“Good morning, Mr. Heller.”
“Morning.” I had my hat off; Gladys had long since taught me respect.
Behind her was another wood-and-frosted-glass wall. On the walls to either side hung framed vintage Century of Progress posters, under which resided boxy lime-color wall-snugged couches, a low-slung plywood and aluminum coffee table in front of each, well stocked with various True Detective magazines that featured stories about me.
Gladys and I had never been an item, but after her husband (an operative of mine) had died at Guadalcanal, she and I had finally become friendly. Her smile was genuine as she handed me a pile of mail and magazines.
“Glad to see you drag in,” she said.
“I didn’t have any appointments. Nobody knows I’m back in town.”
“Somebody does. You have an appointment in half an hour with Captain Gilbert.”
“Hell! Why did you take that?”
“I didn’t—he did. His secretary asked if you had a ten o’clock appointment, and I said no, and she said to put Captain Gilbert down and that was that.”
“Damn.”
“And Mr. Sapperstein wants to talk to you.”
I sighed. “Send him over.”
“I can get you some coffee, if that’ll help.”
“No thanks.”
I went through another frosted-glass door out into the bullpen—Lou’s office was straight ahead, door closed. The area was fairly open—I don’t like butting desks up against each other—and (while I was no modernist in Charley Fischetti’s league) the office furniture I’d chosen was the latest stuff: plywood, Fiberglas, perforated aluminum, and wire, sleek and efficient. We were in an ancient building, with foam green plaster walls and dark molding, and I wanted to send a contemporary message.
About half the desks were filled—my ops spent a good share of their time in the field, and of course Drury’s desk was vacant—and I nodded a couple hellos as I headed around to the right, stopped to get a Dixie cup of water from the cooler, then went through the door marked PRIVATE.
I hung up my hat and coat in the closet. My office was a spacious affair with a comfortable couch, padded leather client chairs, wooden file cabinets, and—positioned against the opposite wall to take advantage of the big double bay windows—the mammoth old scarred desk I’d had since the beginning. I wasn’t going to subject myself to any of that atomic age nonsense.
My office walls were decorated with framed, mostly signed photos of celebrities, sometimes with me, sometimes not. A few magazine covers were framed as well—a Real Detective that covered my handling of the Sir Harry Oakes “locked room” murder, a Daring Detective showcasing my cracking of the Peacock homicide, a couple others—an egotistical array, but it impressed clients.
I leaned back in my swivel chair and sipped my water, wondering if Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert—who I’d seen yesterday afternoon, going in for the next appointment with Charley Fischetti—had spotted me, as well.
Two raps on the door announced Sapperstein, who did not wait for a response, just ambled in, shutting the door behind him, and pulled up a chair. He had his suitcoat off, exposing dark suspenders and the rolled-up sleeves of his white shirt; despite this casualness, his royal blue tie wasn’t loosened.
My bald, bespectacled partner—who at sixty could still kick the hell out of most men half his age, belying his librarian looks—said, “Did Gladys mention you’d had a number of phone calls already this morning?”
“She said Tubbo’s secretary called for an appointment.”
He frowned. “Yeah, so I heard—what’s that about?”
“What do you think? Drury. Tubbo’s on his short list, right next to Fischetti.”
“Where is Bill this morning? Not that he’s ever around. Did you ever track him down yesterday? Not to mention our tape recorders.”
“I tracked him down, and he’s not going to be around, other than I hope to bring back those Reveres. I fired him.”
Briefly, I told Lou how I’d caught our operative in the basement of the Barry Apartments.
“Crazy bastard,” Lou said, shaking his head. “He’ll get us all killed before he’s through.”
“No he won’t. He’s not part of the A-1, anymore. We have nothing to do with him and his little war on crime.”
“Let’s see if you can convince Tubbo of that.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I think I convinced Fischetti—or anyway, I thought I had. With Tubbo turning up on my doorstep this morning, who the hell knows?”
That astounded him. “You saw Fischetti yesterday? What, Charley?”
“Charley and Rocco. And Joey, for that matter.”
I gave him the lowdown, quickly—I left out the part about me giving Rocco’s discarded, battered showgirl a lift into the Loop…or that she was still in my residential suite at the St. Clair Hotel. (You’ll get the lowdown on that, in due time. Patience.)
As I wound up my story, Lou lifted a pack of Camels from his breast pocket and lighted up. I could tell he was thinking about how to approach me, on something. Finally he waved out his match and said, “Those other calls I mentioned? They’re all from Robinson—Kefauver’s man.”
“I know who he is.”
Lou’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, you’ve met him?”
“No. But I know who he is.”
“Robinson wants to meet with you. No subpoena—just informal. Over at the Stevens Hotel.”
“I heard they were camped out at the Crime Commission, with Virgil Peterson.”
Lou nodded. “Officially, yes. But they’re using the Stevens for talking to potential witnesses and, uh…”
“Informants?”
He shrugged. “Better a live informant than a dead witness. Anyway, you better get it out of the way. Go over there—see if you can convince them you don’t know jack shit. Head this fucking thing off.”
“You’ve talked to Robinson?”
Lou’s eyes rolled. “Oh, only six or twelve times, about this. You want me to call, and set it up?”
I sighed. Nodded.
“For when?”
“Soon as the hell possible,” I said. “This morning, even—just allow me time to deal with Tubbo.”
Lou nodded, breathed dragon smoke, and rose. Heading for the door, he said, “I’ll take care of it,” and went out.
I was halfway through my mail when Gladys buzzed, and informed me my “ten o’clock” was here. I told her to usher him in, which she did.
“Quite a step up from Van Buren Street,” Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert said jovially, after we’d shook hands and he’d settled into a leather chair across from me.
If Bill Drury was the best-dressed honest cop in town, Dan Gilbert was the best-dressed bent one…which was a bigger distinction, after all.
Pushing sixty, a fleshy six-footer in a three-piece three-hundred-buck double-breasted gray pinstripe suit with a blood-drop ruby stickpin in his gray-and-blue tie and several diamond-and-gold rings on various pudgy fingers, Tubbo sat with an ankle on a knee and his pearl gray homburg in his lap. His keg of a head sat on an ample double chin, and his dark eyes in their pouches were sharp with cunning if not quite intelligence. His nose was flat and pointed, like Jack Frost’s icicle snout starting to melt; his chin cleft, a Kirk Douglas dimple; his hair neatly combed salt-and-pepper, nicely barbered; his eyebrows thick dark slashes that might have been borrowed from Rocco or Charley Fischetti.
“I guess you haven’t been over to our new offices before, Tub,” I said, leaning back in the swivel chair, arms folded, giving him a faint meaningless smile.
“You should come over to my suite at the Sherman,” he said. “Very nice. Nothing like an office with room service.”
Tubbo was on leave of absence from the State’s Attorney’s office, for the duration of his campaign for sheriff—not that he’d ever spent much time at the office out of which he supposedly supervised one hundred detectives.