The Million-Dollar Wound (13 page)

“So you thought of me.”

“I thought of you. Oh, I had a room lined up with a girl who used to be in my chorus line at the City of Paris, but it fell through ’cause she suddenly shacked up with some guy. Which recalled that summer when you were sleeping in a Murphy bed in your office, and how on so many nights you slept with me instead in my soft round bed in that fancy-ass suite at the Drake. I thought maybe you’d return me the favor.”

I nodded toward the small sitting room. “This isn’t exactly your suite at the Drake.”

“No, but it’ll do quite nicely, thanks. You do seem to be doing well, Nate. Business is good?”

“It’s good. I don’t make forty-five hundred a week for dancing in my nothin’ at all, but…”

“Neither do I, at the moment. And maybe I won’t be able to. I wasn’t appearing with the revue, you know.”

“Sally Rand herself wasn’t in Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch?”

“No. I staged and directed and, obviously, financed the show. But I wasn’t in it. I’m getting older.”

“You’re afraid you won’t be able to make a comeback, huh?”

“A little.”

“You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think you’ll still be strutting around in your birthday suit when I’m in the old-age home. Looking good, and getting paid the same way.”

“You’re sweet. You never married, Nate?”

“Not yet. I’ve had a few close calls.”

Her smile was tinged with sadness again. “Like me, for instance?”

“Like you, for instance. You aren’t married, are you, Sally?”

“Other than to my work? No. And I wish you’d keep calling me Helen.”

“I think I can manage that.”

Somebody knocked at the door.

“Get on the floor,” I told her.

“Don’t be silly.”

“Do it! Get under that table.”

She made a face but she did it.

I got up and got the automatic and unlatched the door and, standing to one side of it, reached over and flung it open.

And shoved my gun right in the chest of a short but massive man in a brown suit and hat; the eyes in the lumpy face were dark and cold and unimpressed. He had an envelope in his hand, and, while I sensed he might be playing messenger, he sure wasn’t Western Union.

I was pointing my automatic at Louis “Little New York” Campagna. Frank Nitti’s right-hand man. A powerful man in every sense of the word—a killer who had moved up the ranks into management in the business of crime.

I backed off, but my gun was still pointed at him.

“That’s something you don’t want to do,” he said, pointing a finger at me gently. His finger seemed far more menacing than my gun.

I lowered the gun but kept it in hand. I did not ask him in.

I said, “I was almost killed today.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here.” He handed me the envelope.

I took it; I peeked out into the hall, to see if he was alone. He seemed to be.

“Put the rod away,” he said, “and look in the envelope.”

I let some air out. I stuck the gun in my waistband and looked in the unsealed envelope. Ten fifty-dollar bills. Five hundred dollars.

“Is this what Nitti thinks my life’s worth?” I said. Anger made my voice tremble. Fear, too.

“No,” he said. “Who could put a price on a life?”

“Some people do it everyday.”

He lifted his shoulders and set them down again. “Some people put a price on death. That’s different.”

Now I was arguing semantics with Little New York Campagna. Well, it’s an interesting life.

“Frank would like to thank you for showing such good sense,” he said, “where the cops was concerned.”

Tubbo had acted fast.

“And if you could keep your story simple for the papers, Frank would be grateful. Can you manage that?”

He touched his hat by way of bidding me good-bye and started off.

I stepped out into the hall. “Don’t you want my answer?” I said.

Stupid question.

Campagna turned back and smiled at me; it was like a crack in a stone wall. “I got your answer. I got your number, too, Heller.” He turned and walked away. Then he turned back and, almost reluctantly, said, “Uh, Frank said to say he’s pleased you are still amongst us.”

“Well. Thank Frank for his concern.”

“Sure. Beats being dead, don’t it?”

And then he was gone.

I shut the door, latched it, put the gun back on the chair. Seemed as good a place as any.

Sally crawled out from under the table, straightening her clothes. “Sounds like you’re going to be okay, where the boys are concerned.”

“Sounds like,” I nodded, tentatively. “Campagna isn’t an errand boy, anymore. Sending him was a gesture from Nitti of how serious he takes this.”

“Is that a good sign or bad?”

“You got me. Look, Sally. Helen. You’re welcome to stay. You’re most very welcome to stay. But there’s no, uh, rent here. No strings. No obligations. By which I mean to say, you’re welcome to my bed and I’ll sleep out here on the couch.”

