She shook her head, shook her head. “I don’t believe you’re saying this. Surely you want to get the people who shot Uncle Jim-who tried to kill you! Don’t you think they ought to be brought to justice?”
“What justice is that? They own the cops, or most of the cops, anyway.”
“I don’t know…it just doesn’t seem right. We should do something.”
“You should do nothing but give your relatives some moral support. I’m going to do my job and see if I can’t keep your uncle alive.”
She sighed. She shrugged. “I suppose you’re right.”
“But you’re disappointed in me.”
“No. Not really.”
“What happened to not wanting me to take dangerous assignments?”
“This is different. This is personal. This is family.”
“This is nuts.”
“I just wish you…we…could
“I’m not Gary Cooper, honey. Nobody is.”
“Gary Cooper is,” she said, with a little pout.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think his real name is Frank.”
That made her smile, and she came over and gave me another hug. About then, Jim, Jr., came and found us.
“Pop’s back in his room,” he said. He looked ashen. I think the sight of his wounded father had shaken him pretty bad. “He’s awake-wants to see Mr. Heller.”
I walked down there. The little room was crowded. Ellen Ragen was standing holding her husband’s left hand, gently; a bottle of plasma was feeding that left arm some life, trying to put some color in the white little Irishman. A nurse was tending the plasma, while a doctor was writing something down on a clipboard. The doctor, a somber chap in his mid-forties, glanced at the three of us as we squeezed in, and said, “Everyone, including Mrs. Ragen, needs to clear the room. We’re going to be bringing in an oxygen tent momentarily.”
“Give me a minute with my friend here, Doc,” Jim said, nodding-barely, but nodding-toward me.
“No more than that,” the doctor said, sternly, and he went out, taking everybody but the patient, nurse and me with him.
“They’ll try to kill me here, lad,” he said. His eyes, for the first time since that afternoon he hired me as his bodyguard, showed fear. “I’m a dead man, sure.”
“Not yet you aren’t,” I said, and I quickly filled him in on my security plans. He smiled, narrowing his eyes in little facial assents to all of it.
“Can you protect my family?” he asked.
“You bet. I’ll put every op I have on this.”
“God bless you. God bless you.”
“What’s this about a statement to the State’s Attorney’s office?”
“I thought that would warn the bastards off.”
“Don’t think it worked, Jim.”
“It should’ve. It should’ve. They know I made affidavits.”
“Affidavits?”
“I fuckin’ read ’em to Serritella! Three affidavits in my safe deposit box. Had my lawyer write ’em up.”
“What’s in those affidavits, Jim?”
He smiled his thin smile. “Everything. I name all the names, lad. Every dirty deed I’ve been privy to, and I’ve been privy to more than a few. Those affidavits, they’re my insurance policy.”
“From the looks of you, you missed a premium.”
His eyes tightened. “That’s what I don’t understand…but I want the word put out: if I die, if they kill me in my hospital bed, those affidavits will go to the feds!”
“Okay, Jim. Okay. But, look-don’t talk to anybody. Not the papers, and particularly not the cops.”
“I said the
“Yeah, and I think, when the time comes, that’s the way to go. The cop who seems to be heading up this investigation happens to be an honest one-Bill Drury-and he hates Guzik maybe more than you do. He’s an ally. But he’s one fish surrounded by sharks. If you deal with him, remember what he’s up against, in his own organization.”
“So I should duck Drury, too, you think.”
“For right now. And when you feel up to talking, we’ll get you somebody federal.”
“You know they won’t beat me, Nate. I will not give in.”
“Take it easy, Jim-”
“If they kill me, my associates, my family, will carry on. They may kill others-but somebody in my organization will always be left to fight. I have told my boys this over and over. If we stand together, they can’t take us.”
“Okay, Jim. What do you say we talk about that later?”
“You know what they say, Nate?”
“No. What do they say?”
“The first hundred years are the hardest.”
And the sixty-five-year-old wounded son of a bitch winked at me.
An op of mine named O’Toole showed up a bit after nine to spell me. O’Toole, tall, thin, bored, was a few years older than me and I’d worked with him on the pickpocket detail back in ’32. I trusted him.
I left Peggy to comfort her aunt and found my way down to the main floor lobby and stepped out into an unusually cool evening for late June. I stretched; to my left was a statue of stocky, mustached Michael Reese himself, whoever the hell he was. Odors mingled in the breeze-from the nearby Keeley Brewery, and the stockyards, and the slum. Nasty odors, but I didn’t mind. I’d been on the South Side before.
Visiting hours were getting over and cabbies were picking up their white fares; I considered grabbing a cab myself, though it’s generally against my religion-not giving cab drivers my money is about all the religion I have, actually-but I was in a hurry to get to Bill Tendlar’s flat on the Near Northwest Side, where Lou was probably getting tired of sitting on the guy. And I was on expense account, so what the hell.
But the cabs were full up, and rather than wait and see if another would pull up, I wandered back over toward 29th, and the Mandel Clinic, where I noticed a jitney driver loading up colored passengers in his seven- passenger Chrysler. I walked up and asked the driver, a skinny Negro of maybe twenty-five wearing a brown army uniform stripped of all insignia, if he could take me to Cermak Road.
“If ya got a deece, jack, you got a ride,” he said.
That meant even if I was white, if I had a dime I was welcome aboard, so I flipped him one and his hand caught it like a frog would a fly and I climbed in back of the limo. A burly black guy who might’ve been a beef-lugger from the yards was in the seat next to me; in the seats facing us, a pretty colored gal sat next to a dark heavy-set woman who might have been her mother; the probable mother had a handbag you could hide a head in. The girl, whose hair had been chemically straightened, smiled at me nervously and the mother, whose hair was presumably under her yellow and blue floral scarf, gave me a dirty look that had no nerves in it at all. I stared between them at the back of a male passenger in the front seat.
I didn’t work Bronzeville often, but when I did I used jitneys and instructed my ops to, as well. They drove a little fast, but it was safer than standing on the sidewalk. If you stayed on the line, which was whatever boulevard the jitney driver was working, you could travel four blocks or forty for a dime (side trips cost a little more). But you couldn’t ride past 22nd-graft only bought these illegal overloaded taxis rights to the South Side streets.
As I got out at Cermak, I risked a wink at the pretty colored gal and she smiled at me, momentarily improving race relations; if the mother caught it, you wouldn’t be able to say the same for family relations.
I took the El back to the Loop, adding another twelve cents to my transportation costs, and I got off at Van Buren and Plymouth, right at the doorstep of my office. I would rather have gone straight to the Morrison and my comfortable bed. I was tired. I’d been shot at and scolded; I’d driven a shot-up Lincoln and lugged its shot-up bloody owner into an emergency room; I’d had to teach the director of medicine at Michael Reese what security was about; I’d even taken a jitney ride. But this day, this night, was not yet over.
