Irish Whiskey

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “The guy that’s buried next to Ma and Pa?”

  “The same.”

  “Hold it, little bro, let me think … They knew him, you know?”

  “I didn’t know … How well?”

  “Pa was moving up in the real estate business back then, working hard, getting ahead, doing well. Some bad guys tried to muscle in. He called Sullivan, who was well-known for helping greenhorns.”

  “He was little more than that himself.”

  “Sullivan warned them off. Pa never had any more trouble.”

  “How come I never heard any of this?”

  “Ma told us about it when she was dying. She wanted us to know that Sullivan was not a totally bad man. She did not mind being buried next to him. She kind of laughed and said something like, ‘not to say that he’s really there.’”

  “Fascinating … I’d better go. I’ve got a couple of errands before I drive up to Brookside.”

  I left Prester George looking totally befuddled. Thank heaven he didn’t ask for any more information.

  I walked out on Wabash Avenue. It was a pleasant early-autumn day, low seventies, hazy, wisps of clouds slowly slipping over the city towards the Lake. Not many days like this left.

  My fingers were trembling. Goose bumps moved up and down my arms. What was going on? Were Ma and Nuala at it again? Would this happen often during our marriage? Was I about to drift into the Twilight Zone?

  I hailed a cab and told the driver I wanted the County Building, Clark Street side. The offices of the County Clerk are on the east side of a massive block square, pseudoclassical building which had been built just before Prohibition. City Hall is in the LaSalle Street half of the building, Cook County Government in the Clark Street half. A long, low, dimly lit catacomb-like lobby ran through the middle of the building, connecting Clark with LaSalle. Both governments are reasonably clean some of the time these days. Yet when you saw the groups of men and women talking to each other by the pillars and in front of the elevators, you felt that there were deals going on, fixes being put in, favors being exchanged.

  “I need a favor,” I said, with my most charming shanty Irish smile, to the pleasant African-American woman at the reception desk of the Office of Vital Statistics. When dealing with bureaucrats you always start out with charm.

  “Honey, everyone does! What kind of favor do you want?”

  “Just to look at the death certificates for 1927.”

  She grinned at me. “You’re not some kind of detective are you?”

  “Do I look like one?”

  “You surely don’t!”

  “What do I look like?”

  “Honey, you look like a real nice gentleman … I’ll get you the microfiche. You can go over there to the reader … Which month?”

  “September.”

  As I searched for the date of Jimmy Sullivan’s death, a distraction slipped into my imagination—Nuala’s imagining me naked—or maybe actually seeing me that way. Why was I embarrassed? Or was I delighted? I had fantasies about her, tons of them. Did she have fantasies about me? Wasn’t that wonderful!

  I was so delighted by such pleasant fantasies that I passed the date of Sweet Rolls’s death. As I flicked back to it I realized that our Sunday at the cemetery was the sixty-eighth anniversary of his death.

  I shivered again. This was too much. Too much altogether.

  I steadied my nerves and tried to concentrate on the microfiche. My daydreaming was getting in the way of my work. Ninety-five people died that day, each death a tragedy in one way or another. My name would be on a microfiche someday. Nuala’s too. Well, love was as strong as death as the Song of Songs says. That’s strong enough.

  I went through the list four times, fighting off the distractions. No dice. Jimmy Sullivan did not die that day, not, if one is to believe the records of the Office of Vital Statistics of the City of Chicago. Nor any day in the week before or the week after.

  But scores of witnesses had seen his body on State Street. Hadn’t they? Weren’t there photographs in the article of him hanging over Marie’s twentieth-birthday cake?

  I brought the fiche back to the clerk.

  “Thank you very much, ma’am; you’ve been very helpful.”

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, honey.”

  “No, ma’am. That’s exactly what I didn’t see … have a nice day.”

