Chicago Lightning Page 3

  “I’d say that’s a good guess, Nate.”

  I thanked Lou and went back to the booth where Barney was brooding about what a louse his friend Heller was.

  “I got something to do,” I told him.

  “What?”

  “My kind of kaddish.”

  Less than two miles from the prominent department stores of the Loop they’d been fleecing, the Circular Distributors Union had their headquarters on the doorstep of Skid Row and various Hoovervilles. This Madison Street area, just north of Greek Town, was a seedy mix of flophouses, marginal apartment buildings and storefront businesses, mostly bars. Union HQ was on the second floor of a two-story brick building whose bottom floor was a plumbing supply outlet.

  I went up the squeaking stairs and into the union hall, a big high-ceilinged open room with a few glassed-in offices toward the front, to the left and right. Ceiling fans whirred lazily, stirring stale smoky air; folding chairs and cardtables were scattered everywhere on the scuffed wooden floor, and seated at some were unshaven, tattered “members” of the union. Across the far end stretched a bar, behind which a burly blond guy in rolled-up white-shirt sleeves was polishing a glass. More hobos leaned against the bar, having beers.

  I ordered a mug from the bartender, who had a massive skull and tiny dark eyes and a sullen kiss of a mouth.

  I salted the brew as I tossed him a nickel. “Hear you had a raid here this morning.”

  He ignored the question. “This hall’s for union members only.”

  “Jeez, it looks like a saloon.”

  “Well, it’s a union hall. Drink up and move along.”

  “There’s a fin in it for you, if you answer a few questions.”

  He thought that over; leaned in. “Are you a cop#8221;

  “No. Private.”

  “Who hired you?”

  “Goldblatt’s.”

  He thought some more. The tiny eyes narrowed. “Let’s hear the questions.”

  “What do you know about the Gross kid’s murder?”

  “Not a damn thing.”

  “Was Rooney here last night?”

  “Far as I know, he was home in bed asleep.”

  “Know where he lives?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know where your boss lives.”

  “No. All I know is he’s a swell guy. He don’t have nothin’ to do with these department store shakedowns the cops are tryin’ to pin on him. It’s union-busting, is what it is.”

  “Union busting.” I had a look around at the bleary-eyed clientele in their patched clothes. “You have to be a union, first, ‘fore you can get busted up.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means this is a scam. Rooney pulls in winos, gets ’em day-labor jobs for $3.25 a day, then they come up here to pay their daily dues of a quarter, and blow the rest on beer or booze. In other words, first the bums pass out ad fliers, then they come here and just plain pass out.”

  “I think you better scram. Otherwise I’m gonna have to throw you down the stairs.”

  I finished the beer. “I’m leaving. But you know what? I’m not gonna give you that fin. I’m afraid you’d just drink it up.”

  I could feel his eyes on my back as I left, but I’d have heard him if he came out from around the bar. I was starting down the stairs when the door below opened and Sgt. Pribyl, looking irritated, came up to meet me on the landing, half-way. He looked more his usual dapper self, but his eyes were black-bagged.

  “What’s the idea, Heller?”

  “I just wanted to come bask in the reflected glory of your triumphant raid this morning.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means when Tubbo’s boys are on the case, the Outfit gets advance notice.”

  He winced. “That’s not the way it was. I don’t know why Rooney and Berry and the others blew. But nobody in our office warned ’em off.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He clearly wasn’t. “Look, I can’t have you messing in this. We’re on the damn case, okay? We’re maintaining surveillance from across the way…that’s how we spotted you.”

  “Peachy. Twenty-four surveillance, now?”

  “No.” He seemed embarrassed. “Just day shift.”

  “You want some help?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Loan me the key to your stakeout crib. I’ll keep nightwatch. Got a phone in there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll call you if Rooney shows. You got pictures of him and the others you can give me?”

  “Well….”

  “What’s the harm? Or would Tubbo lower the boom on you, if you really did your job?”

