by Tee Morris
“Capone?” The scrawny one scoffed. “You t’ink we work for that greasy, jelly-belly dago?”
“Shaddup, Eddie!” barked Funny Man, his speech impaired somewhat by his face being pressed into Mick’s floor. “Don’t say nothin’ no more until I tells ya, okay?”
These ogres didn’t work for Capone and they were causing problems in his territory? Either these boys were particularly stupid, terribly lost, or had a good reason being in this part of town.
“All right then,” I growled, “educate me. Who you mooks representing?”
I felt Funny Man, who was still getting cozy with Beatrice, quickly shake his head at his two dimwits, the looks on their faces silently begging him for an order. Why, oh why, did they have to play it the hard way?
I kept the big guy pinned to the floor with a knee to the back of his neck as I drew a bead on Scarecrow, who had made it through this scuffle so far with only a slight burn and a cleaning bill. Beatrice fired off a shot, knocking his fine felt chapeau off his elongated melon and knocking it several feet behind him.
As Scarecrow fumbled for his piece, Bloody Nose reeled for a moment and gripped the edges of the booth, his piece still underneath the table where he had dropped it. Meanwhile, my own heater was already back kissing Funny Man’s cheek. I knew the barrel was still warm from the shot, reminding him I was worse than serious. I was downright nuts.
“Lemme whack this prick, Lou!” Scarecrow shouted, looking a little unhinged by my target practice. “He took a shot at me!”
I let out a chortle. “Who said I was aimin’ for your noggin, Scarecrow?”
He followed my glance to the left of his shiny brown leather shoes, where there lay a tiny arrangement of quail feathers accented with a single bright yellow feather. Scarecrow quickly looked behind him to where his hat was still rolling unevenly, and then looked back to the adornment by his shoe—a terrific hat decoration just begging to be a sharpshooter’s target.
“Now you know how good a shot I am.” Beatrice’s hammer pulled back once more as a muscle under my left eye twitched lightly. “I can promise you that with your boy here, I won’t miss. We’re going to try this again, boys. Who you packin’ heat for?”
Neither Bloody Nose nor Scarecrow spoke up. They were being good little lapdogs, but Lou here apparently figured if he didn’t speak up at this point, Beatrice would.
“Moran.” And here I thought I was going to have to waste another bullet or three tonight. Lou was a lot smarter than he was funny. “We’re workin’ for Bugs Moran.”
Beatrice doesn’t usually make an appearance without hurting somebody. It has to be one serious exception to the rule to make her back down, and hearing that name in Capone’s territory served as an exceptional exception. Beatrice’s hammer slowly returned to a safe position as I stepped away from Lou, still keeping my girl in my grip in case any of them felt a sudden surge of idiotic bravery.
To say that George “Bugs” Moran and Alfonse “Scarface” Capone didn’t care for one another would be like saying a Cleric of the Resh’ill Valley would “get religious” every now and then. Moran hated Capone. Capone hated Moran. They bickered so intensely that if they lived under the same roof, they would have been legally married by the Justice of the Peace. The only difference is that when married couples bickered, it usually involved a rolling pin, a few flatware projectiles, and maybe the odd pot or pan. When this Irish-Italian couple argued, it involved Tommy guns and switchblades.
Moran and his boys had been keeping clear of Chicago since Valentine’s Day, and now these dinks were in Mick’s kicking up a fuss. This couldn’t be anything good.
“All right, boys.” I nodded. “I know I don’t want any trouble, and you don’t want to be dead. So why don’t we put our toys away and go back to our respective shires? I don’t think either Capone or Moran would take too kindly to you orcs causing trouble in a protected establishment.”
Yeah, yeah, I know I just said Mick’s place wasn’t officially a protected establishment, but Capone had a softer side for the working class who had come up from nothing and built up a legacy. Mick’s legacy was the Chili Special—Capone’s favorite indulgence, apparently, apart from the Italian food he enjoyed in Chicago’s Little Italy. Either way, if something went down with Mick, Moran would be sure to feel a bit of payback in the morning.
