Max Collins - Chicago Lightning

It was Jake.

“How did it go last night?” he asked.

I told him.

“Shit,” he said. “I’ll still talk to Cooke, though. See if I can’t cool this down some.”

“I think it’s too late for that.”

“Me too,” Jake said glumly.

Martin came in on Saturday; gave himself up to Tubbo Gilbert. Stege was off the case. The story Martin told was considerably different from Cooke’s: he said Cooke was in the office using the phone (“Which he had no right to do!”) and Martin told him to leave; Cooke started pushing Martin around, and when Martin fought back, Cooke drew a gun. Cooke (according to Martin) hit him over the head with it and knocked him down. Then Cooke supposedly hit him with the gun again and Martin got up and they struggled and the gun went off. Three times.

The gun was never recovered. If it was really Cooke’s gun, of course, it would have been to Martin’s advantage to produce it; but he didn’t.

Martin’s claim that Cooke attacked and beat him was backed up by the fact that his face was badly bruised and battered. So I guess I did him a favor, beating the shit out of him.

Martin was placed under bond on a charge of intent to kill. Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert, representing the state’s attorney’s office, confiscated the charter of the union, announcing that it had been run “purely as a racket.” Shutting it down until such time that “the actual working members of the union care to continue it, and elect their own officers.”

That sounded good in the papers, but in reality it meant Skidmore and company had been served.

I talked to Stege about it, later, over coffee and bagels in the Dill Pickle deli below my office on Van Buren.

“Tubbo was telling the truth about the union being strictly a racket,” Stege said. “They had a thousand members paying two bucks a head a month. Legitimate uses counted for only seven hundred bucks’ worth a month. Martin’s salary, for example, was only a hundred-twenty bucks.”

“Well he’s shit out of luck, now,” I said.

“He’s still got his position at the Sanitary District,” Stege said. “Of course, he’s got to beat the rap for the assault to kill charge, first…” Stege smiled at the thought. “And Mr. Cooke tells a more convincing story than Martin does.”

When the union was finally re-opened, however, Jake was no longer treasurer. He was still involved in the rackets, though, selling punchboards, working for Ben “Zuckie the Bookie” Zuckerman, with a short time out for a wartime stint in the Air Force. He went to Dallas, I’ve heard, as representative of Chicago mob interests there, winding up running some strip joints. Rumor has it he was involved in other cover-ups, over the years.

By that time, of course, Jake was better known as Jack.

And he’d shortened his last name to Ruby.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

“Scrap” is primarily based upon newspaper research, but I should also acknowledge Maxwell Street (1977) by Ira Berkow; and The Plot to Kill the President (1981) by G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings.

She’d been pretty, once. She was still sexy, in a slutty way, if you’d had enough beers and it was just before closing time.

Kathleen O’Meara, who ran the dingy dive that sported her last name, would have been a well-preserved fifty, if she hadn’t been forty. But I knew from the background materials I’d been provided that she was born in 1899, here in the dirt-poor Irish neighborhood of Cleveland known as the Angles, a scattering of brick and frame dwellings and businesses at the north end of 25 thStreet in the industrial flats.

Kathleen O’Meara’s husband, Frank, had been dead barely a month now, but Katie wasn’t wearing black: her blouse was white with red polka dots, a low-cut peasant affair out of which spilled well-powdered, bowling ball-size breasts. Her mouth was a heavily red-rouged chasm within which gleamed white storebought choppers; her eyes were lovely, within their pouches, long-lashed and money-green.

“What’s your pleasure, handsome?” she asked, her soprano voice musical in a calliope sort of way, a hint of Irish lilt in it.

I guess I was handsome, for this crowd anyway, six feet, one-hundred-eighty pounds poured into threadbare mismatched suitcoat and pants, a wilted excuse for a fedora snugged low over my reddish brown hair, chin and cheeks stubbled with two days growth, looking back at myself in the streaked smudgy mirror behind the bar. A chilly March afternoon had driven better than a dozen men inside the shabby walls of O’Meara’s, where a churning exhaust fan did little to stave off the bouquet of stale smoke and beer-soaked sawdust.

“Suds is all I can afford,” I said.

“There’s worse ways to die,” she said, eyes sparkling.

“Ain’t been reduced to canned heat yet,” I admitted.

At least half of he clientele around me couldn’t have made that claim; while those standing at the bar, with a foot on the rail like me, wore the sweatstained workclothes that branded them employed, the men hunkered at tables and booths wore the tattered rags of the derelict. A skinny dark-haired dead-eyed sunken-cheeked barmaid in an off-white waitress uniform was collecting empty mugs and replacing them with foaming new ones.

The bosomy saloonkeeper set a sloshing mug before me. “Railroad worker?”

I sipped; it was warm and bitter. “Steel mill. Pretty lean in Gary; heard they was hiring at Republic.”

“That was last month.”

“Yeah. Found that out in a hurry.”

She extended a pudgy hand. “Kathleen O’Meara, at your service.”

“William O’Hara,” I said. Nathan Heller, actually. The Jewish last name came from my father, but the Irish mug that was fooling the saloonkeeper was courtesy of my mother.

“Two O’s, that’s us,” she grinned; that mouth must have have been something, once. “My pals call me Katie. Feel free.”

“Well, thanks, Katie. And my pals call me Bill.” Nate.

“Got a place to stay, Bill?”

“No. Thought I’d hop a freight tonight. See what’s shakin’ up at Flint.”

“They ain’t hiring up there, neither.”

“Well, I dunno, then.”

“I got rooms upstairs, Bill.”

“Couldn’t afford it, Katie.”

“Another mug?”

“Couldn’t afford that, either.”

She winked. “Handsome, you got me wrapped around your little pinkie, ain’t ya noticed?”

She fetched me a second beer, then attended to the rest of her customers at the bar. I watched her, feeling both attracted and repulsed; what is it about a beautiful woman run to fat, gone to seed, that can still summon the male in a man?

I was nursing the second beer, knowing that if I had enough of these I might do something I’d regret in the morning, when she trundled back over and leaned on the bar with both elbows.

“A room just opened up. Yours, if you want it.”

“I told ya, Katie, I’m flat-busted.”

“But I’m not,” she said with a lecherous smile, and I couldn’t be sure whether she meant money or her billowing powdered bosoms. “I could use a helpin’ hand around here…. I’m a widow lady, Bill, runnin’ this big old place by her lonesome.”

“You mean sweep up and do dishes and the like.”

Her cute nose wrinkled as if a bad smell had caught its attention; a little late for that, in this joint. “My daughter does most of the drudgery.” She nodded toward the barmaid, who was moving througthe room like a zombie with a beer tray. “Wouldn’t insult ya with woman’s work, Bill…. But there’s things only a man can do.”

She said “things” like “tings.”

“What kind of things?”