Neon Mirage

by Max Allan Collins

  He smiled his thin smile. “Everything. I name all the names, lad. Every dirty deed I’ve been privy to, and I’ve been privy to more than a few. Those affidavits, they’re my insurance policy.”

  “From the looks of you, you missed a premium.”

  His eyes tightened. “That’s what I don’t understand…but I want the word put out: if I die, if they kill me in my hospital bed, those affidavits will go to the feds!”

  “Okay, Jim. Okay. But, look—don’t talk to anybody. Not the papers, and particularly not the cops.”

  “I said the feds, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, and I think, when the time comes, that’s the way to go. The cop who seems to be heading up this investigation happens to be an honest one—Bill Drury—and he hates Guzik maybe more than you do. He’s an ally. But he’s one fish surrounded by sharks. If you deal with him, remember what he’s up against, in his own organization.”

  “So I should duck Drury, too, you think.”

  “For right now. And when you feel up to talking, we’ll get you somebody federal.”

  “You know they won’t beat me, Nate. I will not give in.”

  “Take it easy, Jim—”

  “If they kill me, my associates, my family, will carry on. They may kill others—but somebody in my organization will always be left to fight. I have told my boys this over and over. If we stand together, they can’t take us.”

  “Okay, Jim. What do you say we talk about that later?”

  “You know what they say, Nate?”

  “No. What do they say?”

  “The first hundred years are the hardest.”

  And the sixty-five-year-old wounded son of a bitch winked at me.

  An op of mine named O’Toole showed up a bit after nine to spell me. O’Toole, tall, thin, bored, was a few years older than me and I’d worked with him on the pickpocket detail back in ’32. I trusted him.

  I left Peggy to comfort her aunt and found my way down to the main floor lobby and stepped out into an unusually cool evening for late June. I stretched; to my left was a statue of stocky, mustached Michael Reese himself, whoever the hell he was. Odors mingled in the breeze—from the nearby Keeley Brewery, and the stockyards, and the slum. Nasty odors, but I didn’t mind. I’d been on the South Side before.

  Visiting hours were getting over and cabbies were picking up their white fares; I considered grabbing a cab myself, though it’s generally against my religion—not giving cab drivers my money is about all the religion I have, actually—but I was in a hurry to get to Bill Tendlar’s flat on the Near Northwest Side, where Lou was probably getting tired of sitting on the guy. And I was on expense account, so what the hell.

  But the cabs were full up, and rather than wait and see if another would pull up, I wandered back over toward 29th, and the Mandel Clinic, where I noticed a jitney driver loading up colored passengers in his seven-passenger Chrysler. I walked up and asked the driver, a skinny Negro of maybe twenty-five wearing a brown army uniform stripped of all insignia, if he could take me to Cermak Road.

  “If ya got a deece, jack, you got a ride,” he said.

  That meant even if I was white, if I had a dime I was welcome aboard, so I flipped him one and his hand caught it like a frog would a fly and I climbed in back of the limo. A burly black guy who might’ve been a beef-lugger from the yards was in the seat next to me; in the seats facing us, a pretty colored gal sat next to a dark heavy-set woman who might have been her mother; the probable mother had a handbag you could hide a head in. The girl, whose hair had been chemically straightened, smiled at me nervously and the mother, whose hair was presumably under her yellow and blue floral scarf, gave me a dirty look that had no nerves in it at all. I stared between them at the back of a male passenger in the front seat.

  I didn’t work Bronzeville often, but when I did I used jitneys and instructed my ops to, as well. They drove a little fast, but it was safer than standing on the sidewalk. If you stayed on the line, which was whatever boulevard the jitney driver was working, you could travel four blocks or forty for a dime (side trips cost a little more). But you couldn’t ride past 22nd—graft only bought these illegal overloaded taxis rights to the South Side streets.

  As I got out at Cermak, I risked a wink at the pretty colored gal and she smiled at me, momentarily improving race relations; if the mother caught it, you wouldn’t be able to say the same for family relations.

