“Jack, I feel bad about how it worked out for you. That’s why I asked for a meeting today.”
Moe Kellman had phoned Doyle the previous night, three nights after Doyle had been robbed and laid low, literally and figuratively. “How did you find out about what happened to me?” Doyle had asked.
“I hear a lot of things, Jack,” Moe had replied. “How I hear, that’s not important. What I hear is that you got ripped off, that somebody took all you earned from us. I was sorry to hear that, Jack.”
The two sat in bright sunshine on this summer day in first-row box seats directly behind home plate at Wrigley Field. These were the best seats Doyle had ever had at a baseball game, and he said so. “Had them for years,” Moe shrugged.
Moe Kellman, Doyle had learned, was a man who always had the best seats no matter where he went. His business was fur, luxury level fur, which was still a staple of his “people,” be they Outfit higher-ups or the members of the police and judiciary that helped them continue to thrive in an increasingly competitive criminal world. The animal rights, anti-fur movement had failed to make any inroads whatsoever with the stratum of society served by Moe Kellman.
When Doyle had arrived that afternoon, he’d said to Kellman, “I didn’t know you liked baseball.”
“I don’t,” Kellman replied. “I’m a Cubs fan. There’s a difference.”
Doyle looked around at what legions of loyal Chicago Cubs fans referred to with reverence as the “friendly confines.” The grass almost shone in the sunlight, a slightly lighter shade of green than the ivy that covered the outfield walls of this compact old ball yard.
Doyle hadn’t been at Wrigley Field since a September afternoon two years earlier when he had chaperoned a group of wide-eyed Serafin clients from Salt Lake City to a Cubs-Dodger game. The men in that middle-aged group had almost genuflected at their first sight of this Chicago sports landmark. The women had occupied themselves by ogling the goodly number of good-looking athletes occupying Cubs uniforms. How they played was secondary.
Today, Doyle noticed, although it was a Wednesday afternoon, the Wrigley stands were nearly filled-filled, as usual, by an almost exclusively white crowd of northsiders, suburbanites, and out-of-towners. The many youngsters in the crowd were almost matched in number by the suit-coated businessmen who talked on their cellular phones inning after inning.
Out in the bleachers, halter-topped girls sat with their bare-chested boyfriends, spending as much time applying suntan lotion and ordering from the busy beer vendors as they did watching the action on the field. Behind them, from the rooftoops of the old apartment buildings that bordered the ballpark on Waveland and Sheffield Avenues, gatherings of young people monitored the game in progress from amidst clouds of smoke that billowed skyward from barbecue grills.
Don’t any of these people work? Doyle wondered.
Aloud, he said to Kellman, “How can you be a Cubs fan? How can anybody? They haven’t won a pennant since World War Two.”
“Listen,” Moe replied, “this is a great place to get a tan. And a great place to relax. There’s no pressure to concentrate-these schlubs are hardly ever involved in games that mean anything, so you’ve got a nice, comfortable absence of tension.
“And from a financial standpoint,” Moe said, “you got to love this operation.”
He took a drink of his beer, then carefully dried his impeccably trimmed white mustache with his handkerchief. “They should be a case study in every business school in this country.
“It’s remarkable,” Moe continued, “year after year, with a very occasional exception, the Cubs organization puts a lousy product on the market. Then they sell that product as rich in tradition, as loveable, and all that other happy horseshit, and year after year they pack this joint. They’ve raised ineptitude to a commercial art form.
“Oh, once in a blue moon they’ll win their division. But never the pennant. And they haven’t won the World Series in ninety-five years. Think of that, Jack,” Moe said, poking Doyle’s arm with an index finger for emphasis, “ninety-five years! And yet they raise their prices almost every year, and people line up to pay them! Futility. Failure. But bale up the money and send it to the bank!”
Moe turned away from Doyle to exchange greetings with a portly, red-faced man in a light blue seersucker suit who had come down the steps from behind them. The man’s face was shiny with sweat. After a few moments of soft conversation, during which the man knelt on one knee like a supplicant while whispering into Kellman’s ear, Moe waved him away. “Take care of yourself, Judge,” he said, as the man retreated back up the aisle.
Moe turned back to Doyle. “My grandfather on my mother’s side, Morrie Greenburg may he rest in peace, although he’s a longshot for that, Morrie would have bowed low in admiration to these guys that run the Cubs. Bowed low, I’m saying.
“For over fifty years, Morrie sold cheap jewelry at inflated prices to the schvartzes over on Maxwell Street. But even Morrie gave more value than these guys,” Moe said, as the Cubs shortstop sailed his throw to first base into the third row behind the visitors’ dugout. Two runs scored, putting the home team down 5–0 to the St. Louis Cardinals in the top half of the first inning. When the ninth Cardinal batter of the inning finally flied out against the ivy in dead center, the crowd cheered and clapped enthusiastically.
