True Detective (6 page)

We had our first argument the day I told him I was applying for a job with the Chicago P.D. It was the first time Pa ever really shouted at me (and one of the last: he reverted to sarcasm and contempt thereafter, the arguments continuing but staying low-key if intense) and it shocked me; and I think I shocked him by standing up to him. He hadn't noticed I wasn't a kid, despite my being twenty-four at the time. When he finished shouting, he laughed at me. You'll never get a job with the cops, he said. You got no clout, you got no money, you got no prayer. And the argument was over.

I never told my father that my Uncle Louis had arranged my getting on the force; but it was obvious. Like Pa said, you needed patronage, or money to buy in. to get a city job. So I went to the only person I knew in Chicago who was really somebody, which was Uncle Louis (never Lou), who was by now a full VP with the Dawes Bank. I went to him for advice.

And he said, "You've never asked anything of me, Nate. And you're not asking now. But I'm going to give you a present. Don't expect anything else from me, ever. But this present I will arrange." I asked him how. He said, "I'll speak to A.J." A.J. was Cermak, not yet mayor, but a powerful man in the city.

And I made the force. And it was never the same between Pa and me, though I continued to live at home. My role in "cracking" the Lingle case got me promoted to plainclothes after two years on traffic detail; and it was shortly after that that my father put my gun to his head.

The same gun I had used today, to kill some damn kid in Frank Nitti's office.

"So I quit" I told Barney.

Barney was Barney Ross, who as you may remember was one of the great professional boxers of his time, and that time was now; he was the top lightweight contender in the country, knocking on champion Tony Canzoneri's door. He was a West Side kid. too. another Maxwell Street expatriate. Actually, Barney still
was
a kid: twenty-three or twenty-four, a handsome bulldog with a smile that split his face whenever he chose to use it, which was often.

I knew Barney since he was baby Barney Rasofsky. His family was strictly Orthodox, and come Friday sundown could do no work till after Saturday. Barney's pa was so strict they even ripped toilet paper into strips so the family wouldn't be tearing paper on the
Shabbes
. For about a year, when I was seven or eight, right before we moved out of Maxwell Street, I turned on the gas and did other errands for the Rasofskys, as their
Shabbes gov
, since I was as un-Orthodox as my pa. Later, when I was a teenager in Douglas Park, I'd come back to Maxwell Street on Sundays, to work with Barney as a "puller" a puller being a barker working in front of the door of a store, shouting out bargains supposedly to be found within, often grabbing a passerby and forcing the potential customer into the store. We worked as a team, Barney and me, and Barney was a real
trombenik
by this time, a young roughneck; so I let him do the pulling, and I handled the sales pitch. Barney had turned into a dead-end kid after his pa was shot to death by thieves in the little hole-in-the-wall Rasofsky's Dairy. That's what turned him into a street fighter, and the need to provide for the family his pa had left behind eventually turned him into Barney Ross, the prizefighter.

Barney was smarter than a lot of fighters, but just as lousy with money as the worst of 'em. He'd been pulling in big purses for almost a year now; fortunately, his managers. Winch and Pian, were straight, and got him to make a couple of investments that weren't at the track. One of them was a jewelry store on Clark; another was a building at Van Buren and Plymouth with a downstairs corner deli next to a "blind pig"- that is, a bar that looked closed down from the street, but was really anything but (lots of things in Chicago looked like one thing outside and something else from inside). Barney planned to call the place the Barney Ross Cocktail Lounge someday, after Prohibition, and probably after he retired from the ring. His managers had a fit when he decided to keep the speak going, because Barney was a public figure in Chicago, with a wholesome image, despite a background that included being a runner for Capone and hustling crap games.

"So you quit," Barney said. He had a soft, quiet tenor voice, incongruous coming out of that flat, mildly battered puss of his, and puppy-dog brown eyes you could study for days and not see killer instinct- unless you swung at him.

"That's what I said," I said. "I quit."

"The cops, you mean."

"The opera company. Of course the cops."

