The Million-Dollar Wound (Nathan Heller)

by Max Allan Collins

  “He’s here.”

  It wasn’t like her to interrupt; most unbusinesslike.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Mr. Pegler.”

  I shook my head, smiled; Gladys hadn’t met Davis yet. “Tell him to go to hell.”

  “I will not.”

  “Then tell him it’ll cost him a C-note if he wants a quote. That’ll get rid of him.”

  She pursed her lips; she wasn’t blowing me a kiss. “What is a C-note?”

  “A hundred dollars. Go.”

  She went.

  “Excuse me,” I said to my client. “Where were we?”

  “Dry dyes,” the stockyard office manager said, looking bewildered.

  The door flew open and I could hear Gladys saying, “Please,” and a big red-faced man was in the doorway. I yanked the automatic out from under my arm and yelled, “Up with ’em!”

  Gladys screamed, the office manager dropped to the floor and the big man’s face whitened. He swallowed, thickly. He was very well dressed; double-breasted gray pinstripe suit with stylish wide lapels, a flourish of a hanky in his breast pocket, a wide, thick-knotted, dark blue tie patterned with white abstract shapes. He put his hands slowly in the air, narrowing his eyes, which hid under shaggy, cultivated-to-points satanic eyebrows.

  “Put that ridiculous thing away,” he said. The words were strong, but the tenor voice had something of a quaver. The voice wasn’t as big as the man, that’s all there was to it.

  I came around the desk, saying, “Just keep ’em up,” and patted him down. He stood for the frisk, but scowled all the while. He had on heavy, masculine lotion; pine needles.

  He was clean. Which is to say no weapon, but also well tailored and freshly bathed. This guy had money and I didn’t think it came from the rackets. Not of the Nitti variety, anyway.

  “Who the hell are you?” I asked, lowering the gun but not putting it away.

  “Who the hell do you think? Westbrook Pegler!”

  “Oh.” Now I was swallowing. “I’ll be damned if I don’t think you are.” I turned to the stockyards office manager who was crouching on the floor, looking up like a big bug. “We about had our business taken care of, didn’t we, Mr. Mertz?”

  He got up, brushing himself off, said, “Yes,” and I told him my secretary would call him and set up an on-site meeting with one of my operatives as he scurried out. I closed the door on Gladys’s pretty, glowering face.

  “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Pegler?”

  “I’m not sure I’m staying. I’m not delighted with having guns pointed at me.”

  “But then, who is? Please,” I said, smiling nervously, pulling up a chair for him.

  He cleared his throat, in a grumbling manner, and sat and I got behind the desk. Slipped the gun away, under my shoulder, feeling embarrassed and trigger-happy.

  “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

  “Not at all.”

  He took a gold, FWP-emblazoned case from his inside suitcoat pocket and a cigarette from the case and lit it up and I pushed the ashtray his way, saying, “This wasn’t a story I expected someone of your stature to be interested in covering.”

  “What story is that?”

  “The O’Hare shooting.”

  “Oh. Afraid I just glanced at the headlines, this morning; he was a racetrack promoter, wasn’t he? Why, were you involved in that?”

  “If I might explain,” I said, and briefly I told him about yesterday’s incident, and my fears about mob retaliation and my reluctance to talk to any newshound.

  “I didn’t believe for a minute that Westbrook Pegler had called me,” I said.

  “Admittedly Chicago isn’t my beat,” he granted. “But they do carry my column here.”

  That they did. I often read Pegler, who was basically one of those journalistic attack dogs who latched onto whichever side of an issue grabbed him by the seat of the pants. He was the king of the “meatball” journalists, always on whichever side was the most entertaining and/or controversial, the side most likely to get the loudest cheers, or boos, from the grandstand. You couldn’t peg Pegler for the left or the right, politically; one day he was praising a lynch party for ridding the world of a killer, and the next he was bemoaning poverty in the slums. Champion of the underdog, on Monday, he might be defender of the rich, on Tuesday.

  “Do you know a man named Willie Bioff?” he asked.

  Willie Bioff? Why in hell would Westbrook Pegler be asking about that fat little creep?

  “I used to,” I said.

  “What do you know of him?”

