That bought the boys a lot of good will-particularly considering the Bioff-Browne chefs maintained a deluxe menu for celebrities and politicos and press, including such first-rate fare as orange-glazed roast duck, prime rib and porterhouse steaks. What the hell-even a cynical soul like me had to hand it to ’em: the out-of-work stagehands ate the majority of the meals, in a time when otherwise God knows where or how they’d have eaten at all. Still, I always suspected Bioff and Browne were squeezing more out of the deal than just the means to keep the newspapers and politicians friendly.
Three beers later we were in Westwood, which was just more of the Beverly Hills same except less rolling, and Bioff’s estate, which we pulled into the driveway of, was an impressive sprawling double-story wood-and-stone ranch-style which (Browne informed me) Bioff had dubbed “Rancho Laurie,” after his wife. Compared to Montgomery’s mansion, it came in a fairly distant second; next to a room at the Morrison Hotel, it was paradise. The little pimp from South Halsted Street had gone Hollywood, all right.
I followed Browne around the side of the perfectly tended, gently sloping grounds, an occasional tree throwing some shade on us, and there, reclining on a lounge chair, next to a kidney-shaped pool somewhat smaller than Lake Michigan, was Willie Bioff.
I’d always thought of him as fat, and I guess he was fat, but not in the dissipated George Browne way. His barrel chest was covered with tight curls of black hair as were his muscular arms and legs; he was neckless, stocky but hard, like a wrestler-he had once been a union slugger, after all. Under the black body hair, the flesh I remembered as Illinois pasty was California tan. He wore money-green bathing trunks and blood-red house slippers-not a bead of water on him; my guess was he didn’t swim much-and sunglasses and had a cigarette in one hand and a glass of ice water in the other.
He rose quickly as we approached and smiled broadly and extended a hand to me. “Thanks for coming out here, Heller.”
We shook hands. His was a strong grip. Stronger than mine.
“I was surprised to be invited, Willie. We aren’t exactly pals.”
He waved that off, taking a lime monogrammed crushed velvet robe off a nearby lounge chair and belting it around him. He exchanged his sunglasses for clear rimless octagonal ones from a pocket of the robe. “I told you once, we should let bygones be bygones. I meant it then, I mean it now.”
“Okay.”
He turned a hard, hooded gaze on Browne and said, “I want to talk to Heller alone.”
“Sure thing, Willie. I’ll just sit here by the pool.”
“Why don’t you go down to the office?”
“Friday’s a slow day. You know that.”
“You should be there.”
“Look, Willie, I’ll just sit by the pool. Could you send your house-boy out with some beer?”
“Why don’t you sit in your car and drink your own?”
Browne seemed more sad than embarrassed by this exchange, wandering off without another word, as Willie showed me inside, through glass doors into a big white modern kitchen.
“You’ll have to pardon my lush of a partner,” Bioff said. “He can be a real cluck. You care for anything to drink?”
“No thanks.”
“I gave the help the morning off,” Bioff said, as if needing to explain the emptiness of the kitchen, and the house beyond. “My wife and kids are at our place in Canoga Park-I’ll be joining them this afternoon for the weekend. But I wanted to see you first.”
“Why, Willie?”
“I’ll get to that. Come with me.”
For a place called Rancho Laurie, where you’d expect rustic to be the word, it was pretty posh. We padded across a plush carpet, past a formal dining room, and various antique furniture, none of it early American, and paintings in the manner of old masters, and Chinese vases seemed to be set on anything that wasn’t moving.
I never imagined I’d find myself in Willie Bioff’s bedroom, but neither did I imagine it would be an elegant Louis XV affair. He led me into a walk-in closet where dozens upon dozens of tailored suits hung; the back of the door was heavy with racks of ties, dozens of ties, every color, every pattern in creation; snappy snap-brim hats sat on a long shelf in a row, as if supervising. Shoes polished like black mirrors lined the floor. I thought he was going to change clothes, but that wasn’t the point of this.