He sipped the one beer he was allowing himself. We were in a corner booth. It was midevening, but slow; the night was just cold enough, the snow coming down just hard enough, to keep most sane folk inside. I only lived a few blocks from here, so was only moderately nuts. None of the other booths were taken and only a handful of stools at the bar were filled.

You went in through a door in the deli and found yourself facing the bar in a dark, smoky room three times as long as it was wide. The only tables were on the small dance floor at the far end, chairs stacked on the little open stage nearby- the nightclub aspect of the joint was on hold till Repeal. Boxing photos hung everywhere, shots of Barney and other fighters, in and out of the ring, with an emphasis on other West Side kids like King Levinsky, the heavyweight, and Jackie Fields, the welterweight Barney used to spar with; and, of course, the great lightweight Benny Leonard, who last year suffered a humiliating defeat attempting a comeback- Jimmy McLarnin put him down in six, giving him a bloody beating (the photos of Leonard on Barney's wall were from the 1917 championship victory over Freddie Welsh).

"Your pa woulda liked you quitting," he said.

"I know."

"But Janey ain't gonna."

"That I also know," I said.

Janey was Jane Dougherty; we were engaged. So far.

"You want another beer?"

"What do you think?"

"Buddy!" he said. He was talking to Buddy Gold, the retired heavyweight who ran the place for him and bartended. Then he looked at me with a wry little grin and said, "You're throwing money away, you know."

I nodded. "Being a cop in the Loop is good money in hard times."

Buddy brought the beer.

"It's good money in good times." Barney said.

"True."

"This Nitti thing."

"Yeah?"

"It happened yesterday afternoon?"

"Yeah. You saw the papers. I take it?"

"I saw the papers. I heard the city talking, too."

"No kidding. You serve lousy beer."

"No kidding. Manhattan Beer, what you expect?" Manhattan Beer was Capone's brand name; his Fort Dearborn brand liquors weren't so hot, either. "When did you decide to quit, exactly?"

"This morning."

"When did you turn your badge in?"

"This morning."

"It was that easy, then."

"No. It took me all day to quit."

Barney laughed. One short laugh. "I'm not surprised," he said.

The papers had made me out a hero. Me and Miller and Lang. But I came in for special commendation because I was already the youngest plainclothes officer in the city. That's what having an uncle who knows A. J. Cermak can do for you; that and if you help "crack" the Lingle case.

The mayor was big on publicity. He had a
daily
press conference; made weekly broadcasts he called "intimate chats." inviting listeners to write in and comment on his administration; and kept an "open door" at City Hall, where he could be seen sitting in shirt sleeves, possibly eating a sandwich and having a glass of milk, just like real people, any old time- or till recently, that is. Word had it open-door hours had been cut back, so he could better "transact the business of the mayor's office."

Today the papers had been full of the mayor declaring war on "the underworld." Frank "The Enforcer" Nitti was the first major victim in the current war on crime; the raid on Nitti's office was the opening volley in that war, Cermak said (in his daily news conference); and the three "brave detectives who made the bold attack" were "the mayor's special hoodlum squad." Well, that was news to me.

All I knew was when I went to the station after the shooting, I wrote out my report and gave it to the lieutenant, who read it over and said, "This won't be necessary." and wadded it up and tossed it in the wastebasket. And said. "Miller's doing the talking to the press. You just keep your mouth shut." I didn't say anything, but my expression amounted to a question, and the lieutenant said, "This comes from way upstairs. If I were you, I'd keep my trap shut till you find out what the story's going to be."

Well, I'd seen Miller's story by now- it was in the papers, too and it was a pretty good story, as stories went; it didn't have anything to do with what happened in Nitti's office, but it'd look swell in the true detective magazines, and if they made a movie out of it with Jack Holt as Miller and Chester Morris as Lang and Boris Karloff as Nitti, it'd be a corker. It had Nitti stuffing the piece of paper in his mouth, and Lang trying to stop him, and Nitti drawing a gun from a shoulder holster and firing; and I was supposed to have fired a shot into Nitti, too. And of course one of the gangsters made a break for it out the window, and I plugged him. Frank Hurt, the guy's name was- nice to know, if anybody ever wanted the names of people I killed. I was a regular six-gun kid; maybe Tom Mix should've played me.

