Chicago Confidential

“Sure,” I said, not getting why she wanted a keepsake of her and this harasser.

She beamed at me, stood, slung her purse strap over a shoulder, and reminded me where I was to meet her; we exchanged goodbyes and I watched her walk away. It was a hell of a thing, her walk, a twitchy affair that seemed to propel her as far to the sides as it did forward.

About two minutes later I was still contemplating that walk when my phone rang. It was my Chicago partner, Lou Sapperstein—bald, sixty, a lean hard op who looked like an accountant, thanks to the tortoise-shell glasses— and his Crosbyish baritone over the long-distance wire was edged with irritation.

“You gotta get your ass back here and do something about your pal,” Sapperstein said.

“My pal? I got lots of pals, Lou. You’re my pal.”

“Screw you. You know who I’m talkin’ about—Drury!”

I sighed. “What’s he up to now?”

“Well, for one thing, he hasn’t followed up on half a dozen assignments I’ve given him. And for another, he’s spending his time playing footsie with Robinson.”

George S. Robinson was Kefauver’s stalking horse, the Senate Crime Investigating Committee’s associate counsel, who’d been working in concert with the Chicago Crime Commission, a citizens’ watchdog group dating back to Prohibition.

“Christ,” I said. “He’s going to get me shot.”

“No, Nate—he’s going to get me shot…you’re on the lam in sunny Southern Cal, remember?”

“Yeah, and Bugsy Siegel didn’t get nailed out here in his goddamn living room, I suppose? Fuck—can’t you handle him, Lou?”

“He’s your friend.”

“He’s your friend, too!”

We all dated back to the Chicago P.D. pickpocket detail, in the early thirties, Sapperstein, Bill Drury, and me. After that, Lou and I and Bill’s partner Tim O’Conner played poker together, for years.

“Bill promised he’d lay off,” I said, “while he was on salary with us.”

“Drury is a lunatic on a crusade. Nice guy, great guy, but he’s supposed to be working for the A-1 and instead he’s out gathering evidence for that hick senator in the coonskin cap.”

Kefauver had worn a coonskin cap as a gimmick in his Tennessee campaign to win a Senate seat despite the best corrupt efforts of Boss Crump’s Dixiecrat machine.

“I’ll call Bill,” I said into the phone. “I’ll talk to him.”

“You need to fire him.”

“He’s my friend, Lou—one of my best friends.”

“Then come back and talk some sense into him.”

“I’m in the middle of a job out here.”

“Right—blonde or brunette?”

From the photo on my desk, Vera’s boyfriend Paul was looking up at me accusingly. “I won’t dignify that with a response.”

“Look, you can’t duck this Kefauver thing. You need to get back here, meet with those sons of bitches, tell them you don’t know anything, that they’re wasting their damn subpoenas, and—”

“And go to jail for contempt, and smear our agency’s good name.”

Lou blew me a long-distance raspberry. “Our agency’s ‘good’ name is built on your unsavory reputation, Nate. don’t kid a kidder.”

“Lou—I’ll talk to Drury.”

“Are you coming back? Should I put a light in the window?”

“I’ll talk to Bill, Lou. Goodbye.”

And I hung up.

I got myself a Dixie cup of water and sat and sipped and thought about Bill Drury and what a schmuck I’d been to hire him onto the A-l. I shook my head. This was one of the rare times when I’d fucked myself over by being too nice a guy….

My friend Bill Drury, former lieutenant on the Chicago P.D.—who’d been unadvisedly taking on the Chicago mobsters since he first came on the job, back when Capone was still in power—had been railroaded off the force (not for the first time) two years ago. He had been fighting for reinstatement in the courts, while writing antimob columns for the Chicago Herald-American and the Miami Daily News. Last year, when the Illinois Supreme Court refused to hear his case, Drury found his services as a crime reporter were no longer in demand, and he came to me, looking for a job as a private investigator. I had given it to him, on the condition he lay off the mob busting.

I knew I had to talk to him, but I didn’t feel ready to head back to Chicago. I enjoyed the Sunday afternoons with my sweet lovely son and my sweet lovely goddamn faithless bitch of an ex-wife. I’d gotten attached to the sunshine and the work was easy, and Kefauver’s people—some of whom were investigating out here, also, but looking for California crooks, not Chicago ones—hadn’t bothered me.

Both Bill Drury and his poor common sense were no longer in my thoughts as I parked on Le Conte Avenue, not far from the front gate of UCLA. I wandered through West wood Village—a collection of attractive boutiques and intimate restaurants in handsome Mediterranean-style buildings—enjoying the cool evening under a clear sky flung