The bartender was a big lanky bald man in a black shirt; no apron. Behind the bar, beer cartons lined the wall, with the stack toward the middle only going half way up the wall, so some bottles of whiskey and such would have a place to sit. But the patrons standing at the bar weren’t drinking anything but cold sweaty bottles of beer.
In the back of the room, near the bandstand, sitting at a table by himself, was Sylvester Jefferson, the colored cop known variously as “the Terror of the South Side” and “Two-Gun Pete.” He was respected and feared in Bronzeville—which in Bronzeville terms was the same thing—and I knew him, a little. He’d been on the job since the mid-’30s and we’d had some friendly run-ins over the years—he’d helped me out, I’d helped him out.
Pete was a handsome, light-complected Negro who had a somber, almost sad expression on his slightly puffy face; he looked a little like Joe Louis, though with an alertness in the eyes that no boxer has. He was damn near dapper, with a mustache about as wide as Hitler’s but a third as tall, and his just slightly overweight, five-ten frame was bedecked in a tan suit and white shirt with a wide tie with a tiger-skin pattern. His hat, which had a three-inch brim, was on the table next to a bottle of Schlitz and a poured glass.
He smiled tightly, showing no teeth as we approached, standing, gesturing for us to sit down. Drury said hello, but immediately excused himself to go to the bar and get us some beers. That left me to shake hands with Pete, whose suit coat was open and you could see the two guns on the front of two overlapping belts, framing his police star, clipped to the middle of the lower slung of the belts.
“Those are the biggest revolvers I ever saw, Pete,” I said, sitting down.
He grinned and withdrew the guns and set them on the table, like a gunfighter on a riverboat sitting down to play poker at a possibly crooked table. Both guns were nickel-plated and shiny and although light was at a premium in this place, they found some to reflect. One of the guns had a pearl handle and a six-inch barrel, the other a brown handle and a three-inch barrel.
“You’re not still packin’ that candy-ass nine millimeter?” Pete said to me, huskily, sitting back down.
“Fraid I am,” I said. “Sentimental attachment.”
He waggled a thick black finger at me, narrowed the sad eyes. “That’s a bad idea. That’s the gun your daddy killed hisself with, ain’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“Carrying it, that’s your idea of makin’ sure you don’t use your piece too easy, right?”
“That’s it, I guess. I never want to take death too lightly.”
“I’ll tell you what you don’t want to do,” he said, patting the pearl handle of the revolver like a baby’s butt, “you don’t want to have nothing in between you and a shooting situation. You don’t want to be thinking about whether or not you should shoot, or this is the gun my daddy killed hisself with. That’s bullshit, Heller.”
“Well, you may have a point, Pete. But I’ve been under fire a few times in my time, and I seem to be alive.”
He ignored that, saying, “It’s like the night I was out driving along 35th—I was off-duty. Just me and my pal Bob Miller, the undertaker. I hear this woman scream and see a kid, maybe nineteen, run out of a store, with a gun in his mitt. I yell for him to halt, but he ducks in the alley and I follow and he starts to shoot back at me. I think, well, hell, least I got an undertaker along—’cause one of us is sure as shit gonna need him. So the kid ducks in back of this laundry, and when I find him, he’s locked hisself in the shitter. I yell at him to come out, give hisself up—he says, ‘Fuck you, nigger! You want me, you’re gonna have to come in and get me.’ So I empty this baby into the fuckin’ door.” He patted the brown-handled gun. “I didn’t hear nothing for a while, so I went on in. I got him, all right—more than once. He didn’t even make it to Michael Reese. Funny thing, though—when I pulled that poor bastard out of there, dying, holes in his chest, he was puffing on a reefer like a crazy man.” He shook his head. “People is strange.”
Drury arrived with the beers.
“How’s it going, Pete?”
Jefferson stood up, and shook Drury’s hand and put the guns back in their holsters. “I was just telling Heller he should toss that old automatic of his in a dumpster. He oughta get one of these .357s like I got.”
“I thought those were .38s,” Drury said, sitting, pouring some Schlitz in a glass. I was doing the same.
