“I know that,” Pete said, irritably. “I didn’t just fall off a hay wagon, Heller. That’s one reason why I’m rounding up four. Taken together, they’ll be goddamn hard to impeach.”
A few minutes later the first of Pete’s witnesses wandered in; he was a thick-set man of about forty, wearing a frayed white shirt and rumpled brown slacks, with gray in his hair and mustache and bloodshot eyes and hands that were shaky, until Pete put the rest of his own beer in them.
“Okay, Tad,” he said. “Take it easy.”
“Tore one on last night,” Tad said. “Tore one on.”
“This is Theodosius Jones,” Pete said to us. “He used to be a bedbug.”
That meant he’d been a Pullman porter.
“Till last year,” Tad said.
“Drinking on the job?” I asked, tearing the shell off a peanut.
Pete frowned at me; it wasn’t pleasant being frowned at by Pete. I had the feeling he could, if he so chose, tear the shell off me.
But the former bedbug only nodded and gulped at the glass of beer, till it was drained.
I looked at Drury and shook my head, popping the peanut in my mouth.
Drury didn’t give up easily, though; he went up and got a fresh beer for Tad and came back with it and said, “I want to hear your story.”
“Okay,” Tad said, and he reported what he’d seen, very accurately, and described the two white shooters in some detail.
“One was fatter than the other,” he said, “but they was both big men. One of ’em had hair that come to a point…” He gestured to his forehead.
“A widow’s peak?” Drury asked.
Tad nodded. “His hair was black and curly. The other’s hair was going. Not bald, but will be. He had spectacles on. I seen their faces plain as day. If you could show me pictures, I could pick ’em out, if they was in there.”
“I’ll bring you pictures, Tad,” Drury said, smiling.
“Tad,” I said, “are you up to a court appearance?”
“Pardon?”
“You’d need to be on the witness stand, and you’d need not to have been drinking.”
“Got to be sober as a judge,” he said, agreeing with me.
“The judge can get away with being drunk,” I said. “You can’t.”
Tad nodded. “Don’t matter, really. I been thinkin’ of headin’ out.”
“Heading out?” Drury said, sitting up.
“Detroit. I hear they’s jobs up there.”
Drury reached in his pocket and peeled a ten off a small money-clipped roll. “Take it, Tad. More to come.”
“Thank you kindly,” Tad said, smiling.
Pete was looking at me hard. The sullen brown face above the tiger-striped tie seemed to give off heat. He said, “You don’t think my witness here has what it takes, do you, Heller?”
“No offense to Mr. Jones, but I wouldn’t want to build a case on him.”
“No offense taken,” Tad said, toasting me with his beer.
Pete nodded toward me and said, “Tad, do you know who this fella is?”
“Sure. He’s the guy who was shootin’ back at ’em.”
Pete smiled and patted Tad’s shoulder. “I think you’re a damn wonder as a witness, Tad. Why don’t you take your beer on up to the bar, and tell the man behind the log to charge your next one to Mr. Jefferson.”
Tad nodded, took his ten-spot and beer and went and stood at the bar.
“You’re buying witnesses, now?” I said to Drury.
“Every cop pays his snitches,” Drury said.
“You must want Guzik bad.”
“I want him any way I can get him.”
“What if it isn’t Guzik who bought the hit? What if it’s Siegel’s contract?”
“Who told you that fairy tale?” Drury snorted, smirking cynically. “Guzik?”
“Whoever it was,” I said, “I didn’t pay for the information.”
The next two witnesses, who came along at roughly fifteen-minute intervals, were admittedly stronger. One of them was a steel worker, a big guy named James Martin who’d gotten his hair cut at the corner barber shop before he wandered over to pick up some cigarettes at the drugstore, just before the shootout. Martin was a crane operator at Carnegie-Illinois Steel’s South Works, a union man, a family man, and a church deacon; even colored, this was some witness. Like Tad, he recognized me, immediately. All white people did not look alike to these folks. The other witness was Leroy Smith, a nineteen-year-old clerk from the drug store; he was skinny and a little scared but his description of the two shotgunners matched the others’: black curly hair with a widow’s peak, balding with glasses; he too recognized me. These latter two witnesses each had a description of the driver of the truck, as well, which tallied.
When all three witnesses had gone, promising to meet with Drury and Pete again when the detectives had suspect pictures for them to sort through, I leaned back in the wooden chair and admitted to the two tough cops that these witnesses weren’t all that bad.
“I got one more to round up,” Pete said. “We gonna have some depth on our bench.”
Drury said, “Pete, I don’t know how to thank you. I’d have been lost, trying to work down here without your help.”
“My pleasure. I don’t like it when those Outfit bums come shooting up my beat. I don’t like those Outfit bums, period. Do you fellas have any idea how bad the dope problem is gettin’ down here? Not a week goes by we don’t haul in a dozen kids, eighteen years old, sixteen years old, some of ’em been on dope two or three years already. I know where the dope comes from. So do you, Lt. They’re preyin’ on us-ain’t it bad enough you got sixteen or twenty families living in a three-flat building, children sleeping four to a bed, in rat-crawlin’ firetraps? A man can’t find decent quarters for his family, can’t stretch a few dollars from his menial damn job to provide food for ’em. Kids playin’ in garbage-filled alleys, dirt and filth. And Jake Guzik sends his poison down here so these people can flee into some reefer dream, or stick a needle in themself and go hide in their minds, and pretty soon they’re pawning what little they own and after that they’re pulling stickups, whatever it takes to get the stuff. Bill, you want my help, going up against these Outfit bums, you got my help. Any time. Any day.”
Drury was smiling tightly, drinking that in. Me, I was drinking in the beer. That kind of idealistic talk was fine, in the bar room; in real life, it tended to get you killed.
Up toward the front, at the bar, two colored men were starting to push each other around. A couple of working stiffs in overalls, good size men, both a little drunk at this point.
It was starting to get loud, when Pete got up and said, “Pardon,” and took out his long-barreled, pearl-handled, nickel-plated.357 and strode up there.