Neon Mirage (10 page)

“But if it’s out-of-town talent who did it, that would clear Guzik, and point to Siegel.”

“Not necessarily. Frank Nitti used to hire out of town talent all the time, for his hits; just to confuse the issue. That’s what he did where Tommy Malloy was concerned, and O’Hare, too.”

“Damnit, Nate!” He pounded his bed with his good hand. “Give me some good news!”

“Take it easy, Jim. The good news is you’re alive. The good news is Guzik wants to buy you out, not kill you.”

“He says.”

“It’s his style. You’re not dealing with Ricca or Campagna or Accardo, here. Guzik’s favorite weapon is money.”

“How can I do business with a man if he tried to have me killed?”

“You don’t know that he did.”

“I don’t know that he didn’t. Find out for me.”

“What?”

“I want to look into it—work with Drury, but work on your own, as well. You have your contacts, your ways. Find out whether it was Guzik or Siegel who did this; I’ll pay a fancy fee.”

“I just love fancy fees, but I don’t want that job. Jim, I can get away with playing your bodyguard. I have enough clout with Guzik to manage that. But if I go snooping in Outfit business, it could get me killed.”

The features of his face squeezed tight as a fist. “You’ve been saying you think I should sell—well, I’m seriously considering it, now. But I’ll only do it, if it’s that crazy bastard Siegel who put the hit out on me. How can I sell to Guzik, if he took out the contract?”

“What’s the difference who took out the contract? Guzik’s willing to buy you out and, apparently, let you walk. Maybe those affidavits of yours, your ‘insurance policy,’ is working.”

Jim rubbed his chin. “That
would
explain it. Siegel could care less about those affidavits coming out. They’re no skin off his ass…”

“True. And if Siegel’s the one gunning for you, well, once you’ve sold out to Guzik, the heat’s off. Siegel would no longer have reason to want you dead. No matter how crazy he is.”

“Damnit, Nate! Find out for me! Find out whicha them bastards tried to kill me. Tried to kill
us
!”

I stood. “Jim I’m just upsetting you. I’m going to have to go. I’ll be outside the door, if you need me, till noon. That’s when another of my ops comes on for me.”

His expression pleaded with me; so did his words: “Nate…take the assignment. There isn’t a private dick in town, in the country, that knows these Outfit bastards better than you. You’re the only man for the job, lad…”

“Jim, you’re my friend, and more important, my client, and I’m doing my best to keep you alive. It ends there.”

And I went out in the hall. Breathed out some air. I felt battered. Even with a clipped wing, that Irish son of a bitch was a handful.

I went down to the lounge area where I’d spoken to Peggy last Monday night and, after bumming a cigarette off a passing doctor, sat and smoked. I don’t smoke, as a rule—I picked the habit up overseas, in the Marines, and dropped it when I got back. But now and then I got the craving. Usually when I started getting the combat jitters. I’d been smoking off and on all week.

A few minutes later, just as I was standing up, grinding the cigarette under my heel, ready to go back and help guard Ragen’s door, an orderly approached me, a colored kid of maybe twenty with a light brown complexion and dark close-cropped brown hair.

“Are you one of the detectives watching Mr. Ragen?” he asked.

I said I was.

“I think I have something I oughta tell you about.”

“Well why don’t you, then.”

He swallowed. “Okay. After work yesterday, I was playing ball over at the recreation grounds. At Wentworth Avenue? I was playing softball. I saw these men looking at me in particular. They was watching us play ball, I thought, but they was looking at me. I had my badge on that shows I’m an employee here at the hospital.” He swallowed again.

“Go on, son.”

“Well, one of them come up to me and asked if I work at the hospital. I say I did. He ask me some questions about Mr. Ragen’s condition. He say he was a reporter. Anyway, he ask where Mr. Ragen’s room was. I…I told him.”

“He gave you money, didn’t he?”

The boy looked at the floor and nodded.

“Did you tell him?”

“Just that Mr. Ragen was on the third floor away from the fire escape.”

“What did these men look like?”

“White men—real white. One had dark hair, real curly. The other had glasses and was kind of bald. They were both kinda big.”

Well, what do you know.

“What happened then, kid?”

