"Compared to what, Sam?" Ness asked innocently.
Wild gestured over his shoulder with a thumb. "I was just over at the jail. Now I'll tell you what you already know, 'cause your fine hand is obvious in this: those smelly fuckin' bums you rousted on the Kingsbury Run case, there must be fifty or sixty of 'em, are sharing a cell with Big Jim and Little Jim, still decked out in their finery for that parade they put on today."
"No kidding."
"I never smelled anything so bad as those bums packed together in that holding tank. Pee-you! What a foul stench. And then somebody turned on the steam in the cell block, full blast. Every radiator in the joint was going."
Ness shrugged, "It is cool, for August."
"I mean, those guys smelled bad enough, before they got sweated out. And all the while Caldwell and McFate are going fuckin' nuts. They're screaming their lungs out. They look like a couple of corsages that got left out in the rain."
"I'm sure their lawyers will get them out soon enough."
"I'm sure. But oh you gave me a good laugh-and a great punch line for my story on the 'big parade.' They thought they were making suckers out of you, but they forgot the golden rule."
"Golden rule?"
"PT. Barnum's. There's one born every minute. They made a sap out of you, but you made bigger saps out of them. My hat's off to you."
Ness leaned back in the chair. "I can't take credit for having the steam turned on."
"I'm sure that was that kid Al Curry's idea. He was hanging around, watching 'em like they was monkeys in the zoo. And they're grabbing onto the front bars like they are monkeys, too, in their wilted monkey suits."
Ness smiled and sighed. "I do wish I could see it."
Wild hauled himself up out of the chair, stretched, yawned. "Well, hell, they're probably sprung by now. Anyway, I got a story to write-thanks to you."
"Don't mention it. Have you, uh, talked to that Teamster yet?"
"Whitehall? Yeah. We made contact. You want details?"
"No."
Wild smirked. "Didn't think so. Why do I have the idea that you put the two of us together 'cause you think we share a common bond?"
"And what bond would that be?"
"Whitehall and me, we ain't either of us adverse to breaking a rule or two."
"Sam, I was just giving you a lead on what might make a good sidebar piece. Human interest."
"Right. I don't know what I was thinking of. Nothing you do ever's got an ulterior motive, does it?"
Wild tipped his straw fedora to the safety director, and slipped out into the hall; the press room was just down and across the way.
Ness went back to his desk and looked over the traffic statistics he'd need to be familiar with on the official leg of his Buffalo trip. He was just setting the material aside when he heard a commotion in his outer office. He rose and went to the door and peeked out on a room as large as his own; it was here that his secretary and several clerks kept desks and tended files, and responded to citizens who walked up to the wide counter with a complaint or request.
The two citizens who had bellied up to this bar had a complaint.
They were Big Jim Caldwell and Little Jim McFate, and they were still in their tuxes, although their top hats were long since abandoned and they looked like figures from a wedding cake-a stale one. Their finery looked wrinkled, withered, unwashed; their hair clung tight and yet haphazardly to their scalps, where it had dried after the drenching of sweat from the steamy jail cell.
And they smelled very bad indeed. They carried a cloud of body odor with them like a loser carried bad luck.
"We demand to see the safety director!" Caldwell was shouting. His voice was hoarse, his face devoid of blood. Next to him, horse-faced, morose McFate was trembling with rage, like a child on the verge of tears.
The women in the outer office were taken aback by this loud, unsightly, malodorous intrusion-even Ness's efficient, redheaded secretary Wanda, who usually could ward off the most insistent and obnoxious constituent without batting an eye.
"You can't see Mr. Ness without an appointment," she was saying.
Ness stepped out into the outer office just far enough to be seen, smiled benignly and said, "Send the gentlemen in, Miss Goodson. They're old friends of mine."
He went into his office and stood with his arms folded, waiting. When the gamy, bedraggled pair entered- Caldwell first, McFate shutting the door rattlingly behind them-Ness gestured to two chairs at a nearby conference table.
Caldwell gestured no, with a violent motion. He said, "You think you're pretty goddamn cute."
"Frankly," Ness said pleasantly, "my being cute never occurred to me. My mother's accused me of that, from time to time, but just about nobody else ever has."
Caldwell pointed a finger like a gun; he said, through clenched teeth, "We can take anything you can dish out, pally, and throw it right back at you!"
"Oh," Ness said, sitting on the edge of the conference table, "I didn't realize that's why you dropped by."
"What?" Caldwell said.
"To confess. I can get my secretary in here and you can make a formal statement. You can begin with the Gordon's extortion and vandalism and work backward…"
Caldwell sneered. "You don't need your girl, because we're not here to confess to shit. We came to say that you, Mayor Burton, and the Chamber of Commerce, and all the fat-cat industrialists in the city, are trying to ruin the labor movement. Well, it won't work, pally."
"Mr. Caldwell. Mr. McFate. If you have anything to do with the labor movement, that fact hasn't come to my attention as yet. And I've been examining your activities rather closely, gentlemen."
"Bring on your investigations," Caldwell said derisively, "bring on your indictments. You're bluffing. You haven't got a thing on us."
Ness said nothing; he just smiled blandly at the two disheveled men.
"Go ahead," McFate said, stepping forward ominously. "Do your worst, big shot."
"You boys have courage coming up here," Ness said. "I'll give you that."
"It's not courage," Caldwell said. "It's conviction. You're just part of the national attack on all labor by the moneyed interests, trying to weaken the movement by attacking aggressive leadership like us."
"Why don't you save the bullshit for the rank and file," Ness said coldly. "Although I doubt very many of them are buying it these days. Maybe you can find a paper to peddle it to."
Caldwell moved dangerously close to Ness. The stocky man's eyes were hard behind the wire-framed glasses. He said, "If you attack us like this again, pally, we'll stop you. Whatever it takes."
McFate said, "We'll stop you, you little prick."
"Boys," Ness said, going to his side door, opening it, and gesturing gently with one hand for them to make use of the exit, "haven't you heard about people in glass houses?"
They had no answer to that.
Gathering what remained of their dignity, but leaving a good deal of the smell behind, Big Jim and Little Jim stormed out. Ness shut the door hard on them-but not so hard as to break the pebbled glass. He'd hate like hell to have to replace it right now.
CHAPTER 12
Sam Wild was nervous.
He wasn't a nervous man by disposition. In fact, he took most everything in stride; when you'd worked as many beats as he had, from politics to police, from four-alarm fires to auto fatalities, not much of anything shook you.
Tonight, he was shaking. Gently, but shaking, the match with which he was lighting his Lucky Strike trembling as if in a breeze, only there wasn't a breeze. It was a night (just after ten P.M.) as hot and dry as the back room of a bakery. The reporter was parked on East Seventeenth in a Chevy sedan that belonged to his paper, waiting for Jack Whitehall, the hard-nosed Teamster organizer who, it turned out, was a friend of Ness.