Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 14 (15 page)

“What did
I
do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Which is what you’re going to keep doing. You got a passkey?”

“Fuck you!”

That meant he did. I searched him and found it in a shallow slanty pocket of his blue uniform’s jacket.

“Are they here?” I asked. “The three Fish brothers?”

“Fuck you,” he said, with no enthusiasm.

That meant they probably weren’t—that George the doorman had been right…goddamnit. At that moment, fresh from the murders of my two clients, I would have loved to return the favor to Rocky and Charley— slowly…. Rocky because he was a sadistic son of a bitch, and Charley because he was the brains, and undoubtedly had ordered these hits.

I parked the elevator, flicking the OUT OF SERVICE switch, stepped past Pete, who was on his side, scowling at me, and got off at the entryway, where the golden Egyptian settee and sunburst clock awaited. Using the passkey, I went in, nine millimeter still an extra appendage growing out of my fist—I didn’t think the Fischettis were here, but I might be wrong. My track record tonight wasn’t that great, after all.

Or some other watchdog or two might be present, more competent than the McCarthy-jowled elevator operator.

But I was barely inside when I heard music, coming from the living room.

Someone was playing the piano—“They Say It’s Wonderful,” Irving Berlin,
Annie Get Your Gun
—and someone was singing, a clear, sweet soprano…exquisitely feminine, and not Ethel Merman.

Jackie Payne was sitting at the grand piano in the spacious living room, near the terrace-style balcony, the curtains open, revealing the sky with its stars and the moon with its glow that was turning the endless lake shimmering silver. Accompanying herself (she played fairly well), Jackie sang with delicacy and feeling, and she looked fine—no black eyes, just those lovely big brown ones; she wore a white short-sleeve blouse and sky-blue pedal pushers, her feet bare, toenails painted blood red.

Nine millimeter still in hand, I began to clap; the first of the claps—echoing off the slate floor—made her jump, and stop in midnote, hands frozen over the keys.

“Please,” I said, the gun lowered, “don’t stop on my account. You sound fine.”

She just sat there and looked at me, her face as expressionless as a Kewpie doll; then her lip began to tremble and tears rolled down her face. No sound of sobbing, though.

I sighed, walked over, sat next to her on the piano bench, gun in my lap, in my hand, limply now.

“Why?” I asked her.

“I’m not going with you, Nate.”

“Why?”

“I don’t deserve you. You were wonderful, you believe in me, but I’m not ready to kick.”

“Why?”

“I need it—I need the stuff. I can’t get through the day without it.”

“Why?”

“Rocco called—he was crying. I know…I know you can’t believe that, Nate. But he does have a good heart, a soft side. He said he missed me, he couldn’t live without me, and he would never harm me again. He said, if ever he touched so much as a hair on my head, I could leave him forever, and he’d never bother me again. I had to come back to him.”

“Why?”

“He needed me.”

“Why?”

“I love him.”

“Why?”

“He’s good to me. Look at this place. Look around you. And now he’s promised to let me have my career—starting at the Chez, then, eventually, opening for acts in Vegas. Joey owns part of a recording label, you know. And…I can’t do that, any of that, without my…without help, you know—medicinal help.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m just not strong enough without it. Maybe…maybe someday I can shake it. But not now.”

“Why?”

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

She covered her face with her hands and she wept. I let her do that for a while.

Then I asked her, “Where are they?”

Her voice seemed tiny; so did she. “Gone. They’ve let all but a skeleton staff go. Rocco put me in charge of the apartment here. He didn’t want to take me with him.”

“Why?”

The brown eyes, red from tears, flashed at me. “Are you going to start that again? He said he and his brother Charley—I think Joey is in Florida, at his house there—but Rocky and Charley are sort of…on the run. Incommunicado, until this thing, this Kefauver thing, blows over.”

“And Rocky left you here? Knowing if you changed your mind—if I talked sense to you and you changed your mind—you could be a witness against them?”

She shook her head, shrugged. “What could I testify about?”

