support of business was his promise to 'redeem Chicago,' to restore her good name. To put an end to all gangster operations during the fair."
"Did you really believe that?"
"Yes, within reason. As we've both said, gangsters will always be with us. The people who come to our fair will occasionally seek that which is not offered there. So I would not expect, for example, a gentleman from Des Moines having a great deal of difficulty finding a glass of beer to drink while in Chicago this summer."
"Cermak's declared war on crime. Isn't that what you want?"
"Bloody headlines are not what any of us want. The fair is designed to paint a whole new picture of Chicago. And blood is not the sort of paint we have in mind."
"I can see that," I admitted.
"Now. You may be wondering where you fit into all this."
"Yes."
"I'm merely hoping you'll be civic-minded when Mr. Nitti's trial comes up, before too long."
"Civic-minded?"
"Yes. I would hope you would take the stand and tell the truth."
"Which truth is that?"
Dawes looked at me hard. "The truth, man! The truth. Whatever it is. Wherever the chips may fall."
"Okay." I said, unsurely.
"Like the city- council." he said, with humor. "I believe a sense of civic duty should be rewarded."
"That's nice. How?"
"I understand you've opened a private agency."
"That's correct."
"I understand further that you were a member of the pickpocket detail."
"Yes."
"We'll have our own security force, at the fair. I would like them instructed in the ways and means of the pickpocket. I would like you to do that. And I would like you to spend a day or two at the fair, each week, yourself, when your schedule allows, to supervise them, doing spot checks, perhaps nabbing an occasional pickpocket personally."
"Fine," I said.
■
"Would a retainer of three thousand dollars be sufficient?"
"Oh, yes."
"Good. Now this is all tentative, mind you. Contingent upon your performance at the trial."
"Oh."
"Come and see me afterward. And we'll draw up a contract." He stood. So did my uncle Louis. So did I.
He offered his hand for another shake, and I shook it, and said, "Well, thanks for the offer. It's very kind of you."
"Most of my troubles have come from attempted acts of kindness," he said. "But most of my happiness has come from the same endeavor. It will be illuminating to see into which category you fall."
Right." I said.
Out on the street I said to Uncle Louis, "What was that all about?"
"Isn't it self-evident? He wants you to tell the truth at the trial."
"We're talking about the truth, here? As in. what really happened?"
"Of course."
We walked with hands in topcoat pockets; the wind off the lake was finally kicking in. It was down in the mid-thirties now.
"He wants to expose Cermak?" I said. "I don't get it. That's just more bad Chicago publicity."
"Exposing Cermak would be the best thing in the world for the General and his high-hat friends. Nate. The bad publicity could force Cermak to resign, on account of 'health problems.' He has 'em, you know."
I had a sudden image of Cermak getting up and heading for the toilet.
"Yeah, I know," I said.
"And if he doesn't resign, it'll scare him into cleaning up his act. He won't send his hooligan squads around assassinating gangsters anymore. And he may keep his own associations with gangsters a bit closer to his vest."
"Maybe you're right." I said.
"Besides." Uncle Louis went on. "Cermak is a Democrat. This'll provide a nice cloud to hang over him when reelection comes around, and we'll get a real Republican back in. It's going to be a cold day in hell when a Democratic machine runs Chicago again, after Cermak gets dumped."
"Well, it's already getting colder, you know. Uncle Louis."
"What do you mean?"
"I can't sell Cermak out. At least I don't see how I can. He can yank my license. I won't be able to work. I won't be able to cam' a gun, either. And maybe Ted Newberry or Roger Touhy'll send some guys over to take me for a ride."
"Well." Uncle Louis said, "think it over. Cermak is powerful, but the General is power. When he said Hoover was the guy who got Capone. he was just being nice, you know. It's Dawes who did it. Well. Here's the Standard Club. Let's talk soon. Nate."
And my uncle patted me on the back and entered the gray old club. I walked around the corner, turned down a panhandler's request for a dime, and went up to my office, and called Eliot.
"That looks like a Murphy bed," Eliot said, coming in the door and pointing at the Murphy bed.
"There's a reason for that." I said, sitting behind my desk, feet up. like a big shot.
He took his topcoat off. walked to the straight-backed chair in front of my desk, and turned it around, and draped the coat over it, and sat backward in it and faced me: his face was deadpan, but he was smiling around the cool gray eyes, "You didn't say anything about living here, too."
I shrugged. "I'm not nuts about it getting around."
He pointed again, this time at the varnished-pine four-drawer file in the corner behind me, to my left. "I suppose you got your shorts filed under 5."
I reached over and pulled the bottom file drawer out and pulled out a pair of shorts. "Under U,"l said.
Eliot started laughing till his eyes teared; so did I. A couple of tough guys.
My own laughter under control, the shorts on the desk in front of me like something I was working on, I said, "Well, this used to be a lawyer's office. I suppose he had briefs to file, too."
"Enough," Eliot said, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. "Brother. You've really hit the big time, haven't you, Nate?"