“You can load ’em up with .38s,” he said, matter of factly, “but what I use can shoot clean through a automobile engine block.”
“Lot of call for that, is there, Pete?” I asked, beginning to munch my peanuts. They were pretty good.
He didn’t answer me, not directly. He just said, “A .357 Magnum is the world’s most powerful revolver. These is the finest guns that money can buy.”
“I suppose that’s important down here,” I said.
“The only way to keep law and order and get respect is to earn a reputation for yourself as bein’ as tough or tougher than the roughest s.o.b. on the street.” He patted his guns. “People around here know: they don’t fuck with Mr. Jefferson.”
Like Greasy Thumb and Bugsy and everybody in the world of crime who didn’t like his nickname, Two-Gun Pete was the same. He expected to be called Mr. Jefferson and accepted “Pete” only from friends and fellow cops.
He was a good cop, easily the best in his world, and like most Chicago cops took his share of graft—he wasn’t interested in hassling the bookies or the numbers runners or numbers bankers or the streetwalkers or their madams; but he was hell on muggers and purse-snatchers and con men and heisters and dope pushers. A bachelor, a ladies’ man with a part-time valet and an apartment behind steel bars, Pete Jefferson liked his work.
“So,” Drury said, satisfied that Pete had been allowed to flex his muscles and impress his worth upon the two white cops (who already knew damn well what his worth was), “have you found anything out?”
He glanced at his watch. “In a few minutes you’ll meet the first of my witnesses.”
“How many did you round up?” Drury asked.
“Three so far. Got a line on a fourth.”
“These are witnesses who clearly saw the faces of the two men with shotguns?”
“That’s a fact,” Pete said.
“Did you rough these guys up any?”
“I hardly ever have to rough anybody up no more,” Pete said, almost regretfully. “I just come around and they spill their guts.”
Better than having a .357 Magnum do it for you.
“Pete,” I said, “I have to level with you—I got my doubts. I was there—I was right there in the street shooting it out with those guys, and I didn’t begin to get a look at either of them.”
Pete sipped his beer, licked a foamy mustache off his lip; his real mustache remained. “These boys got a better look than you did. They was on the street. They was not occupied with shooting back.”
“I don’t mean any disrespect,” I said, “but colored witnesses, testifying against white people, in front of a probably mostly white jury and a very white judge, have got to be unimpeachable.”
“I know that,” Pete said, irritably. “I didn’t just fall off a hay wagon, Heller. That’s one reason why I’m rounding up four. Taken together, they’ll be goddamn hard to impeach.”
A few minutes later the first of Pete’s witnesses wandered in; he was a thick-set man of about forty, wearing a frayed white shirt and rumpled brown slacks, with gray in his hair and mustache and bloodshot eyes and hands that were shaky, until Pete put the rest of his own beer in them.
“Okay, Tad,” he said. “Take it easy.”
“Tore one on last night,” Tad said. “Tore one on.”
“This is Theodosius Jones,” Pete said to us. “He used to be a bedbug.”
That meant he’d been a Pullman porter.
“Till last year,” Tad said.
“Drinking on the job?” I asked, tearing the shell
off a peanut.
Pete frowned at me; it wasn’t pleasant being frowned at by Pete. I had the feeling he could, if he so chose, tear the shell off me.
But the former bedbug only nodded and gulped at the glass of beer, till it was drained.
I looked at Drury and shook my head, popping the peanut in my mouth.
Drury didn’t give up easily, though; he went up and got a fresh beer for Tad and came back with it and said, “I want to hear your story.”
“Okay,” Tad said, and he reported what he’d seen, very accurately, and described the two white shooters in some detail.
“One was fatter than the other,” he said, “but they was both big men. One of ’em had hair that come to a point…” He gestured to his forehead.
“A widow’s peak?” Drury asked.
Tad nodded. “His hair was black and curly. The other’s hair was going. Not bald, but will be. He had spectacles on. I seen their faces plain as day. If you could show me pictures, I could pick ’em out, if they was in there.”
