Chicago Lightning

by Max Allan Collins

  Stege, a white-haired fireplug of a man with black-rimmed glasses and a pasty complexion—and that Chicago rarity, an honest cop—was not thrilled to see me.

  “I’m getting sick of you turning up at shootings,” he said.

  “I do it just to irritate you. It makes your eyes twinkle.”

  “ covereleft a crime scene.”

  “I hauled the victim to the hospital. I told the guy at the drugstore to call it in. Let’s not get technical.”

  “Yeah,” Stege grunted. “Let’s not. What’s your story?”

  “The union secretary hired me to keep an eye on this guy Cooke. But Cooke walked in, while I was there, angry, and then Martin showed up, equally steamed.”

  I gave him the details.

  As I was finishing up, a doctor came out of Cooke’s room and Stege cornered him, flashing his badge.

  “Can he talk, doc?”

  “Briefly. He’s in critical condition.”

  “Is he gonna make it?”

  “He should pull through. Stay only a few minutes, gentlemen.”

  Stege went in and I followed; I thought he might object, but he didn’t.

  Cooke looked pale, but alert. He was flat on his back. Stege introduced himself and asked for Cooke’s story.

  Cooke gave it, with lawyer-like formality: “I went to see Martin to protest his conduct of the union. I told Martin he ought to’ve obtained a pay raise for the men in one junkyard. I told him our members were promised a pay increase, by a certain paper company, and instead got a wage cut—and that I understood he’d sided with the employer in the matter! He got very angry, at that, and in a little while we were scuffling. When he grabbed a gun out of his desk, I told him he was crazy, and started to leave. Then…then he shot me in the back.”

  Stege jotted that down, thanked Cooke and we stepped out into the hall.

  “Think that was the truth?” Stege asked me.

  “Maybe. But you really ought to hear Martin’s side, too.”

  “Good idea, Heller. I didn’t think of that. Of course, the fact that Martin lammed does complicate things, some.”

  “With all the heat on unions, lately, I can see why he lammed. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt Martin pulled the trigger. But who attacked who remains in question.”

  Stege sighed. “You do have a point. I can understand Martin taking it on the lam, myself. He’s already under indictment for another matter. He probably just panicked.”

  “Another matter?”

  Stege nodded. “He and Terry Druggan and two others were indicted last August for conspiracy. Trying to conceal from revenue officers that Druggan was part owner of a brewery.”

  Druggan was a former bootlegger, a West Side hood who’d been loosely aligned with such non-Capone forces as the Bugs Moran gang. I was starting to think maybe my old man wouldn’t have been so pleased by all this union activity.

  “We’ll stake out Martin’s place,” Stege said, “for all the good it’ll do. He’s got a bungalow over on Wolcott Avenue.”

  “Nice little neighbrhood,” I said.

  “We’re in the wrong racket,” Stege admitted.

  It was too late in the afternoon to bother going back to the office now, so I stopped and had supper at Pete’s Steaks and then headed back to my apartment at the Morrison Hotel. I was reading a Westbrook Pegler column about what a bad boy Willie Bioff was when the phone rang.

  “Nate? It’s Jake.”

  “Jake, I’m sorry I didn’t call you or anything. I didn’t have any number for you but the union hall. You know about what went down?”

  “Do I. I’m calling from the Marquette station. They’re holding me for questioning.”

  “Hell, you weren’t even there!”

  “That’s okay. I’m stalling ’em a little.”

  “Why, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Listen, Nate—we gotta hold this thing together. You gotta talk to Martin.”

  “Why? How?”

  “I’m gonna talk to Cooke. Cooke’s the guy who hired me to work for the union in the first place, and…”

  “What? Cooke hired you?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Look, I’ll go see Cooke first thing in the morning—that is, if you’ve seen Martin tonight, and worked a story out. Something that’ll make this all sound like an accident…”

  “I don’t like being part of cover-ups.”

  “This ain’t no fuckin’ cover-up! It’s business! Look, they got the state’s attorney’s office in on this already. You know who’s taken over for Stege, already?”

