Dawes leaned his head back and quite literally looked down his nose at me and. as if lecturing, said, "Once a reporter asked me if I were going to take my knickers with me to London- black silk knee breeches are usual court dress, over there- and I asked him if he wanted a diplomatic answer, or the kind the question deserved? And then I told him to go plumb to hell. You might in future take that example to heart."
"But if you void our deal. General, I'm going to be placed in an embarrassing light; I'll have to let the press know the circumstances. You've already had some unfortunate publicity of late, General- if you'll pardon my adding Insull to injury."
He looked at me solemnly. "This reeks of blackmail, young man."
"This reeks of business. And business is about money, and three thousand dollars to a private detective just starting out is good business indeed."
Uncle Louis was breathing hard.
The General said, "In my very young days, I had a burning ardor for money, Mr. Heller. But since then I have been interested in it only intermittently. One of the Rothschilds once said he made his fortune because he discovered there are times when one should not try to make money. It strikes me that money is something you are unduly interested in."
"The Rothschilds can afford that attitude. The Hellers- this Heller, anyway- can't. Now, I apologize for my bad etiquette with the press. But our agreement is binding, as far as I'm concerned, and if you feel differently, I'm going to be noisy about it. I'm not a big wheel, like you, General. But us little wheels can get awful goddamn squeaky when we don't get our grease."
Uncle Louis sat shaking Iris head, staring blankly at the wall of photos of the famous: Coolidge and Dawes; Hoover and Dawes; Pershing and Dawes; Mellon and Dawes.
The General lowered his gaze and began shuffling papers. He said. "My secretary will have contracts ready for you to sign this afternoon at four. Please return then, and sign them, Mr. Heller. Good afternoon, gentlemen."
I rose and went out; Uncle Louis stayed behind, speaking to the General, but the General didn't seem to be having any. Uncle Louis caught up with me at the elevators.
"Let's you and me talk, Nate," he said, pointing down the hall. "I have an office, too."
That he did- and his own secretary, an attractive if bookish woman in her early thirties- but the interior office was perhaps a quarter the size of the General's, albeit bigger than my own. And Uncle
Louis didn't seem to have a Murphy bed.
He did have a desk, and he sat behind it and tried to look as authoritarian and stem as the General. He damn near pulled it off; but I didn't help matters by refusing to take a chair.
He fairly spit the words at me. "You know damn good and well that the General's offer was made at a point in time when besmirching Mayor Cermak's name was a desirable thing. Now that Cermak is dead, and a martyr, your testimony at the Nitti trial has only caused the very sort of bad Chicago publicity? the General wishes to avoid. You know all that, don't you? You knew that all along."
"Sure."
"And yet you take advantage of the General, and of me. and hold us to a bargain that was made under vastly different circumstances. Where do you get your damn nerve?"
"I think it's called chatzpa, Uncle Louis."
"You're an embarrassment to me. You must know all I have to do is tell the General that I'm willing to deny being a witness where that verbal contract is concerned, and your windfall at his- and my- ■ expense will be forfeit."
"Maybe. Maybe not. The General has old-world notions about keeping his word; part of the way he sees himself includes keeping promises, pretentious old fart that he is."
He stood and. his face redder than a Communist, thrust an arm out and pointed a finger as close to my face as he could get without hurtling the desk. "Consider yourself disinherited, disowned, you smart-ass, you gonif... you just traded three thousand dollars for more money than you could ever dream of. You're disinherited!"
"I don't want your money."
He suddenly seemed embarrassed for his outburst. Whether it was a pose or not, I can't say; but he sat down and folded his hands and, nervously, said, "I have no sons, Nathan. I have two daughters I love very much. But I always thought of you as… the son I never had."
"Horseshit."
Maybe it had been a pose: the hands flattened on the desk, fingers spread out but arched, like spiders, and his face turned hard. "You stood to inherit a lot of money, you ridiculous, ridiculous fool. And you threw that money away. Just threw it away. And nothing you can ever say will change it."
"Fine. So long."
I started to go.
"Get out! You're no nephew of mine. As far as I'm concerned, you're dead. As dead as Cermak."
"As dead as my father?"
Uncle Louis blanched. "What does your father have to do with it?"
"Maybe plenty. Maybe he's why I put you on the spot with Dawes. You don't dare not back me up, do you. or Dawes will lose respect for you. He doesn't like outright liars, and he has an overriding sense of family. He idolizes that dead son of his, building fancy flophouses in his memory, and he wouldn't take kindly to the sort of man who would turn on his family, for mere monetary or business concerns."
"Nate. Nathan Why- why this bitterness? What have I done to you?"
"You haven't done anything. You've done me favors."
"Yes I have. I got you on the force. Could your father have done that?"
"No, and he wouldn't if he could. He hated the cops, and it was the saddest day of his life when I joined up. And you knew that; that's why you helped me get on. You didn't do it for me. You didn't give a damn about me, one way or the other. It was to get back at Pa. Because him you hated."
Silence hung between us like a curtain.
Finally he said, "I didn't hate him, Nathan."
"Then why did you kill him, Uncle Louis?"
"Kill him? What obscenity are you speaking…"
"You kept your eye on me. didn't you, Uncle Louis? Kept track of your nephew on the force. You were thick with Cermak, way back when, and you've always been thick with the politicians and all the boys behind the scenes."
He shrugged, not following me. exactly. "I- I suppose that's right."
"Well, somebody in the know told my father where the money came from that I gave him for his shop. Somebody told him it was blood money. Somebody told him his son Nathan was a crooked cop."
Uncle Louis, looking more than ever like a thin version of my father, a shadow of the man my father had been, said nothing; his eyes were wet and his bottom lip trembled.
"You told him, Uncle Louis. You told him. And he killed himself."
Uncle Louis said nothing.
My eyes were wet, too. I pointed my finger at him. "I disinherit you, fucker. I disown you."
And I left the guilt there with him.
Tower Town April 9-June 25,
Winter was over, but it was still cold. Mary Ann Beame and I set out for a Sunday drive under overcast skies that didn't let the sun peek through once in six hours- which is how long a Sunday drive we took, starting out around noon and heading across the state toward the Mississippi River and the Tri-Cities, where Mary Ann and her lost brother Jimmy had been bora and raised.
This was my first cross-country trip, and even with paved roads. I was a little uneasy about it. The '29 Chevy had been getting me around the city well enough, but clear across the state? That suddenly seemed overly ambitious, particularly under a sky this nasty.
But soon I was going a confident 40 mph down U.S. 30, farm country whizzing by us on either side- though I did slow down for the dozen or so little towns along the way. Eviction notices in the farmyards, and out-of-business signs in store windows, said that hard times wasn't something Chicago had cornered the market on. All that farmland, stretching out flat to the horizon, looking wasteland-barren this time of year, broken only by the occasional farmhouse/silo,/barn, came as a shock to a city kid. I knew this rural world surrounded Chicago, but I'd never really seen it before, and when we pulled up to a gas station outside of DeKalb, a farmer in coveralls and floppy straw hat, his face as barren as the land, leaned against his pickup truck, which was getting filled at the next pump, and regarded us like visitors from another planet. So did a couple more farmers sitting leaned back in chairs in front of the station, chewing tobacco, apparently not minding the somewhat chilly day.