  I shrugged. “He used to be a pimp. He was a union slugger, too. He’s still involved in union organizing, isn’t he?”

  “That’s an understatement. Ostensibly, he’s the bodyguard of a man named George Browne. In reality, he runs…” And here he paused, in order to spit each of the following words out like distasteful seeds: “…the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.”

  “The Stagehands Union,” I nodded. “Yeah, I know Browne. He’s a drunk, and a blowhard. But when you prop him up he can make a speech and get the rank and file stirred up. He’s got patriotism and mom and apple pie and ten other kinds of baloney, for any occasion.”

  “But you see him as a figurehead.”

  “Yeah, sure. Bioff’s been the brains behind Browne for a long, long time. They say Browne drinks a hundred bottles of beer a day. He better have somebody’s brains behind him.”

  Pegler drew on the cigarette; smiled a little. Just being polite, I thought. He said, “I met…or rather, encountered Willie Bioff once, many years ago. 1913, I’d say. That was the last time I worked a Chicago beat steadily. My father was the star rewrite man for the American, at the time, and they took me on as a favor to him.”

  “You must’ve just been a kid.”

  “Seventeen,” he said, his elaborate shrug not masking his pride. “And working for the United Press at the same time. I may live in the East, Mr. Heller, but I’m of the Chicago school of journalism. The New York school represents…” And these words, too, were distasteful seeds to spit. “…ethics and manners. Reporters on rival papers actually cooperated with each other in gathering facts when working on the same story.” The thought of it was beyond him, and he smiled as he described the Chicago school: “We, on the other hand, sanctioned the commission of any crime short of burglary in pursuit of an exclusive, and wouldn’t’ve helped a rival reporter if he was bleeding in the street. Ha! We fought and tricked and, to be honest about it, hated each other.”

  He seemed lost in nostalgia; what this had to do with Willie Bioff or George Browne, or Nathan Heller, for that matter, was lost on me.

  Then he answered my unasked question: “I saw Bioff when I was covering the police stations and police courts. I did a little bit of everything in those days—chased fires, took pictures, held down City Hall on weekends, where I lost at poker to the likes of Ben Hecht and Jake Lingle. The Harrison Street police court was perhaps the most eye-opening of my experiences…”

  It would have been. West Harrison Street gave its name to a precinct that included one of the most depressed sections of the city, immigrants and colored and Chinese seeking the dream of America and finding the reality of tenements. And a red-light district second to none, the prostitutes a dreary rainbow of races and colors.

  “The court enjoyed a steady diet of stabbings, shootings and sluggings,” Pegler said, pretending disgust at a memory he relished. “Judge Hopkins would get bored with the violence, and would shout, ‘Bailiff, bring me in some whores!’ The judge enjoyed badinage with the girls; he loved it when a girl would say she hadn’t the wherewithal to pay his five-dollar fine. ‘Oh, I think you do, dearie,’ he’d say, and give her time to earn the money. But he wasn’t a bad judge, just the same. It was a grim atmosphere, and gallows humor, especially from a judge, was to be expected. Winos, ginsoaks, stewbums, hopheads and lesser delinquents were a constant parade before the bench. And the ever-present ladies of
the evening.”

  “And where there are whores,” I said, “there are pimps.”

  He smiled, not just being polite now, showing some teeth this time. “You anticipate me. I like that. Yes, it was in one of the police courts—Harrison Street, perhaps, though my memory isn’t exact on that account—that I first saw young Willie Bioff. It made an impression on me, barely eighteen myself, seeing a panderer who was younger than me, years younger. The judge asked him his age and he said, ‘Thirteen,’ proudly. He was fined and released. But I remembered him.”

  “Why?”

  “As I said, his age. Younger than me, but eons older. The street had done it to him, the liberals would say, and perhaps they’re right to a point. But even at his age he had a gleefulness about who he was and what he did. And cold, piglike eyes that bore no human compassion.”

  “You had this impression just from a court appearance you were routinely covering?”

  He shrugged facially; the bushy eyebrows danced. “Well, I saw Bioff again, a few months later. His name had stuck with me; I’m a literary man myself, after all, and the Dickensian name, ‘buy off,’ made its mark on my memory. Have you ever heard of the old Arsonia Cafe?”

