Boystown 7: Bloodlines (13 page)

“I’m not going to abandon Terry,” Brian said. “He needs to learn to behave himself, that’s all. Let’s see what a few days with Mrs. Harker does for him.”

“It might take more than that,” I pointed out. “Franklin, have a donut.”

“Oh, I couldn’t. All that fat.”

“There’s cold coffee, too,” I added.

“Thank you, Nick,” Brian said. “I’m the one who took responsibility for him, you really didn’t have to do anything.”

“I brought him here. That means I did.”

Franklin looked from me to Brian and back again. He didn’t look happy. I got the impression that it wasn’t exactly me he didn’t like; it seemed as though he didn’t like that Brian and I were friends. I also got the impression that Brian might not have completely explained how things were between us. He could have said that I was a friend of his ex who needed a place to stay. That was completely true, but left out so much it was also a lie.

“Well, I need to take a shower if the bathroom is free.”

I gathered my things and went into the bathroom. I gave myself the whole shower to worry about where I should live. I had much bigger problems at the moment so I couldn’t afford to be thinking about it all day. I needed to move. Not just because of Franklin. But because Brian deserved to be able to bring a guy home without having their first conversation be about me. “Yes, I fuck Nick occasionally and I care about him but we both know things are going nowhere,” is a turnoff for a lot of guys. Of course, since there was also someone who wanted to pin a murder on me, and especially since it was a murder I actually committed, finding a new place to live needed to be easy and hassle free.
 

It was hard to imagine a life where anything was hassle free.

Chapter Eleven

Speaking of hassles, when I arrived at my office a half an hour later, Christian Baylor stood in my doorway. He wore a parka and held an umbrella in one hand. The streets looked as though it had rained overnight, and above us the dark, heavy clouds threatened to let loose again.
 

“I’m not happy to see you,” I said when I reached him. It was an understatement.

“A policeman came to see me,” he said, following me into the stairwell.

“Yeah, what was his name?”

“Devlin. Harry Devlin. I think he said he was a captain.”

“What did he want?”

“To talk to me about the story I wrote.”

I unlocked my office door and walked in. “Yeah, congratulations on that. I read it. I guess I should have sent you a note or something. It was a stunning piece of journalistic fiction.”

“I didn’t think you’d want me writing about you so I left you out. Big deal.”

“You’re right. I didn’t want you writing about me. I didn’t want you writing about Bert either.”

“I have a right to my own experiences.”

“Half of which you made up.”

He shook his head dismissively. “It doesn’t matter, Nick. It’s in the past. This Captain Devlin…he was scary.”

“But that’s why it does matter. If you hadn’t written the article you wouldn’t be getting visits from scary policemen.”

“He wanted to know who the vigilante was who killed Gorshuk. I didn’t tell him anything.”

“You don’t know anything. I hope you told him that.”

“But I do know something.”

“Yeah, what do you know?”

“I talked to an officer who was there on the scene when they found Gorshuk’s body. They found a gun in the cemetery. They sent the serial number out to be identified, and then a day later the gun disappeared and it was like the report was never requested. The guy who picked it up and turned it in only remembers that it was a Sig Sauer.”

“So what?”

“I know you have a Sig Sauer.”

“Do you?”

“I asked Bert about what kinds of guns cops like. He told me about his Smith and Wesson. Then he mentioned you carried a Sig Sauer.”

“You’re absolutely right. I have the only Sig Sauer in Chicago.”

“I know a lot of people have those guns. But how many of those people would have been in Graceland cemetery the night the Bughouse Slasher died?”

“Is that it?” I asked.

“What?”

“Is that all the information you have?”

“Yes.”

“Then you should go.”

He got a pouty look on his face. “You always hated me. I’ve never understood why.”

“Really? Re-read your article. That might tell you why.”

He tossed his head with a little huff and walked out of my office.
 

I checked my messages. There were three hang-ups. Sooner or later I was going to have to plunk myself down in my office for at least four or five hours so I could pick up the phone when that person called back. It wasn’t, however, going to be that morning. What I needed to do that morning was talk to Owen Lovejoy, Esquire. I just had to figure out how.
 

