The Big Score

by Kilian, Michael;

  “They’d have to be,” Zany said. “No machine could turn out work that bad.”

  Plotnik scrolled the file some more, going all the way to the end, which didn’t take very long.

  “The only other recent one I got is in Area One,” he said. “A burglary in Lake Point Tower. A painting by some guy named William de Kooning. Could that be it?”

  “Willem de Kooning,” Zany corrected. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, sorry I can’t help you. Looks like you got a real weird one. It’s a week for weird ones. We caught a burglary case in Old Town yesterday where the perps went through some broad’s apartment the minute the landlord took off to go grocery shopping. Broad daylight. Sunday afternoon. Tore the whole goddamn place apart in less than an hour and apparently didn’t take a thing. Not a fucking thing. She told us she thought the perps might be cops. Jeez. Old Town, you know. Flake city.”

  “Yeah,” said Zany. “I really miss Chicago.” He handed Plotnik a photo of his unidentified victim, the last he had with him. “This is the girl. Maybe somebody’s seen her.”

  “I’ll keep it in the file. Why don’t you take that painting down to the Art Institute? If it’s something worth stealing, maybe they’ve got a record of it or something. They’ve helped us before.”

  “I’ll try that.”

  “I’ll give them a call. Tell them it’s for us. They can get a little snooty sometimes. Throw around words like Impressionist. I don’t know shit from Impressionist. It’s all just insurable goods to me. But if it is stolen, we’ll hear about it sooner or later. You can’t file an insurance claim on these things without a police burglary report.”

  “I remember.”

  “Sorry, Zany. You’ve been out there in the dunes so long I forget how much time you put in this place.”

  “I haven’t forgotten a minute of it. I just wish I’d put more time in homicide.”

  “How long were you there? Wasn’t long, was it?”

  “About three weeks. Until my first murder.”

  “Well, now you got another. You gonna transfer out again?” He laughed.

  “In the Grand Pier P.D.,” said Zany, “the only transfer is out. But I’m sure as hell not coming back here.”

  Peter Poe owned four aldermen—bought and paid for. From time to time, he rented maybe a half-dozen others. Like any proud owner of expensive goods, he liked to show them off, and so this noon hour had three of them to lunch at his regular and very prominent table at Eli’s—two of the bought-and-paid-fors and one of the rentals. Poe had learned long before that it was image that counted more than anything, that power perceived or imagined—power feared—was of far more consequence than power rawly exercised. If you fired off your guns, people could assess just how much damage you really were capable of inflicting; and how much ammunition you might have left. And if you missed—if your target survived—you were that much diminished.

  The first Mayor Daley—Richard J.—won the national title of “Boss” because of his shoot-to-kill orders during the riots that broke out on the West Side in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King and because of his cops’ violent crackdown on the rioting antiwar protestors who had made such a mess of his 1968 Democratic National Convention. Both actions, taken in sputtering, self-defeating anger, had won him the respect of the neighborhoods. Except for a brief outburst of random violence by a few radical Weathermen, there never was a major riot in Chicago again, and Daley won his next mayoral by his biggest vote margin ever.

  Out in the rest of the country, however, Daley the First’s enemies not only survived, but flourished. The wounded Hubert Humphrey lost Illinois to Richard Nixon. In 1972 Daley not only failed to prevent George McGovern and his peace people from winning the nomination, but he and his entire Chicago delegation were thrown out of the Democratic convention. He wasn’t accepted back until Jimmy Carter’s 1976 lovefest, and four months later the mayor was dead.

  What had really made Daley “Boss” was not cops’ nightsticks but the fear of the potential of his power—the fear of ward heelers that he’d vise their precinct captains from their city jobs, the fear of judges that he’d dump them from the party retention slate, the fear of developers that he’d say no to a building permit or zoning amendment, the fear of rich ladies on the order of Bitsie Symms that the city might say no to their silly garden festival or whatever.

