The Million-Dollar Wound (Nathan Heller) Page 16

  “Billy Wilkerson,” Dean said. “He owns the joint.”

  And the Hollywood Reporter. That had been about the negative piece on the IA that Montgomery mentioned had run in the Reporter yesterday. These boys did have clout.

  Half an hour on the second and Browne was getting out of the booth again, saying, “Excuse.”

  “Anyway, Heller,” Dean said. “You must not have a car out here. Maybe we can drop you off at your hotel?”

  I didn’t think there was anything sinister in that; and, if there was, I couldn’t think of a graceful way out, so I said, “That’d be swell.”

  “Maybe you’d like to show Dixie your etchings.”

  Dixie, whose fingers were working in Dean’s hair, smiled at me shyly. Maybe she did have a future as an actress. As for whether or not I took Dean and Dixie up on this, I’m not going to say. You might be disappointed in me, either way.

  Browne came back and settled his fat ass in the booth and said, “Willie wants to see you while you’re out here.”

  I didn’t know that was directed toward me, at first; then Browne repeated it, saying he’d phoned Willie at home to say Wilkerson had eaten crow, and I said, “Bioff’s out here, too?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Kind of unofficially these days, but he’s out here.”

  “Willie and I go way back.”

  “Yeah,” Dean said. “You hate each other’s goddamn guts.”

  “I don’t hate anybody,” I said, smiling, sipping some rum. “I haven’t seen Willie in years. If he’s making good, more power to him.”

  “He’s making good,” Dean said.

  “Anyway,” Browne said, wiping some foam off his face, “he wants to see you.”

  “Why would he want to see me?”

  “I don’t know. When I called him, I mentioned we run into you. He wants you to come out to his place.”

  “I’m leaving tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Go out to his place at Bel Air tomorrow morning. Hell, I’ll drive you out there myself. He says to tell you it’s worth a C-note minimum.”

  The thought of George Browne driving a car was a sobering thought.

  But I said, “Call him back and tell him sure,” anyway.

  “In half an hour I will,” Browne said, and lifted another bottle.

  WILLIE BIOFF

  Browne driving was no problem: he picked me up in a chauffeured limo, a big shiny black Caddy. I tried not to make anything out of the fact that the last big shiny black car I went riding in was E. J. O’Hare’s. Besides, that was overcast, chilly Chicago and this was warm, sunny Hollywood.

  There was plenty of legroom, despite the extra passenger that sat between us on the floor: a tub of ice and beer. It was ten o’clock in the morning and Browne was already at it. Maybe the tale about him putting away one hundred bottles of imported beer a day wasn’t an exaggeration; maybe it was an understatement.

  Probably it was the constant drinking that did it, but he showed no signs of the night before having taken any effect; he was wearing a baggy brown suit and had a glow in his cheeks, not to mention his nose. We were on our way to Westwood, on the other side of Beverly Hills, and we had plenty of time to talk.

  “You have any idea why Willie wants to see me, George?”

  “Not a clue,” he said, cheerfully, bottle in hand. “But Willie always has his reasons.”

  “You guys been partners a long time.”

  Swigging, nodding, he said, “Long time.”

  “Even before the soup kitchen?”

  In 1932 the Stagehands Union, which is to say Browne and Bioff, had opened up a soup kitchen in the Loop, at Randolph and Franklin Streets to be exact, two blocks west of City Hall. The 150 working members of the local would pay 35 cents a meal, which—along with the donations of food from merchants and money from theater owners—helped ensure that the 250 unemployed members could eat free.

  “Oh yeah, sure,” Browne said, “before that. Willie was running a kosher butchers union, similar to what I was doing with the gentile poultry dealers.”

  “You were already head of the Stagehands local, though.”

  “Yeah, sure. My ‘Poultry Board of Trade’ was just a sideline. No, the soup kitchen was what taught me to listen to Willie, what taught me Willie had brains. That was a sweetheart idea, that soup kitchen.”

  “Made you a lot of friends,” I said agreeably. “Nice publicity.”

