Friday afternoon, December 8, 1939, I had a call from Jake Rubinstein to meet him at 3159 Roosevelt, which was in Lawndale, my old neighborhood. Jake was an all right guy, kind of talkative and something of a roughneck, but then on Maxwell Street, when I was growing up, developing a mouth and muscles was necessary for survival. I knew Jake had been existing out on the fringes of the rackets since then, but that was true of a lot of guys. I didn’t hold it against him. I went into one of the rackets myself, after all-known in Chicago as the police department-and I figured Jake wouldn’t hold that against me, either. Especially since I was private, now, and he wanted to hire me.
The afternoon was bitterly cold, snow on the ground but not snowing, as I sat parked in my sporty ’32 Auburn across the street from the drug store, over which was the union hall where Jake said to meet him. The Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union, he said. I didn’t know there was one. They had unions for everything these days. My pop, an old union man, would’ve been pleased. I didn’t much care.
I went up the flight of stairs and into the outer office; the meeting room was adjacent, at my left. The place was modest, like most union halls-if you’re running a union you don’t want the rank and file to think you’re living it up-but the secretary behind the desk looked like a million. She was a brunette in a trim brown suit with big brown eyes and bright red lipstick. She’d soften the blow of paying dues any day.
She smiled at me and I forgot it was winter. “Would you be Mr. Heller?”
“I would. Would you be free for dinner?”
Her smile settled in one corner of her bright red mouth. “I wouldn’t. Mr. Rubinstein is waiting for you in Mr. Martin’s office.”
And she pointed to the only door in the wall behind her, and I gave her a can’t-blame-a-guy-for-trying look and went on in.
The inner office wasn’t big but it seemed bigger than it was because it was under-furnished: just a clutter-free desk and a couple of chairs and two wooden file cabinets. Jake was sitting behind the desk, feet up on in, socks with clocks showing, as he read The Racing News.
“How are you, Jake,” I said, and held out my hand.
He put the paper down, stood and grinned and shook my hand; he was a little guy, short I mean, but he had shoulders on him and his grip was a killer. He wore a natty dark blue suit and a red hand-painted tie with a sunset on it and a hat that was a little big for him. He kept the hat on indoors-self-conscious about his thinning hair, I guess.
“You look good, Nate. Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming yourself and not sending one of your ops.”
“Any excuse to get back to the old neighborhood, Jake,” I said, pulling up a chair and sitting. “We’re about four blocks from where my pop’s bookshop was, you know.”
“I know, I know,” he said, sitting again. “What do you hear from Barney these days?”
“Not much. When did you get in the union racket, anyway? Last I heard you were a door-to-door salesman.”
Jake shrugged. He had dark eyes and a weak chin and five o’clock shadow; make that six o’clock shadow. “A while ago,” he allowed. “But it ain’t really a racket. We’re trying to give our guys a break.”
I smirked at him. “In this town? Billy Skidmore isn’t going to put up with a legit junk handler’s union.”
Skidmore was a portly, dapperly dressed junk dealer and politician who controlled most of the major non-Capone gambling in town. Frank Nitti, Capone’s heir, put up with that because Skidmore was also a bailbondsmen, which made him a necessary evil.
“Skidmore’s got troubles these days,” Jake said. “He can’t afford to push us around no more.”
“You’re talking about the income tax thing.”
“Yeah. Just like Capone. He didn’t pay his taxes and they got ‘im for it.”
“They indicted him, but that doesn’t mean they got him. Anyway, where do I come in?”
Jake leaned forward, brow beetling. “You know a guy named Leon Cooke?”
“Can’t say I do.”
“He’s a little younger than us, but he’s from around here. He’s a lawyer. He put this union together, two, three years ago. Well, about a year back he became head of an association of junkyard dealers, and the rank and file voted him out.”
I shrugged. “Seems reasonable. In Chicago it wouldn’t be unusual to represent both the employees and the employers, but kosher it ain’t.”
Jake was nodding. “Right. The new president is Johnny Martin. Know him?”
“Can’t say I do.”
“He’s been with the Sanitary District for, oh, twenty or more years.”
The Sanitary District controlled the sewage in the city’s rivers and canals.
“He needed a hobby,” I said, “so he ran for president of the junk handler’s union, huh?”
“He’s a good man, Nate, he really is.”
“What’s your job?”
“I’m treasurer of the union.”
“You’re the collector, then.”
“Well…yeah. Does it show?”
“I just didn’t figure you for the accountant type.”
