The Million-Dollar Wound

there. The case had been purposely sidetracked in Cook County, somewhere, and conveniently forgotten.”

Jesus. In 1930 I’d been part of a raid on a sleazy South Halsted Street brothel and we’d caught the stocky little pimp slipping out the back with the brothel’s tally sheet in hand; later he’d slapped one of the whores who said the wrong incriminating thing about him, and I’d sworn to myself the little bastard would serve time in the Bridewell for it, Chicago or no Chicago. Now, almost ten years later, it looked like maybe he would.

“I’ve laid the information before State’s Attorney Thomas E. Courtney,” Pegler said grandiosely, “who informs me he’ll request Bioff’s extradition to Illinois.”

“By God, I think you’ve got the little bastard.”

“I’ve got the little kike, all right.”

Silence.

“Watch that, okay, Mr. Pegler?”

Amused little smile. “You’re offended?”

“Nothing much offends me. But sometimes I get pissed off awful fierce. You remember me-the guy with the gun?”

Pegler smirked at that and said, “At any rate, your friend Lieutenant Drury has come up with the goods on George Browne, as well. In 1925 Browne was involved in a gangland shooting, in a restaurant; he was shot in the seat of the pants, and his companion was killed. Browne was quoted as telling the police at the scene, ‘I’ll take care of it, boys.’ Four weeks after he got out of the hospital, the man who fired the shots was himself shot to death, his assailant never found.”

“That’s not as good as an unserved jail sentence,” I said, “but it’ll play in your column. It’ll paint Browne as a union man with a gangster past.”

“They’re both finished,” he said, with quiet glee. “And so is the Stagehands Union.”

“I wouldn’t count on that. Maybe they’ll clean house. Maybe if Bioff and Browne and the Outfit are tossed out, it’ll be a real union again.”

He looked like he had a bad taste in his mouth, as he said, “A real union, what is that? An inert rank and file who go to meetings only when something’s in it for them. And a union boss who’s part ham actor and part Tammany chief, who knows enough not to show too much respect for their intelligence.”

“I don’t want to talk unions with you, Pegler. I’m for exposing Bioff and Browne and Dean and the rest, because they’re perverting something that should work. But your anti-unionism offends me, it’s bullshit. My father-”

“Your father. He was of that particular tribe, I take it?”

“What?”

Pegler rose. Stabbed his cigarette out in the glass tray on my desk. “Nothing. It’s too bad you’re unwilling to put your convictions on the line and tell me what else you’ve discovered, in your own investigation. You’ll be a hero in my column, nonetheless, as the surviving arresting officer, as the man whose hard work ten years ago made possible bringing Willie Bioff to justice today.”

“Spell my name right and mention the agency and I won’t sue you.”

“How generous of you. Are you certain you wouldn’t care to share any further information with me? There’s money in it. A man of your persuasion can appreciate that, I’m sure.”

“My persuasion?”

His lip curled in a patrician sneer. “You’re a Jew, aren’t you? Mr. Heller? You don’t look it, but you are.”

“So fucking what?”

He didn’t like being cursed at; his face reddened and his satanic eyebrows twitched and he said, “Listen to me, you foulmouthed little hebe-if I didn’t need you to make this story float, I’d paint you for the kike coward you are…”

I was out from behind the desk before he could finish and grabbed him by the wings of his suitcoat and dragged him out of my inner office and dragged him through my outer office and hurled him out into the hall, where he bounced up against and off the abortionist’s office, almost shattering that glass.

“I could break you,” Pegler said, sitting in a pile, breathing through his nose like a bull.

“I could kill you,” I said.

He thought that over. I was, after all, a guy who’d pointed a gun at him more than once. And I was breathing hard, too, and looked like I meant it. I did.

He pushed up and straightened himself and walked off without another word.

That evening, in Barney’s Cocktail Lounge, I sat in a rear booth with my ex-boxer pal and said, “I never felt this Jewish before. I never felt particularly Jewish at all. Anyway, not since I was a kid.”

Barney hadn’t been surprised by my Pegler story.

“There’s a lot of it goin’ around,” he said, shrugging.

I knew what he meant.

“Don’t start with me, Barney. Please don’t start.”

He didn’t. But for the first time I think I understood him, and his concerns. I knew that something was loose in the world that was worse than the Chicago Outfit.

For the moment, however, the Outfit was bad enough.

Because suddenly there was Little New York Campagna standing by the booth with his cold dark eyes and impassive putty face trained on me.

And without saying a word, he clearly conveyed to me that somebody in a suite at the Bismarck Hotel was waiting to see me.

Nitti didn’t have an office in the Loop. He did his business out of several restaurants and various hotels-most frequently the Bismarck, on the corner of LaSalle and Randolph, just across from City Hall. I’d met Nitti here before, in this very suite-the Presidential Suite, the little gold plate on the door said. The room was at the dead end of the seventh-floor hall, down at the left after you stepped off the elevator, and I was presently standing in a vestibule facing Louis Campagna.

We’d walked here from Barney’s cocktail lounge; a gentle snow falling. Sunday night in the Loop, and the concrete canyons were strangely peaceful. Like church. My heart was a trip-hammer.

And it hadn’t slowed yet; which was fine with me, since having a heart that was still beating was something I valued. Campagna hadn’t said two words to me on the way here-he hadn’t said one word, either-but he was keeping two eyes on me, rarely blinking, perfecting a cold dark stare that made me wonder just how much trouble I was in.

If I was in serious trouble, wouldn’t I be dead in an alley by now? Or did Nitti merely want to talk to me, first? He’d sent Campagna after me, tonight, just as earlier in the week he’d sent him to deliver a message; and Campagna was beyond that sort of thing-he was in the inner circle, now, not just a bodyguard or an enforcer. Yet Frank had sent him, not some flunkie. What did that mean?

The door opened and Johnny Patton, in a dapper gray topcoat with a dark fur collar, exited, looking back, smiling, saying, “A pleasure as always, Frank,” a black homburg in one gloved hand.

What was Patton-the “boy mayor of Burnham,” Eddie O’Hare’s business partner at Sportsman’s Park-doing here? And why had Nitti let me see him?

Patton put his hat on and walked by without a word, not recognizing me, or not choosing to.

Campagna jerked a thumb toward the door, which Patton had left ajar.

That meant I was to go in.

There were no bodyguards in the suite, at least in the living room that I entered into, the same white- appointed, gold-trimmed room I remembered. A bedroom off the entryway, to my right, had its door cracked open and a light was on; someone was rustling around in there. Whether a bodyguard or a woman or what, I couldn’t say. And I sure as hell didn’t ask.

As for Nitti, he was seated on a white couch, feet on a glass coffee table on which were several stacks of ledger books; he was thumbing through one, reading one of the large, awkward-to-hold books like the latest popular novel. He was wearing a brown silk dressing gown, black dress pants and brown slippers. There was no monogram on the robe. A glass of milk, about a third drunk, was making a ring on the coffee table, next to some ledgers.