Max Collins - Neon Mirage

Drury arrived with the beers.

“How’s it going, Pete?”

Jefferson stood up, and shook Drury’s hand and put the guns back in their holsters. “I was just telling Heller he should toss that old automatic of his in a dumpster. He oughta get one of these.357s like I got.”

“I thought those were.38s,” Drury said, sitting, pouring some Schlitz in a glass. I was doing the same.

“You can load ’em up with.38s,” he said, matter of factly, “but what I use can shoot clean through a automobile engine block.”

“Lot of call for that, is there, Pete?” I asked, beginning to munch my peanuts. They were pretty good.

He didn’t answer me, not directly. He just said, “A.357 Magnum is the world’s most powerful revolver. These is the finest guns that money can buy.”

“I suppose that’s important down here,” I said.

“The only way to keep law and order and get respect is to earn a reputation for yourself as bein’ as tough or tougher than the roughest s.o.b. on the street.” He patted his guns. “People around here know: they don’t fuck with Mr. Jefferson.”

Like Greasy Thumb and Bugsy and everybody in the world of crime who didn’t like his nickname, Two-Gun Pete was the same. He expected to be called Mr. Jefferson and accepted “Pete” only from friends and fellow cops.

He was a good cop, easily the best in his world, and like most Chicago cops took his share of graft-he wasn’t interested in hassling the bookies or the numbers runners or numbers bankers or the streetwalkers or their madams; but he was hell on muggers and purse-snatchers and con men and heisters and dope pushers. A bachelor, a ladies’ man with a part-time valet and an apartment behind steel bars, Pete Jefferson liked his work.

“So,” Drury said, satisfied that Pete had been allowed to flex his muscles and impress his worth upon the two white cops (who already knew damn well what his worth was), “have you found anything out?”

He glanced at his watch. “In a few minutes you’ll meet the first of my witnesses.”

“How many did you round up?” Drury asked.

“Three so far. Got a line on a fourth.”

“These are witnesses who clearly saw the faces of the two men with shotguns?”

“That’s a fact,” Pete said.

“Did you rough these guys up any?”

“I hardly ever have to rough anybody up no more,” Pete said, almost regretfully. “I just come around and they spill their guts.”

Better than having a.357 Magnum do it for you.

“Pete,” I said, “I have to level with you-I got my doubts. I was there-I was right there in the street shooting it out with those guys, and I didn’t begin to get a look at either of them.”

Pete sipped his beer, licked a foamy mustache off his lip; his real mustache remained. “These boys got a better look than you did. They was on the street. They was not occupied with shooting back.”

“I don’t mean any disrespect,” I said, “but colored witnesses, testifying against white people, in front of a probably mostly white jury and a very white judge, have got to be unimpeachable.”

“I know that,” Pete said, irritably. “I didn’t just fall off a hay wagon, Heller. That’s one reason why I’m rounding up four. Taken together, they’ll be goddamn hard to impeach.”

A few minutes later the first of Pete’s witnesses wandered in; he was a thick-set man of about forty, wearing a frayed white shirt and rumpled brown slacks, with gray in his hair and mustache and bloodshot eyes and hands that were shaky, until Pete put the rest of his own beer in them.

“Okay, Tad,” he said. “Take it easy.”

“Tore one on last night,” Tad said. “Tore one on.”

“This is Theodosius Jones,” Pete said to us. “He used to be a bedbug.”

That meant he’d been a Pullman porter.

“Till last year,” Tad said.

“Drinking on the job?” I asked, tearing the shell off a peanut.

Pete frowned at me; it wasn’t pleasant being frowned at by Pete. I had the feeling he could, if he so chose, tear the shell off me.

But the former bedbug only nodded and gulped at the glass of beer, till it was drained.

I looked at Drury and shook my head, popping the peanut in my mouth.

Drury didn’t give up easily, though; he went up and got a fresh beer for Tad and came back with it and said, “I want to hear your story.”

“Okay,” Tad said, and he reported what he’d seen, very accurately, and described the two white shooters in some detail.

“One was fatter than the other,” he said, “but they was both big men. One of ’em had hair that come to a point…” He gestured to his forehead.

“A widow’s peak?” Drury asked.

Tad nodded. “His hair was black and curly. The other’s hair was going. Not bald, but will be. He had spectacles on. I seen their faces plain as day. If you could show me pictures, I could pick ’em out, if they was in there.”

“I’ll bring you pictures, Tad,” Drury said, smiling.

“Tad,” I said, “are you up to a court appearance?”

“Pardon?”

“You’d need to be on the witness stand, and you’d need not to have been drinking.”

“Got to be sober as a judge,” he said, agreeing with me.

“The judge can get away with being drunk,” I said. “You can’t.”

Tad nodded. “Don’t matter, really. I been thinkin’ of headin’ out.”

“Heading out?” Drury said, sitting up.

“Detroit. I hear they’s jobs up there.”

Drury reached in his pocket and peeled a ten off a small money-clipped roll. “Take it, Tad. More to come.”

“Thank you kindly,” Tad said, smiling.

Pete was looking at me hard. The sullen brown face above the tiger-striped tie seemed to give off heat. He said, “You don’t think my witness here has what it takes, do you, Heller?”

“No offense to Mr. Jones, but I wouldn’t want to build a case on him.”

“No offense taken,” Tad said, toasting me with his beer.

Pete nodded toward me and said, “Tad, do you know who this fella is?”

“Sure. He’s the guy who was shootin’ back at ’em.”

Pete smiled and patted Tad’s shoulder. “I think you’re a damn wonder as a witness, Tad. Why don’t you take your beer on up to the bar, and tell the man behind the log to charge your next one to Mr. Jefferson.”

Tad nodded, took his ten-spot and beer and went and stood at the bar.

“You’re buying witnesses, now?” I said to Drury.

“Every cop pays his snitches,” Drury said.

“You must want Guzik bad.”

“I want him any way I can get him.”

“What if it isn’t Guzik who bought the hit? What if it’s Siegel’s contract?”

“Who told you that fairy tale?” Drury snorted, smirking cynically. “Guzik?”

“Whoever it was,” I said, “I didn’t pay for the information.”

The next two witnesses, who came along at roughly fifteen-minute intervals, were admittedly stronger. One of them was a steel worker, a big guy named James Martin who’d gotten his hair cut at the corner barber shop before he wandered over to pick up some cigarettes at the drugstore, just before the shootout. Martin was a crane operator at Carnegie-Illinois Steel’s South Works, a union man, a family man, and a church deacon; even colored, this was some witness. Like Tad, he recognized me, immediately. All white people did not look alike to these folks. The other witness was Leroy Smith, a nineteen-year-old clerk from the drug store; he was skinny and a little scared but his description of the two shotgunners matched the others’: black curly hair with a widow’s peak, balding with glasses; he too recognized me. These latter two witnesses each had a description of the driver of the truck, as well, which tallied.