Chicago Noir

by Joe Meno

  “One what?” I asked.

  “I’m gettin’ to that. She showed up around one o’clock—good-looking dame with black hair and eyes so dark they coulda been black too.”

  “Who was she?”

  “I don’t know. Never saw her before. She took a gun out of her purse and gave it to Rooney.”

  “That was what he asked her to bring.”

  “I guess. It was a thirty-eight revolver, a Colt, I think. Anyway, Rooney and Berry were both pretty drunk; I don’t know what her excuse was. So Rooney takes the gun and says, We got a job to pull at Goldblatt’s. We’re gonna throw some slugs at the windows and watchmen.”

  “How did the girl react?”

  He swallowed. “She laughed. She said, I’ll go along and watch the fun. Then they all went out.”

  Jesus.

  Finally I said, “What did you do?”

  “They told me to wait for ’em. Keep the bar open. They came back in, laughing like hyenas. Rooney says to me, You want to see the way he keeled over? And I says, Who? And he says, The guard at Goldblatt’s. Berry laughs and says, We really let him have it.”

  “That kid was twenty-one, Alex. It was his goddamn birthday.”

  The bartender was looking down. “They laughed and joked about it till Berry passed out. About six in the morning, Rooney has me pile Berry in a cab. Rooney and the twist slept in his office for maybe an hour. Then they came out, looking sober and kind of . . . scared. He warned me not to tell anybody what I seen, unless I wanted to trade my job for a morgue slab.”

  “Colorful. Tell me, Alex. You got that girl’s phone number in Berwyn?”

  “I think it’s upstairs. You can put that gun away. I’ll help you.”

  It was dark, but I could see his face well enough; the big man’s eyes looked damp. The fear was gone. Something else was in its place. Shame? Something.

  We went upstairs, he unlocked the union hall and, under the bar, found the matchbook with the number written inside: Berwyn 2981.

  “You want a drink before you go?” he asked.

  “You know,” I said, “I think I’ll pass.”

  * * *

  I went back to my office to use the reverse-listing phone book that told me Berwyn 2981 was Rosalie Rizzo’s number; and that Rosalie Rizzo lived at 6348 West 13th Street in Berwyn.

  First thing the next morning, I borrowed Barney’s Hupmobile and drove out to Berwyn, the clean, tidy hunky suburb populated in part by the late Mayor Cermak’s patronage people. But finding a Rosalie Rizzo in this largely Czech and Bohemian area came as no surprise: Capone’s Cicero was a stone’s throw away.

  The woman’s address was a three-story brick apartment building, but none of the mailboxes in the vestibule bore her name. I found the janitor and gave him Rosalie Rizzo’s description. It sounded like Mrs. Riggs to him.

  “She’s a doll,” the janitor said. He was heavy-set and needed a shave; he licked his thick lips as he thought about her. “Ain’t seen her since yesterday noon.”

  That was about nine hours after Stanley was killed.

  He continued: “Her and her husband was going to the country, she said. Didn’t expect to be back for a couple of weeks.”

  Her husband.

  “What’ll a look around their apartment cost me?”

  He licked his lips again. “Two bucks?”

  Two bucks it was; the janitor used his passkey and left me to it. The well-appointed little apartment included a canary that sang in its gilded cage, a framed photo of slick Boss Rooney on an end table, and a closet containing two sawed-off shotguns and a repeating rifle.

  I had barely started to poke around when I had company: a slender, gray-haired woman in a flowered print dress.

  “Oh!” she said, coming in the door she’d unlocked.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “Who are you?” Her voice had the lilt of an Italian accent.

  Under the circumstances, the truth seemed prudent. “A private detective.”

  “My daughter is not here! She and her-a husband, they go to vacation. Up north some-a-where. I just-a come to feed the canary!”

  “Please don’t be frightened. Do you know where she’s gone, exactly?”

  “No. But . . . maybe my husband do. He is-a downstairs . . .”

  She went to a window, threw it open, and yelled something frantically down in Italian.

  I eased her aside in time to see a heavy-set man jump into a maroon Plymouth with a silver swan on the radiator cap, and cream-colored wheels, and squeal away.