  “Tubbo Gilbert?”

  “Himself,” Jake said.

  Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert was the richest cop in Chicago. In the world. He was tied in with every mob, every fixer in town.

  “The local will be finished,” Jake said. “He’ll find something in the books and use that and the shooting as an excuse to close the union down.”

  “Which’ll freeze wages at current levels,” I said. “Exactly what the likes of Billy Skidmore would want.”

  “Right. And then somebody else’ll open the union back up, in six months or so. Somebody tied into the Nitti and Guzik crowd.”

  “As opposed to Druggan and Moran.”

  “Don’t compare them to Nitti and Guzik. Those guys went straight, Nate.”

  “Please. I just ate. Moran got busted on a counterfeit railroad-bond scam just last week.”

  “Nobody’s perfect. Nate, it’s for the best. Think of your old man.”

  “Don’t do that to me, Jake. I don’t exactly think your union is what my pop had in mind when he was handing out pamphlets on Maxwell Street.”

  “Well, it’s all that stands between the working stiffs and the Billy Skidmores.”

  “I take it you know where Martin is hiding out.”

  “Yeah. That secretary of his, her mother has a house in Hinsdale. Lemme give you the address…”

  “Okay, Jake. It’s against my better judgment, but okay…”

  It took an hour to get there by car. Well after dark. Hinsdale was a quiet, well-fed little suburb, and the house at 409 Walnut Street was a two-story number in the midst of a healthy lawn. The kind of place the suburbs are full of, but which always seem shockingly sprawling to city boys like yours truly.

  There were a few lights on, downstairs. I walked up onto the porch and knocked. I was unarmed. Probably not wise, but I was.

  The secretary answered the door. Cracked it open.

  She didn’t recognize me at first.

  “I’m here about our dinner date,” I said.

  Then, in relief, she smiled, opened the door wider.

  “You’re Mr. Heller.”

  “That’s right. I never did get your name.”

  “Then how did you find me?”

  “I had your address. I just didn’t get your name.”

  “Well, it’s Nancy. But what do you want, Mr. Heller?”

  “Make it Nate. It’s cold. Could I step in?”

  She swallowed. “Sure.”

  I stepped inside; it was a nicely furnished home, but obviously the home of an older person: the doilies and ancient photo portraits were a dead giveaway.

  “This is my mother’s home,” she said. “She’s visiting relatives. I live here.”

  I doubted that; the commute would be impossible. If she didn’t live with Martin, in his nifty little bungalow on South Wolcott, I’d eat every doilie in the joint.

  “I know that John Martin is here,” I said. “Jake Rubinstein told me. He asked me to stop by.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that.

  Martin stepped out from a darkened doorway into the living room. He was in rolled-up shirt sleeves and no tie. He looked frazzled. He had the gun in his hand.

  “What do you want?” he said. His tone was not at all friendly.

  “You’re making too big a deal out of this,” I said. “There’s no reason to go on the lam. This is just another union shooting—the papers’re full of
’em.”

  “I don’t shoot a man every day,” Martin said.

  “I’m relieved to hear that. How about putting the heater away, then?”

  Martin sneered and tossed the piece on a nearby floral couch. He was a nasty man to have a nice girl like this. But then, so often nice girls do like nasty men.

  I took it upon myself to sit down. Not on the couch: on a chair, with a soft seat and curved wooden arms.

  Speaking of curves, Nancy, who was wearing a blue print dress, was standing wringing her hands, looking about to cry.

  “I could use something to drink,” I said, wanting to give her something to do.

  “Me too,” Martin said. “Beer. For him, too.”

  “Beer would be fine,” I said, magnanimously.

  She went into the kitchen.

  “What’s Jake’s idea?” Martin asked.

  I explained that Jake was afraid the union would be steam-rolled by crooked cops and political fixers, should this shooting blow into something major, first in the papers, then in the courts.

  “Jake wants you to mend fences with Cooke. Put together some story you can both live with. Then find some way you can run the union together, or pay him off or something.”

