Actually, I was known in at least one instance for singing on the witness stand-when I helped bring the world crashing down on Mayor Cermak’s favorite corrupt cops, Lang and Miller; but I had indeed kept some secrets for Frank Nitti. That was more important, where somebody like Bioff was concerned.
“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” I said.
“How would you like to earn a couple of grand?”
The money was sure flying this week; I wondered if I’d live to spend any of it.
“Sure,” I said. “What’s your poison?”
“Pegler,” he said.
It would be.
He was asking, “When are you heading back?”
“This afternoon,” I said, somehow. “I’ll be in Chicago tomorrow morning.”
“Good. There are some people I want you to see.”
“About what?’
“About me. I want you to find out if Pegler’s been around to see them, and if he has, try and worm out of them what, if anything, they spilled.”
Oh my.
“If he hasn’t been around,” he continued, “warn them him or somebody he’s hired may be around. And tell them if they talk they’ll go to sleep and never wake up.”
I shook my head no. “Willie, I’ll do some checking for you. Gladly. But I won’t threaten anybody for you. And I don’t want to know about that end of it, understood?”
He smiled, friendly as Santa Claus. “Sure, Heller. Sure. They can figure that out for themselves, anyway. Like the man said, when you eat garlic, it speaks for itself. Shall we say a grand down, a grand upon your reporting back to me? By phone is fine.”
“Okay.”
“You want this on your books, or should I give you cash?”
“Cash’ll do.”
“Sit tight and I’ll get you some. Oh, and Heller. Don’t tell anybody about this. Not Nitti or anybody. As far as Nick Dean is concerned, I had you out here to ask you about that O’Hare killing. I knew Eddie, you see, and as a matter of fact I would like to ask you a few questions about that before you go.”
“All right.”
“Anyway, I don’t want Nitti to know I’m nervous about this Pegler deal. It wouldn’t look good. I’m on the spot enough with this federal-tax heat. So be careful-like the man said, when you play both ends against the middle you risk getting squeezed.”
You’re telling me.
He got up and went out and came back shortly with a thousand in hundreds in an IATSE envelope. I put it in my suitcoat pocket, answered his questions about the O’Hare shooting in a similar manner to the way I’d handled Captain Stege’s, and soon he was walking me out of the house, an arm reached up around my shoulder, two old buddies from Chicago.
“Let me tell you about the time Little New York came out to visit,” he said.
Louis Campagna; now there’s a house guest.
“I had my sprinkler system going,” Bioff said, gesturing to his expansive green lawn, “and Campagna-you know, he’s a nature lover-”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Oh yeah, he’s got a farm in Wisconsin, goes fishing all the time, loves the great outdoors. Anyway, he sees my sprinklers, dozens of ’em, turning in full circles, and he asks me what the hell they are, and I tell him, and he says, that’s great! Get me six hundred.”
I laughed.
“So I told him that six hundred of those things could irrigate all the city parks in Chicago. And that they’d freeze up in the cold weather. But he insisted, and he said I should charge ’em to the union. So I called the Waiter and asked him to talk Louie out of it.”
The Waiter was Paul Ricca, rumored to be second in the Outfit only to Nitti.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Ricca wanted three hundred of ’em,” he said, and walked me to the limo where his partner sat in back drinking beer.
On the way he told me who to see in Chicago.
The Southern belle, hoop skirt flouncing, parasol atwirl, a vision in white and pink and lace, strolled coyly to the settee and, with a leisurely grace, took off her red slippers. Then she removed her bonnet. The languid strains of “Swanee River” filling the air began to pick up tempo, build in volume. The belle, who was blond, shoulder-length curls tumbling to lacy shoulders, was rolling down a knee-length silk stocking from a leg extended from under the hoop skirt, foot arched; another slowly peeled stocking fell, and then she stood, stepping ever so ladylike out of her hoop skirt. She was about to step out of her lacy pantaloons as well when somebody tapped me on the shoulder.
“You pay to get in or what?” Jack Barger asked. The balding little Jew with the gone-out cigar in the corner of his mouth and the expensive but slept-in-looking brown suit was the owner of the theater, so he had a right to ask.
“No,” I said. I was standing in back, next to a bored, uniformed usher who was looking at something he’d just picked out of his nose. “I told the girl at the box office I was here to see you.”
Barger put a disgusted look on a puss that was naturally sour anyway, nodded toward the light. “Is that me?”
Across the darkened theater and its bumpy sea of male heads, I could tell at once that the stripper, who was now parading across the stage in lace panties and blue pasties before a cheesy plantation backdrop, was not Jack Barger.
“I’d say no,” I said.
“You ain’t kidding when you claim to be a detective, are you?” he said, typically. Barger was one of those guys whose kidding always seemed to be on the square; I’d known him, casually, for years, but sensed no affection in his sarcasm. If so, it was deep down.
He crooked and wiggled his forefinger at me in a “come along” motion. Though he was barely ten years my senior, he treated me like a kid. But I had a feeling he treated everybody that way.
I followed him through the small, rather bare lobby, with its seedily uniformed ushers and well-stocked concession stand and embarrassed uniformed girl behind it and all-pervasive popcorn smell, toward some stairs. The Rialto, which was on State Street just up the block and around the corner from my office on Van Buren, was the Loop’s only burlesque house. The exterior was flashy enough, with the bright lights and usual promises-CHARMAINE AND HER BROADWAY ROAD SHOW, 250, GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS, with the window-card cheesecake displays and life-size standees to prove it, and of course, on the Rialto screen, this week’s cinema masterpiece, Sinful Souls,ADULTS ONLY. And the promises were pretty much kept, even if the interior was decidedly unracy looking, more along the lines of an unadorned, smallish neighborhood theater. The patrons didn’t mind; like the congregation of a spartanly appointed Protestant church, they didn’t begrudge the lack of a cathedral as long as they could get to heaven.
Judging from how fast and loud the pit band was belting “Swanee River,” now, heaven was well within view.
But not to me. I was following Barger up the jogs of the stairs to the level of purgatory housing his office, a cubbyhole next to the projectionist’s booth.
The office was, like the theater itself, stark-a dark-wood desk and some metal file cabinets and a few framed photos of strippers and baggy-pants comics on one of the pale cream pebbly plaster walls; each and every one of the photos hung crooked.
“You look like something the cat drug in,” Barger said, sitting behind his cluttered desk, lighting up a new cigar. It smelled like wet leaves trying to burn.
I sat across from him, topcoat in my lap. I still had on the suit I’d traveled in, and I didn’t just have bags under my eyes, I had valises. I hadn’t slept well on the plane; the flight had been bumpy, and so were my thoughts regarding my two conflicting clients, Montgomery of SAG and Bioff of the IATSE.