I ran down the steps, slipping a couple of times on the patches of ice. Somewhere I could hear the wail of police sirens over the weather and the thubbing of my heart. Someone, maybe the old lady who was waiting for Sheldon, had called the cops about machine-gun shots. Even with the wind, someone must have heard what looked like at least forty rounds of explosion.
Running across the snowy sidewalk of the courtyard, I turned the corner and ran through a passageway to a street. Half a block ahead I could see the figure with the suitcase. I figured I had been lucky. I had arrived when he had put the machine gun away. Whoever he was, even if he had a car waiting, couldn’t carry a machine gun through the streets. That was why he had taken the shot at me with a hand gun. The few seconds I had stopped to talk to the kid downstairs had probably kept him from decorating the apartment with me along with Canetta and the little man.
I couldn’t get a good look at the guy, who was moving pretty well on the empty streets in the snow considering the fact that he was carrying a fifteen pound machine gun in a suitcase.
Running was hard. No one shoveled the walks in this neighborhood. It was tough to cut the distance between us. Everytime I tried to hurry, I slipped, but I kept the distance between us the same. There were definitely police cars somewhere behind, but I didn’t stop to worry about them. If the guy with the chopper had someone in a car waiting, it was far from where he had used his gun. If he had a car parked, I had stayed close enough to him to keep him from jumping into it without risking a clean shot from me as he took time to start it and drive away, especially on a snowy street.
We kept chugging through snow, my pant legs dripping wet, steam coming from my mouth. I didn’t know what kind of shape he was in for a cross-country race.
He turned a corner and headed east toward Pulaski. I kept up. In two short blocks he crossed Pulaski. I had cut the distance by about fifteen feet and was sure I’d have him. He was slowing down. Then he got lucky. Streetcars didn’t run often on Sunday in Chicago, but one pulled up at the corner as he crossed the street. It was heading north and he got on. I was too far away to catch it and bothered by the blowing wind and low visibility to make out his face even if he had turned it toward me, which he carefully did not.
The red streetcar headed north and I stood panting. I still had some run left in me, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to take on a streetcar. I decided to give it a try anyway. Maybe a cab would come by and I could catch it and the streetcar. There weren’t many people on the street, which looked like it was normally commercial. Sunday and bad weather kept the number down to a handful as I trotted into unknown territory after the slow-moving streetcar.
It stopped to pick up a passenger on Sixteenth Street but pulled away before I could cut the distance very much. The sidewalks of Pulaski were shoveled reasonably clean, and I would have caught up with the streetcar on a day when it made normal stops to let off and pick up people. As it was, even with traffic lights, I kept it in sight. The streets moved up in numbers. By Twelfth Street, I had managed to keep from losing ground and I was sure the man with suitcase had not gotten off. But it was man against machine. The man was sucking in chilled air fast and feeling the pain of unfamiliar cold.
I leaned against a delicatessen on the corner of Twelfth and Pulaski and was stared at by a small, bearded man dressed entirely in black. He picked up a discarded cigarette butt that had melted a hole in a bank of shoveled snow and turned his back on me.
The streetcar and killer had won. It pulled further into the blowing snow. I stood catching my breath, or trying to. When I could talk, I asked the bearded man where I could get a cab. He answered me in Yiddish. I said thanks and looked around for a cab. There wasn’t any. I gave up and went into the delicatessen, sweating and panting.
At a booth away from the door, I put my hands on the warm table, waiting for the pain and trembling to pass. The place was full of families and couples having their Sunday meal out. The place was clean and plain, with the smell of hot food and onions.
“What’ll it be?” asked a guy with a pot belly, a sour look, wild grey hair, and a white apron.
“A buck and a half of lunch, a friendly smile, and coffee.”
His thick face moved into a bilious fake grin, and I let out a laugh-more of a laugh than the moment deserved, but I needed it. I was alive. The waiter shrugged, people looked at me and I tried to control myself.
The food was great-hot Jewish food, memories of childhood and a mother long gone. Chicago, murder, and disease had begun to turn me nostalgic. I ate the chopped liver, cold beet borscht with sour cream, kishke, boiled chicken, and rice pudding; downed my coffee, ate a piece of halvah, left a big tip, and asked the waiter how to get downtown. He told me and pocketed the tip without a comment.
I made it back to Merle’s place by late afternoon. She was reading the Sunday paper and listening to Henry Aldrich on the radio. She made some coffee, helped me undress and made me warm all over. I told her my tale, enjoyed her hands on me and giggled once.
Then I fell asleep.
When I woke up, my watch told me it was night, and my eyes told me that Merle was still in her robe. She got dressed, told me what there was to eat, and said she was going out.
“I’m going to see my kid,” she explained somewhat defiantly.
“I didn’t ask,” I said.
She smiled sadly and went out.
The phone was down the hall. I called Kleinhans’ home number, figuring it was still Sunday, but he wasn’t there. I tried the Maxwell Street Station number. He was there.
“Peters,” he sighed enormously, a man of broad telephonic gestures. “What the hell happened on the West Side?”
“I went to see Canetta, but somebody was just ahead of me.”
“We know all about your visit,” he said. “Homicide wants to talk to you.”
“They want to do more than talk, don’t they?”
“Maybe so,” he said. “I told them I thought you were clean. That I knew you were going to see Canetta, that you have no way of getting your hands on a chopper, but they want to talk. They’ve already got witnesses to your being there-some kid-and other witnesses saying you were in the neighborhood running around.”
“Shit, Kleinhans,” I said wearily, “you don’t think I did it. You-”
“I don’t think I like you, Peters, but I don’t think you did this either. You have to admit, three guys have been chopped down around you since you hit town less than two days ago, and you came here straight from a visit with Capone in Miami. I think you’d better come in and do some explaining.”
“That’d keep me tied up too long,” I said. “I’m still trying to save Chico Marx, remember?”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “But the word’s out for you and they’ve called for pictures of you from L.A. You don’t come in, it’s going to look bad and take you longer to get out and on your way back to L.A.”
“Kleinhans, did you see the bodies from that place?”
“Yeah. One of them fits what you were saying about Marx having an impersonator, but the guy isn’t that close. His name’s Morris Kelakowsky, a harmless neighborhood guy who used to act in the Yiddish theater on Ogden Avenue. Did a little neighborhood gambling, small time stuff.
“He fits, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah,” Kleinhans admitted. “But I don’t know what you’re going to do with it now.”
“Someone’s knocking off everyone who might know about this gambling scam,” I explained. “There’s something to find out, and I keep getting close without knowing what I’m close to. Can you give me some time? How about your boss, the one who assigned you to watch me?”