Chicago 11, page 2
His funeral had been the talk of Chicago. Ten thousand people had followed the hearse. Twenty-five cars and trucks had been required to carry the floral tributes. And while the church had refused to allow the dead man to be buried in consecrated ground, five months after his death his body had been disinterred and reburied under circumstances that had caused an honest police official of the era to comment, “O’Banion was a thief and a murderer. But look at him now. He’s buried eighty feet from a bishop.”
It was a little cooler on the side street, but not much. The breeze was blowing intermittently. Mary used the corner of her mantilla as a fan.
This brought her to the reason for her morning safari. As O’Banion’s second in command, Weiss had taken over his interests, including the North State Street flower shop. But he’d had little of the dead man’s charm. The only good thing she’d been able to learn about him was that Little Hymie, as he was familiarly known, had been good to his mother and also deeply religious. In that respect, the scene of his demise had been fitting. Some twenty-one months after O’Banion had been killed, a fusillade of shots had splattered Little Hymie’s mortal remains all over the steps and the lower facade of Holy Name Cathedral. Leaving him dead at twenty-eight, with nothing to show for his brief career in crime except an estate valued at one million three hundred thousand dollars.
Mary’s heart bled for him. There had to be a moral in the story somewhere. Perhaps, when you sin, sin big. If, as she hoped she would some day, she ever earned ten thousand dollars a year, it would take her, even at maximum salary, one hundred and thirty years to earn as much as Little Hymie had made peddling illicit beer.
She was hot. Her clothes were beginning to stick to her body. She wanted to get out of them and under a cold shower. She was glad to see the old brownstone building.
But that brought up another matter. Cora was going to Europe. Ann was getting married as soon as school was out. And she had to find another apartment in which to live, one on which the rent wasn’t so high she couldn’t handle it by herself.
The high-school teacher pushed open one of the big plate-glass doors and walked in, glad to be out of the sun, grateful for the relatively cool silence of the eighty-year-old octagonal three-story entrance hall that had been the one thing in the building that none of its owners had ever been able to remodel. It still seemed incredible to her that in any era of the city’s growth any single owner had been wealthy enough to maintain so much structure as a private dwelling. Still, judging from the instances she’d researched, the Little Hymies and the Dion O’Banions had been novices in the art of making money. Any number of the early pioneers who had built Chicago into one of the world’s largest and greatest cities had made ten times as much money, more or less honestly, than all of the hoodlums put together had stolen.
From force of habit, she glanced at the bank of mail boxes before starting up the ornate metal spiral staircase. In at least one respect the brownstone shell was still a private dwelling. After having lived in the building for three years, with two exceptions, her fellow tenants were merely names on a mailbox. Mason, Rogers, Adamowski, Anderson, Jones, Stafford, Garcia, LaTour. Names and faces, male and female, with whom she exchanged the time of day when they chanced to pass on the stairs or meet in the parking lot.
The two exceptions were Terry Jones and old Mr. LaTour. And no one could help knowing Terry, not when they shared a mutual living-room wall. At a conservative estimate, she or Ann or Cora had to pound on the wall or step next door and ask the blonde teenager to turn down her hi-fi or ask her guests to be a little less noisy at least twice a week. Mary blamed Terry’s father more than she did Terry. The radio evangelist, currently preaching over a station south of the border due to some slight disagreement with the F.C.C., might be perfectly sincere in his attempt to preach the gospel as he saw it. But any father who would leave a motherless, sensationally beautiful sixteen-year-old high-school girl alone in a Near North Side apartment for months at a time, with nothing but charge accounts in most of the better Loop department stores, unlimited pocket money, and a late-model white Ford convertible to assuage her unsupervised loneliness was asking for trouble.
Mr. LaTour was the other exception. Mary liked the talkative old carnival man. She liked him very much. Whenever the daughter-in-law with whom he lived had to go out of town on business, she and Cora and Ant. always invited him to share their Sunday brunch or dinner. Mary smiled as she searched her purse for her key, thinking of the first night they’d met him and the old man had expounded his personal philosophy.