  “Fuck that shit!” Martin said. He stood up. “What’s wrong with that little kike, has he lost his marbles?”

  “A guy who works on the West Side,” I said, “really ought to watch his goddamn mouth where the Jew-baiting’s concerned.”

  “What’s it to you? You’re Irish.”

  “Does Heller sound Irish to you? Don’t let the red hair fool you.”

  “Well fuck you, too, then. Cooke’s a lying little kike, and Jake’s still in bed with him. Damn! I thought I could trust that little bastard…”

  “I think you can. I think he’s trying to hold your union together, with spit and rubber bands. I don’t know if it’s worth holding together. I don’t know what you’re in it for—maybe you really care about your members, a little. Maybe it’s the money. But if I were you, I’d do some fast thinking, put together a story you can live with and let Jake try to sell it to Cooke. Then when the dust settles you’ll still have a piece of the action.”

  Martin walked over and pointed a thick finger at me. “I don’t believe you, you slick son of a bitch. I think this is a set-up. Put together to get me to come in, give myself up and go straight to the lock-up, while Jake and Cooke tuck the union in their fuckin’ belt!”

  I stood. “That’s up to you. I was hired to deliver a message. I delivered it. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

  He thumped his finger in my chest. “You tell that little kike Rubinstein for me that…”

  I smacked him.

  He don’t go down, but it backed him up. He stood there looking like a confused bear and then growled and lumbered at me with massive fists out in front, ready to do damage.

  So I smacked the bastard again, and again. He went down that time. I help him up. He swung clumsily at me, so I hit him in the side of the face and he went down again. Stayed down.

  Nancy came in, a glass of beer in either hand, and said, “What…?” Her brown eyes wide.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking one glass, chugging it. I wiped the foam off my face with the back of a hand and said, “I needed that.”

  And I left them there.

  The next morning, early, while I was still at the Morrison, shaving in fact, the phone rang.

  It was Jake.

  “How did it go last night?” he asked.

  I told him.

  “Shit,” he said. “I’ll still talk to Cooke, though. See if I can’t cool this down some.”

  “I think it’s too late for that.”

  “Me too,” Jake said glumly.

  Martin came in on Saturday; gave himself up to Tubbo Gilbert. Stege was off the case. The story Martin told was considerably different from Cooke’s: he said Cooke was in the office using the phone (“Which he had no right to do!”) and Martin told him to leave; Cooke started pushing Martin around, and when Martin fought back, Cooke drew a gun. Cooke (according to Martin) hit him over the head with it and knocked him down. Then Cooke supposedly hit him with the gun again and Martin got up and they struggled and the gun went off. Three times.

  The gun was never recovered. If it was really Cooke’s gun, of course, it would have been to Martin’s advantage to produce it; but he didn’t.

  Martin’s claim that Cooke attacked and beat him was backed up by the fact that his face was badly bruised and battered. So I guess I did him a favor, beating the shit out of him.

  Martin was placed under bond on a charge of intent to kill. Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert, representing the state’s attorney’s office, confiscated the charter of the union, announcing that it had been run “purely as a racket.” Shutting it down until such time that “the actual working members of the union care to continue it, and elect their own officers.”

  That sounded good in the papers, but in reality it meant Skidmore and company had been served.

  I talked to Stege about it, later, over coffee and bagels in the Dill Pickle deli below my office on Van Buren.

  “Tubbo was telling the truth about the union being strictly a racket,” Stege said. “They had a thousand members paying two bucks a head a month. Legitimate uses counted for only seven hundred bucks’ worth a month. Martin’s salary, for example, was only a hundred-twenty bucks.”

  “Well he’s shit out of luck, now,” I said.

  “He’s still got his position at the Sanitary District,” Stege said. “Of course, he’s got to beat the rap for the assault to kill charge, first…” Stege smiled at the thought. “And Mr. Cooke tells a more convincing story than Martin does.”