  I took the El back to the Loop, adding another twelve cents to my transportation costs, and I got off at Van Buren and Plymouth, right at the doorstep of my office. I would rather have gone straight to the Morrison and my comfortable bed. I was tired. I’d been shot at and scolded; I’d driven a shot-up Lincoln and lugged its shot-up bloody owner into an emergency room; I’d had to teach the director of medicine at Michael Reese what security was about; I’d even taken a jitney ride. But this day, this night, was not yet over.

  For one thing, I needed to go up and reload my nine millimeter, and grab a rubber hose while I was at it. We had a little box of such things, saps and brass knucks and the like, on one of the closet floors. Every office has a “miscellaneous items” file, after all.

  I headed for the door nestled between the pawn shop and the men only hotel, opened it, relieved not to find a wino sleeping it off there, thinking for perhaps the thousandth time that moving to better digs was way overdue for the A-1 Detective Agency. True, we’d taken over the better part of the fourth floor; but it was becoming an embarrassment to have clients drop by. The block had never been classy—despite Binyon’s and the Standard Club being just around the corner—but my business had come up in the world.

  Still, certain things about my business never seemed to change.

  He was waiting for me at the top of the first flight of stairs; he was sitting on the floor, hook-nosed and pale, black greasy hair combed back, cigarette dangling from his lips, a pile of butts before him at the center of the V made by his long legs. He was tearing a matchbook with his hairy hands, making something out of it. He wore a green and white checked sportcoat and brown slacks and a pale green shirt and a green and yellow and orange tie that was an offense against nature. His socks were green argyles with some ungodly pattern and his shoes tan loafers. He looked like the golf pro at a country club for felons.

  I hadn’t seen the guy—who Guzik, on the phone, had once referred to as “the Greek”—since the night he approached Peggy and me on the street. His eyes flickered as he saw me, and he straightened his spine.

  “Don’t get up on my account,” I told him, thinking about the unloaded automatic under my arm.

  He got up slowly—like a building reassembling itself in a newsreel played slow-motion and backwards—and glowered at me.

  “Mr. Guzik wants to see you.”

  This wasn’t a point worth discussing.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Now,” he said, as if I’d refused.

  “Fine. Where?”

  “The restaurant.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

  We walked the few blocks silently. The lake was in the summer breeze. Nice night or not, he was unhappy; he had a constipated look. I figured Guzik had told him not to rough me up or anything, and that ruined the Greek’s evening. It wasn’t the first time I’d ruined his evening, after all.

  On narrow Federal Street, at the foot of the Union League Club, was St. Hubert’s English Grill, where I had once lunched with General Charles Gates Dawes himself, former vice-president of these United States, mover and shaker behind Chicago’s Century of Progress, one of the biggest bankers in the city. Dawes had been concerned about Chicago’s image—he was outraged by the Capone gang, this “colony of unnaturalized persons” who “had undertaken a reign of lawlessness and terror in open defiance of the law.” I wondered if Dawes, who undoubtedly still lunched here from time to time, was aware that another powerful figure in Chicago, one Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, sat nightly in this same Dickensian-style inn dispen
sing graft to district police captains (or the sergeants who collected the payoffs for them) and to the bagmen (often plain-clothes cops) of numerous Chicago politicians, including various Mayors over the years.

  Jake Guzik grew up in the rough Levee district on the near South Side, one of five brothers, and it was said he made his first nickel by running an errand for a prostitute. He was a pimp before he was a teenager and owned several whorehouses before he was twenty. His self-taught accounting skills attracted the attention of notorious Levee aldermen “Bath House” John Coughlin and “Hinky Dink” Kenna, who schooled Guzik in the art of the payoff, the place where politics and the underworld met.

  He’d moved up in the Outfit, it was said, by virtue of his accounting wizardry, and because he had once warned Al Capone—who he barely knew at the time—of an impending visit by a pair of hitmen. Later, when Jake was roughed up by a hardass thief named Joe Howard—who stuck around the bar where it happened bragging about “making the little Jew whine”—Capone repaid the debt, by confronting Howard at the bar, holding a gun to the man’s cheek, instructing him, “Whine, you fucking fink.” Howard begged a little and Capone shot him in the face. Six times.