“I look at life this way, see?” he’d told them. “All of us can’t be whistle tooters or blow-off men and do the march playing a horse piano. Some of us have to be apes and reach-over men and spielers or we’d never draw enough of a scuff to keep the show on the road. So, if you’ll pardon my French, what the hell? Unless we’re forty-milers, when we find we have a growler tied to our tails instead of the red one we expected, why yell ‘Hey, rube’? Why not take it down to the corner and fill it up with a little cool brew while we sweat out the big parade?”
Mary found her key and unlocked her door. That one had taken a bit of deciphering. But after they had gotten a thesaurus of slang from the library and found the section devoted to carnivals, they’d figured out the old man had been saying:
“We can’t all be ringmasters or play a calliope. Some of us have to do the less attractive jobs. So when we find out life isn’t going to be all that we expected, instead of fighting about it, why not make the best of what we have?”
Mary started to enter her own apartment and stood in the doorway as the door of the adjoining apartment opened and her teenage neighbor emerged. Terry was carrying a beach bag and wearing a smart and expensive but very scanty pastel-green playsuit that left her attractive midriff bare and detailed every curve and anatomical division.
The teacher started to criticize the girl’s costume, but refrained. She was old enough to know how much of herself she wanted to display in public. Besides, every beach along the lake would undoubtedly be dotted with similar playsuits and even more revealing bikinis. “Good morning, Terry,” she greeted her youthful neighbor. “You look like you’re bound for one of the beaches.”
“That’s right,” the girl said. “I thought I’d try Oak Street first, then Clarendon. And if they’re both too crowded, I may just find a quiet spot and soak up some sun.”
“That’s going to be difficult to do this morning, find a quiet spot along the lake.”
“Probably.”
The teenager closed and locked her door and started down the hall. Impelled by something in her face, the older woman put out her hand and stopped her. “What’s the matter, Terry? Is there anything wrong? Is there something I can do?”
The blonde girl considered her answer. “No. There’s nothing wrong. But thank you for asking, Miss Daly.” Mary watched her walk down the hall and descend the spiral stairs. If some girls were too pretty for their own good, the allegation applied to her youthful neighbor. Her big brown eyes, her honey-colored hair, her breasts, her rounded little behind, everything about her was lovely. But dressed as she was dressed, leaving little but the color of her pubic hair to male surprise, she was also a walking invitation to rape. The child might as well be wearing a flashing neon sign reading: “Here I am, boys. Come get me.”
Mary was wryly amused. But then, she wasn’t supposed to know anything about such matters. She was cold. She was incapable of love.
She closed and locked her door, and laid her short white gloves and her prayer book on the coffee table in the living room, then unpinned and removed the lace mantilla. Normally, even when alone, she was meticulous about her person and possessions. This morning she felt “shanty.” With reason. She had been out of her mind to walk to Mass on a day like this. And all the way to Holy Name at that.
Without bothering to walk the remaining few steps into her bedroom, she peeled off her perspiration-sodden outer and inner garments standing where she was. Then, leaving them where they fell, she kicked off her shoes and walked nude and bare foot into the bathroom and turned on the cold-water faucet in the shower stall.
The water standing in the pipes came out lukewarm. While she waited for it to cool, she fitted her shower cap to her head, then stood studying her body in the full-length mirror on the door.
She didn’t suppose that, as seen through the eyes of an amorous male, her body would be as attractive and desirable as that of her teenage neighbor. Still, the texture of her skin was good. She had nice ankles, well-shaped legs, a not unpleasing and adequate behind. Her pubic area was clearly and crisply outlined. She had the correct number of areolae and nipples and orifices. And until the muscles supporting her breasts began to sag and flab set in, one young woman was much like another. They all had the same basic organs and desires. And in spite of what her former fiancé had said, she knew she was capable of loving and of being loved. In fact, when the right man came along, he might be quite pleasantly surprised.