  Daley’s first elected successor, the tempestuous Jane Byrne, never understood that lesson and tried to rule the city like Catherine the Great, rolling heads every five minutes. She was out on a her kiester next election. All the other successors, including the present mayor, demonstrated they had learned the lesson well.

  So had Poe. He’d been born in Chicago and had studied its politics carefully. After buying up all these guys, he’d never once given them a direct order, never once threatened them with reprisals. From time to time, when he’d wanted something, he’d let his desires be known, and they were usually fulfilled. Most of the time, he kept these fellows around just for show, just as he did the state legislators and county board members he owned. People presumed that if these characters were so obviously in his pocket, a lot of others must be, too. He encouraged a lot of grander beliefs by taking a lot of judges to lunch, sometimes even congressmen and the state’s two U.S. Senators. He freely allowed people the use of his several Bears season tickets and loaned out his three trademark red stretch limos. He entertained lavishly. The mayor had never come to one of his parties, but the governor had.

  He’d never directly asked any of these people for anything. You kept your hole cards in the hole until the bets were called. But every time someone accepted one of Poe’s kindnesses or favors, he carried away a message for all to note. Peter Poe could reach far.

  To Mango, lawyer Yeats, and sometimes his wife, Diandra, Poe referred to the three aldermen he was lunching with as Larry, Curly, and Moe. Larry he had bought because he was close to a member of the mayor’s inner circle, and some of what rubbed off the friend rubbed off on Larry. Curly was chairman of the zoning committee. Enough said. Poe had never had a problem with any of his projects. Moe, chairman of the city council committee on forestry, Poe only rented, but he would shortly be buying him up for good in a very big way. The development Poe was going to put up on the Cabrini Green site would require a lot of insurance. Moe’s brother had an insurance agency. In return, Moe was going to give up his aldermanic seat and go on the Park District board, there to do as bidden.

  Or was he? Poe had selected Moe because he was rentable and buyable and because he was a natural to fill the next vacancy on the park board, as President O’Rourke’s sudden demise had just now provided. Moe had begun his career on the public payroll as a Parks Department playground instructor. He was a parks nut, out playing softball every Saturday even at his age, defending every blade of park grass like it was Concord Bridge. Moe had even stood up to his fellow council regulars and opposed expansion of the McCormick Place lakefront exhibition hall. He was an organization guy, but the Friends of the Parks and other liberal outfits loved him.

  But Poe had begun to wonder. As he studied the man across the table at Eli’s, it occurred to him that Moe might be the short form of Mope. For all his prominence, the fellow was really nothing more than a playground instructor with big, deep pockets. He was compliant because he was dumb. The enterprise Poe was embarked upon could afford no clumsiness. Moe had trouble handling his fork.

  It would be days—maybe weeks—before the mayor would move on naming O’Rourke’s successor. Poe had time to think well on this.

  For the moment, all that was on the minds of those at Poe’s table was the manner of O’Rourke’s passing.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Larry. “I always knew that guy was going to get his prick in a ringer. Why the hell didn’t he just grab some broad out of the office?”

  “He thought hookers were safer,” said Curly.

  “Safer, shit,” said Larry. “The guy took five slugs. Fiv
e slugs for a piece of ass. Why didn’t he just get himself a ‘niece’ like that old fire commissioner—what was his name?—Bob Quinn?”

  “He was the one who set off all the city air raid sirens when the Sox won the pennant in fifty-nine,” Moe said.

  “Fifty-eight,” said Curly.

  “Fifty-nine.”

  “Anyway, Quinn was a bachelor,” Larry noted. “O’Rourke had eight kids. And a wife who knew from nieces.”

  “Didn’t something like this happen to Matthew Danaher, what was he, county clerk?”

  “Clerk of the Circuit Court,” corrected Larry. “And that wasn’t gunshots. That was booze and some broad in a hotel. His heart quit. They never found the girl. The old man Daley was mayor then. He got real disgusted. Danaher was like a son to him.”

  “And George Dunne,” said Curly. “He got caught fucking around in the park. With two broadies.”

