bag and have at.
There are a lot of variations on this, and I taught as many of 'em as I could to my pupils. Common ones at the fair would include action at the refreshment-stand counter, with the buzzer reaching across for some mustard and jostling the mark as the hook works the mark from behind.
Of course there would be the occasional solo artist, and redheaded, freckle-faced Dipper Cooney. a man of thirty-five or forty who unless you looked close looked twenty, was one of the best. A real live cannon, a dip deft enough to take a wallet from the back pocket of a prosperous, alert mark- without benefit of buzzers to jostle said mark's attention.
A live cannon like Cooney would never be able to pass up the fair; he would see it as duck soup, and he'd be right… normally.
Of course he wouldn't know that each and every one of the two hundred boys in white pith helmets, red jackets, blue trousers, and bolstered sidearms would have seen his police file photo; that each was instructed, if catching the Dipper in the act, to hold him for me personally.
This was about as far as I'd gone in putting word out I was looking for Cooney. The boys on the pickpocket detail were among the few on the Chicago department who had not come to view me as persona non grata for having talked against Lang and Miller in court; but I still didn't trust the boys so far as to let them know how urgently I was looking for Cooney. One of the reasons Cooney had left Chicago was that my superior on the detail had demanded a percentage of the cannon's take to allow him to have free reign at the train stations; Cooney had unwisely turned the offer down, and had been collared so many times by the detail thereafter that Chicago became a place he didn't want to be anymore. I let the guys on the detail know only that Cooney was a guy I needed to talk to, regarding an insurance matter I was tracking, and that if they caught him and called me, it was worth a fin. If I'd made more out of it than that, well, Cooney might get told I was after him: the pickpocket detail knew very well that a live cannon like Cooney was worth more than a private cop like me, and he or Billy Skidmore would pay well for the information.
And of course I avoided talking to Skidmore himself, the portly, bowler-wearing junk dealer/ward heeler/bail bondsman with whom most serious pickpockets, gamblers, and shoplifters did their bonding business.
I had to keep it low key if I wanted to reel my fish in; the boldest move I made was to ask one of the pickpocket detail boys to lift Cooney's file photo for me, so I could borrow it and get some copies made. But I just made a couple; I wasn't going to go handing them out. If word got out on the streets I was after him, Cooney'd spook, sure as hell.
I considered calling Nitti and using up that favor he said he owed me. It was pretty well known that Cooney, through Skidmore, had done occasional work for the Capone/Nitti crowd; he was that good a dip, the kind you could send on a specific assignment, to pick a key out of somebody's vest pocket, or slip something incriminating into somebody's wallet.
But I couldn't risk it: Nitti seemed a dangerous last resort, as his loyalty to Cooney might outweigh any sense of obligation he felt to me; and besides, he was in Florida, on his estate, resting up, still recuperating.
I did go to two of Cooney's favorite hunting grounds: the Aragon Ballroom on the North Side, where Wayne King the Waltz King foisted watered-down Chicago jazz on his public between rounds of Viennese schmaltz in a mock Moorish setting; and the College Inn. where the Old Maestro Ben Bemie and his Lads performed in front of a dance floor that resembled a big backgammon board, while couples danced in the dimmed lights of a room where radium-painted fish glowed off pastel walls, turning the room into a sort of aquarium. But my fish hadn't shown, the bouncers told me, when I showed them his picture, promising anybody a fin who called me if Cooney swam in.
And now it was weeks later, and Ben Bernie was playing at the Pabst Casino- which was run by the College Inn management- and none of my efforts to turn Cooney up had done a bit of good. Still, the fair had opened today; he'd show. He'd show.
Or so I thought. May turned into June, and I found myself several days a week, supposedly as a function of my role as pickpocket adviser, haunting the fair. My pith-helmeted pupils would nod to me as I'd pass, and whenever I'd remind them about that specific pickpocket I was looking for, I'd get a shrug, and a 'Can I see that picture again?'
At the same time, my relationship with Mary Ann was getting a little strained; I was on the verge of telling her to hire another detective- but the part of me that wanted to stay with her, to sleep with her, to maybe God-help-me marry her, was afraid to say so.
She didn't go to Barney's big fight, June 23.1 wanted her to, but she pretended she didn't want to see my friend Barney get hurt, which was horseshit, because she didn't give a damn about Barney. I'd introduced them months ago, and Barney had loved her on first sight ('What a terrific girl you lucked on to, Nate!' he'd told me, later); but Mary Ann, I'm afraid, was jealous of Barney, not so much because he and I were close- but because he was somebody I knew who was more famous than she was.
So Eliot and I went, and sat in the third-row seats Barney had provided us, in the same Chicago Stadium where FDR got nominated and Cermak got eulogized. We were watching the second prelim, in which one light heavyweight was knocking the stuffing out of another. I was watching, but I wasn't really seeing. This was Barney's big night, his big fight, and I was nervous for him. Somebody had to be- the cock)' little bastard was cool as a cuke at his speak this afternoon, or pretending to be, and the butterflies in my stomach were in full flight.
Barney couldn't have had a better, more beautiful starry summer night for it, and the turnout should have been terrific- Barney was, as the sports page put it, 'the most popular fistic figure to develop in these parts in years' but the stadium was only half-full. The massive floor of the arena was spectator-covered, but only the first few rows of stands were filled, and I wondered if the fair had hurt tonight's attendance, or maybe it was just the price of a ticket in times like these, for a fight you could hear on the radio free.
Whatever the reason, it wasn't because Barney was a shoo-in. In fact, it was almost the opposite: the odds favored the champ, Canzoneri, to hold on to his title. But by no means was Canzoneri a shoo-in, either (the odds were 6 to 5 in his favor), and the mostly male crowd here tonight, the stadium air turned into a hazy fog of cigarette and cigar smoke caught in bright white lights, seemed confident the fighters would fan the smoke to flames. Christ, I was nervous. Eliot picked up on it.
'How much dough you got on this fight?' he grinned.
'A C-note,' I said.
'On Barney?'
'On Seabiscuit, you jerk. What do you think?'
'I think you're going to take some money home. Relax.'