She wanted a lot more out of life than any number of degrees. They, and her job with the Board of Education, merely represented security and a certain social standing she’d never known as a girl.
No, thank you. She might still be virgin at twenty-seven but she had no intention of spending her life as an unmarried schoolteacher. Please God, when she found the right man, a man willing to play by the established rules, she would be very happy to put her fair white body to all of the various uses for which nature had intended it.
Since she’d broken up with Jim. she’d even been hopeful that she might have met such a man. That had been the night that old Mr. LaTour had introduced her to a tall, broad-shouldered man, obviously of Nordic extraction, when they’d chanced to meet on the stairs.
“Mary,” the old man had said, “I’d like you to meet Lieutenant of Detectives, Ejler Hanson. Ejler, meet my favorite neighbor, Miss Daly, one of our prettier high-school teachers.”
That had been all there was to it. She’d read in one of the numerous reports concerning the sexual behavior of women that they were never biologically stimulated by erotic memories or external stimuli. But that hadn’t held true in the case of Lieutenant Hanson. True, she had no erotic memories. All that the man had done was shake hands with her. But even now, two months later, Lieutenant Hanson’s remembered broad shoulders and tapered torso, the memory of the big hand dwarfing hers and the sound of his voice as he’d smiled, “I’m pleased to meet you, Miss Daly. Any friend of Frenchy’s is a friend of mine,” still sufficed to turn her knees to jelly whenever she thought of the incident.
Brief as the encounter had been, he’d seemed to be equally impressed. There’d been that almost immediate something between them. Hoping he had felt the same as she did, for two weeks after their meeting she’d hurried home from school like a high-school girl with her first crush, then sat alone all evening hoping the phone would ring, with Lieutenant Ejler Hanson on the other end, asking for a date.
She left the mirror and stepped into the shower stall. But no. She couldn’t be that lucky. As far as he was concerned she was just another dame. They’d just been a man and a woman who chanced to meet on a stairs.
Mary was suddenly furious with Hanson. The least the big, good-looking, blonde Swedish son of a bitch could have done was drop a dime in a phone. It could be they both would have been surprised at what the investment might have earned him.
CHAPTER 3
From the silence of sorrowful hours
The desolate mourners go,
Lovingly laden with flowers,
Alike for the friend and for the foe:—
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting for the Judgment:—
Under the roses, the Blue
Under the lilies, the Gray . . .
FRANCIES MILES FINCH
“The Blue and the Gray”
A dapper man of medium height, with a deeply-lined face weathered by the sun and wind of more carnival and circus midways than he could remember. Frenchy LaTour sat in front of one of the open casement windows in his son’s widow’s expensively furnished apartment, twisting one spike of his now almost completely white waxed mustache as he viewed the Sow of traffic on the two-block-distant Outer Drive with disapproving eyes.
It just didn’t seem right.
Instead of there being a steady stream of cars pouring out of the city, stinking up a beautiful last-of-May morning with the fumes from their stinking exhausts, on their way to become crumpled statistics in the annual report compiled by the National Safety Council, their drivers and their families should be vying for places along Michigan Boulevard from which to watch the annual Memorial Day parade.
If this was fifty years before, they would. There’d been a time when everyone in Chicago—well almost even one—had celebrated Decoration Day, as they called it then, with almost as much enthusiasm as they had the Fourth of July. He knew that when he’d been a boy the holiday had always been one of the biggest days in his year. It was one of his nicest and most pleasant memories.
First, he and his family had watched the parade, then there’d been the ceremonies and the decorating of the graves and the picnic in Elmwood Cemetery, with all of the LaTours and the in-laws present and accounted for. He’d always enjoyed, the picnic. But the incident he remembered best of all was the year that his grandfather had been elected Commander of the local post of the G.A.R. That had been the year that the old man, wearing his double-breasted dark blue uniform and black slouch hat with the gold cord, a big silver sword dangling from a white patent-leather sword belt, had ridden a white horse at the head of the parade, with everyone cheering himself hoarse and taking off his hat whenever the flag went by.