  And when I turned, the slight gray-haired woman was just as gone. Only she hadn’t squealed.

  * * *

  The difference, this time, was a license number for the maroon coupe; I’d seen it: 519-836. In a diner I made a call to Lou Sapperstein, who made a call to the motor vehicle bureau, and phoned back with the scoop: the Plymouth was licensed to Rosalie Rizzo, but the address was different—2848 South Cuyler Avenue, in Berwyn.

  The bungalow was typical for Berwyn—a tidy little frame house on a small, perfect lawn. My guess was this was her folks’ place. In back was a small matching, but unattached garage, on the alley. Peeking in the garage windows, I saw the maroon coupe and smiled.

  “Is Rosalie in trouble again?”

  The voice was female, sweet, young.

  I turned and saw a slender, almost beautiful teenage girl with dark eyes and bouncy, dark, shoulder-length hair. She wore a navy-blue sailor-ish playsuit. Her pretty white legs were bare.

  “Are you Rosalie’s sister?”

  “Yes. Is she in trouble?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I just know Rosalie, that’s all. That man isn’t really her husband, is he? That Mr. Riggs.”

  “No.”

  “Are you here about her accident?”

  “No. Where is she?”

  “Are you a police officer?”

  “I’m a detective. Where did she go?”

  “Papa’s inside. He’s afraid he’s going to be in trouble.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Rosalie put her car in our garage yesterday. She said she was in an accident and it was damaged and not to use it. She’s going to have it repaired when she gets back from vacation.”

  “What does that have to do with your papa being scared?”

  “Rosalie’s going to be mad as h at him, that he used her car.” She shrugged. “He said he looked at it and it didn’t look damaged to him, and if Mama was going to have to look after Rosalie’s g.d. canary, well, he’d sure as h use her gas not his.”

  “I can see his point. Where did your sister go on vacation?”

  “She didn’t say. Up north someplace. Someplace she and Mr. Riggs like to go to, to . . . you know. To get away?”

  I called Sergeant Pribyl from a gas station where I was getting Barney’s Hupmobile tank refilled: I suggested he have another talk with bartender Alex Davidson, gave him the address of “Mr. and Mrs. Riggs,” and told him where he could find the maroon Plymouth.

  He was grateful but a little miffed about all I had done on my own. “So much for not showboating,” he said, almost huffily. “You’ve found everything but the damn suspects.”

  “They’ve gone up north somewhere,” I said.

  “Where up north?”

  “They don’t seem to’ve told anybody. Look, I have a piece of evidence you may need.”

  “What?”

  “When you talk to Davidson, he’ll tell you about a matchbook Rooney wrote the girl’s number on. I got the matchbook.”

  It was still in my pocket. I took it out, idly, and shut the girl’s number away, revealing the picture on the matchbook cover: a blue moon hovered surrealistically over a white lake on which two blue lovers paddled in a blue canoe—Eagle River Lodge, Wisconsin.

  “I suppose we’ll need that,” Pribyl’s voice over the phone said, “when the time comes.”

  “I suppose,” I said, and hung up.

 
* * *

  Eagle River was a town of 1,386 (so said the sign) just inside the Vilas County line at the junction of US 45 and Wisconsin State Highway 70. The country was beyond beautiful, green pines towering higher than Chicago skyscrapers, glittering blue lakes nestling in woodland pockets.

  The lodge I was looking for was on Silver Lake, a gas station attendant told me. A beautiful dusk was settling on the woods as I drew into the parking of the large resort sporting a red city-style neon sign saying: DINING AND DANCE. Log-cabin cottages were flung here and there around the periphery like Paul Bunyan’s Tinkertoys. Each one was just secluded enough—ideal for couples, married or un-.

  Even if Rooney and his dark-haired honey weren’t staying here, it was time to find a room: I’d been driving all day. When Barney loaned me his Hupmobile, he’d had no idea the kind of miles I’d put on it. Dead tired, I went to the desk and paid for a cabin.

  The guy behind the counter had a plaid shirt on, but he was small and squinty and Hitler-mustached, smoking a stogie, and looked more like a bookie than a lumberjack.

  I told him some friends of mine were supposed to be staying here.

