True Crime

S

TATE,

D

EARBORN, A BLOCK DOWN

14

At my office that afternoon I couldn’t resist checking one last thing out. Frank Nitti or no, there was something I had to follow through on. In the bottom of my pine four-drawer file I had several out-of-town phone books, as well as two Chicago cross-directories (numbers first; addresses first). I took out the Gary, Indiana, book and looked in the Yellow Pages. There were six grain companies. I called the personnel departments of each; it took all the rest of the afternoon, and talking to two or three people each place, which ran my phone bill up, but I did it. And John Howard didn’t work for any of them.

Not that I’d expected him to. It was obvious, now, that my traveling-salesman client was a con artist hired to rope me into the play Zarkovich and Nitti were putting on. I felt like a chump. And with good reason: I was a chump.

I took the money clip out of my pocket, peeled off the two fifties Nitti had given me. A braver man would’ve tossed them in Nitti’s face. He’d also be a dumber man, and possibly a deader one. Maybe if I had the integrity Nitti was talking about, I’d turn the bills into confetti and toss them out my office window; or give ’em to the first down- and-outer on the street I ran across. But I needed a new suit, so I went out and bought one. The rest of the money could go for luxuries. Like eating and the phone bill.

Some of Nitti’s money I decided to blow on Barney Ross and his girl Pearl. I called him over at the Morrison and he said he and Pearl were planning to go out for a bite, but had no special plans. So I drove over and picked ’em up and took Pearl and her smart green dress and Barney and his blue bow tie to my favorite restaurant in the city, Pete’s Steaks.

Pete’s was on Dearborn, just north of Randolph. Pretty redheaded Pearl, on Barney’s arm, tried to hide her surprise as we approached the place; the neon sign that hung above the awning had a few vowels burned out, so that it read P T ’S STE KS, and looking in the window all you could see was an ordinary white-tile, one-arm joint. But then we went inside, and back to the rear of the place and up the steps to the air-cooled dining room, where framed autographed celebrity photos (including one from Barney, signed to Bill and Marie Botham, the owners—I never did find out who Pete was) rode the walls of the long, narrow dining-car-like room.

As soon as Pearl started spotting celebrities (Eddie Cantor and George Jessel were at a table together and, at another, second time today, Rudy Vallee) she brightened. The place catered to the show biz crowd, press agents, song boosters, chorines, vaudevillians, with a good number of newspapermen tossed in in the bargain. Doc Dwyer of the Examiner, Hal Davis of the News, and Jim Doherty of the Trib were here tonight, and probably some others I didn’t recognize.

Our table conversation ran to small talk—Barney had taken Pearl to the fair today, including Sally Rand’s matinee, which Pearl found “shameless,” but sort of giggled when she said it—and I mostly just listened. But Barney was watching me close; he knew I was in a black mood. He also knew I’d called and invited him and Pearl out to try to shake that mood, and that I wasn’t being particularly successful.

The steaks arrived and helped distract me. Thick and tender and juicy, with melted butter and a side concoction of cottage fries, radishes, green onions, peas and sliced Bermuda onions that spilled onto the steak. I’d eaten nothing today except a bagel at the deli under my office, when I’d got back from Nitti’s; it’d been all I could make myself eat. But I was ravenous, now, and I attacked the rare steak like an enemy. Pearl, fortunately, didn’t notice my rotten table manners; she was too caught up in her own Pete’s Special. Barney, though, continued to eye me.

A minor sportswriter from the Times, whose name I didn’t remember, buttonholed Barney on the way out, and I stood and talked to Pearl at the top of the stairs.

“You’re a very special friend to Barney,” she said.

“He’s a special friend to me.”

“When you’re in Barney’s position, the friends you had before you got famous are the important ones, you know.”

“Are you going to marry him, Pearl?”

“If he asks me.”

“He will.”

She gave me a pretty smile, and I managed to give one back to her. A smile, that is. I doubt it was pretty.

I drove them back to the Morrison, and let them out, but Barney leaned in the window on the rider’s side before I pulled away.

“Are you going to be all right, Nate?”

“Sure.”

“You want I should drop up tonight, and we can talk?”

“No. It’s okay. You only got tonight and tomorrow night before Pearl goes home. Spend your time with her, you bum.”

“You sure, Nate?”

“Sure I’m sure—now, go be with your girl!”

“Thanks for supper, Nate.”

I smiled and waved and pulled away.

Pete’s special steak, good as it was, was grinding in my stomach. I passed some gas and it smelled the way I felt.

There was a place in the alley behind the building where Barney let me park my Chevy. I’d been lucky—no vandals or thieves had had at it yet. During the winter, it was hell to start ’er up, on the really cold days; but on the really cold days I tried to work out of my office, anyway. A telephone’s a detective’s best tool, after all; and I was like anybody born and brought up in Chicago—I was more comfortable riding the Els and streetcars, and didn’t use