EYEHEARTZOMBIES

Even with two busted knees and a broken arm, Dan found a way to tell the Chinese to take their business elsewhere. That, or he died and they never felt like following up on their investigation. Either way, we didn’t hear any more from them. They still controlled Chinatown, but it didn’t have enough action to interest our bosses anyway. Mostly just drug trafficking and some illegal gambling. We were more interested in booze, cancer sticks, prostitutes, and protection money. Those were the real money-makers. Not that we didn’t care about gambling, though.

Actually, we cared enough about gambling to send Max out to Vegas. He was sent to that jewel of the desert to run the accounting department of a casino. I can’t remember the name of it, but it was one of the older joints, farther back off the strip. They tore it down a few years after Max and my story ends, so you can’t go see it any more or anything. They sent him out as an accountant, but he was really more of a mole in there. They used him to get accurate counts, before any pay off or skim, of all the money that came in and went out. They wanted to make sure they really were turning a profit. And that helped them keep track of the skims, too. I’m not sure how many people got laid out ’cause of too big of a skim, but I know there were some.

It seems like things started going bad after Max left. He moved out there in August of ‘45, and come the middle of September, we get the first blow. James Camillo, the boss for Chicago’s west side, got killed. His girl did it to him. Shot him in the back of the head ’cause she thought he was boning some other frail. He was, but not the one she thought. She ended up killing herself, too. I’m sure someone would have been sent to take care of her if she hadn’t done that. She probably knew it, too. I’m sure that thought helped her swallow a bullet.

Ray and the bigger bosses, who I never knew — Ray was my only contact with the higher ups — wanted to put someone tougher and without a steady girl in Camillo’s seat. Ray turned to me and I agreed to do it readily enough. It was a step up. I wasn’t as high as Ray, who ran all of Brooklyn, but I was closer to the top than I had ever been before. I moved to Chicago at the end of September.

Chicago, as windy and cold as it is, was great for me. At first. I loved the town. It wasn’t as cold-hearted or towering as Manhattan, and it didn’t have all the street toughs, thinking themselves invincible, that the other borroughs are infested with.

There was one big problem, though. Chicago had been Capone’s sandbox. He wasn’t there any more, of course. He’d gotten out off The Rock in ‘39 and was in Florida now, dealing with Syphilis. They had learned, though. The town wasn’t very friendly to those of us with “alternative occupations.” I figured I could make it, though. Friendly or not, I wasn’t one to be trifled with. Or so I told myself.

The first problem showed up three weeks after I sat in my new desk. A beat cop, thinking himself a big man on the street, came in, sat down without asking, and said, “You’ll play $2,500 each month. On the first.”

I looked at him, surprised by the gall it takes to sit in front of a man’s desk, uninvited, and demand money from him. I had to keep myself from ventilating his forehead. That kind of insult deserved a bullet, to my mind. But he was a cop. And law enforcement the country over have to be given special consideration. Especially if they’re willing to take a bribe.

“$2,500?” I said, an eyebrow raised. “And what’ll that buy me?”

“A closed eye,” he said. “Look, just pay it. I don’t want to discuss this any longer.” He stood up, obviously ready to go.

“And…if I don’t?”

“You’ll get a knock on your door and a pair of bracelets every time we find a wino in the river or a hooker in a dumpster. We’ll arrest you for everything. You greaseballs don’t get a second look in court. Your whole operation’ll be behind bars in a month.” He sneered at me. He spat on the floor of my office.

I stood up and moved around the desk to stand in front of him. I was slightly taller, maybe an inch or two, and he seemed uncomfortable now. The closeness, or maybe the slight height difference made him nervous. “Alright, then,” I said. “I guess we’ll have to pay. Do we drop it off at the precinct or what?”

He smiled when I said we’d pay. “No, no. I’ll make it easy for you. I’ll come by and you can just give it to me.” I agreed and we shook hands and then left the office.

I didn’t bring much with me to Chicago. I brought a few suits of clothes, a couple of guns I was particularly fond of, and Manny. Manny was indispensable to me now. He was my eyes and ears. I called for Manny and he came over.

“Manny, I need you to get me some dirt on a cop.” I gave him a description of the guy. “His name is Mallory. Dumb fuck didn’t take off his name tag when he came in. Get me everything you can.” Manny wrote down the name and said he’d do his best. He left and I went home for the night.

Another couple of weeks went by. We paid Mallory off at the first of the month. Marked bills, in sequence. The most dangerous kind for bribes and bank robberies. I hoped he’d get caught with it before we decided to do anything to him. Manny still hadn’t brought me anything really useful.

James Mallory was an Irish Catholic like every other God-forsaken cop in Chicago. He was married to some mouse named Julia and they had a menagerie of a household. Some six kids, four dogs, two cats, and, if Manny could be believed, a snake. Sounded more like a zoo than a house to me. But nothing dirty. At least, nothing other than the buy-off money. He didn’t drive a new car, didn’t live in a new, big house. Didn’t even have a gold watch or a set of gold pens. The man was soap.

Manny, though, wasn’t have as good of a time in Chicago as he did in New York. Mallory had caught him spying, twice. The second time, he and a couple of other street walker cops beat him with a tire iron and a beer bottle. Cut him up pretty bad. We put him in the hospital for a month and he came out with a nasty scar on his right cheek. We sent him on to Las Vegas, some place we thought would be quieter.