  Dunne’s was the only name Poe recognized. He was an elder statesman of the party, and for years had been county board president and party chairman.

  “Those weren’t hookers,” said Moe. “They were employees. And nothing happened to him. He retired honorably.”

  “They gave him the wink just because he was a nice old guy. With no wifey.”

  “It’s the Republicans who do all the fucking around,” said Moe. “My cousin’s a watch commander in Area Six. He says the coppers call the Gold Coast ‘whore heaven.’ There are all those call girls and mistresses, servicing the commuters.”

  “And when they finally do get home to the suburbs, they swap wives,” said Curly.

  Poe smiled to himself. These men looked upon suburbanites as an alien species. He remembered a ward committeeman in the building department once telling him about the creepy feeling he got crossing the city line from Chicago into proper, respectable, tree-shaded Evanston.

  “What are the police saying?” Poe asked. “They have any suspects?”

  “What, on O’Rourke?” said Larry. “They’ll never make a pinch. Never.”

  “They’ll be bringing in all the whores,” Curly said. He pronounced the word “whooores.”

  “And they’ll all walk,” Larry said. “I don’t think it was any hooker, anyway. Maybe a pimp. More likely some creep in the park. They’ll never find him.”

  “I don’t know,” Curly said. “The mayor’s pretty pissed about this. I think he’ll lean on the coppers to turn something up.”

  Poe made a mental note to have Moe check with his watch commander cousin for progress reports on the investigation. Glancing about the crowded dining room, he noticed a political columnist from the Sun-Times at a nearby table. Perhaps he’d write in his column that Poe was seen lunching with these three, all regarded as powers in the council. Every little bit helped.

  The Tribune’s social reporter had already noted Poe’s presence at Bitsie Symms’s “party of the year” on the Overnight page. That would help for a different reason.

  But it wouldn’t help Mango.

  Matthias didn’t like most clubs, with all their tribal ritual and conformity. The several socially prominent clubs his parents had belonged to served principally as badges of what passed for aristocracy in this city built and made prosperous by hardworking immigrants. Matthias found these mossbound institutions as stifling and pointless as the archaic, class-ridden English lifestyle they aped.

  The Arts Club was different. Founded in the 1920s, it had been a revolutionary force in the city’s cultural history, providing a beachhead for the modern art and modern ideas that the wealthy few who for so many years had controlled the Art Institute had resisted like a foreign plague. For those stuffy reactionaries and their grand dame wives, the history of art stopped with the pretty flowers of Impressionism. Art had no other function for them than to enhance their own surroundings and provide a moral, uplifting influence on the masses who labored on their behalf. Art as truth, art as an expression of thought, of revelation, of rebellion, of fear and sexuality, was as dangerous a concept to them as trade union collective bargaining. They were the “moral force” that had sent police to confiscate Paul Chabas’s innocent nude September Morn as an unlawful obscenity in 1912.

  Even in the 1930s, Chicago’s ruling families were supporting a “Sanity in Art” movement that had driven many of the city’s finest young painters to New York and Europe. Those who had remained had found sanctuary in the Arts Club, which bravely exhibited their work no matter how controversial. It seemed inoffensively mainstream and circumspect now, but only because the mainstream had caught up with it. Matthias felt more comfortable here than any other place in the city, except for his own house.

  Christian arrived late. Natty in blue blazer, white pants, striped Oxford shirt, and polka-dotted ascot, he seated himself so quietly Matthias almost didn’t notice him.

  “Drinking wine, big brother?”

  “One small glass.” Matthias pronounced each word emphatically.

  “I’ll have a small martini, then, very cold,” Christian said to the waiter who scurried up behind him. “With a twist.”

  “I’m disturbed,” Matthias said.

  “It’s been a disturbing couple of days.”

  “You told me that the family’s on the brink of ruin,” Matthias said. “That the firm’s about to go out of business. Annelise wants to sell everything and put Father in some sort of home.”

