The Million-Dollar Wound (17 page)

“Why such a fuss, over show business? Aren’t there bigger fish to fry, better unions to go after?”

As if speaking to a slow child, he said, “Heller, no matter what anybody tells you, people do not have to eat. Like the man said, there’s only two things they really got to do—get laid, and see a show, when they can dig up the scratch.”

The philosophy of a pimp turned Hollywood power broker.

“Listen,” he said. “You’ve got a reputation of being a straight shooter. Frank speaks highly of you.”

Nitti again.

“That’s nice to hear,” I said.

“You’re known as a boy who can keep his mouth shut.”

Actually, I was known in at least one instance for singing on the witness stand—when I helped bring the world crashing down on Mayor Cermak’s favorite corrupt cops, Lang and Miller; but I had indeed kept some secrets for Frank Nitti. That was more important, where somebody like Bioff was concerned.

“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” I said.

“How would you like to earn a couple of grand?”

The money was sure flying this week; I wondered if I’d live to spend any of it.

“Sure,” I said. “What’s your poison?”

“Pegler,” he said.

It would be.

He was asking, “When are you heading back?”

“This afternoon,” I said, somehow. “I’ll be in Chicago tomorrow morning.”

“Good. There are some people I want you to see.”

“About what?’

“About me. I want you to find out if Pegler’s been around to see them, and if he has, try and worm out of them what, if anything, they spilled.”

Oh my.

“If he hasn’t been around,” he continued, “warn them him or somebody he’s hired
may
be around. And tell them if they talk they’ll go to sleep and never wake up.”

I shook my head no. “Willie, I’ll do some checking for you. Gladly. But I won’t threaten anybody for you. And I don’t want to know about that end of it, understood?”

He smiled, friendly as Santa Claus. “Sure, Heller. Sure. They can figure that out for themselves, anyway. Like the man said, when you eat garlic, it speaks for itself. Shall we say a grand down, a grand upon your reporting back to me? By phone is fine.”

“Okay.”

“You want this on your books, or should I give you cash?”

“Cash’ll do.”

“Sit tight and I’ll get you some. Oh, and Heller. Don’t tell anybody about this. Not Nitti or anybody. As far as Nick Dean is concerned, I had you out here to ask you about that O’Hare killing. I knew Eddie, you see, and as a matter of fact I would like to ask you a few questions about that before you go.”

“All right.”

“Anyway, I don’t want Nitti to know I’m nervous about this Pegler deal. It wouldn’t look good. I’m on the spot enough with this federal-tax heat. So be careful—like the man said, when you play both ends against the middle you risk getting squeezed.”

You’re telling me.

He got up and went out and came back shortly with a thousand in hundreds in an IATSE envelope. I put it in my suitcoat pocket, answered his questions about the O’Hare shooting in a similar manner to the way I’d handled Captain Stege’s, and soon he was walking me out of the house, an arm reached up around my shoulder, two old buddies from Chicago.

“Let me tell you about the time Little New York came out to visit,” he said.

Louis Campagna; now
there’s
a house guest.

“I had my sprinkler system going,” Bioff said, gesturing to his expansive green lawn, “and Campagna—you know, he’s a nature lover—”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Oh yeah, he’s got a farm in Wisconsin, goes fishing all the time, loves the great outdoors. Anyway, he sees my sprinklers, dozens of ’em, turning in full circles, and he asks me what the hell they are, and I tell him, and he says, that’s great! Get me six hundred.”

I laughed.

“So I told him that six hundred of those things could irrigate all the city parks in Chicago. And that they’d freeze up in the cold weather. But he insisted, and he said I should charge ’em to the union. So I called the Waiter and asked him to talk Louie out of it.”

The Waiter was Paul Ricca, rumored to be second in the Outfit only to Nitti.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Ricca wanted three hundred of ’em,” he said, and walked me to the limo where his partner sat in back drinking beer.

On the way he told me who to see in Chicago.

