Neon Mirage

by Max Allan Collins

  The gray-brick complex of Michael Reese Hospital stretched along Ellis Avenue like a fortress in a foreign land; to the rear, separated from the hospital only by Lake Park Avenue, the wide W of the central building and its two major wings faced the downward slope of the Illinois Central tracks, beyond which was the lake. Nothing fancy to look at, the six stories of Michael Reese nonetheless towered over the rundown colored neighborhood at its feet, crumbling three-story buildings that huddled together as if only their close proximity kept them from falling down.

  The big privately owned hospital had enough specialists on its staff to attract patients the likes of Ragen, even if he weren’t being dragged into the emergency room shot-up, even if it wasn’t just the closest, handiest hospital. But that emergency room was populated by street people, almost exclusively colored, victims of the casual violence their neighborhood bred. The South Side Irish seeking their health in this hospital were upstairs in the small private rooms; the emergency room’s darker clientele would wind up in a charity ward in Reese’s Mandel Clinic or, more likely, be treated as out patients.

  As we dragged Ragen in, Walt on one side of him, me on the other, bloody newspaper sheets dropping to the floor like petals from a grotesque flower, a couple orderlies took over and ushered him into the emergency examination room at left, where they eased him onto an examination table and shut a curtain around him. I left Walt to fill in the attending physician, and went back out to the 29th Street ambulance ramp, where we’d left the shot-up Lincoln, doors open, motor running, and parked it in one of the nearby Staff Only stalls. I locked the sawed-off in the trunk; this was no neighborhood to be leaving weapons in the back seat of cars. Of course, what neighborhood in Chicago was?

  In the phone booth in the corridor outside the emergency room, I called Ragen’s home first. His wife Ellen answered.

  “He’s been shot,” I told her, “but he’s alive.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Where is he?” she asked; her voice was husky. It tried to be strong, but didn’t make it.

  “Michael Reese,” I said, and she said thank you and hung up.

  She didn’t ask for any details. There would be time enough for that. I didn’t know Ellen very well—we’d only met a few times—but she wasn’t naive. That much I knew. Jim winding up on the end of a shooting was inevitable. That much she knew.

  Then I called my office. It was late—almost seven, now. I knew Gladys Fortunato, my secretary, would be long gone—she was a dedicated girl, Gladys, until five o’clock rolled around, at which point she couldn’t care less about A-1 Detective Agency, and who could blame her?

  But Lou Sapperstein might be there. Lou had been out in the field today, investigating loan applicants for a Skokie bank. He was conscientious, and would likely stick around to do his paper work, while the afternoon’s interviews were fresh in his mind. If I let it ring long enough…

  “A-1,” Lou’s voice said, finally. It was a soothing baritone; Bing Crosby, only Lou couldn’t carry a tune.

  “It’s your boss,” I said.

  “And you love it,” Lou said.

  He always said that, or words to that effect, when I reminded him who the boss was. He had been my boss on the pickpocket detail, back in the early thirties, when I was the youngest plain-clothes dick on the department and he still had hair, or anyway some hair. Lou was pushing sixty, but was still a hard, lean cop. Don’t let the tortoise-shell eyeglasses fool you.

  “Drop everything,” I told him. “You’re working tonight.”

  “That’s why you put me on salary, isn’t it? To get sixty hours a week out of me. So what’s up?”

  “Jim Ragen’s time. Or it pretty soon will be. Lou, they hit us.”

  “Shit! Where? How?”

  I gave it to him.

  “Now here’s what I want you to do…” I started.

  “Don’t waste your breath,” Sapperstein said. “I’ll tell you: you want me to go to Bill Tendlar’s flat over on the near Northwest Side and see just how sick he really is.”

  Tendlar was the op who’d called in sick; whose shotgun I’d used.

  “If he isn’t sick,” I said, “he’s going to be.”

  “And if he is sick,” Sapperstein said, “he’s gonna be sicker.”

  “You got it. This was an inside job, and it wasn’t Walt. He was under fire just like I was.”

  “What about that truck driver pal of Ragen’s who had the day off?”

  “I want him checked out, too. Maybe you can put Richie on that. But my nose says Tendlar. Of all the guys we got working for us, him I know the least about.”

