'Yeah,' Steve agreed. 'But she caused me trouble, getting it like that.'
'How so?'
McFarlin, without being obvious, just out of the corner of his eye, studied the stubbly-faced guy. I know him, he thought. Where do I know him from?
'Well,' Steve was saying, 'her buying it like that brought the cops in here like goddamn flies. We had to shut the game down in the backroom, for weeks.'
'Fuck that shit,' the stubbly-faced guy said sympathetically.
'And they messed with our patronage,' Steve said with an oddly dignified formality. 'Rousting 'em, hauling 'em downtown for questioning. Some of the people who come in here, they got reason to wanna steer clear of the cops.'
'Whores like Flo, you mean?'
'Yeah,' Steve said.
Somebody down the bar laughed and said, 'This place is fairy heaven, after seven.'
Steve scowled at the voice's owner, said, 'Go to hell, Pete.' He looked at the stubbly-faced guy and said, 'We ain't a fag hangout, bud. We just don't figure what hole you wanna stick it in is any of our business, catch my drift?'
The stubbly-faced guy grinned. 'Their money is as good as mine, huh?'
Steve tried to smile back; it was hard for him. 'That's it. It ain't any of our business, in general, is the idea.'
Ness!
McFarlin damn near spit out his beer. He hoped his face hadn't shown his surprise.
But he'd be damned if this scummy-looking near-derelict next to him wasn't goddamn fucking Ness himself.
'Well, that guy Andrassy,' Ness was saying, 'I hear he was a fag.'
'He was a two-way ghee,' Steve said matter-of-factly, nodding, drawing a beer for a customer and taking it to him down the bar. Then he came back and said to the director of public safety, 'But Eddie was a good kid.'
And Ness, cool as a cuke (McFarlin had to hand it to the son of a bitch), said, 'So he did hang out here, huh?'
'Yeah. He knew Flo. They weren't thick or anything, but they knew each other. Had, you know… mutual friends.'
'That guy 'One-Armed Willie' the reporter was mentioning, you mean.'
'Yeah,' Steve said. 'Him and others. Like, you know-Abe Seleyman, the strong-arm guy. And Frankie Dolezal- he's a plasterer who's plastered most of the time.'
Ness laughed, sipped his beer.
McFarlin was impressed. He hated Ness's guts on general principles, but this was a fine, sneaky piece of police work. Ness was wearing well-worn work clothes, his hair was a brown, dry mop, his face stubbly, his teeth looked scummy. To almost anybody down here, he would be unrecognizable.
It took a cop like McFarlin to make him, and it had taken him a while. McFarlin had never met Ness, but he had seen him any number of times, and not just in the papers; Ness, on the other hand, would not know McFarlin from Adam. There were scores of cops driven from the force, and only those prosecuted, or the higher-up ones, would have come to Ness's attention individually.
But it wasn't the role Ness was playing that impressed McFarlin, though he was playing it well; it was the scam of coming in, sitting at the bar, waiting for the reporter to come in and prime the pump, and then sitting back with a bucket and letting the bartender fill it up. Part of McFarlin wanted to shake Ness's hand, but at the same time another part would've like to put a bullet in him.
'I don't think I know either of those guys,' Ness was saying.
'Well,' Steve said, 'Abe's a real bastard to a lot of people, but he's always been jake around here. He's been shaking down small merchants in East Cleveland. The cops shut the real protection racket down, so a small-timer like him can make a little chicken-feed racket play, for a while.'
'Nice work if you can get it,' Ness said enviously. 'This Frankie guy, is he in the same racket?'
McFarlin continued to be impressed: obviously Ness had heard Steve describe Frankie Dolezal as a plasterer, but was playing dumb to keep the bucket filling up.
'Naw,' Steve was saying, 'Frankie's a nice guy. He's kind of a roughneck-I seen him go after somebody with a knife before.'
'Maybe he's the Butcher,' Ness said, conversationally.
'You don't know Frankie,' Steve said, actually smiling. 'He's a sweetheart. He's got a brother-in-law on the cops, for Christ's sake. Goes to church regular. Works regular, too.'
Ness shrugged, as if he'd lost interest. Finished his beer. Then he had one more, which he drank more quickly
Once Ness had gone, McFarlin sat staring at the door.
'What's with you, Bob?'
McFarlin looked at the bartender blankly. He wondered, for a moment, what do. Should he tell Steve who he'd just been blabbing to?
'Nothing at all, Steve,' he said, downed his beer, and headed out to his car.
Within an hour he was standing before the desk in the office of Sheriff William O'Connell on the fourth floor of the Cuyahoga County Criminal Courts Building, which also housed the jail. The jail, as the sheriff and his people referred to the Criminal Courts Building, was separated from the Central Police Station by a parking lot and a world of bitterness.
'That goddamn gloryhound!' the sheriff, on his feet, was sputtering, waving a fist. He was a big, fat man with a square head and small dark eyes and, at the moment, a bright red face; he was sweating through his khakis despite the buildings air-conditioning. His office was a moderately-sized affair decorated with awards of civic merit from the various suburban police departments where he had served the public and various gangsters, not necessarily in that order.
McFarlin knew all too well that the sheriff feared and resented Ness, who the papers were always saying would make a good county sheriff, if he ever got tired of the safety directors post.
'It was slick, Sheriff,' McFarlin said, gesturing, shrugging. 'Guys a detective. You got to hand it to him.'
'I hand him shit! That son of a bitch has cost us more money than
…' Suddenly the sheriff began to smile. He sat back down. His desk was tidy in the way that the desk of a man who does little actual work is tidy.
'Sit down, Bob,' the sheriff said. 'Sit down.'
Bob pulled up a straight-back chair and sat.
'This little Boy Scout bastard,' the sheriff said agreeably, 'has put his dick on the chopping block. You seen the papers?'
'Sure,' Bob said, not getting it.
'He's taken over the 'Mad Butcher' investigation personally. Staking his whole goddamn rep on it.'
'Well,' Bob said, shrugging again, 'you can't deny he's getting in there himself and doing the job.
The sheriff's face reddened again. 'He's a showboat! An arrogant little prick! Doing it himself, out in the field…'
'From what I overheard,' Bob said, 'he was doing good-gathering new information, lining up new suspects. He was getting somewhere.'
The sheriff smiled like an evil cherub. 'Exactly. And so can we.'
'What?'
'Get somewhere.'
'I don't follow you.'
'You're not: going to follow me at all.' He pointed at his deputy. 'You're going to follow Ness.'
'Oh,' Bob said, smiling, getting it.
The sheriff rose and went to a wire-meshed window and looked out, looked across at the Central Police Station and smiled. His small dark eyes glittered.