  “We don’t have anybody named Riggs registered.”

  “How ’bout Mr. and Mrs. Rooney?”

  “Them either. How many friends you got, anyway?”

  “Why, did I already catch the limit?”

  Before I headed to my cabin, I grabbed some supper in the rustic restaurant. I placed my order with a friendly brunette girl of about nineteen with plenty of personality and makeup. A road-company Paul Whiteman outfit was playing “Sophisticated Lady” in the adjacent dance hall, and I went over and peeked in, to look for familiar faces. A number of couples were cutting a rug, but not Rooney and Rosalie. Or Henry Berry or Herbert Arnold, either. I went back and had my green salad and fried trout and well-buttered baked potato; I was full and sleepy when I stumbled toward my guest cottage under the light of a moon that bathed the woods ivory.

  Walking along the path, I spotted something: snuggled next to one of the secluded cabins was a blue LaSalle coupe with Cook County plates.

  Suddenly I wasn’t sleepy. I walked briskly back to the lodge check-in desk and batted the bell to summon the stogie-chewing clerk.

  “Cabin 7,” I said. “I think that blue LaSalle is my friends’ car.”

  His smirk turned his Hitler mustache Chaplinesque. “You want I should break out the champagne?”

  “I just want to make sure it’s them. Dark-haired doll and an older guy, good-looking, kinda sleepy-eyed, just starting to go bald?”

  “That’s them.” He checked his register. “That’s the Ridges.” He frowned. “Are they usin’ a phony name?”

  “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

  He squinted. “You sure they’re friends of yours?”

  “Positive. Don’t call their room and tell ’em I’m here, though—I want to surprise ’em . . .”

  * * *

  I knocked with my left hand; my right was filled with the nine millimeter. Nothing. I knocked again.

  “Who is it?” a male voice said gruffly. “What is it?”

  “Complimentary fruit basket from the management.”

  “Go away!”

  I kicked the door open.

  The lights were off in the little cabin, but enough moonlight came in with me through the doorway to reveal the pair in bed, naked. She was sitting up, her mouth and eyes open in a silent scream, gathering the sheets up protectively over white skin, her dark hair blending with the darkness of the room, making a cameo of her face. He was diving off the bed for the sawed-off shotgun, but I was there to kick it away, wishing I hadn’t, wishing I’d let him grab it so I could have had an excuse to put one in his forehead, right where he’d put one in Stanley’s.

  Boss Rooney wasn’t boss of anything now: he was just a naked, balding, forty-four-year-old scam artist, sprawled on the floor. Kicking him would have been easy.

  So I did; in the stomach.

  He clutched himself and puked. Apparently he’d had the trout too.

  I went over and slammed the door shut, or as shut as it could be, half off its hinges. Pointing the gun at her retching, naked boyfriend, I said to the girl, “Turn on the light and put on your clothes.”

  She nodded and did as she was told. In the glow of a nightstand lamp, I caught glimpses of her white, well-formed body as she stepped into her step-ins; but you know what? She didn’t do a thing for me.

  “Is Berry here?” I asked Rooney. “Or Arnold?”

  “N . . . no,” he managed.

  “If you’re lying,” I said, “I’ll kill you.”

  The girl said shrilly, “They aren’t here!”

  “You can put your clothes on too,” I told Rooney. “If you have another gun hidden somewhere, do me a favor. Make a play for it.”

  His hooded eyes flared. “Who the hell are you?”

  “The private cop you didn’t kill the other night.”

  He lowered his gaze. “Oh.”

  The girl was sitting on the bed, weeping; body heaving.

  “Take it easy on her, will you?” he said, zipping his fly. “She’s just a kid.”

  I was opening a window to ease the stench of his vomit. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll say kaddish for her.”

  * * *

  I handcuffed the lovebirds to the bed and called the local law; they in turn called the state prosecutor’s office in Chicago, and Sergeants Pribyl and Gray made the long drive up the next day to pick up the pair.

  It seemed the two cops had already caught Henry Berry—a tipster gave them the West Chicago Avenue address of a second-floor room he was holed up in.

  I admitted to Pribyl that I’d been wrong about Tubbo tipping off Rooney and the rest about the raid.