The Southern belle, hoop skirt flouncing, parasol atwirl, a vision in white and pink and lace, strolled coyly to the settee and, with a leisurely grace, took off her red slippers. Then she removed her bonnet. The languid strains of “Swanee River” filling the air began to pick up tempo, build in volume. The belle, who was blond, shoulder-length curls tumbling to lacy shoulders, was rolling down a knee-length silk stocking from a leg extended from under the hoop skirt, foot arched; another slowly peeled stocking fell, and then she stood, stepping ever so ladylike out of her hoop skirt. She was about to step out of her lacy pantaloons as well when somebody tapped me on the shoulder.

“You pay to get in or what?” Jack Barger asked. The balding little Jew with the gone-out cigar in the corner of his mouth and the expensive but slept-in-looking brown suit was the owner of the theater, so he had a right to ask.

“No,” I said. I was standing in back, next to a bored, uniformed usher who was looking at something he’d just picked out of his nose. “I told the girl at the box office I was here to see you.”

Barger put a disgusted look on a puss that was naturally sour anyway, nodded toward the light. “Is that me?”

Across the darkened theater and its bumpy sea of male heads, I could tell at once that the stripper, who was now parading across the stage in lace panties and blue pasties before a cheesy plantation backdrop, was not Jack Barger.

“I’d say no,” I said.

“You ain’t kidding when you claim to be a detective, are you?” he said, typically. Barger was one of those guys whose kidding always seemed to be on the square; I’d known him, casually, for years, but sensed no affection in his sarcasm. If so, it was deep down.

He crooked and wiggled his forefinger at me in a “come along” motion. Though he was barely ten years my senior, he treated me like a kid. But I had a feeling he treated everybody that way.

I followed him through the small, rather bare lobby, with its seedily uniformed ushers and well-stocked concession stand and embarrassed uniformed girl behind it and all-pervasive popcorn smell, toward some stairs. The Rialto, which was on State Street just up the block and around the corner from my office on Van Buren, was the Loop’s only burlesque house. The exterior was flashy enough, with the bright lights and usual promises—
CHARMAINE AND HER BROADWAY ROAD SHOW
, 250,
GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS
, with the window-card cheesecake displays and life-size standees to prove it, and of course, on the Rialto screen, this week’s cinema masterpiece,
Sinful Souls,
ADULTS ONLY.
And the promises were pretty much kept, even if the interior was decidedly unracy looking, more along the lines of an unadorned, smallish neighborhood theater. The patrons didn’t mind; like the congregation of a spartanly appointed Protestant church, they didn’t begrudge the lack of a cathedral as long as they could get to heaven.

Judging from how fast and loud the pit band was belting “Swanee River,” now, heaven was well within view.

But not to me. I was following Barger up the jogs of the stairs to the level of purgatory housing his office, a cubbyhole next to the projectionist’s booth.

The office was, like the theater itself, stark—a dark-wood desk and some metal file cabinets and a few framed photos of strippers and baggy-pants comics on one of the pale cream pebbly plaster walls; each and every one of the photos hung crooked.

“You look like something the cat drug in,” Barger said, sitting behind his cluttered desk, lighting up a new cigar. It smelled like wet leaves trying to burn.

I sat across from him, topcoat in my lap. I still had on the suit I’d traveled in, and I didn’t just have bags under my eyes, I had valises. I hadn’t slept well on the plane; the flight had been bumpy, and so were my thoughts regarding my two conflicting clients, Montgomery of SAG and Bioff of the IATSE.

“I been out of town,” I said.

“So I gathered from what you said on the phone,” he said, picking some tobacco off his tongue. “I’m disappointed in you, Heller. Taking work from a rat bastard like Willie Bioff. Don’t quote me.”

“Don’t worry. I’m on Bioff’s payroll, not president of his fan club.”

He shook his head. “Who’d have thought Nate Heller’d be another of Willie Bioff’s whores.”

“Who’d have thought Jack Barger would.”

He laughed humorlessly. “Fair enough,” he said.

“Speaking of Pegler,” I said, “Fair Enough” being the name of his column, “that’s why I’m here.”

He squinted at me. “Westbrook Pegler? The big-shot columnist? What would he want with a minor-league Minsky like me?”

Barger’s humility was false; while he was certainly no Minsky, he was the king of the local grind circuit. And in a convention town like Chicago, that meant money.

“He’s looking to smear Bioff,” I said.

“I’ve seen Pegler’s stuff,” Barger nodded, unimpressed. “He makes a living out of hating the unions, and Bioff’s as good a place as any to start giving unionism a bad name.”

