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
“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 was; 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