  “I figure Rooney lammed out of sheer panic,” I said, “the morning after the murder.”

  Pribyl saw it the same way.

  The following March, Pribyl arrested Herbert Arnold running a Northside handbill-distributing agency.

  Rooney, Berry, and Rosalie Rizzo were all convicted of murder; the two men got life, and the girl twenty years. Arnold hadn’t been part of the kill-happy joyride that took Stanley Gross’s young life, and got only one-to-five for conspiracy and extortion.

  None of it brought Stanley Gross back, nor did my putting on a beanie and sitting with the Gross family, suffering through a couple of stints at a storefront synagogue on Roosevelt Road.

  But it did get Barney off my ass.

  Author’s Note: While Nathan Heller is a fictional character, this story is based on a real case—names have not been changed, and the events are fundamentally true; source material included an article by John J. McPhaul and information provided by my research associate, George Hagenauer, who I thank for his insights and suggestions.

  The Man Who Went to Chicago (excerpt)

  by RICHARD WRIGHT

  Illinois Medical District

  (Originally published in 1945)

  When the work in the post office ended, I was assigned by the relief system as an orderly to a medical research institute in one of the largest and wealthiest hospitals in Chicago. I cleaned operating rooms, dog, rat, mice, cat, and rabbit pans, and fed guinea pigs. Four of us Negroes worked there and we occupied an underworld position, remembering that we must restrict ourselves—when not engaged upon some task—to the basement corridors, so that we would not mingle with white nurses, doctors, or visitors.

  The sharp line of racial division drawn by the hospital authorities came to me the first morning when I walked along an underground corridor and saw two long lines of women coming toward me. A line of white girls marched past, clad in starched uniforms that gleamed white; their faces were alert, their step quick, their bodies lean and shapely, their shoulders erect, their faces lit with the light of purpose. And after them came a line of black girls, old, fat, dressed in ragged gingham, walking loosely, carrying tin cans of soap powder, rags, mops, brooms . . . I wonder
ed what law of the universe kept them from being mixed? The sun would not have stopped shining had there been a few black girls in the first line, and the earth would not have stopped whirling on its axis had there been a few white girls in the second line. But the two lines I saw graded social status in purely racial terms.

  Of the three Negroes who worked with me, one was a boy about my own age, Bill, who was either sleepy or drunk most of the time. Bill straightened his hair and I suspected that he kept a bottle hidden somewhere in the piles of hay which we fed to the guinea pigs. He did not like me and I did not like him, though I tried harder than he to conceal my dislike. We had nothing in common except that we were both black and lost. While I contained my frustration, he drank to drown his. Often I tried to talk to him, tried in simple words to convey to him some of my ideas, and he would listen in sullen silence. Then one day he came to me with an angry look on his face.

  “I got it,” he said.

  “You’ve got what?” I asked.

  “This old race problem you keep talking about,” he said.

  “What about it?”

  “Well, it’s this way,” he explained seriously. “Let the government give every man a gun and five bullets, then let us all start over again. Make it just like it was in the beginning. The ones who come out on top, white or black, let them rule.”

  His simplicity terrified me. I had never met a Negro who was so irredeemably brutalized. I stopped pumping my ideas into Bill’s brain for fear that the fumes of alcohol might send him reeling toward some fantastic fate.

  The two other Negroes were elderly and had been employed in the institute for fifteen years or more. One was Brand, a short, black, morose bachelor; the other was Cooke, a tall, yellow, spectacled fellow who spent his spare time keeping track of world events through the Chicago Tribune. Brand and Cooke hated each other for a reason that I was never able to determine, and they spent a good part of each day quarreling.

  When I began working at the institute, I recalled my adolescent dream of wanting to be a medical research worker. Daily I saw young Jewish boys and girls receiving instruction in chemistry and medicine that the average black boy or girl could never receive. When I was alone, I wandered and poked my fingers into strange chemicals, watched intricate machines trace red and black lines on ruled paper. At times I paused and stared at the walls of the rooms, at the floors, at the wide desks at which the white doctors sat; and I realized—with a feeling that I could never quite get used to—that I was looking at the world of another race.