“You know why I’m here,” he said, tentatively.
“Yup. I don’t know why they sent the top VD G-man to do a grand jury prosecutor’s job, though.”
“I am still a G-man, and that’s why I’m in town, doing a joint workshop with the FBI over at the Banker’s Building. We got cops from all over the city and the suburbs coming in.”
I bet I knew the conference room they were using-the one next to the old FBI HQ, that big room whose windows faced the Rookery across the way, windows from which agents like Melvin Purvis and Sam Cowley hung suspects out by their ankles till they talked. At least one suspect had been dropped. It made a splash in the papers. And on the cement.
Now Eliot Ness was using it to teach cops about whores. Wasn’t law enforcement a wonderful thing?
“Let me guess,” I said. “The steel mill district on the east side must be hooker heaven about now.”
He nodded. “The Pullman plant, just west of there, is another key area.”
They were Pullman Aircraft, for the duration. Electromotive was near there, too; even before I joined up, it was rumored they were making tanks.
He got up and got himself a Dixie cup of water from the cooler over by the bathroom. “The cops in these industrial districts never had a prostitution problem the like of this before; it’s an epidemic. We’re helping ’em out.”
“You and the FBI.”
“Yeah.” Sitting back down, sipping his water.
“So if they ask you to help them out, by talking to a contrary cuss name of Heller, you say, why sure.”
“Do you resent that, Nate?”
I shook my head. “I could never resent you, Eliot. Not much, anyway. But it’s been ten years now that you’ve been trying to turn me into a good citizen. Won’t you ever give up?”
“What are you talking about? I’ve heard you tell the truth on the witness stand before. With my own ears. Saw it with my own eyes.”
“Who else’s were you planning on using?”
“Well, you did do it. You told the truth.”
“Once. That doesn’t make me a saint.”
“Nate, you’re not on Nitti’s side. You never were.”
“That’s right. I’m on my own side.”
“Which is whichever side is safest, you mean.”
“Or the most profitable.”
He crumpled the paper cup in a fist and gestured with it. “The Outfit is strangling every union in this town. Can you honestly think about your father, and what he gave to unionism, and sit back and let that happen?”
I pointed at him, gently. “Eliot, you’re my friend, but when you bring up my old man, you’re pushing it. And when you suggest that I could in any way single-handedly clean up union corruption that goes back years, decades, you’re screwier than the guys I was bunking with back at the bughouse.”
He tossed the crumpled cup at the wastebasket by my desk; it went in. “The investigation is centering on the IA movie extortion racket, you know.”
“So?”
“So you were involved in Pegler’s initial investigation of the racket.”
“Something you dragged me into, by the way, giving my name to your federal pals. I never thanked you for that, did I?”
“I guess you didn’t.”
“That’s because at the time I felt like kicking you in the slats.”
He ignored that, pressed on: “You know plenty about that racket, Nate. You had contact with most of the principals.”
“I don’t know anything firsthand. All I did was talk to some people.”
“One of whom was Frank Nitti.”
Shit.
I said, “Nobody knows that for sure.”
“Federal agents have a record of you going to see him several times, over a seven-year period, including in November 1939. At the Bismarck Hotel?”
“Christ.”
“The Grand Jury is going to want to know what was said in those meetings. Going way back, Nate. Back to Cermak.”
I sat up and gave my friend as nasty a grin as I’d ever given him. “What about back to Dillinger? How would the FBI like to have what I know about the Dillinger hit go public? How at best the feds aided and abetted crooked Indiana cops in a police execution, and at worst shot the wrong man? If what I knew came out, Hoover would shit his fucking pants.”
He shrugged elaborately. “That would be fine with me. Hoover’s overrated anyway. All I care about is the truth.”
“Oh, Eliot, please. You’re not naive. Don’t pretend to be.”
“Your testimony could be very valuable. You are the only non-mob-tainted party known to have had frequent private meetings with Nitti. Your testimony would have credence well beyond that of Bioff and Browne and Dean.”
“So the Three Stooges are talking, huh?”
He nodded. “They didn’t talk at their first trial, but when those stiff sentences came down, and they found out how much different prison life was than the El Mocambo, they started fishing for a deal.”
“It was the Trocadero where they hung out in Hollywood, Eliot, but never mind. I still don’t want to play.”
There was a knock at the door and I said, “It’s open.”
Bill Drury came in.
He wasn’t a big man, really-perhaps five-nine, a hundred and sixty pounds-but he was broad-shouldered and he had great energy, and a physical presence that could overwhelm you. He hung his camel-hair topcoat next to Eliot’s, and his fedora, too, revealing his typically dapper attire, a black-vested suit with gray pinstripes and a colorful blue-and-red-patterned tie and a fifty-cent shine. Bill was the best-dressed honest cop I ever met.
And one of the friendliest, unless you were part of the Outfit. He strode over to us with his ready smile, shaking my hand first, then Eliot’s. His dark thinning hair was combed across his scalp to give an impression of more but the effect was less. His dark, alert eyes crowded a jutting nose under which a firm jaw rested on the beginnings of a double chin.
“Heller,” he said, cheerfully, sitting down next to Eliot, “you truly look like death warmed over.”
“An honest man at last,” I said. “You look fat and sassy.”
“When your wife works,” he said with an expansive gesture of one hand, “why not?”
I had no argument with that.
“I presume Eliot has filled you in,” he said.
“Somewhat.”
“We were asked, because we’re old friends of yours, to pave the way for the federal prosecutor. They’d like you to be a witness.”
“Then I presume they’ll subpoena me.”
“They’d like you to be a friendly witness.”
“You know me, Lieutenant. Friendly as the day is long.”
“And the days are getting shorter, I know, I know. And it’s ‘Captain,’ now.”
“Really? How the world does change when you go off on a pleasure cruise.”
Eliot turned to Bill and said, “I get the feeling Nate feels we’re imposing upon his friendship.”
“If we are,’’ Bill said to me, flatly sincere, “I apologize. I think you know what sort of stranglehold the Outfit’s had on the unions, here, and we’re finally getting a chance to break it. Your inside knowledge could play a major role in that.”
“I doubt it,” I said.
“The IA’s extortion racket is going to blow the lid off. We’re talking about ending gangster control of not just the IA, but the laborer’s council, which includes twenty-five local unions, twenty-thousand members, street cleaners, tunnel workers, streetcar company employees, you name it. Then, beyond the laborer’s council, there’s the sanitary engineers union, the hotel employees, the bartenders, the truckers, the laundry workers, the retail clerks-”
“I get the point, Bill.”
“Then cooperate with the grand jury.”
“Let me ask you something. Both of you. You keep talking about the IA’s movie ‘extortion’ racket. What extortion is that? As I recall, it was collusion between the movie moguls and the mob. Since when is strike prevention insurance ‘extortion’?”
Drury finally bristled. “I don’t know what else you’d call it.”
I put my feet up on the desk and leaned back in my swivel chair. “I tell you what. I’ll come testify. I’ll come spill my guts about every secret meeting I ever had with Nitti. I’ll tell you and the grand jury things that’ll make the hair on your head curlier than the hair in your shorts. I’ll tell God and everybody things that’ll guarantee me ending up in an alley with a bullet in my brain. But first you got to assure me of one thing. You got to assure me that those movie moguls are going to be indicted right alongside Nitti and company.”