I knew she wanted to talk—had to talk—so I let her; she couldn’t know how goddamn lousy she was making me feel, for my role in making her ordeal even harder.
“I knew Bill said he had an appointment, at seven, but he also said he’d stop at home, and grab a bite to eat if there was time. I was preparing a little something in the kitchen, just a sandwich he could take with him…. Then when it was almost seven, I thought—maybe he’d gone on to that appointment…. Still, something seemed wrong, and finally I got a little flashlight and went out to the garage.”
She had found Bill there, sitting in the Caddy, covered in blood, torn by bullets, and her scream had summoned Bill’s seventy-six-year-old mother, and several other family members—all of whom were subjected to that terrible scene.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You have nothing to be sorry about, Nate.”
Well….
She looked at me with weary, dazed eyes. “Bill thought the world of you. But I want you to know—I don’t expect you to do anything about this.”
“Annabel—”
“Please understand—I anticipated this. I feared it for a long, long time. But Bill had absolutely no fear. I never pried into his business affairs. That’s why we had a happy married life. I let him tell me only as much as he wanted to.”
The trimly attractive, fortyish widow was calm, tearless— a mix of shock and resignation…and probably a weird sense of relief. In a way, a long personal siege of terror had finally ended.
“Annabel—Bill kept diaries, notebooks.”
“I know.”
“Do you have them?”
“No. He kept them in a desk in his den—they filled a whole drawer. I have no idea what was in them, and he took them with him on the day…on that last day.”
“You don’t know where they are, where he took them—who might have them?”
“No. No idea.” She looked at me, searchingly. “Nate—you’re not going to get involved, are you?”
“I am involved. Why, should we leave this to Tubbo Gilbert and the police department?”
A tiny bitter smile etched itself in one corner of her mouth. “They won’t find his killers. They won’t even look. But, Nate— how can you even know where to start? Bill was a one-man crusade, and he made a lot of enemies in his twenty-six years on the force.”
Annabel didn’t know I’d been at the scene of her husband’s death, not to mention the shooting of Bas on that desolate street, half an hour later. No one but me did, except those two assassins…although since I hadn’t recognized them, perhaps they didn’t know me from Adam, either.
I had told no one, certainly not Tubbo when he came around to the office to question me the day after the shootings, not even Lou Sapperstein and certainly not anyone connected to the Kefauver staff. A few colored witnesses in Little Hell had seen a white man leaving the scene, but no one reported my firing at the maroon coupe, and no one contributed a description of my Olds, much less its license number. My fedora had been found, giving the crack sleuths of the Chicago P.D. and the State’s Attorney’s office my hat size to go on.
I was the little man who wasn’t there—a role at which I’d become adept. But who the hell were those mustached assassins? They had been young—mid-to late twenties, well dressed—but nonetheless cold-blooded pros who knew their way around firearms and were unperturbed about the notion of pulling off back-to-back hits. Out of town talent, almost certainly—hired by Charley Fischetti, who had skipped in anticipation of the heat the two murders would stir up.
The day after the news got around, just about every other major hoodlum in town had skipped, as well. In the papers the morning after the murders, Kefauver—in Kansas City holding hearings—was quoted as saying the Drury and Bas hits “showed the savagery of Chicago gangland. There is no doubt that the slaying of our key witness, former police lieutenant William Drury, is a brutal attempt to thwart our investigation.”
Kefauver—who rejected Tubbo’s claim that the Drury and Bas murders were “unrelated”—retaliated by turning over more than a dozen subpoenas to the U.S. Marshal’s office in Chicago. But the small army of servers discovered that the mansions and penthouse apartments of such Outfit luminaries as Jake Guzik, Tony Accardo, Paul Ricca, and (of course) the Fischetti brothers contained only servants and the occasional wife.
Even the relatively modest yellow-brick bungalow of Sam “Mooney” Giancana, in Oak Park—well, it did take up a corner lot and had a lavishly landscaped lawn—had been bereft of Sicilians. With the exception of a handful who had already been served, the local mobsters had flown the coop.
After the funeral, out in front of the massive cathedral, the fall breeze had teeth that made me turn up the collars of my London Fog. Lee Mortimer—in a charcoal suit and silk light blue tie, under a lighter gray topcoat with a black fur collar (a coat that cost no more than a good used Buick)—had no babe on his arm this time, as he picked his way through the milling crowd and planted himself in front of me, like an unwanted tree. Make that shrub.
“My condolences, Nate,” he said. He produced a deck of Chesterfields and offered me one—I declined—and he lit up…no cigarette holder, this time. The smoke curling out his mouth and nostrils seemed about the color of his grayish complexion, while his hair was more a silver gray. He looked like he hadn’t seen the outside of a nightclub since 1934.
I hadn’t replied to his expression of sympathy, which seemed about as sincere as a Fuller Brush salesman’s smile.
“I mean,” he said, with a lift of his shoulders, “I know Bill was your friend. You went way back, right?”
“Right.”
He raised an eyebrow, cocked his head. “I tried to call your office, last week, and you weren’t available. We were going to talk, remember? Maybe do some business? Hope you’re not ducking me.”
“Why, do you bruise easily, Lee?”
“Not really.” He blew a smoke ring, which the wind caught and obliterated. “I have a tough enough hide—but you’re a public figure, these days, with your Hollywood clientele. You don’t want to alienate a nationally syndicated columnist, do you?”
I started walking toward the parking lot, edging through the crowd, and Mortimer tagged along. I said, “Actually, Lee, I looked into that Halley matter for you—the chief counsel’s so-called Hollywood connections? A great big pound of air.”
The hard, tiny eyes slitted and he shook his head, as we moved through the mourners. “Then you didn’t look into it hard enough—there’s a major leak on the Crime Committee, and I swear that clown Halley is it…. You going out to the cemetery?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m gonna pass. But we can still do business, you know.”
“Yeah?”
He put a hand on my shoulder and I stopped to look at him. His grin was wide and ghastly, like a skull’s—this was a man who smiled only when he was wheedling or threatening.
Mortimer whispered: “Bill Drury has ceased to be a source for me—as you may have noticed. I need a new one. His murder gives you the perfect ‘in’ with the Crime Committee…. Halley’s turned Estes against me, and—”
I removed his hand as if it were a bug that had settled on my shoulder. “You really think this funeral’s a good place to recruit Bill Drury’s replacement?”
The hearse was gliding by, cars falling in line for the procession to Mt. Carmel cemetery.
“I mean no offense to the dead,” Mortimer said, “but you’re smarter than my previous source. You know what his motto was?”
Actually, I did.
But Mortimer said it: “‘A coward dies a thousand deaths, a brave man only one.’ A man who sees himself as a hero is a fool, Nate. You, on the other hand, are one tough, shrewd, manipulative son of a bitch.”