“You could tell them, for example, just how many times Tubbo Gilbert came calling in recent months.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“You couldn’t? Two men died tonight, Jackie—I saw it. But I couldn’t stop it.”

She frowned and looked at the piano keys. “Oh, Nate…don’t. I don’t want to hear this….”

“Bill Drury, a cop—maybe you read about him in the papers. He saved my life once. He was an honest cop—in Chicago, can you buy that? He and an attorney named Bas…they both have wives who probably love them, and families to support…were trying to get the goods on Charley and Tubbo. And they were murdered, just about an hour ago—Bill in his own garage, that attorney on a public street. Executed. Cattle at the stockyards die with more dignity.”

She swallowed, looked up, stared right at me. “Nate, I couldn’t testify against Rocky, and I don’t know anything about Charley.”

“You couldn’t testify against Rocky? Listen, if they subpoena you, and you’re under oath—”

“Nate! You don’t understand. Listen to me: I can’t testify against Rocky. A wife can’t testify against her own husband.”

I just looked at her. Finally I said, almost spitting at her, “What?”

“We were married this afternoon, at City Hall. Rocky pulled some strings, to get past the waiting period. He has connections.”

“No kidding.”

She was looking at the keys again. “I saw him off at O’Hare. Our honeymoon will have to wait.”

“Where are you and Rocky and your hypodermic planning to go?”

The brown eyes fixed themselves on me—they were soft, even loving; she touched my hand—the one that didn’t have a gun in it.

“Nate…I’ll always love you, you’ll always occupy a special place inside of me. Our few days together—the things you did for me, and tried to do for me—I’ll never forget them. I’ll cherish that memory—like a flower pressed into a book.”

“Swell. I get the honeymoon, but Rocky gets the bride.”

“Please, Nate…”

I sat there, wondering if I should search the penthouse.

I couldn’t think of a reason to; and the brothers were long gone. Probably I needed to get out of there—the cops would be coming to talk to the Fischettis, as soon as the Drury and Bas murders went past the crime scene stage. Of course, Tubbo Gilbert would probably be in charge of the investigation.

“Wait here,” I said, standing.

“What are you…?”

“You’re going to hear some noise. Don’t worry about it. Just stay put. Okay?”

“Why?”

I grinned at her. “You don’t get to ask that question, baby. Just sit tight and shut up.”

Five minutes later, breathing hard, I came back in the living room—my arms ached. Jackie had a startled-deer look—she had to have heard the racket I made; but she had stayed put.

“What on earth—Nate, what did you do?”

“I threw each and every one of them against the wall,” I said. “I broke every goddamn precious fucking train.”

Then I went over and grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her on the mouth.

And got the hell out of there.

St. Andrew’s Church—a stone’s throw from the Drury home, just beyond the rumbling El—was more than just the biggest cathedral on the Northside: it was a tribute to the fund-raising savvy of Bishop Bernard J. Sheil. The sprawling complex of Catholic activity, including a school and a gym, took up three of the four corners of the Addison/Paulina intersection, and the formidable brick cathedral spanned a city block, with twin bell towers, a massive round stained-glass window between them, and a trio of solemn wall-sconce-enshrined concrete statues, one of them depicting St. Andrew (don’t ask me which or who the other two were—it was my mother who was the Catholic).

The vast ornate sanctuary, with its high vaulted plastered ceilings, was filled almost to capacity for the funeral of William Drury, the fallen Watchdog of the Loop…though noticeably absent were the high-ranking city and county officials, who— in the days since Bill’s murder—had been badmouthing the deceased in the press.

Bishop Sheil himself was sending Bill off, with a requiem high mass, and a dramatic sermon worthy of the fat-cat Catholic industrialists and politicos who had made this cavern of Christianity possible. Of course, Catholics do love a good martyr, even a poor one.

“Bill Drury was a man who gave his life for things he thought were right and just,” the prelate said. “Now we have men elected to a high public office who have thrown innuendos at this hero, and sullied his name, and attempted to tarnish his character.”

