But we didn’t become really good friends, Barney and me, till we worked Maxwell Street as pullers-teenage street barkers who literally pulled customers into stores for bargains they had no interest in.
Barney, a roughneck made good, was a real Chicago success story. He owned this entire building, and my office-which, with its Murphy bed, was also my residence-was space he traded me for keeping an eye on the place.come alongas his nightwatchman, unless a paying job like Goldblatt’s came along to take precedence. The lightweight champion of the world was having a beer, too, in that back booth; he wore a cheerful blue and white sportshirt and a dour expression.
“I’m sorry about your young pal,” Barney said.
“He wasn’t a ‘pal,’ really. Just an acquaintance.”
“I don’t know that Douglas Park crowd myself. But to think of a kid, on his twenty-first birthday…” His mildly battered bulldog countenance looked woeful. “He have a girl?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Poor little bastard. When’s the funeral?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re going, aren’t you?”
“No. I don’t really know the family that well. I’m sending flowers.”
He looked at me with as long a face as a round-faced guy could muster. “You oughta go. He was working for you when he got it.”
“I’d be intruding. I’d be out of place.”
“You should do kaddish for the kid, Nate.”
A mourner’s prayer.
“Jesus Christ, Barney, I’m no Jew. I haven’t been in a synagogue more than half a dozen times in my life, and then it was social occasions.”
“Maybe you don’t consider yourself a Jew, with that Irish mug of yours your ma bequeathed you…but you’re gonna have a rude awakening one of these days, boyo.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s plenty of people you’re just another ‘kike’ to, believe you me.”
I sipped the beer. “Nudge me when you get to the point.”
“You owe this kid kaddish, Nate.”
“Hell, doesn’t that go on for months? I don’t know the lingo. And if you think I’m putting on some fuckin’ beanie and…”
There was a tap on my shoulder. Buddy Gold, the bartender, an ex-pug, leaned in to say, “You got a call.”
I went behind the bar to use the phone. It was Sergeant Lou Sapperstein at Central HQ in the Loop; Lou had been my boss on the pickpocket detail. I’d called him this morning with a request.
“Tubbo’s coppers made their raid this morning, around nine,” Lou said. Sapperstein was a hardnosed, balding cop of about forty-five and one of the few friends I had left on the PD.
“And?”
“And the union hall was empty, ’cept for a bartender. Pribyl and his partner Bert Gray took a whole squad up there, but Rooney and his boys had flew the coop.”
“Fuck. Somebody tipped them.”
“Are you surprised?”
“Yeah. Surprised I expected the cops to play it straight for a change. You wouldn’t have the address of that union, by any chance?”
“No, but I can get it. Hold a second.”
A sweet union scam like the Circular Distributors had Outfit written all over it-and Captain Tubbo Gilbert, head of the State Prosecutor’s police, was known as the richest cop in Chicago. Tubbo was a bagman and police fixer so deep in Frank Nitti’s pocket he had Nitti’s lint up his nose.
Lou was back: “It’s at 7 North Racine. That’s Madison and Racine.”
“Well, hell-that’s spitting distance from Skid Row.”
“Yeah. So?”
“So that explains the scam-that ‘union’ takes hobos and makes day laborers out of them. No wonder they charge daily dues. It’s just bums handing out ad circulars….”
“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
“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.”