“This has to do with the power the Stagehands Union is building in Hollywood, you know.’’

He expressed his disinterest with a wave of the hand in which the cigar resided, embers flying. “Don’t give me history lessons on Willie Bioff and George Browne. I been around that block so many times your head’d spin. No, far as I know, Westbrook Pegler ain’t been in my establishment. Not unless he likes young tits and old jokes.”

“He doesn’t seem the type,” I admitted. “But he might send somebody around to pump you.”

“Nobody pumps Jack Barger for information.”

“It might not be direct; somebody might come around under false pretenses and—”

“Do I look stupid to you, Heller? Do you think I’m going to advertise what those bastards done to me? That’d make me look like a schmuck, and if Frank Nitti found out I’d been vocal, which he would, I’d wake up with a hole in my head in a goddamn ditch.”

He was talking to me like I was an insider; if I handled this right, I could open him up like a clam.

“I’m not working for Nitti,” I said. “I’m working for Bioff. And I’m only in it for the dough.”

He pointed the cigar at me. “Be careful who you go whoring for, my friend. Those sons of bitches are murderers and thieves. Grow up.”

I knew Barger primarily from the occasional drink he’d have with Barney and me in Barney’s cocktail lounge, when it was still below my office, and just around the corner from the Rialto. He and Barney were friends, hit it off fine, but Barney’s more Jewish than I am. I always felt Irish around guys like Barger.

So I gave
him
the needle for a change. “You say you’re surprised to see me, Jack. Hell, I was surprised to get
your
name from Bioff. I didn’t know they had their hooks in you.”

He stirred in his chair. “What’d you think, I don’t have stagehands? Not that I should pay those lazy bastards anything for what little they do. Move some scenery here, carry a prop there. They should pay
me
for the privilege of working here, the ass they get. Only it don’t work that way. And, fuck, the IA’s got me coming and going, cause I’m a moviehouse, too, I got projectionists to deal with. Shit, I’ve had to put up with that beer-guzzling slob Browne longer than Bioff himself!”

The best way to keep Barger talking was to make him think I already knew more than I did. This required some calculated guessing, which as sluggish as I was from the sixteen-hour plane ride was going to be a good trick.

But I jumped right in—casually: “Browne must’ve been a phantom on your payroll since the Star and Garter days.”

He didn’t hesitate in confirming that: “To the tune of a hundred and fifty smackers a week, the drunken bastard.”

The Star and Garter, a burlesque house at Madison and Halsted, had been Barger’s mainstay prior to the success of the Rialto, which the “minor-league Minksy” opened during the World’s Fair in ’33; the Rialto’s Loop location was closer to the fair, and less threatening for tourist trade, than the Star and Garter’s Skid Row neighborhood.

“Of course a hundred-and-fifty’s cheap,” I said, “compared to what Bioff’s hitting you for, these days. By the way, he said, ‘Give my regards to my partner Jack.’”

Which Bioff had in fact said, and which proved to be what opened Barger’s floodgate: “That arrogant little pimp! Partner! The first time I ever talked to him, what, must’ve been four years ago anyways, he walked in here with Browne and said, ‘Kid,’ called me
kid,
the condescending little bastard, ‘kid, everybody’s paying to keep the unions happy. So you have to pay.’ What the hell, this is Chicago, I expect that, so I say, ‘How much?’ And Bioff says, ‘Let’s say twenty-five grand to start.’ And I damn near fall off my seat! I say fuck you, go to hell, I ain’t got twenty-five grand, and Bioff says, ‘You want to stay in business, that’s how it’s gotta be.’ I told ’em to get the hell out and they did.”

He smiled to himself, pleased with the memory of getting tough with Bioff and Browne, then noticed his cigar had gone out and was relighting it when I said, “Yet here I am, Jack, giving you a message from your partner Willie.”

His expression turned as foul as the cigar smoke. He said, “The fat little pimp came back alone, next time. No Browne, just the two of us, in this same office, and he said, ‘How’s tricks, partner?’ And I said, ‘I ain’t your goddamn partner, and I suggest you leave.’ And he said, ‘I already talked to the Outfit about our partnership.’ And I told him I’d close my show down before I got in bed with the mob.”