He smiled sheepishly. “Every union needs a little muscle. Anyways, Cooke. He’s trying to stir things up, we think. He isn’t even legal counsel for the union anymore, but he’s been coming to meetings, hanging around. We think he’s been going around talking to the members.”
“Got an election coming up?”
“Yeah. We want to know who he’s talking to. We want to know if anybody’s backing him.”
“You think Nitti’s people might be using him for a front?”
“Could be. Maybe even Skidmore. Playing both ends against the middle is Cooke’s style. Anyways, can you shadow him and find out?”
“For fifteen a day and expenses, I can.”
“Isn’t that a little steep, Nate?”
“What’s the monthly take on union dues around this joint?”
“Fifteen a day’s fine,” Jake said, shaking his head side to side, smiling.
“And expenses.”
The door opened and the secretary came in, quickly, her silk stockings flashing.
“Mr. Rubinstein,” she said, visibly upset, “Mr. Cooke is in the outer office. Demanding to see Mr. Martin.”
“Shit,” Jake said through his teeth. He glanced at me. “Let’s get you out of here.”
We followed the secretary into the outer office, where Cooke, a man of medium size in an off-the-rack brown suit, was pacing. A heavy top coat was slung over his arm. In his late twenties, with thinning brown hair, Cooke was rather mild looking, with wire-rim glasses and cupid lips. Nonetheless, he was well and truly pissed off.
“Where’s that btard Martin?” he demanded of Jake. Not at all intimidated by the little strongarm man.
“He stepped out,” Jake said.
“Then I’ll wait. Till hell freezes over, if necessary.”
Judging by the weather, that wouldn’t be long.
“If you’ll excuse us,” Jake said, brushing by him. I followed.
“Who’s this?” Cooke said, meaning me. “A new member of your goon squad? Isn’t Fontana enough for you?”
Jake ignored that and I followed him down the steps to the street.
“He didn’t mean Carlos Fontana, did he?” I asked.
Jake nodded. His breath was smoking, teeth chattering. He wasn’t wearing a topcoat; we’d left too quick for such niceties.
“Fontana’s a pretty rough boy,” I said.
“A lot of people who was in bootlegging,” Jake said, shrugging, “had to go straight. What are you gonna do now?”
“I’ll use the phone booth in the drug store to get one of my ops out here to shadow Cooke. I’ll keep watch till then. He got enough of a look at me that I don’t dare shadow him myself.”
Jake nodded. “I’m gonna go call Martin.”
“And tell him to stay away?”
“That’s up to him.”
I shook my head. “Cooke seemed pretty mad.”
“He’s an asshole.”
And Jake walked quickly down to a parked black Ford coupe, got in, and smoked off.
I called the office and told my secretary to send either Lou or Frankie out as soon as possible, whoever was available first; then I sat in the Auburn and waited.
Not five minutes later a heavy-set, dark-haired man in a camel’s hair topcoat went in and up the union-hall stairs. I had a hunch it was Martin. More than a hunch: he looked well and truly pissed off, too.
I could smell trouble.
I probably should have sat it out, but I got out of the Auburn and crossed Roosevelt and went up those stairs myself. The secretary was standing behind the desk. She was scared shitless. She looked about an inch away from crying.
Neither man was in the anteroom, but from behind the closed door came the sounds of loud voices.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“That awful Mr. Cooke was in using Johnny…Mr. Martin’s telephone, in his office, when Mr. Martin arrived.”
They were scuffling in there, now.
“Any objection if I go in there and break that up?” I asked her.
“None at all,” she said.
That was when we heard the shots.
Three of them, in rapid succession.
The secretary sucked in breath, covered her mouth, said, “My God…my God.”
And I didn’t have a gun, goddamnit.
I was still trying to figure out whether to go in there or not when the burly, dark-haired guy who I assumed (rightly) to be Martin, still in the camel’s hair topcoat, came out with a blue-steel revolver in his hand. Smoke was curling out the barrel.
“Johnny, Johnny,” the secretary said, going to him, clinging to him. “Are you all right?”
“Never better,” he said, but his voice was shaking. He scowled over at me; he had bushy black eyebrows that made the scowl frightening. And the gun helped. “Who the hell are you?”
“Nate Heller. I’m a dick Jake Rubinstein hired to shadow Leon Cooke.”
Martin nodded his head back toward the office. “Well, if you want to get started, he’s on the floor in there.”
