“Hey, that was twelve, thirteen years ago. And they weren’t cops, they were a couple of West Side hoods Mayor Cermak hired as bodyguards. Okay? Can we move on to new business? Like the guy bleeding to death in the next room? Or do you wanna read the minutes of the last meeting?”
He looked at me like he was thinking of spitting, and maybe he was, but the hospital floor looked too clean. So instead he posted the two uniformed cops at the surgery’s double doors, and got out his little notebook, licked the tip of his pencil, and started asking questions. I knew we’d have to make a more formal statement later on, but I answered the questions, anyway. There was nothing better to do.
“Where’s this shotgun that wouldn’t shoot?” he wanted to know. The first vaguely pertinent question in nearly five minutes of piss-poor interrogation.
“In the trunk,” I told him, and dug out the keys for him. “You’ll be impounding the heap, anyway, right?”
“Yeah, right,” he said, like he’d thought of it too. He tucked the little notebook away, and the Lincoln keys. “I guess you boys can find your way home without it.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” I said. “We work for Ragen.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot,” he smirked. “You’re protectin’ him.”
“That’s right. And we’re sticking, or anyway somebody else from my agency will be sticking, till Ragen or his family sends us away.”
“Listen, buddy.” He prodded the air with a forefinger. “You just take a hike.” He jerked a thumb over one shoulder. “You let the cops do their job.” He pointed at himself with the other thumb.
“Do their job,” I said. “Like look the other way, if the price is right. A fin, say.”
The stupid eyes narrowed, tried to get smart. Without any particular success. He was trying to summon some indignation and come up with something clever or nasty to say, when a finger tapped his shoulder.
“You better call in, sergeant,” Bill Drury said. “I can take over on this end.”
Drury wasn’t big, really, but his broad shoulders and sheer physical presence turned his five-foot-nine, hundred-sixty-pound frame into something formidable. His eyes were just as dark as Blaine’s, but infinitely more intelligent. His hair was thinning, but combed so as to spread what little there was around. His nose was somewhat prominent and his jaw jutting. And, as usual, he was nattily dressed, wearing (despite the heat) a vest with his dark blue suit, the breast pocket of which bore a white flourish of handkerchief, his wide tie a light blue with a yellow sunburst pattern. He was easily the best-dressed honest cop on the Chicago P.D.
Blaine, about the same size as Bill, nonetheless seemed dwarfed by him. He probably felt dwarfed by him, too. The sergeant swallowed, said, “Yes, lieutenant. I should call this information in. You’re right about that.”
And he clip-clopped down the tile floor toward the elevator, and went away.
Drury grinned at me, nodded at Walt. Walt had splotches of Ragen’s blood on his brown suit. I had some on my brown suit, too, I noticed.
Walt excused himself to go grab a smoke. Drury dispatched one of the uniformed cops to stand by the window near the fire escape down the hall, and the other to guard the elevator. Then it was just me and Drury and the surgery double doors.
“Well, Nate,” Drury said. “For a guy who swore off gangsters, you sure pick a hell of a boyo to play bodyguard for. What’s a big executive like you doing work like that for, anyway?”
I smiled at this sarcasm, stalled on the answer; I wanted Lou to have a chance to track Tendlar down before I gave all the details to the cops, even to the honest exception of a cop that was Bill Drury.
“Nobody else was available,” I explained. That wasn’t a lie. It was only marginally the truth, but it wasn’t a lie.
Bill folded his arms, leaned back against the cool brick wall. “I’ve got warrants out on Guzik and Serritella. Also, Murray Humphreys and Joe Batters. And Hymie the Loud Mouth, too.”
“Dago Mangano’s lucky he’s dead,” I said, “or you’d have a warrant out on him, too.”
“I considered it,” Drury said, arching an eyebrow.
“Those guys are just going to love getting hauled in for questioning.”
“Not as much as I’m going to love questioning ’em.”
Bill hated the Outfit boys. It had started back in the early thirties, when he first came on the job; unlike most cops in Chicago, Drury had pulled no political strings to get on the force-no Outfit-beholden ward committeeman, alderman or judge had played a role in his appointment. He’d made it by scoring record high marks on the police entrance exams; and his reputation as a Golden Gloves boxer hadn’t hurt, either. Also, his brother John was a reporter on the Daily News-and the department courted good publicity. So Bill had been allowed on.
Naively, Bill had in his early days treated some of the town’s top Outfit guys like gangsters; imagine. Whenever he met ’em, even if they were dining with their wives and kids, he would make them assume the position against the nearest wall and pat them down like common criminals (as opposed to uncommon criminals). Those Outfit guys began to wonder what they were paying good money to Bill’s superiors for, and soon Bill was forbidden to leave the station house on his tour of duty.
So he’d made a crusade out of it. On his off-duty hours he would stroll Rush Street and Division and various Loop thoroughfares. The time he rousted Guzik himself just outside Marshall Field’s on State Street at high noon, before a jeering crowd, was the capper: Guzik had blown a gasket, screaming, cursing, as Drury coolly frisked him, saying: “Two more words out of you, Jake, and I’ll put the cuffs on you. Two more sentences and I’ll call the Black Maria and get you fitted for a straitjacket.”
Shortly after, Guzik headed for the county building and soon a judge had placed Drury under a peace bond, to prevent future molestation of good citizen Greasy Thumb.
Ever since, Bill had had a hard-on where the Outfit was concerned, in general, and where Guzik was concerned, in particular.
“Did you see who did it, Nate?”
“They were just shapes behind shotguns. Wearing white shirts. Sportshirts, I think-I remember seeing their bare arms holding the shotguns. Aren’t you glad a trained detective was on the scene to pick up on all these details?”
Drury smiled faintly. “I’ve sent a colored cop down to question the eye witnesses.”
“Good idea. Who?”
“Two-Gun Pete.”
“Christ, he won’t question ’em, he’ll kill ’em.”
Drury laughed shortly. “Well, they won’t hide any information from him, that’s for sure. We’re going to nail Guzik’s hide on this one, Nate. I can feel it. I can smell it.”
“That’s disinfectant, Bill.”
“If that tough little bastard pulls through in there,” Drury said, grinning, nodding back at the double doors, “we’ll have Guzik cold.”
“Why, you think Jim’ll cooperate with you?”
“Sure as hell do. He already gave the State’s Attorney’s office a detailed statement.”
“The hell you say-when the fuck was this?”
Drury shrugged. “Last May. Or late April. Right after that car chased him to the Morgan Park police station.”
“He never said a word about it to me! What’s in this statement?”
“Quite a bit. It runs almost a hundred pages in transcript. It’s mostly about Capone.”
“Capone! Capone is ancient history. Capone has the mind of a twelve-year-old kid-and the twelve-year-old kid wants it back.”
“Well, frankly, very little of the statement is anything that can be used. He talks a lot about the ‘Capone mob.’ Not quite naming names. It mostly indicates how pissed off Ragen was that they made an attempt to hit him.”
“In other words, it was a message he was sending to the Outfit. That if they tried it again, he’d really talk.”
Drury nodded. “That’s about how I see it. He gave the statement to State’s Attorney Crowley, after all.”