Angel’s Flight, the funicular railway carting passengers 315 feet up and down the sheer slope between Hill and Olive Streets, had once been a grand tourist attraction and even now its two orange-trimmed-black cars transported several thousand a day, though their cable screech was like screams of pain.
These days it took a reckless tourist to brave the blighted neighborhood. A slum clearance project had begun several years ago, and now the top of the once fashionable hill had been lopped off, razed of its Gothic two-stories to make way for planned plazas and possibly even skyscrapers that would tower over the hill they crushed along with its ethnic mix of pensioners and poets, dope dealers and drunks.
A street over from where the Angel’s Flight would have done me some good, I went up steep cement stairs as cracked as the skin of the old men in rockers on the wide porches of leaning gingerbread houses where even the most foolish Hansel or Gretel would never risk entry. My destination — the Hillcrest Hotel — offered monthly and weekly rates and was not without its luxuries: it boasted hot and cold running water.
The cranky old heavyset gal behind an excuse for a check-in desk pointed up toward the second of the hotel’s two floors, where (she said) John Hagan lived in apartment 2B.
“Or not to be,” I said to her.
“Huh?” she said.
Even I can’t charm all the ladies.
“Is he in?” I asked.
“It’s not my turn to look after him.”
I jerked a thumb at the adjacent open stairway. “You see him go up?”
“No. He drives cab some. Might be in, might not.” She leaned on her elbow; fat settled around the bone on the filthy scuffed counter, lending support. “Anything else I can do to make your life any fucking easier?”
Somehow she did not sound sincere. I gave her a “no thanks” anyway and went up creaky stairs whose last shellacking had not bothered with cleaning the dirt off first. Of course I hadn’t been dusted off either since the old desk gal’s shellacking.
The door to 2B was down a short hall to my left. I knocked, twice, hard. Nothing. But I heard movement within, so I gave the paint-blistered thing another couple knocks. Waited.
I was poised to knock again when the door cracked open. Not enough was showing of the face to confirm it as Johnny Hagan’s, but the eye that was part of that slice of flesh started out narrowed — at first he didn’t recognize me — and then widened. Now he did.
“Heller,” he said.
“Johnny. I was in the neighborhood so I thought I’d drop by.”
“Right. Go away. We got nothing to talk about.”
“There’s money in it for you.”
The eye narrowed again.
The door opened enough for him to step aside and me to enter. He was fleshier than I remembered, or maybe he’d managed to put on some weight, despite his obviously impoverished circumstances. But then starchy food is cheap.
He wore a sweat-soaked athletic t-shirt and baggy brown slacks and was in his socks, one of which was letting his big right toe out for some air. He reeked of beer and body odor with a hint of the hallway’s disinfectant.
Oh, and he was holding a .38 revolver in his right hand.
Johnny Hagan bared his teeth at me; he’d lost a couple of them, a canine on one side, an incisor on the other. Whether someone had knocked them out or bad dental hygiene had taken a toll, I never found out. He’d had that scar on his lip when we met. In any case, he certainly wasn’t the good-looking cabbie I’d known a few years ago in St. Louis — his five o’clock shadow seemed darker, a dirty effect, and his hairline was retreating, all those little soldiers heading for the hills.
“I’m not carrying,” I said, my hands up.
He kicked the door shut and patted me down. I hadn’t been lying — I’d seen no reason to come calling with the nine millimeter. But I was starting to question my judgment.
“What do you want, Heller?”
“Just to chat.”
The one-room apartment opened onto a kitchen area, where dishes in the sink had long ago given up on being washed; the only way it could have looked dirtier was if cockroaches were up on their back legs dancing on the linoleum counter. The ceiling was rather high, typical of such former mansions, but everything else was dingy — faded, curling wallpaper, a meager array of mismatched furniture, a metal frame single bed, its white paint flaking. The bed was unmade, crumpled pillow, fitted sheet, top sheet so twisted he might have been planning to make a break for it out a window. On top of a dresser, with the framework for a mirror but without one, was a cabbie’s cap on a folded jacket. They bore the Ray-D-O Cab designation.
An oscillating electric fan sat purring on a small beat-up table by the center bay window whose pale white curtain hung like a limp ghost, an occasional whisper of wind making it go “boo” half-heartedly.
He gestured me to an easy chair with cracked black faux-leather and sat opposite on the bed, which sagged under his weight like a very old horse. He tossed the .38 on the bed and the weapon bounced a little.
“Sorry about the frisk,” he said. “This neighborhood isn’t the best.”
“According to what I hear, your old boss Joe Costello moved you out here and is sending you two hundred a month. You ought to be able to live better than this.”
“Does it look like I got that much coming in?”
I shook my head. “I figure you were on Joe’s payroll for a couple of years. When that Grand Jury went after Costello for stealing a little matter of three hundred thousand dollars, you were good enough to plead the Fifth. So you covered for him, though by doing that you indicated you had something to hide. So he set you up out here in a new life. If you call this living.”
His eyes were lidded but alert. “You want me to talk, Heller? It’ll put you in the Coral Court with Hall and me... and Sandy, for that matter. How does that help you?”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t. It’d cause a few headaches. But all I did was what Lt. Shoulders, the officer in charge, told me to. I was gone before he and that kid Dolan hauled Hall’s ass out and into their jurisdiction. No one asked me about it then, but if they do now, I’ll come clean. I broke no laws.”
“Neither did I.”
“Then why take the Fifth? You helped those two cops transport that footlocker and metal suitcase and probably the briefcase out of that motel and take it, where? To Joe Costello, to count the dough and figure who got what? In ’54, Shoulders and Dolan caught a couple of years on a perjury charge, because they lied about having taken that money straight to the Newstead station, when there’s an hour unaccounted for. Eight of their fellow cops testified to that effect. Were you there, at Costello’s... his office, the cab company, his nightclub... for the real accounting?”
He said nothing.
I extended an open hand. “My client is a well-known journalist who wants an on-the-record interview with you. If you will tell what you know about where that money went... and you sure as hell didn’t get much of it... he will pay for the privilege. And he’ll pay well.”
“How well?”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”
His mouth dropped; his eyes all but fell out of his head. “What? Jesus, you gotta be...”
I raised a swear-to-God palm. “Not kidding. You’ll be able to trade your testimony to the Rackets Committee for immunity.” I gestured around his seedy circumstances. “You are obviously a small fish in this.”
He got off the bed and it whined like one of the Angel’s Flight cable cars. He put his hands in his pockets and he walked to the bay windows and stared out.
I let him stare. Several minutes went by, which is a very long time. But soul-searching can take a while.