I went into the office and Cooke was on his stomach; he wasn’t dead yet. He had a bullet in the side; the other two slugs went through the heavy coat that had been slung over his arm.
“I had to do it,” Martin said. “He jumped me. He attacked me.”
“We better call an ambulance,” I said.
“So, then, we can’t just dump his body somewhere,” Martin said, thoughtfully.
“I was hired to shadow this guy,” I said. “It starts and ends there. You want something covered up, call a cop.”
“How much money you got on you?” Martin said. He wasn’t talking to me.
The secretary said, “Maybe a hundred.”
“That’ll hold us. Come on.”
He led her through the office and opened a window behind his desk. In a very gentlemanly manner, he helped her out onto the fire escape.
And they were gone.
I helped Cooke onto his feet.
“You awake, pal?”
“Y-yes,” he said. “Christ, it hurts.”
“Mount Sinai hospital’s just a few blocks away,” I said. “We’re gonna get you there.”
I wrapped the coat around him, to keep from getting blood on my car seat, and drove him to the hospital.
Half an hour later, I was waiting outside Cooke’s room in the hospital hall when Captain Stege caught up with me.
Stege, a white-haired fireplug of a man with black-rimmed glasses and a pasty complexion-and that Chicago rarity, an honest cop-was not thrilled to see me.
“I’m getting sick of you turning up at shootings,” he said.
“I do it just to irritate you. It makes your eyes twinkle.”
“ covereleft a crime scene.”
“I hauled the victim to the hospital. I told the guy at the drugstore to call it in. Let’s not get technical.”
“Yeah,” Stege grunted. “Let’s not. What’s your story?”
“The union secretary hired me to keep an eye on this guy Cooke. But Cooke walked in, while I was there, angry, and then Martin showed up, equally steamed.”
I gave him the details.
As I was finishing up, a doctor came out of Cooke’s room and Stege cornered him, flashing his badge.
“Can he talk, doc?”
“Briefly. He’s in critical condition.”
“Is he gonna make it?”
“He should pull through. Stay only a few minutes, gentlemen.”
Stege went in and I followed; I thought he might object, but he didn’t.
Cooke looked pale, but alert. He was flat on his back. Stege introduced himself and asked for Cooke’s story.
Cooke gave it, with lawyer-like formality: “I went to see Martin to protest his conduct of the union. I told Martin he ought to’ve obtained a pay raise for the men in one junkyard. I told him our members were promised a pay increase, by a certain paper company, and instead got a wage cut-and that I understood he’d sided with the employer in the matter! He got very angry, at that, and in a little while we were scuffling. When he grabbed a gun out of his desk, I told him he was crazy, and started to leave. Then…then he shot me in the back.”
Stege jotted that down, thanked Cooke and we stepped out into the hall.
“Think that was the truth?” Stege asked me.
“Maybe. But you really ought to hear Martin’s side, too.”
“Good idea, Heller. I didn’t think of that. Of course, the fact that Martin lammed does complicate things, some.”
“With all the heat on unions, lately, I can see why he lammed. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt Martin pulled the trigger. But who attacked who remains in question.”
Stege sighed. “You do have a point. I can understand Martin taking it on the lam, myself. He’s already under indictment for another matter. He probably just panicked.”
“Another matter?”
Stege nodded. “He and Terry Druggan and two others were indicted last August for conspiracy. Trying to conceal from revenue officers that Druggan was part owner of a brewery.”
Druggan was a former bootlegger, a West Side hood who’d been loosely aligned with such non-Capone forces as the Bugs Moran gang. I was starting to think maybe my old man wouldn’t have been so pleased by all this union activity.
“We’ll stake out Martin’s place,” Stege said, “for all the good it’ll do. He’s got a bungalow over on Wolcott Avenue.”
“Nice little neighbrhood,” I said.
“We’re in the wrong racket,” Stege admitted.
It was too late in the afternoon to bother going back to the office now, so I stopped and had supper at Pete’s Steaks and then headed back to my apartment at the Morrison Hotel. I was reading a Westbrook Pegler column about what a bad boy Willie Bioff was when the phone rang.
“Nate? It’s Jake.”
“Jake, I’m sorry I didn’t call you or anything. I didn’t have any number for you but the union hall. You know about what went down?”
“Do I. I’m calling from the Marquette station. They’re holding me for questioning.”
“Hell, you weren’t even there!”
“That’s okay. I’m stalling ’em a little.”
“Why, for Christ’s sake?”
“Listen, Nate-we gotta hold this thing together. You gotta talk to Martin.”
