That was the first time I’d heard Martineau use that kind of language.
Gross glanced at Shoppa, and Shoppa glanced back.
“All right,” Gross said. He was the ranking officer, so it was his decision. “We are on it. Where on Paulina is that rooming house again?”
We gave them the address and they were off.
The cops were barely out of the door, the smell of Shoppa’s cigar still lingering, when another of those crew cuts leaned in and said, “We just got an interesting tip, Marty, courtesy of the Chicago FBI.”
“Yeah?”
“Seems there’s a landlady on the North Side complaining about some ‘spics’ renting a flat from her. She says they have four rifles with telescopic sights in there.”
“Where would we be today,” I said, already on my feet, “without suspicious landladies?”
“Ebe, you and Nate follow this up,” Martineau said.
But Ebe was right behind me, as we trailed the agent out and to his desk, to get that address, grab our raincoats, and go.
* * *
The rooming house, oddly enough, was just four blocks south and a couple of blocks east of my town house. The compact nature of the geography of this case was starting to feel weird.
The light-yellow Victorian wood-frame, peak-roofed structure dated to the teens. The landlady lived in the basement apartment of the old three-story, whose outer walls almost touched the newer brick buildings on either side—a twenties-era terra-cotta-trimmed number with offices over a Walgreens drugstore and a nondescript fifties-vintage four-story with apartments over a “New and Used” record shop. Three decades represented by three side-by-side buildings—not unusual in this part of the city.
She met us up the handful of steps on the small porch, a squat woman in her fifties wearing a floral tent and nurse’s shoes, another DP but of Greek extraction. Her features were coarse in a squashed circle face, her hair gray and netted, her eyebrows thick and black with a facial mole perfect for today—Halloween.
I introduced myself, showing her my Justice Department credentials, and, wide-eyed, she pointed past me to Eben Boldt, like somebody about to yell,
Fire!
“Is he with you?” she demanded.
“We’re together,” I admitted. “He’s a Secret Service agent.”
She folded her arms like Chief Sitting Bull. “Well, the boy waits outside. No colored allowed.”
Eben’s face turned hard as a carved African mask—a frightening one, at that—also fit for All Hallows’ Eve. He seemed about to verbally explode, so I stepped in.
“Ma’am, he needs to come along. I may require him to take notes for me, or maybe run errands.”
Eben’s eyebrows went up, but so did the heavy black ones on our witchy hostess’s mug.
“Okay, then.” She heaved a wary sigh, then shook a schoolmarmish finger at me. “But
you
deal with him. I don’t truck with the colored.”
“He’ll be my responsibility,” I assured her, and followed her in. I grinned back at Eben, who sneered at me. He really didn’t have much of a sense of humor.
Again, there was no question of a search warrant. The landlady—whose name was Knockomus, she said, and who was the owner of the building—led us up a flight of stairs.
“They paid for a week in advance,” she said. “Starting Monday.”
At the landing, we followed her to the left, a short trip. You could see a bathroom at the end of the hall, door ajar.
Wondering if I should be getting the nine-millimeter out, I asked, “Is there any chance they’re here now, ma’am?”
“No. I saw them go an hour ago. They never come back till late afternoon.”
We were in front of a door marked 2A.
As she was unlocking it, Mrs. Knockomus said, “I don’t relish this at all. I have to put up with the girls on the first floor—I got two apartments down there, they are whores, those girls—and now it comes to renting to spics.”
Her description of her first-floor tenants as whores was likely less a slur than a job description—we were at Clark and Division, near Rush Street and the older Rialto area, where prostitutes plied their trade.
Mrs. Knockomus opened the door and gestured for me to go in. I did, and she moved in front of Eben, I guess to make sure he was admitted last.
This was a flat that took up the entire second floor. The rooms—there were three—were much nicer and larger than Vallee’s one room. The floors here were hardwood with worn yet still handsome Oriental carpets, and the solid-looking furnishings were probably antiques, the upholstery still decent, the iron bed blessed with a “Home sweet home” comforter that looked hand sewn. Maybe our hostess had hidden depths.
“I should have sold back in the fifties,” she said, scowling at nobody in particular, not even Ebe, “but I missed my chance. This urban renewal thing coming up? I’m gonna snap at that line like a mackerel. Enough of this nonsense with scum-of-the-earth tenants.”