After that, I left Chicago. I didn’t leave ’cause of him beating Manny. That was already taken care of. Two guys were waiting on Mallory when he got back to the police station that night. They picked him up off his feet in the locker room and carried him into the showers. When they finished with him, one whole wall of the communal showers had to have new tile put in. I heard that something like six whole pieces of ceramic tile were removed from his head in the hospital that night. He didn’t die, but he never came asking for money again, either.

No, I left ’cause of the body. No one outside of the Mob is supposed to know where any of the bosses live. As I was a boss now, I was protected by that clause. Someone must have found out, though. That, or someone on the inside wanted me out.

It was a Friday night. I had been out with some girl, I don’t remember her name, but I remember she had mountains like I had never seen before. The dress hung off of her front like a tablecloth. I took her out for a night of dancing and drinks. We ended up drunk and at my place. She slipped out of the dress and the rest of the night was spent in bed, tangled in the sheets.

I woke up around four in the morning after hearing some sort of thump in the living room. The Mob had actually bought me a house here in Chicago, on the outskirts of the west end, and to hear something in the house was more distressing than it would be to you. I had guards. They were supposed to patrol the outside all night, from an hour before dusk to an hour after dawn. If something got in, they let it or it snuck past. Neither option was particularly appealing.

I climbed out of bed, and from halfway under the dame, and wrapped a robe around me. I also picked up my snub-nosed revolver and slowly opened the bedroom door. No sounds, but that didn’t mean much. I closed the door behind me, not wanting the girl to wake up, come out, and have me cap her in the dark. I went down the hall toward the living room. The place was quiet and still. I didn’t like that stillness. Something was going on, I was sure of it. I stepped into the living room and flipped on the light switch.

After Mallory’s head renovated the police showers, we got a lot of heat from the cops. Especially from the District Attorney. He’d barge into one of our warehouses at least once a week on some weak suspicion of drugs or gun trafficking, a warrant from one of the many push-over judges in town, and a gaggle of pimply-faced policemen, fresh out of the academy. He never found anything, but he had been very vocal about his raids. Said they were “riding the city of organized crime and the last vestiges of Capone’s era.” The man had a serious ego problem.

Needless to say, I wasn’t very happy to find the DA’s body in my living room. He’d been shot and stabbed, a couple of times each, and was laying face down in a small pool of blood just inside one of my windows. I sat down on the couch and stared at him, trying to decide what do to.

Normally, we hide a body. We throw it in the lake or the river, or we bury it somewhere. If we’re pressed for time, we use a dumpster or just toss it into an abandoned house. How a body ended up in my place was beyond me. None of my guys would have done that, I’m sure. They’re not morons and even the dumbest of them knows that you don’t shit where you eat.

I called up Frank and Paul, the two guys that watch the front gate, and asked if they had seen anything. Neither had. They also said they hadn’t heard anything from any of the grounds guys either, the one patrolling my property. No one had seen anything, none of them would have brought in the body, so how the hell did District Attorney Lester Vance end up in my living room?

I called Ray. It was five in New York and I knew he was an early riser. Sure enough, he was up and he listened to my problem. His advice, as usual, was great.

“Someone’s trying to plant it on you, kid,” he said. “Just get the body out of your house and then figure out how it got in.”

I knew how it had come it. It came in through the window. I could see blood smears on the sill and frame. I just wanted to know who.

I called Frank again, and one of the patrol guys. I think it was Mikey. They came and I told ‘em to dump Mr. Vance in Lake Erie and weight him down with something. They took a couple of heavy tow chains from the garage and left with the body wrapped in a blanket. They must have hidden him pretty well, ’cause I never heard tell of anyone finding it.

I called a taxi for the broad, telling her I had some family coming for the day and she needed to leave. She protested, some bullshit about “I love you” and “I want to meet your family.” I don’t have time for that mushy crap, so I patted her ass out the door and got back to brass tacks.

Paul’s shift was over, so I asked him to come up to the house before he went home. He did and I asked if he’d seen any new people around the place. Not suspicious, but just people that weren’t normally there. He mentioned the dame I’d had that night, and another guy. Some guy named Jimmy that he said was affiliated with the bosses back in New York. Or Vegas. He wasn’t sure. Said the guy had mentioned both.

I asked Ray about Jimmy when I called him back later that morning. He hadn’t heard of him, but he said that wasn’t hard, since there were a lot of guys working in the two cities now that he didn’t ever deal with.

“Kid, we’re moving you on,” he said at the end. “You’re going to Vegas. You leave tonight. We’re gonna set you up as security for another of our hotels. The Flamingo. That’s one of our places. Bugsy’s running it. Into the ground, I hear, but that’s another matter. Anyway, you hop on a plane this afternoon for Vegas and I’ll see to it that this DA gets taken care of.” He hung up the phone after I said alright.

So, I did. I packed up my things again. They had only had me in Chicago for a couple of months before I was moving again. Seemed kind of fishy to me, them moving me so suddenly and for such a little problem as a dead DA. But I was a company man. I did what I was told.