This didn’t bode well for Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert and his boss, State’s Attorney John S. Boyle, who were the unnamed public officials the powerful priest was referring to. And the reporters, scattered amidst the mourners in the pews, were scribbling down every word.

“I am prevented by the canons and ethics of my office from saying things burning now within my heart and body,” the bishop said from his pulpit. “I will say them on another, not so sacred occasion in the near future.”

Another service, in a modest chapel at Erie and Wabash, was also under way this morning: Marvin J. Bas was being laid to rest, before a smaller but no less indignant group of mourners.

Bas, like Bill, had been the object of Tubbo and the State’s Attorney’s afflictions, in the days since the twin murders. To reporters, Boyle asked the tactless rhetorical question: “Who says Bill Drury was a brave, heroic crimefighter? We don’t know how he made his living, the last two years. He had six hundred dollars in his pants when he was shot—in his new Cadillac!”

As for Bas, Tubbo’s boss proclaimed that the attorney “worked the wrong side of the fence. Bas was always getting a habeas corpus for persons we arrested. And he represented a lot of honky-tonks and hoodlums.”

According to Boyle, “good, law-abiding citizens” had no fear of being “shot down on Chicago’s streets—no one tending to his own honest business is in any danger in Chicago.”

Which meant, of course, that Drury and Bas were not good, law-abiding citizens tending to their own honest business.

Tubbo—who abandoned his leave of absence to take command of the Drury and Bas investigations—proclaimed that the slayings were unrelated, though he offered no theory on the murder of either man. And a statement from Gilbert’s campaign manager made it clear that “we can see no connection between these slayings and the candidacy of Captain Gilbert.”

No connection, that is, other than Drury and Bas working together to gather evidence against Tubbo to hand over to his opponent in the sheriffs race.

Tubbo’s investigation consisted of issuing an “arrest on sight” order for “every hoodlum in town”; and making an accusation to the press that, while on the force, Drury had “shaken down” bookies. Then, the day after the killings, without a warrant, Tubbo raided murder victim Bas’s office, seizing the attorney’s papers and records.

John E. Babb, Tubbo’s opponent for sheriff—who was among the mourners at Drury’s funeral—told the press, “It’s a new twist in law enforcement that the officers in charge are devoting more time to maligning the murder victims than to catching their murderers.”

And the widows of the two men stuck up gamely for their husbands, Mrs. Bas decrying Tubbo’s gestapo tactics in confiscating his private papers, while Mrs. Drury said, “I’ll sue any public official—State’s Attorney Boyle and Captain Gilbert included—who makes dirty statements about my husband.”

Petite, pretty Annabel Drury—who’d been married to Bill for twenty-one years—had had a rough time of it from the start. And I’d made that inevitable, when I’d bolted the crime scene to pursue the assassins, leaving Mrs. Drury the most likely person to make the ghastly discovery.

Around six-thirty that evening, she’d heard three loud reports, which she took to be cars backfiring at the nearby neighborhood service station. She and Bill lived on the second floor, and a kitchen window looked out on the garage.

“I had a strange feeling about those noises, though,” she’d told me last night, at the funeral home. Her dark silver-streaked hair in a fashionable bob, she wore a black suit and white gloves as we sat, holding hands. “I kept thinking about those noises…. They seemed…different. But when I looked out the window, I could see down below, and the garage lights weren’t on—Bill always turned the lights on when he came home.”

I knew she wanted to talk—had to talk—so I let her; she couldn’t know how goddamn lousy she was making me feel, for my role in making her ordeal even harder.

“I knew Bill said he had an appointment, at seven, but he also said he’d stop at home, and grab a bite to eat if there was time. I was preparing a little something in the kitchen, just a sandwich he could take with him…. Then when it was almost seven, I thought—maybe he’d gone on to that appointment…. Still, something seemed wrong, and finally I got a little flashlight and went out to the garage.”

She had found Bill there, sitting in the Caddy, covered in blood, torn by bullets, and her scream had summoned Bill’s seventy-six-year-old mother, and several other family members—all of whom were subjected to that terrible scene.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You have nothing to be sorry about, Nate.”