  I walked out on Clark Street and down towards Adams Street, where I was going to meet a reporter who had been a classmate of mine at Marquette and now worked for The Chicago Law Bulletin on the crime beat. As I crossed Monroe I glanced over at the building where herself worked. Was she up there in her cubby-hole fantasizing about my bod?

  Well, if she were, fair play to her.

  I arrived at Berghoff’s a few minutes before my friend. Two lawyer types were at the next table. I eavesdropped because that’s where writers pick up dialogue.

  “You ask me, Joel Redmond is right. The Bureau is never going to nail the big fellas over there. They’re too smart. If the Bureau guys were that smart, they’d be working on the floor, too.”

  “Yeah, they sweep up some small fry and won’t get convictions against most of them. The man must be desperate for headlines. Even the media assholes are laughing at them.”

  “I hear that Dale Quade threatened to make him stop banging her if he didn’t let her go ahead with the indictment.”

  “I wouldn’t mind banging her; she’s a nice piece of ass.”

  “Might as well bang the ice on the United Center floor. Used to be a nice woman, idealistic, you know, and concerned about civil rights. Then that asshole husband walked out on her … Did you hear the quote they leaked from their wire this morning?”

  “No. What did the poor jerk say?”

  “On September 4 he is supposed to have said ‘I screwed them left and right, took all their money and they didn’t even have the sense to complain.’”

  “That’s not worth shit. But if the guy doesn’t have any money to fight them, he’ll have to plea bargain like Danny Rostenkowski did, and he’ll do time. Not much time, but a little time.”

  “I agree. Unless they have paper, that won’t be enough to get a conviction in a jury trial.”

  “Is the Service involved?”

  “I hear not. They won’t touch it.”

  “The guys over there are usually assholes. Now the women are trying to outasshole the guys.”

  They both laughed and then went on to a clinical discussion of what engaging in sexual intercourse with Dale Quade, a Senior Assistant United States Attorney, might be like. Apparently there was an extensive folklore on the subject.

  Men in their late thirties talking like teenagers in a locker room and loud enough so an observant storyteller might hear them.

  I stood up to shake hands with my friend, a little more at ease about the Jarry Kennedy caper. I hadn’t talked to him on September 4. That was the day after Labor Day. I had seen him on Labor Day. Moreover, I had never said anything like that in my life to him or anyone else. If they claimed I did, I wouldn’t have to plea bargain and we’d beat them in a jury trial. Still, the whole business seemed scary.

  My buddy, a certain Sean Cassidy, who had devoured books on organized crime when we were at Marquette, told me that he thought he’d died and gone to heaven. They were paying good money to cover a beat that he would have covered for nothing. He had heard I was engaged and congratulated me. I showed him the picture of Nuala on the jacket of her disc that I was carrying in my attaché case. Sean whistled and congratulated me again. He’d like to meet her someday. I took down his address and assured him we’d send him an invitation to the wedding. Hell, she was inviting everyone in the city. No, he wasn’t dating anyone special. Too busy on the job. Lots of gorgeous women in Chicago, though, a lot better than in Green Bay. None as nice as my fiancée, however.

  Then I asked him about Sweet Rolls Sullivan. His eyes lit up. Yeah, he knew all about him. He recycled the story for me. Most c
olorful of all the bootleggers and no one had ever written a book about him.

  “Did he really die?” I inquired.

  “Sure he died. Capone’s hit men, Anselmi and Scalise, gunned him down in his bakery in front of scores of people, including the Cardinal. There was no one more dead than a guy Scarface killed in those days.”

  “From now on this is a personal confidence between friends?”

  “Absolutely. You know what I think of guys like Joe Klein.”

  “There’s no death certificate.”

  “What?”

  “Or burial certificate at his parish church.”

  I didn’t know that for sure. I’d have George check on it. But I was willing to bet on it.

  “You gotta be kidding. It was the biggest of all the gang funerals. Scarface sent a whole car of flowers. From Al Brown, which is what he called himself when he was being fancy.”

