"You wouldn't happen to know some of the places he hung out, would you? And who his 'friends' were?"
"Are you nuts? I never went with him: he couldn't be seen around with me. if he was gonna do this half-assed undercover work. But I can tell you where some of the speaks in town are. if you like."
He started rattling 'em off, and I stopped him till I could get my notepad out. When he'd finished, he said, "I can't really give you any names of the wharf rats he was hanging around with, 'cause he never really said. He wasn't close to the big boys, so talking to Talarico or Lucchesi wouldn't do any good. They probably wouldn't know Jimmy from Adam. Coin knew Jimmy, but Coin's dead."
"Anything else you can tell me?"
"Well. I do know he made some trips to Chicago. This was while he was in college, but during the summers. As early as the summer of'30. That always bothered me. See, his friend Coin was tight with the Chicago boys. Ever hear of a guy named Ted Newberry?"
The body was in a ditch near a telephone pole.
"Yeah," I said. "I heard of him."
"He was the Chicago big shot the Tri-Cities liquor ring was tight with. I covered a trial in the fall of '31, where Newberry and Coin. Talarico and Lucchesi were codefendants. Anyway. Jimmy went to Chicago a couple times, and I always wondered if he was running an errand or something for Coin. I grilled him about it. but he always claimed it was just pleasure trips. Still. I always had the queasy feeling that Jimmy was getting in over his head. All I could think of were those scrapbooks he put together in junior high and high school, full of Chicago and Capone. and couldn't help but wonder about those 'pleasure trips.'"
"Did you talk to him about his plans to go to Chicago and try to get a job there?"
"Yeah. I told him his expectations were unrealistic. That they'd toss him out on his butt. But he had to try, he said. And I guess every kid does have to try. So I didn't try to stop him. I even wrote him a letter of recommendation, in case he did get in for a real interview by some miracle. And I told him if he flopped, he could come back and I'd try to get him on the Democrat here, as a copyboy if nothing else. And he said- what was it he said? He seemed confident they'd give him a shot. Almost cocky, the little snotnose. 'Oh, they'll print my stuff,' he said. Something like that. Ever heard anything so ridiculous?"
I hadn't, and I said as much to Mary Ann, in the Palmer cafeteria over lunch. The cafeteria was in a narrow one-story building with a half-roof slanting up against the side of one of the main school buildings; above the archway going in was a motto: "Is Life Worth Living? That Depends On the Liver!"
Well. I wasn't having liver, though it had been one of the selections; I was having a go at the meat loaf, and it wasn't a Little Bite O' Heaven.
"I knew Jimmy had some rough friends." Maty Ann said, "and knew he went out drinking and all. But I didn't know about any… gangsters or bootleggers or anything."
"Maybe you weren't as close to him as you thought."
Her eyes stung me. "We were very close." Then, offhandedly, she said, "I knew he had an interest in criminology."
"He had an interest in criminals."
"It's the same thing."
"No it isn't. Ever hear of a guy named Reinhardt Schwimmer?"
She was having liver. She swallowed a bite of it and then said, "Why of course. Rudolph Schwimmer's name is on the tip of every tongue," and stuck hers out at me, just a bit. Some college boys who were watching her from a nearby table about fell over when she did that; they'd fallen deeply in love with her back in the cafeteria line.
"Reinhardt Schwimmer," I said. "He was an optometrist. He had a fascination for gangsters. And since his practice was in Chicago, he had access to some. He took to hanging around with them, at the speakeasies they frequented, even at some of their places of business, including a garage where trucks of hooch got loaded and unloaded. One day Doc Schwimmer dropped by the garage to talk to the boys, who were waiting for their boss Bugs Moran and his second-in-command, a fella named Newberry, to show, when some cops came barging in and told everybody to put their hands in the air."
"And the innocent doctor got arrested right along with the bad guys," she said.
"Not exactly. This was Saint Valentine's, 1929."
Mary Ann didn't play naive; she knew what I meant.
"They killed him, Mary Ann," I said. "He probably told the men with machine guns he wasn't one of the gangsters; that he was just an optometrist. But they killed him anyway. He was there, and he got killed."
Her eyes were damp. "Why are you saying these things, Nathan?"
We were on the verse of a scene.
"Hey," I said, trying to shift gears, "I shouldn't have got into this here. I'm sorry. I didn't intend to upset you, it just came out… but a picture's starting to form, Mary Ann. A picture of your brother. And he isn't looking too very smart."
"For your information, my brother was an A student."
"Mary Ann. There's school, and there's school. Like the hard-knocks kind. Your brother is a kid from Davenport, Iowa. He may have hung around with some bootleggers"- I'd been a little vague with her on this point not wanting to betray Traynor's confidence- "but he was still a kid from the sticks."
"What's your point?"
"I don't know. I'm starting to have a sick feeling, that's all. Maybe it's the meat loaf."
"You've said all along you think Jimmy's off somewhere… riding the rails, seeing the country."
"I think he probably is. But he's not seeing Chicago, or I'd probably turned him up by now. Some things bother me, Mary Ann. Like his hanging around with hoods, here in Davenport. And did you know your father gave him two hundred dollars for tuition to Parmer, which he pocketed and took with him to Chicago?"
She turned pale. "No. Jimmy didn't tell me that."
"He told you he was going to hop a freight, though, didn't he?"
"Yes."
"If he did, and if he had two hundred dollars on him, well… that worries me."
"What are you saying?"
"Nothing. But if he made it to Chicago with his two hundred, I'll eat another serving of this meat loaf."
Her lower lip was trembling; I reached across and touched her hand.
"I'm sorry if I seem a bastard" I said. "It's just… I want you to be prepared, incase."
"In case what?"
"In case you have to look at something without the rose-colored glasses on."
She thought about that; she pushed the plate of liver away.
"Find him, Nathan," she said. "Please."
"I'm going to try."
"Don't try. Do it. Find him for me."
"I can't promise that."
"You have to."
"Okay. I promise. All right? Are you all right?"
She managed a smile. "Yes."
"How about helping me find this brother of yours?"
"Sure," she said.
She had arranged for me to talk to her brother's journalism instructor at Augustana, across the river in Rock Island; it was a beautiful campus on a rolling green bluff and the building we entered didn't have a single motto on its walls. But the matronly Enslish literature instructor who also taught journalism had nothing illuminating to say about Jimmy, except that he was a fine writer and showed a lot of promise; that his marks in everything from literature to math were top-drawer. Nothing about Jimmy's personal life; nothing in the subject matter of his stories for the school paper that reflected the interest in crime that Traynor had told me about.
Back in Davenport, we stopped at a market, then went back to her father's modernistic castle, where I helped her in the kitchen, and she surprised her father with a roast beef dinner with all the trimmings, and she and I surprised each other by both being good cooks. I'd done a lot of cooking at home, growing up; and she'd been the only woman in this house for many a year. So we agreed to alternate days in the kitchen when we got married, though I silently promised myself to let her handle it, except for special occasions.