  “He was on the pickpocket detail,” Lou said, “but after both our times. We had mutual friends, though. He came recommended.”

  “Judas looked good to Jesus, too. It was Tendlar’s shotgun that jammed and almost got me killed. Find him. Sit on him. ’Cause I want him.”

  “You’ll have him, if he’s still in town to be had.”

  And Lou hung up.

  Then I dialed the detective bureau at the Central Police Station, at 11th and State in the Loop. And asked for Lt. Drury.

  Bill Drury was another former pickpocket detail dick—only he had stayed on. Recently he’d been acting captain over at Town Hall Station, till he and a handful of the other honest detectives got railroaded out of their jobs by the Civil Service Commission, over supposedly tolerating bookie joints on their beats.

  “Drury,” he said.

  “Welcome back,” I said.

  He laughed. “I been wondering when you’d get around to congratulating me.”

  “Well, give me a chance. They only reinstated you Friday. And this is your first day back on the job.”

  “It’s not the greatest shift,” he admitted, “but it beats unemployment.”

  “How long you been on?”

  “Since five o’clock. Where you calling from? Why don’t you come over and I’ll buy you a cup of lousy coffee?”

  “I’m calling from Michael Reese. Get your reinstated butt over here and I’ll give you more than a cup of coffee.”

  “Oh?”

  And I told him, very quickly, about Ragen getting shot up at the corner of State and Pershing.

  “Guzik,” Drury said, with a smile in his voice.

  “Probably. But remember—I don’t want to end up in the middle of this, now…”

  “You’re already in the middle of State Street, exchanging fire with a couple of shotguns—and you don’t want to be in the middle of this?”

  “Well, I don’t. Get over here, if you can.”

  “Who’s going to stop me?”

  I joined Walt in the emergency room, where Ragen, still unconscious but now stripped down to his waist, his pasty Irish flesh even pastier than usual, his wounds dressed, was being rolled out on his back on what looked like a mobile morgue tray, a young fair-haired intern on one side of him, an older heavy-set dark nurse on the other. They were giving him a bottle of plasma.

  We followed them out into the corridor, toward an elevator, where they wheeled him on and the intern looked out at me and said, “Who are you?”

  “I’m his bodyguard. Let’s hope you’re better at your job than I am at mine.”

  I squeezed onto the elevator and so did Walt.

  “You can’t come along,” the intern said.

  “Watch me,” I said.

  It was one of those self-operated elevators.

  “What floor?” I asked the nurse, pleasantly.

  “Second,” the nurse said, warily.

  I pushed the button and we went up.

  Walt and I waited outside the surgery, down at one end of a narrow, rather dark corridor, where footsteps echoed on the tile floor and the cool disinfectant-institutional smell constantly reminded us where we were. Ten minutes after Ragen had been wheeled in, two uniformed cops and a detective from the third district joined us.

  The detective, a Sgt. Blaine, was a pot-bellied guy in his forties with dar
k, stupid eyes in a round, stupid face. He pushed his porkpie hat back on his head, to let us know he was appraising us. Big deal. I didn’t know him from Adam, but he’d heard of me.

  “Heller,” he said, his humorless one-sided smile buried in a pocket of puffy cheek. “You’re the guy who sided with Frank Nitti over your brother cops.”

  “If you’re going to be mean to me,” I said, “I might just bust out crying.”

  Now he tried to sneer. “Nobody likes a cop who rats out other cops.”

  “Hey, that was twelve, thirteen years ago. And they weren’t cops, they were a couple of West Side hoods Mayor Cermak hired as bodyguards. Okay? Can we move on to new business? Like the guy bleeding to death in the next room? Or do you wanna read the minutes of the last meeting?”

  He looked at me like he was thinking of spitting, and maybe he was, but the hospital floor looked too clean. So instead he posted the two uniformed cops at the surgery’s double doors, and got out his little notebook, licked the tip of his pencil, and started asking questions. I knew we’d have to make a more formal statement later on, but I answered the questions, anyway. There was nothing better to do.

  “Where’s this shotgun that wouldn’t shoot?” he wanted to know. The first vaguely pertinent question in nearly five minutes of piss-poor interrogation.

