“Then this is about Capone getting out,” I said. “You’re nervous he may’ve found out you were an informer.”
“That is a part of it. And I’ve been told as much, that Capone’s been making noise about me in Alcatraz. But I’m valuable to the Outfit, and am as powerful in my way as any of them.” He sighed. “It’s all rather complex. With Capone’s release, various factions within the Outfit will be jockeying for position.”
We were moving up over a tall traffic bridge, over the railroad yard; then we came down into Chicago, into a factory district.
“What do you want of me?” I asked him.
“I haven’t been an…‘informer,’ as you put it…in years. And my racing interests are quite legal, now. But recently federal agents have tried to contact me, left several messages at my office, asking for information about a small-time thief from my St. Louis days. Apparently somebody told them I’d be willing to talk. This comes at a very bad time indeed!”
We were in a residential area now; occasional bars, mom-and-pop groceries.
“With Capone’s return imminent,” I said, “it’s a very bad time to be renewing your federal acquaintance. Say-the recent problems Billy Skidmore and Moe Annenberg have had with the feds could also be laid at your doorstep-”
Skidmore, scrap-iron dealer and bailbondsman, had run afoul of the Internal Revenue boys; and Moe Annenberg’s nationwide wire service-on Dearborn, around the corner from my office-had just been shut down for good.
“Precisely. And I had nothing to do with either. But I’m afraid some people suspect I may have.”
“Oh?”
“I fear for my life, Nate. I’m being followed. I’m being watched. I’ve taken to staying in a secret little flat in a building I own on the North Side.”
We crossed Pulaski and 22nd Street-renamed Cermak Road, though nobody seemed to call it that yet-into a commercial district. A black Ford coupe, a similar make to O’Hare’s, pulled out from the curb and fell in behind us.
I said, “If it’s a bodyguard you want, I’m not interested.”
“That’s not what I want of you. I wish that simple a remedy were called for. What I want is for you to go to them, the feds in question. Woltz and Bennett, their names are.”
“I don’t know ’em.”
“Neither do I! But you’re Ness’s friend. He’ll vouch for you.”
“He’s not a fed anymore; and he hasn’t been in Chicago in years.”
“I know, I know! He’s in Cleveland, but he’d vouch for you, with them, wouldn’t he? There’s such a thing as telephones.”
“Well, sure…”
“Tell them I’m not interested. Tell them not to call me. Tell them not to leave messages for me.”
“Why don’t you tell them?”
“I’ve had no direct contact with them as yet, and I want to keep it that way.”
We were now in what had been Mayor Cermak’s old turf-some of the storefronts even had lettering in Czech. I’d grown up not far from here, myself-we were just south of Jake Arvey’s territory, where Czech gave way to Yiddish.
“Okay,” I said. “I suppose I could do that.”
“There’s more. I want you to go to Frank Nitti and tell him what you’ve done.”
“Huh?”
He was smiling and it was the oddest damn smile I ever saw: his upper lip was pulled back across his teeth in a display of smugness tinged with desperation. And what he said was everything his smile promised: “As if you’re going behind my back, out of loyalty to him, you go to Nitti and tell him that somebody’s trying to make it look like O’Hare’s informing the feds, but that in fact O’Hare isn’t informing, that he went so far as to instruct you to tell the feds he is not about to do any informing.”
I hate it when people talk about themselves in the third person.
“Why don’t you just go to Nitti yourself?”
“Coming from me, it would be dismissed as self-serving. I might be lying to him. Coming from you, without my knowledge, it can prove my loyalty.”
We went under the El.
“Will you do it?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I don’t want anything to do with Nitti.”
“Nitti likes you. He’ll believe you. He respects you.”
“I don’t know that any of that is true. I’ve had dealings with him from time to time, and he’s been friendly to me in his way, but I always wind up in the middle of something bloody.”
He took one hand off the wheel and reached over and grasped my arm with it. “I’m being set up, Heller. Only somebody on the outside can save me.”
I shook the arm off. “No.”
“Name your retainer.”
“No.”
We crossed Kedzie into Douglas Park. I used to play here as a kid; I wondered if the lagoon was frozen over yet. Probably not.
“Five thousand. Five grand, Heller!”
Judas Priest. For running a couple of errands? Could I say no to that?
“No.” I said. “No more Nitti. Five grand is five grand, but it ain’t worth getting killed over. Now, pull over and let me out.”
“Somebody’s following me.”
“I know. They have been since Twenty-second Street.”
The park was empty of people; the faded green of it, its barren trees, leaves blown away, seemed oddly peaceful. O’Hare was picking up speed, going forty, now, and the Ford was a few car lengths behind, keeping right up.
“Do you have a gun?” he sputtered.
“In my desk drawer in my office, I do. Pull over.”
“Use mine, then!”
“Okay.”
I picked up his automatic and pointed it at him. “Pull over and let me out.”
His cheeks were blood red. “I’m not stopping!”
I put the gun in his face.
He swallowed. “I’ll slow down, but I’m not stopping!”
“I’ll settle for that.”
“At least leave me the gun!”
He slowed, I opened the door, stepped onto the running board, tossed the gun on the seat and dove for grass.
The other black coupe came roaring up, and then it was alongside of O’Hare, both cars going fifty at least, barreling through the park, and then a shotgun barrel extended from the rider’s window of the coupe and blasted a hole in the driver’s window of O’Hare’s car, the roar of the gun and the crash of the glass fighting over who was loudest.
O’Hare swerved away from the other coupe, then back into it, nearly sideswiping them; they were riding the white center line of the four-lane street. I could see them, barely, two anonymous hoodlums in black hats and black coats in their black car with their black gun, which blew a second hole in O’Hare’s window, and in him, too, apparently, for the fancy coupe careened out of control, lurched over the curb, sideswiping a light pole, its white globe shattering, and then shuttled down the streetcar tracks like a berserk sidecar and smashed into a trolley pole and stopped.
The other black Ford coupe cut its speed, stopping for a red light at Western. I couldn’t make out the license plates, but they were Illinois. Then it moved nonchalantly on.
I was the first one to O’Hare’s car. The window on the side I’d been sitting on was spiderwebbed from buckshot. I opened the door and there he was, slumped, hatless, the wheel of the car bent away from him, his eyes open and staring, lips parted as if about to speak, blood spattered everywhere, one hand tucked inside his jacket, like the Little General he’d patterned himself after, two baseball-size holes from close-up shotgun blasts in the driver’s window just above him, like two more empty eyes, staring.
The.32 automatic was on the seat beside him.
I had to find a phone. Not to call the cops: some honest citizen would’ve beat me to it, by now.
I wanted to call Gladys and tell her if she hadn’t already deposited O’Hare’s check, drop everything and do it.
The two dicks from the detective bureau knew who I was, and called my name in to Captain Stege. So I ended up having to hang around waiting for Stege to show up, as did everybody else, four uniformed officers, the two detective bureau dicks, a police photographer, somebody from the coroner’s office, three guys with the paddy wagon that O’Hare would be hauled off to the nearby morgue in. The captain wanted to see the crime scene, including poor old Eddie O’Hare, who accordingly had spent the past forty-five minutes of this cold afternoon a virtual sideshow attraction for the gawkers who’d gathered around the wrecked car, which was crumpled against a trolley pole like a used paper cup. Ogden is a busy street; and several residential areas were close by, as was Mt. Sinai Hospital, a pillar covering the corner of California and Ogden. So there were plenty of gawkers.