“Shut up,” she said, and began unbuttoning her blouse.

I didn’t make it into the office the next morning till almost ten-thirty. We’d had another breakfast, Sally and I, and I don’t mean anything racy by that: simply that I bought her some breakfast, this time, in the Morrison’s coffee shop. And we sat drinking orange juice and putting pancakes away and then cup upon cup of coffee as we filled each other in on our lives for the past five years. Then she noticed the time and remembered she had an eleven o’clock appointment with the manager of the Brown Derby and was off.

And I walked to the office, where Gladys greeted me, if “greeted” is the word, with a disgusted expression and a hand outthrust with another stack of memos.

“Reporters,” I asked, only it wasn’t really a question.

“Reporters,” she said. She had on a pale blue blouse and a navy skirt with a wide black patent leather belt and was everything a man could want in a woman except friendly. “Do you realize Westbrook Pegler’s been trying to call you?”

“Yeah, right,” I said. I went on through to my office.

I was sitting behind the desk, glancing at some insurance adjusting reports that Gladys had typed neatly up, when herself was standing in the doorway—never leaning, that wasn’t her style—and saying, “He really has been calling. Three times already today.”

“Who?”

“Westbrook Pegler! The columnist!”

“Gladys, my dear, you’re mistaken—you’ve apparently never read him. Pegler’s no Red.”

She did a slow burn. “I said columnist, not communist.”

I kept trolling for a sense of humor with the girl and coming up old rubber tires.

“My dear,” I started again, and she reminded me humorlessly that she wasn’t my dear. She reminded me further that she preferred “Miss Andrews,” to which I replied, “Gladys—that’s Hal Davis of the
Daily News
calling, needling me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Why would Westbrook Pegler be in Chicago, for Christ’s sakes, and if he was, why would he be calling about some Chicago racetrack tycoon getting pushed?”

“Pushed?”

She hadn’t been affiliated with the detective business long.

“Killed,” I explained. “Shot. Rubbed out. Liquidated. Mob style.”

“If you say so,” she said, disinterested but lingering.

“Shoo. Go file.”

“Yes, Mr. Heller.”

God, what I wouldn’t have given for even some
sarcasm
out of that kid. She was cute as lace panties but not nearly so much fun.

A client kept an eleven o’clock appointment, the office manager from the Swift Plant; he was white collar, but he brought the fragrance of the stockyards with him. He had a recurring pilferage problem—desks, lockers, cabinets forced open, pocketbooks gotten into. I explained how we could plant valuable articles in obvious places, as decoys to invite theft, articles to which thief-branding dyes would be applied. I was explaining how I preferred dry dyes of the sort that didn’t immediately stain, but that perspiration would soon bring out, when Gladys leaned in and interrupted.

“He’s here.”

It wasn’t like her to interrupt; most unbusinesslike.

“Who?” I said.

“Mr. Pegler.”

I shook my head, smiled; Gladys hadn’t met Davis yet. “Tell him to go to hell.”

“I will not.”

“Then tell him it’ll cost him a C-note if he wants a quote. That’ll get rid of him.”

She pursed her lips; she wasn’t blowing me a kiss. “What is a C-note?”

“A hundred dollars. Go.”

She went.

“Excuse me,” I said to my client. “Where were we?”

“Dry dyes,” the stockyard office manager said, looking bewildered.

The door flew open and I could hear Gladys saying, “Please,” and a big red-faced man was in the doorway. I yanked the automatic out from under my arm and yelled, “Up with ’em!”

Gladys screamed, the office manager dropped to the floor and the big man’s face whitened. He swallowed, thickly. He was very well dressed; double-breasted gray pinstripe suit with stylish wide lapels, a flourish of a hanky in his breast pocket, a wide, thick-knotted, dark blue tie patterned with white abstract shapes. He put his hands slowly in the air, narrowing his eyes, which hid under shaggy, cultivated-to-points satanic eyebrows.

“Put that ridiculous thing away,” he said. The words were strong, but the tenor voice had something of a quaver. The voice wasn’t as big as the man, that’s all there was to it.

I came around the desk, saying, “Just keep ’em up,” and patted him down. He stood for the frisk, but scowled all the while. He had on heavy, masculine lotion; pine needles.

He was clean. Which is to say no weapon, but also well tailored and freshly bathed. This guy had money and I didn’t think it came from the rackets. Not of the Nitti variety, anyway.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked, lowering the gun but not putting it away.