  He sighed. Scratched his head and came to a decision. “This is unofficial, okay? But there’s a possibility the door to that apartment’s gonna be left unlocked tonight.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Third-floor—301.” He raised a cautionary finger. “We’ll try this for one night…no showboating, okay? Call me if one of ’em shows.”

  “Sure. You tried their homes?”

  He nodded. “Nothing. Rooney lives on North Ridgeland in Oak Park. Four kids. Wife’s a pleasant, matronly type.”

  “Fat, you mean.”

  “She hasn’t seen Rooney for several weeks. She says he’s away from home a lot.”

  “Keeping a guard posted there?”

  “Yeah. And that is twenty-four hour.” He sighed, shook his head. “Heller, there’s a lot about this case that doesn’t make sense.”

  “Such as?”

  “That maroon Plymouth. We never saw a car like that in the entire six weeks we had the union hall under surveillance. Rooney drives a blue LaSalle coupe.”

  “Any maroon Plymouths reported stolen?”

  He shook his head. “And it hasn’t turned up abandoned, either. They must still have the car.”

  “Is Rooney that stupid?”

  “We can always hope,” Pribyl said.

  I sat in an easy chair with sprung springs by the window in room 301 of the residential hotel across the way. It wasn’t a flophouse cage, but it wasn’t a suite at the Drake, either. Anyway, in the dark it looked fine. I had a flask of rum to keep me company, and the breeze fluttering the sheer, frayed curtains remained unseasonably cool.

  Thanks to some photos Pribyl left me, I now knew what Rooney looked like: a good-looking, oval-faced smoothie, in his mid-forties, just starting to lose his dark, slicked-back hair; his eyes were hooded, his mouth soft, sensual, sullen. There were also photos of bespectacled, balding Berry and pockmarked, cold-eyed Herbert Arnold, V.P. of the union.

  But none of them stopped by the union hall—only a steady stream of winos and bums went in and out.

  Thenhe ound seven, I spotted somebody who didn’t fit the profile.

  It was a guy I knew—a fellow private op, Eddie McGowan, a Pinkerton man, in uniform, meaning he was on nightwatchman duty. A number of the merchants along Madison must have pitched in for his services.

  I left the stakeout and waited down on the street, in front of the plumbing supply store, for Eddie to come back out. It didn’t take long—maybe ten minutes.

  “Heller!” he said. He was a skinny, tow-haired guy in his late twenties with a bad complexion and a good outlook. “What no good are you up to?”

  “The Goldblatt’s shooting. That kid they killed was working with me.”

  “Oh! I didn’t know! Heard about the shooting, of course, but didn’t read the papers or anything. So you were involved in that? No kidding.”

  “No kidding. You on watchman duty?”

  “Yeah. Up and down the street, here, all night.”

  “Including the union hall?”

  “Sure.” He grinned. “I usually stop up for a free drink, ’bout this time of night.”

  “Can you knock off for a couple of minutes? For another free drink?”

  “Sure!”

  Soon we were in a smoky booth in back o
f a bar and Eddie was having a boilermaker on me.

  “See anything unusual last night,” I asked, “around the union hall?”

  “Well…I had a drink there, around two o’clock in the morning. That was a first.”

  “A drink? Don’t they close earlier than that?”

  “Yeah. Around eleven. That’s all the longer it takes for their ‘members’ to lap up their daily dough.”

  “So what were you doing up there at two?”

  He shrugged. “Well, I noticed the lights was on upstairs, so I unlocked the street level door and went up. Figured Alex…that’s the bartender, Alex Davidson…might have forgot to turn out the lights, ’fore he left. The door up there was locked, but then Mr. Rooney opened it up and told me to come on in.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He was feelin’ pretty good. Looked like he was workin’ on a bender. Anyway, he insists I have a drink with him. I says, sure. Turns out Davidson is still there.”

  “No kidding?”

  “No kidding. So Alex serves me a beer. Henry Berry—he’s the union’s so-called business agent, mousy little guy with glasses—he was there, too. He was in his cups, also. So was Rooney’s wife—she was there, and also feeling giddy.”

  I thought about Pribyl’s description of Mrs. Rooney as a matronly woman with four kids. “His wife was there?”