  Browne’s smile was a proud fold in his flabby face. “We served thirty-seven hundred meals a week, most of ’em free. The biggest actors in the land passed through our portals—Harry Richman, Helen Morgan, Texas Guinan, Jolson, Cantor, Olson and Johnson, everybody.”

  “So did a lot of politicians and reporters.”

  Browne swigged and swallowed and grinned. “Being close to City Hall didn’t hurt. It’s like Willie always says: never seen a whore who wasn’t hungry or a politician who wasn’t a whore. So we let the politicians eat for nix. And the reporters.”

  That bought the boys a lot of good will—particularly considering the Bioff-Browne chefs maintained a deluxe menu for celebrities and politicos and press, including such first-rate fare as orange-glazed roast duck, prime rib and porterhouse steaks. What the hell—even a cynical soul like me had to hand it to ’em: the out-of-work stagehands ate the majority of the meals, in a time when otherwise God knows where or how they’d have eaten at all. Still, I always suspected Bioff and Browne were squeezing more out of the deal than just the means to keep the newspapers and politicians friendly.

  Three beers later we were in Westwood, which was just more of the Beverly Hills same except less rolling, and Bioff’s estate, which we pulled into the driveway of, was an impressive sprawling double-story wood-and-stone ranch-style which (Browne informed me) Bioff had dubbed “Rancho Laurie,” after his wife. Compared to Montgomery’s mansion, it came in a fairly distant second; next to a room at the Morrison Hotel, it was paradise. The little pimp from South Halsted Street had gone Hollywood, all right.

  I followed Browne around the side of the perfectly tended, gently sloping grounds, an occasional tree throwing some shade on us, and there, reclining on a lounge chair, next to a kidney-shaped pool somewhat smaller than Lake Michigan, was Willie Bioff.

  I’d always thought of him as fat, and I guess he was fat, but not in the dissipated George Browne way. His barrel chest was covered with tight curls of black hair as were his muscular arms and legs; he was neckless, stocky but hard, like a wrestler—he had once been a union slugger, after all. Under the black body hair, the flesh I remembered as Illinois pasty was California tan. He wore money-green bathing trunks and blood-red house slippers—not a bead of water on him; my guess was he didn’t swim much—and sunglasses and had a cigarette in one hand and a glass of ice water in the other.

  He rose quickly as we approached and smiled broadly and extended a hand to me. “Thanks for coming out here, Heller.”

  We shook hands. His was a strong grip. Stronger than mine.

  “I was surprised to be invited, Willie. We aren’t exactly pals.”

  He waved that off, taking a lime monogrammed crushed velvet robe off a nearby lounge chair and belting it around him. He exchanged his sunglasses for clear rimless octagonal ones from a pocket of the robe. “I told you once, we should let bygones be bygones. I meant it then, I mean it now.”

  “Okay.”

  He turned a hard, hooded gaze on Browne and said, “I want to talk to Heller alone.”

  “Sure thing, Willie. I’ll just sit here by the pool.”

  “Why don’t you go down to the office?”

  “Friday’s a slow day. You know that.”

  “You should be there.”

  “Look, Willie, I’ll just sit by the pool. Could you send your house-boy out with some beer?”

  “Why don’t you sit in your car and drink your own?”

  Browne seemed more sad than embarrassed by this exchange, wandering off without another word, as Willie showed me inside,
through glass doors into a big white modern kitchen.

  “You’ll have to pardon my lush of a partner,” Bioff said. “He can be a real cluck. You care for anything to drink?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I gave the help the morning off,” Bioff said, as if needing to explain the emptiness of the kitchen, and the house beyond. “My wife and kids are at our place in Canoga Park—I’ll be joining them this afternoon for the weekend. But I wanted to see you first.”

  “Why, Willie?”

  “I’ll get to that. Come with me.”

  For a place called Rancho Laurie, where you’d expect rustic to be the word, it was pretty posh. We padded across a plush carpet, past a formal dining room, and various antique furniture, none of it early American, and paintings in the manner of old masters, and Chinese vases seemed to be set on anything that wasn’t moving.

