Max Collins - True Detective

“It was a handbook and wire room.”

“An illegal gambling den, yes, and in the course of your raid, Frank Nitti pulled a gun.”

I shrugged. Got myself up. “That’s the story,” I said.

“Keep that in mind,” the commissioner said. There was a tremor in his voice; anger? Fear.

“I will,” I said.

I turned and headed out.

“You’ve forgotten something.”

I glanced back; the commissioner was pointing to my badge, where I’d laid it on his desk.

“No I didn’t,” I said, and left.

“So what’s bothering you?” Barney said. “Killing some innocent kid?”

I sipped at my third beer. “Who’s to say he was innocent? That isn’t the point. Look. I held on to this goddamn thing” — I patted under my arm, where the automatic was — “because my father blew his brains out with it. Anytime I take it out of its harness, somewhere in my brain I keep the thought of that. So that I won’t take using it lightly. Only I did use it, didn’t I?”

“Yeah.” He patted my drinking arm. “But you ain’t takin’ it lightly.”

I found a smile. “I guess not.”

“So where do you go from here?”

“To all one rooms of my apartment. Where else?”

“No, I mean, what kind of trade you gonna take up?”

“I only got one trade. Cop. For what it’s worth.”

We’d talked about it plenty of times, Barney and me. That one day I’d quit the department and open my own agency. I’d talked about it with my friend Eliot, too; he’d encouraged me to do it, said he’d help line some business up. But it had always been a pipe dream.

Barney stood up and got a funny little smile going, a little kid smile, and motioned with a curling forefinger. “Come with me,” he said.

I just sat there with half a beer in my hand, giving him a “what the—” look.

He grabbed me by the coat sleeve and tugged till I got up and followed him, back through the deli and out onto the street, where the snow had stopped and the city had got quiet, for a change. There was a door between the blind pig and the pawnshop next door. Barney searched for keys, found some, and unlocked the door. I followed him up a flight of narrow stairs to a landing, and then did that two more times, and we were on the fourth floor of his building, which ran mostly to small businesses, import/export, a few low-rent doctors and lawyers and one dentist. Nothing fancy, certainly. Wood floors, glass-and-wood office walls, pebbled glass doors.

At the end of the hall the floor dead-ended in an office that bore no name. Barney fished for keys again and opened the door.

I followed him in.

It was a good-size office, cream-color plaster walls with some wood trim, sparsely furnished: a scarred oak desk with its back to the wall that had windows, a brown leather couch with some tears repaired by brown tape, a few straight-back chairs, one in front of the desk, a slightly more comfortable, partially padded one behind it. The El was right outside the windows. It was a Chicago view, all right.

I ran a finger idly across the desk top. Dusty.

“You can find a dustcloth, can’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s your office. Leave it filthy if you want.”

“My office?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t go meshugge on me, Barney.”

“Don’t go Yiddish on me, Nate. You can’t pass.”

“Then don’t go Jewish on me when you tell me the rent.”

“For you, nothing.”

“Nothing.”

“Almost nothing. You gotta live here. I can use a night watchman. If you ain’t gonna be here some night, just phone in and I’ll cover for you somehow.”

“Live here.”

“I’ll put a Murphy bed in.”

He opened a door that I thought was a closet. It wasn’t. The office had its own washroom: a sink, a stool.

“Not all the offices have their own can,” he said, “but this was a lawyer’s office, and lawyers got a lot to wash their hands over.”

I walked around the room, looking at it; it was kind of dingy-looking. Beautiful-looking, is what it was.

“I don’t know what to say, Barney.”

“Say you’ll do it. Now, in the morning, you want a shower, you walk over to the Morrison.”

The Morrison Hotel was where Barney lived. They had a traveler’s lounge for regular patrons who were in town for the day and needed a place to freshen up or relax — sitting rooms, shower stalls, exercise rooms — one of which had been converted into a sort of mini-gym by Barney, with the hotel’s blessing.

“I’ll be working out there most mornings,” Barney continued, “and at the Trafton gym most afternoons. You’re welcome both places. I’m training, you know.”

“Yeah, somebody’s got to pay for all this.”

Barney was known for being a soft touch: a lot of the guys from the old neighborhood had taken advantage of him, hitting him for loans of fifty and a hundred like asking for a nickel for coffee. I didn’t want to be a leech; I told him so.

“You’re makin’ me mad, Nate,” he said expressionlessly. “You really think it’s smart to make the next champ mad?” He struck a half-assed boxing pose and got a laugh out of me. “So what do you say? When do you move in?”

I shrugged. “Soon as I break it to Janey, I guess. Soon as I see if I can get an op’s license. Jesus. You’re Santa Claus.”

“I don’t believe in Santa Claus. Unlike some people I know, I’m a real Jew.”

“Yeah, well drop your drawers and prove it.”

Barney was looking for a fast answer when the El rumbled by like a herd of elephants on roller skates and provided him with one.

“No cover charge for the local color,” he said, speaking up.

“Don’t you know music when you hear it?” I said. “I wouldn’t take this dump without it.”

Barney rocked on his heels, smiling like a kid getting away with something.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, trying not to smile back at him, “before I start dusting.”

“Nightcap?” Barney asked.

“Nightcap,” I agreed.

I was having one last beer, and Barney, staying in training, was just watching, when a figure moved up to the booth like a truck parking.

It was Miller; the eyes behind the Coke-bottle glasses looked bored, half-asleep.

“How’s the fight racket, Ross?” Miller asked, in his off-pitch monotone, hands in his topcoat pockets.

“Ask your brother,” Barney said, noncommitally. Miller’s brother Dave, also an ex-bootlegger, was a prizefight referee.

Miller stood there for a while, his capacity for making small talk exhausted.

Then moved his head in a kind of sideways nod, toward me, and said, “Come on.”

“What?”

“You’re coming with me, Heller.”

“What is it? Visiting time at Nitti’s hospital room? Go to hell, Miller.”

He leaned over and put a hand on my arm. “Come on, Heller.”

“Hey, pal, this is where I came in.”

Barney said, “I’m going to land you on your fat ass, Miller, if you don’t take your hand off my friend.”

Miller thought about that, took the hand off, but out of something closer to boredom than fear from Barney’s threat.

“Cermak wants to see you,” he said to me. “Now. Are you coming, or what?”

I’d never spoken to Mayor Cermak, but I’d seen him before; almost every cop in Chicago had. His Honor liked to pull surprise personal inspections on the boys in blue and then carry his criticisms to the press. He claimed he wanted to weed the deadweight out of the department, to cut down on the paperwork, to have a maximum number of men out on the streets at all times, battling crime. All this from a mayor with the behind-his-back nickname Ten Percent Tony, whose political life seemed a study in patronage; who as Cook County commissioner (a position also known as “mayor of Cook County”) had given Capone free reign (well, not exactly “free”) to turn the little city of Cicero into gang headquarters, with it and nearby Stickney becoming the wettest of the wet in this dry land, as they were simultaneously overrun with slot machines, whores, and gangsters. Cook County, where two hundred roadhouses had been personally licensed by Tony; where Capone dog tracks flourished thanks to an injunction by a Cermak judge; where Sheriff Hoffman permitted bootleggers Terry Druggan and Frankie Lake to leave his jail most anytime they pleased, and they consequently spent more time in their luxurious apartments than behind bars, though Hoffman eventually landed behind bars himself — for thirty days — after which Cermak gave him a post with the forest preserves at ten grand per annum; and, well, all this “reform” talk coming from Cermak sounded like a crock of shit to most Chicago cops.