“I can’t give you the name, Nate.”
“Don’t you trust me, either?”
“No—I don’t have a name.”
My eyes almost fell out of my head and into my coffee. “You don’t have a name for your surprise witness?”
Drury shrugged, embarrassed; he knew this was half-assed. “I told you—we’ve been going through intermediaries, and we’ve been talking on the phone. Our witness is nervous, understandably so.”
“How did you find this anonymous witness?”
“That attorney, Kurnitz, has a client at Joliet, who’s unhappy with the warden there. Our witness is a friend of the unhappy inmate, who’s been our chief intermediary.”
“What’s the inmate get out of it?”
“Kurnitz is going after the warden for mistreatment of prisoners and misappropriation of funds.”
Actually, that rang a bell: I’d seen stories in the press about this unlikely lawsuit.
The dark blue eyes were no longer penetrating; they had turned soft, and even sentimental. “Nate—I appreciate this. I didn’t know who else I could turn to.”
“It’s okay.”
“I know you don’t want to buck these Outfit guys. I know I’m imposing on our friendship….”
“Shut up, Bill. Drink your coffee.”
He flashed a chagrined grin, and drank his coffee.
So I followed Drury home. He was driving a blue Cadillac—a new model—which sure didn’t reflect his A-1 earnings; apparently he’d been paid well by journalists Lait & Mortimer and Lester Velie for his insider’s views on Chicago’s gangsters and the crooked cops who served them.
Funny, if you think about it—Drury despised police officers who took the mob’s money…yet he’d been making good money off the mob himself, lately.
Traffic on the Outer Drive was heavy—rush hour—and the going was slow; dusk was already darkening into night. When Drury’s Caddy and my Olds rolled past the Fischetti penthouse on Sheridan, I wondered if Jackie was sitting up there with Rocco, an engineer’s cap on her pretty blonde head, her lovely brown eyes glazed with horse.
Drury lived on Addison, a mile west of Wrigley Field, which we passed on our way. I knew this area well—the United States Marine Hospital, where I’d had outpatient treatment after the war (for my recurring malaria, among other things), was just three blocks northeast of here. And Riverview amusement park, for whom the A-1 provided security consulting, was less than a mile northeast.
This was a typical Chicago middle-class/working-class neighborhood, an amalgam of two-and three-story apartment buildings with an occasional single-family home. Some buildings, particularly on corners, housed apartments on the upper floor or two, with stores at street level. Town Hall Station— where in another life, not so long ago, Bill Drury had been in command—was just ten blocks away.
Drury’s block was dominated by the looming twin towers of nearby St. Andrew’s Church and, of course, the Ravenswood El tracks and the Addison Street Station. Most Chicago Els went from the North to the South Side, but the Ravenswood went nowhere, really, starting a couple miles further north and west, going down to curl around in the looping fashion that gave the Loop its name, then heading back from whence it came. The El ran along the trestles at the end of Drury’s block, curving east along Roscoe Street; the thunder of its trains was omnipresent.
Bill needed to park his car in the garage behind his house, before joining me in the Olds to drive over to Little Hell for our mysterious appointment with the Lone Ranger of surprise witnesses. We rolled past the Drury homestead, a narrow brick two-story with a spacious, open porch with brick pillars and white trim—a two-flat, though the entire building was filled with Drury and his extended family—and I followed Bill as he turned left on Wolcott.
I pulled over and waited with the motor running as Bill turned into the narrow alley, off of which was his garage. He would have to get out and unlock his garage door, climb back in the car to drive it in. So I wasn’t surprised that it was taking a while, and with a train roaring across the nearby El—at the other end of that alley you had to drive under the elevated train tracks—I didn’t react immediately, when I heard the two booms and the sharp crack.
For a couple seconds I tried to make them be part of the El racket, or maybe backfiring cars…a neighborhood service station was a block away, after all…and then I shut the car off, jumped out, and ran down the alley, filling my hand with the nine millimeter, trenchcoat flapping, my fedora damn near flying off.
I slowed to a stop at the garage, off the alley. The overhead door was swung up and open—Bill had backed the car in. Nobody was in sight, including Bill, but the Caddy’s windshield had four baseball-sized holes punched in it—in a neat row. As I approached the vehicle, the smell of cordite hanging in the air like foul factory smoke, I was careful not to step on the four shotgun casings on the cement…twelve gauge…and the single ejected shell from an automatic handgun…seemed to be a .45, but I didn’t bend down for a closer inspection. I was busy looking into the car, through the passenger window.
Bill was slumped in the front seat, still sitting behind the wheel, but the top of him draped across the rider’s seat. His well-punctured homburg was beside him, where it had fallen (or been blown) off. He might have been going for his glove compartment, where I knew he kept a .38, or maybe he’d just ducked down seeking safety when the assassins…two were indicated…stepped out of the garage where they must have been hiding, moving right around in front of his windshield, to start blasting, one with a shotgun, the other a .45.
But Bill Drury hadn’t made it to his revolver, or to safety— riddled with slugs as he was, blood streaming from a dozen nasty wounds in his face, chest, arms, and the reaching hand, the seat already soaked with glistening crimson. His eyes were wide and empty, but the surprise and fear were frozen on his pellet-ravaged face.
Probably the decent thing to do would have been to go up to the house and break the tragic news to his wife, so she could be spared discovering the body.
