“I’m quite busy,” she said. “I go to the Latin School, and they give lots of homework.”
The Davis apartment looked like a movie set. All the furniture, even the grand piano, was white, as was the wall-to-wall carpeting. Odd-shaped lamps with funny shades were stuck all over the floor. Nothing looked comfortable. I couldn’t imagine sitting down and reading a book or even having a conversation in this room; but, I must say, everything was spotless.
“Must be hard to keep all of this clean, Mrs. Davis,” I said. Probably not the most polite remark, but Margaret made up for my lack of enthusiasm.
“Oh, Lucky. This is so sleek and sophisticated. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Thank you. The doctor likes everything very modern. His first wife smothered him in Victoriana, but this,” she gestured at the room, “lifts his spirits.”
“It reminds him of his operating room,” Nancy said. Her mother laughed.
“The doctor does not like mess. That’s true. But I say a man’s home should reflect him, and the doctor has been wonderful to the both of us, hasn’t he, Nancy?” The girl didn’t say anything. “Hasn’t he?” her mother repeated.
“Yes,” Nancy said. “And I do love him very much. I’m only repeating what he said.”
I was trying to think of something to say to get the conversation going in another direction, when Margaret said, “I’m sure Ed will be interested in meeting Dr. Davis, though I suspect they already know each other. Most successful men in Chicago seem to move in the same circles.”
“I don’t know, Margaret. You see, the doctor is a staunch Republican,” Lucky said.
“Plenty of decent Republicans,” Margaret said.
“Who are appalled at what Big Bill has done to their party. I’d say they dislike him even more than we do,” I said.
“The doctor is a friend of Mayor Thompson,” Lucky said. “Brings him here to play cards.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well he’s ex-Mayor Thompson now.”
Lucky picked up a silver cigarette box from the shiny white coffee table and offered Margaret and me what looked like a Camel. I was surprised to see Margaret take one. I thought she didn’t smoke. I only had an occasional cigarette, but figured I might as well join in. I helped myself. Lucky took a heavy, oval silver lighter and flicked the wick, passing the flame first to Margaret, then to me. The three of us puffed together.
“You know how it is, girls. Easier to let your husband decide the family’s politics.”
“I wouldn’t think that an actress who…” I stopped.
“Who what?” Lucky said, not laughing now.
“Traveled,” I said, “and, you know, met a lot of different kinds of people, getting a broader outlook on life, umm…”
“I hope you’re not one of those judgmental women who think anyone who’s been in show business is an immoral Bolshevik, Miss Kelly.”
“Me? No, not at all. It’s just … I mean, come on Mrs. Davis, Big Bill’s a buffoon, and he’s dangerous.” Lucky inhaled and blew out a trail of smoke that floated up the white walls to the ceiling and said nothing.
“Dino told me you appeared with George M. Cohan. I wonder if you ever heard him speak of Dolly McGee?” I asked.
“Oh Dolly,” she said, “before my time really, but a legend. George said she was a marvelous singer and real grand dame,” she said, making it sound very French. “Something tragic happened to her, didn’t it?”
“It did,” I said.
“Some man, I suppose,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
She pointed her cigarette toward Margaret.
“It’s a very fortunate woman who finds a good man. For once I lived up to my name.”
“Mother,” Nancy said. “It’s five o’clock.”
“Oh dear,” Lucky said, “I have to say goodbye. The doctor likes his martini right at five thirty when he comes home, and I’m the only one can mix it properly—and I also have to make sure that Cook is on schedule. Dinner is on the table at six sharp. But really, Margaret, we must have lunch at the Cape Cod Room,” she said. “You, too, Nora.”
“And Nancy,” I said. “On a Saturday or school holiday.” Something appealing about this little girl.
“I don’t like fish,” Nancy said. Her mother didn’t seem to hear her.
“Don’t forget about our portrait, Nora,” she said to me.
“I could shoot it right here in the living room,” I say. “Plenty of light.”
“No, no,” she said. “That wouldn’t work.”
“Well, come up to my atelier,” I said—better than saying “the servants’ quarters.”