  “In the trunk,” I told him, and dug out the keys for him. “You’ll be impounding the heap, anyway, right?”

  “Yeah, right,” he said, like he’d thought of it too. He tucked the little notebook away, and the Lincoln keys. “I guess you boys can find your way home without it.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” I said. “We work for Ragen.”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot,” he smirked. “You’re protectin’ him.”

  “That’s right. And we’re sticking, or anyway somebody else from my agency will be sticking, till Ragen or his family sends us away.”

  “Listen, buddy.” He prodded the air with a forefinger. “You just take a hike.” He jerked a thumb over one shoulder. “You let the cops do their job.” He pointed at himself with the other thumb.

  “Do their job,” I said. “Like look the other way, if the price is right. A fin, say.”

  The stupid eyes narrowed, tried to get smart. Without any particular success. He was trying to summon some indignation and come up with something clever or nasty to say, when a finger tapped his shoulder.

  “You better call in, sergeant,” Bill Drury said. “I can take over on this end.”

  Drury wasn’t big, really, but his broad shoulders and sheer physical presence turned his five-foot-nine, hundred-sixty-pound frame into something formidable. His eyes were just as dark as Blaine’s, but infinitely more intelligent. His hair was thinning, but combed so as to spread what little there was around. His nose was somewhat prominent and his jaw jutting. And, as usual, he was nattily dressed, wearing (despite the heat) a vest with his dark blue suit, the breast pocket of which bore a white flourish of handkerchief, his wide tie a light blue with a yellow sunburst pattern. He was easily the best-dressed honest cop on the Chicago P.D.

  Blaine, about the same size as Bill, nonetheless seemed dwarfed by him. He probably felt dwarfed by him, too. The sergeant swallowed, said, “Yes, lieutenant. I should call this information in. You’re right about that.”

  And he clip-clopped down the tile floor toward the elevator, and went away.

  Drury grinned at me, nodded at Walt. Walt had splotches of Ragen’s blood on his brown suit. I had some on my brown suit, too, I noticed.

  Walt excused himself to go grab a smoke. Drury dispatched one of the uniformed cops to stand by the window near the fire escape down the hall, and the other to guard the elevator. Then it was just me and Drury and the surgery double doors.

  “Well, Nate,” Drury said. “For a guy who swore off gangsters, you sure pick a hell of a boyo to play bodyguard for. What’s a big executive like you doing work like that for, anyway?”

  I smiled at this sarcasm, stalled on the answer; I wanted Lou to have a chance to track Tendlar down before I gave all the details to the cops, even to the honest exception of a cop that was Bill Drury.

  “Nobody else was available,” I explained. That wasn’t a lie. It was only marginally the truth, but it wasn’t a lie.

  Bill folded his arms, leaned back against the cool brick wall. “I’ve got warrants out on Guzik and Serritella. Also, Murray Humphreys and Joe Batters. And Hymie the Loud Mouth, too.”

  “Dago Mangano’s lucky he’s dead,” I said, “or you’d have a warrant out on him, too.”

  “I considered it,” Drury said, arching an eyebrow.

  “Those guys are just going to love getting hauled in for questioning.”

  “Not as much as I’m going to love questioning ’em.”

  Bill hated the Outfit boys. It had started back in the early thirties, when he first came on the job; unlike most cops in Chicago, Drury had pulled no political strings to get on the force—no Outfit-beholden ward committeeman, alderman or judge had played a role in his appointment. He’d made it by scoring record high marks on the police entrance exams; and his reputation as a Golden Gloves boxer hadn’t hurt, either. Also, his brother John was a reporter on the Daily News—and the department courted good publicity. So Bill had been allowed on.

  Naively, Bill had in his early days treated some of the town’s top Outfit guys like gangsters; imagine. Whenever he met ’em, even if they were dining with their wives and kids, he would make them assume the position against the nearest wall and pat them down like common criminals (as opposed to uncommon criminals). Those Outfit guys began to wonder what they were paying good money to Bill’s superiors for, and soon Bill was forbidden to leave the station house on his tour of duty.