We’d been through all three rooms. No guns, not rifles, not handguns, not in the dresser, not in any of three closets.
“I mean, I don’t mind the girls, really,” she was saying. “The whores keep to themselves and don’t bring nobody home. And I don’t even mind some Outfit guy on the lam, now and then, neither. They dress nice, those type fellas, and they are … what’s the right word? Much more
discreet
about their weapons. These spics, they just leave their guns lying around! What if one went off and was pointed at the floor and killed somebody, like me for example?”
“I don’t see any weapons,” I said.
She pointed at the windows onto the street. No screens, I noted; no air conditioner. Summer would be rough in this space.
“They was leaned up against there,” she said, indicating the wallpapered area between the windows. “Four rifles. Had those fancy telescopes attached. Like the hunters use.… It’s Kennedy, isn’t it?”
Eben and I exchanged glances. “What makes you think that?”
“Right there,” she said, and pointed to an end table by the couch, “they had a map with street names on it.”
I asked, “The kind of map you get from a service station?”
“No! Hand-drawn. With street names and highways and places.”
“Such as?”
“Such as Northwest Expressway and Jackson and Soldier Field.”
Jesus.
She was smiling at her own cleverness. “The motorcade route, am I right?”
Eben walked over to the table. “No map here now.”
Forgetting herself, she said to him: “And the newspaper is gone, too.”
“What newspaper?” I asked.
“It was on that dresser, in the bedroom.” Now she was pointing in that direction. “With the article about Kennedy coming, circled.”
Not a wall collage, but telling enough.
I said to Eben, “Show her the photos.”
He took the four suspect shots from his inside suit-coat pocket and handed them to her. She paused before accepting something from him—he might have been a Zulu handing her a shrunken head—but finally she took them.
Without hesitation, she said, “That’s the two tenants. Their names on here are correct, the spics—Gonzales and Rodriguez. These other boys, the whites? They aren’t staying here, but they come around in the evening.”
“Often?”
“Twice, at least.”
She had placed all four suspects in this flat.
I asked, “Could the two white guys be crashing here at night?”
“Crashing?”
“Staying all night. Maybe slipping out before you’re up, or when you aren’t looking.”
She frowned, offended. “I’m up at six, mister G-man, and I don’t miss nothing.”
Eben asked, “They haven’t checked out, have they, ma’am, your two tenants?”
“No,” she said, but she was looking at me. “They’re still staying here. I don’t know where they go during the day. What do spics do with their time, anyway?”
“It’s a mystery to me,” I said. “Look, Mrs. Knockomus, you mustn’t say anything to them about our being here. About you having a look in their room. Nothing at all.”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” she said. “The only thing I ever said to them was, ‘Seventy-five dollars in advance.’”
I asked her several more questions—did her tenants have a car?
Yes, green Pontiac, no idea what model or year.
Where did they park it?
On the street, best they can.
Was there a rear exit?
Not one available to the upstairs tenants, as it was off one of the downstairs apartments.
Soon we were on the sidewalk, under a sky that remained overcast on a day cooler than the previous several.
I used the phone booth in the Walgreens next door to report in to Martineau.
After filling him in, I said, “I’m going to recommend a twenty-four-hour stakeout.”
“Fine,” Martineau said. “Saves me the trouble. You and Ebe take the first shift.”
Before doing so, we had lunch at the drugstore counter. Cheeseburgers and fries and Cokes. Around us, mothers were scurrying to buy their kids Halloween costumes—Yogi Bear, Popeye, Casper the Ghost. And all sorts of people were scooping up whatever candy was left for the little ghouls and goblins who’d be ringing their doorbells before too long.
“This sounds real, doesn’t it?” Eben said, meaning what we’d learned at Mrs. Knockomus’s place.
“Does to me.” I dragged a fry through ketchup. “Is this common?”
“Is what common?”
“I’ve been with the Secret Service since Tuesday afternoon, and this is the second time rifles with scopes have turned up in rooming-house flats.”
“There weren’t any guns next door.”
“No, but that sweet old gal saw them. She didn’t imagine ’em or make it up—the guns were there. You know it and I know it.”