"The biggest," I said, filing my shorts away. "Everybody in town is trying to hire me or bribe me. shut me up or make me talk. I'm popular."
"Seriously?"
"Yeah. Did you know General Dawes and me were thick?"
"Yeah?"
I held up crossed fingers. "Like this. Guess which one I am. He wants me to tell the truth on the stand, when Nitti's trial comes up."
Eliot thought about that. "He wants you to sell Cermak out, you mean?"
"Yowsah."
Eliot took his hat off and tossed it on the desk. "Well, Cermak is making the wrong kind of headlines."
I nodded. "Don't want to scare potential fairgoers off, you know."
"The fair is Dawes' baby, remember. Him and his brother Rufus, who's the president of the thing. You mean to say, he came right out and asked you…"
"Not really. My uncle Louis had to explain it to me. Dawes is a walking garden of platitudes; I needed a translator."
Eliot smiled "I've met him a couple of times. Didn't make much of an impression on me."
"Don't you know he's the guy who got Capone?"
"What? What am I, chopped liver?"
"You were Dawes' tool, my boy."
"Sure," he said, his smile turning to a smirk.
I decided not to pursue the issue; why burst his bubble?
I had asked him to come over here- it wasn't much of a walk from the Transportation Building- to show him my office and to allow him to speak freely, without the other prohibition agents at his office overhearing. I wanted to find out about the Nydick inquest, at which he'd been a witness this morning.
"It was a circus," Eliot said, disgustedly. "The second inquest this week where the coroner sat in judgment of the actions of police officers who, officially, are deputy coroners. Sometimes I think the reason justice is blind is 'cause it's looking the other way."
They had started out at the morgue and moved to the Park Row Hotel where the crime was reenacted- theoretically for the sake of the jurors, but really for the press photogs. (Eliot said this with an uncharacteristic disdain for publicity; on the other hand, this publicity wasn't his.) Mrs. Nydick's attorney had charged that the shooting was unjustified, and that no revolver had been in the dresser drawer before the hoodlum squad entered to arrest her (now-deceased) husband. Miller had to fend off the attorney's questions about possible animosity toward Nydick, but the coroner put an early end to that, saying that if the attorney was soins to be belligerent. he wouldn't be allowed to cross-examine witnesses at all. Miller was exonerated.
"What do you make of it?" I asked.
Eliot shrugged elaborately. "I think the wife set her husband up for her boyfriend Miller to collar, but Miller, on his own initiative, decided to take the opportunity to bump the husband off. And I think the wife took that less than kindly, and sicced her attorney on Miller."
"She might've done that just to make herself look good." I said. "It makes the cover-up look more legit to have some of these questions raised and quashed, you know."
He nodded. "You may be right. And she may not be his girl friend at all. We're just guessing. At any rate. Miller planted the gun."
"If all the guns Lang and Miller planted bore fruit," I said, "we'd be picking bullets off trees."
"Ain't it the truth. The other detectives seemed embarrassed, testifying. I think they felt taken, like you did."
"You don't think they were in on it?"
"Naw. I think Miller planted the thirty-two in the drawer with his back to them. That's my guess, anyway."
"It's as good as any." I admitted.
Eliot looked around. "It's a nice office. Bigger than mine."
"Well, you don't live in yours."
"True. Why'd you give up your room at the Adams?"
"It was getting old. living in the lap of luxury." I explained my night-watchman arrangement with Barney.
"Sounds like a good deal for both of you." Eliot nodded. He reached into an inside pocket. "Say, I've already talked to this guy, and he may have something for you." He handed me a slip of paper across the desk.
I read it aloud. "Retail Credit Company." There was a name and a number, too, and an address in the Jackson Park area.
"Real glamorous work," he said. "All the pavement-pounding a man could hope for. Checking credit ratings, investigating insurance claims. You know- exciting stuff."
"I appreciate this, Eliot."
He shrugged. "What about Sunday?"
"What about it?"
"Christmas. Nate. How about having Christmas dinner with Betty and me."
"Yeah, well that's awful nice of you, but I don't celebrate Christmas, particularly. I'm sort of a Jew, remember?"
"You don't, so why should I? Come on over. We got a huge turkey and only a handful of relatives. Plenty of room for an honest private detective."
"And for me?"
"And for you. And why not bring Janey?"
"Can I call you later? If Janey's already got something planned, then…"
"I understand." He stood; pointed a finger at me. "But if she doesn't, you better both be there."
"Okay. You rushing off. already?"
"I got a press conference this afternoon. We're announcing raids for New Year's Eve. Assuring the public that we're arresting only owners, not patrons."
"It'll probably be legal next New Year's, you know."
"I know, and it's fine with me. But till then. I got to at least go through the motions." He had his hat and coat on now. "Let me know if you change your mind about Christmas."
"I will."
"Good. I got a real nice lump of coal for you, tied with a big red ribbon."
The office was a little cold; the radiator behind my desk seemed largely ornamental. "I think that may come in handy."
"It might," he smiled, waved, went out.
