“Okay.”
I picked up his automatic and pointed it at him. “Pull over and let me out.”
His cheeks were blood red. “I’m not stopping!”
I put the gun in his face.
He swallowed. “I’ll slow down, but I’m not stopping!”
“I’ll settle for that.”
“At least leave me the gun!”
He slowed, I opened the door, stepped onto the running board, tossed the gun on the seat and dove for grass.
The other black coupe came roaring up, and then it was alongside of O’Hare, both cars going fifty at least, barreling through the park, and then a shotgun barrel extended from the rider’s window of the coupe and blasted a hole in the driver’s window of O’Hare’s car, the roar of the gun and the crash of the glass fighting over who was loudest.
O’Hare swerved away from the other coupe, then back into it, nearly sideswiping them; they were riding the white center line of the four-lane street. I could see them, barely, two anonymous hoodlums in black hats and black coats in their black car with their black gun, which blew a second hole in O’Hare’s window, and in him, too, apparently, for the fancy coupe careened out of control, lurched over the curb, sideswiping a light pole, its white globe shattering, and then shuttled down the streetcar tracks like a berserk sidecar and smashed into a trolley pole and stopped.
The other black Ford coupe cut its speed, stopping for a red light at Western. I couldn’t make out the license plates, but they were Illinois. Then it moved nonchalantly on.
I was the first one to O’Hare’s car. The window on the side I’d been sitting on was spiderwebbed from buckshot. I opened the door and there he was, slumped, hatless, the wheel of the car bent away from him, his eyes open and staring, lips parted as if about to speak, blood spattered everywhere, one hand tucked inside his jacket, like the Little General he’d patterned himself after, two baseball-size holes from close-up shotgun blasts in the driver’s window just above him, like two more empty eyes, staring.
The.32 automatic was on the seat beside him.
I had to find a phone. Not to call the cops: some honest citizen would’ve beat me to it, by now.
I wanted to call Gladys and tell her if she hadn’t already deposited O’Hare’s check, drop everything and do it.
The two dicks from the detective bureau knew who I was, and called my name in to Captain Stege. So I ended up having to hang around waiting for Stege to show up, as did everybody else, four uniformed officers, the two detective bureau dicks, a police photographer, somebody from the coroner’s office, three guys with the paddy wagon that O’Hare would be hauled off to the nearby morgue in. The captain wanted to see the crime scene, including poor old Eddie O’Hare, who accordingly had spent the past forty-five minutes of this cold afternoon a virtual sideshow attraction for the gawkers who’d gathered around the wrecked car, which was crumpled against a trolley pole like a used paper cup. Ogden is a busy street; and several residential areas were close by, as was Mt. Sinai Hospital, a pillar covering the corner of California and Ogden. So there were plenty of gawkers.
Lieutenant Phelan, a gray-complected man in his forties, asked me some questions and took some notes, but it was pretty perfunctory. Phelan knew that Stege would take over, where questioning me was concerned. Stege and me went way back.
The captain was an exception to the Chicago rule: he was an honest cop. He’d helped nail Capone-his raid on the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, where O’Hare’s accountant Les Shumway had once worked, provided the feds with the ledgers that allowed them to make their income-tax case against the Big Fellow. Later Stege (rhymes with “leggy,” which he wasn’t, being just a shade taller than a fireplug) had been the head of the special Dillinger Squad.
His one bad break was getting unfairly tarnished in the Jake Lingle affair. Lingle, a
But that was almost ten years ago. Now he was the grand old man of the force, a favorite of the Chicago press when an expert quote on the latest headline crime was needed.
There was a time when Stege despised me. He had me pegged as a crooked cop, which was true to a point but by Chicago standards I was a piker; all I did was give some false testimony at the Lingle trial (in return for a promotion to plainclothes), so the patsy the mob and the D.A.’s office selected could take the fall and put a sensational story that refused to die in the press finally to rest.
Plus, I’d later testified, truthfully, against Miller and Lang, the late Mayor Cermak’s two police bodyguards who had attempted to assassinate Frank Nitti for His Honor, and failed (which Nitti’s hit on Cermak, less than two months later, had not). Testifying against those cops, dirty as they were, still made two black marks against me with Stege: I’d embarrassed the department publicly; and I’d tarnished the martyr Cermak’s memory. Stege, you see, had been a Cermak crony.
Still, in recent years, Stege seemed to have earned a grudging respect for me. We’d bumped heads in the Dillinger case and a few times after and found, despite ourselves, we often saw eye to eye. Considering how much shorter he was than me, that was an accomplishment. Anyway, he no longer seemed to despise me.
Or that’s what I thought, until I saw the look on his face when he climbed out of the chauffeured black-and- white squad car, which had come up with siren screaming, as if there was any rush where O’Hare was concerned.
Stege was a stocky, white-haired little man with a doughy face and black-rim glasses. He looked like an ineffectual owl. Looks can be deceiving.
“Heller, you lying goddamn son of a bitch,” he said, striding over on short legs to where I stood, on the grass, away from the gawkers and the crumpled car and dead Eddie O’Hare. He wore a topcoat as gray as the overcast afternoon and a shapeless brown hat and half of a grayish-brown cigar was stuck in the corner of his tight mouth. He poked my chest with a short, thick finger not much longer than the cigar. “You’re out of business. You overstepped yourself this time, you cagey bastard. You’re going to jail.”
“I’m glad to see you’re keeping an open mind,” I said.
“Stay,” he said, as if to a dog, pointing to the ground where I stood.
He went over and had a lingering look at O’Hare. Then he allowed the paddy-wagon cops to pull the body out of the car onto a sheet. Lieutenant Phelan bent down and frisked the corpse; emptied its pockets. I couldn’t make out the contents from where I stood. The crowd was wide-eyed as the cops wrapped the body in the sheet and tossed him in the paddy wagon with a
The car had already been searched; I’d seen Phelan find a steno pad in the glove box of the car-O’Hare’s secretary’s steno pad, perhaps? Had that been the “papers” she wanted to get out of his car? At any rate, Phelan was showing the pad to Stege, who was thumbing through it; he stopped at a page and read, then glanced over at me.
Stege came over and said, “Give me your story from the top.”
“O’Hare approached me to handle a security matter at Sportsman’s Park,” I said. “He had a pickpocket problem there. I went out today and had a look at his plant. Then he offered to drive me into the Loop and I took him up on it.”
“That’s it? That’s your story?”
“Every word is true, Captain.”
“A witness-a guy who was painting windowsills on a ladder over on Talman Avenue-saw the whole thing. And he says you jumped from the car, seconds before this went down.”
I’d seen a guy in work clothes being questioned, earlier, by Phelan. I’d noticed them looking over at me, too, so this revelation came as no real surprise.
“Yes I did jump from the car. I noticed we were being followed, and I noticed too that the car behind us was picking up speed. I asked O’Hare to let me out, he refused, and I jumped.”
