Paul said he’d had a fire in his previous building. He inquired about fire exits. The superintendent showed him the back stairs: fire stairs that went down to a steel door on the ground floor at the rear of the building. It gave out onto an alley cluttered with trash cans. You could open the door from inside without a key but you couldn’t enter from outside without one; the outside had no handle and there were steel buffer plates grooved into the doorframe to prevent a burglar from slipping the lock with plastic or wire.
He spent the rest of the afternoon preparing the remainder of his cover. He ordered cheap printed stationery and a few rubber stamps, mailing envelopes, a postage meter, a second-hand typewriter, a packet of stick-on address labels, a small bag filled with office miscellany: paper clips and ballpoint pens, cellotape, manila file folders. Then he went up State Street to a card shop and bought twenty dollars’ worth of assorted greeting cards.
He stopped at a public booth and called the telephone company; gave the name and previous address and phone number of his brother-in-law in New Jersey and asked the company to connect the telephone in his new office. The appointment was made for Monday morning.
Neuser Studios was born. At half past four he returned to the flyspecked office and distributed his office supplies, wearing rubber kitchen gloves he’d bought in a variety store on his way back from State Street. He slipped one greeting card into each manila folder and stacked them all in the filing cabinet. He set up the old typewriter on the desk and screwed light bulbs into the fixtures.
He’d spent nearly three hundred dollars including the rent and security. It was for the single purpose of establishing a hiding place for the guns.
He could no longer afford to have the guns in his apartment, nor even in his car when he left it unattended. When he began work at Childress his apartment and car would be empty all day long: suspicion might lead Mastro’s troops in his direction and he could afford to take no chances; his apartment and car might be searched.
At the other end of the investigation it was possible they’d canvass arms dealers; there might be ten thousand .38 Centennials in the Chicago area but there was the remote possibility they’d question Truett in the Wisconsin gun shop and find out that Robert Neuser had bought the two pistols there. They’d start hunting for Neuser then. They’d find him listed in an office on Grand Avenue and they’d search the office, and they’d find the guns.
But they wouldn’t connect Neuser with Paul. He must never leave a single fingerprint in the office or indeed anywhere in the building.
Or on the guns.
He cleaned both of them, oiled them and wiped them down. He wiped the cleaning kit as well; then put kit and both guns in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. It had no lock and there was always the chance a burglar would break into the place and steal the guns but if that happened it would do Paul no real harm; it might even provide a red herring for the police to chase, if the burglar used the stolen guns.
In any case he could always buy another gun.
When he returned to the street it was dark and the rush-hour traffic was diminishing. He got his car out of the parking garage and turned north toward Irene’s apartment.
28
¶ CHICAGO, JAN. 3RD—A twelve-year-old boy shot and wounded his sixth-grade teacher yesterday when she scolded him for classroom misbehavior, Chicago police reported.
¶ CHICAGO, JAN. 3RD—When a robber with his hand in his coat pocket threatened to shoot a CTA bus driver if the farebox wasn’t handed over, the bus driver shot him.
The robber proved to be unarmed.
The robber carried no identification. He died at County Hospital without regaining consciousness after emergency surgery.
“He said he had a gun in his pocket,” said the driver, James Sweet, 31, of 3108 W. Beach. “I didn’t aim to be another dead robbery victim.”
CTA regulations prohibit transit employees from carrying guns. “But I’d rather be fired and alive than employed and dead,” Sweet said. “As far as I was concerned it was my life or my job.”
Sweet said he had been carrying the gun since he first heard about the vigilante.
The robber boarded Sweet’s Number 46 bus on Western Avenue near Addison and began to threaten Sweet as soon as the doors closed, Sweet said. There were no other passengers on the bus. Sweet immediately activated the secret distress signal which has been installed on all CTA buses, but no police responded immediately to the alarm.
“He gave me no choice,” Sweet said. “I don’t carry a key to the farebox. I couldn’t hand it over. And even if I could, why should I?”
Sweet has been a bus driver for seven years. “It’s been getting worse and worse,” he said. “Drivers get knocked over nearly every day now.”
The robber, described as being in his early twenties, is being investigated through fingerprint identification.
A CTA spokesman said Sweet would not be suspended or dismissed immediately; a decision is forthcoming, he said, pending departmental investigation.
No criminal charges have been brought.
29
COOK COUNTY Juvenile Court was housed in a long flat dark building, square and stylelessly modern; it was five stories high and might have been a factory or a company headquarters, or a leprosarium. It fronted on the point of an acutely triangular block, bias-cut by the diagonal slash of Ogden Avenue.
Ogden’s Route 66 truck traffic rumbled past steadily. Paul turned out of the stream and parked on Hamilton Avenue opposite the side entrance of the Juvenile Court.
The sky had thickened and gone pewter. Snow that had fallen in December remained in the park and on the curbs; there had been no thaw. At intervals while he waited he started the engine and ran up the heater until the interior of the car grew uncomfortably hot; then he sat in stillness while the cold pried its way through the sealed windows.
He had the newspapers on the seat beside him; he went through them, turning the pages without hurry, keeping one eye on the court building. The car radio oozed wallpaper music as viscous as syrup but he didn’t bother to change the station; it kept him company without calling attention to itself and he had distractions enough: he kept thinking of Irene.
He’d made a few unusual preparations. He’d smeared the car’s license plates, front and back, with oil and dirt to render them unreadable. He’d bought a winter hat, a Russian sort of thing with earflaps; when pulled down tight it covered everything above his eyes and behind his ears. He’d bought an oversize pair of sunglasses—the mirrored ones, motorcycle goggle-style. And he’d pasted to his upper lip a bushy mustache from a theatrical supply shop. It had occurred to him that if he were to stalk them in daylight he must run the risk of being seen. That was all right but he wanted them to remember the hat, the goggles and the mustache.
The goggles and hat rested on the seat under the newspapers. The flat little .25 automatic was in his hip pocket; the .38 Centennial was clipped under the car seat where he could reach it fast.
A patrol car crunched past and stopped at the courthouse door. A cop and a man in a business suit escorted two youths from the cruiser into the building; the cop returned in a few moments and drove away. Paul looked at his watch: 9:45.
A number of people drifted into the building in the course of the next quarter hour. Paul watched them with distracted mild interest; his mind was on Irene. He kept picturing her laugh, the way her hips moved when she walked, the characteristic glint of secret amusement behind her long eyes.