“Okay,” I said. I rose, sticking the five hundred in my wallet. “Is that all you wanted, Mr. Guzik?”
“Yes. Report back to me. I’ll give you a number.” He took a card from his breast pocket and handed it to me. There was no name on it, just a phone number.
“I’ll send flowers, as well,” he said. “He’s in Michael Reese, I understand. I was in there for pneumonia, oh, ten or fifteen years ago, myself. Good hospital. I had ’em put me in that Meyer House wing. Better for security.”
“Really,” I said, slipping his card in my wallet next to the five C-notes.
I was just turning to go when I heard a commotion in the adjacent room.
One of the waiters, in his mock English accent, was saying, “You can’t go back there, sir,” and somebody else was saying, “Oh yes I can.”
And then, big as life, there was Bill Drury standing there in his natty vested blue suit. He was grinning like a fox; of course, the sporting prints on the walls around him were all about foxes getting killed, but that probably didn’t occur to him.
“Jake,” he said, not acknowledging my presence, “stand up. Everybody else, stay seated.”
“Drury,” Guzik said, standing slowly, a dirigible lifting off, “why don’t you wise up. Look at the record.”
“And what will I see if I do, Jake?”
“You’ll see I always reward my friends and punish my enemies.”
“Assume the goddamn position, Jake. That wall will be fine.”
Guzik’s gray face turned pink. He said, “Must I suffer that indignity?”
“Oh, yeah,” Drury said.
“You know I never carry a gun. I never carried a gun in my life.”
“How do I know tonight isn’t the first night? Maybe you didn’t hear-Jim Ragen got shot. You’re a suspect. Assume the fucking position, Jake.”
Guzik’s face tightened-an unlikely sight, considering how flabby that pan of his was-and he shook his head at the two tables of bodyguards, who sat on the edge of their chairs, ready to wade into this; but Guzik’s gesture meant for them to sit it out. He leaned against one wall, a fox hunt print just above his pudgy, splayed hands.
Drury patted him down hard. Came across the fat roll of bills and held it up to look at it, like a piece of evidence he was considering.
“What’s this, Jake?”
“More money than you see in a year. Why don’t you get smart and let me give you some of it?”
“Are you bribing me, Jake?”
Guzik turned away from the wall and looked at Drury with an expressionless expression that somehow oozed hatred. He said, “You came alone, Lt. I don’t think anything I say here is going to hold up in court, now, do you?”
“Well, then, we’ll just settle for hauling you in for questioning, for the moment. Okay? I think we’ll have a little lie detector test…”
“If I took a lie test, twenty of Chicago’s biggest men would jump out of windows.”
Drury threw the roll of dough at Guzik, whose fat hands clapped at it, caught it.
“I’ll try to make sure there’s a window nearby when we test you, then,” Drury said. “Do I have to cuff you, Jake, or will you come along quietly?”
Guzik glared at him, and Drury hauled him out of St. Hubert’s. I followed them out, watched Drury deposit Guzik in the back of an unmarked car pulled up against the yellow curb. A uniformed cop was driving.
“Excuse me, Jake,” Drury said pleasantly. “I need to talk to your little friend for a minute.”
Then he came over and took me by the arm and walked me out of ear shot, up against the front window of St. Hubert’s.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Drury said, edgily.
“Guzik sent for me, by way of armed messenger. I decided to go willingly-I’d already been in a shoot-out today.”
Drury shook his head. “I didn’t know you were in there, Nate-I wouldn’t want to put you on the spot. I’d have waited till you came out.”
“Thanks, but you’re the one putting yourself on the spot. You just had to bust Guzik personally, didn’t you?”
Drury grinned. “Hell, it’s no secret my pal Jake holds court at St. Hubert’s. He just didn’t think any cop would have the balls to beard him in his den.”
“You’re crazier than Ragen,” I said, shaking my head.
“We found your green truck, by the way. Over on 43rd Place and Union Avenue. It was built up with quarter- inch steel plates all ’round.”
“No wonder I never got a piece of them. Anybody seen ditching it?”
He nodded. “Witness saw two white men in white sportshirts get out of it. That’s the extent of the description. It was after dark.”
“Great.”
“Here’s something you’re going to like even less: that shotgun of yours? The one you said jammed?”
“What do you mean that I
“Whoever’s it was, it’s working now. Sgt. Blaine tested it out this evening, over at the third district station. It fired first time out.”
“What? Somebody pulled a switch, Bill! That sawed-off was rigged against me.”
“Well, so is this, apparently. It’s not going to make you look good. And if the papers get wind of you meeting with Jake tonight…”
“The hell with that. Witnesses saw me charge that truck with a gun in my hand, shooting. Nobody can say I was bought off on this one.”
“People say a lot of things in Chicago.”
“People can go fuck themselves.”
He smiled sympathetically. “Where those colored witnesses are concerned, I got Two-Gun Pete on the job. He’ll come up with something. Hey-you look beat. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?”
I sighed. “Not a bad idea.”
And I walked back toward the office, while Drury joined his “pal” Jake in the unmarked car. I would have loved to take Drury up on his advice, and head for my warm bed in the Morrison. Only I wasn’t ready to sleep just yet.
I still had a trip to make, over to the Northwest Side.
Had to see a man about a shotgun.
It was nearly midnight by the time I got to the Polish neighborhood near Wicker Park where Bill Tendlar’s flat was. I drove my blue ’41 Buick straight up Milwaukee, leaving the Loop behind, ending up on this narrow, dirty side street just south of Division, in the shadow of a huge, ornate Catholic church. God had it great in this neighborhood, but the residents in these sagging two-and three-story frame buildings sure as hell didn’t.
I parked behind a tipped-over trash barrel and locked up the Buick and stood on the sidewalk, the street as quiet as death, the breeze as soothing as the thought of an afterlife. But the paint-peeling dreariness of the gray three-story building before me was a puzzler. I paid my ops a good wage-there was a housing shortage, yes, but Tendlar should’ve been able to afford better than this. Not a lot better, maybe, but better.
The building was dark but for a window on the third floor, light peeking out between the sides of and cracks in the green shade. Tendlar’s room. Worn wooden steps, half-heartedly bordered by a leaning, rusted iron rail, led me to a heavy, paint-curling, unlocked door. The hall, which seemed more narrow than it was, thanks to walls painted a dirty-chocolate brown, was stuffy, and barely lit by a forty-watt bulb in a corroded copper fixture above an old wooden wall-mounted hatrack that in another part of town might’ve sold as an antique. I checked the mailboxes on the opposite wall and saw Tendlar’s name on 3-A. At the end of the hall, between twin rows of closed doors, stairs rose into darkness. That was okay. I had a rubber hose in my hand, not to mention a loaded automatic under my arm.