I had no idea how many resources the Feds were devoting to this. I knew there was equipment you could get that you could aim at people in parks and places and pick up at least part of their conversation. Coppola made a movie in the early seventies where they did exactly that. Though, being in the business, it’s hard to imagine a client paying the kind of invoices something like that would generate. Which is part of why I doubted the Feds were doing anything of the sort. The CIA might have that kind of gear to keep an eye on the Russians, but I really didn’t think the FBI could get that kind of expense approved to take down an elderly mobster. Particularly when they didn’t even have a warrant.

I decided to head downtown. The paper bag full of Joseph’s black suit and collar sat on my sofa. I thought about taking it with me and beginning my surveillance after I met with Owen, but I hadn’t shaved. I looked too unkempt to be a priest. I needed to pull myself together, maybe even get a haircut before I began. Interesting that impersonating someone who might have taken a vow of poverty required that I not look shabby.

A half an hour later, I was getting off an elevator and walking into the penthouse offices of Cooke, Babcock and Lackerby. The offices were in a turn-of-the-century nineteen-story building on Jackson. Ironically, the building was two blocks from the Federal building where Operation Tea and Crumpets was housed.
 

The lobby was traditional “lawyer”: paneled, British prints of horses and hounds, a heavy walnut reception desk. The receptionist was pretty, brunette, and wore a very conservative blouse and skirt. She plucked away at an IBM Selectric doing double duty as a typist. She looked up at me and was about to say something when I put my finger to my mouth. I reached over her desk and grabbed a pad that was sitting there and a pen. She looked at me curiously, a little offended.

On one sheet, I wrote: GIVE THIS TO MR. LOVEJOY. On a second, I wrote: WE NEED TO MEET. I’M IN THE RECEPTION AREA. NICK. When she read the second note she frowned at me. “He might be busy, you know. They usually are.” I wagged a finger in the general direction of his office. She rolled her eyes and walked through the arch that led to the offices.
 

Standing alone in the reception area, I worried that the task force might have put cameras in the room somewhere but that seemed unlikely. Yeah, the Feds used cameras in some of their cases, like the DeLorean case and the ABSCAM thing, but they always had to have control of the environment. Those stings took place in hotel rooms with technicians in the next room. They wouldn’t have been able to get cameras into a law firm’s reception area.
 

God,
I thought,
I’m getting paranoid
.
 

I also wondered if I needed to find out more about this stuff. The Feds had put a bug into a lawyer’s office and probably tapped their phones. In response, I was planning to dress like a priest and stand in a lobby. I felt like I was behind the eight ball. I knew it wasn’t legal for me to put a bug in the task force offices. In Illinois you couldn’t even record a phone call without both party’s consent. But still, I should at least learn how to check a room for bugs.

The receptionist returned with a surprised look on her face. She didn’t say anything to me, just sat back down at her desk. Then Owen Lovejoy, Esquire came into the lobby wearing a trench coat over his expensive suit. Silently, we walked out of the office and back to the elevator. On the way down, we didn’t say anything, though I imagine it would have been safe. When we got out to Jackson, we walked toward the lake.

“So you’re sure your office is bugged?”

“Yeah, we had a guy come out and check. It’s on the underside of one of my guest chairs. There are also bugs in the offices of Mr. Cooke, Mr. Babcock, Mr. Lackerby, the reception area and the men’s room. They’re very thorough.”

“Why not remove the bugs?”

“We don’t want them to know we know, for one thing. For another they’ll just put them back and try harder next time.”

“Are you sure we can’t get them on that? You want me to look into it?”

“What you’re doing is too important. And it means I control what they know. Jimmy comes down once a week, sits in Mr. Babcock’s office, and they tell each other dirty jokes for an hour.”

“And that doesn’t tell them you know there’s a bug?”

“Mr. Babcock charges three hundred and fifty dollars an hour. Clients get to talk about whatever they want.”

“I can’t believe they pull shit like this,” I said. Part of me wanted the good guys to be good and the bad guys to be bad. It just made life easier.

