Pete, whose suit coat was open and you could see the two guns on the front of two overlapping belts, framing his police star, clipped to the middle of the lower slung of the belts.
“Those are the biggest revolvers I ever saw, Pete,” I said, sitting down.
He grinned and withdrew the guns and set them on the table, like a gunfighter on a riverboat sitting down to play poker at a possibly crooked table. Both guns were nickel-plated and shiny and although light was at a premium in this place, they found some to reflect. One of the guns had a pearl handle and a six-inch barrel, the other a brown handle and a three-inch barrel.
“You’re not still packin’ that candy-ass nine millimeter?” Pete said to me, huskily, sitting back down.
“Fraid I am,” I said. “Sentimental attachment.”
He waggled a thick black finger at me, narrowed the sad eyes. “That’s a bad idea. That’s the gun your daddy killed hisself with, ain’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“Carrying it, that’s your idea of makin’ sure you don’t use your piece too easy, right?”
“That’s it, I guess. I never want to take death too lightly.”
“I’ll tell you what you don’t want to do,” he said, patting the pearl handle of the revolver like a baby’s butt, “you don’t want to have nothing in between you and a shooting situation. You don’t want to be thinking about whether or not you should shoot, or this is the gun my daddy killed hisself with. That’s bullshit, Heller.”
“Well, you may have a point, Pete. But I’ve been under fire a few times in my time, and I seem to be alive.”
He ignored that, saying, “It’s like the night I was out driving along 35th-I was off-duty. Just me and my pal Bob Miller, the undertaker. I hear this woman scream and see a kid, maybe nineteen, run out of a store, with a gun in his mitt. I yell for him to halt, but he ducks in the alley and I follow and he starts to shoot back at me. I think, well, hell, least I got an undertaker along-’cause one of us is sure as shit gonna need him. So the kid ducks in back of this laundry, and when I find him, he’s locked hisself in the shitter. I yell at him to come out, give hisself up-he says, ‘Fuck you, nigger! You want me, you’re gonna have to come in and get me.’ So I empty this baby into the fuckin’ door.” He patted the brown-handled gun. “I didn’t hear nothing for a while, so I went on in. I got him, all right-more than once. He didn’t even make it to Michael Reese. Funny thing, though-when I pulled that poor bastard out of there, dying, holes in his chest, he was puffing on a reefer like a crazy man.” He shook his head. “People is strange.”
Drury arrived with the beers.
“How’s it going, Pete?”
Jefferson stood up, and shook Drury’s hand and put the guns back in their holsters. “I was just telling Heller he should toss that old automatic of his in a dumpster. He oughta get one of these.357s like I got.”
“I thought those were.38s,” Drury said, sitting, pouring some Schlitz in a glass. I was doing the same.
“You can load ’em up with.38s,” he said, matter of factly, “but what
“Lot of call for that, is there, Pete?” I asked, beginning to munch my peanuts. They were pretty good.
He didn’t answer me, not directly. He just said, “A.357 Magnum is the world’s most powerful revolver. These is the finest guns that money can buy.”
“I suppose that’s important down here,” I said.
“The only way to keep law and order and get respect is to earn a reputation for yourself as bein’ as tough or tougher than the roughest s.o.b. on the street.” He patted his guns. “People around here know: they don’t fuck with Mr. Jefferson.”
Like Greasy Thumb and Bugsy and everybody in the world of crime who didn’t like his nickname, Two-Gun Pete was the same. He expected to be called Mr. Jefferson and accepted “Pete” only from friends and fellow cops.
He was a good cop, easily the best in his world, and like most Chicago cops took his share of graft-he wasn’t interested in hassling the bookies or the numbers runners or numbers bankers or the streetwalkers or their madams; but he was hell on muggers and purse-snatchers and con men and heisters and dope pushers. A bachelor, a ladies’ man with a part-time valet and an apartment behind steel bars, Pete Jefferson liked his work.
“So,” Drury said, satisfied that Pete had been allowed to flex his muscles and impress his worth upon the two white cops (who already knew damn well what his worth was), “have you found anything out?”
He glanced at his watch. “In a few minutes you’ll meet the first of my witnesses.”
“How many did you round up?” Drury asked.
“Three so far. Got a line on a fourth.”
“These are witnesses who clearly saw the faces of the two men with shotguns?”
“That’s a fact,” Pete said.
“Did you rough these guys up any?”
“I hardly ever have to rough anybody up no more,” Pete said, almost regretfully. “I just come around and they spill their guts.”
Better than having a.357 Magnum do it for you.
“Pete,” I said, “I have to level with you-I got my doubts. I was there-I was right there in the street shooting it out with those guys, and
Pete sipped his beer, licked a foamy mustache off his lip; his real mustache remained. “These boys got a better look than you did. They was on the street. They was not occupied with shooting back.”
“I don’t mean any disrespect,” I said, “but colored witnesses, testifying against white people, in front of a probably mostly white jury and a very white judge, have got to be unimpeachable.”
“I know that,” Pete said, irritably. “I didn’t just fall off a hay wagon, Heller. That’s one reason why I’m rounding up four. Taken together, they’ll be goddamn hard to impeach.”
A few minutes later the first of Pete’s witnesses wandered in; he was a thick-set man of about forty, wearing a frayed white shirt and rumpled brown slacks, with gray in his hair and mustache and bloodshot eyes and hands that were shaky, until Pete put the rest of his own beer in them.
“Okay, Tad,” he said. “Take it easy.”
“Tore one on last night,” Tad said. “Tore one on.”
“This is Theodosius Jones,” Pete said to us. “He used to be a bedbug.”
That meant he’d been a Pullman porter.
“Till last year,” Tad said.
“Drinking on the job?” I asked, tearing the shell off a peanut.
Pete frowned at me; it wasn’t pleasant being frowned at by Pete. I had the feeling he could, if he so chose, tear the shell off me.
But the former bedbug only nodded and gulped at the glass of beer, till it was drained.
I looked at Drury and shook my head, popping the peanut in my mouth.
Drury didn’t give up easily, though; he went up and got a fresh beer for Tad and came back with it and said, “I want to hear your story.”
“Okay,” Tad said, and he reported what he’d seen, very accurately, and described the two white shooters in some detail.
“One was fatter than the other,” he said, “but they was both big men. One of ’em had hair that come to a point…” He gestured to his forehead.
“A widow’s peak?” Drury asked.
Tad nodded. “His hair was black and curly. The other’s hair was going. Not bald, but will be. He had spectacles on. I seen their faces plain as day. If you could show me pictures, I could pick ’em out, if they was in there.”
“I’ll bring you pictures, Tad,” Drury said, smiling.
“Tad,” I said, “are you up to a court appearance?”
“Pardon?”
“You’d need to be on the witness stand, and you’d need not to have been drinking.”
“Got to be sober as a judge,” he said, agreeing with me.
“The judge can get away with being drunk,” I said. “You can’t.”
Tad nodded. “Don’t matter, really. I been thinkin’ of headin’ out.”