  “Bit before my time, but wasn’t that Mike Fritzel’s saloon?”

  Nodding, the memory obviously a fond one, Pegler said, “Yes, back before the Great War, and a wild place it was. Fritzel’s gal Gilda Gray would allow herself to be hoisted up onto the bar for an impromptu performance of her well-known shimmy.”

  Judging from the gleam in his eyes, the shimmy had made its mark on his memory as well.

  “At any rate,” he continued, putting out his cigarette, getting the gold case back out again, “we reporters would occasionally congregate at the Arsonia, which was frequented by prostitutes and their panderers, and other denizens of the night.”

  “And that’s where you saw Bioff again.”

  “Precisely. Like any good reporter, I observed these creatures closely—it was an education of sorts for a lad like myself. I happened to spot Bioff, the teenage pimp, wearing a silk shirt, talking with some older examples of his ilk; there he stood, gesturing with his mug of beer, its contents sloshing onto the floor as he bragged.” This memory seemed anything but a fond one, but it was vividly recalled: “I assumed a spot at the bar nearby, and soon discovered Bioff was regaling his fellow panderers with his technique for ‘keeping his girls in line.’ Do you have a strong stomach, Mr. Heller?”

  “I’ve lived in Chicago all my life, Mr. Pegler.”

  “Sound answer. Here, more or less, is what I heard him say: ‘If you slug a girl half silly and then tie her down, you can stuff her…’” He paused, shook his head. “‘…her cunt with powdered ice. They tell me it’s so cold in there it feels like fire. You got to gag the girl, she screams so loud, but you don’t really hurt her permanent. But after ten minutes of that, she will get down on her knees to you any time you say the word ice.’”

  He lighted a new cigarette; his hand was shaking. I didn’t blame him. It was an ugly story.

  “You have a memory any reporter would envy you for, Mr. Pegler.”

  “Is it any wonder I remember it?” he said, a bit defensively. “I was an impressionable lad of eighteen, and I was hearing detailed and horrid descriptions of sexual perversion from a boy four or five years my junior. A boy whose polished nails caught the light, shining his financial success in my ten-dollar-a-week face. Is it any wonder I viewed it as an insult?”

  I didn’t point out that Pegler had in fact been eavesdropping, that Bioff hadn’t intended to impress anybody but his fellow pimps. Still, I could see this man, as a boy, taking it as an insult.

  “I saw him again, years later, in another bar,” Pegler continued, “on the North Side. He looked familiar, and I asked my drinking companion if he knew the fat, dapper little man, and my friend said, ‘Why, that’s Willie Bioff—the union slugger and pimp.’”

  “And of course the name rang a bell. When was this?”

  “Nineteen twenty-seven, perhaps,” he said. “I didn’t know you were in Chicago then.”

  “I didn’t live here. I was working for the Tribune Syndicate, however, and touched bases often. Working a sports beat, traveling all over. Got here quite often.”

  “I see.”

  “Let me bring you up to date,” he said, sitting forward. “If you’ve indeed read my columns, you must know that I’ve waged something of a war against the crooked unions.”

  “Yeah.”

  He was getting wound up, his eyes staring, not looking at me, as he said, “The newspaper guild soured me on unionism once and for all, you see; it was a hotbed of Reds, and as for the AFL, that great, arrogant, corrupt, hypocritical, parasitic racket, well, I…”

  “I’ve read your column,” I said. He was starting to irritate me, now. My father was an old union man, he gave his heart and soul to the movement, and while Pegler’s opinions weren’t entirely baseless, they still rubbed me the wrong way.

  He sensed it. “Let me stress that the idea of unionism is something I can admire; what it is rapidly degenerating into is something I can only abhor.”

  “Understood.”

  “At any rate. I usually make two or three cross-country jaunts each year, looking for material for my column. I think of myself as a reporter, and while I’m paid handsomely to air my opinions, those opinions mustn’t be formed in a vacuum. I need to get out and be a newspaperman from time to time. Last week I was in Los Angeles, that modern Babylon, and I found a real story.” He drew on the cigarette, relishing the moment. “I was at a party given by Joe Schenck, the Twentieth Century-Fox film executive. Across a wide room, filled with Hollywood stars and directors and producers, with all the fancy trimmings, cocktails and caviar, I spied a familiar face.”

