“Yeah?”
He put a hand on my shoulder and I stopped to look at him. His grin was wide and ghastly, like a skull’s—this was a man who smiled only when he was wheedling or threatening.
Mortimer whispered: “Bill Drury has ceased to be a source for me—as you may have noticed. I need a new one. His murder gives you the perfect ‘in’ with the Crime Committee…. Halley’s turned Estes against me, and—”
I removed his hand as if it were a bug that had settled on my shoulder. “You really think this funeral’s a good place to recruit Bill Drury’s replacement?”
The hearse was gliding by, cars falling in line for the procession to Mt. Carmel cemetery.
“I mean no offense to the dead,” Mortimer said, “but you’re smarter than my previous source. You know what his motto was?”
Actually, I did.
But Mortimer said it: “‘A coward dies a thousand deaths, a brave man only one.’ A man who sees himself as a hero is a fool, Nate. You, on the other hand, are one tough, shrewd, manipulative son of a bitch.”
“Stop. I’ll blush.”
“In short, you could have been a newspaperman.” And he gave me that ghastly smile again. “Tah tah.” And he pitched his cigarette, trailing sparks into the street, and moved through the thinning crowd to go hail a taxi.
I slipped away, heading toward the parking lot. Lou Sapperstein—brown topcoat over a dark suit, his bald head hatless—was waiting at my Olds, leaning against a fender, having a smoke. He and I had been ushers; the pallbearers had been relatives but for ex-captain Tim O’Conner, Bill’s fellow railroaded-off-the-force police pal. I knew O’Conner had taken it hard—he’d been crying, and more than a little drunk, at the funeral home last night.
I had avoided him—I’m half-Irish, and that was enough to be embarrassed by Irish drunks who felt famously sorry for themselves.
At the immaculately landscaped cemetery, after the grave-side service—which was also overseen by the bishop, and well attended—I was walking with Lou along a graveled drive, heading back to my car when O’Conner came striding up alongside me.
“Got a minute, Nate?” the lanky ex-cop asked. With his black suit and tie under a black raincoat, O’Conner might have been the undertaker, not just a pallbearer; he looked like hell—his blue eyes bloodshot, his pockmarked face fish-belly pale, but for a drink-reddened nose.
Somehow I kept the sigh out of my voice. “Sure, Tim.”
His sandy blond hair riffling like thin wheat in the bitter breeze, the wind turning his black tie into a whip, O’Conner turned to Sapperstein, and, a little embarrassed, said, “If you’ll excuse us, Lou—”
Since Lou had also been a cop, and a friend of Drury’s, as well as a member of our poker-playing cadre, this seemed a vaguely insulting exclusion; but Sapperstein just shrugged and nodded and walked over by an oak tree, leaning against it, while O’Conner led me off between rows of headstones with their elaborate carvings and statuary.
“I know this shouldn’t be a surprise,” O’Conner said, hands dug in his raincoat pockets, his eyes hollow, “but somehow I thought Bill was…above anything anybody could do to him.”
“Nobody’s above a shotgun, Tim.”
He was shaking his head, staring at the earth, across which a few stray leaves were dancing. “I…this is fucking hard, Nate. Ever since I lost Janet…”
“She didn’t die, Tim. You fucked around on her, and she divorced you and took the kids.”
Now he looked right at me—his eyes tight with surprise. “Are you really this hard?”
“I see in the papers where you barely knew Bill.”
“Oh. That.”
O’Conner had been quoted as saying he’d had no business association with Drury in recent months—that in particular he hadn’t been part of his late friend’s journalistic endeavors. His comments had seemed designed to keep the heat off him with the Outfit.
Embarrassed, looking at the ground again, he said, “That was all true—I just didn’t mention that Bill and I had been working together, cooperating with Kefauver’s staff. I mean—that was confidential stuff.”
“Really? And are you still planning to spend your spare time, Tim, pouring Cokes and coffee for the Crime Committee?”
Chin up, now. “I’m still working for Kurnitz, and he’s still working with Robinson and Halley, yeah. I was hoping you’d come aboard.”
I laughed, once. “You think that’s the way to make this thing right?”
“You know there’s no way to make this right. Bill’s gone forever…and we let him down.”
“Bullshit. Bill was a grown-up. He knew the risks. He relished them.”
He was shaking his head; he looked like he was going to start crying again. “I just don’t want him to have died for nothing. I’m going to stick with the committee and see if I can help them bring these bastards down.”
“You really believe that? That Fischetti and Tubbo Gilbert and Ricca and the rest, that some out-of-town senators trying to make themselves look good politically can change the way life’s always been in Chicago?”
The wind shook the trees around us; the brittle brown leaves might have been laughing.
His chin was trembling as he withdrew a hand to point a finger at me, like a gun. “I’ll tell you this—if Tubbo was involved, he shot himself in his foot, this time. Halley says Kefauver is furious about these killings. Apparently, the senator says, to hell with waiting till after the election for the hearings.”