“What do you think of my ties?” he said, running a caressing hand over some of them.
“They’re real nice, Willie.”
He sucked on the cigarette, smiling with immense satisfaction. Then he said, “How about those suits?”
“They’re swell. Hats, too. Like your shoes.”
He looked at me and smiled, just a little. “I’m not showing off. I just wanted to share this with you. You were a poor Chicago street kid yourself. You can appreciate how sweet my life is, compared to what shit it was once.”
“Sure.”
He led me out of the closet and I sat down while he changed into slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt in the adjacent bathroom, losing the cigarette. Then he led me back down the stairs and we were soon in a knotty-pine library that was uncomfortably similar to Montgomery’s study. About the only difference was the lack of hunting prints-Willie had instead some handsome tinted photos of outdoor landscapes (“I took those,” he said proudly, as I looked at them)-and the leather furniture here wasn’t oversize, and was black not tan. On the couch, spread open face down, as if to save a place, was a book: Das Kapital by Karl Marx. I didn’t think I’d have found that at Montgomery’s; of course I didn’t expect to find it here, either.
I sat down next to the book. “Are you reading this, Willie?”
“A great man wrote that book,” he said defensively. “We’ll be living that way sometime in the future.”
And then we’ll all have closets full of suits and ties and hats and shoes. “Why am I here, Willie? Besides to look at your suits and ties and hats and shoes.”
He sat beside me. “You still think I’m a low uncouth man, don’t you?”
“The question isn’t whether you own Chinese vases, Willie. The question is how you paid for ’em.”
He sneered, and looked more like I remembered him. “Are you sure you’re from Chicago? Jesus, Heller, I come up the hard way, you know that. I slept in my share of doorways, stomach growling like a stray dog; like the man said, bread is expensive when your pockets are empty. I learned to earn a buck any way I could. But I’m legit now. I’m doing good work for the unions out here, lookin’ after my members.”
“Why do you feel you have to justify yourself to me, of all people? I’m just an ex-cop who busted you once.”
“That’s why. I want you to understand I don’t hold any grudge against you. You were doing your job. I was doing mine. Hell, they were the same job, really.”
“How do you figure?”
He shrugged. “We were both maintaining law and order. I just happened to be maintaining it in a whorehouse.”
“Slapping women around.”
“I never slapped a woman in my life. I got great respect for women. I have slapped some whores in my time. Of various sex. Like the man said, most businessmen are nothing but two-bit whores with a clean shirt and a shine.” The moon face beamed. “Only now I know more subtle ways of slapping them around than just plain slapping.”
“I guess greedy people just rub you the wrong way.”
“Be sarcastic if you want, but I’m a union man. I look out for the little guy!” Unconsciously or not, he was pointing a thumb at his own barrel chest as he said that.
“Why am I here, Willie?”
“To maybe do a job for me.”
“Aren’t there any detectives in California?”
“Sure. But not the Chicago variety. When Georgie called me from the Troc last night, I thought, this is perfect. Just the ticket.”
“What is?”
“You being here. You know what irony is?”
“We’ve met.”
“Well, then you can appreciate this. You know who Westbrook Pegler is?”
My mouth went dry.
“Irony’s sister?” I said.
“You know who he is. He’s in Chicago right now. He’s looking for dirt on me. To spread in his column.”
“I know,” I admitted.
It was the only way to play it.
The hard dark pig eyes behind the rimless glass squinted. “You know?”
I shrugged. “Yeah. He stopped by my office the other day. He wanted to know if I was the arresting officer on your pandering charge, years ago.”
He went a little pale, sat up. “What did you say to him?”
I shrugged again. “I said yes.”
“Shit. Did you give him any details?”
“No. It was a long time ago, Willie. He just asked if the rumor that I arrested you for pimping, once, was true, and I said it was. He asked if you were convicted, and I said you were.”
He didn’t like that. He stood, paced; wandered over to a writing desk decorated with framed pictures of his brood of lads and lit up a cigarette and began smoking nervously. But soon he said: “I can’t expect you to have said otherwise. Thanks for telling me straight out.”
