“Don’t compare them to Nitti and Guzik. Those guys went straight, Nate.”
“Please. I just ate. Moran got busted on a counterfeit railroad-bond scam just last week.”
“Nobody’s perfect. Nate, it’s for the best. Think of your old man.”
“Don’t do that to me, Jake. I don’t exactly think your union is what my pop had in mind when he was handing out pamphlets on Maxwell Street.”
“Well, it’s all that stands between the working stiffs and the Billy Skidmores.”
“I take it you know where Martin is hiding out.”
“Yeah. That secretary of his, her mother has a house in Hinsdale. Lemme give you the address…”
“Okay, Jake. It’s against my better judgment, but okay…”
It took an hour to get there by car. Well after dark. Hinsdale was a quiet, well-fed little suburb, and the house at 409 Walnut Street was a two-story number in the midst of a healthy lawn. The kind of place the suburbs are full of, but which always seem shockingly sprawling to city boys like yours truly.
There were a few lights on, downstairs. I walked up onto the porch and knocked. I was unarmed. Probably not wise, but I was.
The secretary answered the door. Cracked it open.
She didn’t recognize me at first.
“I’m here about our dinner date,” I said.
Then, in relief, she smiled, opened the door wider.
“You’re Mr. Heller.”
“That’s right. I never did get your name.”
“Then how did you find me?”
“I had your address. I just didn’t get your name.”
“Well, it’s Nancy. But what do you want, Mr. Heller?”
“Make it Nate. It’s cold. Could I step in?”
She swallowed. “Sure.”
I stepped inside; it was a nicely furnished home, but obviously the home of an older person: the doilies and ancient photo portraits were a dead giveaway.
“This is my mother’s home,” she said. “She’s visiting relatives. I live here.”
I doubted that; the commute would be impossible. If she didn’t live with Martin, in his nifty little bungalow on South Wolcott, I’d eat every doilie in the joint.
“I know that John Martin is here,” I said. “Jake Rubinstein told me. He asked me to stop by.”
She didn’t know what to say to that.
Martin stepped out from a darkened doorway into the living room. He was in rolled-up shirt sleeves and no tie. He looked frazzled. He had the gun in his hand.
“What do you want?” he said. His tone was not at all friendly.
“You’re making too big a deal out of this,” I said. “There’s no reason to go on the lam. This is just another union shooting-the papers’re full of ’em.”
“I don’t shoot a man every day,” Martin said.
“I’m relieved to hear that. How about putting the heater away, then?”
Martin sneered and tossed the piece on a nearby floral couch. He was a nasty man to have a nice girl like this. But then, so often nice girls do like nasty men.
I took it upon myself to sit down. Not on the couch: on a chair, with a soft seat and curved wooden arms.
Speaking of curves, Nancy, who was wearing a blue print dress, was standing wringing her hands, looking about to cry.
“I could use something to drink,” I said, wanting to give her something to do.
“Me too,” Martin said. “Beer. For him, too.”
“Beer would be fine,” I said, magnanimously.
She went into the kitchen.
“What’s Jake’s idea?” Martin asked.
I explained that Jake was afraid the union would be steam-rolled by crooked cops and political fixers, should this shooting blow into something major, first in the papers, then in the courts.
“Jake wants you to mend fences with Cooke. Put together some story you can both live with. Then find some way you can run the union together, or pay him off or something.”
“Fuck that shit!” Martin said. He stood up. “What’s wrong with that little kike, has he lost his marbles?”
“A guy who works on the West Side,” I said, “really ought to watch his goddamn mouth where the Jew-baiting’s concerned.”
“What’s it to you? You’re Irish.”
“Does Heller sound Irish to you? Don’t let the red hair fool you.”
“Well fuck you, too, then. Cooke’s a lying little kike, and Jake’s still in bed with him. Damn! I thought I could trust that little bastard…”
“I think you can. I think he’s trying to hold your union together, with spit and rubber bands. I don’t know if it’s worth holding together. I don’t know what you’re in it for-maybe you really care about your members, a little. Maybe it’s the money. But if I were you, I’d do some fast thinking, put together a story you can live with and let Jake try to sell it to Cooke. Then when the dust settles you’ll still have a piece of the action.”
Martin walked over and pointed a thick finger at me. “I don’t believe you, you slick son of a bitch. I think this is a set-up. Put together to get me to come in, give myself up and go straight to the lock-up, while Jake and Cooke tuck the union in their fuckin’ belt!”
I stood. “That’s up to you. I was hired to deliver a message. I delivered it. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
He thumped his finger in my chest. “You tell that little kike Rubinstein for me that…”
I smacked him.
He don’t go down, but it backed him up. He stood there looking like a confused bear and then growled and lumbered at me with massive fists out in front, ready to do damage.
So I smacked the bastard again, and again. He went down that time. I help him up. He swung clumsily at me, so I hit him in the side of the face and he went down again. Stayed down.
Nancy came in, a glass of beer in either hand, and said, “What…?” Her brown eyes wide.
“Thanks,” I said, taking one glass, chugging it. I wiped the foam off my face with the back of a hand and said, “I needed that.”
And I left them there.
The next morning, early, while I was still at the Morrison, shaving in fact, the phone rang.
It was Jake.
“How did it go last night?” he asked.
I told him.
“Shit,” he said. “I’ll still talk to Cooke, though. See if I can’t cool this down some.”
“I think it’s too late for that.”
“Me too,” Jake said glumly.
Martin came in on Saturday; gave himself up to Tubbo Gilbert. Stege was off the case. The story Martin told was considerably different from Cooke’s: he said Cooke was in the office using the phone (“Which he had no right to do!”) and Martin told him to leave; Cooke started pushing Martin around, and when Martin fought back, Cooke drew a gun. Cooke (according to Martin) hit him over the head with it and knocked him down. Then Cooke supposedly hit him with the gun again and Martin got up and they struggled and the gun went off. Three times.
The gun was never recovered. If it was really Cooke’s gun, of course, it would have been to Martin’s advantage to produce it; but he didn’t.
Martin’s claim that Cooke attacked and beat him was backed up by the fact that his face was badly bruised and battered. So I guess I did him a favor, beating the shit out of him.
Martin was placed under bond on a charge of intent to kill. Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert, representing the state’s attorney’s office, confiscated the charter of the union, announcing that it had been run “purely as a racket.” Shutting it down until such time that “the actual working members of the union care to continue it, and elect their own officers.”
That sounded good in the papers, but in reality it meant Skidmore and company had been served.
I talked to Stege about it, later, over coffee and bagels in the Dill Pickle deli below my office on Van Buren.
“Tubbo was telling the truth about the union being strictly a racket,” Stege said. “They had a thousand members paying two bucks a head a month. Legitimate uses counted for only seven hundred bucks’ worth a month. Martin’s salary, for example, was only a hundred-twenty bucks.”
“Well he’s shit out of luck, now,” I said.
“He’s still got his position at the Sanitary District,” Stege said. “Of course, he’s got to beat the rap for the assault to kill charge, first…” Stege smiled at the thought. “And Mr. Cooke tells a more convincing story than Martin does.”