Barger was shaking, now; whether with anger or fear or just the intensity of the memory, I couldn’t say. But he went on speaking, and it seemed more for his own benefit than mine.

“The bastard Bioff says, ‘You’re already in. There’s no getting out. You’re partners with me, and I’m partners with the Outfit.’ He said it’d be foolish for me to close down my show ’cause a man’s gotta work, a man’s gotta eat.” Then with harsh sarcasm he added, “‘Like the man said,’ he said, ‘don’t throw away the blanket because you’re mad at the fleas.’”

He sat smoking, his eyes glowing like the cigar’s tip.

“That’s Willie Bioff,” I said. “A proverb for every occasion.”

Very softly, with what I felt to be self-hate, he said, “And then he said, ‘And just think, if you close the show, there’s always the fact that maybe the mob wouldn’t like it. They’re sensitive people.’”

“And you went along with it,” I said, with a tiny matter-of-fact shrug. “What else could you do?”

He slammed a fist on the desk and the clutter there jumped. “I
didn’t
go along with it. Not till…aw, fuck it.”

I made an educated guess, based on past experience: “Not till Little New York Campagna invited you in a certain suite at the Bismarck Hotel.”

Where Frank Nitti himself would’ve waited.

Barger only nodded.

Then he sat up, pointed with the cigar. “Some friendly advice, kid. If you can get out from under Bioff, do it. That’s bad company you’re in. I like you, Heller. Any friend of Barney’s is a friend of mine. This is no good for you.”

I had a card left to play. On two occasions, in Barney’s cocktail lounge, I’d seen Barger approached by Frankie Maritote, also known as Frankie Diamond, Al Capone’s brother-in-law, a big ape with a broad homely mug and thick eyebrows like grease smears over beady eyes. It had stuck with me, and, when Bioff mentioned Barger as one of those I was to warn about Pegler, I remembered the mob connection the earlier Barger/Diamond encounters seemed to indicate.

Anyway, I played the card: “How long was it before Frankie Diamond came around?”

Barger shrugged. He seemed defeated. “Not long. They thought I was monkeying with the books, because I said business was off, and they heard we did standing-room-only, which was true, when the fair was in town. Since then it’s weekends and conventions; we die during the week.”

“So they sent a Syndicate bookkeeper over.”

“Yeah. This guy Zevin. He’s the Stagehand Union’s bookkeeper, for this local anyway. He found I was giving myself a salary of two hundred a week. They made me fire myself and take Diamond on as manager. Only he never came around except to collect money from me, me who was doing the actual managing. Then, on one of the happiest days of my life, Diamond leaves town, for some other Syndicate deal, and I figure I’m rid of the leech. And this guy Nick Dean—you know him?’

I nodded. “He’s a cold one.”

He almost shivered. “Freezing. He brings Phil D’Andrea around. Phil D’Andrea!”

D’Andrea was the Capone bodyguard infamous for attending the Big Fellow’s trial armed with a revolver, and getting caught at it. Contempt of court and six months in jail.

Barger was shaking his head. “Now D’Andrea’s the ‘manager.’ That girl down in the box office is his goddamn sister.”

Silence and cigar smoke filled the air.

“I appreciate the words of advice,” I said, rising. “I’ll finish this job for Bioff, and be done with him.”

“You do that. The bastards’ve damn near drained me dry. I had to sell the Star and Garter for a lousy seven gee’s, just to pay my goddamn taxes, and when they found out, they took half of
that
! Stay the hell clear of ’em, Heller.”

“I’ll do that. And you stay clear of Pegler, or anybody he might send to sniff around.”

“Yeah, yeah. They won’t get word one out of Jack Barger.”

The baggy pants comics and a couple of girls from the pony line were doing the “Crazy House” routine on stage, when I came downstairs, leaving Barger behind. I watched from the back of the house, watched another stripper. good-looking dame with black hair, and somebody tapped me on the shoulder.

Barger again.

“You pay yet?” he asked.

“No.”

“You must still think you’re a cop. Everything’s a free ride. Is it true Sally Rand’s in town?”

“Yeah.”

“You think you’ll see her? Barney says you two were an item, once.”

“I might see her.”

“I hear she’s broke.”

“For the moment.”