True Detective (4 page)

My father never wanted me to be a cop. Particularly not a Chicago cop, the definition of which (my father frequently said) was a guy with change for a five. He'd been a union man, my father, and had been jailed and beaten by police; and he'd always had disdain for Chicago politics, from the butcher down the block who was assistant precinct captain to "Big Bill" Thompson, the mayor who wanted to be known as the "Builder" when "Boozer" was more like it.

Pa would've liked nothing more than for me to quit the force. It had been a major stumbling block between us, those last few years of his life. It may have led to his death. I don't know for sure. He didn't leave a note that night he shot himself. With my gun.

The Hellers came from Halle, in eastern Germany, orginally, and so did their name: Jews in Germany in the early 1800s were forced to abandon their traditional lack of surname and take on the name of either their occupation or home area. If my name hadn't been Heller it probably would've been Taylor, because a tailor is what my great-grandfather, Jacob Heller, was, in Halle, in the late 1840s.

Which were hard times. The economy was doing handstands due to developing railroads and industry; technology was making jobs obsolete for everybody from the guy who weaved the cloth to the oxcart driver who shipped it. Unemployment flourished, while crops failed and food prices doubled. A lot of people headed for America. My great-grandfather hung on. His business was suffering, yes, but he had contacts with the richer Jews in Halle- moneylenders, bankers, businessmen- and when the region was rocked by political unrest in 1848, great-grandfather watched from the sidelines. He couldn't afford getting involved: his business depended on an upper-class patronage, after all.

Then the letter arrived. From Vienna, where great-grandfather's younger brother Albert had lived;
had
lived: he'd been killed in the March 13, 1848. revolt against Metternich. His brother left an inheritance, which had been placed in the hands of Rabbi Kohn, the rabbi of Vienna's Reform synagogue. Greatgrandfather didn't trust the mails during such troubled times, and he went to Vienna to pick up the money. He stayed for a few days with Rabbi Kohn. and enjoyed the company of this kind, intelligent man and his gracious family. He was still there when the rabbi and his family were poisoned by Orthodox fanatics.

My great-grandfather was apparently hit hard by all this: political unrest had taken his brother from him; and in Vienna, he'd seen Jew kill Jew. He'd always been a very pragmatic businessman, preferring to be apolitical; and where religion was concerned, he practiced Reform Judaism rather than strict Orthodoxy. But now he renounced his faith altogether, and became apostate. Judaism hasn't been seen in my family since.

Leaving Halle couldn't have been easy, but staying would've been hard. The secret police that grew up in the wake of the revolution of 1848 were making things tough. So were the Orthodox Jews who attacked my great-grandfather verbally for his apostasy, and who spread the word to his wealthy clients that their tailor's late brother had been a radical. The latter didn't help business, certainly, nor did the general economic climate, and my great-grandfather decided, all in all, that America had to be a safer place to raise his family of four (the youngest, Hiram, having been born in 1850, just three years before the family immigrated to New York City).

As a youth, Hiram, my grandfather, worked in the family tailor shop, which was proving a moderately successful business, though Hiram never went into it. He went instead into the Union army at age seventeen. Like a lot of young Jews at that time, he wanted to prove his patriotism: Jewish war profiteers had been giving their fellows a bad name, and my grandfather helped make up for that by getting shot in both leas at Gettysburg.

He returned to New York, where his father had died in his absence, after a long hospitalization. His mother had died ten years before, and now his two brothers and his sister were squabbling over the business/inheritance, the upshot being that sister Anna left the city with a good chunk of the family savings, not to be heard of again for some years. His brothers, Jacob and Benjamin, stayed in New York but never spoke to each other again; they rarely saw Hiram, either, a nearly crippled, isolated man who was lucky to get his job in a sweatshop in the garment district.

In 1871 my grandfather married Naomi Levitz, a fellow sweatshop worker. My father, Mahlon, was bora in 1875, my uncle Louis in 1877. In 1884 my grandfather collapsed while working and from then on was totally bedridden, left at home to look after the two boys as best he could, while grandmother continued working. In 1886 the crowded tenement building the family lived in caught fire. Many died in the blaze. My grandmother got my father and uncle out safely, then went back in after grandfather. Neither came out.

