“I know,” I admitted.
It was the only way to play it.
The hard dark pig eyes behind the rimless glass squinted. “You know?”
I shrugged. “Yeah. He stopped by my office the other day. He wanted to know if I was the arresting officer on your pandering charge, years ago.”
He went a little pale, sat up. “What did you say to him?”
I shrugged again. “I said yes.”
“Shit. Did you give him any details?”
“No. It was a long time ago, Willie. He just asked if the rumor that I arrested you for pimping, once, was true, and I said it was. He asked if you were convicted, and I said you were.”
He didn’t like that. He stood, paced; wandered over to a writing desk decorated with framed pictures of his brood of lads and lit up a cigarette and began smoking nervously. But soon he said: “I can’t expect you to have said otherwise. Thanks for telling me straight out.”
“No thanks needed.”
He sat next to me again, cigarette in hand, his expression painfully earnest. “You got to understand, Heller-the feds have been breathing down my neck for months. I had to step down as the IA’s representative, not long ago, ’cause of this federal heat. Oh, I’m still running things. But from the sidelines; I can’t even go in my own goddamn office, can you picture it?”
So that was why he bitterly bit off Browne’s head for not being at the office: he was jealous he couldn’t be there himself.
“Now, this Pegler shit. Comes at a bad time. I know who put him up to it, too.”
“Who?”
“That bastard Montgomery. The smart-ass actor.”
This irony guy got around.
“Robert Montgomery, you mean?”
“Yeah, him. That smart-ass, no-good, double-crossing bastard…after all I did for him.”
Here was a new wrinkle.
“Why?” I asked. “What did you do for Montgomery?”
He scowled, not looking at me, but at an image of Montgomery fixed in his mind, I’d guess. He said, “Couple years ago SAG-Screen Actors Guild-serves notice on the studios that they now consider themselves a legitimate labor union, and want to be so recognized. You know-they wanted to enter into collective bargaining, like the big kids. So we, the IATSE, me, went to bat for ’em.”
“Really.”
“Yeah, I told that prick L. B. Mayer if he didn’t recognize SAG, he’d have an IA strike to play with. My movie projectionists can shut this industry down overnight, you know.”
“So I hear.”
The round face was reddening. “Thanks to me, Mayer recognized their lousy little Guild, and Montgomery thanked us publicly, but now, fuck him! We’re not good enough for him and the fags and dykes and Reds in his club.”
So much for Karl Marx; Willie seemed more interested in the brothers Marx, or anyway their union dues.
“I’ll tell you whose fault it really is. Frank. Frank’s getting too greedy.”
He meant Nitti. It was Bioff’s first admission that he was working for the Outfit. He let it escape casually and I didn’t react to it as any big deal. All I said was: “How so, Willie?”
“He wants to expand, and it just ain’t the right time. There’s this rival group, a CIO bunch called the United Studio Technicians, and they’re spreading dissent among the IA rank and file. We got them to deal with, we got plenty to do, rather than try and kidnap a union that don’t want anything to do with us, anyway.”
“Why such a fuss, over show business? Aren’t there bigger fish to fry, better unions to go after?”
As if speaking to a slow child, he said, “Heller, no matter what anybody tells you, people do not have to eat. Like the man said, there’s only two things they really got to do-get laid, and see a show, when they can dig up the scratch.”
The philosophy of a pimp turned Hollywood power broker.
“Listen,” he said. “You’ve got a reputation of being a straight shooter. Frank speaks highly of you.”
Nitti again.
“That’s nice to hear,” I said.
“You’re known as a boy who can keep his mouth shut.”
Actually, I was known in at least one instance for singing on the witness stand-when I helped bring the world crashing down on Mayor Cermak’s favorite corrupt cops, Lang and Miller; but I had indeed kept some secrets for Frank Nitti. That was more important, where somebody like Bioff was concerned.
“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” I said.
“How would you like to earn a couple of grand?”
The money was sure flying this week; I wondered if I’d live to spend any of it.
“Sure,” I said. “What’s your poison?”
“Pegler,” he said.
It would be.
He was asking, “When are you heading back?”
“This afternoon,” I said, somehow. “I’ll be in Chicago tomorrow morning.”
“Good. There are some people I want you to see.”
“About what?’
“About me. I want you to find out if Pegler’s been around to see them, and if he has, try and worm out of them what, if anything, they spilled.”
Oh my.
“If he hasn’t been around,” he continued, “warn them him or somebody he’s hired may be around. And tell them if they talk they’ll go to sleep and never wake up.”
I shook my head no. “Willie, I’ll do some checking for you. Gladly. But I won’t threaten anybody for you. And I don’t want to know about that end of it, understood?”
He smiled, friendly as Santa Claus. “Sure, Heller. Sure. They can figure that out for themselves, anyway. Like the man said, when you eat garlic, it speaks for itself. Shall we say a grand down, a grand upon your reporting back to me? By phone is fine.”
“Okay.”
“You want this on your books, or should I give you cash?”
“Cash’ll do.”
“Sit tight and I’ll get you some. Oh, and Heller. Don’t tell anybody about this. Not Nitti or anybody. As far as Nick Dean is concerned, I had you out here to ask you about that O’Hare killing. I knew Eddie, you see, and as a matter of fact I would like to ask you a few questions about that before you go.”
“All right.”
“Anyway, I don’t want Nitti to know I’m nervous about this Pegler deal. It wouldn’t look good. I’m on the spot enough with this federal-tax heat. So be careful-like the man said, when you play both ends against the middle you risk getting squeezed.”
You’re telling me.
He got up and went out and came back shortly with a thousand in hundreds in an IATSE envelope. I put it in my suitcoat pocket, answered his questions about the O’Hare shooting in a similar manner to the way I’d handled Captain Stege’s, and soon he was walking me out of the house, an arm reached up around my shoulder, two old buddies from Chicago.
“Let me tell you about the time Little New York came out to visit,” he said.
Louis Campagna; now there’s a house guest.
“I had my sprinkler system going,” Bioff said, gesturing to his expansive green lawn, “and Campagna-you know, he’s a nature lover-”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Oh yeah, he’s got a farm in Wisconsin, goes fishing all the time, loves the great outdoors. Anyway, he sees my sprinklers, dozens of ’em, turning in full circles, and he asks me what the hell they are, and I tell him, and he says, that’s great! Get me six hundred.”
I laughed.
“So I told him that six hundred of those things could irrigate all the city parks in Chicago. And that they’d freeze up in the cold weather. But he insisted, and he said I should charge ’em to the union. So I called the Waiter and asked him to talk Louie out of it.”
The Waiter was Paul Ricca, rumored to be second in the Outfit only to Nitti.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Ricca wanted three hundred of ’em,” he said, and walked me to the limo where his partner sat in back drinking beer.
On the way he told me who to see in Chicago.
The Southern belle, hoop skirt flouncing, parasol atwirl, a vision in white and pink and lace, strolled coyly to the settee and, with a leisurely grace, took off her red slippers. Then she removed her bonnet. The languid strains of “Swanee River” filling the air began to pick up tempo, build in volume. The belle, who was blond, shoulder-length curls tumbling to lacy shoulders, was rolling down a knee-length silk stocking from a leg extended from under the hoop skirt, foot arched; another slowly peeled stocking fell, and then she stood, stepping ever so ladylike out of her hoop skirt. She was about to step out of her lacy pantaloons as well when somebody tapped me on the shoulder.