We were now in what had been Mayor Cermak’s old turf-some of the storefronts even had lettering in Czech. I’d grown up not far from here, myself-we were just south of Jake Arvey’s territory, where Czech gave way to Yiddish.
“Okay,” I said. “I suppose I could do that.”
“There’s more. I want you to go to Frank Nitti and tell him what you’ve done.”
“Huh?”
He was smiling and it was the oddest damn smile I ever saw: his upper lip was pulled back across his teeth in a display of smugness tinged with desperation. And what he said was everything his smile promised: “As if you’re going behind my back, out of loyalty to him, you go to Nitti and tell him that somebody’s trying to make it look like O’Hare’s informing the feds, but that in fact O’Hare isn’t informing, that he went so far as to instruct you to tell the feds he is not about to do any informing.”
I hate it when people talk about themselves in the third person.
“Why don’t you just go to Nitti yourself?”
“Coming from me, it would be dismissed as self-serving. I might be lying to him. Coming from you, without my knowledge, it can prove my loyalty.”
We went under the El.
“Will you do it?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I don’t want anything to do with Nitti.”
“Nitti likes you. He’ll believe you. He respects you.”
“I don’t know that any of that is true. I’ve had dealings with him from time to time, and he’s been friendly to me in his way, but I always wind up in the middle of something bloody.”
He took one hand off the wheel and reached over and grasped my arm with it. “I’m being set up, Heller. Only somebody on the outside can save me.”
I shook the arm off. “No.”
“Name your retainer.”
“No.”
We crossed Kedzie into Douglas Park. I used to play here as a kid; I wondered if the lagoon was frozen over yet. Probably not.
“Five thousand. Five grand, Heller!”
Judas Priest. For running a couple of errands? Could I say no to that?
“No.” I said. “No more Nitti. Five grand is five grand, but it ain’t worth getting killed over. Now, pull over and let me out.”
“Somebody’s following me.”
“I know. They have been since Twenty-second Street.”
The park was empty of people; the faded green of it, its barren trees, leaves blown away, seemed oddly peaceful. O’Hare was picking up speed, going forty, now, and the Ford was a few car lengths behind, keeping right up.
“Do you have a gun?” he sputtered.
“In my desk drawer in my office, I do. Pull over.”
“Use mine, then!”
“Okay.”
I picked up his automatic and pointed it at him. “Pull over and let me out.”
His cheeks were blood red. “I’m not stopping!”
I put the gun in his face.
He swallowed. “I’ll slow down, but I’m not stopping!”
“I’ll settle for that.”
“At least leave me the gun!”
He slowed, I opened the door, stepped onto the running board, tossed the gun on the seat and dove for grass.
The other black coupe came roaring up, and then it was alongside of O’Hare, both cars going fifty at least, barreling through the park, and then a shotgun barrel extended from the rider’s window of the coupe and blasted a hole in the driver’s window of O’Hare’s car, the roar of the gun and the crash of the glass fighting over who was loudest.
O’Hare swerved away from the other coupe, then back into it, nearly sideswiping them; they were riding the white center line of the four-lane street. I could see them, barely, two anonymous hoodlums in black hats and black coats in their black car with their black gun, which blew a second hole in O’Hare’s window, and in him, too, apparently, for the fancy coupe careened out of control, lurched over the curb, sideswiping a light pole, its white globe shattering, and then shuttled down the streetcar tracks like a berserk sidecar and smashed into a trolley pole and stopped.
The other black Ford coupe cut its speed, stopping for a red light at Western. I couldn’t make out the license plates, but they were Illinois. Then it moved nonchalantly on.
I was the first one to O’Hare’s car. The window on the side I’d been sitting on was spiderwebbed from buckshot. I opened the door and there he was, slumped, hatless, the wheel of the car bent away from him, his eyes open and staring, lips parted as if about to speak, blood spattered everywhere, one hand tucked inside his jacket, like the Little General he’d patterned himself after, two baseball-size holes from close-up shotgun blasts in the driver’s window just above him, like two more empty eyes, staring.
The.32 automatic was on the seat beside him.
I had to find a phone. Not to call the cops: some honest citizen would’ve beat me to it, by now.
I wanted to call Gladys and tell her if she hadn’t already deposited O’Hare’s check, drop everything and do it.
The two dicks from the detective bureau knew who I was, and called my name in to Captain Stege. So I ended up having to hang around waiting for Stege to show up, as did everybody else, four uniformed officers, the two detective bureau dicks, a police photographer, somebody from the coroner’s office, three guys with the paddy wagon that O’Hare would be hauled off to the nearby morgue in. The captain wanted to see the crime scene, including poor old Eddie O’Hare, who accordingly had spent the past forty-five minutes of this cold afternoon a virtual sideshow attraction for the gawkers who’d gathered around the wrecked car, which was crumpled against a trolley pole like a used paper cup. Ogden is a busy street; and several residential areas were close by, as was Mt. Sinai Hospital, a pillar covering the corner of California and Ogden. So there were plenty of gawkers.
Lieutenant Phelan, a gray-complected man in his forties, asked me some questions and took some notes, but it was pretty perfunctory. Phelan knew that Stege would take over, where questioning me was concerned. Stege and me went way back.
The captain was an exception to the Chicago rule: he was an honest cop. He’d helped nail Capone-his raid on the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, where O’Hare’s accountant Les Shumway had once worked, provided the feds with the ledgers that allowed them to make their income-tax case against the Big Fellow. Later Stege (rhymes with “leggy,” which he wasn’t, being just a shade taller than a fireplug) had been the head of the special Dillinger Squad.
His one bad break was getting unfairly tarnished in the Jake Lingle affair. Lingle, a Tribune reporter gunned down gangland style in the pedestrian tunnel under Michigan Avenue, had been thick with both Al Capone and the police commissioner-the latter being the bloke who appointed Stege chief of the Detective Bureau. Guilt by association lost Stege that job. And being even vaguely linked to Capone was a bitter pill for one of the Chicago PD’s few good men.
But that was almost ten years ago. Now he was the grand old man of the force, a favorite of the Chicago press when an expert quote on the latest headline crime was needed.