“I’ll bring you pictures, Tad,” Drury said, smiling.
“Tad,” I said, “are you up to a court appearance?”
“Pardon?”
“You’d need to be on the witness stand, and you’d need not to have been drinking.”
“Got to be sober as a judge,” he said, agreeing with me.
“The judge can get away with being drunk,” I said. “You can’t.”
Tad nodded. “Don’t matter, really. I been thinkin’ of headin’ out.”
“Heading out?” Drury said, sitting up.
“Detroit. I hear they’s jobs up there.”
Drury reached in his pocket and peeled a ten off a small money-clipped roll. “Take it, Tad. More to come.”
“Thank you kindly,” Tad said, smiling.
Pete was looking at me hard. The sullen brown face above the tiger-striped tie seemed to give off heat. He said, “You don’t think my witness here has what it takes, do you, Heller?”
“No offense to Mr. Jones, but I wouldn’t want to build a case on him.”
“No offense taken,” Tad said, toasting me with his beer.
Pete nodded toward me and said, “Tad, do you know who this fella is?”
“Sure. He’s the guy who was shootin’ back at ’em.”
Pete smiled and patted Tad’s shoulder. “I think you’re a damn wonder as a witness, Tad. Why don’t you take your beer on up to the bar, and tell the man behind the log to charge your next one to Mr. Jefferson.”
Tad nodded, took his ten-spot and beer and went and stood at the bar.
“You’re buying witnesses, now?” I said to Drury.
“Every cop pays his snitches,” Drury said.
“You must want Guzik bad.”
“I want him any way I can get him.”
“What if it isn’t Guzik who bought the hit? What if it’s Siegel’s contract?”
“Who told you that fairy tale?” Drury snorted, smirking cynically. “Guzik?”
“Whoever it was,” I said, “I didn’t pay for the information.”
The next two witnesses, who came along at roughly fifteen-minute intervals, were admittedly stronger. One of them was a steel worker, a big guy named James Martin who’d gotten his hair cut at the corner barber shop before he wandered over to pick up some cigarettes at the drugstore, just before the shootout. Martin was a crane operator at Carnegie-Illinois Steel’s South Works, a union man, a family man, and a church deacon; even colored, this was some witness. Like Tad, he recognized me, immediately. All white people did not look alike to these folks. The other witness was Leroy Smith, a nineteen-year-old clerk from the drug store; he was skinny and a little scared but his description of the two shotgunners matched the others’: black curly hair with a widow’s peak, balding with glasses; he too recognized me. These latter two witnesses each had a description of the driver of the truck, as well, which tallied.
When all three witnesses had gone, promising to meet with Drury and Pete again when the detectives had suspect pictures for them to sort through, I leaned back in the wooden chair and admitted to the two tough cops that these witnesses weren’t all that bad.
“I got one more to round up,” Pete said. “We gonna have some depth on our bench.”
Drury said, “Pete, I don’t know how to thank you. I’d have been lost, trying to work down here without your help.”
“My pleasure. I don’t like it when those Outfit bums come shooting up my beat. I don’t like those Outfit bums, period. Do you fellas have any idea how bad the dope problem is gettin’ down here? Not a week goes by we don’t haul in a dozen kids, eighteen years old, sixteen years old, some of ’em been on dope two or three years already. I know where the dope comes from. So do you, Lt. They’re preyin’ on us—ain’t it bad enough you got sixteen or twenty families living in a three-flat building, children sleeping four to a bed, in rat-crawlin’ firetraps? A man can’t find decent quarters for his family, can’t stretch a few dollars from his menial damn job to provide food for ’em. Kids playin’ in garbage-filled alleys, dirt and filth. And Jake Guzik sends his poison down here so these people can flee into some reefer dream, or stick a needle in themself and go hide in their minds, and pretty soon they’re pawning what little they own and after that they’re pulling stickups, whatever it takes to get the stuff. Bill, you want my help, going up against these Outfit bums, you got my help. Any time. Any day.”