Well….

She looked at me with weary, dazed eyes. “Bill thought the world of you. But I want you to know—I don’t expect you to do anything about this.”

“Annabel—”

“Please understand—I anticipated this. I feared it for a long, long time. But Bill had absolutely no fear. I never pried into his business affairs. That’s why we had a happy married life. I let him tell me only as much as he wanted to.”

The trimly attractive, fortyish widow was calm, tearless— a mix of shock and resignation…and probably a weird sense of relief. In a way, a long personal siege of terror had finally ended.

“Annabel—Bill kept diaries, notebooks.”

“I know.”

“Do you have them?”

“No. He kept them in a desk in his den—they filled a whole drawer. I have no idea what was in them, and he took them with him on the day…on that last day.”

“You don’t know where they are, where he took them—who might have them?”

“No. No idea.” She looked at me, searchingly. “Nate—you’re not going to get involved, are you?”

“I am involved. Why, should we leave this to Tubbo Gilbert and the police department?”

A tiny bitter smile etched itself in one corner of her mouth. “They won’t find his killers. They won’t even look. But, Nate— how can you even know where to start? Bill was a one-man crusade, and he made a lot of enemies in his twenty-six years on the force.”

Annabel didn’t know I’d been at the scene of her husband’s death, not to mention the shooting of Bas on that desolate street, half an hour later. No one but me did, except those two assassins…although since I hadn’t recognized them, perhaps they didn’t know me from Adam, either.

I had told no one, certainly not Tubbo when he came around to the office to question me the day after the shootings, not even Lou Sapperstein and certainly not anyone connected to the Kefauver staff. A few colored witnesses in Little Hell had seen a white man leaving the scene, but no one reported my firing at the maroon coupe, and no one contributed a description of my Olds, much less its license number. My fedora had been found, giving the crack sleuths of the Chicago P.D. and the State’s Attorney’s office my hat size to go on.

I was the little man who wasn’t there—a role at which I’d become adept. But who the hell were those mustached assassins? They had been young—mid-to late twenties, well dressed—but nonetheless cold-blooded pros who knew their way around firearms and were unperturbed about the notion of pulling off back-to-back hits. Out of town talent, almost certainly—hired by Charley Fischetti, who had skipped in anticipation of the heat the two murders would stir up.

The day after the news got around, just about every other major hoodlum in town had skipped, as well. In the papers the morning after the murders, Kefauver—in Kansas City holding hearings—was quoted as saying the Drury and Bas hits “showed the savagery of Chicago gangland. There is no doubt that the slaying of our key witness, former police lieutenant William Drury, is a brutal attempt to thwart our investigation.”

Kefauver—who rejected Tubbo’s claim that the Drury and Bas murders were “unrelated”—retaliated by turning over more than a dozen subpoenas to the U.S. Marshal’s office in Chicago. But the small army of servers discovered that the mansions and penthouse apartments of such Outfit luminaries as Jake Guzik, Tony Accardo, Paul Ricca, and (of course) the Fischetti brothers contained only servants and the occasional wife.

Even the relatively modest yellow-brick bungalow of Sam “Mooney” Giancana, in Oak Park—well, it did take up a corner lot and had a lavishly landscaped lawn—had been bereft of Sicilians. With the exception of a handful who had already been served, the local mobsters had flown the coop.

After the funeral, out in front of the massive cathedral, the fall breeze had teeth that made me turn up the collars of my London Fog. Lee Mortimer—in a charcoal suit and silk light blue tie, under a lighter gray topcoat with a black fur collar (a coat that cost no more than a good used Buick)—had no babe on his arm this time, as he picked his way through the milling crowd and planted himself in front of me, like an unwanted tree. Make that shrub.

“My condolences, Nate,” he said. He produced a deck of Chesterfields and offered me one—I declined—and he lit up…no cigarette holder, this time. The smoke curling out his mouth and nostrils seemed about the color of his grayish complexion, while his hair was more a silver gray. He looked like he hadn’t seen the outside of a nightclub since 1934.

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.