“Why? How?”
“I’m gonna talk to Cooke. Cooke’s the guy who hired me to work for the union in the first place, and…”
“What? Cooke hired you?”
“Yeah, yeah. Look, I’ll go see Cooke first thing in the morning-that is, if you’ve seen Martin tonight, and worked a story out. Something that’ll make this all sound like an accident…”
“I don’t like being part of cover-ups.”
“This ain’t no fuckin’ cover-up! It’s business! Look, they got the state’s attorney’s office in on this already. You know who’s taken over for Stege, already?”
“Tubbo Gilbert?”
“Himself,” Jake said.
Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert was the richest cop in Chicago. In the world. He was tied in with every mob, every fixer in town.
“The local will be finished,” Jake said. “He’ll find something in the books and use that and the shooting as an excuse to close the union down.”
“Which’ll freeze wages at current levels,” I said. “Exactly what the likes of Billy Skidmore would want.”
“Right. And then somebody else’ll open the union back up, in six months or so. Somebody tied into the Nitti and Guzik crowd.”
“As opposed to Druggan and Moran.”
“Don’t compare them to Nitti and Guzik. Those guys went straight, Nate.”
“Please. I just ate. Moran got busted on a counterfeit railroad-bond scam just last week.”
“Nobody’s perfect. Nate, it’s for the best. Think of your old man.”
“Don’t do that to me, Jake. I don’t exactly think your union is what my pop had in mind when he was handing out pamphlets on Maxwell Street.”
“Well, it’s all that stands between the working stiffs and the Billy Skidmores.”
“I take it you know where Martin is hiding out.”
“Yeah. That secretary of his, her mother has a house in Hinsdale. Lemme give you the address…”
“Okay, Jake. It’s against my better judgment, but okay…”
It took an hour to get there by car. Well after dark. Hinsdale was a quiet, well-fed little suburb, and the house at 409 Walnut Street was a two-story number in the midst of a healthy lawn. The kind of place the suburbs are full of, but which always seem shockingly sprawling to city boys like yours truly.
There were a few lights on, downstairs. I walked up onto the porch and knocked. I was unarmed. Probably not wise, but I was.
The secretary answered the door. Cracked it open.
She didn’t recognize me at first.
“I’m here about our dinner date,” I said.
Then, in relief, she smiled, opened the door wider.
“You’re Mr. Heller.”
“That’s right. I never did get your name.”
“Then how did you find me?”
“I had your address. I just didn’t get your name.”
“Well, it’s Nancy. But what do you want, Mr. Heller?”
“Make it Nate. It’s cold. Could I step in?”
She swallowed. “Sure.”
I stepped inside; it was a nicely furnished home, but obviously the home of an older person: the doilies and ancient photo portraits were a dead giveaway.
“This is my mother’s home,” she said. “She’s visiting relatives. I live here.”
I doubted that; the commute would be impossible. If she didn’t live with Martin, in his nifty little bungalow on South Wolcott, I’d eat every doilie in the joint.
“I know that John Martin is here,” I said. “Jake Rubinstein told me. He asked me to stop by.”
She didn’t know what to say to that.
Martin stepped out from a darkened doorway into the living room. He was in rolled-up shirt sleeves and no tie. He looked frazzled. He had the gun in his hand.
“What do you want?” he said. His tone was not at all friendly.
“You’re making too big a deal out of this,” I said. “There’s no reason to go on the lam. This is just another union shooting-the papers’re full of ’em.”
“I don’t shoot a man every day,” Martin said.
“I’m relieved to hear that. How about putting the heater away, then?”
Martin sneered and tossed the piece on a nearby floral couch. He was a nasty man to have a nice girl like this. But then, so often nice girls do like nasty men.
I took it upon myself to sit down. Not on the couch: on a chair, with a soft seat and curved wooden arms.
Speaking of curves, Nancy, who was wearing a blue print dress, was standing wringing her hands, looking about to cry.
“I could use something to drink,” I said, wanting to give her something to do.
“Me too,” Martin said. “Beer. For him, too.”
“Beer would be fine,” I said, magnanimously.
She went into the kitchen.
“What’s Jake’s idea?” Martin asked.
I explained that Jake was afraid the union would be steam-rolled by crooked cops and political fixers, should this shooting blow into something major, first in the papers, then in the courts.
“Jake wants you to mend fences with Cooke. Put together some story you can both live with. Then find some way you can run the union together, or pay him off or something.”