My father's aunt- who had left town with her estimated share of the inheritance- had got back in touch with the rest of the family, letting them know she was "successful." It was to her the two boys were sent. To Chicago. From the train to the streetcar, the wide-eyed boys were shuttled not to the Jewish section of the near West Side but to the section of the city known as the Levee. The First Ward- home of "Bathhouse" John and "Hinky Dink," the corrupt ward bosses; site of the most famous whorehouse in the country, the Everleigh Club, run by sisters Ada and Minna, and scores of lesser houses of ill repute. Their "successful" Aunt Anna was a madam in one of the latter.

Not that Aunt Anna was at the bottom rung; not when there were tenements housing row upon row of crib upon crib of streetwalkers taking a load off. Vile establishments, one of which was owned by the police superintendent at one time; several others by Carter Harrison, Sr., five-time mayor of Chicago. And then there were the panel houses, providing rooms furnished only with a bed and a chair, the former occupied by a girl and her client, the latter by the client's pants; and from a sliding panel in a wall or door, a third part)' would enter at an opportune moment and make a withdrawal, often at the very moment a deposit was being made.

At the other end of the spectrum were the Everleigh sisters and, before them. Carrie Watson, into whose parlor one could go at least five ways, as there were five parlors in her three-story brownstone mansion. There were also twenty bedrooms, a billiard room, and, in the basement, a bowling alley. Damask upholster>
^;
, silk gowns, linen sheets; wine served in silver buckets, sipped from gold goblets.

Then there was Anna Heller's house. Wine was served there, too; the dozen girls residing there had it for breakfast. This was around 1:00 P.M., and the third liquid meal of their (so far) short day: at noon a colored girl woke these "withered roses of society" for cocktails in bed; they dressed themselves with the assistance of absinthe, and headed down for breakfast. Soon the girls, in pairs, would sit at windows and attract the attention of male passersby. This would be done by rapping on the window and providing a glimpse of what a girl was wearing, if you could call it that: costumes ranging from Mother Hubbards made of mosquito netting to jockey uniforms to gowns without sleeves to gowns without bosoms (or rather, with bosoms out) to nothing. Business was brisk. And by four or five in the morning, the girls would find a novel use for a bed: sleep. Or drunken stupor.

It helped a girl to stay drunk at Anna Heller's. Anna was known to boast that no act was too disgusting or perverse for her girls-- Circus Night was held three or four times a month- and heaven help the girl who made a liar out of Anna. It was said- though this one aspect of his aunt's business my father never witnessed- that Anna had in her employ six colored gentlemen who resided at a separate dwelling of hers; and that she would take business trips to other cities and return with girls from age thirteen to seventeen, having promised them jobs as actresses. The act Anna had in mind was a predictable one. though her variation wasn't. A girl would be locked in a room without clothing and raped by the colored gentlemen. In this way a airl became accustomed to "the life" and soon was having wine for breakfast. So it was said, at any rate.

My father didn't like his aunt; he didn't like her house or the way she slapped the drunken "chippies" (as she constantly called them) or the way she hoarded the money her girls made her. And
she
didn't like the way my father looked at her. a look of silent unveiled contempt (which my father was good at), and so my father got slapped a lot, too.

Anna and my uncle Louis got along fine. The parlor wasn't a fancy one, but it was upper-grade enough to occasionally attract a clientele that included ward politicans and successful businessmen, bankers and the like, and Louis must have liked the life these men led. or seemed to lead, and got a taste for capitalism. Of course Aunt Anna was a hell of a capitalist herself, so maybe that was where he picked it up. He probably learned to kiss ass watching Anna deal with the politicos and the posher types who occasionally showed up, and he put the skill to good effect by using it back on Anna, playing upon her pockmarked vanity. While Anna made my father stop school after the third grade, making him the bordello's janitor, Louis was attending a boarding school out east.