  “Yeah, the luctiff.”

  “Lucky?”

  “You should see the dame! Good-lookin’ tomato with big dark eyes and a nice shape on her.”

  “About how old?”

  “Young. Twenties. It’d take the sting out of a ball and chain, I can tell you that.”

  “Eddie…here’s a fin.”

  “Heller, the beer’s enough!”

  “The fin is for telling this same story to Sgt. Pribyl of the State’s Attorney’s coppers.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “But do it tomorrow.”

  He smirked. “Okay. I got rounds to make, anyway.”

  So did I.

  At around eleven fifteen, bartender Alex Davidson was leaving the union hall; his back was turned, as he was locking the street-level door, and I put my nine-millimeter in it.

  “Hi, Alex,” I said. “Don’t turn around, unless you prefer being gut-shot.”

  “If it’s a stick-up, all I got’s a couple bucks. Take ’em and bug off!”

  “No such luck. Leave that door unlocked. We’re gonna step back inside.”

  He grunted and opened the door and we stepped inside.

  “Now we’re going up the stairs,” I said, and we did, in the dark, the wooden steps whining under our weight. He was a big man; I’d have had my work cut out for me—if I hadn’t had the gun.

  We stopped at the landing where earlier I had spoken to Sgt. Pribyl. “Here’s fine,” I said.

  I allowed him to face me in the near-dark.

  He sneered. “You’re that private dick.”

  “I’m sure you mean that in the nicest way. Let me tell you a little more about me. See, we’re going to get to know each other, Alex.”

  “Fuck you.”

  I slapped him with the nine millimeter.

  He wiped blood off his mouth and looked at me with hate, but also with fear. And he made no more smart-ass remarks.

  “I’m the private dick whose twenty-one-year-old partner got shot in the head last night.”

  Now the fear was edging out the hate; he knew he might die in this dark stairwell.

  “I know you were here with Rooney and Berry and the broad, last night, serving up drinks as late as two in the morning,” I said. “Now you’re going to tell me the whole story—or you’re the one who’s getting tossed down the fucking stairs.”

  He was trembling, now; a big hulk of a man trembling with fear. “I didn’t have anything to do with the murder. Not a damn thing!”

  “Then why cover for Rooney and the rest?”

  “You saw what they’re capable of!”

  “Take it easy, Alex. Just tell the story.”

  Rooney had come into the office about noon the day of the shooting; he had started drinking and never stopped. Berry and several other union “officers” arrived and angry discussions about being under surveillance by the State’s Attorney’s cops were accompanied by a lot more drinking.

  “The other guys left around five, but Rooney and Berry, they just hung around drinking all evening. Around midnight, Rooney handed me a phone number he jotted on a matchbook, and gave it to me to call for him. It was a Berwyn number. A woman answered. I handed him the phone and he said to her, ‘Bring one.’”

  “One what?” I asked.

  “I’m gettin’ to that. She showed up around one o’clock—good-looking dame with black hair and eyes so dark they coulda been black, too.”

  “Who was she?”

  “I don’t know. Never saw her before. She took a gun out of her purse and gave it to Rooney.”

  “That was what he asked her to bring.”

  “I guess. It was a .38 revolver, a Colt I think. Anyway, Rooney and Berry were both pretty drunk; I don’t know what her excuse was. So Rooney takes the gun and says, ‘We got a job to pull at Goldblatt’s. We’re gonna throw some slugs at the windows and watchmen.’”

  “How did the girl react?”

  He swallowed. “She laughed. She said, ‘I’ll go along and watch the fun.’ Then they all went out.”

  Jesus.

  Finally I said, “What do you did do?”

  “They told me to wait for ’em. Keep the bar open. They came back in, laughing like hyenas. Rooney says to me, ‘You want to see the way he keeled over?’ And I says, ‘Who?’ And he says, ‘The guard at Goldblatt’s.’ Berry laughs and says, ‘We really let him have it.’”

  “That kid was twenty-one, Alex. It was his goddamn birthday.”