“Who the hell do you think? Westbrook Pegler!”

“Oh.” Now I was swallowing. “I’ll be damned if I don’t think you are.” I turned to the stockyards office manager who was crouching on the floor, looking up like a big bug. “We about had our business taken care of, didn’t we, Mr. Mertz?”

He got up, brushing himself off, said, “Yes,” and I told him my secretary would call him and set up an on-site meeting with one of my operatives as he scurried out. I closed the door on Gladys’s pretty, glowering face.

“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Pegler?”

“I’m not sure I’m staying. I’m not delighted with having guns pointed at me.”

“But then, who is? Please,” I said, smiling nervously, pulling up a chair for him.

He cleared his throat, in a grumbling manner, and sat and I got behind the desk. Slipped the gun away, under my shoulder, feeling embarrassed and trigger-happy.

“Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

“Not at all.”

He took a gold, FWP-emblazoned case from his inside suitcoat pocket and a cigarette from the case and lit it up and I pushed the ashtray his way, saying, “This wasn’t a story I expected someone of your stature to be interested in covering.”

“What story is that?”

“The O’Hare shooting.”

“Oh. Afraid I just glanced at the headlines, this morning; he was a racetrack promoter, wasn’t he? Why, were you involved in that?”

“If I might explain,” I said, and briefly I told him about yesterday’s incident, and my fears about mob retaliation and my reluctance to talk to any newshound.

“I didn’t believe for a minute that Westbrook Pegler had called me,” I said.

“Admittedly Chicago isn’t my beat,” he granted. “But they do carry my column here.”

That they did. I often read Pegler, who was basically one of those journalistic attack dogs who latched onto whichever side of an issue grabbed him by the seat of the pants. He was the king of the “meatball” journalists, always on whichever side was the most entertaining and/or controversial, the side most likely to get the loudest cheers, or boos, from the grandstand. You couldn’t peg Pegler for the left or the right, politically; one day he was praising a lynch party for ridding the world of a killer, and the next he was bemoaning poverty in the slums. Champion of the underdog, on Monday, he might be defender of the rich, on Tuesday.

“Do you know a man named Willie Bioff?” he asked.

Willie Bioff? Why in hell would Westbrook Pegler be asking about that fat little creep?

“I used to,” I said.

“What do you know of him?”

I shrugged. “He used to be a pimp. He was a union slugger, too. He’s still involved in union organizing, isn’t he?”

“That’s an understatement. Ostensibly, he’s the bodyguard of a man named George Browne. In reality, he runs…” And here he paused, in order to spit each of the following words out like distasteful seeds: “…the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.”

“The Stagehands Union,” I nodded. “Yeah, I know Browne. He’s a drunk, and a blowhard. But when you prop him up he can make a speech and get the rank and file stirred up. He’s got patriotism and mom and apple pie and ten other kinds of baloney, for any occasion.”

“But you see him as a figurehead.”

“Yeah, sure. Bioff’s been the brains behind Browne for a long, long time. They say Browne drinks a hundred bottles of beer a day. He better have
somebody’s
brains behind him.”

Pegler drew on the cigarette; smiled a little. Just being polite, I thought. He said, “I met…or rather, encountered Willie Bioff once, many years ago. 1913, I’d say. That was the last time I worked a Chicago beat steadily. My father was the star rewrite man for the
American,
at the time, and they took me on as a favor to him.”

“You must’ve just been a kid.”

“Seventeen,” he said, his elaborate shrug not masking his pride. “And working for the United Press at the same time. I may live in the East, Mr. Heller, but I’m of the Chicago school of journalism. The New York school represents…” And these words, too, were distasteful seeds to spit. “…ethics and manners. Reporters on rival papers actually cooperated with each other in gathering facts when working on the same story.” The thought of it was beyond him, and he smiled as he described the Chicago school: “We, on the other hand, sanctioned the commission of any crime short of burglary in pursuit of an exclusive, and wouldn’t’ve helped a rival reporter if he was bleeding in the street. Ha! We fought and tricked and, to be honest about it, hated each other.”

He seemed lost in nostalgia; what this had to do with Willie Bioff or George Browne, or Nathan Heller, for that matter, was lost on me.

