When the union was finally re-opened, however, Jake was no longer treasurer. He was still involved in the rackets, though, selling punchboards, working for Ben “Zuckie the Bookie” Zuckerman, with a short time out for a wartime stint in the Air Force. He went to Dallas, I’ve heard, as representative of Chicago mob interests there, winding up running some strip joints. Rumor has it he was involved in other cover-ups, over the years.
By that time, of course, Jake was better known as Jack.
And he’d shortened his last name to Ruby.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
“Scrap” is primarily based upon newspaper research, but I should also acknowledge Maxwell Street (1977) by Ira Berkow; and The Plot to Kill the President (1981) by G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings.
NATURAL DEATH INC.
She’d been pretty, once. She was still sexy, in a slutty way, if you’d had enough beers and it was just before closing time.
Kathleen O’Meara, who ran the dingy dive that sported her last name, would have been a well-preserved fifty, if she hadn’t been forty. But I knew from the background materials I’d been provided that she was born in 1899, here in the dirt-poor Irish neighborhood of Cleveland known as the Angles, a scattering of brick and frame dwellings and businesses at the north end of 25th Street in the industrial flats.
Kathleen O’Meara’s husband, Frank, had been dead barely a month now, but Katie wasn’t wearing black: her blouse was white with red polka dots, a low-cut peasant affair out of which spilled well-powdered, bowling ball-size breasts. Her mouth was a heavily red-rouged chasm within which gleamed white storebought choppers; her eyes were lovely, within their pouches, long-lashed and money-green.
“What’s your pleasure, handsome?” she asked, her soprano voice musical in a calliope sort of way, a hint of Irish lilt in it.
I guess I was handsome, for this crowd anyway, six feet, one-hundred-eighty pounds poured into threadbare mismatched suitcoat and pants, a wilted excuse for a fedora snugged low over my reddish brown hair, chin and cheeks stubbled with two days growth, looking back at myself in the streaked smudgy mirror behind the bar. A chilly March afternoon had driven better than a dozen men inside the shabby walls of O’Meara’s, where a churning exhaust fan did little to stave off the bouquet of stale smoke and beer-soaked sawdust.
“Suds is all I can afford,” I said.
“There’s worse ways to die,” she said, eyes sparkling.
“Ain’t been reduced to canned heat yet,” I admitted.
At least half of he clientele around me couldn’t have made that claim; while those standing at the bar, with a foot on the rail like me, wore the sweatstained workclothes that branded them employed, the men hunkered at tables and booths wore the tattered rags of the derelict. A skinny dark-haired dead-eyed sunken-cheeked barmaid in an off-white waitress uniform was collecting empty mugs and replacing them with foaming new ones.
The bosomy saloonkeeper set a sloshing mug before me. “Railroad worker?”
I sipped; it was warm and bitter. “Steel mill. Pretty lean in Gary; heard they was hiring at Republic.”
“That was last month.”
“Yeah. Found that out in a hurry.”
She extended a pudgy hand. “Kathleen O’Meara, at your service.”
“William O’Hara,” I said. Nathan Heller, actually. The Jewish last name came from my father, but the Irish mug that was fooling the saloonkeeper was courtesy of my mother.
“Two O’s, that’s us,” she grinned; that mouth must have have been something, once. “My pals call me Katie. Feel free.”
“Well, thanks, Katie. And my pals call me Bill.” Nate.
“Got a place to stay, Bill?”
“No. Thought I’d hop a freight tonight. See what’s shakin’ up at Flint.”
“They ain’t hiring up there, neither.”
“Well, I dunno, then.”
“I got rooms upstairs, Bill.”
“Couldn’t afford it, Katie.”
“Another mug?”
“Couldn’t afford that, either.”
She winked. “Handsome, you got me wrapped around your little pinkie, ain’t ya noticed?”
She fetched me a second beer, then attended to the rest of her customers at the bar. I watched her, feeling both attracted and repulsed; what is it about a beautiful woman run to fat, gone to seed, that can still summon the male in a man?
I was nursing the second beer, knowing that if I had enough of these I might do something I’d regret in the morning, when she trundled back over and leaned on the bar with both elbows.
“A room just opened up. Yours, if you want it.”
“I told ya, Katie, I’m flat-busted.”
“But I’m not,” she said with a lecherous smile, and I couldn’t be sure whether she meant money or her billowing powdered bosoms. “I could use a helpin’ hand around here…. I’m a widow lady, Bill, runnin’ this big old place by her lonesome.”
“You mean sweep up and do dishes and the like.”
Her cute nose wrinkled as if a bad smell had caught its attention; a little late for that, in this joint. “My daughter does most of the drudgery.” She nodded toward the barmaid, who was moving througthe room like a zombie with a beer tray. “Wouldn’t insult ya with woman’s work, Bill…. But there’s things only a man can do.”
She said “things” like “tings.”
“What kind of things?”
Her eyes had a twinkle, like broken glass. “Things…. Interested?”
“Sure, Katie.”
And it was just that easy.
Three days earlier, I had been seated at a conference table in the spacious dark-wood and pebbled-glass office of the Public Safety Director in Cleveland’s City Hall.
“It’s going to be necessary to swear you in as a part of my staff,” Eliot Ness said.
I had known Eliot since we were both teenagers at the University of Chicago. I’d dropped out, finished up at a community college and gone into law enforcement; Eliot had graduated and became a private investigator, often working for insurance companies. Somewhere along the way, we’d swapped jobs.
His dark brown hair brushed with gray at the temples, Eliot’s faintly freckled, boyish good looks were going puffy on him, gray eyes pouchy and marked by crow’s feet. But even in his late thirties, the former Treasury agent who had been instrumental in Al Capone’s fall was the youngest Public Safety Director in the nation.
When I was on the Chicago P.D., I had been one of the few cops Eliot could trust for information; and when I opened up the one-man A-1 Detective Agency, Eliot had returned the favor as my only trustworthy source within the law enforcement community. I had remained in Chicago and he had gone on to more government crimebusting in various corners of the Midwest, winding up with this high profile job as Cleveland’s “top cop”; since 1935, he had made national headlines cleaning up the police department, busting crooked labor unions and curtailing the numbers racket.
Eliot was perched on the edge of the table, a casual posture at odds with his three-piece suit and tie. “Just a formality,” he explained. “I caught a little heat recently from the City Council for hiring outside investigators.”
I’d been brought in on several other cases, over the past five or six years.
“It’s an undercover assignment?”
He nodded. “Yes, and I’d love to tackle it myself, but I’m afraid at this point, even in the Angles, this puss of mine is too well-known.”
Eliot, a boyhood Sherlock Holmes fan, was not one to stay behind his desk; even as Public Safety Director, he was known to lead raids, wielding an ax, and go undercover, in disguise.
I said, “You’ve never been shy about staying out of the papers.”
I was one of the few people who could make a crack like that and not get a rebuke; in fact, I got a little smile out of the stone face.