“Let’s see if you can convince Tubbo of that.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I think I convinced Fischetti—or anyway, I thought I had. With Tubbo turning up on my doorstep this morning, who the hell knows?”
That astounded him. “You saw Fischetti yesterday? What, Charley?”
“Charley
I gave him the lowdown, quickly—I left out the part about me giving Rocco’s discarded, battered showgirl a lift into the Loop…or that she was still in my residential suite at the St. Clair Hotel. (You’ll get the lowdown on that, in due time. Patience.)
As I wound up my story, Lou lifted a pack of Camels from his breast pocket and lighted up. I could tell he was thinking about how to approach me, on something. Finally he waved out his match and said, “Those other calls I mentioned? They’re all from Robinson—Kefauver’s man.”
“I know who he is.”
Lou’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, you’ve met him?”
“No. But I know who he is.”
“Robinson wants to meet with you. No subpoena—just informal. Over at the Stevens Hotel.”
“I heard they were camped out at the Crime Commission, with Virgil Peterson.”
Lou nodded. “Officially, yes. But they’re using the Stevens for talking to potential witnesses and, uh…”
“Informants?”
He shrugged. “Better a live informant than a dead witness. Anyway, you better get it out of the way. Go over there—see if you can convince them you don’t know jack shit. Head this fucking thing off.”
“You’ve talked to Robinson?”
Lou’s eyes rolled. “Oh, only six or twelve times, about this. You want me to call, and set it up?”
I sighed. Nodded.
“For when?”
“Soon as the hell possible,” I said. “This morning, even—just allow me time to deal with Tubbo.”
Lou nodded, breathed dragon smoke, and rose. Heading for the door, he said, “I’ll take care of it,” and went out.
I was halfway through my mail when Gladys buzzed, and informed me my “ten o’clock” was here. I told her to usher him in, which she did.
“Quite a step up from Van Buren Street,” Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert said jovially, after we’d shook hands and he’d settled into a leather chair across from me.
If Bill Drury was the best-dressed honest cop in town, Dan Gilbert was the best-dressed bent one…which was a bigger distinction, after all.
Pushing sixty, a fleshy six-footer in a three-piece three-hundred-buck double-breasted gray pinstripe suit with a blood-drop ruby stickpin in his gray-and-blue tie and several diamond-and-gold rings on various pudgy fingers, Tubbo sat with an ankle on a knee and his pearl gray homburg in his lap. His keg of a head sat on an ample double chin, and his dark eyes in their pouches were sharp with cunning if not quite intelligence. His nose was flat and pointed, like Jack Frost’s icicle snout starting to melt; his chin cleft, a Kirk Douglas dimple; his hair neatly combed salt-and- pepper, nicely barbered; his eyebrows thick dark slashes that might have been borrowed from Rocco or Charley Fischetti.
“I guess you haven’t been over to our new offices before, Tub,” I said, leaning back in the swivel chair, arms folded, giving him a faint meaningless smile.
“You should come over to my suite at the Sherman,” he said. “Very nice. Nothing like an office with room service.”
Tubbo was on leave of absence from the State’s Attorney’s office, for the duration of his campaign for sheriff— not that he’d ever spent much time at the office out of which he supposedly supervised one hundred detectives.
“How’s the campaign going?” I asked.
“Swell. Public’s really responding to our message.”
“What message is that? I’ve been out of town.”
“Oh. Well. I’m going to drive all the gambling out of Cook County—just give me your vote, and six months.”
I had to grin. “Does that include that handbook of yours, over on West Washington?”
Tubbo didn’t take offense; he just flashed me a yellow grin, and reached inside his suitcoat pocket. I knew he wasn’t going for a weapon—well, not a weapon that used bullets.
The envelope he flopped onto my desk would have green ammunition in it, no doubt.
“Take a look,” he said. “Two grand in fifties.”
During his thirty-three years as a police officer, Tubbo Gilbert had been a busy boy. He’d been a labor organizer prior to his first assignment on the P.D.—patrolman—and in less than nine years, he made captain. And it didn’t interfere with his continued union organizing, at all. After he became chief investigator for the State’s Attorney’s office, few Chicago-area labor crimes were solved; and in his eighteen years with the State’s Attorney, gambling flourished in suburban Cook County, while not one major Capone hoodlum went to jail—although Tubbo did find time to frame a few of the Outfit’s competitors, notably bootlegger Roger Touhy.