“Goodbye, goodbye,” Lucky said to us, but it was Nancy who walked us to the door. Lucky was picking up ashes from the carpet with her manicured nails.
* * *
“But you don’t understand, Lucky. Thompson almost destroyed Chicago,” I said to Lucky as I posed her with her daughter on my sofa a week after our first meeting. I had pulled it over to the window so she and Nancy were backlit. The two sat close together, though Nancy leaned just a bit away from her mother. I suppose you learn to protect yourself from the woman who more or less abandoned you for the first nine years of your life. Lucky had told Margaret her marriage to Nancy’s father had been very brief, ending just after Nancy was born. Lucky’s sister had raised the child. They were the all-American family now, and Lucky certainly played the part of a respectable society matron devoted to her husband and little girl, but Nancy sometimes looked at her mother as if asking, “What is my next line?”
“Thompson’s trying to undermine Ed now,” I said. “Got that little weasel Wilcox out bribing informers. Looking for dirt. Even Margaret’s not…” I stopped myself.
Nancy didn’t need to hear this, though I was sure Mrs. Loyal Davis wouldn’t want to see her past dissected in Thunderin. But then again she was a Protestant, so maybe divorce wasn’t such a stigma. That did seem to be true because now she said, “Oh, gossip. Can’t worry about gossip. Jealousy at the root of it. The doctor’s marriage was over when I met him on that cruise, with only some legal technicalities to be ironed out—no matter what some people said. And, of course, Nancy’s father and I had been divorced for ages.”
I saw Nancy twitch on the couch. Hard for a child, even a Protestant, to hear the breakup of her family dismissed so easily. Now, in a few years, Nancy would tell her father that she had asked Dr. Davis to adopt her. From then on, she would be Nancy Davis. But right now, she was still trying on this new life as the doctor’s Latin School–attending daughter—and not a little girl living with her aunt while her actress mother toured the country.
“Nancy, lift your chin,” Lucky said. “Makes your face seem thinner. Are we ready, Nora?”
“You are,” I said, and spent the next half hour shooting the pair from every angle. I put on a bit of an act. Went down on my knees to shoot up at them; stood on a chair pointing the camera down. As I looked through the viewfinder, I thought that both Lucky and Nancy had an actress’s ability to project an image. Both could change expressions like slides in a zoetrope. Four different kinds of smiles each: one, a closed-lipped regal version with guarded eyes; then, a warm I’m-just-like-you half grin; a head back, let’s laugh together version; and then the slightest upturn of the corners of their mouths, as if they were recalling a secret memory. In the end, Lucky chose the queen and princess shot, and I went down to Mabel Sykes’s darkroom to print three oversized portraits.
“Those are two women who know what they want and how to get it,” Mabel said.
“Nancy’s only a little girl,” I said.
“So … Hey, I meant it as a compliment to them,” Mabel said.
And I did admire Lucky. She’d rowed herself onto a safe shore, and brought her daughter along with her. Good luck to her. But her politics!
“It’s just the doctor could never vote for the Democrats,” she’d said to me the day of the sitting. “All that corruption. Thompson comes from a very good fam
ily. Four generations in America.”
“You mean he’s not like the Irish and Italian and German and Jewish riffraff,” I started, but she cut me off.
“Now, Nora, I think it’s wonderful that people like you and Margaret have bettered yourself, but you must admit most of these immigrants just don’t understand how to behave. I was really afraid of moving to Chicago with the doctor. All those gangsters machine-gunning each other in the street.”
I stopped her. “Big Bill took money from every one of them,” I said. “Al Capone was Thompson’s biggest backer. Why, he beat Dever, who was decent and tried to clean up Chicago.”
“Oh, well. Capone’s in jail now, and Ed Kelly is going to be our neighbor. I guess we just won’t talk politics,” Lucky said.
“Lucky, I can tell you’re not from Chicago,” I said.
What would Ed make of them? But, surprise. Guess what? Ed liked Dr. Davis, and the building, and the apartment. He and Margaret and the children moved in a month later, though Ed did refuse to have white carpets and white furniture. “We’ve plenty of stuff,” he told Margaret.