  Now Capone was crazy as a bedbug, syphilis nibbling his brain while he fished in his swimming pool down in Florida, and Jake was still here. Here in St. Hubert’s; sitting alone at a table for four near an unlit fire place, cutting off his next bite of lamb chop. The low, open-beamed ceiling and prints of fox hunts and other sporting events made this a warmly masculine room. At tables nearby, coldly masculine bodyguards sat, lumpy-faced men in loose-fitting suits under which guns lurked, men with the blank expressions of somebody who could kill you in the morning and forget about it by noon.

  Guzik did not look like a killer; he looked like a prosperous, gone-to-seed accountant, which is what he was. He was chubby but small, flesh hanging loose on him everywhere like the underside of a fat lady’s arm. His pouchy eyes huddled behind dark gray tinted wire-rimmed glasses; his flesh was a lighter gray, mottled, aged beyond his perhaps sixty years. His suit was dark blue, nicely tailored but nothing fancy, his tie a solid color blue as well, a shade lighter. He was eating the lamb chop slowly but single-mindedly.

  They say the night that Capone threw the testimonial banquet for Scalise and Anselmi at Robinson’s Restaurant in Cicero, only to surprise the boys by pulling a baseball bat out from under the table and clubbing them to death, Guzik just kept calmly eating his dessert while the fatal beating went on. And when Capone, bloody bat in hand, began giving a speech to the stunned assemblage, pointing to the fresh corpses, saying, among other things, “This should teach you to keep your traps shut—and to be loyal,” Guzik tugged Capone’s sleeve and paused between bites to say, “Okay, Al—that’s enough. You made your point.”

  “Heller,” Guzik said, glancing up from his plate, his mouth tightening between the jowls into what passed for a smile on that ravaged face.

  “Hello, Mr. Guzik.”

  A pink-coated waiter, whose English accent struck me as about as real as Mayor Kelly’s campaign promises, had ushered me here, to this side room which Guzik and his retinue had to themselves.

  “Sit.” The fat little man gestured. On his pudgy fingers there were no fancy rings—just his wedding band.

  “Thanks,” I said, and pulled up a chair across from him.

  He nodded to the Greek who’d accompanied me here and the man took a seat at one of the nearby tables with his fellow (if less spectacularly attired) bodyguards.

  “How did you and the Greek get along tonight?”

  “I didn’t slap him around, and he didn’t kill me. I consider that a fair exchange.”

  Guzik grunted his laugh. “Frank got a charge out of you. I can see why.”

  He meant Nitti.

  “How did you know I’d be going to my office?” I asked.

  “I didn’t. I posted a man there and another at the Morrison.”

  Fat little bastard thought of everything.

  “Mr. Guzik, before we get into anything, there’s something you ought to know: Lt. Drury has a warrant out for your arrest right now.”

  Guzik shrugged gently. “I’ll talk to my lawyer. Go in to the station, tomorrow or the next day.”

  “But you’re in a public place…”

  “Don’t be silly, Heller. Are the police going to bother me here? Who is Drury going to get to make the collar?”

  He was referring to the fact that St. Hubert’s was where Guzik acted as paymaster for the police, prosecutors and political bosses of the eight-county metropolitan area. So that pretty much made it hands off. He felt safe here. That was more than I could say.

  “I have a job for you,” he said, cutting the lamb.

  “I guess you know I’m working for Jim Ragen,” I said, carefully. “I don’t mean to insult you, Mr. Guzik, but there’s such a thing as a conflict of interests.”

  “I like you, Heller,” he said, but I didn’t figure he liked me. I didn’t figure he liked anything or anybody, except maybe his family, money and food. Of course that’s true of a lot of people.

  He went on: “Loyalty is important. Al was loyal to me, and now I’m loyal to Al. He’s down there in Miami nutty as a squirrel, and a lot of the boys think there’s no need to keep him on the payroll. There’s not a lot of call for brain-damaged people in our business. But I keep him on the payroll. That’s loyalty.”

  He ate a bite of lamb, leaving a place for me to say something, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I could feel the eyes of the bodyguards on me.

