The day following the election, Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert resigned in disgrace as chief investigator of the State’s Attorney’s office and from the police department itself. He had plenty of money for his old age, but the commodity he valued most of all—power—was lost to him forever.
Tim O’Conner lived on the far Northwest Side, on Forest View Lane off Milwaukee Avenue. I’d called Tim and told him I had something for him—Bill Drury’s widow, Annabel, had asked me to deliver a personal item—and he said tonight would be fine.
A few weeks had passed since Tubbo appeared before the Crime Committee—the papers were still having a field day with the story, including speculation over who might have leaked the testimony (Kefauver blamed the reporting company who transcribed the court recorder’s work). This was a Tuesday evening in early November and drizzly and cold, enough so that I’d zipped the lining into my London Fog.
I pulled the Olds into the Forest Preserve and walked across the woods, leaves crunching damply under my Florsheims, and angled through the trees until I came out at the dead-end street that was Forest View Lane. Tim’s house was the last one on the end of the block, with no one directly across the street, and a vacant lot of knee-high weeds next door. A standard Chicago brown-brick bungalow, the squat, pitch-roofed one-story had an attic with an overhang and a big bay window in front of the living room, drapes closed, though lights burned behind them.
Carrying a paper bag about big enough for a sandwich, I walked up on the cement stoop and knocked and had just knocked a second time when Tim opened the door.
“Jesus, get out of the rain,” he said.
I did, removing my fedora, shaking the beads of moisture off. My lanky host closed the door behind me and took my raincoat, tossing it over a straightback chair by the door. I pitched my hat on the same chair.
In a gym-style T-shirt and rumpled gray moleskin slacks, in his stocking feet, O’Conner looked lousy—his sandy blond hair uncut and unkempt, his blue eyes bloodshot, and his pockmarked complexion had taken on a grayish cast; already thin, he seemed to have lost some weight, which made the sharp features of his face seem less handsome, more exaggerated…and his nose was as red as if he were working on a huge pimple. But it was just the beer, which was on his breath, by the way.
“I guess you haven’t been here since the divorce,” he said, with an embarrassed chuckle, gesturing to the all but empty living room. To call the room, with its bare wood floor, sparsely furnished was a ridiculous understatement: facing a television console against the far wall was an easy chair with one of those lamp/end table combinations, several empty Pabst bottles on the table part, and that was all. No sofa or other chairs—a few newspapers tossed on the. floor, some magazines, a couple more beer bottles. On the wall opposite his TV area was a formal fireplace, its mantel bare, though a mirror over it served to make the big empty room seem even bigger and emptier.
“I got the house,” Tim said, “but Janet got the furniture.”
And the kids. And any life inside these walls that might have been worth living.
“Hey, don’t worry,” he said, with a grin, putting a hand on my shoulder, “she didn’t get the poker table…. Come on.”
In the dining room—always an object of discussion between Tim and Janet—was a large octagonal poker table with a felt top and built-in chip holders. Tim had fashioned a piece of dark wood that could fit over it, so Janet could serve dinner to company (not in use at present); and the wall you saw entering from the living room still had the built-in china hutch—piled with a few paperbacks and pulp magazines now—reflecting the room’s onetime schizophrenic functions.
“Why don’t we sit in here,” he said. “Beer all right?”
Indeed, chairs were all around the poker table, just as when Bill Drury, Tim, Lou Sapperstein, and a few other cops and reporters had regularly played poker here—what was it, once a month? Up until maybe three years ago.
“Beer is fine,” I called to him. He had gone into the kitchen, off the dining room.
The skinny pockmarked man in the T-shirt came back with two sweating bottles of Pabst, no glasses, and he sat with his back to the kitchen doorway, and I took the chair right next to him, placed the brown paper bag on the table before me, making a little clunk.
“Lots of memories at this table,” O’Conner said between gulps of beer.
“Yeah—huge fortunes passed hands. Sometimes as much as twenty-five bucks.”
His laugh echoed sharply in the plaster-walled, carpetless room. “Yeah, you and your Black Mariah. Fucking wild cards.”
“Threes and nines,” I said.
“That’s not real poker.”
I grinned and swigged. “It wasn’t real money.”
“Except once a year.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Every December, sometime between Christmas and New Year’s, we’d play one higher stakes game, bumping our quarter/fifty cents/a buck chips to a buck/five bucks/ten. On those occasions, hundreds of dollars had crossed this felt-covered table.
“Funny,” Tim said, with a faint smile, holding the beer bottle in his palm as if he were going to toss it, “how conservative Bill always played.”
I nodded, sipped the Pabst. “Even small stakes, he played like it was his life savings.”
Tim shook his head, laughed a single hollow laugh. “I mean, a guy that took the kind of risks he did, in real life—and on a night out with the boys, he was a little old lady.”
“You, on the other hand, were always a reckless fucker.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I know. Sometimes I bluffed my way into some pretty good pots.”
“Yeah, Tim, but you got greedy. Too much bluffing.”
“Oh yeah? Your problem was, you never did bluff.”
“I still don’t.”
He took another swallow, then nodded at the paper bag. “So what’s that, your supper?”
“That’s what I came to bring you. What Annabel Drury wanted you to have.”
“Yeah?”
I pushed the bag toward him, like it was a pot he’d won. “Take it. She said he would have wanted you to have it—Bill’s old partner, after all.”
Tim put the beer down in a built-in coaster, and emptied the paper bag onto the table; this time it made a bigger clunk, as Bill Drury’s nickel-plated, well-worn ivory-handled .38 police revolver dropped onto the felt tabletop.
“Oh Christ,” he said softly.
“He carried that same piece from the day he made detective till the day he died,” I said.
O’Conner was nodding, eyes glazed. “His late brother gave it to him. The reporter? Lots of…sentimental value.”
“It was in his glove compartment, with a box of shells, when those sons of bitches shot him…. Like I say, Annabel wanted you to have it.”
O’Conner hadn’t picked it up; he was just staring at it, leaning an elbow against the table, fingertips pressed to his head.
Then he finished his Pabst off in a big gulp, and said, “I can use another. How about you?”
“No, I’m fine.”
While he was in the kitchen, I took the nine millimeter Browning from my shoulder holster and held it beneath the table, where he wouldn’t notice. I’d carried this weapon a long time, too. Different sentimental reasons, though.
A few moments later, he stumbled back in, sliding on the floor in stocking feet, with a fresh sweaty Pabst in hand, and sat down, rather heavily. He sighed and took several swigs of the beer.
“I miss him, that bald-headed bastard,” O’Conner said. He had tears in his eyes. “I feel like I let him down.”
“Well, sure you did—setting him up like that.”
O’Conner looked up, sharply. “Is that what you think?”
I bestowed him a bland smile. “I don’t just think it, Tim. I know it.”