Max Collins - Chicago Lightning

“Keeping a guard posted there?”

“Yeah. And that is twenty-four hour.” He sighed, shook his head. “Heller, there’s a lot about this case that doesn’t make sense.”

“Such as?”

“That maroon Plymouth. We never saw a car like that in the entire six weeks we had the union hall under surveillance. Rooney drives a blue LaSalle coupe.”

“Any maroon Plymouths reported stolen?”

He shook his head. “And it hasn’t turned up abandoned, either. They must still have the car.”

“Is Rooney that stupid?”

“We can always hope,” Pribyl said.

I sat in an easy chair with sprung springs by the window in room 301 of the residential hotel across the way. It wasn’t a flophouse cage, but it wasn’t a suite at the Drake, either. Anyway, in the dark it looked fine. I had a flask of rum to keep me company, and the breeze fluttering the sheer, frayed curtains remained unseasonably cool.

Thanks to some photos Pribyl left me, I now knew what Rooney looked like: a good-looking, oval-faced smoothie, in his mid-forties, just starting to lose his dark, slicked-back hair; his eyes were hooded, his mouth soft, sensual, sullen. There were also photos of bespectacled, balding Berry and pockmarked, cold-eyed Herbert Arnold, V.P. of the union.

But none of them stopped by the union hall-only a steady stream of winos and bums went in and out.

Thenhe ound seven, I spotted somebody who didn’t fit the profile.

It was a guy I knew-a fellow private op, Eddie McGowan, a Pinkerton man, in uniform, meaning he was on nightwatchman duty. A number of the merchants along Madison must have pitched in for his services.

I left the stakeout and waited down on the street, in front of the plumbing supply store, for Eddie to come back out. It didn’t take long-maybe ten minutes.

“Heller!” he said. He was a skinny, tow-haired guy in his late twenties with a bad complexion and a good outlook. “What no good are you up to?”

“The Goldblatt’s shooting. That kid they killed was working with me.”

“Oh! I didn’t know! Heard about the shooting, of course, but didn’t read the papers or anything. So you were involved in that? No kidding.”

“No kidding. You on watchman duty?”

“Yeah. Up and down the street, here, all night.”

“Including the union hall?”

“Sure.” He grinned. “I usually stop up for a free drink, ’bout this time of night.”

“Can you knock off for a couple of minutes? For another free drink?”

“Sure!”

Soon we were in a smoky booth in back of a bar and Eddie was having a boilermaker on me.

“See anything unusual last night,” I asked, “around the union hall?”

“Well…I had a drink there, around two o’clock in the morning. That was a first.”

“A drink? Don’t they close earlier than that?”

“Yeah. Around eleven. That’s all the longer it takes for their ‘members’ to lap up their daily dough.”

“So what were you doing up there at two?”

He shrugged. “Well, I noticed the lights was on upstairs, so I unlocked the street level door and went up. Figured Alex…that’s the bartender, Alex Davidson…might have forgot to turn out the lights, ’fore he left. The door up there was locked, but then Mr. Rooney opened it up and told me to come on in.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He was feelin’ pretty good. Looked like he was workin’ on a bender. Anyway, he insists I have a drink with him. I says, sure. Turns out Davidson is still there.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding. So Alex serves me a beer. Henry Berry-he’s the union’s so-called business agent, mousy little guy with glasses-he was there, too. He was in his cups, also. So was Rooney’s wife-she was there, and also feeling giddy.”

I thought about Pribyl’s description of Mrs. Rooney as a matronly woman with four kids. “His wife was there?”

“Yeah, the luctiff.”

“Lucky?”

“You should see the dame! Good-lookin’ tomato with big dark eyes and a nice shape on her.”

“About how old?”

“Young. Twenties. It’d take the sting out of a ball and chain, I can tell you that.”

“Eddie…here’s a fin.”

“Heller, the beer’s enough!”

“The fin is for telling this same story to Sgt. Pribyl of the State’s Attorney’s coppers.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“But do it tomorrow.”

He smirked. “Okay. I got rounds to make, anyway.”

So did I.

At around eleven fifteen, bartender Alex Davidson was leaving the union hall; his back was turned, as he was locking the street-level door, and I put my nine-millimeter in it.

“Hi, Alex,” I said. “Don’t turn around, unless you prefer being gut-shot.”

“If it’s a stick-up, all I got’s a couple bucks. Take ’em and bug off!”

“No such luck. Leave that door unlocked. We’re gonna step back inside.”

He grunted and opened the door and we stepped inside.

“Now we’re going up the stairs,” I said, and we did, in the dark, the wooden steps whining under our weight. He was a big man; I’d have had my work cut out for me-if I hadn’t had the gun.

We stopped at the landing where earlier I had spoken to Sgt. Pribyl. “Here’s fine,” I said.

I allowed him to face me in the near-dark.

He sneered. “You’re that private dick.”

“I’m sure you mean that in the nicest way. Let me tell you a little more about me. See, we’re going to get to know each other, Alex.”

“Fuck you.”

I slapped him with the nine millimeter.

He wiped blood off his mouth and looked at me with hate, but also with fear. And he made no more smart-ass remarks.

“I’m the private dick whose twenty-one-year-old partner got shot in the head last night.”

Now the fear was edging out the hate; he knew he might die in this dark stairwell.

“I know you were here with Rooney and Berry and the broad, last night, serving up drinks as late as two in the morning,” I said. “Now you’re going to tell me the whole story-or you’re the one who’s getting tossed down the fucking stairs.”

He was trembling, now; a big hulk of a man trembling with fear. “I didn’t have anything to do with the murder. Not a damn thing!”

“Then why cover for Rooney and the rest?”

“You saw what they’re capable of!”

“Take it easy, Alex. Just tell the story.”

Rooney had come into the office about noon the day of the shooting; he had started drinking and never stopped. Berry and several other union “officers” arrived and angry discussions about being under surveillance by the State’s Attorney’s cops were accompanied by a lot more drinking.

“The other guys left around five, but Rooney and Berry, they just hung around drinking all evening. Around midnight, Rooney handed me a phone number he jotted on a matchbook, and gave it to me to call for him. It was a Berwyn number. A woman answered. I handed him the phone and he said to her, ‘Bring one.’”

“One what?” I asked.

“I’m gettin’ to that. She showed up around one o’clock-good-looking dame with black hair and eyes so dark they coulda been black, too.”

“Who was she?”

“I don’t know. Never saw her before. She took a gun out of her purse and gave it to Rooney.”

“That was what he asked her to bring.”

“I guess. It was a .38 revolver, a Colt I think. Anyway, Rooney and Berry were both pretty drunk; I don’t know what her excuse was. So Rooney takes the gun and says, ‘We got a job to pull at Goldblatt’s. We’re gonna throw some slugs at the windows and watchmen.’”

“How did the girl react?”

He swallowed. “She laughed. She said, ‘I’ll go along and watch the fun.’ Then they all went out.”