And I did like the way the mahogany chairs, dark wood cabinets, and the blue velvet sofa and loveseat Mary had bought for the Hyde Park house looked in the new space. Made the apartment look more like a home than a fancy hotel suite. Though Margaret had said to me, “This is alright for now, but Lucky took me to meet this gallery owner who imports furniture and paintings. With the light in this apartment, we need to display some fine art.”
Ed joined the doctor’s weekly poker game. When I asked him how he enjoyed playing with Republicans, he told me, “Nora, I need these fellows on my side. Besides, Loyal told me in confidence that Big Bill is his patient. Now, you know what the doctor specializes in?”
“Neurology,” I said.
“Yes. He’s a brain surgeon and very eminent, so I wonder what Big Bill’s problem is.”
“Are you going to ask the doctor?”
“No. I wouldn’t want him to violate his ethics, but…”
“You’ll find out,” I said.
“I might,” Ed said.
7
JULY 1933
So. I was glad that the couples were becoming such good friends. Lucky Davis and Margaret were both “women with a past” who had managed to return to the heights of respectability. I wondered if they ever talked about what might have been—Margaret single and living alone on the fringes of Kansas City society, and Lucky an actress playing older and older parts while her daughter grew up and away from her. But now, here they were. Living at the best address in Chicago. Admired matrons.
Funny how I felt not the slightest twinges of envy for them. I’d had my love and could never have married again.
I began to think of Ireland and Peter’s grave. July, now, and a lovely month there. I still had a chunk of Cermak’s money, and I was collecting a salary. Margaret had the children in Eagle River. Things were quiet in city hall. Maybe Ed would give me a few weeks’ vacation.
But then, I got a note from Maurine. There was a new fellow in town. Charles Blake, an editor at the Chicago Evening American, which was a Hearst paper. He was an old pal of hers and wanted to talk to someone who knew Chicago. “He’s not bad looking either, and the right age—in his mid-fifties, like we are.”
“Not interested,” I’d told her. I’d seen one story Blake wrote where he described Hinky Dink as “the dean of the thick Micks.” But Maurine had always been good to me, and she really wanted me to meet her friend …
So that’s how I ended up sitting in Greek Nick’s speakeasy under Wacker Drive with Charles Blake a week later. Maurine had set up the appointment with him from LA.
“God, Maurine did it. Didn’t she?” Blake said to me. “Got out of there and is making real money in Hollywood. She promised she’d sniff around the studios for me. I could do that kind of snappy dialogue. Certainly there are plenty of characters to draw from in Chicago.”
We were drinking Irish whiskey, though I didn’t recognize the label. Sheerin’s, it was called.
“This stuff is bonded,” Blake said to me. “Didn’t come from some bathtub in Bridgeport, though I wouldn’t trust the gin. Won’t be long before Prohibition is gone for good. Can’t be soon enough for me. It will be interesting to see what the Outfit does to survive. Now let’s talk about why your cousin should be in jail.”
“What?” I said.
“Listen, Nora, I won’t beat around the bush. I’ve got a source in the IRS tells me, right after Roosevelt was elected, they settled with Ed Kelly for a hundred thousand dollars as tax on four hundred and fifty thousand dollars of unreported income from 1927, ’28, and ’29.”
I stood up. “What the hell is going on? Maurine said you wanted to talk about Chicago. You, you snake. Did she know this was a setup?”
“Why bother her with details? I heard you’re close to His Honor and half a newshound yourself. Don’t you want to tell his side of the story? Hey, I personally don’t care if your cousin was printing hundred dollar bills, but Mr. Hearst likes connecting Roosevelt with a crooked politician.”
Now, I knew Ed had had a tax problem that he’d settled. No charges were ever filed against him. Done and dusted. And really, in the early years of income tax, lots of people were unsure about what to report. If anyone was at fault, it was Ed’s lawyer. But Blake wasn’t thinking of legalities. He wanted to find graft, corruption, bribes—licking his chops, I thought, as he tilted the shot glass back and grinned at me. Maybe I should find out what he knew. I sat down.
“So what?” I asked. “Ed made money, he paid his taxes. A little late maybe, but he did pay.”