Then he answered my unasked question: “I saw Bioff when I was covering the police stations and police courts. I did a little bit of everything in those days—chased fires, took pictures, held down City Hall on weekends, where I lost at poker to the likes of Ben Hecht and Jake Lingle. The Harrison Street police court was perhaps the most eye-opening of my experiences…”

It would have been. West Harrison Street gave its name to a precinct that included one of the most depressed sections of the city, immigrants and colored and Chinese seeking the dream of America and finding the reality of tenements. And a red-light district second to none, the prostitutes a dreary rainbow of races and colors.

“The court enjoyed a steady diet of stabbings, shootings and sluggings,” Pegler said, pretending disgust at a memory he relished. “Judge Hopkins would get bored with the violence, and would shout, ‘Bailiff, bring me in some whores!’ The judge enjoyed badinage with the girls; he loved it when a girl would say she hadn’t the wherewithal to pay his five-dollar fine. ‘Oh, I think you do, dearie,’ he’d say, and give her time to earn the money. But he wasn’t a bad judge, just the same. It was a grim atmosphere, and gallows humor, especially from a judge, was to be expected. Winos, ginsoaks, stewbums, hopheads and lesser delinquents were a constant parade before the bench. And the ever-present ladies of the evening.”

“And where there are whores,” I said, “there are pimps.”

He smiled, not just being polite now, showing some teeth this time. “You anticipate me. I like that. Yes, it was in one of the police courts—Harrison Street, perhaps, though my memory isn’t exact on that account—that I first saw young Willie Bioff. It made an impression on me, barely eighteen myself, seeing a panderer who was younger than me,
years
younger. The judge asked him his age and he said, ‘Thirteen,’ proudly. He was fined and released. But I remembered him.”

“Why?”

“As I said, his age. Younger than me, but eons older. The street had done it to him, the liberals would say, and perhaps they’re right to a point. But even at his age he had a gleefulness about who he was and what he did. And cold, piglike eyes that bore no human compassion.”

“You had this impression just from a court appearance you were routinely covering?”

He shrugged facially; the bushy eyebrows danced. “Well, I saw Bioff again, a few months later. His name had stuck with me; I’m a literary man myself, after all, and the Dickensian name, ‘buy off,’ made its mark on my memory. Have you ever heard of the old Arsonia Cafe?”

“Bit before my time, but wasn’t that Mike Fritzel’s saloon?”

Nodding, the memory obviously a fond one, Pegler said, “Yes, back before the Great War, and a wild place it was. Fritzel’s gal Gilda Gray would allow herself to be hoisted up onto the bar for an impromptu performance of her well-known shimmy.”

Judging from the gleam in his eyes, the shimmy had made its mark on his memory as well.

“At any rate,” he continued, putting out his cigarette, getting the gold case back out again, “we reporters would occasionally congregate at the Arsonia, which was frequented by prostitutes and their panderers, and other denizens of the night.”

“And that’s where you saw Bioff again.”

“Precisely. Like any good reporter, I observed these creatures closely—it was an education of sorts for a lad like myself. I happened to spot Bioff, the teenage pimp, wearing a silk shirt, talking with some older examples of his ilk; there he stood, gesturing with his mug of beer, its contents sloshing onto the floor as he bragged.” This memory seemed anything but a fond one, but it was vividly recalled: “I assumed a spot at the bar nearby, and soon discovered Bioff was regaling his fellow panderers with his technique for ‘keeping his girls in line.’ Do you have a strong stomach, Mr. Heller?”

“I’ve lived in Chicago all my life, Mr. Pegler.”

“Sound answer. Here, more or less, is what I heard him say: ‘If you slug a girl half silly and then tie her down, you can stuff her…’” He paused, shook his head. “‘…her cunt with powdered ice. They tell me it’s so cold in there
it
feels like fire. You got to gag the girl, she screams so loud, but you don’t really hurt her permanent. But after ten minutes of that, she will get down on her knees to you any time you say the word
ice.
’”

He lighted a new cigarette; his hand was shaking. I didn’t blame him. It was an ugly story.

“You have a memory any reporter would envy you for, Mr. Pegler.”

“Is it any wonder I remember it?” he said, a bit defensively. “I was an impressionable lad of eighteen, and I was hearing detailed and horrid descriptions of sexual perversion from a boy four or five years my junior. A boy whose polished nails caught the light, shining his financial success in my ten-dollar-a-week face. Is it any wonder I viewed it as an insult?”