  “There is no record of anyone seeing the body after they took it out of the bakeshop. I have reason to believe it is not in the grave.”

  Sean stopped eating his geschnetzeltes, took a long swallow of his Red Dog beer, and asked, “You sure.”

  “Yep. I can’t tell you how, but I’m sure.”

  “Wow!”

  “Marie, his ditsy wife, disappeared. No one knows where she is or the two kids she had. You read the old story in Chicago History?”

  “Got it in my files.”

  “Go back and read it again with that perspective.”

  Sean thought for a moment. “You know, I felt that there was something missing in that article but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Why would he choose to disappear that way?”

  “He was Irish, and they like things complicated.”

  “I read a book by a guy named David Tracy who says that the Irish spiritual experience is simple nature mysticism but because they are such playful people they love to tell elaborate stories about the experience, the Book of Kells and Joyce for example … Hey, is this gorgeous woman of yours—let me see her picture again—is she playful?”

  I showed him the picture.

  “That’s a good one-word description of her.”

  “You lucky bastard … Anyway, maybe Sweet Rolls liked a playful escape. Or maybe he had so many enemies that this was the only way to go. Start a whole new life somewhere … But, hey, Capone would have had to cooperate.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  We both were silent for a moment. Sean finished off his Red Dog and signaled for a refill.

  “You know, Dermot, now that you mention it there’s a kind of mystery about him that lingers. None of the older guys on the crime beat were around in his day, but when his name comes up at the Ale House, they act like the whole story about him hasn’t been told.”

  “Some pieces missing?”

  “Something like that … They don’t know what the pieces are, not exactly. Let me poke around and try to find out.”

  “Don’t mention my name.”

  “No way, Dermot, no way.”

  I’m sure he didn’t mention my name. However, I must have talked to too many people in the next few days to keep my interest a secret, especially since I was about to become big-time news. Our interest wasn’t secret anymore. The results were scary.

  8

  “SURE I remember Joe Curran,” the Pastor of St. Mary’s by the Brook said with a marvelous laugh. “Who could ever forget him?”

  Father Nolan was in his middle sixties, a man of enthusiasm and wit, relaxed, confident, and dedicated. He had thin black hair, wore glasses, and smiled more than half the time. The fires of zeal burned in him like he had just been ordained. We were talking in the “counseling room,” which once had been the parlor of a bungalow before it became a rectory.

  “In what way, Father?” I asked.

  “He was a working pastor back in the middle nineteen fifties when a pastor didn’t have to work because there were plenty of curates around. That has changed a lot as your brother has probably told you. Curates are a vanishing breed. You can’t push them around anymore, thank God. Joe took his turn on calls and at the 6:30 Mass. Went to every wake, showed up at every wedding, visited every sick person in the hospital. He had his fatal heart attack while he was blessing a newborn baby. His last words were, ‘It’s a good thing I’m dying in a hospital. It won’t upset the guys back at the rectory.’ That’s the kind of guy he was.”

  “A good priest.”

  “One of the best. Maybe the most radical priest in the Archdiocese. Long before the Vatican Council he figured out the same things that the Council did. His motto, and I quote, was ‘Fuck the rules! We’re here to serve the people.’ He saw nothing wrong with birth control and granted dispensations and annulments in his office. The Chancery was all over him, but it didn’t stop him. Everyone in the Archdiocese thought he was a saint.”

  “Tell a lot of stories?”

  “How did you know that? He had a limitless supply of stories about the twenties and thirties. I was with him five wonderful years at St. Henry the Pious and he repeated stories only a couple of times. He loved to tell them and we, priests and people, loved to hear them. He had a favorite that we heard pretty often, usually in a different form each time.”

  “About Jimmy Sweet Rolls Sullivan?”

  “Your brother George didn’t say you were psychic. He’s, by the way, an impressive young priest. We need more like him. Have you ever thought about following him?”

  “On occasion. I’m marrying on the second Friday of next month. To a Galway woman.”

  “From where?”