  I never imagined I’d find myself in Willie Bioff’s bedroom, but neither did I imagine it would be an elegant Louis XV affair. He led me into a walk-in closet where dozens upon dozens of tailored suits hung; the back of the door was heavy with racks of ties, dozens of ties, every color, every pattern in creation; snappy snap-brim hats sat on a long shelf in a row, as if supervising. Shoes polished like black mirrors lined the floor. I thought he was going to change clothes, but that wasn’t the point of this.

  “What do you think of my ties?” he said, running a caressing hand over some of them.

  “They’re real nice, Willie.”

  He sucked on the cigarette, smiling with immense satisfaction. Then he said, “How about those suits?”

  “They’re swell. Hats, too. Like your shoes.”

  He looked at me and smiled, just a little. “I’m not showing off. I just wanted to share this with you. You were a poor Chicago street kid yourself. You can appreciate how sweet my life is, compared to what shit it was once.”

  “Sure.”

  He led me out of the closet and I sat down while he changed into slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt in the adjacent bathroom, losing the cigarette. Then he led me back down the stairs and we were soon in a knotty-pine library that was uncomfortably similar to Montgomery’s study. About the only difference was the lack of hunting prints—Willie had instead some handsome tinted photos of outdoor landscapes (“I took those,” he said proudly, as I looked at them)—and the leather furniture here wasn’t oversize, and was black not tan. On the couch, spread open face down, as if to save a place, was a book: Das Kapital by Karl Marx. I didn’t think I’d have found that at Montgomery’s; of course I didn’t expect to find it here, either.

  I sat down next to the book. “Are you reading this, Willie?”

  “A great man wrote that book,” he said defensively. “We’ll be living that way sometime in the future.”

  And then we’ll all have closets full of suits and ties and hats and shoes. “Why am I here, Willie? Besides to look at your suits and ties and hats and shoes.”

  He sat beside me. “You still think I’m a low uncouth man, don’t you?”

  “The question isn’t whether you own Chinese vases, Willie. The question is how you paid for ’em.”

  He sneered, and looked more like I remembered him. “Are you sure you’re from Chicago? Jesus, Heller, I come up the hard way, you know that. I slept in my share of doorways, stomach growling like a stray dog; like the man said, bread is expensive when your pockets are empty. I learned to earn a buck any way I could. But I’m legit now. I’m doing good work for the unions out here, lookin’ after my members.”

  “Why do you feel you have to justify yourself to me, of all people? I’m just an ex-cop who busted you once.”

  “That’s why. I want you to understand I don’t hold any grudge against you. You were doing your job. I was doing mine. Hell, they were the same job, really.”

  “How do you figure?”

  He shrugged. “We were both maintaining law and order. I just happened to be maintaining it in a whorehouse.”

  “Slapping women around.”

  “I never slapped a woman in my life. I got great respect for women. I have slapped some whores in my time. Of various sex. Like the man said, most businessmen are nothing but two-bit whores with a clean shirt and a shine.” The moon face beamed. “Only now I know more subtle ways of slapping them around than just plain slapping.”

  “I guess greedy people just rub you the wrong way.”

  “Be sarcastic if you want, but I’m a union man. I look out for the little guy!” Unconsciously or not, he was pointing a thumb at his own barrel chest as he said that.

  “Why am I here, Willie?”

  “To maybe do a job for me.”

  “Aren’t there any detectives in California?”

  “Sure. But not the Chicago variety. When Georgie called me from the Troc last night, I thought, this is perfect. Just the ticket.”

  “What is?”

  “You being here. You know what irony is?”

  “We’ve met.”

  “Well, then you can appreciate this. You know who Westbrook Pegler is?”

  My mouth went dry.

  “Irony’s sister?” I said.

  “You know who he is. He’s in Chicago right now. He’s looking for dirt on me. To spread in his column.”

  “I know,” I admitted.

  It was the only way to play it.

  The hard dark pig eyes behind the rimless glass squinted. “You know?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah. He stopped by my office the other day. He wanted to know if I was the arresting officer on your pandering charge, years ago.”

