Even the relatively modest yellow-brick bungalow of Sam “Mooney” Giancana, in Oak Park — well, it did take up a corner lot and had a lavishly landscaped lawn — had been bereft of Sicilians. With the exception of a handful who had already been served, the local mobsters had flown the coop.
After the funeral, out in front of the massive cathedral, the fall breeze had teeth that made me turn up the collars of my London Fog. Lee Mortimer — in a charcoal suit and silk light blue tie, under a lighter gray topcoat with a black fur collar (a coat that cost no more than a good used Buick) — had no babe on his arm this time, as he picked his way through the milling crowd and planted himself in front of me, like an unwanted tree. Make that shrub.
“My condolences, Nate,” he said. He produced a deck of Chesterfields and offered me one — I declined — and he lit up... no cigarette holder, this time. The smoke curling out his mouth and nostrils seemed about the color of his grayish complexion, while his hair was more a silver gray. He looked like he hadn’t seen the outside of a nightclub since 1934.
I hadn’t replied to his expression of sympathy, which seemed about as sincere as a Fuller Brush salesman’s smile.
“I mean,” he said, with a lift of his shoulders, “I know Bill was your friend. You went way back, right?”
“Right.”
He raised an eyebrow, cocked his head. “I tried to call your office, last week, and you weren’t available. We were going to talk, remember? Maybe do some business? Hope you’re not ducking me.”
“Why, do you bruise easily, Lee?”
“Not really.” He blew a smoke ring, which the wind caught and obliterated. “I have a tough enough hide — but you’re a public figure, these days, with your Hollywood clientele. You don’t want to alienate a nationally syndicated columnist, do you?”
I started walking toward the parking lot, edging through the crowd, and Mortimer tagged along. I said, “Actually, Lee, I looked into that Halley matter for you — the chief counsel’s so-called Hollywood connections? A great big pound of air.”
The hard, tiny eyes slitted and he shook his head, as we moved through the mourners. “Then you didn’t look into it hard enough — there’s a major leak on the Crime Committee, and I swear that clown Halley is it... You going out to the cemetery?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m gonna pass. But we can still do business, you know.”
“Yeah?”
He put a hand on my shoulder and I stopped to look at him. His grin was wide and ghastly, like a skull’s — this was a man who smiled only when he was wheedling or threatening.
Mortimer whispered: “Bill Drury has ceased to be a source for me — as you may have noticed. I need a new one. His murder gives you the perfect ‘in’ with the Crime Committee... Halley’s turned Estes against me, and—”
I removed his hand as if it were a bug that had settled on my shoulder. “You really think this funeral’s a good place to recruit Bill Drury’s replacement?”
The hearse was gliding by, cars falling in line for the procession to Mt. Carmel cemetery.
“I mean no offense to the dead,” Mortimer said, “but you’re smarter than my previous source. You know what his motto was?”
Actually, I did.
But Mortimer said it: “‘A coward dies a thousand deaths, a brave man only one.’ A man who sees himself as a hero is a fool, Nate. You, on the other hand, are one tough, shrewd, manipulative son of a bitch.”
“Stop. I’ll blush.”
“In short, you could have been a newspaperman.” And he gave me that ghastly smile again. “Tah tah.” And he pitched his cigarette, trailing sparks into the street, and moved through the thinning crowd to go hail a taxi.
I slipped away, heading toward the parking lot. Lou Sapperstein — brown topcoat over a dark suit, his bald head hatless — was waiting at my Olds, leaning against a fender, having a smoke. He and I had been ushers; the pallbearers had been relatives but for ex-captain Tim O’Conner, Bill’s fellow railroaded-off-the-force police pal. I knew O’Conner had taken it hard — he’d been crying, and more than a little drunk, at the funeral home last night.
I had avoided him — I’m half-Irish, and that was enough to be embarrassed by Irish drunks who felt famously sorry for themselves.
At the immaculately landscaped cemetery, after the grave-side service — which was also overseen by the bishop, and well attended — I was walking with Lou along a graveled drive, heading back to my car when O’Conner came striding up alongside me.
“Got a minute, Nate?” the lanky ex-cop asked. With his black suit and tie under a black raincoat, O’Conner might have been the undertaker, not just a pallbearer; he looked like hell — his blue eyes bloodshot, his pockmarked face fish-belly pale, but for a drink-reddened nose.
Somehow I kept the sigh out of my voice. “Sure, Tim.”
His sandy blond hair riffling like thin wheat in the bitter breeze, the wind turning his black tie into a whip, O’Conner turned to Sapperstein, and, a little embarrassed, said, “If you’ll excuse us, Lou—”