  “Carraroe.”

  “Irish speaker?”

  “Indeed.”

  “There’s a lot of dark ones from out there.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  I showed him the CD jacket.

  “Galway woman, all right … Do you think she’d give a concert out here for the parish benefit drive? We’ll pay her rate.”

  “Once she finds out that your family is from Galway, it’s a done deal. Free … It’s the Sweet Rolls story I’m interested in. Did Father Curran ever say in so many words that he anointed Jimmy in the bakeshop?”

  Father Nolan’s face went blank.

  “You sound like a dark one, too.”

  “Believe me, I’m not.”

  “Now that you mention it, I can’t remember him ever saying anything about administering the sacraments in the bakeshop. I never thought it strange until you asked. He talked a lot about Jimmy’s past—orphan in Cork City, English Army at the Somme, Irregulars in the Irish Civil War, left half his money to his wife and the other half to Maryville, St. Mary’s Training School then, first-rate mind, self-educated—all that kind of stuff. The high point of the story was his comic description of George Cardinal Mundelein falling on his face in front of the Chancery. Not a word about anointing the corpse … Strange, Joe usually talked about the sacraments. He was a liturgist before the word was invented.”

  I remained silent, waiting for the priest’s memories to flood back.

  “Or about Marie Sullivan, Jimmy’s wife?” I said finally.

  “I was just thinking about her. Joe was fond of her. Admitted he had a kind of crush on her. He said she had a first-rate mind and was a good influence on Jimmy.”

  “Ever say where she went after the funeral?”

  “I don’t think so … Someone asked once whether she was still alive. He just smiled, and said something like, ‘Ah that would be telling, wouldn’t it now?’”

  “As far as I can tell Sullivan’s family vanished from the face of the earth.”

  “Put down?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Father Nolan frowned, searching again for memories.

  “In the middle nineteen fifties,” I continued, “she would have been in her late forties or early fifties. Did a woman ever come to see him, tall, handsome, hair still red?”

  His eyes flickered.

  “Dermot, you scare me.”
>
  “The dark one scares me, too.”

  “That’s the way of it, is it … Lovely woman, they’d chat for a half hour after the nine o’clock Mass in the rectory office, oh, maybe a couple of times a year. He never introduced us. He’d laugh and say that she was the mysterious Madam S … . For Sullivan, do you think?”

  “Probably … Did he say where she was from?”

  “As best as I can remember, he said she spent part of the year on the West Coast and part in Chicago. One of her kids was at the University of Chicago Law School. Probably twenty-three or so then.”

  Twenty-three from fifty-five? The kid would have been born five years after Sweet Rolls’s death!

  “When did Sullivan die?” he went on. “Late twenties?”

  “Right.”

  “So she must have married again.”

  “Or Jimmy wasn’t really dead.”

  “That’s the way of it, is it?”

  “Maybe.”

  He rested his jaw on his thumbs and crossed his fingers in front of his mouth—a man in deep thought.

  “It’s strange, Dermot,” he said slowly. “As I remember the way he told the story, it was kind of like part of the Arthurian saga, funny, sad, but not tragic. Occasionally, he’d say that among some of the people from that time—the ones that survived and later went straight—there was a legend that Jimmy would come back someday. Jimmy, Joe would say with a chuckle, never expected when he was growing up in Cork and stealing whatever he could, that he’d become a mythological figure.”

  “Mythological was Father Curran’s word?”

  “Oh yeah, he was a great reader. The guys in the rectory said that he had read everything … Is that what you’re interested in?”

  “Professional secret?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “The dark one says there’s no body in his grave.”

  Father Nolan shivered for a moment.

  “You’re not afraid to marry someone like that?”

  “She’s as wonderful a human being as she is a beautiful woman.”

  “So Sweet Rolls is still alive somewhere? Where?”

  “Avalon maybe … but only if he is ninety-nine years old.”

  “So why are you interested in his story? What difference does it make today?”