Lou straightened his tie and removed the blood from the corner of his mouth; Scarecrow (who Lou was calling “Eddie”) resheathed his boom dagger; and Bloody Nose (nameless, as well as brainless, so far), keeping his eye on me for as long as he could, returned to the booth and reached under the table for his own gun. While slipping it back into his shoulder holster, Bloody Nose flipped his once-white handkerchief to a clean side. The hankie was now a deep crimson, and I could only smile at the excuses he would give Moran about what had happened.
I slipped Beatrice back inside my jacket, giving Moran’s muscle the grin of a vermulth after it devours a small hunting party. “Good boys. Now, how ’bout you three call it a night? Hell, I’ll even pick up your bill.”
Lou instinctively took a couple steps back as I passed him on the way back to the bar and hopped up on my barstool without so much as a second glance. “If we part on good terms, Capone and Moran won’t know about this. So go home, and make sure your doc takes a look at Bloody Nose. I’d hate to have an infection on my conscience.”
Yeah, I was enjoying this. I didn’t think it could get any better until Lou the Leader leaned in, looking as if he were going to rip my head off and stuff it in his coat pocket.
“Anything else, leprechaun?”
I nodded, not looking at him. “Yeah, that reminds me…”
I grabbed his necktie and yanked him down to the bar, his chin slamming hard against its cool surface. I could hear Mick utter a sympathetic groan as Lou’s teeth slammed hard against each other in his mouth.
“I am not a leprechaun. I am not an elf. And I definitely ain’t no munchkin! I am a Highlands Dwarf! You hear me? A dwarf! D-W-A-R-F! Confuse me with anything else, and I will take great pleasure in teaching you the differences between dwarves, elves, and leprechauns.” I leaned in closer and whispered, “And I’ll let you in on one difference right now: dwarves love battle-axes.”
I could hear his hands underneath the bar, trying to come up and rip the necktie out of my hand. Then I felt Lou grab my coat. (Guess he thought we were in Round Two. Bad guess.) I gave the necktie a bit of slack only to yank again, bringing his square jaw back to the bar. He let me go after that. “We understand each other?”
“Yeah,” he grunted, struggling against my hold on his necktie. A few drops of blood dribbled out from between his gnashing teeth. Yep, he’d bit through his tongue. “I gotcha, dwarf.”
“Good.” Releasing the tie, I motioned to Mick, who already had a fresh bowl of the special waiting for me. “Now beat it. Your stink is killing the scent of my chili.”
For a long minute, no one moved. Lou was holding all the cards in this game. I could tell the bleeding in his mouth was giving him a huge complex. But if Moran wanted him in Capone’s territory, he probably wanted him to stay out of trouble. A death like mine in an establishment like Mick’s would have been a bushel full of it.
“Let’s go, boys,” he muttered.
Mick watched wide-eyed as the rumpled, wrinkled pinstripes left his place. The family quickly ripped out a few bills, threw them on the table, and quickly hurried out, their little boy staring wide-eyed at me. That left only the young couple at a table in the corner, staring at me for a moment before nervously returning to their root-beer float and chitchat.
Annabelle frowned at the mess I had made with my chili discus, but she was soon smiling as she tidied up the family’s table. In his haste, the father had tipped her fifty percent of the bill. Seemed like she and her kid were going to have a good weekend.
I adjusted my own hat and took a deep breath to clear my noggin as Mick presented me with the new bowl of chili. While I fin
ally started to enjoy dinner, he wiped the old chili and Lou’s blood off the bar, giving a high-pitched whistle and shaking his head as he did so.
“I tell you what, Billi: You either lead a charmed life, or you have a death wish.”
“How so, Mick?”
His voice dropped to a sharp whisper. “Oh come off it, Billi, you know why! Those were Bugs Moran’s boys!”
When the entrance bell jingled again, I thought Mick was going to jump out of his Polish-American skin. It was just his son Joshua, coming in from his last delivery of the day. He must have had a hot date lined up tonight, if the anxiousness in his eyes was anything to go by.
