“You have a memory any reporter would envy you for, Mr. Pegler.”
“Is it any wonder I remember it?” he said, a bit defensively. “I was an impressionable lad of eighteen, and I was hearing detailed and horrid descriptions of sexual perversion from a boy four or five years my junior. A boy whose polished nails caught the light, shining his financial success in my ten-dollar-a-week face. Is it any wonder I viewed it as an insult?”
I didn’t point out that Pegler had in fact been eavesdropping, that Bioff hadn’t intended to impress anybody but his fellow pimps. Still, I could see this man, as a boy, taking it as an insult.
“I saw him again, years later, in another bar,” Pegler continued, “on the North Side. He looked familiar, and I asked my drinking companion if he knew the fat, dapper little man, and my friend said, ‘Why, that’s Willie Bioff-the union slugger and pimp.’”
“And of course the name rang a bell. When was this?”
“Nineteen twenty-seven, perhaps,” he said. “I didn’t know you were in Chicago then.”
“I didn’t live here. I was working for the Tribune Syndicate, however, and touched bases often. Working a sports beat, traveling all over. Got here quite often.”
“I see.”
“Let me bring you up to date,” he said, sitting forward. “If you’ve indeed read my columns, you must know that I’ve waged something of a war against the crooked unions.”
“Yeah.”
He was getting wound up, his eyes staring, not looking at me, as he said, “The newspaper guild soured me on unionism once and for all, you see; it was a hotbed of Reds, and as for the AFL, that great, arrogant, corrupt, hypocritical, parasitic racket, well, I…”
“I’ve read your column,” I said. He was starting to irritate me, now. My father was an old union man, he gave his heart and soul to the movement, and while Pegler’s opinions weren’t entirely baseless, they still rubbed me the wrong way.
He sensed it. “Let me stress that the idea of unionism is something I can admire; what it is rapidly degenerating into is something I can only abhor.”
“Understood.”
“At any rate. I usually make two or three cross-country jaunts each year, looking for material for my column. I think of myself as a reporter, and while I’m paid handsomely to air my opinions, those opinions mustn’t be formed in a vacuum. I need to get out and be a newspaperman from time to time. Last week I was in Los Angeles, that modern Babylon, and I found a real story.” He drew on the cigarette, relishing the moment. “I was at a party given by Joe Schenck, the Twentieth Century-Fox film executive. Across a wide room, filled with Hollywood stars and directors and producers, with all the fancy trimmings, cocktails and caviar, I spied a familiar face.”
“Bioff?”
Pegler nodded, smugly. “Oh, he was older than a teenager, now, by some distance. As was I. But that fat round smiling face was the same, and, as I drew nearer, the hard little pig’s eyes, behind wire-rim glasses now, were as cold and inhuman as ever. Oh, he was handsomely turned out, in the Hollywood style, double-breasted pinstripe suit, a handkerchief with a monogram, WB.”
Except for the initials, Pegler might have been describing his own wardrobe.
“I asked my host if that man’s name wasn’t Bioff,” Pegler said, “and he replied, ‘Yes it is-that’s one of our most illustrious citizens. Would you like to be introduced to him?’ I said I wouldn’t shake hands with Willie Bioff if I were wearing gloves.”
“I wasn’t aware Bioff was in Hollywood; I didn’t know what became of him, frankly.” I shrugged. “I guess I assumed he was still involved with Browne and the Stagehands Union. Browne moved his office to the East Coast years ago.”
A humorless smile made a slant on Pegler’s fleshy face. “Well, it’s in Hollywood, now, and has been since 1935. I did some checking. I talked to Arthur Unger, the editor of the Daily Variety, and he informed me that the Stagehands Union now controls some twenty-seven different unions. Browne, or in reality Bioff, controls not just the stagehands and the movie projectionists, but ushers, treasurers, porters and hatcheck concessionaires in legitimate theaters coast to coast, and movie studio mechanics, sound technicians, laboratory technicians, virtually everyone involved in the manufacturing end of the film industry. A hundred and seventy-five thousand dues-paying members.”
“That’s a lot of power for our fat little former pimp.”
“It is indeed.” He straightened up in his chair and smiled tightly, smugly. “Mr. Heller, I intend to expose Willie Bioff for the panderer he is.”
“That should be easy. He’s been arrested enough times.”
“Yes, but has he been convicted?”
“At least once that I know of.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“I was the arresting officer,” I said.
He smiled. “That was a rumor we heard, but we’ve not been able to verify it.”
So that’s how my name got picked out of the hat to be the dick Pegler pegged for his legwork.
“I’m not sure I want to be involved in this,” I said. “I hear Browne is tied in with Nicky Dean, and Dean’s an Outfit man. If this is an Outfit operation, my future health precludes my involvement.”
“You don’t need to decide this instant. Have you ever been to California?”
“No.”
He reached in his inside pocket and produced an envelope, which he handed to me.
I took it.
“Look inside,” he prompted.
I did. Two one-hundred-dollar bills and an airline ticket.
“Your flight to Hollywood leaves at six-twenty this evening,” he said.
Train travel I was used to; plane travel was something new, and a little frightening. Truth be told, I slept through a lot of it. Twenty-five other hearty souls and I sat within the DC-3 “Flagship,” a noisy, rattling projectile that churned through the night sky like a big kitchen mixer. The businessman I sat next to actually read Fortune magazine, as if this sort of travel was an everyday thing to him. Maybe it was. We spoke a few polite words, but, sitting over the wing, fighting the sound of the propellers, there just wasn’t much to be said. I was relieved when the thing sat down in Dallas, sometime after one o’clock in the morning, and was surprised to find I could make my stomach accept a little something in the airport cafeteria, where oddly enough the people working had Southern accents. Within an hour I was on a sleeper plane, within which two facing seats in a sort of train-type compartment were converted to a berth by a good-looking blonde woman in a vaguely military outfit, a “stewardess” she was called, who then shut the curtains and I got awkwardly undressed, hanging my clothes in the netting provided, and slipped under cool sheets and I’ll be damned if the sound of the props and the up-and-down motion didn’t put me to sleep. Some hours later the stewardess woke me to let me know the airliner was landing-at Tucson, Arizona, which, unlike my present confusion, was a state I’d never been in. I dressed, and then helped her turn the berth back into two seats, into one of which I was strapped, and we landed. Another airport, another cafeteria. Soon I was sleeping again, in my pants atop the blankets this time, and before long it was eight o’clock in the morning in Los Angeles (ten o’clock in the real world, but never mind).
But this wasn’t the real world, it was Glendale, where I caught a cab, despite the six-mile ride I was in for. All expenses were paid on this little jaunt, after all; that was the deaclass="underline" two hundred bucks, all expenses, no strings. I could enjoy the trip to sunny California, pocket the two C’s, and head back for the windy city, even should I refuse the job.
Which well I might, but I didn’t see how I could turn down this preliminary offer. Besides, I was going to meet a real-life movie star, unless that was a contradiction in terms.
“Where to?” the cabby said. He was a blond handsome kid of about twenty, who’d been sitting behind the wheel at the curb reading something called the Hollywood Reporter.