  So he’d made a crusade out of it. On his off-duty hours he would stroll Rush Street and Division and various Loop thoroughfares. The time he rousted Guzik himself just outside Marshall Field’s on State Street at high noon, before a jeering crowd, was the capper: Guzik had blown a gasket, screaming, cursing, as Drury coolly frisked him, saying: “Two more words out of you, Jake, and I’ll put the cuffs on you. Two more sentences and I’ll call the Black Maria and get you fitted for a straitjacket.”

  Shortly after, Guzik headed for the county building and soon a judge had placed Drury under a peace bond, to prevent future molestation of good citizen Greasy Thumb.

  Ever since, Bill had had a hard-on where the Outfit was concerned, in general, and where Guzik was concerned, in particular.

  “Did you see who did it, Nate?”

  “They were just shapes behind shotguns. Wearing white shirts. Sportshirts, I think—I remember seeing their bare arms holding the shotguns. Aren’t you glad a trained detective was on the scene to pick up on all these details?”

  Drury smiled faintly. “I’ve sent a colored cop down to question the eye witnesses.”

  “Good idea. Who?”

  “Two-Gun Pete.”

  “Christ, he won’t question ’em, he’ll kill ’em.”

  Drury laughed shortly. “Well, they won’t hide any information from him, that’s for sure. We’re going to nail Guzik’s hide on this one, Nate. I can feel it. I can smell it.”

  “That’s disinfectant, Bill.”

  “If that tough little bastard pulls through in there,” Drury said, grinning, nodding back at the double doors, “we’ll have Guzik cold.”

  “Why, you think Jim’ll cooperate with you?”

  “Sure as hell do. He already gave the State’s Attorney’s office a detailed statement.”

  “The hell you say—when the fuck was this?”

  Drury shrugged. “Last May. Or late April. Right after that car chased him to the Morgan Park police station.”

  “He never said a word about it to me! What’s in this statement?”

  “Quite a bit. It runs almost a hundred pages in transcript. It’s mostly about Capone.”

  “Capone! Capone is ancient history. Capone has the mind of a tw
elve-year-old kid—and the twelve-year-old kid wants it back.”

  “Well, frankly, very little of the statement is anything that can be used. He talks a lot about the ‘Capone mob.’ Not quite naming names. It mostly indicates how pissed off Ragen was that they made an attempt to hit him.”

  “In other words, it was a message he was sending to the Outfit. That if they tried it again, he’d really talk.”

  Drury nodded. “That’s about how I see it. He gave the statement to State’s Attorney Crowley, after all.”

  “Ha. Was he ever sending ’em a message. Jesus.”

  Crowley was a close personal pal of George Brieber, Guzik’s attorney.

  “He warned ’em not to try it again,” Drury said, matter of factly, “but they tried it again, anyway, didn’t they? And failed.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Jim was shot up pretty bad.”

  “You said it was his arm, mostly.”

  “His chest was bleeding, too. Don’t forget, he’s not a kid, either.”

  The surgery’s double doors swung open and a doctor in a blood-spotted smock appeared; he lowered his mask like a bandit surrendering and said, “Which of you gentlemen represents Mr. Ragen’s family?”

  “I guess I do,” I said. “I’m in his employ. I called his wife— she’ll be here soon, if she’s not downstairs already.”

  The doctor sighed. He was obviously tired. He said, “We haven’t done much yet, except stop the bleeding. He’s had several transfusions already, and we’re just getting started. He may lose that arm. And his collarbone is shattered. He’ll be crippled for life. No doubt of that.”

  “But he will live, doctor?” Drury asked.

  “These are nasty wounds, gentlemen,” the doctor said.

  “But there’s no foreseeable reason why they should prove fatal.”

  The doctor excused himself and moved down the corridor, disappearing around a corner.

  Drury looked at me, grinning.

  “Your concern for Ragen’s health has me all choked up,” I said.

  Drury was laughing softly.

  “Now the fun begins,” he said.

  Ragen was in surgery for over two hours. Drury left early on, but said he’d be sending up several more boys in blue to help stand guard—and he’d do his best to hand pick ’em. I sent Walt home and kept watch myself. A little after eight-thirty, Drury’s extra cops showed up; he’d actually told the trio to check in with me for deployment. That meant finding places for them to stand. I kept two of them with me at the double doors, and sent the other one outside, to maintain a patrol, particularly the side alleys.