The Million-Dollar Wound

further that she preferred “Miss Andrews,” to which I replied, “Gladys-that’s Hal Davis of the Daily News calling, needling me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Why would Westbrook Pegler be in Chicago, for Christ’s sakes, and if he was, why would he be calling about some Chicago racetrack tycoon getting pushed?”

“Pushed?”

She hadn’t been affiliated with the detective business long.

“Killed,” I explained. “Shot. Rubbed out. Liquidated. Mob style.”

“If you say so,” she said, disinterested but lingering.

“Shoo. Go file.”

“Yes, Mr. Heller.”

God, what I wouldn’t have given for even some sarcasm out of that kid. She was cute as lace panties but not nearly so much fun.

A client kept an eleven o’clock appointment, the office manager from the Swift Plant; he was white collar, but he brought the fragrance of the stockyards with him. He had a recurring pilferage problem-desks, lockers, cabinets forced open, pocketbooks gotten into. I explained how we could plant valuable articles in obvious places, as decoys to invite theft, articles to which thief-branding dyes would be applied. I was explaining how I preferred dry dyes of the sort that didn’t immediately stain, but that perspiration would soon bring out, when Gladys leaned in and interrupted.

“He’s here.”

It wasn’t like her to interrupt; most unbusinesslike.

“Who?” I said.

“Mr. Pegler.”

I shook my head, smiled; Gladys hadn’t met Davis yet. “Tell him to go to hell.”

“I will not.”

“Then tell him it’ll cost him a C-note if he wants a quote. That’ll get rid of him.”

She pursed her lips; she wasn’t blowing me a kiss. “What is a C-note?”

“A hundred dollars. Go.”

She went.

“Excuse me,” I said to my client. “Where were we?”

“Dry dyes,” the stockyard office manager said, looking bewildered.

The door flew open and I could hear Gladys saying, “Please,” and a big red-faced man was in the doorway. I yanked the automatic out from under my arm and yelled, “Up with ’em!”

Gladys screamed, the office manager dropped to the floor and the big man’s face whitened. He swallowed, thickly. He was very well dressed; double-breasted gray pinstripe suit with stylish wide lapels, a flourish of a hanky in his breast pocket, a wide, thick-knotted, dark blue tie patterned with white abstract shapes. He put his hands slowly in the air, narrowing his eyes, which hid under shaggy, cultivated-to-points satanic eyebrows.

“Put that ridiculous thing away,” he said. The words were strong, but the tenor voice had something of a quaver. The voice wasn’t as big as the man, that’s all there was to it.

I came around the desk, saying, “Just keep ’em up,” and patted him down. He stood for the frisk, but scowled all the while. He had on heavy, masculine lotion; pine needles.

He was clean. Which is to say no weapon, but also well tailored and freshly bathed. This guy had money and I didn’t think it came from the rackets. Not of the Nitti variety, anyway.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked, lowering the gun but not putting it away.

“Who the hell do you think? Westbrook Pegler!”

“Oh.” Now I was swallowing. “I’ll be damned if I don’t think you are.” I turned to the stockyards office manager who was crouching on the floor, looking up like a big bug. “We about had our business taken care of, didn’t we, Mr. Mertz?”

He got up, brushing himself off, said, “Yes,” and I told him my secretary would call him and set up an on-site meeting with one of my operatives as he scurried out. I closed the door on Gladys’s pretty, glowering face.

“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Pegler?”

“I’m not sure I’m staying. I’m not delighted with having guns pointed at me.”

“But then, who is? Please,” I said, smiling nervously, pulling up a chair for him.

He cleared his throat, in a grumbling manner, and sat and I got behind the desk. Slipped the gun away, under my shoulder, feeling embarrassed and trigger-happy.

“Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

“Not at all.”

He took a gold, FWP-emblazoned case from his inside suitcoat pocket and a cigarette from the case and lit it up and I pushed the ashtray his way, saying, “This wasn’t a story I expected someone of your stature to be interested in covering.”

“What story is that?”

“The O’Hare shooting.”

“Oh. Afraid I just glanced at the headlines, this morning; he was a racetrack promoter, wasn’t he? Why, were you involved in that?”

“If I might explain,” I said, and briefly I told him about yesterday’s incident, and my fears about mob retaliation and my reluctance to talk to any newshound.

“I didn’t believe for a minute that Westbrook Pegler had called me,” I said.

“Admittedly Chicago isn’t my beat,” he granted. “But they do carry my column here.”

That they did. I often read Pegler, who was basically one of those journalistic attack dogs who latched onto whichever side of an issue grabbed him by the seat of the pants. He was the king of the “meatball” journalists, always on whichever side was the most entertaining and/or controversial, the side most likely to get the loudest cheers, or boos, from the grandstand. You couldn’t peg Pegler for the left or the right, politically; one day he was praising a lynch party for ridding the world of a killer, and the next he was bemoaning poverty in the slums. Champion of the underdog, on Monday, he might be defender of the rich, on Tuesday.

“Do you know a man named Willie Bioff?” he asked.

Willie Bioff? Why in hell would Westbrook Pegler be asking about that fat little creep?

“I used to,” I said.

“What do you know of him?”

I shrugged. “He used to be a pimp. He was a union slugger, too. He’s still involved in union organizing, isn’t he?”

“That’s an understatement. Ostensibly, he’s the bodyguard of a man named George Browne. In reality, he runs…” And here he paused, in order to spit each of the following words out like distasteful seeds: “…the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.”

“The Stagehands Union,” I nodded. “Yeah, I know Browne. He’s a drunk, and a blowhard. But when you prop him up he can make a speech and get the rank and file stirred up. He’s got patriotism and mom and apple pie and ten other kinds of baloney, for any occasion.”

“But you see him as a figurehead.”

“Yeah, sure. Bioff’s been the brains behind Browne for a long, long time. They say Browne drinks a hundred bottles of beer a day. He better have somebody’s brains behind him.”

Pegler drew on the cigarette; smiled a little. Just being polite, I thought. He said, “I met…or rather, encountered Willie Bioff once, many years ago. 1913, I’d say. That was the last time I worked a Chicago beat steadily. My father was the star rewrite man for the American, at the time, and they took me on as a favor to him.”

“You must’ve just been a kid.”

“Seventeen,” he said, his elaborate shrug not masking his pride. “And working for the United Press at the same time. I may live in the East, Mr. Heller, but I’m of the Chicago school of journalism. The New York school represents…” And these words, too, were distasteful seeds to spit. “…ethics and manners. Reporters on rival papers actually cooperated with each other in gathering facts when working on the same story.” The thought of it was beyond him, and he smiled as he described the Chicago school: “We, on the other hand, sanctioned the