  The bartender was looking down. “They laughed and joked about it till Berry passed out. About six in the morning, Rooney has me pile Berry in a cab. Rooney and the twist slept in his office for maybe an hour. Then they came out, looking sober and kind of…scared. He warned me not to tell anybody what I seen, unless I wanted to trade my job for a morgue slab.”

  “Colorful. Tell me, Alex. You got that girl’s phone number in Berwyn?”

  “I think it’s upstairs. You can put that gun away. I’ll help you.”

  It was dark, but I could see his face well enough; the big man’s eyes looked damp. The fear was gone. Something else was in its place. Shame? Something.

  We went upstairs, he unlocked the union hall and, under the bar, found the matchbook with the number written inside: Berwyn 2981.

  “You want a drink before you go?” he asked.

  “You know,” I said, “I think I’ll pass.”

  I went back to my office to use the reverse-listing phone book that told me Berwyn 2981 was Rosalie Rizzo’s number; and that Rosalie Rizzo lived at 6348 West 13th Street in Berwyn.

  First thing the next morning, I borrowed Barney’s Hupmobile and drove out to Berwyn, the clean, tidy Hunky suburb populated in part by the late Mayor Cermak’s patronage people. But finding a Rosalie Rizzo in this largely Czech and Bohemian area came as no surprise: Capone’s Cicero was a stone’s throw away.

  The woman’s address was a three-story brick apartment building, but none of the mailboxes in the vestibule bore her name. I found the janitor and gave him Rosalie Rizzo’s description. It sounded like Mrs. Riggs to him.

  “She’s a doll,” the janitor said. He was heavy-set and needed a shave; he licked his thick lips as he thought about her. “Ain’t seen her since yesterday noon.”

  That was about nine hours after Stanley was killed.

  He continued: “Her and her husband was going to the country, she said. Didn’t expect to be back for a couple of weeks, she said.”

  Her husband.

  “What’ll a look around their apartment cost me?”

  He licked his lips again. “Two bucks?”

  Two bucks it w
as; the janitor used his passkey and left me to it. The well-appointed little apartment included a canary that sang in its gilded cage, a framed photo of slick Boss Rooney on an end table, and a closet containing two sawed-off shotguns and a repeating rifle.

  I had barely started to poke around when I had company: a slender, gray-haired woman in a flowered print dress.

  “Oh!” she said, coming in the door she’d unlocked.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “Who are you?” Her voice had the lilt of an Italian accent.

  Under the circumstances, the truth seemed prudent. “A private detective.”

  “My daughter is not here! She and her-a husband, they go to vacation. Up north some-a-where. I just-a come to feed the canary!”

  “Please don’t be frightened. Do you know where she’s gone, exactly?”

  “No. But…maybe my husband do. He is-a downstairs….”

  She went to a window, threw it open and yelled something frantically down in Italian.

  I eased her aside in time to see a heavy-set man jump into a maroon Plymouth with a silver swan on the radiator cap, and cream colored wheels, and squeal away.

  And when I turned, the slight gray-haired woman was just as gone. Only she hadn’t squealed.

  The difference, this timewas a license number for the maroon coupe; I’d seen it: 519-836. In a diner I made a call to Lou Sapperstein, who made a call to the motor vehicle bureau, and phoned back with the scoop: the Plymouth was licensed to Rosalie Rizzo, but the address was different—2848 South Cuyler Avenue, in Berwyn.

  The bungalow was typical for Berwyn—a tidy little frame house on a small perfect lawn. My guess was this was her folks’ place. In back was a small matching, but unattached garage, on the alley. Peeking in the garage windows, I saw the maroon coupe and smiled.

  “Is Rosalie in trouble again?”

  The voice was female, sweet, young.

  I turned and saw a slender, almost beautiful teenage girl with dark eyes and bouncy, dark shoulder-length hair. She wore a navy-blue sailor-ish playsuit. Her pretty white legs were bare.

  “Are you Rosalie’s sister?”

  “Yes. Is she in trouble?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I just know Rosalie, that’s all. That man isn’t really her husband, is he? That Mr. Riggs.”