I called the Retail Credit Company in Jackson Park and arranged with the manager, a Mr. Anderson, for a meeting next Monday afternoon. He was friendly, glad to hear from me, expected my call Eliot had really laid some groundwork for me, and that was a nice Christmas present; even better than the coal he'd promised. Then I called the phone company to see if my agency could still get into the '33 phone book, and made it just under the wire. A-1 Detective Agency, Nathan Heller, President. The A-1 should get me listed first in the Yellow Pages, and that alone could bring in some clients.
And I called the other agencies in town to let them know I was in business, and that I could handle their overflow at a reasonable rate: ten dollars a day and expenses. That appealed to a couple of the medium-size agencies, where there were three or four operatives, and occasionally the work load did get too big for them to handle. My rate for the general public would be twenty dollars a day plus expenses, though I didn't plan to post it; better to size a client up and slide the rate up or down, as traffic would allow- in times like these, down was where most of the sliding would be, I supposed.
This took the better part of the afternoon, and at four I got a small suitcase with some toiletries, a change of underwear, a clean shirt, and my relatively clean navy pinstripe, and went over to the Morrison Hotel, to the traveler's lounge, where I showered and shaved, leaving the suitcase and dirty clothes in a locker, before heading over to City Hall to meet Janey.
By that time it was five and already getting dark; the neons gave off a funny, halfhearted glow in the dusk, an effect amplified by the mist, which was what the cloudy day had decided to give us instead of rain or snow. Christmas was looking to be gloomy and wet, not cheery and white. The streets were filled with rush-hour traffic as I walked the concrete canyons to City Hall; once there, I stood within the high marble lobby waiting for Janey, watching city employees get out of there as fast as possible- all of 'em except Janey, of course.
Janey was, like a lot of City Hall employees, a patronage worker. She worked in the county treasurer's office as a clerk, though she did a great deal of secretarial work for the man who ran the office, Dick Daley. The county treasurer was an obese drunken gambler named McDonough; his secretary, the de facto county treasurer, was Daley. Because a lot of the patronage workers in the county treasurer's office were, like Janey, from the Back of the Yards (which is to say the area that included the Union Stockyards), there was a problem for some of the clerks: they couldn't read or write. Janey's father, a drugstore owner and political precinct captain, had seen to it that she got a high school education in a neighborhood where that was an exception, and she had managed to pick up some secretarial skills, which led to her doing a lot of secretarial work in the county treasurer's office, some of it for Daley, whom she seemed to greatly admire.
A mutual friend at City Hall had introduced us almost three years ago, about the same time Janey went to work there. It was a bit unusual for anybody to move out of a neighborhood in Chicago, but I could well see why she might want to get the hell out of the Back of the Yards. The stockyards gave the nation its meat and the South Side its jobs, but it also gave the air a stench; and her neighborhood, Bridgeport, despite her father's relative affluence and influence, was a shabby little collection of frame houses and rented two-flats, though a lot of people found it a pleasant enough place to live. But Janey didn't,
and at age twenty-one she had married a man named Dougherty, who was ten years older than her, lived on the North Side (and was a political associate of the powerful alderman Paddy Bauler), and ran a saloon, which became a speakeasy, and one drunken evening was hit by a streetcar and killed deader than he was drunk
Janey had been a widow? for about a year when we met; she rarely spoke of her late husband, and what I mentioned above is the extent of what I knew about him. What I knew? about her was that she did not return to the Back of the Yards after the death of her husband, but instead took a flat in the rooming-house district of the near North Side, an area of drearily similar, soot-stained stone houses, dirt)- alleys, and window? after window with the familial" black-and-white card reading ROOMS TO RENT. Nearby were the fancy apartments and homes of Lake Shore Drive, and the shade-tree-lined streets of the Gold Coast back of them. For someone like Janey, who had an eye on the finer things, this must have provided inspiration and irritation, depending on her varying moods. And they did vary.
The security guards were starting to talk quietly to one another, glancing over at me with obvious suspicion, when at ten after six. Janey finally emerged from an elevator. She looked stunning: her eyes. with their startled lashes, leaped out of her face, and her lips were appropriately red and bee-stung. She walked over like a model, her hands in knit cream-color gloves riding the pockets of her brown alpaca coat, thumbs out; the coat had a big double-breasted collar that rose around her neck, around which was a pale brown scarf, and there were two big buttons above the coat's belt, and two below, and she wore a fur felt hat with a brim that dipped just above one brown eye. A small cream-color purse was tucked under one arm.
I was leaning against a pillar. She approached me and looked up at me with a cute, arrogant smile. "I had to work a little late. For Mr. Daley."
"Fuck Dick Daley," I said.
I hadn't said it loud, but my voice carried a bit in the echoey corridor, and a security guard turned and looked at me with wide eyes.
But Janey didn't shock easy. She just said, "Maybe I would, if he weren't engaged," and her smile got even more arrogant, and even cuter, and she turned her back on me and walked toward the doors. I followed her.
True Detective Page 11