  “Yes. That’s what she and her loving husband Paul have been urging for some years now. I’ve always resisted.”

  “I’ve just been looking through the books, Christian.”

  “No need to do that. Everything’s in order.”

  “They’re disorderly as hell. I don’t understand all the entries, but I understand enough. There’s a lot of debt, but the loan payments on the Lake Forest house are only two months behind. The office rent’s up to date. Martha’s been paid. The associate’s been paid. The dues here have been paid.”

  “You’ve always loved this club.”

  “Damn it, Chris! If I understand the entries in those books, Father—the family—owed nearly seven hundred thousand dollars last year. Now the debt’s down to just over three hundred thousand.”

  “And this disturbs you?”

  “It isn’t what you said!”

  “Perhaps I exaggerated a little.”

  “A little? Where did this money come from? The ledger entries don’t make that at all clear. The firm hasn’t had a new commission in more than a year.”

  “Are you suggesting I robbed a bank? Fleeced my portrait clients?”

  “You’ve been in enough of their bedrooms.”

  “I shouldn’t go on so about bedrooms, Matthias. I noticed the traces of your house guest when I stopped by to change clothes on the way here.”

  “If you bring that up again, Christian, I’ll hit you. I’ll smash every glass of gin you bring to your lips. And you know why.”

  “Merely raising a point of fairness, big brother. As for my friendship with Sally—which I gather is what prompts all this righteous anger—well, she wasn’t exactly married to you when we had our little tryst, was she?”

  The two sat motionless, like figures in a tableau vivant, Matthias’s anger draining. He knew his brother’s cleverness well. Christian’s provocation was intended as a distraction. Matthias got back to the point.

  “Where did the money come from?” he said finally, quietly.

  The waiter brought Christian’s drink. He accepted it with much gratitude and ceremony, postponing the inevitable.

  “Where?”

  “You wouldn’t approve, Matthias.”

  “Who did you rob?”

  “Peter Poe.”

  “What?”

  “The money came from Peter Poe or, more precisely, from his casino in Indiana. Also a few parties on his yacht, gambling among the many amusements. I gamble. I know Annelise told you that. She hates it. It’s my latest addiction. I started doing it out of desperation and now I do it for the sheer pleasure. And I’m many t
housands of dollars ahead.”

  “As many as I found in the books?”

  “Oh, much more than that. You know my taste in things. That Jaguar’s mine. I bought it for cash. And, for the time being anyway, I’ve kept the wolves at bay. Father still has the house. For now.”

  “Why did you lie to me?”

  “I didn’t want you to be ‘disturbed.’ Not by the amount of the debt or by the way I’ve been paying it off. I thought you’d see Mother into the oven and then be off back to your life of abandon on the Côte d’Azur. It didn’t seem to me that you’d cared much at all about our financial circumstances back here. So why bother you with what I was doing about them? You obviously didn’t want to be involved, so why involve you?”

  “When I left Chicago, the debts were paid and the firm was solvent. It had clients.”

  “Your clients, big brother. Not Father’s. But I don’t begrudge you your playing the prodigal. You have the right to live your own life. I’m just living mine. And may I point out, sir, that gambling is perfectly legal in Indiana now. I’ve paid income tax on every cent I’ve won. I resent your treating me like a war criminal.”

  “How did you win?”

  “Playing vingt-et-un, roulette. Nothing so declassé as craps.”

  “Do you have proof? Of your winnings?”

  “Of course. I’m well acquainted with the passionate curiosity of the IRS. I’ve saved every cash slip.”

  “Cash slip?”

  “When you cash in your chips, you’re issued a little receipt. One’s supposed to save them for the IRS.”

  They studied each other.

  “What happens when you begin to lose?” said Matthias.

  “Lose? Horrible thought. Hasn’t happened often. There are times when I’ve wondered if Mr. Poe hasn’t been using me as some sort of shill, returning to Chicago with my pockets full of money as an encouragement to all my society friends to come out and join the fun.”