  “Bioff?”

  Pegler nodded, smugly. “Oh, he was older than a teenager, now, by some distance. As was I. But that fat round smiling face was the same, and, as I drew nearer, the hard little pig’s eyes, behind wire-rim glasses now, were as cold and inhuman as ever. Oh, he was handsomely turned out, in the Hollywood style, double-breasted pinstripe suit, a handkerchief with a monogram, WB.”

  Except for the initials, Pegler might have been describing his own wardrobe.

  “I asked my host if that man’s name wasn’t Bioff,” Pegler said, “and he replied, ‘Yes it is—that’s one of our most illustrious citizens. Would you like to be introduced to him?’ I said I wouldn’t shake hands with Willie Bioff if I were wearing gloves.”

  “I wasn’t aware Bioff was in Hollywood; I didn’t know what became of him, frankly.” I shrugged. “I guess I assumed he was still involved with Browne and the Stagehands Union. Browne moved his office to the East Coast years ago.”

  A humorless smile made a slant on Pegler’s fleshy face. “Well, it’s in Hollywood, now, and has been since 1935. I did some checking. I talked to Arthur Unger, the editor of the Daily Variety, and he informed me that the Stagehands Union now controls some twenty-seven different unions. Browne, or in reality Bioff, controls not just the stagehands and the movie projectionists, but ushers, treasurers, porters and hatcheck concessionaires in legitimate theaters coast to coast, and movie studio mechanics, sound technicians, laboratory technicians, virtually everyone involved in the manufacturing end of the film industry. A hundred and seventy-five thousand dues-paying members.”

  “That’s a lot of power for our fat little former pimp.”

  “It is indeed.” He straightened up in his chair and smiled tightly, smugly. “Mr. Heller, I intend to expose Willie Bioff for the panderer he is.”

  “That should be easy. He’s been arrested enough times.”

  “Yes, but has he been convicted?”

  “At least once that I know of.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I was the arresting officer,” I said.

  He smiled. “That was a rumor we heard, but we’ve not been able to verify it.”

&n
bsp; So that’s how my name got picked out of the hat to be the dick Pegler pegged for his legwork.

  “I’m not sure I want to be involved in this,” I said. “I hear Browne is tied in with Nicky Dean, and Dean’s an Outfit man. If this is an Outfit operation, my future health precludes my involvement.”

  “You don’t need to decide this instant. Have you ever been to California?”

  “No.”

  He reached in his inside pocket and produced an envelope, which he handed to me.

  I took it.

  “Look inside,” he prompted.

  I did. Two one-hundred-dollar bills and an airline ticket.

  “Your flight to Hollywood leaves at six-twenty this evening,” he said.

  Train travel I was used to; plane travel was something new, and a little frightening. Truth be told, I slept through a lot of it. Twenty-five other hearty souls and I sat within the DC-3 “Flagship,” a noisy, rattling projectile that churned through the night sky like a big kitchen mixer. The businessman I sat next to actually read Fortune magazine, as if this sort of travel was an everyday thing to him. Maybe it was. We spoke a few polite words, but, sitting over the wing, fighting the sound of the propellers, there just wasn’t much to be said. I was relieved when the thing sat down in Dallas, sometime after one o’clock in the morning, and was surprised to find I could make my stomach accept a little something in the airport cafeteria, where oddly enough the people working had Southern accents. Within an hour I was on a sleeper plane, within which two facing seats in a sort of train-type compartment were converted to a berth by a good-looking blonde woman in a vaguely military outfit, a “stewardess” she was called, who then shut the curtains and I got awkwardly undressed, hanging my clothes in the netting provided, and slipped under cool sheets and I’ll be damned if the sound of the props and the up-and-down motion didn’t put me to sleep. Some hours later the stewardess woke me to let me know the airliner was landing—at Tucson, Arizona, which, unlike my present confusion, was a state I’d never been in. I dressed, and then helped her turn the berth back into two seats, into one of which I was strapped, and we landed. Another airport, another cafeteria. Soon I was sleeping again, in my pants atop the blankets this time, and before long it was eight o’clock in the morning in Los Angeles (ten o’clock in the real world, but never mind).