  “We aren’t friends,” he said. “I don’t expect loyalty from you. If you do a job for me, I expect it. But you and me—well, I think you and Frank had an understanding. But to be truthful, to me you’re just a guy who did me a favor once. A guy who can be trusted. That’s a lot. I don’t mean to play that down.”

  “I already asked you for a favor, Mr. Guzik,” I said, meaning when I asked him to lay off Ragen’s niece because she was my girl. “I don’t figure you owe me anything.”

  “I don’t know about that. When those bookies snatched me, we needed somebody both sides trusted to deliver the dough. And when things got ugly, during the exchange, you came through for me. You did right by me. I don’t forget things like that.”

  He was finished with his lamb chop. Since it was after ten o’clock, I wondered if this had been a late supper for him or just a snack.

  He poured himself some Mosel wine; then he poured me some.

  “Jim Ragen is a friend of mine,” he said. “This has all been a misunderstanding.”

  “Mr. Guzik, I was there. I had shots fired on me. I took Ragen’s body to the hospital—he’s been crippled for life from this. Excuse me, but that’s not a misunderstanding.”

  Guzik’s eyes went hard behind the gray glass. He pointed a stubby finger at me; it was as steady a finger as has ever been pointed my way.

  He said, “That wasn’t my hit. It was that crazy bastard Siegel.”

  I felt my face tighten. “Siegel? Bugsy Siegel?”

  “Don’t ever call him that or he’ll have you killed.”

  Yeah, and you don’t like being called “Greasy Thumb,” either, do you, Jake? But you can’t peel off all those bills without getting some ink on your thumb…

  “Why Siegel?” I asked.

  “Siegel wants Ragen gone. He figures when Ragen goes, Continental Press will close up shop. The survivors will be too afraid to compete with him and his Trans-American.”

  “I thought that was your operation. I thought Siegel was your boy.”

  Guzik’s mouth twitched. “He’s supposed to be working for us, and for his Eastern friends.” He shook his head, frustrated. “He was their idea.”

  Meyer Lansky’s idea, probably; but I thought it best to leave that unsaid. I was already hearing more from Guzik than I cared to, my curiosity aside.

  “I like Jim,” he said. “We’ve had our disagreements. But I think we can come to te
rms.”

  “You’d still like to buy him out.”

  “Or go partners. Heller, you got to understand our point of view. Back in 1940, after Jim was convicted on that tax rap, he was on probation—he was ordered by the court to stay out of the racing information business. We ran Continental for him, while he was on probation—we sank money in that we lost. Large sums of money, getting this new business off the ground, after Annenberg had to fold up. Of course Continental went on to be a big success, but without our backing, it couldn’t have gotten started. We feel we already own a part of Continental, based on this indebtedness.”

  “None of this is on the books, though. You couldn’t go to court over it.”

  “No.” Guzik’s thin smile connected his jowls again. “I get a charge out of Jim, taking us to court, on this, on that. He’s just taking a page out of my book—he knows I sue at the drop of a hat.” He grunted. “I’m paying those judges—why shouldn’t I put ’em to use?”

  I sipped my wine.

  Guzik sipped his, got reflective, said: “You know how you buy a judge, Heller? By weight—like iron in a junkyard. A justice of the peace or magistrate can be had for a five spot. Municipal court judge’ll cost you ten. Circuit or superior courts, he wants fifteen. And you can’t buy a federal judge for less than a twenty-dollar bill.”

  “Ragen got a court order against you, though. And he’s got you tied up in litigation right now.”

  Guzik shrugged. “I’m not the only guy in town with money. Jim’s got money, too. Judges don’t care who’s paying.”

  “I’ve already advised him to retire. To sell to you.”

  “That’s wise. I think Jim will come to his senses, too. He needs to understand that we—I—did not do this thing. He needs to understand that he’s up against a man who is sick in the head.”

  “Siegel, you mean.”

  “They don’t call him Bugs because he has fleas. You know me, Heller. You’ve known me a while, and you knew of me before you knew me. Am I lying when I say that it’s well-known I stand for a sound business approach? That I always say, don’t kill a guy when you can pay him off?”