“No thanks needed.”
He sat next to me again, cigarette in hand, his expression painfully earnest. “You got to understand, Heller-the feds have been breathing down my neck for months. I had to step down as the IA’s representative, not long ago, ’cause of this federal heat. Oh, I’m still running things. But from the sidelines; I can’t even go in my own goddamn office, can you picture it?”
So that was why he bitterly bit off Browne’s head for not being at the office: he was jealous he couldn’t be there himself.
“Now, this Pegler shit. Comes at a bad time. I know who put him up to it, too.”
“Who?”
“That bastard Montgomery. The smart-ass actor.”
This irony guy got around.
“Robert Montgomery, you mean?”
“Yeah, him. That smart-ass, no-good, double-crossing bastard…after all I did for him.”
Here was a new wrinkle.
“Why?” I asked. “What did you do for Montgomery?”
He scowled, not looking at me, but at an image of Montgomery fixed in his mind, I’d guess. He said, “Couple years ago SAG-Screen Actors Guild-serves notice on the studios that they now consider themselves a legitimate labor union, and want to be so recognized. You know-they wanted to enter into collective bargaining, like the big kids. So we, the IATSE, me, went to bat for ’em.”
“Really.”
“Yeah, I told that prick L. B. Mayer if he didn’t recognize SAG, he’d have an IA strike to play with. My movie projectionists can shut this industry down overnight, you know.”
“So I hear.”
The round face was reddening. “Thanks to me, Mayer recognized their lousy little Guild, and Montgomery thanked us publicly, but now, fuck him! We’re not good enough for him and the fags and dykes and Reds in his club.”
So much for Karl Marx; Willie seemed more interested in the brothers Marx, or anyway their union dues.
“I’ll tell you whose fault it really is. Frank. Frank’s getting too greedy.”
He meant Nitti. It was Bioff’s first admission that he was working for the Outfit. He let it escape casually and I didn’t react to it as any big deal. All I said was: “How so, Willie?”
“He wants to expand, and it just ain’t the right time. There’s this rival group, a CIO bunch called the United Studio Technicians, and they’re spreading dissent among the IA rank and file. We got them to deal with, we got plenty to do, rather than try and kidnap a union that don’t want anything to do with us, anyway.”
“Why such a fuss, over show business? Aren’t there bigger fish to fry, better unions to go after?”
As if speaking to a slow child, he said, “Heller, no matter what anybody tells you, people do not have to eat. Like the man said, there’s only two things they really got to do-get laid, and see a show, when they can dig up the scratch.”
The philosophy of a pimp turned Hollywood power broker.
“Listen,” he said. “You’ve got a reputation of being a straight shooter. Frank speaks highly of you.”
Nitti again.
“That’s nice to hear,” I said.
“You’re known as a boy who can keep his mouth shut.”
Actually, I was known in at least one instance for singing on the witness stand-when I helped bring the world crashing down on Mayor Cermak’s favorite corrupt cops, Lang and Miller; but I had indeed kept some secrets for Frank Nitti. That was more important, where somebody like Bioff was concerned.
“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” I said.
“How would you like to earn a couple of grand?”
The money was sure flying this week; I wondered if I’d live to spend any of it.
“Sure,” I said. “What’s your poison?”
“Pegler,” he said.
It would be.
He was asking, “When are you heading back?”
“This afternoon,” I said, somehow. “I’ll be in Chicago tomorrow morning.”
“Good. There are some people I want you to see.”
“About what?’
“About me. I want you to find out if Pegler’s been around to see them, and if he has, try and worm out of them what, if anything, they spilled.”
Oh my.
“If he hasn’t been around,” he continued, “warn them him or somebody he’s hired may be around. And tell them if they talk they’ll go to sleep and never wake up.”
I shook my head no. “Willie, I’ll do some checking for you. Gladly. But I won’t threaten anybody for you. And I don’t want to know about that end of it, understood?”