Doyle ordered beers from a vendor who was several exits past seventy on his roadway of life. As he handed one of the cups to Kellman, Doyle said, “Look, I know we’re not here to discuss contemporary corporate economics. What’s our business today?”
“Jack…Jack,” Moe said, a pained expression on his face, “it’s not business here today. I just wanted to make sure that you know my people had nothing to do with that ripoff of your twenty-five grand.
“According to the story I get-no, no, don’t ask me how I know this, just believe me that I do-there was a white woman and a colored guy seen running out of your garage that night, probably right about the time you hit the deck.
“We’ve made inquiries, you might say, but we don’t have a clue as to who these two were. Maybe they were looking to mug somebody and just stumbled on you. Who knows?
“What I do know is that when you do business for us, and do it right, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” Moe emphasized.
Nothing to show for it either, Doyle thought as he sat there, feeling like an idiot. Somehow Maureen and E. D. had smelled out the plot involving City Sarah and had combined forces to take dead aim at one of the plotters-him. Doyle couldn’t escape feeling another silent wave of deep embarrassment.
Moe said, “The point, Jack, is that we don’t owe you a goddam thing. But we owe you. You know what I mean?”
He shook his head as he saw Doyle’s puzzled expression. “It doesn’t make any difference if you understand or not. The thing is, here’s five grand-it’s to tide you over till you find something else.” Moe slipped an envelope into the side pocket of Doyle’s sport coat. “No, it’s not a loan,” Moe said before Doyle could speak, “don’t worry about that. Let’s just say it’s a belated bonus.”
Moe looked thoughtfully toward the Cubs bullpen, a beehive of activity all afternoon. “Another thing, Jack. I heard you had some visitors early the other morning. Representatives of one of the nation’s law enforcement agencies.” He smiled slightly, noting the look of astonishment on Doyle’s face.
“That’s okay, Jack,” Kellman continued. “Everybody gets unwanted visitors every once in a while. But you don’t want to get too cozy with people like that.”
“Moe, I have to-or I might have to,” Doyle hurriedly amended. Looking at his little companion, Doyle suspected that here, too, Kellman was probably running head to head with him in the knowledge department.
“We understand that, Jack. You’re in kind of a bind here, or”-Kellman smiled-“what at the racetrack they call a blind switch. Great old term. A blind switch is when a jockey gets himself caught in a pocket during a race, trapped maybe down on the inside, looking for a way out. Jocks just have to keep looking to work their way out when they’re in those spots. Otherwise they lose for sure. Looks like the feds have you boxed in.”
Kellman took off his sunglasses and turned in his seat to face Doyle. “Let me get back to ‘too cozy’ with the feds, as I just mentioned. Too cozy as it might pertain to me and my people. Sometimes you tend toward the blunt side. That wouldn’t be good in your dealings with those people you’re being forced to deal with now. There’s a lot to be said for the vague approach, if you know what I mean.”
After putting his sunglasses back on and draining his beer cup, Moe again patted dry his mustache. “Don’t thank me, Jack,” he said as he stood to leave. Then he leaned down and added: “But don’t look for anything more either.
“One of Grandpa Morrie’s favorite quotes-I can almost hear him saying it-was from Benjamin Franklin. Franklin said ‘There are three faithful friends-an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.’
“All you’ve got is one out of three, Jack, so try to hang on to it, okay?” Moe turned away.
“See you at the gym.”
After Moe had gone, Doyle sat half-watching the game. He bought a cold hot dog and a warm beer, but didn’t finish either. He thought of the money in his pocket, then of E. D. and Maureen. He had really liked both of them, and had believed the feeling was at least close to mutual. How had he so badly misread that situation?
As the Cardinal batters continued to feast on a procession of Cubs pitchers, Doyle concentrated on the game only occasionally. He had a final beer, this one cold, and, still thinking of his assailants, realized that he was quite capable of forgiving them if their actions were ever explained to him. Doyle shook his head. “I must be going soft,” he said to himself. “Anybody else robbed me like that, I’d be looking forward to flaying them.”
Doyle left Wrigley Field just prior to the start of the bottom of the seventh inning. The home team trailed 11-1. Yet the crowd was on its feet, waving at the panning WGN-TV cameras, singing along with an apparently half-demented one-time rock star as he led them, clueless as to the lyrics, in a genuinely horrendous rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Their team trailing by ten, Cubs fans were still having a grand old time.
Moe’s Grandpa Morrie would have envied this scene.