Gladys was crying a little, or trying to.
I put a finger under her chin and lifted her head and looked into her wide brown eyes. “I don’t mean to make you feel bad. I’m just jealous, understand?”
And then she did the most remarkable thing, which made the whole embarrassing, expensive encounter worthwhile: she smiled at me.
I went into my inner office and pulled my typing stand around and began pecking out Montgomery’s confidential report. After while I heard glass being dumped into the wastebasket and, surprisingly, it wasn’t Fortunato but Gladys who opened the door and looked in.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Heller.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. Can I ask you a question, though?”
“Sure.”
“Why him?”
She shrugged. “He’s cute.”
And then she was gone, and I was pecking at the report. I put it all in, every rumor, every anecdote, every slip of the tongue that Browne, Dean, Bioff, Barger, Balaban, Coston and Estelle had handed me. But I stated clearly that it was all hearsay, and should be used only as background, or as the starting place for a real investigation. None of these people was likely ever to go public with their knowledge. It took over two hours and I made some corrections in ink and then folded the six single-spaced pages and put them in an envelope, with Montgomery’s home address typed on it. I included no cover letter and no return address. He had promised to keep my name out of it, after all; why not remind him?
I put my feet up on the desk and called Willie Bioff at the number he’d given me, which was his eighty-acre ranch in Canoga Park. A colored maid answered and it took a few minutes for him to come to the phone; calling long distance and hearing silence for several minutes is like watching dollar bills float out the window, but considering I’d wrapped Bioff’s two-grand assignment up in as many days, I could stand to watch a few of ’em float.
“Heller,” Bioff said.
“I talked to your friends.”
“Good. Any problems?”
“No.”
“Any of them say anybody’s been around asking?”
“No.”
“Think they’ll keep mum?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“That’s a fair answer. I’ll send you a cashier’s check for the second grand. We don’t want to trust that much cash to the mails. Those guys ain’t union-yet.”
He hung up, and so did I.
At ten to four I heard somebody enter the outer office. I slipped my gun out of the holster and leaned back in my chair and waited.
Pegler came in.
“You’re early,” I said, gun in hand.
He frowned and waggled a finger at me. “Aren’t we past that?” Then he waggled the finger back where he came from. “And what happened in your outer office? It’s a goddamned mess.”
Not a “goddamn” mess. A “goddamned” mess. Ain’t we grand.
I put the automatic back under my shoulder. “I thought somebody was in my office lyin’ in wait for me, so I broke the glass, but it was just one of my operatives humping the secretary.”
Pegler made a disgusted face, pulled a chair up and sat down. “Very amusing, I’m sure. What have you got to tell me?” He wore another expensive, beautifully tailored suit with lapels wide as wings, light brown this time, with monogrammed pocket kerchief and a dark brown tie touched with white.
“Nothing, really,” I said. “I’m making a confidential report to Robert Montgomery. If he wants to share any of it with you, that’s up to him. But nothing I discovered is anything you’ll be able to easily prove. Nobody who talked to me is going to talk to you, or anybody, not openly.”
“You could be quoted,” he said, with a shrewd little devilish smile. “My column is not a court of law; I’ll admit hearsay evidence, gladly.”
“No. It wouldn’t be healthy to.”
“I see. I didn’t take you for a coward, Heller.”
“I didn’t take you for a jackass. I’ve been risking my life, poking into this. This is Frank Nitti’s business you’re nosing in, and if you really did play cards with Jake Lingle, once upon a time, you’ll know that the Capone mob has been known to kill reporters-so you’re not immune, either.”
He took his cigarette case out of his coat pocket and selected a cigarette and lit it up. “Is it a matter of money?”
“No, it’s a matter of life and death. I don’t want you for a client, Mr. Pegler. I have enough clients already.”
He shrugged elaborately, blew out smoke. “Do what you please. I don’t need your paltry gossip, anyway. You’ve already helped me, Heller, whether you know it or not, whether you want to or not.”
“Really?”
His smile, the tilt of his head, turned coy. “I’ve just spent the last several days looking through old police records. With the help of a local officer, a Lieutenant Bill Drury, and several others, I’ve made some interesting discoveries.”
Bill Drury and I had started out on the pickpocket detail together; he was an honest, ambitious cop who hated the Outfit almost irrationally. He’d rousted every major mob figure in the city, numerous times, just for fun-Nitti, Guzik, Ricca, all of them. Why he was still alive was a mystery it would take a better detective than yours truly to ever solve.
But I meant it when I said, “Bill is as good as they come.”
“He spoke highly of you,” Pegler conceded. “If I hadn’t dropped your name, in fact, I don’t know that he would have devoted the time to this he did. He helped me locate a number of brief jail terms Bioff served, dating back as early as 1922. But more importantly we tracked down the record of your arrest of Bioff. There it was-a lonely faded index card-with your name and Shoemaker’s, as arresting officers.”
“Old Shoes”-another honest cop, a legendary police detective, dead now.
“So what?” I said. “I already told you Bioff got a conviction off that bust.”
Smugness was in every line of his face, every pore. “We needed verification. But we found much more; we hit the proverbial jackpot. You see, Willie Bioff’s never served his six-month sentence for pandering.”
I shrugged. “I could’ve told you that. He clouted his way out of it.”
“Perhaps. But I don’t think you understand-it’s on the records as an ‘open’ conviction-Willie Bioff still owes the state of Illinois six months.”
I sat forward. “Maybe you really do have hold of something. You’re sure about this? My understanding was he appealed it and bought his way out.”
“Money no doubt exchanged hands,” Pegler said, blowing out smoke but not hot air, “and William Morris Bioff did appeal the sentence, and was released pending the decision of the higher court. But when I placed a simple phone call to the clerk of the Supreme Court in Springfield, Illinois, I learned that the appeal had never reached there. The case had been purposely sidetracked in Cook County, somewhere, and conveniently forgotten.”
Jesus. In 1930 I’d been part of a raid on a sleazy South Halsted Street brothel and we’d caught the stocky little pimp slipping out the back with the brothel’s tally sheet in hand; later he’d slapped one of the whores who said the wrong incriminating thing about him, and I’d sworn to myself the little bastard would serve time in the Bridewell for it, Chicago or no Chicago. Now, almost ten years later, it looked like maybe he would.
“I’ve laid the information before State’s Attorney Thomas E. Courtney,” Pegler said grandiosely, “who informs me he’ll request Bioff’s extradition to Illinois.”
“By God, I think you’ve got the little bastard.”
“I’ve got the little kike, all right.”
Silence.
“Watch that, okay, Mr. Pegler?”
Amused little smile. “You’re offended?”
“Nothing much offends me. But sometimes I get pissed off awful fierce. You remember me-the guy with the gun?”
Pegler smirked at that and said, “At any rate, your friend Lieutenant Drury has come up with the goods on George Browne, as well. In 1925 Browne was involved in a gangland shooting, in a restaurant; he was shot in the seat of the pants, and his companion was killed. Browne was quoted as telling the police at the scene, ‘I’ll take care of it, boys.’ Four weeks after he got out of the hospital, the man who fired the shots was himself shot to death, his assailant never found.”