Now if you took off your hat when the flag was trooped, it made you a square or a geek. Piss on such a people. He was glad he was old as he was. He wished he were a year older. If he were sixty-five instead of sixty-four, he could apply for his maximum Social Security and would not have to move with May into some new apartment.
The old man was fiercely loyal to his out-of-town daughter-in-law. Not that May wasn’t good to him. She was. Embarrassingly so. He couldn’t put his hand into the pocket of a freshly pressed pair of pants without finding a ten or a twenty that May had put there, just for walk-around money. Because he might maybe want to buy a beer or put two bucks on a nag.
LaTour was mildly grim about it. But that didn’t alter the fact that, every time he opened his mouth, he was afraid he might use some word or expression that would shock her, or, even more important, until May had insisted that he move in with her, at least until he could go back to work, he’d never taken so much as a deuce note from a broad, let alone let a dame support him.
Then, there was the other side of the picture. Lieutenant Colonel Jim LaTour had been one swell guy and a hell of a hotshot pilot. He was proud to have been his father. It was the one big thing he’d ever done in his life. LaTour finished the coffee in his cup and looked at the framed picture of his son. But Jim was dead. He had no use for a woman where he was, and the silver-framed picture of a jet pilot who had been shot down over Haiphong made a hell of a bed companion for an attractive and desirable young woman.
Jim wouldn’t want it this way. He’d want May to marry again, at least find herself a boy friend. Perhaps if he moved to a hotel, she would. He wished he knew some nice way he could discuss the subject with May. He wished he knew some woman who could talk to her. Any cooch dancer in any show he’d ever worked for could tell her that all men were similar at least in that one department, and that while shacking up with another man wouldn’t bring back Jim or cure her grief, it would beat hell out of taking phenobarbital and crying herself to sleep four nights out of seven.
Unfortunately, his daughter-in-law had never traveled in carny circles. She’d gone straight from lead girl in a Vassar daisy chain to being a high-priced copywriter for one of Chicago’s major advertising firms.
Carrying his coffee cup with him, he walked out into the kitchen and opened the door of the refrigerator. As always, when she had to go out of town on business, May had left an ample supply of food. There were fruit juices and eggs and bacon and country sausage, even a carton of pancake batter—all you had to do was pour it on a griddle.
“Now you eat while I’m gone, Father,” May had insisted before she left for the airport. “You promise me that you’ll eat.”
LaTour closed the door of the refrigerator and located the pint of whiskey he’d hidden in back of the stove and bought himself his first drink of the day.
Okay. He’d promised. So he’d eat. As soon as he got dressed he’d walk over to one of the ptomaine parlors on North Clark. That way, if it was only a Chinese counterman, at least he’d have someone to chin with. Besides, when a man had eaten in small-town restaurants and carnival cooks’ tents most of his life, he got so he missed the grease.
He bought himself another drink as he planned his day. Then, after he’d eaten, he’d walk down town and find a good spot from which to watch the parade. It probably wouldn’t be as good as the ones he had seen as a boy, but it would be something to do.
According to the notice he’d read in the morning paper, the parade was to start promptly at 2:00 P.M. and travel down Michigan Avenue from South Water Street to Van Buren. It would consist, at least so it said in the paper, of 30,000 marchers, including representatives of the various military services, veterans’ groups, and other patriotic associations. It was to be sponsored by the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Association, was to be led by the president of the Sons of Union Veterans, and reviewed from a grandstand erected in front of the Art Institute by the mothers and fathers of soldiers who had been killed in wars.
“I should have told them,” LaTour thought. “I could be sitting right there with all the brass.”
He debated the idea, then rejected it. Who wanted to get chummy with generals? As far as he was concerned there’d only been one good one in the crowd. And the clem from Missouri had fired him.