Drury was smiling tightly, drinking that in. Me, I was drinking in the beer. That kind of idealistic talk was fine, in the bar room; in real life, it tended to get you killed.
Up toward the front, at the bar, two colored men were starting to push each other around. A couple of working stiffs in overalls, good size men, both a little drunk at this point.
It was starting to get loud, when Pete got up and said, “Pardon,” and took out his long-barreled, pearl-handled, nickel-plated .357 and strode up there.
“Who started this?” he demanded.
Behind the counter, the bartender was leaning against his boxes, smiling. He had a gold tooth.
The two men looked at Pete with wide eyes—they obviously recognized him, and just as obviously hadn’t realized he was in the place—and simultaneously pointed each to the other.
He swung the .357 sideways into the gut of the man at his right and with his left connected with the chin of the other. Both men were soon on the dirty wooden floor, one rubbing his chin, the other doubled over.
“No fighting,” Pete told them, and put his gun away and came back to us and said he had to be going.
What a coincidence.
So did we.
By the following Saturday a lot had happened and nothing had happened.
I did some time at Meyer House on Ragen’s door each day, but mostly turned it over to O’Toole and Pelitier, with Sapperstein doing a turn or two, as well. It was a round-the-clock vigil, so some of my boys put in long hours. The police kept three men on at all times, one outside patrolling Lake Park Avenue, another by the fire escape window, and one more sharing the corridor outside Ragen’s room with an A-1 man.
We got along with the cops just fine—we were all ex-Chicago P.D. ourselves—but of course didn’t trust them far as we could throw ’em. Like I said, we were all ex-Chicago P.D. ourselves.
The fire escape had a landing at each Meyer House floor, trimmed in flowers and plants, making for a regular balcony; Tuesday morning, I’d noticed men in pale green blousy shirts and pants, like pajamas, standing on every level.
“What the hell’s that about?” I asked the cop on guard there. “Can’t you keep that fire escape clear?”
“Aw, I kinda feel sorry for the poor bastards,” the cop said.
They were psyche ward patients, it turned out. The first floor of Michael Reese, where the lobby once was as lavish as that of the finest hotel, had been converted to a psychiatric unit in ’39. Some patients were allowed out in the enclosed yard of Meyer House, where they sat in c
hairs and/or wandered about the small area facing Lake Park Avenue. Hollow-eyed zombies, most of them.
I knew all about it. I’d done some time in a psyche hospital myself, during the war.
“Yeah, you’re right—let ’em enjoy themselves,” I said. “But if you see anybody on those landings who isn’t a psyche patient, clear ’em the hell off immediately. And nobody on this landing at all, or I’ll hand your ass to Drury. I don’t care if it’s Freud and his favorite patient.”
“Okay, Mr. Heller.”
I talked to Drury every day, to see how the investigation was going. The green truck, it turned out, had been stolen last March; the FBI had lent its fingerprint experts to help dust the vehicle, but nothing came of it. Nor did anything come of the gray sedan with Indiana plates, the license number of which no witness seemed to have gotten. Two-Gun Pete did manage to “round up” his fourth witness, a newsboy (possibly the one I bought those papers from, to soak up Ragen’s blood); and Drury had gone down to Bronzeville and questioned him, and was satisfied another good witness had been found. Early next week the four would be gathered at the Central Police Station to start going through pictures.
Drury had been less than successful with his frontal attack on the Outfit: Guzik, Serritella and the rest were all kicked loose after questioning. Serritella had been badly embarrassed, however, as Drury—around midnight, Monday night, fresh from his St. Hubert’s bust of Guzik—had taken several squads of coppers to surround the home of the First Ward Republican Committeeman (and former State Senator). It got a lot of play in the papers, making Serritella look like the front man for gangsters that he was. Unlike Guzik, though, Serritella submitted to a lie detector test, and passed with flying colors, where complicity in the Ragen shooting was concerned.
At the same time, Mayor Kelly ordered a crackdown on local gambling, handbooks especially; Police Commissioner Prendergast called it “the greatest gambling cleanup” in the city’s history. I figured it’d last maybe a week. Possibly even two.
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