deflower a virgin, and you don’t want to know what kind of wilted rose three bucks would buy. Guns (from a snubby to a burp), dope (from reefer to horse), and booze (from untaxed bubbly to rotgut whiskey) were available at prices even the middle class could afford.
It was good to be home.
The beautiful parks fringing the lake were still greener than money, no sign of the leaves turning yet; these landscaped acres and the broad lakefront boulevards of Chicago’s Northside were a reminder of how the city’s planners had intended things, before commerce and human nature took over. Lake Shore Drive—up which I was tooling my dark blue 1950 Olds 88—had once been strewn with the elaborate domiciles of the wealthy; most of those structures remaining had been converted into schools and other institutions—the U.S. Court of Appeals, for one.
The remaining members of the old wealthy class—those who had not yet had the decency to die, or move to the suburbs or Florida—lived in the towering modern apartment buildings here and on the other lake-facing avenues, Lincoln Parkway and Sheridan Road, and their cross streets. These uber-flats also put roofs over the heads of the Windy City’s new nobility: high-rolling gamblers, mistresses, tavern owners, and, top of the heap, mobsters.
One block south of Belmont Avenue, where the shoreline curved around glimmering lagoonlike Belmont Harbor, I located something even the most skillful Chicago detectives didn’t often find—a parking place—right across from the nondescript brown-brick building at the corner of Barry and Sheridan. The late Al Capone’s cousins, the Fischetti brothers, nested in the top three penthouse floors, which were set back a ways, sitting on the fifteen stories below like a brimless, too-small top hat.
The doorman of Barry Apartments, a paunchy fiftyish guy with a drink-splotched face that went well with his red uniform, did not seem to be a Fischetti bodyguard in liveried drag. At least it didn’t look like he was packing, anyway.
“Visiting someone here, sir?” he asked, hands locked behind him, rocking on his heels.
“Yeah. I’m sure my name’s on your list.”
“I don’t have a list, sir.”
“Sure you do. Name’s Lincoln.” And I gave him my identification.
He looked at the fin, nodded, said, “Yeah this is you, all right,” and slipped the bill in his pocket. “But the top three floors is off-limits, unless the elevator man is expecting you.”
So the elevator man
“I don’t know anybody in the penthouse,” I said. “I just want to talk to the building manager.”
“We don’t have one on site. We do have a janitorial supervisor. He’s got a staff of three, and an office around back.”
I nodded. “Any building inspectors, or fire marshals come around lately?”
“Matter of fact, yeah. Building inspector last week.”
“Well-dressed for a building inspector, was he?”
“Funny you should say that. He was a real dapper dan. Nice fella. I sent him around back to see the janitor, too.”
“Thanks.” I turned to go, then glanced back at him. “This conversation is confidential, by the way.”
He shot me a yellow grin in the midst of the red-splotchy puss, and touched the brim of his cap. “Mum’s the word, Mr. Lincoln.”
I walked around back; the paved alley was a single narrow lane, widening into the recess of the building’s modest loading dock, next to which was a door, unlocked. It opened onto an unfinished vestibule with double PUSH doors to the left, the wooden slats of a service elevator straight ahead, and a corner turned into a sort of office at right, with a desk and a couple battered file cabinets in the middle of stacked boxes and bucket-size barrels, all squatting on the cement floor. The air wafted with the bouquet of disinfectant.
The janitor was skinny, but he had a round piggy face; a balding guy in his forties in wireframe glasses and bib overalls, he had his workshoe-shod feet up on the scarred desktop as he sat reading the
At first I didn’t think he’d heard me come in, but then he chimed out, in a whiny tenor, “Didn’t you see the sign? No soliciting.”
“I’m here about the guy in your basement,” I said.
The magazine dropped to his lap. His pig’s nose twitched and so did his buck-toothed mouth; his eyes—a rather attractive china blue, in the midst of all that homeliness—were as round and hard as marbles. But there was fear in them.
“Nobody in the basement,” he said.
“Sure there is,” I said, and tossed a fin on the desk.
He just looked at it; after a while, he blinked a few times.
“I’m not from the cops,” I said, “and I’m not a Fischetti boy. The guy in the basement? I’m his boss.”
And I tossed an A-1 Detective Agency business card his way. He took his feet off the desk and sat forward and studied the card, which he held in two hands, like a Treasury agent examining a counterfeit bill.
Then I plucked the card back—it was nothing I wanted to leave lying around the Fischetti homestead—and said, “Just point me, and there’s another fivespot in it for you, on my way out.”
“I could really get in trouble, you know.”
“How much is my op paying you?”
