True Detective

reelection comes around, and we'll get a real Republican back in. It's going to be a cold day in hell when a Democratic machine runs Chicago again, after Cermak gets dumped.'

'Well, it's already getting colder, you know. Uncle Louis.'

'What do you mean?'

'I can't sell Cermak out. At least I don't see how I can. He can yank my license. I won't be able to work. I won't be able to cam' a gun, either. And maybe Ted Newberry or Roger Touhy'll send some guys over to take me for a ride.'

'Well.' Uncle Louis said, 'think it over. Cermak is powerful, but the General is power. When he said Hoover was the guy who got Capone. he was just being nice, you know. It's Dawes who did it. Well. Here's the Standard Club. Let's talk soon. Nate.'

And my uncle patted me on the back and entered the gray old club. I walked around the corner, turned down a panhandler's request for a dime, and went up to my office, and called Eliot.

'That looks like a Murphy bed,' Eliot said, coming in the door and pointing at the Murphy bed.

'There's a reason for that.' I said, sitting behind my desk, feet up. like a big shot.

He took his topcoat off. walked to the straight-backed chair in front of my desk, and turned it around, and draped the coat over it, and sat backward in it and faced me: his face was deadpan, but he was smiling around the cool gray eyes, 'You didn't say anything about living here, too.'

I shrugged. 'I'm not nuts about it getting around.'

He pointed again, this time at the varnished-pine four-drawer file in the corner behind me, to my left. 'I suppose you got your shorts filed under 5.'

I reached over and pulled the bottom file drawer out and pulled out a pair of shorts. 'Under U,'l said.

Eliot started laughing till his eyes teared; so did I. A couple of tough guys.

My own laughter under control, the shorts on the desk in front of me like something I was working on, I said, 'Well, this used to be a lawyer's office. I suppose he had briefs to file, too.'

'Enough,' Eliot said, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. 'Brother. You've really hit the big time, haven't you, Nate?'

'The biggest,' I said, filing my shorts away. 'Everybody in town is trying to hire me or bribe me. shut me up or make me talk. I'm popular.'

'Seriously?'

'Yeah. Did you know General Dawes and me were thick?'

'Yeah?'

I held up crossed fingers. 'Like this. Guess which one I am. He wants me to tell the truth on the stand, when Nitti's trial comes up.'

Eliot thought about that. 'He wants you to sell Cermak out, you mean?'

'Yowsah.'

Eliot took his hat off and tossed it on the desk. 'Well, Cermak is making the wrong kind of headlines.'

I nodded. 'Don't want to scare potential fairgoers off, you know.'

'The fair is Dawes' baby, remember. Him and his brother Rufus, who's the president of the thing. You mean to say, he came right out and asked you…'

'Not really. My uncle Louis had to explain it to me. Dawes is a walking garden of platitudes; I needed a translator.'

Eliot smiled 'I've met him a couple of times. Didn't make much of an impression on me.'

'Don't you know he's the guy who got Capone?'

'What? What am I, chopped liver?'

'You were Dawes' tool, my boy.'

'Sure,' he said, his smile turning to a smirk.

I decided not to pursue the issue; why burst his bubble?

I had asked him to come over here- it wasn't much of a walk from the Transportation Building- to show him my office and to allow him to speak freely, without the other prohibition agents at his office overhearing. I wanted to find out about the Nydick inquest, at which he'd been a witness this morning.

'It was a circus,' Eliot said, disgustedly. 'The second inquest this week where the coroner sat in judgment of the actions of police officers who, officially, are deputy coroners. Sometimes I think the reason justice is blind is 'cause it's looking the other way.'

They had started out at the morgue and moved to the Park Row Hotel where the crime was reenacted- theoretically for the sake of the jurors, but really for the press photogs. (Eliot said this with an uncharacteristic disdain for publicity; on the other hand, this publicity wasn't his.) Mrs. Nydick's attorney had charged that the shooting was unjustified, and that no revolver had been in the dresser drawer before the hoodlum squad entered to arrest her (now-deceased) husband. Miller had to fend off the attorney's questions about possible animosity toward Nydick, but the coroner put an early end to that, saying that if the attorney was soins to be belligerent. he wouldn't be allowed to cross-examine witnesses at all. Miller was exonerated.

'What do you make of it?' I asked.

Eliot shrugged elaborately. 'I think the wife set her husband up for her boyfriend Miller to collar, but Miller, on