Lou nodded, breathed dragon smoke, and rose. Heading for the door, he said, “I’ll take care of it,” and went out.
I was halfway through my mail when Gladys buzzed, and informed me my “ten o’clock” was here. I told her to usher him in, which she did.
“Quite a step up from Van Buren Street,” Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert said jovially, after we’d shook hands and he’d settled into a leather chair across from me.
If Bill Drury was the best-dressed honest cop in town, Dan Gilbert was the best-dressed bent one... which was a bigger distinction, after all.
Pushing sixty, a fleshy six-footer in a three-piece three-hundred-buck double-breasted gray pinstripe suit with a blood-drop ruby stickpin in his gray-and-blue tie and several diamond-and-gold rings on various pudgy fingers, Tubbo sat with an ankle on a knee and his pearl gray homburg in his lap. His keg of a head sat on an ample double chin, and his dark eyes in their pouches were sharp with cunning if not quite intelligence. His nose was flat and pointed, like Jack Frost’s icicle snout starting to melt; his chin cleft, a Kirk Douglas dimple; his hair neatly combed salt-and-pepper, nicely barbered; his eyebrows thick dark slashes that might have been borrowed from Rocco or Charley Fischetti.
“I guess you haven’t been over to our new offices before, Tub,” I said, leaning back in the swivel chair, arms folded, giving him a faint meaningless smile.
“You should come over to my suite at the Sherman,” he said. “Very nice. Nothing like an office with room service.”
Tubbo was on leave of absence from the State’s Attorney’s office, for the duration of his campaign for sheriff — not that he’d ever spent much time at the office out of which he supposedly supervised one hundred detectives.
“How’s the campaign going?” I asked.
“Swell. Public’s really responding to our message.”
“What message is that? I’ve been out of town.”
“Oh. Well. I’m going to drive all the gambling out of Cook County — just give me your vote, and six months.”
I had to grin. “Does that include that handbook of yours, over on West Washington?”
Tubbo didn’t take offense; he just flashed me a yellow grin, and reached inside his suitcoat pocket. I knew he wasn’t going for a weapon — well, not a weapon that used bullets.
The envelope he flopped onto my desk would have green ammunition in it, no doubt.
“Take a look,” he said. “Two grand in fifties.”
During his thirty-three years as a police officer, Tubbo Gilbert had been a busy boy. He’d been a labor organizer prior to his first assignment on the P.D. — patrolman — and in less than nine years, he made captain. And it didn’t interfere with his continued union organizing, at all. After he became chief investigator for the State’s Attorney’s office, few Chicago-area labor crimes were solved; and in his eighteen years with the State’s Attorney, gambling flourished in suburban Cook County, while not one major Capone hoodlum went to jail — although Tubbo did find time to frame a few of the Outfit’s competitors, notably bootlegger Roger Touhy.
These minor lapses didn’t keep Tubbo from achieving distinction as a law enforcement officer in Chicago. He was considered the city’s top cop — above the commissioner and the chief of police — and was undoubtedly the most important law enforcement officer in the county. His real claim to fame, however — cemented by various newspaper articles — was as “the world’s richest cop.”
An underpaid public servant could get wealthy, he explained to reporters, by investing wisely on the Chicago Commodity Market.
“It’s two grand, all right,” I said, thumbing through the greenbacks; then I tossed the envelope back on the desk — nearer to myself than Tubbo.
“Would you like to know what that’s for, Nate?”
“I figure you’ll get around to it.”
“We’ve not had many dealings, you and I.”
I’d seen to that: steered Tubbo a wide path.
He went on: “But we’ve had mutual friends, over the years. Frank Nitti said I was his favorite golfing partner.”
“No kidding.”
“None. We used to go down to the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, together — great golf course. Owney Madden used to join us. You know, I still use the clubs Frank gave me. Gold-plated. Frank was a generous man.”
“The clubs he gave me were solid gold.”
Tubbo frowned — the pouchy eyes seemed hurt, for an instant; then he grinned. “You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?”
“A little. But I agree with you. Frank Nitti was a hell of a guy.”
“He put the word out, you know — no one was to screw with Nate Heller. He liked you. You had his protection.”
“But he’s dead, now. Dead for what — seven years?”
Tubbo raised a plump, jeweled hand as if in benediction. “It still goes — you still benefit from his goodwill. His respect for you.”
“Good to know.” I didn’t mention that Tubbo was referring to the same Outfit guys who had cornered Nitti into suicide.
Captain Gilbert folded his hands on his ample belly. “I don’t see your associate, Mr. Drury, in the office today — or does he have a private office?”