  He went a little pale, sat up. “What did you say to him?”

  I shrugged again. “I said yes.”

  “Shit. Did you give him any details?”

  “No. It was a long time ago, Willie. He just asked if the rumor that I arrested you for pimping, once, was true, and I said it was. He asked if you were convicted, and I said you were.”

  He didn’t like that. He stood, paced; wandered over to a writing desk decorated with framed pictures of his brood of lads and lit up a cigarette and began smoking nervously. But soon he said: “I can’t expect you to have said otherwise. Thanks for telling me straight out.”

  “No thanks needed.”

  He sat next to me again, cigarette in hand, his expression painfully earnest. “You got to understand, Heller—the feds have been breathing down my neck for months. I had to step down as the IA’s representative, not long ago, ’cause of this federal heat. Oh, I’m still running things. But from the sidelines; I can’t even go in my own goddamn office, can you picture it?”

  So that was why he bitterly bit off Browne’s head for not being at the office: he was jealous he couldn’t be there himself.

  “Now, this Pegler shit. Comes at a bad time. I know who put him up to it, too.”

  “Who?”

  “That bastard Montgomery. The smart-ass actor.”

  This irony guy got around.

  “Robert Montgomery, you mean?”

  “Yeah, him. That smart-ass, no-good, double-crossing bastard…after all I did for him.”

  Here was a new wrinkle.

  “Why?” I asked. “What did you do for Montgomery?”

  He scowled, not looking at me, but at an image of Montgomery fixed in his mind, I’d guess. He said, “Couple years ago SAG—Screen Actors Guild—serves notice on the studios that they now consider themselves a legitimate labor union, and want to be so recognized. You know—they wanted to enter into collective bargaining, like the big kids. So we, the IATSE, me, went to bat for ’em.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah, I told that prick L. B. Mayer if he didn’t recognize SAG, he’d have an IA strike to play with. My movie projectionists can shut this industry down overnight, you know.”

  “So I hear.”

  The round face was reddening. “Thanks to me, Mayer recognized their lousy little Guild, and Montgomery thanked us publicly, but now, fuck him! We’re not good enough for him and
the fags and dykes and Reds in his club.”

  So much for Karl Marx; Willie seemed more interested in the brothers Marx, or anyway their union dues.

  “I’ll tell you whose fault it really is. Frank. Frank’s getting too greedy.”

  He meant Nitti. It was Bioff’s first admission that he was working for the Outfit. He let it escape casually and I didn’t react to it as any big deal. All I said was: “How so, Willie?”

  “He wants to expand, and it just ain’t the right time. There’s this rival group, a CIO bunch called the United Studio Technicians, and they’re spreading dissent among the IA rank and file. We got them to deal with, we got plenty to do, rather than try and kidnap a union that don’t want anything to do with us, anyway.”

  “Why such a fuss, over show business? Aren’t there bigger fish to fry, better unions to go after?”

  As if speaking to a slow child, he said, “Heller, no matter what anybody tells you, people do not have to eat. Like the man said, there’s only two things they really got to do—get laid, and see a show, when they can dig up the scratch.”

  The philosophy of a pimp turned Hollywood power broker.

  “Listen,” he said. “You’ve got a reputation of being a straight shooter. Frank speaks highly of you.”

  Nitti again.

  “That’s nice to hear,” I said.

  “You’re known as a boy who can keep his mouth shut.”

  Actually, I was known in at least one instance for singing on the witness stand—when I helped bring the world crashing down on Mayor Cermak’s favorite corrupt cops, Lang and Miller; but I had indeed kept some secrets for Frank Nitti. That was more important, where somebody like Bioff was concerned.

  “I appreciate the vote of confidence,” I said.

  “How would you like to earn a couple of grand?”

  The money was sure flying this week; I wondered if I’d live to spend any of it.

  “Sure,” I said. “What’s your poison?”

  “Pegler,” he said.

  It would be.

  He was asking, “When are you heading back?”

  “This afternoon,” I said, somehow. “I’ll be in Chicago tomorrow morning.”

  “Good. There are some people I want you to see.”