“Fuck that shit!” Martin said. He stood up. “What’s wrong with that little kike, has he lost his marbles?”
“A guy who works on the West Side,” I said, “really ought to watch his goddamn mouth where the Jew-baiting’s concerned.”
“What’s it to you? You’re Irish.”
“Does Heller sound Irish to you? Don’t let the red hair fool you.”
“Well fuck you, too, then. Cooke’s a lying little kike, and Jake’s still in bed with him. Damn! I thought I could trust that little bastard…”
“I think you can. I think he’s trying to hold your union together, with spit and rubber bands. I don’t know if it’s worth holding together. I don’t know what you’re in it for-maybe you really care about your members, a little. Maybe it’s the money. But if I were you, I’d do some fast thinking, put together a story you can live with and let Jake try to sell it to Cooke. Then when the dust settles you’ll still have a piece of the action.”
Martin walked over and pointed a thick finger at me. “I don’t believe you, you slick son of a bitch. I think this is a set-up. Put together to get me to come in, give myself up and go straight to the lock-up, while Jake and Cooke tuck the union in their fuckin’ belt!”
I stood. “That’s up to you. I was hired to deliver a message. I delivered it. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
He thumped his finger in my chest. “You tell that little kike Rubinstein for me that…”
I smacked him.
He don’t go down, but it backed him up. He stood there looking like a confused bear and then growled and lumbered at me with massive fists out in front, ready to do damage.
So I smacked the bastard again, and again. He went down that time. I help him up. He swung clumsily at me, so I hit him in the side of the face and he went down again. Stayed down.
Nancy came in, a glass of beer in either hand, and said, “What…?” Her brown eyes wide.
“Thanks,” I said, taking one glass, chugging it. I wiped the foam off my face with the back of a hand and said, “I needed that.”
And I left them there.
The next morning, early, while I was still at the Morrison, shaving in fact, the phone rang.
It was Jake.
“How did it go last night?” he asked.
I told him.
“Shit,” he said. “I’ll still talk to Cooke, though. See if I can’t cool this down some.”
“I think it’s too late for that.”
“Me too,” Jake said glumly.
Martin came in on Saturday; gave himself up to Tubbo Gilbert. Stege was off the case. The story Martin told was considerably different from Cooke’s: he said Cooke was in the office using the phone (“Which he had no right to do!”) and Martin told him to leave; Cooke started pushing Martin around, and when Martin fought back, Cooke drew a gun. Cooke (according to Martin) hit him over the head with it and knocked him down. Then Cooke supposedly hit him with the gun again and Martin got up and they struggled and the gun went off. Three times.
The gun was never recovered. If it was really Cooke’s gun, of course, it would have been to Martin’s advantage to produce it; but he didn’t.
Martin’s claim that Cooke attacked and beat him was backed up by the fact that his face was badly bruised and battered. So I guess I did him a favor, beating the shit out of him.
Martin was placed under bond on a charge of intent to kill. Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert, representing the state’s attorney’s office, confiscated the charter of the union, announcing that it had been run “purely as a racket.” Shutting it down until such time that “the actual working members of the union care to continue it, and elect their own officers.”
That sounded good in the papers, but in reality it meant Skidmore and company had been served.
I talked to Stege about it, later, over coffee and bagels in the Dill Pickle deli below my office on Van Buren.
“Tubbo was telling the truth about the union being strictly a racket,” Stege said. “They had a thousand members paying two bucks a head a month. Legitimate uses counted for only seven hundred bucks’ worth a month. Martin’s salary, for example, was only a hundred-twenty bucks.”
“Well he’s shit out of luck, now,” I said.
“He’s still got his position at the Sanitary District,” Stege said. “Of course, he’s got to beat the rap for the assault to kill charge, first…” Stege smiled at the thought. “And Mr. Cooke tells a more convincing story than Martin does.”
When the union was finally re-opened, however, Jake was no longer treasurer. He was still involved in the rackets, though, selling punchboards, working for Ben “Zuckie the Bookie” Zuckerman, with a short time out for a wartime stint in the Air Force. He went to Dallas, I’ve heard, as representative of Chicago mob interests there, winding up running some strip joints. Rumor has it he was involved in other cover-ups, over the years.
By that time, of course, Jake was better known as Jack.
And he’d shortened his last name to Ruby.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
“Scrap” is primarily based upon newspaper research, but I should also acknowledge Maxwell Street (1977) by Ira Berkow; and The Plot to Kill the President (1981) by G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings.