Stege was a rarity in Chicago—an honest cop; he was one of half a dozen individuals credited with being “the guy that got Capone” (my friend Eliot Ness was another) and, in a way, Stege was as worthy of that credit as the next guy (Eliot included). Stege had fought Capone’s Outfit all through the twenties and it was his raid on Capone’s Cicero joints that brought forth the ledgers that allowed the feds to put together the income tax evasion rap that finally sent the Big Fellow to Atlanta.
But Stege’d had his share of bad press, too. He’d lost his job as chief of the Detective Bureau over the Jake Lingle case; he’d looked dirty, guilty by association, because he was thick with the police commissioner, who in turn had been thick with reporter Lingle, who’d been thick with Capone and company. This all came out after Lingle was murdered in the subway tunnel under Michigan Avenue.
I’d been involved in that case; specifically, I’d been a traffic cop on Michigan Avenue, and had pursued, and failed to catch, the fleeing killer. I’d been a star witness at the trial. I’d lied, of course, to help put away the scapegoat the Outfit had given the D.A.’s office to satisfy the public and the press. And had gone on to be a plainclothes cop, as part of my good-conduct reward.
It was then that my father, an idealistic old union man who hated the cops and hated me becoming one, blew his brains out with my gun. But that’s another story.
Stege, like my father, smelled a bad apple when young Nate Heller traded his uniform, and his integrity, in for plain clothes. He—and a lot of people on the force—pegged me as a kid on the make, willing to go along with just about anything. That led to my being pulled in by two real sweethearts named Lang and Miller—the late Mayor Cermak’s chief bagmen and bodyguards (this was before Cermak was late, of course)—on an attempt on Frank Nitti’s life.
That was when I left the force to go private; but eventually I had to testify about the Nitti hit, and—since Mayor Cermak had since been killed in Miami by a Sicilian assassin named Zangara—I felt under no obligation to lie. Maybe I was trying to make it up to my old man and his Bughouse Square idealism. Or maybe I was trying to make it up to me. But I told the truth on the stand—a novelty around these parts—and made Lang and Miller, and the late mayor, look very bad.
Stege, though a tough, straight cop by Chicago (or any) standards, had a blind spot: he didn’t like even a crooked cop getting a public bath. And I was an ex-cop who’d publicly bathed not only two Chicago police sergeants, but Mayor Cermak as well.
And Stege had been a Cermak crony. The story went that shortly after Cermak was elected, Stege had been transferred to the South Wabash station, in the heart of Bronzeville, to “raise hell with the Policy racket”—and in the process the captain put about two hundred colored prisoners in jail per day, in cells so crammed they couldn’t sit. The Negro politicians had bitched to Cermak, at first, then finally begged: What did Cermak want from them, to get Stege out of their district?
“Become Democrats,” Cermak said.
And they did.
Stege would’ve done anything for Anton J. Cermak, and I had dirtied His Honor’s posthumous honor. The last time I’d seen Stege—at City Hall, where I’d come to testify in one of the subsequent Lang-Miller proceedings—I’d nodded to the stocky, white-haired copper, saying, “Good afternoon, Captain.”
And Stege had said, “Go straight to hell, you lying son of a bitch, and don’t come back.”
Hal Davis of the
No, I wouldn’t be able to go to Captain Stege with this; of course, if Jimmy Lawrence
But if Jimmy Lawrence turned out to be just another Dillinger double, I’d probably find myself tied up in a little room in the back of some station house somewhere doing the rubber-hose rhumba.
Around dusk a Yellow cab pulled up in front of the apartment house, but on my side of the street, facing south. I leaned back and dropped my hat down over my face—mostly—and made like I was snoozing. A few minutes later Jimmy Lawrence and Polly Hamilton, arm in arm, came out the front and got in the back of the cab. I waited thirty seconds, crawled over in the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition and pushed the starter and pulled out after them.
The Yellow cut over to Halsted and before I knew it the scenery was looking familiar.
The cab stopped in front of a big graystone three-flat and waited as Jimmy Lawrence got out to hold the door open for Anna Sage, who came out of her apartment building in a smart blue dress and a broad-brimmed white hat.
