A bleached blonde of about fifty, weighing in at maybe two hundred pounds at five foot three, strutted out in a red-and-yellow muumuu and growled wisecracks into a microphone — “Big Mary, your mistress of ceremonies, but don’t get any ideas.” She worked blue enough to get a few laughs, and stayed on only a minute before introducing the next stripper, wisely not wearing out her welcome.
A slender brunette minced out overdressed in a Southern hoop skirt affair with Scarlett O’Hara bonnet, and she was down to her petticoats when I got the may-I-cut-in tap on the shoulder.
A thug with a flat nose, dead eyes, and broad shoulders — all wrapped up in a double-breasted blue suit with a blue-and-gray tie and a pearl gray fedora — was standing there like a potted plant with a shoulder holster.
“Yeah?” I said.
Suddenly I realized the thug was looking past me at the brunette, who was taking off her bra to reveal perky little titties with tasseled pasties. For a second I thought the guy wanted my seat; then he blinked and looked at me and remembered why he’d come over.
“Table toward the back,” he said, thickly. He gestured with a bratwurst of a pointing finger.
Through the smoke I could make out a table with a small man seated at it, way in back, off to the side — one of the worst seats in the house. Even the tables nearby were empty, affording this diminutive patron of the arts a modicum of privacy.
I thought I knew who it was — you might even say, I was afraid I knew who it was — and the thug accompanied me as I approached the little guy in the green snapbrim, who wore a gray tailored suit with a pale yellow shirt and darker yellow tie, his oval face dominated by a lumpy schnoz and close-set eyes and a blank impassivity.
Sam Giancana looked up at me and said, “Sit, Heller... Join me here in my office.” To the thug he said, “Sally — a little breathing room.”
As the thug faded toward the bar and the stage, I sat across from Giancana at the postage-stamp table; the lighting was nil — a glass-and-candle centerpiece remained unlit, the only light near us coming from a bulb placed under a wall-hung velvet painting of a native girl with breasts the size of coconuts... not exactly National Geographic material.
I’d brought my rum and Coke with me; Giancana was drinking coffee — he needed a shave, giving him a scruffiness at odds with his natty apparel.
“This is where Satira started, you know,” Giancana said.
“That stripper who killed her married lover?”
“Yeah — down in Havana Harbor, remember?”
I did — it had been page one stuff.
He was saying, “We paid for her defense, and the cunt paid us back by working for the competition across the street, when she got out. We trumped the bitch, though.”
“How’s that?”
He snorted a laugh. “We hired the widow of the guy she murdered. Booked her in and she out-stripped Satira.”
“That’s showmanship, Sam.”
“That’s nothing — I tried to book both of them. Wouldn’t that have stood Chicago on its ear? The murderer and the widow of her murder victim, peeling side by naked side.”
“That’s entertainment,” I said. “Little surprised to see you, gotta admit. The feds who tried to serve your subpoena think you’re in Florida somewhere — that’s what your gardener told them.”
Giancana shrugged facially, and had a sip of his coffee. “A few of us have to stick around and tend to business. I got a couple rocks left in this town I can crawl under.”
“That message you left at my office was a little vague, Sam. How did you know I’d show?”
“I know what makes you tick, Heller. You’re a fuckin’ snoop. Curiosity is in your blood.”
“And my blood is still in my veins, inside my body. I’m hoping to keep it that way.”
Giancana flashed a sick-looking grin; like Lee Mortimer, he had a gray pallor — I didn’t figure Sam for many camping trips... except maybe to bury an occasional stiff in a field.
“This is a friendly meeting,” Giancana said. He placed both his hands on the table, palms down, fingers spread. “Friendly on my part, anyway. Your friend Drury — that little scuffle we had at the Stevens... you tell anybody about that?”
“No.”
“You think you could keep that unpleasantness to yourself?”
“Yes.”
“That thing, that was nothing. Drury was like that — he saw anybody remotely Outfit, he went off on them. You know that.”
“I know that.”
“He rousted Guzik, Fischetti, even Accardo, tons of times.”
“I know.”
Both eyebrows raised. “You don’t think I had anything to do with what happened to him, do you now?”
I chose my words carefully. “...I think it was Outfit. I don’t make it as anything to do with you, Sam.”
He was studying me like a scientist studies a slide under a microscope. “And why is that your opinion?”
“Because you’re smart, Sam. You have a temper — you’ve been known to lose your head, if you get pissed off... no offense.”
“None taken.”
“But this was stupid. This is bringing heat, these killings. St. Valentine’s Day Massacre type heat. Jake Lingle type heat.”
He was nodding.
I continued: “The Crime Committee hearings are getting moved to next week, you know. Kefauver is tossing fucking subpoenas over this city like advertising leaflets out of a plane.”
“You’re tellin’ me. You know, he’s going after our wives next, the prick.”
I wondered where he heard that.
Shifting in my hard seat, I said, “I figure this is like when Dutch Schultz wanted to hit Dewey, and the rest of the New York boys said no fuckin’ way. You don’t hit a cop; you don’t bump off a public figure.”
Giancana’s expression was blandly friendly; but he was still studying me. “You’re not just sayin’ this, Heller. This is how you see it.”
“Sam, this is how I see it. I’m not just trying to talk my way out of a tight spot.”
“This ain’t a tight spot.” He nodded toward his hands, still spread on the table. “It’s a public place, Heller. That’s why I arranged to meet you somewheres like this. Specifically, this joint ’cause Bas was the lawyer for the management... and, after you sort through all the holding companies, I’m the management.”
All of this was news to me. “Bas was your attorney?”
“Only where certain businesses, like this one, was concerned. And Drury had no knowledge of that. don’t get thinking Bas was dirty, ’cause he wasn’t — he was just a lawyer with various clients... like a private eye can have various clients.”
“Right. Would I be overstepping if I suggested you might have been helping Bas in his efforts to unseat Tubbo?”
He twitched a grimace. “I’d rather not say. Tubbo has been a friend to Outfit interests for a lot of years — one-stop shopping, a fixer who can help with both the cops and the State’s Attorney’s office. But a guy that’s been around as long as Tubbo can get... too powerful. Too full of himself.”
For a guy who’d “rather not say,” Sam had said a hell of a lot.
I sat forward. “Was Tubbo involved in the Drury hit? The Bas hit?”
“Heller, I don’t know the answer to that question. But I know you — and know how you can go off on these... little rampages, now and then. You wouldn’t talk to the Kefauver Committee, but you might decide to settle some scores in your own way. You’ve done it before.”
I just shrugged.
He leaned forward, and lifted his right hand off the table, to gesture. “Now... there’s something you need to know, Heller: neither of these hits was... what’s the word? Approved — authorized. Just the opposite — Charley Fischetti asked to have this done, and was told not to. In no uncertain terms.”