Max Collins - True Detective

I never told my father that my Uncle Louis had arranged my getting on the force; but it was obvious. Like Pa said, you needed patronage, or money to buy in, to get a city job. So I went to the only person I knew in Chicago who was really somebody, which was Uncle Louis (never Lou), who was by now a full VP with the Dawes Bank. I went to him for advice.

And he said, “You’ve never asked anything of me, Nate. And you’re not asking now. But I’m going to give you a present. Don’t expect anything else from me, ever. But this present I will arrange.” I asked him how. He said, “I’ll speak to A.J.” A.J. was Cermak, not yet mayor, but a powerful man in the city.

And I made the force. And it was never the same between Pa and me, though I continued to live at home. My role in “cracking” the Lingle case got me promoted to plainclothes after two years on traffic detail; and it was shortly after that that my father put my gun to his head.

The same gun I had used today, to kill some damn kid in Frank Nitti’s office.

“So I quit,” I told Barney.

Barney was Barney Ross, who as you may remember was one of the great professional boxers of his time, and that time was now; he was the top lightweight contender in the country, knocking on champion Tony Canzoneri’s door. He was a West Side kid, too, another Maxwell Street expatriate. Actually, Barney still was a kid: twenty-three or twenty-four, a handsome bulldog with a smile that split his face whenever he chose to use it, which was often.

I knew Barney since he was baby Barney Rasofsky. His family was strictly Orthodox, and come Friday sundown could do no work till after Saturday. Barney’s pa was so strict they even ripped toilet paper into strips so the family wouldn’t be tearing paper on the Shabbes. For about a year, when I was seven or eight, right before we moved out of Maxwell Street, I turned on the gas and did other errands for the Rasofskys, as their Shabbes goy, since I was as un-Orthodox as my pa. Later, when I was a teenager in Douglas Park, I’d come back to Maxwell Street on Sundays, to work with Barney as a “puller” a puller being a barker working in front of the door of a store, shouting out bargains supposedly to be found within, often grabbing a passerby and forcing the potential customer into the store. We worked as a team, Barney and me, and Barney was a real trombenik by this time, a young roughneck; so I let him do the pulling, and I handled the sales pitch. Barney had turned into a dead-end kid after his pa was shot to death by thieves in the little hole-in-the-wall Rasofsky’s Dairy. That’s what turned him into a street fighter, and the need to provide for the family his pa had left behind eventually turned him into Barney Ross, the prizefighter.

Barney was smarter than a lot of fighters, but just as lousy with money as the worst of ’em. He’d been pulling in big purses for almost a year now; fortunately, his managers, Winch and Pian, were straight, and got him to make a couple of investments that weren’t at the track. One of them was a jewelry store on Clark; another was a building at Van Buren and Plymouth with a downstairs corner deli next to a “blind pig” — that is, a bar that looked closed down from the street, but was really anything but (lots of things in Chicago looked like one thing outside and something else from inside). Barney planned to call the place the Barney Ross Cocktail Lounge someday, after Prohibition, and probably after he retired from the ring. His managers had a fit when he decided to keep the speak going, because Barney was a public figure in Chicago, with a wholesome image, despite a background that included being a runner for Capone and hustling crap games.

“So you quit,” Barney said. He had a soft, quiet tenor voice, incongruous coming out of that flat, mildly battered puss of his, and puppy-dog brown eyes you could study for days and not see killer instinct — unless you swung at him.

“That’s what I said,” I said. “I quit.”

“The cops, you mean.”

“The opera company. Of course the cops.”

He sipped the one beer he was allowing himself. We were in a corner booth. It was midevening, but slow; the night was just cold enough, the snow coming down just hard enough, to keep most sane folk inside. I only lived a few blocks from here, so was only moderately nuts. None of the other booths were taken and only a handful of stools at the bar were filled.

You went in through a door in the deli and found yourself facing the bar in a dark, smoky room three times as long as it was wide. The only tables were on the small dance floor at the far end, chairs stacked on the little open stage nearby — the nightclub aspect of the joint was on hold till Repeal. Boxing photos hung everywhere, shots of Barney and other fighters, in and out of the ring, with an emphasis on other West Side kids like King Levinsky, the heavyweight, and Jackie Fields, the welterweight Barney used to spar with; and, of course, the great lightweight Benny Leonard, who last year suffered a humiliating defeat attempting a comeback — Jimmy McLarnin put him down in six, giving him a bloody beating (the photos of Leonard on Barney’s wall were from the 1917 championship victory over Freddie Welsh).

“Your pa woulda liked you quitting,” he said.

“I know.”

“But Janey ain’t gonna.”

“That I also know,” I said.

Janey was Jane Dougherty; we were engaged. So far.

“You want another beer?”

“What do you think?”

“Buddy!” he said. He was talking to Buddy Gold, the retired heavyweight who ran the place for him and bartended. Then he looked at me with a wry little grin and said, “You’re throwing money away, you know.”

I nodded. “Being a cop in the Loop is good money in hard times.”

Buddy brought the beer.

“It’s good money in good times,” Barney said.

“True.”

“This Nitti thing.”

“Yeah?”

“It happened yesterday afternoon?”

“Yeah. You saw the papers, I take it?”

“I saw the papers. I heard the city talking, too.”

“No kidding. You serve lousy beer.”

“No kidding. Manhattan Beer, what you expect?” Manhattan Beer was Capone’s brand name; his Fort Dearborn brand liquors weren’t so hot, either. “When did you decide to quit, exactly?”

“This morning.”

“When did you turn your badge in?”

“This morning.”

“It was that easy, then.”

“No. It took me all day to quit.”

Barney laughed. One short laugh. “I’m not surprised,” he said.

The papers had made me out a hero. Me and Miller and Lang. But I came in for special commendation because I was already the youngest plainclothes officer in the city. That’s what having an uncle who knows A. J. Cermak can do for you; that and if you help “crack” the Lingle case.

The mayor was big on publicity. He had a daily press conference; made weekly broadcasts he called “intimate chats,” inviting listeners to write in and comment on his administration; and kept an “open door” at City Hall, where he could be seen sitting in shirt sleeves, possibly eating a sandwich and having a glass of milk, just like real people, any old time — or till recently, that is. Word had it open-door hours had been cut back, so he could better “transact the business of the mayor’s office.”

Today the papers had been full of the mayor declaring war on “the underworld.” Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti was the first major victim in the current war on crime; the raid on Nitti’s office was the opening volley in that war, Cermak said (in his daily news conference); and the three “brave detectives who made the bold attack” were “the mayor’s special hoodlum squad.” Well, that was news to me.