True Detective (42 page)

So did the rest of the people, and it was a swell place to hide from the depression, even if a lot of families did have to pass up the many food concessions and find a bench to eat the lunch in brown bags they'd brought with 'em. Most of the tourists were staying in private homes, usually at fifty cents per person, meals included; and many a frugal head of the family- whether in trousers or skirts- insisted on getting the full fifty cents worth by bringing their lunch.

Of course a lot of people
were
buying their lunch here, in which case it was likely their money- at least some of it- would go into Syndicate coffers. Capone might have been in Atlanta, and Cermak in the ground, and Chicago superficially a cleaner city, but Nitti's boys were cleaning up at the fair. Quite literally, since they controlled the fair's street-sweepers union, and the union the college-boy rickshaw pullers/carriage pushers formed, and half a dozen others. The San Carlo Italian Village restaurant was run by Nitti people; they had the popcorn concession, hatcheck, parking, towel/soap/disinfectant concessions; every hot dog and hamburger sold at the fair was theirs, and Ralph "Bottles" Capone, Al's brother, had seen to it that, with the exception of Coca-Cola, no soft drinks sold on the grounds came from any other bottling works than his own. Most of the beer here was Nitti's, too, of course. And why shouldn't Nitti make money off the fair? He built it.

Word from the street, confirmed by Eliot, seconded by the private police I'd been working with on pickpocket prevention, was that Nitti-dominated unions and employers' associations had controlled the trucking and much of the construction work in the clearing of Northerly Island and the turning of the lakeshore into a futuristic landscape of geometry and giantism. And all contractors accepting construction jobs on Northerly Island had added an extra 10 percent on top of their bids- because Nitti had decried 10 percent off the top for the mob.

Nobody was talking about this, really: not the papers; not the Dawes boys, certainly. You had to look the other way in certain matters, after all. For example, with all these tourists coming in, prostitution was bound to go through the roof, so the city fathers had required prostitutes to register as "masseuses." and to submit to weekly examinations by a city-appointed doctor who would look for. well, "skin diseases." And now all around town neon signs had sprung up saying MASSAGE PARLOR, and so what? Hadn't the General admitted to me once that he only wanted to clean the town up "within reason"? The world wasn't going to end because some bird from Duluth got laid- and if we wanted him to brine his business back to Chicago again sometime, better to send him home without the clap.

This fair that Mary Ann was wandering through so gaga-eyed was not the City of Tomorrow, it was just another never-never land; harmless, but transitory. In a few months the brightly colored plywood and glass would come crashing down. These tourists from Iowa and every other hick state were all aglow, thinking their future was all around them; some poor souls even imagined they were in Chicago.

They weren't, of course; they were in Chicago only in the sense that the fair was what Chicago- which is to say, Dawes and Cermak and Nitti- had planned it to be. In that sense, they were in Chicago, all right.

In every other sense, they were in Tower Town, with Mary Ann.

"I haven't mentioned you looking for my brother." Mary Ann said, "for ages."

We were seated at a small round table in the open-air gardens at the Pabst Blue Ribbon Casino, overlooking the fair's south lagoon, just to the rear of the Hollywood pavilion. There was a lake breeze.

"Actually," I said, pouring a legal Pabst from its bottle into a glass, "it's been two weeks. But you
have
been good about it, I must say."

Ben Bernie and his Lads were taking a break; they'd been playing on a circular revolving platform right out in the open, next to a canopy-covered dance floor that extended into the garden. We'd had to wait half an hour for our table, even though it was only around three-thirty in the afternoon, well away from either lunch or supper crowds. But this was opening day at the Century of Progress, and the Pabst Casino (casino in the cabaret sense only- no gambling was going on) was the largest, swankiest joint on the exposition grounds; it was, quite legitimately, touting itself as the place "to dine and dance with the famous," and the three round white-red-and-blue interlocking buildings, one of them twice the size of the other two, were jammed to capacity.

She poked at her Hawaiian salad. "It's been over a month since you told me you 'finally had something.' Remember?"

"You're right. And what else did I say?"

" 'Just don't hound me about it.'"

"Right."

She poked at her salad some more. Then she looked up and her eyes got wide. She leaned forward. "Glance back over your shoulder."

I did.

"Now what?" I said.

"Don't you see who that is, walking toward us?"

"Oh. yeah. It's Walter Winchell. He and Damon Runyon and all the big-shot New York newshounds are in town. So what?"

"Didn't you say you met him in Florida?"

"That's true."

"Here he comes! Introduce me. Nathan! If I had a mention in his column, well, it could mean- " She shut up. Winchell was nearing us.

As he went by, I said, "Hello."

He glanced at me, smiled without smiling. "Hiya," he said, not recognizing me, and was gone.

The smirk settled on the left side of Mary Ann's face. "I thought you said you
knew
Walter Winchell."

"I said I met him," I said "I didn't say I knew him."

"Well, you
know
who this pickpocket is that Jimmy hitched a ride with, don't you?"

"Yeah."

"Well, why don't you/?«rfhim, already?"

"Jimmy or the pickpocket?"

"Nathan!"

The people at the next table looked at us and Mary Ann, uneasy about center stage all of a sudden, said, "You know who I meant."

"Mary Ann, this pickpocket is a guy we used to bust all the time. He was good, one of the best, but he had a bad habit of hitting the same few places over and over again. The train stations. The Aragon. The College Inn. And he ended up getting busted so often, he left the area."

"But he came back here with Jimmy."

"Apparently, but that doesn't mean he stayed. In fact, according to my old working buddies on the pickpocket detail, he was run in by 'em shortly after the time he would've brought Jimmy into town."

"Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"I didn't want to get your hopes up. They also told me they haven't seen hide nor hair of Dipper Cooney since. Word is he's stayed in the Midwest, but is floating city to city."

"Oh. Then why did you tell me you thought he would turn up, eventually?"

I gestured toward the fair, spread out across the lagoon before us like Frank Lloyd Wright's scattered toys.

"That," I said. "The fair. It's pickpocket heaven. He won't be able to resist it."

"You think you'll find him here, at the exposition?"

"Of course. I got two hundred helpers, don't I?"

The two hundred helpers were the fair's private police, the men I'd been training the better part of the month and a half since the Tri-Cities trip. The General was paying me good money, so I was giving him value for the dollar. I had taken the two hundred men- many of them ex-cops and out-of-work security people, but none of whom were pickpocket detail veterans, like yours truly- and handled them in classes of twelve in the fancy trustee's room in the blue box that was the Administration Building, using three of them who I'd known before, when they worked for the department, to act out some standard pickpocket techniques.

"There's one hard-and-fast rule on the pickpocket detail." I'd start out. " 'Look for people who seem inconsistent with their surroundings.'"

That meant, in a department store, you looked for people walking around looking not at the items displayed for sale, but other shoppers. At a prizefight, you looked for people studying not the action in the ring, but the crowd. At the El stations, you looked for people not looking in the direction of their train, but at the guy standing next to 'em.

And at the world's fair, you looked for people not looking at the futuristic towering pavilions or the exhibits therein; you looked for people on the midway whose attention was not drawn to the Fort Dearborn Massacre show, or Carter's Temple of Mystery; you looked for people in the Streets of Paris show whose eyes weren't on Sally Rand: you looked for people looking at people. And a lot of em would turn out to be pickpockets.

I trained the three ex-cops- pickpockets usually work in teams of three- to demonstrate some of the typical routines. For instance, a whiz mob- pickpocket team- will spot a wealthy-looking dame walking along with an expensive shoulder-strap bag hanging like it's fruit and she's the tree, and guess who's harvesting? The whiz mob, who decide to "beat her on the stride," as it's called. Two fairer-sexed members of the mob- moll buzzers, in the dip's own vernacular will walk in front of the mark, then suddenly stop or maybe back up a step, as if avoiding stepping in something. The mark will unavoidably bump into them, and as the mark is being jostled, and being profusely apologized to, the third member of the mob- the hook- will have come up from behind to open the mark's bag and have at.

There are a lot of variations on this, and I taught as many of 'em as I could to my pupils. Common ones at the fair would include action at the refreshment-stand counter, with the buzzer reaching across for some mustard and jostling the mark as the hook works the mark from behind.

Of course there would be the occasional solo artist, and redheaded, freckle-faced Dipper Cooney. a man of thirty-five or forty who unless you looked close looked twenty, was one of the best. A real live cannon, a dip deft enough to take a wallet from the back pocket of a prosperous, alert mark- without benefit of buzzers to jostle said mark's attention.

A live cannon like Cooney would never be able to pass up the fair; he would see it as duck soup, and he'd be right… normally.

Of course he wouldn't know that each and every one of the two hundred boys in white pith helmets, red jackets, blue trousers, and bolstered sidearms would have seen his police file photo; that each was instructed, if catching the Dipper in the act, to hold him for me personally.

This was about as far as I'd gone in putting word out I was looking for Cooney. The boys on the pickpocket detail were among the few on the Chicago department who had not come to view me as persona non grata for having talked against Lang and Miller in court; but I still didn't trust the boys so far as to let them know how urgently I was looking for Cooney. One of the reasons Cooney had left Chicago was that my superior on the detail had demanded a percentage of the cannon's take to allow him to have free reign at the train stations; Cooney had unwisely turned the offer down, and had been collared so many times by the detail thereafter that Chicago became a place he didn't want to be anymore. I let the guys on the detail know only that Cooney was a guy I needed to talk to, regarding an insurance matter I was tracking, and that if they caught him and called me, it was worth a fin. If I'd made more out of it than that, well, Cooney might get told I was after him: the pickpocket detail knew very well that a live cannon like Cooney was worth more than a private cop like me, and he or Billy Skidmore would pay well for the information.

And of course I avoided talking to Skidmore himself, the portly, bowler-wearing junk dealer/ward heeler/bail bondsman with whom most serious pickpockets, gamblers, and shoplifters did their bonding business.

I had to keep it low key if I wanted to reel my fish in; the boldest move I made was to ask one of the pickpocket detail boys to lift Cooney's file photo for me, so I could borrow it and get some copies made. But I just made a couple; I wasn't going to go handing them out. If word got out on the streets I was after him, Cooney'd spook, sure as hell.

I considered calling Nitti and using up that favor he said he owed me. It was pretty well known that Cooney, through Skidmore, had done occasional work for the Capone/Nitti crowd; he was that good a dip, the kind you could send on a specific assignment, to pick a key out of somebody's vest pocket, or slip something incriminating into somebody's wallet.

But I couldn't risk it: Nitti seemed a dangerous last resort, as his loyalty to Cooney might outweigh any sense of obligation he felt to me; and besides, he was in Florida, on his estate, resting up, still recuperating.

I did go to two of Cooney's favorite hunting grounds: the Aragon Ballroom on the North Side, where Wayne King the Waltz King foisted watered-down Chicago jazz on his public between rounds of Viennese schmaltz in a mock Moorish setting; and the College Inn. where the Old Maestro Ben Bemie and his Lads performed in front of a dance floor that resembled a big backgammon board, while couples danced in the dimmed lights of a room where radium-painted fish glowed off pastel walls, turning the room into a sort of aquarium. But my fish hadn't shown, the bouncers told me, when I showed them his picture, promising anybody a fin who called me if Cooney swam in.