  When the union was finally re-opened, however, Jake was no longer treasurer. He was still involved in the rackets, though, selling punchboards, working for Ben “Zuckie the Bookie” Zuckerman, with a short time out for a wartime stint in the Air Force. He went to Dallas, I’ve heard, as representative of Chicago mob interests there, winding up running some strip joints. Rumor has it he was involved in other cover-ups, over the years.

  By that time, of course, Jake was better known as Jack.

  And he’d shortened his last name to Ruby.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  “Scrap” is primarily based upon newspaper research, but I should also acknowledge Maxwell Street (1977) by Ira Berkow; and The Plot to Kill the President (1981) by G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings.

  She’d been pretty, once. She was still sexy, in a slutty way, if you’d had enough beers and it was just before closing time.

  Kathleen O’Meara, who ran the dingy dive that sported her last name, would have been a well-preserved fifty, if she hadn’t been forty. But I knew from the background materials I’d been provided that she was born in 1899, here in the dirt-poor Irish neighborhood of Cleveland known as the Angles, a scattering of brick and frame dwellings and businesses at the north end of 25th Street in the industrial flats.

  Kathleen O’Meara’s husband, Frank, had been dead barely a month now, but Katie wasn’t wearing black: her blouse was white with red polka dots, a low-cut peasant affair out of which spilled well-powdered, bowling ball-size breasts. Her mouth was a heavily red-rouged chasm within which gleamed white storebought choppers; her eyes were lovely, within their pouches, long-lashed and money-green.

  “What’s your pleasure, handsome?” she asked, her soprano voice musical in a calliope sort of way, a hint of Irish lilt in it.

  I guess I was handsome, for this crowd anyway, six feet, one-hundred-eighty pounds poured into threadbare mismatched suitcoat and pants, a wilted excuse for a fedora snugged low over my reddish brown hair, chin and cheeks stubbled with two days growth, looking back at myself in the streaked smudgy mirror behind the bar. A chilly March afternoon had driven better than a dozen men inside the shabby walls of O’Meara’s, where a churning exhaust fan did little to stave off the bouquet of stale smoke and beer-soaked sawdust.
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  “Suds is all I can afford,” I said.

  “There’s worse ways to die,” she said, eyes sparkling.

  “Ain’t been reduced to canned heat yet,” I admitted.

  At least half of he clientele around me couldn’t have made that claim; while those standing at the bar, with a foot on the rail like me, wore the sweatstained workclothes that branded them employed, the men hunkered at tables and booths wore the tattered rags of the derelict. A skinny dark-haired dead-eyed sunken-cheeked barmaid in an off-white waitress uniform was collecting empty mugs and replacing them with foaming new ones.

  The bosomy saloonkeeper set a sloshing mug before me. “Railroad worker?”

  I sipped; it was warm and bitter. “Steel mill. Pretty lean in Gary; heard they was hiring at Republic.”

  “That was last month.”

  “Yeah. Found that out in a hurry.”

  She extended a pudgy hand. “Kathleen O’Meara, at your service.”

  “William O’Hara,” I said. Nathan Heller, actually. The Jewish last name came from my father, but the Irish mug that was fooling the saloonkeeper was courtesy of my mother.

  “Two O’s, that’s us,” she grinned; that mouth must have have been something, once. “My pals call me Katie. Feel free.”

  “Well, thanks, Katie. And my pals call me Bill.” Nate.

  “Got a place to stay, Bill?”

  “No. Thought I’d hop a freight tonight. See what’s shakin’ up at Flint.”

  “They ain’t hiring up there, neither.”

  “Well, I dunno, then.”

  “I got rooms upstairs, Bill.”

  “Couldn’t afford it, Katie.”

  “Another mug?”

  “Couldn’t afford that, either.”

  She winked. “Handsome, you got me wrapped around your little pinkie, ain’t ya noticed?”

  She fetched me a second beer, then attended to the rest of her customers at the bar. I watched her, feeling both attracted and repulsed; what is it about a beautiful woman run to fat, gone to seed, that can still summon the male in a man?

  I was nursing the second beer, knowing that if I had enough of these I might do something I’d regret in the morning, when she trundled back over and leaned on the bar with both elbows.