As I listened to the new tales of navigating his business around our city officials and police force, I thought as I usually did that Blackjack might step across the line someday and become fresh quarry I might be sent out to find, haul in and put behind bars. With his temperament, he could even commit a hanging offense. He’d make a fine trophy, a great shaggy head to put on the wall, but I enjoyed his company, so maybe instead he’d live to be an old man, ripe from his privateering. Unlikely as it seemed, seated listening to him, death in bed was a possibility. If it came to that, a man was long out of the game.
When my turn to bend ears came I was prepared, and said, “I saw The Fin last week.”
“No kidding? He out of jail or—”
“Walking the streets like a white man.”
The Fin was a local boy no one could find a use for until Blackjack came along with an angle, sending the kid armed with folding money into the waterfront speaks. Gin flowed until a sizeable crew sailed under all sheets, then some tougher members on Blackjack’s payroll would appear, load them into trucks and drive boldly through the strike lines on the docks. The shanghais could unload cargo all day to pay off their binge and be driven back out come nightfall, or walk away right then across the lines of maddened union men armed with clubs and shivs. The arithmetic was simple enough.
If I heard the kid tell it once, though, I heard it a hundred times, how when he was in short pants growing up out in the Mission, his family marched to the top of Bernal Hill with a picnic basket day after day and watched San Francisco burn in the distance. The whole downtown was brand spanking new, a land of opportunity, that’s all The Fin ever talked about. You’d think someone with one grand idea like that might have others, but that was as far as the kid’s intellect wandered. At the height of his success recruiting for Blackjack one morning he walked into an Italian grocer’s with a rod and boosted the till for close to an even fin. When he returned to that very same store in the early evening to buy tobacco, of course the old coot recognized him and managed to pull out a shotgun. The grocer held him arms high for the police instead of blasting him, which was a break, but that’s where The Fin picked up his moniker, which he hated. The kid could never see the humor in the situation.
The wheels were turning in Blackjack’s head, figuring out some new purpose for The Fin when he found him. To Jerome the kid was like a box of matches, waiting to be slipped opened and burnt a stick at a time until the fire was all gone. The box must not be empty yet, with The Fin still walking around and breathing.
“Say,” Blackjack said, reminded of old times, “do you remember those guys horsing around in the blood?”
“Sure.”
Dawn was just breaking on East Street when we had come across a group of our strike-breakers, squatting around in a circle. Blackjack and I had strolled over to see what the action might be. On the pavement gleamed a fresh splash of blood, and a couple of the crew used sticks to play Tic Tac Toe in it while the others gambled on the outcome.
“It helps,” I added, “to have some boys working for you who know how to keep themselves entertained.”
Blackjack laughed in agreement. He loved that particular strike, because he came out on top, with lots of stories everyone liked to hear.
Scraping back our chairs, we tossed some coins on the table for the luncheon and stepped out the door. As we hit the sidewalk I saw a face float by in the crowd that rang some kind of bell for me. Why was this mug sticking in my mind? Yeah. I had it. Oak Park.
“Catch you later, Jack. I just spotted a bird whose feathers may need picking.”
I fell into step with Riordan, a shadow two dozen paces back, intent on hanging at his heels until I determined what he was up to in my burg. I wasn’t sure if Danny Riordan’s rep had traveled to the coast, but his face once decorated the Chicago papers for a couple of weeks when I worked out of that branch. A banker over in Oak Park had hired a rival agency to guard jewels and other presents bought for his daughter’s wedding, but the operative working the perimeter had been run down and killed. At least he’d gotten a couple of rounds snapped out of his gun before they plowed him over. Riordan was the inside man for Burns, and he was found with a lump on his noggin, his unsmoked pistol in a side holster. The jewels were gone and I had never heard of a recovery.
The whole set-up sounded hinkey, but the DA couldn’t convince himself to charge Riordan with a crime. After a brief stir he was clear, though the Burns management allowed him to take his services elsewhere. It was a black mark for Burns, the sort of affair that made all of us in the business look bad.
Riordan reached the Powell Street corner just as a cable car was pulling forward, heading north toward the hill. He swung easily onto the front running panel and the gripman allowed the cable to heave the machine ahead. I had to swing out my beefy legs double time to overtake the rear steps and grab the railing, hoping I looked like nothing more sinister than the short fat man I am, anxious to make the train.
As far as I knew, Riordan and I had never crossed paths, so I had an advantage. His photograph was in a thousand newspaper morgues. I’d managed to hold my picture out of the papers by keeping my killings legal.
II
I dropped off the cable car a block after Riordan left it, and had to hustle to pull him back into sight. He’d looked around for tails when he put foot to the pavement, and checked again as he crossed Powell and hoofed west on Clay. I was beginning to feel good about all this exercise. If he thought his movements were worth watching, then maybe he was involved in something I needed to know more about — or he may have been holding on to some basic caution, which you learn as a detective. He didn’t impress me as being someone you could just sap across the head without a single pill fired. I was confident that whoever had insured the banker’s gifts could be talked into picking up the bill on this job.
Riordan went into an apartment house on Clay off Mason. It was barely noon. Odds were good that he wouldn’t come back out instantly, the same odds that told me that if he had gone crooked, chances were he was living off a woman. Most crooks don’t work steadily enough to make rent or even buy smokes, and need that female with a job to baby them along. If he had honest labor, these daylight hours should see him on the stick.
I figured I had some time, and hiked to a phone in the Fairmont and told the operator to ring the agency.
“I need someone to take over on a shadow job. Who’ve you got handy?”
“Everyone else went out on a robbery, but Arney just walked in.”
“He’ll do. Have him meet me in front of the Fairmont. Tell him to hire a taxi and get here quick. And tell him to leave every bullet in his arsenal behind.”
I liked the Arney kid, and was putting in a hand training him. Enthusiastic as hell, he looked on jobs as Wild West Shows, carrying twin .45s and enough extra clips and ammo boxes so that he walked around bowlegged, like he was trying to ride a hog in a trench. You had to explain things to him a few times to make sure he understood — it wasn’t until the war was nearly over that finally he’d changed his name from Von Arnim, tired of taking the ribbing. A new all-American, from his mother’s mouth he was fluent in Yiddish, a common language of the underworld. If we got him trained properly, he’d be good to ship east and work from those offices, a fresh face to send out against crime.
I was lighting another Fatima when he piled out of the taxi.
“Young Wilhelm!” I greeted him.
“Cut it out. My name is Bill now.”
“Sure it is. Come with me, youngster.”