Ah, to be sixty and young again…
After heaving a sigh of relief, Mick continued whispering anyway, as if not to tempt the Fates and have Moran’s boys return for another inning (although that they had just struck out in the bottom of the ninth and wouldn’t risk another beating over Mick’s name-dropping). Superstitious Pollack, but I love him like a brother!
“Good Lord, Billi, those are the kind of people you thank God every morning you don’t know. If you do know them, you have to make sure to stay on their good side through the day so you can make it through the day!”
I shot him a grin. “Now, Mick, I know those boys could have made me disappear in an unforgettable kind of way, but this is where you have to look at the big picture. Last month. Valentine’s Day. You remember that little party Capone threw?”
“Billi, come on.” Mick was sweating, and it had nothing to do with how hard he was working. If I didn’t calm him down, the poor guy was going to have a heart attack. “You got to watch what you—”
“Hey, you two! Romeo and Juliet!”
The couple halted their chat and looked at me with wide eyes as I addressed them. “Either of you work for Al Capone or George Moran?”
For a minute there, I thought that I had evoked the powers of a medusa. Those poor kids didn’t move for so long that I was expecting to find the telltale veins of marble slowly appearing in their paling skin. With faces you would only find in a statue garden, they silently gave me a “No” with a simultaneous shaking of their heads.
“There you go. Some free detective work. So unless you are working with Moran, it is just you, me, and the star-crossed lovers over there.”
He just laughed, shaking his head ruefully as I returned to the bouquet of spicy flavors in the bowl before me.
“Mick,” I continued, “ol’ Bugs knows that Capone has pissed all over this town like a possessive hunting hound. He’s claimed his territory, and he intends to keep it.”
He lifted a cautionary finger. “So what’s your point, Billi? If I were anyone else, you’d be outta here without a second thought. I don’t want any trouble in my place!”
“And you’re not gonna get any, my friend.” I smiled confidently, giving his shoulder a friendly nudge. “I don’t start trouble that I can’t finish. You know that. You and your customers were safe tonight.”
“Eh, I knew they were, Billi,” Mick replied, shaking his head in frustration, “but that’s not what I mean. What I mean is, Capone leaves me alone so long as he likes my chili. But if Moran’s boys mention what happened…”
“If Moran wanted to let Capone know he was back in his territory, or even if he wanted this to be a warning by starting up trouble, you think those ogres would have laid low for so long? You’re gonna tell me they were waiting for some half-pint yahoo like me to walk in here so they could announce that Moran’s back in town? It took a bullet to get them to spill the beans on their employer!”
“You mean they were here in secret?” Mick mused out loud. It’s always fun watching him play detective. I had sung for my supper already—twice—and it was time I got a little entertainment with my meal. Whenever Mick assumes the role of my unofficial assistant in my casework, I can’t help but smile.
“Then Moran would want ’em to stay that way,” Mick added, continuing his train of thought. “Best way to blow a secret is to blow someone away, right? If they were made, that means Capone would know Moran is in town, making two bosses mad at ’em.”
“I’ll make a gumshoe of you yet, Mick,” I winked, savoring another spoonful of chili.
“Doesn’t take a gumshoe to read the papers, Billi,” he replied with a chuckle, but I could see the gears starting to turn. “That ain’t like Moran, being all secret-like.”
Now, he was really getting caught up in it. This is usually the point where I have to remind him that I’m the detective, and he’s the master of the chili.
“So what do you think Moran is up to?” he asked. “Checking to see if the coast is clear?”
I shrugged. “Well now, if I knew that, Mick, I wouldn’t be that busy of a detective, now would I? Right now, I need to focus on only one problem at a time.”
But then, I paused in my dinner. I don’t know why it suddenly hit me on this particular spoonful, but then I popped the chili in my mouth and nodded. “There is a chance—and I’m thinking it’s a pretty big one—it might have somethin’ to do with my latest case,” I sighed, producing a larger-than-usual amount of greenbacks from my wallet.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Who’s your latest case? Joseph Rockefeller?!?”