“The man had some more questions—he was the one that didn’t have no glasses—and I said I didn’t think I wanted to talk to him anymore. Last night I was thinking about it, and I thought, what if he wasn’t a reporter? Those men didn’t look like reporters. I didn’t sleep so good.”

“Have you told anybody else about this?”

“No, sir. I heard you was a private detective and not city. So I waited to tell you. I didn’t want Mr. Ragen to get hurt, but I didn’t want to get myself in trouble, neither.”

I patted him on the shoulder. “You were smart to come to me.”

“I don’t want any money from you, mister.”

“Good, ’cause I’m not going to give you any. Now go back to work.”

I went down to the second floor, to the nearest phone booth, and tried to call Drury at home; his wife said he was still asleep and I told her not to wake him—I’d call back around noon. Then I walked back toward Ragen’s room and plopped myself down in a straightback chair next to the cop. He was reading the morning
Tribune
. I told him he ought to be more alert than that, and took it away from him, read it myself. But all I could think about was the two guys the orderly had seen.

About eleven o’clock I glanced down the hall and noticed the fire-escape cop was gone.

“Where’s your pal?” I asked the cop next to me.

“How should I know? Takin’ a dump?”

“I’m going to cover the fire escape till he gets back.”

I went down there and looked out the window. Down through the grating of the fire escape I could see a few psyche ward patients, in their green pajamas, enjoying the view of the I.C. tracks from their perch.

Maybe ten minutes later, a patient started up the stairs onto the third level; he was followed by another.

I stepped out onto the fire escape just as they had gotten onto the landing and said, “Nobody on this level, boys,” and realized I was looking at two sallow individuals, one of whom had dark brown curly hair and a widow’s peak and a wedge-shaped face, the other of whom was balding and round-faced and wore glasses, both of whom were wearing green psyche-ward p.j.s, but neither of whom were mentally sick, though I wouldn’t have minded giving either one of them a lobotomy with my nine millimeter, which I was grabbing out from under my shoulder.

“Hold it right there,” I said, pointing the gun at them.

They froze. The widow’s-peaked guy had a big nose and bushy brown eyebrows and thick lips and bad teeth and a couple of facial moles; the guy with glasses hadn’t exactly stepped out of an Arrow shirt ad, either, though he had more regular features that added up to a baby face, albeit a pretty ugly baby. They both had the blankly evil expression of the business end of an automatic.

“Put your fuckin’ hands in the air,” I added, and they did.

I knew them. I don’t just mean that they matched up with the descriptions given by Two-Gun Pete’s trio of colored witnesses, and the orderly’s description of the “reporters”: no. I knew them from the West Side. The widow’s-peaked guy was Davey Finkel. The guy with glasses was Joseph “Blinkey” Leonard. West Side boys—like me. Well, not quite like me, I hope.

“Okay, Davey,” I said to Finkel, “one step forward.”

With my left hand, I patted him down; under the loose green top, he had a .45 automatic tucked in his waistband—he was wearing slacks under the baggy pajama bottoms. I tossed the piece just behind me and it clanked on the fire escape floor.

“One step back,” I told him, and nodded to his balding friend. “Now you, Blinkey.”

I disarmed him, as well; he carried a relatively small gun, a .32 automatic, but it had a silencer attached, making it bulky. This, had I not intercepted them, would have been the murder weapon, the little darling that would’ve given Ragen a goodbye kiss. I tossed it just behind me, too, clanking.

“What’s a couple of nice Jewish bookies like you guys doing playing torpedo, anyway?”

“Why don’t you just let us lam out of here, Heller,” Finkel said, in his sandpaper voice. “You won this round, okay?”

“No hard feelings,” Blinkey said; his voice was higher pitched but just as unpleasant.

“I got hard feelings,” I said. “You boys tried to kill me last Monday.”

They shut their traps, glanced at each other, looked back at me. Finkel was scowling; Blinkey had a bland, blank expression.

“Now we’re all going to step inside,” I said, jerking my head toward the door to the Meyer House third floor. “You boys, first. Feel free to pull something and give me an excuse.”

Just behind them, coming up the fire escape steps, came a painfully thin patient, about thirty, with a gray pallor and dazed expression and green psyche-ward p.j.s. I knew just looking at him he was a veteran; he had combat in his face.

