I don’t know where he came from; I don’t know if he was staking out the lobby himself, or was on his way up to join his friend O’Conner with the Kefauver advance team.
But suddenly Bill Drury was yanking Sam Giancana to his feet, Giancana’s hat flying off, his grip on my arm popping open, just like the gangster’s eyes were popping when he saw the brawny Drury—in topcoat and homburg—right on top of him, all but screaming in his face.
“Are you getting rough with my friend?” Drury asked Giancana, gripping him by a bicep, looming over him.
I got up, saying, “Jesus, Bill—back off!”
Drury’s flushed Irish puss made a stark contrast with Giancana’s grayish Sicilian pallor. “You don’t want to get rough with my friends, Mooney.”
Giancana’s teeth were bared, like a growling dog. “You’re not a cop anymore, you dumb mick!”
Drury clutched Giancana’s other bicep, holding it as if to shake him. “I’m a licensed private investigator, Mooney. I’m an officer of the court. Are you packing? Care to stand for a frisk?”
I grabbed onto Drury and pulled him away from Giancana, whose eyes were wide and wild. I said, “Don’t do me any goddamn favors, Bill!”
People in the lobby, guests getting off the elevator, were noticing this, some frozen, others moving quickly on, but all of them wide-eyed and murmuring.
I turned to Giancana. “Sam, I apologize.”
His suit rumpled from Drury’s hands, Giancana was breathing hard, trembling with rage. He wasn’t looking at me: his crazed glazed gaze was strictly on the grinning Drury.
Giancana’s voice was soft—a terrible kind of softness: “You ain’t at fault, Heller. It’s your friend who has the problem.”
With me standing between them, my arms out like a ref who broke up a basketball court scuffle, Drury shouted at Giancana. “You’re goddamn right! I’m your problem, and all of you Sicilian sons of bitches better pack your bags, ’cause you’re either going to jail or back home to the motherland!”
Giancana picked up his hat, dusted it off.
I reached a hand out and said, “Sam….”
Snugging the snapbrim down over his bald pate, Giancana said, “Heller—you’re not to blame. You’re not to blame.”
And then the little gangster made a beeline through the white marble lobby, toward the Michigan Avenue exit, leaving his sports section behind.
Drury looked at me with concern. “Are you okay, Nate?”
“Am I okay? Are you drunk? Are you fucking crazy? That’s the looniest homicidal son of a bitch in the city! If you want to die, that’s your business—leave me the hell out of it!”
A hotel employee approached, a youngish man in a blue Stevens blazer. “Gentlemen—I’m afraid we can’t have a scene…. You’ll have to leave.”
Scowling, Drury got out his badge—his P.I. badge—and flashed it and said, “I’m a cop. This is police business. You just get back to your desk.”
“Yessir,” the hotel guy said, and scurried.
I sat back down on the round couch, and flopped back, stunned.
Drury plopped down next to me, grinning, pleased with himself. “They’re all cowards at heart…. Are you all right, Nate?”
“No, I’m not all right! What the hell was the idea?”
“That bastard was getting tough with you.”
“Do I look like I need you to defend me? If I want saved, I’ll go to a goddamn revival meeting. Jesus! Stay away from me, Bill—just stay away. I don’t want to be in your line of fire.”
Drury was spreading his hands. “What? What did I do?”
“You’re not a cop, anymore, Bill. They can shoot at you now—get it?”
He patted beneath his arm, where his shoulder-holstered .38 lived. “Let ’em try.”
“Oh, they will,” I said. “They will.”
He waved me off. “Don’t be an old woman.”
“The point is,” I said, getting up, “to be an old man.”
And I left him there to ponder that—though I doubted he would.
The black-eyed blonde’s name was Jackie Payne—Jacqueline, really, but nobody called her that except her parents, who she hadn’t seen in some time.
She was born and grew up in Kankakee, in the shadow of the state insane asylum, and as omens go, that was a hell of a one. Her parents were “real religious”—a polite way to say goddamn zealots—who had been ashamed of her wild behavior in high school, which is to say she’d been a cheerleader and in drama club.
A talent scout at the county fair—where she tap-danced and won five dollars—had encouraged her to look him up in Chicago; so, three and a half years ago, shortly after graduating Kankakee High, she had hopped the Twentieth Century east and, with the talent scout’s backing, took up residence in the Croyden, a Near Northside hotel catering to showgirls.