Owen shrugged. “Twenty years ago Johnson told the FBI to stop with the illegal wiretaps. But presidents change. Time passes and they’re back to their old tricks.” An idea hit him. “Do you know if Jimmy has bugged the task force? Is this why you wanted to see me? Wiretapping?”

“No. As far as I know Jimmy hasn’t done anything like that. And you don’t want to know if he has.” Technically, lawyers weren’t supposed to break the law any more than Federal agencies.
 

I decided to tackle the uncomfortable bit of what I needed to tell him first. “I went to see Jimmy.”

“I would have liked to have known that before you did it.”

“I was out in the suburbs anyway and I couldn’t exactly call you and tell you, now could I?” I hadn’t thought of it at the time, but it made a good excuse now.

“Still, I’d like to know these things, dear.”

“I know.”

“What did you talk to him about?” Owen asked, as we crossed Michigan Avenue. I scanned the people nearby, attempting to be sure we weren’t being followed. Feeling really paranoid while I did it.

“I wanted to make sure he didn’t keep any kind of a diary. And I wanted him to be thinking about people who might have.”

“That was on my list for our next conversation. I’ll follow-up.”

“I went to see Nino Nitti’s son, Nino Jr. I was trying to see his widow but she’s senile and doesn’t remember who she is half the time. The son said the Feds were there putting pressure on him to say that his father confessed that Jimmy hired him to kill the Perellis.”

“Is he going to say that?”

“I don’t think so. He seemed pissed about it.”

“Do you think I can get him to talk about their trying to put words in his mouth?”

“You can try. But that will probably piss him off, too. He just wants to go back to Indianapolis.”

“What are you doing next?”

“There’s more I need to tell you.” We stopped walking and stood in front of the Art Institute by the southerly lion. I don’t know why I knew this, but I seemed to remember that the lion was named Defiance. “It’s not good. I got a call from Detective Frank Connors. He was Harker’s partner.”

“Okay,” Owen said, not really seeing a connection.

“He also handled the Bughouse Slasher investigation. This morning I had a visit from Christian Baylor. He wrote an article about the Slasher. There’s a CPD Captain named Devlin looking into the death of the Slasher.”

“Devlin is on the task force,” Owen said, getting half the connection.

“You’re still my attorney, right?”

“Of course.”

“The night Joseph Gorshuk was killed my gun was found in the cemetery. Connors returned it to me.”

Owen’s mind raced with the various possibilities. “Oh. I see. So this Devlin guy is coming after you because you’re working for Jimmy now.”

“Exactly. And he’ll take down Connors in the process.”

“Nick, the safest thing to do is to walk away. They’ll leave you alone if you back off. Jimmy will understand and so will I.”

I thought about it for a moment. I remembered Joseph saying that I should try to make a different choice if I could. I wanted to make a different choice, I just didn’t know what—something occurred to me. I looked at Owen and said, “Let’s go back to your office.”

“And do what?”

“Control what the task force knows.”

On the walk back, I explained exactly what I wanted to do. Which was basically to repeat much of what I’d said, then quit, or rather pretend to quit and keep right on working for Jimmy. It would take them a while to figure out I was still working but it might give me enough time to find something out.

We walked into the reception area of Cooke, Babcock and Lackerby, and the receptionist looked up at us in surprise. She couldn’t figure out why we’d gone to such lengths to not speak in Owen’s office and were now going to do exactly that. I gave her a sympathetic smile as we walked by.
 

In Owen’s office, I sat down on one of the thin, metal chairs and pointed back and forth, silently asking which one was bugged. Owen pointed at the one I wasn’t sitting in. I leaned in that direction. Owen sat down and said, “Nick! How are you doing?” I nearly cringed. He wasn’t much of an actor.

“Not so great.” Actually, I wasn’t much of an actor either. “I’ve heard from a couple of people that a cop is chasing down my tail. A guy named Devlin.”

“There’s a guy named Devlin on Operation Tea and Crumpets.”

“Same guy. He’s got me on something I did. Something incriminating.”

“What exactly?”

“I’d rather not say. Even to my attorney.”

“So…are you quitting?”

That threw me a little. It was sort of my line. “Um, yeah. I have to.”