He smiled, friendly as Santa Claus. “Sure, Heller. Sure. They can figure that out for themselves, anyway. Like the man said, when you eat garlic, it speaks for itself. Shall we say a grand down, a grand upon your reporting back to me? By phone is fine.”
“Okay.”
“You want this on your books, or should I give you cash?”
“Cash’ll do.”
“Sit tight and I’ll get you some. Oh, and Heller. Don’t tell anybody about this. Not Nitti or anybody. As far as Nick Dean is concerned, I had you out here to ask you about that O’Hare killing. I knew Eddie, you see, and as a matter of fact I would like to ask you a few questions about that before you go.”
“All right.”
“Anyway, I don’t want Nitti to know I’m nervous about this Pegler deal. It wouldn’t look good. I’m on the spot enough with this federal-tax heat. So be careful-like the man said, when you play both ends against the middle you risk getting squeezed.”
You’re telling me.
He got up and went out and came back shortly with a thousand in hundreds in an IATSE envelope. I put it in my suitcoat pocket, answered his questions about the O’Hare shooting in a similar manner to the way I’d handled Captain Stege’s, and soon he was walking me out of the house, an arm reached up around my shoulder, two old buddies from Chicago.
“Let me tell you about the time Little New York came out to visit,” he said.
Louis Campagna; now there’s a house guest.
“I had my sprinkler system going,” Bioff said, gesturing to his expansive green lawn, “and Campagna-you know, he’s a nature lover-”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Oh yeah, he’s got a farm in Wisconsin, goes fishing all the time, loves the great outdoors. Anyway, he sees my sprinklers, dozens of ’em, turning in full circles, and he asks me what the hell they are, and I tell him, and he says, that’s great! Get me six hundred.”
I laughed.
“So I told him that six hundred of those things could irrigate all the city parks in Chicago. And that they’d freeze up in the cold weather. But he insisted, and he said I should charge ’em to the union. So I called the Waiter and asked him to tal
k Louie out of it.”
The Waiter was Paul Ricca, rumored to be second in the Outfit only to Nitti.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Ricca wanted three hundred of ’em,” he said, and walked me to the limo where his partner sat in back drinking beer.
On the way he told me who to see in Chicago.
The Southern belle, hoop skirt flouncing, parasol atwirl, a vision in white and pink and lace, strolled coyly to the settee and, with a leisurely grace, took off her red slippers. Then she removed her bonnet. The languid strains of “Swanee River” filling the air began to pick up tempo, build in volume. The belle, who was blond, shoulder-length curls tumbling to lacy shoulders, was rolling down a knee-length silk stocking from a leg extended from under the hoop skirt, foot arched; another slowly peeled stocking fell, and then she stood, stepping ever so ladylike out of her hoop skirt. She was about to step out of her lacy pantaloons as well when somebody tapped me on the shoulder.
“You pay to get in or what?” Jack Barger asked. The balding little Jew with the gone-out cigar in the corner of his mouth and the expensive but slept-in-looking brown suit was the owner of the theater, so he had a right to ask.
“No,” I said. I was standing in back, next to a bored, uniformed usher who was looking at something he’d just picked out of his nose. “I told the girl at the box office I was here to see you.”
Barger put a disgusted look on a puss that was naturally sour anyway, nodded toward the light. “Is that me?”
Across the darkened theater and its bumpy sea of male heads, I could tell at once that the stripper, who was now parading across the stage in lace panties and blue pasties before a cheesy plantation backdrop, was not Jack Barger.
“I’d say no,” I said.
“You ain’t kidding when you claim to be a detective, are you?” he said, typically. Barger was one of those guys whose kidding always seemed to be on the square; I’d known him, casually, for years, but sensed no affection in his sarcasm. If so, it was deep down.
He crooked and wiggled his forefinger at me in a “come along” motion. Though he was barely ten years my senior, he treated me like a kid. But I had a feeling he treated everybody that way.
The Million-Dollar Wound nh-3 Page 16