He bit into his cheeseburger, chewed awhile, swallowed, then said, “No, it isn’t.”
“Isn’t what?”
“Common.”
We didn’t speak any more of it as we finished lunch. We got a few dirty looks, a white guy and colored guy eating together, but we got served, didn’t we? Hell of a lot better than down south. I wondered if Eben appreciated that.
On the way out, I said, “I want to stop in at that record shop.”
“Why?”
“I’m gonna prove to you I’m not prejudiced.”
“How?”
“I’m going to see if they have
Ray Charles Greatest Hits.
”
“Are you making fun of me?”
They had a nice used copy.
We sat in the car and started our surveillance—perhaps a little too noticeable, a Negro sitting in a car on the street in this part of town; but with the Secret Service’s limited man power, it would have to do.
Before long Eben asked, “Ever hear Muddy Waters?”
“Heard
of
him. Plays the blues on the South Side?”
“Yeah. After we catch these pricks, I’ll take you there. Joint called Smitty’s. Nothing against Ray Charles, but you haven’t lived till you heard Muddy.”
“Smitty’s, huh? South Side? Is it safe?”
“Well,
I
won’t get killed.”
That made me smile.
“Looking forward to it,” I said.
And the boring afternoon officially began.
CHAPTER
15
Because the Secret Service office was so undermanned, Eben Boldt and I sat surveillance at the rooming house near Clark and Division till after seven
P.M.
We witnessed the return of the Cuban tenants at around five-fifteen—they parked a green Pontiac Bonneville on the street, a recent model and a nice ride for guys staying in a rooming house. They snagged a spot maybe half a block from the old Victorian structure, not a bad parking place, considering. It was a Cook County license plate, which Eben wrote down.
They were clearly the Gonzales and Rodriguez of the photos, though the younger man, Gonzales, had been bearded in his surveillance shot and now was clean-shaven, with a wiry look not obvious before. Rodriguez, on the other hand, had a formidable build and a mangy ball of black, slightly graying hair to go with his Zapata mustache—the effect made his head look damn near as big as the carved pumpkins on porches.
The two Cuban pals were smiling, joshing, with an easygoing spring to their step, and both were smoking—cigarettes, not cigars. They wore zippered jackets over sport shirts, and chinos and sneakers.
They went up into the rooming house. There hadn’t been a kitchenette in their flat, not even a hot plate or little refrigerator, so I figured they had to come back out and eat somewhere, sometime. But it didn’t happen on our watch.
And the two white guys, the rest of the supposed hit team, never made an appearance.
Around six o’clock, trick-or-treaters started their assault, kids (with poor or maybe cheap parents) in homemade hobo getups or sheets that made them ghosts, as well as the gaudy but cheap-looking store-bought outfits, among them one Howdy Doody, two witches, and three Lone Rangers, but not a single Tonto.
By the time we got back to the Secret Service office, and reported in to Martineau (who would be working even later than we had), it was well after eight; and by the time I’d collected my Jag from the Federal Building lot, and made my way to my Old Town town house, nine was looming. The trick-or-treating in my neighborhood was winding down, the cowboys and princesses and cartoon characters replaced by older kids just wearing masks, eager as thieves to fill their brown-paper bags with goodies.
I did not park in back, in the former stable, having called Helen from the office with my plans, which were to drive us somewhere nice for a late supper. Maybe Riccardo’s. She had landed a January booking at the Silver Frolics, and we had that to celebrate, plus she was leaving for California tomorrow; so I wanted it to be a special night.
Luck was with me and I found space at the curb right in front. My raincoat loose and open, I climbed out into the cool evening—the squeals of kiddie laughter and padding feet on pavement seemed distant and a little hysterical, as the spoils of Halloween were taken home for sorting, eating, and puking. Down the street, candlelit pumpkins watched me, flickering their eyes and jagged teeth, as the sugarcoated bacchanal wound down.
I headed up the walk. After this long day, I wanted to go in and shower and change clothes before going out for what was left of the evening. Helen must have been watching for me, because she opened the door to the safe-house apartment and was just stepping out—in another of those Peter Pan–collar dresses—when I heard the footsteps behind me.