My father didn't like Louis much either, by this point. Louis didn't seem to notice, or care. When he was home from school out east, that is. If you called that house a home. Anna and my father did have one thing in common, though: a hatred of cops. Pa hated the sight of the patrolmen arriving for their weekly two dollars and fifty cents each, plus booze and food and girls anytime they were in the mood, which was every time. And Anna hated paying the two-fifty, and providing the booze, food, and girls. The beat cops weren't the only freeloaders: inspectors and captains from the Harrison Street police station held out a helping-themselves hand, as did the ward politicians, for whom my father also built a dislike. These were the same politicians, of course, who were among those my uncle Louis looked up to.

After eastern prep school, Louis returned to Chicago, and Aunt Anna sent him promptly off to Northwestern. And it was about then that she started taking her favorite nephew to the annual First Ward Ball, where Louis would not only see those admired politicians, but rub shoulders with them, and more important ones than just the First Ward ward heelers: Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John themselves, and most every other alderman in town, and bankers and lawyers and railroad executives and prominent businessmen, and police captains and inspectors and maybe even the commissioner: and pimps, madams, streetwalkers, pickpockets, burglars, and dope fiends. Everyone in costume, the men running to knights, gladiators, and circus strongmen, the ladies (most of whom were of the evening) to Indian maidens, Little Egypts, and geisha girls (costumes the newspapers understatedly described as "abbreviated"). The ball filled the Chicago Coliseum every year, a few days before Christmas, and added twenty-five to fifty thousand dollars to the Hinky Dink-Bathhouse John campaign fund.

"Bathhouse" John Coughlin, former rubber in a bathhouse. Democratic alderman from the First Ward, was the showman: he recited (his own) lousy poetry, wore outlandish clothes (lavender cravat and a red sash), and blew a fortune or two on the horses. "Hinky Dink" (Michael) Kenna was the brains, a little man who chewed on his cigars and accumulated a fortune or two while running the Workingmen's Exchange, a landmark Levee saloon; among his contributions to Chicago was establishing the standard rate for a vote: fifty cents. Their First Ward Balls were described by the Illinois Crime Survey as the "annual underworld orgy." Hinky Dink didn't care. "Chicago." he said, "ain't no sissy town."

But at the time Uncle Louis was being impressed by the balls of the First Ward, my father was long gone. In 1893, during the Columbian Exhibition- Chicago's first world's fair- business at Anna Heller's had boomed, and extra girls were taken on, and Anna's iron hand had taken its toll: on the girls and on my father. The syphilis was probably starting to eat Anna's brain and possibly explained her erratic behavior. When my father exploded at her, his silent contempt finally erupting after his aunt slapped a young woman senseless, she came at him with a kitchen knife. The scar on his shoulder was five inches long. Pa stayed around long enough for the doctor Anna had on call to come sew up the wound, then hopped a freight south.

He got thrown off the train near 115th Street. The Pullman plant nearby was where he ended up working; a year later he found himself in the midst of a strike, and was one of the militant strikers who got laid off when the strike finally ended.

And so began Pa's union work: with the Hebrew Worker's Congress on the near West Side; with the Wobblies on the near North Side; as a union organizer; a worker at various plants, and involved with union actions and strikes…

Uncle Louis took a different path. By now he was a trust officer with
the
major Chicago bank, Central Trust Company of Illinois, the famous "Dawes Bank," founded by General Charles Gates Dawes, who went on to be Calvin Coolidge's vice-president. Aunt Anna died in an insane asylum the year Louis graduated from Northwestern, so he was able to start out with a degree- and an inheritance, which is to say the money off the sale of the brothel and its hookers- and leave his sordid past behind him.

So the occasional meetings thereafter between my father and uncle were strained, to say the least- a polished young financier on his way up. and a radical worker into union organizing- and usually ended with my father shouting slogans and my uncle remaining quiet, expressing his contempt by not condescending to reply, which is funny because that was my
father's
favorite tactic. My father, despite his union activities, was not a man prone to losing his temper; Iris rage he swallowed, like an unchewable piece of meat that couldn't be spit out because times were too hard. But at my uncle, he would shout; at my uncle, he would vent his rage. So by century's turn, the two men weren't speaking; it made for no awkward moments: they didn't exactly travel in the same circles.