“A little late? Try six years past due. Think of it, Miss Kelly. Your cousin settled with the IRS for a hundred thousand dollars. That was the compromise he agreed on. God only knows what he really owed. And though I don’t personally converse with God, I’ve plenty of other sources. I intend to find out where Ed Kelly’s money came from. And if Roosevelt was involved in getting the IRS to settle—well, we’ve got a national story.”
“Oh, come on. You can’t attack Ed and the president. Look at all the good they’re doing. Ed’s getting Chicago on its feet again. He’s only been in office a month, and already he’s collected more taxes, paid more salaries, put more people on relief than Thompson ever did. Come on, Blake, the newspapers were screaming for Ed to cancel the Century of Progress, but he’s showed how it could be a moneymaker.”
“That’s bull. The last thing Chicago needs is another World’s Fair. Hubris, Miss Kelly. Pure hubris.” He looked at me, sure I didn’t understand.
“Hubris,” I said, “an interesting word. It’s from the Greek, though I suppose you wouldn’t expect a thick Mick like me to know much about etymology. Though, from your name, you have some thick Mick blood yourself.”
“My people were Scotch-Irish, Miss Kelly. A very different heritage altogether,” he said.
Oh, dear God. Here was another one. Scratch one of these cynical newspapermen and you’d find another Wilcox. Next thing, Blake will be going on about the pope being the whore of Babylon. I wonder if Blake had ever bothered to examine the McCormicks’ tax returns. “So what do you want, Mr. Blake?”
“An interview with the mayor where he gives me a reasonable account of his income over the last five years.”
“And if he gives you an interview and shows you that he made his money honestly through investments, property, sales, and consulting fees, you’ll stop the story?”
And he nodded.
“On a dime, Miss Kelly. On a dime.”
“No. I’d be nuts to talk to Blake. He’ll twist whatever I say.”
Ed and I were walking along the lakefront, crossing Oak Street Beach, the morning after my meeting with Blake.
“Okay,” I said. “Write out a summary, and I’ll meet with Blake and give it to him.”
“Nonie, I have no obligation to reveal the source of my income to anyone. Privacy is a fundamental right in t
his country. It’s the law. Even the IRS recognizes it. Look at Section 3167 of the Revenue Act of 1932,” he said to me—and then didn’t he quote it word for word. “It is unlawful for any collector or officer or employee of the United States to divulge or make known in any manner whatsoever the amount or source of any taxpayer’s income.”
“Jesus, Ed, you’ve got it memorized,” I said.
“Even a thick Mick like me can learn,” he said.
“But what would be so bad about coming clean? None of the regular people in Chicago begrudge you the money you’ve made. I mean, so what if Pat Nash paid you a consulting fee now and then? Everybody knows Nash Brothers are the best sewer company—that they get the job done. Even the Hearst papers admit that. And so what if you got some advance information, now and then, about new roads going into empty bits of the prairie. Isn’t buying cheap and selling dear the American way?”
“Except some of my partners in those land deals are rather shy. They wouldn’t like to see their names in the paper,” he said.
I stopped. Took him by the arm.
“Oh no, Ed, you didn’t … Not Capone or Nitti?”
He pushed my hand away. Stepped back.
“Goddamn it, Honora Kelly, I don’t take that kind of an accusation from anyone, not even you.”
Sometimes I forget just how tall Ed is. How broad were his shoulders. Here was the man who’d flattened his supervisor on the canal, who’d punched the train engineer in Florida. “I’m sorry, Ed. I’m sorry.”
He started walking. I caught up.
“The fellow I got involved with isn’t like those Italians, but the Hearst newspapers would love to connect us. He’s a man who bought acres and acres of vacant land on the far South Side. Worthless, unless the city put in roads and sewers. He came to me and asked me to invest in this land, and to recommend the area for development. I said yes, even though I knew his money came from bootlegging and gambling.”
“Mont Tennes? But he’s gone respectable. No scandal in having invested with him.”
“Not Tennes,” Ed said. “This fellow manages to get shot at on a regular basis, but he always survives. Blake of the big words once called him the archetypal Chicago hood.” And suddenly, I knew the name and why Ed had agreed to be his partner.
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