explained the committee using him—a guy with connections in the underworld who wasn’t connected.
O’Conner was saying, “The committee didn’t want to hire either Bill or me, because we’re controversial figures. We were fired off the police force, after all.”
“I’d think getting fired off the crookedest goddamn force in the country would be a glowing recommendation.”
“Doesn’t matter. We’re getting the job done.”
O’Conner escorted me into the living room area of the nicely appointed suite, where my hosts were waiting. A sofa along the window overlooked Grant Park and the lake—a breathtaking view made irrelevant by the gray afternoon—with several easy chairs pulled up close, a coffee table between…a nice, cozy setting for an inquisition.
As we approached, the three men who’d been seated together on that couch rose as one. All three had dark- rimmed glasses and dark hair and receding hairlines—they might have been brothers.
Or maybe the Three Stooges—only all of them were Moes, albeit balding ones.
The one nearest me extended a hand—he was tall, lean, but sturdy-looking with an oblong face that had slits for eyes and a slightly wider slit for a mouth, which right now were combining to form a stern expression. Fiftyish, he wore a brown suit and a darker brown tie. “George Robinson, Mr. Heller, associate counsel. Thank you for joining us.”
It was a firm handshake, and his words were cordial enough; but his manner made me think of a high school principal regarding a problem student.
“Rudolph Halley, Mr. Heller,” said the man next to Robinson—a head shorter, a good ten years younger—in a high-pitched voice laced with a lisp. “Chief Counsel.” A compact character in a blue suit with a blue-and-red bow tie, Halley had a moon face, its roundness offset by a cleft chin and hard dark eyes.
“Mr. Halley,” I said, accepting his aggressive handshake. Then I turned to the remaining man, and said, “Mr. Kurnitz,” nodding to the lawyer, who was at right, standing slightly apart from the other two.
“Mr. Heller,” he said, nodding back, in a well-modulated courtroom baritone. He wore a gray suit, nicely cut, and a blue-and-gray tie, and would have been handsome if his intense brown eyes hadn’t been too large for his face even before his eyeglasses magnified them.
They returned to the couch and I took a comfortable armchair opposite them, with the coffee table—piled with various files and notebooks—between us. Water glasses and a coffee cup also rested on the glass top. The grayness of the afternoon filled the windows behind them like a bleak expressionist painting.
O’Conner, standing near the other easy chair but not taking it, asked, “Anybody want anything?” To me he explained, “There’s coffee and ice water and soft drinks.”
“No pretzels?” I asked.
Nobody but me found that funny.
Robinson and Halley asked for refills of their water glasses, and Kurnitz requested another coffee, black. I asked for a Coke. O’Conner hustled over to the wet bar and filled everybody’s orders. Glad to see the ex-cop had a significant job here on the Crime Committee.
“Mr. Heller, you’ve had an interesting and varied career,” Robinson said. He managed to make that sound like an insult.
Sitting forward, Halley said, “You can understand why we would like to have your cooperation.”
“I’m here,” I said with a shrug.
O’Conner was in the process of serving everybody.
“You left the police force, locally,” Robinson said, referring to a spiral notebook, “in December 1932, not long after an incident involving Frank Nitti.”
“Two crooked cops tried to kill him,” I said. “They expected me to lie for them. I didn’t.”
“You testified to that fact in April 1933,” Halley said. Unlike Robinson, he didn’t refer to any notes, and I guess I was supposed to be impressed.
O’Conner—after serving me last, handing me a water glass with ice cubes and Coke—settled into the easy chair at my right. He flashed me a nervous smile; he hadn’t gotten himself anything to drink.
“I don’t have anything to add, where that incident is concerned,” I said. “It’s all part of the public record—my testimony speaks for itself. Besides, that’s ancient history, isn’t it? Frank Nitti is dead.”
“Killed himself,” Robinson said, in a “crime does not pay” fashion.
I shifted in my seat. “Why do you need to ask me things you already know the answers to? If you have the FBI file on me—”
“We don’t have your file, Mr. Heller,” Halley said. That nasal voice of his was weirdly hypnotic. “J. Edgar Hoover has gone on record with his opinion that the Mafia is a myth—we are receiving no cooperation whatsoever from the FBI, which is why we have to work so hard investigating, on our own steam.”
I kept a poker face, but relief was flooding through me. I knew for a fact—because just last year, I’d been confronted with it in an interrogation in Washington, D.C.—that the FBI had a file on me as thick as the Chicago phone book. Once, a long time ago, I had told J. Edgar to go fuck himself (that’s not a paraphrase, by the way) and he had ever since taken a personal interest in my welfare. I had been expecting Kefauver’s advance team, here, to have that handy little reference tool to guide them.
“We do have the cooperation of the IRS,” Robinson said. “And Frank J. Wilson gives you high marks.”
Wilson had been one of the IRS agents who had nailed Capone; until recently, he’d been head of the Secret Service, another Treasury Department operation.
“That’s nice to hear,” I said.
