I almost threw a paperweight at him. “What the fuck kind of thing is that to say? I got lines I don’t cross, for Chrissake!”
He got up, patting the air with both palms. “I know, Nate, I know, I’m sorry…. It’s just—after all these years, I still have trouble keeping track of what they are, exactly.”
And he went out.
The Stevens Hotel was hardly an out-of-the-way hole-in-the-wall where an investigator might discreetly interview informants. On Michigan Avenue between Balbo and Eighth, overlooking Grant Park and Lake Michigan, the massive, rococo hotel was the world’s largest, with its three thousand rooms, twenty-five stories and four finger-like skyscraper towers.
Still, it made some sense, Kefauver’s team camping out, here. Uncle Sam had a relationship with the Stevens, which had been used by the military during the war, for offices, training, and even billeting. And with all these rooms, all this activity—who knew how many conventions and conferences were going on in the hotel right now?— anybody could get lost in the crowd, or at least have an excuse for being here.
Though the Stevens was only a four-block walk from the Monadnock, a light rain encouraged me to hop a cab, which dropped me at the Michigan Avenue entry. A corridor of store-front windows opened into a two-story, ornate lobby bordered by yawningly wide staircases, leading to ballrooms and, no kidding, an ice-skating rink. Shaking the drizzle from my fedora, I strolled on into the vast white chamber, a world of marble pilasters, luxurious Louis XVI furnishings, and fluffy clouds drifting on a high, carved-plaster, gold-trimmed ceiling’s painted sky—what better setting for Chicago gangsters?
The elevators were to the left of the check-in counter, near an elegant sitting area of round button-tufted couches and overstuffed chairs. I spotted a small man in a brown suit and green snapbrim, seated in a chair between a couple of potted ferns, legs crossed exposing diamond-pattern socks over brown tasseled loafers. Though his identity was hidden by the
When I turned my back to this possible sentry—or spy—I continued to watch him in the polished bronze elevator door, to see if he peeked out over or around that sports section. He did not. Maybe I was just being paranoid—but that was okay, because I was, after all, a professional paranoid.
When I got off on the tenth floor, a short, burly-looking little guy—snappy, in a well-cut blue suit with blue-and- red striped tie and gray feathered hat—was waiting to get on. His hair was black and his eyes were like black buttons in a rumpled oval face made round by five o’clock-shadowed jowls.
I knew him and he knew me—and we both froze there, long enough for him to miss the elevator. We understood at once why we both were on the tenth floor of the Stevens.
“Well, hello, Jake,” I said, and offered my hand.
Jake Rubinstein’s grip was firm, but his smile wasn’t. “Been a long time, Nate. Since before the war, right?”
“Right. I thought you were in Dallas.”
“Yeah, yeah I still am.” He hitched his shoulders, Cagney-style, only without the confidence. “I had, uh… business back here.”
We both knew what kind of business—the Kefauver variety—but that went unstated.
Jake punched the DOWN button, and said, “So is Barney in town?”
“No, he and Cathy are in L.A. They got remarried.”
“Ah, that’s great. I heard he shook that monkey off his back. That’s great, too. Gutsy little bastard.”
This strained exchange referred to our mutual pal, Barney Ross, who had come back from the war with a morphine habit that he managed to kick, going public with his problem.
All three of us had grown up in the Lawndale district, near Maxwell Street, and we’d all been little street hustlers as kids, only Barney went on to be a world’s champ prizefighter, I became a cop, and Jake a strong-arm goon and bagman for local unions. A few years ago Jake had moved to Dallas, where (among other things) he managed the Silver Spur, a nightclub.
The elevator made a return stop, and Jake and I bid our goodbyes, and he went on his way, and I on mine.
Once you got away from the area around the elevators, the halls of the posh hotel got as tight as a train car. I took a right down to the door of the corner suite where I’d been told to come. I knocked on a gold-edged ivory door.
After peephole inspection, the door swung open and revealed Drury’s fellow exile, ex-police captain Tim O’Conner, a lanky, blue-eyed, sandy-blond Irishman whose narrow, handsomely sharp-featured face was mildly ravaged by pock-marks (cheeks) and drink (nose).
“Doorman, now, Tim?” I asked, as he ushered me in. “That the only job available to an ex-copper these days?”
“I’m lucky anybody’ll have me.” Like Drury, O’Conner was well dressed for a cop, his off-the-rack brown suit livened up by a pale yellow shirt and dark yellow tie. “Actually, these gentlemen thought you might warm up to a familiar face.”
I stopped him in the hall-like entryway of the suite, off of which were closets and a bathroom. “Are you working for the committee?”
He took my raincoat and hung it up; I kept my hat, but took it off.
“In a roundabout way,” O’Conner said. “This local lawyer working with the committee, Kurnitz, I hired on as his investigator. He’s here, you’ll meet him, Kurnitz, I mean.”
“I’ve met him before.”
Kurnitz was an eccentric, full-of-himself lawyer in the Loop who did a lot of criminal work, both for white-collar criminals, like embezzlers, and blue-collar crooks, like heist men. He didn’t mouthpiece for the mob, though, which