It was a real publicity triumph, made to order for His Honor.

Only I was gumming it up. Today I told the lieutenant I was quitting; I tried to give him my badge, but he wouldn't take it. He had me talk to the chief of detectives, who wouldn't take my badge, either. He sent me over to City Hall where the chief himself talked to me; he. also, didn't want my badge. Neither did the deputy commissioner. He told me if I wanted to turn my badge in, I'd have to give it to the commissioner himself.

The commissioner's office was adjacent to Mayor Cermak's, whose door was not open this afternoon. It was about three-thirty; I'd been trying to give my badge away since nine.

The large reception room, where a male secretary sat behind a desk, was filled with ordinary citizens with legitimate gripes, and none of them had a prayer at getting in to see the commissioner. A ward heeler from the North Side went in right ahead of me and without a glance at the poor peons seated and standing around him, went to the male secretary with a stack of traffic tickets that needed fixing, which the secretary took with a wordless, mild smile, stuffing them in a manila envelope that was already overflowing, which he then filed in a pigeonhole behind the desk.

The male secretary, seeing me, motioned toward a wall where all the chairs were already taken.

I said, "I'm Heller."

The secretary looked up from his paper work as if goosed, then pointed to a door to his right; I went in.

It was an anteroom, smaller than the previous one, but filled with aldermen, ward heelers, bail bondsmen, even a few ranking cops including my lieutenant, who when he saw me motioned and whispered, "Get in there."

I went in. There were four reporters in chairs in front of the commissioner's desk; the room was gray, trimmed in dark wood: the commissioner was gray. Hair, eyes, complexion, suit; his tie was blue, however.

He was referring to daily reports on his desk, and some Teletype tape, but what the subject was I couldn't say, because when he saw me, the commissioner stopped in midsentence.

"Gentlemen," he said to the reporters, their backs to me, none yet noticing my presence. "I'm going to have to cut this short… My Board of Strategy is about to convene."

The Board of Strategy was a "kitchen cabinet" made up of police personnel who gathered in advisory session. I wasn't it, though I had a feeling the commissioner and I were about to convene.

Shrugging, the reporters got up. The first one who turned toward me was Davis, with the
News
, who'd talked to me more than once on the Lingle case.

"Well," he grinned, "it's the hero." He was a short guy with a head too big for his body. He wore a brown suit and a gray hat that didn't go together and he didn't give a shit. "When you going to brag to the press, Heller?"

"I'm waiting for Ben Hecht to come back to Chicago," I said. "It's been downhill for local journalism ever since he left."

Davis smirked; the others didn't know me by sight, but Davis saying my name had clued them in. But then when Davis wandered out without pursuing it, they followed. I had a feeling they'd be waiting for me when I left, though; Davis, anyway.

I stood in front of the commissioner's desk. He didn't rise. He did smile, though, and gestured toward one of the four vacated chairs; his smile was like plaster cracking.

"We're proud of you, Officer Heller," he said. "His Honor and I. The department. The city."

"Swell." I put my badge on his desk.

He ignored it. "You will receive an official commendation; there will be a ceremony at His Honor's office tomorrow morning. Can you attend?"

"I got nothing planned."

He smiled some more; it was a smile that had nothing to do with pleasure or happiness or even courtesy. He folded his hands on the desk and it was like he was praying and strangling something simultaneously.

"Now," he said slowly, carefully, looking at the badge on his desk out of the corner of an eye. "What's this nonsense about you… leaving us."

"I'm not leaving," I said. "I'm quitting."

"That is quite ridiculous. You're a hero, Officer Heller. The department is granting you and Sergeants

Lang and Miller extra compensation for meritorious service. The city council, today, voted you three the city's
thanks
as heroes. The mayor has hailed you publicly for helping score a major victory in the war on crime."

"Yeah, it was a great show, all right. But two things flicked it up."

He squirmed visibly at having the word "fuck" said in his office, and by a subordinate; this was 1932 and school children weren't using the word at the dinner table yet. so it still had mild shock value.

"Which are?" he said, struggling for dignity'.