I was the little man who wasn’t there — a role at which I’d become adept. But who the hell were those mustached assassins? They had been young — mid-to late twenties, well dressed — but nonetheless cold-blooded pros who knew their way around firearms and were unperturbed about the notion of pulling off back-to-back hits. Out of town talent, almost certainly — hired by Charley Fischetti, who had skipped in anticipation of the heat the two murders would stir up.
The day after the news got around, just about every other major hoodlum in town had skipped, as well. In the papers the morning after the murders, Kefauver — in Kansas City holding hearings — was quoted as saying the Drury and Bas hits “showed the savagery of Chicago gangland. There is no doubt that the slaying of our key witness, former police lieutenant William Drury, is a brutal attempt to thwart our investigation.”
Kefauver — who rejected Tubbo’s claim that the Drury and Bas murders were “unrelated” — retaliated by turning over more than a dozen subpoenas to the U.S. Marshal’s office in Chicago. But the small army of servers discovered that the mansions and penthouse apartments of such Outfit luminaries as Jake Guzik, Tony Accardo, Paul Ricca, and (of course) the Fischetti brothers contained only servants and the occasional wife.
Even the relatively modest yellow-brick bungalow of Sam “Mooney” Giancana, in Oak Park — well, it did take up a corner lot and had a lavishly landscaped lawn — had been bereft of Sicilians. With the exception of a handful who had already been served, the local mobsters had flown the coop.
After the funeral, out in front of the massive cathedral, the fall breeze had teeth that made me turn up the collars of my London Fog. Lee Mortimer — in a charcoal suit and silk light blue tie, under a lighter gray topcoat with a black fur collar (a coat that cost no more than a good used Buick) — had no babe on his arm this time, as he picked his way through the milling crowd and planted himself in front of me, like an unwanted tree. Make that shrub.
“My condolences, Nate,” he said. He produced a deck of Chesterfields and offered me one — I declined — and he lit up... no cigarette holder, this time. The smoke curling out his mouth and nostrils seemed about the color of his grayish complexion, while his hair was more a silver gray. He looked like he hadn’t seen the outside of a nightclub since 1934.
I hadn’t replied to his expression of sympathy, which seemed about as sincere as a Fuller Brush salesman’s smile.
“I mean,” he said, with a lift of his shoulders, “I know Bill was your friend. You went way back, right?”
“Right.”
He raised an eyebrow, cocked his head. “I tried to call your office, last week, and you weren’t available. We were going to talk, remember? Maybe do some business? Hope you’re not ducking me.”
“Why, do you bruise easily, Lee?”
“Not really.” He blew a smoke ring, which the wind caught and obliterated. “I have a tough enough hide — but you’re a public figure, these days, with your Hollywood clientele. You don’t want to alienate a nationally syndicated columnist, do you?”
I started walking toward the parking lot, edging through the crowd, and Mortimer tagged along. I said, “Actually, Lee, I looked into that Halley matter for you — the chief counsel’s so-called Hollywood connections? A great big pound of air.”
The hard, tiny eyes slitted and he shook his head, as we moved through the mourners. “Then you didn’t look into it hard enough — there’s a major leak on the Crime Committee, and I swear that clown Halley is it... You going out to the cemetery?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m gonna pass. But we can still do business, you know.”
“Yeah?”
He put a hand on my shoulder and I stopped to look at him. His grin was wide and ghastly, like a skull’s — this was a man who smiled only when he was wheedling or threatening.
Mortimer whispered: “Bill Drury has ceased to be a source for me — as you may have noticed. I need a new one. His murder gives you the perfect ‘in’ with the Crime Committee... Halley’s turned Estes against me, and—”
I removed his hand as if it were a bug that had settled on my shoulder. “You really think this funeral’s a good place to recruit Bill Drury’s replacement?”
The hearse was gliding by, cars falling in line for the procession to Mt. Carmel cemetery.
“I mean no offense to the dead,” Mortimer said, “but you’re smarter than my previous source. You know what his motto was?”
Actually, I did.
But Mortimer said it: “‘A coward dies a thousand deaths, a brave man only one.’ A man who sees himself as a hero is a fool, Nate. You, on the other hand, are one tough, shrewd, manipulative son of a bitch.”
“Stop. I’ll blush.”
“In short, you could have been a newspaperman.” And he gave me that ghastly smile again. “Tah tah.” And he pitched his cigarette, trailing sparks into the street, and moved through the thinning crowd to go hail a taxi.
I slipped away, heading toward the parking lot. Lou Sapperstein — brown topcoat over a dark suit, his bald head hatless — was waiting at my Olds, leaning against a fender, having a smoke. He and I had been ushers; the pallbearers had been relatives but for ex-captain Tim O’Conner, Bill’s fellow railroaded-off-the-force police pal. I knew O’Conner had taken it hard — he’d been crying, and more than a little drunk, at the funeral home last night.
I had avoided him — I’m half-Irish, and that was enough to be embarrassed by Irish drunks who felt famously sorry for themselves.
At the immaculately landscaped cemetery, after the grave-side service — which was also overseen by the bishop, and well attended — I was walking with Lou along a graveled drive, heading back to my car when O’Conner came striding up alongside me.
“Got a minute, Nate?” the lanky ex-cop asked. With his black suit and tie under a black raincoat, O’Conner might have been the undertaker, not just a pallbearer; he looked like hell — his blue eyes bloodshot, his pockmarked face fish-belly pale, but for a drink-reddened nose.
Somehow I kept the sigh out of my voice. “Sure, Tim.”
His sandy blond hair riffling like thin wheat in the bitter breeze, the wind turning his black tie into a whip, O’Conner turned to Sapperstein, and, a little embarrassed, said, “If you’ll excuse us, Lou—”
Since Lou had also been a cop, and a friend of Drury’s, as well as a member of our poker-playing cadre, this seemed a vaguely insulting exclusion; but Sapperstein just shrugged and nodded and walked over by an oak tree, leaning against it, while O’Conner led me off between rows of headstones with their elaborate carvings and statuary.
“I know this shouldn’t be a surprise,” O’Conner said, hands dug in his raincoat pockets, his eyes hollow, “but somehow I thought Bill was... above anything anybody could do to him.”
“Nobody’s above a shotgun, Tim.”
He was shaking his head, staring at the earth, across which a few stray leaves were dancing. “I... this is fucking hard, Nate. Ever since I lost Janet...”
“She didn’t die, Tim. You fucked around on her, and she divorced you and took the kids.”
Now he looked right at me — his eyes tight with surprise. “Are you really this hard?”
“I see in the papers where you barely knew Bill.”
“Oh. That.”
O’Conner had been quoted as saying he’d had no business association with Drury in recent months — that in particular he hadn’t been part of his late friend’s journalistic endeavors. His comments had seemed designed to keep the heat off him with the Outfit.
Embarrassed, looking at the ground again, he said, “That was all true — I just didn’t mention that Bill and I had been working together, cooperating with Kefauver’s staff. I mean — that was confidential stuff.”