I felt a strange pang; a sense of loss. Funny.
“I’m talking about our buddy from pickpocket-detail days,” Lou said. “Bill Drury.”
Drury. That lovable hard-ass.
“I should’ve guessed,” I said. “He always has had a hard-on against the Outfit. He would get involved in something like this. You said two old friends.”
“What?”
“You said two old friends were going to meet with me about this grand jury deal. Drury, and who else?”
He smiled on one side of his face. “If you were Uncle Sam, and you wanted to convince Nathan Heller to testify, who would you send?”
“Oh, no,” I said.
Lou toasted me with his beer.
“That’s right,” he said. Drank some beer. “Mr. Untouchable himself.”
Eliot Ness.
Eliot was fifteen minutes early.
He walked into the big single-room office-into which he’d walked so often, years before-and the sight of the Murphy bed against the wall, in its long-ago position, and me sitting behind my big old scarred oak desk in my long-ago position, made him smile.
“Isn’t that a Murphy bed?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “There’s a housing shortage. It’s been in all the papers.”
I got up from around the desk and I thought I could make out a slight tightening around his eyes as he got his first good look at me, skinny, gray, sunken-eyed me. I put the sore into sight for sore eyes.
He, on the other hand, looked much the same; a slight salt-and-peppering around the ears was the only noticeable difference. All else was familiar: a comma of dark brown hair falling down on his rather high forehead, a ruddy, handsome six-footer who was pushing forty and didn’t look it, partly due to the trail of freckles across his nose that kept him looking boyish in the face of time.
We shook hands, exchanging grins. His topcoat was over his arm, hat in hand; his gray suit with vest and dark tie was nicely tailored, giving him an executive look. I took the coat and hung it on the tree by the door.
“You look good, Nate.”
“You’re a liar, Eliot.”
“Well, you look good to me. You crazy SOB, what’s a grown man doing fighting a young man’s war?”
SOB was about as blue as Eliot’s language got.
“I’m not fighting it anymore,” I said, and got back behind the desk, gesturing to one of the two waiting chairs I’d placed opposite me in anticipation of my visitors. “What are you doing in Chicago, anyway? Who’s minding the store?”
“If you mean Cleveland,” Eliot said, crossing his legs, resting an ankle on a knee, “I resigned.”
That was a shock; the public safety director slot-which was essentially like being commissioner of both the police and fire departments-was perfect for Eliot. He’d had a lot of glory, a good salary, and accomplished plenty. I thought he’d die in that job, an old bearded public servant.
“First I heard of it,” I said.
“It was while you were away.”
“I knew you’d had that trouble…”
In March of ’42 Eliot had been involved in an auto accident that had found him, wrongly, briefly, accused of a hit-and-run; as a public safety man known for taking a tough stand on traffic violators, Eliot caught a lot of public heat.
“The press never left me alone after that,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact but his expression just barely revealing a buried hurt.
“Fuck ’em! You’ve been their fair-haired boy for years. You were cleared, weren’t you? Goddamn newspapers. Why couldn’t the bastards give you a fair shake…?”
He shrugged. “I think it was the fact that Evie and I had both been drinking. We weren’t drunk, Nate, I swear-but we had been drinking, and, well, you know my reputation as the big-shot prohibition agent. It made me look like a hypocrite.”
“How are you and Evie?”
Evie was his wife; his second wife.
“Not so good,” he admitted. “A little rocky. I’m traveling a lot.”
I was sorry to hear that, and said so. He just shrugged again.
Then I said, “What are you doing these days? Since you’re here to quiz me for the grand jury, I assume you’re back in the law enforcement business. So what is it? Treasury or Justice or what?”
“Nothing so glamorous,” he said, with a chagrined grin.
“Come on. Spill.”
“Actually,” he said, sitting up straight, summoning his self-respect, “it’s a pretty important job. I’m working for the Federal Security Agency. Specifically, the Office of Defense Health and Welfare.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Well,” he said, shrugging, “I’m the Chief Administrator of their Division of Social Protection.”
“What’s that mean?”
“We’re dealing with social problems of the sort that inevitably develop when there’s a rapid expansion of a work force in a community, or a large concentration of armed forces.”
“What are you talking about?”
He pursed his lips, mildly irritated, or was that embarrassment? “I’m talking about safeguarding the health and morale of the armed forces and of workers in defense industry. What do you think I’m talking about?”
“I think you’re talking about VD.”
He sighed; laughed. “I am talking about VD.”
“I think I saw some of your movies while I was in the Corps.”