“Now you know I can’t go into that,” I chided him as I paid for the dinner and the evening’s excitement with a couple of Hamiltons. I had managed to get to the bank just in time before it closed for the weekend to deposit the down payment from Miss Lesinger and break one of her C-notes down to some smaller bills. Still, walking around with a few more Lincolns and Hamiltons than usual was a touch unsettling. I must’ve forgotten for a moment just how much cash I had on me. Some private investigator, huh? Well, I blame the night and the mixed company at Mick’s. So I fell back on that client confidentiality clause that was my trade. “Remember? I’m a private, not public, investigator.”
“Yeah okay, Billi. If you need anything, you just ask of me, okay?”
Ain’t no way I would involve him or his home in anything this serious. Mick was the kind of guy you couldn’t tell this to, though, because he would only work harder to get into the thick of things. I had to give him an assurance I’d call on him, even if I knew I had no intention of doing so.
“I hear you, pal. Thanks.” I gave Annabelle a wink, hopped off the barstool, and straightened my hat. “Good night, ya crazy Polack.”
“Sweet dreams, Scrappie,” Mick shot back with a wink.
Yeah, I taught him that slur…and he’s the only soul alive who is allowed to call me that. With the friendship we got, he’s earned it.
The jingling of the bell was overpowered by the slam of the diner door closing behind me. I felt the slight March chill in the air as I looked around, savoring the sounds of Saturday night in Chicago. Car horns beeped, traffic started to pick up slightly, and I caught a riff of a trumpet solo coming from a jazz club a few blocks away. Yeah, this was the Windy City reveling in the apex of a weekend. My own weekend of rest and relaxation wouldn’t start until I could close this case.
I was past that point where you reconsider a charge into battle, way past that moment when your battle-axe is firm in your grasp and you’re matching the grunts and growls of a front line of orcs and ogres with your own regiment’s cry. Still, I caught myself wondering if it had been such a smart idea accepting this job. Dealing with Capone was bad enough, but what was so important in Chicago that “Bugs” Moran would risk getting into Capone’s business close on the heels of Valentine’s Day? A hit Moran knew full well was intended for him personally?
Or was Moran just playing another one of his dangerous games with Capone? While Capone was a ruthless son of a bitch who left nothing to chance, Moran got this perverse joy in daring Capone through impromptu hits and other shows of disrespect, sometimes carried out on the same day a truce would be called between them. Capone just annoyed the hell out of me, but Moran gave me the willies.
Moran. Capone. Apart from the obvious, could t
here a connection that I wasn’t seeing off the bat?
The obvious connection was, of course, my client, Julia Lesinger: a spoiled little rich girl with a taste for the wilder side of Chicago, mixed up with one of Capone’s most trusted generals. And because no doubt “Pretty Boy” had served as a mouthpiece for Capone in certain social settings, Julia could have associations with Moran. Could she have known about the hit on DeMayo before it went down?
No, Lesinger wouldn’t be that connected. She knew, like everyone in Chicago, that Capone was behind the hit. She wanted to know why the hit went down. I must admit, after my run-in with Moran’s less-than-secret street spies, I now wanted to know why, too. Whatever Capone’s business was, it was grabbing the attention of the well-to-do’s and the ne’er-do-wells alike.
Feeling the rumbling of those four jalapeños in my gut, I decided it would be best to start fresh tomorrow. Tonight was going to be a quiet Saturday night of Pepto-Bismol and bed.
Chapter Four
My Boy, Benny
Sunday, I woke up exhausted. When your evening recreation includes roughing up a couple of Bugs Moran’s boys at Mick’s Diner, you tend not to sleep too well. All night long, I kept dreaming up possible outcomes from this case—all of them ending with me either taking a ride with Capone’s boys, or finding myself on the wrong end of Moran’s guns. Even though I vaguely remembered reassuring Mick that we had seen the last of those ogres, it didn’t change the fact that being a dwarf in this city made you easy to find.
To that end, I spent Chicago’s agreed day of worship in the office making sure that Beatrice, my hogleg, and any other weapons were all oiled, loaded, sharpened, and re-gripped. Even my old reliables from Acryonis would be ready for a fight. After last night, I wanted to leave nothing to chance.