This strained exchange referred to our mutual pal, Barney Ross, who had come back from the war with a morphine habit that he managed to kick, going public with his problem. All three of us had grown up in the Lawndale district, near Maxwell Street, and we’d all been little street hustlers as kids, only Barney went on to be a world’s champ prizefighter, I became a cop, and Jake a strong-arm goon and bagman for local unions. A few years ago Jake had moved to Dallas, where (among other things) he managed the Silver Spur, a nightclub.
The elevator made a return stop, and Jake and I bid our goodbyes, and he went on his way, and I on mine.
Once you got away from the area around the elevators, the halls of the posh hotel got as tight as a train car. I took a right down to the door of the corner suite where I’d been told to come. I knocked on a gold-edged ivory door.
After peephole inspection, the door swung open and revealed Drury’s fellow exile, ex-police captain Tim O’Conner, a lanky, blue-eyed, sandy-blond Irishman whose narrow, handsomely sharp-featured face was mildly ravaged by pock-marks (cheeks) and drink (nose).
“Doorman, now, Tim?” I asked, as he ushered me in. “That the only job available to an ex-copper these days?”
“I’m lucky anybody’ll have me.” Like Drury, O’Conner was well dressed for a cop, his off-the-rack brown suit livened up by a pale yellow shirt and dark yellow tie. “Actually, these gentlemen thought you might warm up to a familiar face.”
I stopped him in the hall-like entryway of the suite, off of which were closets and a bathroom. “Are you working for the committee?”
He took my raincoat and hung it up; I kept my hat, but took it off.
“In a roundabout way,” O’Conner said. “This local lawyer working with the committee, Kurnitz, I hired on as his investigator. He’s here, you’ll meet him, Kurnitz, I mean.”
“I’ve met him before.”
Kurnitz was an eccentric, full-of-himself lawyer in the Loop who did a lot of criminal work, both for white-collar criminals, like embezzlers, and blue-collar crooks, like heist men. He didn’t mouthpiece for the mob, though, which explained the committee using him — a guy with connections in the underworld who wasn’t connected.
O’Conner was saying, “The committee didn’t want to hire either Bill or me, because we’re controversial figures. We were fired off the police force, after all.”
“I’d think getting fired off the crookedest goddamn force in the country would be a glowing recommendation.”
“Doesn’t matter. We’re getting the job done.”
O’Conner escorted me into the living room area of the nicely appointed suite, where my hosts were waiting. A sofa along the window overlooked Grant Park and the lake — a breathtaking view made irrelevant by the gray afternoon — with several easy chairs pulled up close, a coffee table between... a nice, cozy setting for an inquisition.
As we approached, the three men who’d been seated together on that couch rose as one. All three had dark-rimmed glasses and dark hair and receding hairlines — they might have been brothers.
Or maybe the Three Stooges — only all of them were Moes, albeit balding ones.
The one nearest me extended a hand — he was tall, lean, but sturdy-looking with an oblong face that had slits for eyes and a slightly wider slit for a mouth, which right now were combining to form a stern expression. Fiftyish, he wore a brown suit and a darker brown tie. “George Robinson, Mr. Heller, associate counsel. Thank you for joining us.”
It was a firm handshake, and his words were cordial enough; but his manner made me think of a high school principal regarding a problem student.
“Rudolph Halley, Mr. Heller,” said the man next to Robinson — a head shorter, a good ten years younger — in a high-pitched voice laced with a lisp. “Chief Counsel.” A compact character in a blue suit with a blue-and-red bow tie, Halley had a moon face, its roundness offset by a cleft chin and hard dark eyes.
“Mr. Halley,” I said, accepting his aggressive handshake. Then I turned to the remaining man, and said, “Mr. Kurnitz,” nodding to the lawyer, who was at right, standing slightly apart from the other two.
“Mr. Heller,” he said, nodding back, in a well-modulated courtroom baritone. He wore a gray suit, nicely cut, and a blue-and-gray tie, and would have been handsome if his intense brown eyes hadn’t been too large for his face even before his eyeglasses magnified them.
They returned to the couch and I took a comfortable armchair opposite them, with the coffee table — piled with various files and notebooks — between us. Water glasses and a coffee cup also rested on the glass top. The grayness of the afternoon filled the windows behind them like a bleak expressionist painting.
O’Conner, standing near the other easy chair but not taking it, asked, “Anybody want anything?” To me he explained, “There’s coffee and ice water and soft drinks.”
“No pretzels?” I asked.
Nobody but me found that funny.