“Can you see the lake from here?” the man said, very slowly.

“Please,” I started, “get off…”

Finkel grabbed the skinny figure and goddamn hurled him at me, knocking me back against the fire-escape rail, hard; and quickly headed back down the iron stairway, Leonard already having a head start on him.

I brushed past the confused psyche patient and followed them down, the fire escape stairs rattling like a passing El. I had a gun and they didn’t, but they stayed a landing ahead of me and on each landing were more psyche patients, and when they reached the bottom, there were more psyche patients still, a sea of green nutcases they waded into, poor goddamn innocents that were in the way of me getting a shot off at these guilty sons of bitches. They didn’t head for Lake Park Avenue, possibly because a cop was patrolling it, but to the right, around toward the Meyer House parking lot and loading area.

Their car was probably in this small lot, but it wasn’t going to do them any good at the moment, because a food delivery truck was slowly maneuvering—and blocking—the narrow alley between the parking lot, the Meyer House and another hospital building. And that was the only way out.

So they were on foot, running down an aisle between parked cars, then squeezing past that delivery truck through the alley, two desperate men in green pajamas.

I followed, gun in hand, running through the parking lot, edging past the truck, following them out onto 29th; they were moving fast, but tearing at their outer covering, shedding their green tops, beneath which were white sportshirts. They crossed to Ellis Avenue, a street of two-and three-story buildings whose once proud architecture had long since decayed, cutting across a lot made vacant by an urban renewal project.

Finkel and Leonard were heavier men than me, but younger, and, so far anyway, faster. I could take a shot at them, but they were unarmed; wasn’t sure I could risk it. I was breathing hard, stumbling on the rocks and rubble of the vacant lot, watching up ahead as they climbed a fence that was half-fallen down already. When I climbed it, I found myself in an alley. Soon I was trailing them through a nightmare landscape, the garbage-strewn alley running past the ass-ends of crumbling tenements whose tiers of back porch balconies sagged, their wooden slats like rotting teeth about to fall out. But it was strangely deserted—not a single colored face looked out from a window; no children jumped rope or sang songs. Yet in the distance I could hear music. A marching band was accompanying us as we ran…

And, God bless John Philip Sousa, I was gaining on them; they were glancing back, seeing that I was, some panic in their faces, and I grinned and poured it on. Then, at alley’s end, they rounded the corner, on what must have been 32nd, and soon I realized why it was so deserted, understood the band music, remembered: Bud Billikens Day.

Thirty-second Street itself was thronged with colored kids in Boy Scout uniforms being lined up for marching purposes by similarly garbed dark adults; and some kind of high school marching band, in gaudy uniform, was already in rows, practicing a tune. Most of this activity was in the street itself, but there was overflow and parents and such on the sidewalks, including the two white men in white sportshirts and green pajama bottoms who went running through that crowd, knocking people aside, women and children included, and people were immediately pissed. Into that hostile arena I ran, having tucked my nine millimeter away as soon as I saw this mass of humanity, doing my best not to knock into anybody, slowing down accordingly.

And then I was at South Park Avenue, where the parade was in full swing, sidewalks packed; this boulevard, with its four lanes divided by a parkway, was thronged with colored people, in their summer finery, men in straw hats, women in bonnets, kids getting their Sunday duds stained from free ice cream and candy and pop, families filling the sidewalks, lining the parkway, as marching bands and floats streamed by.

Through this pushed my two psyche ward escapees, jostling an otherwise utterly Negro crowd that was too stunned by this Caucasian presence to do anything; I followed after, but was falling back, slowed by the sidewalk swarm. I felt hands on me, touching, slapping, but nobody outright grabbed me, or hit me, or had yet, at least. I couldn’t even make out any cries of outrage, in the general confusion of band music and the crowd noise.

I’d lost sight of them, now. Hopelessness rising in me, I got to the front of the packed sidewalk and looked for white faces in a black world. It was a Klansman’s worst nightmare come true.

And then there they were: they’d moved out into the street, were running alongside a float from Lake View Dairy, where a giant shredded paper milk bottle served as the backdrop for a throne for a lovely high yellow gal in a gown and crown, who was waving to her subjects.