He always said that, or words to that effect, when I reminded him who the boss was. He had been my boss on the pickpocket detail, back in the early thirties, when I was the youngest plain-clothes dick on the department and he still had hair, or anyway some hair. Lou was pushing sixty, but was still a hard, lean cop. Don’t let the tortoise-shell eyeglasses fool you.
“Drop everything,” I told him. “You’re working tonight.”
“That’s why you put me on salary, isn’t it? To get sixty hours a week out of me. So what’s up?”
“Jim Ragen’s time. Or it pretty soon will be. Lou, they hit us.”
“Shit! Where? How?”
I gave it to him.
“Now here’s what I want you to do…” I started.
“Don’t waste your breath,” Sapperstein said. “I’ll tell you: you want me to go to Bill Tendlar’s flat over on the near Northwest Side and see just how sick he really is.”
Tendlar was the op who’d called in sick; whose shotgun I’d used.
“If he isn’t sick,” I said, “he’s going to be.”
“And if he is sick,” Sapperstein said, “he’s gonna be sicker.”
“You got it. This was an inside job, and it wasn’t Walt. He was under fire just like I was.”
“What about that truck driver pal of Ragen’s who had the day off?”
“I want him checked out, too. Maybe you can put Richie on that. But my nose says Tendlar. Of all the guys we got working for us, him I know the least about.”
“He was on the pickpocket detail,” Lou said, “but after both our times. We had mutual friends, though. He came recommended.”
“Judas looked good to Jesus, too. It was Tendlar’s shotgun that jammed and almost got me killed. Find him. Sit on him. ’Cause I want him.”
“You’ll have him, if he’s still in town to be had.”
And Lou hung up.
Then I dialed the detective bureau at the Central Police Station, at 11th and State in the Loop. And asked for Lt. Drury.
Bill Drury was another former pickpocket detail dick-only he had stayed on. Recently he’d been acting captain over at Town Hall Station, till he and a handful of the other honest detectives got railroaded out of their jobs by the Civil Service Commission, over supposedly tolerating bookie joints on their beats.
“Drury,” he said.
“Welcome back,” I said.
He laughed. “I been wondering when you’d get around to congratulating me.”
“Well, give me a chance. They only reinstated you Friday. And this is your first day back on the job.”
“It’s not the greatest shift,” he admitted, “but it beats unemployment.”
“How long you been on?”
“Since five o’clock. Where you calling from? Why don’t you come over and I’ll buy you a cup of lousy coffee?”
“I’m calling from Michael Reese. Get your reinstated butt over here and I’ll give you more than a cup of coffee.”
“Oh?”
And I told him, very quickly, about Ragen getting shot up at the corner of State and Pershing.
“Guzik,” Drury said, with a smile in his voice.
“Probably. But remember-I don’t want to end up in the middle of this, now…”
“You’re already in the middle of State Street, exchanging fire with a couple of shotguns-and you don’t want to be in the middle of this?”
“Well, I don’t. Get over here, if you can.”
“Who’s going to stop me?”
I joined Walt in the emergency room, where Ragen, still unconscious but now stripped down to his waist, his pasty Irish flesh even pastier than usual, his wounds dressed, was being rolled out on his back on what looked like a mobile morgue tray, a young fair-haired intern on one side of him, an older heavy-set dark nurse on the other. They were giving him a bottle of plasma.
We followed them out into the corridor, toward an elevator, where they wheeled him on and the intern looked out at me and said, “Who are you?”
“I’m his bodyguard. Let’s hope you’re better at your job than I am at mine.”
I squeezed onto the elevator and so did Walt.
“You can’t come along,” the intern said.
“Watch me,” I said.
It was one of those self-operated elevators.
“What floor?” I asked the nurse, pleasantly.
“Second,” the nurse said, warily.
I pushed the button and we went up.
Walt and I waited outside the surgery, down at one end of a narrow, rather dark corridor, where footsteps echoed on the tile floor and the cool disinfectant-institutional smell constantly reminded us where we were. Ten minutes after Ragen had been wheeled in, two uniformed cops and a detective from the third district joined us.
The detective, a Sgt. Blaine, was a pot-bellied guy in his forties with dark, stupid eyes in a round, stupid face. He pushed his porkpie hat back on his head, to let us know he was appraising us. Big deal. I didn’t know him from Adam, but he’d heard of me.
“Heller,” he said, his humorless one-sided smile buried in a pocket of puffy cheek. “You’re the guy who sided with Frank Nitti over your brother cops.”
“If you’re going to be mean to me,” I said, “I might just bust out crying.”